Donald R. Wehrs, Auburn University
Antonio Damasio's research on the interdependence of emotional susceptibility and practical reasoning indicates that humans are incapable of processing mental images of violence or suffering without being physiologically, somatically, disturbed in ways that are measurable through monitoring the autonomic nervous system. Mental images are thus "somatically marked" in the sense that one cannot apprehend them without being "touched" by them. Damasio's clinical studies found exceptions to this involuntary, bodily entwinement of affect and cognition only among subjects suffering from a particular kind of brain damage that deadens emotions and debilitates practical reasoning, and among subjects previously diagnosed as sociopaths. Such results and their confirmation in subsequent research imply a biological basis for worldwide literary representations of indifference to the sufferings of others as being not only morally, but also physiologically, corporeally impossible--except for people who are or have become in significant respects less than fully human. Moreover, Damasio's research casts light on the role demons and witches play in diverse societies. Discussing ghosts, Pascal Boyer argues that supernatural entities, while having counter-intuitive attributes (immortality, invisibility, etc.), are believed to behave in a manner consistent with intuitive understandings of normative psychology. Thus ancestral spirits in China or Africa will respond positively to offerings and honor, and negatively to their absence--just as a prominent living member of the society would be expected to do. Malevolent spirits similarly are assumed to have a normative psychology, except for an absence of the emotionally mediated rationality that follows from "somatic markers." Thus, malevolent spirits are monstrous in ways that articulate diverse cultures' recognition that without somatically mediated ethical compunction, one's very humanity is deformed: those spirits act just as one would expect people to do, if no "somatic marking" impressed itself upon their deliberations and relations with others.In modern literatures universally, one may see how a monstrousness akin to that diverse traditional cultures imputed to malevolent spirits, an estrangement from full humanity, is associated with either habitual cultural desensitivity or traumatic disruptions that effectively strip "somatic markers" from the experience of mental images. Thus, Richardson's Lovelace is repeatedly likened to a devil in his inability to allow his practical judgments to be modified by somatic receptivity to other people's suffering and Dostoyesky's Ivan Karamazov is presented as having so intellectually estranged himself from affective life that he experiences himself as "possessed" by the Devil. Here I want to explore how modern war, as portrayed by Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato and Duong Thu Huong's Novel Without A Name, institutionalizes trauma in ways that induce coercively, invasively, the kinds of stripping of "somatic markers" that Lovelace and Ivan bring gradually upon themselves through ideological rigidity. In O'Brien's and Duong's fictions of combat in Vietnam, from American and North Vietnamese perspectives, respectively, no less than in the "classical" novels of Richardson and Dostoyevsky, retrieving "somatic marking" is crucial to the text's ethical, literary labor, and is connected with "recentering" meaning in ways concordant with cognitive science's analysis of "prototype effects"--the idea that categories are structured in terms of proximity or distance from a "prototype"--either an ideal or a representative instance. In each of these literary works, cultures and ideologies are critically assessed on the basis of the effects their prototypes engender--the kind of perception, valuing, and conduct they encourage and authorize. In each case, a culture's redemptive value is tightly bound to its prototypes' efficacy in renewing "somatic markers"' regulation of ethical, political, and psychic life. [D.W.]