CONSCIOUSNESS, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE FICTION Artists are like the canary in the coal mine, but instead of being harbingers of doom, they are, instead, often exquisitely attuned to the new. They have a need to eclipse previous boundaries. Of course, nothing can be completely new or else it would be unintelligible, a claim some make for Finnegan's Wake, various forms of poetry, or extreme visual art. One's ability to understand that which is on the edge in the arts depends, as does understanding of science, on previous training. For instance, the Modernism and Postmodernism that Pinker criticizes could be seen as utterly etiolated, and therefore unavailable to the uninitiated. Most people are not trained in appreciation of art and literature; there must be exposure, excitement, and, particularly in the appreciation of literature, adequate reading skills. This does not negate the fact that many people deeply enjoy literature, and, in particular, Modernist and Postmodernist work. If the vast majority of humanity prefers landscapes unlayered with meaning, or simple stories of vengeance that include a lot of explosions, or love stories with the usual complications, this does not mean that those who prefer more complexity are poseurs, as Pinker seems to insinuate. It only means that there are not many of them, just as there are relatively few astrophysicists, cutting edge biologists, and accomplished mathematicians. Those who are at the top of their field and inclined (or able) to communicate what they know in language understandable to laypeople are very few indeed. So it is, perhaps, with the biological predilection for the study of extreme literature. The pleasures are there to be experienced, but it is difficult to communicate the reasons for this pleasure to the uninitiated. That which we know, or believe, about reality and about nature deeply informs society and, in its turn, literature and art. In the late nineteenth century, issues of class began to dissolve before the bare fact that evolution is the product of pure chance, and has no peak, no pinnacle. This theory is so counterintuitive that it is still not widely understood, and is rejected outright by more people than accept it. But Darwin's radical work, which was a completely new way of looking at nature, seemed to remove theological and God from "Creation," and had a huge influence on how people regarded themselves in relation to the rest of the natural world. 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 non-religious 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._____________ Crick, Francis. The Astonishing Hypotheses: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Calvino, Italo. The Uses of Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986. 19. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random House, Vintage International, 1986. 37. |