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Less than a century ago, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce harnessed the wonders of human consciousness in series of verbal cascades that seemed to capture humankind's seminal understanding of the essence of character and self. They fueled their art with the discoveries of William James, who coined the expression stream of consciousness; Sigmund Freud, who plowed the subconscious; and the narrative explorations of consciousness by William's brother Henry. The recombinant approach to narrative and plot reshaped the modern novel. Their infectious influence remained unchallenged as the concept of consciousness and the mind were held hostage by the theories of Freud and Karl Jung.

For the past thirty years, though, advances in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, neurology, and even philosophy, special relativity, and quantum mechanics have altered the understanding of consciousness, making it at best a contentious field of conflicting theories. They all share one commonality: They dam the streams of consciousness found in Mrs. Dalloway or Ulysses—at least for 21^st Century writers. Science has redefined consciousness and memory—if not to describe what they are at least to note what they are not.

The nature of consciousness and memory no longer reflects a present and a past as perceived, enjoyed and hated, by an individual in a given linear moment of time. Consciousness and, by definition, memory are an amalgam of all individual experience, continuously altered by each experience and each recalled memory. The consciousness of the moment is thereby integrated into memory and reflect back to the moment. When taken to an extreme, consciousness and memory—long before a writer sets a word on page—is but a fiction itself, the greatest fiction for it's each individual's story of a truth molded by the totality of his/her experience and perceptions altered by the integration into that experience.

This fiction of consciousness and memory shapes and molds the individual, making him or her more of what he or she is than any other perceived truth. This principle is intentionally or unintentionally reshaping the nature of the novel and all writing, but that's for another time.

Contractions of Consciousness
Consciousness and memory being fictions contradicts the intuitive sense of what we believe to be so. How can it be what we remember from yesterday, or even a minute ago, be but a fiction of what was and is? We seem to recall events with the accuracy of a video camera operating twenty-four hours a day. We trust memory as if we are reliving the event. Unfortunately the trust in memory's accuracy betrays the concept of memory itself.

Our memory functions, feeds and breathes, off an essential tool of survival—learning. Learning functions like a series of hooks. Each new piece of information is connected to a hook for another piece of information, the new having itself a series of hooks onto which we can associate more information. The more we repeat the “information” (now a memory) either by thought or expression, the more memories we hook the “information” onto, giving it the texture and shading of that new piece of information. The memory becomes all memory, akin to the creation of fiction. “The images and data [of a memory] are seldom exclusive property of one particular memory.” (Franzen, 8) For example, there's the relatively benign fruit called the apple. It's red or green or yellow, sweet, sour, or sweet and sour. Yet in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the apple possesses a negative connotation—it being the fruit with which Satan tempted Eve and Adam.¹

When we piece a memory together, we call on our entire consciousness. In this way, memory becomes fiction.² “Those memories that [we] do retain [we] tend to revisit and thereby strengthen. They become literally—morphologically, electrochemically—part of the architecture of the brain.” (Franzen, 9) In other words we merge information, tailor it, massage it, to give the memory life within the framework of our minds and not the framework of reality. “A memory is...a 'temporal constellation' of activity—a necessarily approximate excitation of neural circuits that bind a set of sensory images and semantic data into the momentary sensation of a remembered whole.” (Franzen 8) Therefore “all memories...are actually memories of memory.” (Franzen, 27)

To put it another way, we forget what actually happened and remember what we perceived to have happened, which is “one of the great adaptive virtues of our brains, the feature that makes our gray matter so much smarter than any machine yet devised..., ...our ability to forget almost everything that has ever happened to us.” (Franzen, 9) Our memory therefore is shaped by large categorical pieces of information and only a few episodes of our lives.

This new understanding of memory bears directly on consciousness, including consciousness of characters.

What Is Actually Is What Was
Consciousness is but memory, an awareness of self either in the now, or an awareness of self in relation to an event that has happened. It's deceptive to think of consciousness of the now as being the present. It is the awareness of the recently happened. Time has elapsed from the moment of the event perceived and the registration of that perception in the mind. We don't recognize the distinction because the synapses and neurons process information at speeds approximating that of light (approximately 670 million miles per hour). At such a speed, the mind, much as it rights the upside-down image conveyed by the optic nerves, easily makes the process appear seamless. The mind smoothes out the distinction for the psychological convenience of dealing with the present as if it were present.

