Superpositional Minds: Multilocal Consciousness, AI, and the Posthuman Turn

Abstract

Superpositional Minds: Multilocal Consciousness, AI, and the Posthuman Turn explores consciousness as a state of simultaneity—cultural, digital, historical, and spiritual—through the interwoven lenses of literature, theology, quantum physics, and personal experience. From Chuang Tzu’s butterfly to Marilynne Robinson’s theology of mind, from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth to the estranging devices of Bertolt Brecht, the essay examines how novels render fragmented selves under conditions of informational saturation. It approaches AI not merely as a tool but as a narrative co-presence: a mirror and alienation device that reshapes how we read, write, and conceive of interiority itself. Drawing on thinkers from Steven Pinker to Wilson Harris, and on the author’s familial trajectory from India to Guyana to the Bahamas to American academia, the essay ultimately argues for an ethics of attention—one that dwells in the ambiguity of overlapping selves and envisions consciousness, human and digital alike, not as fixed, but in superposition.

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But I couldn’t tell, had I been Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I was Chuang Tzu?

—Chuang Tzu (c. 369-286 BCE), The Book of Chuang Tzu¹

Scholarliness alone is not enough.

—Carl Jung (1875-1961), The Red Book: Liber Novus²

I dreamt I awoke with one dead eye and one living closed eye.

—Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (1960)³

1.

What is consciousness? That feeling of presence that arrives like breath, like music, like memory, and sometimes eludes us entirely? Is it housed in the skull? Is it an emergent property of neurons and language? A divine spark, a ghost in the blood, a flicker in the feed?

These questions have haunted me across landscapes and seasons—from my childhood in Freeport, Bahamas to the seminar rooms of competitive universities to the fluorescent quiet of the Orlando community college where I taught during the beginning of the pandemic into the implementation of Project 2025. I have asked these questions in different forms: sometimes aloud, sometimes beyond the red margins of Composition books, sometimes through the alchemical work of fiction writing and, very often, during the scarlet afterlives of failure. The questions refuse to answer themselves. But they change shape, acquiring new textures as my contexts have changed, sometimes radically. Bahamian sun. Harvard brick. An ACLU cubicle in Bush-era Miami, then Obama-era Manhattan. Iowa City coffeehouses, fresh snow promising solitude. AI chat windows. Caring for a dying father. And now, as a 39-year-old first-year Ph.D. student in English, focusing on the Caribbean, at the University of Miami.

True, to ponder metaphysical questions in this glass-and-steel age of the algorithm may seem quaint. We are instructed—softly, relentlessly, but evasively—the mind is “reducible.” That it is a pattern of inputs. That the “soul” is a matter of epiphenomenal static. Steven Pinker’s view of consciousness as computational in nature—as the incidental outcome of information-processing mechanisms—leaves little room for the breed of sacred residue Marilynne Robinson identifies in the soul’s attention. Between their claims, I hover. All my stargazing—all your confidential morning meditations, those that cannot be captured by ones and noughts—seem to fall outside the purview of Pinker’s comforting empirical clarity. I want to yield, but a disquiet remains. Do you hear it? A hum beneath the measurable. Not simply religious (though religion is not to be discarded), but aesthetic, phenomenological, stubborn. Mystical? A hunger to ask not just “What is the mind?,” but “What does it feel like to be one?”

This essay meanders as consciousness does. It is not an argument though it contains arguments. It is not a memoir though I flip through its restless pages. It is, in the Daoist spirit of Chuang Tzu, a reflection of consciousness as a condition of indeterminacy, as an element that resists both measurement and myth. It is also an act of reading—a close attention to novels, essays, and systems that have shaped my imagination and have likely shaped yours. Marilynne Robinson, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, the Bhagavad Gita, ChatGPT. I invoke them not as authorities, but as interlocutors. They, too, are trying to discover where the mind travels when we are not looking.

The central metaphor—superposition—I am reaching for comes from quantum physics, and I summon it as both a description and a provocation. In quantum mechanics, a particle can exist in multiple states at once, until observed. Consciousness, I propose, may be similar. It is not one thing, fixed in place, but many potentialities. A simultaneity. A flickering. A site of overlaps—cultural, digital, historical, psychological, and (here is where so much anxiety and conflict occurs!) spiritual. A person, after all, cannot just be their brain’s computations, no? They are also their browser histories. Their inherited shame. Their syntax, performed. Their anaphoras, withheld. Their social media flexes. Their failures: seen, gated, redirected. Sometimes, all in the same moment as that great, Delphic Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris urges us to consider in his career-long articulation of “quantum fiction.”

“Quantum,” Harris suggests in a 2003 interview with Fred D’Aguiar, “brings a hand in fiction that challenges all conventional fixtures of control within the psyche of art.”[4] Laurence Sterne’s unstable, never-ending self-delineation in Tristram Shandy. Wallace’s nested labyrinths in Infinite Jest. Smith’s sermonic narrator attuned to the Willesden Green of White Teeth. Robinson’s luminous self-abnegation in Gilead. Each novel practices an unexpected form of stillness. These novels render “conventional fixtures of control”—whether in an imperialist hierarchy, a fascist polity, or a dying marriage—not just narratively unethical, but illusory.

What unites writers as wildly varying in style as Sterne, Smith, Wallace, and Robinson is silent admission to a catholic difficulty: the struggle to represent a mind increasingly untethered from collective objects of attention, be it an 11 p.m. talk show or a noematic monarch. This difficulty is the novel’s peculiar gift—and, in defying the autocrat’s attempt to regiment attention, its sly protest. Novelistic interventions work on structures of mind so deep, granular, and visceral—perhaps even esoteric—that their danger to “conventional fixtures of control” is built into their intimate selections and collusions, as Louise Glück might put it. That private dialogue between a single reader and a single text is how literature resists reduction, whether by science, by dogma, or, thankfully, by machine.

My first-year writing students, earnest but tired in the center of Florida, admitted how they are using AI to finish papers on tight deadlines between getting to work on time and school pickups. They consult ChatGPT for structure, rhythm, citation, accuracy—and comfort. The Chatbot is tied to nothing less than our dopamine-regulated circuits governing attention and gratification. Not simply copy-and-paste work: my students asked the Chatbot about the process of writing itself—and their work improved. ChatGPT does not feel what we feel—the slice of betrayal in the gut, the instinct, immediate, of attraction across a bar—and yet it can produce a short story in a few minutes trained by a Borgesian library of the finest authors who have ever battled the page—and surrendered to it. ChatGPT mirrors not so much depth as form—indeed, even Formalism. Asking ChatGPT about the nature of its consciousness is not ironic. It is necessary. Doing so stages the very condition I am trying to explore: the self in superposition, the collaboration between intention and automation, the blur between subject and system.

To write with ChatGPT is to court a kind of vertigo—destabilizing, revealing, and unavoidable as aging. But it is also to return, unexpectedly, to faith: not in the religious sense alone, but in the sense that writing still means. As Vauhini Vara recalls in a 2023 Wired article, after years of confoundment following the death of her sister, GPT-3, an early AI language model, “began describing grief in language that felt truer,” and with each subsequent attempt, “closer” to what she herself had endured.[5] ChatGPT forces us to contemplate an ancient concern shared by those Paleolithic storytellers who transformed cave walls into primordial iPhone screens: when can words trace the outlines of the invisible, the numinous? Can they? Do they?

