Things are going too far. It's bad enough for the old guard that science took on religion (and won), but now something called "cognitive science" has started to encroach on the exclusive domain of novelists and artists: consciousness, the "human condition", the private world of thoughts. Is nothing sacred?
So David Lodge would have it, anyway. Myself, I had never seen the novel as being under threat from cognitive science, but Lodge evidently believes the threat is there, so while reading the book I took him at his word. In Thinks..., he argues for the continued relevance of the novelist and the novel in face of the latest scientific intrusion. Unfortunately, he fails, badly. I finished the book suspecting that the novel is on its way out, and even hoping for its speedy demise.
The protagonists of Thinks... are Ralph Messenger, head of the "Cognitive Science Department" at the fictional Gloucester University, and Helen Reed, a visiting novelist who teaches a course on creative writing. The story, which is told from a variety of perspectives, centres on their intellectual differences and their extra-marital affair. About the latter, I have little to say. It seems a well-structured infidelity tale, with a beginning, middle and end, not too much moralising, and lots of sex, told from a macho perspective. Vibrator fiction for men, basically. I remain convinced that prose is the wrong venue for the beast with two backs -- it emphasises the fiddly and repetitive, it loses the thrills -- but Lodge's efforts seem no better or worse than any other fictional fucking I've skimmed over.
The rest of the book is much less successful. Messenger argues his materialist pro-AI case with potted summaries of pop-science books; one can almost recognise the jacket blurb behind each of his speeches. Reed can't take him on directly, but in her private quality time goes to church and muses that there must be a creator, there must be something transcendental about something, etc. It's at these times I wonder why on earth Lodge thought he had anything of substance to say on the matter. But what could a retired English professor have to say about AI? It's like asking a bishop to talk about biology. Against the computer model of the mind, Lodge can only hold up some vague and half-hearted Catholic angst.
The Messenger character (note the significance of the name!) is an awful cliche. He's not just a Darwinist, but a social Darwinist, a Thatcher fan; his materialism is not just metaphysical but economic as well, as if there were a necessary link between the two. Fortunately for Lodge, he's not a real scientist -- he's a media personality, a dealer in scientific soundbites, an administrator, who does no research. Indeed, one might almost imagine he was an unconvincing fictional character made up by someone who didn't know the first thing about science. He thinks the Web and the Internet are the same thing, he opens a file and is so flustered by its contents that "he closes it without saving", and his experiment to capture the internal workings of the mind through stream-of-consciousness tape recordings -- one of the central conceits of the book -- is something so unscientific that even a psychology undergrad would see through it.
I get the impression that in Ralph Messenger, philosophy and politics aside, Lodge has dreamed up the only kind of scientist he could admire and relate to. Messenger's thoroughly vile middle-class domestic existence -- complete with routine weekend retreats in the country, and kids practised at preparing dinner parties -- is described without the least hint of disapproval. He is a hyper-sexed Lothario whose clumsy seductions are so successful that I suspect Lodge is indulging in a little wish-fulfillment. And he is contrasted with a stereotyped scientific "boffin" character, who, in an unpleasant plot development, turns out to be a paedophile.
Reed (note again the name significance!) is a bad novelist, a writer of mousy fiction, mostly trumped-up autobiography, the kind of dainty upper-middle-brow stuff that plagues book groups around the country. We know Reed is a woman because she has breasts and a vagina and writes about them occasionally (though in fairness, Messenger talks about his cock and balls far more often). She is recovering from the death of her husband some time earlier, and begins the novel in a state of grief, which, it turns out, is nothing a few visits to church, a few weeks of redemptive fucking, and a few revelations about her husband's infidelity can't solve. Lodge appears to be making the old anti-Darwin argument that grief is something science just can't describe -- though judging by his own efforts here, art can't describe it either.
It's hard not to see Thinks... as an attempt to justify the novel in the 21st century. In one of the final chapters, Reed and Lodge make a speech arguing that something about human consciousness is still uniquely the domain of literature -- though the argument is so wishy-washy and half-hearted that it's hard to tell what that something is. Maybe the answer lies in the story -- maybe the story itself is an argument for the continued significance of the novel, in the language of fiction. Towards the end of the book, Messenger is shaken by various events: the suicide of his colleague, and the news of his wife's infidelity and his own apparent terminal illness. He looks like he is about to reevaluate his whole worldview. He realises that treating people like machines (as all materialists no doubt do) is a dead end, he realises that life and family values are more important; perhaps even a spiritual awakening of some sort is imminent. Ultimately, Lodge's argument seems to be that old crock about no atheists being in foxholes. The novel is still important because the spirit world is really there.
While I am less and less interested in reading them, I do happen to believe that novels have a role in the 21st century; Lodge just makes a mistake in trying to justify their importance as a source of knowledge. The time when novelists had anything important to say is at an end; literature is no longer the great battleground of ideas. As Peter Watson writes in A Terrible Beauty, his overview of the significant thinkers of the 20th century:
A hundred years ago, writers such as Hugo van Hofmannsthal, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Thomas Mann could seriously hope to say something about the human condition that rivalled the scientific understanding then at hand. [...] Is that true any longer?In Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky, with his imagination, could enter the mind of a murderer and offer psychological insights that spawned a whole scientific discipline (along with many pseudoscientific ones). To write the same novel today, some hack would just read a book about the psychology of murderers, and what's more, he'd have no excuse not to. The novel is simply no longer a primary source of knowledge.
The novel also no longer has the cultural weight it used to. In the Information Age, nothing is the main cultural event; the novel is a sideshow, just like any other sideshow. Contemporary novelists, especially "literary" novelists, have little place in the popular consciousness, to the extent that such a thing exists anymore. Even among literate people, the stock of the novel is declining. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Media come in and out of fashion. When writers today want to change the world with their words, they don't choose to do it in epic poetry; and increasingly they won't choose the novel either.
But the novel will still retain its place, like any other art form, as a vehicle for self-expression. It may not shake the earth anymore, but it will still be a potentially beautiful form of human activity. Novelists will still create wonder and delight, they will still reach out and engage people, they will still inspire and provoke, they will still stimulate argument. They just won't be the final authorities on the "human condition". They won't be at the forefront of human knowledge.
And if 21st century literary novelists want to contribute to human knowledge at all, they might begin by paying attention to the state of that knowledge today, and stop drooling over past glories and the works of various pomo atavists. Science fiction -- the one literary genre whose writers tried to anticipate or keep up with human knowledge -- was quickly consigned to the gutter, and the remaining literary types are only too keen to display their ignorance of science, as if that ignorance gives them a kind of artistic merit. Lodge, to his credit, did wade through some of the latest scientific thinking in researching his novel, but not to any obvious effect. Like his stand-in Helen Reed, and rather like the Pope, he has just serenely accomodated the choice parts of the new science into his dogma, while leaving his core beliefs unchanged. There is something sad and quaint about a novelist maintaining that human thought and consciousness are ineffable mysteries, when there is a conscious machine on his desk doing a chunk of his thinking for him.