In essence, we never perceive the actual present. We are conscious only of its shadow. “The present—the concreteness of the present as a phenomenon to consider...is for us an unknown planet: so we can neither hold onto it in our memory nor reconstruct it through imagination.” (Kundera, Testaments)

All consciousness therefore is a form of the past, and therefore subjected to the fictions of memory. “We are conscious of existing in time, moving from a past that we recall very patchily, and into a future that is unknown and unknowable.” (Lodge, Consciousness, 31) That's the aspect of character Woolf and Joyce³ attempted to capture with their stream of consciousness, a variation of solipsism: Nothing is certainly real except for one's existence. (Lodge, Art, 42) It was an effective spring board 80 years ago, not today. This solipsistic stream ignores recent developments in cognitive and consciousness studies, such as “the concrete encounter of self and other [individuals] fundamentally involves empathy, understood as a unique and irreducible kind of intentionality.” (Thompson, 2)

What has been made clear in the past few decades is that Woolf and Joyce—along with James and Freud—had it wrong. “In neurobiological terms, [the mind] is a complex system of billions of neurons between which countless connections are being made simultaneously as long as we are conscience....The atoms do not fall in a discrete chronological order—they bombard us from all directions, and are dealt with simultaneously by different parts of the brain.” (Lodge, Consciousness, 62)

Where does this leave the fiction writers when we still hear the echoes of Woolf's Modern Fiction: “The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms...life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the being of consciousness to the end.”⁴

The Appropriateness of Consciousness?
Do writers abandon consciousness, that representation of the world as humans' perceive they perceive it, as did Kingsley Amis and Evelyn Waugh in a postmodernist reaction to the modernists? Some writers have abandoned the idea of consciousness. Some have gone as far as to abandon the novel as once advocated by Donald Barthleme who compelled by publishers wrote the novel Snow White, it being his anti-novel novel. Their philosophies arose from new theories of cognition, perception, memory, giving rise to the anti-self and anti-free-will declarations:

“The self is a mythical entity...It is a philosophical muddle to allow the space which differentiates 'my self' from 'myself' to generate the illusion of a mysterious entity distinct from..the human being. (Kenny 1988)

“A self ...is...an abstraction, a center of narrative gravity. (Dennett 1991)

“Perceptual consciousness is a kind of false consciousness, a sort of confabulation. The visual world is a grand illusion. (Noe, 1)

“Language is serving as a slave of an executive, not as the medium of thought...Language is not the prison house of thought...” (Pinker, 210)

The emergence of this anti-self becomes most apparent in Looking for Spinoza. In this book, Antonio Damasio argues that we don't cry because we are sad, but we are sad because we cry. Emotion, in essence, is a bodily response. “The mind is built from ideas that are, in one way or another, brain representations of the body'...The body [becomes] the central focus of the mind. The mind is not just embodied; it is about the body.'” In his review of the book, philosopher Colin McGinn argues, as any writer would so naturally do: “It is a gross non-sequitor to infer that the mental state is about the bodily state...The body is indeed the basis of my mind's ideas, but it [the body] is not their object.” (McGinn, 11)

These gnomic theories of humanity, consciousness, and memory hinge on a gnomic and computational explanation of self. But they defy individual experience, one's sense of self, as well as the literary history of self exploration, the place where individuals first observed the impact of memory and consciousness. Writers therefore must expatriate the scientific territorial creep for it denies or diminishes free will without which consciousness and memory become merely organic functions and more importantly without which all sense of character vanishes. Writers must assert again that “the value of great fiction...helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations.” (Gardener, 31)

More important, humanity is but the sum of its consciousness and memory. In essence, we are our memories as false as they are. These fictions of the mind define our selves.

As Franzen did with his father in How to Be Alone, I gradually watched as my father at the young age of 54 developed Alzheimer's Disease. It was decades ago before the support groups, before the Alzheimer Foundation, before the word dementia had any currency in the vernacular. The disease ate his mind, short-term memory went first, then it crept deeper and deeper into his imagination, stealing the memories of the past or infusing what was into what is. The man whom I had known for three decades vanished. My father disappeared with his memories. He became another man, less of the previous because of the loss of memory and the loss of consciousness. I watched the same decent (captured so well in The Hours by Michael Cunningham) of the mind of my cousin suffering in the final stages of AIDS. With the loss or confusion of memory there was the loss or confusion of consciousness, and thus the transformation of the individual into another person. With this loss and this redefinition of self, empathy fades.

