Consciousness and the Novel

by David Lodge

  It cannot be coincidental that the generation of novelists I have been discussing was the first to grow up with the movies, to acquire the habit of movie-going; and that several of them became involved in the art of film. Evelyn Waugh, for instance, acted in an amateur movie called “The Scarlet Woman” made by a group of Oxford undergraduates. His first significant piece of published fiction, The Balance: A Yarn of the Good Old Days of Broad Trousers and High Necked Jumpers (1925), consists mostly of dialogue and partly of the scenario of a silent film and the comments of a cinema audience that is watching it.55 One of the comic highlights of Vile Bodies is the making of a historical film by a venal and incompetent commercial producer. In his article on Ronald Firbank’s novels, Waugh compared them to “cinema films in which the relation of caption and photograph is directly reversed; occasionally a brief vivid image flashes out to illuminate and explain the flickering succession of spoken words.”56 Henry Green described his novel, Living (1929), to a correspondent as “written in a very condensed kind of way in short paragraphs . . . A kind of very disconnected cinema film.”57 According to his friend and fellow Etonian Anthony Powell, Henry Green, or Henry Yorke (to use his real name), did very little work as an undergraduate, but made “a point of watching a film every afternoon and every evening of his Oxford life, changes of programme in the city’s three cinemas making this just possible.”58 Even if this is only half true, it is still impressive testimony of film-addiction. Evelyn Waugh, in spite of his often declared scorn for the modern world in general, and Hollywood in particular, retained the habit of attending the local cinema every week in his postwar existence as a country gentleman.

  Christopher Isherwood famously described his narrative stance in Goodbye to Berlin as, “I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” It is not clear whether he was alluding to still or moving pictures in this image. But he says in his lightly fictionalised autobiography Lions and Shadows, “I had always been fascinated by films . . . I was a born film fan”; and that “if you are a novelist and want to watch your scene taking place visibly before you, it is simplest to project it on to an imaginary screen.”59 In due course Isherwood became a screenwriter himself in Hollywood.

  The emphasis on dialogue and external appearances in these novelists, leaving thought and feeling to be implied, was not the only effect of cinema on the novel. It also brought story back into literary fiction. The novel of consciousness tended to neglect story, or diminish its importance, for obvious reasons. The deeper you go, as a writer, into the minds of your characters—the more detailed and refined your registration of their thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, scruples—the slower the narrative tempo becomes, and the less action there is. Moreover, the machinery of the traditional plot may be seen as a distraction from the true business of the literary novelist, to create the sense of “felt life.” That of course was Henry James’s aim, and his phrase, and he himself was painfully aware that his work suffered in popularity because it was perceived to lack narrative interest. There is something poignant and slightly desperate in his argument, in the preface to the New York edition of The Portrait of a Lady, that it is the character and sensibility of Isabel Archer that makes what happens to her interesting. In comparison to “the moving accident, of battle or murder and sudden death,” he admits, “her adventures are . . . mild. Without her sense of them, her sense for them, as one may say, they are next to nothing at all; but isn’t the beauty and the difficulty just in showing their mystic conversion by that sense, conversion into the stuff of drama or, even more delightful word still, of ‘story’?”60 The wider reading public, alas, was never convinced. Even in a writer like Conrad, who actually dealt with “accident . . . battle . . . murder and sudden death,” the gratifications of the conventional adventure story are deliberately frustrated, inverted, problematised, by complex time shifts, shifts of point of view, elaborate framing devices, and a densely written, syntactically complicated, metaphorically rich prose style—all of which together retard and obstruct the delivery of simple narrative excitement. In Joyce and Woolf, narrative is pared down to a minimum; the great crises in the lives of the characters are alluded to fragmentarily in memory, while the immediate focus is on the habitual and the quotidian. It is not surprising that the action of the greatest of all stream-of-consciousness novels takes place on one ordinary day.

  The cinema, however, was from the beginning a popular narrative medium which told exciting stories of a traditional kind. Far from slowing down the normal tempo of human existence to make room for psychological depth, as the literary novel of consciousness does, the cinema, and especially the early silent cinema, artificially speeded it up, keeping its characters in a continuous state of thrilling or farcical jeopardy. Continual exposure to this kind of material must have had its effect on the writers who came of age in the 1920s, and encouraged them to see no necessary contradiction between writing literary fiction and telling a good story.

  The fascination of this generation of writers with film, and its influence on their imaginations, did not mean however that their novels always translated successfully to the screen. Graham Greene is an interesting case in point. He too frequented the cinema from an early age; he was for several years in the 1930s a film critic in London, and so saw hundreds of films in the line of professional duty. He wrote numerous screenplays, some original, some adaptations of his own fiction, and almost every one of his novels has been made into a feature film. But in this considerable body of cinematic work, there is only one really great film, The Third Man, which Greene scripted himself and originally conceived as a movie, though he later published a novella based on his film treatment.

