The previous chapters outlined the history of the cerebral subject and explored some of its key forms in contemporary society. This one deals with it in “fiction,” a term we place in quotation marks because, in this domain as in others, fiction is far from fictive. It is “real” not only for the simple reason that it exists but also because it has real effects and contributes to shape ways of being and forms of living. On the one hand, fictions of the sort we shall examine here are not merely literary or cinematographic renderings of brainhood-related philosophical problems and thought experiments but specific ways of addressing them (on this point see for example Lardreau 1988). On the other hand, novels and movies can of course be described as reflecting in many ways issues and questions that are independent of them; however, since they are themselves part of the contexts where those issues and questions take root and are mobilized, they must also be considered in themselves as social agents that structure attitudes and beliefs and play an active role in bringing them about. The same can be said of the plastic arts, as well as music and dance, any of which could have been the subject of an entire chapter.
The visual nature of many of the outputs of contemporary neuroscience, including anatomical preparations, PET and fMRI scans, and most recently the dazzling pictures generated by diffusion imaging, has inspired artists (often in collaboration with neuroscientists) to incorporate brain images into their creative work and has given rise to festivals, exhibitions, and at least two annual brain art competitions.1 In her book on art in the age of technoscience, Ingeborg Reichle (2009, 35) remarks that, although artists may work with brain scans or other scientific materials, the artistic approach tends to deal with “the diversity of human experience, which rarely lends itself to portrayal by standardized scientific procedures.” Some artists’ testimonies and life stories, such as those of Susan Aldworth (2011) or Katherine Sherwood (2007), who have respectively worked with brain scans and angiograms, corroborate Reichle’s observations at an intensely personal level.
An emphasis on the historical and experiential nature of art implies a certain point of view concerning its relationship with science. It has been customary to discuss science fiction, and more generally science-related cinema and literature, as if the main purpose were to assess how accurately the forms and contents of science are “represented” in the various products of the “entertainment industry.” Regardless of whether the assessment is positive or negative, the spirit of such analysis is close to the so-called deficit model. This model, which is rather a set of approaches to the relationship between science and the public, often tries to detect and redress unreliability or inaccuracy, underlines the fact that people respond to information in ways that experts find inadequate, and looks for ways to communicate “correct” information efficiently (for an overview see Bucchi and Neresini 2007). In line with many authors who have dealt with both literature and cinema, we stand at the opposite end of such an approach insofar as we consider it more productive to search for the meanings works of fiction inspire or convey, rather than to examine them for informational consistency, exactness, or completeness.
Of course there always are areas of convergence and divergence between “fact” and “fiction,” but emphasizing them implies at least two problematic assumptions. First, the deficit model suggests that scientific knowledge is produced in isolation from nonscientific contexts, especially those of its public dissemination. Second, it forgets that entertainment appeal, storytelling, and narrative and filmic codes necessarily take precedence over accuracy. Although scientific expertise may contribute to verisimilitude, it does not dictate a movie’s factual and scientific content (Kirby 2003), and (in film as in literature) accuracy must be considered in the context of an entire “rhetorical apparatus” (Mellor 2009). When works are examined as totalities, then it turns out that their deficits (relative to official expert knowledge) and their internal inconsistencies are not informational shortcomings but sources of surplus of meaning. As we shall illustrate here, visual and narrative resources may convey ambivalence and contradiction or simultaneously display apparently incompatible claims. Rather than being an aesthetic or intellectual defect, this feature reveals fiction’s ability to unfold the complexity of the questions it explores and suggests that univocal answers are not available.
It is in such a perspective that we shall here approach fictional worlds. We shall explore them as spaces in the topography of the neuro, connected to the others we have already discussed and involving processes that give substance to the cerebral subject and shape it as a resource for thinking about the human. We shall first examine two phenomena in the literary field since the 1990s, the appearance of the “neuronovel” and the invention of “neuro literary criticism,” and then deal with brain movies. Because memory plays in the Western tradition such a fundamental role for understanding personal identity, we shall pay special attention to its treatment on screen and paper. Our main overall observation is that both literature and film illustrate a general feature of art, namely that it “is allowed to be a locus of contradictions where opposites may coincide” (Zwijnenberg 2011, 303). Far from weakening them, this feature makes them particularly powerful for shaping subjectivities.
On Paper: Neuronarratives and Neuro Lit Crit
The defining feature of the literary subgenres christened “neuronarratives” (G. Johnson 2008) and “neuronovels” (Roth 2009) is that they place neuroscientific discourse center stage and use it as a means of expression consubstantial to the stories they tell. In parallel to the creation of those labels, the “next big thing in English” (Cohen 2010) seemed to be “neuro lit crit,” or the use of the cognitive neurosciences to gain “unexpected insights” into individual texts as well as to answer questions such as “Why do we read fiction?” “Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters?” and “What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?” The Guardian hailed the emerging field as “the cutting edge of literary studies” (Harris and Flood 2010), public relations officers at universities were quick to publicize brain imaging research claiming to prove the value of reading literature (e.g., Goldman 2012), and the New York Times went as far as asking whether neuro lit crit can “save the humanities.”2
Neuro lit crit could be considered as a branch of neuroaesthetics. Its more distant roots, however, predate the neural turn and lie in the work of authors such as Robert de Beaugrande (1987), Norman Holland (1988), and Reuven Tsur (1992), who, starting in the 1980s, approached literary theory and criticism with psychological models from the cognitive sciences (for overviews, see Crane and Richardson 1999, Richardson 2004, Zunshine 2010; for an early debate, see Herbert Simon’s 1994 article and the responses it drew). Cognitive literary studies do not necessarily include considerations about the brain. However, by the early 2000s the emphasis of cognitive approaches on mind embodiment or the embodied mind had made them partly dependent on neuroscientific studies (for the epistemological consequences of this situation, see Hart 2001).
From the standpoint of a cultural history of the cerebral subject, the most significant feature of neuro lit crit is that it emerged at a time when some noted writers chose to depict their protagonists and construct their plots using neuroscientific vocabulary. Although only a minority of authors in literature and literary studies has recourse to the neuro, the convergence of viewpoints has configured a perspective characterized by its placing brains in literature and literature in the brain. Some writers introduce neuroscientific issues, processes, and terminology into their narratives, and some scholars hope that a neuroscientific approach will furnish the key to literary creation and reception. Although neuronovelists and literary scholars seem to share the belief that the neuroscientific approach can revitalize their fields, their approaches are not strictly symmetrical: For the scholars, neuroscientific realism is or functions as an ontological belief; for the writers, it appears to be mainly a literary tool.
Like neuroaesthetics, neuro lit crit approaches literature as if it embodied neuroscientific knowledge, considers writers as more or less penetrating but generally accurate spontaneous neuroscientists, and therefore analyzes their texts in a neurorealistic key. Among writers, A. S. Byatt gave a silly expression to that frame of reference in her speculations about the role of mirror neurons in her experience of reading John Donne: “The pleasure Donne offers our bodies is the pleasure of extreme activity of the brain” (Byatt 2006a; see also Byatt 2006b and the critique by Tallis 2008a). Apparently better informed, the pop-science blogger and writer Jonah Lehrer claimed that Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Paul Cézanne, Igor Stravinsky, Marcel Proust, and the fin-de-siècle French chef Auguste Escoffier were all “artists who anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience” and “discovered truths about the human mind—real, tangible truths—that science is only now rediscovering”; their art “proved to be the most accurate, because they most explicitly anticipated our science” (Lehrer 2007, ix, xi; on Lehrer’s fall from grace, see for example Kachka 2012). More serious scholars share such an outlook on artistic creation, claiming, for example, that when Virginia Woolf, in To the Lighthouse (1927), connects the lighthouse to the mother figure and thereby evokes “the long-term memory of her mother,” she “was unwittingly acknowledging the limbic underpinnings of her art” (Nalbantian 2008, 363).
Considered in the longue durée, the realism of neuroliterary readings is a recent avatar of a tradition that goes back at least to the ancient depiction of Homer as an accurate describer of landscapes, customs, peoples, and events and the equally ancient interpretation of mythical beings and episodes as allegories of human or natural events (Ford 1999, Lamberton 1986). And from Antiquity onward, the value of such a hermeneutic stance has been questioned. Already before neuro lit crit was given a name, some considered it doubtful that “neurological findings can actually be translated into terms relevant to cultural artifacts and achievements and specifically to literary analysis” (Adler and Gross 2002, 210; see responses in Poetics Today, Summer 2003). The debate has continued (e.g., Lauer 2009) but has not weakened calls for literary studies to open themselves to neuroscience (e.g., Starr 2012). The appearance of the neologism “neuro lit crit,” apparently never used in print before articles published in 2010 in the New York Times and the Guardian (Cohen 2010, Harris and Flood 2010), gives a certain unity to this trend and associates a label with a set of beliefs, assertions, and methods.
However, beyond commonalities, does the neurologizing gaze fulfill the same function in literature and in neuro lit crit? The answer, as we shall see, is no, and the differences throw light on distinct ways of articulating the cerebral subject. We shall show this by exploring three central features of neuronovels.
