Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome [1 ed.] 0415507405, 9780415507400

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction • T.J. Lustig and James Peacock
1 The Naturalistic Turn, the Syndrome, and the Rise of the Neo-Phenomenological Novel • Patricia Waugh
2 Mapping the Syndrome Novel • Stephen J. Burn
3 From Syndrome to Sincerity: Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision • Adam Kelly
4 “We learned to tell our story walking:” Tourette’s and Urban Space in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn • James Peacock
5 The Pathologies of Mobility: Time Travel as Syndrome in The Time Traveller’s Wife, La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys • Brian Baker
6 Syndrome, Symptom, and Trauma Chains in American Pre- and Post-9/11 Novels • Bent Sørensen
7 Mind and Brain: The Representation of Trauma in Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog and Ian McEwan’s Saturday • Nick Bentley
8 “Two-way traffic”? Syndrome as Symbol in Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker • T.J. Lustig
9 “I wanted unheimlich [ . . . ] but of the right kind. Strangeness and Strangerness without the blank despair:” Trauma and Travel in the Works of Jenny Diski • Joanna Price
10 The Human Condition? • Martyn Bracewell
11 A Psychiatrist’s Opinion of the Neuronovel • Lisetta Lovett
Annotated Bibliography of Primary Materials • Nicola Brindley
Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials • Hannah Merry
Glossary
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction

This collection addresses the current preoccupation with neurological conditions and disorders in contemporary British and American literature. The book places these fictional treatments within a broader cultural and historical context, exploring such topics as the two cultures debate, the neurological turn, postmodernism and the ‘post-postmodern’, and transatlantic responses to September 11. Considering a variety of materials including mainstream literary fiction, graphic novels, popular fiction, autobiographical writing, film, and television, contributors consider the interface between the sciences and humanities. They also develop the debate about ‘postpostmodernism’ as a new humanism or a return to realism and investigate questions of form and genre. The essays in this collection discuss contemporary writers’ engagements with the relation between the individual and the social, exploring connections between the ‘syndrome syndrome’ (referring to the prevalence in contemporary literature of neurological phenomena evident at the biological level) and existing work in the field of trauma studies (where explanations tend to take a psychoanalytical form), going on to question the assumptions that have marked these fields. The current preoccupation with neurological conditions presents us with a new and distinctive form of trauma literature, one concerned less with psychoanalysis than with the physical and evolutionary status of human beings. T. J. Lustig is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Keele University, UK. James Peacock is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literatures at Keele University, UK.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

1 Literature After 9/11 Edited by Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn 2 Reading Chuck Palahniuk American Monsters and Literary Mayhem Edited by Cynthia Kuhn and Lance Rubin 3 Beyond Cyberpunk New Critical Perspectives Edited by Graham J. Murphy and Sherryl Vint 4 Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk Edited by Paul Crosthwaite 5 Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction Lorna Piatti-Farnell 6 Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy Borders and Crossing Edited by Nicholas Monk with a Foreword by Rick Wallach 7 Global Issues in Contemporary Hispanic Women’s Writing Shaping Gender, the Environment, and Politics Edited by Estrella Cibreiro and Francisca López

8 Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature Edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega 9 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature Writing Architecture and the Body Laura Colombino 10 Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction The Syndrome Syndrome Edited by T.J. Lustig and James Peacock

Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction The Syndrome Syndrome Edited by T.J. Lustig and James Peacock

NEW YORK

LONDON

First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of T. J. Lustig and James Peacock to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Diseases and disorders in contemporary fiction : the syndrome syndrome / edited by T. J. Lustig and James Peacock. pages cm. — (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature ; 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Diseases in literature. 2. Fiction—History and criticism. I. Lustig, T. J., 1961– editor of compilation. II. Peacock, James, 1970– editor of compilation. PN56.D56D57 2013 809'.933561—dc23 2012046124 ISBN13: 978-0-415-50740-0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-06731-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global.

Printed and bound in the United States of America by IBT Global. SFI-01234

SFI label applies to the text stock

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

T.J. LUSTIG AND JAMES PEACOCK

1

The Naturalistic Turn, the Syndrome, and the Rise of the Neo-Phenomenological Novel

17

PATRICIA WAUGH

2

Mapping the Syndrome Novel

35

STEPHEN J. BURN

3

From Syndrome to Sincerity: Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision

53

ADAM KELLY

4

“We learned to tell our story walking:” Tourette’s and Urban Space in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn

67

JAMES PEACOCK

5

The Pathologies of Mobility: Time Travel as Syndrome in The Time Traveller’s Wife, La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys

83

BRIAN BAKER

6

Syndrome, Symptom, and Trauma Chains in American Pre- and Post-9/11 Novels

98

BENT SØRENSEN

7

Mind and Brain: The Representation of Trauma in Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog and Ian McEwan’s Saturday NICK BENTLEY

115

vi

Contents

8

“Two-way traffic”? Syndrome as Symbol in Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker

130

T.J. LUSTIG

9

“I wanted unheimlich [ . . . ] but of the right kind. Strangeness and Strangerness without the blank despair:” Trauma and Travel in the Works of Jenny Diski

144

JOANNA PRICE

10 The Human Condition?

160

MARTYN BRACEWELL

11 A Psychiatrist’s Opinion of the Neuronovel

169

LISETTA LOVETT

Annotated Bibliography of Primary Materials

183

NICOLA BRINDLEY

Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials

189

HANNAH MERRY

Glossary List of Contributors Index

195 201 205

Acknowledgments

The editors gratefully acknowledge the David Bruce Centre for American Studies at Keele University, whose generous fi nancial assistance made possible the one-day conference in October 2009 at which many of the essays in the present collection were first presented as papers. For their encouragement and creative suggestions, thanks are also due to the three anonymous reviewers selected by Routledge.

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Introduction T.J. Lustig and James Peacock

An Iowan truck driver is involved in a road accident, wakes up from a coma and is unable to recognize his own sister (The Echo Maker); unable to make up his mind about anything, a young New Yorker is tempted to try a miracle drug called Abulinix (Indecision); an orphan in Brooklyn with Tourette’s syndrome goes undercover to fi nd the killer of his friend and mentor (Motherless Brooklyn); a London neurologist diagnoses Huntington’s disease in a man who accosts him in the street during a protest march against the Iraq invasion (Saturday). What connects these brief synopses is, of course, a preoccupation with neurological conditions. It is one many other texts share. Rain Man (1988), Enduring Love (1997), Fight Club (1999), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), The Time Traveller’s Wife (2003), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Lowboy (2009), United States of Tara (2009): a cursory list of film, novel and TV series titles indicates the extent to which British and American cultural production of the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries has been fascinated by neurological conditions including among others: Capgras syndrome, abulia, autism, de Clérambault’s syndrome, dissociative identity disorder (DID) and paranoid schizophrenia. This collection addresses many of these, but its overall purpose is not only to identify the ‘syndrome syndrome’ as a phenomenon and to analyse individual instances (though it does both of these). It is to place these fictional treatments within a broader cultural and historical context. What are the social, cultural or historical determinants of the ‘syndrome syndrome’? What is its significance for writers, cultural commentators and for literary theorists and critics? And how might scientists respond to the heightened presence of scientifically-defi ned conditions in literary texts? The ‘two cultures’ controversy of the late 1950s and early 1960s continues to frame current discussions of the encounter between literature and science and also sheds light on the more specific fascination with neurological disorders in contemporary culture. In “The Two Cultures” (1959), C. P. Snow (a research chemist turned novelist and government advisor) famously painted a picture of division, with “literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists” and “between them a gulf of mutual incomprehension”

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(1998, 4). Science was active and literature passive; science was the future and literature the past; science was egalitarian and literature elitist. It was regrettable that scientists found Dickens incomprehensible (see Snow 1998, 12). But Snow was more worried that, when asked, writers could not explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics: to him, the question was “the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?” (15). According to Snow, intellectuals—in the universities and the “Establishment” as a whole—were “natural Luddites” (17, 22). Industrialization was “the only hope of the poor” (25) and investment in training scientists to work in undeveloped countries was imperative. Although “The Two Cultures” was as much an exercise in rhetoric as analysis (it had originally been delivered as a lecture), Snow qualified his account of a stark division. Research in the social sciences made it plausible to speak of “three cultures” (8). Novels remained “relevant” (14). And Snow looked forward, albeit with a rather forced optimism, to a time when the “vacuum” between literature and science would be fi lled by dialogue: this would multiply the “creative chances” (16). Yet the existence of a fundamental divide between the two cultures was emphatically re-asserted by Snow’s most well known antagonist. In “Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow” (1962), F. R. Leavis, Fellow of Downing College and Reader in English at Cambridge University, conducted what was widely seen as a brutal ad hominem attack on Snow. Denying (somewhat disingenuously) that he was “enjoying a slaughterous field-day,” Leavis accused Snow of “bad writing” and “intellectual nullity.” “The Two Cultures” displayed ignorance “of history, of the nature of civilisation” and of “the human history of the Industrial Revolution” (1962, 10–12). Snow had levelled the charge of Luddism at those whose idea of life involved something more than “material standards of living [ . . . ] and technological progress,” yet to think merely of “external civilisation” was to suffer “life-impoverishment” (19, 25–26).1 The two cultures debate pitted a pair of controversialists—one prone to easy formulations, the other puritanically “slaughterous”—against each other. In spite of the prejudice and special pleading, however, the debate was a touchstone. It raised issues relating to social class, the higher education system, consumer culture, and modernity in general. Even in the 1960s, Snow’s claim that “traditional” (i.e. literary) culture “manages the western world” (1998, 11) was disputed by those who saw ‘crisis’ in the humanities (see Plumb 1964). In the ensuing decades, changes in higher education and society at large did little to stem this perception—and not just on the part of traditional humanists. In The Postmodern Condition, for example, Jean-François Lyotard described the displacement of older grand narratives by scientific micronarratives that served the interests of power rather than those of truth. Lyotard’s account of a technocratic society in which knowledge is “produced in order to be sold” (1984, 4) is as scathing as anything in “Two Cultures?” and more gloomy, for it lacks Leavis’ messianic

Introduction 3 insistence that literature should be “the centre of a university” (1962, 29). According to Stefan Collini, however, Snow’s two cultures thesis has “lost some of its purchase” in recent decades (1998, xliv). We may “fi nd it convenient to go on using terms like ‘the humanities’ and ‘the sciences’” but since there is no general agreement about what constitutes these forms of enquiry it cannot be said that they are fundamentally incompatible (xlv). The rise of academic specialization and interdisciplinary research makes the notion of just two cultures seem increasingly implausible. Moreover, there can be few if any areas in the contemporary Humanities which exhibit the snobbery deplored by Snow, and hardly any literary critics who would (at least in public) embrace Leavis’ sense of literature’s unique status. In one respect, however, Snow’s views were prophetic. In “The Two Cultures: A Second Look” (1964), Snow predicted that advances in molecular biology and the understanding of “the higher nervous system” would “affect the way in which men think of themselves more profoundly than any scientific advance since Darwin’s” (1998, 74–75). Snow could not have known it, but he had just identified the germ of the ‘syndrome syndrome.’ The encounter between Snow and Leavis was a defi ning moment. And yet, as Collini points out, it was merely one battle in a “cultural civil war” (1998, xxxv). In “Literature and Science” (1882), for example, Matthew Arnold responded to T.H. Huxley’s “Science and Culture” (1880) in ways which anticipated (albeit more graciously) Leavis’ reaction to Snow (see Collini 1998, xiv–xv). Romantics versus Utilitarians, Coleridge against Bentham, ancients against moderns, idealists versus materialists: we are dealing here with a longue durée in which responses (both positive and negative) to the democratic and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are inflected by seemingly primordial philosophical differences. Yet, for Collini at least, these differences are not immutable. Advances in biology and physics have raised doubts about the empirical or mechanistic approaches of traditional science. According to Collini, the new science is more open to “the role of imagination, of metaphor and analogy, of category-transforming speculation” (xlviii). Yet, as Collini points out, it would be inaccurate to suggest that movement has only taken place on one side of the divide. In recent decades, historians of science have exposed the cultural assumptions of scientific discourse. And, more importantly for the present volume, the “creative chances” that Snow looked forward to are precisely the ones that have been realized in the phenomenon of the ‘syndrome syndrome.’ That novelists are writing about science is not new: one thinks of Thomas Pynchon and William Vollmann, of Willa Cather and Edgar Allan Poe. Among British writers there is Snow himself and, more notably, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and also (the forerunner of them all) Mary Shelley. Nevertheless, the frequency with which contemporary writers address themes relating specifically to molecular biology and what Snow called the “higher nervous system” deserves further exploration. How should we

4

T.J. Lustig and James Peacock

evaluate this new engagement with neurology? Is it another instance of cultural arrogance—novelists continuing to behave as though literature alone defi nes value? Is the frontier between the two cultures opening up? Is the phenomenon a manifestation of crisis, a belated bid for relevance on the part of an increasingly marginalized body of intellectuals whose subjects— consciousness, identity, the self—have been taken over by scientists? Or is the syndrome syndrome a symptom of something else in the political unconscious—perhaps a biologism whose ideological overtones themselves require critical scrutiny? The essays in this collection offer a variety of answers to these questions, but each of our authors would agree that the relation between contemporary cultural production and science deserves serious and sustained analysis. In the end, however, it is not simply a case of literature staring in bafflement or hostility at science, or vice versa—nor even of the two cultures engaging in dialogue. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, social and political theorists—members of a ‘third’ culture, perhaps—have been thinking about both science and literature. Marx and Engels’ interest in and knowledge of European literature requires no further comment. But, as Sebastiano Timpanaro reminds us, Karl Marx “admired Darwin and wanted to dedicate the second volume of Capital to him” (1975, 41). Friedrich Engels (in, for example, his unfi nished Dialectics of Nature) was “more sensible than Marx of the necessity to [ . . . ] link ‘historical’ materialism [ . . . ] to physical and biological materialism” (32). The “link” between historical and biological materialism is crucial, for Timpanaro’s version of the ‘two cultures’ presents us with two equally disabling idealisms: “modern technocracy,” characterized by an empirical or pragmatic idealism, and a “humanist idealism” which, “subordinated but not destroyed” by twentieth-century technological advances, persists as a compensatory counterbalance to industrial or scientific modernity (31). Timpanaro’s position would not endear him to committed neo-Darwinians: his priority is a “social revolution” to take forward humanity’s longstanding “struggle against nature” (17, 11). An ecological emphasis on “biological evolution” at the expense of the old Marxist themes—the relations of production, the class struggle—would for Timpanaro be “reactionary” (15). And yet, in a renewal both of materialism and of naturalism, Timpanaro argues that the Marxist tradition needs to address the legacy of Darwin and in particular “the relation between nature and society” (10). The key problem, as Timpanaro suggests in a particularly vivid image, is that Marxism is itself vulnerable to the charge it directs at others—that of idealism: The position of the contemporary Marxist seems at times like that of a person living on the fi rst floor of a house, who turns to the tenant of the second floor and says: “You think you’re independent, that you support yourself by yourself? You’re wrong! Your apartment stands only because it is supported on mine, and if mine collapses, yours will

Introduction 5 too;” and on the other hand to the ground-floor tenant: “What are you saying? That you support and condition me? What a wretched illusion! The ground floor exists only in so far as it is the ground floor to the fi rst floor. Or rather, strictly speaking, the real ground floor is the fi rst floor, and your apartment is only a sort of cellar, to which no real existence can be assigned.” (44) Timpanaro is not proposing to reduce the social to the biological but would instead have us acknowledge the way in which the physical and biological world precedes the socio-economic ‘base’ and the cultural ‘superstructure’—not simply chronologically but as an inevitable conditioning force. Timpanaro recognizes not only the contribution of science to an understanding of the relation between “nature and society” but also that of literature. Love, desire, sorrow: these are not simply the individualistic themes of bourgeois literature but are instead representations of a human ‘nature’ which Marxism left “in the shadows” (21). Timpanaro does not show what a Marxist theory of nature would look like. But it is striking that the list of issues which head his agenda—heredity, death and illness—are identical with the concerns of writers who have taken neurological conditions as their subject matter. Such cultural producers might, then, be described as representatives of a new materialism. A number of alternative terms have been suggested: ‘cognitive fiction’ (Tabbi 2002), ‘neurological realism’ (Harris 2008), ‘neuronarrative’ (Johnson 2008) and ‘neuronovel’ (Roth 2009). But (as the critics just mentioned recognize) it is not simply a matter of identifying a theme or proposing a genre, illuminating as this can be. In their explorations of the neurological, and also genetic, factors affecting human existence, contemporary cultural producers are addressing a paradigm shift in our understanding of the world and of ourselves. We have suggested that any exploration of the shape of the ‘two cultures’ debate in the twenty-fi rst century must reach beyond the Snow–Leavis controversy to consider the relation between cultural production and two very different kinds of materialism. But at this point another crucial intersection comes into view. The subjects that Marxism kept “in the shadows” (desire and death, to take the two most obvious examples) are not only the preserve of writers but also of psychoanalysts. To put it another way: Sigmund Freud is as relevant to the ‘syndrome syndrome’ as Darwin or Marx. This being so, an assessment of the neurological turn in recent fiction must consider the ways in which ‘trauma theory’ has enabled, but also limited, our understanding. Any discussion of ‘trauma theory,’ ‘the literature of trauma’ or ‘trauma fiction’ has to proceed from the acknowledgement that the term ‘trauma’ has achieved a bewildering level of coverage in contemporary culture. From the increasingly widespread public awareness of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the wake of the Gulf Wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, to the palpable sense of collective, national trauma engendered by the 2001 attacks on the

6

T.J. Lustig and James Peacock

World Trade Center, the centrality of traumatic experience has perhaps never been more evident. And it is in the arena of popular cultural production that it has assumed the most varied and, in some cases, extreme forms. In his impressively comprehensive book The Trauma Question Roger Luckhurst sees, for example, the “innovations around the traumatic flashback, the narrative mosaic and the temporal loop” in movies such as Memento and 21 Grams as attempts to reproduce the lived experience of trauma, including “memory dysfunction” (Luckhurst 2008, 206). The genre known as ‘torture porn,’ on the other hand, depicts “the demolition of body, memory and self” in an attempt to obliterate traumatic legacies “of burdened history and compromised, damaged selves” (206). Elsewhere Luckhurst discusses other instances of mainstream trauma culture, including the 1990s boom in ‘misery memoir’ and the blurring of public and private boundaries excited in the confessional air of Oprah Winfrey’s chat shows. Such is trauma’s pervasiveness in the public consciousness, and so common the stylized, shorthand representations of traumatic experience in movies such as Christopher Nolan’s Inception and the Bourne trilogy, that it is easy to forget just how contested the idea has been. ‘Trauma’ derives from the Greek word meaning ‘wound,’ and was originally used in medical discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to denote externallyinflicted bodily injuries. The fact that there has been a profound shift in its meaning toward psychic and mental afflictions suggests that precise definitions of the term are as debatable and as historically determined as the mental symptoms to which it has come to refer. Moreover, the theorization of trauma in different fields—psychology, sociology, literary criticism—has always raised issues of disciplinarity which are themselves embroiled in ethical concerns. To theorize and to analyze the effects of trauma in one arena of endeavor is always to enter into debate with practitioners and theorists in other arenas, and to run up against questions of ownership and signification: Who has the right to speak of trauma? Are only the survivors of horrific experiences such as war, genocide or sexual abuse equipped with an adequate vocabulary with which to bear witness to trauma? (A writer such as Kalí Tal would answer this question in the affi rmative, believing that trauma “displaces [the survivor’s] preconceived notions about the world” and radically alters his or her defi nitions of words and experiences [1996, 15].) Can we speak of trauma by proxy, trauma induced by spectatorship of terrible events? And is the cultural theorists’ preoccupation with how trauma affects representation detrimental to an understanding of the everyday, lived experience of trauma sufferers? In the light of such questions, the Freudian model which has dominated trauma theory in the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries has come to be challenged from a number of different directions and in some cases summarily dismissed. Freud’s thinking on the subject, famously articulated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (fi rst published in 1920, soon after

Introduction 7 the end of the First World War), centers on “the compulsion to repeat” experienced by trauma patients through dreams and waking nightmares (2003, 58). Although the return to traumatic episodes would seem to contradict the demands of the pleasure principle, Freud argues that it constitutes an attempt retroactively to master the trauma, to gain control of it by replacing shock or “fright-induced neurosis” (2003, 51) with anticipatory fear, “the absence of which was the cause of the traumatic neurosis in the fi rst place” (2003, 71). The disjunction between shock and retrospection produces a temporal aspect to trauma which has been crucial to the Freud-inspired theories of writers such as Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra. Caruth describes trauma as “a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.” The traumatic moment, is “experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again” (Caruth 1996, 4). Paradox and aporia are therefore dominant figures in Caruth’s work: trauma provokes a crisis in memory, in that it involves attempts to remember that which was fundamentally not known in the fi rst place, and thus crises in history, narrative time and, inevitably, representation. Indeed, memory is not identical to the event being remembered, and must instead be conceived of as a mode of representation. This is a point Freud readily acknowledged, as Roger Luckhurst notes (2008, 12). Though LaCapra invokes similar paradoxes and crises to Caruth, he questions her privileging of literature as a form that “can somehow get at trauma in a manner unavailable to theory,” emphasising the importance of historiography to the exploration of historical trauma (LaCapra 2001, 183). Yet again, the relative status of disciplines appears to be at stake. LaCapra’s arguments are valid ones, but if our concern here is with the literary, then it is appropriate that our examples come from literature. Think of Billy Pilgrim’s tendency to come “unstuck in time” (Vonnegut 1991, 17); Norman Bowker standing in the lake watching the Independence Day fi reworks in a symbolic reimagining of the horrific Vietnam shit field (O’Brien 1990, 152); narrator Pella Marsh’s psychological conversion of her childhood Brooklyn into an alien “landscape of remembrance” where she can mourn her mother (Lethem 1998, 49); and Artie’s vexed efforts to write his father’s recollections of Auschwitz (Spiegelman 2003). All of these fictions, be they inspired by the Second World War (Slaughterhouse-Five), Vietnam (The Things They Carried), personal loss (Girl in Landscape), or the Holocaust (Maus), are characterized by temporal and generic disruption, by instances of traumatic repetition and, crucially, by a meta-reflexive quality resulting from an understanding of trauma as a crisis of representation. This quality is seen most clearly in Vonnegut’s preamble to his “telegraphic schizophrenic” tale (1991, Title Page), which describes his attempts to write a novel about Dresden; in O’Brien’s musings on the challenges of writing “true war stories” (1990, 75) and in the sections of Maus dedicated

8

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to Artie’s agonising over, among other things, the possibility that his depiction of Vladek conforms to the “racist caricature of the miserly old Jew” (2003, 133). One might suggest that even if such metafictional musings are not to every reader’s taste, they at least evince honesty about tackling the representational problems trauma throws up. Yet it is precisely the way trauma literature and theory have been preoccupied with representation that has attracted criticism and, in consequence, partially contributed to a renewed concern with a biology ostensibly less fraught with ethical issues. Wulf Kansteiner complains that the idea of trauma has been hijacked by cultural criticism, divested of the understanding of the very real suffering involved, and turned into the “aestheticised, morally and politically imprecise concept of cultural trauma” (2004, 194). Far too easily, he suggests, traumatic experiences are generalized and mediated so that facile, widespread outpourings of emotion are substituted for the real thing. Theorists such as Caruth, he feels, are partly to blame: “Just because trauma is inevitably a problem of representation in memory and communication does not imply the reverse, i.e. that problems of representation are always partaking in the traumatic” (2004, 205). In lamenting the transformation of September 11—the real event, the trauma-as-experienced—into ‘September 11’—the media construction of the event—Leon Wieseltier makes a similar point about the factitiousness of much cultural trauma (2002, 38). The broadly Freudian model of trauma has been criticized from many other angles, by sociologists, gender theorists and deconstructionists.2 But in the end, criticisms of Freud’s work, his influence on trauma theory, and the trauma industry which has blossomed around it, including those criticisms which seek to ‘biologize’ or ‘medicalize’ traumatic symptoms and thus deprive psychoanalysis of some of its authority (see Young 1995), should not be seen as an absolute discreditation. Rather, they represent a return to an understanding that throughout its history “meanings of trauma have stalled somewhere between the physical and the psychical” (Luckhurst 2008, 3), and thus between the material and the metaphorical. Ironically, Freud’s own metaphor of the mind as a cell breached by traumatic events perfectly anticipates the way in which seemingly incompatible discourses on trauma have come into collision and interpenetrated each other. While the more well-established field of ‘trauma studies’ is likely to remain an important area of inquiry, contributors to this collection do perceive a shift in the territory in recent years, a change, perhaps, in what Raymond Williams would call a “structure of feeling” (1980, 64). Trauma texts such as Girl in Landscape are typically concerned, as we have seen, with individual memory and psychological determinants. Others—and here one might include Slaughterhouse-Five, The Things They Carried and Maus— answer the desire of some critics for a more historicist or social approach by considering individual cases from which one can extrapolate national, generational or ethnic traumas. But syndrome literature posits another more

Introduction 9 material realm of causality: the symptom here is not generated by familial, social or historical experience but by physical experience; that is, our own embodiment. It is just as much a matter of evolution or genetics as it is of sociology or psychology even when, as is the case in novels such as Matt Ruff ’s Set This House in Order and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife (both 2003), neurological disorder and trauma are linked. These shifts are broad, and can be coordinated with others to which we have already alluded. For instance, the apparent decline of Marxism as a system of total interpretation might be linked with the rise of postmodernism and of value-neutral, empirical, scientific-capitalist development. The influence of postmodernism might also do something to explain a feeling that ‘trauma’ has recently become a less compelling topic for writers and critics alike because it carries certain implications about human subjectivity and wholeness which are incompatible with a postmodern take on selves variously described as fractured, plural, elusive, performative or provisional. Recovered memories, traumas overcome or ‘cured’ by catharsis and therapy connote a view of individual sovereignty increasingly open to question. Yet as we have seen, trauma fiction frequently gives rise to distinctly ‘postmodern,’ metafictional practices—fragmented narratives, authorial intrusions, open endings and an underlying assumption that sign and referent will always fail to match up. Again, this provides evidence of a disjunction between sociological or psychoanalytical approaches to trauma, which might at least accept the possibility of cure and wholeness, and cultural approaches to trauma more interested in representational breakdown. Anecdotally speaking, signs of the shift we have identified can be seen in undergraduate class discussions. Twenty years ago, the notion of social or cultural determination tended to take precedence. However, students in the early twenty-fi rst century are much more likely to say that ‘nature’ (in the somewhat limiting formula) is at least as important as ‘nurture.’ So we appear to have returned—or turned—to ‘nature,’ or nature, perhaps, as scientifically understood. We live in, or think we live in, a world ruled by science, and if not by science then by nature—that which science tries to understand. We are not necessarily talking about a new master narrative in the way that these have traditionally been circulated by psychoanalysis and the novel but, to revisit Lyotard’s terms, a series of alternative micronarratives. A reinvigorated embrace of science has altered our general estimates of risk and our sense of how the world works. Of course, it is possible to fi nd extreme and possibly unrepresentative examples of the shift: Richard Dawkins’ rabid attacks on the church and creationism in books such as The God Delusion (2006) constitute the latest, rather unedifying chapter of the Two Cultures debate. And there have been controversial legal cases in which neurological evidence has played a pivotal role: in 2003, Simon Pirela’s death sentence was reduced to life imprisonment because it was proved that “he suffered from aberrations in his frontal lobes, diminishing his ability to function normally” (Aharoni et al 2008, 145).

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Such examples can, of course, generate scepticism. But there is undoubtedly a great deal at stake here, not least whether we still believe in an autonomous subjecthood and a liberal understanding of individual responsibility. And whether or not one privileges literature as a form uniquely equipped to treat such weighty subjects, one can certainly hypothesize that the novel is adjusting its subject matter to a new age. Yet it is also a question of what the formal consequences might be for authors choosing to write syndrome novels. Is linear narrative, faced with the complexities of neurological systems and the ungraspable nature of consciousness, looking increasingly outmoded and more suitable, perhaps, to some kind of Whiggish liberalism? Moreover, evolution is not progressive, it is multiple; it is not about perfectibility, but about adaptation in shifting and multiple contexts. Environment is not a narrative but a complex web of connections and feedback loops. And the self, bound up in any number of complex systems, is largely determined not by its choices or its past, but by the very cells with which it becomes aware (or ceases to be) or by its own conditioning. Increasingly, novelists and literary theorists are ruminating on these issues and questioning how the novel can accurately reflect a complex world.3 Jennifer Fleissner also discusses the implications for the way novels get read: a psychoanalytical approach to textual analysis, she suggests, encourages “hyperbolization of the symptom,” a need to see every word as a symptom of latent meanings (2009, 387). If neurology takes center stage, must we reject the notion of hidden meanings, indeed of deep meaningfulness as necessary or desirable? What if a novel, like certain neurological disorders, produces symptoms which are simply random accidents, the results of faulty wiring and hence in no way truly meaningful? These formal and hermeneutic questions are accompanied by ethical ones. Indeed, the syndrome novel is no less plagued by ethical issues than is trauma fiction. This is particularly true (as a number of the essays in this collection show) when the syndrome is employed as a metaphor for some other condition—late capitalist alienation, for example. Making an illness into a literary metaphor risks denying the reality and the suffering associated with TB or cancer, AIDS or DID. Susan Sontag’s landmark study Illness as Metaphor (1978), which examines Romantic associations of tuberculosis with passion and heightened aesthetic sensibility and contemporary portrayals of cancer as a disease of repressed emotion, argues that “the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking” (1978, 1). The companion essay, AIDS and its Metaphors (1989) examines the dangerous, prejudicial view of AIDS as a consequence of decadence, and therefore as a judgement on certain ways of life. Her arguments continue to have relevance to the contemporary syndrome novel. Finally, there is the question of whether syndrome fiction signals or participates in a recognisable cultural movement. If, as Marco Roth argues, the neurological turn emerges in part from “the exhaustion of ‘the linguistic

Introduction 11 turn’ in the humanities” (Roth, 2009), are we to believe that the syndrome syndrome is one “of a range of uneven, tentative, local shifts” (Hoberek 2007, 241) inviting a reappraisal of postmodernism and its dominance? Is it in fact a symptom of what a number of contributors to this book call the ‘post-postmodern,’ involving a return to the human, to biology and biography, and a concomitant eschewal of postmodern metafictional reflexivity? Or are we witnessing a new post-humanism, where certain kinds of value relocate from their old center in ‘man’ and take up residence in complex systems like the bloodstream or the cosmos or the living environment as representatives of a kind of ‘good,’ an authenticity which is no longer possible for us alone? If this introduction has aimed to provide context and to raise questions about the syndrome syndrome, then the essays that follow enthusiastically set out to answer them. In a significant contribution to the contemporary ‘two cultures’ debate, Patricia Waugh uses the ‘modern’ or ‘partial’ madness of Hamlet to explore responses to the rise of neuroscience on the part of such writers as Jonathan Franzen, Hilary Mantel, Tom McCarthy and Jonathan Coe. Waugh sees these and other contemporary writers as ‘neo-phenomenological’ in the attention they pay to the ‘pre-reflective’ lives of their characters, who often adopt biomedical explanations of their situation rather than seeing their ‘sickness of soul’ as conditioned by social and economic factors. Waugh suggests that the typical mood of the syndrome novel is one of weariness and loss—an entirely different structure of feeling to the manic worlds one fi nds in early Martin Amis, for example, or Bret Easton Ellis. For Waugh, the contemporary syndrome novel attempts to retrieve the self by exploring what gave rise to its loss and in doing so moves beyond both a neuroscientific and a postmodern viewpoint. In order to explore the relationship between postmodernism and the ‘postpostmodern’ in contemporary American literature, Stephen J. Burn distinguishes between first and second generation syndrome novels. Earlier writers such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Tom Robbins produced fictional works which were grounded in developments in scientific understanding, particularly of cognition. In the central section of his essay, Burn demonstrates that, from early works such as Americana (1971) and Great Jones Street (1973) through to more recent novels such as Cosmopolis (2003) and Falling Man (2007), Don DeLillo has looked to cognitive science not simply for the subject matter of his novels but for their deeper ‘architecture.’ The first generation syndrome novel, Burn argues, shares with postmodernism a sense of the self as recursive and displaced, the product of ‘confabulation.’ In second generation syndrome fiction, by contrast—he is thinking of such writers as Nicole Krauss, Jennifer Egan and Joshua Ferris—Burn argues that the insights of neuroscience give way to something more mystical. Post-postmodernism is often associated with a ‘return’ to more traditional narrative techniques and conventional subject matter, but for Burn its ‘metaphysical ache’ for the idea of a soul is more significant.

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Adam Kelly’s essay uses Benjamin Kunkel’s debut novel Indecision (2005) as a case study to explore a number of the issues raised by Burn and Waugh but from a different angle. Kelly suggests that Kunkel and other writers including Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers and Colson Whitehead are attempting to move away from the paralyzing irony and self-consciousness associated with postmodernism towards a “new sincerity” which might again be called “post-postmodern.” But Kelly shows that the postmodern emphasis on irony, dispersal, and selfreflexivity remains present—however ‘sincerely’—in Kunkel’s protagonist, Dwight Wilmerding, and in his ‘abulia’ or chronic indecisiveness syndrome. It would seem that after postmodernism there can be no simple ‘return’ to earlier styles of consciousness. Like Kelly, James Peacock takes a single text and a single syndrome in order to raise further questions about the role of the syndrome in contemporary culture and literature. Peacock’s essay on Motherless Brooklyn (1999) by Jonathan Lethem returns to some classic postmodern preoccupations—notably space and linguistic fragmentation—but suggests that Tourette’s syndrome in Lethem’s work provides a framework for new kinds of historical, referential and metaphorical thinking. Peacock also addresses Susan Sontag’s concern that the reality of particular conditions is obscured by precisely this desire on the part of artists to deploy them as metaphors. A number of contributors, Peacock included, inevitably raise the question of literary genre, partly because postmodernism itself can be seen in terms of aesthetic genre as well as cultural transformation. Brian Baker takes up the issue of genre in his analysis of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife. Demonstrating that a preoccupation with syndromes is not the sole preserve of canonical or ‘high’ literary fiction, Baker argues that in the protagonist’s predicament we see another example of the blurring of the distinction between humanistic and scientific discourses. By internalizing the familiar science fiction motif of time travel and making it a neurological condition that is nonetheless traumatically-induced, Niffenegger’s novel simultaneously displays a commitment to psychoanalytical and neurological models. As an event, September 11, 2001 has been the key recent reference point for discussions of traumatic experience. At the same time, however, it has also been cited in discussions of the post-postmodern and of historical ruptures more generally. Bent Sørensen’s essay discusses work by Don DeLillo and Ken Kalfus, as well as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, significant for its bringing together of neurological and psychological explanations. Sørensen’s main focus is the phenomenon of “trauma by proxy”—further evidence that contemporary representations of trauma have moved beyond a narrowly ontogenetic perspective. For Nick Bentley, both Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog (2003) and Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) can be considered ‘post-9/11’ novels in their

Introduction 13 representations of individual and to some extent wider cultural reactions to violence and trauma. Amis’ depiction of Xan Meo’s regression into predatory, violent and patriarchal forms of masculinity, initiated by a head injury, leads to an exploration of trauma based on psychoanalytical models; McEwan’s depiction of a day in the life of neuroscientist Henry Perowne can instead be seen as an instance of the ‘neurological turn’ in contemporary fiction. However, Bentley argues that both approaches are problematic in their blending of medical discourses and metaphorical uses of traumatic experience and behavior. This metaphorical use, which extends to depictions of the syndrome in other novels, raises the question of the ‘everyman’: to what extent do writers employ characters with neurological or traumatological conditions as representative figures, and what are the ethical implications? Taking up problems of form and content, T.J. Lustig turns to the work of Richard Powers, who has spoken of the ‘two-way traffic’ between such familiar antinomies as art and science, subjective and objective, and public and private. In The Echo Maker (2006) Powers questions traditional oppositions between animal and human in what critics have called a ‘new naturalism.’ At the same time, Powers’ work raises the question of the syndrome as metaphor in, for Lustig, ways which elide the social and political. Joanna Price also focuses on the problematic nature of discourses of trauma and illness. In her discussion of Jenni Diski’s travel narratives, Price explores Diski’s critique of the medicalization of discourse about depression, mental disorders, and syndromes. Rather than the emphasis on the ‘brain’ so characteristic of much recent work on syndromes and psychological disorders, Diski reaffi rms the importance of the ‘mind,’ with its intentions and fantasies, in producing the distinctive personality and identity of the depressive. In fact, the unique subjectivity created by the mind of the person experiencing depression is something which might be cautiously embraced, rather than too readily pathologized with a view to ‘treatment’ or ‘cure.’ In making these points, Price’s essay clarifies the terms of a contemporary ‘two cultures’ debate—one which is pursued in the final two essays of this volume. Martyn Bracewell brings his expertise as a neuroscientist to bear on an analysis of some of the novels examined elsewhere in the volume. As well as providing more detailed neurological explanations for certain disorders and outlining inaccuracies in novelists’ treatments of these conditions, he develops ideas discussed in, for example, Baker’s essay: syndrome as metaphor, the temporal dimension of many neurological conditions. Finally, he makes some fascinating claims about the connection between memory—“the very essence of the human condition”— and trauma. Psychiatrist Lisetta Lovett begins her response to the essays above by highlighting the similarities between psychiatrists and novelists, both of whom possess particular observational skills. Indeed, she views the ‘Two

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Cultures’ divide as a recent aberration, arguing that science and the arts were from classical times very closely linked. Thus the neurological turn, in her view, may represent “a tentative reintegration.” Although she expresses concerns about novelists’ (and literary critics’) preoccupation with the linguistic symptoms of neurological disorders, she argues that novels can be useful as teaching tools because they can provide insights into the lived experience of people with such conditions. In order that the material and ideas discussed here be accessible to the general reader, this volume concludes with three reference resources. The fi rst, compiled by Nicola Brindley, is a bibliography of primary sources, including novels, movies and TV series, concerned with syndromes. Hannah Merry’s bibliography covers critical books, articles and reviews. Finally, the editors present a list of key terms and defi nitions. The essays in this collection—and the bibliographies that follow— reveal the ways in which the syndrome has become a touchstone in contemporary cultural production. This is a state of the field collection that focuses on a particular aspect of contemporary writing and suggests a number of contexts or pathways rather than a single theoretical framework. We have aimed to give a sense of spread—mainstream literary fiction but also popular fiction, autobiographical writing, fi lm and TV. The collection surveys both authors recognized as key such as Don DeLillo and less frequently discussed writers such as Benjamin Kunkel. Finally, though, it should be clear that there is no question of either/or in such a project. Simply opposing mind and brain, trauma and syndrome, psychoanalysis and neurology or science and humanities would only do damage to the cross-disciplinary work which has begun to emerge. At the very least, scientists and writers are beginning to look at each others’ work with renewed interest and understanding. Thus the collaboration between critics and scientists in this volume takes up a challenge identified by Stefan Collini: to encourage “the growth of the intellectual equivalent of bilingualism” (1998, lvii), to move from disciplinary specialism to a “wider cultural conversation” (1998, lvii), and to foster “a public language” for both criticism and science (1998, lxxi). NOTES 1. The best short account of the Snow–Leavis encounter is to be found in Collini’s introduction to Snow’s The Two Cultures. For contemporary responses, see Cornelius and Vincent 1964, Plumb 1964 and Trilling 1966. For more recent appraisals, see Shaffer 1997, Burnett 1999, Labinger and Collins 2001, Clayton 2002, Johnson 2008, Furedi et al. 2009 and Ortolano 2009. 2. See, for example, Masson (1984), who attacks Freud from a gender perspective and Crews (1997), who argues that the craze for recovered memories is a legacy of Freud’s thinking on memory. 3. On the relationship between narrative and environmental, evolutionary, and neurological complexity, see Heise (2002), Tabbi (2002) and Abbott (2008).

Introduction 15 BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbott, H. Porter. 2008. “Narrative and Emergent Behavior.” Poetics Today 29: 227–44. Aharoni, Eyal et al. 2008. “Can Neurological Evidence Help Courts Assess Criminal Responsibility? Lessons from Law and Neuroscience.” Annals of the New York Academy of Science 1124: 145–60. Burnett, D. Graham. 1999. “A View from the Bridge: the Two Cultures Debate, its Legacy, and the History of Science.” Daedalus 128: 193–218. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Clayton, Jay. 2002. “Convergence of the Two Cultures: a Geek’s Guide to Contemporary Literature.” American Literature 74: 807–31. Collini, Stefan. 1998. Introduction to The Two Cultures, by C. P. Snow, vii–lxxi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cornelius, David K., and Edwin St. Vincent, eds. 1964. Cultures in Conflict: Perspectives on the Snow–Leavis Controversy. Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company. Crews, Frederick. 1997. The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute. London: Granta. Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The God Delusion. London: Bantam. Fleissner, Jennifer L. 2009. “Symptomatology and the Novel.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42: 387–92. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings. Translated by John Reddick. London: Penguin. Furedi, Frank, Roger Kimball, Raymond Tallis and Robert Whelan. 2009. From Two Cultures to No Culture: C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” Lecture Fifty Years On. London: Civitas. Harris, Charles B. 2008. “The Story of the Self: The Echo Maker and Neurological Realism.” In Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, edited by Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey, 230–59. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Heise, Ursula K. 2002. “Toxins, Drugs, and Global Systems: Risk and Narrative in the Contemporary Novel.” American Literature 74: 747–78. Hoberek, Andrew. 2007. “Introduction: After Postmodernism.” Twentieth-Century Literature 53: 233–47. Johnson, Gary. 2008. “Consciousness as Content: Neuronarratives and the Redemption of Fiction.” Mosaic 41: 169–84. Kansteiner, Wulf. 2004. “Genealogy of a Category Mistake: a Critical, Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor.” Rethinking History 8: 193–221. Labinger, Jay A., and Harry Collins, eds. 2001. The One Culture? A Conversation about Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leavis, F. R. 1962. Two Cultures: the Significance of C. P. Snow. London: Chatto and Windus. . 1972. “Luddites? Or, There is Only One Culture.” In Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope, 39–74. London: Chatto and Windus. Lethem, Jonathan. 1998. Girl in Landscape. London: Faber and Faber. Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

16 T.J. Lustig and James Peacock Masson, Jeff rey. 1984. The Assault on Truth: Freud and Child Sexual Abuse. London: Fontana. Niffenegger, Audrey. 2003. The Time Traveller’s Wife. O’ Brien, Tim. 1990. The Things They Carried. London: Flamingo. Ortolano, Guy. 2009. The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plumb, J. H., ed. 1964. Crisis in the Humanities. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Roth, Marco. 2009. “The Rise of the Neuronovel.” n+1 8. Accessed November 15, 2011. http://www.nplusonemag.com/rise-neuronovel. Ruff, Matt. 2003. Set This House in Order. New York: Harper Perennial. Shaffer, Elinor S., ed. 1997. The Third Culture: Literature and Science. Berlin: de Gruyter. Snow, C. P. 1998. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. . 1989. AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. . 2004. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Picador. Spiegelman, Art. 2003. The Complete Maus. London: Penguin. Tabbi, Joseph. 2002. Cognitive Fictions. Electronic Mediations, 8. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tal, Kalí. 1996. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge University Press. Timpanaro, Sebastiano. 1975. On Materialism. Translated by Lawrence Garner. London: New Left Books. Trilling, Lionel. 1966. “The Leavis–Snow Controversy.” In Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning, 145–77. London: Secker and Warburg. Vonnegut Jr, Kurt. 1969. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell Publishing. Williams, Raymond. 1980. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth, Penguin. Wieseltier, Leon. 2002. “A Year Later.” New Republic. September 2. 38. Young, Allan. 1995. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

1

The Naturalistic Turn, the Syndrome, and the Rise of the Neo-Phenomenological Novel Patricia Waugh

Hamlet fascinates. For conservatives, he is the jewel in the crown of the Western canon. But even critics on the left see Hamlet as the fi rst literary portrayal of a modern self. Being modern mostly seems to involve turning inward, and this involves thinking—thinking too much, perhaps. Hamlet is the fi rst modern self because in Shakespeare’s reworking of the revenge tradition, conventional obstacles to action are transmuted into thoughts. But those thoughts, the inward ruminations of the melancholic mind reflecting endlessly upon itself, are also the source of Hamlet’s undoing. Thinking too much makes you sick. The modernity of Hamlet’s subjectivity seems inextricably bound to the question of his madness. The old chestnut of literary criticism—is he or isn’t he mad?—continues to haunt us. Is Hamlet’s antic disposition the sign of genuine unreason or a strategic and perfectly rational disguise? Or is it rather a strategy for coping with a devastating absence? In this interpretation, Hamlet mimics the flamboyant gestures of the stereotypical madman in order to conceal a deeper but ‘partial’ madness. He may be mad, but not in the way others think he is mad. Hamlet fascinates because his is a very modern madness. “Psychology can never tell the truth about madness because it is madness that holds the truth of psychology:” so Michel Foucault asserts in Madness: the Invention of an Idea (2011, 73). The book was written in the early 1950s when Foucault was working in psychiatric hospitals and observing the rise of neuro-surgery and psychopharmacology. He witnessed the beginning of a ‘naturalistic’ turn that would reshape understandings of mental health in the era of the syndrome. Psychology invented ever more ingenious ‘personality’ tests and statistical measurements of human behavior in order to fit the postwar population to the new rigors of welfare capitalist corporate life. Behaviorism was supplanted by computational models of mind. NeoDarwinist assumptions of hard-wired modules and evolutionarily honed ‘distal’ mechanisms displaced the idea of consciousness as self-reflection— the model of the mind for which Hamlet stands as the literary exemplar. New psychotropic drugs gave further credence to the idea of the mind as simply the neuro-transmissions of the brain. At an early point during this naturalistic turn in the cognitive sciences, the fi rst edition of the Diagnostic

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and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–I)—the fi rst systematic diagnostic manual of psychiatry—was published. The mind was well on its way to medicalization (see Andreasen 1984, Aronowitz 1998, Morris 1998, Luhrmann 2000, Horowitz 2002 and Lane 2007). During this transition from earlier dynamic psychologies of mental illness to the biomedical syndrome, a hugely influential essay, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” was published. David Rosenhan tested R. D. Laing’s claim that psychiatry was in a state of diagnostic chaos by sending eight individuals to different psychiatric hospitals, each claiming to be hearing a voice repeating particular words like ‘thud.’ Diagnoses were largely, though not entirely, of schizophrenia, with a bizarre variety of ‘co-morbid’ states being subsequently reported: one ‘patient,’ observed queuing a few minutes early for the hospital canteen, was reported to be suffering from ‘oral acquisitiveness syndrome;’ another, jotting down ideas in a notebook, was diagnosed with ‘obsessional writing syndrome’ (see Rosenhan 1973). On exposure of the hoax, the American Psychiatric Association initiated a program to collect data on mental illness which resulted in DSM–III. In 1980, then, the Age of the Syndrome began. Some twenty years later, the psychologist Stephen Pinker announced that cognitive neuroscience “will not shrink from applying its new tools to every aspect of mind and behavior” (2002, 135). The neuroscientific literature underpinning much of the thinking behind the rise of the syndrome offers an understanding of mental disorder which not only somatizes but also molecularizes the self. Mental illnesses are diseases of the brain or central nervous system conceived as evolutionarily wired into localized and dedicated functional modules. These modules signal to each other via dendritic and axonal interconnections through chemical and electrical transmission. The ‘self’ is reduced to a material property of the brain and can still further be reduced to neural networks, modules, neurotransmitters and genes (see Dennett 1993, Calvin 1997, Wilson 2004, Rose 2005). But this phantom objectivity naturalizes (in the Marxist sense) what is actually constructed: it exhibits what Alfred North Whitehead called the fallacy of “misplaced concreteness” (1997, 51). In 1890, William James, the American philosopher who also trained in medicine, cautioned against medical materialism and the positivist insistence on the separation of fact and value: “there is no purely objective standard of sound health [ . . . ] we should broaden our notion of health instead of narrowing it” (1950, II: 545). In our own time, the syndrome has been naturalized (in the Marxist and scientific sense) through neurobiological materialism. The teenager at odds with the world now learns the mantra that ‘it’s not me, but my ADHD’; the distinguished professor struggling with constant performance monitoring now prefers to blame ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’ rather than neo-corporate late capitalism. All of us reach for the phantom ‘object’—material or social—to explain our sicknesses of soul. And this is especially true when the theorists, philosophers, and self-help books seem bent on persuading us that the idea of ‘my self’ is an outmoded metaphysical

The Naturalistic Turn 19 entity (see Kenny 1988). ‘I’ am instead simply a body extended into a nervous system that helps me survive through the illusion of a self; I am, in effect, wired up like a computer, and when I go wrong it is for mechanical reasons, just as a computer goes wrong. Looking for alternatives to this bleak picture, we fi nd psychosocial medicine approaching mental illness as socially constructed within norms of behavior that determine available possibilities. Such studies include Thomas Szasz-style denials of the very existence of mental illness, but also more nuanced ‘bio-cultural’ accounts by philosophers and historians who argue that suffering produces observable changes in individuals and is disseminated through social (as opposed to neurological) mechanisms (see Shorter 1997, Hacking 1998). The distress that appears as anorexia in one culture may present as abdominal pain in another. Ian Hacking describes an outbreak of the dissociative disorder of fugue amongst lower-middle-class clerks in late nineteenth-century France. He argues that the appearance of a disorder taking this form and restricted to this group was created through class precariousness and professional boredom. Such feelings found expression in an “ecological niche” shaped by the culture’s fascination with travel as a sign of leisure, and its fear of that other, more commonly encountered traveler, the mad vagrant (Hacking 1998, 1 and passim). For Hacking, fugue is a ‘real’ illness which arises out of class (and gender) positioning at a particular historical moment and geographical place. There is no gene propelling us to wander unknowingly. But such accounts are unheard of in biomedicine. Biologization encourages abandonment of even a basic distinction between ‘organic’ (somatic) and ‘functional’ (mentally induced) disorders. Just as the self is somatized and molecularized, so more and more of everyday life is medicalized. Though Eric Kandel introduced the idea of neural plasticity and offered a more sophisticated epigenetic argument that recognized the significance of cultural influences on gene expression, he also optimistically predicted that, as “biology begins to change the nature of psychiatry,” the latter field would become a “more scientifically rigorous medical discipline” (1998, 467). Genes are deep in our culture, but the breadth of human experience is scarcely represented in the ever-increasing number of symptom clusters lining up for inclusion as syndromes under the neurobiological umbrella. DSM–V, still under construction but available online, lists almost five hundred. The prospect of successful pharmaceutical treatment of chronic or ineradicable symptoms may be a factor here, particularly in a culture for which the pursuit of health has become equivalent to the Platonic good. Stigma too may play a role, for if we accept that we can be held morally responsible for our ‘mental’ choices, there is no such responsibility if we imagine that genes determine our brain chemistry and therefore behavior. Most of all, perhaps, in a secular age, the syndrome provides hope for a way out of what Kierkegaard calls “the sickness unto death,” the ever present anxiety that accompanies the condition of mortality and is sometimes referred to as ‘shit life syndrome.’

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The transition from madness to mental disorder in bio-psychiatry and the concomitant neurobiologization of the mind has fascinated contemporary novelists. Some claim to have rejected postmodernism and its mantra of uncertainty. But the rise of postmodernism overlapped with that of the “evolutionary epic,” E. O. Wilson’s term for scientific approaches which reductively insisted that human behavior and culture was biologically determined (1978, 201). It might seem, then, that swallowing the pill of neurobiology would be the quickest way to reject postmodern uncertainty. But those who reject postmodernism often blame cognitive science and neo-Darwinianism for the decline of a humanist conception of interiority. Indeed, there are valid grounds for suspicion. As the naturalistic turn gathered momentum, a hermeneutic sense of selfhood as a complex and dynamic reframing of experience was left behind. The new paradigm (most influentially articulated by Dennett [1995]) had no need for the idea of intentionality or agency. If Hamlet is taken to be emblematic of modern consciousness as the capacity for self-conscious introspection, postmodernist self-reflexivity seems—like the naturalistic account of behavior—to have no need of mind, authorship or selfhood. If Hamlet suffers from the disease of doubt, of a characteristically modern hyper-reflexivity, the postmodern might, following Fredric Jameson, be encapsulated as a new “pathology of auto-referentiality,” of not thinking at all (1991, 392). Few writers of fiction have been as postmodern as that and few have seen science as the way out of the postmodern. In fact, Jonathan Franzen suggests that his “recovery” from postmodernism involved quelling the “amateur scientist” in himself (2004, 10). But everyone seems to agree that postmodernism is over. Zadie Smith pronounced it dead in 2009: “the American metafiction that stood in opposition to realism has been relegated to a safe corner of literary history” (73). As early as 1993, David Foster Wallace suggested that the “linguistic self-consciousness” of metafiction “gets empty and solipsistic real fast.” For Wallace, fiction is “about what it is to be a fucking human being”; half the job of the novelist is to “dramatize the fact that we still ‘are’ human beings” (1993, 143). Yet the obituaries for postmodernism had hardly been written when the arrival of cognitive neuroscience was loudly proclaimed. After the molecular biology revolution, as the social theorist Nikolas Rose puts it, “things will not be the same again” (2007, 5). According to Rose, “the deep psychological space that opened in the twentieth century has flattened out”: life is now best understood “at the molecular level” (192). Writing on the neurobiological turn, the novelist Marilyn Robinson takes a more nuanced view: for her, claims of “epochal change” are rhetorical displays of discursive power (see 2010, 3–4). The apocalyptic fervor of early cognitive science and postmodernism seems to have faded. The contemporary novel shows a continuing preoccupation with what it feels like to live in a biomedicalized, neo-corporate, late capitalist, post-postmodern culture and with the relations between the economic and the neurobiological as they play out in the psychopathologies of

The Naturalistic Turn 21 contemporary everyday life. But the pathologies have changed. The manic addictions, obsessions and anxieties of the postmodern 1980s captured in Martin Amis’ Money (1984) or Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991) have been replaced by a sense of what the sociologist Alain Ehrenberger calls “the weariness of the self” (2010). We are somehow back to Hamlet. The sobriety of titles such as The Corrections (2001), Remainder (2005) or The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010) reflects a continuing preoccupation with the self after postmodernism and the naturalistic turn. But the mania has gone. These are primarily novels about loss, inadequacy, and weariness in which the dominant mood is depressive (though sometimes comic-depressive) rather than apocalyptic, manic or addictive. In the current cross-disciplinary quest to recover from what Raymond Tallis calls “neuromania” and “Darwinitis” as well as from postmodernism, there seems to be a renewed interest in retrieving the self through examining those processes and structures of feeling that give rise to its loss, as in conditions of mental disturbance and depression (2011). After postmodernism, there is an acute awareness that language plays a crucial role in this process. Madness is demotically referred to as being ‘off one’s head’ or ‘out of one’s mind.’ Mind is conceived here as supra-bodily space. In ‘shattered’ or ‘frayed nerves,’ however, the suggestion is of something material. Either way, words make a difference to how we understand ourselves; metaphors are abridgments of metaphysics; and the novel is the perfect place to explore what it is like to live in a biomedicalized world. Franzen writes of his journey from postmodernism, through neuro-flirtation, to a sense that fiction recovers “the soul-like aspects of the self,” showing that we are “more than our biologies” (2004, 33). In its self-reflexive, masterfully comic anatomy of a culture obsessed with its own biological life and neglectful of its soul, The Corrections describes the results of this journey. In his 2004 essay “Why Bother?” Franzen writes of that earlier incarnation of himself who, feeling that his culture offered him a choice between “being sick or healthy,” chose to become depressed: “if that flattening of possibilities is what’s depressing you,” he comments, “you’re inclined to resist . . . by calling yourself depressed” (72). Franzen’s former self is reincarnated in the novel as the Lamberts’ son Chip, politically correct intellectual manqué, who is as obsessed with the pursuit of sex as he is with his lack of money, and who pronounces on the biomedical condition of his culture by observing that “the very defi nition of ‘mental health’ is the ability to participate in the consumer economy” (2001, 36). Chip’s brother Gary, the neo-corporate man, resident of executive commuter-belt country, is similarly in a constant state of self-monitoring and socially mimetic self-fashioning. Through Gary, Franzen revisits the “amateur scientist,” giving us a satirical portrait of an individual who constantly tracks his neurochemistry, checks the neural correlates of every slump in mood or spring in step, and is terrified that his performance as the confident corporate executive, the happy bourgeois husband and family man, might fall short. Wearing a post-Fordist mask of

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smiling neutrality, Gary throws himself into the urban pastoral of his Iron John role as the spearer and searer of exotic barbecue meats. Despite this constant monitoring of bodily signs, however, Gary cannot acknowledge his inability to fi nd pleasure and meaning in life. The urban pastoral palls, and instead of browning meat on the barbecue he sees the “eternal broiling, broiling of the damned. The parching torments of compulsive repetition” (189). Feeling here becomes perception though not self-knowledge, for the language of DSM–IV has intervened: Gary’s “weariness” involves “the deficit of every friendly neurofactor” (263). Misery is neurological “deficit,” a cause and not the effect of his condition. Franzen depicts a culture mired in a depressive free-fall from which the only exits are money or bio-science—the disease pursued as cure. Despite constant self-surveillance, everyone is hidden to themselves, in anosognosic flight from spiritual weariness. A neuro-maniacal obsession with the body and the brain, with the discourse of physical health and self-fulfilment, presents self-reflexivity, not as a route to cure, but as part of the sickness. Franzen moves from the comically postmodern to an estrangement from postmodernism’s own estrangement by revealing how the affective selfestrangement infecting all of his characters is a restitution strategy, an attempt to name and contain a pervasive mood of weariness that colors the entire world. The Corrections opens with one of the most brilliant portrayals of Kierkegaardian angst in contemporary fiction as a cold front creeps over the “gerontocratic” suburbs of St Jude and an “alarm bell of anxiety” rings in the heads of Alfred and Enid, the ageing parents of Gary and Chip (3). It is as if Franzen sets out to extrapolate The Sickness Unto Death into life in the contemporary US. Kierkegaard wrote that there is “not one single living human being who is completely healthy” and “not one single living human being who does not despair a little” (1980, 22). And in Franzen’s novel, “despair” looms in empty hours that are a “sinus in which infections bred,” in the “metasound” of consciousness, which hears its own alarm bell of anxiety resounding through the world outside (4). Franzen creates a pre-reflective existential1 underworld which runs throughout the novel and intermittently explodes into melodramatic display in bizarre set-pieces (most memorably in the scene with Alfred and the talking turds). Alfred is lost in the ruminative labyrinth of his mind, but the source of his anxiety is the absence of an affective anchor in the world, an absence that is projected onto the world around him. A man brought up to regard feeling as self-indulgent, Alfred’s anxiety is not felt in his body: it is a feeling that takes over everything in his world. Suffering from a degenerative neurological condition, Alfred’s growing sense of dissociation from his ailing body leaves him with the feeling that he does not inhabit that either: his shaking hands become alien objects that he longs to chop off (see 77). A sense of affective blankness is the dominant mood in much recent fiction. Jonathan Coe’s The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim presents a protagonist suffering from a condition diagnosed as a depressive syndrome but

The Naturalistic Turn 23 one which again presents, not as felt sadness, but only as a somatic weariness “weighing down my spine, cutting off my freedom of movement” in an ultra-connected world of mobile phones, social networking, satellite navigation and text messaging—the neo-corporate world in its lower reaches (30). Madness is traditionally conceived of as a loss of ownership of the self, a loss of agency in relation to thoughts and feelings. In the phenomenological terms of Kierkegaard, however—and in those of syndrome fiction—the key experience is of an estrangement in which the body seems beyond the control of thinking, seems to have interposed itself as an object between oneself and the world or to have been dissociated from the thinking self so thoroughly that the self experiences itself as disembodied, outside itself and looking in. This is certainly Sim’s experience and Coe, like Franzen, presents it largely through a phenomenological lens which preserves the pre-reflective in all its painful contradictoriness but also ironically exposes the social, political and economic roots of Sim’s malaise. Alfred Lambert and Maxwell Sim both suffer hidden and quiet madnesses that reflect the unreason of their culture. We see a more exuberant treatment of a similar condition in Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black (2005). Alison, the protagonist, is a ‘sensitive,’ an artiste soothsayer capitalizing on the lucrative market in housewifely depression that is opening up across the commuter hinterlands of the London orbital. Existentialist techniques are again in evidence as the new breed of professionalized mediums and therapists, with their business cards and service plans, ply their simples for the sick contemporary soul. Alison needs her ‘profession’ to face her own ghosts. But egged on by her partner Colette, a trained events manager, she is encouraged to Aim Higher and Think Big. She buys a new build on an info-tech estate that Colette sees as a pension pot in a world that is unremittingly future. But staring into the foundations of the unbuilt house, gifted with what she refers to as ‘hearsight,’ Alison hear-sees much more, in particular the playing back of her own dissociated feelings of terror from the childhood rape that has disappeared from her explicit memory. Unaware of the violations perpetrated on her own body, Alison gazes at the violated earth: she sensed the underscape, shuddering as it waited to be ripped. Builders’ machines stood ready, their maws crusted with soil, waiting for Monday morning. Violence hung in the air, like the smell of explosive. Birds had flown. Foxes had abandoned their lairs. The bones of mice and voles were mulched into mud, and . . . through the soles of her shoes she felt gashed worms turning, twisting and repairing themselves. (218) All these novels use existentialist techniques to represent mental distress and disorder; all of them reach beyond postmodern self-reflexivity and neurological reductionism. Franzen, Coe and Mantel recognize, or at least intuit, that the power of fiction is not simply a story-telling one,

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but a world-creating capacity to convey what it feels like to be alive. This activity can, as I have suggested, be thought of as phenomenology. To the extent that the novel creates a pre-reflective place which positions embodied minds in imaginary worlds and confers on them depth and thickness, we might think of it as the practical counterpart to theoretical phenomenology. From Miguel Cervantes to Karl Jaspers, both discourses cut their teeth trying to understand madness. In the contemporary syndrome novel the literary and phenomenological join forces in the attempt to understand suffering in the biomedical age. Neuroscience dominates contemporary psychology but, with its interest in the body and structures of feeling, perception, memory and imagination, phenomenology is currently undergoing a significant revival in philosophy (see Bruner 1986, Ratcliffe 2008, Gallagher and Zahavi 2008). In the novel, the turn from madness to the syndrome seems also to have prompted a search for new techniques to embody feeling, perception, memory, and imagination. Equipped with a post-postmodern awareness of the socially constructed and the linguistically mediated, this phenomenological turn has produced some of the most interesting recent fiction. Less fl amboyant than fi rst wave postmodernism, such writing tends to be given awkward labels like hysterical, paranoid, anxious, or hyper-reflective realism. But it is part of a project to rescue the singularity of human experience from phantom objectivity, to understand the intersubjective processes that constitute our sense of self-presence or loss of it. The connection between contemporary fiction and phenomenology has an often overlooked prehistory, for existentialist insights characterized many of the most compelling novels of the 1940s and 1950s, studies of madness, obsession, delusion and depression by such writers as A.L. Barker, Henry Green, Rex Warner, Kingsley Amis, William Golding, Alan Sillitoe and William Sansom. What is crucial in this writing is the phenomenological recognition that feeling is not necessarily felt; that it can be experienced as an attribute of the world. In The Psychology of the Imagination, JeanPaul Sartre argues that feeling presents itself as a “species of knowledge” for it “projects a certain tonality on the object” (1972, 77). In Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, he underlines the point: “emotion is a specific manner of apprehending a world [ . . . ] It is not necessary that the subject [ . . . ] should turn back upon himself and interpose a reflective consciousness” (2001, 34–36). In Nausea (1938), one of the more distant precursors of the syndrome novel, we discover that Roquentin’s nausea is a quality of his world. In another such precursor, Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942), we see again that characteristic loss of a tacit sense of self-presence. This mode of disconnection in its blank, or hyper-reflexive, or comically disjunctive form—one might also mention Franz Kafka, Robert Musil and Samuel Beckett—has been a major orientation of twentieth century literary fiction, of course. But this is hardly surprising, for fiction, as we have seen, is the perfect vehicle for conveying the pre-reflexive and anognosic characteristics

The Naturalistic Turn 25 of complex mental states like depression: it is not I who am weary, stale and flat, but the world in which I fi nd myself. Phenomenology seeks to understand feelings, perceptions, and beliefs as meaningful entities involved in experiences of mental distress; literary novels embody such experiences in imaginary worlds. I propose to call this concatenation of the phenomenological and the postmodern the ‘neo-phenomenological.’ But is there really such an entity as the ‘syndrome novel’ or is this simply a useful way of indicating contemporary fiction’s interest in neurological disorders and science more generally? The very idea of setting up a subgenre might be seen as a symptom of the ‘syndrome syndrome,’ but it also suggests how syndromic thinking is present in the organization of all disciplinary thinking and can be pernicious in its effects. The syndrome arose because, in an age of rapidly progressing biomedicine, the discipline of psychiatry, founded on therapeutic practices rather than hard science, sensed its vulnerability. Perhaps, then, we should not be too ‘scientific’ in defi ning the syndrome novel. Neither the syndrome nor the syndrome novel is a natural category. But there is evidently a substantial body of novels preoccupied with the biologization of the self and the medicalization of the mind. Some operate with specific disorders and some do not. Those that do usually involve neurological specialists and explore the construction of a dialectics of health and sickness. They show ‘cases’ to be more than a collection of symptoms. They often deal in the psychiatrically or neurologically exotic—in Capgras syndrome or de Clérambault’s syndrome—in the style of Oliver Sacks’ travels into the bizarre worlds of neurologically affl icted patients (see Sacks 1970). Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker (2006) invents a neurologist modeled on Sacks whose doubts concerning the ethics of writing about neurological suffering may echo Powers’ own attempt to answer similar accusations about his own travels in this newest of postcolonial orients. Powers and Ian McEwan are the doyens of the neuroscientific ‘two cultures’ novel and, though both are often accused of science envy, the emphasis in their fiction is also phenomenological, albeit with an additional postmodern sense of the close relation between the fashioning of fictional worlds and the delusions we all engage in unknowingly when holes open up in the fabric of the real. For both McEwan and Powers recognize that naming a syndrome and so appearing to make it ‘objective’ puts up an invisible barrier of ‘science’ around suffering, a barrier that, were it to fall, might expose the holes in the world of the therapist, opening up the potential for his or her own misrecognition or misidentification. This is precisely the effect of Jed Parry, the sufferer from de Clérambault’s syndrome, on the rationalist popular science writer Joe in McEwan’s Enduring Love (1997). Other writers prefer to engage with bio-political themes, though again with a formal orientation that tends more to the phenomenological than the postmodern. They range from the anatomy of the Nazi bio-politics of race and of the mass dissociation disorder that underpinned it in Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow (1991)

