Is the soul what is known? Here’s how this often goes in fiction: through some spiritual, technological, and/or biological process, an individual’s life force (let’s call it, for now) is moved from one vessel to another. This process may involve physical bits — usually a head, containing a brain. We see such scenarios (with various amounts of meat, or surgical intervention) play out in Mary Rodgers’ book Freaky Friday, the PG Wodehouse novel Laughing Gas, and Irving Welsh’s short story “The Acid House.” We see it in the Carl Reiner film All of Me, the Pixar film Soul, and the Makoto Shinkai film Your Name. And we see it in episodes of Alien: Earth, Annoying Orange, The Daily Show, Looney Toons, Doctor Who, Dragon Ball, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Eureka, and Futurama.
Not all of these stories use the word “soul,” though many do.1 Avoidance is understandable; it’s a term with baggage. Millennia of religious, philosophical, romantic, critical and even some medical writing have attempted an exegesis of the soul (and its varyingly related concepts: Ātman, hun, jīva, nephesh, etc) only to have the concept remain, perhaps necessarily, enigmatic, and certainly loaded. “Soul” does nonetheless provide an effective shorthand for what’s moving: the subject’s knowledge, memories, and experiences; their essential nature divorced from its physical instance; the self, but also more and somehow slightly less.
How did this soul-self become equated with knowledge, though? Knowledge is something we claim (conversationally, at least) to possess. We gain and have our knowledge, but it is not us. Yet concerning the transferability of the self, the soul is often portrayed as a disembodied kernel bearing the intellectual spoils of its (dis)associated physical form. When Annabel becomes Ellen in Freaky Friday, when Coco Brice inhabits a newborn in “The Acid House,” when Hamton and Sweetie swap places in the Tiny Toons Looniversity Spring Beak [sic] episode, what moves is what each knows.2 The self in these media is, principally, the narrativized self: a continually existing metaphysical repository of experiences. When the narrative-self is transported, this means the person is transported.
But I wonder: can the knowledge gained in one body be used in another? Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2023 film Poor Things, Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out, and stories like these — brain- and head-transplant stories, specifically — provide a half answer: the brain contains one’s knowledge-and-experience. If this knowledge-and-experience are moved, so too is the self (or, in the case of Get Out, proportional amounts of it). The fictional body hosts this new head/brain as its own; in some cases, the switcheroo is even an upgrade. B.J. Blaskowitz, head grafted atop a Nazi “bio-engineered super soldier body” in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, says he feels “powerful,” and later, “unstoppable. Like a fucking freight train.”
This is likely all moot in a practical sense. Medical experiments done with primates produce a temporarily “living” head atop an inert body. The work of reknitting nerves remains remote to contemporary medicine. Still, I wonder how the transplants depicted in fiction align with attitudes of the real world, where other sorts of transplants are possible and much of what we say we “know” more resembles feeling, sometimes located “in” a particular body part. Put another way: how much of what is known is in the brain, versus the hands, the feet, the gut, the eardrums, the everywhere else? How much of what we know requires the specific body we wear (are?) while becoming ourselves? And if the body is changed, would the knowledge (that may be us) persist in its new receptacle, and be intelligible to it?
We ask these questions not to uncover some strict truth of the world, nor to push our glasses up, and pick apart these works of fiction. We ask these questions for the same reason we watch movies, play games, read books, and so on: to knit together thoughts, in order to see if they come to life. Do they animate themselves, and then us? Do we see ourselves somewhere in their amalgamation, or are they frightening, shambling pariahs? And in either case — why?
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Say what you might about the poetry of the soul, but of the body at least it’s known (and widely agreed) that each of us has one. The body exists in the world, constrained by that material existence. There are sensible forces which act upon it, and also social ones. All of these forces cause each of us to use, feel, and perceive our own physical form in unique, dynamic ways. These forces are also tied very strongly to where we are in time and place. One constructs the idea of themself not in an infinite, sterile void but within their own environment: familiar surroundings full of people with whom they are more or less acquainted, and whose interior judgments they (maybe correctly, maybe incorrectly) theorize. We know, in short, how it’s done around here and formulate the self with, against, or alongside that sense but always, unavoidably, in relation to it.