First, neuronovels do not limit themselves to incorporating brain-related vocabulary from a third-person perspective, as Victorian authors sometimes did when depicting a character in phrenological terms. Rather, they integrate a neuroscientific perspective and language into first-person narratives. Nevertheless (second feature), such a writing strategy does not imply a sort of cerebral solipsism that would confine literary characters inside their own brains. It has been argued that it does and that by turning inward, “to an almost cellular level,” neuronovels bypass the self, society, and history and construe a neurological “privacy without individuality” in which “mere biological contingency” replaces meaning (Roth 2009). Against such a reading, we shall argue that what may look like solipsism serves mainly to problematize the notion of the human as cerebral subject.
Finally, we illustrate neuronovels’ ambivalence vis-à-vis the brainhood ideology by examining how they dramatize the phenomenological, affective, and embodied dimension of memory, a psychological function considered as fundamental to selfhood in the Western philosophical tradition as well as in the contemporary sciences of mind and brain. We discuss some of the English-language works that directly inspired the invention of the notion of neuronovel; we will therefore leave aside recent “brain memoirs” (Tougaw 2012), which are autobiographical disease narratives, and will refer to older novels that incorporate neurological idioms and phenomena only to give historical perspective. Neuronovels exist in languages other than in English, but we have found no critical work about them other than Stephan Besser’s (2013, 2016) on the “poetics of the neuromolecular gaze” in contemporary Dutch fiction.
Varieties of Neurological Fiction
In a 2009 article entitled “The Rise of the Neuronovel,” the critic Marco Roth claimed that, in Anglo-American fiction, the workings of the mind had been replaced by the mechanics of the brain, and he dated the shift to the English writer Ian McEwan’s 1997 Enduring Love. In this novel, a young man with De Clérambault syndrome, a condition also known as erotomania, in which patients believe someone is in love with them, stalks a science journalist. The novel’s appendix consists of a clinical case history and a scientific bibliography. Prominent examples of the same genre include Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), on autism; McEwan’s Saturday (2005), on Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease; Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999), on Tourette syndrome; John Wray’s Lowboy (2009), on paranoid schizophrenia; and finally Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (2006) and Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), both on Capgras syndrome. We could add Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) and novels and stories by Tom Wolfe, A. S. Byatt, David Foster Wallace, Umberto Eco, and Jeffrey Eugenides. Medical thrillers, science fiction, and cyberpunk novels and short stories by less well-known authors have also explored neurological conditions as well as the consequences of transplanting brains or transferring their contents (Cavallaro 2004; Dinello 2006; Geraci 2010; Hahn 2005; Pethes 2005; Tofts, Jonson, and Cavallaro 2004).
Roth attributed the rise of the neuronovel to the exhaustion of the linguistic turn in the humanities, the fall of psychoanalysis in the Anglo-American world, and the popularization of brain research and the accompanying neural turn. Nevertheless, just as neuro lit crit is only the latest development of cognitive literary studies, the neuronovel is the newest way of using brain-related issues in fiction. Victorian literature, to begin with, gave a considerable role to phrenology (Boshears and Whitaker 2013), which appears in the works of Anne Brontë (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 1848), Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre, 1847; Shirley, 1849; Villette, 1853; The Professor, 1857), George Eliot (The Lifted Veil, 1859), Wilkie Collins (The Legacy of Cain, 1889), and Charles Dickens (David Copperfield, 1850; Great Expectations, 1861; Sketches by Boz, 1836; Bleak House, 1853). Phrenology also appears in fiction from Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, the United States, and most likely from all other countries where literature was informed by romanticism, realism, and naturalism (Bernucci 2008, Bottoni 2012, Cooter 1984, De Giustino 1975, Goscilo 1981, Krow-Lucal 1983, Oehler-Klein 1990, Van Wyhe 2002, Wright 1982).
Regardless of whether phrenology was part of a writer’s personal beliefs, it could be used as a literary device. In Shirley, for example, Charlotte Brontë described the character of Mr. Yorke as lacking “the organ of Veneration—a great want, and which throws a man wrong on every point where veneration is required,” as well the organ “of Comparison—a deficiency which strips a man of sympathy,” and as having “too little of the organs of Benevolence and Ideality, which took the glory and softness from his nature, and for him diminished those divine qualities throughout the universe” (Brontë 1985 [1849], 76). Brontë believed in phrenology (Shuttleworth 1996), but on this occasion exploited it primarily as an easily recognizable resource for ironically depicting a character.
Late Victorian neurology is also present in Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Silas Weir Mitchell, and H. G. Wells (Stiles 2007). The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) was probably informed by documented cases of multiple personality from the 1870s (Stiles 2006a, Harrington 1987). Dracula (1897) drew on debates about the localization of brain function (Stiles 2006b), and works by Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre, 1847; Villette, 1853), Wilkie Collins (Heart and Science, 1883), and Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 1891) incorporated discussions about the gendered brain (Malane 2005). Inversely, a century later, the novel Albricks Gold fictionalized its neuroscientist author’s theory that certain regions of the hypothalamus are smaller in gay men than in heterosexual men (Levay 1997).
Brain transplantation featured in Michael Bulgakov’s 1925 Heart of a Dog, a short novel in which a murderer’s brain is transplanted into a dog’s body, resulting in a dog with the criminal’s personality. Also in 1925, Bulgakov’s fellow countryman Alexander Beliaev published Professor Dowell’s Head, a novel in which a young doctor must take care of the living head an evil scientist exploits for its ideas and knowledge. Both novels allude to research that was being carried out at the time in the Soviet Union (Krementsov 2009). Half a century later, at the other end of the world, the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares took up the fiction of transplanting a human soul into a dog. Although transplantation here concerns a soul rather than a brain, the procedure involves trepanning the skull and gives rise to a discussion about cerebral localization between the surgeon and the man whose wife’s soul is being transplanted:
—Remember what Descartes said? How are you going to remember if you never read him. Descartes thought that the soul was in a gland of the brain.
He said a name which sounded like “pineral” or “mineral.”
The missus’ soul? I asked.
He was so annoyed when he answered that he confused me.
—Anybody’s souls, my good man. Yours, mine.
—What’s the gland called?
—Forget it, because it doesn’t matter and it doesn’t even have the function they attributed to it.
—Then why do you mention it?
—Descartes was not wrong in principle. The soul is in the brain and we can isolate it. (Bioy Casares 2004 [1973], 160)
As other brain fictions, the transplantation theme explores the belief that “the soul” (or, in more secular terms, that which makes us the persons we are), is in the brain and is, in fact, consubstantial with it.
The brain in a vat (mentioned in Chapter 1) is the most recognizable twentieth-century variation on this theme, and in the 1960s it became one of the professional philosophers’ favorite thought experiments about personal identity. It might have become especially familiar after the philosopher Hilary Putnam used it in the first chapter of Reason, Truth, and History (1981), but it had by then made a good number of literary (and filmic) appearances, from J. D. Bernal’s futuristic The World, the Flesh, and the Devil of 1929 to Curt Siodmak’s 1942 Donovan’s Brain and the 1964 story “Whither Go the Cephalomos? [¿A dónde van los cefalomos?]” by the Cuban science fiction pioneer Angel Arango. In A Scanner Darkly (1977), Philip K. Dick incorporated research on the split brain and hemispheric lateralization and quoted articles of the late 1960s by the neuroscientists Joseph E. Bogen and Michael Gazzaniga. Dick (1977, 144) also referred to Arthur L. Wigan’s 1844 The Duality of Mind, one of the first works to present the idea of the “double brain” (also discussed in Chapter 1). The 1970s witnessed the rise of medical thrillers, which sometimes rehearse brain-related theories and practices (Hahn 2005, Pethes 2005); a famous example is Michael Crichton’s 1972 The Terminal Man, in which a microcomputer is inserted into a computer scientist’s brain.
Science fiction and, later, cyberpunk authors such as William Gibson (Neuromancer, 1985), Pat Cadigan (Mindplayers, 1987; Fools, 1992), Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky (The Turing Option, 1992), John Darnton (Mind Catcher, 2002), Bruce Sterling (Schismatrix, 1985), George Alec Effinger (When Gravity Fails, 1987; A Fire in the Sun, 1990; The Exile Kiss, 1991), and William Hjortsberg (Odd Corners, 1971) have dealt more or less critically with brain death and brain transplantation, the cerebral localization of memory and personal identity, and the technological means to preserve brain contents and, thereby, the person (see also Cadigan 2002; Dinello 2006; Geraci 2010; Guidotti 2003; Sterling 1986; Tofts, Jonson, and Cavallaro 2004).
The neuronovel of the 1990s continues in some respects this line of neurological fiction. Nevertheless, while the earlier works usually juxtaposed neuro themes to the treatment of characters or were merely instrumental (as for example when someone’s personality is described in phrenological terms or modified by a head injury, or even when brain contents are uploaded to a computer), neuronovels provide a neurochemical depiction of interiority. Rather than using neuroscientific vocabulary as an explanation of psychology and behavior, they turn brain mechanisms into a constitutive element of their characters.
