Consciousness and the Novel

by David Lodge

  II FIRST PERSON AND THIRD PERSON

  According to V S. Ramachandran, the “need to reconcile the first person and third person accounts of the universe . . . is the single most important problem in science.”28 It is certainly crucial to the study of consciousness. I quoted another neuroscientist, Gerald Edelman, earlier to the effect that “consciousness is a first-person phenomenon” which science, oriented to impersonal observation and the formulation of general laws, finds difficult to cope with. My fictitious cognitive scientist Ralph Messenger makes the same point to the novelist Helen Reed in Thinks . . .:

  “That’s the problem of consciousness in a nutshell,” Ralph says. “How to give an objective, third person account of a subjective, first-person phenomenon.”

  “Oh, but novelists have been doing that for the last two hundred years,” says Helen airily.

  “What d’you mean?”

  She stops on the footpath, lifts one hand, and shuts her eyes, frowning with concentration. Then she recites, with hardly any hesitation, or stumbling over words: “‘She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once—she had tried it—the sense of the slippery and the sticky.’”

  He stares. “What’s that?”

  “Henry James. The opening sentences of The Wings of the Dove.”Helen walks on, and Ralph moves into step beside her.

  “Is it a party trick of yours—reciting chunks of classic novels from memory?”

  “I started a PhD thesis on point of view in Henry James,” says Helen. “Never finished it, unfortunately, but some of the key quotations stuck.”

  “Do it again.”

  Helen repeats the quotation, and says: “You see—you have Kate’s consciousness there, her thoughts, her feelings, her impatience, her hesitation about leaving or staying, her perception of her own appearance in the mirror, the nasty texture of the armchair’s upholstery, ‘at once slippery and sticky’—how’s that for qualia? And yet it’s all narrated in the third person, in precise, elegant, well-formed sentences. It’s subjective and objective.”

  “Well, it’s effectively done, I grant you,” says Ralph. “But it’s literary fiction, not science. James can claim to know what’s going on in Kate Whatshername’s head because he put it there, he invented her. Out of his own experience and folk psychology.”

  “There’s nothing folksy about Henry James.”

  He waves this quibble aside. “Folk psychology is a term we use in the trade,” he says. “It means received wisdom and commonsense assumptions about human behaviour and motivation, what makes people tick. It works fine for ordinary social life—we couldn’t get along without it. And it works fine for fiction, all the way from The Wings of the Dove to Eastenders . . . but it’s not objective enough to qualify as science. If Kate Croy were a real human being, Henry James could never presume to say how she felt about that armchair, unless she’d told him.” (See here)

  Ralph is of course perfectly correct. Kate Croy is not, was not, a real human being, who could report her experience. There is no empirical reality against which we can check the truth of Henry James’s account of her consciousness. It cannot be regarded as scientific knowledge. However, it is also true that we read novels like The Wings of the Dove because they give us a convincing sense of what the consciousness of people other than ourselves is like. We feel we have “learned” something from them; we have acquired new information. How does prose fiction do that? Not just by confirming and exemplifying what Ralph calls “folk psychology,” the accumulated wisdom and commonsense assumptions about why people behave as they do. The “laws” of folk psychology are not equivalent to the laws of physics or chemistry. There are always exceptions to them, and they always operate in different ways for different people with different personal histories. We certainly don’t read novels in order to extract from them the confirmation of some banal proverbial “truth” about human behaviour, like pride comes before a fall, or first impressions can be misleading.

  I referred earlier to the essentially narrative nature of human consciousness, recognized by a number of scientific writers on the subject. But it is a narrative full of lacunae. We are conscious of existing in time, moving from a past that we recall very patchily, and into a future that is unknown and unknowable. “We are,” says Milan Kundera,

  resigned to losing the concreteness of the present . . . We need only recount an episode we experienced a few hours ago: the dialogue contracts to a brief summary, the setting to a few general features. This applies to even the strongest memories . . . We can assiduously keep a diary and note every event. Rereading the entries one day we will see that they cannot evoke a single concrete image. And still worse: that the imagination is unable to help our memory along and reconstruct what has been forgotten. The present—the concreteness of the present as a phenomenon to consider . . . is for us an unknown planet: so we can neither hold on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it through imagination.29

  Kundera is surely right to say that literature, and especially literary fiction, compensates us for this leakage of information. It allows us vicariously to possess the continuum of experience in a way we are never able to in reality Perhaps novelists are usually gifted with better-than-average powers of recall—I actually believe that to be the case—but all memory is inevitably partial and fragmentary. I can’t, for example, now recall with precise specificity any particular occasion of the many on which I visited my elderly father in the rather shabby house in southeast London where I grew up, and where he lived by his own choice until his death; but through the words of Henry James I can, as it were, relive the distantly comparable experience of the fictitious Kate Croy in all its dense combination of sense impressions, thoughts, feelings, and emotions. It is true that after I have put the novel aside, this scene too will soon fade from my memory in all its specificity, just like the memory of my own experience. But unlike my own experience it is always recuperable by simply opening the book again. (I should perhaps explain that Helen is word-perfect in her recitation of the passage from The Wings of the Dove because she taught it in a class the day before—a fact she does not reveal to Ralph.)

