Reviewed by:

• The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre by Matthew Wilson Smith
• Sarah McCarroll (bio)

To assert that the theatre is a place where larger political, social, cultural, and/or scientific developments are embodied via performance is nothing new. What is new in what Matthew Wilson Smith has to say about the performance of developing philosophical and medical discourses of the human nervous system during the nineteenth century is his understanding of the ways in which those discourses did not just influence dramatic texts or themes, but lie at the heart of dramatic structures, presentational styles, and the expected effects that productions had on audiences. In The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre, Smith traces a move from a gestural, representational drama to one in which representation has been fully disrupted, one which "sought to play directly on the nerves of spectators through non-representational and sensorial means and did not so much eschew representation as profoundly destabilize it by means of direct effects upon the audience's sensorium" (11). The question this move immediately raises is how theatre, a form with embodied representation at the heart of its traditional act, can function in the absence of a stable notion of representation; in short, how mimesis is possible for the neural subject. Smith's answer to this question is ultimately found in the work of Antonin Artaud, which emerges here not as the radical epistemological (one might even say ontological) departure from "traditional" theatrical forms it is often positioned as being, but as the endpoint of a century-long "decay of the language of gesture as an accurate representation of mental states [from which] modern European theater emerged" (183), one in which can be seen "a gradual transition from the dominance of a discourse of gestural representation to one of nervous sensation" (183).

As Smith sure-handedly explores these cross-fades from the gestural to the nervous to the sensational, he pairs the work of neurologists, philosophers, and others interested in the mind-body problem with close readings of dramatic texts. It is these analyses that make The Nervous Stage a thoroughly enjoyable experience for the reader. Smith examines the ways texts as varied as Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight, Richard Wagner's operas, the horror dramas of the Grand Guignol, and August Strindberg's Miss Julie, among others, showcase what Smith sees as "two fundamental shifts" (8) that occurred as the Enlightenment gave way to the Romantic era, which in its turn ceded to the Victorian age, which was brought to an abrupt halt by the cataclysm of World War I. Those shifts were: "1. Where gestures once served as a window into a person's hidden inner life, nerves increasingly fulfilled the same function. 2. Where sympathies once helped to construct the liberal subject and [End Page 119] the promise of a liberal social order, the stimulation and networking of neural sensations increasingly operated in their place" (8; emphasis in original). Each of the texts Smith examines in his roughly chronological journey along the path of these shifts is clearly and cogently connected to the scientific works that influenced (or in some cases, were influenced by) its presentation of characters' external demonstrations of the visible signs of internal, invisible, nervous/neural operations.

The lines of intellectual and artistic transmission are clearly drawn in The Nervous Stage; it is always clear what evidentiary value Smith is claiming for the texts and events he examines. It is particularly welcome that Smith so clearly positions his work ("I am differentiating historical studies of relations between neurology and the theater … from the application of contemporary neuroscience and/or cognitive science to theatrical practices. … The methodology and aims of such works are quite different from those of the cultural historian" [12]). In addition to clearly laying out the aims of his work, Smith is notably effective at providing nuanced yet concise historical and theoretical summaries that keep his...

审核人：

• 紧张的舞台：19 世纪的神经科学与现代戏剧的诞生马修·威尔逊·史密斯
• 莎拉·麦卡罗尔（生物）

断言剧院是一个通过表演体现更大的政治、社会、文化和/或科学发展的地方并不是什么新鲜事。马修·威尔逊·史密斯 (Matthew Wilson Smith) 关于 19 世纪发展人类神经系统哲学和医学话语的表现的新观点是他对这些话语不仅影响戏剧文本或主题的方式的理解，而且还说谎是戏剧结构、表现风格以及作品对观众产生的预期效果的核心。在紧张的舞台上：19 世纪的神经科学与现代戏剧的诞生, 史密斯追溯了一种从手势性、再现性戏剧到再现性被完全破坏的转变，这种戏剧“试图通过非再现性和感官方式直接在观众的神经上发挥作用，并没有过多地回避再现性，而是严重破坏稳定。它通过直接影响观众的感官”（11）。这一举措立即引发的问题是，戏剧这种以具身表现作为其传统行为核心的形式，如何在缺乏稳定的表现概念的情况下发挥作用？简而言之，对于神经主体来说，模仿是如何可能的。史密斯对这个问题的回答最终在 Antonin Artaud 的作品中找到，它在这里出现并不是作为对“传统”的激进认识论（甚至可以说是本体论）背离

当史密斯稳妥地探索从手势到紧张再到耸人听闻的这些交叉淡入淡出时，他将神经学家、哲学家和其他对身心问题感兴趣的人的工作与戏剧性文本的仔细阅读结合起来。正是这些分析使The Nervous Stage成为读者彻底享受的体验。史密斯考察了各种文本的方式，如乔治·布希纳的《沃伊采克》、奥古斯丁·戴利的《煤气灯下》、理查德·瓦格纳的歌剧、大吉尼奥尔的恐怖剧和奥古斯特·斯特林堡的《朱莉小姐》等等，展示史密斯眼中的“两个根本性转变”（8），随着启蒙运动让位于浪漫主义时代，浪漫主义时代又让位于维多利亚时代，维多利亚时代因第一次世界大战这些转变是：“1.凡手势曾经担任过一个窗口，进入一个人的内心隐藏着生命，神经越来越履行相同的功能2.凡。同情曾经帮助构建自由主义主体和[尾页119]的自由社会秩序的承诺，神经感觉的刺激和联网越来越多地在他们的位置上运作”（8；强调原文）。史密斯在他沿着这些转变的路径大致按时间顺序的旅程中检查的每一篇文本都清楚而令人信服地与影响（或在某些情况下，受到影响）的科学著作联系在一起通过）它对人物内部、不可见、神经/神经活动的可见迹象的外部演示的呈现。

《神经舞台》清晰地描绘了知识和艺术的传播线；史密斯对他所考察的文本和事件所主张的证据价值总是很清楚的。特别欢迎史密斯如此明确地定位他的工作（“我正在区分神经病学和戏剧之间关系的历史研究......从当代神经科学和/或认知科学到戏剧实践的应用......这些作品的方法和目标是与文化历史学家的完全不同”[12]）。除了清楚地阐述他的工作目标之外，史密斯在提供细致入微但简洁的历史和理论总结方面特别有效，这些总结使他的...