Consciousness and the Novel

by David Lodge

  D. L. I think that’s true. I wasn’t foolish enough to give any example of Helen’s fiction.

  C. R. Except the seduction.

  D.L. Er, yes—though that’s sort of autobiography.

  C.R. But she can’t tell it head-on. She does it as fiction.fn3

  D.L. What did you think of that? Is that second-rate?

  C.R. Well, I thought it would have been more interesting if it had been unfiltered. The central formal idea of the novel seems to me to be a reversal of sympathy. At the beginning, Ralph looks predatory and coarse. Helen looks sensitive and thoughtful. But in fact he’s much more interesting than she is. He’s much less conventional than she is. He’s much more prepared to say what he thinks. So in the course of the book, you change your opinion of the characters completely. You see her limitations, and you see his strengths. One of his strengths is that he’s prepared to tell the truth more often than she is. For her, fiction is a slight refuge from the truth.

  D.L. I wouldn’t dispute anything you’ve said, but some of it slightly surprises me. I certainly didn’t set out with the intention of making Helen second-rate. I had an idea of a certain kind of literary lady novelist that I was trying to evoke. And I certainly meant to suggest that some people found her a good novelist. She’s obviously not a great novelist, but I meant her to be a good novelist. The kind who wins small literary prizes. In writing the novel the way I did, without any authorial judgement and interpretation, I deliberately left it open to readers to make their own assessments. So I don’t think there’s anything in what you’ve said that’s incompatible with the book—but it’s not the only way to read it. Some people read in a very different way. I accept what you say, but lots of people would draw different moral conclusions.

  C.R. Well, I think she’s presented as a respectable novelist. The kind of novelist who’d be asked to teach a creative writing course at a university. As you say, she’d win some prizes. But neither of us would actually cross the street to buy one of her books.

  D.L. OK, fair enough.

  C.R. Let’s move on. I wanted to ask you about the role intuition plays in this book. Intuition seems to me to be absolutely central.

  D.L. Intuition? You’re saying the role of intuition in human life—the place of it, is one of the things thrown up by the book?

  C.R. Yes. Where do you think intuition fits into consciousness? Let me give you an example. Ralph’s potency fails him as soon as he’s threatened—before he knows he’s threatened. It’s intuitive. Carrie sees the surgeon Henderson, and knows he’s an incompetent shit, by intuition.

  D.L. That’s true. Again it’s a theme which I can’t say I consciously formulated. But I think it comes out of the literature that I read. For instance, one of these neurobiologists said that it’s almost impossible to use the facial muscles to fake a smile. You can always tell a social smile from a real one. And that, if you like, is exercising the intuitive judgement of people. We seem to have some way of interpreting that kind of data which you could describe as intuition.

  C.R. But in fact it’s rational. It’s based on evidence. It’s not mystical.

  D.L. Yeah. I suppose we’re all always rather haunted by the idea that there is some totally immaterial form of intuition. Telepathy is the extreme example of this. Have you ever experienced that? Do you think it exists? Even Ralph is tempted by this—when Douglass commits suicide at the very moment that Ralph hears he’s reprieved. Ralph’s tempted by the idea that it’s not a complete coincidence, that there must be some kind of system behind this. Is that the sort of thing you mean?

  C. R. Yes: I think everyone is tempted by that. I’ve just been rereading Milan Kundera’s The Joke. A brilliant book. In it Ludwig asks the question, “What is life trying to tell me all the time?” We all feel that life is trying to tell us something. Of course, it’s not, it’s pure subjectivity. What I meant by intuition was this: you give examples of very accurate intuitions. OK, they’re based on covert evidence. But don’t they effectively destroy the validity of Ralph’s models of consciousness? He thinks the body is a machine. So he thinks that sex can be just recreational. But the very first example—him fucking Isabel Hodgkiss—shows that it isn’t recreational. She needs him to say that he loves her. And he needs her to say something incredibly filthy back. And then they can do it. It’s not recreation, it’s not two machines at work. Doesn’t this undermine the scientific paradigms on offer?

