Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 3, December 2005
___________________________________________________________________
Rousseau, George S., Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility, New York, Palgrave, 2004. 395 pp. ISBN: 1-4039-3454-1, Hardback $68.00, paperback $26.95.
Reviewed by
University of Tulsa
Subdivided into three primary parts, Nervous Acts is a compilation of the major essays by George S. Rousseau published between 1965 and 2000. Rousseau, Emeritus professor at De Montfort University and a member of the Faculty of Modern History in Oxford University, is one of the most highly influential critics of the eighteenth century and its preoccupation with sensibility and the nervous system. Nervous Acts, then, offers four decades of essays that chronicle his argument that the study of the human nervous system played a crucial and oftentimes central role in cultural production. He argues that sensibility “constitutes a significant chapter in Western civilization that still leaves many questions unanswered despite a massive amount of writing in recent decades” (ix). Thus, in each essay, he posits that “early modern neuroantomy” is related directly to “larger problems associated with its conception and incorporation into the social fabric in which it originally fit” (ix). In the Acknowledgements, Rousseau claims that each essay within the collection appears unaltered.
Written last, the Introduction—“’Originated Neurology’: Nerves, Spirits and Fibers, 1969 – 2004”—offers a twelve part overview of the Rousseau’s theory that the coincidentally simultaneous development of the literature of sensibility and the ever-growing study of nerves and the nervous system were not, in fact, so coincidental. Rather, the rise of interest in the nervous system afforded an expanded vocabulary and understanding for the literary and cultural focus on the passions. Furthermore, the introduction chronicles the difficulties Rousseau first encountered as he began to work out his thesis—“The word interdisciplinary was then new; still sufficiently novel to be hard to pronounce and spell, but it was almost never invoked in practice (that came later, in the 1970s) and had made few of the advances it would later make within the academy. . . . My memory is that the copula of science and the humanities constantly loomed in our daily conversations, even if we were unaware of its contexts” (6).
Fortunately for Rousseau, the seeming irreconcilable areas of science and the humanities did eventually occupy a space he was able to invade. The remainder of the introductory essay offers a sweeping historical examination of literary development and its fixation on theories about neuroscience. He argues:
The progression is clear: medicine, built on the anatomy learned in schools, presented nerves first; thereafter fiction imported their medical theories, as novelist Samuel Richardson did from physician George Cheyne; only after early fiction had vivified nervous protagonists, such as Laurence Sterne’s inimitable ‘Tristram Shandy’ and Scottish Henry Mackenzie’s tearful ‘Harley,’ the crying ‘Man of Feeling,’ did they migrate further afield to infuse philosophy—as in Burke’s philosophy of sublimity—and the civic thought of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. These fictive male character . . . brim over with ‘animal spirits’ and are staunchily ‘nervous.’ They shed tears because their nervous systems are exquisitely calibrated to their innate physiologies, their nervous frames anything but delicate and soft in the way female figures of the period are. (16 – 17)
He goes on to argue that as life became more complicated with industrialization and political conflict, nerves took on an ever-increasing role within the portrayal of the individual, particularly in literature. Not only were madness and disease related to the nervous system but also energy and aesthetics. Rousseau’s portrait of the Victorian obsession of sensibility in art and the ensuing debates about aesthetic principles of the late nineteenth century paves the way for his speculations about absence of “nervous” vocabulary in modernist literary works.
The eight essays within the body of Rousseau’s book, titled “Essays, 1969 – 1993,” are arranged in chronological order, offering one essay from the late 1960s, three from the 1970s, two from the 1980s, and two from the 1990s. Rousseau includes: “Science and the Discovery of the Imagination” (1969), “Pineapples, Pregnancy, and Pica: Nerves and the ‘Mother’s Imagination’” (1972), “Nerves and Racism: Le Cat’s Neurology of Racism” (1973), “Nerves, Spirits and Fibers: Toward the Origins of Sensibility” (1982), “Discourses of the Nerve” (1989), “Towards a Semiotics of the Nerve” (1991), and “’Strange Pathology’: Nerves and the Hysteria Diagnosis in Early Modern Europe” (1993). This sampling of his work not only provides a useful resource for students of literature and the nervous system but also a balanced overview of Rousseau’s major contributions to the field of eighteenth-century studies.
He concludes Nervous Acts with an Epilogue written in 2004 that serves as both an apology for the preceding book and brief discussion of how nerves and the discourse about the nervous system continue to infiltrate our conceptions of humanity and reality today. The book contains an extensive bibliography as well as a brief but useful index to its major subjects, offering a valuable guide for those interested in the intersections of medicinal study and cultural production.