  The influence of the cinema on Greene’s fictional technique has been noted often enough: the fast cutting from scene to scene, his eye for the telling synecdochic detail (the rhetorical equivalent of the close-up shot), his preference for exciting plots derived from popular cinematic subgenres—the gangster movie, the spy thriller, the whodunit, the Western. Even his religious novels have these structures. The Power and the Glory is a spiritual Western. The End of the Affair is a detective story with a Divine culprit. But unlike the other novelists of his generation I have mentioned, the Catholic Greene did not turn away entirely from depth in order to render the surface of life; he remained interested in representing the consciousness of his characters, partly because he regarded them very literally as having “souls,” capable of salvation and damnation. And he saw no contradiction in aiming at both social and psychological realism. His compliment to François Mauriac is an implicit manifesto for his own fiction:

  He is a writer for whom the visible world has not ceased to exist, whose characters have the solidity and importance of men with souls to save or lose, and a writer who claims the traditional and essential right of a novelist, to comment, to express his views.61

  Greene’s most powerful novels are those in which the implied author identifies with characters who have transgressed the limits of normal civilised society, and are racked with moral and metaphysical anxiety. He takes us inside their minds in free indirect style, but lends them some of his own eloquence, using the privilege of the traditional “omniscient” narrator. For example, here is a passage about the Catholic teenage gangster Pinkie Brown, in Brighton Rock, driving the pathetically devoted waiflike Rose to what she supposes to be a suicide pact, but which he intends to be a murder by which he will cover the traces of an earlier crime:

  The car lurched on to the main road; he turned the nose to Brighton. An enormous emotion beat on him; it was like something trying to get in, the pressure of gigantic wings against the glass. Dona Nobis pacem. He withstood it, with all the bitter force of the school bench, the cement playground, the St Pancras waiting room, Dallow’s and Judy’s secret lust, and the cold, unhappy moment on the pier. If the glass broke, if the beast—whatever it was—got in, God knows what it would do. He had a sense of huge havoc—the confession, the penance an
d the sacrament—an awful distraction, and he drove blind into the rain.62

  Pinkie is experiencing here what Mauriac called “the good temptation”—the temptation to repent. His thoughts are dominated by religious imagery: the wings of the Holy Spirit, conventionally portrayed as a dove, magnified and fused with Francis Thompson’s figure of the Hound of Heaven, and mixed up with echoes of the Latin mass and synecdochic flashbacks to Pinkie’s violent, deprived childhood and youth. There’s no way this rich matrix of allusion and association could be conveyed through visual imagery or spoken dialogue alone. One reason why so many of the films of Greene’s novels disappoint is that without the powerful and persuasive rhetoric of his narrative voice, the stories can seem contrived and melodramatic.

  Writing in 1956, the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet invoked the cinematic adaptation of novels to advocate art that stays on the surface and to denounce what he called “the old myths of depth.”63 “We know that the whole literature of the novel was based on these myths,” he says. “The writer’s traditional role consisted in excavating Nature, in burrowing deeper and deeper to reach some ever more intimate strata.” But, “not only do we no longer consider the world as our own . . . we no longer even believe in its ‘depth’ . . . the surface of things has ceased to be for us the mask of their heart, a sentiment that led to every kind of metaphysical transcendence.” Robbe-Grillet was an agronomist before he was a novelist or a screenplay writer, and perhaps his scientific training lies behind his uncompromising materialism, which is antihumanist as well as atheistic. Even existentialism is dismissed as sentimental and self-indulgent. The world, he says, “is neither significant nor absurd. It is, quite simply . . . Around us, defying the noisy pack of our animistic or protective adjectives, things are there.” And film can remind us of that fact even against its own intentions. In narrative films, as in the novels on which they are often based, the images are laden with human meanings: “the empty chair becomes only absence or expectation, the hand on the shoulder becomes a sign of friendliness, the bars on the window only the impossibility of leaving.” But in the cinema you actually see these things, and the effect, Robbe-Grillet claims, is to make the human significations attached to them seem superfluous. “What affects us, what persists in our memory, what appears as essential and irreducible . . . are the gestures themselves, the objects, the movements, and the outlines, to which the image has suddenly (and unintentionally) restored their reality.” To capture this reality, the novel, according to Robbe-Grillet, must purge itself of language of a “visceral, analogical, or incantatory character.” Instead, “the visual or descriptive adjective, the word that contents itself with measuring, locating, limiting, defining, indicates a difficult but most likely direction for a new art of the novel.” In short, Robbe-Grillet is calling for a literature without qualia. It’s a bracing argument, though the kind of fiction that Robbe-Grillet himself wrote in accordance with it seems to me almost unendurably tedious, except when the human emotions he tried to expunge manage to insinuate themselves back into the text. And I would say the same of the celebrated film he made with Alain Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad.

