THINKS…

This novel is well plotted, with a number of surprising but plausible twists. The setting is well delineated, and the perils and triumphs of academic and secular life on and off campus at one of our new universities are convincingly conveyed. It contains credible and mildly arousing sexual encounters, including a spicy morsel of kink. Its characters are generally convincing; as so often these days, the central female character is much more sympathetically drawn than her male counterpart, who starts off no better than a shit, and finishes, we are led to believe, just a bit better than that. The dialogue runs a little roughly at times, but our need to know what happens next carries us over. The author achieves clarity and pace partly by the skilful use of a variety of 'voices', including (tape recorder mediated) putative stream of consciousness, diary entries, historic present, and omniscient third person. We encounter witty parodies of Henry James, Ezra Pound and other authors. The book is full of often amusing, sometimes plot-related, intertwined self-reference, very much in the post-modern tradition, if such an oxymoron may be permitted. But why ever should such a work be granted a review in Network? Many readers will know, others will have guessed: the central and unifying theme of the book is that of the puzzle of consciousness. A whole chapter is devoted to what it is like to be Nagel's bat, and another to the predicament of Mary, who as described by Jackson was brought up from birth deprived of any contact with colour. More or less detailed references and commentaries are to be found to Searle and his Chinese Room, to Dennett and his zombies, to Schrödinger and his cat, to Chalmers and his hard problem, and to Libet, Dawkins, Crick, Edelman, Pinker, Strawson and Damasio, among others. The depiction of a major international conference on consciousness will strike many only too familiar chords with those who have spent time at Tucson or Elsinore. So what is a novelist's take on consciousness? Unsurprisingly and like most specialists, David Lodge holds to the view that his trade has a slant to offer that all else have missed or dismissed. In the climatic scene, Helen, a author leading a creative writing course and our heroine, delivers the 'last word' at the conference. We know from a recent edited extract from a newly published volume of essays that indeed what she says is what David Lodge thinks… Helen claims that all along the novelist and the poet have been the experts in consciousness, in that their aim is to convey the essence of consciousness, the subjectivity of qualia, to their readers: to translate the first person into the third so that it can again become first. She uses Andrew Marvell's poem The Garden to illustrate how we respond with our own qualia to his evocation of 'fruit and fruitfulness', and draws out from the second stanza of this marvellous poem the claim "that human consciousness is uniquely capable of imagining that which is not physically present to the senses, capable of imagining things which do not exist, capable of creating imaginary worlds (like novels) and capable of abstract thought – of distinguishing for instance between the concept of colour ('a green thought') and the sensation of colour ('in a green shade')" (p .318, h/b). Now my first reaction to this was that it misses the point, more precisely evades the hard problem: certainly novelists and poets are skilful at evoking in us particular states of consciousness, in manipulating its content; but that speaks nothing to the issue of the nature of conscious experience itself, of its form, so to say. How can first person subjectivity arise from objective molecules; mind from matter in motion? That is the key question. On reflection, though, the boundary between form and content, here as always, is more subtle and elusive than at first appears. Like all boundaries, they are ultimately human constructs, established for convenience and communication, and not because they conform to any final reality. Consciousness cannot exist ('form') without its qualia ('content'), even if exceptionally its quale may be just consciousness itself. The first and last truth is that the Cosmos is One Thing, which is not to deny its manifest plurality, nor the welcome we should give to novelists who, though late arrivals, come to take their proper and well-earned place in the ferment of debate about consciousness.