The Rise of the Neuronovel By Marco Roth

It seems that Freud is out and neuroscience is in. Back in the day, James Joyce was a Jungian, not a Freudian. But I digress.

From n+1.

The Rise of the Neuronovel

By Marco Roth

[From Issue 8]

October 19th, 2009

The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain. Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in “literary fiction.” There are also many recent genre novels, mostly thrillers, of amnesia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder. As young writers in Balzac walk around Paris pitching historical novels with titles like The Archer of Charles IX, in imitation of Walter Scott, today an aspiring novelist might seek his subject matter in a neglected corner or along some new frontier of neurology.

What makes so many writers try their hands and brains at the neuronovel? At the most obvious level, the trend follows a cultural (and, in psychology proper, a disciplinary) shift away from environmental and relational theories of personality back to the study of brains themselves, as the source of who we are. This cultural sea change probably began with the exhaustion of “the linguistic turn” in the humanities, in the 1980s, and with the discredit psychoanalysis suffered, around the same time, from revelations that Freud had discounted some credible claims of sexual abuse among his patients. Those philosophers of mind who had always been opposed to trendy French poststructuralism or old-fashioned Freudianism, and the mutability of personality these implied, put forth strong claims for the persistence of innate ideas and unalterable structures. And in neuroscience such changes as the mind did endure were analyzed in terms of chemistry. By the early ’90s, psychoanalysis—whether of a Lacanian and therefore linguistic variety, or a Freudian and drive-oriented kind—was generally considered bankrupt, not to mention far less effective and more expensive than the psychiatric drugs (like Prozac) that began to flow through the general population’s bloodstream. The new reductionism of mind to brain, eagerly taken up by the press—especially the New York Times in its science pages—had two main properties: it explained proximate causes of mental function in terms of neurochemistry, and ultimate causes in terms of evolution and heredity.

Many scientists and philosophers acknowledge that they understand more about how damaged brains work—or, rather, don’t work— than about the neurochemistry of the normal brain. And yet, in its popular journalistic form, the new reductionism can or will soon describe all human behavior, from warfare to soul-making. The British physician, philosopher, and neuro-skeptic Raymond Tallis has summarized the doctrine: “A convergence of evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and other biological disciplines has led countless thinkers to claim that we are best understood as organisms whose entire panoply of behavior is directly or indirectly related to organic survival.”

New scientific discoveries may be less important for the change in the novel than the triumphal march of scientific advancement recounted in books like Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991) and Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works (1997). Culture-shaping institutions like the Times can’t easily respond to Dennett’s and Pinker’s arguments and analyses, which the average journalist remains unprepared to evaluate, but it has been impossible to ignore their superbly confident rhetoric. Here is the philosopher Dennett:

Fiery gods driving golden chariots across the skies are simpleminded comicbook fare compared to the ravishing strangeness of contemporary cosmology, and the recursive intricacies of the reproductive machinery of DNA make [Bergson’s] élan vital about as interesting as Superman’s dread kryptonite. When we understand consciousness—when there is no more mystery—consciousness will be different, but there will still be beauty, and more room than ever for awe.

The program was to develop a full redescription of consciousness in scientific terms. A corollary program in philosophy of mind was the “eliminativism” of Paul and Patricia Churchland, who dismiss “folk psychological” terms (such as happiness, sadness, excitement, anxiety, et cetera) as constituting a hopelessly and indeed meaninglessly imprecise vocabulary without bearing on the actual activities of the brain.

In 1949, Lionel Trilling could write, “A specter haunts our culture—it is that people will eventually be unable to say, ‘They fell in love and married,’ let alone understand the language of Romeo and Juliet, but will as a matter of course say ‘Their libidinal impulses being reciprocal, they activated their individual erotic drives and integrated them within the same frame of reference.’” The joke is now quaint; the possibility of an orthodox everyday Freudianism turned out to be no more ultimately threatening than the other specter Trilling was alluding to. Today people, or a certain class of university-educated ones, are likelier to read books like The Female Brain than to consult any psychoanalytic writer on female sexuality, and to send emails like this almost serious one I received from a friend:

In advance of your date in Brooklyn, there are one or two things to know and one or two things to get ready to do! First we should hope that N is post-menstrual and therefore on an estrogen up. Day twelve of the menstrual cycle would be best. Testosterone will be kicking in with a bit of androgen on top of the estrogen, making N somewhat aggressively sexual. Of course she will also be speeding toward ovulation and will be at her verbal and intuitive best. So, use a condom and do a lot of looking in her eyes (girls are prewired at birth for mutual gazing, unlike boys). Give her a lot of face. Her capacity to read emotions and her need to evaluate the facial expressions of those around her will be at a peak (setting in motion circuits established during estrogen flushes in utero and the massive estrogen marination which took place during infantile puberty and hyped-up during adolescence).

So: smile!

In this language, one now needs more words than ever to say “They fell in love,” and we haven’t even got past the first minute of the first date.

This is a problem: what to do after psychoanalysis, and before Dennett’s mystery-banishing total explanation of consciousness has arrived? Of course it’s not as if mid-century novels were case studies written in Freudian jargon. But an era in which analysis, rather than neurology, was taken to offer the most authoritative account of personality was an era more friendly to the informal psychological explorations of novelists. After all, introspection of the self and observation of others were Freud’s main tools — as they remain the novelist’s.