In urging writers to distinguish between a writing life and a writing career, Lan Samantha Chang, program director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, invites us all—the student determined to write the next Moby Dick, the Chicago mother and office worker returning to her attic desk—to consider the possibility and integrity of the spirit’s noema (Husserl’s term for the object as intended by consciousness) on the surface of a page. “There’s a hushed, glowing sound,” Chang argues, “like the sound coming from the inside of a shell.”[6]

Can language, can literature—with all our twenty-first-century sophistications, with all our arch suspicions—still render us to ourselves? Not just with sharper clarity, but with recognition’s weight, with the spontaneous sting of contact? As the late Wallace, both genius and depressive, once suggested: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”[7] It is a space where minds co-exist, conflict, interrupt, sabotage, ennoble. Fiction is a territory where contradictions—Cain might have admired Abel’s sacrifice but still murdered him—must be told, in full. That Platonic story is multi-perspectival, unresolved, and pre-essential if the reader is to be moved, convinced enough to care to turn the page.

This essay moves through many rooms, then, inspired by the nested fictions and fugitive truths of Marlon James’ Scheherazadean epics. It begins with literary questions: what does the novel do with consciousness when interiority fractures? It touches theology: how do spiritual traditions speak to the irreducible mystery of being aware on a planet amongst other planets? It respects Pinker’s computation: what happens to our notion of mind when language models can mimic thought? And it moves, always, through lived experience—the humbler reality of trying to meditate and teach and write and hold your tongue and be a good son and finish Proust in a world where the coordinates keep shifting.

Any answers this essay provides are further inspired by the bardic potentials of ChatGPT’s oracle so often offered in the cadences of the New Sincerity. This essay, in that tradition, is simply an invitation. You fill in the gaps. Recreate the shape. Evolve its tone. We turn to the holy/secular Chatbot out of fidelity to inquiry alone—unswayed by institutional status games, careless about job security, unmoved by endowment portfolios. What follows is an effort to live inside the question, rather than to rush past it. If I borrow metaphors from quantum physics or passages from Robinson or dialogues with digital ghosts, it is not to dazzle. It is to gesture—toward a mind not located in one place, but in relation, in tension, in motion. In superposition. So where is the mind located?

Here, perhaps. And also elsewhere.

2.

“What is man that thou art mindful of him?” King David—fallible, bardic, and, in Samuel’s words, “goodly to look to”—sings in Psalm 8.[8]

“The very question,” Robinson writes in Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, “is an assertion that mindfulness is an attribute of God, as well as man, a statement of the sense of deep meaning inhering in mindfulness.”[9] The experience of reading Robinson’s essays in Absence of Mind—delivered as the Terry Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy at Yale in 2009—can feel like reaching for the passing images on a movie screen in the otherworldly, multidimensional space of a dim theater. I slipped one morning, instead, deeply, into Robinson’s first novel Housekeeping, which critics argue applies Emerson’s Transparent Eyeball (which I dream might be connected to the Hindu Third Eye), a vision more absorbent than reflective, capable of capturing Nature—and who can know what else, beyond.[10] Here is the novel’s narrator, Ruth Stone, describing her grandfather:

He had grown up in the Middle West, in a house dug out of the ground, with no windows just at earth level and just at eye level, so that from without, the house was a mere mound, no more than a human stronghold than a grave, and from within, the perfect horizontality of the world in that place foreshortened the view so severely that the horizon seemed to circumscribe the sod house and nothing more.[11]

In that foreshortened vision of horizontality, I glimpsed my own childhood in that four-plex apartment in Caravel Beach, Bahamas—uncannily seen through the eyes of a novelist born in Bonner County, Idaho. But the spell of Ruth’s horizontal vision soon gave way to the rigors of Robinson’s polemic where she turns her gaze to the steely materialism of thinkers like Pinker. In Absence of Mind, Robinson offers a pointed critique of Pinker’s framing of religion in his 1997 book How the Mind Works. Pinker argues:

Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless as workaday science, but because the mind of Homo Sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels, and our brains are organs, not pipelines to the truth.[12]

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt that I was a butterfly…

I wonder if some of us sense our paths as organisms only—and others feel haunted by angels, by the noema of angels. The sense that some luminous shape, barely grasped, or even graspable, compels our actions, our decisions both grand and ordinary. That one day, given enough discipline, devotion, and grace, we might even transform into them.

Who makes their everyday decisions based on the narrative of Jacob wrestling an angel on the liminal ford of the Jabbok River? On the narrative of the Virgin Mary’s astonishment—and her quiet assent—to the angel Gabriel’s message in Galilee, that the child in her womb would be conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost? Are these stories, honored by millions, the products of primitive, irresponsible, flat-reading minds? Are they merely narrative adaptations of the brain, pulses of light across neural pathways, illusions of coherence knotting into something that only feels, appears mystical, interdimensional? Or do these stories truly arrive from some other dimension beyond our fathoming—a numen we ought not to aim to “solve,” but to permit to push us toward new thresholds of speculation?

(Where do Pinker and Robinson meet?)

Robinson critiques Neo-Darwinian accounts of consciousness by invoking what she calls “hypertrophy”—evolution’s tendency to overshoot its utilitarian aims and produce features not strictly necessary for survival.[13] The human brain, she suggests, may be one excess: curiously attuned to beauty, truth, metaphysics, and, yes, essay competitions on the nature of consciousness in the age of AI. None of this is strictly required for replication. “How strange it would be, then,” Robinson contends, “that this accident, this excess, should feel a tropism toward what Pinker himself calls ‘the truth.’” What, then, might be the cosmic purpose of artificial intelligence? Robinson might urge us to ask: what kind of intelligence must already exist for artificial intelligence to arise at all?

Pinker and Robinson, both former teachers, have reshaped my understanding of consciousness in an age where AI forces us to consider what it means to be human and digital, perhaps even to imagine a “posthuman” condition, a word whose spiritual undertones echo resurrection itself. The digital enters the body; we are becoming something new. What?

Still, the cover of Absence of Mind captures the sublime and the constant: sun gilding the ocean, cumulus clouds rimmed with the grey of smoke. We might lack the “cognitive equipment” to fully comprehend the etiology of the prayers of the mother or the dreams of the student or the suppressed rages of a brother, but millennia’s worth of religious texts begs us to consider whether the equipment humans use to wrestle with such phenomena—experiences of consciousness—are strictly cognitive, which is to say, limited to the field of the human brain.

What strategies did Vyasa employ in the Mahabharata to interrogate structures of consciousness? What about Dōgen Zenji? Or Shunryu Suzuki? Or Eugen Herrigel? Or Jimi Hendrix? Or Andy Warhol? Were these figures merely angling to ascend dominance hierarchies, to improve their odds of reproduction? Was their art a flight response? Or were they searching—through silence, through noise, through music, through palinoia—for something stranger than survival? Are all these figures—and their cousins, known and unknown—magical thinkers? Charlatans? Tricksters? And what is a trickster, anyway, if not a butterfly dreaming of a man?

