Consciousness and the Novel

by David Lodge

  Watt observed that whereas earlier narrative literature usually recycled familiar stories, novelists were the first storytellers to pretend that their stories had never been told before, that they were entirely new and unique, as is each of our own lives according to the empirical, historical, and individualistic concept of human life. They did this partly by imitating empirical forms of narrative like autobiography, confessions, letters, and early journalism. Defoe and Richardson are obvious examples. But there was also a new emphasis on the interiority of experience, which Watt suggests followed from Descartes making consciousness the basis for a definition of man: “I think, therefore I am,” in the famous formula. Watt observes that “once Descartes had given the thought processes within the individual’s consciousness supreme importance, philosophical problems connected with personal identity naturally attracted a great deal of attention. In England, for example, Locke, Bishop Butler, Berkeley, Hume and Reid all debated the issue.” And this debate, the precursor of our own contemporary consciousness debate, fed into fiction both indirectly, through the process of meme transmission described by Dawkins, and in some cases, like that of Laurence Sterne, directly. Phenomena such as memory, the association of ideas in the mind, the causes of emotions and the individual’s sense of self, became of central importance to speculative thinkers and writers of narrative literature alike.

  It is probable that the fairly recent invention and rapid development of printing contributed to that process. The increasing availability of books in which exactly the same story could be experienced privately, silently, by discrete individuals, was a marked departure from the usual transmission of stories in preprint culture by means of oral recitation or dramatic performance in front of a collective audience. The silence and privacy of the reading experience afforded by books mimicked the silent privacy of individual consciousness.

  This privacy, the fact that no one knows our thoughts as intimately as we ourselves know them, is what makes consciousness such a challenge to scientific investigation. “Consciousness,” says Susan Greenfield in The Human Brain: A Guided Tour, “. . . is the ultimate puzzle to the neuroscientist; it is your most private place.”33 But for the very same reason consciousness is of absorbing interest to novelists—and to their readers. “Fiction has, and must keep, a private address,” Eudora Welty wrote. “For life is lived in a private place; where it means anything is inside the mind and inside the heart.”34 Of course other minds and hearts are not totally opaque—social life would be impossible if they were. But they are not absolutely transparent either. People may tell us what they are thinking and feeling, but we have to assess whether they are telling us the truth or the whole truth, using other evidence and “folk psychology” to guide us. Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that the ability to imagine what another person—an enemy, for instance—might be thinking in a given situation, by running hypothetical scenarios on the brain’s hardware, was a crucial survival skill for primitive man and might explain the storytelling instinct that seems to be a part of all human cultures. Cognitive psychologists have identified a similar stage in the development of infants which they call Theory of Mind, or TOM for short—when the child first realises that other people have other minds and may have a different interpretation of the world from their own. This usually occurs at around four and a half years of age. Interestingly, testing for TOM entails playing games of deception—the false belief test. Little Sally puts some candies under a cushion and leaves the room. Little Anne is told to take the candies and put them in her own pocket. When Sally returns, Anne is asked, where does Sally think the candies are? If the answer is “under the cushion,” Anne has Theory of Mind. A less advanced infant will say, “in my pocket.” Anne now knows how other people’s interpretations of the world can be manipulated. She will know how to lie.

  Theory of Mind is thus an ambiguous gift. In some ways it is what makes social and interpersonal life possible—the effort to understand what another individual feels and thinks, and to communicate our thoughts and feelings to others when we want to do so. It is the essential basis for what Nicholas Maxwell calls “personalistic” knowledge. Autistic subjects usually lack Theory of Mind, which is why they don’t seem interested in trying to communicate with others. But they don’t lie. They don’t understand the concept of fiction, either, which is a kind of benign lie, because it is known to be untrue but has explanatory power. One might suggest that the ability novelists have to create characters, characters often very different from themselves, and to give a plausible account of their consciousnesses, is a special application of Theory of Mind. It is one that helps us develop powers of sympathy and empathy in real life. Commenting on the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001, Ian McEwan wrote, “If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed . . . Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality.”35 The dark corollary is that nobody could tell from the outward behaviour of the terrorists beforehand what they intended to do.

  It has often been observed that in a sense all novels are about the difference between appearance and reality or the progress from innocence to experience, and this is very much connected with the ability or indeed propensity of human beings to hide their real thoughts and feelings, to project versions of themselves that are partial or misleading, and to deceive each other. The heroes and heroines of most novels are involved in a social world where the achievement of their goals requires constant adjustment of their own beliefs, and the correct understanding of other people’s. This is very clearly illustrated by the first three great English novelists, discussed by Ian Watt—Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding—but in three very different ways. The most obvious difference between their narrative methods concerns the choice of first-person and third-person narration.

  Defoe is the simplest and most straightforward case. All his novels have essentially the same form—the fictitious autobiography or confession. The protagonists, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana, and the others, tell their life stories in their own words. This simple equation between first-person consciousness and first-person narration works—up to a point. What we miss is discrimination, subtlety, consistency. It is notoriously difficult, for instance, to be sure whether the contradiction between Moll’s lively evocation of her criminal and sexual exploits, and the reformed state of pious religious conviction in which her memoirs are allegedly written, is an irony intended by the author or (as seems more likely) an inconsistency which he was unable to resolve.