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to the bio-politics of life itself in a culture of biological enhancement in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). I have suggested that syndrome novels make use of neo-phenomenological insights at a formal level. One aspect of this is the distinctive use of voice. Particularly relevant here is Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005), which uses a dissociated, affectively flattened narrator with a digital range of feeling: on or off, neutral or tingling. A brain injury has left the (unnamed) narrator with £8.5 million in compensation but deprived him of any emotional nuance or feeling of the real: “I felt neutral. I’d been told the Settlement would put me back together, kick-start my new life, but I didn’t feel any different [ . . . ] I looked around me at the sky: it was neutral too—a neutral spring day, sunny but not bright, neither cold nor warm” (8). He experiences a disconnection of mind from body so Cartesian that every movement has to be relearned intentionally. The world and the body are presented as if always under, and an object for, scientific analysis: “Everything was like this. Everything, each movement: I had to learn them all. I had to understand how they work fi rst, break them down . . . then execute them” (21). The voice here is a phenomenological vehicle for the indictment of a world driven by social mimesis, managed and collated, a simulation of the real. It also reveals the impoverishment of a scientific, quantitative and mechanical understanding of that world. In Remainder the loss of bodily and affective attunement to the world produces a hyper-reflexive disconnection after which everything has to be built from scratch and nothing feels real. These experiences and the techniques McCarthy uses to render them are characteristic of neo-phenomenology. As in Franzen, the experience of living in a neurally and socially networked world is presented through a blankly wearied, dissociated mood that is labeled and lived as a neuro-psychiatric condition. Performance is all, and weariness, the weariness of the self, has long set in. A Beckettian akrasia is now represented by the protagonist to himself as a circuit-disconnect between wiring and neuro-transmission in the brain, and wiring and neuro-transmission to the muscles of the body and to the wirings and networks of the outside world. The pre-reflexive has almost entirely been replaced by event management; the orchestrated confabulation of the ‘real’ as memory, dream, and perception. This new neural subject belongs to neo-corporate late capitalism, with its complex management of the real, its interconnected flows and networks, its flexibility and last minute delivery, its event production and performance monitoring—the mandatory scripting of experience. Remainder is Money updated for the new millennium, then: hypermanic late capitalism has given way to neo-corporate control and production in a culture where everything is interconnected from the brain to the global economy. A key feature shared by syndrome novels is the presentation of a complex cultural condition through attention to individual phenomenologies of perception and feeling refracted through a linguistically and formally self-

The Naturalistic Turn 27 reflexive frame. This is the distinctive mode of an attempt to restore what has been lost through the exposure of the processes that have led to that loss. The syndrome novel thus takes its place in a long literary tradition of writing that overturns normative distinctions between sickness and health, reason and madness. I have suggested that in this, modern and contemporary fiction shows a strong affinity with phenomenological philosophy, which developed over the same period and was also interested in mental illness. Perhaps, as Foucault suggested for psychology, madness holds the truth of the self for modern literature. Madness certainly seems to go hand in hand with fiction. But does the notion of a neo-phenomenological turn shed light on earlier literature of estrangement, and mental disorder? I return to Hamlet. What is the consequence of choosing or being given a name or diagnostic label? Does it matter whether one’s misery is called ‘madness’ or ‘shyness,’ ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘social phobia disorder’? Let us try a thought experiment and subject Hamlet’s madness to the ‘two cultures’ approach we fi nd in novels like The Echo Maker and Saturday (2005). We know the state of play with regard to psychoanalysis: once at the heart of clinical psychiatry, it now appears to its biomedical successor—like a cigarette to an ex-smoker—as the despised reminder of a former way of life. The neurobiological revolution ousted Freud from the clinic, replaced his dynamic model of repressed confl ict with the statistical, pharmaceutical and biotechnical diagnostic tools of the syndrome. Archaic and mythopoeic rather than modern and neuroscientific, psychoanalysis no longer straddled the two cultures like a colossus. Around 1980, it was unceremoniously tipped over to the side of literature and humanism. And yet, as Julia Kristeva reminds us, psychoanalysis “defends us from biological fatalism” (1995, 4). The key difference between the humanistic or psychoanalytic approach to mental disorder and the biomedical is that, in the former, the symptom is not regarded as a natural sign but as the symbolic expression of a repressed conflict. In this view, mental illnesses cannot be reduced to constellations of symptoms. Symptoms are unique expressions of particular life experiences for which the case study is the appropriate mode of diagnosis. By 1994, however, when DSM–IV was published, neurosis (like the medieval limbo) had been removed from the authorized version. The psychiatric symptom was a natural sign; the mind had become indistinguishable from the brain. There is a well-established psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet—after all, the explanation for Hamlet’s madness is the crux of Freudian analysis. The reading goes something like this. Hamlet’s inability to avenge the murder of his father and his evident fascination with his mother represents the first fully elaborated illustration of the Oedipus complex in Western literature. Hamlet is inhibited in action because his uncle Claudius has done the thing he most desired to do: not by seizing the crown but by taking sexual possession of the mother. For Hamlet to kill Claudius, therefore, would be to

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destroy the deepest sources of his own wish-fulfillment. Hamlet’s confl ict cannot be resolved; he commits suicide. But what happens when we look at the case through the lens of DSM–V? A susceptible young man fi nds himself in a difficult home situation and at risk. He is evidently suffering from a borderline personality disorder, indicated by compulsive behavior, attention issues, an incipient eating disorder, and self-harming tendencies. He has recently experienced psychotic episodes involving visual and auditory hallucinations—clear evidence of a delusional disorder. There are accompanying identity issues around unresolved sexuality and a possibly co-morbid masked depressive syndrome suggestive of serotonin deficiency. These may have been exacerbated by bereavement. The condition is further marked by symptoms of profound social phobia and a social communication spectrum disorder leading to intermittent rage that suggests oppositional defiant disorder, almost certainly indicating disturbed levels of dopamine. Psychoanalysis, like literary criticism, reads the human mind as an overdetermined and symbolically complex text; the biomedical model reads the symptom as a natural sign of a material illness. For many in literary studies, psychoanalysis offers an alternative to an absurd biologism which puts chemistry and not conflict at the heart of being human. If DSM–III adopted the neurobiological model of disorder and laid to rest the humanist self, it is time for psychoanalysis to bring the latter back to life. And yet, although the two readings of Hamlet look completely different, they share a number of crucial assumptions: recourse to the idea of universal mechanisms to explain behavior; the tendency to adopt a bounded view of mind as ‘in the head’ rather than a more distributed view of the mind as embodied and extended into the world of objects and people; and, perhaps most importantly, a tendency to defi ne and classify subjects or cases. In both psychoanalysis and neuroscience what purports to be ‘scientific’ is what postmodernists would call a ‘text.’ So what’s in a name: Oedipus complex or oppositional defiant disorder? Is the self that names itself with the fi rst label radically different from the one that thinks with the second? As humans name their condition, they become what they name: the placebo effect of nomenclature is at the reflexive heart of the postmodern and now in the pronouncements of biomedical psychiatry. The urge to diagnose, and the proliferation of syndrome diagnoses, is itself a major symptom of the modern disease of doubt. But it also reflects a postmodern uncertainty which suspects that what it names is its own invention. As the five hundred syndromes now lining up for inclusion in DSM–V suggest, the career of the psychiatric syndrome is doomed to endless recursivity. Naming a human condition changes the thing it names and gives rise to an entirely new thing: the self is re-shaped as it names itself and is therefore always in excess of its naming. Nowhere is this truer than in psychiatric medicine, despite its materialist pretensions. If I name my liver sclerotic, it is unlikely to change in response to the act of naming. If I name myself as suffering from a depressive syndrome, however, I change what I name in the very act

The Naturalistic Turn 29 of naming. Living in a culture in which neuroscientific and psychoanalytic explanations appear exclusive, it is hardly surprising that, as Ian Hacking puts it, “we are profoundly confused about an entire group of mental disorders, feeling that their symptoms are both nurtured and natural, both moral and neurobiological” (1998, 8). I have argued that acts of naming forever change the experience and nature of what is named. Mary Douglas was the fi rst anthropologist to connect such tendencies to the rise of expert cultures and to modernity’s obsession with cataloguing: “First the people are tempted out of their niches by new possibilities of exercising or evading control. They make new kinds of institutions, and the institutions make new labels, and the label makes new kinds of people” (1986, 108). Syndromes begin with statistical modelling of clusters of ‘symptoms,’ but in a situation where ‘disorder’ itself must fi rst be named in order to be observed and counted, the syndrome is always a materialization of the hypothetical. We represent to intervene and we intervene in a representation that is partly of our own making (see Hacking 1983, 31). Science may eventually acknowledge the ‘bio-cultural.’ So far, however, this has been unusual in psychiatry and almost unknown in neuroscience. The relative lack of attention paid to phenomenology in literary studies deserves explanation. With its attention to the signifier, psychoanalysis better suited the preoccupations of postmodern theory. Phenomenology was repudiated—by Paul de Man and poststructuralism more generally— because of its commitment to ‘presence,’ the pre-reflective and the tacit. But the love affair with psychoanalysis in literary studies is always a turbulent threesome—criticism, psychoanalysis, and the text. Literary critics may be drawn to psychoanalysis because it suggests ways to do things to texts. Novelists generally prefer to invent their worlds and not borrow others. Unlike psychoanalysis, though, phenomenology—like literary creation— interposes no substantive dogma between the writer, the critic, and the text. There is no Oedipus complex, no castration complex, not even an unconscious to wrestle into words. For the writer and the phenomenologist, perception is style. I have argued that the role of phenomenological thinking in literary studies has been neglected. The same is true of psychiatry. Early in the twentieth century, psychiatrists such as Karl Jaspers, Ludwig Biswanger, Eugen Bleuler and Mieczyslaw Minkowski began to turn to the work of Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl for a more nuanced description of human experience. They fashioned a view of mental illness as an often hidden or disguised upheaval in the self which might only be glimpsed under the cover of a more pallid simulation. “In my world I am omnipotent, in yours I practice diplomacy,” as Manfred Bleuler was told by one of his patients (1978, 490). For Gaëtan de Clérambault (the author of the syndrome revisited in Enduring Love), such complex madnesses express themselves not in the florid raving familiar from sensation literature, but in the “silences that

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are the hallmark of delusion” (quoted in Leader 2011, 13). Eugen Bleuler noted the lack of any sense of contradiction in the patient who is convinced that he is the Holy Roman Emperor yet content to scrub the floor or the patient who believes his food is poisoned but never fails to fi nish his meal. Such experiences involve a kind of shadow or parallel world that, while it drains away the feeling of the real in the primary world, similarly lacks existential fullness for the patient. Eugen Bleuler coined the term “doublebook keeping” to describe this dual experience of derealization and felt absence of selfhood (1950, 126). Indeed, Foucault draws on this account in his early work, referring to “a silent invasion from within, a secret gap in the earth” (2011, 126–27). From a phenomenological perspective, delusion is not a consequence of faulty reality testing: it is a mood, a conviction that may be impossible to relinquish, “a transformation,” as Jaspers put it, “in our total awareness of reality” (1962, 94). There is something postmodern, as well as modern, about this kind of madness. It remained unrecognized in what became the dominant current in psychiatry. Emil Kraepelin, who fi rst coined the term ‘dementia praecox’ (renamed ‘schizophrenia’ by Eugen Bleuler in 1911), lent his name and ethos to the currently dominant mode of biological psychiatry (the neoKraepelin). For Kraepelin, there is nothing meaningful in the signs, physical or verbal, of madness. Mental disorder is attributable to a lesion or to heredity—early physicalist versions of genetic or neurological disorders. The most powerful force in psychiatry resisting this fi rst phase of the biologization of the mind in the early twentieth century was not—at least not initially—psychoanalysis, but phenomenology. What phenomenology began to explore in philosophical terms at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, bears a number of resemblances to what Shakespeare fi rst brought forth in Hamlet: the recognition that stories plug holes in gaps in the feeling, and therefore perceptual, structures of an experiential world. Hamlet is melancholic: but Shakespeare provides through him crucial insights into mental disorder. For Hamlet, what is within transforms and is inextricable from the world outside, the imaginary space conjured up in that other Globe, a place that is now stale and unprofitable. In attempting to seize himself, to catch by the tail the inward flow of turbulent thought, Hamlet constantly loses himself in hyper-reflexive recursivity. Sluggish in action and existentially divided from a body that is experienced as the dead weight of a “mortal coil,” Hamlet mind-wanders, lost in his distracted globe. His melancholia is not simply in his head, but in his body as the vehicle of an attitude, and in the world which is the constituted and constituting place and habitation of a mood. Shakespeare recognizes that to be depressed may be to feel nothing in one’s mind. It may instead be to feel trapped in a body grown heavy and corpse-like; most likely it will involve the perception of a world that has grown flat. The view of modernism as the exploration of interiority and realism as the evocation of external or social relations has done considerable disservice

The Naturalistic Turn 31 to the understanding of the history of the twentieth century novel. It sets up a false dualism between the ‘psychological’ and the ‘social’ novel, skewing literary history by assuming that nothing interesting happened between modernism viewed as the ‘psychological turn’ and postmodernism as the linguistic one. It ignores the ‘distributed’ exposition of mind through existentialist techniques that runs throughout the fiction of the twentieth century from Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and William Faulkner to the novelists of the 1950s. But there is a longer history here. By turns inhibited and exhibitionist, Hamlet thinks too much. He is both the yardstick for modern selfhood and its abnormal opposite—that which answers to the norm but is too much or too little, too fast or too slow, too repetitive or too disconnected—the hyper-reflexive, hysterical, manic, depressive, melancholic, obsessional, or schizoaffective (see Sass 1992). But how do you think too much—or too little—when any mind proceeds through the same processes of affective selectivity, mending minor tears in the fabric of the real, reflecting on, engaging and reconstituting its environment through engagement and withdrawal? Who lays down the norms for mental health? For whoever controls the defi nition of the ‘normal’ mind controls the mind. In the end, the importance of the neo-phenomenological or syndrome novel is that in an age when the biomedical and neo-corporate threaten to name and incorporate what we are, it both keeps alive and explores the threats to, the complexity and contradictoriness, of felt selfhood. I have spent some time on Hamlet as the most famously ‘mad’ character in literature. After Hamlet, though, it was the novel and not drama that most emphatically traced the modern self’s propensity for madness. It was the novel that was drawn to a phenomenological grasp of mind and mental illness, the novel that explored the paradoxical idea of a ‘partial’ madness which exposes culturally inscribed norms of reason. Hamlet presents an antic performance that seems at once to conceal and to offer a glimpse of a more deeply hidden and partial madness. But his performance is also the exposure through ironic mimicry of the hidden madness in modernity’s own much vaunted idea of reason. As the fi rst fully modern literary genre, the European novel engaged such paradoxes. If we read these novels to discover a secret, however, it is almost always in vain. It as if the text knows the nature of what it hides but refuses to open up its reticence under the lens of a positivist or scientific enquiry. To read in search of a meaning, a center, is to discover that the search decenters the very idea of a center and brings the marginal or mad to the expected place of reason. Even the activity of reading a novel becomes exposed as the activity of a paranoiac engaged in a consolatory search for a secret message that will give order and meaningfulness to the whole. The history of the novel begins with the delusory madness of Don Quixote, the literal double book-keeping of Robinson Crusoe, the obsessional hobbyhorses of Tristram Shandy, the narcissistically doubled self-delusions of Clarissa and Lovelace. There is scarcely a single nineteenth-century novel

32 Patricia Waugh that does not include themes of delusion or partial madness. By the end of the century, obsessives, fanatics, the deluded and the erotically possessed dominate the storyworlds of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Hardy and Émile Zola. As in the ‘syndrome’ novels of today, the double made a marked appearance at this moment (in Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde) as a figure for the imbrication of madness and reason, norm and pathology, health and sickness. All these writers play with the boundaries between the real and the fictional, the delusory and the fantastic. Their novels are metafictional and self-reflexive; their themes of madness and delusion carry over into a meditation on the novel form as a manifestation of the human capacity for the illusory, for conferring the feeling and depth of the real on imaginary worlds (see Waugh 2011). From Hamlet to the nineteenth-century novel, literary presentations of mental disorder reflected upon and resisted the categorizations of established scientific and philosophical discourses. In its exploration of scientific versus humanistic epistemologies and values and in its bio-political response to the somatization and medicalization of the self in the second half of the twentieth century, the contemporary ‘syndrome’ novel takes its place in an honorable tradition; indeed, what the syndrome novel is doing is at the core of what novels have always done. The rise of the novel coincided historically with the scientific revolution. Novelists registered an ambivalent interest in the new discourse, but remained more interested in what it feels like to be an embodied organism in the world. The novel also developed in conjunction with the new philosophical discourse of aesthetics; both share a sense of art as an embodied or ‘tacit’ knowing, both complement and resist science as the ‘mirror of nature.’ Phenomenology theorized that understanding from the end of the nineteenth century, but literature continued to embody it in practice. The picture of the self which has emerged from the naturalistic turn—the neurobiological subject of post-postmodernity—presents by far the greatest challenge yet to a genre whose idea of ‘character’ has mostly required interiority, depth, intentionality, responsibility, agency, and a sense of continuity through time and attachment to place. The syndrome novel is likely to use neo-phenomenological modes and techniques in its continuing efforts to rise to that challenge.2 NOTES 1. For a useful discussion of the notion of the ‘pre-reflective’ in phenomenological and existentialist thought, see Zahavi 2005. In the discussion that follows, I use the term ‘existential’ in its original and broad sense; I do not mean to refer exclusively to existentialism as a specifically Sartreian strand in phenomenological thought. On the intellectual recovery of phenomenology, see also Sass 1992. 2. The research undertaken for this essay was supported by a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award (WT098455MA).

The Naturalistic Turn 33 BIBLIOGRAPHY Andreasen, N. 1984. The Broken Brain: the Biological Revolution in Psychiatry. New York: Harper and Row. Aronowitz, R.A. 1998. Making Sense of Illness: Science, Society, and Disease. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bleuler, Eugen. 1950. Dementia Praecox; or, the Group of Schizophrenias [1911]. New York: International Universities Press. Bleuler, Manfred. 1978. The Schizophrenic Disorders. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bruner, Jerome. 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Calvin, William H. 1997. How Brains Think. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Coe, Jonathan. 2010. The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. London: Penguin. Dennett, Daniel C. 1993. Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin. . 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. London: Allen Lane. Douglas, Mary. 1986. How Institutions Think. New York: Syracuse University Press. Ehrenberg, Alain. 2010. The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Foucault, Michel. 2011. Madness: the Invention of an Idea, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York and London: HarperCollins. Franzen, Jonathan. 2002 [2001]. The Corrections. London: Fourth Estate. . 2004. “My Father’s Brain.” In How to Be Alone. London: Harper Perennial, 7–39. . 2004. “Why Bother?” In How to Be Alone. London: Harper Perennial, 55–97. Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind: an Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. London: Routledge. Hacking, Ian. 1983. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1998. Mad Travelers: Refl ections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Horowitz, Allan V. 2002. Creating Mental Illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, William. 1950 [1890]. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 2. New York: Dover. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso. Jaspers, Karl. 1962 [1913]. General Psychopathology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kandel, Eric. 1998. “A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry.” American Journal of Psychiatry 155, 4: 457–69. Kenny, Anthony. 1988. The Self. Milwaukee: Milwaukee University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1980 [1849]. The Sickness Unto Death, translated by H. Hong and E. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1995. New Maladies of the Soul. New York: Columbia University Press. Lane, Christopher. 2007. Shyness: how Normal Behavior became a Sickness. New Haven: Yale University Press. Leader, Darian. 2011. What is Madness? London: Penguin.

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Luhrmann, T. M. 2000. Of Two Minds: the Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry. New York: Alfred Knopf. Mantel, Hilary. 2005. Beyond Black. London: Fourth Estate. McCarthy, Tom. 2005. Remainder. London: Alma Books. Morris, David B. 1998. Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pinker, Stephen. 2002. The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature. London: Allen Lane. Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2008. Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robinson, Marilyn. 2010. Absence of Mind: the Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rose, Nikolas. 2007. The Politics of Life itself: Bio-medicine, Power and Subjectvity in the Twenty-First Century. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Rose, Stephen. 2005. The Twenty-First Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind. London: Jonathan Cape. Rosenhan, David. 1973. “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” Science 179: 250–58. Sacks, Oliver. 1970. The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. London: Picador. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1972. The Psychology of the Imagination. London: Routledge. . Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. London: Routledge. Sass, Louis. 1992. Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shorter, Edward. 1997. A History of Psychiatry from the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac. New York: John Wiley. Smith, Zadie. 2009. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. London: Hamish Hamilton. Tallis, Raymond. 2011. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham: Acumen. Wallace, David Foster. 1993. Interview with Larry McCaffery. Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, 2: 127–50. Waugh, Patricia. 2011. “Modernism and Contemporary Neuroscience.” In The Legacies of Modernism: Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, edited by David James, 75–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1997 [1925]. Science and the Modern World. New York: Simon and Shuster. Wilson, E. O. 1978. On Human Nature. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Wilson, Robert A. 2004. Boundaries of the Mind: the Individual in the Fragile Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zahavi, Dan. 2005. Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

2

Mapping the Syndrome Novel* Stephen J. Burn

In synoptic snapshots of the changing field, the rise of modern neurology is often dated from Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s histological studies, which isolated the neuron as a discrete unit underpinning the brain’s complexity. Cajal’s work brought him the Nobel prize in 1906, but earlier still his painstaking use of the Golgi stain to trace cortical circuits was registered in the contemporary arts when Edvard Munch’s painting of his chronically insane sister, Laura, included a Cajal-inspired design based on “a sagittal section of cerebral nerve tissue viewed in tight perspective” (Everdell 1997, 114). Art’s osmotic openness toward eclectic systems of knowledge has always produced such moments—where an advanced artist seems to be incrementally ahead of specialist bodies such as the Nobel committee—but amid the networks of millennial communication technologies, the contemporary novel has been enmeshed within an even richer intellectual matrix characterized by dense and diverse feedback loops connecting disparate fields of knowledge. Yet while theorists such as Paul Cilliers have argued that postmodern society must be conceived “in terms of the distributed model of complex systems” (1998, 123), current maps of the contemporary novel’s mind have tended to downplay its entanglement with larger nonliterary interests, inadvertently obscuring the extent to which the syndrome novel and other neurologically informed fictions represent a vibrant contemporary subgenre. Specifically, while literary postmodernism has increasingly been constructed so that its exoskeleton is provided by the moods and obsessions of poststructuralism, such a design has isolated the novel from scientific currents, curtailing its field of reference. Reformulating our maps of the contemporary novel to acknowledge a neurological dimension reveals that a surprising number of themes and concepts cursorily ascribed to postmodernism are shared by the contemporary sciences of mind, and can reframe our understanding of both central postmodern novels and contemporary fiction’s larger territory. Even outside the humanities, postmodernism is regularly considered to be the antithesis of the sciences of mind. E. O. Wilson, for instance, argued in 1998 that “the postmodern hypothesis [ . . . ] is blissfully free of existing information on how the mind works” (238). Yet, if we examine the early

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chronologies of both movements in more detail, it is notable that in postwar America, neuroscience and postmodern literature’s institutional foundations began to harden at around the same time, with both fields sealing a decade of vital experiments by codifying their activity in important ways in 1971.1 Beyond a shared chronology, there are deeper overlaps between the movements. At a general level, it is significant that postmodernism emerged in close connection with the counterculture of the 1960s, especially in terms of its experiments with various psychedelic drugs (and their attendant ontological disruptions), which provided vivid documentation of the organic-chemical substrate of consciousness that was being explored by contemporary neuroscientists. More specifically, neuroscience’s increasing insistence that the “creative process of confabulation [ . . . ] is emblematic of what it is to be human” (Hirstein 2005, 239) is paralleled by Robert Scholes’ early sense that postmodern fiction had found in the centrality of ‘confabulation’ an “answer to the great question of where fiction could go after the realistic novel” (1967, 11). At the same time, the recursive curve built into neuroscience—the fact that the brain can only be understood by using the brain—seems a cognitive analogue to the textual concerns of postmodernism, from the poststructural extreme of Derrida’s claim that “there is nothing outside the text” (1976, 158), to the metafictionist’s efforts to deploy a tiered system of narratives to interrogate narrative itself. Finally, the dispersed self produced by both systems is resoundingly anti-hierarchical as postmodernism’s decentered subject finds a corresponding echo in the distributed I that emerges from neuroscience’s assault on the idea that the brain has a central “theater where ‘it all comes together’” (Dennett 1991, 107). Moving from overarching concepts to literature itself, it is surprisingly easy to accumulate evidence of postmodern fiction’s engagement with neuroscience, whether in terms of superficial details such as story titles— Clarence Major’s “An Area of the Cerebral Hemisphere” (1975) or Donald Barthelme’s “Brain Damage” (1970)—or in terms of more substantial references that run from Joseph McElroy’s systemic account of “the multiple and parallel sorties which raise our brain above the digital computer to which it is akin” (1974, 447) to Lynne Tillman’s exploration of “the neural routes of the brain” (2006, 132). Yet when the contemporary novel’s neurological turn is addressed, it is often conceptualized purely at the level of plot, as in Gary Johnson’s thematic model that defines a “neuronarrative” as “a work of fiction that has cognitive science as a, or the, main theme” (2008, 170). Limiting its focus to a novel’s topical concerns, such a schema neglects the novel’s larger (and non-narrative) bandwidth and overlooks one of the most important aspects of the neurological revolution: its invasion of nearly all areas of contemporary existence. Some of the most revealing syndrome novels, in fact, are those that do not foreground cognitive models at the level of plot, but instead offer suggestive hints of their neural narrative through an author’s formal and rhetorical choices or through carefully placed allusions that lie at the ragged edges of the central character’s lives.

Mapping the Syndrome Novel 37 Taken together, the tendency entirely to omit postmodernism’s engagement with neuroscience and the corresponding desire to focus too tightly on a single layer of the literary experience—plot—can equally obscure contemporary literature’s fertile neural dialogues. But just as cognitive historicist research into earlier literary periods2 has found that recourse to a cognitive literary theory might, for instance, “fundamentally reorient an unresolved issue within Romantic studies” (Richardson 2002, xii), in this essay I argue that certain key problems within postmodern literature might be similarly reframed by adopting a cognitive historicist approach. By setting the postmodern syndrome novel next to contemporaneous neuroscientific texts, and by broadening our conception of the syndrome novel to acknowledge brain-based novels whose disorders do not necessarily act explicitly as plot engines, postmodernism’s relation to overarching theories, character, and form can each be reconsidered, while a tentative model of the movement toward a theory of the post-postmodern novel might also be constructed. At a more concrete level, the trajectory of a specific writer’s career may also be reframed by a cognitive historicist reading of postmodernism, and in the fi rst part of the chapter I take Don DeLillo’s oeuvre as a test case for this contention. While critics rarely limit DeLillo’s intellectual horizons to the purely literary, his novels are nevertheless largely absent from brain-based literary studies, 3 an omission that may stem from much of his post-Underworld canonization hardening around such axioms as his putative attempt to write “stories that dispense with conventions such as [ . . . ] psychology” (Osteen 2000, 16). Yet—as his notebooks make clear—DeLillo conceived of Cosmopolis (2003) as a syndrome novel built around the so-called Icarus complex, a “syndrome characterized by [ . . . ] a desire to be immortal, narcissism and lofty but fragile ambition” (Reber and Reber 2001, 336),4 while he also researched dissociative amnesia for his 9/11 novel, Falling Man (2007).5 Neural models provide a generative grid for both the form and psychological dynamics of DeLillo’s earlier fiction, and recognizing this engagement with the syndrome syndrome marks a vital step toward constructing a more nuanced critical schema that no longer isolates his novels from questions of psychology. On a basic level DeLillo tends to view his characters through what he calls “the special viewpoint of a long lens” (1977, 6) that emphasizes deep history. For all the studied immediacy of his fiction, a sense that evolutionary scales underpin present action is manifest across his early novels: while Americana’s ostensible interest is in the way subjectivity changes through the “chemical reincarnation” of cinema (1971, 254), at the edges of the novel’s action, characters sense their phylogenetic histories, as when Sullivan reflects that “in bed in the dark we’re urged on by the monkey waiting in our sleep” (116). In a similar fashion, End Zone’s Anatole Bloomberg tells Gary Harkness that he stays out of the sun because his “awareness of reptilian antecedents is unnaturally vivid” (1972, 50). With Great Jones Street, however, the

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science of mind moves nearer to the core of DeLillo’s fiction, and his third novel’s fascination with “the left sector of the brain” (1973, 255)—as well as its foundation in specific neuroscientific research—inaugurates a sea change in his narrative practice, after which specific neuroscientific source texts provide a powerful undercurrent that shapes his fiction. Drawing from the increasingly intense cultural power of neuroscience in the early 1970s, Great Jones Street is specifically informed by A.R. Luria’s research into hemispheric damage and Paul MacLean’s theory that the brain is composed of three functionally separate cerebral modules, both of whom DeLillo seems to have encountered in Nigel Calder’s overview of brain research, The Mind of Man (1971). Taken together, Luria and MacLean provide DeLillo with a working cognitive hypothesis in which the fi ndings of neuroscience powerfully account for characters’ behavior. According to MacLean’s theory, the three cerebral modules (reptilian, paleomammalian and neomammalian) represent three different phases in our evolutionary history, with the fi rst two modules roughly corresponding to the brain functions “manifest in the lower animals in which they fi rst developed” (Calder 1971, 275). While the neomammalian brain (roughly the cerebral cortex) seems to control the special cognitive strengths that distinguish humanity, this sophisticated processing unit is underwritten by “the reptilian brain, the old crocodile under our skulls” that controls basic fear reactions, and the paleomammalian “horse-like brain,” which “is very much involved in emotional responses” (275–76). The functional separation between these three modules leads to what MacLean calls a “schizophysiology”—an internal conflict of interests that persuaded Arthur Koestler (along with Carl Sagan, MacLean’s principal popularizer) to conclude that “man—normal man—is insane” (276). MacLean’s sense that all human consciousness—properly understood—is schizophysiological syndrome consciousness works on several levels in DeLillo’s fiction. At the level of the novel’s imagery, the logic of many of DeLillo’s metaphoric comparisons to lower animals—the “snake brain of early experience,” for instance, that’s proposed in Underworld (1997, 422), or Falling Man’s reference to a “snake-brain level of perception” (2007, 31)—seems to be derived from MacLean’s tripartite system, just as his allusions to the continued power of primal terror—the “million years of terror stored” in “the limbic system of the brain” described in Libra (1988, 292)—can equally be clarified with reference to MacLean’s model. But in Great Jones Street specifically DeLillo probes the reptilian brain’s influence upon normal cognitive activity as a range of characters are progressively linked to MacLean’s three cerebral modules. In short set pieces, for instance, we meet Hanes, “a very snaky boy” (1973, 57), and Azarian, whose announcement that he is constantly prey to all “kinds of fear,” and that it is “hard to pick out a single moment when I’m not afraid” can be understood as an extreme representation of reptilian-dominated consciousness rather than a simple caricature (123).6

Mapping the Syndrome Novel 39 DeLillo’s next novel, Ratner’s Star, is equally rich in references to the human struggle to understand “the living brain” (1976, 238), and incidents in the novel can often be directly mapped onto specific source texts. Gerald Jonas’ New Yorker essay, “Into the Brain” (1974), for example, contains the kernel of the LeDuc electrode DeLillo imagines in Chapter 11. Describing neurophysiology’s efforts to study the brain, Jonas writes of “fine steel wires” that make up “a stimulator that is small enough to be buried under the skin of a monkey’s scalp. Once the incision heals, nothing is visible on the surface [ . . . ] in the next two years, with the new technique of integrated circuitry, it will be possible to implant microminituarized computers subcutaneously” (Jonas 1974, 67, 68). Moving in parallel, DeLillo has Cheops Feeley promote “a bundle of extremely tiny wires able to stimulate and record brain activity [ . . . ] attached to a microminiaturized disk that functions almost exactly as a computer does” (DeLillo 1976, 243). “Subcutaneous implantation” under the “scalp,” Feeley assures DeLillo’s protagonist, Billy Twillig, will involve “only a tiny incision that leaves no scars” (244, 243). The careful documentation that underlies such scenes provides a corrective to the consensus view that Ratner’s Star is built upon “overwhelming[ly] absurd” foundations (Kavadlo 2004, 146). Yet while Ratner’s Star extends DeLillo’s engagement with specific scientific intertexts, the novel’s dialogue with the sciences of mind complicates Great Jones Street’s apparently straightforward endorsement of its neuroscientific sources, and instead probes the limits of neuroscience’s explanatory power. Just two years before Ratner’s Star, Thomas Nagel had critiqued neuroscience’s reductionist foundations in his influential essay “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel argued that no theory that attempted to understand consciousness from a study of the brain’s physical basis could “account for the subjective character of experience” (1974, 445). In effect, we could not understand what it was like to be a bat purely from analyzing the physical structures of the bat’s brain. The explanatory gap that Nagel defi nes is partly the gap that Billy explores in his efforts to understand that in examining himself “as a biological individual [ . . . ] there was something between or beyond, something he couldn’t account for, between himself and the idea of himself” (DeLillo 1976, 361). But Nagel’s argument is also subtly embedded in the novel as a counterbalance to its explorations of “Mind Science” (58). DeLillo incorporates this critique by assigning one of his commentators on the brain—Maurice Wu—to undertake some bat research. Contra Nagel, Wu suspects that he understands “bat consciousness” (394), but the substance of his research—collecting bat droppings—suggests DeLillo’s skeptical attitude toward the physical basis of Wu’s theorizing, and materialist approaches to the mind in general. While neuroscientific research is clearly a dynamic concept in DeLillo’s work—one that is interrogated rather than simplistically endorsed or rejected—what is particularly revealing about the way such research functions

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in his fiction is that the brain’s operations are typically projected beyond the confines of any single character to provide each novel’s distinctive architecture. Paralleling MacLean’s tripartite model of the brain, for instance, Great Jones Street’s central narrative is itself divided by media inserts into three parts. Similarly, the two-part structure of Ratner’s Star is designed—as DeLillo told Tom LeClair—to replicate the respective processing strengths of the “left brain [and] right brain” (LeClair 1983, 87). Within this arrangement, the divergent styles of each part of the book are modeled around opposed hemispheric specializations, and even the individual characters fall into groups that reflect either “a parody of the left brain” or the discovery that the “right side of the brain outprocessed the left” (DeLillo 1976, 245, 195).7 The way neuroscience shapes the architecture of these novels represents what we might call a neural architecture that adds a further dimension to DeLillo’s treatment of character: while each of the characters has an idiosyncratic personality and history, their existence within the formal structure of a novel modeled around a neuroscientific theory is designed to remind the reader that their own experiences take place within biological constraints: that is, the boundaries of their cerebral hardware. With their carefully encoded intertexts and suggestive neural architectures, both Great Jones Street and Ratner’s Star can be reconceived as syndrome novels inasmuch as they dramatize behaviors—whether feardominated or rooted in hemispheric asymmetries—that are attributed to the brain’s physiology and that fall within the extreme bounds of normal cognitive function. At the same time, the structures and techniques of both early novels carry forward to DeLillo’s later work. White Noise’s exploration of the “fear-of-death part of the brain” (DeLillo 1985, 200), for instance, seems on one level to be a conscious rewrite of Great Jones Street’s neural investigations. Like the characters in Great Jones Street, Jack Gladney’s behavior is increasingly controlled by the fear-dominated reptilian brain, and—in the manner that typifies DeLillo’s neural metaphors—his cognitive decline is reflected in the way that his narration is infected by references to pre-human phases of evolutionary history: his wife emits a “creaturely hum” (15), a colleague resembles “an endangered animal or some phenomenal subhuman” (186), while his own state of mind is a “deep-dwelling crablike consciousness” (155). White Noise’s three-part structure also mirrors the arrangement of Great Jones Street, but the later book’s organization seems to be even more closely intertwined than its predecessor with MacLean’s conception of the reptilian brain. MacLean saw the reptilian brain as a “biological computer” whose “instinctually determined functions” included at the most primal level the binary response to fear stimuli: fight or flight (1968, 28). Viewed according to this schema, the plot of White Noise’s three sections neatly recapitulates our primal responses to terror: the novel’s fi rst part serves as an introduction to the psychological dynamics of Jack’s life and traces the outlines of his reptilian-brain dominated syndrome; the second part, with its ominous “heavy black mass”

Mapping the Syndrome Novel 41 of toxic cloud (DeLillo 1985, 110), charts a flight response to a terrifying situation; the book’s fi nal section flips the binary to trace a fight response as Jack attempts to murder Willie Mink. A full reading of DeLillo’s complex dialogue with the sciences of mind is beyond the scope of this essay, but because Underworld is arguably DeLillo’s most studied novel, and because both its form and modes of characterization were found wanting by Tony Tanner, a brief summary of its incorporation of a similar neural architecture is worth articulating here. While Tanner argued that the novel presented a series of narrative “fragments [that] do not collect around anything” (2000, 208), Jesse Kavadlo has demonstrated that the novel is laid out “in a palindrome formation” (2004, 116).8 This structure effectively pivots around the second Manx Martin episode to yield what David Cowart describes as “twinned [ . . . ] mirror narratives” (2002, 106), each devoted to roughly twenty-five years of the novel’s action. Strategically deployed verbal echoes and parallel scenes function together across this structure to create parallel loops. The fi rst loop begins after the prologue, when Part 1 opens with Nick “driving a Lexus through a rustling wind” (DeLillo 1997, 63) to see Klara Sax, a woman whose marriage dissolved after she slept with Nick in the 1950s. The circle closes at the end of Part 3, where the final image is of Nick’s wife, Marian, driving in tears after Nick has admitted a later adultery. Replicating this design, the second half similarly forms a circular structure— though it is again predicated on the omission of the fi rst part—and runs from the beginning of Part 5 to the last page of the novel. Part 5 begins with Nick in a penitentiary in Staatsburg, staring at “rolling hills that made you wonder who you were” (501). The last description in the novel, narrated by an unnamed character, is of “solitary hills” (827). While these two halves are not marked by the distinct stylistic contrast DeLillo adopts in Ratner’s Star, Underworld’s division into two halved circles similarly suggests the split-hemisphere structure of the brain, and as the brain seeks complementary relationships between the opposed capabilities in each hemisphere, the novel’s paired halves might be seen to seek a similarly symbiotic relationship, encouraging the reader to ask “what is the connection between Us and Them, how many bundled links do we fi nd in the neural labyrinth?” (51) as one route toward the novel’s final vision of “peace” (827). Viewed in this way, Underworld is (in its own phrase) “a kind of neural process remapped in the world” (451), a model for the possibility of collaboration that might take place between its many opposed pairings: young and old, male and female, black and white. The significance of such a reading does not lie in outlining an overlooked aspect of DeLillo’s fiction merely to add to the aggregate of other perspectives, building toward some total reading of his imaginative project. Reconnecting DeLillo’s novels with the larger discourse of contemporary theories of the mind is, rather, an opportunity to document a representative instance of postmodernism’s engagement with the syndrome novel and

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to articulate the ways in which DeLillo’s treatment of character intersects with developing cognitive historicist efforts to “approach their subject at the level of the species” rather than limiting themselves to locally circumscribed conceptions of individuality (Richardson and Steen 2002, 3). Traditionally, fiction works at the level of particularity—its descriptive energies devoted to Henry James’ “solidity of specification” (1987, 195)—but while DeLillo’s syndrome narratives build plots around individual characters’ psychologies, each novel’s architecture redescribes the same neuro-dynamic at a greater level of abstraction, excising the distracting specifics of contextual entanglement to outline a general, species-level, neural model. A neuroscientific system in DeLillo’s work is a polyphonic effect, its vectors simultaneously arcing toward the cultural and historical specificity prized by contextualist studies and the abstraction of what Patrick Colm Hogan calls “universal human properties” conceived at “higher levels of explanatory generalization” (224, 225). DeLillo provides a particularly vivid example of postmodernism’s engagement with the sciences of mind precisely because his novels are so rarely recognized as cutting-edge neuronovels. Yet cognate practices are relatively easy to locate amongst other postmodern novels: at the end of Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume (1984) the book’s long historical narrative is reframed by a mini-lecture on neurology which (like DeLillo’s specieslevel abstractions) proposes an ambitious universalist theory. Grounded in research by “Paul McLean [sic]” which pointed “out that we still carry a reptilian brain—functional and intact—around in our skulls today” (1984, 321), Robbins splits human evolutionary history into three phases, each tied to MacLean’s cerebral modules, that he sums up aphoristically: With reptile consciousness, we had hostile confrontation. With mammal consciousness, we had civilized debate. With floral consciousness, we’ll have empathetic telepathy. (324) Even John Barth, whose work Joseph Tabbi summarizes as a set of “exclusively literary self-reflexings” (2002, xix), plays a part in postmodernism’s neurological turn. As early as Giles Goat-Boy, Barth was alert to splitbrain research’s tendency to attribute behavior to the complementary processing strengths of “the hemispheres of a single brain” (1966, 59), while in the hallucinatory play of such later novels as Once Upon a Time (1994) he explicitly works in the syndrome genre.9 Amongst the generation of writers that have followed in the wake of DeLillo, Robbins, and Barth, a fascination with altered states of consciousness is one of the many signs that the post-postmodern novel is not a genetically distinct genre, but one that carries a heavy inheritance from its immediate ancestors.10 Just as texts by DeLillo, Robbins and Barth can be reframed with reference to neural research by Paul MacLean or Daniel Dennett, so post-postmodern novels can be historicized in terms of specific

Mapping the Syndrome Novel 43 scientific sources, with Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) mapping on to Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works (1997), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999) drawing on Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) exploring Timothy D. Wilson’s model of the adaptive unconscious in Strangers to Ourselves (2002). Yet in certain later novels, the cognitive revolution remains at the edge of the narrative, providing a loose formal skeleton for the novel without invoking specific research. In Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me (2001), for example, the novel’s system of paired narratives and characters are paralleled by Egan’s tendency to link motivation to the “bicameral mind” while attributing different processing strengths to each “cerebral lobe” (391, 34). Yet across a broader range of literary activity, the neural coordinates evident in what we might call fi rst- and second-generation syndrome novels are subtly reconfigured in the later movement. If neuroscience provided fi rst generation syndrome novelists such as DeLillo with an underlying grid that generated character motivation, local metaphoric clusters, and overarching architecture, then it’s notable that in the post-postmodern second generation psychological disorders serve a more amorphous function. While Jonathan Lethem has argued that the medicalization of contemporary existence provides writers with “new vocabularies for human perceptual life” (2000, xvi), beyond new words, the post-postmodern syndrome often stands as a synecdoche for the larger sense of disorientation that haunts millennial life. In novels built around Capgras syndrome—explicitly, Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker (2006) and, implicitly, Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances (2008)—in Mark Haddon’s autism-based The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), and in the recurring trope of the amnesiac—Nicole Krauss’ Man Walks into a Room (2002), Lethem’s Amnesia Moon (1995)—the disordered mind reformulates the complex world so that its basic axioms, rather than its elaborate superstructure, are brought back to the center of the novel’s circle of experience. Having made—by psychological fiat—the familiar strange, such novels probe, in traditional fashion, the root conditions of modernity: what is a wife? a job? or even the meaning of modern experience? While there are certainly post-postmodern writers who follow DeLillo in creating neuroscientifically inflected novelistic structures,11 the substitution of a syndrome for alternative modes of defamiliarization is a narrative compromise that represents one solution to a signature problem that haunts post-postmodernism: how (in Jonathan Franzen’s words) to “open up in some way” the novel’s form to allow the “kind of traditional stuff” the postmodernists omitted—implicitly more emotive character studies—to re-enter the genre without completely and naively rejecting the entire postmodern program (Birkerts 2006). In the aesthetically conservative Man Walks into a Room, for instance, Samson’s amnesiac confusion permits Krauss to generate entire paragraphs that luxuriate over small moments of

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ordinary, tactile existence. Such moments in Krauss are charged not with narrative significance, but with a purer desire to render anew the cluster of experiential details that add up to the basic feeling of living close to our skins, as when she describes Samson taking a bath: he lowered himself an inch at a time into scalding water [ . . . ] the water a hot itch, a small punishment to clear the way for comfort [ . . . ] Silver bubbles like mercury formed on his skin, the skin taking on a green hue under the water, making it look rubbery and inhuman [ . . . ] he squeezed his eyes shut and slipped his head under, and in the hot, muffled silence he could hear his waterlogged pulse. (127) Such passages play to Krauss’ traditional novelistic strengths—sensitive rendering of detail, heightened attention to ordinary moments—but the return to a largely conventional narrative form is connected to a wider argument the novel makes about literature’s reaction against neuroscience’s growing cultural authority. Within an intellectual ecology increasingly dominated by the neurosciences’ vast expansion through the 1990s—the so-called “decade of the brain”—Krauss’ novel implies that literature’s engagement with neuroscience should reverse postmodern practice: rather than drawing upon neuroscience’s universalizing abstractions, the novel should provide a counternarrative to the imperial march of the sciences of mind. Krauss introduces this argument early in the book, when Samson’s neural condition—caused by a brain tumor—is glossed by the doctor who explains to his wife, Anna, that the tumor is “about the size of a cherry, pressing on the temporal lobe of his brain, most likely a juvenile pilocytic astrocytoma.” Anna responds to this diagnosis by imagining “the shiny dark red of a cherry nestled into the gray matter of the brain” (13). If the logic of DeLillo’s metaphors was dictated by reference to neural systems, Krauss’ work marks the disconnection between language and a specialized neuroscience: the doctor’s comparison is drained of metaphoricity and the analogy rests statically in its initial state as a literal cherry on the brain. Yet Krauss’ novel is about more than a procedural opposition between literature and the sciences of mind, and Nagel again provides a useful reference point. Nagel’s sense that the limits of neuroscience’s explanatory power lie in its inability to express the subjective flavor of an individual’s existence is explored by Krauss through a chain of references to the difficult “capacity to participate in, or vicariously experience, another’s feelings” (42, see also 126, 208, 236). But while such power is deemed to lie beyond neuroscience’s current horizons, Krauss’ self-conscious references to the act of storytelling dramatize her claim that literature already acts as a sophisticated container of subjective consciousness. This theory is outlined in capsule form when Samson sees a geriatric’s collection of bound volumes and reflects that “it did not seem impossible [ . . . ] that somehow everything in Max’s brain had been meticulously copied down there in tiny print” (224), yet the

Mapping the Syndrome Novel 45 practical workings of the connection is more vividly registered in scenes where Krauss dramatizes the relationship between a storyteller and its audience, as when Pip recalls an earlier experience that Samson, as auditor, seamlessly enters: “Pip described how after the meeting she’d driven back on the dark roads. As she talked Samson frantically imagined the scenes, adding details of his own, like her headlights sweeping across the trees” (205). The logic of this argument provides one explanation for the more conservative formal choices in such second generation syndrome novels as Man Walks into a Room: Krauss’ treatment of neurology is less about the biological constraints that frame DeLillo’s fictions and more about the pure power of storytelling as a counternarrative to the abstraction of specieslevel theorizing. More subdued formal choices inevitably serve to throw the fundamental act of subjective narration into high relief.12 Krauss’ insistence on literature’s primal connection to subjective experience may go some way to explaining the dominance of the fi rst-person perspective within both fi rst and second generation syndrome novels, but while a measured formal conservatism characterizes much post-postmodern activity, her second novel—The History of Love (2005)—does adopt one of post-postmodernism’s signature formal innovations to record the content of consciousness. In a maneuver that’s also adopted in works by Jonathan Safran Foer, Evan Dara, and Mark Z. Danielewski, The History of Love periodically rejects the fluid unit of the paragraph to present shards of thought as fragments on an otherwise blank page (see Krauss 2005, 28, 30, 32, 219–46). Such devices underscore Man Walks into a Room’s insistence upon literature’s connection to subjectivity by emphasizing the page’s ability to spatially represent the moment-by-moment movement of consciousness with an increased sense of its stark immediacy. Yet Man Walks into a Room is not without its own technical parallels to other second generation syndrome works: like Krauss’ fi rst novel, Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed (2010) similarly locates a pregnant defamiliarization in the neural disorder at the novel’s center. Tim Farnsworth, a Manhattan lawyer, suffers from an unspecified compulsion to keep walking, and in typical post-postmodern fashion the new perspective this condition sheds upon his daily existence allows Ferris to question the basic foundations of marriage: “Why do you do it? Security, family, companionship. Ideally you do it for love. There’s something they don’t elaborate on. They just say the word and you’re supposed to know what it means” (2010, 114). But while Ferris’ interest in a measured return to traditional subject matter overlaps with Krauss’ practice, The Unnamed also provides an unusually vivid exploration of the deep metaphysical ache that lies at the heart of post-postmodern fiction, a yearning to achieve some transcendent spiritual meaning presumed to be absent from the postmodern world.13 Although recent criticism has argued for the emergence of the “new atheist novel”—a form that seeks to “affi rm [ . . . ] the secular pieties of [ . . . ] evolutionary biology” (Bradley and Tate 2010, 11) over the claims of religion—much post-postmodern fiction seems

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to yearn for at least a partial return to religion and spirituality. Such a return is anecdotally apparent in biographical fragments—say, David Foster Wallace’s several attempts to convert to Catholicism—but a distillation of this impulse is also palpable in the heightened resonance the word soul carries in much post-postmodern fiction.14 Though references to the soul sometimes exist within a satirical matrix in post-postmodern works, the same word carries a more traditional weight with suggestive frequency even in works by the same writer. In George Saunders’ “Winky,” for example, a bowl of oatmeal is parodically offered as a stand-in for “your soul in its pure state” (2000, 71), yet elsewhere in his fiction the passage of the soul out of a tormented body—especially the transmateriation scenes at the end of “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” and “Commcomm,” or the description of “Norris’s soul” as it “whizzed through the highgrass” in “Isabelle” (1996, 31)—provides the climactic metaphysical amplification with which many Saunders stories conclude. In The Unnamed, as Tom LeClair has argued, Farnsworth’s syndrome partly serves to underscore “the lesson of syndrome novels: that the body/brain interface [ . . . ] is more enigmatic than lawyers can imagine” (LeClair 2010), yet the enigma of this interface shades into spiritual questions as Farnsworth searches for his soul. Early in The Unnamed, Farnsworth “thought he had one—a soul [ . . . ] He thought his mind was proof of it” (Ferris 2010, 81), and following the onslaught of medical care his “mystical impulse” hardens as he tells a doctor his belief in a soul stems from the conviction that “without God, [doctors] win” (223). Increasingly, his conception of a soul blurs into other categories—“his mind, his will, his soul” (252)—and amid mounting evidence of his biological foundation he announces that “there’s no soul [ . . . ] No God” (300), before shifting positions in the face of his wife’s cancer to claim that the “soul was inside her doing the work of angels to repulse the atheistic forces of biology and strict materialism” (304). In open-ended fashion, Farnsworth’s cyclical movement through these conflicting positions indicates Ferris’ exploration of the novel’s dialogic capabilities simultaneously to endorse the authoritative languages of “chemical imbalances and shorting neural circuits” and the more mystical “work of the divine” (214, 305).15 This bifurcated vision recalls Andrew Marvell’s biologically entangled “A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body,” where the soul is “hung up, as ’twere, in chains / of nerves, and arteries, and veins” (1996, 103). Yet Ferris’ treatment of the soul recurs with suggestive frequency in similarly conflicted contexts in post-postmodern fiction. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, for example, carries out a millennial excavation of what the novel calls “the soul’s core systems” (1996, 692). Similarly, Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 conducts a rapid survey of connectionist models before locating the “immaterial in mortal garb:” “Our life was a chest of maps, self-assembling, fused into point-for-point feedback, each slice continuously rewriting itself to match the other layers’ rewrites. In that thicket, the soul existed; it was the search for attractors where the system might settle” (1995, 320).

Mapping the Syndrome Novel 47 In each of these references, the writers’ fascination with the mechanics of identity is marked by the stubborn persistence of the idea of a soul, though the very status of its invocation is compromised—stretched toward two different registers—as it is shot through with the language of modern science, of systems and artificial intelligence. While DeLillo’s argument with neuroscience centered upon the nature of subjective experience, in the second-generation syndrome novel the idea of the soul acts as a placeholder for science to merge with a persistent mysticism. The fi rst generation syndrome novel grounded its map of consciousness in contemporary scientific research in part to incorporate neuroscience’s ability to address questions at an explanatory level—of the species, or of human history—that postmodern epistemological critiques had denied to other discursive forms. The second-generation syndrome novel, by contrast, is a site of divided energies yet its dominant narrative mode favors synthesis over rupture, compromise over raw polarities. Its frequent tendency to fi lter the specialized languages of contemporary science into the lingering power of spirituality represents a microtradition within the larger aesthetic compromises wrought by post-postmodernism’s return to more conventional narrative forms. On one level the intermingling of science and the soul indicates a certain resistance to the totalizing claims of contemporary neuroscience; on another level its dialogic openness to divergent truth claims accords with neuroscientist Paul Broks’ conception of the way we all have to live in the age of neuroscience: One has to be bilingual, switching from the language of neuroscience to the language of experience; from talk of “brain systems” and “pathology” to talk of “hope,” “dread,” “pain,” “joy,” “love,” “loss,” and all the other animals, fierce and tame, in the zoo of human consciousness. (2003, 130)

NOTES * Stephen J. Burn is grateful to the Harry Ransom Center (the University of Texas at Austin), for permission to quote from the Don DeLillo’s unpublished notebooks.” 1. In 1971, American scientists marked the emergence of neuroscience as an autonomous (if interdisciplinary) discipline by holding the fi rst annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, DC. The same year, as historian of postmodernism Hans Bertens has argued, the term entered Ihab Hassan’s “critical vocabulary” as part of his “vital” efforts to “promote [ . . . ] the terms postmodern and postmodernism” (1995, 37–38). 2. Alan Richardson and Francis Steen gloss Cognitive Historicism as comprising “cognitively informed interpretive readings of literary texts that at the same time fully acknowledge their historical specificity” (2002, 5). Although the cognitive literary revolution is a phenomenon of recent decades, with few exceptions (such as Joseph Tabbi’s Cognitive Fictions [2002]), cognitive literary criticism is mystifyingly confined to pre-contemporary literature. Lisa Zunshine’s

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3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

overview volume, Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (2010), rarely touches on contemporary works, while such full-length studies as Alan Richardson’s British Romanticism and the Science of Mind (2001), Mary Thomas Crane’s Shakespeare’s Brain (2001), Nicholas Dames’ The Physiology of the Novel (2007), and Anne Stile’s edited volume Neurology and Literature (2007) concentrate on a span of roughly 400 years that ends at 1920. DeLillo is not substantially discussed in Tabbi’s Cognitive Fictions, David Lodge’s Consciousness and the Novel (2002), or in Johnson’s “Consciousness as Content” (2008). Tom LeClair’s In the Loop (1987), with its early exploration of the way “the vertical and horizontal integrations of the brain” (142) function in DeLillo’s fiction, is a notable exception. DeLillo copied this defi nition in his research materials (now held at the Harry Ransom Center) for Cosmopolis, while other syndrome-based research materials for the same novel include a research letter on the Koro syndrome, a “culture-bound psychiatric disorder characterized by acute anxiety symptoms with deep-seated fear of shrinkage of the penis into the abdomen followed by death” (Kuruppuarachchi et al 2000), and Daniel Goleman’s New York Times article, “Making Room on the Couch for Culture” (1995). A clutch of DeLillo’s printouts related to this research are headed “Understanding Abnormal Behavior” and “Dissociative Disorders and Somatoform Disorders.” A genetic basis for action may have been more pronounced in DeLillo’s earlier drafts of Falling Man because while Lianne (in the published version of the novel) edits books on “ancient alphabets,” “early polar exploration” and “late renaissance art” (2007, 22, 218), in the novel’s earlier incarnations she was to work on a book about gene research. For a full reading of Great Jones Street’s dialogue with neuroscience, see Burn, “Great Jones Street and the Science of Mind.” DeLillo’s plans for the second half of Ratner’s Star, in particular, make the hemispheric grouping of the characters more explicit. In a notebook gathering research for the novel he wrote: “The main characters in Part II actually come in pairs and there is a specific mirror-image or bilateral relationship between the members of each pair.” Kavadlo summarized the arrangement as “Prologue, Part [1], Manx Martin [1]. Part [2]. Part [3], Manx Martin [2], Part [4], Part [5], Manx Martin [3], Part [6], Epilogue” (2004, 116). As in Ratner’s Star, the neural framework for Once Upon a Time is provided by what the novel calls “the bicameral theory of human brain functioning (the analytical, cogitative, linearly inclined left brain and the intuitive, contemplative, gestaltic right)” (Barth 1994, 347). In line with the logic of the hemisphere’s complementary strengths, the novel unfolds according to a series of symbiotic pairings: the relationship between male and female twins; the pairing of the intellectual Jay and the artistic narrator; the dramatized relationship between the narrator and audience; and the interplay between genetic inheritance and experience, which the novel terms “coaxial esemplasy” (20). Even the title plays into such a pairing of opposites: “once upon a time” indicates a beginning, but the title also yields an acronym (OUT) that implies a departure or ending. Elsewhere in the same novel, Barth’s discussion of consciousness as “the brain’s biologically evolved narrativity” (170) draws on Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991). For a taxonomy of post-postmodern fiction’s characteristics see Burn, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (2008, 15–27); for an exploration of the way the science of mind shapes Franzen’s work, see pages 113–22. As Charles B. Harris has argued, the “smooth architectural surface” that characterizes the structure of Powers’ The Echo Maker (2006), is designed to imitate the “the false coherence forged by the human brain” in the face

Mapping the Syndrome Novel 49

12.

13.

14.

15.

of “the fractured realities we have just seen dramatized” (2008, 251, 250). Similarly, even in its incomplete form, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King seems to be modeled around what Wallace calls “Random-Fact Intuition” syndrome (2011, 118). Just as the novel presents a willfully centrifugal narrative that is periodically fragmented by interpolated stories and intrusive screeds of data, so RFI syndrome is characterized by “the interruption of normal thought and attention” by “psychically intuited and intrusive facts” (118, 119). Evan Dara fits less comfortably into a post-postmodern framework, but The Lost Scrapbook’s distributed set of narrative nodes seems to be designed to imitate a neural net. While less straightforwardly built around homologies between form and content, Dara’s The Easy Chain can hardly be called conventionally structured in its exploration of “Zinkofsky’s Syndrome [ . . . ] a benign dysfunction of the semanto-neurological system thought to be triggered by exquisite sensitivity to social nuance” (Dara 2008, 96–97) A further way that the post-postmodern novel approaches more conventional formal structures is by rewriting an earlier work: despite its linguistically rich verbal improvisations, Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, for instance, might be seen as a coded rewrite of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Just as Shelley’s novel is predicated on the hint that its giant murderer may be a hallucination of its fi rst-person narrator (Walton confesses early in the book that his “day dreams” have “become more fervent and vivid” [1994, 5]), the same possibility is raised at the end of Motherless Brooklyn when Julia Minna says to Lethem’s narrator: “I’m not acquainted with this giant killer you keep talking about. Are you sure you’re not imagining things?” (Lethem 1999, 299). Lethem’s novel also takes place across a few days in November—the “dreary” month when Frankenstein’s monster comes to life (Shelley 1994, 38). Cognate post-postmodern examples might include Zadie Smith’s rewrite of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End in On Beauty (2005), and Jonathan Franzen’s attempt to revise what he perceived as the postmodern excesses of Gaddis’ A Frolic of His Own in The Corrections (2001). Religious impulses in the postmodern period often serve different purposes: in John McClure’s Partial Faiths (2007), for example, postmodern fiction’s fascination with “partial and painful conversion[s] toward the religious” provides the foundation for McClure’s claim that religious representations— what McClure calls scenes of “open dwelling”—allow writers to resist the “tendency to reduce all forms of religious dwelling to a choice between stifl ing routinization of the sacred and the fiercer enclosures of fundamentalism” (3, 196). In a later study, Amy Hungerford argues that “what is special about literature of the late twentieth century [ . . . ] is the way some of the most prominent writers of the time use language as a religious form to salvage what they see as a threatened literary authority” (2010, xix). Postmodernism’s argument with fundamentalism and religiously infused anxieties about literature’s obsolescence are both qualitatively and quantitatively different from the impulse toward spiritualism I diagnose in a later generation of writers through the remainder of this essay. A similar argument could be made with reference to the ghosts that haunt, for example, George Saunders and David Foster Wallace’s fiction, but this is not an exclusively American phenomenon. Several transmateriation scenes in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999) perform a similar function, while recent British fiction is also torn between spiritualism and neurology: in Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space (2007), for example, Anton Markov doesn’t know whether to attribute his fortune to a “guardian angel—or neural impulse” (5). Krauss’ syndrome novel is arguably more strongly shadowed by the competing claims of religion—indeed, the novel was criticized for its “many heavyhanded biblical allusions (not least the protagonist’s name)” (Blum 2002).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Barth, John. 1987 [1966]. Giles Goat-Boy; or, the Revised New Syllabus. New York: Anchor-Random. . 1994. Once Upon a Time: a Floating Opera. Boston: Little. Bertens, Hans. 1995. The Idea of the Postmodern: a History. London: Routledge. Birkerts, Sven. 2001. “The Esquire Conversation: Jonathan Franzen.” Esquire. Blum, Meredith. 2002. Review of Man Walks into a Room, by Nicole Krauss. New York Times, Sunday Book Review, July 28. Accessed January 2, 2012. http://www. nytimes.com/2002/07/28/books/books-in-brief-fiction-poetry-062715.html. Bradley, Arthur and Andrew Tate. 2010. The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11. London: Continuum. Broks, Paul. 2003. Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology. London: Atlantic. Burn, Stephen J. 2009. “Great Jones Street and the Science of Mind.” Modern Fiction Studies 55.2 (2009): 349–68. . 2008. Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism. London: Continuum. Calder, Nigel. 1970. The Mind of Man: an Investigation into Current Research on the Brain and Human Nature. New York: Viking. Cilliers, Paul. 1998. Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems. London: Routledge. Cowart, David. 2002. Don DeLillo: the Physics of Language. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Dara, Evan. 2008. The Easy Chain. New York: Aurora. DeLillo, Don. 1971. Americana. Harmondsworth: Penguin. . 1972. End Zone. Boston: Houghton. . 1973. Great Jones Street. Boston: Houghton. .1973–2003. Notebooks and Research Materials. Unpublished. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. . 1976. Ratner’s Star. New York: Knopf. . 1977. Players. New York: Knopf. . 1985. White Noise. New York: Viking-Penguin. . 1988. Libra. New York: Viking-Penguin. . 1997. Underworld. New York: Scribner-Simon. . 2003. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner-Simon. . 2007. Falling Man. New York: Scribner-Simon. Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Egan, Jennifer. 2001. Look at Me. New York: Anchor-Random. Everdell, William R. 1997. The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ferris, Joshua. 2010. The Unnamed. New York: Reagan-Little. Goleman, Daniel. 1995. “Making Room on the Couch for Culture.” New York Times, December 5. Harris, Charles B. 2008. “The Story of the Self: The Echo Maker and Neurological Realism.” In Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, edited by Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey, 230–59. Champaign, IL: Dalkey. Hirstein, William. 2005. Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation. Cambridge, MA: Bradford-MIT Press. Hogan, Patrick Colm. 1997. “Literary Universals.” Poetics Today 18, 2: 223–49. Hungerford, Amy. 2010. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mapping the Syndrome Novel 51 James, Henry. 1987. The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, edited by Roger Gard. London: Penguin. Johnson, Gary. 2008. “Consciousness as Content: Neuronarratives and the Redemption of Fiction.” Mosaic 41, 1: 169–84. Jonas, Gerald. 1974. “Into the Brain.” New Yorker, July 1. Kavadlo, Jesse. 2004. Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief. New York: Lang. Krauss, Nicole. 2002. Man Walks into a Room. New York: Anchor-Random. Kuruppuarachchi, K. A. L. A., J. A. W. S. Ratnayake, N. A. H. Dasanayake, and R. R. Rajakaruna. 2000. “The Koro Syndrome.” Ceylon Medical Journal 45, 4: 182. Accessed April 25, 2011. http://www.cmj.slma.lk/cmj4504/182.htm. LeClair, Tom. 1983. “An Interview with Don DeLillo.” In Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, edited by Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, 79–80. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. . 1987. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. . 2010. “The Unnamed.” Review of The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris. Barnes and Noble Review, 18 January. Accessed January 2, 2012. http://bnreview. barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/The-Unnamed/ba-p/2066. Lethem, Jonathan. 1999. Motherless Brooklyn. New York: Vintage-Random. . 2000. “Introduction.” In The Vintage Book of Amnesia, edited by Jonathan Lethem, xiii–xvii. New York: Vintage-Random. MacLean, Paul D. 1968. “Alternative Neural Pathways to Violence.” In Alternatives to Violence: a Stimulus to Dialogue, edited by Larry Ng, 24–34. New York: Time-Life. Marvell, Andrew. 1996. The Complete Poems. Edited by Elizabeth Story Donno. Harmondsworth: Penguin. McCarthy, Tom. 2007. Men in Space. New York: Vintage-Random. McClure, John A. 2007. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. McElroy, Joseph. 1974. Lookout Cartridge. New York: Knopf. Osteen, Mark. 2000. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Pennsylvania Studies in Contemporary American Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83, 4: 435–50. Powers, Richard. 1995. Galatea 2.2. New York: Farrar. Reber, Arthur S., and Emily S. Reber. 2001. Dictionary of Psychology. 3rd ed. London: Penguin. Richardson, Alan. 2010. The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Richardson, Alan, and Francis F. Steen. 2002. “Literature and the Cognitive Revolution: an Introduction.” Poetics Today 23, 1: 1–8. Robbins, Tom. 1984. Jitterbug Perfume. New York: Bantam. Saunders, George. 1996. “Isabelle.” In CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 27–33. New York: Riverhead. . “Winky.” 2000. In Pastoralia, 69–88. London: Bloomsbury. Scholes, Robert. 1967. The Fabulators. New York: Oxford University Press. Shelley, Mary. 1994 [1818]. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, edited by Marilyn Butler. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tabbi, Joseph. 2002. Cognitive Fictions. Electronic Meditations, 8. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tanner, Tony. 2000. “Don DeLillo and the ‘American Mystery:’ Underworld.” In The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo,

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201–21. Foreword by Edward Said. Introduction by Ian F. A. Bell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tillman, Lynne. 2006. American Genius: a Comedy. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull. Wallace, David Foster. 1996. Infi nite Jest. Boston: Little. .2011. The Pale King, edited by Michael Pietsch. New York: Little. Wilson, Edward O. 1998. Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge. London: Little.