  D. L. Yes—except that Ralph would use the word “machine” in a rather different way from you. He’s not saying merely that the body’s a machine, but that consciousness is like software being run on the hardware of the brain’s machine. That consciousness is a virtual machine. So anything that processes information is a machine—that doesn’t mean it’s made of metal and wires and things. It can be just a binary system. He would say that it doesn’t in any way undermine his position—that concepts like “love,” or pretending to love in order to get more enjoyment out of sex, can be incorporated within his theory of the mind. It’s a part of the cultural construction of consciousness. And it can all be simulated, in his view, in a computer program. My position would be that there’s something about the interface between the virtual machine and the real physical flesh-and-blood machine of the body—it’s very different from whatever you do with a purely material, inorganic machine. That’s really what I’m exploring. The existence of the flesh and the mortality of the flesh make such a difference to consciousness, that I can’t imagine it ever being simulated in a program.

  C.R. Presumably emotion is the great thing. You can’t have virtual emotion.

  D.L. Well, they reckon that they’re going to do it one day. I don’t know how.

  C.R. There is an interesting strand in your novel about lack of affect. Oliver, the autistic son of the Richmonds, has certain limitations and certain gifts. He can’t distinguish between truth and falsehood. He can’t distinguish between the fictional and the real. And he has a deficit of affect. He doesn’t have the right emotions. Just as a computer doesn’t have emotions either. What’s interesting about this is the play between Oliver and Ralph. When Carrie’s father is ill, Carrie accuses Ralph of a lack of affect—not feeling the right things. How do Oliver and Ralph go together? I think he’s just being honest. That’s his great thing. He doesn’t pretend to more emotion than he actually has.

  D.L. I think that’s true. The crucial scene is the little girl, Ralph’s daughter, asking about death. And I think you can read that scene in two ways. Some people would find Ralph’s behaviour absolutely unacceptable. Other people would see it rather more sympathetically. From your point of view, he’s being honest, he’s not pretending. He’s being consistent with what he believes, and other people are not being honest. Normally, we pretend to feel emotions we never actually feel—in order not to hurt people’s feelings.

  C. R. Well, Ralph too is capable of doing that. When Douglass hangs himself, Messenger says, in effect: “I go round saying how shocked I am, because people would be shocked if I said I wasn’t shocked—they’d think I was callous.” So he’s aware of the need for tact—but also he’s honest. What do you feel about the conversation with the daughter? Which side do you take?

  D. L. The fact that I put the two sides means that I don’t really want to say. But in real life I think I would not sympathise with Ralph. I would take his wife Carrie’s view: why destroy this kid’s sentimental myth about heaven, why not let it just drop away like milk teeth? Personally, I think that’s the right thing to do.

  C.R. Is Thinks . . . ultimately a novel about intimacy? About being inside another person’s consciousness? Messenger proposes an exchange of journals. But Helen’s reaction to Messenger’s violation of her journal—he hacks into her laptop, calls up her journal, and effectively ends their relationship—this suggests that we also have a need for privacy. In other words, we have two conflicting needs—the need for privacy and the need for intimacy. Is this what the novel’s about?

 
D.L. I wouldn’t say that. That would be making it too central and too explicit. It’s one of the things that emerges out of the novel. The novel is about consciousness in all its aspects and implications. The way you interpret my book—in a very professional literary-critical way—interests me, pleases me, and slightly surprises me. It’s the only way you can do it, of course. You articulate very clear thematic oppositions, pairings, and so on. But for me these things are all rather intuitive—following my characters, trying to imagine how they would react to each other, in particular circumstances. I’m not saying your reading’s illegitimate, but it’s not the way I created the book.

