Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I begin by repeating my spoiler alert from last week. This concerns the final chapters of an E.L. Doctorow novel published in 2014, the last one he published (he died the following year). IF YOU WANT TO COME TO IT FRESH, YOU WILL NOT WANT THE REVELATIONS I AM ABOUT TO MAKE!  Anyone still here?  Okay, then.  Andrew's time as a teacher at a DC high school is brief. He soon, accidentally, and in a manner I won't relate, comes to the attention of President George W. Bush.  We learn only at this point that the two knew each other -- indeed, they had been roommates at Yale as undergrads.  They had both been involved in what seem like typical frat-boy hijinks, and in at least one such instance Andrew had taken the blame to help keep the Bush family crest clean re one such hijink, involving a Bunsen burner in a Yale lab. Someone in the Bush staff gets nervous that someone like that -- someone who could tell such tales to the press corps -- is in DC. So they press...

Spoiler alert! If you have never read this book and hope someday to do so, and hope to be surprised by plot turns, I have to warn you that this post will give one big one away.  Still here, anybody?  All right. In our earlier posts I made clear that in the opening scene, Andrew's beloved second wife Briony is dead.  Andrew thrusts his infant by Briony upon his first wife, Martha.  There is no explanation of the reason for her death, and while reading the middle of the book about their courtship and life together the easiest assumption is that she was going to die in childbirth. She didn't.  Briony gave birth and there was a cozy household of three for a time. But she died soon thereafter in the collapse of the Twin Towers in the financial district of New York City on September 11, 2001. That struck me as quite a twist in a story that until then had been vague about chronology. Hence the spoiler warning above. It was over the following two months that Andrew make...

  We return to Andrew and Briony.  There is a bit in chapter three in which Andrew is describing to his therapist a road trip: our two young lovers drive from southern California to New York City, taking turns at the wheel.   For the final stretch, beginning in Atlanta, the one not at the wheel was reading out loud. From Mark Twain, whom Andrew refers to, familiarly as MT.  The book of MT's that enlivened those hours and days of driving?  The therapist guesses Huckleberry Finn.  Andrew corrects him. The book was The Prince and the Pauper.  And he puts what I take it is a Doctorow-esque gloss on this book: The two boys exchange identities, the prince is the pauper and the pauper is the prince. Briony liked the romance of that, Clemens saying there's nothing to royalty but the assumption. But it's more than a democratic parable: it's a tale for brain scientists. Given the inspiration, anyone can step into an identity because the brain is deft, it c...

More on the novel, Andrew's Brain , by Doctorow.  We discover soon after the passage I quoted yesterday that the narrative voice saying "I can tell you about my friend, Andrew" is himself Andrew.  He has a proclivity for speaking of himself, and I submit a proclivity for seeing himself, in the third person. This discovery has weight in the unfolding of the not-especially-narrative tale. For one of the key themes here is the relation of mind to brain, of a self to its physical stratum.  And one might say that to the extent we reduce self to brain, we are trying to escape from the responsibilities of a first person point of view, into a world in which there is no subject, there is only the third person.  The first chapter is the longest in the book, going 50 pages. That is one-quarter the length of the book though there are eleven chapters. That is not remarkable -- the long first chapter feels like leisurely scene setting.  Anyway: as the second chapter opens we ...

  I've been reading a short novel by E.L. Doctorow, ANDREW'S BRAIN (2014). Let me quote for you the opening paragraph: "I can tell you about my friend Andrew, the cognitive scientist, but it isn't pretty. One evening he appeared with an infant in his arms at the door of his ex-wife, Martha. Because Briony, his lovely young wife after Martha, had died." That paragraph throws us in the middle of things. It works from and, I think, presumes our familiarity with, a number of conventions. Andrew's job sounds like an academic one, and the paragraph primes us for a campus novel, where love triangles, ambitions successful or foiled, human tragedies, all play out amidst faculty, students, administrators with well-defined social roles.     The speaker may be addressing us, the readers, here.  Or he might be addressing a therapist -- not an unusual expository device in contemporary fiction.  We also cued up here have a rather ordinary-seeming love triangle.  A mi...