David Lodge, Consciousness & the Novel

Secker & Warburg £17.99

The closest we may ever come to learning how another human being thinks is reading novels. Despite all the ingenious suppositions of science fiction, and the technical advances that could eventually assist us to penetrate the mystery of another person’s consciousness, what will always remain is the old-fashioned method of putting black marks down on some sort of surface. Whether this is an accurate version - when philosophers such as Daniel Dennett insist that the metaphor for the brain is Pandemonium - is something novelists have been debating ever since Joyce and Woolf. However, there should be no doubt that by being given a fictional version of how imaginary beings see, feel and think, our own lives are rendered richer, more human and possibly more humane. As Ian McEwan wrote after September 11, “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.”

This is a marvellous subject for the novelist, critic and reader to explore, and there can be no better guide to it than David Lodge’s new book of essays, Consciousness and the Novel. Lodge occupies a unique position in modern English letters, that of being a highly successful and enjoyable novelist of ideas, and of also being a consistently lively and perceptive critic. I have been rather fierce about this duality in these pages in the past, because my own feeling has always been that the artist and the critic cannot truly coexist without the one (usually the critic) driving the other out. Lodge is defensive, claiming criticism as part of creation and quoting Graham Greene saying, “An author of talent is his own best critic – an ability to criticise his own work is inseparably bound up with his talent.” Well, possibly. What most of us would prefer to do is to present our work in its most flattering light, the better to impress upon a reader quite how much research, intelligence and ingenuity has gone into its construction. This is frankly best left to an author’s website, as none of it has any application to the artistic impulse that should be at the heart of a novel, working from the inside out.

In the past, Lodge has taken his academic persona to descant on his own works, which do, predictably, suffer from being apparently written from the outside in. Here, too, he uses examples from his own work and, methods, in particular Thinks… in which a debate (inevitably erotic) between a novelist and a cognitive psychologist examined developments in Artificial Intelligence and perception. Because it is a very clever novel, whose characters are vehicles for ideas rather than fully formed creations, these essays work as a way of impressing us even further as to Lodge’s intellectual playfulness. Those unfamiliar with the concept of memes (ideas being passed like genes), the Theory of Mind and qualia would find it an excellent crib. More movingly, Lodge interposes fragments of his own life, including his tendency to depression and anxiety, which one can’t help wishing had been allowed to penetrate the polished viscosity of his fiction. At the end of the book there is a fascinating interview with Craig Raine, which explores why he is so good at polyphony and parody, and why he has failed to become a major writer by not developing a distinctive voice.

Despite the framework of the title, it is when Lodge explores other novelists – here Dickens, Forster, Waugh, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Henry James, Updike and Roth – that his book becomes most rewarding. Most have already been printed elsewhere, notably in the TLS and New York Review of Books, but are no less impressive for being given a permanent home. There is scarcely a page that does not make you stop, think, laugh, consider and feel refreshed. Lodge’s ease and clarity of style sometimes, paradoxically, disguise the intelligence of what he says, and the weight of scholarship behind it. Nobody, for instance, has described Jane Austen’s use of the free indirect style so cogently, and Lodge’s use of Fanny Burney’s Camilla to show just where it came from is (as far as I know) a first. “The gain in fluency, economy, naturalness…is obvious” he says, having waded through a story that is, as he says, unbearably tedious.

Henry James calls out the best in him, as with all novelists most deeply concerned with the pschological portrayal of characters. One long and splendid essay examines how and why each time one of James’s novels if filmed it misses what is essential because of the nature of each medium. A crucial figure in the transition between the classic and the modern novel, it’s no surprise to find Lodge pinpointing “consciousness” as one of the key words in both his fiction and his criticism. James, like EM Forster, was hampered both by the conventions of his time and his probable homosexuality from showing his characters at their most psychologically turbulent, in the act of making love, but this was, as we know, turned to advantage. Lodge is also quite wonderful in exploring why Howard’s End is probably Forster’s great novel, despite being so unsatisfactory in parts.

The test of a book like this is whether it not only illuminates authors whose work you know well, but inspires you to try others. Having resisted Philip Roth’s later work for years, I found myself buying The Human Stain because of Lodge’s descriptions of it. David Lodge was often confused with Malcolm Bradbury while the latter was alive, and I can’t think why he, unlike Bradbury has not been knighted yet for services to literature. He is much the better critic and novelist – even if he doesn’t keep the two as discrete as this critic and novelist would like.

The Literary Review, October 2002