Roads to Consciousness by Sydney Mendel

Abstract

500 Sydney Mendel, Roads to Consciousness (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974). 276. £4.75 “ Hope springs eternal" might well be inscribed, if a bit crookedly, over critics' desks. Drones when compared to authors, critics are averse to undue or unre­ warding labors ; they hope that the book to be assessed fits some genre with reasonable clearness. Sydney Mendel's Roads to Consciousness is somewhat of a disappointment in this respect. It is scarcely literary criticism or literary history, though there is a degree of similitude to both. It is not aesthetics. It does not qualify as philosophy nor as systematic psychology, however much it leans on the latter. Publishers' remarks are sometimes not believed to be very reliable, but there is no reason (noting the qualifications) to doubt that this book "should perhaps be regarded as a novel kind of idealized spiritual autobiography under the guise of literary criticism."Professor Mendel appears then to be seeking his place in the annals of self-examined lives ranging from St Augustine and Socrates to Walt Whitman. The book does have a precise identity explained in the author's introduction: it is that kind of writing which pursues a thesis, in this instance a triple-layered version of the myth of the Fall of Man. Paradise, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained are given psychological equivalents: Unconscious, Self-Conscious, and Conscious Man. The latter two in turn are the Adolescent Hero and the Mature Hero of Consciousness; the movement of the first into the second as shown in literary works is the chief concern of the book. Paradise is inhabited by Unconscious Man "living authentically from within in accordance with the law of his own being." The citizen of Paradise Lost is filled with mad self-love and therefore is disposed to see all men (even friends) as rivals and to rejoice at their misfortunes. An abstract thinker, aware of evil all around him, he discovers his own evil, and, in the identity of idealistic Adoles­ cent Hero, seeks to combat it. Finally, as the Mature Hero he, "obeying the Socratic injunction, Know thyself, [achieves] authenticity (or the recovery of real being), and hence a right relationship with his fellow-men." He "does indeed emerge into the sunlight, and looks out upon the many-coloured world, seeing things as in themselves they really are without fear and without envy" his Paradise Regained. Basic in this set of concepts is Professor Mendel's somewhat free version of être veritable as he finds the term in a quotation from Pascal. "The real being," he writes, "is 'right' because everything that has real existence, that is part of the created universe, is inherently valid and right... the man who is ferocious, lustful, and pitiless ... will be 'right' ... insofar as he is acting in accordance with his own nature, and occupies his proper place in the scale of creation." The whole argument, elaborately convoluted and not always free of lacunae in logic, is made to rest on Hamlet: "Hamlet may be considered as paradigmatic of the lover of truth who seeks to follow the roads of Consciousness." Other 5oi major texts are Antony and Cleopatra, Crime and Punishment, The Wild Duck, Sartre's Dirty Hands, Sartor Resartus, Howard's End, The Immoralist, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. In addition what seem to be endless references from an extraordinary multiplicity of sources fill a considerable portion of the book. The Hamlet in Roads to Consciousness is no more convincing than are its philosophic-psychological premises; he is simply shaped to suit the thesis. Although capable of abstract thought Hamlet is not typically shown as an abstract thinker, nor is he perceptibly filled with mad self-love. It is hard to see him as an 'adolescent' unless the term has some special meaning. He has only admiration and affection for the one friend he has, Horatio. Nowhere does he rejoice in his friend's misfortunes. In a similarly simplistic reading of Antony and Cleopatra, Antony is the very type of the Conscious or Mature Man, "who does indeed emerge into the sunlight" although Shakespeare seems to have thought of him as a tragic figure. (By Professor Mendel's own...