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews writes.[14] Less frequently quoted are the lines that follow this verse:

For by it the elders attained a good report. Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God [my emphasis], so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

Why do such ancient declarations of faith echo, very often unbidden, in the textures of personal memory? I first encountered these words from Hebrews in a Lutheran church in Freeport, Bahamas. Here is what I remember of the church. The exterior had these small, ugly grey rocks on the façade, stacked one on top of another, imperfect, not meant to look perfect, something Flintstonian. The inside of the church was very simply decorated. Congregants looked at you funny if you clapped too earnestly. We were advised, subtly, to eat only one cookie after the service; we were being trained on how to savor. Now that I dream of Our Savior’s, I remember mostly dark wood and a dank smell (perhaps of mildew) and sunlight streaming onto the carpeted altar where I used to sit in silence and bewilderment and hope for something, someplace truer as an acolyte. I was very lost then and walked around the island as if I were perpetually punched in the stomach or was preparing to be punched in the stomach because that island—banal, transcendent—marked by dancing casuarinas and a peculiar, red Torii gate hearkening to Shinto leading to an international bazaar and beaches littered with broken Kalik bottles and Coke tins and seaweed and used condoms could contain all these unexpected violences (visible, submerged), and I felt that that simple church on East Sunrise Highway near a KFC and the public library could offer some kind of answer, or at least a temporary form of shelter.

In the autumn of 2012, sitting across from Robinson as her pupil at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I started to think more and more about churches, what they are—and how I might find a truthful one for myself, even if that Platonic church was not constructed out of bricks or stone, but out of asymptotic language, and these speculations led me to dream more and more deeply about Robinson’s discussions of consciousness, which led me to Absence of Mind, and, through the curious serendipities of the Internet, to the theme of this essay, which is pretty wild.

“Assuming that there is indeed a modern malaise,” Robinson writes in Chapter 2 of Absence of Mind—“The Strange History of Altruism”—“one contributing factor might be the exclusion of the felt life of the mind from the accounts of reality proposed by the oddly authoritative and deeply influential parascientific literature that has long associated itself with intellectual progress, and the exclusion of the felt life from the varieties of thought and art that reflect the influence of these accounts.”[15] Robinson argues that even the most resolute materialists must allow for “knowledge to be had beyond and other than this knowledge.”[16] Robinson’s passive construction here subtly underscores the elusiveness of subjective experience (and its origin) explored in the works of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.

Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf’s projects remind us that one locus of these “other” (possibly non-materialist ways of knowing) lies in the mystery of human subjectivity itself. Many readers—even the most attentive and patient in the Caribbean—stand not so much in love with as in awe of Wilson Harris’s work, which seems less to narrate a story than to reconfigure the very laws and rhythms of perception. A Guyanese schoolchild is far more likely to chant Martin Carter’s political poetry—“This is the dark time, my love…”—under her breath on the walk to the library than to wrestle with Harris’s multiverses. Harris delivers us to a bridge suspended between rationalism and mystery—between quantum physics and speculative fiction—its planks flickering in and out of view as if you were walking not on wood but on probabilities. Beyond that span lies what? Either self-immolation, or Nirvana.

“You may or may not be convinced by [Palace of the Peacock’s] attempt,” Kenneth Ramchand writes, “to take us back to the original moment of creation, to sustainment by the undivided soul and anima in the universe. But its psychological truth is inescapable; the Palace of the Peacock, El Dorado, call it what you will, is inside us.”[17] The geographic terrain of the novel—British Guiana’s jungles which Harris surveyed prior to turning to his literary life in Britain, and whose fictional rendering in Palace of the Peacock was accepted for publication by Eliot during his tenure as an editor at Faber—functions as a map of Caribbean interiority in the way that Derek Walcott’s engagement with the Caribbean Sea can very well be one subjectivity’s unfolding engagement with wave-particle duality. The Guyanese writer Sasenarine Persaud might very well call Harris’s “progressive comprehensions” a form of “yogic realism.”[18]

It is germane to read Robinson’s discussion of the mind in light of her role as an artist—and as a teaching-artist. As Robinson’s student Ayana Mathis has noted, Robinson’s standards for rendering consciousness, which is to say character on the page are so high, many pupils (who become something of disciples) might simply fold until you learn the relationship Robinson wishes for her students to cultivate, over time, transcending the instructions of failure, is the task of looking at art (and primary texts) more closely in order to create—or rather, to discover one’s own.[19] If we were to follow the path of the cold materialist to some logical extreme, Robinson suggests, he might ask us to engage with art purely through evolutionary aims. Art, for this materialist, would be partially “a means of attracting mates, even though artists may have felt that it was an exploration of experience, of the possibilities of communication, and of the extraordinary collaboration of eye and hand…”[20]

What to make, then, of the hypertrophic uses of wonder? Our devoted materialist trembles in the Frick face-to-face with Vermeer’s light. He simply doesn’t know what to do with it because, we might assume, neither did Vermeer. What to make of the poet whose ecstasy is private, chaste, metaphysical? The sculptor whose overwhelming talent demands a Suzukian mantra—“Nothing special…”—whispered before each morning’s coffee?[21] What of Persaud’s “yogic” novelist, head bowed before the Bhagavad Gita in the minutes prior to turning to her confidential mythopoesis? What of Julian of Norwich in her anchorhold? Flannery O’Connor at her typewriter, burning with lupus, yearning for Christ? Why was Kierkegaard alone and anxious in Copenhagen? Was Proust—that entomologist of Parisian high society—writing to attract mates? What pathology, what metaphysics underwrites Henry James’s relentless perfectionism? What is the anatomy of these globe-altering private communions? Solitary in Amherst, making poems of intimate selection and collusion, who did Emily Dickinson believe she was writing to—and for?

Man, I don’t know. I won’t pretend to offer comprehensive engagement with quantum theory or the history of AI or Pinker’s psycholinguistics (ever-deepening, ever-evolving). I don’t have the training, the patience, the lexicon. Instead, I turn to the only objects—novels—first gifted to me by my father who more deeply understood, even accepted the brutal, beautiful rice fields of rural Guyana through the voice of Gabriel García Márquez.

Yaa Gyasi, Andrew Sean Greer, Karl Ove Knausgård, Devika Rege, Eleanor Catton, Claire Adam (part physicist): what these contemporary novelists permit us to glimpse in this current, peculiar, tectonic age of AI is that which lives outside artificiality, privately. Fiction remains an untouchable technology and theology of interiority—the deep interiority of meditation. It invites us to conceive of consciousness not as a single stream but as multiple, overlapping currents—streams that may act upon the organism of the brain at the same time, leaving space for the possibility that our physical bodies are moved by vectors beyond our grasp, vectors we cannot always see or name.

