David Lodge – Consciousness and the Novel – review by Anthony Nanson

David Lodge is my favourite comic novelist. Being a comic novelist is evidently a good qualification for writing enjoyable literary criticism. The eponymous first essay of Lodge’s Consciousness and the Novel is umbilically connected to his superbly entertaining novel Thinks …, in which cognitive science’s materialist model of consciousness is compared, via a comedy of manners, with a novelist’s more experiential approach to consciousness. Lodge’s essay was published in 2002, before novelists had to worry about AI muscling in. He presents a beautifully concise chronology of the management of characters' and narrators' points of view, from the starting points staked out by Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, through Austen’s development of the indirect style, and the confident omniscience of the Victorians, to the modernists’ explicit presentation of inner life, and the retreat from inner life which begins with writers like Evelyn Waugh. The strategies of point of view are shown to be intimately related to the exploration of consciousness and so to the changing understanding of its nature over time.

After an interesting essay about the different models of relationship between creative and critical writing, a subject close to Lodge’s heart as both novelist and critic, come a series of studies of Dickens, Forster, Waugh, Amis (pater et filius), Henry James (film adaptations), John Updike, and Philip Roth. In all these, questions of consciousness come into play, as may be expected from Lodge’s statement early in the book that ‘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.’ A statement that offers a good foundation also for arguing the pointless of publishing or reading AI-generated novels. Lodge perceives the postmodernist retreat from inner life to have gone too far in writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nicholson Baker. His sympathies are more with Graham Greene, who consistently maintained a balance between the surface and depth of his characters’ consciousness.

Lodge’s book ends with a ‘conversation’ between him and Craig Raine about Thinks … It’s a bit toe-curling because Raine keeps making bold statements about what Lodge is doing in that novel and Lodge’s polite replies seem to suggest he intended nothing of the sort. This reveals another side of the creative/critical dynamic: a good contemporary novel can say what it’s trying to say more effectively than any attempt to explain it. In the course of this conversation Lodge acknowledges that he does basically accept the cognitive scientists’ explanation of consciousness as epiphenomenon of the physical brain, ruling out the credibility of transcendent divinity, and thus marking how far his thinking has moved from his Christian roots. I am more comfortable with Virginia Woolf’s almost tantric perception of consciousness which Lodge quotes in the first essay: ‘The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms … life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’ The difference in tantric, as in Christian, thought is that consciousness has neither beginning nor end.