"Consciousness and the novel" by David Lodge (Secker and Warburg, 2002)

Some essays. In the first, titular essay (much the longest and most relevant) he describes "Galatea 2.2" by Richard Powers, which covers many similar issues. The next essay, "Literary Criticism and Literary Creation", makes some useful though not especially relevant points. The other essays are nearly all about particular authors and stray even further from the main topic. Nothing about Joyce, which is strange because in the first essay he writes that Joyce"came as close to representing the phenomenon of consciousness as perhaps any writer has ever done in the history of literature". Here are some extracts -

• p.14 "A good deal of the recent scientific work on consciousness has stressed its essentially narrative character"
• "Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are" Dennett
• "The world of objective facts has almost completely vanished, almost everything stated appears by way of reflection in the consciousness of the dramatis personae" (Erich Auerbach about "To the Lighthouse")
• p.64 "what the first postmodern generation of English novelists ... have in common, to a greater or lesser extent, is a retreat from the modernist effort to represent subjective consciousness as faithfully as possible. They reverse the modernist privileging of depth over surface ... There is a striking readjustment of the ratio of dialogue to narrative, of direct speech to the rendering of character's unspoken thoughts"
• p.86 "my impression is that a majority of literary novels published in the last couple of decades have been written in the first person"
• p.93 "There are, I suggest, four main ways in which the relationship between creative writing and criticism has been perceived: 1. Criticism as complementary to creative writing. 2. Criticism as opposed to creative writing. 3. Criticism as a kind of creative writing. 4. Criticism as a part of creative writing"
• p.93 "The absence of anything much resembling literary criticism before the Renaissance" ... may be because printing was expensive, so little criticism has survived.
• p.104 "A fundamental tenet of deconstruction is that the nature of language is such that any discourse, including a literary text, can be shown under analysis to be full of gaps and contradictions that undermine its claim to have a determinant reading"
• p.109 "Every story has a story. ... the history of its own creation ... Maybe the 'story of a story' can never be told, for a finished work consumes its own history, renders it obsolete, a husk" (Patricia Hempl)

Other reviews

• Adam Hill (Ultimately, his book is a mixed bag because only the title essay (which is 91 pages in length) truly takes up his thesis. And even there he but scatters quotes from the scientific and philosophic studies rather than truly linking them with the breakthroughs of the novel form. )
• Kirkus Review