  Samuel Richardson enormously extended and refined fiction’s ability to represent consciousness when he stumbled on the idea of the epistolary novel, first in Pamela and much more magnificently in Clarissa. When a story is told through letters, the first-person phenomenon of experience is reported in a first-person narrative while it is still fresh. The narrative unfolds with the events, and the outcome is unknown to the narrators. This overcomes the problem raised by the pseudo-autobiographical novel about reconciling the time frame of its putative composition with the time frame of the action. And by having more than one correspondent the author can present different points of view on the same incident, and allow the reader to compare them. Thus the reader of Clarissa is able to share all the heroine’s doubts, hopes, and fears, as she describes them to her friend and confidante Miss Howe, about the character of her admirer Lovelace, and the protection he offers her, and at the same time learn how coldly calculated is Lovelace’s plan to seduce her from his letters to his friend Belmont. These correspondents reply and add their opinions and perspectives on the motives of the protagonists. The influence of Richardson on the English and European novel was immense and is almost impossible to exaggerate. From Pamela came the heroine-centered love story which runs all the way through Jane Eyre to modern Mills & Boon and Harlequin romance; from Clarissa came the psycho
logical novel of sexual transgression like Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Rousseau’s Julie. There were, however, drawbacks to the epistolary method, which sometimes threatened to undermine the realistic illusion. For instance, it often seems somewhat contrived or implausible that the protagonists should write so many letters, and be able to exchange them, even when in situations of extreme jeopardy.

  Both Defoe and Richardson represented the process of individual self-consciousness so convincingly that their novels were mistaken by many naïve readers for real documents of the kind that they were modelled on: confessions and letters. Fielding’s approach was quite different. Though he calls his novels “histories”—The History of Joseph Andrews, The History of Tom Jones—his storytelling method is much more traditional, much more overtly fictive, than Defoe’s or Richardson’s. They removed all trace of themselves from their texts, posing as editors of documents written by their characters. Fielding’s authorial voice is everywhere in his novels, and indeed is the dominant element in them, speaking in the first person, describing the characters and their actions in the third person, and commenting on them with an omniscience that he boldly compares to God’s perspective on his creation. Tom Jones teems with instances of deception, hypocrisy, and concealed spite, of the disparity between people’s private thoughts and their outward speech and behaviour, but it is the omniscient author who tells us this, who looks into their minds and analyses their motives. One reason why this doesn’t seem clumsily didactic is that the authorial voice is highly ironic in manner, so we have to be alert to interpret his real meaning. Thus the author’s rhetoric itself constantly re-enacts the gap between appearance and reality.

  Ian Watt distinguishes between what he calls Fielding’s “realism of assessment” and Defoe and Richardson’s “realism of presentation.” These were the swings and roundabouts of the eighteenth-century novel: what writers gained on one they lost on the other. It was not possible to combine the realism of assessment that belongs to third-person narration with the realism of presentation that comes from first-person narration until novelists discovered free indirect style, which allows the narrative discourse to move freely back and forth between the author’s voice and the character’s voice without preserving a clear boundary between them. As far as I am aware this rhetorical device was never explicitly identified until the twentieth century, certainly not by novelists themselves. Most novelists today would probably not recognize the term, and many who use the device are probably unaware of it: they have learned it, like their mother tongue, intuitively and by imitation.

  The first English novelist to fully exploit its potential was Jane Austen. She began writing fiction using the model of Richardson’s epistolary novel. Most of her juvenilia and early adult experiments, like Love and Friendship and Lady Susan, are in that form. These are entertaining, but the epistolary form gave no room for Jane Austen to deploy her equivalent of Fielding’s authorial irony. Somewhere between the lost epistolary novel Elinor and Marianne and its rewriting as Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen discovered free indirect style. Probably she discovered it in the women novelists of a slightly older generation, Fanny Burney and Maria Edgworth, because it appears briefly and fragmentarily in their work. Fanny Burney’s Camilla is interesting to look at in this respect: a sentimental love story in the Richardson tradition, but using Fielding’s omniscient author method, it is mainly concerned with the love between the heroine Camilla and the hero Edgar, which it manages to keep in jeopardy for some nine hundred pages by contriving an extraordinary number of misunderstandings between the two, caused by over-hasty judgements, misleading appearances, malicious conspiracies by rivals, and so on. The story is unbearably tedious and only exists as a machine for generating endless emotional and moral crises in the minds of the protagonists. The real focus of interest is on what the characters feel and think, not what they do. Mostly this is conveyed either by the authorial narrator summarising and explaining the characters’ thought processes, or by letting them express themselves in reported but unvoiced speech. Thus Edgar, having found Camilla in a compromising situation (of which she is of course entirely innocent):

  The less he could account for this, the more it offended him. And dwells caprice, thought he, while his eye followed her, even there! In that fair composition!—where may I look for singleness of mind, for nobleness of simplicity, if caprice, mere girlish, unmeaning caprice, dwell there? (book III, chap. 5)