This has been the falling of many postmodernists. They ignored the cornerstone of their characters' humanity, the essence of themselves—the who they are, the why they are, and the what they will be. They ignored empathy—which arises from what psychologists called TOM, Theory of the Mind.⁵ So diminished are motivation, character development, transition, epiphany, denouement, the essential ingredients to any story attempting at some kind of truth. Their works, reactions to the modernists, saw only action—all the while ignoring that action, the plot, meant nothing in and of themselves (like the sound of a tree falling in the forest), until perceived by an individual—until consciousness and memory are brought to bear on the action.

Finding a New Way
David Lodge apparently thinks the answer rests in the return to a Jamesian type of approach: The “ambitious and impressive novel [Jonathna Franzen's The Corrections] together with Ian McEwan's Atonement, may conceivably herald, or encourage, a return to the third-person novel of consciousness in postmodern literary fiction.” (Consciousness, 88) But after all the developments in consciousness studies, can writers merely return to what has been done?

It's troublesome proposal. There's an obligation in the arts, especially the art of writing, not to go back. “There are certain [writers] who, in addition to the virtue of revealing to us some phase of the human consciousness unknown until their time, also have the more doubtful virtue of summing up in themselves the thousands of contrasting tendencies of their era, of being, so to speak, the storage batteries of new forces” (Eco, 13) In his essay The Depreciate Legacy of Cervantes, Milan Kundera put it another way: “The sole raison d'etre of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover....Knowledge is the novel's only morality.” ( Kundera, Art, 5-6)

There's one step that writers have taken in light of the confusion abounding in the field of consciousness. They are adopting one so-far crucial element to the thinking of self—the Heinsenberg uncertainty principle. Simply it states that the position and momentum of an object or event are inherently uncertain because they are affected by the act of observation.

For example, in McEwan's novel, an omniscient narrator enters into the consciousness of several characters. Then in the epilogue the reader discovers that one of those characters wrote the book. She confesses that she changed the facts, as any novelist would. Therefore the fiction is fiction, an already complicated point if memory is fiction. At first blush, it appears McEwan has yanked a deus ex machina from behind the proscenium. That's too simplistic for such a writer. From a Heisenbergian point of view, the omniscient narrator does not affect the experiment (the novel), until the epilogue where the observer position changes, altering the integrity of the experiment, altering the nature of the consciousness of the characters, giving a new meaning to all that was written.

The HUP Observer
Dermot Healy applies a similar principle in A Goat's Song. In a state of crapulence, tittering between hangover and drunkenness, salmon-fisherman/playwright Jack Ferris awaits longingly for the return of Catherine Adams to the fishing town of Bellumullet from Dublin. He waits, he drinks, he waits, he drinks, and drinks and drinks. He passes out. He awakes to find that she has not returned. He travels to Dublin to discover that she will not return for he is still drinking. Therefore, he is left alone “to transcend. To enter a new story. She must be imagined. He opened a spiral-bound notebook and thought, Here it begins.” (84) In other words, the writer, as the observer, effects the outcome of the experiment, in this case a novel. Ferris is the observer who already has affected the story, freeing him to explore the consciousness of characters whom he pretends to know but whom he does not—all of which is an attempt to understand that which he does not. Heisenbergian at its best.

Another example of play with the uncertainty of memory and therefore consciousness, whether intended or not, prevails throughout Olafur Olafsson's Absolution. It is a memoir of the elderly and dying misanthrope Peter Peterson. He confesses that memories torment him: “An old man's memories haunt him every day” (Olafsson, 242) because “the human mind's capacity for remembrance is strong.” (Olafsson, 232) Yet the science surrounding the development of consciousness and memory belies this statement. What the old man remembers actually is an event, the planned betrayal of Jon to the Gestapo, that he has replayed in his imagination. For more than five decades, he has assumed his plot worked. The memory of the loss love of Gudrun also triggers a synaptic thunderstorm, especially the sense that she felt betrayed by his awkward, if not misogynistic, and failed seduction. Between these two memories he records portions of his life, episodes told in full detail, creating the illusion of relating his life step by step. But as consciousness studies have shown, memory is at best a fiction of what an individual perceives to have happened and that it is impossible to reconstruct, at least accurately, one's life which is merely a series of memories. So the novel quickly becomes a fiction of a fiction, as any fiction piece eventually dissolves into.