  The beginning of The Wings of the Dove is typical novel discourse. There was nothing like it in literature before the rise of the novel, and it is only to be found in other kinds of writing that postdate and imitate the novel, like the nonfiction novel or the New Journalism or certain kinds of imaginative historiography. If you were presented with the passage unattributed, and without having read it before, you would immediately identify it as a passage from a novel, especially if you knew it was the beginning of the text to which it belongs. Why? Mainly because it is focalised, as narratologists say, through the consciousness of Kate Croy. It plunges us immediately, with the very first words, into the stream of impressions, thoughts, feelings, that constitutes her experience. “She waited”—we are given a state of mind before we know the name of who it belongs to. (And of course in a sense Kate is waiting throughout the novel—waiting for an opportunity to marry Densher, waiting for Milly to die.) As the passage proceeds, we only see and feel what Kate is conscious of seeing and feeling. The unpleasant tactile sensation of the armchair’s upholstery is hers. The feelings of irritation, frustration, and impatience referred to are hers. As Ralph Messenger says, in real life we can never assert such things about anyone other than ourselves, unless others report them to us. But it is not Kate Croy who is telling us. It is some unspecified narrator, an authorial voice, who describes Kate’s experience in the third person, allowing us to see her from outside as well as inside, as she moves restlessly about the room—to see her as she sees herself only momentarily,
in the mirror. The discourse is, as Helen Reed says, both objective and subjective, simultaneously; and the mirror image is a kind of concrete symbol of that doubling. One might say that the diction is mostly subjective, belonging to Kate’s consciousness, and the syntax is objective. That is to say, the vocabulary is quite consistent with Kate Croy’s character as we get to know it—her class, her education, her intelligence, and so forth; there is no word or phrase that we could not imagine her using in speech, or in silent thought. But the way in which these words are combined into sentences belongs to narrative literature—and not just because of the use of the third-person pronoun. We can demonstrate this by recasting the sentences into the first person (I omit the proper name because that obviously doesn’t belong to a first-person discourse.)

  [I waited for my father to come in, but he kept me unconscionably, and there were moments at which I showed myself, in the glass over the mantle, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought me to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that I remained; changing my place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once—I had tried it—the sense of the slippery and of the sticky.]

  If presented with this passage, unattributed, we would probably still identify it as a piece of prose fiction, but less confidently. In principle it could be extracted from a letter or journal or autobiography. But I think we would feel there was in any case something slightly mannered or precious about it, as if the narrator were taking an unusually detached view of her own experience and sacrificing a sense of immediacy and authenticity to stylistic elegance and subtlety. This could be the beginning of a novel written in the first person, but as a reader we would be very conscious of the rhetorical ostentation of the narrative style, and ask ourselves what this might signify about the narrator—perhaps that she (or he, for it would be impossible to determine the gender of the narrator from these opening sentences alone) is a writer by vocation. The kind of novel from which this emended passage might come would be a novel like A la recherche du temps perdu, in which the effort to fix experience in words is essentially what the book is about.

  The change of personal pronoun also changes the effect of the verbal tense. In the original text the past tense is a storytelling convention. It does not imply a gap between the time of the action and the time of the narration, or raise questions about the character of the narrator. We do not ask who is the narrator, how did he acquire all this information, how can he reproduce it in such detail? We do not think of the writer at his desk, penning these words. The method places us in the room, there, then, with Kate. But when the pronoun is changed to the first person, we are immediately conscious of the actual process of recall. Suppose we try to overcome this effect by casting the passage into the present tense? The result is even more obtrusively artificial:

  [I wait for my father to come in, but he keeps me unconscionably, and there are moments at which I show myself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that has brought me to the point of going away without sight of him. It is at this point, however, that I remain; changing my place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gives at once—I have tried it—the sense of the slippery and the sticky.]