  “Thought he” and “thought she” are recurrent tags in Camilla, linking authorial commentary with first-person thought. Two hundred pages later, Camilla has yet again compromised herself in Edgar’s sight. But for a rare moment her reflections take on the flexibility of free indirect speech. She has observed him give a sigh when he saw her and is not sure how to interpret it:

  Yet was it for her he sighed? Was it not, rather, from some secret inquietude, in which she was wholly uninterested, and might never know? Still, however, he was at Tonbridge; still therefore, she might hope something relative to herself induced his coming. (book VI, chap. 4)

  The gain in fluency, economy, naturalness, over the previous quotation is obvious. There are just a few other such instances in this enormous novel. Why, having discovered this technique, Fanny Burney did not use it more extensively we shall never know.

  Jane Austen was a master of this device. In Emma, for example, the heroine tries to promote a match between the vicar, Mr. Elton, and her protégée Harriet Smith, but is dismayed when Mr. Elton takes the opportunity of a carriage ride to make a declaration to Emma herself. Later:

  The hair was curled, and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think and be miserable.—It was a wretched business, indeed!—Such an overthrow of everything she had been wishing for!—Such a development of everything most unwelcome!—Such a blow for Harriet!—That was the worst of all.

  The beginning of the first sentence is objective narrative description—“The hair,” not “her hair.” “The maid,” not “her maid.” But “to think and be miserable” moves the focus of the narrative onto Emma’s state of mind, and the succeeding sentences actually give us access to her consciousness. We overhear, as it were, Emma’s thoughts as she might have formulated them—“It’s a wretched business—such an overthrow of everything I’ve been wishing for!” but transposed into the third person, past tense—though in fact some of the sentences lack a main verb, further blurring the distinction between author’s voice and character’s voice. The advantage of the third-person mode is that it allows a smooth, seamless transmission to a more summary, and syntactically complicated, description of Emma’s state of mind, in which the authorial narrator’s voice mingles with Emma’s:

  Every part of it brought pain and humiliation, of some sort or other; but compared with the evil to Harriet, all was light; and she would gladly have submitted to feel yet more mistaken—more in error—more disgraced by mis-judgment, than she actually was, could the effect of her blunders have been confined to herself. (vol. I, chap. 16)

  The most remarkable formal feature of Emma is that the story is told almost entirely from her point of view—there are just a couple of scenes at which she is not present—but during most of the action she is mistaken about the true state of affairs, so that, on first reading, the reader shares at least some of her misapprehensions, and the shock of discovery. This was an effect in which Henry James later specialised—telling the story through the consciousness of characters whose understanding of events is partial, mistaken, deceived, or self-deceiving—which makes it all the more surprising that his recorded remarks about Jane Austen are so condescending. Of all the earlier English novelists, Jane Austen seems to have the closest affinity with James.

  The great Victorian novelists who came between them rarely focalised their narrative through a single character in this way. If they wanted to present the action through the consciousness of one character they usually made him or her the narrator, falling back on the model of autobiography, as in Jane
Eyre, or Great Expectations. The classic Victorian novel, perhaps most perfectly exemplified by George Eliot’s Middlemarch, usually told its story from several points of view, which are often mediated through free indirect style, but compared and assessed by an authorial narrator. This was thoroughly consistent with the Victorian novelist’s aim to present the individual in relation to society and social change. Individual fortunes in these novels illustrate broad social themes, developments, and conflicts in ways which only the narrator fully understands and can fully articulate. There is a kind of underlying confidence in this fiction that reality can be known, that the truth about human affairs can be told, and that such knowledge and truth can be shared collectively. As the century drew to its close, however, this epistemological confidence declined. For a number of reasons, reality, and the representation of it in fiction, came to be seen as much more problematic. Increasingly, as we move into the modern period, the emphasis falls on the construction of the real within the individual’s consciousness, the difficulty of communication between these separate mental worlds, the distorting effects of the unconscious on consciousness, and the limits of human understanding.

  Henry James is a crucial figure in the transition from classic to modern fiction, and “consciousness” is one of the key words in his criticism of fiction and reflections on his own practice. In one of his earliest published pieces, a book review written in his twenties, he is already seeing the problem of characterisation as one of representing consciousnesses other than one’s own:

  To project yourself into a consciousness of a person essentially your opposite requires the audacity of great genius; and even men of genius are cautious in approaching the problem.36

  Even more difficult—indeed impossible in James’s view—was to project oneself into the consciousness of someone living in a different era. James disapproved of the historical novel as a genre, on the grounds that it was impossible to reconstruct life as actually experienced by people in the past. To Henry James, ‘What was it like to be an Elizabethan?’ was as unanswerable a question as ‘What is it like to be a Bat?’ (to invoke a philosophical paper well known to cognitive scientists). This may have been an unreasonable prejudice—after all, we have Elizabethan literature to guide us—but it illustrates how consciousness-centered Henry James’s approach to the art of fiction was. He writes to a correspondent who rashly ventured to send him her historical novel: