Abstract
Matthew Kibbee notes the timeliness of literary studies’ turn to consciousness, not only because the cognitive sciences have recently reengaged with fundamental questions about consciousness, but because that engagement challenges historicist approaches to subjective aesthetic experience.
Citing historical phenomenology’s resistance to New Historicist models of conscious experience, he makes a case for a neurophenomological approach that acknowledges the reciprocal constraints between first-person phenomenological reports, third-person scientific data, and historical-cultural information. The method is at once sensitive to neurobiological foundations of consciousness and aware of phenomenological traditions. He concludes by offering a reading of Hamlet that explores the temporal paradox at the center of consciousness and how it is enduringly present but always time-bound.
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Notes
- 1.
Here and throughout I favor the term “cognitive sciences” over the singular form in order to emphasize the diversity of methodologies and philosophical positions operating under this name. For a detailed summary of the so-called first cognitive revolution, which focused on computational processing, see Andy Clark, Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). For a survey of the second revolution, including notions of embodied and extended cognition, see Mark Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
- 2.
Some prominent early challenges include Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Edward Pechter, “New Historicism and Its Discontents,” PMLA 102.3 (May, 1987), 292–303; and Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
- 3.
On presentism, see Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, eds, Presentist Shakespeares (New York: Routledge, 2007). For a recent reappraisal of New Historicism in light of these critiques, see Ann B. Coiro and Thomas Fulton, eds, Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
- 4.
Important examples include Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000); Michael Clark, Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Heather Dubrow, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Reinterpreting Formalism and the Country House Poem,” Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000), 59–77; and Jonathan Loesberg, A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
- 5.
In a survey of this work, Marjorie Levinson calls new formalism a “movement” rather than a theory or method because, in her view, new formalist critics fail to critique the premises of New Historicism and instead seem mainly to target its dominant influence within the profession. See her “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122.2 (March, 2007), 558–69, esp. 558.
- 6.
Paul B. Armstrong, “In Defense of Reading: Or, Why Reading Still Matters in a Contextualist Age,” New Literary History 42.1 (Winter, 2011), 87–113, esp. 87; Mark Womack, “Undelivered Meanings: The Aesthetics of Shakespearean Wordplay,” in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 138–158, esp. 142.
- 7.
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4.
- 8.
See, for example, Heather Hirschfeld, “Historicizing Satisfaction in Shakespeare’s Othello,” in Rethinking Historicism, 113–115; and Levinson, “What is New Formalism?” 561-2.
- 9.
Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology an d Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Katharine A. Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- 10.
Paster, Humoring the Body, 20. My emphasis.
- 11.
These points are made by Richard Strier in his remarks with Carla Mazzio, “Two Responses to ‘Shakespeare and Embodiment: An E-Conversation’,” Literature Compass 3.1 (2005), 15–31, esp. 16.
- 12.
Nancy Easterlin argues that these positions, though rarely endorsed explicitly anymore, continue to influence literary critical culture. See her A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 39–40.
- 13.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1.
- 14.
I favor this term over modified versions such as “cultural” or (with a nod to Paster) “historical neurophenomenology.” While these latter terms might, at first glance, make the approach more palatable to skeptical readers, they are, as I explain below, redundant. They also indirectly serve to reinforce the assumption that phenomenology is an ahistorical, culturally blind philosophy. For the use of cultural neurophenomenology in anthropology, see Charles D. Laughlin and C. Jason Throop, “Cultural Neurophenomenology: Integrating Experience, Culture and Reality Through Fisher Information,” Culture & Psychology 12.3 (2006), 305–337.
- 15.
There are many examples throughout literary studies. Notable monographs in Renaissance studies reflecting a variety of uses for the cognitive sciences are Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Ellen Spolsky Word vs Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare’s England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Evelyn Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
- 16.
The most extensive guide to the phenomenological method is Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch’s On Becoming Aware. Depraz et al. recommend working with another, more experienced person when producing phenomenological reports. See Natalie Depraz, Francisco J. Varela, and Pierre Vermersch, On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 2003).
- 17.
Francisco J. Varela, “Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3.4 (1996), 330–49, esp. 336-7.
- 18.
Bruce R. Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 34.
- 19.
For a response to concerns that phenomenology is ill-equipped to analyze culture, see Robert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop, “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011), 87–102, esp. 94–7.
- 20.
Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 88–95.
- 21.
Depraz et al., On Becoming Aware, 9. For an extended response to the linguistic critique of phenomenology, see Zahavi, Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the Linguistic-Pragmatic Critique (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), esp. 171–205. For a critique of phenomenology and an alternative methodology known has “heterophenomenology,” see Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Back Bay Books, 1991), 72–9. Dennett maintains that we should treat first-person reports as beliefs the subject has about her own experience but not as descriptions of stable structures of experience. For a neurophenomenological response to heterophenomenology, see Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 306-8.
- 22.
Charles D. Laughlin and C. Jason Throop, “Husserlian Meditations and Anthropological Reflections: Toward a Cultural Neurophenomenology of Experience and Reality,” Anthropology of Consciousness 20.2 (2009), 130–170.
- 23.
For a debate on the relationship between science and phenomenology, see the essays in Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud, and Jean-Michel Roy, eds, Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
- 24.
Only late in the process of writing this paper did I find that neurophenomenology has made some inroads into religious studies where scholars are attempting to combine textual analysis with neurophenomenological investigations into religious experience. See the papers collected in Frances Flannery, Colleen Shantz, and Rodney A. Werline eds, Experientia, Volume 1: Inquiry for Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Christianity (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008).
- 25.
All quotations from the play are taken from Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006). This edition is based on the 1604–5 Second Quarto. I will mention any significant textual variations in the endnotes. This particular moment of forgetting appears both in the First Quarto and the 1623 Folio. Q1 has “What was I about to say?” instead of “Where did I leave?” (6.14-15). All quotations from Q1 and F are taken from Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006).
- 26.
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998). Bloom’s bold title makes it an easy target, but of course his work follows in a long tradition of trumpeting Hamlet’s modern consciousness. For a brief survey of this type of criticism, see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7–22.
- 27.
John Lee makes this point in his Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 200.
- 28.
On memory in a religious context, see Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Anthony Low, “Hamlet and the Ghost of Purgatory,” English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999), 443–67. On memory, Galenic theory, and faculty psychology, see Paster, Humoring the Body, 25–76; and Sullivan Memory and Forgetting, 25-43. On the Aristotelian theory of memory, see Rhodri Lewis, “Hamlet, Metaphor, and Memory,” Studies in Philology 109.5 (2012), 609–41. On memory and writing technology, see Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe, “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55.4 (Winter, 2004), 379–419. On the ars memoriae in a pedagogical context, see Andrew Wallace, “‘What’s Hecuba to Him?’: Pain, Privacy, and the Ancient Text” in Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture, Donald Beecher and Grant Williams, eds (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009), 231–43.
- 29.
Margreta de Grazia, “Hamlet before Its Time,” Modern Language Quarterly 62.4 (December, 2001), 355–76, esp. 375.
- 30.
Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting, 7.
- 31.
Lewis, “Hamlet, Memory, Metaphor,” 617.
- 32.
Lina Perkins Wilder, Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties, and Character (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 8.
- 33.
Sullivan, for example, argues, “‘Forgetting’ is the sign under which are collected models of subjectivity and of embodiment unsanctioned by secular and ecclesiastical authorizes.” See Memory and Forgetting, 43. And Wilder sets off “male bodily discipline” that has been trained in the ars memoriae with female “dilation.” Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre, 8.
- 34.
John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43.
- 35.
See Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp. 50.
- 36.
See W. R. M. Lamb ed., “Meno” in Plato: With An English Translation, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1924), 4:259–371. In later dialogues, Socrates further develops this notion of recollection to describe a process by which the soul comes to forget prenatal knowledge yet reacquires it, as it were, through the body’s sense-perception: “But, I suppose, if we acquired knowledge before we were born and lost it at birth, but afterwards by the use of our senses regained the knowledge which we had previously possessed, would not the process which we call learning really be recovering knowledge which is our own? And should we be right in calling this recollection?” See Jeffrey Henderson, ed., “Phaedo” in Plato, trans. Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 1:193–403, esp. 263–5. Plato continued to explore this idea of memory, albeit in a rather unsystematic way, in his later dialogues, in which memory takes on an almost mystical quality.
- 37.
