[Discussion] Sense and sensibility

[Paksoy, Hb]

Sense and sensibility 

For centuries, science and philosophy have grappled with the mystery of our
inner life. But, argues David Lodge, it is literature that has provided the
most accurate record of human consciousness 

Saturday November 2, 2002
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk> 

		
Until fairly recently, consciousness was not much studied by the natural
sciences. It was considered the province of philosophy. Psychology, inasmuch
as it aspired to be an empirical science, regarded consciousness as "a black
box." 
All that could be observed and measured was input and output, not what went
on inside. This placed severe limitations on the study of human experience.
As recently as 1989 Stuart Sutherland wrote in the International Dictionary
of Psychology , "Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it
is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved.
Nothing worth reading has been written about it." 
Psychoanalysis, of course, was always concerned with trying to understand
consciousness, but its claims to be a science have been dismissed by most
natural scientists, and many of its critics have regarded it as a kind of
substitute for religion. Its ideas, or memes (to use Richard Dawkins's
useful term for the conceptual equivalent of genes), have been disseminated
and kept in currency largely by literature and literary intellectuals. 
The current stir of scientific interest in consciousness is usually traced
back to a 1990 paper by Francis Crick and Christof Koch announcing that it
was time to make human consciousness the subject of empirical study. But
several earlier developments had encouraged such a move. For example: the
discovery in quantum physics that an event is ultimately inseparable from
its observation, undermining the assumption that science is absolutely
objective and impersonal. 
For example: the discovery of DNA, which put biology in the driving seat of
the physical sciences; the development of new brain-scanning techniques; and
the surge of neo- Darwinian evolutionary theory in the 1970s and 1980s,
disseminated by brilliant popular science writers such as Dawkins, which
offered a comprehensive materialist account of human nature. For example:
advances in computing power and miniaturisation,which opened up new
possibilities in Artificial Intelligence. 
At the same time, some philosophers began to ask whether the dismissive
catch-phrase "the Ghost in the Machine" - used by Gilbert Ryle to denounce
the notion of the mind as something like a soul or spirit existing
independently of the human brain - really disposed of all the questions
raised by the phenomenon of consciousness. Joseph Levine published an
influential paper in 1983 entitled "Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory
Gap." Qualia, plural of the Latin quale, is a key term in consciousness
studies, meaning the specific nature of our subjective experience of the
world. 
"Examples of qualia are the smell of freshly ground coffee or the taste of
pineapple; such experiences have a distinctive phenomenological character
which we have all experienced but which, it seems, is very difficult to
describe."( The Oxford Companion to the Mind ) 
Levine was drawing attention to the failure of purely materialistic theories
of mind to explain this phenomenon. A decade later the philosopher David
Chalmers agreed: "It still seems utterly mysterious that the causation of
behaviour should be accompanied by a subjective inner life." 
Even the physicist James Trefil concedes that "no matter how my brain works,
no matter how much interplay there is between my brain and my body, one
single fact remains... I am aware of a self that looks out at the world from
somewhere inside my skull... this is not simply an observation, but the
central datum with which every theory of consciousness has to grapple. In
the end the theory has to go from the firing of neurons to this essential
perception." 
When Sutherland said that nothing worth reading had been written about
consciousness he was articulating a rather dismissive judgment of published
work in the professional field of psychology, but unintentionally he was
dismissing the entire corpus of the world's literature - because literature
is a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we
have. Lyric poetry is arguably man's most successful effort to describe
qualia. The novel is arguably man's most successful effort to describe the
experience of individual human beings moving through space and time. 
There are some thinkers in cognitive science, or on the fringes of it, who
have acknowledged as much. Noam Chomsky, for instance, has said: "It is
quite possible... that we will always learn more about human life and
personality from novels than from scientific psychology." The reason is that
science tries to formulate general explanatory laws which apply universally,
which were in operation before they were discovered, and which would have
been discovered sooner or later by somebody. 
Works of literature describe in the guise of fiction the dense specificity
of personal experience, which is always unique, because each of us has a
slightly or very different personal history, modifying every new experience
we have; and the creation of literary texts recapitulates this uniqueness
(that is to say, Jane Austen's Emma , for example, could not have been
written by anybody else, and never will be written by anyone else again, but
an experiment demonstrating the second law of thermodynamics is and must be
repeatable by any competent scientist). 
The Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, in his book Bright
Air, Brilliant Fire , writes: "We are at the beginning of the
neuroscientific revolution. At the end we should know how the mind works,
what governs our nature, and how we know the world." But he acknowledges the
limitations of this project. There is, for instance, the problem of qualia. 
"The dilemma is that phenomenal experience is a first person matter, and
this seems, at first glance, to prevent the formulation of a completely
objective or causal account." Science, of course, is a third-person
discourse. The first-person pronoun is not used in scientific papers. If
there were any hint of qualia in a scientific paper, Edelman says, it would
be edited out. But a scientific study of consciousness cannot ignore qualia.
His proposed solution is to accept that other people as well as oneself do
experience qualia, to collect their first-person accounts, and correlate
them to establish what they have in common, bearing in mind that these
reports are inevitably "partial, imprecise and relative to... personal
context." 
Lyric poetry, however, uses language in such a way that the description of
qualia does not seem partial, imprecise, and only comprehensible when put in
the context of the poet's personal life. In my novel Thinks..., the heroine
Helen Reed makes this point to a cognitive science conference, quoting from
Andrew Marvell's poem "The Garden": 
The Luscious Clusters of the Vine 
Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine; 
The Nectaren, and curious Peach, 
Into my hands themselves do reach; 
Stumbling on Melons, as I pass, 
Insnar'd with Flow'rs, I fall on Grass. 
Helen says: "Let me point to a paradox about Marvell's verse, which applies
to lyric poetry in general. Although he speaks in the first person, Marvell
does not speak for himself alone. In reading this stanza we enhance our own
experience of the qualia of fruit and fruitfulness. We see the fruit, we
