Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia, by Jon Day, Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative, by Paul B. Armstrong

“Every sentence of psychology,” Rudolf Carnap (1959: 165) wrote in “Psychology in Physical Language” (1932), “may be formulated in physical language. . . . This is a sub-thesis of the general thesis of physicalism to the effect that physical language is a universal language, that is, a language into which every sentence may be translated.” This reductive physicalism was fundamental to Carnap’s early efforts to unify the sciences. And in “Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)” (1974), Jerry Fodor did his best to shut it down. Of course Fodor isn’t the only philosopher to reject reductionism. See W. V. O. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1953) and Hilary Putnam’s “Psychological Predicates” (1967) for other examples. But for my purposes here Fodor’s rejection is the most relevant. In short, his point is that even if you could demonstrate one-to-one correspondences between psychology and physics—a claim he disputed on both empirical and logical grounds—that doesn’t mean you should or need to. We have special sciences like psychology because we are interested in psychological matters and because we find psychological concepts valuable. For that reason it doesn’t make much sense to talk about those matters—about mental states, emotions, sexual desire—in a language that has no words for them. It’s not meaningful and it’s not practical, the same way it’s not meaningful or practical to talk about a heap of sand by referring to each grain individually. Moreover, Fodor maintained that such reductionism wasn’t necessary to begin with. Logically, you could accept that all psychological phenomena are physical phenomena without accepting anything more constraining than that. This is the notion of “token physicalism” (Fodor 1974: 100). And Fodor believed that any position more reductive or restrictive than token physicalism was probably untrue anyway. “Reductionism,” he concluded, “is probably too strong a construal of the unity of science; on the one hand, it is incompatible with probable results in the special sciences, and, on the other, it is more than we need to assume if what we primarily want is just to be good token physicalists” (107–108).Along those lines, I think it’s important for literary critics and theorists to be good token cognitivists (in the disciplinary, rather than the strictly mentalistic, sense of the term). While literary criticism is by no means a “special science,” and while our relationship to cognitive science is logically and historically different from the psychologist’s relationship to physics, I think the spirit of Fodor’s argument holds. We can (and should) acknowledge that, at some level, reading and writing literature rely on various cognitive processes. How could they not? But this acknowledgement does not entail a strongly reductive or explanatory relationship between them—that is, it does not entail one-to-one correspondences between literary and cognitive discourses. Nor is it meaningful or practical to reduce literary terms to cognitive ones. To expand on a point made above, we have disciplines like literary criticism because we are interested in literary matters and because we find literary concepts valuable. This doesn’t mean that critics shouldn’t talk about cognitive science. It’s just that if we wish to work at the intersection of literature and the sciences of mind we need to be clear-eyed about what we can and should do.This is a way of introducing two new books working in these areas: Jon Day’s Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia (2020) and Paul B. Armstrong’s Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative (2020). Each of these books is a noteworthy addition to its respective fields—cognitive literary study and narratology in the case of Armstrong, and modernism’s relations with philosophy of mind in the case of Day. And insofar as both Armstrong and Day take up the issue of reductionism, I think Fodor’s framework is appropriate for thinking about the strengths and drawbacks of each book. For that reason I will not be offering chapter-by-chapter breakdowns. Instead I’m going to focus on a few points from each book that pertain to reductionism and address the significance of those points for critical encounters with the sciences of mind.Those sciences of mind are the heart of Armstrong’s Stories and the Brain. But they are also means to an end. His argument is that cognitive science, by way of phenomenology, can answer many (though not all) of the questions raised by narratology. The ways we experience and write about time, the ways we organize plots and describe other minds—according to Armstrong these things follow directly from the brain’s architecture. As he explains, “Although I am opposed to neural reductionism, I believe there is much to learn from comparing lived experience and the neural correlates of consciousness, and the aim of this book is to show what such correlations reveal about narrative” (5). I don’t think this sounds all that opposed to “neural reductionism” (although what Armstrong describes is less constraining than Carnap’s translational reductionism). Nonetheless he highlights the limits of what cognitive science can, or cannot, do for us as literary critics:Stories and the Brain is refreshingly candid about the limits of cognitive literary study. This appeal to the “hard problem” of consciousness, however, is something of a straw man. Armstrong is right to suggest that we are currently unable to cross the “explanatory gap” (2) between science and phenomenal experience. But the implication here