Olafsson weaves into the plot of the novel an element of the Heisenberg uncertainty by introducing an unnamed Icelander, who is asked to review Peterson's Icelandic memoir. The unnamed translator describes the “random heap of papers” as consisting “of nothing more than the incoherent memoirs of an old man.” (Olafsson, 11) Does he dropped the manuscript into the trash and go on with his other work? No. “When I returned home that evening, I began, as if by instinct, to translate the manuscript. I became so obsessed with it that I found myself revising, amending, and abridging it as if I were its original author. For the next few months, I spent evenings this way...” (Olafsson, 12) The translator becomes the Heinsenberg observer who affects the outcome of the experiment, changing its nature by his nature and presence. The translator becomes so much a part of this experiment of memory that he acts “as if [he] were its original author.” This is heightened by the fact that the memoir is written in first person and with interior monologues, which is juxtaposed by the first person narrative and interior monologue of the translator who is addressing a narrative you.

To complicate matters further, the translator is pining for a recently lost love. He, like Peterson, is obsessed with memory, it affecting his consciousness. Therefore, the character has almost no choice but to become so much a part of the memoir and therefore the memories and consciousness of Peterson that he feels “the Peterson's words might just as easily have flowed from my own pen.” In essence, he becomes the experiment, the memory and consciousness of Peterson. By the end of the novel, he, like Peterson, is shocked to find that Gudrun has all but forgotten the failed seduction by Peterson. Therefore, memory is flawed.

What can be trusted of the consciousness and memory of Peterson? They have first been filtered through his own perception of being, massaged over four decades, and then refined through the consciousness of the translator. A story remains, but whose story? Or is there a double negative taking effect: The fiction Peterson's memory is neutralized by the fiction of the translator's consciousness, thereby making an accurate piece of fiction by Olafsson? Whatever the outcome, Olafsson takes the uncertainty of Peterson's perception and overlays with the uncertainty (in the Heisenbergian way) of the translator perception, in the end leaving the reader with only the one certainty: we are but the summation of our own consciousness only onto ourselves, and we are to others an entirely different memory and consciousness.

Layering Uncertainty
A similar level of consciousness uncertainty is woven into the novel I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters. Rabih Alameddine however employs a different tack. The novel is multi-textual, it being sometimes a novel and sometimes a memoir, sometimes in English, sometimes in French, are written by the protagonist Sarah Nour el-Din. She, in essence, transforms into the Heisenberg observer of her own life, thereby altering the experiment that is called consciousness. It, like life, is a never ending experiment. It begins again and again in a series of first chapters to potential novels and memoirs, and with each restart the tone shifts along with the progression of the experiment. Compare the first line of the first 'first' chapter, “My grandfather named me for the great Sarah Bernhardt,” (Alameddine, 3) with the first line of another first chapter, “I woke up with a hangover.” (Alameddine, 254) The first is laced with the perception of a child, the second is portrayed as a perception of fact.

The technique allows Alameddine to give his author a deeper and a cleaner, albeit painful, insight into her life. Her consciousness expands. At the same time, as each start enables her to probe deeper, she becomes more knowledgeable of her own memories and consciousness.

In the end, the reader knows that the experiment is not over. That there is more to the story. There is more to the memory of the life lived. That there will be more with the passing of time, all representing the constant shifting of consciousness and memory.

Uncertainty Confounding Story
The uncertainty of memory and consciousness is the up-front theme of Dale Peck's Martin and John:

Memory is my only possession, but it resists ownership. I remember the first thing I wrote: this is the worst thing I remember, I wrote, and then I stopped writing. Nothing came after that sentence; nothing ever did. Nothing announced itself as the worst of it all, although many, many things—images, sounds, sensations, sentences even, though I don't remember who first wrote or spoke them—all vied for the honor...[then] I wrote something that hadn't happened. Everything's been a little confused since then, what's real and what's invented, but it all seems to make more sense too.” (Peck, 225)

John, the protagonist, has created a puzzle of stories “forced together or merely laid end to end,” thereby perpetuating the permutation of two characters, himself and his lover Martin who has died. In some stories, they are older, some younger, sometimes John is Martin, Martin, John. In the end John is infected with AIDS. Could he be hallucinating? Could he be on drugs? Who can say because John does not know? The memories are unclear, leaving John only the possibility of inventing stories to a life diluted by abuse and abandonment, to make sense of the senseless.