Neurological Narrative
Both David Lodge’s Thinks … (2001) and Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 (1995) involve writers who are guests at prestigious cognitive neuroscience centers, and both deal with the clash between the scientific and humanist worldviews. Helen Reed, the protagonist of Thinks …, is a novelist visiting at the Centre for Cognitive Science in the imaginary British Gloucester University. Her relationship with the Centre’s director Ralph Messenger gives Lodge the occasion to explore the nature of the human self and consciousness. In one of their first encounters, Helen skeptically remarks that consciousness is “the thing at the moment” among cognitive scientists, who consider it a “ ‘problem’ which has to be ‘solved’ ” (Lodge 2001, 61). For the humanist, she notes, the scientific approach to consciousness is not only unfamiliar but also threatening:
I’ve always assumed, I suppose, that consciousness was the province of the arts, especially literature, and most specifically the novel.… Consciousness is simply the medium in which one lives and has a sense of personal identity. The problem is how to represent it, especially in different selves from one’s own (61).
The challenge for Helen is how to assimilate the neurocognitive perspective while keeping consciousness as that which enables a sense of personal identity and, therefore, as appropriate material for literary creation.
In contrast to Helen, Richard Powers, the protagonist of Galatea 2.2 and namesake of the novel’s author, becomes a convert to the neurological vocabulary and is exhilarated to realize that reading has changed the “physical structure” of his brain and thus “deformed the cell map of the mind” (Powers 1995, 56). After some hesitation, Richard joins an artificial intelligence project whose goal is to assemble a device capable of passing the final exam for a master’s degree in English literature. The goal of the project is to emulate the workings of the human brain through “Implementations” based on neural networks. Richard then spends months reading literary classics to Helen, as the computer is called, until he believes it can mimic self-consciousness and has become not only “operationally equivalent” to a human mind but actually “indistinguishable” from it (52).
At the same time, however, the novelist-protagonist asserts that “knowledge is physical” and that embodiment is crucial for personal identity (Adams 2008). Words and their neural representations do not suffice for personhood: the crucial element is not “what your mother reads you” but “the weight of her arm around you” as she reads (Powers 1995, 147). Even the computer Helen comes to realize this and to desire full human embodiment. Neuronovels thus problematize the belief that humans are essentially their brains; films, as we shall see below, do very much the same. And while it may seem that neuronovelists try to bridge the gap between the “two cultures” (G. Johnson 2008, Max 2007), the tensions they dramatize suggest insuperable differences.
The relationship between the novelist Helen and Ralph the cognitive scientist in Thinks … as well as the writer Richard Powers’s conversations with the scientist Philip Lentz in Galatea 2.2 function as vehicles for conveying knowledge on cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and connectionism. That is why some commentators feel that Lodge and Powers are closer to science writing than to fiction (Deresiewicz 2006). Others, such as the philosopher Daniel Dennett (2008, 160), consider that to ask if Powers is “doing science in a new, informal, ‘artistic’ way, or … ‘just’ writing fiction” is to ask a “bad question.” But the dilemma remains, and many neuronovels explore the difficulties of reconciling science popularization with basic research and scientific writing. In Enduring Love, the popular science writer Joe claims that “someone has to go between the researcher and the general public, giving the higher order explanations that the average laboratory worker is too busy, or too cautious, to indulge” (McEwan 1997, 75). Joe, however, had been a basic scientist and remains torn between his two vocations.
Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006) depicts an analogous situation. The novel narrates the story of Mark Schluchter, a twenty-seven-year-old meatpacker who, as a consequence of severe head trauma in an almost fatal car accident, develops Capgras syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that makes him believe his sister Karin is an impostor who looks exactly like her. Dr. Hayes and Dr. Weber take up his case. The former sees Capgras exclusively as a brain disorder. For Weber, who also writes popular science, the delusion involves the whole person, his life, history, and personality. Inspired by such scientist-writers as Oliver Sacks, V. S. Ramachandran, Daniel Dennett, and Gerald Edelman, Weber, like Joe in Enduring Love, hesitates between basic neurological research and a science popularization style focused on the existential-narrative aspects of illness (Draaisma 2009, Herman and Vervaeck 2009, Tabbi 2008). But a review in Harper’s Magazine dismissing one of his books as “slightly cartoonish,” “entirely predictable,” and based on “unacknowledged research” wounds his narcissism and makes him want to return to pure science (Powers 2006, 221). In rehearsing such difficulties at the borderline of science and nonscience, Lodge, Powers, and McEwan seem to remain confident that narratives exploring neurological research and conditions have the “potential to refresh and redeem the field of literature” (G. Johnson 2008, 184). Neuronovels would thus be a creative response to the exhaustion of the traditional consciousness novel, and instead of a deficient instance of psychological realism, a piece like The Echo Maker emerges as the “first fully realized novel of neurological realism,” that is, a novel in which neuroscientific perspectives are “fully enfolded” into the narrative strategies (Harris 2008, 243, 258).
By fictionalizing neurological conditions, neuronovels also offer a mirror image of the kind of clinical narrative so brilliantly practiced by Oliver Sacks (1985, 1995) or Paul Broks (2003). The Russian neurophysiologist Alexander Luria (1979), who pioneered the genre, referred to it as “romantic neurology,” an approach that attempts to recover the “I” or “who” of the patient’s subjectivity from the “it” or “what” of the physical illness (Couser 2004, 75–76). We have already mentioned the confrontation of perspectives through the characters of the doctors Haynes and Weber in The Echo Maker. Whereas the former reduces Capgras syndrome to neurology, the latter emphasizes the patient’s individual story and inner experience. Looking at the patient’s brain scans, Haynes perceives only “structure.… Something that looks like possible discrete injury near the anterior right fusiform gyrus, as well as the anterior middle and inferior temporal gyri.” Weber, in contrast, sees “the rarest of butterflies, fluttering mind, its paired wings pinned to the film in obscene detail.” He asks for “something more than neurons,” since “Capgras may not be caused so much by the lesion per se as by large-scale psychological reactions to the disorientation” characteristic of the condition (Powers 2006, 131, 132). Dr. Weber’s demanding “something more than neurons” points to a second central feature of neuronovels, namely that they need not imply cerebral solipsism.
Neuronovels and Solipsism
The Echo Maker’s epigraph is the last sentence from a passage where Alexander Luria explains that, in order to find the sources of human consciousness and freedom, “it is necessary to go outside the limits of the organism … into the objective forms of social life” and into “the social history of humanity.” And then comes the sentence used as the novel’s epigraph: “To find the soul it is necessary to lose it” (Luria 1966, 96–97). The choice of such a statement makes sense because The Echo Maker exhibits neurological realism at least as much as it challenges the belief that personhood and selfhood reside essentially in the brain.
Neuronovels, of course, often make characters speak in a neuro idiom supposed to account for their psychological situation. For example, in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, the protagonist Gary finds it hard to believe that his depression “wasn’t neurochemical but personal” (Franzen 2001, 198). Franzen writes:
Various chemicals that molecular floodgates had been holding back all afternoon burst loose and flooded Gary’s neural pathways. A cascade of reactions initiated by Factor 6 relaxed his tear valves and sent a wave of nausea down his vagus, a “sense” that he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. (156–157)
The writer here attenuates his own neurobiological depiction by combining it with references to the felt experiences of nausea and of the anticipation of death. Similarly, in Saturday, Ian McEwan portrays the main characters through their relation to the brain but lyrically extrapolates the brain-based vocabulary, as in the following description of two nurses crossing a square:
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 invisible glow of consciousness—these engines devise their own tracks. (McEwan 2005, 12)
It has been argued that neuronovels transform the self “into an object whose intricacies can only be described by future science” (Roth 2009). The examples from Franzen and McEwan nevertheless demonstrate that the neurobiological vocabulary may coexist with ambivalence regarding the biological determinism it seems to convey.
Beyond the literary realm, neuronovels illustrate the psychosocial phenomenon we reported in the chapter on cerebralizing distress: Neuro idioms are used pragmatically, and neurological solipsism does not necessarily follow from conceiving oneself and others as cerebral subjects. The Echo Maker, for instance, transforms contemporary neuroscientific insights about the nature of the self and neurological disorders into a fictional device to convey the fragility of selfhood as well as of collective and individual experience. The feeling of estrangement that characterizes Capgras syndrome becomes the “baseline condition for life in terrorized America” after September 11 (Powers 2007). America, said Powers in an interview, has become a place that “looks like my country, sounds like my country, acts like my country, but it’s no place that I can recognize. It must be an impostor” (quoted in Gennero 2008, 96). Thus, starting with a pathological condition, The Echo Maker explores the social and political predicament of an entire nation. It illustrates how, instead of isolating personhood inside the individual brain, neuronovels use neuropsychiatric disorders as an existential-phenomenological mirror for the undiagnosed.
Cerebralizing Memory?
