G ESA S TEDMAN Brain Plots Neuroscience and the Contemporary Novel 1. To write a novel which will be successful in terms of readers, reviews, and prizes, you need the following basic ingredients: an expert on neuroscience, for instance a neurologist; a victim or patient, for instance someone with a brain impairment following an accident; the victim’s or doctor’s wife, sister or girlfriend; a generally threatening, gloomy context, preferably something to do with 9/ 11; mental illness, e.g. the Capgras Syndrome where people become unable to recognize relatives and friends and decide these are impostors; neurological jargon; dreams, nightmares, memories and stream-of-consciousness; clichés such as “the eyes are windows to the soul” or “traumatized people do not talk” or “poetry helps people overcome their problems”. In other words: a brain plot, a sure recipe for literary success. In this article, I will explore some of these successful contemporary novels based on “brain plots” - plots revolving around mental illness, the workings of the mind and how experts and victims deal with these issues. Rather than addressing the question how neuroscience can explain art or literature, or how literature may go into regions neuroscience cannot (or cannot yet, perhaps) explain, my analysis focuses on a different meeting between literature and neuroscience: it focuses on novels about neuroscience and the mind, an issue which seems to be becoming more and more popular with writers on both sides of the Atlantic. After doing a brief and of necessity superficial tour d’horizon of the way literature has attempted to represent the mind and the brain, I will look at five recent novels and their treatment of neuroscience. I want to find out why these novels are so little satisfying in literary or aesthetic terms. When reading contemporary novels that deal with the brain, the mind, or with neuroscience, whose numbers seem to be steadily growing, following David Lodge’s campus/ science novel Thinks… published in 2001, a pattern such as the one sketched above emerges. One might object, of course, and criticise my selection criteria and say that badly written novels always have hackneyed plots. Not so, I argue. The writers whose work I analyse here are well-respected, prize-winning and widely acclaimed authors such as Siri Hustved, Ian McEwan, and Richard Powers. One might further object that I G ESA S TEDMAN 114 have pared down the novels to such basic patterns that one would be able to find these patterns in almost any work of contemporary fiction. Granted - there is usually some kind of love interest or emotional entanglement between characters, so a wife, sister or girlfriend usually comes in when the protagonist is male and not gay. 9/ 11 appears all over the place, too, and other novels use stream-of-consciousness or similar narrative techniques to explain what goes on in characters’ minds. But these texts are set off from others since they contain the expert and the victim, the mental illness or mental condition and the mini-brain plots such as memory loss or Capgras Syndrome as well as the use of a lot of specialist jargon and in addition the ethical problems with which neuroscience confronts us. For want of a better term, I have called what these novels are based on “brain plots”. But rather than merely refer to the elements of the plot, this term is also meant to cover the narrative shape in which these plot elements appear. It is not so much, or at least not only, the subject matter of the novels which is problematic and repetitive, but also the way in which the authors treat this material. But of course there is a close connection between the plot and the shape it takes, since the sources of these plots - public discourse on neuroscience, popular books on neuroscience as quoted in the writers’s acknowledgement statements at the end of their own books - also have a specific shape. This shape - an emphasis on disease, the use of scientific or pseudo-scientific jargon, a focus on individual disease or health, rather than on the relation between society and health issues - then has an impact on how the writers of fiction choose to arrange the material aesthetically. Why have the authors mentioned above produced novels which are similar to the point of utter boredom? And why are these works so unsatisfactory in terms of the narration, their aesthetic treatment of their subject matter which lacks irony, originality and never surprises? Is it perhaps impossible to write really good novels which contain any or all of the above-mentioned elements - the neuroscientist, the mental patient, the impact illness or accidents have on families and friends, the contemporary context the plot is set in etc.? Is the novel as a form intrinsically not suited to represent the workings of the mind, sick or otherwise? 