The zombie is in your head

Virginia Woolf lived disconcerted by what she called non-being (

).

"Any day has much more of not-being than of being," she reflected.

“Much of the day is not lived consciously.

One walks, eats, sees things, takes care of what has to be done, what if the vacuum cleaner has broken…”.

The co-inventor with James Joyce of the interior monologue, that great literary artifact to undress our minds, she was also a shrewd thinker about consciousness.

And she perceived that her narrative technique, with all its brilliance and penetrating power, did nothing more than scratch the epidermis of the formidable enigma of perception, experience, knowledge.

Of all that non-being that underlies us.

Consciousness and the novel have always gone hand in hand.

It didn't take long for Woolf and Joyce to invent, or discover, the inner monologue for storytellers to master the art of getting inside their characters' heads.

One of my favorite literary critics, David Lodge, highly values ​​another earlier discovery, indirect free style, which allowed the best of two worlds to be combined, or unified: the realism of third-person narration with the subjective immediacy of the first person.

(Example: "Paco entered the room. Hadn't he been there before? Yes, there was still that copper pipe, damn it").

Interestingly, indirect freestyle was discovered by another woman, Jane Austen, in the early 19th century, though it wasn't recognized by narrative theorists until well into the 20th.

Austen's first novels

are written in older, rather epistolary, models, but things suddenly change in 1811 with the publication of

, where Austen unfolds indirect freestyle at the top of her lungs.

Where did she get it?

"It is likely that she discovered it in novelists of a slightly earlier generation," Lodge opines, "in Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth, for she appears fleetingly in their works."

Every genius creates his precursors, said Jorge Luis Borges.

Sometimes the essential thing is not to be the first to see something, but to see it better.

Indeed, the novel and consciousness have gone hand in hand for at least two centuries.

The narrative flows in the image and likeness of our conscious experience, that which we call life.

But the point is that Woolf was right.

Most of the day consists not in being, but in non-being.

Most of our cognition occurs outside of our awareness, beginning with the simple act of perceiving reality.

It is so easy for us to open our eyes and see the world that we are unable to imagine the immense and complex neural machinery that this implies.

Perception is an active process, but inaccessible to consciousness, totally alien to what we call the

.

And what is valid for perception is valid for thought, for understanding, for the creation of knowledge.

Even great creative minds are unaware of the origin of their discoveries.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Woolf all pointed in the right direction.

And introspection - thinking about what we think - leads us down the wrong paths, both in the world and in the novel.

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