John is the Heisenbergian observer who recognizes his own effect. Peck exploits the observer, showing his effects, thereby allowing Peck to deal with a multitude of issues, such as homosexuality in an unfriendly America, the effects of AIDS especially on individuals in the gay community, and finally the uncertainty of the sum of one's life because memory itself is fiction. He basically proves through repeated stories that “the individual human mind is not confined within the head, but throughout the living body and includes the world beyond the biological membrane of the organism, especially the interpersonal world of self and other.” (Thompson, 5)

Consciousness and memory, and all their failings, serve a different master in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. She is chasing after a sense of truth as Umberto Eco describes:

The artist can succeed in possessing and communicating the truth, but only through beauty...not the truth that...becomes beauty, but of a gratuitous beauty, born from the provocative strength of the imagination which, in fact, becomes the only possible truth. (Eco, 13)

The novel was triggered by a memory Morrison had of a childhood African-American friend who, like a character Pecola in the novel, wanted blue eyes. It was for the pain of discovering the racially defined paradigms of beauty that forced some children to disqualify their own beauty that Morrison wanted a special language and in turn a special language for consciousness and memory:

The novel tried to hit the raw nerve of racial self-contempt, expose it, then soothe it not with narcotics but with language that replicated the agency I discovered in my first experience of beauty. Because that moment was so racially infused (my revulsion at what my school friend wanted...), the struggle was for writing that was indisputably black. I don't yet know quite what that is, but neither that nor the attempts to disqualify an effort to find out keeps me from trying to pursue it. (Morrison, 211)

Aside from finding a language that broke from English's racist tendencies, she struggled with the concept of memory itself. To handle a novel that dwelled in the multiple memories and consciousness of her characters, she created what Carl D. Malmgren called a polyphony.

The seasonal sections are in the first person, but even they are double-voiced, aware of the different between the experiencing 'I' and the narrating 'I.' In places Claudia speaks as the nine-year-old girl going through the experience, ignorant, for example as to what 'ministratin' is. Elsewhere, she switches to an adult perspective...And sometimes she speaks from the moment of the enunciation itself... (Malmgren)

She shifts the narrative frequently throughout moving within a few pages from authorial to figural to first person. For example, Morrison resorts to a figural narration when recounting Pauline's (Breedlove) perspective of her life, but as soon as Pauline begins talking to an unnamed and unheard neighbor, Morrison opts for a first-person dramatic monologue. (Morrison, 112)

In the sections that start with the 1950s grammar school reading primers, Morrison explores the consciousness of Pauline, Cholly Breedlove, and Soaphead Church using a figural narratives. “Those figural presentations are frequently qualified by authorial interpolations or commentary” (Malmgren) as when she wrote “the easiest thing to do would be to build a case out of her foot. This is what she herself did.” as Claudia of Pauline said. (Morrison, 110) In these sections there's also “no explicit identification of that authorial speaker as the grown-up Claudia.” Claudia refuses to identify herself, thereby keeping a distance, even though Claudia as a child or adult could not have been privy to the information it unfolds, making the material of her memory seem more true than it ever could have been. She, however, is not writing in the interest of truth but the interest of understanding, of knowing the why.

In the seasonal sections, which are in diary form, there's a personal view of Pecola. But it's through the eyes of Claudia the older adopting the notions of her presumed nine-year-old self. She projects backwards as it were, which then begs the question of the accuracy of the perspective, even though it nonetheless is true for Claudia. This is precisely the Heisenberg uncertainty: the sense of a truth that may not be true but which is immaterial to the observer.

Morrison probes the consciousness of the individual's further using a multi-textual approach. “It opens with three different version so fits epigraphic 'master' text, several lines drawn from an elementary school [reading] primer. That is followed by an italicized 'overture,' introducing...Claudia....The body of the novel is composed of two related tests.” (Malmgren) Within these two master forms, there are other textual applications, such as the letter from Soaphead Church to God, the schizophrenic monologue of Pauline, and the Claudia coda beginning with “So it was.”(214)

In Blackwater Lightship, Colm Toibin resists using the writer as observer of the experiment. He creates two trinities, one shadowing the other. There's the trinity of Helen and her estranged mom and grandmother juxtaposed to the trinity of the dying Delcan and his friends, Larry and Peter. Trinity is an inappropriate description of the female group. Helen is on a crucifix of Golgotha with her mother and grandmother at her sides, all looking for salvation. Delcan, Larry, and Peter are the Trinity, Delcan being the transfiguration, the light to salvation for Helen—the salvation of her life with her family, her place, and eventually herself.