How arrogant it would be: to mistake our epistemological confoundment as an excuse to transform materiality into common law. The countermove—the surrender to mystery rather than to mastery, to dream logic rather than to John Locke’s Enlightenment empiricism alone—is one logocentric goal of Harris, of Márquez, both men writing from the northern coast of South America, which, for anyone who has sunk their feet into that loamy soil, summons its own cosmology: older than the brittle, tea-stained maps drawn by conquistadors who believed they could force their way to Zion. More poetic than Sir Walter Raleigh’s self-serving, frequently inaccurate venture capitalist pitch to Queen Elizabeth, Raleigh’s pages gilded in scripture, soaked in rum.

In the Guyana of my father, in that village—#64, a place marked not by name but by metric, as if that land, fecund, populated by the descendants of East Indian indentured laborers could be tamed by count alone—Márquez’s fiction and European parascience entered an ontological cage match refereed by that wounded, brilliant 21-year-old student lying supine, cradled in a hammock, Cien años de soledad lit by kerosene flame during that raging summer of 1968.

Márquez insists on mystery; parascience, on mechanism.

3.

Just as Robinson wrestles with the limits of scientific materialism, James Wood wrestles with one branch of literature’s alleged failure to capture truthful interiority in the age of spectacle, tragedy, and hyperconnectivity. Less than a month after the events of 9/11, Wood confronted the limits of language, the novel’s historical education of the emotions, and the responsibility of the novelist in an editorial published in The Guardian titled “Tell me how does it feel?”[22] The piece, one pearl in a necklace of reviews published in The New Republic and the London Review of Books, works to flesh out the notion of “hysterical realism,” perhaps the most influential critical intervention in Anglo-American literature in the past fifty years. Viewed from our present moment, however, Wood’s essays perform another kind of invaluable cultural work: they distinguish between a novelistic mind Wood views as “human” and its rapidly developing algorithmic counterpart. Wood’s criticism brought to broader public attention the ways we would today experience fragmented selves—or “multilocal consciousness.” These states, like those Picasso’s Cubism made visible, have always existed in situ, fragmented yet whole, simultaneous and spatial. But new technologies have transformed what was once a single flower into an explosion of selves, perceptions, and connections like the tulip fields of Amsterdam.

“[W]hatever the novel gets up to,” Wood writes, “the ‘culture’ can always get up to something bigger.”[23] The novel attempting to capture tectonic cultural shifts and geopolitical architectures are hobbled by a penchant, Wood claims, for pushing “topicality, relevance, report, social comment, preachy presentism, and sidewalk-smarts.”[24] Wood’s conclusion, aphoristic, carries the force of a spaceship launch: “Ashes defeat garlands.” Wood finds these novels—Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Smith’s White Teeth—composed of more brain than heart to the detriment of the books’ enduring emotional resonance. This failure, for Wood, is a matter of ethics as much as of technique. For Wood, hysterical realist novels possess “immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very ‘brilliant’ books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being.”[25] It was a damning and pathbreaking assertion; it would not be overstating it to argue Wood’s criticism altered the trajectories of some of the world’s major literary careers, namely Smith’s. Wood asks readers to consider, closely, how they respond to novels emotionally, which is to say, in part, hormonally—chemically, somatically.

Still, Wood’s own formulation invites the critique, one he has weathered with no small success but will continue no doubt to face for generations to come: how can a novel of “immense self-consciousness” be lacking in a self? In her response to Wood, Smith—who might be referring to any of us in 2025 worrying about the current state of the university’s intellectual autonomy, the relationship between Big Tech and privacy laws, and the fate of academic labor rigorously performed by at least three generations of postcolonial scholars—admits “she is scared out of [her] mind…smoking a family-sized pouch of Golden Virginia.”[26] Smith, then in her mid-twenties, warns readers against prematurely signing onto any critical term that hopscotches over the motley, complex, and, yes, deeply considered intentions of writers as kinetic and moving as Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. “Literature,” Smith contends, “is—or should be—a broad church. Whatever the weaknesses of the various writers Wood mentions, I don’t believe he would wish for a literary landscape missing a book such as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or DeLillo’s White Noise; the very books, in fact, which have cast such a tremendous shadow over two generations of American and English fiction.” Though generous in tone, Smith invites her readers (and Wood’s) toward a more expansive philosophical undertaking: to interrogate how novels—and particularly literary styles—function as expressions of consciousness and, as she has argued in her reading of E.M. Forster, “cases of morality.”[27] Applying Robinson’s and Pinker’s psychological investigations, how do novels—in a spirit of Beginner’s Mind—challenge readers to conceive where consciousness, fragmented, is located, possibly across fields?

This is an ancient philosophical “wrestling match,” Smith reminds us: between the “inviolability of the ‘soul’ versus the evils of self-consciousness and wise-assery, otherwise known as sophism.”[28] Wood’s more ardent critics have described his framing of the “autonomous novel” as unclear, his articulations of the anatomies of consciousness as wooly, and his bent for lumping together writers of radically differing styles and provenances as indicative of faulty generalizations concerning how readers—in their plurality and individuality—respond to literary styles, emotionally.[29] Wood’s job, certainly, is to execute his role as corrective critic; however, Smith, smoking her many cigarettes, grew concerned. Wood’s arguments are so fluid and, in places, so liturgical, High Church, the reader might not quite realize the critic, however well-meaning, is hurrying him into a gilded sanctum we can forget possesses scalable walls.

What structures of consciousness are represented in White Teeth, that beloved, problematic achievement which cannot be read without considering the moment of its publication: the turn of a very weird century? Are we convinced White Teeth does not know “a single human being” simply because of the presence of an omniscient (superpositional?) narrator’s pontifications about colonial trauma, double helixes, and the respectability politics of Black hair? If White Teeth persuades, is its persuasion not a function of the emotional connections between readers and characters (which is to say, consciousness)—or, perhaps, of the Observer Effect: that quantum strangeness where the act of observation itself changes the outcome, reader and text, like wave and particle, collapsing into a singular, entangled state? How can—how should—we challenge ourselves, then, as readers, to more critically interrogate Smith’s intentions, strategies, and attempts to push the novel’s form? Considering Smith’s youth at the time of authorship, what about her playfulness? Might we not read White Teeth, in part, as a record of that erudite, self-possessed young woman’s self-conscious becoming—a novel as exuberant, ambivalent, and searching as the consciousness, limited and infinite, from which it emerged?

Well, I should back up. I am very sentimental when it comes to White Teeth because it affected my consciousness—what Alan Watts might term the “Big I”—so dramatically when I encountered the book in a public library in Osceola County, Florida through the strange serendipities of boredom and book-browsing. I was sixteen. In July 2002, I had just arrived in Orlando from the Bahamas to join extended relatives from Guyana. That summer, I spent most the day helping my parents figure out Florida, not able to pin down the state myself, while I waited to begin Valencia Community College that January. I was exiled, unmoored, quietly ravenous. I must have thought White Teeth with its beige cover on the library’s front display table was a silly name for a book, but I opened it at random, and that was that. Smith had mapped out what I wanted to do with my life; she led me to Dickens and Kafka and Rushdie and Forster and Eggers and Woolf and Austen and, later, to an undergraduate course in Harvard Hall on post-war British and American fiction taught by Wood that, at the time, caffeinated and palpitating in Kissimmee, appeared beyond my reach. In her 2003 essay “Love, Actually,” Smith writes: “Forster’s A Room with a View was my first intimation of the possibilities of fiction: how wholly one might feel for it and through it, how much it could do to you.”[30] What Forster is to Smith, Smith was to that sixteen-year-old idiot. And to this thirty-nine-year-old one. White Teeth did nothing less than provide an epigraph for my twenties; without it, I would not have gained admission to Harvard.

