Thinks is a book about thought and sex-- about thinking about thinking, and thinking about sex. (Well, I'm sure no one's complaining about the sex part.) Davey Lodge has done his research on the science of thought, but that's what turns me off about this book.
Sure, it's great for the purpose of our class-- all the techniques and concepts it brings up could fill our blog assignments twice over. (And I guess we learned something too...) But it bashes you over the head with it's knowledge:
Chapter 3- introduction to the philosophy of thought
- Hello, Helen. It's time for another rousing lesson on cognitive science. (Talking about myself- this will get her motor running.)
- Oh, joy. (Here we go again kids.)
Time passes. A section from a textbook is ripped out and pasted onto the pages of this book.
- My wife is taking a nap in the next room-- care to have some of that sex?
- No, thank you. (Even though I really meant yes.)
Lodge just barely gets away with it because it's an ongoing conversation between two people-- but c'mon, people do talk about other things.
More importantly, I don't really see Lodge putting most of these concepts into use anywhere in his narrative style. Lodge really just draws up three different ways of telling the same story and assigns different people to them. Ralph gets his lush stream-of-consciousness, Helen gets her dry journal, and Lodge gets the bare-bones third-person omniscient. (I guess Lodge gets to play God.) It could just as well have been the other way around. (Which ever way that is.) So why should we see these different styles as anything other than a parlor trick?
And after you get that fact in your mind, I don't really see these characters as being distinct, fleshed out consciousnesses. They're kind of flat. They don't grow emotionally. (Of course so are the characters of Henry James.) Basically, Lodge defines the consciousness of people by their actions and experiences. But they don't feel different to me.
(I'm having trouble formulating what I'm thinking here.) How do you capture the qualia of different consciousnesses through language? When me and Dominik look at the same book in front of the Professor how does he see it differently than I do? Is there some sort of vocabulary that only my brain uses and his doesn't? Is there a vocabulary that we both use?-- because I'm not sure if you can just throw one person in the voice of "The Yellow Wallpaper" and one person into the voice of Ulysses (in this scenario, my brain is Ulysses by the way.) and say "that's how the consciousness of these two people differ" because then, how do you deal with a third person? Or sixteen? Thirty-seven? Eventually you run out of other people's writing styles to copy and then where are you?