Paul Giamatti’s new movie has a wacked-out premise: an actor has his soul surgically removed and put into cold storage in New Jersey so it doesn’t get ruined when he takes on the apparently soul-sucking role of Uncle Vanya. Giamatti’s soul, as it turns out, is about the size of a chickpea. But (as Anthony Lane points out in his unusually glowing New Yorker review) the joy of the movie comes from the surreal juxtaposition of a scientific impossibility in a realistic movie.
I agree. It’s a juxtaposition that’s not only found in Chekhov and Kafka, but also in science itself, which has long been concerned with putting the metaphysical in physical form. The Christian soul is invisible; it’s the part of you that God acts upon. It can be permanently exiled to hell, or it can of course be saved—although not in cold storage in New Jersey. (There are other religions which encourage physical representation of the soul. In Haitian vodou (voodoo), each believer has a “head-spirit”, chosen from a boisterous cast of semi-divine personalities. One of these, Gede, an old man, wears glasses with one lens missing, because he can see into the lands of both the living and the dead.) But that didn’t satisfy early scientists. There simply had to be a place in the body where our deepest thoughts are formed, without us knowing about it.
Descartes, father of rationality, thought the brain was the obvious choice. He declared the pineal gland to be “the seat of the soul,” because it was the only part of the brain he found not to be dual—and the soul of course could only be in one place. The pineal gland is in fact about the size of a pea, though I wouldn’t suggest removing it. This begs the question: if the pineal gland is the soul, are the eyes really the window to it?
Then there’s the infamous case of Dr. Duncan MacDougall, who in 1907 conducted an elaborate series of experience to prove that the human soul a) existed and b) had a measurable mass. He did this by weighing humans immediately before and after death, on the assumption that the soul leaves the body at the moment of the last breath.
He corrected for many other possible cause of at-death weight loss, including air being expelled from the lungs, and the ceasing of circulation. His results, as reported by the New York Times: the human soul weights 3/4 of an ounce, or about 21 grams, which is where that movie gets its title. There was no word on its shape or resemblance to legumes.
With the onset of psychology, the “soul” began to dematerialize. It went by other names: id, ego, personality, spirit, consciousness. But science hadn’t totally given up. Frances Crick, double-helix man himself, wrote a whole book about the scientific search for the soul. He believed that the neuron was the basis of consciousness, just like DNA was the basis for life. If he’s right, Giamatti should not despair of the chickpea-size of his soul. A neuron is much, much smaller.