  As I observed earlier, there are many postmodernisms, and they are not all experimental. Some were simply anti-modernist. The dominant British novelists of the 1950s, for instance—Kingsley Amis, John Wain, C. P. Snow, William Cooper, John Braine, Angus Wilson, Alan Sillitoe—used fictional forms which harked back to the Victorian or Edwardian novel of social realism, and several of them mounted critical attacks on modernist literary experiment. Their representation of consciousness was entirely traditional in method, and they aimed at originality only in the experience with which they dealt and the distinctive verbal styles in which they described it. The novelists of the previous generation also tended, as their careers lengthened, to revert to the norm in terms of narrative technique. The later work of Waugh, Powell, and Isherwood, for instance, maintains a conservative balance between surface and depth. Graham Greene’s work always did; and so, after some unhappy Joycean experiments in The Clergyman’s Daughter, did the novels of George Orwell. Of this group, only Henry Green persevered with the dialogue novel to the end of his writing life, in books like Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952). In two radio talks broadcast at about that time, he defended this method, and criticised the fictional convention by which the narrator claims a privileged knowledge of the consciousness of the characters: “Do we know, in life, what other people are really like?” he asked. “I very much doubt it. We certainly do not know what other people are thinking and feeling. How then can the novelist be so sure?” Henry Green was not always faithful to his own prescription. His Concluding, for instance, published in 1948, is notable for sudden interventions by the authorial voice telling us what lies behind the speech and actions of the characters, often in bizarre extended metaphors, for example:

  “Adams won’t like this,” she said, and turned with a smile which was for him alone to let him take her, and helped his heart find hers by fastening her mouth on his as though she were an octopus that had lost its arms to the propellers of a tug, and had only its mouth now with which, in a world of the hunted, to hang on to wrecked spars.64

  One could say that the baroque extravagance of the image exposes and undermines the pretence of authorial omniscience, that it is therefore a metafictional gesture, what the Russian Formalists called a “baring of the device.” Certainly metafiction has been a favourite resource of many postmodernist novelists, as different as John Fowles, Muriel Spark, Malcolm Bradbury, John Barth, and Kurt Vonnegut. By openly admitting and indeed drawing attention to the fictionality of their texts, they free themselves to use all the conventions of the traditional novel, including omniscient insights into the consciousness of their characters, without laying themselves open to accusations of bad faith.

  Henry Green’s argument that, because in real life we can’t know what other people are thinking and feeling, novelists shouldn’t pretend to do so in writing fiction, is actually voiced by my cognitive scientist, Ralph Messenger, in the passage from Thinks . . . that I quoted in the second part of this essay. It may seem simplistic, but it perhaps helps to explain the increasing popularity of first-person narration in fiction in the postmodern period. Both the classic novel and the modernist novel took on the challenge of telling a story from several points of view, representing the consciousness of more than one character, and doing so in what was basically a third-person narrative discourse, even if it might contain some elements in the form of interior monologue. If you jot down a list of classic fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, first-person novels modelled formally on the confession or autobiography are in a distinct minority. But in the second half of the twentieth century it seems to become an increasingly favoured narrative method. It can, of course, take many different forms, and can be applied to many different aesthetic ends. There is, for instance, the autobiographical roman fleuve for which Proust provided the great model, imitated later by English writers like Anthony Powell and C. P. Snow, though they were more interested in the surface of social life, and less interested in the exploration of psychological depth than was Proust. In A Dance to the Music of Time and the Strangers and Brothers series, the autobiographical narrator acts primarily as an observant reporter of other people’s lives, and is a kind of surrogate for the old omniscient authorial narrator of classic nineteenth-century fiction. (Sometimes indeed C. P. Snow’s Lewis Eliot claims an implausibly certain knowledge of the motivation of his friends and colleagues.) At the opposite aesthetic pole from these panoramic social novels are the disturbing monologues of the late Beckett, in which the narrator seems to be a consciousness almost totally deprived of sensory input, and with a fading memory, condemned to go on narrating without anything tangible to narrate:

  . . . if only there was a thing, but there it is, there is not, they took away things when they departed, they took away nature, there was never anyone, anyone but me, anything but me, t
alking of me, impossible to stop, impossible to go on, but I must go on, I’ll go on, without anyone, without anything, but me, but my voice . . .65

  The most common kind of first-person novel is still the fictitious autobiography or confession: Orwell’s Coming up for Air, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Nabokov’s Lolita, Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and Tim Parks’s Europa are some notable examples from different decades. Some of the narrators of these novels are transparently sincere, some are unreliable and self-betraying. Sometimes their prose style is elaborately literary, and sometimes racily colloquial. When first-person narration is combined with a focus on “surface” rather than “depth”—when, that is, the consciousness that is revealed by the first-person narrative contains none of the emotions and values that we expect to find there—a peculiarly disturbing effect of alienation can be produced, especially when violent death is involved. Camus’s The Outsider is a classic instance of this kind of novel, which has inspired many others. Striking contemporary examples are The Butcher Boy (1992) by Patrick MacCabe and Morven Callar (1996) by the young Scottish writer Alan Warner.