is that everything short of the hard problem is at least potentially explainable, and that everything unexplainable is related in some way to the hard problem. And neither of those things is the case.Moreover, I think Armstrong sometimes misjudges the dimensions of said “gap.” He does this both in terms of what neuroscience can explain but also the degree to which such explanations can press on literary study with specificity. For example: his hypothesis about the relationship between narrative form, time, and cognitive architecture. “At whatever level,” he writes, “twists and turns in our experience of stories are only possible because the temporality of brain function is asynchronous. . . . If our brains were temporally homogeneous, everything firing simultaneously and in lockstep, we could not tell each other stories” (59). I’m generally suspicious of theories where brains and literary forms follow the same kinds of rules or work toward the same kinds of ends. But for the sake of argument let’s say this hypothesis is correct. Accordingly, it’s fair to assess what kind of explanatory value this hypothesis has with respect to our experience of novels. A case in point: Armstrong’s reading of the “Wandering Rocks” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). The “coordinated horizonality of intersubjectivity and time,” he writes, is this chapter’s organizing principle:This point is pleasingly intuitive. And yet we’re in a slightly awkward position here. At one level Armstrong asserts a one-to-one reducibility between narratological and cognitive operations. The organization of the “Wandering Rocks” chapter is cited as an illustration of this. The trouble is that not every chapter of Ulysses—let alone every modernist novel—is narrated in the same way. We can’t ignore or downplay variation among narrators and styles of narration. And Armstrong doesn’t ignore these things. While he provides us with a strict one-to-one scheme, he also gives us plenty of wiggle room to account for variation. While modernist novels are contingent on the brain’s asynchronous temporality, Armstrong tells us, they nonetheless “play” with these cognitive operations. That means their narrations, and our experience of these narrations, do not dramatize or appear to correspond to the brain’s fundamental organization. And if that’s the case then the brain’s asynchronous temporality constrains these literary forms only at the most general level. In other words: in order to account for different styles of narration, Armstrong can’t assert anything more restrictive than token cognitivism. Stories and the Brain is therefore more reductive in spirit than in execution—in part because of its investments in narratology and its refusal to flatten the particularities of literary conventions.Day’s Novel Sensations is more circumspect about reductionism. Actually it has to be: Day argues that we should see the philosophical concept of qualia—the phenomenal aspects of experience, the “what-is-it-like-ness” (14) of consciousness—as being meaningfully contemporary with modernist literature. As Day writes, “What is striking about the qualia debate from the perspective of literary and cultural history is therefore that it represents a way of conceiving of consciousness—and the problems of describing sensations—that is mirrored in debates over the materiality of the mind, and the relation of language to the body, within modernist aesthetics” (5). And as qualia are as-of-yet irreducible to physical descriptions of the brain, Novel Sensations thrills in the Cartesian messiness of modernism’s inward turn. Qualia, Day explains, “keep alive the spectre of [Cartesianism] in an age of materialist reductionism, chasing res cogitans into individual instances of sense-perception, and haunting materialist accounts of consciousness as a new ghost in the old machine.” I’m not sure how I feel about comparing qualia with Gilbert Ryle’s “ghost in the machine”—is Day implying that qualia amount to a category-mistake?—but otherwise the point is well taken.But there are two problems with respect to Novel Sensation’s arguments about qualia. The first is historical. Through its attention to modernism’s relationships with philosophy of mind, Day’s book constitutes a necessary intervention in the study of modernist fiction. And yet in focusing on the relative uniqueness of qualia, and the closeness of modernist literature with the philosophy of its time, Novel Sensations isn’t telling the whole story. Yes, concepts like qualia and issues of reductionism resonated with modernist writers. But that wasn’t the first time this sort of thing happened. Many of the questions about physicalism and phenomenal experience raised during the twentieth century had important precedents in the eighteenth. These questions had precedents in the nineteenth century as well, with the rise of psychophysics and experimental psychology.1 And these things all pressed on the development of novelistic form and reading practices. The histories of novel writing can’t be disentangled from the histories of philosophy and psychology (nor the histories of literacy, education, and so on). In other words, historicizing qualia and the novel within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries isn’t quite enough. For if the modernists perceived the novel to be a suitable object for talking about qualia—an aesthetic object with seemingly unique purchase on problems of mind—the novel’s previous encounters with psychology and philosophy of mind contributed to that suitability.Or, to put it another way: Novel Sensations sometimes looks forward when it should look back. Day’s discussion of Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill” (1926) is