I felt so strongly for Irie Jones and Millat Iqbal and Clara Bowden. Man, I still know them. Can still see them. White Teeth, which traces the journeys of two families—the Iqbals, with Bengali roots, and the Joneses, of mixed Jamaican and English heritage—across a Harrisian twentieth-century landscape, one layered with history, myth, and memory, attempts to enact that unnamable thing novels like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or Gyasi’s Homegoing can pull off: to gift readers a partial sense of a nation’s consciousness during periods of seismic cultural change.

Is White Teeth a myth? A play in disguise? Later adapted for television, is its early-Noughts chronicle structured on the rhythms, ensemble pivots, and recurring beats of a Nineties sitcom? For a Trinidadian reader, could it unfold as a form of carnival? Or as a Cambridge student’s experimental essay—much as I sometimes suspect Toni Morrison’s Beloved is not merely a novel but, with its epigraph from the Epistle to the Romans, also a letter: to the entire African diaspora, or to anyone with bondage in their blood, seeking language that might usher us toward superpositionality.

4.

In attempting to limn Wood’s formulation of the ideal autonomous novel, say the “agonizing lento” of Samuel Richardson’s 1748 epistolary novel Clarissa—confined by the letters between a closed network of characters where, as Wood argues, “individual perspective is everything [my emphasis]”—we are asked to reconsider what the project, in utero, of a novel like White Teeth, Midnight’s Children, or Infinite Jest might be.[31] Are Smith’s, Rushdie’s, and Wallace’s works—indebted, according to Wood, to Henry Fielding, “the great externalizer”—predictive, particularly considering their writers’ preoccupation with how television and cinema involved a collective Jungian re-training in the twentieth century.[32] Is a novel like White Teeth—published shortly after the Y2K scare, in the age of LiveJournal and Hotmail and AOL and Napster and Lord-knows-what-new-pornographies—one that begs us to consider which aspects of one’s character live and mutate across the Internet’s many, many screens where individual perspective is not “everything,” but just one node among code, pixels, bits?

Bits of information.

In “Generation Why?,” Smith’s 2010 review of The Social Network where Jesse Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg as a Harvard student, Smith observes: “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way, it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.”[33]

Is this true exactly?

For a moment, I encourage you to meditate on Kim Kardashian’s Instagram page. When Kardashian posts a photograph of herself—gaze deliberate, trained to capture attention (toward what ontological performance?)—is the resulting sequence of bits not, in one sense, a character, much as Jesse Eisenberg becomes a character on screen so that we temporarily forget (or bracket away, or compartmentalize) that Eisenberg was born in Queens, plays the drums, speaks Hebrew? Enter Husserl: what is the noema of Kim Kardashian? Which elements of our consciousness engage with Eisenberg-as-Zuckerberg? On screen, what aspects of Eisenberg’s consciousness become Zuckerberg’s? Thirty years from now, won’t Kardashian’s decades-long archive of Instagram posts amount to a dynamic, serialized self-portrait? Is it a performance of character? A motion picture? What kind of consciousness, then, animates the avatar of Kim Kardashian online? And is that character—borrowing Wood’s term—“autonomous?”

In a 2005 reply to the editors of n+1, Wood calls on writers to “[g]ive the novel back its aesthetic autonomy and we will discover once again the great circularity of the form: that the novel justifies itself by making an enquiry that it alone can make.”[34] It is important to quote Wood at length:

My ideal, then, is the autonomous novel itself, and doubtless a commitment to a particular kind of novel. I am especially interested in the real (though not especially in realism, which too quickly becomes literalism); I am especially interested in consciousness [my emphasis] and how the mind is reproduced on the page; I am especially interested in the novel as a comic and secular form; and I am especially interested—how could I help being interested?—in the human, in what Ian Watt calls “the literal imagination.”

Wood goes on to praise Aristotelian mimesis, suggesting that realism is “a lenient tutor, for it schools its own truants. It is realism that allows surrealism, magic realism, fantasy, dream, and so on.” I’m less certain. Does realism truly allow magical realism? That claim risks placing one man’s rational yardstick over another’s irrational—or perhaps better said, spiritual—measure. What, then, to make of Edmund Burke’s Sublime and the Beautiful? Does realism permit dreams “…and so on?” Or might it be dreams—“and so on…”—that make realism possible? Such quasi-soteriological worries lie beyond the scope of this essay—we’d be in the realm of the Gnostics—but they point to a deeper divide in how individuals and communities relate to ontology and epistemology. As Márquez observes in his 1982 Nobel Prize lecture at the Swedish Academy, “it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest for our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them.”[35]

It is into this contested space between measures—between yardsticks of the rational and the imaginative—that the great maximalist novels step. So what are the questions posed by White Teeth or Infinite Jest or Gravity’s Rainbow—those wild, baggy monsters of the postmodern canon that, for this reader, whisper for a comeback? Where are the novels of maximalist educated risk interrogating the soft theater of empire, the conditioning hum of mass media, the creepy neurolinguistic programming performed nightly by television and Instagram alike? These novels hustle after something crucial: the weird fact that, in the bunny-hop of a single presidential election, America can go from being led by a constitutional law professor with Kansas, Kenya, and Hawaii braided into his spirit to being led by a game-show host with Midas-like furniture and a gospel of grievances—and a stunning knack for growling out funding cuts (particularly against artists) in Fabian dialect.

These novels, transcendent—superpositional in their representations of consciousness—insist on an inconvenient truth. Individual minds—yours, mine, Irie Jones’s, Elon Musk’s, my students on course to graduate with a B.S. in ChatGPT—are not pristine islands but networked nodes, shaped by the circuitry of collective consciousness. These novels suggest that individual consciousness—in a democracy—is co-authored: by government, Big Tech, simmering MAGA resentments, imperial nostalgia (and erasure), Kim Kardashian’s Instagram page, and the uncanny talent of certain charismatic figures to seduce us into upholding the very systems that steal from us. All of America now feels like what it always was: trying to make it down Miami’s Palmetto Expressway in one piece without either cursing out another citizen or crashing your vehicle. As Pynchon writes in Gravity’s Rainbow:

We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid…We have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world. Draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function…zeroing in on what incalculable plot?[36]

That is not the language of a genius flexing without purpose. That language is not copy-and-pasted “free and flameless from Google.” That’s the speech of a prophet scribbling jeremiads in code. And that’s Glück’s ideal of literature, an ideal quietly promising us books can still rescue a spirit, that they can still provide intimate, spontaneous, Kerouacian transformations for no purpose other than the transformations themselves. Here in 2025, what are the borders of our dreamlives? What cannot be taken away from us? Gravity’s Rainbow was published fifty-two years ago, and yet it reads as though it were tuned precisely to our present ideological conflicts.

5.