In keeping with the syncretic attitude of the period, Aristotelian and Platonic theories of memory often appeared side by side in early modern discourse. Gregor Reisch’s enormously popular work of natural philosophy The Philosophical Pearl, for example, attributes memory both to the sensitive soul and the intellectual soul, essentially positing two different kinds of memories: “The intellectual memory is one thing, and the sensitive [memory] is another.” See Andrew Cunningham and Sachiko Kusukawa’s translation, Natural Philosophy Epitomised: A Translation of Books 8-11 of Gregor Reisch’s Philosophical Pearl (1503) (Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2010), 225. And Guglielmo Gratarolo’s The Castel of Memorie (translated into English by William Fulwood) places Plato’s definition of memory immediately after Aristotle’s. See Guglielmo Gratarolo, The castel of memorie wherein is conteyned the restoring, augmenting, and conseruing of the memorye and remembraunce, with the safest remedies, and best preceptes therevnto in any wise apperteyning, trans. William Fulwood (London, 1562), B.i. r, Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:18554:10.
- 38.
The term “Neo-Platonism” is the invention of the nineteenth century, and many scholars question the usefulness of the term as applied to Plotinus, who saw himself as an interpreter of Plato. Here, I will follow the early modern convention of referring to Plotinus as a Platonic philosopher.
- 39.
Giambattista Cinzio Giraldi, A discourse of ciuill life containing the ethike part of morall philosophie. Fit for the instructing of a gentleman in the course of a vertuous life, trans. Lodowick Bryskett (London, 1606), R3 r, Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:17081:66.
- 40.
Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, ed. John Dillon (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1991), 302.
- 41.
H. J. Blumenthal, Plotinus’ Psychology; His Doctrines of the Embodied Soul (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 80.
- 42.
For a comprehensive and systematic comparison between Aristotle and Plotinus’ theories of memory, see R. A. H. King, Aristotle and Plotinus on Memory (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009).
- 43.
Plotinus, Enneads, 279.
- 44.
Phillipe de Mornay, A woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian religion, written in French: against atheists, Epicures, Paynims, Iewes, Mahumetists, and other infidels, trans. Sir Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding (London, 1587), S[1] r, Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:13215:151.
- 45.
Paige E. Hochschild, Memory in Augustine’s Theological Anthropology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 169.
- 46.
Phillip Cary, who suggestively argues that Platonic recollection marks the beginning of the Western concept of the inner self, believes Augustine uses Platonic memory as a metaphor for seeking God: “[b]ecause we find God precisely as those who have once lost him, and our search for him is therefore like trying to recollect a truth that we have.” See Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 138-9.
- 47.
Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 245.
- 48.
King Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1995). For obvious reasons, it is difficult to say with any certainty what sort of access Shakespeare might have had to these ideas. Although Plotinus’ Enneads were not available in English, his works were widely available in Ficino’s Latin translation, which went through four editions. More broadly, Platonic theories of memory were in circulation via the works of Augustine and the philosophical compendia cited above. Furthermore, in the ars memoriae tradition, Giordano Bruno’s influential work De umbris idearum combined practical techniques for aiding recollection with a characteristically Plotinian schema whereby memory facilitates the ascent to a higher state of knowledge For a brief summary of Plotinus’ influence on early modern English writers, see Kurt Spellmeyer, “Plotinus and Seventeenth-Century Literature: A Prolegomenon to Further Study” Pacific Coast Philology 17.2 (November, 1982), 50–8, esp. 50.
- 49.
Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), translated by John Barnett Brough (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 3.
- 50.
Ibid., 286.
- 51.
Ibid., 11.
- 52.
It must be stressed that all three components occur at once as a unity of consciousness and, despite their superficial resemblance, retention and protention are distinct from recollection and expectation in their everyday meanings. For example, the experience of a just-past tone of a melody is clearly different from a recollection of that melody a few days later.
- 53.
Thompson, Mind in Life, 319.
- 54.
Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 86.
- 55.
The use of multistable perception as an illustration and the following discussion are greatly indebted to Francisco Varela’s essay “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness” in Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, eds Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud, and Jean-Michel Roy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 266-306. Varela himself is adapting the work of Ernst Pöppel. See Ernst Pöppel, Mindworks: Time and Conscious Experience (Boston: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988), esp. 55–63.
- 56.
Varela, “Specious Present,” 270.
- 57.
Ibid., 273–7. Further empirical research can be found in Pöppel, Mindworks.
- 58.
This theory, based on a dynamic systems model, is explained in the most detail by Varela in “Specious Present.” For a brief but detailed summation of this theory, see Gallagher and Zahavi’s discussion in The Phenomenological Mind, 89–92.
- 59.
On the symbolic significance of the animals mentioned, see Roger J. Trienens “The Symbolic Cloud in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 5.2 (Spring, 1954), 211–13. On epistemological stakes of the exchange, see Rhodri Lewis, “Shakespeare’s Clouds and the Image Made by Chance,” Essays in Criticism 62.1 (January, 2012), 1–24.
