Synaptic Space, Neuroscience, and American Modernist Poetry Deric

“Nerves in Patterns” Synaptic Space, Neuroscience, and American Modernist Poetry Deric Corlew A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature Chapel Hill 2010 Approved by: George Lensing William Harmon Linda Wagner-Martin Erin Carlston Jane Thrailkill © 2010 Deric Corlew ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii Abstract Deric Corlew: “Nerves in Patterns”: Synaptic Space, Neuroscience and American Modernist Poetry (Under the direction of Dr. George Lensing) Both modernist poetry and “modern” neuroscience used synaptic space to assemble fragments into meaningful arrangements that would replace the outmoded systems of the nineteenth century. Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams attempted to unify language by cleansing semantic associations and restoring the connection between idea and thing. Like her work in medicine and neuroscience, Stein’s literary attempts to create accurate depictions of reality must ultimately be considered failures because they privilege grammatical connections over semantic associations, playing with surfaces rather than unearthing the networks underlying identity. As a physician, Williams was more willing to accept the mind and its ideas as systems of objects, “things” that can be rearranged and reconnected in space to change patterns of meaning. Like Williams, Wallace Stevens used the imagination to create accurate visions of reality but recognized that a changing and fragmented reality can never be captured by the eye, which can only build fictions that refract, condense, and interpret reality. Stevens’ theory of vision is thus rooted in the anatomical structure of the eye, and his theory of aesthetics viewed any phenomenological evasion of the “I” as an impossibility because the “eye” necessarily distorts and enriches reality. For T.S. Eliot, the division between the “I” and “eye” is framed through the “dissociation of sensibility,” which rests on a tension between the progressive forces of iii consciousness, tradition, and culture, and the mind’s evolutionary past, the sensibility that not only provides the foundation of thought but also threatens the “dissolution” of the mind into a primitive bundle of fragmented instincts. In poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot resists both “higher” psychological abstractions that deny the physicality of the brain and a “lower” physiological behaviorism that would leave the mind without consciousness, scuttling like a crab on the ocean floor. Although modernists used synaptic space to salvage meaning from a skeptical age, this space itself became the target of skepticism as postmodernists questioned the ability of space to unify and limit meaning. iv To my mother, who gave me books To my father, who gave me support To my wife, who gave me a kiss to build a dream on v The author would like to thank Dr. George Lensing for his interest, support, and guidance throughout the dissertation process. The author also wishes to thank Dr. William Harmon for the undeserved opportunities he provided, Dr. Linda Wagner-Martin for her prodding and pragmatism, Dr. Erin Carlston for her careful editing and unrelenting skepticism, and Dr. Jane Thrailkill for lighting the interdisciplinary path. vi Table of Contents Introduction: Synaptic Space and Fragmented Modernity ……………………………….1 Chapter 1: Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams: A Tale of Two Chickens and Two Nervous Systems……………………………………27 From Mental Networks to Grammatical Spaces: The Failure of Gertrude Stein................................................................................38 The Mind and the Nervous System: Synaptic Space in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams………………………72 Chapter 2: “The Eye’s Plain Version”: Wallace Stevens and the Anatomical Prejudices of Perception………………………...102 Revolutions in Crystal: Theories of Vision and Theories of Aesthetics…………………………………110 The “More Than Rational Distortion” of the Retina…………………………...125 Chapter 3: T.S. Eliot and the Hierarchy of Consciousness……………………………..145 The Neurology of Tradition and the (D)evolution of Mind…………………….152 The Dissociation of Sensibility: Behaviorism and Psychology…………….......173 Prufrock’s “I” and the Fall of Consciousness…………………………………..209 Conclusion: “Post-Modern” Neuroscience……………………………………………..242 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….255 vii Introduction: Synaptic Space and “Fragmented” Modernity And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, The Element of fire is quite put out; The Sun is lost, and th’ earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world’s spent When in the Planets, and the Firmament They seeke so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies John Donne, An Anatomy of the World —The First Anniversary (CPSP 199)1 London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (CPP 50) All things considered, Donne’s Anatomy of the World is still a strange poem. Written to gain the favor of a potential patron, Sir Robert Drury, the Anatomy memorializes the death of Drury’s