Neuronovels’ treatment of memory provides a major example of the tension between the cerebralizing of selfhood and the desire to maintain what Jonathan Franzen (2002, 19), in a memoir on his father’s decline with Alzheimer’s, characterized as “the more soul-like aspects of the self.” In Galatea 2.2, after a few weeks living among cognitive scientists, the humanist protagonist, Powers, questions his basic certainties. He asks,
What was memory? Where, if anywhere, did it reside? How did an idea look? Why was comprehension bred, or aesthetic taste, or temperament? Predicates threaded my neural maze. After great inference, I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t the foggiest idea what cognition was. (Powers 1995, 28)
Powers’s quest for an answer leads him away from neuroscientific reduction and toward the phenomenological, embodied, and affective dimension of human interaction. He notes, for example, that although a child who suffers from Down syndrome is described as less able to understand literature than the computer Helen, the “incredible bodily empathy” that makes him capable of interpersonal connection is a dimension of humanity that Helen will never have (Powers 1995, 134; Bould and Vint 2007). Helen possesses a huge memory storage and associative capacity, but that alone does not make her human.
Similarly, in the case of Capgras syndrome as depicted in Powers’s The Echo Maker and Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, the derangement of memory is not treated primarily in a neuroscientific perspective. Since at least Antonio Damasio’s popular Descartes’ Error was published in 1995, it has become commonplace to emphasize the links between “emotion” and “reason.” Neuroscientists have turned their attention to the integration of emotion, memory, and cognition, and studies have also been devoted to how the brain organizes experience narratively and thereby produces a crucial dimension of “self” (Young and Saver 2001). Writers such as Powers and Galchen are aware of these trends yet focus on how emotion, memory, and self are apprehended in phenomenological terms. In Capgras, emotion is severed from memory: patients recognize the beloved others but, feeling no emotion toward them, perceive them as impostors. In order to sustain our relationship to the world, memory must involve emotion (Harris 2008); the narrative deals with the breakdown of this connection.
Again in The Echo Maker, another perspective on memory emerges from a narrative about geographic location as phenomenological and symbolic space. As Powers (2007) explains, “the book is about memory and recognition, but those mental skills are themselves deeply linked to the brain’s spatial abilities.” Hence his decision to focus on a particular location, a town in Nebraska. At the same time, his treatment of place highlights its significance for the American collective psyche. As Powers (2007) put it in an interview:
If space is the field for memory, and if memory is the basis of our narrative self-invention, then we must live in some seam between inside and outside, some corridor between the place we make and the place that makes us. That’s why I went to this crossroads, the empty, remote center of the Great American Desert.
Instead of situating psychological reality in the brain circuits responsible for memory, the author turns to a reflection on the imaginary geographies and the lived experiences of post-9/11 Americans. Such narrative treatment of memory is consistent with neuronovels’ implicit critique of the cerebralizing reduction of self. Speaking about the brain is mainly a trope to deal with sociality and experience, a way for making fiction in a context where neuro discourses have emerged as a prominent way of understanding the human.
Neuronovels seem to adhere to a neuroscientific view of the self and memory mainly when read through the lens of cognitive literary criticism and neuro lit crit. For example, in several novels by Ian McEwan, details of certain memories are magnified, and narrative closeups signify the emotions attached to those details: the protagonist’s narration of an encounter by a fountain in Atonement, the recollection of the hot-air balloon crash in Enduring Love, the circumstantial account of the attack on the main character’s house and family in Saturday. A neuro lit crit analysis of those episodes reads like the following:
When an individual encounters a stressful situation an instinctive response is prompted.… This response suggests that in situations where we undergo stress, our neurons process more information than they usually would do, due to the production of adrenaline. Therefore, a great number of synaptic connections are formed in the brain, allowing us to build up a stronger memory of the event just experienced, which then can be strengthened farther through recall. (Ash 2012)
The commentary assumes that the novel’s narrative choices are designed to depict neurobiological processes. That, however, is patently false, and the interpretation, illustrative of the neural turn in literary studies, does not throw any light on the novel or on the reader’s experience.
Since McEwan is known for his “empirical temperament” and “hostility to irrational thinking,” and since Saturday is supposed to be “a direct assault on the modern novel’s skepticism toward science” (Zalewski 2009, 2, 17, 21), readings of his work in a neuroscientific key may seem appropriate. Such a key, however, does not open any significant hermeneutic door. Even the more elaborate neuro interpretations merely juxtapose the writer and the neuroscientist (as Thrailkill 2011 does with McEwan, Gerald Edelman, and Antonio Damasio) and note the convergence of their treatments of the mind/brain. Such readings do little more than redescribe in superficially neuroscientific terms events and characters depicted in the novels. They assume, as we noted, that writers are intuitive neuroscientists or (as Thraikill 2011, 197, claims of McEwan) that they “import” into their narratives neuroscience’s “wisdom about the human mind.” In contrast, we have argued that neuronovels’ treatment of memory is better understood as a distancing device, as a critical statement about neurorealistic exegesis.
David Lodge’s Thinks … develops a fictional framework to dramatize the confrontation between humanist and scientific theories about human consciousness and selfhood. However, if the novel, and to a certain extent also Powers’s Galatea 2.2, stages the conflict of the Two Cultures as a way of aesthetically conveying opposing worldviews, it also proposes ways of transcending it. At a certain moment the protagonist Helen Reed, a novelist, attends a lecture by Robin Penrose, a feminist postmodern literary scholar who had appeared in Lodge’s earlier novel Nice Work (1988). The title of Penrose’s lecture is “Interrogating the Subject.” Helen is dismayed because, instead of a plea for the humanist subject endowed with a cohesive identity, she must listen to a defense of the view that the subject does not exist. The general argument of Penrose’s lecture, she explains,
was that the Subject in all these senses is a Bad Thing, that there is some kind of equivalence between the privileging of the ego in classical psychoanalysis, the fetishization of formal correctness in traditional grammar, the exploitation and oppression of subject races by colonialism, and the idea of a literary canon, they are all repressive and tyrannical and phallocentric and have to be deconstructed. (Lodge 2001, 225)
Helen realizes that Penrose’s discourse parallels the neurological deconstruction of selfhood endorsed by her lover, the cognitive scientist Ralph Messenger. She is astonished to see that both Ralph and Penrose “deny that the self has any fixed identity, any ‘centre.’ ” As she puts it: “He says it’s a fiction that we make up; she says it is made up for us by culture. It’s alarming that there should be so much agreement on this point between the most advanced thinking in the sciences and the humanities” (Lodge 2001, 224, 225–226; see also Gennero 2011). Similarly, in Powers’s The Echo Maker neuroscience undermines the belief in an integrated and self-conscious self. Both novels depict a neurobiological program deemed coherent with both a biologizing perspective and deconstructionist theories of the subject. On this point, fiction (or, rather, some central fictional characters’ view) is consistent with scholarly opinions.
For example, taking for granted an adaptationist view of Darwinism that has been intensely debated since at least Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin’s (1979) famous article “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm,” Ellen Spolsky (2002, 56) writes that “nothing could be more adaptationist, more Darwinian than deconstruction and post-structuralism, since both understand structuration … as an activity that happens within and in response to a specific environment.” Her assertion is consistent with the assumption of neuroaesthetics (mentioned here in chapter 2) that human aesthetic preferences reflect evolutionary adaptations. Such an evolutionary perspective gives those preferences an apparently solid foundation but also makes them contingent upon environmental demands. Confronted with positions akin to Spolsky’s, Helen, in Thinks …, notes that the cognitive sciences move in the same direction as psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and deconstruction—all arguing for the ultimately illusory character of the humanist “subject.”
On Screen: Brain Transplants and Memory Losses
The novels we just examined variously dramatize the relationship between neuroscientific knowledge (and its supposed larger consequences) and the notion of a “subject” whose embodiment and substantiality is potentially reducible to the networks of neurons out of whose interactions it “emerges.” When film scrutinizes similar issues, it obviously does so with its own means. This implies a predominance of visual materials over verbal ones. Dialogues of course remain essential, but embodiment is given a central role as that which displays the issues at hand. The physical criteria of personal identity take center stage, and in that case the main character often is an individual made up of one person’s brain and another person’s noncerebral body. But when the psychological criteria of personal identity are emphasized, then the dramatic focus shifts to memory, to amnesia, and to situations where characters are given memories that are not originally their own. Within the larger universe of movies that deal with personal identity and its conditions of embodiment, the ones we have chosen here explore specifically the promises and difficulties of the brainhood ideology.
Cerebralizing Frankenstein
Early on in James Whale’s classic film Frankenstein (1931), Dr. Henry Frankenstein and his hunchbacked assistant Fritz plan to steal a hanged man’s body. However, when the body falls to the ground, the neck breaks and makes the brain “useless.” The new brain that Fritz steals from the laboratory of Henry’s former professor, Dr. Waldman, is in a jar labeled “abnormal.” Waldman had explained that the “scarcity of convolutions on the frontal lobe” and the “distinct degeneration of the middle frontal lobe” corresponded exactly with its owner’s life “of brutality, violence, and murder.” Without noticing its anatomical flaws, Henry uses the brain for his creature and urges a bewildered Fritz to “think of it: the brain of a dead man, waiting to live again in a body I made with my own hands!”