3

From Syndrome to Sincerity Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision Adam Kelly

In “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” a 1993 essay now widely regarded as his manifesto for a new generation of writers, David Foster Wallace argued that the ironic outlook which had dominated American literature in the postwar period was becoming exhausted. The continued reliance by writers on self-conscious irony and ridicule to puncture inauthentic social conventions, Wallace argued, by now bespoke a syndrome more damaging than the disorder these strategies sought to resolve. “Irony in postwar art and culture started out the same way youthful rebellion did,” he wrote. “It was difficult and painful, and productive—a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions behind early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: it was assumed that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom” (Wallace 1998, 66–67). But these assumptions have proven false, according to Wallace: for generations since the end of the 1960s, a long-term freedom has not ensued from the sweeping away of outdated assumptions about society, culture, and self. Advanced critical and theoretical knowledge has not produced a clear path to action, whether personal or political; the deconstruction of grand narratives of identity, patriarchy and progress, having relied mainly on ironic negation and a hermeneutics of suspicion, has offered little solid ground to build on. While television and advertising have mastered for profitable ends the ironic methods exploited by the original postmodernists, present-day writers remain stranded within “irony’s aura,” unable to reject satire and cynicism as their primary mode of engagement with contemporary culture (54). Irony, “singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks,” now “tyrannizes us,” preventing the development of positive programs for action and change (67). This polemical analysis led Wallace to end his essay with a bynow-famous pronouncement on the future of literary fiction in the US, a call for a post-postmodern generation of writers who would sacrifice the fixation with irony, self-consciousness and alienation in favor of a renewed sincerity: The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to

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Adam Kelly back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. (81)

Judged from a viewpoint nearly two decades on from the publication of this essay, it is striking the extent to which the fiction produced by Wallace’s generation of writers—Americans born between the late 1950s and early 1970s—has indeed been defi ned by the concerns that Wallace here raises. Members of what I have elsewhere termed the “New Sincerity” strand of contemporary American fiction include, alongside Wallace himself, writers such as Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem, Richard Powers, George Saunders, Dana Spiotta and Colson Whitehead (see Kelly 2010). Yet the work of these writers has turned out to have, perhaps unsurprisingly, a more complex relation to ironic strategies than the rather straightforward return to sincerity that Wallace’s concluding declaration appears to suggest. Moreover, while Wallace employs concepts such as irony and sincerity rather loosely in his essay, these terms can and should be reassessed by critics on the basis of the innovative textual strategies that contemporary writers have developed to deal with these concerns. In the present essay, my focus will be on a novel that, despite or perhaps because of its comic buoyancy and ethical undecidability, illustrates in important ways the treacherous shift from a model of ironic negation to a new kind of sincerity. What makes Benjamin Kunkel’s debut novel Indecision (2005) a particularly salutary text both for this literary movement and for the present volume of essays is that it figures the present historical conundrum Wallace identifies—the problem of diagnosis not leading to cure, of knowledge not resulting in action—as a literal syndrome, a pathology the protagonist of the novel suffers from, namely his “chronic indecision” (Kunkel 2005, 33) or, expressed in neuroscientific terms, his abulia. Indecision is first and foremost a Bildungsroman, and thus partakes of a genre that Franco Moretti has described as necessarily messy and imperfect, sharing as it does in what he calls “the ‘formlessness’ of the new epoch [ . . . ] its protean elusiveness” (Moretti 2000, 5). The genre dates from the German Romantic period—Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96) is usually cited as the first major exemplar—but, according to Moretti, after the first half of the nineteenth century the European Bildungsroman lost its central symbolic status, because the genre’s assumption that “the biography of a young individual was the most meaningful viewpoint for the understanding and the evaluation of history” no longer held true in the “age of the masses” (227). By contrast, the significance of the Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, for the US literary tradition has never been eroded in

From Syndrome to Sincerity 55 this way—we need only think of the hold that texts such as Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye continue to exert on the American imagination. The perennial American concern with innocence, futurity, self-making and rebirth has ensured a certain priority to the viewpoint of the young individual in every generation, and Kenneth Millard has recently gone so far as to argue for “a confluence of the genre of the coming-of-age novel and a particularly, and even uniquely, American narrative of national identity” (Millard 2010, 5). Unusually, then, for a genre normally associated with the early efforts of new, young and unfinished writers, the American Bildungsroman has continually demanded close attention and critical scrutiny. As Millard declares, “it is a tradition that permits the individual novel to make claims of national significance” (6). Certainly, the numerous reviews of Indecision in the American press took seriously the novel’s aim to capture “zeitgeist frequencies” (McInerney 2005). In general, two connected features were perceived as essential to Kunkel’s attempts at generational defi nition. First, the narrator Dwight Wilmerding’s characteristic self-contemplation, buttressed by the self-reflexive aspects of his narrative—the text’s metafictional awareness of the literary conventions and clichés it invokes, its comic lack of storytelling innocence in a genre historically concerned with innocence—were viewed as a humorous spin on the jaded sensibility of millennial youth culture. Second, the novel’s apparent commitment to what one reviewer called “the birth of a new earnestness” also drew widespread comment (Tobias 2005). In his review of Indecision, Jay McInerney (2005) made a direct connection to Wallace’s argument in “E Unibus Pluram” for a return to “singleentendre principles,” while in considering what she described as a “risky conclusion” to the novel, Joyce Carol Oates pondered whether Kunkel genuinely presents the decisive awakening of Dwight’s political consciousness “without irony” (Oates 2005, 40). This latter question was generally regarded as the key to understanding the generational shift at stake in the arc of Kunkel’s narrative. As another reviewer phrased it, Indecision seems determined to portray a movement from “the dramatic irony of being selfaware” to “the reconstruction of belief that comes after it” (Agger 2005). The fi rst-person narrator of Indecision, Dwight Bell Wilmerding, is a 28-year-old college-educated WASP, who when his story begins is living with a group of friends in a low-rent Manhattan apartment, working in technological support for the drug company Pfi zer, and resolutely in the midst of a series of fairly casual “romantico-sexual” relationships (Kunkel 2005, 132). Having already undergone most of the traditionally formative processes that Holden Caulfield, for example, spends the majority of Salinger’s novel detailing to his reader—going to school and college, separating from the family, discovering sex—it would seem that Dwight should by now have come of age. Yet we fi nd him in stasis, unable to decide on questions from the largest to the most basic. Unable to choose between pesto and Nutella to spread on his morning bagel, he buys both. Unable to choose

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between two guidebooks for a trip to Ecuador, he buys neither. When it comes to choosing whether to go to Ecuador or not, he flips a coin as many times as he feels necessary: “I knew a larger sample size would make the stats more accurate” (5). This method he also uses to decide whether or not to accept invitations to various events from his friends and family. Dwight describes the advantages of his system thus: “Statistically fair, it also kept my whole easy nature from forcing me to do everyone’s bidding; it ensured a certain scarcity of Dwightness on the market; it contributed the prestige of the inscrutable to my otherwise transparent persona; and above all it allowed me to fi nd out in my own good time whether I would actually have liked to do the thing in question” (19). As we can sense from this quotation, Dwight is an easy-going and amusing narrator, given to a philosophical outlook on his lack of direction. Indeed, he has majored in philosophy at college, and it is this that has convinced him of the significance of self-knowledge—the centrality of the Delphic maxim ‘Know thyself.’ The quest to know oneself is, of course, likewise central to the genre of the Bildungsroman, and Dwight’s rendering of his “narrative of important life-changing events” (4) so self-consciously within this genre inevitably highlights his attempts to come to grips with the “Dwightness” that people associate with him. On the opening page he tells us that “everybody always remarked on my apparently remarkable, indestructible Dwightness that was immune to time and place. ‘Dwight, dude, you’re exactly the same, man!’ an old friend from school would say. Or ‘So lovely to have seen you, Dwight, you haven’t changed a bit!’ a friend’s mom would say. Even mom herself would sometimes say this” (3). The chief dogma of modern identity construction—that one is required to be someone rather than exist in a process of constant change and becoming, that one should possess an authentic self—is thus internalized by Dwight and forms the basis of his search for a means to acting decisively. Yet such a notion of identity does not fit particularly well with his own experience of self, which is of contingency and abstraction rather than any concrete essence: “to myself I always seemed totally steeped in my environment, or dyed in local color [ . . . ] and therefore like I might turn out to be anyone at all” (4). This statement, like many of Dwight’s reflective flourishes, nods to the reader in a lightly metafictional manner, but Dwight is never overly arch or knowing concerning his status as a character in a novel. Rather he appears to be, in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, an “honest soul,” one for whom sincere expression is a natural character trait (Trilling 1972, 26). Yet in a belated and hyper-knowing world, Dwight wants to become authentic, because he worries that “once all the sensation had evaporated from my life the residue would be a cliché” (Kunkel 2005, 9). For Trilling, the concept that in the contemporary age most acutely opposes sincerity is not irony but authenticity. In his landmark work in the history of ideas, Sincerity and Authenticity, Trilling observed that the ideal of sincerity—which he defi nes as “a congruence between avowal and actual

From Syndrome to Sincerity 57 feeling”—had enjoyed dominance in “the moral life of Europe” from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century (Trilling 1972, 2). Among sincerity’s features are its theatrical origins and public nature, its emphasis on truth to the self as a means of ensuring truth to the other, and its conception of artists, in Wordsworth’s phrase, as “men speaking to men.” But by the twentieth century the value of sincerity had gone into decline, superseded by an ideal of authenticity, which conceives truth to the self as an end and not simply as a means. Whereas sincerity places emphasis on intersubjective truth and communication with others, on what Trilling calls the “public end in view” (9), authenticity conceives truth as something inward, personal, and hidden, the product of self-examination rather than otherdirected communication. This conception of selfhood is explored in the existentialist thinking of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, and in its support Trilling also cites the intense but non-confessional exploration of the self characteristic of literary modernism. Modernism replaces the artist as person with a persona, and repudiates the role-playing associated with sincerity in favor of a plunge into the Conradian heart of darkness. It is in these murky waters that Dwight Wilmerding also wants to swim, which partly explains his enthusiasm for Otto Knittel’s The Uses of Freedom, Indecision’s stand-in for Heidegger’s Being and Time. Dwight is looking for a model of authenticity that would offer, in Trilling’s words, “a more strenuous moral experience than ‘sincerity’ [ . . . ] a more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in, a wider reference to the universe and man’s place in it” (11). To be authentic by these lights would mean by defi nition to be something other than a cliché. In responding to Dwight’s worries about his inauthenticity, however, his girlfriend Vaneetha informs him, affectionately, that his life is not only a cliché but “not even a fresh cliché.” Dwight, reluctantly, can only agree: “I knew she was right. It wasn’t very unusual for me to lie awake at night feeling like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world” (Kunkel 2005, 26). Addressing the problem of irony, and sounding not unlike David Foster Wallace, Paul de Man once remarked that “to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic” (de Man 1983, 214). Similarly, Dwight informs the reader that “knowing the clichés are clichés doesn’t help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has ever done it” (Kunkel 2005, 26). It is this line that shows Dwight at his most representative: he is typical of a contemporary generation that has been taught to cultivate self-consciousness, reflexive knowledge and discursive dexterity as positive traits, but fi nds that its problems are not alleviated but rather exacerbated by self-consciousness, knowledge and discourse. Despite the postmodern insights that Dwight has internalized—he knows, for example, that “Everything everybody says” is “in quotes” (54)—he fi nds that the supposed death of the subject in the postmodern era has not averted the problems of self-understanding and of fi nding a way to act. Dwight believes that the answer to these problems lies

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in becoming authentic, in somehow discovering the inner truth of his self. But the novel will suggest, rather, that instead of going back to earlier models for answers, Dwight must go forward: he must become post-postmodern, whatever that may entail. Solving the problem of Dwight’s indecision is thus linked to discovering a mode of subjectivity that can persist beyond the epoch of the subject. One model for this new subjectivity is neurochemical. Almost as soon as we have learned the basic details of Dwight’s life, his housemate Dan, a medical student, diagnoses his friend’s indecision as ‘abulia,’ a mental imbalance stemming from a “protracted civil conflict” in the brain’s “medial forebrain bundle” (34). Confi rming Dwight’s representativeness is the fact that, according to Dan, this condition affects “a huge number of ostensibly normal people” (33). A potential solution has just been discovered, however, in the form of the drug “Abulinix.” The idea of a medical treatment for his problem is immediately attractive to Dwight: as he asks rhetorically, “Doesn’t everyone dream of a magic pill?” (31). But Dwight doesn’t simply yearn for medication: he desires an explanation of his syndrome that is not just a re-description of it within the terms of one or another relativistic discourse or language game, none of which, at this late stage in history, seem able to claim defi nitive validity or priority. Before his eureka moment with Abulinix, Dwight has considered numerous possible reasons for his indecision, providing a bulletpoint list that includes “ambivalence, laziness, bad faith, good family, suggestibleness (regarding ideas), resistance (regarding events), indiscriminate breast fi xation, together with a weakened libido, not having found the right person, not having been the right person, sociological sense of one’s life (shared with so many others), inconsequence of the self (except to itself),” and so on, ending with a “lack of ground for the individual’s action,” a formulation Dwight draws from Knittel’s The Uses of Freedom (32–33). Clearly, the whole gamut of explanation is being run here: candidate descriptions of Dwight’s problem are alternately psychoanalytical, ontological, sociological, existential, and stemming from traditional humanist notions of agency and personal responsibility. Each of these descriptions metonymically codifies an entire worldview, and the comedy lies in the fact that Dwight is familiar with all these worldviews but unable to ascribe privilege to any one of them. Previously, “I’d been unable to see all of these for the mere epiphenomena they only too obviously were” (33); “only now,” Dwight tells us with newfound certainty, does he hold “the panacea in my hand,” recognizing abulia as “my major basic overriding problem” (32). This epiphany, the fi rst of a long series in Dwight’s narrative, initially makes Indecision appear as if it might be a “hard neuronovel” (Roth 2009) in the vein of Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) or Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker (2006). These novels, treated elsewhere in this volume by Bentley and Lustig, address questions of contemporary identity through the insights of neuroscience. Some evidence supporting this reading of Indecision is

From Syndrome to Sincerity 59 offered by the scene in which Dwight visits his father to ask for fi nancial help prior to his trip to Ecuador. Their discussion is a staple of the comingof-age novel, a fact of which Dwight is not unaware: “Dad and I often had these very zeitgeisty conversations—they seemed to be an aspect of the father-son relationship.”1 In this case the zeitgeist bears upon his father’s current confidence in the market for pharmaceuticals, where the brain is “the new frontier”: But we’re chemistry. That’s what we are [ . . . ] food, exercise, sexual intercourse, warmth—all these things function like drugs. They modify your mood and perspective. That’s how it’s always been. Mark my words, this distinction between natural and artificial, when this is your brain but then it’s your brain on drugs—that will frankly come to be seen as so much twentieth-century superstition. It’s a last hangover [ . . . ] from the old religious concept of the “soul.” (Kunkel 2005, 78–79) “The point,” he goes on to tell his son, is that “to think of the person without thinking of chemistry is like thinking of a house without architecture. There’s no house that’s simply a house you go home to, then you add or remove the design. The design is the house” (80). Yet while Dwight acknowledges to himself that “disbelief in a person’s innate character had a serious intellectual pedigree going at least back to Scottish philosopher David Hume,” he also remembers contradictory advice given to him by his parents: “mom and dad had always encouraged me to be true to myself—a phrase actually used—and seemed to have an idea of what this kind of fidelity should entail” (80). Being true to oneself would seem to require embodying one’s selfhood in some kind of action; in the end, however, Dwight’s father’s faith in the new science proves of little help when it comes to giving parental advice about his son’s decisions. Moreover, the father fi nds himself unable even to stick to his basic scientific insight: having poured scorn on the notion of the “soul” in the passage quoted above, he soon returns to it when he praises his son for having “a hell of a pure soul” (87). With the categories shifting all the time, Indecision portrays neuroscience as merely one more theory of the self, one more claim to authentic description. Yet Kunkel’s novel is ultimately less interested in what theory of the self to accept than it is in questioning whether a defi nitive model of selfhood should be our primary aim at all. This assumption (long a prevailing one in scientific, philosophical and even literary-critical circles) is in this novel portrayed as the real syndrome, because it offers in the end no ethics, no guidance on right action. Dwight recognizes this in the scene with his father when he worries that Abulinix “would force me to decide that my entire personality boiled down to neurochemistry, and I only flattered myself in believing I possessed a free will in need of regular exercise.” In which case, as Dwight asks himself: “why would I do anything at all? Once you decide you’re only an animal, how do you keep from becoming

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a vegetable?” (85). The ethical alternative to the neuroscientific turn that Indecision goes on to suggest is in no way simple or unproblematic, however. It might be described, in fact, as fundamentally literary in orientation, involving a prioritization of other over self, dialogue over knowledge, affect over meaning, and a concomitant re-thinking of generic form and of the reader-writer relationship. This alternative begins to take shape in part two of the novel, when Dwight makes his trip to Ecuador to meet his old school friend Natasha, who he suspects he might be half in love with. Upon arriving in Ecuador, “a terra incognito I knew nothing about” (10), he ingests his fi rst dose of Abulinix. Dwight does meet Natasha in Quito, but in a plot twist that gets explained only later in the text, Natasha disappears, and Dwight finds himself journeying into the Amazon jungle with a friend of Natasha’s, a beautiful Belgian girl named Brigid. Initially Dwight views his relationship to Brigid through structures of objectification that serve to fortify the novel’s strongly established self/other dichotomy. Waking up on his first morning in Quito, Dwight provides a detailed description of Brigid’s appearance, and remarks that “she would make a welcome addition to any threesome” (104). Here Brigid is imagined as simply the next in a long line of women in Dwight’s life, the proximity of whose bodies, Dwight tells us early on, “tended to really bring home to me the famous other-minds problem” (5). This mode of perceiving otherness (regularly linked in the text to Bildungsroman tropes as well as to philosophical conventions) culminates in a scene when Dwight masturbates in a moment of imagined simultaneity with Brigid, only to discover that he has grossly misunderstood the sounds of crying emerging from her hammock (158–59). This is the low point of their relationship, and comes after a series of epiphanies undergone by Dwight, which have promised the dawn of a new decisiveness brought on by the Abulinix, have been revealed as inauthentic, each in turn a false dawn.2 Of course epiphany has been, since modernism, the literary trope that has most often served to validate the authentic self-relation of the modern subject (see Baxter 2008). In Indecision, however, such epiphanies are shown only to offer support to the figure of the imperialist self, the white American male who uses a developing country as the canvas for his project of self-discovery. But in a series of conversations with Brigid, Dwight will begin to recognize that his investment in this model of separated, selfknowing subjectivity is central to his difficulties, both personal and political. Soon Dwight will take to calling his traveling partner “Bridge,” and it is as a bridge, a point of communicative traversal rather than an objectified other, that she will provide Dwight with the key to the potential resolution of the syndrome at the core of Kunkel’s novel. Brigid constantly challenges Dwight’s assumption that self-identity on the one hand, and openness to events and changes on the other, should be compatible, telling him at one point, “You thought you were very open to whatever can happen. But the reason you have remained so open is that

From Syndrome to Sincerity 61 nothing can enter you. So this is not actually to be open [ . . . ] Nothing can happen to you. You are that type” (175). At another moment, she accuses him of believing in nothing. Dwight responds that “I believe in things, Brigid. I believe in myself,” to which she retorts: “And your self that you believe in, what does it believe in?” (157). Rather than suggesting, therefore, that Dwight has not yet succeeded in establishing his authentic individual identity, as he believes, Brigid consistently presents him as being, in effect, too much of a self, too comfortable within his isolating, individuating shell. The implication is that the search for authenticity, linked to this model of selfhood, this imperialist project, and this traditional narrative genre, is doomed to ethical failure even where it appears to succeed, and Indecision gradually replaces it with a model of open and dialogic subjectivity which the text can perform but cannot directly state. This new model, founded on dialogue with the other rather than on self-knowledge, is best described not as authenticity but as a kind of sincerity. This is because, based as it is not on certain knowledge but on trust, affect, and a willingness to believe what one hears, sincerity, in contrast to authenticity, has always depended on the other for validation. In their introduction to The Rhetoric of Sincerity, Ernst Van Alphen and Mieke Bal emphasize these intersubjective, affective and social dimensions of sincerity in calling for “a new theorization of the concept,” one which can capture the insight that in the multiculturalist and mediatized present “the issue of sincerity is no longer one of ‘being’ sincere but of ‘doing’ sincerity” (Van Alphen and Bal 2009, 16). Traditional conceptions of both sincerity and authenticity assume the unique wholeness of the inner self, a lack of internal division regardless of what shows on the outside. This is an assumption made by Trilling among many others, but it cannot account for the notion that “performance overrules expression,” as Van Alphen and Bal put it (5). Emphasizing performance rather than expression puts the stress on the public and social dimensions of sincerity, its dependence on otherness, and leads the authors to insist that “sincerity can be reframed outside of its bond with subjectivity” (5). This, I would argue, is precisely the aim of Indecision: the novel undertakes a humorous critique of the liberal imperialist subject yet still wants to maintain the truth of intersubjective affectivity as the basis of a politics. Yet Indecision is typical of the Bildungsroman in the untidy way it carries out this task. Remarking, in his preface to the second edition of The Way of the World, on the unexpected difficulties he faced in dealing with the European Bildungsroman, Franco Moretti comments that the formal elements of these novels would “disagree,” so that the texts worked less as identifiable wholes than as bricolage: the Bildungsroman seemed to have its own private ideology, that had almost nothing in common with what one knew from the history of ideas or of political theories. There was always something strange, something “messy,” in these novels, and fi nally I understood why: they

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Adam Kelly were trying not to shape consistent worldviews, but rather compromises among distinct worldviews. (Moretti 2000, xii)

We have already seen how the worldviews that Dwight enumerates as explanations for his indecision are distinct and frequently confl icting. But shaping a compromise between them, in the context of New Sincerity writing, is far from unproblematic, or unproblematically represented. In Indecision, Dwight’s culminating moment of decision—a political conversion to democratic socialism—fi nally occurs while he and Brigid are high on a powerful drug called San Pedro. Intoxicated and newly joyous, Dwight offers to “sign up for justice right now,” and does so by writing down “Justice!” in his notebook (Kunkel 2005, 202). Kunkel thereby inscribes a moment of conversion into Dwight’s narrative by having Dwight mimic the inscription himself; the comic suddenness of this development is likewise alluded to when Brigid exclaims, “What a change from one minute to the next!” (198), and when Dwight tells Brigid, “say it and it’s done” (203). Subsequently, as their sexual awakening progresses in time to Dwight’s discovery of his commitment to justice, Brigid tells Dwight of an Eden she imagines in which “there is no third person, not a him or a her to address. There is only one other so you address the person simply as you. You say ‘you.’ [ . . . ] Only you and I, I and you” (203). The imagined scenario draws attention to the text’s new emphasis on the priority of the other as a dialogic companion in the search for truth. And in keeping with this priority, in the remainder of the novel Dwight’s conversion experience never hardens into subjective knowledge outside of dialogue, as Brigid continues to correct the many humorous errors he makes about the socialism he has signed up to promote.3 Nevertheless, the comic tenor of the scene I have just described—in which the novel’s key themes are brought to resolution only through the drug-fuelled mania of two characters in an exotic outpost of Western colonization—suggests that any such resolving insight on Dwight’s part cannot be unquestioningly embraced. Indeed, it is here that the novel most obviously ironizes the sincerity of its message for the reader. As they consummate their relationship on the grass of the clearing, Brigid reveals to Dwight that he has in fact been the subject of a plot, “a friendly conspiracy of remarkable women” (214), in which she, Natasha, and Dwight’s sister Alice have conspired to engineer Brigid and Dwight’s encounter. There is thus a third (and fourth) person in Eden after all, and an improbable twist is situated at the core of the novel’s love plot. Meanwhile, with the political conversion plot also nearing resolution, Dwight’s agonized admission that part of his reluctance to “bust a move” on Brigid was because “I’m afraid of becoming—becoming a—a—[ . . . ] I’m afraid of being a—I’m terrified of becoming a socialist!” (211) has found its ecstatic post-coital counterpart: “Now that I was a socialist fucking made me joyous, and I wanted to do it again right away” (215). Sex thus appears, for Dwight at

From Syndrome to Sincerity 63 least, to be the true path to socialism. As if there weren’t already enough indicators in the text of the unlikelihood of Dwight’s story of conversion, his housemate Dan reiterates it in historical terms: “Dwight, people don’t do this anymore. You don’t fly to Latin America, take psychedelic drugs, and fi nd sexual liberation with some suntanned goddess of international socialism [ . . . ] Now is not thirty-five years ago” (227). Dwight himself is equally aware of the untimeliness of his experience, and in bringing this scene of sexual and political epiphany with Brigid to a close, his comment to the reader is more than a little wry: “Things were maybe getting cheesy. But at least they possessed the dignity of taking place” (217). Reviewers have understandably questioned the seriousness of all of this. While most admitted that Kunkel seems sincere in the way he ends the novel, many poured scorn on the abrupt nature of Dwight’s conversion, and especially on the content of the democratic socialism to which he claims to have been converted. Mark Lotto, complaining that “in Indecision, resolutions and epiphanies are not so much earned as given away like gifts to a spoiled child,” called the ending “indefensible and cheap” and claimed that Dwight’s socialism “is never a coherent ideology or a concrete political solution. It’s just another form of self-help” (Lotto 2005). Michael Agger, despite praising “the way the novel does not withdraw in disgust, but rather embraces a social justice argument in its fi nal chapters,” still found that embrace to be little more than a “nostalgic pose.” “The hard part,” Agger commented, “is to engage socialism as a rigorous, powerful, and fraught ideology. Dwight seems committed to his ethic of anti-consumerism, but what’s less clear is how his passion for his cause translates into a viable intellectual framework for improving on the economic policies of our globalized world” (Agger 2005). But the problem Indecision wants to confront does not concern whether social justice arguments are sound, or whether such arguments can be translated into a viable intellectual framework. The novel takes both these propositions as self-evident, even as it embeds their discovery into the experience of a white American coming of age through an encounter with an exotic female in an exotic country. Rather, the comically imperialist cast of this scenario is intended in its very extremity to push to the forefront of Indecision the question David Foster Wallace also asked: given all we know, given how self-reflexive and critical we have become at this historical juncture, how can diagnosis be made to lead to cure, what can connect knowledge to action? Put another way, the key contemporary syndrome to be overcome in Indecision does not concern political awareness as such, but what Peter Sloterdijk has termed “enlightened false consciousness,” the cynical reason of the postmodern subject that promotes irony and inaction over meaningful response (Sloterdijk 1988, 5). “We are enlightened, we are apathetic,” Sloterdijk remarks (xxvi), adding that “because everything has become problematic, everything is also somehow a matter of indifference” (xxxii). Ideology critique is thus no longer effective within the historical

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space of the postmodern; while such critique can still reveal abuses and injustices, it cannot overcome a contemporary cynicism that will acknowledge these injustices but will retreat in response into a functional equivalent of Dwight’s abulia: Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernised, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has laboured both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Welloff and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered. (5) Sloterdijk’s own solution to the syndrome of enlightened false consciousness is for the postmodern subject to withdraw in irony from the political sphere, aping Diogenes of Sinope, the mythical figure in ancient Athens who lived his existentially authentic life in a tub. By contrast, Kunkel’s novel, addressing the same syndrome, tries to conceive of a more politically engaged response to contemporary conditions. A model of sincerity, rather than authenticity, underlies this response, because the emphasis is not on self-knowledge but on the priority of dialogue with the other. And while “Bridge” plays the role of other within the novel’s story, on a formal level the crucial and ultimate respondent for Dwight proves to be the reader of his text. While working as a reporter in Bolivia at the end of his narrative, Dwight keeps his spirits up by writing emails to Brigid in Argentina. The novel itself, however, takes the form of a memoir addressed only to the reader, whose individual response is explicitly thematized as structurally necessary for the potential sincerity of Dwight’s conversion to gain validation. As the many vexed reviews of the novel indicate, however, each response to Dwight’s culminating decision necessarily remains open-ended, with affi rmation only possible, if at all, in spite of history, ideology and literary cliché. Moreover Indecision, rather than go to lengths to avoid being described as imperialist, patriarchal, and clichéd, actually appears to invite that very critique. Like New Sincerity writing more generally, in other words, it offers no real defence against the application of a readerly hermeneutics of suspicion. Whether, in reading a line like Dwight’s “things were maybe getting cheesy. But at least they possessed the dignity of taking place,” one (a) responds primarily to the cheesiness and mocking tone, (b) prefers to affirm the claim to actual experience that underlies it, or (c) evinces disgust at the imperialist connotations of the whole scenario, one must recognize that there is no internal reason to privilege one reading over the others, just as there is no reason for the main character to decide one way or another in various situations in the text. Dwight’s culminating decision—presented, like everything else in the novel, in comic terms—becomes impossible to read in an absolute manner as either sincere or ironic,

From Syndrome to Sincerity 65 given that it is a cliché like everything else. Like any syndrome, it calls for interpretation, but with self-knowledge and action divorced so completely as here, sincerity will always look like irony or insincerity. Indeed, it is the very polarity between the ironic and the sincere that is being called into question by Indecision, as an unsettling question for the other and not the self to decide upon, if not fi nally resolve. Writing of the modernist artist, Trilling tells us that he “seeks his personal authenticity in his entire autonomousness—his goal is to be as selfdefi ning as the art object he creates” (1972, 100). Yet neither Kunkel as artist nor the text he writes are self-defi ning in this manner. Rather they are defi ned by the undecidable reaction they invoke in readers, a reaction that embeds questions about the sincere intentions of the author into the experience of the artwork. In the end, Dwight’s seriousness as a narrator cannot be fi rmly established, so clearly is he both a self and a literary construct. This is the crux of the New Sincerity—in the postmodern, media-saturated age, sincerity will always resemble insincerity in structural terms, with the difference not a question of knowledge but of trust and faith. If, as Brian McHale has claimed, modernism is characterized by an epistemological dominant and postmodernism by an ontological dominant (see McHale 1987), then the equivalent dominant in New Sincerity writing is the ethical. Contemporary sincerity privileges ethical questions by performing the confusions that divide the writer’s own self and that complicate the old notions of inner truth and wholeness which underlie both sincerity and authenticity as Trilling defi nes them. These earlier concepts focus on hidden meaning, whereas in Indecision meaning is not something hidden but something yet to come: meaning requires the futurity of the reader to provide a dialogic engagement that is not simply codifiable as a decidable ethics. Here the fi rst “post” of the post-postmodern might be said to be deferred into this uncertain future, a future alluded to by Indecision’s fi nal sentence, which is, aptly, a line of dialogue spoken not by the self but by the other. It is also a line that offers only a comic undecidability in response to the very question that in Western culture usually calls for the most decisive of all decisions. Faced with Dwight’s typically spontaneous and shambling request for her hand in marriage, Brigid responds: “I’d like to. But not now. Maybe not ever. Really I don’t know” (Kunkel 2005, 241). NOTES 1. Millard tells us that “Coming of age is [ . . . ] a drama of coming to terms with the father, and with all the social and cultural governance for which he stands” (2010, 15). Indecision does not deny us this drama, but turns the solemn tone of Millard’s assessment on its head in a typically knowing way. 2. The Abulinix itself also proves a false dawn: in keeping with a reading that downplays the novel’s neurochemical dimension in favor of its ethical and political outlook, the drug is revealed at the fi nale to be no more than a placebo.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Agger, Michael. 2005. “Wilmerding Shrugged: the Political Ambitions of Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision.” Slate, October 3. Accessed November 21, 2011. http:// www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2005/10/wilmerding_shrugged.html. Baxter, Charles. 2008. “Against Epiphanies.” In Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction, 2nd edition, 41–62. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press. de Man, Paul. 1983. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition, 187–228. London: Routledge. Kelly, Adam. 2010. “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.” In Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, edited by David Hering, 131–46. Austin, TX: SSMG Press. Kunkel, Benjamin. 2005. Indecision. London: Picador. Lotto, Mark. 2005. “A Hero for Our Time.” The Nation, October 24. Accessed November 21, 2011. http://www.thenation.com/article/hero-our-time. McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen. McInerney, Jay. 2005. “Getting it Together.” New York Times, August 28. Accessed November 21, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/books/ review/28MCINER.html. Millard, Kenneth. 2007. Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Moretti, Franco. 2000. The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture, 2nd edition. London: Verso. Oates, Joyce Carol. 2005. “Dangling Men.” New York Review of Books, November 3, 36–40. Roth, Marco. 2009. “The Rise of the Neuronovel.” n+1, September 14. Accessed November 21, 2011. http://nplusonemag.com/rise-neuronovel. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1988. A Critique of Cynical Reason, translated by Michael Eldred. London: Verso. Tobias, Scott. 2005. “Indecision.” A. V. Club, October 5. Accessed November 21, 2011. http://www.avclub.com/articles/benjamin-kunkel-indecision,4276/. Trilling, Lionel. 1972. Sincerity and Authenticity. London: Oxford University Press. Van Alphen, Ernst, and Mieke Bal. 2009. “Introduction.” In The Rhetoric of Sincerity, edited by Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal and Carel Smith, 1–16. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wallace, David Foster. 1998. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” In A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, 21–82. London: Abacus.

4

“We learned to tell our story walking” Tourette’s and Urban Space in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn 1

James Peacock

In interview, Jonathan Lethem has repeatedly evoked the idea of “dreaming his way back” to the borough of his birth. He explains his tendency to divide his time between Brooklyn and other places such as Toronto or Maine like this: “dreaming my way back to Brooklyn seems to be a necessary part of loving it for me—continuing to also love it from afar” (Birnbaum, 2004). Elsewhere, in “Patchwork Planet: Notes for a Prehistory of the Gentrification of Gowanus,” he remarks: “In the neighborhood of Gowanus, Boerum Hill, I’m forever a child” (Lethem, 2004). It is true that Lethem’s three “Brooklynite” novels—Girl in Landscape (1998), Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and The Fortress of Solitude (2003)—are also the most obviously preoccupied with filial relationships and parental loss. Yet it is also true that the two novels planting themselves most firmly and insistently in the ‘real’ Brooklyn run a greater risk of succumbing to a melancholic denial of loss—a fossilization and fetishization of childhood experience—than Girl in Landscape, which, by transplanting Brooklyn to an alien planet and reconceiving it as a town named ‘Caitlin’ is able more successfully to complete the mourning process, to “work through” trauma (LaCapra 2001, 70). Thus Girl in Landscape’s protagonist Pella Marsh simultaneously “dreams her way back” to Brooklyn and moves on. This essay explores the ways Motherless Brooklyn problematizes and retards the process of moving on by continually “acting out” the losses of childhood (LaCapra 2001, 46). Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Macallan Gold Dagger and the Salon Book Award, has thus far attracted considerably more critical attention than Lethem’s other work except Fortress of Solitude. It is a hard-boiled detective novel. This simple statement becomes remarkable when one considers the novels that preceded it, all of which brought multiple genres rudely into collision. Conrad Metcalf, first-person narrator of Lethem’s debut Gun, With Occasional Music (1994), struggles to maintain the ethical imperatives of detective fiction while dystopian science fiction takes over his world. His everyday realities include talking animals, amnesia-inducing narcotics and smoking babies rather than the minutiae of ‘real’ neighborhood life—street names, sandwich shops and burger joints— which lend Motherless Brooklyn an aura of authenticity.

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On the one hand, the decision to adhere, at least diegetically, to the conventions of a popular genre traditionally associated with powerful evocations of place (one thinks of Chandler’s Los Angeles and Rankin’s Edinburgh) is understandable in that it is sympathetic to Lethem’s desire to unearth a Brooklyn with which he has been familiar from his childhood. But if his fifth novel does not employ genre fantastically or excessively as previous novels do, it nonetheless tends toward excess in one significant aspect: the idiolect of its narrator protagonist. Chief among the novel’s attractions, according to critics and scholars, is a first-person narrative voice which can be described, at the very least, as distinctive. Ostensibly a hard-boiled detective novel, Motherless Brooklyn is in fact a kaleidoscopic, picaresque journey into the “dense thicket” of Tourette’s syndrome sufferer Lionel Essrog’s mind, “a place where words split and twine in an ever-deepening tangle” (Mobilio 1999, 7). Adam Begley, writing in The New York Observer, borrows a term of affectionate abuse frequently directed at Lionel by other characters to describe him more succinctly: “Lionel is a freakshow,” he says (1999, 15). Jennifer Fleissner correctly argues that the reader’s attention to generic narrative elements is overridden by Motherless Brooklyn’s linguistic joys: “one tends to forget the supposed ‘main narrative’ of Motherless Brooklyn in the intervals between rereading. Who killed Minna again? Why did they do it? These puzzles are generic ones; the text achieves its distinctiveness, by contrast, in its proliferation of Lionel’s verbal tics” (2009, 390). Certainly a plot synopsis offers scant indication of the novel’s dazzling originality and ingenuity: Lionel Essrog is an orphan who at thirteen is rescued from St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, along with three other orphans, and taken on by Frank Minna, a small-time neighborhood crook whom the boys come to idolize as a walking embodiment of old Brooklyn and as a surrogate father figure. At fi rst, Minna urges them to regard their mysterious tasks euphemistically as “moving work” (Lethem 1999, 50); they are, of course, unloading stolen goods. By the time they are in their thirties, Lionel, Tony, Gilbert and Danny, collectively known as “the Minna Men,” are running a detective agency disguised as a car service. The action begins when Lionel and Gilbert, trailing Minna in Manhattan, fail to prevent his murder and a devastated Lionel immediately sets out to find the killer. His investigations force him to engage with the wider world outside his familiar territory of Court Street, Brooklyn; they bring about confrontations with the other Minna Men, especially Tony Vermonte, as well as minatory encounters with Frank’s brother Gerard Minna; two ageing Italian crime lords called Matricardi and Rockaforte; a Buddhist Zendo on the Upper East Side; and the unimaginably rich and malevolent Fujisaki corporation. Significantly, these disparate threads are pulled together not in Brooklyn, but Maine’s Atlantic coast, where local fishermen are employed by Fujisaki to catch sea urchins for Japanese dining tables (269). We later learn that Frank Minna was murdered by the Japanese businessmen’s enforcer because he and his brother were siphoning money away from Fujisaki.

“We learned to tell our story walking” 69 So tragic loss forces Lionel to become a proper detective, a situation he approaches with a mixture of excitement, fear and disbelief: “It seemed possible I was a detective on a case” (132). And at first glance, the eruptive language and compulsive physical behaviors generated by his syndrome would seem to render Lionel laughably unsuited to undercover detective work, and thus render the novel more of a loving deconstruction of detective conventions than a traditional treatment of the genre. After all, it is difficult to perform a discreet stake-out in a parked car or to menace someone into giving up vital information when one is likely to blurt out “ghostradish, pepperpony, kaiserphone” at any moment (244) or to experience an uncontrollable urge to tap each of one’s interlocutor’s shoulders precisely six times. To some extent, this impression of Lionel’s unsuitability for the job and the novel’s deconstructive approach is justified and confirmed by interpolated passages of generic reflexivity in which Lionel considers what is permissible or expected in detective narratives: “Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence?” (119). Such generalizing moments, as becomes clear, participate in a debate central to the novel, between generic representativeness and uniqueness, between wide-reaching metaphorical applications of conditions such as Tourette’s and individual lived experience of those conditions. Yet one of the pleasures of the story is the revelation that Tourette’s is, in fact, perfectly suited to detective work. Lionel is actually very useful during stakeouts, “since my compulsiveness forced me to eyeball the site or mark in question every thirty seconds or so” (4). Similarly, the exigencies of his condition make him a diligent and talented listener to wiretaps: “give me a key list of trigger words to listen for in a conversation and I’d think about nothing else, nearly jumping out of my clothes at the slightest hint of one, while the same task invariably drew anyone else toward blissful sleep” (4). These are practical applications, but there are deeper reasons for Lionel’s ability to work undercover. First, there is the plain fact that most people are unaware of the condition and therefore routinely dismiss the Tourette’s sufferer as “crazy” (107). Holding such a view, it is impossible to credit the Touretter with shrewd intelligence or guile or to consider him or her a genuine threat. As Lionel observes when reflecting on his high school years: “I wasn’t tough, provocative, stylish, self-destructive, sexy, wasn’t babbling some secret countercultural tongue, wasn’t testing authority [ . . . ] I was merely crazy” (84). Secondly, and relatedly, there is the general public’s unfailing ability to dismiss and forget elements in its midst which are momentarily disruptive or simply different. Recalling another Touretter with a massive “belching tic” (43) sitting on a busy bus, Lionel says: “I knew that those other passengers would barely recall it a few minutes after stepping off to their destinations [ . . . ] Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble. The belching man ruptured it so quickly and completely that I could watch the wound instantly

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heal.” For the aspiring detective this revelation presents abundant opportunities because “a Touretter can also be The Invisible Man” (44). Brooklyn is especially conducive to Lionel’s invisibility. It has become, Lethem admits, one of his “hoariest set-pieces” to claim that Brooklyn is “my Tourette’s” (Peacock, 2011), that the provocative street talk, the humorous negotiations which allow resident Brooklynites to “play at hostility” and “flirt with aggression” (Peacock, 2011) have become deeply inscribed on his character and are reproduced in Frank Minna and Lionel Essrog. Despite his reputation as a “freakshow,” Lionel is able to some extent to blend in to Brooklyn life because his Tourette’s is an only marginally amplified version of the linguistic playfulness and experimentation all around him; it is, indeed, shaped by and dependent on it. As he remembers his long afternoons reading books in the St. Vincent’s library and watching old television programmes like Bewitched and I Love Lucy, Lionel says that these texts “weren’t showing me what I needed to see, weren’t helping me find the language” (Lethem 1999, 37), the words “trapped like a roiling ocean under a calm floe of ice” (45). Leaving behind the “Nowhere” of St. Vincent’s (37) for the bustle and excitement of Court Street and meeting Frank Minna, a man who savors his own vaguely Tourettic insults such as “You boiled cabbageheads” (24), finally releases this flow of words. As Lionel says: “it was Minna who brought me the language, Minna and Court Street that let me speak” (37). The second chapter of Lethem’s novel (simply called “Motherless Brooklyn”), thus incorporates within its ongoing detective narrative a coming-ofage story as Lionel fi nds in Court Street a place to establish his identity and discover his own unique mode of expression. It is a deliberately perverse Bildungsroman, however. Whereas a common trajectory of such narratives describes an emergence into maturity characterized by the sublimation of youthful, instinctive and dangerous impulses, Lionel’s arrival into adulthood, synonymous with his arrival into “the only Brooklyn” (56), represents the flowering of instinctive impulses that, in any other location, might be considered dangerously anti-social. On Court Street they become, if not entirely acceptable, at least a neighborhood entertainment and a constant reminder of the network of “casual insults” underpinning this part of Brooklyn (55). For this reason the novel’s very fi rst sentence, which pertains partly to the paradoxical combination of involuntary compulsion and intentionality peculiar to Tourette’s, attains an additional geographical significance: context is indeed everything when the Touretter claims a special place for his neighborhood in the development of his condition. It is no coincidence that the opening paragraphs bristle with spatial metaphors and images of vehicularity; Tourette’s produces words that “course over the surface of the world” (1) and “break into the stores,” and it excites the urge “to shout in the church, the nursery, the crowded movie house” (2). What is also significant, as we shall see, is that the manifestations of Lionel’s condition are altered when he leaves Brooklyn for Maine or Manhattan.

“We learned to tell our story walking” 71 To equate Tourette’s so explicitly with Brooklyn is to stretch a conceit and, in Lethem’s own words, to “take this observation and make the kind of exaggeration of it that fiction thrives on. If I decide that Brooklyn is Tourette’s, it’s wrong, it’s a mistake, but fiction loves those mistakes” (Peacock, 2011). Lethem’s frank admission of this “mistake,” however, does little to dispel the suspicion that such an avowedly metaphorical use of the syndrome risks diminishing understanding of the unique, everyday lived experience of the Tourette’s sufferer. What results is a situation one might call the ‘everyman’ syndrome: the tendency, with which Motherless Brooklyn implicitly and sometimes deliberately fl irts, to deploy the neurological disorder in order to make general statements about humanity such as: “everyone’s a little ticcish that way sometimes” (Lethem 1999, 160). These are not in themselves new ideas, of course: Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), as the introduction to this volume explains, deal with the dangers of illnesses used metaphorically. Since the 1990s, as this volume shows, the illnesses and disorders co-opted by literature for metaphorical purposes have frequently been neurological ones. What Marco Roth calls “the neurological novel” is a contemporary phenomenon resulting partly from “a cultural [ . . . ] shift away from environmental and relational theories of personality back to the study of brains themselves, as the source of who we are” and partly from what Roth sees as “the exhaustion of ‘the linguistic turn’ in the humanities” (Roth 2009). Accompanying these trends, as both Roth and Jennifer Fleissner point out, is the widespread discrediting of Freudian psychoanalysis as a totalizing explanation for human behavior. Agreeing with Lethem that neurology has become “the latest contender for the novel’s crown,” Fleissner suggests that the shift from psychoanalysis to neurology dictates a change in interpretive strategies from an over-emphasis on the submerged meanings of symptoms and their fi rst, probably traumatic causes, to an explanation of symptoms as manifestations of malfunctions in the brain’s wiring, and thus as considerably less meaningful (Fleissner 2009, 387–88). This idea has important implications for a reading of Lionel Essrog’s tics and compulsions, but what demands emphasis at this point is just how frequently writers and literary critics ascribe metaphorical meanings to neurological conditions. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), for instance, with its depiction of processes broken down into minute tasks carried out by drones with no awareness of the overall effects of their work, bears out psychologist Steven N. Gold’s contention that “ubiquitous features of modern society—advanced technology, rampant consumerism, and rapid mobility—induce, to a greater or lesser extent, a pervasive form of dissociation in its members” (2004, 14). Dissociative identity disorder thus stands as metaphor for the effects of late capitalism and postmodern society. Working from a similar premise to Gold,

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Bent Sørensen makes a more general point about neurological syndromes in recent literature: “the latest trend in disorders [ . . . ] fits the glove of postmodernism so well, rife as it is with a celebration of fragmentation, loss of faith, history, telos, God etc.” (Sørensen 2004). Drawing on Sontag’s work, Bennett Kravitz argues that “in the postmodern world, we can take the relationship between culture and disease to a more complex level—that is, that culture is either the origin or catalyst of certain diseases” (2003, 172). For Kravitz, then, the relationship is symbiotic: neurological disorders reflect and are partially shaped by the fragmented postmodern society in which they occur: “Culture helps to defi ne disease because of the former’s dis-ease, yet disease also contributes to the making of culture” (2003, 179). The danger of this metaphorical approach is that this relationship becomes a vicious, closed circle and the novelist lapses into “stark biological determinism” (Roth 2009): Western society is incurably diseased and fi nds its choicest metaphors in characters damaged beyond hope. It would be wrong to argue that metaphors are intrinsically bad, however. First, the syndrome metaphor can serve to place symptoms such as those of the Touretter on a spectrum of all human behaviors and thus break down the perception of certain neurological conditions as aberrant and completely outside a medically or culturally sanctioned norm. When Lionel has his sexual encounter with Kimmery, for example, we discover that she has her own gentle tic, the repetition of “okay” (221). Secondly, it should not be forgotten that words can be metaphors: to deny the metaphorical capabilities of the novel in order to pursue a documentary recording of the real experience of neurological disorder would be to deny the possibilities of the form and the ethical opportunities provided by the deliberate “mistakes” of which Lethem speaks. Yet the particular mistake he makes in Motherless Brooklyn flirts with an ahistorical outlook, I argue, that risks undermining the anti-amnesiac stance common to most of his writing. This is because in addition to Lionel’s condition, a metaphor for Brooklyn and for the feverish activity which characterizes Lethem’s creativity, the borough is also employed metaphorically. As part of the underlying debate between competing urban regions and between past and present, Brooklyn (specifically Court Street) comes to stand for contact with the past, for a healthy appreciation of neighborhood history. But this apparently laudable sense of history frequently fl irts with enervating nostalgia because of the repetitious and retardant effects of Lionel’s Tourette’s. So Tourette’s is the perfect metaphor for Brooklyn as Lethem conceives it, though not exactly in the way he intends: it demonstrates how metaphorical messages can become obscured and destabilized. Previous critics have also noted the ways in which New York as a whole compliments and contributes to Lionel’s condition. Sørensen’s reading of the “Tourettic city” (113) is consistent with his equation of Tourette’s and other neurological conditions with the postmodern. New York becomes for

“We learned to tell our story walking” 73 him a spatial embodiment of postmodernity’s dismantling of epistemological certainties: Take this bumbling detective type, and set him loose in a confusing world such as New York City at the end of the 20th century, and the ensuing interpretation of this world through the lens of his Tourettic mind sets the scene for a non-epistemological devolution of the crime in question: clues become indistinguishable from his own symptoms; the disorder infects the sequentiality and causality of events, and leads to order becoming contingent and at best temporary; ultimately, to the Tourette’s sufferer, the whole of New York, from its subway system to its social hierarchies, resembles a Tourettic body, always in motion, never going anywhere with teleological certainty. (2006, 4) Seen in this way, New York becomes a set of symptoms revealing contemporary culture’s profound dis-ease and disruption. Where one might take issue with Sørensen is in his treatment of ‘New York’ as a homogenous entity. Throughout Motherless Brooklyn, from the moment Lionel declares that he and Gilbert are “off our customary map” as they track Minna on the Upper East Side (Lethem 1999, 3), strong distinctions are drawn between Brooklyn and “citadel Manhattan” (25). As subsequent remarks illustrate, the two locations are shown to encapsulate different attitudes to history, and therefore to the whole question of amnesia. It is the contradictory impulses of Tourette’s that threaten to collapse these distinctions and reveal their factitiousness. In the bravura opening paragraphs Lionel explains, with characteristic mixing of metaphors, these contradictory impulses. Calling himself “a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on fi libuster” (1), he nonetheless stresses that in the fi rst instance his verbal tics (like his physical ones) derive from an overwhelming desire to restore order: “the words rush out of the cornucopia of my brain to course over the surface of the world, tickling reality like fi ngers on piano keys. Caressing, nudging. They’re an invisible army on a peacekeeping mission, a peaceable horde. They mean no harm. They placate, interpret, massage. Everywhere they’re smoothing down imperfections” (1). It is only when “they fi nd too much perfection, when the surface is already buffed smooth” (1) that his “little army rebels, breaks into the stores. Reality needs a prick here and there, the carpet needs a fl aw” (2). Although this is Lethem’s fi rst novel not to incorporate science fiction, Lionel’s outbursts perform precisely the same function as, to cite some examples from Lethem’s earlier novels, talking animals, intelligent holes in the universe or poetic aliens: they disrupt mundane reality with incongruous, surprising or fantastical elements. So Lionel is compelled both to smooth imperfections and to ruffle already smooth surfaces. Despite the contrasting motivations, the result

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is the same: apparent chaos. This is the paradox of Tourette’s: in its incessant smoothing over of fl aws, its compulsive desire to order, its striving for a discursive precision it can never attain, it reveals language and the world as play and difference. Yet Lionel’s narration often insists on enforcing a separation between the two impulses, a separation enacted geographically and indeed ethically in the differences he perceives between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and between the areas of Brooklyn he regards as ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ and those that aspire to the glamour of the noisy neighbor across the bridge. In parenthesis, it is interesting to note that the allegorizing tendencies of many contemporary Brooklyn fictions—Brooklyn as disappearing spirit of community, as diversity, as local and global in harmony, as knowing, unsentimental nostalgia—similarly require the pitting of periphery against metropolitan center, and hence the near-demonization of Manhattan. Such a scheme is evident in Kitty Burns Florey’s Solos (2004), in which property and interior design choices attest to one’s ethical orientation. Manhattan—fl ashy, homogenizing, overly expensive—is associated with anonymous luxury loft conversions (Florey 2004, 221) and Williamsburg, Brooklyn with the shabby but somehow more honest apartment owned by protagonist Emily Lime. To aspire to own a Manhattan-style loft apartment is to be “banal, boring, pretentious, untrue to the spirit of Brooklyn in general and Williamsburg in particular” (2004, 23). As Elizabeth Gumport rightly points out, such romanticizing depictions trade in an aesthetics of authenticity which is blind to economic and class realities (Gumport 2009). Lionel Essrog is not averse to such artificial distinctions. At times he engages in a kind of gerrymandering in order to maintain his preconceived notions of what constitutes the essential, authentic Brooklyn: that is, Frank Minna’s Brooklyn, centered on “Court Street, where it passed through Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill” (Lethem 1999, 56). Thus Brooklyn Heights, one of the borough’s most upmarket areas, is “secretly a part of Manhattan” and “everything east of the Gowanus Canal” is rejected as “an unspeakable barbarian tumult” (56). Most revealingly, the “elegantly renovated” Boerum Hill Inn caters for “a Manhattanized clientele of professional singles too good for bars with televisions [ . . . ] oblivious to the neighborhood’s past or present reality” (238–39). Nomenclature is central to the oppositions Lionel constructs in these passages. “Gowanus” signals the pre-gentrification neighborhood, whereas “Boerum Hill” comes laden with the cultural, economic baggage of the post-gentrification, bourgeois Brooklyn which becomes the focus of The Fortress of Solitude. “Manhattanized” as a pejorative term is similarly freighted: in Lionel’s personal schema, to be “Manhattanized” is to be “oblivious to the neighborhood’s past or present reality;” it is to indulge too enthusiastically in an ahistorical drive toward incessant newness, to be reduced, consciously or unconsciously, to the homogenized desires of global consumerism. It is, to return

“We learned to tell our story walking” 75 to metaphors of Tourette’s, to engage in the smoothing over of difference and imperfection. Court Street, on the other hand, corresponds to the disruptive compulsion of Tourette’s, that which “teaches you what people will ignore and forget” (43). In contrast to Manhattan, it consistently fails to make things glossy and new, and therein, for Lionel, lies its virtue: “Minna’s Court Street was the old Brooklyn, a placid ageless surface alive underneath with talk, with deals and casual insults, a neighborhood political machine with pizzeria and butcher-shop bosses and unwritten rules everywhere. All was talk except for what mattered most, which were unspoken understandings” (55). Just as the “deals and casual insults” erupt Touretically through Court Street’s “placid ageless surface,” so the past refuses to lie down and die despite the present’s best efforts. In the form of talk—specifically “tugboating,” the Minna boys’ term for taking a story too far (52)—memories constantly intrude on a Brooklyn which itself feels the hand of bourgeoisification at work in areas such as Park Slope and Boerum Hill. As the author has expressed it elsewhere, Brooklyn is “permanently unsmoothed over” (Zeitchik 2003, 37). Following Lionel’s schematic division, then, one might argue that Brooklyn operates as the rebellious Id, Manhattan as the Ego, the latter mediating between individual desires and the homogenizing demands of the global marketplace. Lionel exemplifies the demands of the Id: his is talk that refuses to lay dormant, that prefers to emerge “on the fly, out on the pavement, between beats of action” (Lethem 1999, 70). More than anyone, he has learnt to tell his story walking (70), to fi nd a voice that echoes the restless trafficking between past and present he sees in the streets around him. But only in the streets immediately around him, for Lionel’s “Brooklyn,” evidently, is restricted to a specific section of Court Street, the Minna Men’s territory. His vision is, to use the term in its specifically Lethemite sense, an amnesiac one, in that it works hard to reduce the world to a tiny zone of activity, a mini-utopia which excludes contiguous groupings. Manhattan, obviously, is “off the map” and anathema; Maine is “off the page” (264) and even Greenpoint, another part of Brooklyn, falls outside his cultural jurisdiction: “Brooklyn is one big place, and this wasn’t our end of it” (20). Inspired and nurtured by Frank Minna and Court Street, Lionel’s verbal tics are thus revealed as an idiosyncratic form of cognitive mapping; they give him a defined role within Minna’s tiny sphere of operation. Yet they also trap him in his fi xations on the past, on his surrogate father figure, on the spuriously ‘authentic’ Brooklyn he has defi ned for himself. The discovery that his sense even of Frank’s “small world” is “diminished, two-dimensional” (231) and that the Minnas’ criminal activities also take in Manhattan, Maine and even, indirectly, Japan, severely disturbs Lionel’s nostalgic conceptions of Court Street as the center of the world. Yet it also offers him a chance to escape from these conceptions. One of the reasons Lionel is able to map so effectively his Tourette’s and his Brooklyn is because condition and place alike exist both materially

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and symbolically. As Ronald Schleifer argues, one of the most distinctive features of Tourette’s is its apparent breaking down of “the strict distinction between language and motor activities” (2001, 564). Combining tics and jerky movements with linguistic compulsions such as echolalia and coprolalia, it is (and here Schleifer quotes from the work of Oliver Sacks) “situated ‘partway between meaningless jerks or noises and meaningful acts’ at the ‘interface of mind and body,’” and “‘seems to take up the very materiality of language and underlines its materiality even as it also preserves it as language’” (Schleifer 2001, 567). Schleifer is highlighting the performative nature of much Tourettic discourse. Sudden ejaculations, curses and vocal tics are “primal cries” in which the distance between signifier and signified, between sound and import, does not exist” (571). Their meaning is simply their utterance. Yet the fact that they are invariably context-specific and unique to the speaker invests them with a kind of intentionality. This is why Lionel’s ticcing is invariably so funny; as he admits: “speech was intention, and I couldn’t let anyone else or myself know how intentional my craziness felt” (Lethem 1999, 47). His verbal tics hover between physical compulsion and a kind of contextual appropriateness. This is what Schleifer means when he says that Tourette’s highlights the materiality of language while retaining its status as language: it is physical and symbolic simultaneously. For several reasons, then, the often-repeated “Eat me!” (2) is an entirely appropriate coprolalic outburst for a condition that proves all-consuming for Lionel as he attempts to model the world: he admits to relating everything to his condition, such that counting tics becomes a tic in itself, resulting in “meta-Tourette’s” (192). Food is a repeated metaphor because it emphasizes the materiality of the condition. For example, one of the most persistent symptoms is what Lionel dubs his “echolalia salad” (4)—taking a phrase and gradually modifying it until it is radically transformed. In this way “Zendo” becomes: “Don’t know from Zendo, Ken-like Zung Fu, Feng Shui master, Fungo bastard, Zen masturbation, Eat me!” (4). Given this tendency, Lionel’s declaration that “food really mellows me out” (2) deserves close scrutiny because it implies an uneasy truce between material consumption—of the White Castle mini-burgers which are his favorites at the beginning of the novel (2), the skinny frankfurters from the “Papaya Czar” (160), the kosher “chicken schwarma” sandwiches he craves at the end (302)—and metaphorical consumption. Most importantly, food, along with other things like Prince’s music (128), allows him to externalize his symptoms. Lionel is only able to relax when he can “let [his] syndrome live outside [his] brain for once, live in the air instead” (128). Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” (2006, 6) is a familiar concept and relevant here: it reminds us that places and communities depend on an uneasy truce between their status as geographical, material spaces and as subjective, linguistic constructs. Brooklyn is taken to stand for so many things in recent novels, including Lethem’s, that Brooklyn authors

“We learned to tell our story walking” 77 have become peculiarly self-conscious and explicit about its geographical specificity and its overlapping symbolic value. Audrey, the narrator of Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn, refers to the borough as “a state of mind or perception” (1990, 16). Michael Stephens’ Brooklyn in The Brooklyn Book of the Dead “lend[s] itself more to the imagination than facts” (1994, 23). Myth and history, physical reality and intentionality, compete Touretically in these texts. So if Lionel imagines and identifies with Brooklyn more passionately than with Manhattan, it is because he insists on seeing in its beguiling combination of elegance and chaos, concreteness and myth, a mirror of and contributor to his own condition. The eruptive fragments of the past are comforting to Lionel as an orphan, an individual detached from a sense of familial history and mourning the loss both of his parents and his replacement father figure Frank Minna. As Lionel puts it: “we orphans were idiots of connectivity, overly impressed by any trace of the familial in the world” (74). In trading incessantly between past and present, between myth and facts, Brooklyn allows a glimpse of those longed-for connections. In An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks implies the existence of just such a temporal aspect in Tourettic tics and utterances: “tics are like hieroglyphic, petrified residues of the past and may, indeed, with the passage of time become so hieroglyphic, so abbreviated, as to become unintelligible” (1995, 81). In effect, tics function as stored-up fragments of the past which are employed either to make sense of or to destabilize the present. In Motherless Brooklyn the temporal transitivity underlying Lionel’s Tourette’s is reflected in the temporal and spatial negotiations of Brooklyn itself. The statement “we learned to tell our story walking” (70), which is rehearsed in the very last line of the novel as an entreaty to the reader, attests to the perception of a Brooklyn constantly in motion and under negotiation, like Lionel’s language; a place where past and present are constantly interacting; where people immigrate and emigrate; where whole chunks of the neighborhood can change color and class in the blink of an eye while retaining some essential quality innately “Brooklynite.” The storing-up quality of Tourette’s and Brooklyn presents its own problems, however. Like the borough, Lionel’s condition is tenacious and stubborn; it simply will not leave things alone or forget “the intolerable, the incongruous, the disruptive” (43). While it may well be instructive, Tourette’s becomes intolerable for this very reason. And, when Lionel is honest enough to acknowledge it, so does his neighborhood: “Ordinarily I savored Brooklyn’s unchangeability, the bullying, Minna-like embrace of its long memory. At the moment I yearned to see this neighborhood razed, replaced by skyscrapers or multiplexes. I longed to disappear into Manhattan’s amnesiac dance of renewal” (179). In this episode, Lionel is being bullied by Tony, one of the other Minna boys whom he suspects of being connected with Minna’s murder. It is at moments like these, moments of high stress, sadness and loneliness, when Lionel wishes that Brooklyn’s

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memory were not quite so long, when he wishes it could be more like Manhattan and aspire to continual rejuvenation through willed amnesia. Lionel and Brooklyn’s Tourettic inability to let go is the most ambiguous and problematic of their metaphorical tendencies. The smoothing and the disrupting impulses of Tourette’s may have a common endpoint—a kind of chaos. Yet it is chaos which, as Lionel suggests, runs the risk of becoming retrogressive or even ahistorical because in the end it is unclear whether the potentially destabilizing relationship between past and present is truly dialectical. In fact, it is likely that Lionel’s Tourettic tics and echoes reveal a desire to freeze (or in Oliver Sacks’ terms ‘petrify’) a particular period in time, which results in a destruction of historical sense altogether. In Fredric Jameson’s terms (and here the neurological metaphors become unavoidably mixed) Lionel’s Tourette’s is schizophrenic, in that it defeats reference and reduces sentences to isolated signifiers: “With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time” (Jameson 1991, 25–26). With this breakdown and with the waning of “our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way” (21) comes an inability to represent the present as history and a recourse to modes of representation dominated by nostalgia. Lionel suffers from precisely this problem after Minna’s death: his is an idealized Brooklyn always on the verge of obsolescence, “an everyday life that already felt nostalgic” (230). Lionel’s incessant tinkering with language thus attests to a desire not to change or move forward, to complete the mourning process, but to change back and thus maintain a nostalgically conceived past situation in the present (when Minna was still alive, when Lionel’s Brooklyn was not motherless). Seen in this way, linguistic play offers only the illusion of transitivity and vehicularity. Tourette’s sufferers, as Oliver Sacks asserts, are “no nearer for not being still. . . . no nearer to anything by virtue of motion; and in this sense, motion is not genuine movement” (1987, 16–17). Because Lionel’s idealized Brooklyn is so inextricably linked to Lionel’s condition, because it is in a sense internalized and created by his verbal and motor tics, it precludes the possibility of externalizing his Tourette’s for long enough that he can reflect on his loss and move on. Lionel’s Court Street is a temporary utopia, but one the protagonist tries to make permanent to the detriment of his future well-being. As he admits soon after Minna’s death: “If I didn’t stem my syndrome’s needs, I would never clear a space in which my own sorrow could dwell” (127). Brooklyn cannot appease or quell the demands of his syndrome because it is too closely associated with it. Too bound up in his personal myths and symbols, too imprinted with icons of Minna, Lionel’s Brooklyn ends up simply feeling too small. Lionel himself becomes, in Bennett Kravitz’s words, “a self-fulfilling prophecy” because “his symptoms emanate from specific cultural and social contexts” (2003, 175) from which he is reluctant to depart, partly due to his guilt