The women are being crucified for the most important element of self, empathy for each other and to a lesser degree others. It is the shadow trinity who cares, Delcan for his sister and mother, Larry and Peter for Delcan and the women. It is the shadow trinity that invades the lives of these three women. It's this trinity of gay men—distinctly separated in the Catholic world of Ireland—who affect the experiment of life—helping Delcan to die and Helen to live. But where the other writers relied on a writer to be the observer, to interfere, Toibin relies on another person on the fringe of society, the gay man, who are “both distant and close to a culture at the same time,” making their observations central to a culture rather than peripheral. (Toibin, Love, 9) As great as the book is, it falls short of an understanding of Helen's consciousness. It's more an understanding of her consciousness through the consciousness of the omniscient narrator, whom he/she was.

We drifted toward the repeated dependence on the Heisenberg uncertainty because as writers we understand the nature of the human mind. It seems most akin to a theory recently espoused by Harvard dream researcher Allan Hobson. In his Activation Input Modulation theory, he postulates that the mind-brain as a cube, obviously having three variable dimensions affecting consciousness second by second:

Level of activation in the brain; coma low, waking high.

1. Predominant source of input—waking the external environment, sleep the brain itself.

2. The brain's chemical microclimate, the mix of neuromodulators that enhance or impede the ability to analyze information. (Brown, 72)

According to the Hobson theory, the genetically determined brain-mind is constantly changing. He also postulates that as with any complex system there are design and program errors which lead to the “gorgeous construct” of self. (Brown, 72)

It's logical. It fits accepted thinking of the mind. It accounts for the brain-mind dichotomy without introducing Descartes's “ghost in the machine,” that untenable element called the soul. The first two variables have been massaged and handled for more than two centuries, with the emphasis shifting from one to two and back again. But it is the third element that eludes writers. This new elusive notion of memory and consciousness present opportunity for writer's to explore narrative, plot and consciousness with the multi-textual and multi-vocal approaches. Yet there's more to this. Must writers wait for the next advance in neurobiology or neuropsychology or artificial intelligence? No. It is time to wander in that a wilderness of consciousness, leading more to an understanding of what that cascade of thought and feelings and sensations mean, now and not now.

Bibliography

Alameddine, Rabih. I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters, W.W. Norton & Co., New York City 2001.

Brown, Chip. “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Deer.” The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 2, 2003, p. 34.

Eco, Umberto. The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. Translated by Ellen Esrock. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1982) 1992.

Franzen, Jonathan. How to Be Alone: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2002.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. Vintage Books Edition, New York City 1991 (1983).

Healy, Dermot. A Goat's Song, Viking Penguin, New York City, 1995.

Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel, Perennial Library, Harper & Row, New York City, 1988.

---. Testaments Betrayed (1995). Quoted by Thomas J. Shff in “Multipersonal Dialgoue of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (2000), p. 3-19.

Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction. Penguin Books Ltd., London, England 1992.

---. Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 2002.

McGinn, Colin. “Fear Factor: A Review of Looking for Spinoza by Antonio Damasio (Harcourt Bracke, New York City, 2003), The New York Times Book Review, Feb. 23, 2003, New York City, p. 11.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Plume of the Penguin Group, New York City, 1993.

Noe, Alva. “Is the Virtual World a Grand Illusion?” Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 9, No. 5-6 (2002), p. 1-12. (as accessed in Feb. 2003 at <http://www.imprint.co.uk>).

Olafsson, Olafur Johann. Absolution, Pantheon Books, New York City, 1991.

Peck, Dale. Martin and John, HarperPerennial, New York City 1994.

Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Viking, New York City, 2002.

Thompson, Evan. “Empathy and Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies. (As accessed in February 2003 at <http://www.imprint.co.uk>).

Toibin, Colm. The Blackwater Lightship. Scribner Paperback Fiction, New York City, 1999.

---. Love in a Dark Time and Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature. Scribner, New York City, 2002.

With Thanks to the Following

Checkoway, Julie, ed. Creating Fiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs. Story Press, Cincinnati, OH 1999.

Manfred, Jahn. Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative. <http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppn.htm>. April 10, 2002, Version 1.6.

Strawson, Galen. “The Self.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 4, No. 5-6 (1997), p. 405-428. (as accessed in February 2003 at <http://www.imprint.co.uk/strawson.htm>).

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