2. Literary history provides us with a number of interesting examples of how the mind’s workings can be represented in literature. The following selection is of course idiosyncratic and every reader will have favourite examples which may have been overlooked here. Leaving aside obvious and widelywritten-about authors such as Shakespeare, who has to take on the role of expert on just about everything human, such as emotion, the mind, and human relations, including warped ones, let’s turn to the 18th century first. Brain Plots - Neuroscience and the Contemporary Novel 115 Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is a prime example of a new way of representing what a character is thinking. The manner in which the ramblings of Tristram Shandy’s mind are rendered is humorous and at the same time convincing. Tristram jumps from one topic to the next, association follows on association. Or think of Jane Austen’s Emma, who manages to deceive herself throughout most of the novel while the reader is able to see that she is blind to what really goes on around her. We can hear Emma’s thoughts as Austen uses a sophisticated narrative technique for rendering mental phenomena and Emma’s only slowly growing awareness that she is in the wrong in her interpretations of the feelings of most of the people arround her. Or take Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, which contains dreams, visions, and unusual similes to explain why the characters are in turmoil from emotional and social upheaval. Think of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which uses elements of the Gothic novel to represent a child’s suffering, fear and nightmares, as well as the adult Jane’s experience of mental and physical deprivation. The perspective of the child is also adopted in Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield. The protagonist’s changing perceptions, growing awareness, and self-explanations of his own complex emotions are rendered with the use of the first-person narrative, allowing the reader to grow up with David Copperfield, as it were, and to follow his trajectory from confused and dejected child to young lover and finally experienced young adult. George Eliot’s uncomfortable insight into the power-wielding but rather mysterious mind of Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda is also a striking example of a narrator entering a literary character’s mind and of an author finding a memorable aesthetic shape for such a mind. Henry James followed George Eliot’s example in The Portrait of a Lady with his minute rendering of a young woman’s experience, or, as he put it in the preface to the novel: “Place the centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness […] and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish.” (James, preface p. 50) How James Joyce deals with this “beautiful difficulty” in the shape of a male character in Ulysses does not need much comment perhaps - suffice it to say that both Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway served as background plots for Ian McEwan’s Saturday, a dangerous path to tread indeed, since it is easier to fail than to succeed if one has to contend with literary giants. Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is particularly interesting because it was written in the context of a general feeling of crisis, similar to the 9/ 11-phenomenon that we are currently experiencing; mental disturbance or even illness and the relation between individual experience and the general context is the great theme of this novel, which still seems fresh whenever one re-reads it, with very few predictable, tired or clichéd sentences to be found. I will speed up my short tour: a brief stop at Doris Lessing’s disturbing novel, The Golden Notebook, with its focus on changing gender relations and her rendition of mental health and disease, another stop with Jeanette Win- G ESA S TEDMAN 116 terson - although admittedly, some of her novels are predictable in the way they represent bodily and mental experience, to end up with, for the time being at least, Ali Smith’s novel The Accidental (2005), a book which has the different ways of experiencing events based on the way we see at its heart, and whose fragmented and experimental shape and ironic tone challenge the reader at every turn of the page. There are, obviously, many differences between these novels, but what they share is a convincing way of representing what goes on in people’s heads and minds. They also share a sense of excitement they instil in the reader - at least in me -, something that most of the more contemporary examples seem to lack. But before explaining the reasons for this lack, an account of the plots as well as the literary characteristics of the five novels chosen for this article shall follow. 3. If such an abundance of successful, interesting, intriguing novels which are about all kinds of issues but also include the human mind as an important topic exist, why are the most contemporary examples that explicitly use stateof-the-art knowledge about the brain less satisfactory? The writers whose work is analysed in greater detail in this article all know a lot about neuroscience, they all did their homework before borrowing plots and problems from another field of human activity. Not least from the list of acknowledgements at the end of their texts can we learn how much effort the writers have put in to learn about the brain and the mind from the neuroscientists and brain specialists themselves. Novelists of course always do that, they look around and pick up contemporary trends and topics. If they want to write for their readers, they will be involved in issues in which the readers are also interested, into whatever aesthetic or literary shape the writers then turn the contemporary problem or issue. So it cannot be the relation between text and context which is problematic per se - on the contrary. I will treat the five texts chronologically in order to find at least a preliminary answer to the question why brain plots have been - so far - so unsatisfactory. Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (1997) Ian McEwan set the terms and was one of the first to develop the model of what I call “brain plots”. In his successful novel Enduring Love, published in 1997, he has the tired and frustrated scientist Joe Rose - an academic turned journalist - confronted with a mentally-ill man who thinks Joe has fallen in love with him, Jed Parry. They meet when trying to save the passengers travelling in a hot air balloon that has broken away from its moorings. Joe’s relationship with his wife Clarissa becomes affected, his judgement, his professional career, his life are thrown into turmoil because of the effects of the so- Brain Plots - Neuroscience and the Contemporary Novel 117 called “Clérambault’s syndrome” from which Jed Parry suffers. Clérambault’s syndrome is the clinical term for delusional love or erotomania. The basic ingredients of a brain plot are already developed by McEwan in this novel: the expert, the madman, the love interest, the connection between mental health or disease and general unease, the unravelling of the everyday - and of course the clinical jargon. But since the novel predates by some years the contemporary craze for neuroscientific discoveries, the use of jargon is not quite so widespread as it is in the later novels. What we do get, however, is the unreliable narrator, fragmented narration, postmodern textuality and the acknowledgment of expert advice at the end of the novel. McEwan develops this successful formula further in his more recent novel Saturday, discussed below. Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room (2002) In Nicole Krauss’s novel Man Walks Into a Room, her first novel published in 2001, a man appears in the middle of nowhere, having forgotten not only his name but his complete life after the age of twelve. He turns out to have been Samson Greene, a young and successful professor of English, married to Anna who takes him home from the Nevada desert where he is first found. It turns out that he has a small brain tumor which can be removed, so his life is saved, but his memories remain permanently lost. In trying to resurrect something of his former life - a project that largely fails - Samson is assisted by Lana, a former student of his, and by his uncle Max. So far so good - what might have turned into an interesting story of a person trying to pick up the pieces of his life rather unconvincingly changes into a kind of science fiction. Samson is contacted by Dr Ray Malcolm, a brain specialist involved in a secret project in the Mojave desert where he records other people’s memories so that they can then be loaded onto other human brains and shared. He intends to save for posterity unique memories by storing them on a kind of giant ‘hard disk’. Samson’s room-mate in the desert, Donald Selwyn, has his memories recorded of a nuclear experiment involving American soldiers which he experienced as a young man. Donald’s memories of this event are transferred onto Samson’s brain who repeatedly has this nuclear bomb going off in his head, an occurrence which virtually drives Samson mad. He manages to retrieve a sense of his own self by finding his old uncle Max, talking to a stray teenage waif and finally begins a new life without his former wife Anna. The novel ends with Anna’s memory of a perfect moment with Samson, shortly before he disappeared, never to return again, at least not as his former self. Memory loss, the importance of memory for one’s own identity, a general sense of doom or threat vaguely associated with war or military experience, the lonely, slightly ruthless and certainly divorced lone male brain specialist, his victim and the latter’s illness - are all central ingredients of a brain plot. Add to this a bit of love interest here and there - the student Lana, Samson’s G ESA S TEDMAN 118 wife Anna, and you have one version of something which a number of critics where impressed by - in spite of the clichés which abound on the page. An example is the way in which Ray Malcolm, the doctor, explains his rather awful science-fiction experiment: ‘See, science is about sharing. The reason we want to quantify is so we can communicate and share more clearly. The more carefully I can define something, the better I’m able to share it. So if a guy tells me, ‘I’ve just seen the light,’ and I don’t know what he’s talking about, then I can’t share that. But if he gets me to have the same experience, that begins to be science.’ (105) This could be, of course, just a silly character, one whose warped sense of morality is exposed by the narrator or other characters. But the chief centre of consciousness of the novel, the chief focalizer, Samson Greene, is just as trite, as the following predictable paragraph illustrates: It was there in the center of his mind, the memory Ray had transferred; there was no way to get around it. The images were uncannily familiar, as if he had experienced them himself, though he knew he hadn’t, and this made them more frightening still. […] He saw and felt it all as if the memory were his own, but it wasn’t, damn it, and this is what drove him insane, more insane, even, than the blast whose force and heat seemed almost engineered to drive to madness anyone it didn’t kill. (164 and 165) A potentially more promising novel is Ian McEwan’s work Saturday, which was published in 2005, also to considerable critical acclaim. Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005) Ian McEwan being Ian McEwan, he sets himself a difficult task - namely, writing a book about a single day in the life of his protagonist, the successful neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. The day, of course, goes largely wrong. Like James Joyce’s Ulysses and even more like Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, McEwan compresses everything he is interested in into the course of 24 hours. Perowne wakes up in the middle of the night and watches what he thinks is a burning plane on the way to Heathrow (it turns out to have been a fairly harmless fire, easily extinguished), following another terrorist attack. Post-9/ 11, the context is definitely gloomy and threatening and explicitly linked to terrorist threats and the pending war on Iraq, since it is the day of the big anti-war demonstration in London. In the course of the day, Perowne is involved in a minor car accident with a man called Baxter, who appears to be on the verge of mental illness. Perowne diagnoses him as suffering from the first onset of Huntington Chorea but at first manages to avert violence in his encounter with the man. Baxter later reappears at the Perowne’s private family party, given in honour of the return of their poet daughter Daisy from Italy where she has spent the last six months. In a shocking encounter, Baxter breaks into the Perowne’s house and forces the pregnant Daisy to strip in front of all her family, including her aged poet grandfather. The passion in Brain Plots - Neuroscience and the Contemporary Novel 119 Daisy’s recital of Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach saves the moment because Baxter can identify with the text and ends up not killing anyone with the knife he has wielded throughout the encounter. But Theo, Perowne’s son, and Perowne himself push Baxter down the stairs, who falls and hits his head, to end up in Perowne’s brain injury unit, operated on by Perowne himself. The novel closes with Perowne getting back into bed with his successful media lawyer wife Rosalind, more or less where the novel started. The successful brain specialist is affected negatively by the general gloomy context - post- 9/ 11 Britain, imminent war, unspecified terrorist threats - and by one of his later patients, Baxter, suffering from a nasty hereditary disease, Huntington Chorea, which leads to complete madness and loss of control over mind and body. In turn, the diseased Baxter upsets the whole family equilibrium, already under tension because the famous poet grandfather, John Grammaticus, and his gifted granddaughter Daisy, have fallen out and now need to make up at the family reunion. Add to this the many scenes in neurological gobbledegook when Perowne works on various diseased brains on his operating table, and you have another brain plot, this time on the European side of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, sentences as the following abound, positively heaving with meaning: “As Theo said, on the streets there’s pride, and here it is, concealing a knife. When anything can happen, everything matters.” (207) Or, even more pretentious, a kind of mini-summary of the whole novel: There’s a moment, which seems to unfold and luxuriously expand, when all goes silent and still, when Baxter is entirely airborne, suspended in time, looking directly at Henry with an expression, not so much of terror, as dismay. And Henry thinks he sees in the wide brown eyes a sorrowful accusation of betrayal. He, Henry Perowne, possesses so much - the work, money, status, the home, above all, the family - the handsome healthy son with the strong guitarist’s hands come to rescue him, the beautiful poet for a daughter, unattainable even in her nakedness, the famous father-in-law, the gifted, loving wife; and he has done nothing, given nothing to Baxter who has so little that is not wrecked by his defective gene, and who is soon to have even less. (228) This is a middle-class view of the “world out there”, or how the author-asnarrator imagines it, and the threats this world, which seems to have become less intelligible since 9/ 11 and 7/ 7, poses to the privileged life of the doctor, the journalist, the poet daughter, and the guitarist son. Somewhat similar in its conception of a doomed world is Richard Power’s novel The Echo Maker, published in 2006 to great critical acclaim. Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (2006) This time, we get both the victim’s perspective, as in Samson Greene’s story by Nicola Krauss, and the doctor’s account, as in Ian McEwan’s day-in-thelife of Henry Perowne. Richard Powers tells the story of Mark Schluter, who suffers from Capgras Syndrome following a terrible and unexplained acci- G ESA S TEDMAN 120 dent with his super-truck on a remote Nebraska road. Mark takes a long time coming out of the coma following the accident, a chance for Powers to use all kinds of stream-of-consciousness passages, detailing the ‘mad’ impressions which his surroundings make on Mark’s brain, only slowly coming back to the surface. Mark’s sister Karin Schluter gives up her job and her flat to help Mark back to life. Unfortunately, Mark does not believe it is really his beloved sister Karin, who always got him out of all the scrapes he got into, both being from a rather sad family of losers, according to Karin. Add to this the perspective of the specialist, Dr Gerald Weber, a professor of cognitive neurology and author of popular books about the brain, who reminded me of Professor Oliver Sacks. Weber’s doubts about his books, his standing, his marriage, a lot of brain babble and jargon are also included in the novel - and you have a book about memory, memory loss, and the importance of memory for one’s own identity. Furthermore, a general sense of doom and threat, embodied in the danger to the cranes, Nebraska’s special attraction in the novel punctuate the plot, which is further complicated by the various love interests between Mark’s special nurse, Weber, Karin and her former lover and once-again-partner Daniel, environmentalist and saviour of the cranes. Finally, ethical problems, the Glasgow coma scale and other familiar plot elements are included in The Echo Maker - and there we are once again, another brain plot for us to consume, one which made the final short list for the Pulitzer Prize and won a National Book Award in the US. With the binary distinction between the healthy, natural memory of the cranes migrating every year to the same places and the sick mind of Mark Schluter, the whole novel is based on a great cliché. The passages describing the dancing cranes read like a set piece for a creative writing class, whereas the parts which represent Mark’s slow awakening cannot compete with, say, Virginia Woolf’s rendition of the fits of madness which engulf Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway. Here is an example from Power’s novel: A flock of birds, each one burning. Stars swoop down to bullets. Hot red specks take flesh, nest there, a body part, part body. Lasts forever: no change to measure. Flock of fiery cinders. When gray pain of them thins, then always water. Flattest width so slow it fails as liquid. Nothing in the end but flow. Nextless stream, lowest thing above knowing. A thing itself the cold and so can’t feel it. Body flat water, falling an inch a mile. (arrangement on the page follows the original, 10) And so on - the more Mark wakes up, the clearer his syntax becomes, if not necessarily the sense of his impressions and thoughts. Just as clichéd is the sense of impending crisis which Weber experiences, feeling himself proverbially small and useless in the face of nature: That nightmare flashed across Weber’s closed lids just before he fell asleep, looking up into the million leaves of a tree towering above him, each leaf a life he had met once, a moment in a life, even a particular emotional aspect of that isolated moment, every look a separate object to identify, unique and multiplying into the Brain Plots - Neuroscience and the Contemporary Novel 121 billions, beyond anyone’s ability to simplify into names … (dots in the original) (150) That the expert is no longer convinced of his field of expertise is summed up in the following manner, another staple of the brain plot: “Neurology would never grasp from without a thing that existed only deep in the impenetrable inside.” (365) It is unclear what Powers wishes to tell us here: doubts about the explanatory power of neuroscience have been part of brain plots since, at least, Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love. But in spite of these doubts, the authors of the novels discussed in this paper all fall for the attractions of neuroscience so that the misgivings concerning neuroscientific findings do not carry the day. Similar critical acclaim, instant translation into German and other languages, many portraits and interviews in the press were also Siri Hustved’s lot, occasioned by the publication of her most recent novel The Sorrows of an American, published in 2008. Siri Hustved, The Sorrows of an American (2008) In her new book, we get most of the ingredients we are already familiar with - some with a different emphasis, so the Glasgow coma scale and brain surgery only appear briefly, as do the Capgras Syndrome which is merely mentioned in passing, and it is the lonely specialist and his love problems, his sense of identity and the role of memories, his own and his father’s, which make up the main elements of the novel’s plot. The Sorrows of an American concentrate on Dr Erik Davidsen and his life, punctuated by his father Lars’s