Because of this change, a new energy began to pervade literature, and all of the arts—an energy that reflected the new, scientific spirit of the time. The literature of the Victorian age, which concentrated on the vagaries of class and of class distinctions--the idea that that the wealthy are rich because they have a divine dispensation that originated with God and then made its way "downward" through queen to burgher to peasant--receded, and literatures in which individuals, and their thought processes, came to the forefront. The Romantics, with their mystical vision of a meaning-infused landscape, were also eclipsed. Western literature’s focus was no longer about perfecting the self and the soul in order to become more Christlike. Just as Darwin demolished the mirror of God in which Western civilization had seen itself for millennia, literature stopped reproducing a social order that descended from God and began, instead, to look inward at this strange, new, disturbing phenomenon--the human being, no longer outside of the natural world, but produced by it. This was truly a new and astonishing idea, and was still astonishing when Francis Crick published The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul,10 which encompasses this idea and the magnitude of social, emotional, and mental upheaval it continues to engender.
Calvino, in The Uses of Literature, says, “The power of modern literature lies in its willingness to give a voice to what has remained unexpressed in the social or individual unconscious: this is the gauntlet it throws down time and again.”11 Instead of sailing from continent to continent and encountering new external wonders, authors began to examine what was close at hand, previously unexplored by science, and utterly mysterious: consciousness. Henry James brought psychology, another new field, into literature. James’ lush sentences expand to include multitudes of introspective thoughts in which the protagonists attempt to understand their motivations, their actions, the power of their memories, and how such attributes affect the actions of others.
In Woolf’s work, consciousness is a kind of cloud which she as the author accesses at will, almost as if the thoughts of everyone are blending, in some unseen, invisible place, in the aether, in the newly-discovered place where relativity is not a thought-game, but reality itself. Stein attempts an even deeper dive in an attempt to fix on the place where thought is rendered into language, that mysterious, almost divine crux where thought and matter seem to be one, where Keat’s Grecian Urn is pure thought, platonic perfection, and still an everyday object in the world.
For Joyce, all of existence is language--foreign, perhaps, but charged with deep meaning, the meaning of rock, seaweed, color. “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.”12
Far from being ultra-refined or removed from real life, as Pinker would have it, the Moderns were the first to attempt not just to tell stories and relate those stories to God, the gods, morals, or societal constructs, but to get to the center of the mystery of consciousness. They grabbed hold of the line wavering downward, inward, through the pellucid, curiously liquid attribute we call awareness and pulled themselves into the depths. Literature no longer took the reader on a concrete and satisfying timebound trip of morals or manners or the exterior facts of the protagonist’s life. Instead, the moderns sought to go deeper into the well of consciousness, to deconstruct it as scientists were deconstructing the mysteries of time and space. The physical world was just a jumping-off place, engendering thoughts that rippled and eddied through the medium of the mind like waves from a stone cast into a pool. Modern literature is an attempt to fathom, to recreate, the state of an individual’s awareness, many steps back from the artifices of fortune and society, so that the bare temporal act of consciousness itself is rendered at the first waypoint from which it bubbles forth: our thoughts, just barely caught in the net of verbalization.
This seems like no mean task--indeed, the work of the Moderns seems like the first nonreligious attempt at a true study of consciousness. All study begins with observation, and this is what the Moderns did.
A new interiority, combined with the division of matter and its necessary companion, time, into finer and finer unseen particles and energies, is paralleled by Joyce’s and Woolf’s division of consciousness into ever more fine units of time. In the same stroke, with Einstein’s theory of relativity, time lost adherence to any solid touchstone, and instead expanded and contracted according to laws that only those deeply initiated in mathematics and physics could begin to understand, but to which Proust’s long life-work, In Search of Lost Time, owes much.
At the same time, Freud’s concept of the Unconscious took the place of God. Modern literature, like Freud, looked inward for the first time beyond social scrims, to the unconscious, the pre-conscious, the not-so-prettily-formed-and-edited conscious basis of thought, dreams, and action. It began to examine territory previously reserved for poets and philosophers. It tried to get down to what senses actually perceive and piece together to form the still-there “I,” contrasting with the latter-day Postmodern “not-I,” the fractured I, the empty place inside that past ages believed so immutable: the soul.
The soul--or at least, the sense of a person, nebulous though that person/soul may be—still exists in much modern literature, particularly in Woolf’s. But it is accepted as being human, rather than God-related, and in this it is something new in the world, or at least, something not much seen since the Greeks. Pulled loose from God, known to have sprung not from heaven but from accidental combinations of matter, this essence of humanity is a new thing, an object that can be observed from the inside. Every person is seen not as a cog in society but as a complete and mysterious individual whose motivations and actions come from a place unseen.