“We learned to tell our story walking” 79 over Minna’s murder. And guilt, as Lionel says, also has a Tourettic quality, always wanting to “reach into the past to tweak, neaten, and repair” (Lethem 1999, 284). All of which imbues the climactic episodes in Maine with added significance. They take place in a chapter called “Auto Body,” which refers not only to Lionel’s overnight stake-out outside the storefront and to his pursuit of Tony and the murderous giant along the freeways to Maine, but also to his motor compulsions. At the moment he crosses the bridge at Portsmouth into Maine, however, Lionel determines to jettison the automatic body and become a creature of pure intentionality: “I focused everything I had left on the drive, on casting off unnecessary behaviors, thrusting exhaustion and bitterness aside and making myself into a vehicular arrow” (262). When Lionel leaves the car and contemplates the ocean, he experiences a moment of the sublime. Tacitly acknowledging that Brooklyn is a text of his own creation, or a map drafted through his own tics and obsessions, he says: “Waves, sky, trees, Essrog—I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement” (264). The “loss of language” he experiences, the “great sucking away of the word-laden walls I needed around me” (264), forces him to “reply in some new tongue, to find a way to assert a self that had become tenuous, shrunk to a shred of Brooklyn stumbling on the coastal void” (264). What he does, remarkably, is deliberately to shout some of his recurring tics (“Bailey!,” “Eat me! Dickweed!”) across the ocean, culminating in an ironic yet hugely significant proclamation of ownership: “I claim this big water for Essrog!” (265). Though he in no sense owns this water, the reassertion of his non-Tourettic self as his Brooklyn self dissipates suggests strongly that a more permanent departure from the borough will be beneficial to him, by relieving him of his fixation on the past. The vastness gives him the space to mourn properly, to externalize his symptoms away from the claustrophobic meaningfulness of the borough. Just after his ocean epiphany, another episode increases the sense that Maine is a place where Lionel can externalize his condition. Although Frank Minna once gave Lionel a useless book about Tourette’s (81), nobody else in Brooklyn seems to recognize Lionel’s behavior as a neurological condition, preferring instead to regard him as crazy, his tics as a performance or “routine” in keeping with Brooklyn’s pervading sense of mischief (123). Yet in Maine, Lionel meets with an old man called Foible who instantly and without judgment states: “You got a touch of Tourette’s syndrome there, son” (270). This simple act of recognition is an additional aspect of the radical de-contextualization Lionel experiences here, and another invitation to get out of Brooklyn. After defeating the giant and piecing together the full story behind Minna’s murder with Minna’s wife Julia, Lionel does of course return to Brooklyn (303). Before he leaves, however, he flings the detritus of the case—his and Julia’s guns, his cell phone, Minna’s pager—into the ocean in a symbolic act of catharsis and consignment of the past to the past (albeit one partly

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driven by physical compulsion). In a typical moment of tragicomic bathos, Lionel is forced to throw away one of his shoes, too, in order to honor the number that happens Tourettically to be haunting him that day—five (303). Yet the absurd image of Lionel driving “with [his] gas-pedal-and-brake foot clad only in a dress sock, back to Brooklyn” (303) only partially hides the deeper resonances of the incident. For Lionel has, in a sense, left part of himself behind in the language-defeating ocean. In the closing paragraphs of the novel, Lionel indulges in some fi nal observations on the nature of the detective genre. Throughout the novel, he has shared with the reader such observations: indeed, Lionel’s meta-Tourette’s is matched by a meta-generic consciousness on a par with Lethem’s. Lionel assumes the existence of a constellated community in which he and the readers participate. This is shown, for example, by the sharing of quotations from the work of Raymond Chandler (205). However, Lionel’s fi nal comments on the genre, where he reflects melancholically on his performance as a detective and on his losses and disappointments, point to its unsuitability to a man already inclined toward nostalgia: Assertions are common to me, and they’re also common to detectives [ . . . ] And in detective stories things are always always, the detective casting his exhausted, caustic gaze over the corrupted permanence of everything and thrilling you with his sweetly savage generalizations. This or that runs deep or true to form, is invariable, exemplary [ . . . ] Assertions and generalizations are, of course, a version of Tourette’s. A way of touching the world, handling it, covering it with confirming language. Here’s one more. As a great man once said, the more things change, the harder they are to change back. (Lethem, 1999: 307) Seen in this way, detective fiction in Motherless Brooklyn succumbs to the temptation to attribute such importance to the past, to remembering, that a sense of historical evolution is sacrificed to a contrived sense of timelessness. Moreover, Lionel’s observations in these paragraphs reveal another aspect of the tension discussed earlier: the ‘everyman’ syndrome. The detective’s urge to generalize, one shared by Lionel’s Tourettic self and, as he perceives it, by Brooklyn, has a dangerously ahistorical quality but also the potential to reduce individuals to representative figures, or metaphors for the “human condition.” About “Bailey,” the subject of so many of his verbal tics, Lionel speculates: “Maybe Bailey was everyman, like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life” (10). As an “imaginary listener” (10), this everyman performs a similar function to the reader of the novel, demonstrating how Lionel attempts to create a metaphorical, representative reader figure to collude with his speculations and generalizations. Thus in the final paragraph the figures of “Bailey,” “Ullman” (the lawyer murdered early on without ever appearing in the story, and phonetically related to “all men”), and indeed the reader, assume a paradoxical status: they are the “ghosts” who “never even get into

“We learned to tell our story walking” 81 your house they are so busy howling at the windows” (311), unknown individuals who stand for every person we will never know and never be able to know. At a textual level, Lionel’s way of dealing with this epistemological gap, achieved partly through his Tourette’s, partly through his chosen genre and partly through his neighborhood, is to assume complicity with and sympathy for his observations on the part of others. One of the dangers of Motherless Brooklyn, then, derives precisely from the irresistible pleasures of its narration. Of course, the simple fact of having a fi rst-person narrator with a neurological disability is a positive thing, in that it forces the reader to question the structures of normativity which usually prevail. But although the Tourettic narrator defamiliarizes the world in the fi rst instance, his desire to generalize, to smooth, to keep things as they were risks undermining the ostranenie the novel initially promises. As Jennifer Fleissner says, the tic becomes “a mode of mimesis” (2009, 391) of an eccentric and ticcish world (Court Street, Brooklyn) that Lionel fi nds comforting and familiar and about which, by and large, he wishes the reader to feel likewise. He might momentarily shake it up, but his desire is to conserve. And although Lionel, as we have seen, does on occasion question his own assumptions, and does at the end hint at a revised outlook, our identification with him is so strong that it is difficult not to assume a desire on the part of the author for readers to subscribe to similar prejudices (about Brooklyn and Manhattan, for example). Yet there are ultimately signs that Lionel’s restricted outlook might be changing. The Minna Men call themselves detectives, but they have no clients, and so instead operate as a proper car service for the first time. Lionel’s investigative impulses, having been the means by which he could attempt to arrest time and keep reaching into the past, have been banished, and he now engages in an activity—driving—that at least symbolizes mobility, a desire to overcome the past. The fact that he takes a trip to JFK Airport at the end of the novel also connotes a broadening of horizons (310). As Sørensen suggests (2006, 6), Lionel’s new-found love of the chicken sandwich sold at the “kosher-food stand called Mushy’s, run by a family of Israelis” (Lethem 1999, 310) hints at a reconnection with the Jewish roots signified by his surname (the esrog being a citrus fruit used at the harvest festival of Sukkoth), and thus with a community that crosses neighborhood, city and national boundaries. Thus Lionel’s closing demands to Bailey, to Ullman and to the reader apply equally well to him as he looks for a way out of the tiny utopian world he has inhabited up to now: “Put an egg in your shoe, and beat it. Make like a tree, and leave. Tell your story walking” (311). NOTES 1. This chapter appears in slightly different form in my Jonathan Lethem (Manchester University Press, 2012). I would like to thank the publishers for permission to use this material.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Begley, Adam. 1999. “Detective Yarn with a Twist: Tick-Plagued P.I. Sleuths Self.” New York Observer. October 18. Birnbaum, Robert. 2004. “Birnbaum v Jonathan Lethem.” Morning News. January 7. Accessed November 11, 2011. http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/ personalities/birnbaum_v_jonathan_lethem.php. Fleissner, Jennifer L. 2009. “Symptomatology and the Novel.” Novel: a Forum on Fiction. 42, 3: 387–92. Florey, Kitty Burns. 2004. Solos. New York: Berkley Books. Gold, Steven N. 2004. “Fight Club: a Depiction of Contemporary Society as Dissociogenic.” Journal of Trauma and Dissociation. 5, 2: 13–34. Gumport, Elizabeth. 2009. “Gentrified Fiction.” n+1. 5. Accessed June 15, 2010. http://www.nplusonemag.com/gentrified-fiction. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso. Kravitz, Bennett. 2003. “The Culture of Disease or the Dis-ease of Culture in Motherless Brooklyn and Eve’s Apple.” Journal of American Culture. 26, 2: 171–79. Lethem, Jonathan.1998. Girl in Landscape. London: Faber and Faber. . 1999. Motherless Brooklyn. London: Faber and Faber. . 2003. The Fortress of Solitude. London: Faber and Faber. . 2004. “Patchwork Planet: Notes for a Prehistory of the Gentrification of Gowanus.” Brooklyn Magazine. Accessed December 21, 2012. http://www. jonathanlethem.com/patchwork_planet.html Mobilio, Albert. 1999. “What Makes Him Tic?” New York Times. 17 October. Palahniuk, Chuck. 1997. Fight Club. London: Vintage. Peacock, James. 2011. “Why all the Marsupials? An Interview with Jonathan Lethem.” American Studies Today Online. Accessed November 16, 2011. http://www.americansc.org.uk/Online/Online_2011/Lethem.html. Roth, Marco. 2009. “The Rise of the Neuronovel.” n+1. 8. Accessed October 30. http://www.nplusonemag.com/rise-neuronovel. Sacks, Oliver. 1987. Awakenings. New York: Knopf Publishing Group. . 1995. An Anthropologist on Mars. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Schleifer, Ronald. 2001. “The Poetics of Tourette Syndrome: Language, Neurobiology, and Poetry.” New Literary History. 32, 3: 563–84. Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. 1990. Leaving Brooklyn. New York: Minerva. Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. . 1989. AIDS and its Metaphors. London: Penguin. Sørensen, Bent. 2006. “Jewishness and Identity in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn.” 1–7. Accessed November 7, 2011. www.hum.aau.dk/~i12bent/ Lethem.doc. Stephens, Michael. 1994. The Brooklyn Book of the Dead. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Zeitchik, Steven. 2003. “Jonathan Lethem: A Brooklyn of the Soul.” Publishers Weekly. September 15. 37–38.

5

The Pathologies of Mobility Time Travel as Syndrome in The Time Traveller’s Wife, La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys Brian Baker

This chapter concentrates on science fictions, particularly those that are concerned with time travel. While this subgenre’s history can be traced back to H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), a narrative that takes up the form of the imperial romance, recent reworkings of the time-travel story have stressed not the fantasy mobility of the masculine adventurer, but rather the psychological dislocations attendant upon what Audrey Niffenegger, in The Time Traveller’s Wife (2005) calls ‘chrono-displacement.’1 Because it names a kind of syndrome (time travel is not just about time machines), Niffenegger’s pathologization of time travel points to a tension in contemporary culture’s imagination of mobility: it is both a fantasy and also dangerous or psychologically disruptive. This chapter will analyse Niffenegger’s novel, the Chris Marker fi lm La Jetée (1964) and its ‘re-make,’ Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) to investigate the imagination of mobility and its informing discourses and anxieties, but it will begin in the museum. The museum itself has been central to imaginative constructions of time and space since the nineteenth century: the South Kensington museums in London still exhibit ‘knowledge,’ affording visitors the means by which to understand information about scientific discoveries or natural history that would be otherwise incomprehensible. The museum is a space of exhibition, deeply implicated in colonial discourses and practices, that offers an organized view of the world (or the universe) with the museum itself, the collection of ordered knowledge, at its center. Little wonder that the museum is a place recurrently visited in time travel narratives, then: it provides the ordering principles which the time travelers themselves may lose sight of in their dislocations. Contemporary capitalism, which has been characterized by David Harvey as producing ‘time-space compression,’ or in Fredric Jameson’s terms a loss of ‘cognitive mapping,’ itself produces spatial and temporal dislocations. The ‘syndrome’ at work in The Time Traveller’s Wife, which imagines genetic rather than mechanical means by which to travel in time, can be read as a metaphor for the dislocating mobility of the contemporary world. The novel’s protagonist, Henry DeTamble, subject to his own body’s temporal displacements, then becomes a postmodern everyman. We are all dislocated, but spaces such

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as the museum (and the heroic mobility of contemporary figurations of the adventurer-scientist) offer a compensatory fantasy whereby space is still ordered, comprehensible, and readable. In Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), Harvard Professor Robert Langdon, visiting the American University in Paris to give a lecture on the ‘power of symbols,’ is drawn into a plot to do with the Holy Grail and various forces attempting to gain possession of it. Langdon is typed as a reluctant celebrity in the art world, a “Harrison Ford in Harris tweed” (Brown 2003, 20) who is a kind of innocent Indiana Jones (the third film in which series, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), itself dealt with the Grail legend and pursuit by various forces across Europe and the Middle East). Langdon is also a variant of Roger Thornhill, the “man in the grey flannel suit” played by Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), a professional and bachelor male who is accidentally drawn into an international espionage plot, which sees the narrative cross the North American continent (traversing various iconic locations, such as the UN building in New York and Mount Rushmore). The Da Vinci Code begins with a murder in the Louvre museum in Paris, a murder inquiry of which Langdon himself (somewhat implausibly) becomes the chief suspect. All three narratives (The Da Vinci Code, North by Northwest and The Last Crusade) place a professional masculine subject at the center of a chase narrative; all three invoke a mobility which is crucial generically and also in the constitution of the male protagonist, a figure free from the binding structures of wife, family and workplace. Thornhill, Jones and Langdon are free to embark on their pursuits because they are already dislocated, though North by Northwest eventually places Thornhill in a heterosexual relationship and Jones’ relationship with his father (a disapproving older version of himself) anchors the emotional arc of Last Crusade. Langdon is more removed still from familial or emotional relationships. His pursuit of the Grail is, in the main, an intellectual one. As a “Professor of Religious Symbology,” Langdon is a cryptologist, de-coding the arcane meanings of religious paintings and icons as a kind of puzzle or game. His entry into a world of physical mobility (the chase narrative) is directly analogous to his intellectual pursuits: each place visited offers another clue, another solution which might lead to the fi nal resolution of the quest. Langdon’s spatial mobility is predicated upon, and indistinguishable from, his intellectual acuity. The spaces of the museums and churches he visits are maps of what is contained within his head—and vice versa. The museum is a crucial space for both The Da Vinci Code and for the Indiana Jones movies, what in Bakhtinian terms we might call a chronotope, “the primary means for materializing time in space,” “providing the ground essential for the showing forth, the representability of events” (Bakhtin 1981, 250). The chronotope is not simply a figure for analysing how space and/or time is represented in a text but rather the means by which spatio-temporal relations are encoded in representation itself. As

The Pathologies of Mobility 85 such, these relations are culturally and historically contingent, and change over time, as well as between different genres. For Dr Henry Jones Jr, the museum is a kind of ideological alibi for his globe-trotting adventures, his double-fisted plunder of ancient artifacts: without this, he is just another treasure-seeker. For Langdon, the museum is the site of intellectual enquiry and enlightenment, a place where art objects can be physically and symbolically put together to form meaningful geometries. The museum as chronotope is diagnosed by Tony Bennett as an index of the imperatives of industrial and imperial cultures. According to Bennett, the museum’s spatial organization signifies what he calls the “exhibitionary complex.” Bennett understands the rise of the museum in the mid-nineteenth century as the result of a nexus of forces: The emergence of the art museum was related to that of a wider range of institutions—history and natural science museums, dioramas and panaromas, national, and later international exhibitions, arcades and department stores—which served as linked sites for the development and circulation of new disciplines (history, biology, art history, anthropology) and their discursive formations (the past, evolution, aesthetics, man) as well as for the development of new technologies of vision. (Bennett 1994, 332) Bennett connects the museum to Foucauldian analyses of “knowledge/ power relations.” The institutions are exhibitionary and disciplinary: they “simultaneously [ordered] objects for public consumption and [ordered] the public that inspected” (Bennett 1994, 333). The disciplinary complex that regulates crowd behavior in exhibitionary spaces is in direct opposition to the kind of intellectual mobility enjoyed by the professional natural scientist in that very same institution. Bennett quotes the famous naturalist Georges Cuvier with regard to the enabling mobility of the “sedentary naturalist” (who is in contradistinction to, and elevated above, the “field naturalist”): If the sedentary naturalist does not see nature in action, he can yet survey all her products spread before him. He can compare them with each other as often as is necessary to reach reliable conclusions [ . . . ]. He can bring together the relevant facts from anywhere he needs to. The traveller can only travel one road; it is really in one’s study (cabinet) that one can roam freely throughout the universe, and for that, a different sort of courage is needed. (Bennett 2004, 21) Cuvier’s remarks can be seen in the light of an imperial matrix of knowledge/power in which the center (sedentary naturalist) dominates the periphery (field naturalist). As Bennett writes, “this capacity to make global systems of relations visible and knowable enabled metropolitan museums to function as “centres of calculation” that were able to ‘act at a distance’

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on a variety of peripheral locations, providing the intellectual frameworks within which the activities conducted there could be organized” (Bennett 2004, 21). We can see how these insights can be applied to the activities of both Indiana Jones and Robert Langdon. The mobility of both protagonists is predicated on a legitimating connection to a high-status academic institution (the University of Chicago for Dr Jones, Harvard for Professor Langdon) which provides both the base for adventurous mobility and the discourse by which to decode the truth about the artefacts gathered thereby. The museum not only legitimates the mobility of the academic-adventurer, but also its own place at the center of the narrative, for it is only there that truth, history, secret history, may be revealed. The museum, with its matrix of significations of mobility and immobility, its implication in discourses of empire, its epistemic engagement with knowledge and power, its function as a collector and organizer of objects and as a disseminator of ordered and comprehensible models of time and space, is crucial both to these kind of adventure narratives and also to a constellation of texts that offer a different kind of mobility: travel in time. In H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), the Traveler constructs a machine not unlike a bicycle, upon which he can perambulate through time, choosing to stop at 802,701 before moving on to the vision of the end of the world, and then returning (albeit temporarily) to his own time. This round-trip of fantasy mobility emphasizes human agency in the face of the evolutionary structures which seem to displace human beings from the center of the biological narrative: as the Traveler explains at the beginning of the text, “time is only a kind of space” (Wells 1911, 5), to be traversed in the right kind of machine. There are clear imperial contexts here too: the Traveler can be seen as a version of the male adventurer of the imperial romance, and the year 802,701 as one of the “blank spaces on the earth” that Conrad’s Marlowe found so irresistible (Conrad 2007, 8). In The Time Machine, the Traveler, a visitor to the world of 802,701, discovers a world of class confl ict that has become subject to the evolutionary dynamic: the Morlocks predate upon what has evolved into a different species, the Eloi. In his attempt to retrieve his Time Machine, the Traveler fi nds the Palace of Green Porcelain: Within the big valves of the door—which were open and broken—we found, instead of the customary hall, a long gallery lit by many side windows [ . . . ] Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter-day South Kensington! Here, apparently, was the Palaeontological Section, and a very splendid array of fossils it must have been, though the inevitable process of decay that had been staved off for a time, and had, through the extinction of bacteria and fungi, lost ninety-nine hundredths of its force, was, nevertheless, with extreme sureness if with extreme slowness at work upon all its treasures. (Wells 1911, 108–9)

The Pathologies of Mobility 87 It is important to note here how the Traveler inserts the Palace of Green Porcelain into the narrative of evolutionary time itself: this space does not stand outside time, as a means by which to ‘array’ objects to understand them through classification systems. Instead it is subject to time, just as the Traveler is. As we can see, the Palace is explicitly characterized in terms of the then ‘new’ South Kensington museums, the Natural History and Science Museums. The Traveler attempts to avail himself not only of information about the world he fi nds himself in, but also physical materials to combat the Morlocks: practicality and utility fi nally overcome the Traveler’s sense of wonder. (He fi nds, bizarrely, matches and camphor as well as a sturdy metal lever.) However, the pedagogical function of the museum has failed along with the exhibits—the Traveler learns very little that is concrete and is forced back, once again, into surmise. In both the 1960 and 2002 fi lms of The Time Machine, the Traveler does actually encounter some kind of eidetic machine which tells him of the path of history he has circumnavigated: Wells avoids this simple expository device in order to maintain the uncanny and elusive truth about the world of the Morlocks and Eloi. For Wells’ Time Traveler, the failure of the ruined museum to deliver its pedagogical and ideological function—to make the world transparent and comprehensible through displays and models, from the point of view of the viewer standing at the imperial center—suggests a kind of anxiety at work even in a narrative that draws upon the conventions of the imperial romance. The ruined museum signifies the hubristic qualities of a worldview based on scientific ‘progress’ and imperial possession, by revealing that the center itself is subject to the depredations of time (or history). In Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife, Henry DeTamble, the time traveler, encounters his younger self (also time-traveling) in the Field Museum in Chicago. The Museum, far from ruined, is a place of enchantment. The young Henry, age six, has been “chrono-displaced” for the fi rst time. The older Henry becomes a kind of mentor or guide, teaching the young boy how to survive when displaced in time: how to steal, how to pick locks, how to beat people up. Just as in Wells’ The Time Machine, the travelers have the museum to themselves: they “wander amiably,” looking at meteorites and goldfi nches (in a clear nod to Darwin), and then peruse John James Audubon’s famous book of illustrations, Birds of America: the deluxe, wonderful double-elephant folio that’s almost as tall as my young self. This copy is the fi nest in existence, and I have spent many rainy afternoons admiring it. I open it to the fi rst plate [ . . . ] and page slowly through the birds, so much more alive than the real thing in glass tubes down the hall. “Here’s a Great Blue Heron. He’s really big, bigger than a flamingo. Have you ever seen a hummingbird?” “I saw some today!”

88 Brian Baker “Here in the museum?” “Uh-huh.” “Wait ‘til you see one outside—they’re like tiny helicopters, their wings go so fast you just see a blur . . .” Turning over each page is like making a bed, an enormous expanse of paper rises slowly up and over. Henry stands attentively, waits each time for the new wonder, emits small noises of pleasure for each Sandhill Crane, American Coot, Great Auk, Pilated Woodpecker. When we come to the last plate, Snow Bunting, he leans down and touches the page, delicately stroking the engraving. I look at him, look at the book, remember, this book, this moment, the fi rst book I loved, remember wanting to crawl into it and sleep. (Niffenegger 2005, 34–35) The time travelers roam through the galleries of the museum, a spatial mobility placed in contradistinction to their much more problematic mobility in time. It is as though the museum is a secure or private space in which the traveler becomes free, a fantasy of spatial freedom that escapes the anxieties about temporal mobility that can be found elsewhere: dislocation, madness and death all accompany time travel. 2 The Time Traveller’s Wife is not the fi rst time travel narrative to splice heterosexual romance with temporal mobility. In the 1964 fi lm La Jetée, which formed the basis for an extended ‘remake’ or reimagining by Terry Gilliam in Twelve Monkeys (1995), director Chris Marker (in a series of still images accompanied by a voice-over) narrates the time travel story of a man who witnesses his own death. From the ruin of a post-apocalyptic Paris, a man is sent back in time in order for the ruined society to fi nd the resources necessary to rebuild. He is chosen for this mission because an originary trauma—witnessing the death of a man at Orly airport— provides him with a powerful image to locate and materialize himself in another time. (Previous experimental subjects had been driven insane by their radical dislocation in time and space.) The fi lm blurs interiority and exteriority to suggest that material time-traveling is a kind of psychological journey into one’s own past. In this past the man meets a woman, and in the course of a series of meetings, love develops between them. This emotional bond becomes another chrono-spatial anchor or locator for the time traveler, enabling him sequentially to revisit the past. In a fairly long sequence in the thirty-minute film, the man and woman visit a museum of natural history, complete with glass cases and stuffed animals. The space depicted is, in fact, more like an early cabinet—a repository of interesting objects—than an ordered space designed to communicate classification and system, as the institution of the museum has been since the mid-nineteenth century. The couple wander the galleries of this building because it is the symbol of a material rootedness in time that has been lost by both La Jetée’s time traveler and by the postapocalyptic world he comes from.

The Pathologies of Mobility 89 In La Jetée, the chronotope of the museum is counterposed to the chronotope of the airport. Where the museum expresses order, both in terms of disciplinary power/knowledge, the “exhibitionary complex” and chronological structure or process (evolution), the airport expresses the space-time compression of late capitalism, as outlined by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity, and the dispersal or centrifugal dynamic of tourism (see Harvey 1990, 260 ff). Its defining experiential characteristic is not locatedness, but dislocation; its nomadic inhabitants are channeled (in another disciplinary space) through what Marc Augé has called a “non-place” (34), a site which is voided of the markers of history, usage and locale. A crucial image is used in La Jetée to indicate that the time traveler comes from elsewhere. The traveler and the woman look at a sectioned tree trunk onto some of whose rings historical dates have been attached. This is, of course, another model of time, a way of making time visually or spatially comprehensible. When asked “where do you come from?” however, the man points beyond the tree trunk altogether. It is a revealing gesture, both impossible and directly comprehensible to both the woman and to the viewer: he literally comes from ‘nowhere.’ Dendritic models of time (branching future, single past) seem to be suggested in this scene, but the model of the tree’s rings and the traveler’s gesture actually signify that, for him, time has stopped entirely: he comes from outside time. There is the past (shown by the dates on the rings), but no future. In Twelve Monkeys, Terry Gilliam includes the tree-ring scene, but does so in order to indicate that the experience of time traveling corresponds to the experience of fi lm-watching. Bruce Willis plays James Cole, the traveler from the future who attempts to fi nd the solution to the apocalypse that has overtaken his world of 2035, in which most human beings have been killed by a virus and the world has been returned to a kind of perpetual winter, with human survivors subsisting underground. When sent back into the ‘past’ (our present), Cole’s alienation is seen by the authorities merely as mental derangement. He is discovered in a police cell, “irrational, disoriented, doesn’t know where he is [ . . . ] [having had] a psychotic episode,” by Dr Railly (Madeline Stowe) who oversees his transfer to a mental hospital. “I’m supposed to be gathering information,” he tells her, but this information “won’t change anything:” the apocalypse has already happened and cannot be altered. During this fi rst interview, he repeatedly shouts “need to go!” while being held in restraints. The tension between the necessity of mobility (in time and space) and forced immobility could not be more starkly or physically represented. Where, in La Jetée, the traveler points simply outside the diameter of the tree rings to indicate that he comes from elsewhere (the future), Gilliam focuses this moment through another film. On the run, Cole takes refuge in a cinema, where he watches Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1959), a narrative in which a traumatized man (whose symptoms include the vertigo of the title) attempts to undo his loss through transforming a young woman, physically

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and symbolically, into the love he had lost. In Vertigo, Scotty (James Stewart) takes Madeleine (Kim Novak) to see the long-lived Sequoias in northern California, where she points to the tree ring of a thousand-year-old redwood, marked as in La Jetée with historically significant dates, and seems to speak the words: “Here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you, and you took no notice.” The scene from Vertigo is intercut with Cole being tended by Dr Railly. While Madeleine in Vertigo expresses the uncanny feeling of having ‘been there before,’ Cole’s own sense of displacement is mediated: the ‘present’ itself becomes an extended déjà vu that can be witnessed but not changed, just like the experience of being a cinema spectator. To be a time traveler, in Twelve Monkeys, is to be ‘crazy.’ Cole is taken to the hospital, a literal bedlam, where he meets Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), who tells him: “Do you know what crazy is? Majority rules.” The hospital (as bedlam) is an inverse chronotope of the museum. Where the latter orders history as a comprehensible spectacle, in the hospital yesterday, today and tomorrow are jumbled: Jeffrey tells the story of a patient who became agitated because the ward nurses could not schedule television programs that had been broadcast the day before. A temporal dislocation is at work, akin to that of the schizophrenic described by Fredric Jameson in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society:” “an undifferentiated vision of the world in the present” in which, “as temporal continuities break down [ . . . ] the world comes before the schizophrenic with heightened intensity” (Jameson 1985, 120). The ‘crazy’ patients, including Cole the time traveler, are symbolic postmodern subjects, victims and emblems of what Mark Fisher calls “a culture that privileges only the present and the immediate”—one in which “the extirpation of the long term extends backwards as well as forwards in time” (Fisher 2009, 59). In Twelve Monkeys, the “long term” is literally canceled, subject to an apocalyptic event; the past is an alienating and claustral environment in which Cole can only observe and memorize, not act. Time in Twelve Monkeys appears deterministic, though Cole’s very presence seems to alter his own personal future. When he ‘remembers’ an event at the airport as a boy—he saw a man shot down by police—the diegetic representation of the man who is shot alters, from Brad Pitt (in a long blonde hairpiece) to Bruce Willis: that is to say, from Jeffrey Goines to himself. He has inserted himself into a temporal loop where he witnesses his own death, as a boy; and indeed, in one scene it appears that Cole himself gives Jeffrey the idea of destroying the human race. In Twelve Monkeys, Brad Pitt prefigures his role as Tyler Durden in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) in playing the character of Jerrey Goines, prophet of apocalyptic resistance to late capitalism. Durden’s rhetoric inhabits the turn-of-the-millennium ‘crisis of masculinity’ that became highly visible in the last years of the 1990s. He both diagnoses hegemonic masculinity as pathological and reproduces that pathologization—something we also see in books like Susan Faludi’s Stiffed (1999) or Anthony Clare’s On

The Pathologies of Mobility 91 Men (2000) and in films such as Fight Club and American Beauty (1999). Where Durden’s resistance to late capitalism can be seen in his emphasis on feminization and emasculation is symptoms of capitalism’s corrosive effects, and a recovery of masculine potency through violence (and wounds), Jeffrey Goines’ critique is articulated through psychopathology itself. “If you don’t buy things, what are you?” he asks: “mentally ill?” In Goines’ manic riffs, ‘mental illness’ is produced by capitalism as a subject position that categorizes and subjugates resistance to its imperatives, strongly echoing the antipsychiatry of R. D. Laing and David Cooper, and suggesting a Foucauldian understanding of the hospital as a disciplinary institution in which a range of rational discourses are engaged to ‘understand’ and ‘treat’ non-normative subjects, thereby bringing the ‘other’ into the realm of the rational. Instead of ‘la folie,’ madness as an incomprehensible and non-recuperable state of otherness, we have a medicalized understanding of insanity, drawn into a process of diagnosis, treatment and healing. Both Goines and Cole are subject to an understanding of their different mental landscapes and experiences which reads difference as a symptom of pathology. That they might be telling the ‘truth’ about time travel, or capitalism, is outside the purview of the psychiatrists and nurses. Where Wells’ Time Traveler sought to understand the world of the Morlocks and Eloi through frameworks of Victorian science and imperial mobility, leading him to erroneous and imposed suppositions, Twelve Monkeys represents the world through the reverse perspective: Goines and Cole are subjected to a similarly imposed and erroneous misconception, but evolutionary science has been displaced by sciences of the mind. What differentiates Niffenegger’s text from the neuronovel is that Niffenegger invents a ‘disease’ or genetic condition, the “chrono-displacement” gene encoded in the DNA of the male protagonist of the novel, Henry DeTamble. While The Time Traveller’s Wife is science fiction, it has clear generic connections to the romance novel, in that it concentrates upon the (albeit rather unusual) courtship and marriage of a heterosexual couple (and ultimately the death of Henry, figured as an unbearable loss for his wife Clare, the ‘wife’ of the title). It also radically destabilizes the sense of a unitary subjectivity in its male time traveler. There are many scenes in the novel in which multiple ‘Henrys’ are present, either located in his ‘own time’ or traveling from elsewhere or elsewhen, the most strikingly transgressive being when two fi fteen-year-old Henrys are caught in a shared sexual act by his/their father, the most comic when a Henry from the future has to go through the marriage ceremony with Clare because the ‘present time’ Henry is indisposed. Clare seems unbothered by this seeming split or multiple subjectivity, having sex with an older Henry (from the future) while the younger ‘present-time’ Henry is absent. In a sense, this works as a fantasy of sexual mobility, a ‘safe’ adultery played out solely between husband and wife: both Clare and Henry sleep with another person, but this person is only the spouse removed in time.

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In the most interesting, but ultimately troubling, scenes in the novel, Henry transcends his own death, traveling into the future to meet his daughter Alba, and then meeting her in other times and places ‘after’ (in Alba’s chronology) he has died. Even the fact of mortality is undermined by chrono-displacement, but as the recurrent motifs of imprisonment in the novel suggest (particularly in Henry’s fear of “the Cage” in his place of work), time-traveling is a kind of trap for both Henry and Clare. For Henry, because he comes to know the place and manner of his own death, having witnessed it as he does his own mother’s death; for Clare, because throughout the novel she is cast into the role of the ‘wife’ who waits for the return of her husband, and at the end of her life waits for a fi nal visit from Henry before her own death. If this is a romance, then, it is a fatal one, one that seems to reinforce feminine inactivity or immobility; it also reinforces, despite the discourse of pathology, a rather heroic sense of the mobile masculine subject. For all of its fantasies of masculine mobility, The Time Traveller’s Wife actually validates a “sedentarist metaphysics.” Tim Cresswell uses this term to refer to “ways of thinking about mobility in the Western world [that] see it as a threat, a disorder in the system, a thing to control” (Cresswell 2006, 26). A sedentarist metaphysics privileges rootedness or locatedness, “the moral and logical primacy of fi xity in space and place” (26). This metaphysics “reaffi rm[s] and enable[s] the commonsense segmentation of the world into things like nations, states, countries, and places” (28). There is a tension between mobility and place in modernity, argues Cresswell, but it is not that between an inauthentic spatial flux and an authentic sense of locatedness; rather, modernity produces an irreducible tension between free flows of capital, labor, information, and populations, and the need to restrict or control this mobility, as it may destabilize the geopolitical and economic structures that enable these flows. The Time Traveller’s Wife, in the figure of Henry DeTamble, stages this irresolvable tension between the intensities and pathologies of contemporary mobility. Henry’s time-traveling is exciting, but dangerous, and proves fatal in the end, when his spatial mobility is curtailed by the amputation of frostbitten feet; temporal mobility, it now appears, is actually dependent upon the capability for bodily spatial mobility, running. The amputation understandably proves a problem with regard to employment, but also in terms of the normative mobilities inherent in late modernity: vacations taken by air travel, and the ubiquity of the automobile in contemporary American social organization, for instance, are problems for Henry. More metaphysically, Henry is radically dis-located by his chrono-displacing ‘abilities,’ alienated from other people, and even from his own father. Henry’s temporal mobility leads to an evacuation of rootedness, a sense of anxiety, loss and emotional displacement, until he meets Clare. Until then, he is never at home, always elsewhere. In this sense, the narrative of chrono-displacement is an extended metaphor for the dislocating properties of contemporary life.

The Pathologies of Mobility 93 Through the lens of estrangement, Henry’s (seemingly) singular abilities can be seen to symbolize the pathological subject of late modernity. In The Time Traveller’s Wife, Henry’s time machine is his own body. He suffers from a genetic mutation which determines that he ‘chrono-displaces’ to other historical moments. Throughout the novel, Henry desires to be ‘normal,’ to seek a ‘cure’ for his problematic ability to move in time (and space). He explains thus: First of all, I think it’s a brain thing. I think it’s a bit like epilepsy, because it tends to happen when I’m stressed, and there are physical cues, like flashing light, that can prompt it. And because things like running, and sex, and meditation tend to help me stay in the present. Secondly, I have absolutely no conscious control over when or where I go, how long I stay, or when I come back [ . . . ] Having said that, my subconscious seems to exert tremendous control, because I spend a lot of time in my own past, visiting events that are interesting or important, and evidently I will be spending enormous amounts of time visiting you, which I am looking forward to immensely. I tend to go to places I’ve already been in real time, although I do fi nd myself in other, more random times and places. I tend to go to the past, rather than to the future. (Niffenegger 2005, 162) Time traveling is: (a) a genetic ‘condition;’ (b) clearly modeled on epilepsy; (c) understood by its exemplar to be a ‘disease;’ (d) connected explicitly to the subconscious; and (e) connected explicitly to trauma: Henry’s obsessive revisiting of the site of his mother’s death in an automobile accident. In one sense, then, time traveling becomes a kind of repetition-compulsion: Henry returns again and again to the accident scene, acting as bystander, helper, and witness. Chrono-displacement, in this conception, is psychological, bound up with memory, with trauma, with fantasy. At the same time, Henry also offers an explanation which affi rms genetic predisposition and temporal determinism: his body is a malfunctioning machine which displaces him in time, and for which he seeks a ‘cure’ throughout the second half of the novel. The Time Traveller’s Wife stitches genetic and psychological mechanisms together, in Henry’s explanation and throughout the text as a whole, without defi nitively validating one or other (see Sørensen’s chapter in this volume). The motivation for ‘chrono-displacment’ thus remains hybrid, echoing both the novel’s generic hybridity and its mixed conception of time, which is at once deterministic (in none of his visits can he alter history: the past is like space, as in Wells’ conception, as in Twelve Monkeys—material, fi xed, not subject to fundamental alteration) and mutable (the future is more attenuated, less material, than the past). Niffenegger’s alteration of the generic trope of time travel from a willed, external fantasy of mobility and agency to an unwilled, internalized anxiety about mobility as victimhood, pathologizes the fantasy of mobility. Mobility

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becomes the sign and symptom of illness. Henry’s own greatest anxiety, however, is immobility, an immobility that ultimately comes to pass when he awakes, chrono-displaced, in a snowy park and suffers frostbite to his feet. When they are amputated, Henry’s time-traveling becomes increasingly traumatic, and increasingly displaced from the narrative diegesis: from his wife Clare’s point of view, we see Henry return bloodied or otherwise traumatized from his time-traveling, but not Henry’s experiences themselves. Throughout The Time Traveller’s Wife, indeed, Henry runs. He says: “I am a beast of the hoof. If anything ever happens to my feet, you might as well shoot me” (Niffenegger 2005, 163). When he meets another central character, Gomez, his physical fitness is to the fore: “You don’t smoke? Anything?” [asks Gomez] “I run.” “Oh, shit, you’re in great shape. I thought you had about killed Nick, and you weren’t even winded.” (138) Running is survival, for Henry: physical mobility is crucial for him to be able to deal with his involuntary temporal mobility. Curiously, we see the same motif—the necessity to run, and anxiety about immobility—in two other recent generic texts, the fi lms Casino Royale (2006) and Minority Report (2002), where the advertising tag-line was “Everybody Runs.” In both texts, immobility leads to trauma—Bond’s genitals are beaten while strapped to a chair by Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, and in Minority Report Anderton’s son is taken from him while he is at a public swimming pool. Both films ultimately validate a sedentarist metaphysics, revealing anxieties about globalized flows of fi nance and data, and the necessity for rootedness in locale and family for psychological health (and the undoing of trauma).3 The pathologization of temporal mobility for Henry DeTamble means that the problematic constructions of contemporary mobility—at once liberatory and disruptive, enabling and anxious—are unresolvable in terms of his own personal narrative. If Henry is, in a sense, a typical postmodern subject in his involuntary dislocation, his willed mobility (running) can never be an escape: he can only run toward his own death. At the same time, his yearning for ‘normality,’ for a home, wife and child is also only (ironically) a “temporary autonomous zone” (Bey 1991), always subject to the imperatives of his chrono-displacement syndrome and the global determinism of the temporal model Niffenegger uses in the novel. For Henry, pathologized mobility is at once internal and exogenous; it can never be ‘free.’ As in La Jetée (and indeed the 2002 film of The Time Machine), The Time Traveller’s Wife’s time-traveling is based upon an originary trauma which cannot ultimately be undone. In La Jetée, the traumatic nature of the protagonist’s own death at Orly provides the chrono-spatial locator that enables him to travel back there in the fi rst place, sealing the causal loop. Chrono-displacement in The Time Traveller’s Wife is a syndrome, a genetic

The Pathologies of Mobility 95 condition, which cannot be ‘cured.’ Henry’s biological hardwiring means his time-traveling is inescapable and leads to an early death. In Wells’ The Time Machine, evolutionary determinism is at issue, re-writing class conflict in terms of species and predation. In La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys, there is a temporal determinism at work. In The Time Traveller’s Wife there is a biological determinism that is located in Henry’s DNA, and which is connected to Henry’s understanding of time (deterministic) and to the fateful imperatives of the romance plot. Neither Henry nor the traveler nor James Cole has the free will to forestall the future, but in Alba, the fantasy of mobility is re-established, for she is able to control where and when she time travels. In Alba, the pathologies of mobility are fi nally ‘cured.’ This problematic recuperation of a fantasy mobility does suggest a way out of the determinism of Henry’s syndrome, of his own ‘postmodern condition’: some degree of agency and autonomy is restored. If science fiction is, as Darko Suvin has suggested, the “literature of estrangement” (Suvin 1979, 4), and uses particular narrative strategies to make us see our own world anew, then it is easy to read the displacement of Henry DeTamble or James Cole as metaphors, analogies for the radical dislocation of the postmodern subject or, speaking more psychologically, as extended investigations of a ‘wounded’ masculine subjectivity which constitutes a revision of hegemonic masculinity in contemporary American culture.4 Further, it would not be difficult to produce readings of the texts considered in this chapter, in particular The Time Traveller’s Wife, as science-fictional reworkings of the kind of Freud-inflected narrative of compulsion-to-repeat that has been central to trauma studies, and which is discussed in the introduction to this volume. If, as Hamilton Carroll suggests in Affi rmative Reaction, it is the very mobile and labile formations of hegemonic masculinity which constitute its ideological (and economic) privilege, this surely constitutes a very different mode of mobility to the one inhabited by Wells’ Traveler or other masculine adventurers of the imperial romance. Contemporary fantasies of mobility, when displaced from space onto time, become anxious, destructive, a symptom of pathology: far from fi nding time-traveling an adventure, Henry DeTamble and James Cole become terminally ‘unstuck.’ NOTES 1. The term ‘imperial romance’ has been used to designate a particular type of British adventure novel, prominent in the late nineteenth century, that is typified by the work of H. Rider Haggard, in particular King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Work by such critics as Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (1990); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993); and Laura Chrisman, Re-reading the Imperial Romance (2000), among many others, has explored how these texts encode imperial constructions of space through discourses of mapping, mobility, and scientific knowledge.

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Brian Baker 2. The fantasy mobility of roaming the museum (at night, in private) can be found elsewhere in recent popular culture: in the fi lm of Silence of the Lambs (1991), Night at the Museum and its sequel (2006 and 2009), in The Da Vinci Code (fi lm 2007), and in Gore Vidal’s The Smithsonian Institution (1998). 3. For a more extended study of the themes of mobility in Casino Royale and Minority Report, see my “‘Gallivanting round the world:’ Bond, the Gaze and Mobility in Casino Royale” and “‘Do You See?:’ Spielberg’s Adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s ‘The Minority Report’.” 4. This argument, particularly about white masculinity, is forcefully made in Hamilton Carroll’s Affi rmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity (2011).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Baker, Brian. 2006. Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres, 1945–2000. London: Continuum. . 2009. “‘Do You See?:’ Spielberg’s Adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s ‘The Minority Report’.” In Textual Revisions, edited by Brian Baker, 203–33. Chester: Chester Academic Press. . 2010. “‘Gallivanting round the world:’ Bond, the Gaze and Mobility in Casino Royale.” In Revisioning 007: Casino Royale, edited by Christoph Lindner, 144–58. London: Wallflower Press. Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bennett, Tony. 1994. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” In Representing the Nation, a Reader: Histories, Heritage and Museums, edited by David Boswell and Jessica Evans, 332–61. London: Routledge. . 2004. Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism. London: Routledge. Bey, Hakim, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (1991). http://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html. Accessed May 31, 2012. Brantlinger, Patrick. 1990. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Brown, Dan. 2003. The Da Vinci Code. London: Corgi. Carroll, Hamilton. 2011. Affi rmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chrisman, Laura. 2000. Re-reading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner and Plaatje. New York: Oxford University Press. Clare, Anthony. 2000. On Men: Masculinity in Crisis. London: Chatto and Windus. Conrad, Joseph. 2007 [1902]. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin. Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On The Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. London: Routledge. Faludi, Susan. 1999. Stiffed: the Betrayal of Modern Man. London: Vintage. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: is there no Alternative? London: Zero Books.

The Pathologies of Mobility 97 Foucault, Michel. 1991 [1975]. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. . 2001 [1967]. Madness and Civilization. London: Routledge. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Jameson, Fredric. 1985. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 111–25. London: Pluto. Niffenegger, Audrey. 2005. The Time Traveller’s Wife. London: Vintage. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press. Vidal, Gore. 1999. The Smithsonian Institution. London: Abacus. Wells, H. G. 1911 [1895]. The Time Machine. London: Heinemann.

FILMOGRAPHY Demme, Jonathan (dir.). 1992. The Silence of the Lambs (Orion Pictures). Gilliam, Terry (dir.). 1995. Twelve Monkeys (Universal). Howard, Ron (dir.). 2007. The Da Vinci Code (Sony Pictures). Levy, Shawn (dir.). 2006. Night at the Museum (20th Century Fox). . 2009. Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian (20th Century Fox). Marker, Chris (dir.). 1964. La Jetée (Argos Films). Pal, George (dir.). 1960. The Time Machine (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Schwentke, Robert (dir.). 2008. The Time Traveller’s Wife (New Line). Spielberg, Steven (dir.). 1989. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Paramount). Wells, Simon (dir.). 2002. The Time Machine (Warner Bros./DreamWorks).

6

Syndrome, Symptom, and Trauma Chains in American Pre- and Post9/11 Novels Bent Sørensen

Perhaps Slavoj Žižek’s notorious exhortation ‘Enjoy Your Symptom!’ set forth in a 1992 book of that title containing his Lacanian analyses of Hollywood film, should more properly, after September 11, 2001, be reformulated as ‘enjoy your syndrome!’ A whole new batch of trauma literature and trauma films has appeared, as American culture has attempted to come to terms with the fact that not everyone in the world loves the American way of life. While psychoanalytical theory goes a long way toward explaining this new proliferation of trauma literature, a supplemental cultural criticism is required to fully understand this development. One way of bringing this cultural criticism into play during the analysis of specific works is to center the assessment of the impact of trauma narratives on gauging and describing the effect such narratives have on readers. It is a well-known side-effect of trauma literature that the reading of it forces the reader to participate in the trauma, by proxy as it were, but also affords the reader the opportunity of a subsequent healing-by-proxy within what one could term a safe, fictional ‘trauma laboratory’. Furthermore, one should consider the concurrent paradigm shift in psychology toward neurological or neuro-psychoanalytic descriptions of disorders and symptoms (see, for instance, Holland 2009), especially since such explanations are often embedded in the trauma fictions themselves as part of the characters’ self-reflections and -diagnoses. A remarkable number of post-9/11 fictions feature impaired narrators, described by their authors as suffering from one syndrome or another, the most prevalent no doubt being PTSD, or posttraumatic stress disorder. I shall focus on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (2005), a novel whose child protagonist is unique in being both an autistic spectrum sufferer prior to the traumatic events narrated, and subsequently becoming a traumatized subject with a complex, imbricated symptomology; and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), a realist novel which follows the education of a fictionalized version of one of the September 11 terrorists and, parallel to this, depicts the symptomology of an American family in the wake of their close escape from the terrorist attack. Thus, we are dealing with two novels that both show the several facets of terrorism through portraits of the agents involved: victims and perpetrators,

Syndrome, Symptom, and Trauma 99 sufferers and relatives, directly traumatized individuals and family members (and ultimately a larger public) who become exposed to trauma-by-proxy by the events and their representation in the media. A comparison of the two novels is, however, complicated by the fact that the books, respectively, use a tragicomic and a realist mode to describe the syndrome in question. A brief look at DeLillo’s earlier trauma narrative, The Body Artist (2001) provides a useful counterpoint to this comparison. Furthermore, in the latter half of the fi rst post-millennial decade, certain postmodern fictions have appeared which feature a satirical style used ultimately to describe the cultural climate of the day, and as a transgressive and novel strategy such fictions attempt to use the satirical mode in a postSeptember 11 setting. In the case of Ken Kalfus’ novel, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), the trauma-by-proxy of the protagonists is hidden under manifestations of their primary narcissistic disorder, but the narrator subtly weaves together a critique of their egotism as well as the hypocritical trauma response of society-at-large, which is shown to be unscrupulously channelled into gung-ho patriotism and twisted religious or racial hatred. To understand not just the novels in question but also to grasp the almost epidemic nature and extent of the above-mentioned emergent discourse field of trauma narratives and its implications for American and global culture, it is necessary to first consider what a trauma is, what traumatic knowledge consists of, and how trauma travels from a person or character’s raw experience to being narrated. While a standard Freudian definition is hard to obtain, because Freud’s own view of the nature of trauma evolved considerably through his writings on the subject, a general definition is offered by Jean Laplanche, the translator of Freud’s collected oeuvre into French: “An event in the subject’s life, defined by its intensity, by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967: 465). In recent years an increased theorization of these concepts and mechanisms (trauma itself, its narration and the transmission processes involved) has occurred, obviously inspired by Freudian usages of the term ‘trauma’. The intersection of poststructuralism’s interest in marginalized groups and discourses such as postcolonialism and feminism, and the political empowerment of hitherto disenfranchised and victimized minorities have further contributed to this theorization. As social constructivism has become more and more dominant as a method of understanding the relation between texts and identity, an obvious role has been assigned to hitherto little regarded discursive forms that express fragmentary, abjectal, and disorderly experiences in narratives. The still emergent interdisciplinary discourse of trauma theory offers a mode of explanation that allows us to tackle fictional representations of trauma sufferers. This new discursive field was marked in its inception by the efforts of Cathy Caruth, editor of volumes such as Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), and more recently by the appearance of retrospective articles such as Geoffrey Hartman’s 2004 piece, “On Traumatic Knowledge

100 Bent Sørensen and Literary Studies,” and Rosemary Winslow’s “Troping Trauma: Conceiving /of/ Experiences of Speechless Terror” (2004). While Freud found it difficult to theorize the notion of trauma to his full satisfaction, his followers have attempted to simplify his vacillations and thus achieve a state of canonical insight into the nature of trauma, as exemplified by this paragraph from Hartman’s article: The [(post)Freudian] theory holds that the knowledge of trauma, or the knowledge which comes from that source, is composed of two contradictory elements. One is the traumatic event, registered rather than experienced. It seems to have bypassed perception and consciousness, and falls directly into the psyche. The other is a kind of memory of the event, in the form of a perpetual troping of it by the bypassed or severely split (dissociated) psyche. (Hartman 2004) Because trauma is caused by “an event outside the range of ordinary human experience”, the original event cannot be consciously accessed, evaluated or rationalized by the traumatized individual (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 467). All that is accessible to the conscious psyche is the memory of the event, a supplementary experience often directly decodable as a set of symptoms, linguistic as well as behavioral. These symptoms frequently include a form of repetition compulsion and other types of serial behavior. Such behavior can become an ingrained pattern of avoidance activities, such as are known from isolated phobias and irrational fears. All defi nitions of such a state of trauma are themselves culturally contingent specimens of discourse, socially constructed by various discourse communities, be they Freudian or clinically therapeutic, but they uniformly share a strong emphasis on the importance for healing of the patient attempting a narrativization of the original traumatic event. A group of therapists (Bloom, Foderaro and Ryan 2009) working with posttraumatic patients have systematized their symptoms into the so-called ‘9 As’ of trauma: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Attachment Affect Anger Authority Awareness Addiction Automatic repetition Avoidance Alienation

The fi rst four of these concepts cover in turn: a lack of ability to establish or maintain attachments, for instance within previously close relations

Syndrome, Symptom, and Trauma 101 (familial, erotic, emotional); a surplus or deficit of affect, either state being outside conscious regulatory control; and a marked defense mechanism regarding authority, which is either assumed without license (in the form of bullying behavior) or submitted to excessively and in petty detail. Further, items 5–9 describe dissociative states or episodes, sleep disturbances, addictive behavior, and repetition compulsions—either in the form of forced actions or forced avoidances of specific activities or stimuli—culminating ultimately with a feeling of alienation from the surrounding world or apocalyptic fears of events in the future. Such a litany of woes is indeed descriptive of the characteristics of the protagonists in trauma narratives, whether authentic or fictive, as we shall see shortly, but also corresponds closely to the symptomology of autism spectrum disorders. As all sets of symptomologies are social constructs that change over time as new discourses become dominant within a given field, this correspondence is not altogether surprising, but still gives pause. Returning to Geoffrey Hartman’s article to harvest a fi nal theoretical insight, we should note that he goes on to explicitly emphasize the connection between literary tropes and trauma symptoms: Traumatic knowledge, then, would seem to be a contradiction in terms. It is as close to nescience as to knowledge. Any general description or modeling of trauma, therefore, risks being figurative itself, to the point of mythic fantasmagoria [sic!]. Something “falls” into the psyche, or causes it to “split.” There is an original inner catastrophe whereby/in which an experience that is not experienced (and so, apparently, not “real”) has an exceptional presence—is inscribed with a force proportional to the mediations punctured or evaded. (Hartman 2004) In other words, there is an obvious parallel between trauma and its recounting and the split in language that is exhibited, for instance, by the use of metaphor in literary or indeed everyday discourse, into tenor and vehicle. Hartman’s “contradiction in terms” thus repeats itself on a meta-level, as trauma by defi nition is that disjunctive experience which eludes speech (the tenor) while at the same time being eminently metaphorical in its circumscribed and bi-partite nature. Perhaps it is no wonder that novelists love trauma narratives (as vehicles). Hartman points out the use of consciously constructed tropes to narrativize the event as a precondition for breaking the state of ’nescience’ and initiate healing. Kirmayer, Lemelson and Barad (2007) make a similarly constructivist observation in their historicized reading of the “genealogy of trauma” in the introduction to Understanding Trauma: Despite the stark events it names, trauma is not a natural category but a culturally constructed way to mark out certain classes of experiences and events. The salient examples and cultural prototypes of trauma

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Bent Sørensen have changed over time, along with our ways of thinking about illness and suffering, our concepts of mind and personhood, and the moral politics of victimhood, blame, and accountability. (4)

It is exactly the cultural and social constructedness of trauma and its symptoms that allows us to speak of the relatively recently discovered phenomenon of trauma-by-proxy. Žižek reminds us that Freud regarded the symptom as “a compromise formation: in the symptom the subject gets back in the form of a cyphered, unrecognized message the truth about his desire, the truth that he was not able to confront, that he betrayed” (Žižek 1992, 154). As the media began to disseminate the trauma content and the primary trauma narratives in the aftermath of September 11, it became possible for many more individuals to fi nd their own feelings and experiences mirrored in these narratives, and ultimately to self-diagnose as trauma sufferers, despite the spatial and temporal distance which often existed between them and the primary traumatic event. This strong, unrecognized desire to suffer with the victims of September 11, coupled with survivor’s guilt over not having suffered enough personally, led to a trauma-by-proxy epidemic in the months and years following the attacks, an epidemic not confined to New York or even the US, but with its center located in those sites. The twentieth century has often been dubbed the century of trauma— hardly surprising given the list of horrendous events occurring as the technology of destruction seemed to outpace the ethical development of the human race. The First World War; the Second World War; Communist mass internments, dislocations and extermination; colonial and postcolonial wars, particularly in Africa and south-east Asia; assorted minor wars and conflicts, often with a component of ethnic or religious cleansing at their core—the list could and does go on. The truth of the matter seems that the twenty-first century promises to outdo the previous century in terms of traumatic potential. If this had not been painfully obvious to that proportion of the world’s population living in the US, the events of September 11, 2001 certainly constituted a rude awakening. While the number of lives lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was not very high by comparison to war-time events, the exposure of the events by the media and their secondary effects once disseminated and re-disseminated gave us a hitherto unprecedented mass example of ‘trauma by proxy’. In the case of post-September 11 collective trauma-by-proxy, an innocent, even naive people’s state of mental unpreparedness, and the ruthless exploitation of the initial trauma by the media and a war-hungry political and military establishment combined to create an unusual and disproportionately protracted posttraumatic phase in the American public unconscious. Novelists have latterly turned to this rich story for material for tales of trauma and survival, and as is always the case with trauma narratives, thereby run the risk of further perpetuating the posttraumatic phase. On the other hand, literature may just have a role to play in healing the trauma,

Syndrome, Symptom, and Trauma 103 or at least to lend voice to the victims, perhaps even adding a tenth A—for ‘Art’—to the typical trauma responses. I therefore turn to an examination of three post-September 11 novels while briefly glancing back to a preSeptember 11 disorder narrative. Born in 1977, Jonathan Safran Foer represents the third generation of postmodern American writers (fi rst wavers include Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr; second wavers Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and E.L. Doctorow). Foer’s 2005 sophomore novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close continues to mix historical narratives in the best tradition of historiographic metafiction as developed by fi rst and second generation postmodern authors such as Pynchon (known for his two-tier novels which constructed a nexus between the Second World War and the America of the 1960s), Vonnegut (the same dual strategy in Slaughterhouse-Five, with some futuristic sci-fi mixed in), and Auster (whose 1980s novels, such as Leviathan, frequently examined the historical roots of terrorism). Foer’s novel has an obvious intertextual relationship with the works of all three older writers and with several other practitioners of postmodern narrative (such as Don DeLillo), just as his debut novel, also a trauma text, linked the Holocaust to the present (Everything Is Illuminated, 2002). Foer’s most obvious American intertext is Vonnegut’s SlaughterhouseFive, with which Extremely Loud shares the theme of the fi re bombings of Dresden. Vonnegut’s later, extensive use of graphic tricks, illustrations and samples of handwritten texts also all feature in Extremely Loud. Auster’s work also haunts Foer’s text in several ways, not least in the unstated Jewishness of several of the protagonists, but also in the multiple references to walks and rambles in New York, which are strongly reminiscent of those scenes from New York Trilogy in which apparently random roaming literally produces texts and messages (but little meaning). In Extremely Loud the young protagonist Oskar Schell spends a good deal of the novel searching for a lock to match a key he has found among his dead father’s belongings. In the process of this quest he visits every single person in New York named Black (another allusion to Auster, whose protagonists in Ghosts [1987] were color-coded for anonymity). The outcome of the search is, however, as disappointing as any postmodern quest for epistemological insight (compare Oedipa Maas in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49) as the lock turns out to have no relation to Oskar’s father’s life at all. Non-Anglophone postmodern novels such as Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum, obviously also figure as intertexts (the protagonists of both novels are names Oskar, and Grass’ central character also suffers from a complex self-inflicted disorder visible through his dwarfism), but a complete tracing of such intertextual webs would lead us too far afield. As I have suggested, Foer’s novel is unique in my selected corpus in the sense that his young protagonist is doubly exposed to the set of syndrome and trauma responses detailed by Bloom, Foderaro and Ryan. Oskar is already an autistic spectrum disorder sufferer prior to the trauma-by-proxy

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he suffers when his father dies in the WTC collapse, but the posttraumatic stress and survivor’s guilt he develops make his condition worse. He invents impossible gadgets that will keep everyone safe; he avoids targets of terrorism such as trains and ferries; and he collects evidence of “stuff that happened to me” consisting of pictures he downloads from the Internet (indicating that he does not distinguish between things that happened to him by proxy and things that actually happened to him), some of which are reproduced in the novel as images and illustrations (Foer 2005, 53–66). His compulsive attention to detail indicates an Asperger-like condition which the other characters in the novel tacitly acknowledge by giving him space to live out his compulsions while offering watchfulness and care (often without his knowledge). The novel thus affords us valuable, albeit fictional, evidence of the extremely close connection between the two sets of disorder analysis. In Oskar’s case it is almost impossible not to see the PTSD response as a corroboration and realization of his spectrum disorder symptoms. The parallel to the situation in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) is striking: Haddon’s protagonist goes on a life-changing journey when the murder of a dog causes him to suspect his father’s account of their family tragedy, and the voyage becomes one of selfdiscovery, only limited by his Asperger’s. The traumatic experience consists in decoding that his father has lied to him about the death of his mother, causing the protagonist to fear losing both parents. This fear destabilizes his Asperger’s to an extent that was not the case prior to the fatal discovery, and causes him to risk his safety. The state he is in during his voyage to London is close to that of PTSD, and the novel suggests that he can never go back to being simply an Asperger’s patient again. Both these novels therefore seem to question a purely neurological (possibly genetic) explanation of spectrum disorders, and rather call for what Norman Holland has named a “neuropsychoanalytical” approach (Holland 2009: 17–19) (see chapters by Bentley and Price in this volume). The trauma narrative in Extremely Loud consists of two story tiers each representing a different historical period and its traumatic events. Oskar is the only family member who knows that his father left several phone messages from the WTC tower on the day of his death, and feels guilty because he did not pick up the phone the last time his father called immediately before the collapse (this lack of action is motivated by his pre-existing autistic spectrum condition). All Oskar has left are memories of his father and the recordings from the answering machine. He desperately tries to make sense of these texts and the clues that remain, but much of the time he is in fugue from the trauma content provided by these memories and texts, a tendency which he exhibits before the trauma exacerbates it. He zips up “the sleeping bag of his self” (Foer 2005, 6), which suggests dissociation or, in Bloom, Foderaro and Ryan’s A-terms, a closing down of awareness; he wears “heavy boots” (6, 39 et legio), which implies depression, or lack of affect; he compulsively counts the seconds until he falls asleep, and is

Syndrome, Symptom, and Trauma 105 generally incapacitated by his PTSD and grief. The search for the lock that the key he fi nds may open is his last resort at fi nding a solution to the conundrum of why his father had to die. The second narrative strand recounts, in Oskar’s grandparents’ alternating voices, events in another historical tier, set in Dresden, before, during and after the British and American fi re bombings in February 1945. Oskar’s grandmother (who was not present at that time in Dresden) further listens to a survivor’s account of the atom bomb’s effect on Hiroshima, which lends another layer of historical depth to her and Oskar’s experiences and allows increased reader horror and empathy. Her husband, Oskar’s grandfather, experiences the Dresden bombings fi rst-hand and loses his fi rst love, Anna (the sister of Oskar’s grandmother) who is newly pregnant with his child. As a result he loses the ability to speak and also his artistic gift as a sculptor; in his bitterness and powerlessness he swears never again to have children. He emigrates from Germany to America to put as much distance as possible between himself and the scene of his loss. The two narrative strands meet in the present of post-September 11 New York, but prior to that there is a mediating phase in which Oskar’s family history is recounted. Oskar’s grandparents meet again after World War II and decide to marry, despite the lack of mutual love between them. The grandfather is trying to survive despite his oral aphasia and an artist’s block; the grandmother is trying to come to terms with the loss of her entire family. In both cases, however, the trauma effect erases all possible narratives of itself. Through a complicated system of text production the grandparents try to cope with their losses. He writes thousands of daybooks, filling them with phrases that he needs in everyday communication but which make little sense outside their specific context. While gradually losing her sight, she writes her life story on an old typewriter. But the story with which she fi lls thousands of pages turns out to have been typed without a ribbon and therefore leaves no legible traces. He tries to hide this fact from her by pretending to read and discuss the narrative with her. (This is parallel to Oskar concealing his father’s voice messages from the rest of the family.) Both of these types of text production are methods of attempting a retelling of the trauma content, but they both fail due to the characters’ lack of a proper therapeutic setting within which to perform the telling. In fact the two trauma sufferers end up exacerbating one another’s conditions. This lie on which their relationship rests is mirrored in another deception, as she quickly realizes that he still loves her sister and is only using her as a sexual and emotional stand-in for that, to him, all-important person. In effect, he is reliving the traumatic experience of Anna’s loss every day by being married to her sister instead. She decides to prioritize self-realization over self-sacrifice and to follow her destiny instead of performing a tragic repetition of her sister’s life. Therefore she breaks their agreement never to have children by deliberately becoming pregnant. He leaves her the very day she tells him this. After that his writing changes, as he begins a new

106 Bent Sørensen string of thousands of letters addressed to his son, in which he tries to justify his actions. In the only one of these letters his son ever receives he succeeds in narrating the horror of his Dresden experience. That letter is reproduced in the novel’s diegetic world, complete with the son’s copy editing of the discourse, marked in red as a literal form of trauma redaction (Foer 2005, 208–16). At the point in time where the two tiers of history and narrative are brought together after September 11, Oskar’s grandfather and grandmother have begun living together again. He has brought all of the unsent letters to his son back from Europe and now has no living person to send or read them to. Their son has died a death as meaningless as Anna’s, and he has a hard time fi nding a way to be present in his grandson’s life. It is only by gradually involving himself in Oskar’s project of visiting the Blacks that he fi nds a way back into a newly constituted family. The better solution to the trauma of both these generations turns out to lie in another act of transgenerational textual transmission, and Oskar and his grandfather decide to exhume Oskar’s father’s empty coffi n and instead fill it with the letters the grandfather never sent. Through this exchange the grandfather purges himself of a burden of guilt, an act of outpouring or kenosis, which then fills the cenotaph or empty grave and by proxy pours some new content into Oskar’s life, untainted by trauma. The trauma is thus worked through to some extent, or at least partially discharged by the confrontation with the void which has led Oskar to a pattern of avoidance behavior, leaving him and his family with the possibility of forming new attachments in a more anger- and affect-free, nonaddictive manner, to once more use the ‘A’s of Bloom, Foderaro and Ryan. This glimpse of the end of a transgenerational trauma chain may seem overly optimistic to the reader, particularly since Oskar’s spectrum disorder will still remain a major challenge in his life, but one does feel a positive release of trauma energy or de-cathexis at the end of Foer’s novel, which has served as a narrative laboratory using not only tropes, but images, narrative manipulation and emotional characterization to show how one can deal with trauma-by-proxy as a readerly condition. By contrast, Don DeLillo’s post-September 11 novel, Falling Man, contains the story of Keith Neudecker, a literal survivor of the WTC collapse, but more importantly also demonstrates the effect by proxy of such a traumatic event on his family. The strains on the married couple caused by September 11 are quite similar to the ones described as tearing Oskar’s grandparents apart in Foer’s novel. DeLillo’s protagonist feels equally dissociated from the routines of his actual family, who desire nothing more than a continuation of their life as it was before the disruption, and therefore he eventually seeks alternative emotional connections, finding them in the company of a fellow survivor, a woman he hopes has the capacity to understand his feelings of anger, depression and suicidal numbness. His condition by then closely corresponds to the therapeutic nine ‘A’s of Bloom, Foderaro and Ryan.