Frankenstein highlights the ontological function of the brain. Unless the brain lives, the person doesn’t. In theory then (for the audience is rather captivated by the creature’s outer appearance), the “monster” is essentially a brain. But does the film make the theory hold? Although Waldman anticipates the consequences of having given him a “criminal brain,” the creature actually becomes aggressive only in reaction to human violence. Yet most commentators have followed Waldman and found in the brain the obvious cause for the creature’s alleged killing urges. In 1931, a New York Times critic correctly noted that the brain was the reason given in the film for the creature’s “murderous onslaughts.”3 Sixty years later, a Frankenstein historian suggested that the brain plot attenuated the doctor’s guilt (Forry 1990, 92), and the organizers of a 1997 exhibition at the National Library of Medicine in Washington, D.C., wrote that the makers of the 1931 Frankenstein exploited a widespread belief in biological determinism “when they created a monster whose evil results from the lobes of his brain rather than his experiences or character” (Lederer 2002, 46).
The film certainly illustrates how natural it was in the 1920s to think of a person’s inclinations as determined by the brain and to believe that a diagnosis could be established by observing cortical morphology with the naked eye. At the same time, by emphasizing that the creature’s violence is a reaction to human brutality, it questions Waldman’s determinism. Historically, even more significant than the existence of a brain subplot is the insistence with which it has been singled out. The exhibition curators who in the 1990s juxtaposed Whale’s Frankenstein with a 1921 display of “criminal brains” not only highlighted a common historical context of belief about criminality (and, more generally, about racial and individual traits), but they also helped perpetuate the “cerebralizing” interpretation of Whale’s classic.4 In that too, they went along with the later Frankenstein industry.
Indeed, most Frankenstein pictures after Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) replace the original theme of the creation of life with a scenario about brain transplantation and its consequences. The shift begins with Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and persists across genres, from gore to mild porn, to Mel Brooks’s satirical Young Frankenstein (1974) and beyond (Vidal 2016). Everything hinges on whose brain goes into whose body. That is why most films do not include a creature at all in the sense of Whale’s “monster” but instead a freak composed of A’s body and B’s brain. “My brain,” says a desolate character in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), “is in someone else’s body …” He may as well have said, “I am in someone else’s body.” The brain makes the person. At the same time, as we shall see, precisely because the action results from the person’s “being in” an alien body, most films necessarily problematize the reduction of the person to the brain.
The relevant productions in this respect are either “brain movies” or memory movies. We shall not limit the former category to productions involving evil brains or brainlike entities (Senn and Johnson 1992, 99–109) but enlarge it to films that display brains and deal with brain transplantation. The latter category includes films where personal identity is essentially defined by personal memories; although these memories are located in the brain, the organ is not itself a major protagonist. Films produced since the 1970s avoid surgery in favor of manipulating brain contents via microelectronic procedures for inserting, copying, transferring, selling, buying, controlling, implanting, or deleting “embrained” information. In spite of considerable differences—in their scripts, representations of technology, special effects, characters and narrative types, filmic strategies and ambitions—both memory and brain movies explore the relationships between having a body and being a brain and assume that personhood is essentially defined by memories. Memory transfers are functional equivalents of brain transplantations: Saying that A has B’s memories is the same as saying that A has B’s brain, and giving A’s memories to B generally implies relocating some kind of brain substance. The cerebral self is mostly memorial, and the memorial self is necessarily cerebral.
Body Parts and Living Heads
Have other body parts ever been depicted as fulfilling the same function as the brain? For centuries since Antiquity, mind and the physical basis of personality were also located in the heart. The heart played a crucial role in Christian mysticism, and objects in the shape of the cross and other instruments of the Passion were found in holy persons’ hearts. It did not, however, play for personal identity a role equivalent to the brain’s, and it was predominantly seen as the locus and symbol of emotions (Bound Alberti 2010). The same applies to heart transplantation movies. In the comedy Heart Condition (1990), a racist policeman receives the heart of a murdered black lawyer, who returns as a ghost to urge the cop to catch his killers. The drama Heart (1999) revolves around a mother’s obsession with her son’s heart, now located in another man’s body. Yet B’s heart in A’s body never turns A into B. An exception might be the 1969 Mexican cheapie La horripilante bestia humana (The horrifying human beast, aka Night of the Bloody Apes), in which a mad doctor tries to cure his son’s leukemia by giving him a gorilla’s heart, which accidentally transforms him into a violent monster.
More relevant at first sight are the adaptations (four between 1924 and 1960) of the French writer Maurice Renard’s 1921 novel Orlac’s Hands (Les mains d’Orlac), which, as far as the hands are concerned, all roughly follow the original story. The pianist Stephen Orlac’s hands are mangled in an accident, and he receives those of a man executed for murder. He becomes obsessed with them, and crimes are committed that make him look like the culprit. In the novel and most of the movies, someone else is actually framing him. In all cases, the hands affect Orlac not because they carry another person’s identity but because of his own psychological instability.
With the exception of Thing, the friendly forearm of the TV series The Addams Family (1962–1964), disembodied hands like those in The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), or The Hand (1981) roam about murderously but do not incarnate personhood. Body Parts (1991), based on Boileau-Narcejac’s novel Choice Cuts (… Et mon tout est un homme, 1965), seems to realize Orlac’s fears. A female surgeon grafts onto different bodies the head, legs, and arms of an executed murderer called Fletcher. The legs and arms turn out to be autonomous. Their present owners display various asocial behaviors, and a painter of corny landscapes becomes successful creating violent scenes; they also have memory flashes of Fletcher’s crimes. The character with the murderer’s head manages to recover one arm and the legs before having his neck broken by the recipient of the other arm. Given that after the head dies, the memory flashes cease and the surviving patient regains control of the grafted arm, the scenario depends on Fletcher’s brain, not on body parts that would autonomously function as loci of personhood. In short, neither the heart nor the hands ever reach the status of the brain in the making of personal identity.
Living severed heads are special because they both display a person’s face and enclose his or her brain. In The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1959), for example, a surgeon saves the head of his girlfriend Jan out of a car wreck and wants to graft it onto another female body so as to make Jan “complete again.” In Professor Dowell’s Testament (1984), based on Alexander Beliaev’s 1925 Professor Dowell’s Head, the title character is kept alive as a detached head. Similarly, in the British TV miniseries Cold Lazarus (1996), scientists activate memories from Daniel Feeld’s cryogenically preserved head and project them as scenes onto a screen. As visible bodies with recognizable features, Dowell, Jan, and Feeld are their heads; as persons, they are their brains. Yet they do not consider themselves persons and refuse to survive attached to perfusion machines. More dramatically than brain movies, living-head films stage the tragedy of bodily loss, asking how much of our body we could give up and still wish to live; more obviously than brain movies, they probe limits that are fundamentally existential and only secondarily physiological or anatomical.
Brain movies, in contrast, deal with the more disembodied situation of naked brains kept alive in isolation from their natural bodily environment, generally waiting in vats to be transplanted. These “ectobrains,” which were popular in B-movies from the 1940s to the 1970s (Vidal 2009b), embody the person to whom they originally “belonged.” The most interesting films of this sort involve individuals of the same species. Whether we say that A is the brain donor or the body recipient and B the brain recipient or the body donor, the outcome of the operation is a person with the external appearance and (except for the brain) the internal anatomy of B but with the life history and psychological features of A—essentially, therefore, according to the movies, A in or with B’s body. The plots then focus on the consequences of the surgery, which range from the hybrid’s desire for revenge to the choice of a new life in the guise of B; they may also touch on the resurgence in A of personality features originally belonging to B.
Brain Transplants: Staying the Same or Becoming Someone Else?
Three movies stand out in the transplant category: The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936), Change of Mind (1969), and L’homme au cerveau greffé (The Man with the Transplanted Brain, 1971). In contrast to most others, they take the assumption that humans are cerebral subjects as the core of their scenario rather than as a mere trigger for (usually violent) action, and they deal soberly with the transformations that result from a person’s survival as that person’s brain in someone else’s extracerebral body.
At the beginning of Robert Stevenson’s The Man Who Changed His Mind, we learn that the young Dr. Clare Wyatt is going to work with the aged Dr. Laurience (Boris Karloff in one of his usual roles), a once-respectable scientist turned “mad brain specialist.” Laurience has invented a machine for relocating mental contents between brains. “Until now,” he explains to an increasingly worried Clare, “it’s never been possible to, as it were, extract the thought content from a living brain, and leave it alive but empty. I can do it; I can take the thought contents of the mind of a living animal, and store it, as you would store electricity.” As he demonstrates with two chimps, he can then transfer these contents to another living animal’s brain. When Clare realizes that Laurience wants to try this out with humans, she refuses to help him any further. The doctor seeks to convince her: “I can take a young body, and keep my own brain.” And he can do the same for her: “Think of it: I offer you eternal youth, eternal loveliness!”
