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Contemporary writers are fond of exposing their characters' brains–to examine fundamental mysteries about life: consciousness, memory, emotion, empathy. In other words, what does it feel like to be alive?
David B.'s graphic autobiography Epileptic is abundant with images of brains. Here the writer fantasizes that an ingenious neurosurgeon might rig an exchange of brain matter that would allow him to experience his brother's devastating epilepsy, or at least understand him a little better. It's a fantasy of trading alienation for empathy. The fantasy part is key. The experiment, of course, is impossible–except via imagination, the art on the page, or fantasy.
Hannibal Lecter is the most famous, sensational, and creepiest literary character to cut open a brain in literature. And of course, he's most famous in the form of Anthony Hopkins's film portrayal–that scene where he sautées Ray Liotta's brain and feeds it to Julianne Moore. Why did this scene capture the cultural imagination?
Of course, it's partly the gruesome horror involved, but it's also a set of thorny questions about the brain's role in the making of self. These questions are as immediate and constant as they are philosophical. Contemporary literature has a lot to say about them.
These exposed brains range through genres. Whether fiction or nonfiction, psychological realism, satire, or horror, they share a fantasy of overcoming what philosophers call the explanatory gap between what we know about the physiology of our nervous systems and the intangible or immaterial feelings of being alive. In other words, what role does the brain play in making us who we are?
- Ian McEwan's Saturday (2006) features lengthy descriptions of brain surgery, as its neurosurgeon protagonist philosophizes about the brain's role in the making of human experience.
- In Siri Hustvedt's Sorrows of an American (2009), her psychiatrist protagonist recalls medical school days, when he dissected the brain of a cadaver, musing about the fact that "When the man was alive, I thought, it was all there—internal pictures and words, memories of the dead and the living."
- In Paul Beatty's satire The Sellout (2015), the protagonist's psychologist father subjects him to a host of abusive experiments intended to teach him to become "right-brained," to prevent his brain from turning "the ash-gray color and consistency of a barbecue briquette on the Fifth of July."
- In John Wray's detective novel Lowboy (2010), his delusional protagonist imagines himself held prisoner by his brain, the only way out through his nose (and into New York subway tunnels).
- In Maud Casey's historical fiction The Man Who Walked Away (2014), an eminent physician trots out a brain on a platter as he conducts a seminar on his physiological theories about so-called hysteria.
- In his memoir My Lobotomy (2007), Howard Dully traces his medical history to understand why he was subjected to a transorbital lobotomy, conducted by the notorious Walter Freeman, at the age of 12–trying desperately to understand how the procedure may have shaped him.
These writers portray fantasies of finding the ethereal self in physical brains–by dissecting brains, holding them, prodding, examining, or eating them. Touching brains provokes a philosophical question their characters cannot answer: How does the interplay of physiology and the material world produce the felt states whose sum we call self?
Hannibal Lecter plays the surgical aesthete: "Standing over Krendler with an instrument resembling a tonsil spoon, Dr. Lecter removed a slice of Krendler’s prefrontal lobe, then another, until he had four. Krendler’s eyes looked up as though he were following what was going on. Dr. Lecter placed the slices in the bowl of ice water, the water acidulated with the juice of a lemon, in order to firm them.” He tells himself his aim is perverse pleasure, but he's got more emotional motives. He hopes sharing a delicately prepared meal of Kendler's brain will seal a bond with Agent Starling. He's been plotting to share a mind with her. Despite the novel's insistent sensationalism, its fantasies are pretty similar to those of more highbrow works of literature. Lecter wants to connect.
Maud Casey's subtler novel, The Man Who Walked Away, fictionalizes the story of Albert Dadas, a 19th-century man who roamed wide swaths of Europe in fugue states. His doctor, determined to help him, seeks out seminars on so-called hysterical illness conducted by a medical luminary based on Jean-Martin Charcot, who popularized hypnosis to treat women whose bodies wouldn't seem to obey doctrines of his era's medical science.
Casey's doctor is already disturbed by the empathy he feels for the young woman put on display for dozens of male physicians to ogle while she's put in a trance. As he wrestles with his feelings, somebody appears with a platter: "And the Doctor realizes that the something on the platter is not lunch after all. It is a brain."
The girl seizes the moment of chaos: “At first she appears to be reaching for the brain itself, and the Doctor thinks, She will eat it.” In the doctor’s imagination, for that moment, readers are back in Hannibal Lecter territory, where humans eat brains. But the Doctor is wrong: “it isn’t the brain she wants. She picks up the straitjacket instead, slipping her arms expertly through the sleeves.”
Casey replaces gothic melodrama with feminist triumph. The girl knows the brain is a theatrical diversion. She won't find herself there. The straitjacket is her doctor's attempt to tame the mysteries of the explanatory gap–by taming her.
That's what literature does when it comes to mysteries of the brain. It integrates mystery, rather than explaining it away. While some philosophers and neuroscientists argue about whether or not our brains define us, literature uses fantasy to play with mystery–to make it fun, important, and intriguing. Where there are fantasy and mystery, there is also contradiction. We are our brains, these books say, and we are also not our brains.
