Texts are central to understanding what it is to be a person, in every culture. If you were brought up on modern western European literature, you will be familiar with the idea that works of literature offer a “window onto consciousness” or privileged access to other people's experience. One of the dominant genres of the modern West – the novel – was shaped precisely to do this: it developed in the eighteenth century from a picaresque action-narrative to a genre specialising in the revelation of states of mind, emotions and inner experiences. David Lodge, in one of the few attempts by a literary critic and novelist to engage with the scientific study of consciousness, has argued that “literature is a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we have” (2002: 10). While science formulates general explanatory laws, “works of literature describe in the guise of fiction the dense specificity of personal experience, which is always unique” (2002: 10–11). Herein lies the moral justification of fiction and its claim to scientific attention: the modern novel stimulates the reader imaginatively to inhabit another's consciousness, and thus “helps us develop powers of sympathy and empathy in real life” (Lodge 2002: 42).

Prompted by a reading of Clifford Geertz, Lodge acknowledges that the kind of “self” the novel was designed to reveal was historically- and culturally-specific (“the Western humanist concept of the autonomous individual self is not universal, eternally given, and valid for all time and all places …”) but he remains convinced of its supreme value (“A great deal of what we value in civilized life depends on it”) (2002: 91).