death, his sister’s troubles concerning her late husband, a famous novelist, Erik’s tenants Miranda and her daughter Eglantine and their relationship to Eglantine’s father, as well as his own love life and the problems of the patients he treats as a psychoanalyst. Erik falls in love with Miranda and sometimes looks after Eglantine, who has an accident and has brain surgery, successful of course. Erik also reads his father’s memoirs, based on Hustved’s father’s memoirs, of life on a remote Minnesota farm as a poor Scandinavian immigrant, and uncovers his rather silent father’s most haunting memories and teenage problems. He is helped by his sister Inga, herself a rather troubled person, since she has lost her famous writer husband to stomach cancer, has to bring up her teenage daughter Sonia by herself, who had the bad luck to witness the people jumping out of the Twin Towers on 9/ 11 in 2001. Inga is a philosopher and writer of books about memory and consciousness. It turns out that Inga’s husband had a love affair with an actress and has produced a son with this woman, called Edie. Miranda, Erik’s tenant, needs help rather than Erik as a lover, and Erik has an affair which might turn more serious with an analyst colleague instead. Sonia gets over her terror and falls in love, Erik and Inga find out that their father had no dreadful secret himself; he only helped keep G ESA S TEDMAN 122 someone else’s secrets. Everything turns to the good, more or less, since a knight in shining armour, called Burton, a life-long admirer of Inga’s, saves Inga’s husband’s reputation by buying up the letters which his lover, Edie, had threatened to sell to a journalist or publicize otherwise. Burton, conveniently, is a brain specialist. His thoughts as well as Erik and Inga’s conversations about memory, the brain, its dreams, threats and losses, provide a lot of material for the many tortured and often, I found, repetitive and unconvincing brain-related musings which are characteristic of Hustvedt’s latest publication. Hustvedt’s is perhaps the worst novel of the lot in aesthetic terms, she packs her novel so full of all the different modes of perception and consciousness, diseased and healthy ones. She just loves clichés, plot-based ones that writing and painting, art in short, help with mental disease, and character-based ones, such as Erik’s sister’s utterance: “It’s all so familiar, it’s strange” (160) when they travel by car through the landscape where they grew up. Or Erik’s observation that “Every memoir is full of holes” (8). That this memoir is based on Hustvedt’s own father’s memoirs adds to the required “authenticity” which brain plots seem to demand, at least if the acknowledgement pages at the end of the novels can be used as a gauge. Whether such “authentic” material in fact adds anything to the novel in aesthetic terms is another question. 4. The novels I have briefly summarized here, and there are many more, in particular psychological thrillers, e.g. by Barbara Vine and Martin Suter, and novels about memory loss and dementia, not to mention Asperger’s Syndrome and autism, have several things in common. Apart from the plot elements which I have already mentioned, they all use fragmented narration for the representation of disturbed brains, the all include dream passages or nightmarish memories, whether they belong to the characters or to their ancestors. Fragmented narration also means that we encounter several narrators, some of them unreliable ones. Their voices are supplemented by those of authors of letters and memoirs. Changes of perspective, stream-ofconsciousness passages from further characters, or other written materials, e.g. quotations from books, are also included in the narratives. All the authors obviously are able to use, seemingly to their advantage, what narrative techniques are currently available. Authors of course can always work with those technical advances with which prior generations of writers have provided them. So it is only natural that we have postmodern and high modernist elements in the novels. The problem with all five novels, and most of the others I have encountered, is that they have not found an original language with which to treat mental phenomena, diseased or healthy. The novels are predictable not only in terms of the plot but also in terms of the way they narrate their stories. Reading them all together, one amasses so many trite Brain Plots - Neuroscience and the Contemporary Novel 123 sentences, so many pretentious full stops and ellipses, similes, and metaphors that one wishes the writers had written about something less outrageous, something more mundane. And one wishes that the fascination with weird stories of brain damage, memory and identity loss etc. had not been coupled in their texts with the political doom and gloom of post- 9/ 11 society. Mental illness or disturbance is thus tied in a rather simple way to the general context. In contrast to Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, where the same connection is made, but made in tiny, little observations, and everyday things, the weight of these connections is too much for the rather fragile and artificial narrative frames to