Modern literature is an attempt to get at the assemblage of the thing, and story, like the humans and the rest of the natural world, at this point becomes infinitely more complex. When the ideas propelling the Twentieth Century’s scientific and intellectual direction were being formed, humans were definitely not seen as a blank slate, as Pinker would have it. In the art of the early Twentieth Century, the self is something. The Moderns want to find out what that self is, to excavate and reveal the self, not fill it up or smother it with predigested ideas. However, the soul, or whatever one wants to call the sense of one’s own interiority, now finds new territory: not God, but science and technology.
Modernism is exterior as well as interior; the wonder and the speculation extend in all directions.
“Away and away the airplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bently, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculations, mathematics, Mendelian theory--away the airplane shot.”13
Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Stein, and Proust access what might be called a halo of consciousness, comprised of all that the history of human culture has to offer, and all that time’s immediacy imprints upon the senses. The characters in their books realize that they must work harder to make sense of things, because the previous comfortable sense of what life is has been eclipsed by irrefutable discoveries about the natural world. A sense of freedom, wonder, and potential pervades their work, as well as the despair communicated by Woolf and Eliot and Lawrence which has to do with the realization that all of the darkness of the world--war, economic insufficiencies, and even interpersonal pain, are not created or mediated by God. Instead, they are entirely human creations, or at least, manifestations of humanity previously blamed on supernatural agencies.
As previously mentioned, Pinker argues that humans require what he calls “beauty” of their art, and claims studies show that beauty means recognizable landscapes and stories with a beginning, middle and end. He claims that Modern literature forswor
e such artifice in favor of another approach. However, this accusation could more supportably be leveled at Postmodernism. Most works of Modern literature, from Ulysses to Mrs. Dalloway, have beginnings, middles, and ends, although the middles swell to include, because of the nature of closely observed consciousness, a vast array of remembered, invented, or imagined time. Moreover, the point of what one is reading might not be quite as didactically imposed upon the reader as in other literatures. But, certainly, there is something about Modern literature which caused Thomas Hardy to observe, “They’ve changed everything now . . . there used to be a beginning and a middle and an end.”14
Human preference for certain forms or thoughts does not confer any particular value on such forms or thoughts. Most humans prefer to believe that God exists; a universe with God in it seems to be a more beautiful and perfect and even more sensible conclusion, for them. Like belief in God, the preference for recognizable landscapes in art and simple stories springs from our biological past—as does everything about us. This does not mean that we are therefore, as Pinker would have it, incapable of appreciating and assimilating purely imaginary or intellectualized combinations of information. Our biology underlies everything we think and do, including our appreciating forms of art that he seems not to enjoy. A propensity to develop or fall into any particular pattern of thought or way of looking at reality does not mean these patterns are useful, fruitful, or true. Even mathematicians concede that their abstract thoughts, in the end, might not necessarily be universally true. In the case of art, though, which could be said to be unnecessary (like belief in God) in terms of living one’s life, people do have a choice, which they exercise: probably ninety-nine percent of literature that is published today is traditional rather than Postmodern or even Modern.
Perhaps because it is an examination of abstract thoughts rather than anything replicable and outside of ourselves, the study of literature seems like a dead end to a lot of people. However, it can be revelatory in very satisfying ways.
Stefan Collini, in his 1998 introduction to The Two Cultures, points out that critics and academics are actually the “scientists” of literature, in that they study the organized manifestations of human minds. The necessity of being an initiate in order to appreciate the artform fully is implicit in all literature. Just because many of us can read does not mean that we have, are capable of having, or would even want to have, the same kind of reading experience as everyone else. We differ in our intellectual hungers and abilities. The distance between high and low art is predicated on the participant having privileged knowledge in order to understand and appreciate high art, and on low art being something that a relatively unsophisticated reader could enjoy. In this sense, the vaunted flattening of the world in Modernism, and in Postmodernism’s incorporation of low and high, are somewhat illusory.
If literature is a mirror of consciousness, then the changes that have taken place in the literature of the twentieth century mirrors changes in, if not consciousness itself, then in the contents of our shared social consciousness as determined by history--two devastating world wars fueled by ideological differences--and in technological changes such as the birth of the atomic bomb. In fact, I would postulate (and many have probably done so) that the bare fact of the existence of the atomic bomb gave birth to Postmodernism in all of its diversity. Another change in our understanding of consciousness, and concurrent changes in literary fashion, has to do with our ever-expanding understanding of biochemistry, and questions about how biochemistry engenders consciousness.