  C. R. The qualia of the book are different.

  D. L. They are. But yes, it’s true. There is a sort of innate contradiction. Certainly Helen is torn between the desire for privacy and the desire for intimacy. I think it applies to her rather more than it does to Ralph—partly because of her bereavement she’s very lonely, and she craves intimacy. But it’s partly the nature of her own temperament. (And I think, to some extent, it’s an occupational thing. She’s a novelist. And novelists don’t want to give away too much of their own thought processes, because that may invalidate or make too personal the general truths they try to articulate in their work. Lots of novelists are rather cagey about answering questions like these, for instance.) What you propose is a good take on Helen. I’m not sure it applies to Ralph. I’m not sure he wants intimacy in quite that way actually. He’s very independent and rather egotistical—and he’s quite confident that he can defend his own privacy. He’s a bit nervous when the police come round to investigate his hard disk.

  C.R. But he goes along with it. Whereas Douglass, who has something to hide, doesn’t. Let me ask you about Helen’s dead husband, Martin. He’s worked for the BBC and has been unfaithful serially. She’s tremendously wounded by this. I’m not sure what the point of this is. Is it to say that it’s absurd to idealise sexual fidelity? Is that one of the things it’s saying? And does it also say that we can’t ever know people, that there can be no intimacy?

  D.L. Central to the novel is the idea that a crucial stage of ordinary human development is the acquisition of a “theory of mind.” You discover in infancy that people can have different interpretations of the world. This opens up the possibility of deceiving them. Therefore deception is built into human life very deeply. We do it all the time. It’s not necessarily malicious, indeed it may be benevolent. Social life might become impossible if we didn’t dissemble, conceal, and suppress a great deal of what we actually feel. It also means, though, that we can betray and cheat. So I wanted a lot of examples in the book of deception and betrayal. I wanted Helen in particular to be confronted with a whole set of deceptions—partly to motivate her decision to have an affair with Ralph. She has a kind of moral resistance, an innately prim and proper character. So I needed something to precipitate her, make her ripe for having an affair. One thing is the discovery that her husband wasn’t faithful. Second, her discovery that Carrie is unfaithful to Ralph. And there are other examples.

  C.R. What you’re doing is complicating her life for her. She’s not a great novelist because she doesn’t live with enough complication. She’s ready to sort things and simplify things, but you complicate her life and make her more interesting than she would have been.

  D.L. I think it’s what novelists do all the time.

  C.R. I was going to ask you about Annabel Riverdale. She spills the beans when she’s drunk. In other words, she gives us access to her inner life, intimacy, unwillingly. This is the exception that proves the rule. Normally we don’t have access.

  D.L. Yeah, I suppose so. I mean I was a little disappointed with her. She had possibilities I wasn’t able to follow through. I thought she might be a more interesting character. It’s partly the constraints of the form I’d set myself . . .

  C.R. You have Ralph and you have Helen. You have third-person omniscience. You have parodies, e-mails. Julian Barnes’s Love, etc. has quite small bits of interior monologues by characters who are minor cogs in the machine. You didn’t think of trying that?

  D. L. No, I didn’t. Because in terms of the rules of the game that I’d set myself, I would observe the constraints Ralph establishes for the truthful representation of consciousness. It’s got to be a first-person account. Description of people has to be a behaviourist account if it’s in the third person. So there are two first-person accounts and a third-person narration which is objective, on the surface. All the other little parodies, the e-mail, etc., count as third person. They don’t go into the consciousness of our characters. They are documents. So, until the very last chapter, where I’m writing as a conventional omniscient author, everything else observes that rule. And Helen in a way alludes to it, when she says the only way to write fiction and satisfy Ralph would be to stay on the outside—not to invent anybody’s consciousness at all. So in a more conventional novel possibly, I could have spread myself, followed up more of the characters. But I’m not sure that would have been a good idea.

  C. R. So you mean Annabel Riverdale was there as a possibility for development rather than representing an idea?

  D. L. To tell you the truth, she was one of those characters I put in early on, thinking, “I may do something with this woman later.” And it never happened that I needed to.