adolescent daughter Elizabeth. However, rather than offering consolation to the grieving father, Donne spends most of the poem arguing that Elizabeth’s death provides proof of mankind’s fallen and increasingly degraded state. After suggesting that the fourteen-year-old girl had the power to restore order and purpose to the world, Donne argues that her death is indicative of a general trend towards decay and fragmentation. Donne’s Anatomy is really an autopsy, an attempt to determine the cause of Drury’s death through a itemized investigation of the world’s diseased and decomposing corpse. Even as he writes, 1 Most of the poems discussed in this dissertation, such as Donne’s Anatomy and Eliot’s Waste Land , are several pages long and rarely accompanied by line numbers. For this reason, I have provided the page number rather than the line numbers for all quoted passages. the stench of death overwhelms him and forces the poem to its premature conclusion: “So the world’s carcasse would not last, if I / Were punctuall in this Anatomy. / Nor smels it wells to hearers” ( CPSP 204). One can only imagine Sir Robert’s initial reaction to the poem, which spends equal time discussing his daughter’s virtues, the decline of man, and rotting corpses. Perhaps Sir Robert, like most readers, would have immediately understood that Donne’s interest in Elizabeth Drury was only incidental. The untimely death of an innocent girl provides the occasion for Donne to express his fears about the direction of modern thought, developments in science and technology that threatened the stability of Donne’s theological model. During the early seventeenth century, the resurgent popularity of classical thinkers like Democritus, Lucretius, and Epicurus gave new life to the theory of atomism, which argued that the universe consisted mainly of empty space and that all matter was composed of irreducible units invisible to the naked eye. This “new Philosophy call[ed] all in doubt” because it refuted the foundational assumption that the universe possesses a perfect fullness that mirrors the perfection of God. In the older, ordered universe, a system of correspondences could be charted following a quaternary model, connecting everything from the four humors to the four elements and creating a hierarchical chain of being to justify the structures of nature, the Church, the State, and even the family. In a universe “crumbled out again” into atomies these structures are “all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; / All just supply, and all Relation: Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot” (CPSP 199). Donne suggests, rather improbably, that Elizabeth Drury had the “Magnetique force alone, / to draw, and fasten sundred parts in one” ( CPSP 199), but Drury is largely symbolic of a prelapsarian (and pre-modern) innocence that cannot be regained. The death of Drury confirms man’s fallen state, proving that man will never achieve order or reach his spiritual potential. 2 Donne’s poem was published in 1612, three hundred years and a decade before the annus mirabilis of modernism in 1922. Yet the concepts in the Anatomy should be familiar to scholars of modernism, as they are the same themes found in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land : a world imperiled by fragmentation and decay, a loss of cultural values and the unification they provided, and an ultimately hopeless quest for a figure powerful enough to restore order. In Donne’s poem, the danger lies in man’s aspiration “to be a phoenix,” looking to re-order the heavens with inherently faulty reason. In Eliot’s, humanity has chosen the material over the spiritual; each commuter over London Bridge has “fixed his eyes before his feet” ( CPP 39) instead of heavenward, creating a Dante-esque hell of spiritual isolation. Eliot’s vision of crumbling cities and the patchwork construction of The Waste Land provide evidence that culture and tradition have little meaning in an age whose skepticism keeps pace with its rapid developments in science and technology. As in Donne’s Anatomy , it seems that in The Waste Land all coherence is gone, no city, myth, or voice can provide the stabilizing center to the poem. Eliot shows the reader “fear in a handful of dust” ( CPP 38), a collection of disordered material fragments that reveal life’s fragility and lack of purpose. The Fisher King, unwilling to “set his lands in order” ( CPP 50), provides the counterpart to Donne’s Elizabeth Drury and, due to his absence, serves only as a reminder of what has been lost. Critics of modernist poetry, especially Eliot and his New Critical followers, have emphasized the similarity between the two historical periods and the poetry they produced. Yet a comparison of these two poems exposes an important shortcoming in critical discussions of early-twentieth-century literature. Whereas scholars of Donne have viewed his poetry and thought in terms of space through the impact of a Lucretian revival, scholars of modernist poetry have consistently framed the same problem in terms of cultural and social 3 fragmentation.

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