PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND MEDICINE Series Editors: Sharon Ruston, Alice Jenkins and Catherine Belling Arthur Rose Stefanie Heine Naya Tsentourou Corinne Saunders Peter Garratt Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine Series Editors Sharon Ruston Department of English and Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK Alice Jenkins School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Catherine Belling Feinberg School of Medicine Northwestern University Chicago, IL, USA Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its sub- jects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied feld and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones. Editorial Board Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony Brook University, USA Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14613 Arthur Rose · Stefanie Heine Naya Tsentourou · Corinne Saunders Peter Garratt Reading Breath in Literature Arthur Rose Corinne Saunders Institute for Medical Humanities Department of English Studies Durham University Durham University Durham, UK Durham, UK Stefanie Heine Peter Garratt Centre for Comparative Literature Department of English Studies University of Toronto Durham University Toronto, ON, Canada Durham, UK Naya Tsentourou Department of English University of Exeter Cornwall, UK Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ISBN 978-3-319-99947-0 ISBN 978-3-319-99948-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99948-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957436 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. 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Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book originally emerged as a panel discussion organised by Naya Tsentourou for the 2016 Annual Conference of the British Society of Literature and Science at the University of Birmingham. The authors would like to thank Ben Doyle and Milly Davies at Palgrave for all their support and patience as this project developed. Rose and Saunders were supported by the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award Life of Breath (103339/Z/13/Z). Saunders and Garratt were supported by the Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award Hearing the Voice (108720/Z/13/Z). Heine was supported by a Swiss National Foundation (SNF) Postdoc.Mobility Fellowship. The contributors thank the Wellcome Trust for supporting the publication of this work as an Open Access volume. v CONTENTS 1 Introduction: Reading Breath in Literature 1 Arthur Rose 2 The Play of Breath: Chaucer’s Narratives of Feeling 17 Corinne Saunders 3 Wasting Breath in Hamlet 39 Naya Tsentourou 4 Out of Breath: Respiratory Aesthetics from Ruskin to Vernon Lee 65 Peter Garratt 5 Ebb and Flow: Breath-Writing from Ancient Rhetoric to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg 91 Stefanie Heine 6 Combat Breathing in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh 113 Arthur Rose vii AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS Peter Garratt is Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. His publications include Victorian Empiricism (2010) and The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture (2016). A forthcoming volume, Distributed Cognition from Victorian Culture to Modernism, co-edited with Miranda Anderson and Mark Sprevak, will be published in late 2018. Stefanie Heine is a Postdoctoral Fellow (SNF Postdoc.Mobility) at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Visible Words and Chromatic Pulse. Virginia Woolf’s Writing, Impressionist Painting, Maurice Blanchot’s Image (2014). Arthur Rose is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Studies and Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK. He is author of Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee (2017) and co-edited, with Michael J. Kelly, Theories of History: History Read across the Humanities (2018). Corinne Saunders is Professor of Medieval Literature and Co-Director of the Institute of Medical Humanities, Durham University. Her publica- tions include Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (2010) and (co-edited with Carolyne Larrington and Frank Brandsma) Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice (2015). ix x AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS Naya Tsentourou is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Exeter, Penryn. She is the author of Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion: Bodies at Prayer (2017) and has co-edited, with Lucia Nigri, Forms of Hypocrisy in Early Modern England (2017). CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Reading Breath in Literature Arthur Rose Abstract This chapter presents current debates around breathing and breathlessness in the medical humanities and frames this collection of essays as a series of interventions that attend to literature’s role in such debates. Specifcally, these essays consider what literature might offer to discussions of breath as a phenomenon that blends physiology with culturally rich metaphors. Keywords Breath · Medical humanities · Markedness · Embodied poetics · Literature Breath is an autonomic function that is essential for life. Luce Irigaray writes, in “The Age of Breath,” “breathing, in fact, corresponds to the frst autonomous gesture of a human being.”1 In a less anthropocentric, more physiological sense, breath, as a term, catches and brings together all those processes by which beings with lungs take in and release air: the mechanical, the chemical, the affective and the metaphoric. The dia- phragm contracts. It drops. A vacuum appears in the chest cavity, which allows the lungs to expand with air. While the lungs are surfeit with air, oxygen passes through thin membranes in the alveoli to bond with hae- moglobin, which, in turn, releases its load of carbon dioxide. The expe- rience can be ecstatic, as for Keri Hulme in this description of breathing © The Author(s) 2019 1 A. Rose et al., Reading Breath in Literature, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99948-7_1 2 A. ROSE from Te Kaihau/The Windeater: “It was ecstasy, it was sweet, air soughing in and all my little alveoli singing away with joy and oxygen-energy coursing through every space and particle of me.”2 It may also be deeply distressing, as in this passage by Michael Symmons Roberts in Breath: Baras closes his eyes and tries to settle his breath into a slower, deeper rhythm. Ever since his lungs were damaged, he has found it hard to see it as a failure of his own body. Somehow now on the brink of hav- ing his weakest lung cut out and replaced with a new one, he can’t locate the problem in his own chest. Sure his chest is heaving as his lungs try to drag in the air, but it still feels like a problem with the air, not with his own body. On that April morning so many years ago the air itself was altered, and his sensitive lungs failed to adapt. … His lungs were designed to take the cream off the thick air, and now the cream has gone he cannot recalibrate.3 For Hulme’s narrator, breath brings a heightened bodily connection to her environment. Baras’s breathing, on the other hand, seems to alien- ate him from his environment. Yet, in both descriptions, a clear interest in the mechanical and the chemical aspects of breathing is subordinated to fgurative language. For Hulme, this fgurative language emerges in the verbs she chooses: breath “soughs” like the wind, “sings” like the voice, “courses” like water.