Syndrome, Symptom, and Trauma 107 DeLillo’s novel also makes reference to Germany, but not to the Germany of the Second World War. Instead the protagonist’s mother-in-law has an affair with a former Rote Armee Fraktion terrorist; elsewhere, we discover that one of the September 11 terrorists has been trained in a German university and there been converted to the cause by Mohammad Atta. Falling Man is a collective novel, as almost all its characters have a narrative point of view. This unfortunately causes the novel to be somewhat diff use, especially as the terrorists (former and present) come across as little more than stunted human beings, stereotyped beyond sympathy, and not allowed to think or speak in anything but the most paratactic phrases: The beard would look better if he trimmed it. But there were rules now and he was determined to follow them. His life had structure. Things were clearly defi ned. He was becoming one of them now, learning to look like them and think like them. This was inseparable from jihad. He prayed with them to be with them. They were becoming total brothers. (DeLillo 2007, 83) While such a paratactic diction would not in itself be a problem if it were no more than an aesthetic choice by the author, it does serve to diminish the reader’s options of empathy with, or at least understanding of, the characters’ motivations. If DeLillo’s point here is that the terrorists have also been conditioned through their training to act like they were already suffering from PTSD, he certainly succeeds in transmitting this view to the reader who must, frankly, be slightly puzzled by this apparent lack of valorization of one group over the other. As the main American protagonists all clearly suffer from PTSD, one also encounters in their diction the deadening of affect so typical of trauma sufferers, which, albeit that the performance by DeLillo in recreating this discourse is highly effective, means that the novel remains flat and uneventful on a surface level. This diction is endemic to the whole novel, but the following passage is specifically representative of Neudecker’s temporal dissociation, as we fi nd it difficult to know whether he is at home, in a physiotherapist’s office or believes he is still in his WTC office moments after impact: There were the dead and maimed. His injury was slight but it wasn’t the torn cartilage that was the subject of this effort. It was the chaos, the levitation of ceilings and floors, the voices choking in smoke. He sat in deep concentration, working on the hand shapes, the bend of the wrist toward the ceiling, the forearm flat on the table, the thumb-up configuration in certain setups, the use of the uninvolved hand to apply pressure to the involved hand. He washed his splint in warm soapy water. He did not adjust his splint without consulting the therapist. He read the instruction sheet. He curled his hand into a gentle fist. (DeLillo 2007, 40)

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The book ends with a tour de force scene where for the fi rst time in the novel we enter into the burning tower with the protagonist and witness the traumatic event directly through his eyes. The scene begins on board the hijacked plane and is narrated from the terrorist’s point of view. The second the plane hits the tower and he dies, the point of view is propeled out of his body and into the protagonist’s physical experience of the explosion: A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one way and rolling back the other, and he watched it spin more quickly and then skitter across the floor an instant before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel, then fire, and a blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall. He found himself walking into a wall. (DeLillo 2007, 239) This transition, where the “he” of the fi rst line is the terrorist and the “he” of the last line is Neudecker, is meant to suggest the communality of destiny between victim and terrorist, especially as the thoughts of the terrorist as rendered in the narration leading up to the section quoted above indicate that the terrorist feels numb and traumatized himself, but the passage leaves the reader dissatisfied as the narrative link seems contrived and frivolous. This shortcut in narrative psychology lessens the impact of this DeLillo novel for the facilitation of reader healing by proxy, and one could argue that he is more culpable of exploiting September 11 than Foer, despite not providing any neat de-cathexis of trauma content for his characters. DeLillo and Foer of course share the trope of falling as central to the dynamics of their novels. Foer’s protagonist Oscar wishes to know how his father died and imagines that he can see him in the grainy news footage of people jumping from the burning tower. In the end he invents a mechanism that can play back the events in his head in reverse, and the novel closes with a series of images of a man falling up toward safety which can be activated by flicking the pages of the book in the manner of a primitive animation (perhaps an oblique reference to E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime). DeLillo’s falling man is a body artist, David Janiak, who enacts a body falling toward the ground in a number of public settings in New York, much in the manner of Yves Klein, the French Situationist performer. In the novel the New Yorkers are angry with this artist, who stirs memories of an event many would rather repress. However, Neudecker’s wife Leanne comprehends the necessity of the artist acting out the communal trauma content and mourns him when he dies, apparently as a result of a re-enactment going wrong. This process of mourning takes the form of an obsessive and elaborate Internet search for the story of the body artist, which Leanne carries out in a Las Vegas hotel room while her husband is sleeping. At the end of the search she is sufficiently at ease to go to sleep on her husband’s side of the bed, having achieved a narrative fulfilment by proxy through

Syndrome, Symptom, and Trauma 109 reading everything available in the public domain about the falling man (218–24). Thus, DeLillo illustrates well the function of art, which might otherwise contribute to the unnecessary perpetuation of the trauma content, as a solution to the ill effects of trauma-by-proxy. Still, the de-cathexis of trauma seems to be contradicted by the persistence of flattened affect-less language in the novel, and in terms of plot, by its return to September 11 at the very end of the book. As far as PTSD novels are concerned, DeLillo did a more intricate job of characterization and the creation of reader identification points in his first exploration of the notion of the body artist—in his 2001 novel of that very name. Here the protagonist Lauren Hartke tries to reassemble her life after the traumatic event of her recent marriage ending with her husband, filmmaker Rey Robles, committing suicide in his fi rst wife’s apartment. This event is all the more shocking as it occurs immediately after what seemed to both the reader and Lauren to be a relatively blissful, protracted breakfast scene where the couple was shown to be bonding and communing to a considerable extent. Lauren copes with the trauma in various ways: fi rst, by withdrawing from communication and by mirroring her lack of emotion in a preoccupation with an obscure web-cam streaming images of the traffic (or rather lack thereof) in Kotka, a remote Finnish settlement (DeLillo 2001, 38–39), and secondly, by inventing a surrogate husband figure, an aphasic and virtually personality-free ‘entity’ whom she discovers lurking in an upstairs room in the rented house she had shared with her husband. She names this non-person Mr. Tuttle after a high-school teacher of hers who had a speech impediment (47). Mr. Tuttle possesses the uncanny gift of being able to repeat phrases and whole slabs of conversation in the exact voice and manner of Lauren’s dead husband, even though his speech otherwise is typical dissociative, posttraumatic discourse, devoid of markers of deixis and an understanding of context: “What do you see?” she said, gesturing toward the boat and the advancing cloudline. “The trees are some of them,” he said. “Bending. Swaying in the wind. Those are birches. The white ones. Those are called paper birches.” “The white ones.” “The white ones. But beyond the trees.” “Beyond the trees.” “Out there,” she said. He looked a while. “It rained very much.” “It will rain. It is going to rain,” she said. (44) These discourse chunks consist largely of Mr. Tuttle’s blank repetitions or imitations of speech input given him by Lauren. Later he produces chunks

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that can be read as potential memories of Rey, or even as future interactions of an almost spiritualist nature between Lauren and Rey with Tuttle as the medium: “I regain possession of myself through you. I think like myself now, not like the man I became. I eat and sleep like myself, bad, which is bad, but it’s like myself when I was myself and not the other man.” (62) Tuttle thus functions as a potential key to memorializing and possibly even resurrecting the lost love object of Lauren. Finally, she responds to the trauma by creating a performance stretching her skills as a body artist to the extreme by transforming herself into images of both the original husband and of Tuttle, the bland and ultimately unsatisfactory copy or recorder of Rey. Through her performance piece she reclaims her identity as an artist in her own right and not as the near-catatonic grieving widow of another artist. The central traumatic event in The Body Artist is purely individual in its nature and relates to Lauren’s experience alone. Yet Lauren’s performance makes this experience a communal one, and potentially a valuable lesson for her audience. The audience is represented in the novel through a friend of Lauren who interviews her and writes a review of the performance. In this manner DeLillo lifts the trauma didactics out of the limited scope of an isolated family tragedy and performs an attempt at a writing-through of the trauma that can potentially also heal the reader through art—the tenth ‘A’ that I previously proposed as an extension of Bloom, Foderaro and Ryan’s nine ‘A’s. Typically of late DeLillo fictions, there is no remnant of humour or satire in these two novels, unlike in his 1980s work (such as White Noise), which borrowed the formal language of postmodernist fiction to satirize the lack of depth of contemporary society, families and individuals. In contrast to Foer’s playful engagement with multi-modality in his novel (the use of graphic elements, illustrations of various kinds, and the fl ip-section at the end), DeLillo grimly remains rather traditionally textual throughout his two trauma narratives. Critics such as Paula Mártin Salván (see Sørensen 2007) have suggested that DeLillo is perhaps best read as a Modernist in disguise, reverting to representational strategies reminiscent of authors such as T.S. Eliot, and it appears that this trend is also visible in his trauma fiction, where hoarding of fragments (of memories and past pre-PTSD states) and information is used by its protagonists as a survival strategy. Where Foer is perhaps overly optimistic on behalf of his characters’ ability to come out purified on the other side of trauma, DeLillo thus seems too bleakly pessimistic by only allowing the extremely obsessive artist Lauren to recover after a nearly complete personality and body transformation, and by not really allowing any member of Neudecker’s family full release from trauma or trauma-by-proxy.

Syndrome, Symptom, and Trauma 111 Is it then at all possible to write successful satires on September 11 without imposing such strictures on one’s characters as DeLillo and, to a lesser degree, Foer do? And in the larger scheme of things, is it possible to write satire and humour featuring sufferers of trauma or syndromes and disorders without straining the reader’s ability to respond emotionally to their conditions beyond the breaking point? Novels such as Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, which tells a desperately amusing story in the mode of a pastiche of the hard-boiled detective genre about a sufferer of Tourette’s, is an early example of postmodern irreverence toward spectrum sufferers and their plight (see James Peacock’s chapter in this volume). As mentioned before, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which involves a pastiche of a Sherlock Holmes detective fiction, again features a spectrum disorder sufferer as its narrator and would seem to indicate that it is possible to present disability victims in a humorous setting. The daring strategy of Ken Kalfus’ 2006 novel, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (to focus on extremely selfi sh characters whose initial response to the WTC bombing and the crash of United Flight 93 is joy and relief at being rid of their spouse—both characters mistakenly believe the other, respectively, to have been a victim of these two events) would indicate that even massively traumatizing events such as September 11 can be used for other purposes than the creation of empathy. Kalfus boldly chooses to use September 11 to start off the plot of a comedy of manners in the New Yorker tradition, detailing the painful process of a divorce described through a sustained war metaphor. Joyce and Marshall, the parties to the divorce case, use every scrap of mental ammunition in their private, petty divorce war (and even themselves become terrorists in the process). An illustrative quotation from the novel shows both the depths of the characters’ irrational hatred of one another—which adds up to a full-blown narcissistic disorder in its own right—and the narrator’s satirical strategy of hyperbole: Feelings between Joyce and Marshall acquired the intensity of something historic, tribal, and ethnic, and when they watched news of wars on TV, reports from the Balkans or the West Bank, they would think, yes, yes, yes, that’s how I feel about you.” (Kalfus 2006, 7) Kalfus’ novel walks a fi ne line between exploitation and entertainment at the expense of the trauma victims, but its larger cultural critique necessitates this diff usion of the tragic implications of the traumatic events. Unbeknownst to the two ultimately rather unsympathetic protagonists, they have become infected by the evil of the terrorists in their blatant disregard for the tragic implications of September 11 for other people. In fact, other people have become reduced to pure instrumentality in the egotistical service of the characters’ own interests. Kalfus thus cruelly exposes his protagonists, revealing their petty narcissism to the readers.

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This does not mean, however, that the sanctimonious, sentimental pop culture responses to the events of September 11 are kept outside the scope of Kalfus’ satire. Quite the contrary, he also lampoons American patriotism and even addresses head-on the trauma-by-proxy epidemic, neatly exposing this condition peculiar to the US. Joyce’s friend Roger has experienced September 11 from a considerable distance, namely a Florida motel room, and his main grievance seems to be that he could not get a convenient flight home to New York in the days following the event. As he airs his complaints to Joyce, she fi nds herself musing: Joyce realized [ . . . ] he considered himself a significant actor—a victim—in the September 11 tragedy. And didn’t she think she was a victim too? After all, she had seen the buildings fall, with her own helplessly naked eyes. She was supposed to have been on one of the planes. But so what. Every American felt that he had been personally attacked by the terrorists, and that was the patriotic thing of course, but patriotic metaphors aside, wasn’t the belief a bit delusional? There was a difference between being killed and not being killed. Was everyone walking around America thinking they had been intimately, self-importantly, involved in the destruction of the World Trade Center? (78) It is only possible credibly to represent the remarkable clarity with which Joyce assesses Roger’s, and by extension all American sufferers of trauma-by-proxy, self-obsession and solipsism within the satirical mode. Ultimately, the satire of society as an alienating machine that remains implicit in DeLillo’s late fictions is proven faulty by Kalfus’ success in overtly and believably claiming that syndrome-struck characters can fi nd a space to reflect rationally on the measure of events such as September 11. Kalfus, therefore, has written a 9/11 novel that falls entirely outside the therapeutic paradigm that, as we have seen, causes problems both for an empathic narrative such as Foer’s and for an affect-less narrative such as DeLillo’s in Falling Man. The various novels’ use of trauma-by-proxy is illuminating: diagnostically speaking, one can categorize them, depending on their geographical or emotional proximity to the traumatic event. Among the fictional characters discussed here, some have been close to the trauma, but not directly exposed to it, including Oskar, who has lost a family member and develops full-blown PTSD. Neudecker’s wife is in a similar position, except that because Neudecker survived the events, she develops a proxy form of survivor’s guilt. Kalfus’ Joyce and Marshall are the truest traumaby-proxy sufferers, but pull themselves out of that condition by reflecting on how much worse their situation could have been. Roger, of course, has no case at all. The point is not that DeLillo and Foer do not see PTSD sufferers as true victims or sufferers, but rather that DeLillo lessens the reader’s identification effect too much, whereas Foer perhaps plays the sympathy we feel for Oskar for more than it is worth, based on his PTSD alone.

Syndrome, Symptom, and Trauma 113 The satirical mode, then, can be used both as a comment on society at large and its tendency to go for the lowest common denominator (Kalfus), and as a comment on the individual, who can be considered a vessel to be filled with new meaning (Lethem) and thereby rise above the low expectations society has of its Other. Trauma narratives and the odd joyful syndrome-sufferer’s tale thus cover a wide spectrum of genres and modes but each offers a specific vision of healing or at least accommodation over time for the afflicted. Foer is at the optimistic end of the spectrum in this corpus, allowing Oskar as trauma-by-proxy, PTSD or Asperger’s sufferer our full sympathy. DeLillo represents the bleaker vision of a deeper politically motivated background for terrorism and the trauma released by it. His scope transcends that of an individual little boy, but the price paid for that larger scope is a less affecting experience for the reader. Kalfus moves beyond the event of terrorism itself, and mercilessly focuses on the abuses of the events in international and domestic US politics. Society’s future ultimately remains the bone of contention for the satirist, rather than the fictional trauma lab for readers that sincere, post-ironic authors such as Foer are interested in and limited by.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Auster, Paul. 1987. The New York Trilogy. London: Faber and Faber. . 1992. Leviathan. London: Faber and Faber. Bloom, Sandra L., Joseph F. Foderaro, and Ruth Ann Ryan. 2009. www.sanctuaryweb.com. Accessed June 23, 2009. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. DeLillo, Don. 2007. Falling Man. New York: Scribner-Simon. . 2001. The Body Artist. New York: Scribner-Simon. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Doctorow, E. L. 1975. Ragtime. New York: Random House. Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2002. Everything is Illuminated. Boston: Houghton Miffl in. . 2005. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel. Boston: Houghton Miffl in. Haddon, Mark. 2003. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. London: Doubleday. Hartman, Geoff rey. 2004. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.” PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. http:// www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/hartman-on_traumatic_knowledge_ and_literary_stud. Accessed March 31, 2012. Holland, Norman. 2009. Literature and the Brain. Gainesville: Psyart Foundation. Kalfus, Ken. 2006. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. New York: Harper Perennial. Kirmayer, Laurence J., Robert Lemelson, and Mark Barad. 2007. “Introduction: Inscribing Trauma in Culture, Brain, and Body.” In Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives, edited by Laurence

114 Bent Sørensen J. Kirmayer, Robert Lemelson, and Mark Barad, 1–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laplanche, J., and J.-B. Pontalis. 1967. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Lethem, Jonathan. 1999. Motherless Brooklyn. New York: Doubleday. Pynchon, Thomas. 1966. The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Sørensen, Bent. 2007. Review of Figures of Belatedness: Postmodernist Fiction in English, by Javier Gascueña Gahete and Paula Mártin Salván, eds. Cercles. http://www.cercles.com/review/r32/gahete.html. Accessed March 31, 2012. Vonnegut Jr, Kurt. 1969. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell Publishing. Winslow, Rosemary. 2004. “Troping Trauma: Conceiving /of/ Experiences of Speechless Terror.” The Journal of Advanced Composition, 24, 3: 607–33. Žižek, Slavoj. 1992. Enjoy Your Symptom! London: Routledge.

7

Mind and Brain The Representation of Trauma in Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog and Ian McEwan’s Saturday Nick Bentley

This chapter explores the contrasting representation of trauma in two contemporary British novels: Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog (2003) and Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005). The fi rst part focusses on recent debates with respect to the way traumatic experiences have been represented in contemporary culture, drawing on theories of trauma, traumaculture, the traumatological and wound culture by a number of writers including Cathy Caruth, Roger Luckhurst, Mark Seltzer and Philip Tew. I also examine the relationship between psychological understandings of trauma and approaches associated with the ‘neurological turn’ in recent studies of the mind and brain. The second part of the chapter focuses on Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog and particularly on the way in which trauma caused by violence is shown to produce a desire for revenge and a regression to older models of masculinity. This is discussed primarily with respect to the narrative of Xan Meo, whose regression into predatory, violent and patriarchal forms of masculinity is initiated by the head injury he receives when attacked by thugs who have mistaken his role in the ‘naming’ of a gangland criminal. The third part of the chapter explores McEwan’s representation of traumatic experience in Saturday. The main character, Richard Perowne (a neuroscientist and brain surgeon) and his family are subjected to a violent attack by a character who is suffering from Huntington’s disease. McEwan explores the notion of trauma in terms of the attack itself, but also in the neurological trauma associated with Baxter’s condition. My analysis focuses on the way in which the effects of that attack are played out in the novel in terms of each of the characters’ responses to the ensuing events. While Amis relies primarily on psychological models in his exploration of traumatic experience, McEwan is more interested in the ‘neurological turn’ in his representation of trauma. I also argue, however, that in conflating scientific discourse with metaphorical uses of trauma, both Yellow Dog and Saturday remain problematic texts. Two particularly influential approaches to trauma have emerged in British cultural and literary theory over the last ten years. Significantly, one refers to cultural trends before September 11, and one to the period after. The first of these is the idea of ‘traumaculture.’ This was first posited by Roger Luckhurst

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in 2003 but is mainly used in the context of the 1990s. The second is Philip Tew’s notion of the traumatological, which draws on Luckhurst’s theory but develops it in sometimes contrasting ways. It is in the interstices (in both spatial and temporal senses) between these two definitions that I locate Amis and McEwan’s engagement with the idea of trauma. In what follows, I also draw (as do both Luckhurst and Tew) on Mark Seltzer’s earlier definition of “wound culture,” as well as on Cathy Caruth’s excellent analysis of the way trauma has been represented in literary texts. Luckhurst’s notion of traumaculture is employed to characterize a trend in late twentieth-century Western culture, and in the visual arts in particular. As Luckhurst writes: “a new kind of articulation of subjectivity emerged in the 1990s organized around the concept of trauma;” it involved “overlapping psychiatric, medical, legal, journalistic, sociological, cultural theoretical and aesthetic languages” (2003, 28). This new form of subjectivity, however, is somewhat paradoxical: trauma tends to “shatter subjectivity;” to organize identity around trauma “is to premise it on exactly that which escapes the subject, on an absence or a gap” (28). It is in the distinction between trauma as a disruption of subjectivity and the creation of a traumatic identity that aesthetic representation plays its part. What Luckhurst goes on to argue is that through various exhibitions or articulations of traumatic experience in aesthetic and discursive forms, the traumatic subject achieves a communicable and public subjectivity. Traumaculture, then, is characterized by the articulation and performance of traumatic experience in a public environment (37). Luckhurst sees this specifically in the rise of ‘pathography’—a memoir genre that focuses on the traumatic experience of the memoirist—and in the work of a number of young British artists in the 1990s. In both these cultural fields, as Luckhurst argues, traumaculture “fixes identity through the singular childhood event, destining the self to reiterate this definitional moment without prospect of resolution” (42). Where Luckhurst identifies traumaculture as located primarily in the performance of individual subjectivity, Philip Tew suggests that the pervasiveness of trauma narratives reveals a wider cultural response to the new global situation after September 11. For Luckhurst, “pre-millennial individual ‘traumaculture’ is superseded by a broader post-September 11 traumatological culture, by a sociologically significant disposition that permeates both selfhood and artistic renditions of this perspective, a gradual process of transformation” (2007, 199). Yet Luckhurst is, like Tew, also keen to show how traumaculture, by way of artistic manifestation, serves to communicate the sense of trauma to other subjects, thereby making it public. For Luckhurst, this process operates in the response to events such as the disaster at the Hillsborough football stadium in 1989 or the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Traumaculture in this sense does involve collective expressions of trauma, at least in the period before September 11. Tew’s model, however, extends this idea to suggest that after September 11, the traumatological combines the individual and collective articulation

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of traumatic experience in a more pervasive and even universalizing way. As Tew writes: “Everyone I knew was compelled to follow the television images of both the disaster and its consequences” (2007, xvii). This is the essential difference between traumaculture and the traumatological: the former refers to a trend in the performance of individual experience, the latter to a pervasive or collective sense of trauma. Both Luckhurst and Tew draw on an earlier theoretical exploration of the cultural manifestations of trauma by Mark Seltzer. Tew, in particular, develops Seltzer’s identification of the suturing of the individual and the collective in what the latter calls “Wound Culture,” manifest, as Tew puts it, in “a conflation of the public and private, a collapse of boundaries” (2007, 198). Similarly, Seltzer talks of “the coalescence, or collapse of private and public registers” in trauma, drawing attention to “the vague and shifting lines between the singularity or privacy of the subject, on the one side, and collective forms of representation, exhibition, and witnessing on the other” (1997, 4). It is in the context of traumaculture and the traumatological, then, that I approach both Saturday and Yellow Dog. Saturday sets a traumatic and violent experience suffered by Perowne and his family against the September 11 attacks and the London protests against the subsequent War on Terror in Iraq. Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog, although less obviously connected to September 11, also explores the representation of trauma initiated through an act of masculine violence. I have already suggested that Amis and McEwan take different approaches to trauma: the former adopts a psychoanalytical model; the latter a neurological model. These novels, therefore, stand on different sides in relation to the ‘neurological turn,’ adopting contrasting approaches to the relationship between the brain (or mind) and human behavior. Indeed McEwan alludes to this scientific turn in Saturday when he writes: “Among Perowne’s acquaintance are those medics who deal not with the brain, but only with the mind, with the diseases of consciousness; these colleagues embrace a tradition, a set of prejudices only rarely voiced nowadays, that the neuro-surgeons are blundering arrogant fools with blunt instruments, bone-setters let loose upon the most complex object known in the universe” (86). The conflation of the public and the private, and the sense of September 11 acting as a hinge between two cultural modes of trauma, has relevance to Martin Amis’ deployment of trauma as a literal and metaphoric theme in Yellow Dog. In temporal terms Amis has commented in interview that the writing of Yellow Dog was interrupted fi rstly by the death of his father and later by the events of 11 September 2001 (see Isaaman, 2003). These two traumatic events, one private, one public, seep into the representation of trauma in the novel. The result is an exploration of the effects of trauma which combines a satire of contemporary culture with a revenge narrative that recalls classical and Renaissance literary models. The novel has four plotlines, three of which interweave as the novel moves forward: the fi rst details the experiences of Xan Meo; the second

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recounts the actions of Clint Smoker, an unscrupulous but successful tabloid journalist working for the Morning Lark; the third is a blackmail narrative related to Henry IX, the British King in this alternative reality, who receives nude images, taken surreptitiously, of his fi fteen-year-old daughter, the Princess Victoria. The fourth plotline is a separate narrative which recounts the trajectory of Flight CigAir 101 Heavy across the Atlantic: on board are Reynolds Traynor, the Captain with whom she has been having an affair, and the coffi ned body of her husband, Royce. Formally, as with many of Amis’ novels, we move from a state of order to one of chaos: this recalls Renaissance revenge dramas, to which the novel alludes in a number of ways. Part I includes five chapters that are rigidly divided into four sections, each of which concentrates on the four plotlines. Parts II and III, however, move away from this structure as the characters and events in each begin to overlap. The breakdown of order in the structure of the narrative intimates both the breakdown of individual characters’ lives and an impending apocalypse for the planet as a whole, symbolized in the motif of the Near Earth Object that is threatening to crash into the earth throughout the course of the novel. Each of Amis’ plotlines includes moments of traumatic experience. However, it is Xan Meo’s narrative on which I want to concentrate in this chapter. Xan is a successful actor, writer and musician who, since his second marriage to Russia Tannenbaum, an academic, four years previously, has enjoyed a contented and mutually satisfying domestic life. It is from this equilibrium that Xan is violently jolted when he is attacked in a bar (called Hollywood) in London as he is innocently reminiscing about his earlier marriage to Pearl O’Daniel. The attack appears to be unprovoked and the perpetrators seem at fi rst to have a misguided motivation when they accuse Xan of ‘naming’ one Joseph Andrews, a character who is later revealed to be a London gangland thug, and who is now running a lucrative pornography empire on the West Coast of America.1 During this moment of traumatic violence, Xan sustains a head injury that fundamentally changes his personality: having been a (post-) feminist new man, he regresses to a form of atavistic patriarchal masculinity. This results in a desire for revenge, a return to his working-class roots, a heightened sex drive and, most disturbing, the development of incestuous feelings toward his young daughter. This development of an extreme form of patriarchal masculinity is one of the main themes in the novel, and establishes Amis’ broader examination of a culture of quid pro quo violence that appears to have been exacerbated in the aftermath of September 11. We learn that the trauma Xan suffers is not only related to the attack in the bar, but recalls an earlier, childhood trauma, the discovery of which serves to unravel the relationship between Xan, Mick Meo (now dead and who Xan believes to be his father) and Joseph Andrews. Andrews is eventually revealed to be Xan’s real father, and the originator of the attack in the bar. This return to an earlier traumatic moment recalls Cathy Caruth’s suggestion that literary

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representations of trauma are inevitably bound up in the repetition of an original experience which is not necessarily specifically remembered. As Caruth puts it: “the story of trauma is inescapably bound to a referential return” (1996, 7). Or, as Amis writes of Xan’s attempts to recall the initial moment of trauma: “It was like an investigation into the very early universe, that infi nitesimal fragment of time which was obscured by the violence of the initial conditions. You couldn’t quite reach the big bang—no matter what you did” (2003, 97). It is in its range of psychological metaphors that Yellow Dog reveals its distinctive approach to trauma. In Xan’s case, however, Amis appears at fi rst to be referring to actual medical defi nitions of head injuries that result in both physical and psychological changes. In a note at the end of the novel, Amis cites Head Injury: the Facts: A Guide for Families and CareGivers (1990) by Dorothy Gronwall, Philip Wrightson and Peter Waddell as the main source for his understanding of the effects of brain injury. He uses some of the technical terms gained from this book in his description of Xan’s head injury; for example, in his use of the terms fi rst, second and third “injury” (34–36). Indeed, the “Intensivist,” Dr Ghandhi, in the section “The Transfer to Trauma,” who explains the effects of Xan’s injuries to his wife, appears to have been a reader of Gronwall et al. However, the aim of Amis’ novel is not to produce an accurate examination of a recognized medical condition. Xan is diagnosed as suffering from “Post-Traumatic Satyriasis,” which is invented by Amis to fit his thematic patterning and is not an actual medical condition. Admittedly, Head Injury has a section entitled “Changes in Sexuality,” which refers to the fact that head-injured individuals can display “behavior [that] can be seen as sexually provocative or out of place” and behave “in a sexually inappropriate way” (1990, 62–63). However, Gronwall et al nowhere mention that this behavior can become aggressive or incestuous. These aspects of Xan’s behavior are supplied by Amis, which suggests he is less interested in describing the effects of head injuries realistically than in developing trauma as a metaphor for a broader phenomenon, both in contemporary culture and in individual psychology. In this sense, the metaphorical dimensions of trauma might be seen as an example of Tew’s notion of the traumatological as a general anxiety permeating the social world in which Xan and the other characters fi nd themselves. Amis’ novel deals with altered mental states caused by moments of trauma, whether these are related to physical injuries or to a psychological attack, as in the case of the blackmail plot against Henry IX. Amis, however, is not writing within what Marco Roth has identified as the recent trend of ‘neuronovels’ such as Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, and Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker. One main purpose of these works is to provide a realistic depiction of the mental state of the person with one or another physical “condition” or “syndrome”

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(Roth 2009). As Roth identifies, the rise in these novels can be attributed to “a cultural [ . . . ] shift away from environmental and relational theories of personality back to the study of brains themselves,” a trend which he sees as fueled by the “discredit psychoanalysis suffered” in the 1980s and 1990s (Roth 2009). Yellow Dog, then, cannot easily be seen as a ‘neuronovel.’ Indeed, Amis remains committed to a psychoanalytic model in his representation of traumatized subjects, an approach he has commented on in his non-fictional writing. For example, in “The Lonely Voice of the Crowd,” a 2002 article on the cultural effects of September 11, Amis writes: “Imaginative writing is understood to be slightly mysterious [ . . . ] a great deal of the work gets done beneath the threshold of consciousness” (Amis 2008, 12). He also makes a similar claim in his autobiography Experience, writing that novels are: “messages from your unconscious history. They come from the back of your mind, not from its forefront” (2000, 218). As Roth notes, the psychoanalytical approach to the representation of trauma has come under criticism from several theorists over the last twenty years or so. Mark Seltzer, for example, in his analysis of the way serial killers have been represented in popular culture, criticizes the assumption that motivation is located in childhood trauma and abuse. He raises suspicions about the validity of the link between adult actions and childhood experience, suggesting that it has seeped into our collective understanding of individual violence because of the prevalence of psychoanalysis in the cultural imagination. As Seltzer writes: “The assumption that the cause of compulsive violence resides in the childhood trauma has become canonical, in criminological and in popular accounts,” a position that he argues is “the basic premise of psychoanalysis” (1990, 7). Seltzer also draws on Jean Laplanche in interrogating psychoanalytic understandings of the processes of trauma, and in particular the link between its physical and psychical manifestations. As Laplanche writes: “From the model of physical trauma we have moved to psychical trauma, not through any vague or unthematized analogy from one domain to the other, but through a precise transition: the movement from the external to the internal” (1985, 42). Although both Laplanche and Seltzer question this foundational premise, that very linkage is played out in Amis’ understanding of the exchange between traumatic event and psychological change: Amis identifies the traumatic experiences of a number of his characters in the novel as motivations for acts in their adult life. This is certainly the case with Cora Susan (who takes the pseudonym Karla White), whose experience of sexual abuse by her father as a child has resulted in her seeking revenge on Xan, her uncle, by luring him into a quasi-incestuous and adulterous relationship and thereby destroying his marriage. Xan is susceptible to Cora/Karla’s advances precisely because his psychosexual state has been damaged by his injury, and his incestuous desires toward his daughter are partly assuaged by the lure of a sexual encounter with his niece.

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As many commentators have noted (see Diedrick 2004; Head 2008), it is within a psychoanalytic framework that Amis explores father-daughter incest as an extreme instance of patriarchal power. What has received less critical attention, however, is the father-son relationship that the novel examines—one which also draws on psychoanalytical models. As Seltzer has noted, the traumatic subject is often encouraged to return to the moment of trauma to recover an understanding of its meaning. However, this return is problematized by the fact that the memory of that moment is always formed after the event, so that the trauma itself becomes the originating moment, rather than the event which caused the trauma. As he writes: The trauma is something like the compulsive return to the scene of the crime—not merely in that the trauma is the product of its repression, but also in that it is the product, not of an event itself, but of how the subject represents it to himself. One detects here what might be described as a binding of trauma to representation or scene. (1990, 11) Seltzer’s remarks have particular relevance to Xan’s experiences in Yellow Dog. After the attack in the pub, Xan is consumed by the desire for revenge, which is one of the characteristics of his descent into an atavistic form of masculinity. To pursue this desire he must fi rst ascertain the identity of his attacker. He is thus forced to circle around the memory of the trauma: he has to reconstruct the moment in his consciousness so that he can understand it. Yet the attack is precisely non-sensical for Xan, both in its original moment and in his attempt to recover it. He remembers that the attack was caused by an unknown transgression on his part: as his attackers explain, he is being punished because he has “named him” (96). What we discover, however, is that the attack itself is not the origin of the trauma from which Xan is suffering. Rather, it originates from an earlier repressed memory of the moment when as a child he disturbed his presumed father, Mick Meo, beating up the person who turns out to be his real father—Joseph Andrews. This sets in play a familiar literary scenario: a father desiring revenge for the infidelity of a mother recalls, of course, an earlier revenge tragedy, Hamlet. Amis makes several oblique references to Shakespeare’s play: Xan is described as a Renaissance Man, one who spends much of the text seeking revenge, and like Hamlet, he is an actor and performer (with a Literature and Drama degree from Sussex, rather than Wittenberg). Although Xan is much older than Hamlet, and the former’s mother is conspicuously absent from the novel, Amis is fully aware of the thematic connections. Consider, for example, the use of intertextual reference in the following passage, in which Xan is trying to recover a memory of the attack: “You’ll remember this in pain, boy.” Well, he remembered that. “You went and named him!” Named who? [ . . . ] Xan had read in the books, in the literature of head injury, that an experience needs time to become

122 Nick Bentley a memory. Not long—maybe a second or two. And the blow had come so quickly, so hard upon. The significant name didn’t have time to become a memory [ . . . ] the brain didn’t want to remember the blow. (96) The quotation from Hamlet (the wedding of Hamlet’s mother follows “so hard upon” the funeral of his father) is partly a pun on the physical shock of the blow Xan received, but this moment also reveals the various layers of trauma and repression that fuel his psycho-narrative. In addition, the invocation to “remember” echoes the ghost of Hamlet’s father—“Remember me”—as a call for revenge. The moment of trauma that Xan is initially trying to recall is the attack he suffered at the Hollywood bar. However, we later discover that the name which eludes him at this point is the name of his real father Joseph Andrews, a father who has dealt the physical blow vicariously through his two henchmen, but simultaneously set in motion the psychological blow that will take Xan back to a repressed childhood memory. He (and the reader) later discovers that Joseph Andrews has slept with his mother and fathered Xan while his assumed father, Mick Meo, has been murdered on Andrews’ instructions. This establishes the revenge scenario that Xan embarks upon (unknowingly at fi rst), invoking an Oedipal plotline in which a real father must be killed before the son can recover from his trauma. The Oedipal framework that links Xan’s narrative to Hamlet is more concerned with the father-son than the mother-son relationship, and in particular with the reenactment of the imposition of the law of the Father on the child. The traumatic memory that Xan ultimately retrieves is not only of the attack, but of the moment when, as a child, he had witnessed Mick Meo’s beating up of Joseph Andrews, itself an act of masculine revenge: “He tipped open the shed door and saw his father seated on another man’s chest, straddling the flattened shoulders with his knees: Mick Meo over Joseph Andrews” (337). This beating is Mick’s revenge after learning that Andrews has been sleeping with his wife, an affair that has resulted in Xan’s birth. Xan, therefore, is implicated in both this act of masculine violence and in the revenge Andrews eventually gains on Mick Meo. As Xan gleans from the medical literature he has been reading, “experience needs time to become a memory” (96). But the time lag is much greater than he fi rst imagines since there are two separate memories to be recovered, one of which has been halted by the physical assault, one by the psychological repression of an earlier traumatic memory. Toward the end of Yellow Dog, Xan remembers this childhood incident, which had taken place in his backyard, and it mingles with other, sexualized memories of the place where “his sister Leda [ . . . ] took her boyfriends” and he had watched her “up against the wheelless van with her skirt round her waist;” in a place where “the dogs stoically stuck together [ . . . ] in coition and awaiting the deliverance of the bucket” (337). Indeed, the sound of Mick’s blows mingle with the sounds of the dogs having sex in Xan’s memory: “the sound

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had rhythm, like a murderous act of love: a grunt, then a muffled, slushy impact or convergence, then an answering moan” (336–37). James Diedrick rightly identifies Xan’s memory of this scene as an instance of “the atavistic impulses and attitudes human beings throw off to become civilized” (2004, 242). For Xan, the backyard is the spatialization of his repressed childhood trauma, a location in which aggressive sex and masculine violence are psychologically sutured. If Amis’ novel is concerned with deploying a psychological framework for character motivation and action, then McEwan is much more interested in Saturday in neurological explanations for behavior, represented thematically in the choice of his protagonist Henry Perowne, whose perspective is the primary focus in the novel, even though it uses third-person narration. Indeed, the issue of point of view is crucial in Saturday: the novel employs free indirect speech extensively, so that authorial comment is almost always filtered through Perowne’s scientific consciousness, a formal strategy which in turn raises the issue of ironic distance. McEwan has commented that his and Perowne’s views of the Iraq War differ, and clearly his protagonist’s myopia with respect to the values and qualities of literature are meant to be taken ironically by the reader (McEwan, 2007). 2 For example, when Perowne makes pejorative reference to a novel his daughter Daisy has recommended he read in which “one visionary saw through a pub window his parents as they had been seen some weeks after his conception,” those familiar with McEwan’s work will recognize a reference to his 1987 novel The Child in Time (McEwan 2005, 67). Later in the novel, Perowne explains that he dislikes fiction because it is “too humanly flawed, too sprawling and hit-and-miss to inspire uncomplicated wonder at the magnificence of human ingenuity” (68). As a literary form, the novel has traditionally dealt with examining human psychology, but its procedures are far too speculative for Perowne the empiricist. Nevertheless, despite these examples of distance, a shared outlook among author, intended reader, and character is established with respect to Perowne’s area of expertise, namely neuroscience, and to scientific knowledge more broadly. The privileging of Perowne’s scientific discourse also extends into other aspects of the novel including its representation of social class and, most notably, its discussion of the 2003 war in Iraq. Perowne’s commentary, then, based as it is on a neurological model of human behavior (a model which informs the novel’s speculations on morality) can be seen to be high on the “hierarchy of discourses” (to use Catherine Belsey’s useful term) with which the novel presents us (Belsey 1980, 70–72). Neurological explanations of human behavior are established at a number of points in Saturday. At one point, Perowne observes two characters who are described in the following terms: “In the lifeless cold, they pass through the night, hot little biological engines with bipedal skills suited to any terrain, endowed with innumerable branching neural networks sunk deep in a knob of bone casing, buried fibres, warm filaments with their

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invisible glow of consciousness—these engines devise their own tracks” (13). The emphasis here is on humans as biological machines adapted to their environment and conditioned to behave in ways which negotiate this environment. The use of scientific and medical language is striking in this piece of free indirect speech—the “bipedal skills,” the “knob of bone casing” containing “buried fibres.” And despite the slightly more ambiguous “invisible glow of consciousness,” Perowne is not prepared to contemplate an alternative unconscious as a driver for these “biological engines.” This establishes Perowne’s model of behavior as primarily chemical and neurological rather than social or psychological. Later, the authorial voice comments in language that is consistent with Perowne’s point of view: It’s a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get. Opportunities, health, prospects, accent, table manners—these might lie within your power to shape. But what really determines the sort of person who’s coming to live with you is which sperm fi nds which egg, how the cards in two packs are shuffled, halved and spliced at the moment of recombination. (25) Perowne’s account of the biological determinants of character clearly rejects sociological and ideological models of identity, in spite of his acceptance that minor elements of human behavior can be learned. The same position is evident in the recollection of an argument Perowne had with his daughter Daisy about an Oxford lecturer convincing her that “madness is a social construct.” Perowne wins this argument when he gives her a “tour of a closed psychiatric wing” (92). The reference here is perhaps to Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: at any rate, any sense of the cultural meaning of mental illness is rejected by Perowne’s empirical and scientific knowledge of the way “madness” manifests itself at a clinical level. Perowne’s position is given validity because of his professional experience, and by the fact that his neurological understanding of mental illness is presented as attractively up-to-date, unlike the views of a previous generation of radicals: “And who will ever fi nd a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?” (91–92). The use of the phrase “down among” in this passage may ironically recollect similar formulations in 1960s and 1970s identity politics, for example in Fay Weldon’s Down Among the Women (1971), suggesting that Perowne’s strictly scientific and seemingly impartial position has a more universal application. A neurological model of human behavior is also crucial in the unfolding of Saturday’s main plot, which features an initial encounter on the street between Perowne and the violent criminal Baxter, and the latter’s subsequent invasion of Perowne’s domestic environment, during which the neuro-surgeon’s protected bourgeois family and lifestyle are threatened.

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Perowne fi rst encounters Baxter when their cars collide in a deserted London street on the morning of the eponymous day on which the events are set—Saturday, February 15, 2003—the day of a mass anti-Iraq War demonstration. It is because of the disruption affecting the streets of central London that Perowne is forced to take an alternative route, resulting in his encounter with Baxter. The violent confrontation that develops from the collision culminates in Perowne identifying that Baxter is suffering from Huntington’s disease. This discovery saves him from a more serious beating, and also establishes a complicated relationship between the two strangers. The representation of Baxter is problematic for various reasons, not least because the novel appears to ascribe his violent and criminal behavior to his neurological condition. At the moment when the physical attack is about to take place, Perowne reflects that: “There is much in human affairs that can be accounted for at the level of the complex molecule. Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter?” (91). Baxter’s later invasion of Perowne’s house, his violent attack on Perowne’s father-in-law, and his ordering of Perowne’s daughter Daisy to strip naked: McEwan appears to attribute each of these actions to Baxter’s neurological condition. Baxter’s condition can itself be seen as traumatic at the neurological level, and in this sense appears to be biologically determined—the hardwired trauma sufferer is impelled to enact traumatic experiences on others, and the victim is inevitably drawn to victimize others as a kind of warped reaction against the hand he has been dealt. Huntington’s disease therefore carries a heavy moral burden in the novel and it clearly poses problems in terms of the representation of mental disorders in culture at large. Baxter is rather unconvincingly brought back from his violent tendencies when he listens to Daisy recite what he believes to be one of her own poems, but which is in fact Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” a fact that evades both Baxter and Perowne. This is accounted for by the way in which Huntington’s disease causes rapid mood swings: “Here is the signature of so many neurodegenerative diseases—the swift transition from one mood to another, without awareness or memory, or understanding of how it seems to others” (96). And yet the idea that Arnold’s poem about the ebbing of religious faith in the nineteenth century could rapidly alter Baxter’s behavior remains implausible, and comes across as a somewhat crude attempt on McEwan’s part to identify the redemptive value of literature—a lesson which not only Baxter but also Perowne must learn. McEwan uses Arnold to show the power of the literary to produce emotional effects which extend beyond Perowne’s scientific perspective.3 McEwan cites Arnold because he represents a discourse, exemplified in Culture and Anarchy, that appeals to high culture as a way of staving off the ‘barbarism’ of a merely material civilization. In Saturday, poetry is able to ward off the invasion of the threatening masses personified in Baxter. The use of Arnold also informs

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McEwan’s account of the anti-war demonstration. In an earlier argument between Perowne and his daughter about the legitimacy of the war against Iraq, Daisy supports the protesters. However, Perowne’s insistence on the need to resist a threatening violent force is carried over to the Baxter plot: that Daisy is forced to strip by Baxter suggests that her earlier ideas about the reality of violent acts were naïve. As I suggested earlier, the positioning of Perowne in the text’s hierarchy of discourses suggests that his views about the war and his more general ideological position ultimately prove to be correct.4 The fi nal ethical choice the novel presents us with is established in another unlikely twist in the plot.5 After Baxter has been overpowered by Perowne and his son Theo, suffering a head injury through falling down the stairs in Perowne’s house, Perowne is then, somewhat implausibly, called in to operate on him. Nevertheless, this plot contrivance sets up the ethical choice which faces Perowne at the end of the novel. That he decides to save Baxter at a moment when his life is literally in his hands serves to illuminate the broader moral issues which the novel explores. It is apparent that Perowne’s behavior is determined by a logical and rational examination of the facts supported by his medical ethics, a rationalization that is denied to Baxter, whose behavior, as we have seen, is neurologically determined. In their twenty-fi rst century fiction, then, both Amis and McEwan are interested in exploring the effects of traumatic experience. Following Dominic Head, this can be read as an indication of broader social and cultural responses to major world events manifest in the September 11, 2001 attacks and the subsequent War on Terror. It is apparent that both novels are to some extent indicative of the ‘traumatological’—Tew’s term for the pervasive anxiety caused by those events. They also reveal something of Luckhurst’s notion that traumaculture involves an increased interest in cultural works that examine the disruption of subjectivity suffered by traumatized subjects. In Amis’ case, Xan Meo’s narrative represents the intersection of the traumatological with traumaculture in the sense that the attack he suffers and the consequent change in his psychology are representative of both an individual experience of trauma and a metaphor for a collective anxiety. In McEwan’s case, the two models of trauma are brought together in the encounter between Baxter and Perowne; the former’s changed subjectivity brought on by Huntington’s disease being, in part, an explanation of the trauma he inflicts on Perowne and his family, and thus contributing to the novel’s metaphoric representation of a pervasive sense of threat in the period following September 11. Both Amis and McEwan are novelists that are keen to engage in sociopolitical debates, and in their twenty-fi rst century fiction in particular they have used characters and storylines that utilize medical, psychological and neurological contexts to embody within individual characters and plotlines broader concerns about the national body politic and broader international anxieties in a decade that has been plagued by war and the fear of terrorism.

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Lustig and Peacock argue convincingly in the Introduction to this book that trauma and the syndrome have become significant tropes in twentyfi rst century fiction. This usage reveals something of a pervasive sense of social and cultural anxiety, and Amis and McEwan are clearly contributing to this trend. As this chapter has shown, however, the juxtaposition of social and political commentary with the metaphorical use of trauma can be problematic. To a certain extent, both Amis and McEwan manipulate medical theories of trauma to fit the aesthetic and symbolic aspects of their fiction, and this leads to misrepresentation of various psychological and neurological disorders. There is, of course, nothing wrong with literary fiction exceeding a purely factual framework; the danger lies in texts which combine metaphorical strategies with what appear to be scientifically verifiable details. The blurring of fiction and reality, although a staple of much postmodern literature, engenders a dubious politics of representation when applied to medical and scientific discourse.6 C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ can, and often should, be connected, but novels such as Yellow Dog and Saturday show that sensitive reading is necessary to distinguish between the specific objectives of literary and scientific discourses. NOTES 1. “Joseph Andrews” is a reference to Henry Fielding’s satirical novel of the same name: Xan is aware of this, although the Joseph Andrews in Yellow Dog is not. 2. McEwan comments: “As for Saturday—a character in a novel who expresses hostility toward novels in general should not be seen as an entirely trustworthy mouthpiece of his novelist creator. For example, the pro-Iraq war views Henry Perowne expresses in an argument with his daughter are not mine and nor, for that matter, are her anti-war opinions. On the other hand, I would agree with Perowne that some—not all—peace protesters are naïve” (2007). 3. In this paragraph I am drawing on Sebastian Groes’ analysis of the intertextual references to Arnold in Saturday, especially in relation to the way in which Culture and Anarchy engages with the “growing tensions within the English class system” (Groes 2009, 109). David Amigoni reads this episode in the novel as a “parody of literature’s civilizing mission” in an excellent essay on McEwan’s engagement with the interaction of science and literature in Saturday and Enduring Love (Amigoni 2008, 162). 4. I agree, here, with David Alderson’s reading of Saturday as a problematic juxtaposition of political commentary (in what appears to be a tacit endorsement of the war in Iraq) and a resurgent Arnoldianism, brought together in the Baxter storyline. As Alderson writes: “Baxter is, of course, defeated and expelled, though in ways which preserve the civilising superiority of the Perowne family over him [and which] confi rms those qualities of unself-governability he shares with the fanatic” (2011, 233). 5. For a thorough analysis of the ethical contexts of McEwan’s fiction which includes a chapter on Saturday, see Dominic Head, Ian McEwan (2007, 177–99). 6. A similar argument is pursued by Elizabeth Grosz in her critique of the use of the term ‘schizophrenia’ by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-

128 Nick Bentley Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism. Grosz argues that the “romantic elevation of models of psychosis, schizophrenia, and madness” can “on the one hand ignore the very real pain and torment of individuals, and, on the other hand, raise pathology to an unlivable, unvariable ideal for others” (Grosz 1994, 90). As James Peacock points out elsewhere in this collection, the attribution of metaphorical values to medical conditions is also a problem which informs Susan Sontag’s Illness and Metaphor (1978).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alderson, David. 2011. “Saturday’s Enlightenment.” In End of Empire and the English Novel since 1945, edited by Rachel Gilmour and Bill Schwartz, 218–37. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Amigoni, David. 2008. “‘The Luxury of Storytelling:’ Science, Literature and Cultural Contest in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” In Literature and Science, edited by Sharon Ruston, 151–67. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Amis, Martin. 2000. Experience. London: Jonathan Cape. . 2003. Yellow Dog. London: Jonathan Cape. . 2008. The Second Plane. London: Jonathan Cape. Arnold, Matthew. 1993 [1869]. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, edited by Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Belsey, Catherine. 1980. Critical Practice. London and New York: Routledge. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. DeLillo, Don. 2008 [2007]. Falling Man. London: Picador. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1983 [1977]. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Diedrick, James. 2004. Understanding Martin Amis. 2nd edition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Foucault, Michel. 1988 [1965]. Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by Richard Howard. London: Vintage. Gronwall, Dorothy, Philip Wrightson and Peter Waddell. 1990. Head Injury: the Facts; a Guide for Families and Care-Givers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Groes, Sebastian. 2009. Ian McEwan. London: Continuum. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Head, Dominic. 2008. The State of the Novel. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Isaaman, Gerald. 2003. “It’s a Mad, Mad World that Inspires Martin.” Camden New Journal, September 30. Accessed January 2, 2012. http://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/archive/ r301003_6.htm. Laplanche, Jean. 1985. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Luckhurst, Roger. 2003. “Traumaculture.” New Formations: a Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 50: 28–47. McEwan, Ian. 1987. The Child in Time. London: Jonathan Cape. . 1997. Enduring Love. London: Jonathan Cape. . 2005. Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape. . 2007. “Novels Are Not All About You, Natasha.” The Guardian, April 7. Accessed January 2, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/apr/07/ bookscomment.books.

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Roth, Marco. 2009. “The Rise of the Neuronovel.” n+1 8. Accessed January 2, 2012. http://nplusonemag.com/ rise-neuronovel. Seltzer, Mark. 1997. “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere.” October 80: 3–26. Snow, C. P. 1964. The Two Cultures; and A Second Look. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Tew, Philip. 2007. The Contemporary British Novel. 2nd edition. London: Continuum. Weldon, Fay. 1971. Down Among the Women. London: Heinemann.

8

“Two-way traffic”? Syndrome as Symbol in Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker 1

T.J. Lustig

When critical work on the fiction of Richard Powers began to appear in the mid-1990s, it was commonly noted that his ambitious and complex novels regularly featured a series of oppositions: art and science, the subjective and the objective, imagination and the world. In 2002, Joseph Dewey presented Powers’ entire output to that point, from Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985) to Plowing the Dark (2000), as a sequence in which impulses of withdrawal expressed in one novel are answered in the next by a new engagement with the world in all its concrete immediacy. For Dewey, this “irresolvable conflict between the giddy celebration of autonomy and the fearful implication of isolation” has been an enduring preoccupation of the “American imagination” since Emerson (5). Dewey argues that the structuring oppositions of Powers’ work never face each other as implacable antinomies; rather, they are “forever contrapuntal” (53) (see also Harris 1998, passim; Hurt 1998, 40; Tabbi 2002, 56; Herman 2003, 167; Mendelsohn 2003, 12; Frye 2007, 110). Powers’ work, then, is fundamentally concerned—to use the title of a recent collection of essays—with “intersections” (Burn and Dempsey 2008). When Powers takes on the role of reader or critic of his own work in interviews, intersections are again to the fore. In an interview with Jim Neilson, Powers identifies several recurrent themes in his work (“little versus big,” “public versus private,” “personal agency” versus “cultural construction,” “narrative” versus “cognition”), suggesting that his novels stage an “attempted synthesis.” For Powers, everything is “bi-directional;” as a writer, his aim is to “fi nd a form” in which each side of an opposition “betrays itself as the flip side of the other” (1998b, 14). It is not the “outside in” of “naïve materialism” versus the “inside out” of “naïve linguistic determinism.” We need, as Powers argues, to appreciate “the two-way traffic of comprehension” (16). “Two-way traffic” is clearly evident in The Echo Maker (2006) and, as in his previous novels, Powers attempts to demonstrate that each term of the opposition (here it is principally animal and human, biological and social) is “the flip side of the other.” Yet there is something problematic about this counterpoint. Sometimes the two-way street enters a one-way system. And

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sometimes, more perturbingly, there doesn’t seem to be a street at all. This chapter argues that the ‘biological’ strand of Powers’ narrative (which deals with the migration of sandhill cranes through Nebraska and the attempts of an environmental group to protect their threatened habitat) tends to displace a conception of value from human to animal, leaving the former in a (perhaps deservedly) denuded state. But I also argue that the ‘human’ side of The Echo Maker—the story here centers on Mark Schluter, a twentyseven-year old slaughterhouse worker who is diagnosed as suffering from Capgras syndrome following a road accident—is still more problematic as part of an “attempted synthesis.” The narrative of neurological damage certainly sheds light on the relationship between the human and the animal. Yet a rather oblique political subtext in which the reader eventually discovers that Mark’s accident is an indirect consequence of the September 11 attacks tends, as I argue, to suppress the relationship between the individual and the social. In some ways it would be misleading to suggest that the cranes of The Echo Maker are ‘symbols’—as living creatures they are, rather, symbolizers, and their lived existence exceeds any literary function. Mark’s Capgras syndrome is also real, though it also has a metaphorical dimension. Yet the relationship between this neurological or ‘natural’ condition—the metaphorical ‘vehicle’—and its social or political ‘tenor’ (to use I. A. Richards’ much-debated terms) remains curiously unconvincing. 2 And this in turn, I argue, has important implications, not just for The Echo Maker, but also for other recent attempts on the part of British and American writers to reconsider the relationship between art and science or, more broadly, between human meanings and the (genetic, neurological, social, political) systems in which human beings exist: an objective, I take it, which has been central to the ‘syndrome syndrome.’ A “bidirectional” perspective is certainly evident in Powers’ descriptions of the sandhill cranes—descriptions which introduce each of The Echo Maker’s five sections. Here and elsewhere, the novel insistently figures the birds (half a million of which pause on the Platte river in Nebraska each March on their migration from the Southern states and Mexico northward to their breeding grounds in the Arctic Circle) as ‘human.’3 The cranes have wings the “length of a man” and feathers “like fi ngers;” above all, in order to migrate, they have memories (Powers 2006, 3). As they head north, the cranes are returning to “a remembered origin.” And so, for the narrator, “there must be symbols in the birds’ heads, something that says again” (97–98). This is a key insight: the cranes use symbols; they are not reducible to symbols. The point becomes clearer toward the end of the novel, when the cranes, now heading southward, arrive back on the Platte. For if “something” in or behind the cranes’ eyes “must match symbols” then it makes sense to speak of their journey in human terms as “a tradition, a ritual” (277). In the introductory section to the third and central section of The Echo Maker, moreover, Powers points out that the Ojibwa-Anishinabe

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word for the cranes is “Ajijak”—“Echo Makers.” These titular birds are associated, in myth, with speech, with writing, with “messages” and “petroglyphs,” with the peace symbol and with genealogy (pie de grue— ‘pedigree’). In Native American myth, we are told, cranes “are souls that once were humans and might be again,” or alternatively that humans “are souls that once were cranes and will be again” (181–82). The two sides of the opposition—animal and human—unite in time past and time future. It is only in the present, apparently, that “we live in unclear echoes” (183). That animals are “human” is only one side of Powers’ two-way street. For The Echo Maker repeatedly reminds us that humans are also animals. After he has been cut out of the cab of his lorry by fi remen and is under treatment by trauma specialists, Mark Schluter’s sister Karin is struck by her brother’s “animal eyes” (7). A doctor informs her that Mark’s “reptilian brain” is “showing nice activity” (16). A little later, having recovered consciousness, Mark’s expressions of sexual desire for his girlfriend Bonnie are evidence for Karin that the “reptile brain” is now “creeping out to sun itself” (38). During his initial recovery—Capgras has not yet been diagnosed—Mark lies in bed like “a whale in the street,” walks “like a trained bear” and chatters “like a perverted parrot” (41, 46). Mark is a veritable menagerie, but he is not alone. Karin feels that her hands might “turn to doves and fly away” (18). She flushes “faster than a pheasant from the brush” (27). Taking on the speech patterns of those with whom she associates, Karin suffers from a “chameleon complex” (71). And the situation of the Schluter siblings, it seems, is typical. Human speech makes Mark think of “cicadas on a warm night” (49). From the scientific point of view—or at least from the perspective of Dr Weber, an expert on brain disorders who recalls Oliver Sacks—the truth that brain disorders reveal about human identity in general is that we are all “like coral reefs [ . . . ] complex but fragile ecosystems” (186). In one sense, then, the novel’s contrapuntal dynamics suggest that animal and human are merely the “flip side” of each other. And a potential synthesis is suggested in the novel’s repeated images of “interlocked life” (56)—images which culminate, on the penultimate page of the novel, in a remarkable description of the scene which meets the eyes of Dr Weber as he travels by airplane to a destination which remains unclear to the reader if not to him: The lights of unknown cities blink beneath him, hundreds of millions of glowing cells linked together, swapping signals. Even here, the creature spreads countless species deep. Flying, burrowing, creeping things, every path sculpting all the others. A flashing electrical loom, streetsized synapses forming a brain with miles-wide thoughts too large to read. A web of signals spelling out a theory of living things. Cells by sun and rain and endless selection assembling into a mind the size of continents now, impossibly aware, omnipotent, but fragile as mist, cells

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with a few more years to discover how they connect and where they might go, before they gutter out and return to water. (450) This is Powers’ last and fullest invocation of connectedness. But the issue of connection, which until now I have been exploring at the level of content, also has implications at the level of literary form. For Tom LeClair, a dialectic of realism and postmodernism in Powers’ work achieves synthesis in a third, hybridized genre: a “new naturalism” (1996, 20).4 Unlike the old naturalism, with its emphasis on linear determinism, Powers’ fiction brings us a vision of life as a network “born out of chance, affected by ecological constraints beyond its control, spreading and perpetuating itself by improbable variation” (20). Powers’ rejection of “the common-sense empiricism of traditional realism” and his emphasis on “unpredictability” does indeed imply some kind of affiliation to postmodernism, though it is one which appeals to recent scientific research as much as to narrative theory (24). The “new naturalism” implies distance from both realism and postmodernism. And for several critics, Powers’ presumed stance on postmodernism is welcomed with relief, as if some trauma has fi nally been talked through. In the preamble to his interview with Powers, Neilson argues that “twoway traffic” reconciles the old antinomies in a new and welcome turn away from the “radical skepticism” associated with narrative theory (1998b, 17). Powers’ works may be self-reflexive, but their interest in the intricacies of language is accompanied by a more outward-looking engagement with the natural world. The ‘natural’ in literary ‘naturalism’ might, then, be read as a reaction on Powers’ part to what Neilson elsewhere describes as “a standard postmodern preoccupation with discourse” (1998a, 8–9). And Dewey adopts a similar tone: for him, the two-way street of Powers’ novels jolts us out of the “gamesplaying of postmodernism” and gives us back something we had lost: “a humane vision” (2002, 148). But Powers is no conventional realist: rather, he seeks to show that “the world is a vast, yet single cooperative organism,” an “intricately patterned whole” (70, 149).5 It might well be churlish to be skeptical about these evocations of organic complexity and unity. But I doubt whether Powers himself would be as willing as his critics to suggest that the relation between “life,” the human and, indeed, the “humane” is one of seamless continuity. In “The Seventh Event,” Powers reflects on the value of ‘wonder’ as a response to the natural world. Mia Erdmann, a fictionalized ecocritic slowly dying from a neurological disorder (tragically, nature spares no one), excoriates those who use nature “as a metaphor for reflecting the human condition,” arguing that “any writer who invokes the environment or the non-human living world as a transcendental moral category does so out of very human motives” (2005, 64–66). This perspective, one in which “wonder is too easy a dodge,” is emphatically put, although the structure of “The Seventh Event”—six sections numbered in reverse order—enables Powers, who features as a character in his own story, to end with the epigraph to the fi rst

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section, “Six:” “Haldane: The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder” (66, 73). A certain ambivalence about wonder as a response to “the non-human living world” can also be see in The Echo Maker, a novel published a year after “The Seventh Event.” Weber’s fi nal view through the airplane window may look like an affi rmative vision of connectedness at the biological level—a new Romanticism, perhaps, as well as a new naturalism. But it is clear that for Powers, discontinuities remain evident at the level of the individual human organism. In The Echo Maker, the reader is repeatedly reminded that one can only see “interlocked life” from the human edge of the organic web—in Weber’s case, from an airplane, in the context of professional, personal and marital breakdown. Karin’s vision of “the cottonwood and the Platte, the March breeze and rabbits in the undergrowth, something downstream slapping the water in alarm” crystallizes into a sense of the “timelessness of animals” (Powers 2006, 56). But she inevitably perceives the busy continuities of the natural world from the point of view of human time. The Echo Maker suggests that Karin and other characters are in fact locked out of “interlocked life”—isolated in their wayward and stupid humanness. The “web” which Karin glimpses is, as Powers writes later in the novel, “so intricate, so wide, that humans should long ago have shrivelled up and died of shame” (407). Yet there is a sense in which our very capacity to recognize that web alienates the human species from ‘life’ as much as our shameful neglect. In “The Seventh Event,” a fictionalized Powers faces this dilemma still more squarely: reading the work of Mia Erdmann, he feels “amazement:” “personal relationships, family, society, even global economics and politics: Erdmann saw these as nothing more than tiny local nodes in a network so large that it should have made the human vanish in embarrassment.” Yet Powers the character also experiences “repugnance:” the “human” in him insists “that all of life hung upon humanity” (2005, 59). The problem of scale—“tiny local nodes” versus a far larger “network”—is crisply put. But in The Echo Maker Powers seems in some ways to take collective social forms (“personal relationships, family, society, even global economics and politics”) as a totality which can be named “humanity” without tracing more precisely the causal relationships which determine those forms. Powers’ critics have seen in his work evidence of a new accommodation between scientific and fictional discourse, and a number of them have explicitly suggested that he is attempting to restate the ‘two cultures’ debate in bi-directional terms. Sharon Snyder argues that the character ‘Powers’ in Galatea 2.2 (1995) is “the latest in a series of emissary figures [ . . . ] who brave the crossing of C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures divide’ between the humanities and the hard sciences” (1998, 88). D. Quentin Miller agrees that this novel “has its roots in the division between science and the arts and humanities which C. P. Snow articulated in 1959” and goes on to suggest that Powers’ work is not just an instance “of humanism reacting to scientific advancement”