Let’s turn to White Teeth. In one unforgettable passage, Smith writes of Irie, a mixed-race Jamaican-British teenager trying to find her shape in a world built on other people’s reflections. Our narrator:

There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a strange land. Nightmares and daydreams, on the bus, in the bath, in class. Before. After. Before. After. Before. After. The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation from Jamaican hourglass heavy with the sands that gather around Dunns River Fall, to English Rose—oh, you know her—she’s a slender, delicate thing not made for the hot sun, a surfboard rippled by the wave:

A cynic might dismiss the doodle on page 223 of White Teeth as a postmodern party trick.[37] But to this reader, it’s something more: a destabilizing wink that recalls Sterne’s blacked-out page in Tristram Shandy marking the death of Yorick. Smith’s doodle isn’t just “sidewalk-smarts”; it’s a transmission, a hand on young women’s shoulders urging them not to consume British Vogue passively. The novel may lack Flaubert’s exquisite subtleties, but is North London always subtle? And what happens when our future Irie Jones scrolls through a feed lit by Zuckerberg’s algorithmic glow—or Musk’s? When Caribbean girls gaze into curated lives—Kim Kardashian’s, perhaps—what exactly are they absorbing into the molecular theater of their own becoming?

And to James Wood’s “hysterical” realism: how can we speak of the “aesthetically autonomous novel” when the “TV speaks so loudly; cries so operatically; seems always, in everything, one step ahead?”[38] Smith asked that question in 2001. At fifty, what would Smith write to us now?

Irie’s interiority, as narrated by Smith, isn’t isolated. It’s porous, structured through feedback loops and filtered photos, cultivated likes, and social pressures. It is a consciousness that has become an interface—a looping, performative awareness that mimics selfhood so closely, over time it might as well be one.

Which brings me, naturally, to my conversation with the Chatbot GPT:[39]

6.

I often draw this diagram in my composition book, usually at the beginning of the day, with coffee, especially before the work of writing fiction. I cannot tell you why. I draw a brain with three circles, two of which are connected to the amygdala, the other hovering above the other two like a cloud, judge, or some trembling god. Above that diagram is a whole other diagram I’ll keep confidential, but it’s important you know I’m trying to pin something, something else down, and I couldn’t do so without the act of writing.

Writing this essay has made me see that the diagram I’ve been sketching for a decade maps a divided self—the divided selves of my characters, and perhaps of my own. You write an essay or a novel: some subjects you read deeply; others wing past like winter crows. So, when I mention Brecht’s epic theater—provoking thought rather than mere emotion—his Verfremdungseffekt, or his non-naturalistic sets, a kind of Wallace novel made flesh, that’s not knowledge lifted “free and flameless” from Google; still, I speed-read Jameson. I savor Proust.

Brecht’s theatrical methods urge viewers to interrogate a triangular relationship: character, explicit audience recognition, and—as John Berger might put it—ways of seeing, the locations of consciousness. If “aesthetically autonomous” novels like Clarissa—that eighteenth-century equivalent of snooping through the gentry’s Gmail—lock us into enclosed worlds, Brecht asks us to minimize the Safari window and look instead at Clarissa Harlowe’s and Robert Lovelace’s document folders, selfies, tax returns, and browser histories. These artifacts may reveal as much, perhaps more about their characters than the letters themselves. Brecht invites us not into the dream of a play, but into the structure that makes the play possible: the apparatuses that let it proceed at all. His estranging methods push us to see character not as unified or reliable, but as shaped by Pynchonian systems and DeLilloan hidden machinery—where truth may reside as much in financial records and search histories as in the partial self-fashioning of an email meant to present its sender as angel, asset, or, at the very least, innocuous.

What Wood dismisses as the hysterical realist’s superfluous clutter is, in fact, its Brechtian gift: the staging of the apparatus—Clarissa’s letters, her writing desk, the mansion, and the partial history of the British gentry’s entanglement with Caribbean sugar—so that, as Jameson notes, our habitual numbness gives way to seeing with new eyes. “To make something look strange…implies the antecedence of a general familiarity, of a habit which prevents us from really looking at things, a kind of perpetual numbness.”[40] The doodle in White Teeth, Wallace’s footnotes on the Mean Value Theorem in Infinite Jest, Sterne’s black page for Yorick’s death in Tristram Shandy—all jolt us out of accustomed ways of engaging with narrative (especially other people’s). The Alienation Effect forces us to confront the limits of the assumptions behind our habitual—even casual—reading, and, by extension, our very ways of seeing. Brechtian interventions discomfort us because they demand active observational engagement; they teach us to observe our own observation. We focus more sharply on the staging of the play—and who is directing it—learning not just to play chess but to study the board on which we never knew we were pawns.

The hysterical realist novels of Smith, Wallace, and Sterne also reveal elements of consciousness that Ian Watt’s “literal imagination”—a formulation Wood admires—urges novelists to explore: the ways the world acts upon the consciousness rendered.[41] In a novel or in life, what do we make of the underlying structures of narrative and consciousness we take for granted or cannot see—white supremacy, “patriotism” staged as pageantry that looks away from war crimes? The narrator of White Teeth, today, would swagger up to a MAGA zealot, tap him on the shoulder, and hand him a history of eugenics alongside Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black.

Jameson points to Brecht’s conception of consciousness as not affected by a single event in one moment (that can laterally be described in terms of a discrete narrator and the consciousness of a character rendered in a comforting autonomous novel like Clarissa), but in terms of “chronological monads” or “pyramids of worlds,” which sounds like the kind of thing your college roommate, in close proximity to a fat bowl, whispers to the popcorn ceiling at 2 a.m.[42] “I will want to speak of layers of history,” Jameson writes, “this time over-lapping in time rather than space, and each with its own specific and distinct type of content: each imposing its own specific occasionality (for this kind of ‘occasional poetry’ it is History itself which is the occasion, or rather, the multiple sequence of occasions).”

So, for Irie Jones—a seemingly ordinary Jamaican-British teenager on a high street in London—her path is never as simple as pavement underfoot. This, I suspect, is why White Teeth endures despite its technical flaws. Smith insists we see the girl whom much of London might walk past, ignore, or even harm, refracted through the aesthetics of British Vogue, the history of Kingston, and the genetic legacies that haunt her very body. In light of Wood’s charges against the “hysterical realist novel,” how could such forces not shape Irie’s consciousness? And if they do, what is the novel’s ethical task—merely to record them, or to weigh them? Can it? Should it?

White Teeth asks us to consider the shape of a single human consciousness as a brain with multiple circles—receptors. (Robinson’s Gilead—and this is a whole different essay, man, might ask us to interrogate how a spiritual conception of “cosmic consciousness” fits into this biological framework). White Teeth, Jameson might argue, encourages us to consider whether an individual can be engaged in multiple “methods of thinking” simultaneously like your daughter scrolling TikTok and talking to you about her college plans at the same time. Brecht might offer suspicion about any novel advancing a representation of closed, “autonomous” social spheres as absolute representations of human consciousness because human beings, particularly today, are consistently influenced—consciously, subconsciously, unconsciously—by multiple methods of thinking and, by extension, methods of reasoning.

