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Figures of Mind: Thinking Matter in Literary Form, 1650 - 1770

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Figures of Mind: Thinking Matter in Literary Form, 1650 - 1770 FIGURES OF MIND: THINKING MATTER IN LITERARY FORM, 1650 - 1770 A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Jess Keiser January 2013 © 2013 Jess Keiser FIGURES OF MIND: THINKING MATTER IN LITERARY FORM, 1650 - 1770 Jess Keiser, Ph. D. Cornell University 2013 This dissertation examines the interrelation of literary criticism and science of mind in the long eighteenth century by focusing on theories of imagination, fancy, and wit. In grounding these creative faculties in the physiology of the human brain, eighteenth- century thinkers explained the fanciful juxtapositions of the imagination by drawing on experimental science, even as they stressed the confused and mutable nature of the corporeal mind. In so doing, writing on fancy, wit, and metaphor became a means of questioning the boundaries between the thinking subject and the seemingly thoughtless body, the conscious mind and the matter that subtends it. I track this history in the works of Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Willis, John Locke, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Sterne. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Jess Keiser was born in Mountain Top, PA in 1984. He received a B.A. in English from Tufts University in 2006, and an M.A. from Cornell University in 2009. iv For my parents v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My greatest thanks goes to my committee: Rick Bogel, Laura Brown, and my chair, Neil Saccamano. Rick is an ideal reader in multiple senses of the term. His careful and subtle reading of my own work proved to be one of the most important assets when writing this dissertation, just as his often inimitable readings of eighteenth-century poetry and prose continue to be the standard for which my own writing continually strives. Above all, he is generous, wise, and witty (in the most technical sense of the term); I’m proud to say he is my teacher and friend. Laura’s capaciousness is unmatched in contemporary academia. She helped me shape what would otherwise be an idiosyncratic curiosity into something resembling a scholarly monograph. Her sense of what would and would not work in this project borders on the uncanny, and it was always a pleasure to realize that, whenever I finally had figured out some seemingly intractable problem, Laura was the one who had pushed me in the right direction. It’s a cliché to describe a scholar in literary studies as “rigorous,” but I nevertheless think the term can be applied accurately to Neil. His insistence on slowly working through the difficulties of eighteenth-century texts and on rejecting the easy way out spurred me on throughout my years at Cornell. He has encouraged, challenged, and inspired me in so many ways big and small that it would take another dissertation to accurately convey his influence. Like the sublime or the sentimental, his impact goes beyond “mere” words. Without the unwavering support and unerring guidance of Rick, Laura, and Neil I would not have been able to complete this dissertation. I sincerely hope they find their best qualities as scholars and as teachers reflected in these pages. Many of the ideas in this dissertation took shape in classes and conversations with a number of Cornell faculty. I thank Kevin Attell, Cynthia Chase, Elisha Cohn, Peter Gilgen, Neil Hertz, Michael Jonik, Rayna Kalas, Phil Lorenz, and Jenny Mann for their intellectual generosity, unfailing advice, and ready friendship. Various pieces of this dissertation were vi presented at conferences, and I thank Rick Barney, Frank T. Boyle, Danielle Spratt, and especially Al Coppola for encouragement, conversation, and support. The best ideas in these pages are not my own; they resulted from (often late-night) conversations, debates, confessions, confusions, dialogues, speeches, digressions, rants, satires, sing-alongs, “symposia,” and the occasional reading group with my friends at Cornell. They are not only my ideal audience but my ideal friends. They are: Jacob Brogan, Seth Perlow, Paul Flaig, Cecily Swanson, Ryan Dirks, Aaron Hodges, Bradley Depew, Alan Young-Bryant, Alexis Briley, Ari Linden, Sarah Senk, Rob Lehman, Audrey Wasser, Martin Hägglund, Sarah Pickle, Ben Glaser, Stephanie DeGooyer, Sarah Eron, Carl Gelderloos, Douglas McQueen-Thomson, Dan Sinykin, and Tatiana Sverjensky. I fatefully wandered into Lee Edelman’s seminar on the literary criticism of Barbara Johnson and Paul de Man in my Junior year at Tufts. Since then Lee has had the most profound impact on my life as nearly anyone I can think of, and I hope that his influence is felt here. Finally, my greatest debt is to my family—my parents, James and Denise, and my sister, Lindsay—for help, support, and encouragement. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vi INTRODUCTION 1 1. VERY LIKE A WHALE 20 2. FIGURING ANIMAL SPIRITS 62 3. THE PRINTED MIND 116 4. THE MATTER OF THOUGHT 167 WORKS CITED 221 viii Introduction Around 1660—the exact date is uncertain—a team of Royal Society physicians led by Thomas Willis removed an intact brain from the skull for the first time. Prior anatomists, Willis noted, continually failed in this endeavor. According to Willis, these anatomists “imperfectly understood” the organ they had been dissecting for millennia.1 At best, they modestly exposed the brain tissue lurking just beneath the “forehead or forepart” of the skull after “some rude cutting”; at worst, they mangled the brain, carving its “Globe as it were into slices and parts” and thereby making it impossible to differentiate the various segments they had mashed together.2 In either case, they did more to obscure the brain than to enlighten it. Willis himself admitted that properly anatomizing the brain—which seemed baroquely ornamented with rococo “swellings and tuberous risings with several tails or little feet compacted together”—was difficult.3 “[Y]ea the parts of the Brain it self are so complicated and involved,” he lamented, “and their respects and habitudes to one another so hard to be extricated, that it may seem a more hard task to institute its perfect Anatomy, than to delineate on a plain, the flexions and Meanders of some Labyrinth.”4 In order to map this labyrinth, Willis assembled a team of virtuosi to aid in his dissections: Thomas Millington, who would help him “confer and reason about the uses of the [cerebral] Parts” the group uncovered; Christopher Wren, who would illustrate their findings in painstaking sketches; and most important of all, Richard Lower—the team’s very own Ariadne—who performed most of the dissections. Thanks to the edge of Lower’s “Knife and 1 Thomas Willis, Cerebral Anatomy in Five Treatises, trans. Samuel Pordage (London: Printed for T. Dring, C. Harper, J. Leigh, and S. Martin), 55. 2 Ibid., 55. 3 Ibid., 55. 4 Ibid., 55. 1 Wit,” Willis explained, “in a short space there was nothing of the Brain, and its Appendix within the Skull, that seemed not plainly detected, and intimately beheld by us.”5 At first glance, what Lower’s knife had revealed was simply a greyish mass netted with fine blood vessels: a “curious quilted ball,” as Willis later put it. But subsequent dissections made the organ less curious as Willis and his team began better to understand cerebral anatomy. Willis and his team eventually produced the most complete picture of the brain in the seventeenth century. They observed that the brain was divided into twin hemispheres, that it had a large central mass on the top (the cerebrum), a smaller ball on the bottom (the cerebellum), and a marrowy stem at its base (the medulla oblongata). They carefully tracked the nerves that originated at the root of the brain and plunged into the body, and they also mapped the network of arteries that fed blood to the brain from the heart . But these observations, despite their revolutionary significance, were only prelude to Willis’s real work: understanding how the brain produced the “faculties and affections of the Soul.”6 For Willis, this meant reasoning about the ways in which the matter of the mind—the structures of the brain, its nerves, and the fluids contained therein—created mental faculties like imagination, memory, and volition. In lectures delivered to an audience of Oxford students, Willis attempted to overturn millennia of conjectures concerning mind and body by explaining how it was that the brain created thought. Willis explained that sensation “depends on refined vital spirits, distilled in the brain, and thence communicated by the nerves to the whole body”; that imagination “is caused by an impression from some external object that moves the spirits inwards and excites other spirits in the medulla oblongata into an expansive movement”; and that volition occurs when the movement of these animal spirits “is extended to excite the appropriate nerves which in turn, provoke the external 5 Ibid., 55. 6 Ibid., 53. 2 parts to follow the same object.”7 In other words, for Willis, nearly all thinking could be reduced to flux of chemically charged particles (the animal spirits) pulsating in the skull. * Willis “discovery” of the brain is undoubtedly momentous, but it also leaves us with a problem, a problem that still troubles us today and a problem that this dissertation explores by attending to the literature and thought of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The problem is this: how is it that the mere matter of the brain could produce thought? It is one thing, after all, to anatomize the brain, to detail its labyrinthine folds and to track its web of nerves. It is quite another, however, to explain how this “curious quilted ball” thinks—to explain how it was that the curious nerves and flesh Willis discerned in his dissections could also give rise to a mental quality like curiosity.
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