As literary scholars navigate a neuroscientific turn, it's worth remembering that we've been down that path before. Now that readers’ brains can be imaged by MRIs, new models of neural activity seem to hold out the promise of explaining the processes of literary production and readers’ responses. How do we construct narratives or metaphors or images? What mechanisms allow us to “see” verbal worlds, to feel emotionally attached to fictional characters, and to be excited or scandalized by a work of art? So-called “cognitive” approaches are beginning to draw on the insights of neurology and related sciences in order to answer these questions at the level of the human brain. Even novelists themselves – notably Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem, and Siri Hustvedt – are toying with making their characters’ brains the true protagonists of their art.
Justine Murison's terrific book returns us to the first cultural formation surrounding the scientific and para-scientific study of the brain and the nervous system. If today's approaches run the risk of naturalizing cultural processes – flattening out cultural difference by appealing to supposedly universal neural mechanisms – the nineteenth-century version was quite different. The forerunners of neurology conceived of the nervous system as the network that “knit the body and mind together through their interactions with the world” (3). What Murison calls the neurological “open body” was thus vulnerable to political change and environmental pressures, but neural mechanisms could also be manipulated to produce change (3). In tightly constructed readings of works by Robert Montgomery Bird, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, S. Weir Mitchell, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, she shows the deep saturation of nerve-discourse in American culture from roughly 1830 to the turn of the twentieth century. Particularly strong are her readings of the different ways that the rhetoric of nerves, and nervousness, structured the discourse of race and slavery. Bird's surpassingly strange (and recently republished) novel Sheppard Lee: Written by Himself (1836) tells the story of a lazy, hypochondriacal failed farmer who finds – upon dying – that he has the power to reanimate other corpses. When Lee inhabits the bodies of a radical abolitionist and then a slave, he gives his author occasion to ponder ways in which nervous organization defines character and race. Additionally, as Murison shows, Bird reads abolition as promoting a pathological form of sympathy, surpassing the natural limits imposed by biological limitations. While Poe disputed Bird's notion of character as entirely dependent on bodily sensation, Murison shows penetratingly how much Poe was drawn to neurological models of the embodied mind. In particular, the conception of a “reflex arc,” developed by Scottish physician Marshall Hall, provided an analogue for Poe's own studies of reflexive behavior that bypasses conscious will (46). “Hop-Frog,” “Some Words with a Mummy,” and “Instinct vs. Reason – A Black Cat” all circle around the problem of automatic responses to external stimuli, responses that in the extreme undercut the foundational democratic assumption that humans are capable of governing themselves. To my mind the strongest chapter, on Stowe's Dred, reveals how Stowe – and like-minded abolitionist ministers like Charles Grandison Finney – exploited these automatic nervous responses for the ends of reform rather than reaction. Enthusiastic religion, Murison shows, was frequently interpreted by alienists and neurologists as both productive and symptomatic of nervous disorder. Yet Stowe's depiction of a highly charismatic, religiously inspired rebel slave both accepts the diagnostic framework of nervous disorder and suggests that his neurological predisposition toward trance states can indeed be a vehicle for genuine clairvoyance and prophecy.
Murison concludes with perceptive but too-brief reflections on the relevance of her study to contemporary metacritical debates. I think she errs by placing too much weight on post-Freudian affect theory, which she says has privileged a concept of “anxiety” that both depends on and disavows a prehistory of nineteenth-century nerves. (This explains her curious use of “anxiety” in the title, despite the term's anachronism to the period under study: “nervousness” would have been better.) Certain strains of affect theory (notably Brian Massumi's and Sianne Ngai's work) do indeed reach out to cognitive models, so the circuit between soma and psyche may not be as broken in critical discourse as Murison implies. More intriguing are Murison's claims that the new cognitive approaches share with historicist approaches a desire to ground subjective literary readings in hard-and-fast evidence; she favors instead a “surface” reading for cultural pattern that does not count as “evidence” of something else. This idea is rather underdeveloped, but could certainly prompt other scholars to reflect on the significance that the history of science has for models of literary analysis. In the meantime, we should celebrate this exemplary case study of how writers of an earlier time grappled with a set of intellectual and social problems we mistakenly call contemporary.