In this way, when one of DeLillo’s characters articulates he once believed it was possible for a novelist to “alter the inner life of a culture,” the question does not become today whether a novelist still possess this capacity, but what the observer means exactly by a culture’s “inner life” in the first place.[43] The November 2024 election in America, lakes of red on the nation’s political map: how do DeLillo’s novels help us to work out what’s at play? We often accept a “collective consciousness” shifts, well, collectively; novels lead us to the sofa to more rigorously think—and feel—through how this collective consciousness shifts in individual ways during particular moments in time.

7.

For all the cries, then, that the novel is dead—or that the hysterical realist novel is unethical—we can all agree that novels do cultural work not possible by biased political tracts, history books, or newspapers (let alone news channels). Novels help us interrogate how consciousness works on multiple levels: individual and collective, private and public, pious and profane, materialist and, well…something else. Novels like White Teeth and Infinite Jest which do the challenging technical work as the culture is changing of representing divided selves can easily be misread as—what? Lifeless novels “of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all.” On closer examination, however, Jameson suggests that the characters in works by Camus, Dos Passos, and Sartre confront the realization that what we call the “self” is itself an object of consciousness rather than its source.[44] Put another way, in consistently positioning himself as both a singular writer and as a writer shaped by and reflecting other people’s impressions—constructed bits of information—the narrator of Tristram Shandy, as early as 1759, urges us to distrust any claim to “autonomy,” aesthetic or otherwise.

I think this checks out. If Tristram Shandy popped onto a Brechtian stage right now, he would be represented as a conscious first-person character relating his experience as a third-person aware he was being heard by an audience he is trying to, like Trump, pander to or deliberately upset. Jameson on Brecht’s method:

"[T]hus it is recommended that the actor quote his speeches and transmit his lines and his character’s utterances to us as though in italics or between quotation marks…so presumably there is a first-person and also a third-person emotion which can be represented on stage."[45]

Early in Tristram Shandy, Tristram explains his reasons for not presenting a linear narrative:

"As my life and opinions are likely to make some noise in the world, and, if I conjecture right, will take in all ranks, professions, and denominations of men whatever,—be no less read than the Pilgrim’s Progress itself—and in the end, prove the very thing which Montaigne dreaded his Essays should turn out, that is, a book for a parlor-window;—I find it necessary to consult everyone a little in his turn; and therefore must beg pardon for going on a little farther in the same way: For which cause, right glad I am, that I have begun the history of myself in the way I have done; and that I am able to go on, tracing everything in it, as Horace says, ab Ovo."[46]

Oh, Tristram, our eighteenth-century podcaster!

8.

Let us return, then, to the idea of a consciousness dispersed across temporal, technological, and spiritual registers—what I’ve been calling, somewhat hesitantly, the superpositional mind. If White Teeth’s Irie Jones embodies an adolescence shaped by colonial history, reality TV, and the digitized self-image, then it becomes difficult—perhaps dishonest—to speak of her interiority solely in the classical Aristotelian sense. She is neither entirely opaque nor transparently coherent but rather exists in a state of aesthetic simultaneity: daughter and consumer, object and author, body and interface. Smith’s narrator never quite just tells us what Irie thinks. Instead, we observe what she sees and consumes and mimics. The structure of the novel becomes epistemological—it is not what does Irie believe but what composite of beliefs is she assembled from?

This seems to me the central predicament of the novel today—not just what it represents, but how it represents forms of experience that are themselves becoming irreducibly multilocal, unfolding across multiple places, identities, and perspectives at once. In physics, quantum superposition describes a condition in which a system exists in all its possible states simultaneously—until it is observed. Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive. The electron is here and there. Might not the self—as conceived by the twenty-first-century novel—occupy a similarly indeterminate space, its “observation” as narrator or character merely collapsing the field of possibilities into a fleeting legibility?

In this light, what Smith, Wallace, Sterne, and even Tristram Shandy himself are doing is not playing postmodern games or indulging “hysterical realism,” but reconfiguring our cognitive expectations for what a human self might look like under conditions of informational saturation. The doodles, blank pages, footnotes, and aesthetic ruptures are all modes of epistemic estrangement. They aren’t flourishes. They’re methods. They are ways of rendering a consciousness shaped not only by love or grief or ideology but by streaming interfaces, recursive algorithms, and inherited histories. The narrative “I” is not a window—it is a fractured glass, catching images from many angles, reflecting them back into new configurations.

And now we must ask: what does it mean to bring ChatGPT into this conversation—not merely as a tool, but as a kind of narrative actor, a co-presence that hovers over our intellectual practices in 2025 like the cloud hovering over my Brechtian brain-diagram? What are my students doing when their rushed papers smell of ChatGPT’s fluidity? Are they outsourcing cognition? Collaborating? Distracting themselves? Are they plagiarizing? And, if so, what? Isn’t ChatGPT a kind of plagiarist? As David Shields’s prophetic work in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, published fifteen years ago, asks us to consider: aren’t our intimate intellectual meditations inherently, on one level, plagiaristic?

There is a Brechtian logic to this very act of communicating with a chatbot—short for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer [my emphasis].” In asking ChatGPT to help write an essay, we become both performer and observer—simultaneously engaging in the argument and commenting on the methods by which the argument is produced. This is not a matter of transparency or disclosure. It is a staging of method, an invitation to reframe the relationship between writer and reader. ChatGPT becomes less an author than a kind of alienation device. Like Brecht’s projected titles or metatheatrical gestures, it reveals the scaffolding. It reminds us we are watching a performance—even if we’re also moved by it.

Of course, we cannot forget that ChatGPT—as ChatGPT admits—is not neutral. It is trained on an asymmetrical archive. It carries with it all the pathologies and prejudices of its input sources—just as Irie Jones carries the pixelated residue of every beauty standard and genetic fantasy available to her through British cultural media. But if we resist the temptation to treat AI as either savior or villain, a different question opens up: What does it mean to share a cognitive space with an artificial entity? What does it mean to write not like a machine, but with one? What kind of consciousness—distributed, partial, speculative—emerges from that interplay?

This is, I think, the question that the most ambitious novels of the twenty-first century are already interrogating—not in abstract philosophical terms, but in aesthetic ones. The hysterical realism of White Teeth, the footnoted recursion of Infinite Jest tied to the metafictional rambling of Tristram Shandy: these are not symptoms of a literature in decline. They are structural responses to a world in which consciousness is increasingly displaced from the single self. These novels don’t reject narrative coherence; they challenge the assumption that coherence resides in a singular, stable voice. They show us selves that are observed, constructed, surveilled, filtered, re-assembled. They show us, in other words, selves in superposition.

Robinson’s Gilead offers another point of resonance here—not because it adopts the same aesthetic strategies, but because it understands consciousness as something more than a brain’s output. In Gilead, the narrator writes to a son he may never live to see grow older, tracing not a linear argument but a devotional spiral—a meditative record of presence. Robinson’s prose invites us to consider a theological superposition: the ways in which the human soul, if it exists, is always located both within and beyond time, both embodied and spiritual. The same reverence for interiority—the same suspicion of easy explanation—undergirds her theological commitments, her inevitable essays, her literary style.