Pinker claims that science now shows that personality is, for the most part, an irreducible and inescapable given. Agreeing that we are assigned personality through our genetic makeup does not change our individual, conscious experience of reality, but the literature of today certainly reflects an individual becoming infinitely more complex as matter becomes more finely grained, less and less visible to the naked or uninformed eye, more puzzling. Consciousness is decreasingly seen as a matter of id and ego, and increasingly seen as a function of biochemistry. Personality and consciousness, in today’s popular and scientific view, are manifestations that are not under the control of a central principal, whether that principal is called God or the individual. Instead, the fragmentation of matter possible when atomic energy is unleashed is mirrored in the fragmentation of the human being. And if we can blame our genes for that which we count as faults of character (antisocial behavior, a propensity to violence, rape, or murder, or even simple rudeness), responsibility for our behavior could be claimed to be at an end. Philosophy has wrestled for centuries with the question of whether we have free will, and various waves of scientific research in the past fifty years seem to say, “No.” We still have no final consensus.
If we were to visualize ideas about the origin of personality and how they affect literature, the pre-Moderns were at the center of a series of concentric circles. The Moderns were a lot of individual circles immersed in the same soup, bent on turning that soup into something individual through the medium of their consciousness. The Postmoderns are books/whole universes giving forth signals that may or may not reach some target, and in which the target can then interpret as they wish, find what meaning she can, depending on what she brings to the work. But the meaning has not necessarily been deliberately assembled by the author.
Postmodernism is substantially different than previous artistic attempts to represent or fathom reality. “Realistic fiction presupposed chronological time as the medium of a plotted narrative, an irreducible individual psyche as the subject of its characterization, and above all, the ultimate concrete reality of things as the object and rationale of its description.”15 The concept of reality as something that everyone agrees upon has given way to the idea that one’s own point of view yields a singular and ever-changing reality which no one else can share in its entirety. This ever-changing and unique point of view apprehends and interprets the literary object. Italo Calvino states, “The spirit in which one reads is decisive: it is up to the reader to see to it that literature exerts its critical force, and this can occur independently of the author’s intention.”16
One manifestation of this movement is the attempt to leave authoring to the reader. This impulse, though, can never be purely executed. When Borroughs arranged his cut-ups, he was still acting as an author. The negation of the author is just a sleight-of-hand, another technique, with roots in Twentieth Century Modernism, presaged by Surrealism. We cannot help authoring meaning in our lives, and when meaning fails, often we cannot survive its loss. We read meaning and connections into the most random events, a biological predilection upon which Postmodernism capitalizes. Burroughs is showing us that this is the case. We even invest meaninglessness with meaning; nihilism and existentialism are isms that give form to various philosophies and lifestyles. We cannot escape ourselves.
Postmodernist works still assume that a centralized single consciousness/reader is assimilating what is put forth. If we sit down with the intent to disarrange our senses with a Postmodern novel, the experience resembles the enjoyment of an acquired taste as for an exotic cheese. Some people take to it; some people don’t.
Despite this, Postmodern literature is more overtly self-conscious than modern literature. Instead of dealing mostly with emotion, it is intellectual in nature. Postmodern literature often attempts to mirror sensory input rather than interpret it, rather than rearrange and infuse it with author-bound meaning. But the writing practices of Kerouac – arguably a bridge to the Postmodern – in the fifties and sixties were not much different than those of Thomas Wolfe in the twenties and thirties. Both simply stuck a real or metaphorical roll of paper in the typewriter and wrote without regard for structure: the author, in their work, is all.
In his Postmodern masterpiece, Hopscotch,17 Cortazar goes half the distance. Within the book are chapters in which characters interact, as is normal in all novels. If read chronologically, the chapters tell one story. Cortazar places jumps within his
narrative, though; he includes an invitation to read the chapters in a different order – one created by him – and, further, invites the reader to assemble their own novel from these tableaus. The fragments of meaning are tableaus freed from time which can be accessed and rearranged according to the desires of the reader; shuffled to create new motives for the actions of the characters as well as different outcomes to their philosophical dilemmas, which are quite real in terms of affecting them in life-and-death ways. Deconstruction and semiotics are, perhaps, extensions of the examination of consciousness. It could be argued that most philosophers and religious thinkers of the past would be scientists today, because they wanted to know what was going on. Huge swaths of religious and philosophical thought of the past has been rendered irrelevant by science because we have enhanced our knowledge of world with tools capable of sensing that which is too far or too small or otherwise beyond our capability to sense without tools. We have learned that pure thought, without the physical facts, is not a strong enough tool to use to understand ourselves and our environment.
I submit that there is a literary alternative that bridges the rift between science andliterature and takes seriously all that we have learned, in the past century, about ourselves and our surroundings: science fiction.
C.P. Snow, in The Two Cultures, states, “The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures . . . Ought to produce creative chances. In the history of mental activity, that has been where some of the break-throughs came. The chances are there now. But they are there, as it were, in a vacuum, because those of the two cultures can't talk to each other.”18
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