Coming Up for Air might be considered as dramatizing a big change indeed, from poetic consciousness to sociological consciousness. There's something more going on there than a story of nostalgia leading to disillusion, which is, perhaps, how many readers would take it.
I'm going to paste below something I wrote for a different venue (The Eldritch Dark) in which I groped for words to express a hypothesis. This is a bit long, but nobody is obligated to read it.
It lends itself to discussion that Chrons policy forbids. It isn't intended to provoke such responses. In good faith, I do think it could be a useful tool for discussing various works of fiction, Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust being another, and an outstanding, example.
Poetic Consciousness vs. Sociological Consciousness
“Consciousness” is not the same thing as “ideas.” Consciousness is the awareness that we experience.* “Ideas” are our notions about things of which we are aware. To be sure, absorbing from others, forming and holding ideas about things may affect our consciousness; if we habitually occupy our minds with certain ideas, we become more attuned to corresponding things.
For example, a young person might grow up with a spontaneous enjoyment of the beauty of certain plants. Then he goes to college and learns that these plants are not native to a region but were introduced by settlers who dispossessed earlier inhabitants. He might come to perceive the plants with distaste, losing his sense of their genuine beauty and forgetting that he used to enjoy them and also forgetting what changed his view of them (their association with unsavory history).
We are in a “participatory” relationship to that of which we are conscious, such as nature. We produce ideas when we think about nature, etc.
POETIC CONSCIOUSNESS has been the natural state of human beings throughout history, till very recently, when sociological consciousness developed. However hard life was for most people, they lived their lives rather than performing them.
While poetic consciousness pervades life, people typically tell stories about their own lives and other peoples’ lives – mostly people who are known to them, such as family members, neighbors, etc. People expect life to make some kind of sense, though it may be funny or painful, and even though people might feel that life is unfair. Whether one is happy or dissatisfied, one feels that much of life is out of one’s hands and in the hands of fate, the gods, God, the progressive onward push of nature, or the like -- but life is interesting and one has some freedom of action, and with it responsibility. Poetic consciousness typically deals with shame and honor, or iniquity and righteousness.
The discipline of sociology is not ruled out by poetic consciousness, but needs to be kept in its place.
SOCIOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS (which might not be a good choice of term) is the characteristic type of awareness learned by people living in modern or so-called postmodern society especially if they go to college, but consumption of media will probably often suffice. Anyone reading this little essay, including me the author, will tend to perceive things and to think about them in terms of numbers and abstractions. The typical procedure of dealing with difficulties of life is to look for social “root causes.” The typical mental procedure is reductive, to say something is really “nothing but” something else.
In sociological consciousness, one is to discover, or fashion, who one is according to some category or other proposed by current thought. A preoccupation with numbers shows itself again and again, even when used in so casual a statement when someone says “I’m 90% sure that….”
Under sociological consciousness, people often interpret life, including their own lives, in terms of popular sociology, psychology, etc. Thinking thus about their lives, they “recognize” the profiles that fit them, and then perform their lives rather than living them.
Oddly, though sociological consciousness refers, often inappropriately, to numbers, it is often in error about the numerical facts. Thus governments and journalism manufacture endless statistics, statements about trillions of dollars to be spent, and so on, and yet these numbers are often misunderstood or are phantasmal. But sociological consciousness needs a pop numericism.
To help you keep poetic consciousness and sociological consciousness distinct, you could use this mnemonic: iniquity vs. inequity. The former term suggests spiritual states, powers or contexts that transcend the social, etc. The latter term implies number is essential for social reformation, etc.
Poetic consciousness typically recognizes the moral dimension of your life and my life, in which I am called to use my freedom rightly or lest I commit morally faulty behavior, which, to take an intense word, could be called iniquity. It suggests also that deliverance from iniquity may be possible.
Sociological consciousness is hardly concerned with, or aware of, objective right and wrong. It typically holds “morality” to be a nothing but “code” by which a social group exerts control over another group, i.e. maintains inequity.
But where poetic consciousness usually allows forgiveness or “payment” for wrongdoing, sociological consciousness often simply relegates offenders to a category of the condemned.
Sociological consciousness tends to be anxious and irritable and susceptible to manipulation, which may indeed be felt by persons as something that they want. Where sociological consciousness prevails, people will tend not so much to exercise the freedom that they feel they have but may fret about restrictions due to “society” or some hated group that is to blame. It’s often not that they personally feel themselves to be un-free, but that, as they think, “people” or some category of people need greater freedom.
Sociological consciousness uses works of imagination -- poetry, art, music, etc. – to reinforce its ideas. For it, Heart of Darkness is not so much about the mystery of evil in the human heart as about colonialism, the ideology of regarding indigenous people as “savages” and “Other,” etc.
Sociological consciousness tends to a kind of totalitarianism, that is, the politicization of more or more of life till it is all absorbed thereby.
A personal note: I’m obvious more sympathetic to “poetic consciousness” than “sociological consciousness,” but the former is not “salvation.”
Again, this outline of poetic consciousness vs. sociological consciousness would readily lend itself to forbidden discussion of current events. But I hope it may be used rather to discuss works such as Coming Up for Air.
Bowling, as a child and youth, experienced poetic consciousness as, I suppose, even modern children will spontaneously tend to do if the environment permits it. Reading the novel will show that the adult Bowling's feeling is not simple unreal nostalgia for his youth; he remembers that there were nasty things then, e.g. torturing small animals. He does not, then, imply that children are naturally innocent and good and that they simply catch the contagion of badness from "nurture." This is an important point! But he does come to sense that his life, and his wife's, etc. have tended to become consumed by a type of consciousness that is largely unreal -- his wife's lectures, the sociological speaker with the light reflecting off the lenses of his glasses -- and that it is leading to worsening conflict, to totalitarianism, etc.
In Waugh's A Handful of Dust, Tony Last is living in the countryside "ruins" of a decaying culture that shows vestiges of poetic consciousness (the bedrooms named for Arthurian characters, the hollow Anglicanism of church, etc.). This culture is being displaced by a "sociological," up-to-date way of experiencing things, of occupying one's mind, etc. suggested by his unfaithful wife's London classes in economics. Brenda's adoption of sociological consciousness enables her pursuit of a young lover for a relationship without love and her lack of deep grief when her boy is killed. Tony ends up in the Brazilian jungle, the captive of a madman who insists on the reading of Dickens novels.
And so on. I think the poetic consciousness-sociological consciousness is capable of a lot of application. For one more example, take Lovecraft. The intellect displayed in his letters is largely "sociological," categorizing people by ethnicity, conceiving the universe as meaningless, etc., but the "other side of his brain" is responsive to sunsets and so on. Anyway, I hope the poetic consciousness vs. sociological consciousness thing will be helpful for some discussion of Orwell and others.
One might apply this tool to some of the essays, certainly.
*“Ideas” as I am using the word here doesn’t refer to Plato’s concept of permanent higher realities that a human being might try to contemplate, but that exist on their own; Plato’s ideas belong to the realm of Being, but may be manifest in some degree in our experiential world of Becoming.
www.orwellfoundation.com