Making the self, and being that self, are both active processes. Not just in the sense they are ongoing, but also in that they require literal action, taken with a body we control, and must perform the control of. The performance of that control — how we behave — signals our understanding of norms, and reinforces those norms at the same time. The self and the identity that represents it are constructed and communicated through the presence of each in a culturally and historically situated physical space. We receive feedback on that presence, and its lack. We feel ourselves feeling, or acting, or being prevented from either. We feel the gaze and have varying access to the perspectives of others. We spend our lives (maybe their entirety) tuning the self and its physicality, adjusting the distance between the two.
In philosopher Charles Taylor’s paper “Embodied Agency,” he writes: “The subject is not in the world the way in which an intrinsically-desireable object is contained in another, like water in a glass […] rather, the subject is in a world which is a field of meanings for him, and thus inseparably so, because those meanings are what make him the subject he is.” Far from being dualistic mind-body beings — cleaved down some imagined middle, each of us half Shinji, half robot — we are in fact a single, whole thing, and as well: the world itself, inseparably so. The self that we are has many qualities, including a “comportment” which describes our affect, but also “makes the world meaningful.” Researcher Simon J. Charlesworth describes the body and the world as having a “primordial bond,” “one in which the body as a socialized medium is the site of a generative capacity to structure our understanding of the world…” What we know of the world, and our communities in it, is known with and in and through (and throughout) the body. We take this knowledge on, feel it as well as know it, and incorporate it into ourselves.
Charlesworth writes principally of the embodiment of social class. The working class has an especially somatically encoded “knowledge” of the world, he argues, often engaging in hard or protracted labor, suffering anxiety, worry, and various forms of deprivation as the result of a reliance on perennially lacking social programs. This knowledge — deeply felt — often defeats language, especially in cases where acquiring it has meant the experience of pain.3 As such, it is often dismissed, or if it is appreciated, it is as something else entirely. Philosopher Sarah Ahmed writes how this line of phenomenological thinking — about the nature of subjective experience — can help us appreciate how “bodies are shaped by histories, which they perform in their comportment, their posture, their gestures.” Our bodies take the shape of the work we do, “we get stuck in certain alignments as an effect of this work,” she writes, considering how years of pen use have altered the shape of her hand. Repetition, she says, “orients the body in some ways rather than others.” “Orientations shape what bodies can do, while bodies are shaped by the orientation they already have…”
So what then happens when part of that body is given to someone else? Medical studies have identified small cohorts of organ recipients claiming to take on characteristics of their donors: food cravings, hobbies and interests, and so on. Laskowski et al in the Journal of Clinical Medicine write how these outcomes likely result from the extreme stress of organ transplantation, combined with what they name “donor and donation images:” “all (magical and/or rational) thoughts and feelings that an organ recipient has associated with the donor or the donated organ itself” which “are often accompanied by a change or fear of change in personality traits in individuals with transplantation experience attributed to the transplantation.”4 Others have proposed biological or neurological explanations for these changes, though the mechanisms they suggest are speculative and understudied. Psychiatrist Mitchell B. Liester, in a paper in Medical Hypothesis, for example, outlines several potential ways “cellular memory” may carry one’s predilections forward to an organ recipient. In the paper’s conclusion, he writes, “Our willingness to consider possibilities beyond the current widely accepted view that memory and personal identity are brain dependent will likely determine how quickly our knowledge in this area will advance.”