  First-person, present-tense narration is used in certain kinds of stream-of-consciousness fiction, where it is called interior monologue—in Joyce and Woolf, for instance. It is also quite common in contemporary fiction written in a colloquial confessional mode—Nick Hornby’s How To Be Good is a recent example. But it really doesn’t go with James’s very literary narrative style, with his well-wrought syntax and elegant, balanced pairings and oppositions and alliterations: “point” and “place,” “positively pale,” “slippery and sticky,” the presence of the character’s face in the mirror artfully juxtaposed with mention of the absence of the person she has come to see. By the time he wrote this novel, published in 1902, James had perfected a fictional method which allowed him to combine the eloquence of a literary, authorial narrative voice with the intimacy and immediacy of the first-person phenomenon of consciousness. To understand better how he achieved this, we have to look at the conclusion of this long opening paragraph (I omit a detailed description of the decor of the room and the architecture of the street):

  Each time she turned in again [from the small balcony], each time in her impatience, she gave him up, it was to sound to a deeper depth, while she tasted the faint, flat emanation of things, the failure of fortune and of honour. If she continued to wait it was really, in a manner, that she might not add the shame of fear, of individual, personal collapse, to all the other shames. To feel the street, to feel the room, to feel the table-cloth and the centre-piece and the lamp, gave her a small salutary sense, at least, of neither shirking nor lying. This whole vision was the worst thing yet—as including, in particular, the interview for which she had prepared herself; and for what had she come but the worst? She tried to be sad, so as not to be angry; but it made her angry that she couldn’t be sad. And yet where was misery, misery too beaten for blame and chalk-marked by fate like a “lot” at a common auction, if not in these merciless signs of mere, mean, stale feelings?30

  By now, as readers, we are beginning to get the picture: a young woman of taste and discrimination and a strong will is waiting to meet her father, who has somehow disgraced himself, and she sees in the vulgar genteel poverty of the room and the street an index of the shame into which he has fallen. The literary elegance of James’s style is even more obvious here than in the first few lines: the lavish use of rhetorical figures of repetition, alliteration, antithesis, and chiasmus (which was always one of his favourite tropes: “She tried to be sad, so as not to be angry; but it made her angry that she couldn’t be sad”). But the illusion that we are sharing Kate’s consciousness at the time holds. It does so partly through James’s use of a technique known as free indirect speech, or free indirect style.

  For readers who may not be familiar with this term, let me give a very simple example. “Is that the clock striking twelve?” Cinderella exclaimed. “Dear me, I shall be late.” That is a combination of direct or quoted speech and a narrator’s description. “Cinderella enquired if the clock was striking twelve and expressed a fear that she would be late” is reported or indirect speech, in which the same information is conveyed but the individuality of the character’s voice is suppressed by the narrator’s. “Was that the clock striking twelve? She would be late” is free indirect speech. Cinderella’s concern is now a silent, private thought, expressed in her own words, to which we are given access without the overt mediation of a narrator. Grammatically it requires a narrator’s tag, such as “she asked herself,” “she told herself,” but we take this as understood. Hence it is termed “free.” The effect is to locate the narrative in Cinderella’s consciousness.

  James uses this technique towards the end of the opening paragraph of The Wings of the Dove. “For what had she come but for the worst?” “And yet where was misery . . .” The whole of this paragraph (and in a way the whole of the novel, insofar as it concerns Kate Croy) is about her sense of being trapped: having aspirations which the circumstances of her life frustrate, being torn between her duty to her father and her utter scorn for him, between her desire to run away from the room which so powerfully evokes his disgrace, and her determination not to be weak and cowardly. This sense of impasse is suitably expressed in the form of questions, rhetorical questions. These questions are not addressed by the narrator to the reader; they are questions Kate Croy asks herself, and logically they require the tag “she asked herself” or “she wondered.” In a much older novel they would have been spoken aloud by Kate in a kind of soliloquy: “Where,” she exclaimed, “where is misery, misery too beaten for blame and chalk-marked by fate like a ‘lot’ at a common auction, if not in these merciless signs of mere, mean, stale feelings?” Again, in this hypothetical sent
ence, the diction is entirely appropriate to Kate; and the metaphor or simile of the auctioneer’s chalk-marks remains wonderfully appropriate, perhaps the trace of some painful memory of a real auction of her family’s goods. These are all plausible components of Kate’s consciousness. But articulated in direct speech, in a well-formed sentence, they sound very artificial and melodramatic—as indeed such speeches in eighteenth-century and earlier nineteenth-century fiction do seem to us now. It was some time before the novel developed the fusion of first-person and third-person perspectives in a single style; and the discovery of free indirect speech somewhere around the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth was a crucial stage in that process, as I shall now try to show.

  Antonio Demasio, in The Feeling of What Happens, observes that philosophy’s “preoccupation with what we call consciousness now is recent—three and a half centuries perhaps.”31 It is not, he says, merely that the word did not exist before then—neither did the concept. It was not coincidental that this same period saw the emergence of a new form of narrative literature in Europe which soon became dominant. Ian Watt, in his classic study of that phenomenon, The Rise of the Novel, suggests that

  both the philosophical and the literary innovations must be seen as parallel manifestations of larger change—that vast transformation of Western civilization since the Renaissance which has replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very different one—one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and in particular places.32