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but is instead “genuinely engaged” with cognitive science (2005, 382). One shouldn’t forget Powers’ almost Lyotardian critique—not only in The Echo Maker but also in Gain (1998) and The Time of Our Singing (2003)—of managerial science. Yet there is, nonetheless, something of a tectonic shift going on here. It is one in which ‘value’ in the old Leavisite sense has been relocated to the natural world—a world which now seems to be most successfully understood by means of scientific enquiry. No longer the domain of “technologico-Benthamism,” science appears to have become—for Powers and other contemporary writers—the latest repository of that sense of wonder and a complex wholeness which, in the humanist tradition, was once associated with poetry or religion (Leavis 1972, 104). If Powers does indeed displace value from the human realm to the natural one then it might make sense to describe him as a ‘posthumanist.’ But Miller suggests in more qualified terms that although Powers’ subject matter is “posthumanist” he continues to produce “relatively traditional humanist novels” (2005, 382–83). Miller sees Powers’ stance in terms of continuity rather than rupture (rather in the way that postmodernity might be situated within the larger history of modernity).6 As in the case of Powers’ ‘naturalism,’ the emergence of a new paradigm involves the return of older ones, albeit in transformed ways: according to Miller, Powers’ ‘posthumanism’ is more an attempt to “redefine” humanism than surpass it (2005, 384). And Matt Silva agrees: in Galatea 2.2, Powers engages with posthumanism; ultimately, however, the novel recuperates “a vestigial humanism” (2009, 220). Unlike Silva, I would prefer to speak of a ‘displaced’ rather than a “vestigial” humanism. In The Echo Maker, there is no fi nal incompatibility between consciousness and narrative; indeed, as Powers said of this novel in a 2007 interview with Alec Michod, “consciousness is the ultimate story.” At the level of the biosphere, human beings may have their place only on the edge of things, but human ideas of wonder and unity are projected onto a larger whole. To put it glibly: ‘life’—or DNA—takes the place of God.7 Yet Powers’ structuring oppositions (“little versus big,” “public versus private,” and so on) cannot be as satisfactorily synthesized as one might at fi rst have hoped. Although Powers can be seen as a political novelist,8 there is a risk that his work—and perhaps the ‘syndrome syndrome’ in recent writing more generally—might, in seeking to emphasize the ‘big’ of biological determination, render the social as relatively ‘little.’ A new conception of ‘nature’ might drive out—replace but also exclude—an older sense of ‘culture.’ Snyder suggests that literature which “fictionalizes scientific research” tends to appeal to “inbuilt biological differences” rather than to “cultural circumstances” (1998, 89). Again glibly: Darwin takes the place of Marx. This shift of perspective extends the range of our thought but might also limit it.9 ‘Two-way traffic:’ I have explored some of the ways in which The Echo Maker shows us the animal-as-human and the human-as-animal. Yet these crossovers can be conceptualized in various ways. Is Powers saying that

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the homologies between the human and the natural are instances of literal identity? Is the relationship underpinned by what Paul Ricoeur calls the “ontological vehemence” of metaphor (1978, 299)? Or is it the case that one realm is merely ‘like’ another, as in a simile? These are some of the questions which tend to arise when those who remain committed to narrative ponder structures which lack any traditionally narrativizable form.10 But these new and radical challenges to fiction are not without precedent. The ‘new naturalism’ takes us backwards as well as forwards, and recent fictional responses to our current awareness of multi-determined nonlinear complexity sometimes look like a partial re-run of the response to the Industrial Revolution and an earlier awareness of society as a complex whole. Biology and neuroscience give us a new vision of this whole, but this doesn’t mean that sociology can safely be forgotten, for that would indeed lead us into a one-way system. Powers has many critical supporters but his work has not attracted universal praise, and some of the adverse comments are important in developing the next stage of my argument. In a review of The Echo Maker, Margaret Atwood deftly traces Powers’ references to The Wizard of Oz. She is also struck by the fact that Powers’ work has been frequently shortlisted but rarely won major literary prizes. Atwood speculates that juries have drawn back, “as if they’ve suddenly felt that they might be giving an award to somebody not quite human—to Mr. Spock of Star Trek, for instance” (2006, 58). Reviewing The Time of Our Singing in 2003, Daniel Mendelsohn more seriously considers the idea that Powers, or at least his work, is “not quite human.” Mendelsohn argues that the relationship in Powers’ work between science and art, the objective and the subjective, belongs to the literary tradition of realism and naturalism. Yet though Powers takes up the legacy of Balzac, Zola and Tolstoy, there is for Mendelsohn “something essentially unresolved” in his “contrapuntal” writing, an emphasis on the “conceptual” and “symbolic” at the expense of real human characters (12). Such criticisms, articulating as they do a preference for ‘character’ rather than ‘idea,’ for ‘heart’ as opposed to ‘head,’ for ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling,’ clearly spring from a commitment to traditional realism and humanism (see Burn 2008a, xxviii–xxix; Harris 2008, 258). But there is indeed a problem with the ‘symbolic’ in Powers’ work, even if it is not quite of the kind detected by Atwood or Mendelsohn. Discussing Powers’ presentation of Mark Schluter as by turns a reptile, whale, bear and parrot, I previously omitted to mention the crucial fact that the cranial injury which Mark sustains also and more importantly connects him with the sandhill cranes and their pronounced ruddy head markings. This is clearly an instance of Powers’ commitment to bidirectional thinking. And yet, as I have noted, it is never entirely clear whether Powers wants us to think of the relationship between Mark and the cranes as an illuminating simile (Mark is ‘like’ a crane), a more ontologically vehement metaphor (Mark ‘is’

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a crane, whatever that ‘is’ implies) or as an instance of homology (in which different forms ‘echo’ each other for a variety of reasons—and sometimes for no determinate reason). Mark’s Capgras reveals literal and evolutionary homologies between the structure of avian and human brains. But it is at the same time also a metaphor—something more, as I think Powers implies, than a mere simile. As James Peacock points out elsewhere in this volume, Susan Sontag has argued that the literary appropriation of medical conditions for their symbolic value tends to detract from our recognition of real illness and real suffering. And one could certainly debate the extent to which Powers’ use of Capgras as a symbol eclipses an understanding of Capgras as lived experience. Michael Woods suggests that “Mark’s syndrome is real enough” (2007, 7); Joseph Tabbi similarly argues that in Powers, “figures from science become more than metaphors” (2002, 71). But the argument I am pursuing here depends less on Sontag’s reservations about the use of illness as a metaphor than on an earlier critique of literary symbolism— one which allows us to see the ‘new naturalism’ of Powers in the context of nineteenth-century naturalism. In Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, Raymond Williams argues that Ibsen’s fundamental problem in The Wild Duck is “to express the experience of a group through the ‘revelation’ of individuals” (1968, 57). Revelation cannot come through the action of the play because “the original disturbance is obscured [ . . . ] and because it is also seen as general.” Ibsen therefore needed to develop a form which revealed “more than the sum of the expressed relationships” and also “more than the action, since the lost—the alienated—quality, the life that might have been possible [ . . . ] is by defi nition not available as action.” The figure of the wild duck is Ibsen’s solution both to the problem at the level of relationship and that of action. It is, for Williams, an exact solution to the problem of action: the wild duck presents us with “an alienated, imprisoned life.” For the fi rst problem, however—“the expression of more than the sum of the relationships”—Williams argues that the figure of the wild duck is “less effective; it involves a constant reference, by individuals, to just that quality which is in their relationships, and yet which is pushed off-stage.” Such symbolic “references outward” tend to become “in practice [ . . . ] a sentimental self-interpretation, for there is no other available general voice” (57–58). Williams returns to the structural problem of naturalist drama in his analysis of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Like the wild duck, the seagull symbolizes a general “death of freedom;” it is “a device [ . . . ] for inflating the significance of the related representational incidents.” But once again the symbol is unsatisfactory: it remains “imprecise,” a substitute “for adequate expression of the central experience of the play” (103–4). As the dramatic manifestation of late nineteenth century liberalism, naturalism depicted the lives of individuals but failed to represent a wider and determining reality. The symbol, to revert to Powers’ phrasing, connects the ‘big’ and the ‘little,’ but tends to displace the social and political. It is no

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accident that I have been discussing ducks and seagulls, for the cranes of The Echo Maker also have (whatever their innate symbolizing abilities) a symbolic value. And their inclusion in The Echo Maker suggests that the ‘new naturalism’ in some ways replays the limit problems of the old naturalism. Like the seagull and the wild duck, the cranes are the repository of lost or silenced human possibility—a displacement of human values into the biological web. As such, they become a narrative device—a sentimental or lyrical gesture which articulates what cannot be said by the characters themselves. Symbols, as Williams points out, inflate significance, converting local truths into general ones. And this is also and still more significantly true of Capgras syndrome, a condition which a hospital neurologist describes as “incredibly rare” in its accident-induced form (Powers 2006, 60).11 By the end of the novel, however, Capgras—in which the sufferer cannot identify loved ones as themselves but instead sees them as imitations or impostors— figures a more general condition. We might easily call that condition, which comprises the virtualized experience of computer gaming, the rise of themed historical leisure experiences (one of the characters works in an American pioneer theme park; later on in the novel there is a visit to a replica of Stonehenge made from wrecked cars) postmodernism. Capgras, it seems at one point to Weber, is “contagious” (Powers 2006, 430). This medical condition serves to represent a world in which personal identity is conceptualized in terms of branding, in which people “play themselves” (44) and love, at least to Karin, is “not the antidote to Capgras” but “a form of it” (268). This syndrome—collective Capgras—doesn’t just include Mark, Karin and Weber. For during the tourist surge which accompanies the migration of the cranes, the town of Kearney, Nebraska, also “plays itself” (74), becoming “a colossal fake, a life-sized, hollow replica” (197). And it’s not just Kearney: the entire state of Nebraska, it seems, is also “playing itself” (246). The ripples continue to spread: toward the end of The Echo Maker, Karin feels that “the whole race suffered from Capgras” (347). In the end, perhaps, we need again to reach for totality: the issue is not the postmodern condition but the human one. In this case, Mark’s Capgras (which is merely the most recent example of a longstanding interest in a variety of syndromes on the part of Powers)12 might in wider terms be seen as an instance of the way in which literary texts create symbolic play out of the relation between ‘madness’ and ‘sanity,’ ‘nature’ and ‘human nature’ (see Foucault 1971; Feder 1981; Gilman 1988). Karin’s apprehension that Capgras affects “the whole race” serves an environmental point: human beings are like Capgras sufferers in that they cannot recognize their commonality with the cranes; seeing the bird as ‘other,’ they continue to destroy its habitat. But Powers’ success in showing the consequences of the alienation of human beings from the natural world is accompanied by a more immediate failure of recognition—one which Powers either shares or seems reluctant to interrogate. The Echo Maker is set in the period between the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 and

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Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004. It contains glancing references to jihad, Arab terrorists, the First Gulf War in 1991, UN weapons inspectors and to what one of Mark’s friends, a military volunteer, describes as “The Crusades. Armageddon. George versus Saddam” (Powers 2006, 385). It is clear that oil wars abroad counterpoint the water wars being fought around the river Platte. Most importantly—this is the novel’s central mystery and fi nal revelation—Mark Schluter is, albeit indirectly, a victim of the September 11 attacks (he crashes his truck after swerving to avoid Barbara Gillespie, a TV reporter left traumatized and suicidal by events in New York). Yet there is a worrying disconnection here rather than two-way traffic. Powers presents Mark’s Capgras as a butterfly effect of the September 11 attacks.13 But although the syndrome works well as a symbol of the identities formed within postmodern consumer culture, the suggestion that it symbolizes a more specifically determining politics is made only obliquely. The narrative Powers tells is one in which the failure to recognize others is, at least in its most literal and immediate form, seen as a literal but distant consequence of September 11. “Estrangement,” as Powers put it in his interview with Alec Michod, “seems to have become the baseline condition for life in terrorized America,” the problem being that, “after the Patriot Act and the detainee bill, after [ . . . ] Abu Ghraib [ . . . ] the place no longer feels recognizable.” But in The Echo Maker, Powers appears to shrink from the suggestion that a more general failure to recognize others characterized US foreign policy before September 11 and was among the causes of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. So although the syndromesymbol in The Echo Maker enables Powers to put certain kinds of two-way traffic into motion, the ‘big’ of the ecosystem and the ‘little’ of damaged neurons obscure a middle ground of collective and human responsibility. Something of that obliquity reappears in the interview with Michod, in which Powers openly states that “evil is the refusal to see oneself in others,” but seems—unlike Noam Chomsky, for example (see Chomsky 2001)—to date this failure on the part of the American political system only to the period which followed September 11 and not to the one which preceded it. Applying Williams’ discussion of the problem of symbolism in Ibsen and Chekhov to The Echo Maker enables us to see more clearly that Powers’ new naturalism is conditioned by similar structural limitations to nineteenth-century dramatic naturalism. These limitations are more specific than the wider problem facing the contemporary novelist—the problem of realism in unreal times, the problem of remaining committed to linear narrative when, in the environment and even in our own heads, complex and non-linear systems are the norm. Tabbi is doubtless correct to argue that Powers attempts “to reconstruct the complex, often unconscious or accidental, processes that keep environmental knowledge out of sight and out of mind” (2002, 58). Powers deftly identifies this problem in the fi nal section of “The Seventh Event,” writing that “the flaw of narrative imagination, in its current form, is that we can only feel the big in terms of the

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little” (2005, 73). But in The Echo Maker the connections between macrocosm and microcosm detract from a more detailed scrutiny of the social. And Tabbi only glimpses the more obvious consequences of this problem when he suggests that Powers’ interest in complexity might well (for the writer, his characters and also for the reader) distract us from “the need to act collectively” (2002, 68) or when, in a later essay, he argues that a ‘political’ work such as Plowing the Dark has been replaced, in The Echo Maker, by an inclination to keep the imagination “within the frame of what science allows” and to offer, as a kind of sweetener for the common reader, “too much love” (2008, 227, 229). “Too much love”—an ending which another critic describes as “tidy” and “comforting” (Harris 2008, 249): in spite of this, The Echo Maker is no way an apolitical or reactionary work of fiction (as has been suggested, for example, of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and of John Updike’s Terrorist). It does not represent the world of Islam as ‘other’ in some Manichean discourse of the “clash of civilizations” (see Huntington 1996). But nor does Powers show America in relation to the wider world; as a result, a fully political and social consideration of September 11 never takes precise shape. As a symbolically charged form of alienation, Capgras syndrome gestures outward toward a wider social totality but remains, in Williams’ phrase, “pushed off-stage.” Environmental politics are there; an attempt to grasp the ecosystem as a whole is there. Politically and socially, however—in human rather than in biological terms—The Echo Maker remains a tale of the heartland in which the actions of individuals are given prominence at the expense of deeper determinants. For its full meaning, the epigraph to The Echo Maker—“To find the soul it is necessary to lose it,” a line from Alexander Luria’s Language and Cognition (1982)—needs to be read in the context of the sentence which precedes it: “To discover the sources of free action it is necessary to go outside the limits of the organism, not into the intimate sphere of the mind, but into the objective forms of social life; it is necessary to seek the sources of human consciousness and freedom in the social history of humanity” (quoted in Draisma 2009, 439). In his interview with Jim Neilson, Powers speaks of his efforts to write complex and serious books and also to “reach people.” He is trying to provide an “apology for fiction in a post-fictional age,” to be an experimentalist but also a realist, a posthumanist but also a humanist (1998b, 21–22). In The Echo Maker, however, it would seem that the displacement of social and political subjects in favor of a grand counterpoint between cognition and the natural environment represents merely the latest version of an enduring dilemma for the American writer, and perhaps for mainstream or liberal art more generally: the problem in a market culture of maintaining a readership while dissenting from the values of that readership. If this is indeed the case, then Powers becomes the symbol—or perhaps synecdoche—of a wider predicament for which there ought to be a name. Call it, perhaps, ‘Melville syndrome.’

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NOTES 1. I would like to express my thanks to Nicola Brindley for developing my understanding of The Echo Maker. My thanks also go to Adam Kelly and Nick Lawrence, who made a number of useful suggestions for further reading when this paper was fi rst presented at Keele University in October 2009. 2. For discussion of tenor and vehicle in metaphor, see Richards 1936, 100, 132–34. For early criticism of Richards, see Black 1962, 47n23. 3. For Powers’ account of his visit to Nebraska and of the origins of The Echo Maker, see Michod 2007; Burn 2008b, 174–75. 4. On the relation between realism and postmodernism or metafiction in Powers, see also Hurt 1998, 40; Mendelsohn 2003, 12; Burn 2008a, xxx–xxxii; Burn 2008b, 165. Discussing the shift from “the organicism of earlier realist forms” to more “hybrid” or “ecological” forms, Tabbi concludes that Powers’ work is “like realism, but not [ . . . ] like postmodern metafiction, but not” (2002, 60–61, 76). 5. On “wonder and reverence” in the ‘new naturalism,’ see LeClair 1996, 21. For a similarly celebratory sense that Powers sets out to represent “the world in all its complex glory,” see Frye 2007, 110. 6. On Powers’ interest in the ‘posthuman,’ see also Hayles 1997. On the continuities between modernity and postmodernity, see Jameson 1998, 62, 98. 7. Frye suggests that Powers “imbues DNA with a sort of ultimate significance” in The Gold Bug Variations, seeing the cracking of its code as the discovery of “something like God” (2007, 107). Tabbi argues along similar lines that Powers’ vision of complexity should be understood as a “twist on the authorial omniscience of nineteenth-century realism—a situated omniscience, to be sure, but godlike nevertheless” (2002, 68). 8. See, for example, Dewey on Powers’ engagement with the politics of the Middle East in his 2000 novel Plowing the Dark (2002, 137). 9. For discussion of Darwin by Powers, see Burn 2008b, 176. 10. Narrating the non-narrativizable: see Lustig and Peacock’s Introduction in this volume. 11. For discussion of Capgras by Powers, see Burn 2008b, 175. 12. See Operation Wandering Soul (Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome), Prisoner’s Dilemma (Stockholm syndrome), Galatea 2.2 (Down’s syndrome) and Gain (cancer). 13. On references to the butterfly effect in Powers, see Dewey 2002, 35; Burn 2008b, 164.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbott, H. Porter. 2008. “Narrative and Emergent Behavior.” Poetics Today 29: 227–44. Atwood, Margaret. 2006. “In the Heart of the Heartland.” Review of The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers. New York Review of Books, December 21. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2006/dec/21/in-the-heart-of-theheartland/ Black, Max. 1962. Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Burn, Stephen J. 2008a. “Introduction,” in Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press (xvii–xxxix).

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.2008b. “An Interview with Richard Powers.” Contemporary Literature 49: 163–79. Burn, Stephen J. and Peter Dempsey. 2008. Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Chomsky, Noam. 2001. 9–11. New York: Seven Stories Press. Dewey, Joseph. 2002. Understanding Richard Powers. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Draisma, Douwe. 2009. “Echoes, Doubles, and Delusions: Capgras Syndrome in Science and Literature.” Style 43: 429–41. Feder, Lillian. 1980. Madness in Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2005. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel. London: Hamish Hamilton. Foucault, Michel. 1971. Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by R. Howard. London: Tavistock. Frye, Mitch. 2007. “Circulatory Systems: Vitality and Rhetoric in Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations.” Critique 49: 96–112. Gilman, Sander. 1988. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Harris, Charles B. 1998. “‘The Stereo View:’ Politics and the Role of the Reader in Gain.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 18: 97–109. .2008. “The Story of the Self: The Echo Maker and Neurological Realism.” In Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, edited by Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey, 230–59. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1997. “The Posthuman Body: Inscription and Incorporation in Galatea 2.2 and Snow Crash.” Configurations 5: 241–66. Heise, Ursula K. 2002. “Toxins, Drugs, and Global Systems: Risk and Narrative in the Contemporary Novel.” American Literature 74: 747–78. Herman, Luc. 2003. Review of Understanding Richard Powers, by Joseph Dewey. Review of Contemporary Fiction 23: 167. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hurt, James. 1998. “Narrative Powers: Richard Powers as Storyteller.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 18: 24–41. Jameson, Fredric. 1998. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–98. London: Verso. Leavis, F. R. 1972. Nor shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope. London: Chatto and Windus, 1972. LeClair, Tom. 1996. “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace.” Critique 38: 12–37. Mendelsohn, Daniel. 2003. “A Dance to the Music of Time.” Review of The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers. New York Times Book Review, 12, January 26. Michod, Alec. 2007. “The Brain is the Ultimate Storytelling Machine, and Consciousness is the Ultimate Story.” Interview with Richard Powers. The Believer, February. Accessed November 7, 2011. http://www.believermag.com/ issues/200702/?read=interview_powers. Miller, D. Quentin. 2005. “Deeper Blues, or the Posthuman Prometheus: Cybernetic Renewal and the Late-Twentieth-Century American Novel.” American Literature 77: 379–407. Neilson, Jim. 1998a. “Dirtying Our Hands: An Introduction to the Fiction of Richard Powers.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 18: 7–12. .1998b. “An Interview with Richard Powers.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 18: 13–23. Powers, Richard. 2005. “The Seventh Event.” Granta 90: 59–73. .2006. The Echo Maker. London: Heinemann.

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Richards, I. A. 1936. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1978. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, translated by Robert Czerny. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Silva, Matt. 2009. “The ‘Powers’ to ‘Kraft’ Humanist Endings to Posthumanist Novels: Galatea 2.2 as a Rewriting of Operation Wandering Soul.” Critique 50: 208–24. Snyder, Sharon. 1998. “The Gender of Genius: Scientific Experts and Literary Amateurs in the Fiction of Richard Powers.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 18: 84–96. Tabbi, Joseph. 2002. Cognitive Fictions. Electronic Mediations, 8. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. .2008. “Afterthoughts on The Echo Maker.” In Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, edited by Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey, 219–29. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Updike, John. 2006. Terrorist. New York: Knopf. Woods, Michael. 2007. “Don’t You Care?” Review of The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers. London Review of Books, 7–8, February 22.

9

“I wanted unheimlich [ . . . ] but of the right kind. Strangeness and Strangerness without the blank despair” Trauma and Travel in the Works of Jenny Diski Joanna Price

Despite her professed dislike of traveling and repeated claims that she is not a ‘travel writer,’ Jenny Diski has written three travel memoirs to date. These books have been variously commended: Skating to Antarctica (1997) received the ‘Mind’ book award (presented, according to the Mind website, for a work that “celebrates writing that heightens understanding of mental health issues”) and Stranger on a Train (2002) won both the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. As these prizes indicate, Diski fi nds travel writing an amenable form both for autobiographical reflection and for the exploration of mental illness. In Stranger on a Train, Diski professes to believe that travel writing must be simply “about the act of traveling itself, adventures, encounters along the way” and must rely on “the inevitability of incident” (2004, 7). However, although travel writing, like memoir, foregrounds the experiential, “responding to what might be called the pressure of the real,” as Roger Luckhurst has put it (2008, 118), it too is conducive to reflection and retrospection. Diski fi nds that this conventionally extroverted form—one in which the observing, experiencing subject records his or her encounters with other cultures and peoples—affords her a way of exploring her own subjectivity and memories. Diski’s returns to travel writing allow her to revisit particular moments in her autobiographical narrative and to offer different iterations of her ‘self’ through the new versions of that narrative which each account of her travels affords.1 In each of her travel books, Diski revisits the same moments in her life-history: her traumatic childhood and adolescence, and her responses to that trauma, which include recurrent depression, for which she was hospitalized several times. Diski’s accounts of these experiences register, draw upon, and critique changing discourses about mental health, specifically trauma and depression, from the 1960s onward. Diski’s articulation of travel writing with memoir, in particular to represent memories of trauma and depression, reflects cultural trends in the 1990s when discourses about trauma were becoming more prevalent in public and scholarly spheres. During this decade, as Luckhurst points out, memoir became an increasingly popular vehicle for accounts of traumatic experience,

“I wanted unheimlich [ . . . ] but of the right kind.” 145 providing culturally valuable “testimony” (2008, 124). Trauma testimony, especially writing about AIDS, contributed to a “pathography” comprising memoirs about illness and suffering, including a subgenre of memoirs about depression which challenged the taboo on discussing this illness (127–28). The recent cultural preoccupation with trauma has also influenced both the tourist industry and travel writing. As Graham Huggan has observed, the “global ‘memory industry’” that emerged in the 1990s was shaped by trauma discourses, and in particular by testimonies to collective suffering— most influentially the Holocaust. This “memory industry” has influenced tourists’ choice of destination since the 1990s, and their responses to them (2009, 134–35). It also informs Diski’s fusion of travel writing with memoir, as she explores how the sometimes traumatic cultural memories associated with the traveler’s destination interact with personal memories. In addition, travel writing has a generic tendency toward the registration of trauma which predates the circulation of trauma discourses over the past two decades. This predisposition derives from the influence on the genre of western travelers’ accounts of their colonial adventures. According to Mary Louise Pratt in her seminal work on travel writing, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, central to these accounts were representations of the encounters between the travelers and their colonial ‘others,’ which took place in the ‘contact zone’. These encounters “usually involve[d] conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” although they were also “interactive” and “improvisational” (1992, 6–7). Pratt’s emphasis on the unequal power relations which structure encounters in the contact zone suggests that such encounters, and the adaptations of subjectivity which took place through them, might be traumatic for one or more of the subjects involved. This structure for experiencing and representing encounters between the traveler and the people of the host culture persists in contemporary travel writing, which is still inscribed with the colonial paradigm (see Huggan 2009, 8), or, as Debbie Lisle puts it, “a colonial vision” (2006, 3) whereby “the travel writer secures his/her position through various manifestations of the identity/difference logic” (77). However, Lisle also finds in Pratt’s concept of the contact zone the potential for less traumatic modes of encounter and identity formation, because it denotes “complex spaces” in which subjects negotiate identity and meaning (187–88).2 In her use of travel writing to reflect on her experiences and memories, Diski must navigate the structuring of experience as a potentially traumatic “conflict” between ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ which is embedded in the genre. Travel writing is also an amenable form for evoking trauma when regarded through a psychoanalytic perspective such as that of Dennis Porter. In Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing, Porter argues that the traveler’s decisions about departure and destination “often derive from identifications dependent less on objective factors than on the projection of early prototypes onto geographic space” (1991, 11). Drawing on Freud’s work, in particular his essay “The ‘Uncanny’,” Porter

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asserts that travel is often motivated by a “desire to recover an original lost home” and a “search for origins” (12, 189). He remarks that Freud’s comment that “a great part of the pleasure of travel [ . . . ] is rooted [ . . . ] in dissatisfaction with home and family” (made in his 1936 paper “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis”) is “as close as Freud ever comes to pointing to a theory of the general motivation of travel” (196–97). For the traveler who is thus motivated, travel may be accompanied by an uncanny sense of belatedness, a feeling that “the lands we pass though are haunted even if the ghosts do not always manifest themselves directly” (12). There is a further affinity between trauma, travel, and travel writing. Luckhurst traces the development of the term trauma from its origin in the Greek word for ‘wound’ through to its current usage: trauma, he writes, is “a piercing or breach of a border that puts inside and outside into a strange communication. Trauma violently opens passageways between systems that were once discrete, making unforeseen connections that distress or confound” (2008, 3). So it would seem that travel, like trauma, is concerned with crossing borders—topographically and culturally. Travel may also entail the “piercing or breach” of physical and subjective boundaries. The colonial vision imprinted on travel writing attempts to limit the potential “violence” of cultural and psychic border-crossing by fi xing the category of ‘Other’ and consequently the boundaries of the subject. But, just as this hybrid genre is open to generic border-crossing, so the “breach” of borders it depicts, a topic intrinsic to the genre, becomes potentially traumatic. As I have noted, Diski uses travel writing to explore not only her memories of traumatic events in her early life but also the depression that accompanied and ensued from these events.3 It is important to remember that, although it was soon to be designated the “leading mental disorder” in Britain and the United States, depression was still widely stigmatized when Skating to Antarctica was published in 1997, in spite of the fact that the treatment of depression underwent radical shifts in and after the 1960s, when Diski was fi rst diagnosed as having the condition.4 In The Sixties (2009), for instance, Diski recalls witnessing the effects of ECT, lobotomies, insulin shock therapy and LSD “‘treatment’” on other patients in psychiatric hospitals. She herself received a variety of treatments including anti-depressants and other drugs, Laingian anti-psychiatric “intensive group therapy,” and consultations with psychiatrists and psychoanalysts (2009, 119–39). According to Christine Ross, the publication in 1980 of the American Psychiatric Association’s third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–III) reinforced the “biological turn” in the conceptualization and description of mental “disorder” (2006, 188). Luckhurst agrees that DSM–III “moved[d] to an empirical, purely descriptive model of syndromes, identifiable through replicable rule-bound diagnostic criteria that had been developed through biomedical science” (2008, 61). DSM–III based its defi nitions “on the premise that mental illness can

“I wanted unheimlich [ . . . ] but of the right kind.” 147 be both classified and differentiated into specific clusters of symptoms” (Ross 2006, 64). According to this model, “the depressive symptom” (like other symptoms of mental disorder) can be read as an “observable sign” of “behavior or bodily condition” rather than as a “felt experience [ . . . ] corresponding to the patient’s description of inner states” (153). This controversial model of diagnosis also marked a shift from a “dimensional” approach, which regards depression as part of a continuum of moods and experiences, to a “categorical” one which interprets it as “correspond[ing] to prefi xed categories of depressive disorders” (64, 199). In The Aesthetics of Disengagement, Ross argues that the model of diagnosis introduced by DSM–III represents a move away from the understanding of mental illness as an expression of the mind, inner life, psyche or self to its apprehension as a visible effect of physical phenomena at the level of the brain or the body. In addition, Ross suggests that DSM–III’s empirical diagnostic criteria decontextualize the illness and its symptoms, separating them from the subject’s life history and his or her social and cultural background. This form of diagnosis of depression is conducive to treatment by “quick-fix” remedies such as anti-depressants, which, as Ross notes, “were among the most prescribed drugs in the United States” in the 1990s (2006, 189). Such treatments engineer efficient selves in a “neoliberal” culture which idealizes “performative autonomy” (3). In this culture, “initiative, flexibility, self-realization, and the right [ . . . ] to choose one’s own life” are valued (3), and associated with an “entrepreneurial” subjectivity characterized by such attributes as “a heightened sense of responsibility, vigilance [ . . . ] resilience, assertiveness, hedonic capacity and mental agility” (192). This is a culture which demands not only effective performance in the service of economic productivity, but also the performance of a subjectivity which conforms with its model of “the productive individual” (192). Accordingly, Ross states, “depressive disorders are not so much a failure to perform as a failure to perform the self in a culture whose norms of socialization are based on selfcreation” (92). Two of the main facets of depression are the loss of “relation to the other” (xv) and a “pathology of time” (a concept Ross borrows from Alain Ehrenberg) in which “the times proper to psychic life—to remember, to represent to oneself, to desire, to project—seem to have been frozen in the immobility of the body” (Ross, quoting Pierre Fédida, 150).5 Consequently, Ross argues that the restoration of time to the depressed person is a necessary part of her recovery. Such a restoration would enable the person to situate his or her symptoms in the context of a life history, exploring “the unfolding of a life over time” (Ross, quoting Mitchell Wilson, 142) through narrative and metaphor (196). In Skating to Antarctica, Diski describes how one evening on the Antarctic cruise which is the pretext of her book, she and her fellow passengers watch a videotape of Frank Hurley’s 1915 film of Ernest Shackleton’s attempted Antarctic crossing. Diski has traveled to the Antarctic in search of her preferred conditions of whiteness, emptiness, purity, and silence. Yet

148 Joanna Price as she approaches her ideal landscape, Hurley’s fi lm hauntingly captures an historical moment of trauma as Shackleton’s ship is trapped in the ice: The ship beset in the ice was covered with rime, grandiose and monumental, like a sculpture—it’s a famous picture, but the movie version of the Endurance breaking up, creaking, wailing, sometimes seeming to scream as it buckled at the centre, with the main mast crashing to the deck and the whole thing fi nally sinking beneath the ice, is heartstopping. (2008, 133) This image of the destruction of the “monumental” structure by the ice which might have preserved the ship evokes traumatic loss and suffering (and is inscribed with the memory of other foundational losses—specifically of Scott and his party in 1912) but it is also part of the story of the heroic survival of Shackleton and his companions on this expedition. It is one of the most powerful metaphors of the effects of trauma in a book which depicts and enacts a repertoire of tactics for containing those effects. The aesthetic mediation of the destruction of the Endurance through Hurley’s silent images breaks down as Diski imagines the sound of the ship rending under the pressure of the ice and “seeming to scream” as its boundaries are terminally breached. After watching the fi lm, however, and without commenting on her own response to it, Diski joins another passenger whom she concludes is “chronically depressed,” her face “set as if in perpetual mourning,” as though “she must have learned something catastrophic, a death in the family” (134). Diski speculates that her fellow passenger is staying silent about “some personal tragedy” whilst telling instead “the reiterated story of her travels.” She also reflects: “I think Janice is someone who lives deep, or perhaps not so very deep, inside me” (135). However, of her own potential bereavement, Diski concludes she feels “nothing” (137). A year before Diski’s departure for the Antarctic, we learn, her daughter has informed her that she wishes to fi nd out whether her grandmother, Diski’s mother, is alive or dead. For thirty years, Diski has maintained her equilibrium, she believes, by metaphorically containing her mother in a closed box like that of Schrödinger’s cat. There her mother has existed in a “superposition of states [ . . . ] both dead and alive at the same time for as long as the box was closed” (22). Shortly before Diski’s departure for the Antarctic, her daughter obtains the death certificate of a woman of the same name as Diski’s mother. Diski undertakes her voyage, therefore, without confi rmation of whether her mother is alive or dead. The chapters entitled “At Sea,” which record her observations on her Antarctic journey, are interwoven with chapters in which Diski, prompted by her daughter’s search, recalls her childhood and her more recent attempts to gain corroboration of her memories of that period. The interleaving of memories of her traumatic past, which are increasingly, though never completely, elucidated each time she revisits them, creates a traumatic

“I wanted unheimlich [ . . . ] but of the right kind.” 149 temporality which disturbs the linearity of the conventional travel narrative. Diski remembers her parents’ erratic and sometimes violent relationship; their suicide attempts; their manipulation, including through erotic games, of their daughter; her father’s frequent departures; and her mother’s fear of eviction and homelessness. She also recalls being sent to a care home, a boarding school, and a foster parent, and her responses to her situation, which resulted in long periods of hospitalization for depression and attempted suicide during her adolescence and twenties. Travel writing therefore affords Diski a way of re-visiting her childhood and reflecting on the strategies she took as a child to control her environment. She describes how she explored and ‘mapped’ Paramount Court, the block of flats where she lived with her parents until she was eleven, learning “the geography of my world” (8) and the boundaries that separated safe spaces from “dangerous alien territory” (12). In this way, the child would try to avoid the “ghosts” which lived by day “around the wrong corridor, behind unopened doors” (84) and at night in unseen spaces as she listened (“not every night—surely not”) to her parents arguing (86). Another childhood activity, ice skating, also enables her to test boundaries: within the limits of the ice rink she feels empowered by the sense that she can control her bodily boundaries through her own skill. The ice provides another boundary, separating the skater from what is below: “You slide over its surface, but there is no engaging with it, no sense [ . . . ] of there being earth beneath” (15). Despite her recollection of parts of her childhood, Diski believes that recurrent trauma has rendered much of it inaccessible to her: she is “walking through my dreams, not my childhood” (89). In an attempt to recover “Jennifer,” the child from whom she feels dissociated, Diski returns to Paramount Court, seeking witnesses who can corroborate her past. The former neighbors with whom she speaks belong to the largely Jewish community that resided there during her childhood. When one of these neighbors, Mrs. Rosen, enquires if she was ever “abused,” Diski recalls her parents’ breach of her bodily and subjective boundaries, and her consequent apparent suicide attempt. Diski’s surprise that her polite and elderly interlocutors should introduce the term “abuse” into the conversation, as well as her inclusion of this episode in the memoir, underline the fact that her exploration of her memories emerges out of a particular moment and set of discourses. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association responded to the increased cultural and political identification of the effects of trauma (by groups such as the Vietnam War veterans and Holocaust survivors) with the creation of a new medical category, posttraumatic stress disorder, in DSM–III. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, various groups lobbied for the broadening of the concept and its diagnostic criteria so that it might include victims of other types of trauma such as sexual and domestic abuse. This included a proposal of the term ‘complex posttraumatic stress syndrome’ to encompass “the syndrome that follows upon prolonged, repeated trauma” (Herman 2001, 119).6

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Diski’s reconstruction of her childhood through her conversation with her neighbors thus draws upon recent discourses of trauma. Her transcription of her conversations with her Jewish neighbors is situated in a post-Holocaust culture which values personal testimony as a way to alleviate the trauma of the individual witness and to authenticate historical records. Reference to this culture is suggested by Diski’s uneasy sense that her neighbors were bystanders who didn’t ask about “the disaster that happened to live nearby” (184), and her desire to find witnesses to her childhood self, in the absence of other verbal or visual evidence. Her neighbor’s question also focuses Diski’s childhood memories through current discourse about the traumatic effect of child abuse. Despite the memories that the word ‘abuse’ triggers, Diski rejects the term as a “pervasive modern euphemism” which, like ‘denial,’ “wraps up the complicated and [ . . . ] denies the texture of experience” (185). She accepts, however, Mrs. Rosen’s affirmation of her child self through another concept from contemporary trauma discourse—that of the ‘survivor.’ This term is to be re-inflected through the imperialist narratives of endeavour that Diski finds inscribed upon the Antarctic landscape. As a traveler voyaging to the Antarctic, Diski prefers to keep fi rmly in place the subjective and bodily boundaries which have earlier been traumatically breached. She limits her encounters with other passengers by staying in her cabin, hesitating to venture into the ‘contact zone’ which in this instance would comprise interaction with the extreme landscape. For her, Antarctica is primarily a metaphoric landscape, shaped in her imagination by books and films. Diski explains that her desire to visit “the last pure place on earth” (6) is an extension of a search for whiteness and emptiness which she fi rst identified in the sense of “safety” created by the sheets in the psychiatric hospital where, diagnosed with depression, she escaped from her traumatic life with her parents (2). The frozen landscape of the Antarctic connotes “oblivion [ . . . ] a place that has no co-ordinates in time or space” (180). Diski makes the analogy between whiteness, snowy landscapes, and the effect of depression explicit as, reading Moby-Dick, she reflects on the symbolism of the whiteness of Melville’s whale. Whiteness is “absence and negation:” it is, in Melville’s words, “the great principle of light” which reveals “a dumb blankness, full of meaning” (181–82). Similarly, depression is a “lifting of the veil” which enables Diski to “see things as they really are.” In these “less protected moods,” Diski sees “intolerable blankness,” an apprehension of “reality” which she believes is “vital.” This revelation also intimates the conditions that provide solace for the “anguish” of depression: the “hunger for blankness” can be “assuaged” by “staring into peopleless landscapes, heading for the snow and ice [ . . . ] In the face of the waiting I can’t escape, I head straight for its image and rest there for a while” (182–83). The metaphoric associations of Diski’s Antarctica represent both the symptoms of depression—the depressive’s desire for withdrawal from others

“I wanted unheimlich [ . . . ] but of the right kind.” 151 and the world—and the conditions she needs to recover. In this respect, Diski’s Antarctic landscape serves a similar function to the “aesthetics of disengagement” which Ross (2006) discerns in artworks presenting depression, which “enact”7 the symptoms of depression (xviii), including a slowing down of time and the stalling of anticipated loss, through the representation of various states such as waiting, immobility and “the denial of space as place” (123). On the cruise, Diski is able to enjoy restorative “slow time,” despite the irksome “inauguration of time” through the schedule of events aboard ship (2008, 62). She professes to dislike waiting, because in her traumatic childhood “it was a matter of waiting for a cataclysm that would alter things” (180). But just as keeping her mother in Schrödinger’s box freezes time, postponing discovery of whether her mother is dead or alive, so the frozen landscape of Antarctica promises to deliver the suspension of time and spatial blankness that she seeks. As Diski approaches Antarctica, however, traumatic memory disrupts the anticipated blankness of the landscape. In Grytviken, South Georgia, she adopts the typical travel writer’s stance of differentiating herself from ‘tourists,’ who commodify time and the landscape through their photographs.8 Her observation of their activity leads her to reflect on the misrepresentation created by her only photograph of her mother. A tourist snapshot of mother and daughter, it depicts “a posterity smile, a mother who is content to be with her daughter.” The photograph belies its traumatic context: just before it was taken, Diski had been placed in local authority care; afterward, she was to be hospitalized. The traumatic nature of the memories that the photograph evokes is signified by Diski’s observation that the entwining of her own shadow with her mother’s forms “a unified shape, as umbilical as the creaky film of Shackleton’s roped-together men trying to pull the Endurance through the ice floe” (149). This echoes her earlier comment that in Frank Hurley’s film Shackleton’s crew “and the rope between them seemed to bleed darkly into each other, blurring the individuals until they appeared to be umbilically attached to their own shadows” (134). In Grytviken, Diski visits Shackleton’s grave and sees another grave close by: that of an Argentinian soldier killed during the Falklands war. Antarctica becomes a memorial landscape where commemoration of late imperial endeavour is shadowed by earlier stories of a traumatic struggle for survival. Even in St Andrew’s Bay, where the “timeless standing” of the penguins accentuates “the point” of Antarctica—that “great tracts of the continent [are] unseen, unwitnessed,” Diski is “breeched” by her memories. She realizes that her dismay at the bleak and unsheltering landscape “chimed with something mournful inside me,” evoking the fear of having “nowhere to go” which her mother communicated to her when they were temporarily homeless (166–67). As she sails among the ice floes, however, Diski notes that the landscape “was so untroubled [ . . . ] that the heart ached” (222). The multi-faceted metaphor which Antarctica has afforded her, a means by which to re-interpret the experience of depression, reveals

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that the “paradox” of this condition is that whilst “the pain [ . . . ] is intolerable,” “the silence and absence of the place where depression puts you brings the possibility of getting close to contentment” (226). Five years after Skating to Antarctica, Diski published a further travel memoir, Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions. She begins this work with the pronouncement that she “hate[s] neat endings” (2004, 1). Skating to Antarctica had indeed ended without “closure” (2004, 2): whilst confirmation that her mother died in 1988 reassured her that she was “really orphaned, truly safe” (2008, 233) it also served to open up a parallel temporality in which her mother co-existed with her as a “shadow [ . . . ] presence” (232). In Stranger on a Train, Diski is concerned with the forms of storytelling, particularly those involved in telling a life story. Elaborating on her opening comment that she “hate[s] neat endings” (2004, 1) because “an ending always leaves you standing in the whistling vacancy of a storyless landscape,” she observes that “the satisfying circle that ends where it began” provides one form of “neat ending” (2). By this account, Diski’s two journeys around the US, the first from Savannah to Phoenix, and the second anticlockwise around the perimeter of the States, would provide a “satisfying” form through which to tell her narrative. Rather than leading to a “neat ending,” however, the idea of circularity introduces the temporal disruption of traumatic memory. It reminds Diski of how, aged thirteen, she escaped the “microclimate [ . . . ] of misery and punishment” (3) at home by riding “endlessly” (4) around the Circle Line of the London Underground each day. Diski’s memories of the traumatic events which this journey was taken to escape and of her ensuing depression and its treatment ‘interrupt’ her account of her travels around the US—an account which a traditional colonial travel narrative might have rendered as linear and teleological.9 An opening image provides an establishing metaphor for Diski’s relation to the US as ‘place:’ she recalls how as a child in the 1950s she would watch American films in the local cinema with her father. America, she writes, was: “like the moon [ . . . ] what mattered was the light it bathed me in, its universal but private reach.” She liked to walk between the projector and the screen so that she “got caught in its light” and her shadow was projected onto the screen, placing her “where I wanted to be”—“in the way of all that” (8–9). Aboard the train in America, ‘place’—insofar as it comprises the landscapes that she sees through the window—mainly provides a screen onto which Diski can project her reveries and memories. Her “passive watching” (100) as details of the landscape speed past the window registers only the familiarity of already mediated and mythologized scenes, and is conducive to the ‘daydreaming’ she favors.10 Diski’s image of putting herself “in the way of all that” also introduces her self-diagnosed “insatiable” “narcissism,” which she connects to her experiences of trauma and depression through the idea of being a stranger (155). Traveling enables Diski to occupy her preferred position of being a stranger which, she believes, affords her the detachment necessary for clear

“I wanted unheimlich [ . . . ] but of the right kind.” 153 perception. As a stranger, she experiences an “uncluttered horizon,” an ability to see both others and herself with more clarity (7). She explains that “people interfere with my apprehension of reality, they muddy how I can know myself, confuse my understanding of how I am” (69). Hence she construes Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 fi lm, to which her title alludes, as a warning against the dangers of forgetting to maintain one’s boundaries against strangers when a passenger on a train. However, just as Hitchcock’s ‘stranger’ offers a dark mirror to the desires of his fellow passenger, so the passengers on Diski’s train enable her to see herself: “I take occasional wanders, using my separation from others as a mirror, or looking into the dark centre of strangers’ eyes to catch my reflection” (155). Diski attributes her liking of strangerhood to the “unease of place” which originated in the traumatic displacements of her childhood: never feeling “at home,” she sought out “safe” spaces to occupy as a “stranger.” Apart from some brief and, to her, alarming excursions into the ‘contact zone’ beyond the railway, Diski’s ‘America,’ as she prefers to experience it, is located on the train. There, she abandons herself to the slowness of “Amtrak time” and further ‘interrupts’ the journey through smoking, “a ritual of pleasure that takes its own time” (218). She also has some control over the spaces she occupies: the co-ordinates of her movement on the train are her sleeping car, with the solitude and enclosure it offers, and the heterogeneous space of the smoking car, a ‘contact zone’ which she can enter and leave at will. The “real landscape” of America, as Diski perceives it, is embodied in the people she meets in the smoking car (101). Her temporary occupation of it with her fellow passengers gives her a sense of belonging which she can feel in “places of hiatus” such as the psychiatric hospitals in which she was treated for depression (104). To an extent, Diski thinks of her fellow passengers as “vignettes, moments or summaries of lives” (154). She observes that their stories have a formal simplicity and repetitiveness which reproduce dominant American mythologies. The “sentimental narrative of an American train journey” in which she sees herself as being “immersed” is, she notes, a variation of “the template story” which ends in the “happily-ever-after” of “dreams come true” or its “howling opposition” (125). The stories of Diski’s fellow travelers also have a thematic consistency which resonates, somewhat narcissistically, with Diski’s memories of trauma and depression. The stories of these early twenty-fi rst century Americans are mostly of trauma and loss, due to a variety of causes which include fear of racial otherness, the effects of inter-racial violence and of war (in Vietnam and the Gulf), sexual preference, and illness or bereavement. The prevalence of trauma in the stories Diski records illustrates Luckhurst’s observation that, since the 1990s, we have occupied a “traumatic real,” in which “trauma has become a paradigm because it has been turned into a repertoire of compelling stories about the enigmas of identity, memory and selfhood that have saturated Western cultural life” (2008,118, 80).

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These stories are counterpointed by others which depict a history of depression and treatment over the past decades. They culminate in a stranger asking Diski to record his story about “Prozac and depression,” and how the drug “ruined his life” “without curing his depression” (209). These stories are interwoven with Diski’s memories of her own and fellow patients’ treatment in psychiatric hospitals in the 1960s and 1970s, and of how she learned about the introduction of new diagnostic criteria and forms of medication after experiencing her “last major depression” in 1984. The stories to which Diski bears witness on the Amtrak train might be taken as evidence of Ross’ proposition that “depression is now one of the privileged categories though which contemporary subjectivity is being defi ned and designated, made and unmade, biologized and psychologized” (2006, xvii). Diski herself fi nds the “crush of human consciousness” (130) which these stories create to be “overwhelming, catastrophic,” but on reflection she observes that each person’s story is “remarkable” in being a testament to his or her “personal existence:” each story is “extraordinary, unique and worth the telling because it has happened to them and not to someone else” (146). Diski’s most recent travel memoir, On Trying to Keep Still (2006), draws less than the previous ones on the discourse of trauma—possibly due to the autobiographical moment it articulates rather than to the decline of a cultural paradigm or pathology. Although in On Trying Diski recalls again some of the key moments of trauma, and depression and its treatment, in her early life, her account of her travels here appears less pressingly motivated by a self-acknowledged need to convert the landscapes of her journeys into metaphors through which she can explore, interpret and accept her symptoms. It becomes instead a reflection on how she uses her travels to achieve her preferred conditions of “keeping still” and solitude, and how she has recuperated the ‘emptiness’ associated with depression. As she describes three more journeys she has undertaken, Diski charts the accommodations she has made to depression, a condition which has shaped her subjectivity even in asymptomatic periods. To establish On Trying as an exploration of what happens to her mind in solitude, Diski returns to two of the key metaphors of Stranger on a Train: her representation of herself as a stranger, and as “no more than an outline containing dark space” (2004, 275). She again elaborates on how childhood scenes have created both her psychic topography, and the motivation of her physical journeys. Diski recalls that the traumatic displacements of her childhood created a sense of the “unheimlich,” which she translates as ‘unhomelike,’ an uncanniness involving perpetual “strangerness” and “homesickness.” She explains that by deciding to live with her mother rather than her father, with whom she would have preferred to be, she “chose inertia:” “Homesickness is a longing for inertia—for never having moved in the fi rst place” (2006,10). Just as Diski reclaims the position of being a stranger from its initial negativity as an effect of traumatic

“I wanted unheimlich [ . . . ] but of the right kind.” 155 dispossession, so she seeks in the inertia also associated with that dispossession, and subsequently with depression, the conditions for perceptual, intellectual and emotional renewal. She explains that on her travels “I wanted unheimlich—it is essentially what I am always looking for—but of the right kind. Strangeness and strangerness without the blank despair” (13). Diski also returns to her concluding observations in Stranger that, feeling oppressed and exhausted by her fellow passengers’ stories, each of which testified to the teller’s “personal existence” (2004, 146), she “had a sense of” “vacancy,” “emptiness” and lack of “substance:” “Nothing that happened, or had ever happened, accumulated into something solid, into anything I recognized as a—for want of a better word—self” (275). In On Trying, Diski sets out to embrace her sense of emptiness, and to reflect on her mind, which she equates with the faculty of being “conscious of my consciousness” (2006, 215). This project involves various moves, including separating the ‘mind’ from the ‘self’. She cites Montaigne as her model for taking one’s own mind as the object of scrutiny, by placing oneself in “idleness” and solitude. Diski observes that “Montaigne was central to my project of being alone usefully” (77), an undertaking which she seeks to pursue through reading, thinking and writing. But her exploration of her mind also resonates with more contemporary discourses, including those of psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Her cognizance of neuroscience is signaled by her playful speculation that she subscribes to “an unanalysed Cartesianism. A body/spirit split in my self-consciousness” (93). By this proposition, Diski appears to reject the neuroscientific emphasis on the connection between the mind and the brain, and the premise that “the abyssal separation between body and mind” was “Descartes’ error.”11 However, in her critical reviews of books about mental illness and its treatment, Diski neither subscribes to Cartesian dualism nor dismisses neurological insights into the role of the brain in mental illness. Whilst she approaches accounts of neuroscience as sceptically as she does psychiatry and psychoanalysis, she also asserts that each contributes to the understanding and treatment of mental illness.12 Diski’s inclination to separate mind and body, as she accounts for it, arises rather from her imaginative response, as a child, to her then undiagnosed depression and her traumatizing environment. She remembers, for instance, how she would have preferred to have the type of “physical problem” or “condition” that distinguished other children, rather than her own invisible and nameless “emptiness.” The “named things” which signified the other children’s “conditions” also testified that they were “proper human beings, because only components that exist can fail to work” (94). Diski recalls how as a child, through an act of imaginative recuperation of her “emptiness” which anticipates her later mapping and reclamation, through spatial metaphors, of her thought processes, she turned her sense of emptiness into a “spatially extraordinary” “cavernous . . . cathedral of vacant space” into which she could retreat at will (97, 96). She recalls that

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this is “where I was,” a self which she imagined as a “pebble” or “small kernel” housed within the space, which her “mind” could visit for reassurance that “I was not bad, I was good” (97). The adult Diski reflects that “by twelve” she had lost the sanctuary of imagined inner space, the sense of a self located within it, and her “means of verifying my sense of self” (99). However, Diski’s proclivity to regard her body as an empty “outer envelope” persists in adulthood: despite informing herself about them, “bones, muscles, nerves, organs, cells, DNA, nucleotides, amino acids, peptides, hormones [ . . . ] are, so far as I am concerned, mythological” (89). She also explains how, much as she tries to visualize the connection between her body, mood and mind—“a drop of this chemical making me want to get up in the morning . . . a shortage of another causing a blackness darker and bleaker than a homeless winter’s night” (92)—she maintains that “mood” is a “wordless, thoughtless condition” which is distinct from and “functions without reference to” her “mind” (214). Through her journeys to New Zealand and the Quantock Hills, Diski seeks the solitude and stillness which will be congenial to both her mood, and her reflections on her mind. However, her fi rst encounters in New Zealand suggest a culture which, like her own, values ‘effective’ individuality equated with achievement through performance. Sitting in Auckland’s Sky Tower, Diski watches a professional bungee jumper falling past the window at regular intervals. As the woman falls, she “mimes” the “cavernous, toothy scream of happiness that is now an essential part of the public expression of pleasure” (30). Ascending to the platform from which the woman jumps, Diski notices that between jumps “her expression was of the blankest boredom” (32). The bungee jumper simulates the “hedonic capacity” which Ross has identified as one of the indicators of the effectively performing subject and its accompanying culturally desirable “personality type”—an enactment of subjectivity which, she argues, antidepressants such as Prozac are used to produce (2006, 192, 193). The adrenalin-fueled risk-taking of extreme sport, commodified by the tourist industry, offers another means of realizing this subjectivity. As she watches the bungee jumper, Diski momentarily entertains the idea of jumping herself, wryly noting that she is possibly influenced by an “adrenalin residue” (34). This impulse is also, she observes, a response to exhortation by an industry whose rhetoric equates “achievement” and “becoming [a] complete person” with “overcoming fear.” (51–52). Whilst more generally Diski accepts the effect of biochemical factors on mood to the extent that she “takes a prophylactic Prozac every morning,” as she remarks elsewhere (2012, 8), the accommodation to depressive subjectivity which her travel memoirs record offers an alternative to the ideological construction of depression as “an illness [ . . . ] of insufficiency of the self in relation to itself” which Ross describes (2006, 3). In New Zealand, Diski chooses to stay in solitude on the Coromandel Coast, a place known to her from Edward Lear’s poem “The Courtship

“I wanted unheimlich [ . . . ] but of the right kind.” 157 of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.” Like Lear’s Lady Jingly who remains forever in Coromandel “mourning,” “weeping” and “moaning” for her lost love (26), Diski imagines that she too will be able to “just sit and softly weep into a jug without a handle” (27). The melancholia of Lear’s poem creates by association the affective landscape that Diski seeks. She has observed elsewhere that melancholia is different from depression, describing it as “a place you can get to if you go through the clinical depression and wait. And it isn’t negative. It’s more like being in the part of my head that I write from’ (1999, 215). Diski’s understanding of depression as being on a continuum of feeling differs from the ‘categorical’ view propounded by DSM-III and IV and contributes to the acceptance of mood which enables her to observe that it is possible to “arrange the conditions when joy might appear:” At times depression and contentment come together to create a joy that feels like what they mean by grace. Not that thing they call clinical depression, which is implacable and deadly, but a broader form of sadness, a generalised sorrow that seeps slowly towards something else— and joy, if you imagine it very quiet, balanced on an infi nitely small pinpoint, is the word that seems best to describe it. When it comes, I take it with pleasure. (45) Diski’s travel memoirs contribute to her acceptance of the spectrum of feeling which connects “depression” with “joy.” Each of her autobiographical iterations is necessarily provisional, effecting a new understanding of and temporary reconciliation with her feelings. Each memoir negotiates the sense of “emptiness” which shadows and to some extent motivates Diski’s reflection on herself and her world. Through the ice-bound landscape of Antarctica and the “emptiness” of the American landscape observed from the train (2004, 275), Diski has explored the “hunger for blankness” which, she claims, persists after depression (2008, 182). In On Trying, she concludes that contemplation of the emptiness of her mind reveals an intolerable “sense of personlessness” which compels her “to make narrative meaning out of it,” “to turn emptiness into substance” (217). Diski’s belief that the compulsion to avoid emptiness is a “failure” and a “fundamental lie” (217) is consistent with her sustained critique elsewhere of the ascription of meaning to mental illness by theorists and practitioners of various disciplines.13 However, in her travel memoirs the necessarily transient encounters with various landscapes offer Diski changing metaphors through which she can she can explore the provisional but nonetheless valued perceptions depression affords. NOTES 1. See Paul John Eakin’s argument in How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves about the “intimate” connection between “narrative and identity”

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4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Joanna Price in autobiography (1999, 100). Eakin concurs with Oliver Sacks’ statement that “each of us constructs and lives a ‘narrative,’ and that this narrative is us, our identities” (101). Eakin regards autobiographical iterations of the self as occurring on a spectrum which includes both “living autobiography, performing it in our daily lives,” as Sacks postulates we do, and life writing. According to Eakin, as an element of autobiography “narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenal and cognitive self-experience, while self—the self of autobiographical discourse—does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative” (100). Eakin acknowledges, however, that whilst narrative is a “constituent part of self,” it is not “coextensive with all of selfhood,” which has been “expanded” by “manifold registers of neural, psychological, social and cultural experience” (101–2). See also E. Ann Kaplan’s discussion of “harmonious” and traumatic relations in the contact zone in Trauma Culture (2005, 105–6). Diski’s evocation of the relationship between depression and her experience of childhood trauma illustrates Judith Lewis Herman’s observation in Trauma and Recovery that “protracted depression is the most common fi nding in virtually all clinical studies of chronically traumatized people” (2001, 94). In The Aesthetics of Disengagement, Christine Ross states that: “The World Health Organization has established that psychiatric disorders are now the third most common type of disease and that the leading mental disorder is depression” (2006, xvi). Andrew Solomon also comments in The Noonday Demon that: “Depression as described in DSM-IV [the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] is the leading cause of disability in the US and abroad for persons over the age of five” (2002, 25). Andrew Solomon also observes that “rebuilding of the self in and after depression requires love, insight, work, and, most of all, time” (2002, 19). See also Luckhurst’s discussion of the “genealogy” of the concept of trauma (2008, 59–76). Ross’ use of “enactment” draws concurrently on the Freudian concept of acting out and Judith Butler’s concept of performativity. Ross explains that she uses “enact” to connote how the art at once “performs and contributes to the depressive paradigm;” “acts out depression discursively, structurally, formally and symptomatically;” and, after Judith Butler, “requires a performance that is repeated.” She extends Butler’s defi nition of enactment as “a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established” to argue that “not only does art reiterate and challenge the alreadyestablished set of meanings of depression, but it is also fully active [ . . . ] in the establishment of meaning” (2006, xviii). See Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson’s discussion of how Diski “‘performs’ the role of the anti-tourist in her travel books” in Transatlantic Women’s Literature (2008, 25). See Lisle’s discussion of memory and the “complex arrangement of temporality” in Stranger on a Train (2006, 245–50). For discussions of Diski’s representation of landscape in Stranger on a Train, see Lisle (2006, 248) and Macpherson (2008, 106–8). See Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error (2006, 249). See for example Diski’s 2012 review of Clark Lawlor’s From Melancholia to Prozac, 8. In The Sixties, Diski criticizes R. D. Laing’s identification of the “pain” of mental illness with “existential truth” (2009, 133). Earlier, in the book reviews re-published in Don’t, she expressed reservations about Kay Redfield

“I wanted unheimlich [ . . . ] but of the right kind.” 159 Jamison and Lauren Slater’s ascription of a “weight of apparent meaning” to illnesses such as manic depression and schizophrenia (1999, 220). In the same text she also takes issue with Oliver Sacks’ representation of his patients in his neurological case studies, arguing that Sacks “generalize[s]” from them “to a greater understanding of the human condition,” particularly by presenting his patients as “metaphors” of what it means “to be human and stay human in the face of adversity.” Thus Sacks’ representation of his patients comprises “edited tropes, not complete, contained narratives” (251).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cheever, Abigail. 2000. “Prozac Americans: Depression, Identity, and Selfhood.” Twentieth-Century Literature 46, 3: 346–68. Damasio, Antonio. 2006. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. London: Vintage. Diski, Jenny. 2008 (1997). Skating to Antarctica. London: Virago. . 1999 (1998). Don’t. London: Granta. . 2004 (2002). Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions. London: Virago. . 2007 (2006). On Trying To Keep Still. London: Virago. . 2009. The Sixties. London: Profi le. . 2012. “The Pathology of Sadness.” Review of From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression, by Clark Lawlor. The Guardian, March 3, Saturday Review:8. Eakin, Paul John. 1999. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Herman, Judith Lewis. 2001. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Pandora. Huggan, Graham. 2009. Extreme Pursuits: Travel/Writing in an Age of Globalization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kaplan, E. Ann. 2005. Trauma Culture: the Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Lear, Edward. 1955 [1877]. “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.” In The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, edited by Holbrook Jackson, 237–41. London: Faber. Lisle, Debbie. 2006. The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge. Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl. 2008. Transatlantic Women’s Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mind website. http://www.mind.org.uk/news/show/5305. Accessed 6 April, 2012. Porter, Dennis. 1991. Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Ross, Christine. 2006. The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Solomon, Andrew. 2002. The Noonday Demon. London: Vintage.

10 The Human Condition? Martyn Bracewell

I almost feel obliged, as a physician and scientist commenting on a series of critical essays, to invoke the divide between the sciences and the arts embodied in the ‘two cultures’ controversy of fi fty years ago. Like many scientists, I despair at the levels of scientific ‘literacy’ in the general public, and, more so, in those wielding power over us (I understand that there is only one scientist among 650 members of the British parliament). We live in a society permeated by scientific and technical advances, nowhere more so than in the realm of biomedicine. And within biomedicine, genetics and neuroscience have the greatest impact. As T. J. Lustig and James Peacock highlight in their Introduction to this volume, C. P. Snow predicted that advances in molecular biology and understanding of the higher nervous system would “affect the way in which men think of themselves more profoundly than any scientific advance since Darwin’s” (1998, 74–75). While there have indubitably been clinical advances as a consequence of genetic research, the impact on the quotidian practice of most health care professionals (mine, certainly) has been small (as yet). The impact of the new genetics on the general population has, I think, also been small. As well as being able to use functional imaging to show the human brain in action, neuroscience promises a new understanding of behavior (including, and especially, human behavior). Now every self-respecting university Department of Psychology has its own or covets an MRI scanner. Scarcely a week goes by without the announcement in the lay press of the purported neurobiological basis of a human trait or condition, often accompanied by an image of the human brain ‘thinking,’ ‘knowing’ or ‘feeling.’ One theme that most of the authors in this volume explore is how novelists have used neuroscience to explore or explain the motivation of their characters. This is perhaps the most obvious way in which one might expect neuroscience to apply to literature. I will look at this fi rst, but then think more broadly about the integration of neuroscience within everyday discourse. Trauma is another major theme in this volume, as, perhaps surprisingly, is time. I will also offer some comments on the neurobiology of some of the disorders discussed.

