Nervous Fictions: Literary Form and the Enlightenment Origins of Neuroscience by Jess Keiser (review)

It is one thing to talk about the figures and metaphors for the mind and quite another to talk about those of the green spongey ovoid we call the brain. In the last few decades, interest in the latter entity has generated a host of research and funding initiatives aimed at bridging neuroscience to the humanities and social sciences, presumably out of the hope that close attention to the computational structures of neural networks and the anatomical features of brain physiology can yield “new” insights about the mirror realm of the mind. But as Jess Keiser’s fascinating new book Nervous Fictions shows us, what is new is also old, and what is actually quite intractable (if disappointing) about the stance of “neuroscience”—including the promise of a crossing or a bridge between the mushy thing and the mental—can be seen in the early formations of that field in the eighteenth century. The chief insight of this book, and what makes it especially valuable for those interested in both literary history and the history of science, is that physicians, philosophers, satirists, novelists, and essayists of the period recognized or at least unwittingly stumbled upon the need for figurative language—personification, synecdoche, catachresis, metaphor—in order to talk about such things. This is not about cataloguing or interpreting the period’s ways of writing the mind but rather about understanding the limits—indeed, the impossibility—of unadorned or literalist language when brought to the sciences of the nervous system. It’s about what happened when scientists, philosophers, and authors of the period bumped up against the “hard” (or what we might also call the “tangible”) problem.

As Keiser points out in the introduction, Nervous Fictions is not exactly a book about the familiar philosophical conundrum of dualism. More precisely, it is an examination of ways various writers deal with the physicality of the nervous system. Still, in all of the cases, encountering the brain means asking how its operations translate in the mental realm, and this is where things get difficult. Some of the protagonists are optimistic about the aspirations of this proto-neuroscience (Thomas Willis) while others only regard this stance as useful in certain occasions (John Locke); some recognize the necessity of imaginative and figurative language when dealing with such a subject (Margaret Cavendish); some take a mocking or satirical stance towards this science (Joseph Addison, the “Scriblerians,” Laurence Sterne); and others take a mixed view that includes all of the above (James Boswell). The first three chapters get us acquainted with a range of scientists and philosophers and the dilemmas and contradictions they encounter when grappling with the cranium—our protagonists here are Willis, Cavendish, and Locke, respectively. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are where the book really shines: it is here that we arrive to the realm of the more properly literary with a set of authors who more self-consciously play with, mock, or interrogate ideas of the brain’s collapse into mind—namely, a collections of satirists including Addison, the “Scriblerians,” and Matthew Prior (chapter 4), Sterne (chapter 5), and Boswell (chapter 6).

Among the first set of chapters, the very first on Willis is the most essential to the framing of the overall book. Willis is perhaps the best example of a protoneuroscientist of the period and his attempts at a strictly “literalist” approach to talking about the brain is revealing, for, as Keiser shows, he nonetheless (despite himself) must appeal to figuration when he comes up against the problem of the brain’s relation to conscious experience. He is, as Keiser puts it, required to “figure brain matter as inherently thoughtful or else face an explanatory gap” (39). And so, for example, the animal spirits become little people, “complete with their own thoughts, emotions, and desires” (55). In chapter 2, Cavendish offers a fascinating alternative allegory for the government of the brain—one in which the central figure...