Nervous Fictions by Jess Keiser

Author:Jess Keiser
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: IDENTIFIER: Keiser
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2020-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

The Scalpel of the Scriblerians

I now want to pick up the satiric thread the Spectator papers began to weave by turning to the Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, a work coauthored, seemingly, by Arbuthnot, Swift, Pope, and Gay. Although not published until 1741, the Memoirs were composed, in bits and pieces, throughout much of the first half of the eighteenth century.21 The chapters on medical matters that interest me here, for example, were probably first written as early as 1714 (roughly two years after Addison’s mock dissection) but may have undergone revisions as late as 1726 or 1727.22 The Memoirs themselves constitute the biography of the wholly invented, and entirely ridiculous, editor, scholar, and natural philosopher Martin Scriblerus. Ambitious, speculative, and reductive, Martin Scriblerus is the mask Pope, Swift, and their friends wear when they seek to parody some aspect of preeminently “modern” modes of thought. He is the successor of the Hack-narrator of Swift’s Tale of a Tub, now dressed up with a proper name and a suitably absurd life story. He is the official author of texts (actually written by Pope) like Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry: an elocution manual designed to aid those hoping to sink, rather than rise, in poetry. He is to be blamed for the long, digressive, always unenlightening footnotes that hang upon the Dunciad, weighing it down with ponderous musings. Most important for my purposes, Martin, as we learn in the Memoirs, is a trained anatomist, one fascinated by the relationship between body and mind. Hence, the central chapters of the Memoirs—a work that, more generally, recounts Martin’s birth, education, first scholarly achievements, and eventual love affairs—concern Scriblerus’s dissection of the brain, a practice undertaken in the hope of locating the seat of the soul.23

To be sure, as a mock dissection, the Memoirs break certain aspects of the pattern first established by Addison’s satire. The dream-narrative framing and the attack on a particular character type are absent from this text; the body and brain that Martin cuts into is that of an anonymous malefactor rather than some living embodiment of a particularly pernicious personality trait. But while the Memoirs do not explicitly allude to Addison’s papers, it nevertheless makes some of the same satirical moves and arrives at a similar conclusion. It, too, is fascinated by the gap between brain matter and the mental qualities somehow arising from it, and it, too, mocks the efforts of the neuroscientist to close that gap through less than purely scientific or empirical means. Like Addison’s satire, the Memoirs depict dissection as a process that uncovers not real organs but instead figures and fantasies. What we lose in the more scattershot attacks of the Spectator papers—which dissect both a Beau and his anatomists—we gain in a more thorough focus in the Memoirs on the person of the natural philosopher, since ultimately only Martin, his family, and his “modern” methods of knowledge production are the concern of this later text.

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