The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (Oliver Sacks, 1985)
In the preface to this collection of neurological case studies, Sacks writes, "The scientific and the romantic... come together at the intersection of fact and fable, the intersection which characterises... the lives of the patients here narrated." Reading that, I completely underestimated the equal weight he gives to the romantic and to fables. I thought I was reading non-fiction, but I'm not convinced that's the case. Sacks is too unreliable a narrator. He fancies himself equal parts "theorist and dramatist," and his failings at the latter undercut for me his efforts at the former.
This first becomes clear in the self-aggrandizing tone that seeps into his writing, especially in the portrayal of himself as a renaissance physician — the humble servant of medicine with an encyclopedic knowledge of all of Western literature and classical music, who spends his evenings playing chess and reading Horace in the original Latin. I'm exaggerating, of course, but I couldn't help but roll eyes every time he recounted how, mid-conversation with a patient, he thought of some random thing Dostoevsky or someone wrote. Each time, it struck me as an overly romantic view of himself, as if his mind was always working on multiple levels at once.
I was equally skeptical of Dr. Sacks' description of his patients. They're almost all "remarkable" in some way — not because of their rare neurological conditions, but for non-medical reasons. They're remarkable musicians or painters or writers; or they have a remarkable sense of humor; or they're remarkable courageous; or, like Sacks himself, remarkably humane. And they too will make literary references at the drop of a hat. "I feel like Zeno's arrow," says Mrs. S, knowing that the good doctor will know exactly what she means.
Perhaps the last straw, for me, was his description (in the chapter "The Possessed") of a street scene that "was so singular that it remains in my memory today as vivid as it was the day I saw it." He goes on to describe an older woman who was imitating, with remarkable precision, every passerby on the street:
I have seen countless mimes and mimics, clowns and antics, but nothing touched the horrible wonder I now beheld: this virtually instantaneous automatic and convulsive mirroring of every face and figure. ... Every mirroring was also a parody, a mocking, an exaggeration of salient gestures and expressions, but an exaggeration in itself no less convulsive than intentional—a consequence of the violent acceleration and of all her motions. Thus a slow smile, monstrously accelerated, would become a violent, milliseconds-long grimace; and ample gesture, accelerated, would become a farcical convulsive movement. ... In the course of a short city-block this frantic old woman frenetically caricatured the the features of forty or fifty passers-by, in a quick-fire sequence of kaleidoscopic imitations, each lasting a second or two, sometimes less, and the whole dizzying sequence scarcely more than two minutes. I call bullshit. There's no way that someone could stumble upon a chaotic scene like this and perceive events to this level of detail, at intervals of milliseconds. And even if he could, it's just not convincing that he could accurately recognize the woman's rapid-fire, convulsive, expressions as caricatures of the other passers-by — forty or fifty in a two minute span. That's, what, three seconds per imitation? And the good doctor, arriving late to the scene, is able to get to the front of the crowd and see both the woman's face as well as the target of her imitation? Okay, Sherlock Holmes. I believe you.
Suddenly, desperately, the old woman turned aside, into an alley-way which led off the main street. And there, with all the appearances of a woman violently sick, she expelled, tremendously accelerated and abbreviated, all the gestures, the postures, the expressions, the demeanours, the entire behavioural repertoires, of the past forty of fifty people she had passed. She delivered one vast, pantomimic egurgitation, in which the engorged identities of the last fifty people who has possessed her were spewed out. And if the taking-in had lasted two minutes, the throwing out was a single exultation—fifty people in ten seconds, a fifth of a second or less for the time-foreshortened repertoire of each person. Okay, now you've gone too far. Maybe this is what you think you saw, but, dammit, Bones, you're a man of science. At least have the awareness to admit that your description of this scene is at least seventy percent your interpretation, projection, and imagination applied to a living and breathing Rorschach test.
Despite Sacks' unreliability as a narrator, there are still plenty of interesting nuggets in these tales, which at their best are Twilight Zone episodes of the human mind. That's where most of the book's merits lie. It's not very well edited, however, with, among other issues, multiple instances of the identical phrasings appearing in consecutive paragraphs.
Grade: C
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