In the meantime, Clare has met the journalist Dick Haslewood, the son of the press magnate Lord Haslewood. Although Laurience is discredited in the scientific community, the lord offers him a laboratory in his London “Haslewood Institute of Modern Science.” However, after the doctor is ridiculed at a conference, his patron fires him. But Laurience manages to tie Haslewood to the cerebral transfer chair and replace the lord’s mind with that of his crippled assistant Clayton. Haslewood (that is, Haslewood’s mind in Clayton’s body) dies immediately after the transfer; Clayton’s mind survives in the nobleman’s body. In the meantime, Clare has become engaged to Dick. Laurience, who is in love with her, plans to occupy Dick’s body. For that, he needs Clayton’s help. However, since Haslewood’s body turns out to have a fatal heart disease, Clayton claims Dick’s body for himself. Laurience kills him and forces the mind transfer with Dick. Clare later succeeds in reversing the exchange. With his mind back in his original brain, Laurience dies repentant after asking Clare to destroy all his equipment.
The Man Who Changed His Mind stages a metonymy where the brain stands for the mind it “contains.” Although Laurience claims he can take a young body and keep his own brain, he does not transplant brains but transfers without surgery the “thought contents” that define personhood. When Laurience tells Clare that he can keep his own brain in a new young body, he makes brain stand for self or personality. Thus, even though the film enacts psychological criteria of personal identity, it is not without good reasons that it is also known as The Brainsnatcher. Both the conflict and the empirical or logical dependence between the cerebral and psychological criteria of personhood emerge here in the context of a scientist’s quest for brain-based immortality. The film both assumes and relativizes the view of humans as cerebral subjects; it alternately tells us that we are our minds and that we are our brains.
Two later productions explore the brain transplantation drama in the social realm. Robert Stevens’ Change of Mind (1969) uses it to deal with race relations in 1960s America. The movie begins with closeups of an open-skull brain operation. District Attorney David Rowe, a white man, has terminal cancer; Dr. Bornear transplants his brain into the body of Ralph Dickson, a black man run over by a car. It is therefore as a white lawyer in a black man’s body that Rowe will prosecute the white racist sheriff Gene Webb for the murder of a young black woman. The scenario is thoroughly structured by the racial divide.
The Washington, D.C., mayor finds the looks of the postoperative Rowe “a little shocking”; Rowe’s visitors and colleagues are embarrassed; his wife, Margaret, won’t let him touch her; his mother feels she cannot accept him as her son (“It’s me, mother.—How can you look so different without being different?”); he and Dickson’s widow Elizabeth sleep together, but she interrupts their lovemaking with the words “Ralph is dead”; in the nightclub where Elizabeth sings, an attractive black woman recognizes Rowe but treats him as black, while a man comments, “Oh… It’s the brother with the new brain.… You know what’s stitched inside this freak’s head? A white politician’s brain.” At first, Rowe’s political party no longer wants him to run for district attorney: “To a white man,” they tell him, “you’re black. To a black man, you’re a freak.” Predictably, however, Rowe’s pursuit of the case against the white sheriff attracts black voters, and his party lets him run. But after he discovers that the murder was actually committed by a black man and asks the case against Webb to be dismissed, his black supporters turn against him.
Such situations define the social drama of the movie. How does it relate to brainhood? When a journalist asks Dr. Bornear, “What is he now, doctor: a white man with a black body, or a black man with a white brain?” the surgeon does not reply, but the film’s answer seems unambiguous. Several times Rowe asserts the continuity of his personal identity under a different appearance. To his wife, he explains, “the brain is a wonderful thing. It’s really everything: David in me, Margaret in you.” And the country’s top authority on forensic medicine concludes “that since the brain of David Rowe survives, the brain that reasons, has compassion, personality, loyalties and love, which has memory, instinct and sensation, then David Rowe, district attorney of Dorene County, survives medically and legally.”
Yet Rowe’s medical and legal permanence conflicts with the historical conditions of his social survival. Rowe grows increasingly disappointed and estranged from Margaret and becomes cynical about politics. In a country that had only recently passed civil rights laws, his reembodiment transforms not only his mind and body but also his position in society, attitudes toward him, and his sense of self. His preoperative defense of racial desegregation takes on an existential significance that was completely absent when he was still a white district attorney. Hence the movie title’s “change of mind.”
The plot offers no resolution and finishes with Rowe’s flying toward an unknown destination to “think things over.” Such an open ending corresponds to the film’s nuanced notion of personhood and results from the ways it problematizes brainhood. The movie declares that we are cerebral subjects—where Rowe’s brain goes, there goes Rowe. Yet the protagonist’s story is entirely mediated by the historical circumstances and interpersonal relations of his newly embodied self. In the end, a new person materializes from the composite of a “white brain,” a “black body,” and an explosive political context.
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze’s L’homme au cerveau greffé (The Man with the Transplanted Brain) also focuses on the emergence of a new postoperative person. The middle-aged, fatally ill surgeon Jean Marcilly and his collaborator Robert Desagnac have been experimenting with brain transplantation in animals. When the body of the young Franz Eckermann, fatally injured in a car crash, arrives at Marcilly’s clinic, the surgeon asks Desagnac to graft his brain into the victim’s body. In the end, the resulting individual (let’s call him Franz2) voluntarily assumes Franz’s persona.
In Change of Mind, the grafted brain completely dominated the rest of the body, and the transformations of the self derived from the hybrid’s encounter with his social environment. In contrast, The Man with the Transplanted Brain stages the reemergence of Franz’s personality, accompanied by certain antagonisms of brain and body, as crucial elements for the metamorphosis of Franz2 into a genuinely new individual. Right after the operation, Franz2 introduces himself as Professor Marcilly, and Desagnac calls him “Jean.” He speaks with a slight accent, but his demeanor is Marcilly’s. Franz2, however, meets Elena, the beautiful Italian who was about to divorce Franz at the time of the accident, and moves into Franz’s apartment. Desagnac intuits the coming difficulties and insists that Franz2 is the surgeon living “in someone else’s body.”
Franz2 and Elena revive their relationship. In the meantime, some of Franz’s usual behaviors reappear. Franz was a racecar driver; Franz2 drives recklessly. Franz2 handles a cat affectionately and then suddenly drops it with violence; a rapid alternation of Marcilly’s and Franz2’s faces highlights the conflict of the two personalities. Franz2 is puzzled; Elena tells him he loved dogs but hated cats. Franz had a penchant for alcohol; Franz2 drinks without realizing it a bottle of rum, and when Elena scolds him, he denies having drank. As Franz2 explains in his medical persona, “the subject seems to have abruptly become prisoner of the body’s drives, as if the cerebral element had suddenly ceased to govern.”
Scenes demonstrating the coexistence of two persons in Franz2 follow the remark about the power of Franz’s body and the identification of the brain with “reason.” For example, Franz2 visits Marcilly’s widow Elisabeth in her vast bourgeois apartment. Desagnac arrives and is surprised to find Franz2. Franz2 explains that he wished to see his family and environment, even though he does not miss them. In the following scene, Franz2 returns home late, quarrels with Elena, fills a glass with alcohol; as he is about to drink, he sees himself in a mirror, and throws the glass on the floor. Back at Marcilly’s, Elisabeth finds a piece of paper with a doodle her husband was in the habit of making and which was not there before Franz2’s visit. In the end, the automatisms and conflicts are superseded by Franz2’s choice of a new life. When Desagnac objects, “You are not Franz Eckermann,” Franz2 responds, “I know, Robert, I know Eckermann is dead, but the truth is that I, Jean Marcilly, love this woman [Elena].” While the dialogues reproduce traditional associations of the brain with reason and of the body with passions and emotions, Franz2 is trying to bring them together.
Marcilly’s decision to impersonate Eckermann is catalyzed by the surgeon’s attractive daughter Marianne, who falls in love with Franz2. After narrowly escaping from being seduced, he phones Desagnac, introduces himself as Franz Eckermann, calls him “doctor,” addresses him as vous, and asks him to tell Marianne no longer to follow Franz. While phoning, however, he automatically draws the surgeon’s idiosyncratic scribble. When Marcilly deliberately takes on Eckermann’s civil identity, which had until then been a mere cover for the surgeon’s persistence as a newly embodied brain, he turns the doctor’s death and the patient’s survival into public and irreversible social realities.
In spite of the surgery and the connections the movie makes between the brain and the noncerebral body, the brain appears as different from the body rather than as an integral part of it. The film thus rehearses the ancient question of the union of two essentially different substances and gives form to speculations derived, as we saw in Chapter 1, from the Lockean redefinition of personal identity. The brain takes on the functions of the soul as substantial foundation of self and even as that which assures its persistence beyond bodily decay. Marcilly is supposed to survive in Franz’s body; successive transplants of A’s brain into younger bodies could insure A’s immortality.
