What is the origin of consciousness? The Hebrew Bible has a simple answer that everybody knows: it involves an apple. Of course it doesn’t involve an apple per se; apples are northern fruit that do not grow in the Levant. Figs would be more likely. The Hebrew Bible, and the Old Testaments, in no matter what translation, simply mention fruit. Meaning something to eat, presumably inviting.

Actually, they mention fruit only once, at Genesis 3.6: …she took of the fruit and ate. She also gave some to her husband and he ate. (JPS) Consciousness was the immediate consequence:

Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they perceived that they were naked and they sewed together fig leaves and made themselves loincloths. (Gen 3.7; JPS)

You will object: But surely Adam and Eve were conscious prior to this horrible moment. I shall reply: you are confusing conscious with aware. Sadly, we have come to treat these as synonyms in English, much to our loss. Awareness is a faculty possessed by all living creatures, to however limited an extent; it allows them to respond to their environment. Consciousness, in contrast, is unique to human beings, and, as you will learn quickly if you take up French, it comprises what we call conscience. Julian Jaynes, in his wildly interdisciplinary study, The Origin of the Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1979), summarizes the difference between awareness and consciousness as, first, an awareness of the self, as if it were part of the environment; and, second, as the ready ability to narratize, or tell stories about that self in the environment. The first component is obvious in Genesis: they perceived that they were naked. The second, which involves the onrush of shame, has them sewing fig leaves into loincloths. Having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve are not just aware of their sin; they are transformed by it.

From the very beginning, then, Judaism and Christianity associate consciousness with the loss of God’s companionship. That is pretty much Augustine’s definition of sin. Wrapped into this complex new consciousness is the knowledge that the sinners bring alienation upon themselves. Whereas awareness may be uncomfortable, consciousness is painful, at least at first, and we do what we can to push it away. In English, we actually banish it to the compound self-consciousness. According to my Dictionnaire Robert, the only French terms for this compound are timidité and conscient — the latter being French for conscious. In a way, it is impossible to be self-conscious in French. Just timid. No running away.

Much as I would love to dilate upon Julian Jaynes’s fascinating book, I am here to talk about a new novel, The Hypocrite, by Jo Hamya. It would not have been the same novel if I had not, by chance, been re-reading Jaynes when I picked it up. With Jaynes’s acute thinking percolating in my mind, I helplessly read The Hypocrite as the electrifying account of the infliction of shame. A man in late middle age is obliged to recognize that he has edited his awareness to protect his consciousness — his conscience. Not only has he sinned, but he has successfully avoided private disgrace by bleaching his offense to the point of its disappearance. This, and not his bad behavior in the past, is the sin that stings. When someone who remembers what happened tries to enlighten him — his daughter, Sophia (the only named principal character) — his irresistible impulse is to deny the clarification, to fight the raising of his consciousness. The man becomes incoherent, almost demented, with misery.

This story of perception and shame is embedded in a story with a larger perspective. We are asked to consider that neither the man nor his daughter are conscious of their common offenses against the larger world, offenses of disrespectful self-indulgence. This larger story is kept in the background; it obtrudes only twice, once in the middle and once at the end. In this perspective, the wrongs with which the man and his daughter are agonizingly concerned amount to little more than instances of punctured vanity. For the man is an esteemed novelist (albeit an apparently clueless one), and his daughter is a budding playwright. In a more typical family drama, the action of The Hypocrite would take place in the course of a family reunion and involve charges of child abuse. Here, the father’s crime appears to have been kidding himself into believing that his teenage daughter could not hear the after-hours shenanigans in his bedroom, and the setting is a West End theatre in which the daughter, now grown, literally dramatizes what she knew. The play is a comedy. The father has been invited to an opening performance; he sits through it, in sinking wretchedness, while the rest of the audience laughs unto tears.

There is a gravity in the texture of Hamya’s prose that, together with the intense presentation of her stories, forcibly reminded me of Ian McEwen at his very best (Atonement, Saturday, The Children Act); indeed, I now suspect that the pain of consciousness is perhaps his deepest theme. (A very good prompt to revisit them!) The power of Hamya’s writing is contextual and difficult to excerpt, but, for the record, I’ll call attention to the section beginning “It’s like cocktail-party conversation.” The bulk of this section consists of a long section in which the father tries to swat away the implications of the play that he is watching.

Other, terrible, thoughts. Has Sophia heard him come? He listens to the actor do it and decides, evidently not.

More urgent concerns supplant that notion. He has to chew them down. Sophia has, however indirectly, thought of him having sex. (69)

Here, at any rate, is a passage from the opening section of The Hypocrite, given over to a point of view, that of the mother, the ex-wife (but the then-wife, at the time of the passage), that will be implicated but withheld in the remainder of the novel. The setting is a Sicilian beach in the late afternoon.

The beach, the fat pulse of the sun and its resultant waves of light headedness. Sofia’s mother touched her watch. She imagined swimming. Thought about how to do dinner that night, remember dinner the night before — courtesy of her husband’s friend. Someone he hadn’t seen in years another writer, whose daughter had been paid €15 euros to look after Sophia. A table of eight other strangers her husband was excited to meet again. She sat on the far side of the arrangement, away from him. She could not keep track of their names, though evidently few people knew hers. That she had worried whether a sixteen-year-old she didn’t know was equipped enough to take care of her child. That it had been a night of not speaking, with a glass of red wine hovering under her chin by its stem, and recollections pooled by the others from university pubs she’d never been near. And — Aren’t you stunning? her least favorite of them said; gestured to the man she had married six years ago. Has he shagged you yet?

A pause. A smile. An argument on the way home.

This section is headed, “The Decision to Leave.”