"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

"Language of Fiction" by David Lodge, (Routledge, 2002)

The book was first published in 1966. This version has an Afterword added in 1984 and a Foreword added in 2002. I really should have read this long ago. In Part I he tackles head on issues that I'm interested in, showing some options then giving his considered opinion. He points out that in the 1960s a literary criticism book could satisfy both scholars and the general reader.

He begins by quoting Wellek and Warren from 1949 - "Literary theory and criticism concerned with the novel are much inferior in both quantity and quality to theory and criticism of poetry". This state of affairs may have led to the effect Rahv observed - "the commanding position assumed by poetic analysis has led to the indiscriminate importation of its characteristic assumptions and approaches into a field [i.e. prose fiction] which requires generic critical terms and criteria of value that are unmistakably its own".

This leads to a discussion of prose vs poetry and whether there's such a thing as literary or poetic language. Lodge writes that "Abrams and Frank Kermode have shown clearly and perceptively ... how the idea of the lyric poem as the literary norm evolved out of the theory and practice of the English Romantic poets and, later, of the French Symbolist poets, contributing to the modern critical doctrine that a poem is autotelic, non-paraphrasable, non-translatable, a verbal object in which every part is organically related to every other part and to the whole" (p.7). He then challenges the claims that prose is so different -

• He considers a passage from Proust to show that prose too, loses something in translation
• he writes "Few modern critics trouble to prove that poetry is non-paraphrasable, but their justification of every minute part of a good poem on aesthetic grounds implies this. ... Paraphrase, in the sense of summary, is as indispensable to the novel-critic as close analysis is to the critic of lyric poetry. The natural deduction is that novels are paraphrasable whereas poems are not. But this is a false deduction because close analysis is itself a disguised form of paraphrase"

He looks at how literary language might often differ from the language of the everyday, and how they may need to be treated differently -

• "we cannot assume in poetics that there is a denotative level of language at which meaning is embodied prior to the expressive activity of the writer ... The ... proposition that we know the meaning of an utterance by no other way than by the way it is said ... is true applied to literary utterances, but not as applied to non-literary utterances. (We may be assisted in understanding an utterance like 'It's raining' by physical evidence of rain)" p.66
• "Anglo American criticism has ignored valuable developments in methods of accounting for the literary use of language flexible enough to take in both poetry and prose. English criticism, in particular, has maintained a somewhat provincial mistrust of formal grammatical analysis and description from which its own characteristically intuitive and empirical approach could benefit. Continental stylistics, on the other hand, generally yields up thinner results, in terms of interpretation and evaluation of individual texts, than the best Anglo-American criticism", p.55
• "In speech, communication is 'elliptical': many signals can be ignored by the receiver, who is assisted by context, situation, and predictability. The writer aims to avoid this erratic, elliptical communication by 'encoding', at the points he deems important along the writing chain, features that will be inescapable, no matter how perfunctory the reception" p.61, quoting Riffaterre

Part II looks at the language of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Hardy ("Hardy is a peculiarly difficult novelist to assess because his vices are almost inextricably entangled with his virtues", p.199), Henry James ("Modern criticism of James may fairly claim to have exonerated him from the charge of a perverse mannerism in the late style", p.201), Wells, and Kingsley Amis.