The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience by Lianne Habinek (review)

Cross-disciplinary scholarship produces surprising connections, and as Lianne Habinek's absorbing and compellingly argued book about the cognitive, emotive, and aesthetic intersection of neuroscience and English Renaissance literature demonstrates, such connections are not only original but also are creative in their potential to stimulate an entirely original paradigm of thinking about metaphor as a meaning-generating figure of thought. Science and literature have been interlocked for a long time in Western thought through their shared dependency on narrative. Habinek's point that the broader cultural context, within which recent scientific "discoveries" in brain research have not made much use of that research, has opened up a new way from which to pursue new literary knowledge. This knowledge depends on a fresh historicist and philosophical approach to a large body of new archival material, analysed with theoretical sophistication and sensitivity for an original close reading. The book launches an altogether new way of understanding metaphor as a trope that generates literature.

Plasticity, network, and coding, which are concepts that define the working of neuroscience – used to described "neural plasticity," "neural network," and "the neural coding" of perception and sensation – are also the grounding of literary metaphors. The metaphoric system of literary language by which one understands "complex and abstract systems" plays a role in how literary meaning is processed at the cognitive and emotional levels. Habinek moves beyond the relatively well-studied Renaissance anatomy, focusing specifically on illuminating archival material about the brain and exploring the relationship between the brain and "the physiology of the soul," to show how writers, like John Donne, who were interested in medicine and familiar with new scientific theories, turned their knowledge of science into the force of metaphor. Edward Popham looked for the soul in the recesses of the mind to trace the somatic source of memory and also provided a backdrop for Donne's own poetic science of the mind and the soul in his poem "The Ecstasy." Shakespeare developed "the anatomical metaphor" that energized Donne's love poetry. Hamlet is a case study in tracing the link between the "traumatic incident" locked in memory, which hovers about the play, back to the science at the heart of the play. Habinek locates the mnemonic of the play in the neuroscience of the brain and in the writing that examined what its dissection revealed. Whether she is writing about the link between the recesses and the knotty folds in the brain in relation to "the nature of [the] disease," associated with the literary overproduction in Margaret Cavendish's writing, or as way of interpreting the act of reading against the background of the body, which is depicted in the fugitive sheets of flap anatomy books, Habinek's book is repeatedly revealing new knowledge. Her writing is also elegant, transparent, and fluid, unlike the inspiring knots it unties.