Like Change of Mind, The Man with the Transplanted Brain lacks resolution: We do not know what ultimately happens to the main protagonists, nor do we find out if there is a limit to the number of successive brain transplants, a threshold beyond which they would definitely not be “the same.” The question these films choose to leave open is, at bottom, the ancient one of Theseus’s ship: The vessel the hero used to return from Crete after slaying the Minotaur was kept in the Athens harbor, with its parts being replaced as they decayed. Thus, as Plutarch reports in his Life of Theseus (here in John Dryden’s version), “this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”
Philosophers never stopped pondering the paradox of Theseus’s ship, but the puzzle was of course not their preserve. By the early 1960s, when Anglo-American professional philosophy began discussing personal identity with the help of brain transplantation and other cerebral fictions (duplication, grafting of brain halves onto different bodies or of a full brain onto a body cloned from the original), cinema and literature had been covering much of the same ground for several decades. It took thirty more years before a high-profile neuroscientist (Michael Gazzaniga, as quoted in Chapter 1) reified them as a “simple fact” that proves “you are your brain.” That such reification could be so naturally asserted illustrates the power of the cerebral subject as an anthropological figure of modern times. In a period when brain death had just been defined (Beecher et al. 1968), movies such as Change of Mind and The Man with the Transplanted Brain dramatized an extreme version of the predicament that drove the definition: the entire extracerebral body of a brain-dead person becomes a vessel for the brain of a person whose extracerebral body is fatally ill. Yet the films we discussed transmit conflicting messages and support competing views, dramatizing above all the tension between the possibility that someone might be an isolated brain and the fact that we are more fully embodied social beings. By virtue of its capacity to display incompatible doctrines within one production, cinema both reinforces and subverts; it represents and spreads certain beliefs while simultaneously questioning them and suggesting the existence of alternatives.
Memory Movies
In spite of the nuances and ambiguities we just sketched, the result of transplanting A’s brain into B’s body is A’s persistence in B’s body. Precisely because they entail the replacement of the entire outer and visible body, brain transplantations lend themselves particularly well to exploring experiences of reembodiment in relational contexts, and since transplanting the entire brain transfers the totality of mental contents, there is no need to single out any of the psychological features that, in the Western tradition, define personal identity. Among these features, memory has been the most closely associated with visual media. This, no doubt, is partly due to the visuality of memory itself, to the fact that memories often arise in visual form. Cinema has a longstanding relationship with memory and has enacted it in many of its different forms (Greenberg and Gabbard 1999, Radstone 2010). Some films have explored heritage, nostalgia, and trauma at the individual and collective levels; others have taken memory itself as their subject; yet others have modeled themselves on the workings of memory or have sought visually and narratively to mirror its mechanisms and evoke the experience of remembrance.
Yet relatively few films have dealt directly with memory and brain, and most of these few concern an amnesic protagonist. Forgetting has served dramatic and comical purposes from cinema’s earliest days, but it was mainly in the 1980s that movies began connecting memory explicitly to the brain and to various neurotechnologies. A central feature of those films is that although they often involve amnesia, the condition makes sense only in the light of protagonists’ personal histories, experiences, and existential quests. Both before and after venturing a cerebral diagnosis, films (like short stories, novels, and the sciences of memory themselves) must turn toward the mind. Once again, while many filmic elements convey the ideology of the cerebral subject, others resist it, dispute it, contradict it, or give it subtler forms. Both ways, movies incorporate and reinforce elements of widespread views about the primordial role of memories in defining the individual self and of the brain in constituting human personhood.
The “Cerebrality” of Self and Memory
Given the role attributed to memory in the making of personal identity, the importance of amnesia as a dramatic motif comes as no surprise. Yet it seems that “most amnesic conditions in films bear little relation to reality” (Baxendale 2004). For example, although anterograde amnesia (the inability to recall events that take place after the onset of the disease) is more common and incapacitating than retrograde amnesia (the inability to recall events that preceded the onset of the disease), cinema has overwhelmingly focused on the loss of memories of the past. This attests to the vitality of the Lockean view of personal identity.
Indeed, in film, memory has become so much “a shorthand for identity” that, without it, “we cease to exist as who we are and become only receptors of current data” (Bowman 2004, 85, 88. Outside the cinema, this view prevails, but is not the only one; see Tougaw (2016) for examples in patients’ memoirs and literary fiction). Moreover, as we shall see, reality and authenticity are crucial: In most movies, “memory of a ‘real’ past remains a defining criterion of being a ‘real’ person” (Marsen 2004). The explicit connection to the brain, however, is accessory, and it arose late, after the wave of brain movies examined in the previous section. For example, in the original version of The Manchurian Candidate (1962), hypnosis and behavioristic conditioning are used to brainwash soldiers into having false memories of their commander’s behavior. In the 2004 remake, implanting a microchip in the brain augmented the initial psychological means, thus highlighting the extent to which the memory theory of personal identity came to emphasize memory-in-the-brain while not displacing first-person psychological experience as the core event.
In Total Recall (1990), set in the year 2084, Douglas Quaid has recurrent dreams about Mars, where, as far as he knows, he has never been. At a holiday agency that implants artificial memories of visits to exotic places, Quaid signs up for a vacation as a secret agent to the Red Planet. It turns out, however, that he actually has been a secret agent on Mars. Another personality surfaces during implantation, and, for most of the movie, we cannot tell if the events we see are “reality” or programmed memories. A video of someone identical to Quaid tells him, “you are not you, you are me.” This “me” is Hauser, an agent for the dictator of Mars. They had used Quaid to lead them to a rebel leader, and after the leader is killed, Hauser wants his body back. Quaid, however, manages to escape, and in the end, we see him contemplating the fertile landscape of a free Mars in the company of a lovely woman who had also appeared in his dreams. Throughout the movie, tormented by doubts about the reality of his memories (which, a character reminds him, lie in “that black hole you call a brain”), Quaid keeps asking, “If I’m not me, who the hell am I?” Yet he never finds his “real” self, and the rebel leader’s dictum summarizes the lesson of the whole situation: “A man is defined by his actions, not his memories.”
In Magdalena’s Brain (2006), the protagonist’s husband, Arthur, is a paralyzed Stephen Hawking–type genius. Magdalena helps him continue his work in artificial intelligence, with the new goal of developing an artificial brain “smart enough to repair [his] mind and get [him] out of this chair.” The procedure involves a “memory transfer” in which Arthur’s mind’s contents are downloaded into a bluish liquid. A small amount of the fluid is to be injected into the brain of a good-looking young man who suffers from a brain tumor; once the material is “integrated,” his tumor will be removed, and Magdalena will benefit from having her husband’s mind in a fitter body. (None of this happens, and somehow Arthur gets back on his feet.) We are not told how the fluid encodes information, but the point is that memory must appear as a physical cerebral substance. Simple visuals (a glass container with a colored liquid) suffice to demonstrate that manipulating memory amounts to handling neural matter. No scientifically sophisticated detail is necessary to communicate the idea that persons are their memories and that memories are a brain substance or involve neurobiological processes.
Dark City (1998) takes a similar approach. A race of Strangers has invaded the Earth. Once a day, they carry out “tuning,” an operation in which they stop everything, make everybody lose consciousness, and refashion a Metropolis-like artificial city; they then change people’s identities by “imprinting them,” that is, injecting other individuals’ memories into their brains. The Strangers, who use dead human bodies as “vessels,” are a vanishing race of jellyfish-like intelligent creatures that can survive only by becoming like humans. They do not know what defines humanity, and manipulate memories in order to find out. The manipulations are carried out by a human doctor, Daniel P. Schreber, the namesake of the German judge on whose memoirs Sigmund Freud based his 1911 monograph on paranoia. With a syringe, the doctor first extracts memory fluids through people’s foreheads. He mixes them—the painful memory of a great love, a dose of unhappy childhood, youthful rebellion, a death in the family—and injects the preparation into other individuals. The resulting people look just as they did before imprinting but have different memories. So who are they?
Personal Identity and the Authenticity of Memory
Dark City illustrates another filmic leitmotif: the authenticity of memories. The humans whose identities the Strangers transform ignore that their recollections are false. The only exceptions are Schreber, who knows the entire truth, and a certain John Murdoch, who is partly immune to the Strangers’ manipulation and is able to “tune.” Murdoch does not know if his remembered past actually happened or if his beloved wife, “Emma,” ever existed. Yet, unlike other humans, he is aware of his predicament, knowing for example that he is not a serial prostitute killer (the imprint attempted on him) and faintly longing for a place called Shell Beach. Together with Schreber, he embarks on the quest to find that town, only to reach a brilliantly colored billboard behind which there is nothing but deep space.
Schreber eventually helps Murdoch defeat the Strangers, reshape the city, and bring back the sun and natural landscapes. At a recreated Shell Beach, Murdoch meets Emma; the fact that she has been imprinted as Anna and does not remember him is no obstacle to a happy ending. Except for Schreber and Murdoch, nobody’s personal identity in the new world is made up of personal memories of experienced events. All memory has become “prosthetic,” to use with some latitude a term coined to designate memories that “are adopted as the result of a person’s experience with a mass cultural technology of memory that dramatizes or recreates a history that he or she did not live” (Landsberg 2004, 28). Yet that does not make identities fake.