taste it and smell it and savour it with what has been called 'the thrill of
recognition' and yet it is not there, it is the virtual reality of fruit,
conjured up by the qualia of the poem which I could try to analyse if there
were world enough and time, to quote another poem of Marvell's - but there
is not" . 
There are lyrical descriptions of qualia in prose fiction as well as verse.
"My task, which I am trying to achieve," Joseph Conrad wrote in the Preface
to one of his tales, "is by the power of the written word to make you hear,
to make you feel - it is before all, to make you see. That - and no more,
and it is everything." 
Human consciousness, as the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, author of The
Feeling of What Happens , makes clear, is self-consciousness. We not only
have experiences, we are conscious of ourselves having them, and of being
affected by them. 
He draws attention to the paradox noted by the pioneering
philosopher-psychologist William James, brother of the novelist Henry James,
that "the self in our stream of consciousness changes continuously as it
moves forward in time, even as we retain a sense that the self remains the
same while our existence continues." 
Damasio calls the self that is constantly modified the "core" self, and the
self that seems to have a kind of continuous existence the
"autobiographical" self, suggesting that it is like a literary production.
Daniel Dennett, author of Consciousness Explained , says something very
similar. As spiders make webs and beavers build dams, so we tell stories. 
"Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and
self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories,
and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others -
and ourselves - about who we are." 
To Dennett, however, all these stories, and the selves they construct, are
illusions, epiphenomena. Damasio's position is more conservative, and to a
humanist more congenial. He places himself in the tradition of thinkers as
diverse as Locke, Brentano, Kant, Freud, and William James, "all of whom
believed that consciousness is 'an inner sense.'" 
"Whether we like the notion or not," he says, "something like the sense of
self does exist in the human mind as we go about knowing things... the human
mind is constantly being split... between the part that stands for the known
and the part that stands for the knower." 
According to the neuroscientist VS Ramachandran, author of Phantoms in the
Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind , the "need to reconcile the
first person and third person accounts of the universe... is the single most
important problem in science." 
It is certainly crucial to the study of consciousness. 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 "... 
"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 East-Enders . . . 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." 
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. 
Antonio Damasio, 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." 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." 
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 auto biography, 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." 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." 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. 
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, 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." 
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 20s, 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." 
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 James's approach to
the art of fiction was. He writes to a correspondent who rashly ventured to
send him her historical novel: 
"You may multiply little facts that can be got from pictures and documents,
relics and prints, as much as you like - the real thing is almost impossible
to do, and in its absence the whole effect is as nought; I mean the
invention, the representation of the old consciousness - the soul, the
sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things
that make ours, that make the modern world, were non-existent. [James's
emphases] In his famous essay of 1884, "The Art of Fiction," James says,
"Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense
sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads
suspended in the chamber of consciousness, catching every air-borne particle
in its tissue." 
But 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'?" 
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 adven ture 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 stream-of-consciousness novel, even if it uses interior monologue, is
not the same thing as the "first person" novel modelled on confession or
autobiography, which seems to have become the most favoured form of literary
fiction in the last few decades. This first struck me in 1989, when I was
chairman of the judges of the Booker Prize. We read (or partly read) more
than 100 novels and finally chose a shortlist of six. Only after the
shortlist meeting did I realise that five of them had "I" narrators:
Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye , John Banville's The Book of Evidence , Sybille
Bedford's Jigsaw , Rose Tremain's Restoration , and the winner, Kazuo
Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day . (The exception was A Disaffection by
James Kelman.) 
AS Byatt, writing recently about the historical novel, observed: "It is
perhaps no accident that my exemplary 'modern' texts are all written in the
first person - a first person preoccupied with the desirability and
impossibility of objectivity and truthfulness," and felt obliged to defend
her own preference for the "unfashionable Victorian third-person narrator." 
There does seem to be an increasing reluctance among literary novelists to
assume the narrative stance of godlike omniscience that is implied by any
third-person representation of consciousness, however covert and impersonal.
Instead they prefer to create character as a "voice," reporting his or her
experience in his or her own words. Where third-person and first-person
narration are combined, the latter usually has the last word. 
It is not coincidental that the boundary between first-person literary
fiction and autobiography is becoming increasingly blurred. Some of the most
interesting and widely acclaimed books of recent years in Britain and
America have been of a kind sometimes called "life writing" - memoirs or
confessions that read like novels, that use many of the techniques of
novels, that are often written by novelists, or writers who subsequently
became novelists, using material that in earlier times would probably have
been converted into third- person fiction. 
Recent examples are Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father?
Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, Nicholson Baker's U and I , Martin Amis's
Experience , Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, Paul Theroux's Sir Vidia's
Shadow, Lorna Sage's Bad Blood, and Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of
Staggering Genius 
In a world where nothing is certain, in which transcendental belief has been
undermined by scientific materialism, and even the objectivity of science is
qualified by relativity and uncertainty, the single human voice, telling its
own story, can seem the only authentic way of rendering consciousness. 
· This is an edited extract from David Lodge's new book of essays
Consciousness and the Novel published by Secker & Warburg.