Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (review)

Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics. Laura Otis. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp. x + 210. $45.00.

Two of the principal axes whereby we locate the modernist temperament are articulated most familiarly by its American aspect: Pound's notorious claim for the artist's phallic, penetrative energies in his Postscript to Remy de Gourmont's The Natural Philosophy of Love, and James's argument, in his Preface to Roderick Hudson, for the relational nature of the world. Laura Otis's fine new book is more alert to European material--neither Pound nor James attracts her attention, but her diagnosis of the modernist self vibrates with their resonance as she examines the boundaries and connections, breaches and bridges, the largely factitious yet deeply necessary structures that constitute modernist identity as a predominantly self-sealed and self-sealing condition. Her own boundaries are the years between 1830 and 1930, the expansive period of European colonialism, during which the predominantly aesthetic and psychological positions announced by Pound and by James are analysed through the affinities between biological and political thinking. She adopts as her main instrument the developments in cell theory whereby the cell and the neuron were being advanced as independent and live entities. As such, their epistemological relevance becomes clear: independence at the cellular level provides a grittily materialist underpinning for the notion that only through difference and the boundaries that sustain it is meaning possible. We understand what is by what is not, a process, predominantly, of exclusion.

Otis's summary of the affinities she proposes between cell theory and the contemporaneous urge for colonial expansion is refreshingly succinct and direct, and given early on: "If one believes that invisible germs, spread by human contact, can make one sick, one becomes more and more anxious about penetration and about any connection with other people--the same anxieties inspired by imperialism" (5). They are focused more sharply a little later by a quotation from the Spanish neurobiologist Santiago Ramon y Cajal in 1920: "It is a wise and prudent policy, in occupying a country, to let the doctor and the naturalist form the vanguard for the administrator and the soldier" (88). The exclusive and excluding notion of identity that emerges from cell theory matches closely the paradoxical tactics of imperialism that appropriate and reject simultaneously with both ambition and fear--extending borders while reducing the colonised to various forms of Other and becoming nervous about potential leakage of these forms back into the homeland itself. Such leakage is envisaged as both physical and mental: just as the body can be invaded by threatening germs, so the mind can be penetrated by dangerous thoughts. This fascinating story is told by bringing together separate studies of Cajal (whose proof that neurons were independent cells won him a Nobel Prize in 1906), the American neurologist S. Weir Mitchell (most notable, perhaps for the "rest cure" so painfully undertaken by Charlotte Perkins Gilman), the Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle, Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen, and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. While the latter three will be familiar to literary scholars, Mitchell and Cajal are invoked not only as professional scientists but as figures who gave additional expression to their biological findings through fiction.

The story, broadly schematized, charts a movement from notions of self as aggressively bounded to those that bespoke a more patient understanding of its relational aspects--Mitchell and Schnitzler offer the most powerful examples of each position. For Mitchell, individuality was effectively a battle; a struggle against forces both external (disease) and internal (instinctual or irrational urges), where the self is above all a matter of resistance and restraint. Any breach or penetration of the self's borders by either germ or instinct was conceived not only as a loss of individual autonomy but as a form of demasculinization: in both physical and mental health...