bear. They are fragile and artificial because the writers have borrowed stories and plot lines from neuroscience and psychoanalysis without being able to give them a convincing literary shape. They have failed to come up with a narrative mode which conveys more than the strangeness and weirdness of Capgras, memory loss, depression, and tics. Instead of fleshing out the bare bones of the neuroscientist’s stories, they have pasted them into novels and loaded them with meaning. Perhaps the reason for this is the manner in which neuroscience presents itself in the media: as objectivist, teleological, “authentic”, scientific findings with a strong focus on disease rather than on health. In contrast to some modernist novels, Mrs Dalloway high on the list among them, 21 st -century writers have not been able to find a mode for the new ways of explaining consciousness and perception which neuroscience seems to offer. If, as for the generation of Virginia Woolf, “[n]ot only the conventions for representing character […] had changed, but also the very concept of character and personality”, as Elaine Showalter aptly puts it in her introduction to Mrs Dalloway (xviii), echoing Woolf’s contention that the world had changed in the early decades of the 20 th century, then one would expect something equally innovative from the writers working in the 21 st century, influenced as they are by advances in neuroscience. This, however, is not the case. Rather than finding a new way of representing sensation, memory, the mind, the five novels presented here stand for a larger trend, an unsatisfactory one because they use a hackneyed, reductionist notion of human experience which is based on illness and deformation. They use an alienating form of jargon with too little distance so that it sounds not only inhuman but also unconvincing, shows the author is fascinated by neuroscience but has little critical stance, in other words: the typical amateur approach. The novels are unsatisfactory because they have adopted plots from the field of brain research or neuroscience without managing to give them a convincing literary shape. And finally, the novels are unsatisfactory because they rest on a problematic binary division of ethical problems and health/ illness issues. Even if the inevitable crossover occurs between the confused sick victim and the seemingly knowledgeable, fit and healthy doctor or expert when the said expert is also affected by the illness of his victim, also has a crisis for instance because he can no longer write, falls in love with the wrong person or is G ESA S TEDMAN 124 afraid of his patients. This is nothing but the reverse of the cliché of the unassailable doctor - like the divorced, unhappy, alcoholic and lonely detective in contemporary thrillers and detective fiction, the doctor-in-crisis just helps to support the binary division of the healthy on the one hand and the sick on the other. Temporary crossovers into the realms of the sick serve to uphold this division rather than subvert it. In sum, then, the use of jargon, the role of the expert, and borrowed plots which are alien to literature are a hindrance to a satisfying literary representation of the workings of the mind. The question remains what this kind of fiction, this kind of brain plot and the place the authors imagine for literature or poetry in this field, has to say on a deeper, cultural level. Disturbance which is social and political in origin is located only on the level of the individual, diseased brain. But rather than making the characters have a wider impact by being identifiable as social types as well as as believable characters, the writers leave me with a sense of fatigue, of a lack of interest in these particular individuals. Even as individuals, the characters remain uninteresting with their petty love affairs, their boring creative or professional crises. Couching cultural anxiety in terms of illness or alternatively, in terms of neuroscientific jargon, is predictable and explains nothing. It takes more than a brain plot to make at least my brain tick, to make me sit up and notice, to feel disturbed, challenged, to have thoughts provoked or to feel I want to engage with the characters or the texts in any meaningful way. Brain plots, then, I argue, are not really a recipe for success if success is not defined as prizes, reviews and interviews, but rather as the way in which readers are touched, intellectually challenged and provoked by a novel. Brain plots, then, still await an interesting shape, one that sheds their neuroscientific mantle, to be turned into such provoking, challenging novels. Or, to quote Virginia Woolf’s minor character Lady Rosseter in Mrs Dalloway: “’What does the brain matter […] compared with the heart? ’” (213) Works Cited Hustvedt, Siri. The Sorrows of an American. New York: Henry Holt, 2008. Krauss, Nicole. Man Walks into a Room. 2002. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. McEwan, Ian. Enduring Love. 1997. London: Vintage Books, 2006. —. Saturday. 2005. London: Vintage Books, 2006. Powers, Richard. The Echo Maker. New York: Picador, 2006. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway.1925.London: Penguin, 2000.