Fiction has approached this localized body-knowledge question, as well. In Karl Freund’s 1935 film Mad Love, Peter Lorre stars as a horror-obsessed surgeon who performs a hand transplant for the husband of his favorite actress after a train wreck. The husband, a trained pianist, is given the hands of a murderer accurately named “Rollo the Knife-Thrower”5; he can no longer play piano, but his new hands toss pens and daggers in moments of anger. Eventually, he kills his stepfather. In The Simpsons’ 1998 Treehouse of Horror IX segment ‘Hell Toupée,’ Homer’s brain is controlled by executed convict Snake Jailbird’s recovered scalp, causing him to murder Apu and Moe. The disembodied hair later tries to murder Bart. In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Revolver Ocelot loses an arm and replaces it with a transplant of Liquid Snake’s, which eventually invades Ocelot’s brain with Liquid Snake’s personality.6
What, we may now ask, is the significance of all this? What beliefs, desires, or anxieties are carried forth in the details of these stories, like so many imbued appendages? No doubt there is much. Here is one attempt at suturing all of it together:
We, humans, are in — and are — vast alien machines. What animates our whole and its parts, while having been the subject of endless study, endlessly retreats. It’s a fact which can impart great wonder, and great disquiet. We are and control and create meaning with and within a thing of impossible complexity. Belief in the existence of a soul which permeates the brain, heart, hands, kidneys, and blood is a balm for the burning unease that attends to the body’s paradoxical remoteness: each part of you is (don’t fear) you. The transportability of the self, with appendages capable of transporting desire, and knowledge of one’s past, joined inextricably with one’s vital essence, addresses the worry that where we might go when finally disembodied is nowhere.
What we fear may not be death, really, but depersonalization: the absence of meaning, of knowledge, of a world in which these things are made, inseparably so. And so the purest distillation of the self, as well as all of its constituent parts, must know in one way or another. This is a comfort. There is no knowing without a place. If the soul is somewhere, it must know something; if something is known, there must be something there to know it.
Citations
Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press.
Broccolo, M., Favez, N., & Karam, O. (2017). Perceived changes in behavior and values after a red blood cell transfusion. International Journal of Clinical Transfusion Medicine, Volume 6, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.2147/ijctm.s155338
Charlesworth, S. J. (1999). A phenomenology of Working-Class experience. Cambridge University Press.
Laskowski, N. M., Brandt, G., Tigges-Limmer, K., Halbeisen, G., & Paslakis, G. (2023). Donor and donation Images (DDI)—A scoping review of what we know and what we don’t. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 12(3), 952. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm12030952
Liester, M. B. (2019). Personality changes following heart transplantation: The role of cellular memory. Medical Hypotheses, 135, 109468. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2019.109468
Taylor, C (1989). Embodied Agency. In Henry Pietersma (ed), Merleau-Ponty: Critical Essays.
Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology; Lanham, MD: University Press of America
Wiki, C. T. W. (n.d.). William Joseph Blazkowicz. Retrieved from https://wolfenstein.fandom.com/wiki/William_Joseph_Blazkowicz
Notes
- This narrative trope is most often called a “body swap,” though this feels like a misnomer. The physical form of the person is not the material in transit, rather the immaterial essence (occasionally hitching a ride — as it were — on some viscera). The metaphysical force moving makes this less of a “body swap,” and more of a “soul switch.” There are also all manner of unique spins on the approach; in All of Me (1984), e.g., an inhabiting soul controls only a portion of the destination body, a conceit which motivates physical comedy for which Martin has great facility. Not a body swap, per se, but nonetheless making use of the genre. ↩︎
- Occasionally, especially in animated works, voices swap as well. ↩︎
- Here we reach the edges of ideas presented in The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry, a work of theory and critique which puts forth the idea that pain is both unable to be captured by language, and actively destroys one’s facility for it. Scarry deals with the political and social ramifications of this, beginning with torture. ↩︎
- Authors note that previously these ideas were (perhaps uncharitably) referred to in establishment medical research as “fantasies” about the donor, or the organ. This should give a sense of how seriously the idea of an organ transmitting desire from donor to recipient has been taken up until now. ↩︎
- Who also, incidentally, has his head sewn back on after being sentenced to death via guillotine.
↩︎ - There is some disagreement about what transpires in the narrative, concerning the transplanted arm. In classic Metal Gear fashion, this story beat involves extrasensory perception, nanomachines, hypnosis, double agents, and father-son-relationships. Online conversation about the arm also includes meta-discussion of voice actors, and JP -> EN localization issues. ↩︎