Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness by Jonathan Kramnick

Abstract

Reviewed by: Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness by Jonathan Kramnick Regina Janes Jonathan Kramnick. Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness. Chicago: Chicago, 2018. Pp. x + 198. $25.00 Ecology? Consciousness? I wanted this book to be a shoo-in for the Gauss, kicking away the literary biographies that always win, restoring literary criticism to a place on university press lists and on the touted university-for-a-day lecture circuits. Its claim is large: literary studies have a disciplinary contribution to make to understanding consciousness, including the “hard problem.” How can the brain, a mass of matter, produce the experience of consciousness? Why does it persist in propagating fictions, the falser the better? Alas, the argumentation is too subtle and the appropriation of other disciplinary perspectives too tactful to elevate our discipline by its bootstraps. (In the event, Paper Minds made the Gauss short list, but lost to a biography of Lorraine Hansberry.) A collection of essays rather than unified argument, Paper Minds embraces new models of perception that move perception “out of our heads” (Alva Noe’s phrase) into a transaction between a whole body and the world, making consciousness something we do rather than something we have. Elevating form, it enacts the open-endedness of literary enquiry, toying with the changing stories neuroscientists and novelists tell about our minds. Two elegant and rigorous essays defend the methodological status quo in literary studies, and a strong account of the “hard problem” of consciousness introduces modern novelists (McEwan and McCarthy) interpreted as reframing consciousness as bodily process. For Scriblerians, Cowper’s sofa in “The Task” turns into a James J. Gibson “affordance,” viz. “a Newtonian object in space,” that may be climbed or sat or rested on if one is a creature of a particular shape, able to turn knee-high physical objects into the affordance called “a seat,” a.k.a. bench, chair, stool, sofa, or low wall, used to sit rather than to kneel or squat. Affordances are specific both to culture and species. For a cat, sofas afford a scratching post, for bugs nesting areas or food. More generally, an affordance is “an external [End Page 85] phenomenon covered by the laws of nature and a potential for action held from a point of view,” not unlike a sonnet or a couplet. In the chapter “Presence of Mind,” direct perception confronts a “representational interface,” the dominant eighteenth-century empiricist model. Hobbes represents external objects as aggressive, pressing themselves on the sense organs to create a phantasm of the object, while Locke posits a litter of images in a camera obscura, and Hume cuts us off from objects altogether. The dialectical opposition turns up in Addison’s astonishingly elegant and supple account of vision “as a diffusive kind of touch” (reminding us what an extraordinary stylist Addison was); Berkeley’s more worried version; and Reid’s contorted, but vigorous, insistence that the mind really perceives what is there. Addisonian vision reaches out to bring things close and delights in the fluctuations of novelty: objects are “ever in Motion, and sliding away from beneath the Eye of the Beholder.” Thomson’s persuasive tactile vision invites to feeling curvature, and Sterne in his black coat looks through a window at yellow, green, and blue, longing to be there, somewhere, with a gris-set. Like his starling, Sterne wants out—to the there that is there. “On Beauty and Being at Home” returns to an elegant act of literary criticism on Defoe, performed first in the introduction, over the ambiguity of “handsome” (attractive) and “handy” (close to hand). Crusoe begins his journal only when he has created the conditions for his “paper mind”: putting his mind down on paper once he possesses a “handsome” arrangement of his materials and living space. Aesthetics as action or craft, in georgic, Cyder, Swift, Jonathan Richardson, Hogarth, and Cowper, is contrasted with Shaftes-bury’s and Granville’s aesthetics of spectatorship. Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill” is mined for its creation of a poem like its world, adding to a whole rather than representing an original from which it derives. Its iconic, traveling couplet exemplifies “almost pure form...