an example. Woolf laments the difficulty of representing the experience of illness: “Let a sufferer try to describe the pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry” (quoted in Day 48). As a result, Woolf wanted a language better attuned to bodily experience. But as Day points out, she also wanted a “new hierarchy of the passions”—an epistemological rearrangement where “love must be deposed in favour of a temperature of 104; jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica; sleeplessness play the part of the villain” (Woolf quoted in Day 48). In that way, Day argues,Day is right to point us to the irreducibility of thoughts and feelings in Woolf. But in turning to the Churchlands, he overlooks the linchpin of Woolf’s note: “the passions”—which, while not incompatible with the concept of qualia, are not the same sort of thing. By 1926, “the passions” were hardly a cutting edge concept. And yet Woolf isn’t asking to replace them with newer, more scientific concepts. Instead it’s their “hierarchy” that she wants adjusted. However anachronistic they were, the passions were part of the literary history Woolf inherited—and she found them to be a meaningful way of talking about the tensions between linguistic convention and self-expression. This is something we can infer from her discussion of Emily and Charlotte Brontë in The Common Reader (1925). “There is in them,” we read, “some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things. . . . [It] allies itself with their more inarticulate passions. It makes them poets, or, if they choose to write in prose, intolerant of its restrictions. . . . They both feel the need of some more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering passions in human nature than words or actions can convey” (158–59). If Woolf was preempting the materialist philosophy of the future, it’s partly because she was so grounded in the literature and ideas of the past.The other problem in Novel Sensations is the way it talks about the existence of qualia. As Day explains, qualia “are not neutral features of consciousness. Using the term brings with it a particular perspective on the mind body problem. . . . It must be acknowledged that qualia remain a hugely disputed concept within contemporary philosophy of mind” (5). Where philosophers such as David Chalmers and Frank Jackson might invoke the “hard problem,” others such as Daniel Dennett would say that qualia are a “meaningless conceptual unit” no less reducible than other aspects of subjective experience (Day 4). Therefore to use the term qualia at all is to pick a side in this debate. As the term “qualia” appears throughout Novel Sensations (including its subtitle) you’d think that a side has been picked. And yet Day’s official position is one of neutrality:I admire Day’s care and focus here—restricting himself to conversations germane to literary study. The paradoxical existence attributed to qualia, however, is an issue.But I don’t think this paradox is Day’s fault. Instead, I think it’s evidence that literary criticism, as a discipline, has no clear sense of reductionism’s entailments. The reason Day has to maintain the paradox above is that, thanks to Carnap, Dennett, and the Churchlands, he’s stuck contending with a strict reductionist framework that equates reducibility with existence and meaningfulness. Qualia aren’t reducible to neurological correlates. But within this reductionist framework, irreducibility is tantamount to meaninglessness and nonexistence. So Day must, paradoxically, imply the existence of qualia while also asserting that he has no official position on their existence. But, insofar as literary criticism is in some ways analogous to a “special science,” this paradox is avoidable. The point of token physicalism is that we don’t need to assume strict one-to-one reducibility in order to say that, at some level, qualia must be physical phenomena. The physical reality of qualia can be asserted without yielding to the Churchland’s eliminative materialism, or without translating that assertion into Carnap’s universal physical language. Moreover, a model of such token physicalism is already present in Novel Sensations in the form of its token cognitivism—its discussions of the relations between literary forms and the neurological underpinnings of mental life. This is what’s at stake in Day’s treatment of “neuromodernism” (86), a term he borrows from Kirsten Shepherd-Barr. “Neuromodernism,” he writes, was “primarily concerned with ‘reading’ or analysing the inner worlds of its subjects, a process that drew attention to the metaphysical gaps that emerged between differing accounts of the same phenomena.” Novel Sensations shows that these gaps, far from constituting “meaningless conceptual units,” are exactly where we need to look.Put together, Armstrong’s Stories and the Brain and Day’s Novel Sensations make me optimistic about the future of cognitive literary study. This isn’t because of technological advances but rather conceptual ones. The “‘cognitive turn’ in criticism, like the critical narrative of the ‘inward turn’ which held sway before it,” as Day sees it, “often obfuscates precisely what an ontologically ‘realistic’ account of consciousness, either scientific or literary, would or could consist of” (170). Our task is to clear up that obfuscation (at least the literary part of it). In different ways, both Stories and the Brain and Novel Sensations prepare us for that task. We just need to understand the entailments of what we do as literary critics—to remember what makes our work meaningful and meaningfully separate from that of other disciplines. And we need to learn, perhaps, that reductionism isn’t necessarily what we think it is.