Thomas Pavel once gave a splendid paper on the changes in the presentation of
human nature during the history of the novel. In the beginning, he said,
characters had immortal souls, and their actions took place in a battle
between good and evil for the salvation or damnation of these souls. In
later sentimental novels, souls had been replaced by hearts; what mattered
was romantic love, and the recognition of other selves. Later still, he
said, the heart had been replaced by the psyche – a system of unconscious
drives, revealed in dreams, not clear to the characters, though controlled
by the author, who like the analyst, understood the forms of energy and
action. Iris Murdoch felt that humans – including those of her characters
who were philosophers and psychoanalysts – had not understood the shift in
the moral world that had come about with the absconding of God, the
vanishing of external, metaphysical moral authority. Her analysts tend to be
daemonic, manipulating what she described as a “system” and a “mechanism” of
sadomasochism.
The consequences of Darwin’s evolutionary idea for literature has been deeply
studied. Characters in the novels I read as a girl struggled with the
meaninglessness of the world – the chancy world of gradual evolution of
species, and death as a final end. European novels went on using the
biblical and Christian stories as paradigms long after many of the novelists
had lost their belief. Forms of art change more slowly than forms of thought
or belief.
Both Freud and Darwin put sexuality at the centre of human nature. In Darwin,
sexual selection is one of the important ways living creatures pass on their
characteristics. Freud thought all human action was driven by libido, and
libido was sexual desire. The Darwinist Richard Dawkins sees all life as
driven by “selfish genes”, seeking self-replication and outliving the bodies
in which they are temporarily housed. In a way foreshadowing this, Freud saw
what he called “the germ-cell” as immortality: the body dies, the gene lives
on. Self-definition in terms purely of sexuality is one consequence of the
thought patterns of the last century, and has obviously affected fictive
forms; strikingly so in the works of two major American novelists, Saul
Bellow and and Philip Roth.
Moses Herzog, the hero of Bellow’s Herzog (1964), is Jewish, and a scholar who
studies European Romanticism. His two names, Hebrew Moses, Germanic Herzog,
define him ironically as a leader of men – he cries out, from time to time,
that he wanted to be a marvellous Herzog. But he is entangled in sexual
disasters, cut off by successive ex-wives from his children, bodily and
mentally in a mess. He writes an increasingly wild series of letters to the
living and the dead, and one of the phrases that recurs is a question to
Heidegger about “the fall into the Quotidian”. A fall into the quotidian –
into unredeemable ordinary life – is what has happened to the marvellous
Herzog, a clever idiot. He writes to an ex-tutor about the general “hatred
of the present”.
"This hatred of the present has not been well-understood. Perhaps the
first demand of emerging consciousness in this mass civilisation is
expressive. The spirit, released from servile dumbness spits dung and howls
with anguish stored during long ages. Perhaps the fish, the newt, the horrid
scampering ancestral mammal find their voice and add their long experience
to this cry . . . ."
But Herzog has no real means of self-expression. His world is reduced to two
things – sex, and cruelty. His moment of vision comes during a chance visit
to a children’s court where two ordinary stupid people (one of them, the
mother, disabled) are on trial for having beaten and killed a child. Herzog
imagines the child’s terrible death.
"He experienced nothing but his own human feelings, in which he found
nothing of use. What if he felt moved to cry? Or pray? He pressed hand to
hand. And what did he feel? Why he felt himself – his own trembling hands
and eyes that stung. And what was there in modern post . . . post-Christian
America to pray for? Justice – justice and mercy? And pray away the
monstrousness of life, the wicked dream it was?"
Herzog ends being looked after by a mistress who is kind and beautiful and has
a religion of sex which she believes can cure his ailments. The
letter-writer is defeated. The human being might survive.
If Bellow is looking backwards in pain, Roth is glaring at the present. David
Kepesh, the central character in The Professor of Desire (1977), teaches a
class about “novels all concerned to a greater or lesser degree of
obsessiveness, with erotic desire”. He wishes “to disclose the undisclosable
– the story of the professor’s desire”. He makes a pilgrimage to Kafka’s
grave in Prague. He is taken to meet a woman who says she is the prostitute
Kafka visited. He asks questions about the writer’s sexual habits, that is,
the writer’s body. He is expected to pay to see her sexual parts. This is
all he finds of the tragic, witty, complex mind of Kafka: literature reduced
to a gravestone and a whore, death and the body. Kepesh’s story continues in
The Dying Animal (2001). He is now a famous professor and TV personality. He
falls in love with Consuelo, a Cuban student with remarkably big breasts. He
reflects on the wildness and personal freedoms of the 1960s, and also on an
early American community, full of “riotous prodigality” “licentiousness” and
“profuse excess”. He has, like Herzog’s Ramona, a kind of religion of sex –
sex for pleasure, not for procreation:
"because only when you fuck is everything that you dislike in life and
everything by which you are defeated in life purely, if momentarily
revenged. Only then are you most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself.
It’s not the sex that’s the corruption – it's the rest. Sex isn’t just
friction and shallow fun. Sex is also the revenge on death."
The title, The Dying Animal, comes from a poem by Yeats – “Sailing to
Byzantium”: “Consume my soul away. Sick with desire / And fastened to a
dying animal / It knows not what it is”. Yeats’s speaker has an immortal
soul. The professor of desire ends watching Consuelo of the beautiful
breasts, hairless after chemotherapy, preparing to go under the knife and
die.
