Eakin, Paul John. “What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?” Narrative 12.2 (2004): 121 -132.
It might be said that each of us constructs and lives a “narrative,” and that this narrative is us, our identities.
—Oliver Sacks
In this statement Oliver Sacks makes as bold a claim for the function of self-narration in our lives as any I have ever encountered. His observation was prompted by the plight of a brain-damaged individual suffering from severe memory loss. Because the patient, “Mr. Thompson,” could not remember who he was for more than a minute or two at most, he spent his waking hours in frenetic self-invention, seeking to construct new identities to take the place of old ones that he forgot as soon as he created them. For Sacks, Mr. Thompson’s condition exposes identity’s twin supporting structures, memory and narrative: what is this man without his story? I keep returning to the nagging conundrum that Sacks proposes in his meditation on this disturbing case, a radical equivalence between narrative and identity, and I want to make another pass at its meaning in this essay, armed with insights derived from the recent work of the neurologist Antonio Damasio. Before turning to Damasio and his theories about the place of self and narrative in the structure of consciousness, however, I’d like to suggest the social implications of this Sacksian notion of narrative identity.
“This narrative is us, our identities”—surely the notion that what we are is a story of some kind is counterintuitive and even extravagant. Don’t we know that we’re more than that, that Sacks can’t be right? And our instinctive recoil points to an important truth: there are many modes of self and self-experience, more than could possibly be represented in the kind of self-narration Sacks refers to, more than any autobiography could relate. Developmental psychologists convince me, though, that we are trained as children to attach special importance to one kind of selfhood, that of the extended self, so much so that we do in fact regard it as identity’s signature. The extended self is the self of memory and anticipation, extending across time. It is this temporal dimension of extended selfhood that lends itself to expression in narrative form of the kind Sacks posits as identity’s core. For others, we are indeed versions of the extended self and its identity story; when we perform these stories, we establish ourselves for our interlocutors as normal individuals—something that Mr. Thompson tried to do, and failed.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Brain Imagining and the Epistemology of Freedom: Daniel Suarez’s Daemon and Freedom. Modern Fiction Studies 61.2 (Summer 2015): 32- -334.
A captured mercenary is being interrogated not by torture, as he expects, but by an artificial intelligence asking him questions while he is undergoing fMRI scans (a technology explained below). When he refuses to give information, the AI patiently goes through the alphabet letter by letter, quickly determining his name, nationality, and language by the way his brain scans light up when the appropriate letter is reached. As his brain reveals information his consciousness has withheld, he is amazed at the technology’s superiority and at the end of the interrogation says in halting English, “I would like application. Yes? Is this the word,” evidently intending to switch allegiance to what he thinks is bound to be the winning side (Freedom 312).
This scene from Daniel Suarez’s Freedom plays out a scenario already envisioned by the CIA, that fMRI scans can penetrate the ultimate veil of privacy, one’s inner thoughts. Along with Daemon, Freedom‘s prequel, Suarez’s narratives show how fictions simplify and distort neuroscientific results. But the story is not as simple as mere distortion, for these same texts demonstrate that neurobiological research can be recontextualized and embedded in narratives that weave them together with other events to create a contemporary fable, chilling in its implications. In this essay, I explore the transformations brain imaging undergoes as it moves from scientific journals to popular science books to pulp fiction. In Suarez’s case, fiction creates metaphoric frameworks in which scientific results are embedded in order to explore the larger implications of having human brains imaged as if they were transparent while the software creating the scans remains opaque. The result is a dramatic shift in what counts as reality and a vivid demonstration of the power of fiction to change the terms in which we see the world.
Tougaw, Jason. “Brain Memoirs, Neuroscience, and the Self.” Literature and Medicine 30.1 (Spring 2012): 171 -192.
In 1960, twelve-year-old Howard Dully endured a transorbital lobotomy, involving the insertion of a surgical instrument through his eye socket to sever connections between his frontal cortex and the rest of his brain. In 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain anatomist, witnessed her own disorientation when she suffered a stroke one morning as she prepared to go to work. In 2004, Alix Kates Shulman awoke in the middle of the night to find her husband unconscious after having fallen from the loft bed in the remote coastal cabin she used as a writing retreat. In 2006, Siri Hustvedt felt and watched her body convulse, her arms flail, and her skin discolor while she delivered a eulogy at a memorial for her father. These shocking experiences frightened Dully, Taylor, Shulman, and Hustvedt—but they also fascinated them—because they made philosophical or abstract questions about the connections between body, mind, self, and world physically and experientially concrete. All four have written brain memoirs that document their suffering and fascination, chronicles of the push-pull between their selves and their brains. In the case of all four writers, the relations between self and brain they chronicle aren’t simply changed by brain disease or injury, but are continuously changing in response reaction to altered brain function and the writers’ living responses to their physiological conditions—including, crucially, writing about them.
Of course, there is a long tradition of autobiographical writing that chronicles mind-body relationships and their implications for selfhood, including the work of Augustine, Montaigne, Thomas De Quincey, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf. Brain memoirs can be understood as the most recent incarnation of this longstanding tradition, though their explicit focus on the brain—and on the writer as organism—is more pointed than that of their predecessors. Brain memoirs do not let their writers—or readers—forget that they are organisms whose lives are shaped to a large degree by accidents of physiology, culture, family, and circumstance. They confront accidents by crafting a sense of agency that’s nuanced enough to account for what’s beyond their control. This is where their distinctive cultural work begins.