The change we are discussing here was arrestingly summarized in one of the rare recent novels of psychoanalysis, Daniel Menaker’s The Treatment (set in the early 1980s but published in 1998). In our new age—or so complains Dr. Morales, the oracular shrink in Menaker’s novel—“Treatment will no longer consist of explorations of significance and spirit and mystery, but quick fixes, twelve steps, behavioral adjustment, and pills.” Morales’s elegy for the old ways, delivered in a comic Cuban accent, begins with a claim to be the last Freudian,

the last of a line that stretches from Moses to Aristotle through Cicero to our good Lord Jesus Christ and Aquinas and Maimonides and Shakespeare and Montaigne and finally to Freud and then to me. A line of fascination with and respect for the dignity, the very concept of the human soul. . . . Freud will die, as Marx will die. And all that will be left of those nineteenth century giants of intellect will be the unpityingly neutral doctrines of Sharles Darwin. Darwin is the man who must bear the responsibility for the end of meaning.

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Ian McEwan's Enduring Love (1997) effectively inaugurates the genre of the neuronovel, and remains one of its more nuanced treatments. The narrator, Joe Rose, is a science journalist, a self-styled man of the enlightenment. Elitist but meritocratic, Joe is given to saying things to his girlfriend like “Don’t you think I’m some kind of evolutionary throw forward?” Despite this weakness for self-congratulation, he is a decent guy who has the bad luck to become the object of a love with no cause but the deluded lover’s neurochemistry. The demon lover, one Jed Parry, meets Joe for the first time as part of a group of men trying to save a boy from being blown away in a hot air balloon. The accident, or accidents, happen while Joe is on a picnic with his girlfriend Clarissa, a Keats scholar.

Because he is a science writer by profession, McEwan’s Joe is a narrator of realist fiction capable of reflecting on his realism, or rather Zola-esque naturalism. An addict of facts, Joe provides an alibi for McEwan’s moments of lyricism—“The silence appeared so rich as to have a visual quality, a sparkle or hard gloss, and a thickness too, like fresh paint”—and can also comment, in the next sentence, “This synesthesia must have been due to my disorientation.” Joe correctly diagnoses the madman relatively early in the novel; it’s convincing everyone else he’s right that takes time. His girlfriend won’t believe him and neither will the police until the final scene, when Parry holds a knife to Clarissa’s throat. Suffering from de Clérambault’s, Parry is beyond reason or persuasion—as Joe (a Darwinian) had always alleged.

In 1997, McEwan was still the sort of writer to challenge somewhat the correctness of Joe’s neurological reductionism. Joe’s rejection of any talking cure in favor of a thoroughgoing evolutionary psychology and medicalization had costs that the novelist tried to acknowledge: “From day one,” Clarissa the humanist writes to Joe, “you saw [Parry] as an opponent and you set about defeating him, and you—we—paid a high price. . . . Do you remember me suggesting to you early on—the night you walked out on me in fury—that we ask him in and talk to him? You just stared at me in disbelief, but I’m absolutely certain that at that time Parry didn’t know that one day he would want you dead. Together we might have deflected him from the course he took.”

This balanced weighing-up of the case no longer attracts McEwan as a writer. He has now firmly taken sides in a debate he was earlier content to stage with some subtlety. As he confided in a recent New Yorker profile, “Poor Greg [McEwan’s son] had to study Enduring Love in school. He had a female teacher. And he had to write an essay: Who was the moral center of the book? And I said to Greg, ‘Well, I think Clarissa’s got everything wrong.’ He got a D. The teacher didn’t care what I thought. She thought that Joe was too ‘male’ in his thinking. Well. I mean, I only wrote the damn thing.”

Perhaps so that no one would miss the point again, McEwan largely abandoned his earlier ambiguity when he wrote Saturday (2005), in favor of stark biological determinism. That novel evokes recent history—September 11, the street protests against the Iraq war—but only as background music incidental to a central conflict. This is the struggle between mental normals—who are really exceptional normals like the neurosurgeon Perowne, his barrister wife, and their musician son and poet daughter—and the subnormal Baxter, a violent thug suffering from the incurable, genetic brain-wasting disease Huntington’s chorea. Here McEwan changes the narrative voice from the first person of Enduring Love to a more authoritative limited omniscient third person. We’re always in Perowne’s scientific mind, a mind capable of reflecting on itself in up-to-date terms of neuroscience, though we also catch glimpses of his creator guiding us, as in the surgeon’s reflections on the superiority of neuroscience to ordinary language. When Perowne drives by an antiwar demonstration, a host of half thoughts arise, on war, death, terrorism, the justness of the cause. A voice tells us that all this occurs in “the pre-verbal language that linguists call mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second. . . . Even with a poet’s gift of compression, it could take hundreds of words and many minutes to describe.” Of course McEwan has almost done just that, even down to the color of Perowne’s thoughts—“a sickly yellow”—but only while conceding the insufficiency of his chosen medium, like a painter ruing the fact that he is not a photographer.

Despite how often we’re told that Huntington’s disease is the main cause of Baxter’s uncontrolled aggression and wild mood swings, it’s still tempting to declare him, rather than the neurosurgeon, the most human character in Saturday. Blindsided by a car that shouldn’t be there, then lied to, and humiliated in front of his friends, he is a wronged man seeking revenge. When he’s about to rape Perowne’s daughter, he’s momentarily bedazzled and soothed by her impromptu poetry recitation and gets knocked into a coma. Ah, the evolutionary advantages of memorizing Mathew Arnold!

By the novel’s lights, however, Baxter is simply an incurable. Saturday turns into a defense of post-Thatcherite Britain’s class system as well as the global imbalance of power by substituting the medical for the social. Some people are simply thugs, for reasons with nothing to do with social organization; in this respect they resemble terrorists. As Perowne reflects, “There are people around the planet, well-connected and organised, who would like to kill him and his family and friends to make a point.” Perowne knows there is no talking to such people, and this time the novel contains no Clarissa to propose to him that conversation might have spared bloodshed.

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Tags: literature, Psychology, fiction, n+1, The Rise of the Neuronovel, Marco Roth, Freud, neuroscience, philosophy