Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology, by Linda M. Austin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology by Linda M. Austin Anne Stiles (bio) Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology, by Linda M. Austin; pp. x + 260. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, £75.00, $99.00. Linda Austin’s Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology aims to show how various art forms—from landscape painting, memoirs, novels, and photography to classical ballet—addressed psychological debates about human automatism from approximately 1870 to 1911. During this time period, scientists such as T. H. Huxley, Alexander Bain, William James, William Benjamin Carpenter, Henry Maudsley, Théodule Ribot, and others contested the degree to which human neurophysiology was analogous to mechanical mechanism. Mechanistic conceptions of brain function such as theories of reflex action or studies of the autonomic nervous system proved controversial because they undermined a mentalist understanding of human psychology that stressed the autonomy of the human mind, will, or soul. As Austin acknowledges, Victorian debates about human automatism have been ably explored by historians and literary scholars alike, including Anson Rabinbach, Rick Rylance, Nicholas Dames, Deanna Kreisel, Jill Matus, and Jenny Bourne Taylor. Austin’s principal intervention is to broaden these debates to a wider range of art forms and genres than previous critics. Her book thus requires readers to maintain working knowledge of several fields at once, from early photography to popular journalism to classical dance. This makes Automatism and Creative Acts a challenging read at times, but one that rewards determined readers. Austin shows the ways in which literary authors, painters, photographers, librettists, and choreographers weighed in on the debate surrounding human automatism with varying degrees of success and conviction. Part 1, titled “Automato-phobia,” demonstrates how early-nineteenth-century memoirist John Stuart Mill and travel writers Richard Jefferies and John Davidson favored mentalist interpretations of brain function that privileged the [End Page 121] independent mind, soul, or will above a mechanistic view of human neurophysiology. Part 2, “Technologies of the Automatic: Process and Movement,” explores the ways in which landscape photographers, spiritualists, novelists, and choreographers understood their works as simultaneously intentional and automatic, mental and mechanistic. While most of the book focuses on British texts and contexts, the final chapter turns to continental ballet to understand how “the preeminent nineteenth-century art of human movement” served as a battleground for debates surrounding human automatism (169). Austin’s monograph gets progressively better as it goes on. The first two thirds of the book make for challenging reading, especially the highly technical chapter on landscape photography (though perhaps a historian of photography could better appreciate Austin’s discussion of this medium). By contrast, chapters 4 and 5 gather momentum by describing how late-Victorian artists and scientists gradually abandoned mentalist theories of brain function to embrace automatism in its various forms. Because the fin-de-siècle works described in later chapters more closely approach modern understandings of brain function, they are more likely to resonate with twenty-first-century readers. Of greatest relevance for literary scholars is chapter 4 on professional writing, with its brilliant discussion of George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). Austin likens the novel’s antihero, journalist Jasper Milvain, to an automaton whose speed and efficiency allow him to thrive in the cutthroat late-Victorian literary marketplace. By contrast, novelist Edward Reardon is a throwback to an earlier era of literary realism and moral sincerity whose human rate of production dooms him to failure. The two- and three-decker novels he laboriously produces are old-fashioned, as are his mentalist views of literary composition and his adherence to the Romantic ideal of the literary genius. Milvain thus serves as an avatar of the new psychology, while Reardon represents older modes of thinking that privileged the mind or soul over mechanistic understandings of brain function. Gissing reveals clear sympathy with Reardon’s mentalism and his obsolescent literary values, and the novel ultimately condemns both “the climate of forced, frenetic activity” that made late-Victorian publishing inimical to sincere and ambitious writers like Reardon, and the erosion of mentalist values that accompanied this change (133). At the same time, Gissing’s...