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Amazing Neurological Tales
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10972 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1986 |
2,530 Words |
| Author
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Arthur Quinn
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A London reviewer of an earlier of an earlier clinical tale by Oliver Sacks made an apparently serious charge against him. It couldn't have happened the way Sacks said it did. Perhaps Sacks fibbed to make his tale more appealing, perhaps he was deluding himself--but the tale was simply not true.
There was in this denunciation the faint whiff of sour grapes. Sacks, after all, has become an immensely successful writer. Most of the present collection of essays, for instance, were first published in intellectually fashionable magazines like The New York Review of Books. Sacks has become for neurology what Stephen Jay Gould is for paleontology or Lewis Thomas for general medicine, someone who can transform the technicalities of his science into best-sellers that still command the respect of our intelligentsia.
There is one fundamental difference between Sacks and the other two, though, and this difference is one legitimate source of suspicion. Gould and Thomas usually write essays; Sacks writes stories. Worse, he openly admits that these stories are intended to be read like The Arabian Nights, for he is seeking in his patients' case histories new fables, new myths, new symbols for our scientific age. Such an admission could raise questions in the mind of even the most docile reader: should we care whether or not these fables are completely truthful? Does Sacks himself feel free to introduce the equivalent of flying carpets when he thinks a tale would be improved by them? Questions of this kind the London reviewer thought crucial in dismissing Sacks.
Of course, despite their obviousness, these questions still might not be the most important ones to ask of Sacks' tales. Before trying to decide, let's first look at Sacks' stories as stories.
Neurology as Comedy
Most of Sacks' case histories do have very similar plots, such as one would expect from a tightly organized collection of short stories. Oliver Sacks clearly likes to write up his case histories as comedies. By a comedy I mean not a story that is humorous but one that is contrived to work out well in the end, sometimes for the best. The frisky octogenarian with Cupid's disease can gain the benefits of advanced syphilis without suffering any debilities. Witty Ticcy Ray finds a way to hold down a steady job (thanks to medication) while still banging out mean drum solos on the weekends (thanks to his disease). Rebecca struggles against her many disadvantages only to find her true calling as a thespian. This is life as we would like it to be, and as it occasionally is--if not the best of all possible worlds, a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Take the title episode of the collection (not excerpted above): "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." Just reading the title makes one smile. We are led by it to expect a comedy, a happy ending. Imagine how this expectation would be disappointed, cruelly disappointed, if at the story's end the wife in question ran off with someone more appreciative of her charms, or if the man who mistook his wife for a hat one day mistook her for an apple and slit her throat. Well, Sacks is no Kafka.
The patient in question was losing his ability to recognize visual objects. Strangely, he could still describe with extraordinary precision their
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