CONSCIOUSNESS, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE FICTION If we were to visualize ideas about the origin of personality and how they affect literature, the pre-Moderns were at the center of a series of concentric circles. The Moderns were a lot of individual circles immersed in the same soup, bent on turning that soup into something individual through the medium of their consciousness. The Postmoderns are books/whole universes giving forth signals that may or may not reach some target, and in which the target can then interpret as they wish, find what meaning she can, depending on what she brings to the work. But the meaning has not necessarily been deliberately assembled by the author. Postmodernism is substantially different than previous artistic attempts to represent or fathom reality. "Realistic fiction presupposed chronological time as the medium of a plotted narrative, an irreducible individual psyche as the subject of its characterization, and above all, the ultimate concrete reality of things as the object and rationale of its description." [15] The concept of reality as something that everyone agrees upon has given way to the idea that one's own point of view yields a singular and ever-changing reality which no one else can share in its entirety. This ever-changing and unique point of view apprehends and interprets the literary object. Italo Calvino states, "The spirit in which one reads is decisive: it is up to the reader to see to it that literature exerts its critical force, and this can occur independently of the author's intention." [16] One manifestation of this movement is the attempt to leave authoring to the reader. This impulse, though, can never be purely executed. When Borroughs arranged his cut-ups, he was still acting as an author. The negation of the author is just a sleight-of-hand, another technique, with roots in Twentieth Century Modernism, presaged by Surrealism. We cannot help authoring meaning in our lives, and when meaning fails, often we cannot survive its loss. We read meaning and connections into the most random events, a biological predilection upon which Postmodernism capitalizes. Burroughs is showing us that this is the case. We even invest meaninglessness with meaning; nihilism and existentialism are isms that give form to various philosophies and lifestyles. We cannot escape ourselves. Postmodernist works still assume that a centralized single consciousness/reader is assimilating what is put forth. If we sit down with the intent to disarrange our senses with a Postmodern novel, the experience resembles the enjoyment of an acquired taste as for an exotic cheese. Some people take to it; some people don't. Despite this, Postmodern literature is more overtly self-conscious than modern literature. Instead of dealing mostly with emotion, it is intellectual in nature. Postmodern literature often attempts to mirror sensory input rather than interpret it, rather than rearrange and infuse it with author-bound meaning. But the writing practices of Kerouac - arguably a bridge to the Postmodern - in the fifties and sixties were not much different than those of Thomas Wolfe in the twenties and thirties. Both simply stuck a real or metaphorical roll of paper in the typewriter and wrote without regard for structure: the author, in their work, is all. In his Postmodern masterpiece, Hopscotch, [17] Cortazar goes half the distance. Within the book are chapters in which characters interact, as is normal in all novels. If read chronologically, the chapters tell one story. Cortazar places jumps within his narrative, though; he includes an invitation to read the chapters in a different order - one created by him - and, further, invites the reader to assemble their own novel from these tableaus. The fragments of meaning are tableaus freed from time which can be accessed and rearranged according to the desires of the reader; shuffled to create new motives for the actions of the characters as well as different outcomes to their philosophical dilemmas, which are quite real in terms of affecting them in life-and-death ways. Deconstruction and semiotics are, perhaps, extensions of the examination of consciousness. It could be argued that most philosophers and religious thinkers of the past would be scientists today, because they wanted to know what was going on. Huge swaths of religious and philosophical thought of the past has been rendered irrelevant by science because we have enhanced our knowledge of world with tools capable of sensing that which is too far or too small or otherwise beyond our capability to sense without tools. We have learned that pure thought, without the physical facts, is not a strong enough tool to use to understand ourselves and our environment. I submit that there is a literary alternative that bridges the rift between science and literature and takes seriously all that we have learned, in the past century, about ourselves and our surroundings: science fiction. C.P. Snow, in The Two Cultures, states, "The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures . . . Ought to produce creative chances. In the history of mental activity, that has been where some of the break-throughs came. The chances are there now. But they are there, as it were, in a vacuum, because those of the two cultures can't talk to each other." [18] Science fiction is a literature which takes advantage of this creative chance. It is the one literature that takes into account the fact that we live in an age technologically quite different than that of our grandparents and postulates possible differences that might change humanity in the future--including changes in consciousness. In Distress: A Novel, [19]Greg Egan envisions a change in consciousness which might emerge were we to actually understand physical reality in its totality via a Theory of Everything, and his characters, and thus the reader, experiences this change--a good example of the power of literature. Like Modern and Postmodern literature, science fiction often requires a trained mind to fully appreciate its nuances. Because of this, the field has isolated itself from the masses. However, it holds the most promise as a literature for those who truly want to think about what is happening in the totality of the world, not just in the arenas of words and emotions. Science fiction speculates about possible futures and examines such futures from a philosophical point of view. It is an acquired taste, but so are any of the sciences, mathematics, Modernism, Postmodernism, Shakespeare, and poetry. This brings me to the final part of this paper, which is concerned with healing the breach between the two cultures. Samuel Delany has defined science fiction as (to paraphrase),"That which I say is science fiction when I point to it." In other words, it has a chameleonlike ability to use any literary form or to experiment with new ones; it can be as subtle and intense as Woolf, as delicate as Proust, as overt as Dickens. Those in the field try in vain to define science fiction. Attempts to create new marketing labels rise and fall. Various works could be labeled, if the term science fiction had never existed, as postmodern, experimental, apocalyptic, horror, high literature, fantasy, hard-boiled crime, romance, speculative, interstitial, nonlinear. This messiness seems evidence of its vitality. Often, science or some change due to technical fields is foregrounded, but it is not unusual to find science fiction in which the science or technology is a deeply submerged given, and the work is instead entirely character-driven. When we can download a work into our brain and experience it in visual, musical, verbal, literary, pattern, or other modes, when it can be parsed, rearranged, and reveal new interactions, we will indeed be experiencing reality in an entirely new fashion. This interaction is probably not as far in the future, as one might think. The enabling technologies are rapidly coming to birth, often as processes to help the disabled or as research delving into the roots of the process of sensorial assimilation, and will eventually mature into marketable products. _____________ 15 Chamberlain, Lori. "Magicking the Real: Paradoxes of Postmodern Writing." Postmodern Fiction, Larry McCaffrey, Editor. 5. Ronald Sukenick, "The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. New York: Dial Press, 1969. 41. 16 Calvino, Italo. The Uses of Literature. 26. 17 Cortazar, Julio. Hopscotch. New York: Random House, 1966. 19 Egan, Greg. Distress, A Novel. United Kingdom: Gollancz, 1995. |