CONSCIOUSNESS, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE FICTION At the same time, Freud's concept of the Unconscious took the place of God. Modern literature, like Freud, looked inward for the first time beyond social scrims, to the unconscious, the pre-conscious, the not-so-prettily-formed-and-edited conscious basis of thought, dreams, and action. It began to examine territory previously reserved for poets and philosophers. It tried to get down to what senses actually perceive and piece together to form the still-there "I," contrasting with the latter-day Postmodern "not-I," the fractured I, the empty place inside that past ages believed so immutable: the soul. The soul--or at least, the sense of a person, nebulous though that person/soul may be--still exists in much modern literature, particularly in Woolf's. But it is accepted as being human, rather than God-related, and in this it is something new in the world, or at least, something not much seen since the Greeks. Pulled loose from God, known to have sprung not from heaven but from accidental combinations of matter, this essence of humanity is a new thing, an object that can be observed from the inside. Every person is seen not as a cog in society but as a complete and mysterious individual whose motivations and actions come from a place unseen. Modern literature is an attempt to get at the assemblage of the thing, and story, like the humans and the rest of the natural world, at this point becomes infinitely more complex. When the ideas propelling the Twentieth Century's scientific and intellectual direction were being formed, humans were definitely not seen as a blank slate, as Pinker would have it. In the art of the early Twentieth Century, the self is something. The Moderns want to find out what that self is, to excavate and reveal the self, not fill it up or smother it with predigested ideas. However, the soul, or whatever one wants to call the sense of one's own interiority, now finds new territory: not God, but science and technology. Modernism is exterior as well as interior; the wonder and the speculation extend in all directions. "Away and away the airplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bently, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculations, mathematics, Mendelian theory--away the airplane shot." [13] Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Stein, and Proust access what might be called a halo of consciousness, comprised of all that the history of human culture has to offer, and all that time's immediacy imprints upon the senses. The characters in their books realize that they must work harder to make sense of things, because the previous comfortable sense of what life is has been eclipsed by irrefutable discoveries about the natural world. A sense of freedom, wonder, and potential pervades their work, as well as the despair communicated by Woolf and Eliot and Lawrence which has to do with the realization that all of the darkness of the world--war, economic insufficiencies, and even interpersonal pain, are not created or mediated by God. Instead, they are entirely human creations, or at least, manifestations of humanity previously blamed on supernatural agencies. As previously mentioned, Pinker argues that humans require what he calls "beauty" of their art, and claims studies show that beauty means recognizable landscapes and stories with a beginning, middle and end. He claims that Modern literature forswore such artifice in favor of another approach. However, this accusation could more supportably be leveled at Postmodernism. Most works of Modern literature, from Ulysses to Mrs. Dalloway, have beginnings, middles, and ends, although the middles swell to include, because of the nature of closely observed consciousness, a vast array of remembered, invented, or imagined time. Moreover, the point of what one is reading might not be quite as didactically imposed upon the reader as in other literatures. But, certainly, there is something about Modern literature which caused Thomas Hardy to observe, "They've changed everything now . . . there used to be a beginning and a middle and an end." [14] Human preference for certain forms or thoughts does not confer any particular value on such forms or thoughts. Most humans prefer to believe that God exists; a universe with God in it seems to be a more beautiful and perfect and even more sensible conclusion, for them. Like belief in God, the preference for recognizable landscapes in art and simple stories springs from our biological past--as does everything about us. This does not mean that we are therefore, as Pinker would have it, incapable of appreciating and assimilating purely imaginary or intellectualized combinations of information. Our biology underlies everything we think and do, including our appreciating forms of art that he seems not to enjoy. A propensity to develop or fall into any particular pattern of thought or way of looking at reality does not mean these patterns are useful, fruitful, or true. Even mathematicians concede that their abstract thoughts, in the end, might not necessarily be universally true. In the case of art, though, which could be said to be unnecessary (like belief in God) in terms of living one's life, people do have a choice, which they exercise: probably ninety-nine percent of literature that is published today is traditional rather than Postmodern or even Modern. Perhaps because it is an examination of abstract thoughts rather than anything replicable and outside of ourselves, the study of literature seems like a dead end to a lot of people. However, it can be revelatory in very satisfying ways. Stefan Collini, in his 1998 introduction to The Two Cultures , points out that critics and academics are actually the "scientists" of literature, in that they study the organized manifestations of human minds. The necessity of being an initiate in order to appreciate the artform fully is implicit in all literature. Just because many of us can read does not mean that we have, are capable of having, or would even want to have, the same kind of reading experience as everyone else. We differ in our intellectual hungers and abilities. The distance between high and low art is predicated on the participant having privileged knowledge in order to understand and appreciate high art, and on low art being something that a relatively unsophisticated reader could enjoy. In this sense, the vaunted flattening of the world in Modernism, and in Postmodernism's incorporation of low and high, are somewhat illusory. If literature is a mirror of consciousness, then the changes that have taken place in the literature of the twentieth century mirrors changes in, if not consciousness itself, then in the contents of our shared social consciousness as determined by history--two devastating world wars fueled by ideological differences--and in technological changes such as the birth of the atomic bomb. In fact, I would postulate (and many have probably done so) that the bare fact of the existence of the atomic bomb gave birth to Postmodernism in all of its diversity. Another change in our understanding of consciousness, and concurrent changes in literary fashion, has to do with our ever-expanding understanding of biochemistry, and questions about how biochemistry engenders consciousness. Pinker claims that science now shows that personality is, for the most part, an irreducible and inescapable given. Agreeing that we are assigned personality through our genetic makeup does not change our individual, conscious experience of reality, but the literature of today certainly reflects an individual becoming infinitely more complex as matter becomes more finely grained, less and less visible to the naked or uninformed eye, more puzzling. Consciousness is decreasingly seen as a matter of id and ego, and increasingly seen as a function of biochemistry. Personality and consciousness, in today's popular and scientific view, are manifestations that are not under the control of a central principal, whether that principal is called God or the individual. Instead, the fragmentation of matter possible when atomic energy is unleashed is mirrored in the fragmentation of the human being. And if we can blame our genes for that which we count as faults of character (antisocial behavior, a propensity to violence, rape, or murder, or even simple rudeness), responsibility for our behavior could be claimed to be at an end. Philosophy has wrestled for centuries with the question of whether we have free will, and various waves of scientific research in the past fifty years seem to say, "No." We still have no final consensus._____________ 13 Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, 1953. 26. 14 Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983. 31. |