Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity

268 Pages·2014·1.58 MB·English

by  Lee Scrivner (auth.)

Becoming Insomniac
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Becoming Insomniac
How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity
Lee Scrivner
© Lee Scrivner 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-26873-0
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
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Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
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ISBN 978-1-349-44359-8 ISBN 978-1-137-26874-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137268747
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scrivner, Lee, 1971- author.
Becoming insomniac: how sleeplessness alarmed modernity / Lee Scrivner.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Title. [DNLM: 1. Sleep Initiation and Maintenance Disorders—history.
2. Sleep Initiation and Maintenance Disorders—psychology. 3. History,
19th Century. 4. Information Seeking Behavior. 5. Medicine in Literature.
6. Philosophy, Medical. WM 188]
RC548
616.8'4982—dc23
2014021109
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
For
Kim
γνω̑θι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
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Contents
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments x
Prologomenon 1
How it feels to be something on 1
The plan 5
1 A Modern Insomnia 14
Insomnaissance 14
Nervous extensions 22
Insomniac paradox 29
2 The Freeing of the Will 34
Centuries of sensory excess 34
Je pense, donc … 37
The unsettled mind 43
Scientific rumination 52
3 The Narrowing of the Attention 58
Argus eyes and invisible gorillas 58
Phenomenologies of attention, historically considered 64
Into the narrows … 70
4 In Vicious Circles: The Physiologies of Exhaustion 81
Brain/work 81
Thermodynamics and prosthetics of the will 84
(Lacking) the will to sleep 89
Neurasthenia and the soporific supplement 92
5 Mental Hyperactivity and the Hematologies of Sleep 99
Bodies 99
“The mental activity of women” 100
The bloody idea 106
Vicious cycles and paradoxes of cerebral hyperemia 109
6 Psychologorrhea 116
Mind/control 116
The associationist school and confirmation bias 120
Mass quackery? 125
Therapy as logorrhea as critique 131
vii
viii Contents
7 Slumber and Self Subdivided 136
Cogito ergo ego? 136
Multiple sleeps and insomnias 140
Hypnotic suggestion as vibration 147
Auto- suggestion as cause and cure 150
8 Prostheses and Antitheses 157
Night trains (of thought) 157
Mimeses and malingering 163
Telegraphic simultaneity, t wo- sided newspapers,
and “thickened” time 168
Lucem inventioni: light bulbs in the void 176
9 Insomniac Modernism 181
“An ideal insomnia” 181
Proto- Modernist insomnia and the monstrous
shadows of “progress” 184
“A feverish insomnia:” the “fruit of pure will”
and technological embodiment 192
Eliotian “pervigilium” 196
The insomniac sensory subject: light, sound, time, space 202
Tradition and individual techne 206
10 Volitional Regress and Egress 210
“Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies,
good night, good night” 210
Willing backwards 212
Notes 214
Bibliography 239
Index 253
List of Figures
1.1 “Electrical percuteur.” Joseph Mortimer Granville,
Nerve-vibration and Excitation as Agents in the Treatment of
Functional Disorder and Organic Disease (London: J. & A.
Churchill, 1883), 66. Not under copyright. Image taken
from the author’s private collection. 29
7.1 “Outline of a Plan for the Study of Mental and Sensory
Causes, or Forms, of Sleeplessness.” Joseph Mortimer
Granville, Gout in its Clinical Aspects (London:
J. & A. Churchill, 1885), 114-15. Not under copyright.
Image taken from the author’s private collection. 144
8.1 “Edison’s Telephonoscope.” Punch's Almanack for 1879
(Dec. 9, 1878; RB 180263, vol. 75). Image used by
permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino,
California. 171
8.2 “The rise of insomnia.” Google “n-gram” showing the rise
in the prevalence of the word “insomnia” from the late
nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Image produced
by Google Books Ngram Viewer. http://books.google.com/
ngrams 172
9.1 “Melencolia I.” Albrecht Dürer (1514) Not under copyright.
In the public domain. Image from Wikimedia Commons. 189
ix