The thesis of Richard Sennett’s brilliant book The Fall of Public Man (1977)
is that modern humans define themselves to themselves in terms of their
private lives, and define their private lives in terms of sexuality. In the
last four generations, he says,
"physical love has been redefined, from terms of eroticism to terms of
sexuality. Victorian eroticism involved social relationships, sexuality
involves personal identity. Eroticism meant that sexual expression
transpired through actions – of choice, repression, interaction. Sexuality
is not an action but a state of being, in which the physical act of love
follows almost as a passive consequence, a natural result, of people feeling
intimate with each other."
It is in this context that he describes a study conducted in Paris in the
1970s, which
"has shown that as people come to take their bodies as more and more
complete definitions of their own sexuality, the 'symbolising' of the body
becomes less and less easy for them. As sexuality becomes an absolute state
fixed in the form of the body, the people who are those bodies have
increasing difficulty imagining phallic forms in natural organisms such as
plants or feeling a relationship between bodily movement and the activity of
a cylinder or a bellows . . . . The study concludes that the result of this
narcissism is a decrease in the 'metaphorical' imagination of the body,
which is to say an impoverishment of the cognitive activity of creating a
symbol out of a physical thing."
Someone said that the question posed by the nineteenth-century novel was “Who
is the father?”. We can now, in the time of DNA analysis and fertility
treatments, know who is the father, if we choose to find out, and
increasingly we do. The British inventor of eugenics, Francis Galton, once
said that the one right he felt every human being should have was the
knowledge of his own identity (Galton was not interested in women). People
in Britain obsessively research their own genealogies on the internet, and
watch television shows such as Who Do You Think You Are?. At exactly the
same time, we have developed medical techniques for bringing about the birth
of human beings with very new forms of hereditary identities – humans born
from donated eggs, donated sperm, brought up by couples, same-sex,
heterosexual, to whom they may be related, or not, in all sorts of ways.
What interests me, as a novelist, about all this is how such a human being
constructs his or her idea of his or her identity. Such newly created kinds
of humans may be happily or unhappily brought up, contented or discontented
– what is certain is that they will need to define themselves to themselves
in different ways from children in nineteenth-century novels: orphans or
members of large families, lost heirs or illegitimate children inheriting
the “sin” of their parents.
I wondered, when I first began thinking about the Selfish Gene theory, whether
the interest of novelists would shift from romantic love to parental love –
from the desire for the Other to the need to know and preserve and care for
the genetic group to whom we belong. I have attended the Darwin seminars at
the London School of Economics, and listened to passionate debates about the
relative powers of Nature and Nurture in the identity of living forms,
including humans. I have also listened to discussions of the origins of
altruism – from the sacrifice for the good of the genetically related, to
the social benefits of cooperation. All these things are full of conflicts
and compromises, tragic and hopeful, in which novelists can find both
imagery and stories.
The passage I quoted from Sennett deplored the increase of a narcissism which
he said had caused “a decrease in the ‘metaphorical’ imagination of the
body, which is to say an impoverishment of the cognitive activity of
creating a symbol out of a physical thing”. Neuroscience, and the study of
the activity of the brain, is beginning to bring its own illumination to our
understanding of how art works, and what it is. I have come to see the
delight in making connections – of which metaphor-making is one of the most
intense – as perhaps the fundamental reason for art and its pleasures.
Philip Davis, at Liverpool University, has been working with scientists on
responses to Shakespeare’s syntax, and has found that the connecting links
between neurones stay “live” – lit up for longer – after responding to
Shakespeare’s words, especially his novel formations of verbs from nouns,
than they do in the case of “ordinary” sentences. In Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s Aux
Origines des sciences cognitives (1994; translated as The Mechanization of
the Mind, 2000), an extraordinary account of the 1950s meetings of the
cybernetics group which discussed minds and machines and what it was to be
human, a neural network designer suggests that we delight in puns because
the neurone connections become very excited by the double input associated
with all the stored information for two arbitrarily connected things or
ideas. It occurred to me that metaphors might arise from the same neuronal
excitement – a double input, a strengthened connection (and I wrote on John
Donne’s metaphorical excitement – a sensuality of the brain – in these
pages, September 22, 2006).
During my lifetime we have used various metaphors for the activity of the mind
– when I was a girl it was seen as a telephone exchange. Later it became
fashionable to describe the brain as a computer – though a computer was
constructed by a brain. In the past few years the work of Jean-Pierre
Changeux has furnished us with descriptions, both purely physical and
philosophically theoretical, of the way the brain puts the mind together.
When he describes the relations between axons, dendrites, perception,
memory, concepts and the world outside a brain, I feel I am reading a
description of what I always sensed was happening, but could not describe.
He is interested both in a biological and chemical “grammar” or algebra, and
in the way in which things we perceive are retained – by the neurones – and
combined to make “images” and “concepts” which are made by strengthened and
stabilized collections of neurones, related both by the “pruning” of the
sensory input and the combinations resulting from the way the mental objects
are linked.
This may seem a little abstract in the context of a paper on the novel. A
novel is made of language, and arouses both feelings and thoughts in its
readers, as it should depict both feelings and thoughts in its people and
its microcosm. Changeux’s descriptions of the cells of the brain and the way
they combine and recombine give me a sense of understanding the excitement,
the drive, the pleasure, I get out of making worlds with words. We have had
a lot of the body as desire, and listened to many professors of desire.
There is something else – the human capacity to think, and to make feelings
into thoughts. It is a way out of narcissism.
A. S. Byatt’s recent books include The Little Black Book of Stories,
2003, and A Whistling Woman, 2002. She edited The Oxford Book of English
Short Stories, 1998.