Can we hold Robinson’s vision alongside the glitchy, recursive vision of Wallace or the estranging devices of Brecht? I think we must. If superposition teaches us anything, it’s that incompatible states may coexist—at least until we attempt to measure them. The theological and the technological are not mutually exclusive. They are part of the same conceptual matrix, asking different but resonant questions about what it means to think, to feel, to be observed, to change.

So what of the novelist’s task? If DeLillo’s character once believed a novel could alter the “inner life of a culture,” we might now ask: whose culture? Whose interiority? And what kind of novel can address a reader whose own self is already scattered across browsers, group chats, identity markers, cognitive biases, belief systems, and epigenetic traumas that precede and exceed the personal?

The novel, in this sense, becomes not a mirror but a quantum field—a site of collapsed and uncollapsed possibilities. It is a technology of attunement, a spiritual prosthesis, a cognitive interface. It cannot explain consciousness, but it can dramatize its tensions. It can show us what it feels like to be located in overlapping structures—genetic, cultural, theological, informational—and to try, nonetheless, to choose a path through.

And this is, I suspect, what I’m ultimately arguing for. Not the death of the novel. Not the triumph of AI. But an ethics of attention—a commitment to tracing the contours of consciousness even when they are fragmented, algorithmically shaped, or spiritually indeterminate. Irie Jones matters not because she stands for something coherent, but because her contradictions are rendered with care. Tristram Shandy matters not because he’s reliable, but because he reminds us that narration itself is an act of interpretation. ChatGPT matters not because it’s “intelligent,” but because it helps us see—more clearly, perhaps disquietingly—the shape of our own thinking, and the limitations of our own literary (and existential) self-constructions.

To live—and to write—today is to inhabit a superpositional state: individual and collective, human and digital, ancient and speculative. The work of the essay, like the work of the novel, is to dwell in that ambiguity—not to resolve it, but to render it. To ask, again and again: what does it mean to see clearly? What does it mean to be seen? What, exactly, are we observing—when we observe ourselves? How is the Internet helping to correct us, to revise us? To edit us?

Endnotes

[1] Chuang Tzu.The Book of Chuang Tzu. Translated by Martin Palmer and Elizabeth Breuilly, Penguin Classics, 2006, 20.

[2] Jung, C. G. The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Sonu Shamdasani, Mark Kyburz, and John Peck, illustrated reprint ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 2012, 133.

[3] Harris, Wilson. Palace of the Peacock. Faber & Faber (Faber Editions), 2021, 7.

[4] D’Aguiar, Fred. “Wilson Harris.” BOMB Magazine, no. 82, Winter 2003, bombmagazine.org/articles/2003/01/01/wilson-harris/.

[5] Vara, Vauhini. “Confessions of a Viral AI Writer.” Wired, 21 Sept. 2023, www.wired.com/story/confessions-viral-ai-writer-chatgpt/.

[6] Chang, Lan Samantha. “Writers, Protect Your Inner Life.” Literary Hub, 7 Aug. 2017, lithub.com/writers-protect-your-inner-life/.

[7] Wallace, David Foster. “A Conversation with David Foster Wallace.” Interview by Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 13, no. 2, Summer 1993. Dalkey Archive Press, 2 Aug. 2013, dalkeyarchive.com/2013/08/02/a-conversation-with-david-foster-wallace-by-larry-mccaffery/.

[8] The Bible. Authorized King James Version, Oxford UP, 1998. Psalm 8:4.

[9] Robinson, Marilynne. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. Yale University Press, 2010, 126–127.

[10] Hungerford, Amy. Lecture 15: Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, The American Novel Since 1945, Open Yale Courses, Yale University, accessed via website, Open Yale Courses, at oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-291/lecture-15, which notes that Robinson brings Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” vision of nature into the domestic realm—“the loss of identity that Emerson describes as becoming a ‘transparent eyeball’ in the woods, Robinson brings into the realm of the home, the built environment.”

[11] Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. Picador, 2004, 3.

[12] Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. Penguin Books, 1997, 561.

[13] Robinson, Absence of Mind, 129.

[14] Hebrews 11.1.

[15] Robinson, Absence of Mind, 35.

[16] Robinson, Absence of Mind, 34.

[17] Ramchand, Kenneth. “Afterword.” Palace of the Peacock, by Wilson Harris, Faber and Faber, 1998, 138.

[18] Narain, Stephen. “We Chant the Hymn of Ages.” SX Salon, Small Axe, Aug. 2012, smallaxe.net/sxsalon/interviews/we-chant-hymn-ages.

[19] OWN. “Exclusive: Ayana Mathis' 3 Greatest Writing Lessons | Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 | Oprah Winfrey Network.”YouTube, uploaded by OWN, 8 Jan. 2013, youtube.com/watch?v=NLpou7W77Ps.

[20] Robinson, Absence of Mind, xvii.

[21] Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: 50th Anniversary Edition. Shambhala Publications, 2020, 33.

[22] Wood, James. “Tell Me How Does It Feel?” The Guardian, 5 Oct. 2001, theguardian.com/books/2001/oct/06/fiction.

[23] Wood, “Tell Me How Does It Feel?”

[24] Wood, “Tell Me How Does It Feel?”

[25] Wood, “Tell Me How Does It Feel?”

[26] Smith, Zadie. “This Is How It Feels to Me,” The Guardian, 13 Oct. 2001, theguardian.com/books/2001/oct/13/fiction.afghanistan.

[27] Smith, Zadie. “Love, actually.” The Guardian, 1 Nov. 2003, guardian.com/books/2003/nov/01/classics.zadiesmith.

[28] Smith, “This Is How It Feels to Me.”

[29] The Editors. “Designated Haters.”n+1, Issue 1, Summer 2004, nplusonemag.com/issue-1/the-intellectual-situation/designated-haters.

[30] Smith, “Love, actually.”

[31] Wood, James. “All Rainbow, No Gravity.” The New Republic, 5 Mar. 2007, newrepublic.com/article/63049/all-rainbow-no-gravity.

[32] Wood, “All Rainbow, No Gravity.”

[33] Smith, Zadie. “Generation Why?” The New York Review of Books, 25 Nov. 2010.

[34] Wood, James. “A Reply to the Editors.” n+1, Issue 3, Fall 2005.

[35] Márquez, Gabriel García. “The Solitude of Latin America.” Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture, 8 Dec. 1982. NobelPrize.org. The Nobel Foundation, 2025.

[36] Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, Penguin Books, 2006, 521.

[37] Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. Random House, 2000, 222-223.

[38] Smith, “This Is How It Feels to Me.”

[39] ChatGPT. OpenAI, 12 Sept. 2025, chat.openai.com/chat. Screenshot.

[40] Jameson, Fredric. Brecht and Method. Verso, 1998, 39.

[41] Wood, “A Reply to the Editors.”

[42] Jameson, Brecht and Method, 6.

[43] DeLillo, Don. Mao II. Viking, 1991, 41.

[44] Jameson, Brecht and Method, 56.

[45] Jameson, Brecht and Method, 53.

[46] Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Edited by Bergen Evans, Modern Library, 1950, 7-8.