Modern Mind

course is very similar to the way computers work, in ‘bits’ of information, where everything is represented by a configuration of either os or is. The arrival of the concept of parallel processing in computing led the philosopher Daniel Dennett to consider whether an analogous process might happen in the brain between different evolutionary levels, giving rise to consciousness. Again such reasoning, though tantalising, has not gone much further than preliminary exploration. At the moment, no one seems able to think of the next step.
    Francis Crick’s aim has been fulfilled. Consciousness is being investigated as never before. But it would be rash to predict that the new century will bring advances quickly. No less a figure than Noam Chomsky has said, ‘It is quite possible – overwhelmingly probably, one might guess – that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.’

40
THE EMPIRE WRITES BACK
     
    In an essay published in 1975, Marcus Cunliffe, a professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., concluded that, so far as literature was concerned, ‘by the 1960s, the old Anglo-American cultural relationship was decisively reversed: the major contribution, in quantity and quality, was American.’ 1 He also observed that the business of America was still business, that if publishers were to stay alive, they had to make profits, and that in such an environment ‘the most reliable mainstay was… non-fiction: self-help, popular religion, sexology, health, cookery, history and biography, advice on investments, documented scandal, accounts of adventures, reminiscences. 2 Nor did he ignore the fact that by 1960, ‘the annual American consumption of comic books had passed the billion mark; expenditure on them, estimated at $100 million a year, was four times as large as the combined budgets of all the public libraries.’ 3 As this ‘mid-cult’ flourished, mass culture, passive and increasingly commercial, was seen as the enemy by those American authors who wrote increasingly of ‘alienation. In avant-garde fiction one can trace the gradual disappearance of the qualities of worthiness formerly attributed to the main characters. Even in the strongest (as in Hemingway) they go down to defeat. The majority are either victims or slobs.’ 4
    This change occurred, he said, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, provoked by political and economic events, such as the many assassinations and the oil crisis. Cunliffe quoted Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970, who had followed
Social Darwinism in American Thought,
discussed in chapter 3, with
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
(1963), and who in 1967, writing in Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol’s
The Public Interest,
had this to say: ‘Is it not quite possible that the responsible society will get little or no nourishment from modern literature, but will have to draw mainly on history, journalism, economics, sociological commentary? Art, as it more ruthlessly affirms the self, as it more candidly probes the human abyss, may in fact have less and less to tell us about the conditions of a responsible society.’ He referred specifically to such figures as Walter Lippmann, James Reston, J. K. Galbraith, Paul Samuelson, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel P. Moynihan. 5
    Cunliffe and Hofstadter had a point. The centre of gravity
had
shifted; nonfiction
was
buoyant. But America’s genius is to constantly reinvent herself,and it is no surprise to find yet another turn of the wheel in that country’s fiction. Maya Angelou was an early hint of things to come. Though her works are in fact autobiography, they read like fiction. In the last twenty-five years of the century, the role of the black author in America, the part once played by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Eldridge Cleaver, has been better filled by women than by men, by such figures as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. In books like
Sula
(1973),
Tar Baby
(1981), and
Beloved
(1987), Toni Morrison creates her own form, an African-American amalgam that makes use of folk tales, fables, oral history, myths both public and private, to produce highly original narratives whose central concern is to explore the awful darkness of the black (and female) experience in America, not to dwell on it but to ‘banish it with joy,’ much as Angelou does in her autobiographies. 6 Morrison’s characters journey into their past, from where, in a