The Human Condition? 161 In the twentieth century, explanations for the behavior of characters in novels were often ‘psychological’ in origin: the understanding was often couched in specifically psychoanalytic terms. Although the reputation of the neuroscientist-turned-father of psychoanalysis has been subjected to considerable critical scrutiny in the last few decades from psychologists, physicians and cultural critics (see Crews 1997), the insights of Freud and his followers still inform many novelists’ approaches. But has neuroscience replaced psychoanalysis? Is it more than just the most recent contender for the novel’s crown, as Jonathan Lethem (in Fleissner [2009]) has argued? In his essay, Nick Bentley explores how Martin Amis interrogates these ideas in Yellow Dog (2003). The protagonist, Xan Meo, suffers a traumatic brain injury (TBI). As a result his behavior becomes a caricature of modern masculinity. He becomes more violent and develops a higher sex drive (including incestuous feelings toward his daughter). Amis explicitly derives these ideas from a book about TBI. Many TBI patients do indeed develop a ‘dysexecutive’ syndrome (DES), often (erroneously) considered synonymous with a frontal syndrome (i.e., a syndrome caused by damage to the frontal lobes). In DES, a number of cognitive, behavioral and emotional symptoms tend to co-occur. Common cognitive complaints are difficulties in planning, reasoning, attention and working (‘short-term’) memory. Emotional and behavioral symptoms can be troublesome; in particular, patients often have difficulty in inhibiting the expression of strong emotions such as anger. They may also experience a loss of empathy, which can exacerbate behavioral problems. There may be a general lack of impulse control, and also a lack of adherence to the norms of social behavior. However, Amis exaggerates the effects of TBI to the point of distortion. Meo is a grotesque, one of a line of caricatures of the modern male throughout Amis’ oeuvre. Moreover, Amis seems more interested in the traditional, psychoanalytic account of Meo’s motivation: psychological trauma in childhood is offered as the explanation of Meo’s behavior in adult life. (I discuss trauma in more detail below.) Amis is of course too sophisticated a writer to offer a trite dichotomy between neurological and psychological explanations. However, Ian McEwan explores a much less nuanced view of behavior in Saturday (2005). His central character, Henry Perowne, is a neuro-surgeon at a renowned London hospital (a thinly veiled portrait of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, previously the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases). Perowne, too, is a caricature: a surgeon with a resolutely mechanistic view of human behavior. His neurological knowledge, and his understanding of behavior, is effective to an extent (in his fi rst encounter with Baxter, he is able to make a ‘spot diagnosis’ of Huntington’s disease), but it ultimately falls short. In the fateful confrontation in Perowne’s home with Baxter, it is the father-in-law, the somewhat dissolute poet, who rescues the situation: poetry in the form of Matthew Arnold’s “On Dover Beach” calms Baxter. This is an unlikely scenario, but it does allow McEwan to

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reference the author of Culture and Anarchy, an earlier contributor to ‘two cultures’ discourse, and perhaps, therefore, to indicate his own position in the debate. Huntington’s disease is a terrible, incurable neuro-degenerative condition typically manifesting in a patient’s fourth and fifth decade, usually after the sufferer has (or would have had) children. It is an autosomal dominant disease, which means that if one has an affected parent (or sibling) one has a 50% chance of inheriting the disease. Early on, the striatum, one of the group of neurones deep in that part of the brain called the basal ganglia, bears the brunt of the damage. Sufferers develop an insidious movement disorder, characterized by uncontrollable, sinuous movements of the limbs which gave the disease its earlier name, Huntington’s Chorea (from the Greek ‘to dance’). Sufferers also develop psychiatric disturbances. The disease follows a relentless progression: ultimately all sufferers succumb to severe dementia. The psychiatric syndrome depicted in Saturday, however, is inaccurate: patients with Huntington’s are not especially violent, nor prone to rapid mood swings. S. A. K. Wilson, a distinguished physician at the National Hospital, argued in his Croonian lectures that “the ganglia situated in the base of the brain still, to a large extent, retain the characteristic of basements—viz, darkness” (1925, 1). What is apparent, however, is that the basal ganglia are intimately involved in both the overt control of movement and in the ‘control’ of our behavior more broadly. I will return to this point when discussing Jonathan Lethem’s depiction of Tourette’s syndrome in Motherless Brooklyn (1999). In his chapter on Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision (2005), Adam Kelly cites Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity (1972). In the nineteenth century, sincerity was key, and, according to Kelly’s account of Trilling, placed the emphasis on “intersubjective truth and communication with others.” In the twentieth century, by contrast, the emphasis on authenticity presents truth, again in Kelly’s words, as “something inward, personal, and hidden, the goal primarily of self-examination rather than other-directed communication” (57). This view seems to fit well with a psychological, and more specifically psychoanalytic, understanding of how some characters— such as the protagonist in Indecision—seek to understand themselves. One might perhaps also read Saturday as a reification or externalization of this: Baxter’s inner world is hidden from him, and he is not equipped with the education or cultural background to attempt to understand it. Owing to his knowledge of neuroscience, however, Perowne is suitably equipped (or so he might feel) to delve into the workings of Baxter’s basal ganglia. The psychoanalytical and neuroscientific approaches seem as opposed to each other as Leavis and Snow. Is any reconciliation possible? In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud used the term ‘Ego’ to refer to psychic functions such as control, planning, and making judgments. The parallels with the executive system of current neuro-psychological thinking are striking. It is tempting to equate some of the roles of the SuperEgo—our ‘conscience,’

The Human Condition? 163 for example—with the executive system. Perhaps one might conceptualize the frontal lobes as embodiments of the Ego and SuperEgo which, when damaged, allow the more basic instincts of the Id, instantiated in the basal ganglia and other lower centers, to run unfettered. As Stephen Burn observes in his essay, the neurosciences have infiltrated much of everyday discourse. We are used to the notion of disease as metaphor (perhaps most powerfully articulated by Sontag, 1978); today, our conceptualization of neurological diseases must affect how we read these metaphors. Do neurological diseases reflect society’s dis-ease, as Bennett Kravitz has claimed (see Kravitz, 2003)? In Saturday, there is an explicit counterposition of the educated, upper middle class neuro-surgeon, with his rational view of the world and behavior, and the more instinctive, unreflective, resolutely working (or criminal) class Baxter, afflicted with Huntington’s disease. Similarly, in Yellow Dog, TBI leads Meo to return to his more violent, hyper-masculine working class roots. Further evidence of the increasingly high profile of neuroscience in everyday discourse, and of its metaphoric dimensions, comes in Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker (2006), in which the protagonist’s TBI results in Capgras syndrome. Sufferers of Capgras syndrome recognize an intimate such as partners and close family members, but suffer the delusion that the loved one is an imitation or impostor. One neuroscientific explanation for the syndrome is that the sufferer sees a loved one and recognizes her as such; however, because visual recognition centers have in some way been disconnected from the emotional centers, the patient experiences none of the usual emotional response; the ‘mind’ reasons that because there has been no such response, the person seen cannot really have been the loved one, and so must be an impostor (see Ellis 1997). In a rather crude metaphoric extension of the neuroscientific facts, Powers suggests that as a species, human beings have collective Capgras. We do not have the requisite response to other members of our species or to the other species with whom we share the world, and this leads to our alienation from the natural world. In his essay, T. J. Lustig fi nds Powers’ symbolic use of Capgras syndrome unsatisfactory. He argues that although the protagonist’s Capgras is a direct result of the September 11 attacks, Powers fails to engage with the societal level. Were the attacks in some sense due to America’s lack of emotional connection to the ‘Other’ of the Islamic world? Presumably the opposite side of this ‘politically correct’ view is also valid: the terrorists’ lack of a positive emotional response to Westerners made possible the attacks. In his essay, James Peacock also concerns himself with the fictional treatment of disconnection syndromes. Ostensibly, Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999) is a variation on the classic theme of the detective novel in which our hero not only is not exactly hard-boiled, but also has a neuro-psychiatric disease. Lethem’s hero, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette’s syndrome (TS). This clearly shapes how the novel unfolds in important ways; but what I want to reflect on here is the notion that Lionel’s TS is

164 Martyn Bracewell an exaggerated manifestation of the vibrant (equated with working class) street life of Brooklyn. Lionel’s explosive word-blending verbal ticcing is merely a slightly exaggerated version of the language of the streets. There, his tics are scarcely out of place. His behavior is certainly accepted in the small-time criminal circles of Court Street. Lionel, in fact, is at home in Brooklyn. Oliver Sacks suggests that tics are stored up fragments of the past; Brooklyn in a sense externalizes this notion (see Sacks 2005). In contrast, Manhattan is ahistoric; Lionel fi nds himself adrift there. Once again we see an equation of the ‘authentic’ working (or criminal) class world with a neurological disease in which speech and behavior can only be brought under partial, ‘higher,’ control. TS is a disease characterized by verbal and motor tics. A tic is a brief action or speech-act that typically arises unbidden. Often, the tic can be resisted for a while; ticeurs typically describe a build up of inner pressure that can be resisted for only so long before it is released. Peacock mentions Ronald Schleifer’s (2001) argument that TS breaks down “the strict distinction between language and motor activities” (2001, 564). Tourette’s highlights the “materiality of language while retaining its status as language: it is physical and symbolic simultaneously” (567). But, while speech is undoubtedly a form of behavior, I am unconvinced that the distinction between language and motor activities is as strict as Schleifer argues. Dysfunction of the basal ganglia is (again) thought to underlie the abnormalities of TS. One way of conceptualizing some of what the basal ganglia do is that they allow the ‘running’ of appropriate behavioral programs and, just as importantly, stop the running of inappropriate programs (for example, the screaming out of an obscenity). Although neurologists have usually concentrated on the programs that govern the movements of the body, it is clear that the basal ganglia are involved in the regulation of behavior more broadly. Diseases of the basal ganglia may thus produce abnormal movements (the motor tics of TS, the chorea of HD) and also behavioral or psychological manifestations (the obsessive compulsive disorder of TS, the thought disorder of HD). Although I recognize that theories of language have played an important role in cultural theory, I do not fi nd the privileging of language by Schleifer and Peacock helpful; it legitimizes a false dichotomy between thought (the ‘inner life’) and action. It is not surprising that several of the contributors to this volume are interested in representations of trauma. There is now an extensive literature on ‘traumaculture’ and ‘pathography,’ to use Luckhurst’s terms (2003, 2008). One issue of interest here is the conflation of medical and metaphorical uses of ‘trauma.’ It is a commonplace that traumatic events can and will shape our behavior. Such notions are legitimized in the popular genre of ‘misery memoirs’ and in the widespread adoption and acceptance of the term ‘post traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD) by health care professionals and the lay public. Both patients with PTSD and characters in trauma fiction who exhibit avoidance behaviors fi nd it difficult to form or maintain

The Human Condition? 165 satisfying personal relationships, and may become alienated from society. Those who have not had the same experience tend to be seen as outsiders incapable of comprehension. As a result, a common trope in discussions of trauma is that the unknowability of the traumatic event provides some of its ineluctable power. Bent Sørensen cites Hartman on (post-) Freudian theory: “the traumatic event [is] registered rather than experienced. It seems to have bypassed perception and consciousness, and falls directly into the psyche” (2004). A neurobiological correlate of this view is that the emotional and memory circuits of the brain are closely inter-related. The limbic system (so named as it comprises of a number of brain regions on the edge of the cerebral cortex) both processes the emotional content of experience and is intimately involved in the laying down of memories. Thus it is plausible that events vested with strong emotion may have privileged access to memory, but may not always be ‘properly’ processed by the ‘higher’ cerebral cortex. It is almost as though these memories processed by the limbic system—itself literally and physically marginalized—bypass the legitimizing cerebral cortex. These neurobiological conjectures may be linked to Maclean’s notion of the triune brain, discussed by Stephen Burn in his essay in this volume. Maclean’s idea no longer holds much sway in contemporary neuroscientific thinking, although it was widely recognized in the third quarter of the last century. As Burn makes clear, Don DeLillo has clearly been influenced by Maclean’s idea. The “million years of terror” stored in “the limbic system of the brain” (as DeLillo puts it in Libra) could easily be related to our thinking about trauma. The “terror” element in the experience of trauma may lead to what Hartman sees as a second and contradictory phenomenon: a “perpetual troping” of the actual or original event by “the bypassed or severely split psyche.” I do not see this as contradictory at all: rather, it may be an inevitable consequence of the fi rst feature of trauma. Such features of trauma may lead sufferers continuously to revisit or attempt to (re-) visit the traumatic event—a phenomenon which surfaces in Bent Sørensen’s discussion of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). The protagonist in the post-September 11 sections of the novel, Oskar Schell, searches for the lock that will fit the key found amongst his dead father’s belongings. Sørensen doesn’t mention it, but it is significant that in Everything is Illuminated (2002), Foer himself is the protagonist in a quest to fi nd the truth about his grandparents’ sufferings in the Second World War. It is not surprising to see discussion of these instances of trauma by proxy in a volume of this nature. Perhaps more surprising is the way in which traumatic experience has been used to explore the issue of time travel. Brian Baker makes the (perhaps rather obvious point) that displacement in time may be seen as a “metaphor for the dislocating properties of contemporary life” (92). Because it also allows the fictional character immense freedom, time travel also becomes an effective device in the exploration of

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traumatic events. In La Jetée (dir. Chris Marker, 1964), the trauma is that of the protagonist’s own death; in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife (2005), it is the death of his mother. Yet even the gift of access to the traumatic event does not necessarily offer salvation. The ability to revisit the past is not a ‘way out’. This insight is mirrored in clinical practice: trying to get a PTSD patient to go back to the source of his suffering is often an ineffectual and sometimes a counterproductive treatment. Jenny Diski’s travel memoirs offer another form of time travel. As Joanna Price rightly notes, ‘travel writing allows her to revisit particular moments in her autobiographical narrative and to offer different iterations of that narrative.” Diski seeks to understand her depression, revisiting and re-evaluating her experiences. Price notes that she can reinterpret these experiences according to various cultural discourses but, as Kirkmayer et al. (2007) have pointed out, ideology changes the social construction of experience. Perhaps, therefore, we need to consider neuroscience as an ideology. Medical treatment for trauma sufferers does not necessarily succeed. Can art offer succour? DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) re-enacts the dreadful images of people jumping from the stricken twin towers of the World Trade Center; images repeatedly shown on television. Sørensen suggests that Keith Neudecker’s wife understands the “necessity of the artist acting out the trauma content.” So it’s possible that artistic representation may offer a better solution to traumatic experience than unrefracted memories and experiences. I have suggested that Baker’s essay seems at odds with the others in this volume, in that it deals with protagonists who travel in time, actually and metaphorically, rather than those affected and sometimes affl icted by neuro-psychiatric conditions. One theme Baker develops is that the museum privileges and legitimizes the mobility of male heroes such as Indiana Jones (Spielberg 1989) and Robert Langdon in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003). These men are, as Baker claims, “free to embark on their pursuits because they are already dislocated from emotional constraint.” And yet such characters are not portrayed as dysfunctional: rather, some contemporary authors seem interested in the ‘positive’ aspects of what might usually be presented as pathological experience. Here again, we see an interplay between scientifi c or neuroscientific discourse and its potential symbolic significances. Henry de Tamble, the time traveler in Niffenegger’s novel, is afflicted by a genetic disease that renders him unstable in time. This disorder is explicitly modeled on epilepsy; indeed, temporal discombobulation is a feature of several actual seizure syndromes. In fact, a number of neurological and psychiatric diseases can be viewed as having a temporal dimension. Time is closely linked to memory, and it is memory which allows one to construct an inner narrative of oneself. Distorted perceptions of time and distortions of memory are, as I have noted, quite commonly seen in people with epilepsy. In adults the commonest epileptic syndrome is temporal lobe

The Human Condition? 167 epilepsy (TLE). During partial seizures in which the abnormal electrical activity is restricted to the temporal lobe, a patient may suffer distortion of time and of memory. Commonly, they have the experience of déjà vu (a sense of familiarity with what is actually novel) or jamais vu (in which that which should be familiar is felt to be novel). We are increasingly aware of a transient epileptic amnesia (TEA) in which the only or main manifestation of the seizure is memory loss. Recent research has shown that patients with TEA not only suffer episodes of amnesia during their seizures, but show accelerated forgetting of the personal memories that help define who we are. A rarer but probably related condition is transient global amnesia (TGA). Whereas the temporal disruption in TLE may last a few minutes, TGA is characterized by the patient losing several hours of memory, with relatively complete preservation of other cognitive functions. Indeed, patients have been known to complete complex tasks such as driving during the period for which they are amnestic. But during TGA, patients characteristically seem perplexed: they know something is wrong, and repeatedly ask questions such as ‘where are we?’ and ‘what are we doing?’ The commonest neuro-degenerative condition is Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Most AD suffers have an early and marked loss of memory. As their memory worsens, their sense of self dissolves. Neurobiologically, the common feature to all these conditions is temporal lobe dysfunction, primarily paroxysmal in the case of TLE, inexorably progressive in the case of AD. Regions within the temporal lobes form major elements of the limbic system, which I have already discussed. It is therefore possible that the very essence of the human condition—memory, and the ways in which memories are processed—leaves us vulnerable to trauma. The contributors to this volume have shown how neuroscience permeates modern discourse, particularly our thinking about time, trauma and memory. We might see a novel as a thought experiment; neuroscientists have conversely viewed pathological conditions as nature’s experiments. It seems that contemporary writers are conducting a variety of experiments to explore our motivations and behaviors. Neurobiology can offer valid but incomplete contributions to our understanding of ourselves, but we will always need explanations that encompass multiple levels of description. BIBLIOGRAPHY Amis, Martin. 2003. Yellow Dog. London: Jonathan Cape. Baker, Brian. 2013. “The Pathologies of Mobility: time travel as syndrome in The Time Traveller’s Wife, La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys.” In Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: the Syndrome Syndrome, edited by Tim Lustig and James Peacock, xx–xx, this volume. New York: Routledge. Brown, Dan. 2003. The Da Vinci Code. London: Corgi. Crews, Frederick. 1997. The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute. London: Granta. DeLillo, Don. 1988. Libra. New York: Viking Penguin.

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. 2007. Falling Man. New York: Scribner-Simon. Ellis, H. D., A. W. Young, A. H. Quagle, and K. W. DePauw. 1997. “Reduced Autonomic Responses to Faces in Capgras Delusion.” Proceedings of the Royal Society 264: 1085–92. Accessed June 15, 2012. doi: 10.1098/rspb.1997.0150. Fleissner, Jennifer L. 2009. “Symptomatology and the Novel.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, 3: 387–92 Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2002. Everything is Illuminated. Boston: Houghton Miffl in. . 2005. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel. Boston: Houghton Miffl in. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, translated by John Reddick. London: Penguin. Hartman, Geoff rey. 2004. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.” PSYART: a Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/hartman-on_traumatic_knowledge_and_ literary_stud. Kelly, Adam. 2013. “From Syndrome to Sincerity: Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision.” In Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: the Syndrome Syndrome, edited by Tim Lustig and James Peacock, xx–xx, this volume. New York: Routledge. Kirmayer, Laurence J., Robert Lemelson, and Mark Barad. 2007. “Introduction: Inscribing Culture, Brain, and Body.” In Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives, edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer, Robert Lemelson, and Mark Barad, 1–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kravitz, Bennett. 2003. “The Culture of Disease or the Dis-ease of Culture in Motherless Brooklyn and Eve’s Apple.” Journal of American Culture. 26, 2: 171–79. Kunkel, Benjamin. 2005. Indecision. London: Picador. Lethem, Jonathan. 1999. Motherless Brooklyn. New York: Doubleday. Luckhurst, Roger. 2003. “Traumaculture.” New Formations: a Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 50: 28–47. . 2008. The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge. McEwan, Ian. 2005. Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape. Niffenegger, Audrey. 2005. The Time Traveller’s Wife. London: Vintage. Powers, Richard. 2006. The Echo Maker. London: Heinemann. Sacks, Oliver. An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Schleifer, Ronald. 2001. “The Poetics of Tourette Syndrome: Language, Neurobiology, and Poetry.” New Literary History 32, 3: 563–84. Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Sørensen, Bent. 2013. “Syndrome, Symptom, and Trauma Chains in American Preand Post-9/11 Novels.” In Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: the Syndrome Syndrome, edited by Tim Lustig and James Peacock, xx–xx, this volume. New York: Routledge. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. London: Oxford University Press. Wilson, S. A. K. 1925. “On Some Disorders of Motility and of Muscle Tone, with Special Reference to the Corpus Striatum.” Lancet 206: 1–10

FILMOGRAPHY Marker, Chris (dir.). 1964. La Jetée. Spielberg, Steven (dir.). 1989. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

11 A Psychiatrist’s Opinion of the Neuronovel Lisetta Lovett

Psychiatrists and novelists have in common a skill for observation and deduction of motivation or reasons for behavior from careful observation. Unlike most other medical specialities, psychiatry has to rely on accurate identification of phenomenology since it does not enjoy the luxury of falling back on diagnostic tests, of which we hardly have any. We do this by honing our skills in observation and communication. When the discipline of medicine was experiencing an explosion of understanding of the mechanisms of disease at the end of the nineteenth century, the new speciality of psychological medicine also sought explanations, but neuroscience was insufficiently developed to provide them. Then Sigmund Freud, a neurologist by training, developed psychoanalytical theory, which although initially controversial, came to dominate psychological explanations of human behavior for most of the twentieth century. Most psychiatrists have been for some time somewhat dismissive of his contribution and do not incorporate his paradigms into a formulation of their patients’ problems. In contrast, many twentieth-century literary critics have privileged Freudian analysis to interpret characters within fiction and indeed their authors. The books discussed in these essays have triggered interest for several reasons that include the privileging of neuroscience over psychoanalysis to explain human behavior and personality, which marks a significant epistemological shift. It seems that this shift has raised a variety of concerns, to which many of the authors of this collection of essays and the editors give voice. These concerns include the ethics of employing real medical conditions as metaphors for wider social or cultural conditions; the risks of devaluing the misery of suffering when writers generalize trauma; the reduction of symptoms to meaningless random accidents; and the loss of the notion of individual responsibility if we accept that human behavior is predetermined by neurochemicals and genes. As a jobbing consultant psychiatrist for many years, I have been asked to contribute to this collection of essays to provide an interdisciplinary perspective. The editors have suggested I comment on the ‘two cultures’ debate, the significance of the ‘neurological turn’ in fiction, the realism of representations of syndromes and the ethics of using medical conditions

170 Lisetta Lovett metaphorically. Given the range of this shopping list, the philosophical depth of some of the concerns raised and my own practical and scientific bent, this was a bit of a tall order; I hope, however, to bring some coalface clinical experience in my field of expertise, that is psychiatry and neuropsychiatry as well as scientific evidence to the areas considered. First I would like to address the notion of the ‘two cultures’ by putting it in an historical context. In their introduction the editors describe the relationship between the humanities and the sciences in the last century, highlighting the schism identified by C. P. Snow, who saw the creative potential of dialogue. The recent popularity of neuroscientific themes in fiction appears to be an attempt to accomplish this dialogue and to reintegrate these two disciplines. In an historical context, a clear demarcation between science and other scholarly disciplines did not occur until the mid-nineteenth century when William Whewell, a Cambridge scholar and polymath, coined the term ‘scientist’ and developed a philosophy of science based on an understanding of its history (see Butts 2008). Those who explored nature and the physical universe had previously been called ‘Natural Philosophers.’ Philosophers like Descartes, Hobbes and Locke played an important part in legitimizing the acquisition of knowledge through observation and reason rather than uncritically accepting the Church’s scriptures, texts that relied heavily on a non-explanatory Aristotelian philosophy. The dawn of modern science occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, driven by polymath individuals who were erudite in the arts, classics, and humanities. The rediscovery and translation of texts written by Ancient Greek and Egyptian philosophers with an interest in the natural world and man contributed further to the development of modern science. Indeed, the fi rst attempt at describing the brain is found in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, which could be described as marking the beginnings of neuroscience (see Wilkins 1964). So, although the editors of this volume highlight a schism and invite us to consider the significance of rapprochement in the genre of the neuronarrative, perhaps it is the last 150 years or so which have been an aberration, and therefore modern scientific and humanist epistemologies will return to their natural integration, leading to a more knowledgeable and sophisticated understanding of man and the space he inhabits. Indeed this process is perceivable in the growing number of popular science program on television. The ‘neurological turn,’ which I shall now discuss, may also be an example of tentative reintegration. The ‘neurological turn’ is addressed by several of the essayists in this book with reference to novels such as Indecision, The Echo Maker, Saturday and Jenny Diski’s travel volumes. These essayists highlight a concern that privileging science leads to biological reductionism and that ‘felt’ experiences are dismissed as meaningless. Stephen J. Burn articulates this concern particularly well in his historical account of the differences between fi rst- and second-generation postmodern fiction. He highlights a backlash in second-generation novels such as Man Walks into a Room and

A Psychiatrist’s Opinion of the Neuronovel 171 The Unnamed, which suggest that science is unable to explain subjective experience. Such texts, Burn tells us, “yearn for at least a partial return to religion and spirituality” (46) and struggle with finding a material place and status for the soul. The struggle between the material and immaterial is not new, of course. Thomas Willis, a physician and anatomist and Locke’s teacher for a while, conceived, in spite of his meticulous brain dissections and discoveries about brain function, of an immaterial soul within a material body. Descartes too posited an immaterial soul, which he located in the pineal gland (see Zimmer 2004). Both these men were anxious not to rile the church. Both were also wedded to a false dichotomy between body and soul; today we might replace the term ‘soul’ with ‘consciousness’ or ‘self,’ and ‘body’ with ‘brain’. This dichotomy continues to pervade Western views about the brain and self and is the reason why physical disorders are often differentiated from mental disorders. Although psychiatrists are often accused of being monist, a recent study demonstrates that most continue to employ a mind-brain dichotomy when reasoning about clinical cases. (see Miresco and Kirmayer 2006). In chapter 8 in this volume on Richard Powers, T. J. Lustig suggests The Echo Maker risks privileging biological determinism, thereby diminishing the importance of the social, the cultural, and the expression of true human character. He fears that science and not the humanities will be the only “repository of that sense of wonder and a complex wholeness which in the humanist tradition was once associated with poetry and religion” and asserts that “Biology and neuroscience give us a new vision of this whole, but this doesn’t mean that sociology can safely be forgotten.” (136) This raises two questions. Can human behavior and nature ultimately be understood as being just the result of neural networks and chemicals in the brain? And if so does this mean that social and cultural parameters within our lives are of secondary or even of no importance to the development of human character? This debate has been frequently rehearsed by neuroscientists and evolutionary experts, fueled in the last forty years by progress in neuroscience and genetics. Some scholars claim that cognitive neuroscience will illuminate every aspect of mind and behavior including emotionally and politically charged ones (see Pinker 2002). Others go much further such as Humphrey (2011), who argues that consciousness is an illusion which makes our lives interesting and, in common with Damasio (2010), asserts it is a biological phenomenon which has remained in humans because it confers a selective advantage . In contrast, Tallis (2011) vehemently rejects neuroscientific explanations for consciousness in a bid to protect the human characteristics which make man unique—free will, dignity, and existential awareness. He appears to reject Dennett (1991) and Dawkins (1989) on the grounds that they deny the absolute strangeness of being human. Lustig’s essay on The Echo Maker refers to Powers’ “bidirectional” approach to themes and his attempts at synthesis, which in the end he thinks do not always work. Where I feel they do work, however, is in the

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comments of one of the main protagonists, the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber. The author of several books, he has made his name as a popularizer of neurological case histories. Mark Schluter has developed Capgras syndrome, a delusional disorder, following a head injury and his sister, Karin, asks Weber for his help. In discussion with Mark’s biologically inclined young neurologist, Weber suggests that there might be room for a psychological understanding of Capgras as well as acceptance of physical causality. He urges the neurologist to see Mark as a person whose psychological life has been built up by a lifetime of experiences and relationships which could be influencing the content of the delusional beliefs he now holds. Weber goes on to say “I have always found it worthwhile to consider a delusion as both the attempt to make sense—as well as the result—of deeply upsetting developments,” and then chastises the neurologist for offering “a simple one-way fundamentalist causal model” (168). In my clinical experience, which in recent years has concentrated on young people with a fi rst onset of psychotic disorder, I have often observed that delusional beliefs are informed by an individual’s significant life-events and relationships, particularly in childhood and adolescence. Psychiatrists use the vehicle of diagnosis, based on operational criteria, to inform treatment and prognosis, but this process does not imply that psychological, social, and spiritual aspects of the individual are ignored. A row of terraced houses may look the same from the outside, but we all know that the variation of internal decoration reflects the uniqueness of each occupant. In short, current practicing psychiatrists try to synthesize biological, psychological, and social parameters to reach a comprehensive understanding of their patients. Adam Kelly’s chapter on Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision argues that the book initially seems like a standard neuronovel—aiming to “address questions of contemporary identity through the insights of neuroscience” (58). The narrator, Dwight, has been given Abulinix, which will apparently cure ‘abulia,’ a condition characterized by permanent indecisiveness. Later Dwight reflects that “Abulinix would force me to decide that my entire personality boiled down to neurochemistry, and I only flattered myself in believing I possessed a free will” (85). Dwight eventually rejects the neuroscientific frame. In The Echo Maker, Weber also raises the question of free will: “How does the brain erect a mind and how does the mind erect everything else. Do we have free will? What is the self? Where are the neurological correlates of consciousness?” (170). This concern about free will is addressed with reference to the law in Lustig and Peacock’s introduction in which they question whether we can continue to “believe in autonomous subjecthood and [ . . . ] individual responsibility,” (10) citing a legal case where a death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment because the individual suffered from “aberrations in his frontal lobes” (9). These contemporary concerns about the status and relationship of freewill and individual responsibility are echoed

A Psychiatrist’s Opinion of the Neuronovel 173 in the legal history of defendants in the 1800s who were convicted but who we would now consider to have lacked mental capacity due to mental illness. (In fact, however, the fi rst acquittal on the grounds of insanity was as early as 1505 and until the eighteenth century, such acquittals were not uncommon.) The basis of legal judgments changed significantly when Hale published his History of the Pleas of the Crown (1736), in which he argued that a total lack of understanding or memory should be evident before a person be considered insane, and therefore could be said to lack responsibility for his actions. This was a very narrow view of the circumstances in which someone could be acquitted (see Smith 1981). The trial of Edward Arnold illustrates how these criteria of insanity were almost impossible to meet. He was on trial for an attempt to kill Lord Onslow whom he thought had put devils inside his body. Addressing the jury, Mr. Justice Tracey declared: “guilt arises from the mind, and the wicked will and the intention of the man. If a man be deprived of his reason and consequently of his intention, he cannot be guilty [ . . . ] And he is exempted from punishment [ . . . ] but we must be very cautious: it is not every frantic and idle humour of a man that will exempt him from justice [ . . . ] It must be a man that is totally deprived of his understanding and memory, and doth not know what he is doing, no more than an infant, than a brute or a wild beast” (Robinson 1996, 133). This instruction became known as the ‘wild-beast’ test. Arnold was convicted and sentenced to death. So too was Lawrence Shirley, the 4th Earl Ferrers. The Ferrers trial was a landmark trial not only because it was the fi rst time a lord of the realm was executed but also because it was the fi rst documented occasion when the testimony of an ‘alienist’ was allowed. Alienists were physicians with particular expertise in psychological medicine. Dr. John Munro, the then physician superintendent of Bethlem, was called for the defense and explained that Ferrers suffered with ‘occasional insanity’ characterized by symptoms which could fluctuate and were often those of unfounded anger, jealousy or suspicion. However, in 1800 James Hadfield’s trial was stopped by the Lord Chief Justice because he was clearly insane. Hadfield was facing execution for fi ring on and wounding King George III. His lawyer, Thomas Erskine, showed that Hadfield had done so as a result of a grandiose religious delusion in which he had to save the world by sacrificing his own life. Not wanting to commit suicide, he tried to have himself executed for homicide. Two days before attacking the King, Hadfield had tried to kill his baby son. The defense successfully argued that Hadfield did not need to demonstrate ‘raving’ madness to be considered insane and that his delusion was indeed the result of insanity (see Robinson, 142–53). The conflict between legal and medical understandings of mental illness and its relationship with individual responsibility continued to be played out in the Law Courts of England throughout the nineteenth century (see Smith 1981). Doctors felt empowered by the growth in neuroscientific

174 Lisetta Lovett understanding to substantiate their claims about mental illness, and alienists considered that mental disorder usually reduced individual responsibility. The judiciary (and also the public) feared that anyone could be exonerated of crimes if considered insane. The ‘slippery slope’ argument suggested that alienists were willing to excuse anyone with mental disease who committed a crime (see Lovett 2010). Such concerns are now aired particularly with regard to murderers who have been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorder. Just because magnetic resonance imaging demonstrates consistent brain aberrations, should these people be exonerated of responsibility? Does this not put too much power in the hands of the neuro-psychiatrists who diagnose these conditions? In 1927, during debates in parliament about a new Mental Treatment Bill, one MP recounted a story from G.K Chesterton’s novel, The Bull and the Cross, in which increasing numbers of people are found insane until only one psychiatrist is left who reveals himself as the Devil. In short, the legal issues which Lustig and Peacock raise have been alive for hundreds of years. Biological reductionism emerges as a criticism in Joanna Price’s essay on Jenni Diski. The author writes a lot about her experiences of depression during her youth. In Stranger on a Train, she cites a fellow passenger’s diatribe against Prozac and her own experiences of psychiatric hospitals. In The Sixties (2009), she refers to seeing the effects of some of the now discredited psychiatric hospital treatments of the time such as the surgical operation of prefrontal lobotomy, insulin shock therapy, and LSD. Price highlights Christine Ross’ assertion in The Aesthetics of Disengagement that the publication of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) reinforced a ‘biological turn’ and her criticism of the new model of diagnosis which privileged clinical observation of “behaviors or bodily condition” over “felt experience,” corresponding “to the patient’s description of inner states” (153). According to Price, Ross argues that DSM-III represented a move away from understanding of mental illness as an expression of the “mind, inner life, psyche or self to its apprehension as a visible effect of the brain and body.” Further, “diagnostic criteria decontextualize the illness and its symptoms, separating them from the subject’s life history and his or her social and cultural background” (147). Possibly these criticisms are valid with respect to the practice of psychiatry in the era of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), but with respect to British psychiatry, at least over the last twenty years, I would suggest they are anachronistic and perpetuate prejudices which lead people who could benefit from psychiatric intervention to avoid seeking treatment. DSM-III does not decontextualize illness or neglect the whole person. It employs a multiaxial classification which addresses under separate categories the contribution of psychological and social issues, the presence of co morbidity (additional psychiatric disorders such as alcohol dependency)

A Psychiatrist’s Opinion of the Neuronovel 175 as well as physical illness and personality characteristics. Moreover, DSM is not the classification system which tends to be used in Britain and the rest of Europe (this is the International Classification of Diseases or ICD), although DSM does tend to be used for research purposes. Having been trained in psychiatry in the early 1980s, I can recall how my fi rst trainer (Professor Rawnsley, then President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists) was a great endorser of the biopsychosocial model (BPS) of assessment and practice. As Burn points out, the Society of Neuroscience met for the fi rst time in 1977, the same year the term ‘postmodern’ entered the critical vocabulary. In that year, George Engel at the University of Rochester discussed in Science the need for a new medical model (Engel 1977) and introduced the biopsychosocial model. This contrasts with what was then a traditional biomedical model of medicine which posits that every disease can be explained in terms of deviation from normal function. In contrast, the BPS model of health implies that biological, psychological and social factors must be taken into account in understanding human functioning in the context of disease and therapeutic interventions. McLaren (1998) has criticized the model for pretending to be scientific but acknowledges its importance in legitimizing talking to people with non-judgemental respect and a regard for their individuality. Indeed it enjoys wide currency amongst healthcare practitioners. This is probably because it provides pragmatic guidance on how to organize information about a multiplicity of maintaining, precipitating, and predisposing factors which are of importance in assessing a person’s presentation and prognosis. Although the term ‘model’ was probably unfortunate, the biopsychosocial approach is one which all psychiatric trainees, certainly in Britain, learn about and are expected to follow. In order to accomplish this, a competent psychiatric assessment explores an individual’s experience in their family of origin, their early development, the effects of life events as well as academic, employment, and relationship history. Additionally, the process should achieve some understanding of personality and factors which have influenced its development, as well as the person’s concerns and his understanding of what is happening to him and why. A thorough examination of the person’s mental state also takes place and it is during this that an individual’s ‘feelings’ are particularly clarified. For example, if the distress is a result of feeling low in mood, then this is explored further: What do you mean by ‘low’? Are you feeling detached, numb? Is the feeling there all the time? Does it go when you are engaged in activity which you usually consider enjoyable? Is the low feeling worse at any time of the day? Do you feel at times that life is not worth living? Have you sometimes considered taking your own life because the feeling is so bad? Can you see any hope of change? Does this affect the way you think about yourself, your confidence, your self-esteem? Do you fi nd it hard to be sociable? How concerned are you about the effects of your mood on your family?

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The above gives just a flavor of the questions we ask not just to make a diagnosis but to develop an empathic and therapeutic relationship with our patients. So I cannot but reject, at least in contemporary British psychiatric practice, a characterization which suggests a lack of interest in the “mind, inner life, psyche or self.” Of course we are also trying to identify syndromes, if they are there, but this does not mean we ignore the uniqueness of the individual. Similarly, pharmacological treatments may be offered but they are not ‘quick fi x’ remedies. Any competent doctor knows that the quality of the therapeutic relationship is critical to recovery. Price’s essay on Jenni Diski’s travel books also explores the theme of trauma but unlike the novels considered in Lustig’s, Sørensen’s and Bentley’s essays the trauma is a result of emotional abuse in childhood rather than a terrorist attack or a mugging. As Price rightly comments, the concept of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has widened to embrace experiences such as sexual, emotional, or physical abuse in childhood and adolescence, as well as life-threatening situations such as those caused by war or natural disasters. Throughout her books, Diski reflects on her upbringing, which was characterized by violent parental rows, parental suicide attempts, sexual inappropriateness, periodic disappearances of her father, to whom she was close, and a series of surrogate carers. However, much of what she describes, such as intrusive memories of her earlier life, a “hunger for blankness” (182) and depression suggest symptoms of PTSD. Further, some of her descriptions of what she calls ‘depression’ are possibly not always those of clinical depression but rather the emotional detachment sometimes referred to as the dissociation of PTSD. PTSD as a fictional subject in the neuronovel is the main theme of essays by Sørensen and Bentley, both of whom introduce the subject with a definition of trauma and a review of trauma theory. Their essays focus on quite different novels so I will consider them separately, except for the subject of ‘trauma by proxy,’ which is addressed by both essayists and which I will return to later in this essay. First, a brief psychiatric description of PTSD may be helpful to clarify what the disorder looks like since I do not think it can be assumed that the protagonists in these novels are actually suffering from the full syndrome given the behavior and emotional changes described. Indeed, none of these authors explicitly suggest that their characters suffer with PTSD although Sørensen makes this assumption with regard to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Falling Man and A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. I think it is likely that these characters have developed some of the symptoms of PTSD or depression but there are always difficulties in making diagnoses from fictional accounts. Sørensen outlines the symptoms, the nine ‘A’s of trauma, by using as his authority an American psychologist who has written extensively about PTSD and runs a private clinic (see Bloom and Ryan 2009). Yet this description is not one which most psychiatrists would be familiar with or use in their daily practice. He then proceeds to explain these symptoms, but the

A Psychiatrist’s Opinion of the Neuronovel 177 results are over-inclusive and could apply to a variety of people who do not necessarily have PTSD. Based on ICD criteria, there are four phenomenological domains which occur in people suffering with the full PTSD syndrome. These are: 1. Reliving the traumatic experience in the here-and-now (flashbacks) and nightmares or intrusive memories of the trauma. (This is referred to by followers of psychoanalysis as ‘repetition-compulsion’.) 2. Hyper arousal: a high level of anxiety which can be manifest in hyper vigilance (such as constantly looking over one’s shoulder for signs of trouble while walking down a street), insomnia, irritability or even anger. The sufferer may well resort to alcohol or illicit substances to self-medicate. 3. Avoidance of reminders of the traumatic event, because exposure leads to anxiety. 4. An emotional detachment and numbing, sometimes referred to as ‘dissociation,’ which is experienced as a disconnection from oneself and others. The world feels dreamlike or unreal and in this state one’s memory of specific events can be impaired. Secondary depressive symptoms are very common and may develop into a clinical depressive episode. A variety of theories have evolved to explain symptom production ranging from the psychoanalytical to the cognitive behavioral. Indeed the latter has been influential in establishing one of the mainstays of treatment, cognitive behavioral (trauma focused) therapy as recommended in 2005 by the UK’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE). Neuroscientific fi ndings have identified changes in brain volume and activation in certain parts of the brain. Whether these reflect stress-induced changes in neurobiological systems or inadequate adaptation of neurobiological systems to exposure to severe stressors is still unknown (see Hall 2002). Those changes are in parts of the brain involved in language, memory and emotional regulation. This might explain why PTSD sufferers cannot remember and therefore unable to verbally describe a traumatizing event, and are stuck in a state of hyper-arousal. Indeed there is now evidence for language areas shutting down while a person tries to recall the traumatic event, yet the nonverbal and visual areas of the brain remain active (see Rauch et al 1996). ‘Trauma by Proxy’ is clearly an important theme in Extremely Loud, Falling Man, and A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. In all three novels, the child characters experience this. The condition is caused by having contact with someone who had direct experience of a trauma—which, in each of these books, is the events of September 11. It may also result from witnessing repeated horrifying media images. This is explicitly the case for Justin’s mother, Leanne, in Falling Man, who “everytime she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching”

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(134). Her son Justin and his two friends worry their parents because they take to searching the skies with binoculars for planes; it turns out they are looking out for a person called ‘Bill Lawton’ who is in fact their misheard interpretation of ‘Bin Laden’ (154). All three children are depicted as confused, tearful, and vigilant. In A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, the children’s trauma is compounded by witnessing chronic parental conflict. During a court directed session with a child psychiatrist, four-year-old Viola draws a picture of her family hand-in-hand leaping from the Twin Towers. These descriptions are well observed and supported by research which, in the period after September 11, identified a greater prevalence of depression and PTSD symptoms in adults and children who had indirect exposure to the events described (see Ahern 2002, Marshall and Galeo 2004). However, Sørensen’s assertion that PTSD is characterized by a particular diction described in Falling Man and the Body Artist (2001), “devoid of markers of deixis and an understanding of context” (109) is not authentic. I have never come across this clinically and I wonder whether Sørensen is confusing this linguistic disintegration with that of schizophrenia, where language can break down to the point where meaning is an incomprehensible ‘word salad,’ and vocal fluctuation in tonality is lost. The form of a person’s speech, as well as content, is an important part of a psychiatric assessment since it can provide a strong indicator as to the primary pathology. This is particularly the case with schizophrenia and manic states where thought disorder may occur. Essentially, in these conditions, the logical connection between spoken speech can disintegrate, which is professionally interpreted as a reflection of impaired cognitive processes. Sometimes these connections are just about accessible to the listener because they are loose and maybe based on the sound of the words. This is often the case in manic states. For example, the educated individual on being asked to describe his relationship with his mother could say: “maternal, paternal, infernal . . . Dante.” In contrast, someone with a severe psychomotorly retarded depressive illness responds to questions agonizingly slowly and then very quietly and with no fluctuation of tone. A person with dementia may demonstrate perseveration, that is repeating several times the end of a question which has just been asked and is unable to answer. It appears that literary critics also put an emphasis on linguistic representations but these are viewed as the primary pathology. In contrast, psychiatrists see these speech form changes as the epiphenomena of a primary condition. Bentley’s essay concentrates on the novels Yellow Dog by Martin Amis and Saturday by Ian McEwan. He argues that the former explains its characters within the psychoanalytical paradigm, which has recently come under considerable criticism in critical circles. He cites Seltzer, who in 1997 challenged the assumption that adult behavior can be explained by childhood trauma and abuse. Even then, and certainly now, we have considerable evidence that adverse experiences early in life during critical periods of brain development permanently affect the brain, both structurally and functionally. This may lead to cognitive impairments and

A Psychiatrist’s Opinion of the Neuronovel 179 certainly a higher risk of adult mental health disorders such as anxiety, depression, PTSD and substance misuse. It seems that Freud was right all along but for the wrong reasons. One concern raised by Peacock and Lustig in their introductory essay and echoed by Bentley is the potential misuse of the representation of illness either through deploying it as a metaphor for social or political issues or to suit the story. Bentley, highlighting the character of Baxter in Saturday (who has Huntington’s disease), suggests that the condition carries in this novel a “heavy moral burden” in terms of representation of mental disorders in culture generally (125) I share his concerns because despite Baxter’s depiction as a violent thug, sufferers of Huntington’s do not fulfill this stereotype, although irritability and aggression can occur. Furthermore, this scenario perpetuates a popular prejudice fueled by newspaper headlines, that mental disorder is associated with violence. However, I do not have these same concerns with respect to the character of Lionel Essrog, the sufferer from Tourette’s syndrome in Motherless Brooklyn. Peacock’s essay discusses, with reference to Susan Sontag, the potential for trivialization and disrespect of real people with mental or neuro-psychiatric disorders through, in this particular book, the use of Tourette’s as a metaphor for Brooklyn. My own view is that as long as the condition being depicted is conveyed with sensitivity and accuracy, no harm is done. Quite the contrary: it may help to inform the public and students of mental health about the reality of living with such conditions in a way that no dry text-book could ever achieve. Indeed, this is why I frequently recommend Motherless Brooklyn and The Echo Maker to my medical students and psychiatric trainees, in order to facilitate real understanding and empathy for people who have Tourette’s, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and paranoid delusions. Nonetheless, one way of circumventing this ethical difficulty is by inventing conditions. This is done in Indecision with ‘abulia’ and in The Time Traveller’s Wife with the genetic condition ‘chronodisplacement’. Baker’s essay on the latter raises the anti-psychiatric movement’s concern that non-normative behavior can be too readily pathologized. Most of us would look somewhat askance at someone who claimed to time travel, but in the films and books described this is a metaphor for behaviors and beliefs outside the norm which could include mere political dissention. However, the appropriation of our discipline to serve societal or political ends is and has been a concern for psychiatrists rather than just anti-psychiatrists such as Laing and Foucault (Rissmiller and Rissmiller 2006). In the 1980s the World Psychiatric Association expelled psychiatrists in the former USSR for accepting political dissidents into their asylums and treating them with antipsychotics such as chlorpromazine. Controversies about what ‘conditions’ should be pathologized and incorporated in classificatory systems of mental and behavioral disorders have been taking place for decades. This is a particular issue now with the publication of DSM V in May 2013. For example, there is some debate as to whether high risk states for psychosis

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should be given a diagnostic category, given that there is a low transition rate to frank psychosis and a high potential for natural recovery (Morrison 2012). Many psychiatrists also have concerns about medicalizing normal behavior and emotional states such as bereavement and gambling. I have been charged by the editors with commenting on the accuracy of representation of syndromes in the neuronovels discussed in this book. To do so comprehensively is not possible given the constraints of space. I will therefore confi ne my comments to just a few books and end with some general comments. First, let us consider the two books discussed by Bentley: Saturday and Yellow Dog. Regarding the former, Bentley is unconvinced by the mood lability displayed by the character of Baxter. But mood lability is quite characteristic of Huntington’s. Furthermore, mood can alter very rapidly both in normal and pathological states. Another example of this occurs in the manic state of bipolar disorder (sometimes referred to as manic depression). Bentley is also dubious about the portrayal of the effects of head injury on Xan Meo in Yellow Dog. He suggests that it is inaccurate and unrealistic, particularly with regard to Xan’s patriarchal masculinity and predatory sexuality, (115) which extends to the character’s daughter, and proposes that this is contrived to serve a metaphorical framework. While this may be true, I would make the point that paraphilias, which are intense sexual urges that can include paedophilia, are reported in frontal lobe syndromes. Thus the behavior which Bentley refers to as “patriarchal masculinity” could be the result of loss of frontal lobe cortical executive control which has caused disinhibition and judgement impairment. The consequent presentation could be perceived as primitive and egoistical (Cummings and Trimble 2002) but Xan Meo’s struggle with relearning language and basic skills, together with his wife’s horror at witnessing and coping with his decline is authentic. Powers’ description in The Echo Maker of the effects of head injury and the efforts toward rehabilitation is similarly quite authentic. Admittedly, the cause of Capgras syndrome in the novel is far-fetched, but the description of its effect on the sufferer and his sister is convincing. This is an example of where fiction can be superior to a dry textbook in conveying to students the lived experience. I was particularly impressed, too, at how accurate the portrayal of Mark Schluter is in terms of a man with an evolving and expanding paranoid condition, desperately trying to fi nd an explanatory framework yet remaining perplexed. Overall, the authors discussed in this book seem to have researched their syndromes well and in some cases such as Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn succeed in giving the reader an authentic proxy experience of living an illness. The odd inaccuracy I think can be forgiven when the reader is left with this appreciation. From the above you may have gathered that I am quite an enthusiast for the efforts these authors have made to cross the cultural divide. This is where fiction, the repository of the imagination of those who are prepared to

A Psychiatrist’s Opinion of the Neuronovel 181 research their subject, wins. Marco Roth and some of these essayists express a concern about the future of the novel especially in this new ‘medical-materialist’ world. As long as humanity exists there will be an audience for stories which provide plot and character and which address the existential issues which exercise mankind. Neuroscience cannot yet explain personhood, that state in which we have the capacity to develop coherent narratives which take experience into account. Currently, neuroscience is like an educational toy which challenges our imagination, improves our intellectual skills, makes us ask more questions and even at times makes us wonder. Perhaps in another millennium, it will fully explain the nature of consciousness. On the other hand, we may not be hard wired ever to understand it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahern, Jennifer. 2002. “Televised Images and Psychological Symptoms after the September 11 Terrorist Attacks.” Interpersonal and Biological Processes 65: 289–300. Bentley, Nick. 2013. “Mind and Brain: The Representation of Trauma in Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog and Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” In Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: the Syndrome Syndrome, edited by Tim Lustig and James Peacock, xx–xx, this volume. New York: Routledge. Burn, Stephen J. “Mapping the Syndrome Novel.” In Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: the Syndrome Syndrome, edited by Tim Lustig and James Peacock, xx–xx, this volume. New York: Routledge. Butts, Robert. 2008. Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. http://www. encyclopedia.com. Accessed April 14, 2012. Cummings, J., and M. Trimble. 2002. Concise Guide to NeuroPsychiatry and Behavioral Neurology. Washington: American Psychiatric Publishers Damasio Antonio. 2010 . Self Comes to Mind. New York: Random House. Dawkins, Richard. 1989. The Selfi sh Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DeLillo, Don. 2001. The Body Artist. New York: Scribner. . 2007. Falling Man. New York: Scribner-Simon. Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little. Diski, Jenny. 2004. Stranger on a Train. London: Virago. . 2007. On Trying to Sit Still. London: Virago. . 2008. Skating to Antarctica. London: Virago. . 2009. The Sixties. London: Profi le. Engel, George L. 1977. “The Need for a New Model: a Challenge to Biomedicine.” Science 196: 129–36. Humphreys, N. 2011. Soul Dust: the Magic of Consciousness. Oxford: Princeton University Press. International Classification of Mental and Behavioral Disorders. 1992. Geneva: World Health Organisation. Kelly, Adam. 2013. “From Syndrome to Sincerity: Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision.” In Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: the Syndrome Syndrome, edited by Tim Lustig and James Peacock, xx–xx, this volume. New York: Routledge. Lovett, Lisetta. 2010. The Regulation of Madness from the Medieval Age to the Early Twentieth

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Century. CPD Online: Royal College of Psychiatrists. Lethem, Jonathan. 2003. Motherless Brooklyn. London: Faber and Faber. Lustig, Tim and Peacock, James. 2013. “Introduction.” In Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: the Syndrome Syndrome, edited by Tim Lustig and James Peacock, xx–xx, this volume. New York: Routledge. Marshall, R., and S. Galeo. 2004. “Assessing Mental Health after 9/11.” Journal of Clinical Psychology 65: 37–43. McLaren, Niall. 1998. “A Critical Review of the Biopsychosocial Model.” Australian New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 32: 86–92. Miresco, Marc J. and Laurence J. Kirmayer. 2006. “The Persistence of Mind-Brain Dualism in Psychiatric Reasoning about Clinical Scenarios.” American Journal of Psychiatry 163: 913–18. Morrison, Anthony P. 2012. “Early Detection and Intervention Evaluation for People at Risk of Psychosis: Multisite Randomised Controlled Trial.” British Medical Journal 344: e2233. NICE guidelines. 2005. CG26 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): Quick Reference Guide. Guidance.nice.org.uk/CG26/Quick Ref Guide. Accessed March 19, 2012. Niffenegger, Audrey. 2005. The Time Traveller’s Wife. London: Vintage. Pinker, Steven. 2002. The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature. London: Penguin. Powers, Richard. 2006. The Echo Maker. London: Heinemann. Price, Joanna. 2013. “I wanted unheimlich [ . . . ] but of the right kind. Strangeness and Strangerness without the blank despair:” Trauma and Travel in the Works of Jenny Diski.” In Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: the Syndrome Syndrome, edited by Tim Lustig and James Peacock, xx–xx, this volume. New York: Routledge. Rauch, Scott L. et al. 1996. “A Symptom Provocation Study of PTSD using Positron Emission Tomography and Script-Driven Imagery.” Archives of General Psychiatry 53: 380–87. Rissmiller, David and Joshua Rissmiller. 2006. “Evolution of Antipsychiatry Movement into Mental Health Consumerism.” Psychiatric Services 57: 863–66. Robinson, Daniel N. 1996. Wild Beasts and Idle Humours: The Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ross, Christine. 2006. The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Roth, Marco. 2009. “The Rise of the Neuronovel.” n+1, September 14. Accessed November 21, 2011. http://nplusonemag.com/rise-neuronovel. Smith, R. 1981. Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sontag, Susan. 1970. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Tallis, Raymond. 2011. Aping Mankind: Neuromania , Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of History. Durham: Acumen. Wilkins, Robert. 1964. “Neurosurgical Classic XVII: Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus.” Neurosurgery, March, 240–44. Zimmer, Carl. 2004. Souls Made Flesh. London: Heinemann.

Annotated Bibliography of Primary Materials Nicola Brindley

A Beautiful Mind. 2001. Directed by Ron Howard. Los Angeles: Universal Pictures. Film. Based on the biography of mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., written by Sylvia Nasar. The fi lm addresses the effect that paranoid schizophrenia had upon Nash’s personal and professional life prior to him receiving the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994. Adam. 2009. Directed by Max Mayer. Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight. Film. A romance develops between two young people living in Manhattan, one of whom has Asperger’s syndrome. Adam (Hugh Dancy) fi nds social interaction difficult, but his relationship with new neighbor Beth (Rose Byrne) helps him to engage with the world and pursue a career in astronomy, a subject about which he is passionate. Allan, Clare. 2006. Poppy Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury. Poppy and ‘N’ are day patients at a mental health hospital. ‘N’ never wants to be discharged, but Poppy is convinced that she is well and is desperate to leave. However, in order to escape the system, Poppy must convince people that she is mentally ill so that she can receive the state benefits (or ‘MAD money’) needed to pay for legal aid. Clare Allan spent ten years being treated for mental health issues and her experiences form the inspiration for this pessimistic look at Britain’s care system. Bauer, Ann. 2005. A Wild Ride Up the Cupboards. New York: Scribner. A mother struggles to cope when her four-year-old son begins displaying behavioral traits associated with autism. The novel follows the various diagnoses and treatments offered to the boy as well as the mother’s search for answers within her family’s medical history. Black Swan. 2010. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. Century City: Fox Searchlight Pictures. Film. Psychological thriller set around a production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Ballerina Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) begins to suffer from violent hallucinations as she attempts to engage with the inner darkness needed to play the Black Swan. Byalick, Marcia. 2002. Quit It. New York: Delacorte Press. Young adult fiction told from the perspective of a young girl recently diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome. The novel explores how her experiences at school and her relationships with other people are affected by her condition. Coupland, Douglas. 2010. Player One. London: William Heinemann. Four strangers, including a beautiful young autistic woman named Rachel, fi nd themselves trapped in an airport lounge as the world outside descends into chaos. Dirty Filthy Love. 2004. Directed by Adrian Shergold. London: ITV, September 26. Television broadcast. Recently diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, an architect (Michael Sheen) faces the breakdown of his marriage and the loss of his job. He fi nds new friendships and acceptance at a self-help group.

184 Nicola Brindley Dollhouse. 2009–10. Los Angeles: Fox Broadcasting Company. Television broadcast. A science fiction television series based upon a corporation that rents out human beings (known as ‘Actives’) to wealthy clients. The Actives are programmed with a new personality and set of memories for each mission and wiped clean once the mission is completed. However, one Active named Echo (Eliza Dushku) retains data from previous missions, giving her multiple personalities. Ferris, Joshua. 2010. The Unnamed. New York: Reagan-Little. Lawyer Tim Farnsworth suffers from a compulsion to walk, which he is unable to control. The mysterious medical condition has a detrimental effect upon his ability to work and maintain relationships with others. 50 First Dates. 2004. Directed by Peter Segal. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures. Film. Lucy Whitmore (Drew Barrymore) has anteretrograde amnesia and is unable to form new memories. Each morning she wakes having forgotten the events of the previous day. Henry Roth (Adam Sandler) falls in love with Lucy and tries to win her affections despite knowing that he will be a stranger to her in the morning. Filipacchi, Amanda. 2005. Love Creeps. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Manhattan gallery owner Lynn Gallagher has a stalker; fi nding herself suddenly and inexplicably unable to experience desire she too decides to adopt the practice of stalking as a cure for apathy. A bizarre love triangle ensues. Frankie and Alice. 2010. Directed by Geoff rey Sax. Toronto: Access Motion Pictures. Film. Halle Berry plays Frankie Murdoch, a go-go dancer with dissociative identity disorder in 1970s Los Angeles. Frankie has two alter personalities: a young girl called Genius and a white racist woman named Alice. Franzen, Jonathan. 2001. The Corrections. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The novel follows the lives of a Midwestern family, the Lamberts, through various quarrels and life events. Alfred Lambert’s slow decline into dementia illustrates the debilitating physical and mental effects of Alzheimer’s disease, as well as the impact that the condition has upon other family members. Franzen has written about his own father’s death from Alzheimer’s in his essay, “My Father’s Brain.” Galchen, Rivka. 2008. Atmospheric Disturbances. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The novel’s psychiatrist narrator, Leo Liebenstein, has Capgras syndrome and believes that his wife has been replaced by a near identical impostor. Gale, Patrick. 2007. Notes from an Exhibition. London: Fourth Estate. Rachel Kelly is a talented artist and a mother. The novel explores how Rachel’s bipolar disorder affects her work and the people around her. Girl, Interrupted. 1999. Directed by James Mangold. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures. Film. Based on the 1993 memoir by Susanna Kaysen. Susanna (Winona Ryder) is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder following a failed suicide attempt. Having admitted herself to a mental hospital she makes friends with other residents including Lisa (Angelina Jolie), an unpredictable sociopath. Goldberg, Myla. 2000. Bee Season. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell. A young girl finds unexpected success in a school spelling bee. Her mother has kleptomania and obsessive-compulsive tendencies which intensify as the novel progresses. A film adaptation directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel was released in 2005. Harvey, Samantha. 2009. The Wilderness. London: Jonathan Cape. A retired architect with Alzheimer’s disease looks back at his life as his memories become increasingly confused, fragmented, and unreliable. Hensher, Philip. 2004. The Fit. London: Fourth Estate. John Carrington appears to have a form of autism: he is unable to understand figurative language, fi nds relationships with other people difficult, and his behavior is highly ritualized. When his wife leaves him, John develops a fit of hiccups that lasts for a month.

Annotated Bibliography of Primary Materials 185 House, M.D. 2004–11. Los Angeles: Fox Broadcasting Company. Television broadcast. Medical drama about a misanthropic (and possibly autistic) medical practitioner whose patients suffer from unusual medical conditions including Cushing’s syndrome, Giovannini’s ‘mirror’ syndrome, and Korsakoff ’s syndrome. Hornby, Nick. 1998. About A Boy. London: Gollancz. A novel about the unlikely friendship between a fun-seeking bachelor and a young boy, who, in caring for a depressed and suicidal mother, has exceeded him in maturity. A fi lm adaptation starring Hugh Grant and directed by Chris and Paul Weitz was released in 2002. Hustvedt, Siri. 2010. The Shaking Woman; Or, A History of My Nerves. New York: Henry Holt. Non-fictional account of Hustvedt’s foray into neurology and psychiatry as she attempts to understand her recurrent migraines and occasional violent convulsions. Various diagnoses including ‘conversion syndrome’ and ‘vascular migraine syndrome’ are proposed, though no definite cause is identified. Krauss, Nicole. 2002. Man Walks into a Room. New York: Anchor-Random. A professor at Columbia University develops amnesia after surgery to remove a brain tumor. Unable to settle back into the life he led before, Samson heads off into the desert to take part in some experimental neurological research. Lars and the Real Girl. 2007. Directed by Craig Gillespie. Los Angeles: MetroGoldwyn-Mayer. Film. Lars fi nds social interaction difficult. He begins a relationship with an anatomically correct sex doll named ‘Bianca’ under the delusion that she is a real person. This relationship helps him to come to terms with fears of intimacy stemming from his mother’s death in childbirth and a troubled relationship with his father. After a psychologist recommends that Lars’ family and neighbors humour his delusion, the entire community fi nd themselves transformed by Bianca’s presence. Lightman, Alan. 2000. The Diagnosis. New York: Pantheon. A successful businessman suffers a sudden attack of amnesia, followed by numbness and paralysis. No one can explain the cause of his symptoms. Lethem, Jonathan. 2000. The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss. New York: Vintage. A collection of short stories, essays, and novel excerpts from authors such as Oliver Sacks, Philip K. Dick, Martin Amis and Haruki Murakami. Lethem’s introduction talks of “amnesia fiction” as a distinct genre. McCarthy, Tom. 2006. Remainder. Richmond: Alma Books. Suffering from amnesia as a result of an unnamed traumatic event, the narrator spends the fi nancial compensation awarded to him on staging elaborate reconstructions of his remaining memories and of events that trigger feelings of déjà vu. The narrator becomes obsessed with creating these simulations, since they offer him a place in which he can exercise the control he lacks in everyday life. McCormick, Patricia. 2000. Cut. New York: Scholastic. Young adult fiction about a teenage girl, Callie, who self-harms. Through therapy and the support of friends she begins to address the cause of her behavior. Callie has a number of friends at the treatment facility in which she is placed, including girls with eating disorders and substance abuse issues. Melancholia. 2011. Directed by Lars von Trier. Valby: Nordisk Film. Film. Apocalyptic fi lm which juxtaposes one woman’s depression with Earth’s destruction by a giant planet called Melancholia. Memento. 2000. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Los Angeles: Summit Entertainment. Film. Leonard has anteretrograde amnesia following a violent assault and is unable to make new memories. Using a mixture of polaroid photographs, handwritten notes and tattoos as memory aids he attempts to track down his wife’s killer.

186

Nicola Brindley

Me, Myself and Irene. 2000. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox. Film. Comedy starring Jim Carrey. Charlie (Carrey) is a state trooper with a violent alter personality named Hank. Both personalities compete for the attention of Irene, a woman under arrest for her alleged involvement in a hit-and-run incident. Mercury Rising. 1998. Directed by Harold Becker. Los Angeles: Universal Pictures. Film. Simon, a nine-year-old autistic boy, breaks a complex government code which has been secretly planted in a puzzle book by its creators. Undercover FBI agent Art Jeff ries (Bruce Willis) aims to protect Simon from people who want to kill him in for what he knows. Millet, Lydia. 2000. George Bush, Dark Prince of Love: A Presidential Romance. New York: Simon and Schuster. Rosemary, a woman living in a trailer park, becomes obsessed with President George H. W. Bush and decides to begin stalking him. . 2008. How The Dead Dream. Berkeley: Counterpoint. A real-estate developer becomes obsessed with endangered species and begins breaking into zoos at night so that he can get closer to the animals. Monk. 2002–2009. New York: USA Network. Television broadcast. Detective drama series. Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub) is a private detective with obsessive compulsive disorder. Mozart and the Whale. 2005. Directed by Petter Naess. Los Angeles: Millenium Films. Film. Drama based on the developing romance between two people with Asperger’s syndrome. Isabelle meets Donald at a support group which he runs for people with autism. The fi lm focuses on how their different characters and shared condition affect their relationship. My Own Worst Enemy. 2008. Directed by David Semel. New York: NBC. Television broadcast. Christian Slater plays a man with technologically-induced dissociative identity disorder. Henry Spivey is an ordinary man living in the suburbs and his alter personality, Edward Albright, is a secret agent. Each believes that they are the ‘original’ personality belonging to their shared body. Palahniuk, Chuck. 1996. Fight Club. New York: W. W. Norton. The narrator suffers from recurring insomnia and is addicted to attending self-help groups because they help him to sleep. After meeting a man named Tyler Durden he begins fighting strangers to achieve catharsis. The ‘fight club’ which they create becomes increasingly violent and out of control when it begins to act upon an anti-corporate ideology. At the conclusion of the novel we discover that Tyler Durden is the narrator’s own split personality. A fi lm adaptation directed by David Fincher was released in 1999. Percy, Walker. 1987. The Thanatos Syndrome. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A psychiatrist returns to his hometown and fi nds that many people have undergone a personality change. A contaminated water supply is found to be the cause of the residents’ strange behavior. Powers, Richard. 2009. Generosity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Thassadit is an Algerian refugee who despite witnessing numerous atrocities is always full of happiness and optimism. The novel’s main protagonist, Russell Stone, is Thassa’s teacher on a ‘creative nonfiction’ course. He becomes convinced that her sustained happiness must be the symptom of an underlying medical condition such as hyperthymia or hypomania, possibly a result of trauma or a symptom of bipolar depression. Prozac Nation. 2001. Directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg. New York: Miramax Films. Film. Based on the autobiography by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Teenager Lizzie (Christina Ricci) abuses drugs and lashes out at those close to her as she sinks further into clinical depression. After expensive psychiatric treatment and medication Lizzie gains some measure of stability. Punch-Drunk Love. 2002. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Los Angeles: New Line Cinema. Film. Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) suffers from obsessive

Annotated Bibliography of Primary Materials 187 compulsive disorder, anger management issues, and possibly a form of autism. A surreal romance, the fi lm involves an abandoned harmonium, some frequent fl ier miles and large quantities of chocolate pudding. Rubio, Gwyn Hyman. 1998. Icy Sparks. New York: Viking. Icy Sparks is a young girl with Tourette’s syndrome growing up in Kentucky during the 1950s. Her condition is not understood and she is treated with suspicion by others in the community, even spending some time in a mental institution. By the end of the novel she is an adult working as a therapist to help other children with the same condition. Ruff, Matt. 2003. Set This House in Order. London: Harper Perennial. Andy Gage and his work colleague Penny Driver both have dissociative identity disorder. Andy is able to manage his condition by confi ning the multiple personalities to separate rooms in a house that he has created within his mind. Penny is unaware that she has the condition and frequently blacks out as her personalities fight for dominance. Snow Cake. 2006. Directed by Marc Evans. New York: Weinstein Company. Film. Drama about the meeting between an autistic woman named Linda (Sigourney Weaver) and the stranger who was with her daughter Vivienne when she was killed in a car crash. The two form an unlikely friendship as they come to terms with Vivienne’s death. Temple Grandin. 2010. Directed by Mick Jackson. New York: HBO Films. Television broadcast. A made-for-television fi lm based upon the life of Temple Grandin, an autistic woman who has been influential in promoting the humane treatment of cattle in the livestock industry. Grandin is also responsible for the invention of a ‘squeeze machine’ to help calm autistic people. The Aviator. 2004. Directed by Martin Scorsese. New York: Miramax Films. Film. Biopic based on the life of Howard Hughes, a fi lm producer and record breaking aviator whose life was shaped by obsessive compulsive disorder. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. 2011. Directed by David Fincher. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures. Film. Based on the novel by Stieg Larsson. A Swedish language version directed by Niels Arden Oplev was released in 2009. There is some suggestion that the character of Lisbeth Salander may have a form of autism. The Machinist. 2004. Directed by Brad Anderson. Los Angeles. Paramount Classics. Film. Trevor Reznik has chronic insomnia and suffers from paranoia and hallucinations. He believes that he is being followed by a co-worker, Ivan, whom no one else has ever seen. The Soloist. 2009. Directed by Joe Wright. Universal City: DreamWorks Pictures. Film. Based on the novel of the same name by Steve Lopez. Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) is a talented musician who becomes homeless after contracting schizophrenia and dropping out of school. Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr) is a journalist who tries to get Ayers to seek shelter and medical attention. Each man has a profound effect on the other’s life. Tremblay, Paul G. 2009. The Little Sleep. New York City: Henry Holt. A detective novel about a narcoleptic private detective who suffers from hallucinations. United States of Tara. 2009–11. New York: Showtime. Television broadcast. Tara is a wife and mother with dissociative identity disorder. Her alter personalities include Alice, a 1950s housewife, and Buck, a Vietnam veteran. Wray, John. 2009. Lowboy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Will Heller is a teenager with paranoid schizophrenia. Convinced that the world is about to end, he heads to the subway to cool down his body and prevent the approaching environmental catastrophe. Wretches and Jabberers. 2011. Directed by Gerardine Wurzburg. Washington DC: State of the Art, Inc. Film. Documentary fi lm about two men with autism who travel the world promoting awareness of the condition and learning about the

188 Nicola Brindley lives of other people with autism. Tracy Thresher and Larry Bissonnette grew up excluded from normal schooling and unable to speak. Their lives changed in adulthood when they learned to communicate by typing.

Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials Hannah Merry

Bérubé, Michael. 2005. “Disability and Narrative.” PMLA 120, 2: 568–76. Bérubé explores the relationship between disability and narrative in texts such as Rain Man, Gattaca and superhero comic books. He argues that rereading the representation of cognitively impaired narrators through a disability studies framework allows the reader to question temporality, causality, and self-reflexivity within narrative. He uses The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and The Sound and the Fury to develop his argument. Brown, Kate E. and Kushner, Howard I. 2001. “Eruptive Voices: Coprolalia, Malediction and the Poetics of Cursing.” New Literary History 32, 3: 537–62. Brown and Kushner discuss ‘coprolalia’ or convulsive cursing, often found in people with Tourette’s syndrome. They argue that coprolalia is a “self-speaking expression of the speaker’s circumstances while escaping his intentions.” Cursing disturbs the immediacy of the voice, disrupting meaning and the autonomous, individual self. Burn, Stephen J. 2009. “Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street and the Science of Mind.” Modern Fiction Studies 55, 2: 349–68. Burn argues that as new discoveries are made in the realm of science and technology, scientific terms are increasingly coming into common usage, so that our understanding of the world is increasingly shaped by scientific language. He re-examines DeLillo’s Great Jones Street and explores how this scientific understanding of the world informs character development, and how neuroscience has changed the relationship between the self and the world. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Caruth’s work is an important contribution to the field of trauma theory. She discusses the way in which the wide-spread experience of trauma serves to disrupt notions of history based on experience and reference. Caruth draws on Freud’s work on trauma, the work of de Man, Kleist and Kant, and Lacan’s reinterpretation of Freud’s narrative of the dream of the burning child to argue that the notion of trauma permits historical understanding of experiences which are not immediately present. Cheever, Abigail. 2000. “Prozac Americans: Depression, Identity, and Selfhood.” Twentieth-Century Literature 46, 3: 346–68. Cheever examines various ways of understanding the identity of people with depression. She questions whether depression is an illness, an identity (Cheever uses gay and Jewish identity as an example throughout) or a way of life, and examines notions of ‘curing’ the disease. Cheever applies these ideas to a reading of Walker Percy’s novel, The Thanatos Syndrome. Draaisma, Douwe. 2009. “Echoes, Doubles, and Delusions: Capgras Syndrome in Science and Literature.” Style 43: 429–41. Draaisma argues that neurology has shifted from studying individuals (as in the case of the original case studies that

190 Hannah Merry lead to the recognition of Tourette’s, Asperger’s, Alzheimer’s etc. as diseases) to groups of people with the same syndrome. Draaisma is particularly interested in Capgras syndrome, and demonstrates how Richard Powers uses the two neurologist characters in The Echo Maker to explore this shift in emphasis. Draaisma, Douwe. 2009. “Stereotypes of Autism.” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. 264: 1475–80. Draaisma examines various examples of media representation of autism, concentrating in particular on the autistic savant, and discusses how the enduring popularity of these stereotypes distorts our understanding of the reality of autistic spectrum disorders. Enns, Anthony. 2006. “Media, Drugs, and Schizophrenia in the Works of Philip K. Dick.” Science Fiction Studies 33, 1: 68–88. Enns draws on postmodern theory to analyse the figure of the schizophrenic in Dick’s work, creating parallels between the schizophrenic and the androids that appear in the same texts. Using posthumanist and cyberculture theory to support his argument, Enns suggests that both of these figures embody the unstable boundaries between the self and the world. Enns discusses the extent to which Dick sees this as a response to the contemporary electronic media environment, and more generally explores notions of consciousness in Dick’s writings. Feder, Lillian. 1980. Madness in Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Feder examines representations of madness in literature, ranging from ancient Greek myth to contemporary poetry, fiction, and drama. She argues that madness is often used as a means of self-revelation in these works, and suggests that literary representation of madness both reflects and challenges cultural assumptions about mental health. Fleissner, Jennifer L. 2009. “Symptomatology and the Novel.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, 3: 387–92. Fleissner explores Lethem’s assertion that neurology has replaced psychoanalysis as the authoritative paradigm in the contemporary novel, and uses Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn to explore differing understandings of the symptom on the part of these two discourses. She argues that narrator Lionel’s Tourettic tics become increasingly meaningful throughout the novel, not for psycho-biographical reasons, but because of the effects they have on the reader. Gilman, Sander. 1988. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gilman draws on his earlier work on the history of stereotypes to examine representations of illness and disease. The book examines representation of madness through history, the figure of the therapist, the schizophrenic, the AIDS patient, and art by the mentally ill. Gilman demonstrates that images of illness have persisted over time, and points to our need to organize a place within a chaotic world which is separate from that of the diseased Other. Gold, Steven N. 2004. “Fight Club: A Depiction of Contemporary Society as Dissociogenic.” Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 5, 2: 13–34. Gold demonstrates how the narrator’s dissociation in Fight Club reflects the interpersonal disconnectedness and fragmented sense of self encouraged by contemporary social forces. He distinguishes this kind of dissociation from clinical manifestations of the condition, arguing that the former is a form of “normative” dissociation suffered by many people in contemporary Western society. Goldberg, Amos. 2006. “Trauma, Narrative, and Two Forms of Death.” Literature and Medicine 25, 1: 122–43. Goldberg examines the relationship between trauma, identity and narrative, drawing on previous work by Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra and others to argue that stories narrated by victims of traumatic events represent the point at which trauma is “framed” so that it does not lead to symbolic death through the victim’s subjection to the annihilator’s signifier. Goldberg uses the example of Holocaust survivors whose trauma narratives

Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials 191 allowed for the reassertion of Jewish identity in the face of the Nazis’ continued destruction of this identity. Hartman, Geoff rey. 2004. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.” PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. Accessed March 30, 2012. http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/hartman-on_traumatic_knowledge_and_literary_stud. Hartman draws on psychoanalytic theories and literary practice to explore the relationship between traumatic knowledge and literature. Using examples from twentieth century fiction, poetry and fi lms, he discusses the split between language and traumatic experience, and the problem of representing trauma in literature. Hirstein, William. 2005. Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation. Cambridge, MA: Bradford-MIT Press. Hirstein studies the tendency in people with various neurological syndromes such as Korsakoff’s syndrome, anosognosia, split-brain syndrome, schizophrenia, Anton’s syndrome and Alzheimer’s to confabulate —that is, to make up answers or explanations and believe them to be true. Hirstein draws on the fields of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy to demonstrate how confabulation illuminates human thought processes. Johnson, Gary. 2008. “Consciousness as Content: Neuronarratives and the Redemption of Fiction.” Mosaic 41, 1: 169–84. Johnson explores the emergent subgenre of ‘neuronarratives’—works of fiction that take their prominent themes from advances in cognitive science. He argues that neuronarratives allow novelists to explore consciousness as “content” and to reassess the value of fiction. Johnson draws examples from David Lodge’s novel Thinks . . . and Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2. Kravitz, Bennett. 2003. “The Culture of Disease or the Dis-ease of Culture in Motherless Brooklyn and Eve’s Apple.” Journal of American Culture 26, 2: 171–79. Kravitz uses the examples of Tourette’s syndrome and anorexia to argue that diseases have cultural components and roots, and cannot be treated without reference to culture. He uses this reading to discuss Lionel’s Tourette’s syndrome in Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn and Ruth’s anorexia in Rosen’s Eve’s Apple. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. LaCapra examines the problems that trauma poses for historical representation and understanding, through the examination of historical events such as the Holocaust. He applies psychoanalytic notions of ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ trauma to literary writing about trauma, and examines the psychological after affects of trauma in both individual survivors and wider culture. Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge. Luckhurst explores ideas of cultural memory within trauma studies, arguing that trauma is a major component in contemporary Western understandings of the self. He examines these ideas in a wide range of cultural forms, including the novels of Toni Morrison and Stephen King, the art of Tracey Emin and Tracey Moffat, and the fi lms of David Lynch. Murray, Stuart. 2006. “Autism and the Contemporary Sentimental: Fiction and the Narrative Fascination of the Present.” Literature and Medicine 25, 1: 24–45. Murray examines contemporary representations of autism and outlines a number of stock autistic figures such as the savant and the autistic child. Both of these figures, he argues, are used to impart a lesson to the non-impaired characters: in disability narratives, the encounter with difference traditionally forces a positive revaluation. Nochimson, Martha P. 1997. “Amnesia ‘R’ Us: the Retold Melodrama, Soap Opera, and the Representation of Reality.” Film Quarterly 50, 3: 27–38. Nochimson examines the representation of amnesia in contemporary soap operas, which often make reference to dissociative identity disorder or ‘personality fragments’

192 Hannah Merry in order to contrast the characters’ ‘normal’ behavior with that of the repressed self. She argues that although this is often used to question social norms there is a patriarchal bias in melodramatic conventions. Ohmann, Richard. 1983. “The Shaping of a Canon: US Fiction, 1960–1975.” Critical Inquiry 10, 1: 199–223. Ohmann discusses the prevalence of fiction dealing with illnesses in this period and suggests that such fictions perpetuated the assumption that neurosis had an individual rather than a social origin, despite particular neuroses often being closely tied to a particular time or mood in American society. Olsen, Lance. 1986. “Diagnosing Fantastic Autism: Kafka, Borges, Robbe-Grillet.” Modern Language Studies 16, 3: 35–43. Olsen argues that the isolated states of the characters in the works of Kafka, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet can be read as a form of fantastical autism, where the characters are trapped in an ‘internal’ reality concerned with introspection, hallucinations and daydreams and unable to relate to ‘external’ reality. Olsen argues that trauma disrupts communal, chronological notions of time, language and meaning, resulting in short fragmentary stories. Richardson, Alan. 2010. The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Richardson applies contemporary cognitive theory to Romantic literature in order to demonstrate how developments in neuroscience can transform our understanding of literary history. He explores such issues as the Romantic imagination, linguistic theory, fictional representations of the mind, sibling incest, cognitive development psychology and the representation of female speech. Richardson argues that rather than being a departure from critical approaches to literature, cognitive theory provides a compliment to them. Ross, Christine. 2006. The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Ross examines the role of art in the articulation of depression in Western society. For Ross, art challenges our understanding of depression in addressing a depressed spectator, challenging our understanding of depression, and performing an aesthetic detachment that reflects the viewer’s own lack of connection and disengagement. She argues that art addresses a depressed spectator, and transforms this disengagement into a form of disclosure which ultimately allows the artist to reach the viewer. Schleifer, Ronald. 2001. “The Poetics of Tourette Syndrome: Language, Neurobiology, and Poetry.” New Literary History 32, 3: 563–84. Schleifer examines the relationship between the seemingly meaningless tics of Tourette’s syndrome and Greimas’ description of poetry as a “primal cry.” Through an analysis of Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, Schleifer argues that poetry’s use of repetition and rhymes, its fascination with sounds and rhythm, mirrors Tourette’s syndrome. For a more recent and extended discussion of neurobiology and culture, see Schleifer’s Intangible Materialism: the Body, Scientifi c Knowledge, and the Power of Language (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sontag discusses the way in which diseases such as cancer and tuberculosis are used as metaphors for personal psychological traits. By suggesting that illness is caused by repression, literary texts and wider cultural discourses shame patients and erase actual experiences. Sontag, Susan. 1989. AIDS and its Metaphors. London: Penguin. This book is a continuation of Sontag’s work in Illness as Metaphor. Sontag now argues that the stigma of cancer has been transferred to the AIDS epidemic. Media representation of the groups mainly affected during the early years of the epidemic

Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials 193 (homosexuals and intravenous drug users) encouraged the view that illness was a result of ‘high risk’ behavior and therefore the patient’s `fault’. Sørensen, Bent. 2006. “Jewishness and Identity in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn.” 1–7. www.hum.aau.dk/~i12bent/Lethem.doc. Sørenson contends that Lethem uses Tourette’s syndrome as a master metaphor for postmodern American society, and examines the Tourettic narrator’s problems with constructing a stable identity for himself within these conditions. He argues that Lionel progresses from defi ning himself exclusively in terms of his syndrome and instead fi nds for himself a Jewish identity. Stiles, Anne. 2006. “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and the Double Brain.” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 46, 4: 879–901. Stiles traces the inspiration for Stevenson’s novella to two famous French case studies of dual personality, which were believed at the time to be caused by bilateral brain hemisphere asymmetry. She argues that Stevenson anticipated Freudian psychoanalysis, and that the story serves as a critique of the nineteenth century’s assumptions about the diagnosis and classification of medical subjects. Tabbi, Joseph. 2002. Cognitive Fictions. Electronic Mediations, 8. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tabbi analyses contemporary literature in the wake of developments in cognitive science and systems theory, arguing that literature must fi nd its place in a new technological environment. He examines work by Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers and Paul Auster, amongst others, to demonstrate how authors represent consciousness in narrative forms. Timmer, Nicoline. Do You Feel it Too? The Post-postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millenium. 2010. Amsterdam: Rodopi. A useful discussion of the notion of the post-postmodern. Timmer analyzes works by David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. Winslow, Rosemary. 2004. “Troping Trauma: Conceiving /of/ Experiences of Speechless Terror.” The Journal of Advanced Composition 24, 3: 607–33. Winslow re-examines trauma fiction and survivor testimonies in the wake of recent trauma theory, exploring the language and metaphors found in the unrepresentable ‘gaps’ of these texts. She argues that common tropes and metaphors are used in order to allow a non-traumatized audience to relate to the traumatized subject’s ‘world,’ not because survivors are unable to write about trauma in non-metaphorical ways. Wood, Mary E. 2004. “‘I’ve Found Him!’: Diagnostic Narrative in The DSM-IV Casebook.” Narrative 12, 2: 195–220. Wood examines the extent to which ‘narrative’ is present in the DSM-IV case studies. She argues that these case studies, which are designed to present the history of a patient in order to train medical professionals in diagnostic techniques, are actually narratives that rely on interpretation. In spite of the Casebook’s insistence on a single ‘correct’ diagnosis, the case studies allow for alternative meanings and diagnoses. In order to illustrate her point, Wood uses four case studies in which ‘schizophrenia’ is diagnosed. Young, Allan. 1995. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Young examines PTSD in Vietnam veterans, and then moves back through time, exploring the development of the disease from earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. Young argues that PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomenon, but that it is a cultural product created through the treatment and diagnosis process Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Zunshine reexamines texts such as Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Dalloway, and Lolita in order to explore the extent to which we read character motivations based on their movements and body

194 Hannah Merry language. She argues that our ability to make inferences about people’s mental states based on their behavior is so ingrained in us that we do it for both real and fictional people, whether they are in front of us or just being spoken about.

Glossary

ABULIA (ABOULIA). “Loss of will power, as a mental disorder” (OED, dated to 1848). See Kelly’s chapter in this volume. ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE. Both DSM-IV and ICD-10 classify this disease among the organic mental disorders and as one of several varieties of dementia. In fact, according to DSM-IV, “the diagnosis can be made only when other etiologies for dementia have been ruled out” (154). In DSM-IV’s terms: “The essential feature of a dementia is the development of multiple cognitive deficits that include memory impairment and at least one of the following cognitive disturbances: aphasis, apraxia, agnosia, or a disturbance in executive functioning” (148). Alzheimer’s is, according to ICD-10, a “primary degenerative cerebral disease of unknown etiology, with characteristic neuropathological and neurochemical features.” It is “usually insidious in onset and develops slowly but steadily over a period of years” (47). DSM-IV distinguishes between “Early Onset,” occurring before the age of 65, and “Late Onset,” which happens after 65 (148). AMNESIA. See DISSOCIATIVE AMNESIA. ASPERGER’S SYNDROME. DSM-IV and ICD-10 classify this, like autism, among the disorders of psychological development. DSM-IV says that the essential features of Asperger’s syndrome include “severe and sustained impairment in social interaction” and “the development of restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, and activities” (80). ICD-10 states that “the disorder differs from autism primarily in that there is no general delay or retardation in language or in cognitive development” (ICD-10 258), although, as DSM-IV notes, “more subtle aspects of social communication (e.g., typical give-and-take in conversation) may be affected” (80). AUTISTIC DISORDER (or AUTISM). Like Asperger’s syndrome, DSM-IV and ICD-10 classify this among the disorders of psychological development. According to DSM-IV, autistic disorder is characterized by “the presence of markedly abnormal or impaired development in social interaction and communication and a markedly restricted repertoire of activity and interests. Manifestations of the disorder vary greatly depending on the

196 Glossary developmental level and chronological age of the individual” (70). Unlike Asperger’s, there may be “delay in, or total lack of, the development of spoken language” (70). DSM-IV states that individuals with autistic disorder “have restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities. There may be an encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus” (70). ICD-10 notes that autism is usually “manifest before the age of 3 years” (253). See Burn’s chapter in this volume. BIPOLAR DISORDER (also known as bipolar affective disorder and manic-depressive disorder). Both DSM-IV and ICD-10 classify this condition among the mood (or affective) disorders. For DSM-IV the essential feature of bipolar disorder is “a clinical course that is characterized by the occurrence of one or more Manic Episodes [ . . . ] or Mixed Episodes [ . . . ] Often individuals have also had one or more Major Depressive Episodes” (382). Similarly, ICD-10 says that it “is characterized by repeated [ . . . ] episodes in which the patient’s mood and activity levels are significantly disturbed, this disturbance consisting on some occasions of an elevation of mood and increased energy and activity (mania or hypomania), and on others of a lowering of mood and decreased energy and activity (depression)” (116). DSM-IV provides detailed descriptions of the various episodes. A ‘manic’ episode is “a distinct period during which there is an abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood” (357). A ‘mixed’ episode mixes manic and major depressive characteristics (362), and a ‘major’ depressive episode constitutes “a period of at least 2 weeks during which there is either depressed mood or the loss of interest or pleasure in nearly all activities” (349) plus at least four other symptoms including “changes in appetite or weight, sleep and psychomotor activity; decreased energy; feelings of worthlessness or guilt; difficulty thinking, concentrating, or making decisions; or recurrent thoughts of death or suicidal ideation, plans, or attempts” (349). See Lovett’s chapter in this volume. CAPGRAS SYNDROME. This condition is not described in DSM-IV. Neither is it described in ICD-10, although Capgras syndrome appears to share a number of features with depersonalization-derealization syndrome, in which “the sufferer complains that his or her mental activity, body, and/ or surroundings are changed in their quality, so as to be unreal, remote, or automatized.” In such cases, the patient’s surroundings may be experienced as “a stage on which people are acting contrived roles” (172). See chapters by Burn, Lovett and Lustig in this volume. DE CLÉRAMBAULT’S SYNDROME. DSM-IV refers to this condition as ‘Erotomania’ and classifies it as a “Delusional Disorder” of the subtype “Erotomanic” (324). The main symptoms are described as follows: “This subtype applies when the central theme of the delusion is that another person is in love with the individual. The delusion often concerns idealized romantic love and spiritual union rather than sexual attraction. The person about whom

Glossary 197 their conviction is held is usually of higher status (e.g., a famous person or a superior at work), but can be a complete stranger” (324). This condition is not described in ICD-10. See the Introduction to this volume. DEPRESSION. A complex condition with a variety of causes (reactive, postnatal) and degrees (mild, moderate, severe). Unlike bipolar disorder, according to DSM-IV, the clinical course of a sufferer from depression describes “one or more Major Depressive Episodes [ . . . ] without a history of Manic, Mixed, or Hypomanic Episodes” (369). A ‘major’ depressive episode “is a period of at least 2 weeks during which there is either depressed mood or the loss of interest or pleasure in nearly all activities” (349). Similarly, ICD-10 notes that depressive episodes are characterized by “depressed mood, loss of interest and enjoyment, and reduced energy leading to increased fatiguability and diminished activity.” Other symptoms include “reduced concentration and attention,” “reduced self-esteem and self-confidence,” “ideas of guilt and unworthiness,” “bleak and pessimistic views of the future,” “ideas or acts of self-harm or suicide,” “disturbed sleep” and “diminished appetite” (119). See Price’s chapter in this volume. DISSOCIATIVE AMNESIA (formerly psychogenic amnesia). DSM-IV says that this condition “most commonly presents as a retrospectively reported gap or series of gaps in recall for aspects of the individual’s life history. These gaps are usually related to traumatic or extremely stressful events. Some individuals may have amnesia for episodes of self-mutilation, violent outbursts, or suicide attempts” (520). ICD-10 classifies this among neurotic, stress-related, and somatoform disorders. Dissociative disorders as a whole are characterized by “a partial or complete loss of the normal integration between memories of the past, awareness of identity and immediate sensations, and control of bodily movements” (151). In dissociative amnesia, “the main feature is loss of memory, usually of important recent events, which is not due to organic mental disorder and is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness or fatigue.” Like DSM-IV, ICD-10 stresses the fact that “the amnesia is usually centered on traumatic events, such as accidents or unexpected bereavements, and is usually partial and selective” (153). The disorder is to be distinguished from amnesic syndrome, which is organically induced “by alcohol or other psychoactive substances” (81). See chapters by Burn and Peacock in this volume. DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER (DID). According to DSM-IV, “the essential feature of Dissociative Identity Disorder is the presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states (Criterion A) that recurrently take control of behavior (Criterion B). There is an inability to recall important personal information, the extent of which is too great to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness (Criterion C). The disturbance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance or a general medical condition (Criterion D)” (526). Dissociative identity disorder “reflects a failure to integrate various aspects of identity, memory, and consciousness.

198

Glossary

Each personality state may be experienced as if it has a distinct personal history, self-image, and identity, including a separate name” (526). ICD-10 describes a variety of dissociative disorders, the “common theme” of which is “a partial or complete loss of the normal integration between memories of the past, awareness of identity and immediate sensations, and control of bodily movements” (151). Such disorders impair the patient’s ability to exercise “conscious and selective control” over memories and sensations. They are “presumed to be ‘psychogenic’ in origin, being associated closely in time with traumatic events, insoluble and intolerable problems, or disturbed relationships.” (DSM-IV, specifically, observes that DID is frequently linked with “severe physical and sexual abuse, especially during childhood” [527]). According to ICD-10, dissociative disorders are sometimes referred to as ‘conversion’ disorders, implying that “the problems and conflicts that the individual cannot solve” are “somehow transformed into symptoms” (152). See Peacock’s chapter and Lustig and Peacock’s Introduction to this volume. HUNTINGTON’S DISEASE. This condition, according to DSM-IV, “is an inherited progressive degenerative disease of cognition, emotion, and movement. The disease affects men and women equally and is transmitted by a single autosomal dominant gene on the short arm of chromosome 4” (165). The onset of Huntington’s disease “is often heralded by insidious changes in behavior and personality, including depression, irritability, and anxiety” (165). ICD-10 states that symptoms also include “involuntary choreiform movements, typically of the face, hands, and shoulders” as well as “depression, anxiety, or frank paranoid illness, accompanied by a personality change.” Huntington’s is therefore described alongside other causes of organic mental disorder—specifically dementia—as the result of “a widespread degeneration of the brain” (53–54). See chapters by Bentley and Lovett in this volume. OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER (OCD). DSM-IV describes this condition as characterized by “recurrent obsessions or compulsions [ . . . ] that are severe enough to be time consuming (i.e., they take more than 1 hour a day) or cause marked distress or significant impairment.” It is not due to effects of a substance or a “general medical condition” (456). Obsessions are “persistent ideas, thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced as intrusive and inappropriate and that cause marked anxiety or distress” (457). Compulsions are “repetitive behaviors (e.g., hand washing, ordering, checking) or mental acts (e.g., praying, counting, repeating words silently) the goal of which is to prevent or reduce anxiety or distress, not to provide pleasure or gratification” (457). See Lovett’s chapter in this volume. POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER. According to DSM-IV, “the essential feature of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is the development of characteristic symptoms following exposure to an extreme traumatic stressor involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or

Glossary 199 threatened death or serious injury, or other threat to one’s physical integrity; or witnessing an event that involves death, injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of another person; or learning about unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat of death or injury experience by a family member or other close associate” (463). Similarly, ICD-10 states that this disorder “arises as a delayed and/or protracted response to a stressful event or situation [ . . . ] of an exceptionally threatening or catastrophic nature.” ICD-10 adds that “personality traits” or a “previous history of neurotic illness” may be predisposing factors in that they “lower the threshold for the development of the syndrome or aggravate its course.” Symptoms include “episodes of repeated reliving of the trauma in intrusive memories (‘flashbacks’) or dreams [ . . . ] a sense of ‘numbness’ [ . . . ] detachment from other people, unresponsiveness to surroundings, anhedonia, and avoidance of activities and situations reminiscent of the trauma” (147–48). See chapters by Bentley, Lovett, Price and Sørensen in this volume. SCHIZOPHRENIA. According to DSM-IV, there are various subtypes of schizophrenia: paranoid, disorganized, catatonic, undifferentiated, and residual (299). Likewise, for ICD-10, schizophrenia is one of the delusional disorders but is itself a plural category. “The schizophrenic disorders are characterized in general by fundamental and characteristic distortions of thinking and perception, and by inappropriate or blunted affect. Clear consciousness and intellectual capacity are usually maintained, although certain cognitive deficits may evolve” (86). DSM-IV says that there are ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ symptoms: ‘positive’ denotes “an excess or distortion of normal functions” and “negative” reflects “a diminution or loss of normal functions” (299). According to ICD-10, disturbances associated with the schizophrenic disorders involve “the most basic functions that give the normal person a feeling of individuality, uniqueness, and self-direction.” The patient’s thoughts, feelings and actions “are often felt to be known to or shared by others, and explanatory delusions may develop, to the effect that natural or supernatural forces are at work” (86). Other symptoms include hallucinations and other disturbances of perception. In some cases “peripheral and irrelevant features of a total concept [ . . . ] are brought to the fore and utilized in place of those that are relevant” (86–87). See chapters by Baker, Lovett and Peacock in this volume. SYNDROME. In pathology, “a concurrence of several symptoms in a disease; a set of such concurrent symptoms” (OED, fi rst use dated to 1541). Also, “in recent use, a characteristic combination of opinions, behavior, etc.” (OED, fi rst use dated to 1953). TOURETTE’S DISORDER (or syndrome). According to DSM-IV: “The essential features of Tourette’s Disorder are multiple motor tics and one or more vocal tics (Criterion A). These may appear simultaneously or at different periods during the illness. The tics occur many times a day, recurrently throughout a period of more than 1 year. During this period, there is

200

Glossary

never a tic-free period of more than 3 consecutive months (Criterion B). The onset of the disorder is before age 18 years (Criterion C)” (111). Tics are not caused by substances or a “general medical condition” like Huntington’s (111). ICD-10 classifies ‘de la Tourette’s syndrome’ among the disorders of childhood and adolescence, and specifically as “a form of tic disorder in which there are, or have been, multiple motor tics and one or more vocal tics.” These tics “are often multiple with explosive repetitive vocalizations, throat-clearing, and grunting, and there may be the use of obscene words or phrases” (284). DSM-IV stresses that “coprolalia, a complex vocal tic involving the uttering of obscenities, is present in only a small minority of individuals (less than 10%) and is not required for a diagnosis” (111). See chapters by Lovett and Peacock in this volume. TRAUMA. In pathology, “a wound, or external bodily injury in general” (OED, dated to 1693). In psychoanalysis and psychiatry, “a psychic injury, esp. one caused by emotional shock the memory of which is repressed and remains unhealed; an internal injury, esp. to the brain, which may result in a behavioral disorder of organic origin” (OED, dated to 1894; ‘traumatic’ in this sense is dated to 1889 and ‘traumatize’ to 1949). Also “in general and fig. use” (OED, from 1977). See chapters by Baker, Bentley and Price in this volume.

Contributors

Brian Baker is Lecturer in English Literature at Lancaster University, UK. He researches and publishes in several fields, including contemporary British fiction, science fiction, London fictions, masculinities, and film studies. His publications include Literature and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (with John H. Cartwright, 2005) and Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945–2000 (2006). Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University, UK. His main research interests are in twentieth-century literature and literary and cultural theory, and more specifically in the connections between postmodernism, postcolonialism and contemporary fiction and culture. He has published two monographs: Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (2007) and Contemporary British fiction (2008). He has also had several journal articles published on post-World War II literature and culture. He is member of the Executive Committee of the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies. Martyn Bracewell is Senior Lecturer in Neurology and Neuroscience in the Schools of Medical Sciences and Psychology, Bangor University; and Consultant Neurologist to the Walton Centre for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Liverpool, and the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board in North Wales. He has a longstanding interest in how the brain represents sensory information and the control of complex behaviour. He is interested in understanding how neurological damage affects these functions, and in how this knowledge can improve neurological rehabilitation strategies. Nicola Brindley is a doctoral student at Keele University, UK, under the supervision of Tim Lustig and James Peacock. Tracing a route from organicism to complex systems theory, her thesis examines representations of social and biological complexity within a number of nineteenthcentury and contemporary American novels. She is the author of a recent article on Richard Powers, complexity and the posthuman.

202 Contributors Stephen J. Burn is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northern Michigan University in the USA, specialising in contemporary American fiction. His publications include David Foster Wallace’s Infi nite Jest: A Reader’s Guide (2003) and Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (2008). He is also the editor of Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers (2008) and Conversations with David Foster Wallace (2011). Adam Kelly is an Irish Research Council CARA Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and University College Dublin. His research interests include American literature, contemporary fiction, literary theory, and the history of ideas. His fi rst monograph, American Fiction in Transition: Observer-Hero Narrative, the 1990s, and Postmodernism, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2013. He is currently working on a second project entitled “Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the New Sincerity.” Lisetta Lovett was a consulting psychiatrist and Senior Lecturer at Keele University, UK, where she led the Medical Humanities programme at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Now retired, she is pursuing her interest in history. With Alannah Tomkins, who is also at Keele, she is co-authoring a book on the history of medicine, due for publication in 2013. T.J, Lustig is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at Keele University, UK. As well as editing the Oxford University Press edition of The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories, he is the author of Henry James and the Ghostly (1994), the novel Doubled Up, Or, My Life as the Back End of a Pantomime Horse (1992) and several articles on authors including Tim O’Brien and Hannah Crafts. He has recently completed a book about Thomas Malory. Hannah Merry is a doctoral student at Keele University, UK under the supervision of James Peacock and Tim Lustig. Her thesis explores representations of dissociative identity disorder in contemporary American fiction and the metaphorical uses to which authors put this disorder. James Peacock is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literatures at Keele University, UK. He has published monographs on Paul Auster and Jonathan Lethem, and is working on an AHRC-funded project called “Brooklyn Fictions: the Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age.” Joanna Price is Senior Lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. Her research interests are mainly in late twentieth century and twenty-fi rst century American literature. She is particularly interested in questions of personal and cultural memory, mourning and trauma,

Contributors 203 as they are explored in recent fiction, autobiography and travel memoir. She is the author of Understanding Bobbie Ann Mason (2000). Bent Sørensen is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of Culture and Global Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark, where he teaches American literature, cultural studies and theory. He is President of The PsyArt Foundation, which promotes the psychological study of the arts, and the author of Passion Spent: Love, Identity and Reason in the Tales of E.A. Poe (2008), as well as articles on topics including the Beats, Jonathan Lethem, Freudian psychoanalysis and trauma theory. Patricia Waugh is a Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK. She has researched in and published widely on twentieth-century literature, relations between modernism and postmodernism, women’s writing and feminist theory, utopianism, literary criticism and theory, and literature, philosophy, and science. She is the author of, among many other book publications, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1984), Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (1989), and Revolutions of the Word: Intellectual History and Twentieth Century Literature (1997).

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Index

‘n’ refers to notes while ‘g’ refers to the glossary defi nitions

A Abu Ghraib (prison), 139 abulia, 1, 12, 54, 58, 64, 172, 179, 195g Afghanistan, 5, 138 Agger, Michael, review of Kunkel’s Indecision, 55, 63 Aharoni, Eyal, 9 Ahern, Jennifer, “Televised Images and Psychological Symptoms,” 178 AIDS, 10, 145, 190, 196 akrasia, 26 Alderson, David, “Saturday’s Enlightenment,” 127n4 alienation, 53, 139, 140, 163; Capgras syndrome as metaphor for, 138, 140, 163; and capitalism, 10; and trauma, 100–1 alienists, 173, 174 Alphen, Ernst Van, The Rhetoric of Sincerity, 61 Alzheimer’s disease (AD), 167, 184, 191, 195g American Beauty (fi lm), 91 American Psychiatric Association, 18, 146, 149 Amis, Kingsley, 24 Amis, Martin, 11; Experience, 120; “The Lonely Voice of the Crowd,” 120; Money, 21, 26; Time’s Arrow, 25; Yellow Dog, 12–13, 115, 117–23, 161, 163, 178, 180 amnesia, 37, 43, 167, 184, 185, 191, 197g; and Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, 73, 75, 77–8. See also memory Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, 76

anorexia, 19, 191 anti-psychiatry, 91, 146, 179. See also Laing, R. D. anxiety, 48, 92–4, 127, 177, 179, 198; cultural, 119, 126 aphasia, 105, 109 apocalytic events, 88–90 Arnold, Edward, 173 Arnold, Matthew: Culture and Anarchy, 125, 127n3, 162; “On Dover Beach,” 125, 161; “Literature and Science,” 3 Asperger’s syndrome, 104, 113, 183, 186, 190, 195g Atta, Mohammed, 107 Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), 18 Atwood, Margaret, review of Powers’ The Echo Maker, 136 Augé, Marc, Non-places, 89 Auster, Paul: Ghosts, 103; Leviathan, 103; New York Trilogy, 103 authenticity, 56–8, 61, 64, 65, 74, 162 autism, 1, 43, 101, 190, 191, 192, 195g; fictional representations, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188; in Foer Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 103–4

B Baker, Brian, 12, 83–95, 165, 166, 179 Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination, 84 Bal, Mieke, The Rhetoric of Sincerity, 61 Balzac, Honoré de, 32, 136 Barker, A.L., 24 Barth, John, 11, 103; Giles Goat-Boy, 42; Once Upon a Time, 42, 48n9

206 Index Barthelme, Donald, 11; “Brain Damage,” 36 Beckett, Samuel, 24, 26 Begley, Adam, “Detective Yarn with a Twist,” 68 behaviorism, 17 Belsey, Catherine, Critical Practice, 123 Bennett, Tony, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” 85–6 Bentham, Jeremy, 3 Bentley, Nick, 12, 115–29, 161, 176, 178, 179, 180 bereavement, 148, 153, 180, 197 Bertens, Hans, The Idea of the Postmodern, 47n1 Bethlem, 173 Bildungsroman, 54–5, 56, 60, 61–2, 70; see also ‘coming-of-age novel’ biological determinism, 20, 72, 95, 124, 135, 171 biologism, 4, 28 biomedicine, 19, 25, 28, 160 bipolar disorder, 180, 184, 186, 196g Birkerts, Sven, “The Esquire Conversation: Jonathan Franzen,” 43 Birnbaum, Robert, “Birnbaum v. Jonathan Lethem,” 67 Biswanger, Ludwig, 29 Bleuler, Eugen, 29; Dementia Praecox, 30 Bleuler, Manfred, The Schizophrenic Disorders, 29 Bloom, Sandra, 100, 104, 106, 110, 176 Bracewell, Martyn, 13, 160–8 Bradley, Arthur, The New Atheist Novel, 45 brain: and Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, 170; and human behavior, 160; and neuroscience in DeLillo’s fiction, 35–44; and trauma, 165, 177, 178 brain injury: in Amis’s Yellow Dog, 119, 161; in McCarthy’s Remainder, 26; in McEwan’s Saturday, 162; in Powers’s The Echo Maker, 132, 136, 163. See also head injury brain/ mind opposition, 13, 14, 17–18, 27, 46, 59, 71, 115, 117, 120, 147, 155, 171, 172 Brindley, Nicola, 14, 141, 183, 201 Broks, Paul, Into the Silent Land, 47

Brooklyn: in Jonathan Lethem’s writing, 67–8, 74–5, 77–9; representation in literature, 7, 76–7 Brown, Dan, The Da Vinci Code, 84, 86, 166 Burn, Stephen J., 11, 35–52, 163, 165, 170–1, 175; Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, 130 Butts, Robert, Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 170

C Cajal, Santiago, Ramón y. See Ramón y Cajal, Santiago Calder, Nigel, The Mind of Man, 38 Camus, Albert, The Stranger, 24 cancer, 10, 46 Capgras syndrome, 1, 25, 43, 163, 184, 189–90, 196g; in Powers’s The Echo Maker, 131, 137–40, 172, 180 capitalism, 18, 20, 26, 83; and alienation, 10; neo-corporate late capitalism, 20–3, 26; and postmodern society, 71, 89; in Twelve Monkeys, 90–1 Carroll, Hamilton, Affi rmative Reaction, 95 Caruth, Cathy, 8, 115–16; Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 99; Unclaimed Experience, 7, 118–19 Casino Royale (fi lm), 94 Cather, Willa, 3 Cervantes, Miguel, 24; Don Quixote, 31 Chabon, Michael, 12, 54 Chandler, Raymond, 68, 80 Chekhov, Anton, The Seagull, 137 Chesterton, G.K., The Bull and the Cross, 174 child abuse, 149, 150, 176, 178 Chomsky, Noam, 139 chronic fatigue syndrome, 18 chronotopes, 84, 89, 90 Cilliers, Paul, Complexity and Postmodernism, 35 Clare, Anthony, On Men, 90–1 Clérambault, Gaëtan de, 29–30. See also de Clérambault’s syndrome Coe, Jonathan, 11; The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, 21, 22–3 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 3 Collini, Stefan, 14; Introduction to The Two Cultures, by C.P. Snow, 3, 14n1

Index colonial representations, 83, 145–6, 152 ‘coming-of-age novel,’ 54–5, 59, 70. See also Bildungsroman confabulation, 11, 26, 36, 191 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, 86 consciousness, 4, 10, 20, 36, 47, 117, 181, 191; and brain/ mind opposition, 17, 155, 171; in DeLillo’s fiction, 40, 42; ‘enlightened false consciousness,’ 63–4; and free will, 172; and MacLean’s theory of the brain, 38, 40; and Nagel’s “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” 39; neuroscientifc explanations, 124, 181; in Powers’s The Echo Maker, 135, 140; and subjective experience, 39, 44–5 consumerism, 2, 21, 71, 74, 90, 139 Cooper, David, 91 coprolalia, 76, 189, 200 Cowart, David, Don DeLillo and the Physics of Language, 41 Cresswell, Tim, On the Move, 92 Crews, Frederick, The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute, 14n2, 161 culture: bio-cultural approach to mental illness, 19; and disease, 72–3, 191; and Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, 125; versus nature, 125; other cultures, in travel writing, 144, 145, 156. See also traumaculture; ‘two cultures’ debate Cuvier, Georges, 85

D Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind, 171 Danielewski, Mark Z., 45 Dara, Evan, 45; The Easy Chain, 49n11 Darwin, Charles, 4, 135, 160. See also neo-Darwinism Dawkins, Richard: The God Delusion, 9; The Selfi sh Gene, 171 de Clérambault’s syndrome, 1, 25, 196g de Man, Paul, 29; “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” 57 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, 31 DeLillo, Don, 14, 37–42, 43, 44, 45, 47; Americana, 11, 37; The

207

Body Artist, 99, 109–10, 178; Cosmopolis, 11, 37, 48n4; End Zone, 37; Falling Man, 37, 38, 48n5, 98, 106–10, 112–13, 166, 176, 177–8; Great Jones Street, 11, 37–8, 39, 40, 48n6; Libra, 38, 165; Ratner’s Star, 39, 40, 48n7; Underworld, 38, 41; White Noise, 40–1, 110 delusional beliefs, 173, 179, 196, 199; in 19th century literature, 30, 31–2; and Capgras syndrome, 163, 172; and post-9/11 sensibility, 112 dementia, 162, 178, 195, 198; praecox, 30 Dennett, Daniel C., 42; Consciousness Explained, 20, 48n9, 171 depression, 13, 21, 23, 25, 197g; and childhood trauma, 179; diagnosis of, 147; in Diski’s travel writing, 144, 146, 149, 150–7, 158–9, 166, 174, 176; in Foer Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 104; manic depression (bipolar disorder), 180; memoirs about, 145; reported after September 11, 2001, 178 Derrida, Jacques, 36 Descartes, René, 170, 171 detective fiction, 67–9, 80, 111, 163 Dewey, Jospeh, Understanding Richard Powers, 127n4 diagnosis: current practice, 172, 174, 176; of depression, 147; and nomenclature, 27, 28; and postmodern irony, 53, 54, 63; and Rosenhan’s “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” 18 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 100; DSM-I, 17–18; DSM-III, 18, 28, 146–7, 157, 174–5; DSM-IV, 22, 27, 157, 158n5; DSM-V, 19, 28, 179 Diana, Princess, death of, 116 Díaz, Junot, 54 Dickens, Charles, 32 Diedrick, James, Understanding Martin Amis, 123 disconnection syndromes, 163 Diski, Jenni, 13, 166, 170, 176; The Sixties, 146, 158n13, 174; Skating to Antartica, 144, 146, 147–52; Stranger on a Train,

208

Index

144, 152–4, 154, 155, 174; On Trying to Keep Still, 154–7 dissociative amnesia, 37 dissociative identity disorder (DID), 1, 10, 71, 197g Doctorow, E.L., 103, 108 domestic abuse, 149 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 32 Douglas, Mary, How Institutions Think, 29 Dresden, 103, 105–6 dysexecutive syndrome (DES), 161

E Eakin, Paul John, How Our Lives Become Stories, 157n1 echolalia, 76 Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, 170 Egan, Jennifer, 11, 12, 54; Look at Me, 43 Eggers, Dave, 12, 54 Ehrenberger, Alain, 147; The Weariness of the Self, 21 Eliot, T.S., 110 Ellis, Bret Easton, 11; American Psycho, 21 Ellis, H. D., “Reduced Automatic Responses to Faces,” 163 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 130 Engel, George, 175 Engels, Friedrich, Dialectics of Nature, 4 epilepsy, 93, 166–7 Essrog, Lionel (fictional character). See Lethem, Jonathan, Motherless Brooklyn ethical issues, and writing about disease/ disorders, 6, 10, 13, 25, 72, 169–70, 179 Everdell, William R., The First Moderns, 35 existentialist thought, 23–4, 31, 32n1, 57

F Falklands war (1982), 151 Faludi, Susan, Stiffed, 90 Faulkner, William, 31 Fédida, Pierre, 147 Ferrers, Lawrence Shirley, 4th Earl of, 173 Ferris, Jonathan, 11 Ferris, Joshua, The Unnamed, 45, 46, 171, 184

Fight Club (fi lm), 90, 91 Fisher, Mark, Capitalist Realism, 90 Flaubert, Gustave, 32 Fleissner, Jennifer L., “Symptomatology and the Novel,” 10, 68, 71, 81, 161 Florey, Kitty Burns, Solos, 74 Foderaro, Joseph F., 100, 104, 106, 110 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 45; Everything is Illuminated, 165; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 1, 12, 98, 103–106, 108, 140, 165, 176, 177 Foucault, Michel, 27, 85, 91, 179; Madness and Civilization, 124; Madness: the Invention of an Idea, 17, 30 Franzen, Jonathan, 11, 26, 48n11; The Corrections, 21–22, 43, 49n12, 184; How to be Alone, 20, 21 free will, 59, 95, 171, 172 see also individual responsibility Freud, Sigmund, 5, 8, 14n2, 27, 71, 145–146, 161, 169, 179; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 6–7, 162; and trauma theory, 99–100, 102 see also psychoanalysis Frye, Mitch, The Gold Bug Variations, 141n7 fugue, 19, 104 Furedi, Frank (et al), From Two Cultures to No Culture: C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” Lecture Fifty Years On, 14n1

G Galchen, Rivka, Atmospheric Disturbances, 43 genetics, 9, 124, 160, 171 George III, King, 173 Gilliam, Terry, Twelve Monkeys, 83, 88–89 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 54 Gold, Steven N., “Fight Club: a Depiction of Contemporary Society as Dissociogenic,” 71 Golding, William, 24 Grass, Günter, The Tin Drum, 103 Green, Henry, 24 Groes, Sebastian, Ian McEwan, 127n3 Gronwall, Dorothy (with Wrightson and Waddell), Head Injury: the Facts, 119

Index Grosz, Elizabeth, Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism, 127n6 Gumport, Elizabeth, “Gentrified Fiction,” 74

H Hacking, Ian: Mad Travelers, 29; Representing and Intervening, 19, 29 Haddon, Mark, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, 1, 43, 104, 111, 119 Hadfield, James, 173 Hale, Matthew, History of the Pleas of the Crown (1736), 173 Hardy, Thomas, 32 Harris, Charles B., “The Story of the Self,” 5, 48n11, 140 Hartman, Geoff rey, “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” 99–100, 101, 165 Harvey, David, 83; The Condition of Postmodernity, 89 Head, Dominic: Ian McEwan, 127n5; The State of the Novel, 126 head injury: and Amis Yellow Dog, 13, 115, 118–119, 121, 180; and McEwan Saturday, 126; and Powers The Echo Maker, 172. See also brain injury Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, 56–57 Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery, 149, 158n3 Hillsborough football stadium disaster (1989), 116 Hiroshima, 105 Hirstein, William, Brain Fiction, 36 Hitchcock, Alfred: North by Northwest, 84; Strangers on a Train, 152; Vertigo, 89–90 Hobbes, Thomas, 170 Hoberek, Andrew, “Introduction: After Postmodernism,” 11 Hogan, Patrick Colm, “Literary Universals,” 42 Holland, Norman, Literature and the Brain, 104 Holocaust, 7, 145, 149, 150 Huggan, Graham, Extreme Pursuits, 145 humanism, 20, 27, 134–136. See also posthumanism

209

Hume, David, 59 humour, and writing about syndromes, 111 Humphrey, N., Soul Dust, 171 Huntingdon’s disease (HD), 1, 115, 125, 126, 161–162, 164, 179, 180, 198g Husserl, Edmund, 29 Huxley, Aldous, 3 Huxley, T.H., “Science and Culture,” 3

I Ibsen, Henrik, The Wild Duck, 137 Icarus complex, 37 identity, 4, 47, 58, 99, 124, 132, 138, 172; contemporary accounts of, in Kunkel Indecision, 56, 60–61, 172; and depression, 13; and trauma, 116, 153; and travel, 145; white American male, 60. See also dissociative identity disorder; self, the imperialism: imperial romance, 83, 85, 86, 87, 91, 95, 95n1; and the self, 60–61, 63–64; and travel writing, 145, 150, 151 Inception (fi lm), 6 incest, in Amis’ Yellow Dog, 118–121, 161 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (fi lm), 84, 86, 166 individual responsibility, 10, 19, 58, 169, 172–174 International Classification of Diseases (ICD), 175, 177 Iraq War (2003–2011), 1, 5, 117, 139; in McEwan’s Saturday, 123, 126 irony, 12, 53–54, 55, 57, 63–64, 65 Isaaman, Gerald, “It’s a Mad, Mad World that Inspires Martin,” 117 Ishiguro, Kazuo, Never Let Me Go, 26

J James, Henry, The Critical Muse, 42 James, William, 18 Jameson, Fredric, 83; Postmodernism and Consumer Society, 90; Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 20, 78 Jaspers, Karl, 24, 29; General Psychopathology, 30

210

Index

Jetée, La (fi lm), 83, 88, 89, 94, 166 Johnson, Gary, “Consciousness as Content,” 5, 14n1, 36 Jonas, Gerald, “Into the Brain,” 39

K Kafka, Franz, 24 Kalfus, Ken, 12; A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, 99, 111, 176, 177–178 Kandel, Eric, “A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry,” 19 Kansteiner, Wolf, “Genealogy of a Category Mistake,” 8 Kavadlo, Jesse, Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief, 39, 41, 48n8 Kelly, Adam, 12, 53–66, 162, 172; “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity,” 54 Kierkegaard, Søren, 23; The Sickness Unto Death, 19, 22 Kirkmayer, Laurence J., Understanding Trauma, 101–102, 166 Klein, Yves, 108 Koestler, Arthur, 38 Kraepelin, Emil, 30 Krauss, Nicole, 11, 49n15; The History of Love, 45; Man Walks into a Room, 43–45, 170 Kravitz, Bennett, “The Culture of Disease,” 72, 78, 163 Kristeva, Julia, New Maladies of the Soul, 27 Kunkel, Benjamin, 14; Indecision, 1, 12, 53–66, 162, 170, 172, 179

L LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 7, 67 Laing, R. D., 18, 91, 146, 158n13, 179 language: about mental disorders, 21, 22, 44, 46–47; disintegration, 178; and Tourette’s syndrome, 69, 70, 74–80, 164; and trauma, 101, 109, 177 Laplanche, Jean: The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 99; Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, 120 Leader, Darian, What is Madness? 30 Lear, Edward, 156–157 Leavis, F.R., 3, 5, 14n1, 162; “Nor Shall My Sword,” 135; “Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow,” 2

LeClair, Tom: “An Interview with Don DeLillo,” 40; In the Loop, 48n3; “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers etc,” 133, 141n5; Review of Joshua Ferris The Unnamed, 46 legal judgements, taking mental disorder into account, 173 Lethem, Jonathan, 54, 161; Amnesia Moon, 43; The Fortress of Solitude, 67, 74; Girl in Landscape, 7, 8, 67; Gun, With Occasional Music, 67; Motherless Brooklyn, 1, 12, 43, 49n12, 67–82, 111, 119, 162, 163–164, 179, 180; “Patchwork Planet,” 67 Lisle, Debbie, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, 145 Locke, John, 170, 171 Lotto, Mark, “A Hero for our Time,” 63 Lovett, Lisetta, 13–14, 169–182 Luckhurst, Roger, 115–117, 126; The Trauma Question, 6, 7, 8, 144–145, 146, 153, 164; “Traumaculture,” 164 Luria, A. R., 38; Language and Cognition, 140 Lustig, T.J., 1–16, 130–143, 171–172, 178 Lyotard, Jean-François, 135; The Postmodern Condition, 2, 9

M McCarthy, Tom 11; Men in Space 49n14; Remainder 21, 26 MacLean, Paul 38, 40, 42, 165 McClure, John, Partial Faiths 49n13 McElroy, Joseph, Lookout Cartridge 36 McEwan, Ian 25; The Child in Time 123; Enduring Love 1, 25, 119; Saturday 1, 12–13, 27, 58, 115, 117, 123–7, 161–3, 170, 178, 180 McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction 65 McInerney, Jay, review of Kunkel’s Indecision 55 McLaren, Niall, “A Critical Review of the Biopsychosocial Model” 175 Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl, Transatlantic Women’s Literature 158n8

Index madness 23, 30, 88, 91, 124, 138, 173; Foucault on 17, 30, 124; re-defi nition as mental disorder 20, 24; and the self in modern literature 21, 31–2; in Shakespeare’s Hamlet 11, 17, 27 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) 160, 174 Major, Clarence, “An Area of the Cerebral Hemisphere” 36 manic depression. See bipolar disorder Mantel, Hilary 11; Beyond Black 23 Marker, Chris, La Jetée 83, 88, 89, 94, 166 Marshall, R., “Assessing Mental Health after 9/11” 178 Marvell, Andrew, “A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body” 46 Marx, Karl 4 Marxism 4–5, 9, 18, 135 masculinity 84, 115, 166; crisis of 90, 95; and mobility 84, 92; and violence in Amis Yellow Dog 13, 115, 117, 118, 121–3, 161, 163, 180 medicalization: of contemporary existence 19, 21, 43; of mental disorders 13, 18, 25, 91; of normal behavior 180; of the self 32 Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick 150 Memento (fi lm) 6 memoir: about illness and suffering 144–5; misery memoirs 6, 164; and trauma 116, 144, 164; travel 144, 154, 156, 157, 166 memory: memory industry 145; recovered memory 9, 14n2; and time 166–7; and trauma 6, 7, 9, 13, 99–100, 121–3, 152, 165, 167. See also amnesia Mendelsohn, Daniel 136 mental health: and childhood trauma 178–9; defi nition of 31; understanding of 17–20, 124, 144. See also madness Mental Treatment Bill 174 Merry, Hannah, 14, 189, 202 metaphor: mental disorders as 10, 12, 21, 69, 71–2, 131, 133, 137, 150–1, 163, 169, 179; time travel as 83, 92, 95, 165; traumatic experiences as 13, 115, 117, 119, 126, 127, 148, 164 Michod, Alec, interview with Richard Powers 135, 139

211

Millard, Kenneth, Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction 55, 65n1 Miller, D. Quentin, “Deeper Blues” 134–5 mind/ brain opposition 13, 14, 17–18, 27, 46, 59, 71, 115, 117, 120, 147, 155, 171, 172 Minority Report (fi lm) 94 modernism 30–1, 57, 61, 65 molecular biology 3, 19, 20, 160 Montaigne, Michel de 155 moral responsibility see individual responsibility Moretti, Franco, The Way of the World 54, 61–2 Morrison, Anthony P., “Early Detection and Intervention Evaluation” 180 Munch, Edvard 35 Munro, John 173 museum, in time/ space narratives 83–9, 166 Musil, Robert 24

N Nagel, Thomas, “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” 39, 44 narcissism 37, 99, 111, 152 National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery 161 National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) (UK) 177 naturalism 4, 13, 133–8, 139 Neilson, Jim, interview with Richard Powers 130, 133, 140 neo-Darwinism 4, 17, 20 neurology 4, 10, 14, 35, 42, 45, 71, 161 neurosis 7, 27 “New Sincerity” 12, 54, 62, 64–5 New York 72–3, 84, 102, 103, 105, 108, 139. See also Brooklyn; September 11 2001, terrorist attacks Niffenegger, Audrey, The Time Traveller’s Wife 1, 9, 12, 83, 87–8, 91–5, 166, 179 Nolan, Christopher 6 North by Northwest (fi lm) 84

O Oates, Joyce Carol, “Dangling Men” 55 O’Brien, Tim, The Things They Carried 7, 8

212

Index

obsessive-compulsive disorder 179, 198g Oedipus complex 27–8, 29, 122 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest 174 Ortolano, Guy, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain 14n1 Osteen, Mark, American Magic and Dread 37

P Palahniuk, Chuck, Fight Club 71 paraphilias 180 pathography 116, 145, 164 Patriot Act (2001) 139 Peacock, James 1–16, 67–82, 163, 179 phenomenology 23–32, 169 Pinker, Stephen 18; The Blank Slate 171; How the Mind Works 43 Pirela, Simon 9 Plumb, J.H., Crisis in the Humanities 2, 14n1 Poe, Edgar Allan 3 Porter, Dennis, Haunted Journeys 145–6 post-9/11 fiction 12–13, 98–113 post-humanism 11, 135 postmodernism 9, 11–12, 20–1, 24, 31, 65, 71–2, 72, 133, 175; and Capgras syndrome 138; in DeLillo’s fiction 41–2; and Franzen’s The Corrections 22; and Jameson’s “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 90; and sciences of mind 35–7, 42. See also irony post-postmodernism 11–12, 32, 42–7, 45, 47, 65 poststructuralism 29, 35, 99 posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 5, 164, 166, 176–7, 179, 198g; created as category in DSM-III 149; and post-9/11 fiction 98, 104, 107, 109, 112–13; reported after September 11, 2001 178 Powers, Richard 54; The Echo Maker 1, 13, 25, 27, 43, 48n11, 58, 119, 130–43, 163, 170, 171–2, 179, 180; Gain 135; Galatea 2.2 46, 134, 135; Plowing the Dark 140, 141n8; “The Seventh Event” 133, 139–40; The Time of Our Singing 135, 136

Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation 145 Price, Joanna 144–59, 166, 174, 176 Proust, Marcel 31 Prozac 154, 156, 174 psychiatric hospitals 17, 146, 150, 153, 154, 174 psychiatry 13–14, 18, 19, 25, 28, 30; contemporary British practice 174–6 psychoanalysis 5, 8, 9, 14, 153, 155, 161, 162, 177; discrediting of 27–9, 71, 120, 169; and trauma literature 98 psychopathic personality disorder 174 psychosis 179–80 Pynchon, Thomas 3, 103

R Rain Man (fi lm), 1 Ramón y Cajal, Santiago, 35 Rankin, Ian, 68 Rauch, Scott L., “A Symptom Provocation Study of PTSD,” 177 Reber, Arthur S., Dictionary of Psychology, 37 recovered memory, 9, 14n2 religion, and postmodernism, 45–6, 49n13, 49n15 Richards, I. A., 131, 141n2 Richardson, Alan, “Literature and the Cognitive Revolution,” 42, 47n2 Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa, 31 Ricoeur, Paul, The Rule of Metaphor, 136 Rissmiller, David, “Evolution of Antipsychiatry,” 179 Robbins, Tom, 11; Jitterbug Perfume, 42 Robinson, Daniel N., Wild Beasts and Idle Humours, 173 Robinson, Marilyn, Absence of Mind, 20 Romanticism, 3, 10, 54, 134 Rose, Nikolas, The Politics of Life itself, 20 Rosenhan, David, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” 18 Ross, Christine, The Aesthetics of Disengagement, 146–7, 151, 154, 156, 158n4, 158n7, 174 Rote Armee Fraktion (terrorist group), 107

Index Roth, Marco, 181; “The Rise of the Neuronovel,” 5, 10–11, 58, 71, 119–20 Royal College of Psychiatrists, 175 Ruff, Matt, Set This House in Order, 9 Ryan, Ruth Ann, 32, 100, 104, 110, 176

S Sacks, Oliver, 76, 132, 158n1, 159n13, 164; An Anthropologist on Mars, 77; The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, 25, 43 Sagan, Carl, 38 Salán, Paula Mártin, 110 Salinger, J. D., The Catcher in the Rye, 55 Sansom, William, 24 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 57; Nausea, 24; The Psychology of the Imagination, 24; Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, 24 Sass, Louis, Madness and Modernism, 32n1 satire, 53; in Amis’s Yellow Dog, 117; and post-9/11 fiction, 99, 111–13 Saunders, George, 49n14, 54; CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 46; “Commcomm,” 46; “Isabelle,” 46; “Winky,” 46 schizophrenia, 18, 30, 90, 178, 199g Schleifer, Ronald, “The Poetics of Tourette’s Syndrome,” 76, 164 Scholes, Robert, The Fabulators, 36 Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, Leaving Brooklyn, 77 science: and postmodernism, 20, 35; and the ‘two cultures’ debate, 1–4, 9, 14, 25, 134–5, 160, 170 science fiction, 12, 83–95, 95 self, the, 4, 10, 11, 116, 147, 171, 172; and Alzheimer’s disease, 167; and authenticity in Kunkel’s Indecision, 56–61, 64–5; biological reduction of, 18–19, 25, 28, 32, 174, 176; in Diski’s travel writing, 144, 145, 150, 155–6; Hamlet as fi rst modern self, 17, 20, 31; and madness, 23, 27, 29–30; and postmodernism, 36, 53; weariness of, 21, 26. See also consciousness; identity; soul Seltzer, Mark, 115, 116, 120, 121, 178; “Wound Culture,” 117

213

September 11 2001, terrorist attacks, 5–6, 8, 12, 98, 116–17, 118, 126, 140, 163, 165, 166, 177–8; and Amis’s “The Lonely Voice of the Crowd,” 120; and DeLillo’s Falling Man, 106–9; and Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 102–6; and Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, 111–13; and McEwan’s Saturday, 117; and Powers’s The Echo Maker, 131, 139. See also post-9/11 fiction sexual abuse, 149, 176 sexuality, 119, 180 Shackleton, Ernest, 147–8, 151 Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, 11, 17, 20, 21, 27–8, 30–1, 32, 121–2 Shelley, Mary, 3; Frankenstein, 49n12 Sillitoe, Alan, 24 Silva, Matt, “The ‘Powers’ to ‘Kraft’ Humanist Endings,” 135 sincerity, 12, 53–4, 56–7, 61, 62, 64–5, 162 Sloterdijk, Peter, A Critique of Cynical Reason, 63–4 Smith, Edwin, Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, 170 Smith, Roger, Trial by Medicine, 173 Smith, Zadie: On Beauty, 49n12; Changing My Mind, 20 Snow, C.P., 5, 14n1, 127, 134, 160, 162, 170; The Two Cultures, 1–2; “The Two Cultures: A Second Look,” 3 Snyder, Sharon, “The Gender of Genius,” 134, 135 Society of Neurosience, 175 sociology, 6, 9, 136, 171 Solomon, Andrew, The Noonday Demon, 158n4 Sontag, Susan, 12, 136, 179; AIDS and its Metaphors, 10, 71; Illness as Metaphor, 10, 71, 128n6, 163 Sørensen, Bent, 12, 98–114, 165, 176, 178; “Jewishness and Identity,” 72, 73 soul, 11, 46–7, 59, 171 space: and dislocation, 89; museum, 83–9; urban, 67–82 speech disorders, 101, 109, 164, 178. See also echolalia; Tourette’s syndrome Spiegelman, Art, Maus, 7–8

214 Index Spiotta, Dana, 54 spirituality, 45–6, 47, 49n13, 49n14, 171 Stephens, Michael, The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, 77 Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy, 31 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 32 subjective experience, 39, 44, 47, 171 subjectivity, 37, 45, 58, 60–1, 91, 95; and depression, 13, 154, 156; in Diski’s travel writing, 144–5, 147; in Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife, 91–2; in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, 17; and trauma, 9, 116, 126 survivor guilt, 102, 104 Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 95 symbolism, literary, 137–8 ‘syndrome syndrome,’ 1, 3, 4, 11, 25, 131, 135 Szasz, Thomas, 19

T Tabbi, Joseph, Cognitive Fictions, 5, 14n3, 42, 47n2, 48n4, 137, 139–40, 141n4, 141n5 Tal, Kalí, 6 Tallis, Raymond, Aping Mankind, 21, 171 Tanner, Tony, “Don DeLillo and the ‘American Mystery’,” 41 terrorism. See September 11 2001, terrorist attacks Tew, Philip, 115–17, 119, 126 Tillman, Lynne, American Genius: a Comedy, 36 time: and memory, 166–7; time travel, 83–95, 165–6, 179 Time Machine, The (fi lm), 94 Timpanaro, Sebastiano, 4–5 Tolstoy, Leo, 136 Tourette’s syndrome (TS), 1, 12, 111, 163–4, 179, 199g; and Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn, 68–82 transient epileptic amnesia (TEA), 167 trauma, 67, 88, 94, 116, 146, 160, 200g; and Amis Yellow Dog, 115, 117–23; cultural discourses of, 144–5, 150, 153; and McEwan Saturday, 115, 117; and metaphor, 119, 127; and Powers The Echo Maker, 132; representation of, 115, 164–5;

symptoms of, 176–7. See also posttraumatic stress disorder trauma theory, 5–9, 13, 99–102, 115, 176 trauma-by-proxy, 98, 99, 102, 103–4, 106, 110, 112–13, 165, 176, 177 traumaculture, 115–17, 126, 164 traumatological culture, 115–17, 119, 126 travel writing, and mental disorder, 144–59 Trilling, Lionel: “The Leavis-Snow Controversy,” 14n1; Sincerity and Authenticity, 56–7, 61, 65, 162 Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 55 ‘two cultures’ debate, 1–3, 5, 9, 11, 13–14, 127, 134, 160, 162, 169–70

U United States of Tara (television series), 1 Updike, John, Terrorist, 140 USSR (former), 179

V Vertigo (fi lm), 89–90 Vietnam War, 149, 153 violence, 13, 91, 153; and Amis Yellow Dog, 115, 117–20, 122–3; and mental disorder, 179 Vollmann, William, 3 Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse-Five, 7, 8, 103

W Wallace, David Foster, 20, 49n14, 57, 62; “E Unibus Pluram,” 53–4, 55; Infinite Jest, 46; The Pale King, 43, 49n11; and religion, 46 Warner, Rex, 24 Waugh, Patricia, 11, 17–34 Weldon, Fay, Down Among the Women, 124 Wells, H.G., 3; The Time Machine, 83, 86–7, 91 Whewell, William, 170 Whitehead, Alfred North, 18 Whitehead, Colson, 12, 54 Wieseltier, Leon, “A Year Later,” 8 Wilde, Oscar, 32 Wilkins, Robert, “Neurosurgical Classic XVII,” 170

Index Williams, Raymond, 140; Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, 137, 138, 139; The Long Revolution, 8 Willis, Thomas, 171 Wilmerding, Dwight Bell (fictional character). See Kunkel, Benjamin Indecision Wilson, E. O.: Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge, 35; On Human Nature, 20 Wilson, S.A.K., “On Some Disorders of Motility,” 162 Wilson, Timothy D., Strangers to Ourselves, 43 Winfrey, Oprah, 6 Winslow, Rosemary, “Troping Trauma,” 100 Wizard of Oz, The, and Powers The Echo Maker, 136

215

Woods, Michael, review of Powers The Echo Maker, 137 Woolf, Virginia, 31 Wordsworth, William, 57 World Psychiatric Association, 179 World Trade Center. See September 11 2001, terrorist attacks World War I, 7, 102 World War II, 102–3, 165 wound culture, 115–16, 117 Wray, John, Lowboy, 1

Z Zeitchik, Steven, “Jonathan Lethem: A Brooklyn of the Soul,” 75 Zimmer, Carl, Souls Made Flesh, 171 Žižek, Slavoj, Enjoy your Symptom! 98, 102 Zola, Émile, 32, 136