- 60.
Several critics have made reference to this illusion in their analyses of Shakespeare’s works, most notably Norman Rabkin, who labels Henry V as a “rabbit-duck play” in Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 34. See also James L. Calderwood To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 31. Both critics employ the illusion as a metaphor for the possibility of multiple interpretations of Shakespeare’s work. As I hope is clear, my use of a multistable figure is different in that it serves as an isolated phenomenological experience that reoccurs in various guises throughout the play.
- 61.
See, for example, Calderwood, who writes, “In large and small ways these instances of theatricalization in Denmark serve as Brechtian alienation devices to shatter our illusion of Danish reality and cut the cord of our imaginative life there.” To Be and Not To Be, 167.
- 62.
The metatheatrical moments of the play are well-known and oft-discussed, so I will not attempt a comprehensive exposition of them here. Richard Hornby’s Drama, Metadrama, and Perception is one of the few books I know of that attempts a systematic mapping of metadramatic techniques. Although Hornby discusses Shakespeare, he attempts a much broader survey of drama, and he remains committed to a view of metadrama as a sensation of “unease, a dislocation of perception.” See Richard Hornby, Drama, Metadrama, and Perception (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1986), 32.
- 63.
Characters responding to Ophelia’s madness, for example, purport to draw significance from her ravings, but they rather reveal hidden qualities about themselves as they “botch the words up fit to their own thoughts” (4.5.10). Even the Queen acknowledges that her responses to external events are colored by the lens of her “sick soul” (4.5.16). Similar patterns of reacting-reflection occur in encounters with the Ghost. Hamlet marvels at the way the Ghost’s presence reveals the limitations of human cognition by demanding “thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls” and exposing the spectators as mere “fools of nature” (1.4.54–6).
- 64.
Hochschild, Memory in Augustine’s Theological Anthropology, 169.
- 65.
As, for example, when Othello says of Desdemona: “She’d come again, and with a greedy ear / Devour up my discourse” (1.3.150–151). Later, however, Desdemona speaks of the “discourse of thought” (4.2.155). This is one of the few examples where Shakespeare uses term for mental activity. Othello, ed. E. A. Honigmann (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2006).
- 66.
Plotinus, Enneads, 271.
- 67.
Of course, Richard Burbage playing Hamlet at The Globe would mostly likely be looking out at the audience as he spoke these lines. With the audience doubling as Fortinbras’ army, Hamlet learns how to see himself by watching the audience, which learns how to see itself by watching him.
- 68.
Aaron Hill, “On Hamlet” in Brian Vickers. Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1974), 29–39, esp. 35.
- 69.
For a recent attempt to explain Hamlet’s character via (relatively) modern theories of personality, see Lee, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, 149-239. The most extensive reading of Hamlet’s character in light of the theory of the humors is Bert O. States, Hamlet and the Concept of Character (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
- 70.
Plotinus, Enneads, 151.
- 71.
Ibid., 154.
- 72.
Ibid., 154, my emphasis.
- 73.
Hilary Gatti, The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge: Giordano Bruno in England (New York: Routledge, 1989), 161. Gatti believes Hamlet echoes Bruno in this speech, but while Bruno insists upon the cyclical nature of time, Hamlet is focused on the endpoint of his life as it exists against the background of a divine order. Both Bruno and Hamlet’s thought, however, owe something to Platonic philosophy.
- 74.
For Augustine, memorized words provoke this contradictory combination of intimacy and alienation because our memories, in retaining the text in its totality, come closest to mirroring the way the soul possesses knowledge. A memorized psalm, he explains, resides in one’s mind in perfect unity and without sequence; the beginning, middle, and end of the psalm exist together outside of time. Indeed, Augustine speculates that this mode of knowing through memory has some resemblance to the mind of God: “Certainly if there were a mind endowed with such great knowledge and prescience that all things past and future could be known in the way I know a very familiar psalm, this mind would be utterly miraculous and amazing.” See Augustine, Confessions, 245.
Acknowledgments
A version of this essay was presented at the “Shakespeare and Consciousness” seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America in 2013. I wish to thank the members of that seminar for their valuable feedback. I am especially thankful to the editors of this volume, Paul Budra and Clifford Werier, for their helpful and perceptive comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Kibbee, M. (2016). Hamlet and Time-Consciousness: A Neurophenomenological Reading. In: Budra, P., Werier, C. (eds) Shakespeare and Consciousness. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59541-6_10
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