Similarly, in Blade Runner (1982), Rachel, a genetically manufactured “replicant,” is fitted with long-term implanted memories going back to childhood. That those memories are someone else’s does not make them any less significant for her sense of self. On the contrary, the psychological continuity between the alien memories and her own coalesce into one personality. To sum up: In film, amnesia disrupts personal identity more than false memories. The integrity of the self largely depends on the integrity of memory; memory lost is more problematic than memory received, and recovering memory is a cerebral affair.
In Johnny Mnemonic (1995), the hero is a “mnemonic courier” who gives up all his childhood memories to make room for data he carries in a brain implant. After accomplishing his mission, Johnny wants his memory back. That requires expensive surgery. In order to pay for it, he agrees to transport a dangerously large amount of information about the treatment of a pandemic “nerve attenuation syndrome.” Criminal gangs want the information, and a rebel movement wishes to make it freely available. After it turns out that the memory-retrieval surgery cannot take place, Johnny must “hack” his own brain. When he enters the virtual reality of his implant, its contents are broadcast worldwide, thus universally releasing the information about the treatment to the tune of appropriately stirring music. Thanks to the brain space made available, Johnny relives his childhood memories, and the restoration of his full identity opens the way for a happy ending.
Johnny Mnemonic assumes that memory is a collection of fixed data items that can be stored and recovered. Such a view has been called into question by cognitive neuroscience, with its emphasis on plasticity and its demonstration that long-term memories are not embodied in singular locations but in neural connections as well as in different types of memory processed by different brain systems (Eichenbaum 2012). At the same time, like most movies of its kind, Johnny Mnemonic highlights connections between memory and emotion that have been corroborated by the mind and brain sciences, especially the role of emotion in encoding and retrieval (see Dunsmoor et al. 2015 for a recent example).
Movies tend to imply that personal identity requires a repertoire of long-term eidetic or “photographic” episodic memories of real autobiographical events stored in discrete brain locations. For instance, the protagonist of Strange Days (1995) deals in illegal recordings made directly from the cerebral cortex, allowing future viewers to live others’ experiences as if they were their own. This provides a good example of how discredited notions with a high representational potential (memory as a repository of fixed memories) may be conveyed in ways that make them compatible with the reconstructive, malleable, and manipulable nature of memory, which has been the object of outstanding research since Frederick Bartlett’s 1932 Remembering and of heated discussions during the “false memories” controversy of the 1990s (e.g., Loftus and Ketcham 1994).
Despite the significance of their brain motifs, movies offer psychological, not neurological dramas. Johnny retrieves his childhood memory by hacking his brain, the Strange Days devices record from one brain and deliver to another, and Schreber engineers memories by manipulating a cerebral fluid. Like the neurosciences, movies proclaim that memories are cerebral entities and that experiences have neural correlates, yet, also like the neurosciences, they must place psychology center stage if those mechanisms and correlates are to have any meaning.
The same applies to scenarios about erasing memories. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Joel discovers that his ex-girlfriend Clementine has had him and their failed relationship erased from her memory. Enraged, he decides to undergo the same procedure at a clinic that carries out the “focused erasure” of troubling memories. Such an approach to eliminating memories (by destroying localized clusters of neurons) differs from contemporary neuroscience. A 2014 review noted that “enhancing recall, deleting knowledge of the past and implanting fictitious memories—once the preserve of Hollywood blockbusters—are now becoming a reality” thanks to an expanding repertoire of methods (Spiers and Bendor 2014, 2). These methods don’t include Eternal Sunshine’s, but otherwise the movie has been widely considered as a nuanced representation of how the brain forms memories of intense emotional experiences and how traces of those experiences may resurface in amnesia.
However, commentators’ emphasis on memory erasure overlooks one of the film’s crucial features. Erasure is of course essential to the film—but chiefly because both the plot and the shooting are driven by its failure. At one point during the procedure, Joel, who is unconscious, wants to call it off and preserve certain targeted memories. The movie focuses on resistance to memory deletion rather than on the consequences of its success.
Moreover, some films convey the idea that natural memories are never totally lost. In Johnny Mnemonic, where the deletion is voluntary, the memory of the protagonist’s childhood is entirely retrievable. Sometimes, traces remain operational. Eternal Sunshine opens with Joel impulsively taking the train to the forgotten place where he first met Clementine. In Paycheck (2003), which only briefly shows that the procedure involves intervening in the brain, an engineer agrees to have erased from his memory the three years during which he cracked the design of a machine to see into the future. But when he attempts to claim the millions owed him, he discovers that he has signed away the money, and in exchange he receives an envelope with miscellaneous everyday objects. Although he does not recognize them, he uses them appropriately to escape from the killers who chase him; after memory erasure, the unconscious traces of such knowledge (what psychologists call “implicit memory”) serve him well.
For most of the movies that have explored memory, identity, and the brain since the 1980s, humans are essentially defined by the relationship of their present to their remembered past: totally forgetting our past would turn us into different persons. Moreover, most films tend to assume a storehouse model of memory, perhaps because it is familiar and facilitates representation. The notion of discrete brain locations can be more readily incorporated into filmic action than neural networks and chemical events happening at the synaptic gap. Concurrently, though, filmic representation goes beyond that basic theory, and the same relativizing effect concerns the belief that memories are indestructible. Movies give it a central role, yet they also stage discordant characterizations of memorative experiences and of memories themselves. Although characters associate their recollections to events that actually happened and when in doubt look for empirical confirmation, film also portrays memories as (re)constructed, whether by their subjects’ unconscious or by neurotechnological means.
Thus, a movie may insist on antithetical properties: on the one hand, the authenticity of memories and historical truth as criteria for a genuine self and, on the other, the primacy of narrative truth and a psychological reality that eludes the dichotomies of objective and subjective, natural and artificial, true and false (for historical and narrative truth, see Spence 1984). Even alien or fabricated memories are frequently displayed as “flashbulb memories” (a term coined to convey the vividness with which highly emotional memories are recalled; Brown and Kulik 1977) and are given the eidetic and visual qualities cinematography often associates with veracity and authenticity. Finally, how memories are felt, perceived, and integrated into webs of social relations is more important than their source. As psychology and the neurosciences themselves demonstrate, memory “is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds” (Sacks 2013).
As for personal identity, in spite of their great diversity, memory movies, including brain-and-memory productions, adhere to the classical Lockean theory. Only when apparently accurate visual-emotional memories of an experienced past reach consciousness does an amnesic protagonist recover his or her original and ipso facto authentic identity and becomes again himself or herself. This contributes to turn protagonists into cerebral subjects. At the same time, when cinema displays the phenomenological complexity of memory and embeds it in social relations, it downplays the brainhood ideology. The same observation applies to the movies discussed earlier. They typically begin by proclaiming that humans are essentially their brains, and that assumption sustains brain transplantation with the purpose of perpetuating someone’s personal identity “in” a different body. But the plots actually depend on the failure of those initial expectations, and the surgical hybrids voluntarily redefine themselves as new whole persons—bodily, cognitively, emotionally, socially. With specifically cinematographic means, these films thus question the dichotomy brain-body and other central tropes of the neurocultural outlook that began to emerge a few decades after they were themselves produced.
In spite of obvious differences, the “neuroliterary” field points to social and experiential features of the cerebral subject’s mode of existence that coincide with those manifest in film. As we have seen, the novelistic genre that neurologizes consciousness and analyzes characters in neuro terms parallels the neurologization of literary criticism. Although they seem to share an attitude of neuroscientific realism, critics and writers (as far as can be judged from their writings) differ significantly. Neuro lit crit involves a double reduction: a hermeneutic one, whereby authors are regarded as intuitive neuroscientists and their texts as expressions or vehicles of implicit neuroscientific knowledge, and an ontological one, whereby the acts involved in literary creation require a brain and barely anything else. In line with the other neurodisciplines, neuro lit crit sees culture as accessory insofar as literature is the product of a brain whose functioning is merely modulated by contextual and historical factors. Such modulation may be considered necessary but is nevertheless subsidiary to the brain and functions at the most as a secondary cause.
Neuronovels too may seem committed to an ideology of the cerebral subject. However, in contrast to neuro lit crit, they introduce brain-based views chiefly as narrative tools that generate ambivalence vis-à-vis the neurosolipsism of some of their situations and characters. They thus proclaim that fictionally bringing brains into literature is likely to be more productive for understanding the function and workings of literary creation and reception than the scholarly hermeneutics that places literature in the brain. Like brain and memory movies, their choice not to deliver a verdict on the situations they depict and the thought experiments they dramatize implies that the situations have no theoretical, only existential or phenomenological resolution and that those experiments either are not useful tools or stage badly formulated questions. For the late Oxford philosopher Kathleen Wilkes (1988), the theoretical impossibility of thought experiments rendered them irrelevant. But the ways literature and cinema have rehearsed them suggest otherwise, since they underline the profound differences between being a brain and not being able to be without one.