Gotham Diary:
Consciousness
1 March 2012
How can I more quickly persuade you not to read Edward St Aubyn’s A Clue to the Exit than by touting it as a novel “about consciousness”? That’s pretty much what the Sunday Times (London) does in a blurb printed on the back: “Striking metaphors and resonant evocations of sea and desert… accomplished reflections on the possibility of selfhood and the insolubility of consciousness.” It would not take much effort, I expect, for St Aubyn to tweak those lines into a grimly fatuous but also terribly funny parody of his own style. (I am going to resist the temptation to give it a try.) What grand and airy nonsense! It’s nonsense in that it presents A Clue to the Exit as if it belonged to the tradition of English travelogues in which, knowing nothing about them, really, I place Richard Burton, Robert Byron, and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Or perhaps a successor to Under the Sheltering Sky. Only instead of the Oxus or Ararat, we’re taken on a tour of the writer’s primitive and chaotic state of mind.
But St Aubyn, a born parodist, doesn’t stop there. He no mere entertainer — another thing that I probably oughtn’t to tell you if I want to you read the book — no mere fetcher-up of exotic locales and understated insights. He’s more like a really good workout coach, teaching you how to use muscles that you didn’t know you had while making you laugh quite a bit more than you expected to do. You don’t laugh all the time, but when you’ve negotiated one of his thornier sentences — limpidly constructed and perfectly easy to parse but copulating unlikely pairs of statements that you really do have to stop to process — when you finally get one of these, you smile. Now, I myself have never worked with a workout coach, much less a really good one, so I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but it seemed to me that invoking a workout coach would make the book sound more appealing. That kind of book, then. The kind of book that treats you to a good workout. And if St Aubyn didn’t actually show me muscles that I didn’t know I had, he did teach me a few things about getting them to work.
The first thing I want to say about A Clue to the Exit is that is successful in ways that On the Edge, his immediately previous novel, is not. Off the top of my head, I can think of several reasons why this is so. The subject of inquiry in Clue is focused on one thing,  consciousness; whereas the concerns of Edge are diffused among all the varieties of spiritual enlightenment, from drugs to Tantric sex. Clue is narrated in the first person by one man; Edge is written in the third person, from several points of view. One of the points of view in On the Edge is that of Crystal Bukowski, and I am not sure that St Aubyn is up to female impersonation; for the life of me, I couldn’t shake the very unwanted image of Barbra Streisand every time Crystal opened her mouth. Crystal reappears in A Clue to the Exit, but as a figure in a drolly unentertaining little novel (about consciousness) that the narrator is trying to write during the short time left to him to live, she makes vastly reduced claims on our sympathy. St Aubyn has also learned how to avoid making the reader anxious that there is going to be a test, a test that the reader will certainly fail. Finally, A Clue to the Exit has a very simple plot that flies along like a madcap TGV (in delightful contrast to the train in the novel-within-the-novel, which breaks down at Didcot Junction). You could say that, in A Clue to the Exit, St Aubyn has learned how to write a “difficult” novel that still does all of the things that you want a novel to do. I don’t think that I’m prepared to say that, however. I think that there’s plenty of room for improvement, and I wish the author many long, productive years of filling it, and myself many long years to watch him do it.
***
Here is an example of St Aubyn’s hip, witty, and challenging prose, taken from the latter part of A Clue to the Exit.
When writers imagine a character who is dying, or condemned to die, they all to often make him ruminate about the past, worrying that he may not have led a good life, or being haunted by some forking in the road when he ran away from true love, or failed to save a friend’s life. Something with tons of flashbacks, and a big violin section. Either the character claims to have a few regrets but, then again, too few to mention after page 300, or he has the incredible courage and honesty to regret everything and wish he had not done it his way. In either case, the main feeling about dying, namely that it’s happening too soon, is blurred by a preoccupation with the past.
Well, those of us who are dying — as opposed to those who are lounging around in their studies making dinner engagements, and then reluctantly disconnecting the phone for twenty minutes in order to browse through a medical textbook and look up some realistic details — those of us who are really dying haven’t got time to ponder the past. The present is scintillating with horror and precision. The past is a luxury for people who think they have a future. Does my life have subtle connecting threads, strange coincidences, uniting themes? You’d better believe it. Things can’t help repeating themselves, can’t help colliding. That’s not meaning, it’s where the search for meaning begins.
Note the interpenetration of narrative (someone is dying) and criticism (novelists usually get dying wrong). This is by no means the most challenging passage in A Clue to the Exit; far from it. But the writing is almost always this lucid, this emphatic.
***
As I read A Clue to the Exit, I thought a lot about consciousness, a topic that once upon a time interested me enough to get me to make my way through Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. That’s a sneaky way of saying that I, too, believed that consciousness could be explained. My belief these days is that (a) I’m not equipped to study the matter, which I leave to the cognitologists in their laboratories and (b) “consciousness” is a word that, in general usage, covers many different mental phenomena. Eventually, the second statement is going to be confirmed, denied, or rendered meaningless by the scientists mentioned in the first statement, but while they’re at it I am free to attend to what I notice about my own life.
I don’t believe that there is any one way to characterize one’s mental state throughout the entire day, from getting out of bed to getting back into it. For legal convenience, we say that this time is spent consciously, but all we mean by that is that there very well may be a test, so pay attention. When we are not concerned with legal convenience, and are pretty sure that there is not going to be a test, our minds — may I beg the reader’s indulgence as I proceed in comfortable editorial plural? — move from one moment to the next in whatever manner uses the least energy. That is not a conscious decision, of course; it is the physics of survival, hardwired into the simplest organisms, and our cerebrums have not evolved beyond the elemental constraint.
Sense data piles up in heaps of triviality (if we’re lucky); we now know that parts of the brain that are not conscious attend to these inputs more or less constantly. Meanwhile, other parts of the brain talk to each other, again without intruding upon consciousness. A great deal of brainwork goes to the utterly unconscious business of regulating and registering bodily functions that it would drive us mad to be aware of, and do drive us mad when we are ill. I can’t begin to tell you how fear and desire fit into this scheme, but they bubble along in their abstracted way, coloring and otherwise interfering with our awareness of what’s going on around us. I have introduced awareness. Is it the same thing as consciousness? I don’t much care, I’m not trying to explain a system that I hardly understand. I only want to write down what seems to be happening, and what seems to be happening is that some feedback processor in my brain weighs and considers the multitude of neuronal firings according to algorithms of varying degrees of force and returns its findings to an ongoing report that, over many years, takes on the identity of “me.” (It is arguable that this identity is not complete until “I” have been ravaged by adolescence.) I’ve shamelessly borrowed the labels of mechanical computers to sketch this account, and the last thing I’d recommend is the hunt for an actual “feedback processor” or a list of the “algorithms” among the lobes of the brain. All I want to convey is the suggestion that what we call consciousness is nothing but a stream of different types of mental event.
It seems to me, further, that the richer one’s life is — the better one’s health and physical endowment, the more ample one’s resources, the denser one’s relations with other people — the mightier the stream of consciousness is going to be, the more terrifying ones’ sense of helplessly shooting unforeseeable rapids. It’s no surprise, then, to find, at the top of the tree, writers like Edward St Aubyn, fiercely studying the workings of consciousness in hopes of controlling it without turning it off. Turning it off would be dying, which, Mr Aubyn reminds us, always happens too soon.