  C. R. It’s interesting that you say Helen has a commentary on the method. One of the real pleasures of your book is what a sly writer you are. In Nice Work, for instance, you invoked and then used the narrative conventions of the Victorian novel ending. Though half of Thinks . . . is stream of consciousness, you make Helen say: “The stream of consciousness novel is rather out of fashion.” Which seemed to me a rather wonderful joke. And at the beginning of chapter 13 you have Helen advising Carrie about her novel, and saying she should separate the family from the historical material: “Having Alice think so much about local politics and the architecture of the city, and so on, seems rather unnatural”—this in a novel where the two main characters exchange information about science and consciousness all the time. You see the criticism and you preempt it.

  D. L. I’m a metafictional novelist, I suppose, because I was a teacher of fiction and therefore a very self-conscious novelist. I think this is generally true of the present literary period. We’re all very conscious of what we’re doing. So if you want to write a realistic novel, you have to signal to the audience that you’re operating a convention. But, basically, it’s because I was involved in teaching and analysing fiction formally for so long. That’s why my work is riddled with this sort of allusion and joke.

  C. R. When you’re reading Thinks . . . you’re just fascinated by the information. The sheer interest of it stops you raising an objection.

  D.L. That has to be the case, I think. I couldn’t bear to read a novel with just tricks. You have to believe in the characters and care what happens to them.fn4 These little jerks of the strings—which show you it’s actually a device—can give you an extra frisson, but then you go back into the flow of the real. Did you notice the little joke when Helen’s trying to choose a passage to analyse in her lecture to the Cognitive Science Institute at the end? She wonders about doing Henry James’s scene with Strether on the river. And then decides it’s been done already.

  C.R. The scene at the end of The Ambassadors, where Strether knows intuitively that Chad and Marie de Vionnet must be lovers?

  D. L. Helen thinks of taking that example and then rejects it “because it’s been done.” The joke is that I did it. In Language of Fiction.

  C.R. All novelists now seem to be committed to science. Are you? Or was consciousness just another interesting idea like Kierkegaard in Therapy? Have you been changed permanently by the reading you did for this novel?

  D.L. I think it’s made it even more difficult for me to subscribe to any transcendental religious faith. I think it’s been a great education. I’m not quite sure if it’s changed me permanently: it’s just opened out the world
in an interesting way. I know exactly where I got the idea for Thinks . . . In 1994 I read this review of two books by Daniel Dennett (then unknown to me) and Francis Crick, the DNA man. While I was doing the research and writing the novel—which wasn’t immediately—a number of other novelists started to show that they too had tuned into science. It’s partly because there’s been so much good popular science writing recently and partly because of the “end of ideology.” And partly too because literary criticism is up the creek. So the neo-Darwinists have moved in to occupy those areas and have suddenly become a stimulus for thinking about human nature, the world, what it’s all about. It’s the zeitgeist.

  C.R. Talking about “what it’s all about,” what about Messenger’s name? He brings the news? What is the news? Is it that Eros and Thanatos are linked? Thinks . . . begins with Isabel Hodgkiss and sex, but it turns out she died of breast cancer. So sex and death are there at the beginning. And the novel almost ends with the same combination. Ralph has a potentially fatal disease. Moreover, his disease—the virus he’s suffering from—which isn’t terminal cancer—is picked up at the time of his first sexual experience with Martha.

  D.L. I don’t know if I want to tell you all this really—take you into the workshop . . . Basically, I’d decided early on that Messenger should experience some real shock—to do with his mortality. Something that would really challenge his self-confidence and his rather arrogant materialist ideology. We would see what he’s made of. I hadn’t really decided how he was going to react. But I wanted him to fear that he had a terminal disease. So I asked my G.P. To find some disease confronting you with the possibility of death, without your having suffered a lot of pain or obvious distress up to that point. A disease that would fulfill certain realistic criteria. And my G.P. suggested this condition—that you can pick up from sheepdogs, that people who work with dogs or cattle can pick up. (It’s common in Wales, apparently.) I read up a lot about sheep. And I invented this episode which I think fits into this pattern of Ralph’s mind. He always goes to his sexual life whenever he starts to free-associate. So you think, as a reader, that the episode on the sheep farm is just one in a sequence of erotic memoirs. Then it turns out to have another function in the story. I always feel that’s a satisfying combination. That’s why it was there.