Visions of the Mind in English Literature

Winter semester 2021/2022

Kinga Jęczmińska

Short test 2 – Anna Korkosz

1. Present references to afterlife (including underworlds or heaven) in J. M.

Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron. How are they related to the main protagonist’s views
about South Africa?

Age of Iron's main character, Curren, is interested in salvation and the notion of moving
on to the afterlife, but this is inspired by several religions and traditions. The protagonist
doesn't know which afterlife will turn out to be real and whether this place even exists. She
steers her decisions at the end of her life so that they affect the possibility of an afterlife. She
refuses, for example, to be admitted to hospital because she wants to cross the metaphorical
river Styx, across which one must pass to the pagan underworld. On the other hand, Curren
also speaks of Nirvana and limbo, referring to the hereafter of the myriad Eastern religions
and Christian purgatory. Curren refuses to stay in the hospital because, as she tells Vercueil,
she is afraid that in the hospital they will put her to sleep, and thus she will never cross the
Styx. Curren hopes that by enduring the pain, staying away from the hospital and dying at
home, she will gain some kind of absolution or salvation that she would not otherwise receive.
Curren often analyses her experiences through the lens of Greek and Roman mythology,
most often referring to the Aeneid. When Vercueil asks Curren in the final scenes of the novel
what Latin is, the character replies that it is the language of the dead. By the time she dies,
Curren seems to know that Latin and Greek and Roman myths are of little use to a generation
of rising South Africans. Curren writes to her daughter about not taking pain medication
because writing through the pain, allows her to better reflect the words she puts to paper. The
heroine even contemplates suicide, she wanted to set herself on fire and drive into the
parliament building. She tells Vercueil of her suicidal thoughts, which are also linked to her
desire to leave a legacy on the right side of history, to distance herself from her legacy of
profiting from apartheid in a final, timely demonstration. When she writes all this, however,
she feels she is contradicting herself. Through her writing, through pagan mythology, Eastern
religion, or Christian constructions of the afterlife, Curren reflects on mortality and
immortality.
Curren says she is not afraid of the nomads and Cape Town's growing homeless population -
rather, he fears the non-white children of apartheid; she then contrasts these 'gangs' with their
'white cousins', whom she says are also 'soulless', she says of their privilege.
Curren compares bone cancer to "insect eggs laid in the body of a host, now grown to
grubs and eating their host inexorably". Then, as Curren is driven by Guguletu and sees fires,
chaos and misery, she writes to her daughter: "Will we at least be allowed to experience our
Nirvana, we children of this past age? I doubt it. If there is any justice at all, we will find
ourselves at the first threshold of the underworld. White as artichokes in our bands, we will be
sent to join those infant souls whose eternal whimpering Aeneas mistook for crying" (92).
This is a 'bee grubbing' metaphor for the historical innocence of liberal whites who
ideologically oppose apartheid while benefiting from it. This is perfectly demonstrated when
Curren lies on the pavement, driven from her home by the police who murdered John, and is
poked with sticks by small boys. Curren wonders how heaven and the heavens have a place
for all the dead souls, and then cites Marcus Aurelius's hypothesis that souls connect with
each other. "Death by death" - Curren says. "Bee ash."
Curren concludes that this "historical innocence" is not absolution: it is still complicity,
but perhaps without intention.

4 points

2. Explain the distinction between easy problems of consciousness and the hard
problem of consciousness as defined by David Chalmers. How can Ian McEwan’s
novel Saturday be interpreted with reference to these problems?

The hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995) is the issue of explaining the
relationship between physical phenomena, such as brain processes, and experience.
Sometimes we use consciousness as the difference between waking and dreaming and wonder
how our brain can be awake, that our body stands up and reacts? Perhaps for this, we can have
an explanation in terms of the relevant neuronal mechanism in the head that produces this
behaviour. The question then arises: how is it that the perceptual system can discriminate
certain information and respond to it, and how it is that the brain can monitor itself? This is a
question of objective processing and explanation in terms of neurons in the brain. The
answers to these questions are accepted paradigms from science, come up with some
mechanism in terms of neurons that produce this behaviour, and then the problem is solved.
To sum up, in other words, easy problems concern specifying mechanisms that explain how
functions are performed.
The hard problem, on the other hand, is the problem of how it happens that all these
processes produce a subjective experience. E.g., the behaviours that the brain produces -
science can explain all these functions, but there may still remain the question, why is all this
related to a subjective statement?  Ultimately, this is a question of a different format, made for
science, but it is a question to which the scientific method does not know the answer at the
moment.
In Saturday the main protagonist, Henry, a neurosurgeon, a scientist who knows all
about the functioning of the brain, has learnt something new through literature - that
‘‘emotions generate our sense of being’’as much as our thoughts. In a sense, he knows the
answers to the easy problems of consciousness, but the hard problems are that he encounters.
When Baxter breaks into Perowne's house and threatens everyone, and then asks Daisy to
read her poetry, she recites Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" - and Baxter is taken by the
melancholic beauty of it all.  Henry thinks that Baxter understood and felt a spirit of literature
that Henry will never feel.  He was able to enter the consciousness of another person and
glimpse his life as a narrative. Nevertheless, he does not entirely understand what he knows -
it is more a feel that he knows. 

4,5 points

Total: 8,5 points