Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia by Jon Day

Abstract

Reviewed by: Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia by Jon Day Josh Powell Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia. By Jon Day. (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2020. ix+197 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–4744–5839–9. In 2013, taking a break from my Masters dissertation on sensory modernism, I proof-read another student's philosophy dissertation on the problems posed to physicalist views of the world by 'qualia' (individual instances of subjective conscious experience). In 2021, I married the author of that qualia dissertation and it is pleasing to review a work which weds (sorry) the topic of my dissertation with hers. Noting that 'as a philosophical entity the quale is broadly contemporaneous with the artefacts of high modernism' (p. 5), Jon Day's study does striking historicist work in reading philosophical discussions of qualia in relation to the literary movement most known for foregrounding individual instances of conscious experience. It is surprising that this kind of work has not been done before. I am certainly surprised, and a little disappointed, that it did not occur to me back in 2013. The problem to which Day's title refers is not the one that qualia potentially pose to physicalism. Instead, while trying to evade philosophical disputes about the existence of qualia, Day is primarily concerned with the problem that the notion of the quale poses to modernist fiction and its study. In particular, Day stresses the degree to which the discourse around qualia problematizes the 'cognitive realist' understanding of modernism—the understanding that, through literary innovation, modernist writers were able to describe 'not just the functions of consciousness but also its phenomenological properties' (p. 12). The crux here is that qualia, as conceptualized in philosophy, cannot be captured in language, whether [End Page 493] that language is scientific, mathematical, or literary. Thus, as Day memorably puts it: 'if qualia do exist, then Flaubert's "mouldy colour of a wood-louse's existence" simply cannot be conveyed within language, however refined or experimental or accomplished that language may be' (p. 6). Perhaps, then, defenders of cognitive realism would want to deny qualia. This creates its own problems: by denying qualia one risks 'denying some of the very properties of consciousness that the novel, as a form, has often been celebrated for accommodating' (p. 6). To accept qualia, then, is to accept that literary writing cannot capture the phenomenological properties of consciousness; to deny qualia is to bring into question the existence of the very thing that modernist writing is supposed to be singularly deft at getting across: individual instances of conscious experience. In advancing his thesis, Day offers a range of incisive readings of prominent modernist writers. The standout chapter is undoubtedly the one on Joyce (Chapter 3). From this, Ulysses emerges not as an attempt to portray 'what it is like to be another mind', but a 'radical interrogation' of cognitive realist thought (p. 76). Elsewhere the chapter on Wyndham Lewis (Chapter 6) does excellent work in detailing Lewis's concern with a qualia-denying, behaviourist view of human subjectivity. Not everything works. There is something of a double introduction, which means the book is slow to get to its primary literary texts. Chapter 4, which covers 'Neuromodernism and the Explanatory Gap', contains a lot of historical detail that probably would have been better put into notes. Chapter 5, frustratingly for this Beckettian reader, takes a long time to get to its titular author, and suffers from lack of engagement with recent work on Beckett and perceptual experience by writers such as Steven Connor, Laura Salisbury, and Ulrika Maude. These, though, are minor points. The study should ultimately prove a fascinating read for anyone interested in finding new ways of thinking about literary modernism's engagement with the senses. Josh Powell Cardiff University Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association