The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Baumann, Paul
between humorous gesture and genuine fear. The only false note in the film follows this escape: a bus fide in which Page opens up to a young woman (Rebecca de Mornay) who, in effect, becomes a...
...Despite their classification as mental defectives, the so-called simple-minded possess a "quality of mind" rich in meaning, memory, aesthetic and symbolic power...
...The truth about existence, Sacks writes, is that "to be ourselves we must have ourselves--possess, if need be repossess, our life stories...
...where has that pension check gone...
...That person can only be fully understood when we "deepen a case history to a narrative or tale...
...Their conversation covers too much ground, as Foote searches for more parallels between their emotional histories than necessary...
...If the film has less drama than other recent" roots" movies, it approaches the look of the past more accurately, and better conveys its threadbare dignity...
...Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat may remind you of all those peculiar folks on your freshman year college hall, but as it turns out, things are not quite that bad...
...Sacks has in store...
...And so it is with The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: a collection of singular cases, written in a singularly felicitous style...
...The spirit, the soul, the self, cannot be merely calculated or systematically diagrammed...
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...Experience is not possible until it is organized iconically...
...Moreover, the experiences of his patients suggest that at least some neurological incapacities offer "portals" through which the nature of being and the mysterious origins of the self can be glimpsed...
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...On the right side mental operations are cast in a symbolic mode and depend on what Sacks calls our narrative sense of ourselves...
...action is not possible unless it is organized iconically...
...Along the way Foote also raises enough suspense about the old woman's fate--will she get there...
...This is the final form of the brain's record, even though the preliminary form may be computational or programmatic...
...Stories, and especially music, provide the context, the sequencing of events, the schematic framework that the injured mind cannot provide for itself...
...And that's only the beginning...
...Fortunately, it centers on Page's devoted quest for Bountiful, a once prosperous farm town on the Texas Gulf where the soil failed and which is not even reached by bus routes anymore...
...A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner'narrative, to maintain his identity, his self...
...Sacks is concerned with neurological impairments affecting the right hemisphere of the brain...
...Of course the gentleman referred to in the title -- suffering from severe visual agnosia -- makes life around the house seem a little like a "Honeymooners" skit, with Ralph and Norton giving the girls a very hard time indeed...
...A more realistic film might have profitably explored that sadness...
...It has apparently become Sacks's happy task to insist that science finally speak in a language that can accommodate such truth, for Sacks tells us that we must first know the world as symbol, if we are to know it at all, Even Holmes would have been baffled by that mystery...
...In a woefully decrepit bus terminal, empty of all otl~er passengers, Page has to appeal to a sheriff (the admirably stolid Richard Bradford) not to stop her from trying to get the last few miles to Bountiful by herself...
...Watson, do you make of that...
...The case histories collected here concern Sacks's investigations into what he calls the neurology of self, and illuminate the nature of mental processes and the false certainties that beset our common notions of defective intelligence...
...Maybe it's the difference between American and English acting, or Foote and Forster, but Page's melancholy outburst against fate seemed less hammy, less self-consciously important...
...In Time and Myth: A Meditation on Storytelling as an Exploration of Life and Death, theologian John S. Dunne made similar claims for the role story plays in rendering the world meaningful and the self whole...
...For further information, calf or write: Dr...
...Neurological afflictions, like hyper-amnesis and hyper-gnosis, "testify to the essentially 'melodic' and 'scenic' nature of inner life, the 'Proustian' nature of memory and mind...
...In fact, when Sacks introduces his patients and their fantastic problems, he all but turns to an invisible companion after each clinical description and says, "And what, Dr...
...The best scene in the film is not the conclusion of the quest, but a critical turning point...
...516) 423-0499 IB 28 March 1986:183...
...Even When the conceptual apparatus of the left hemisphere is shattered, the neglected powers of the right brain can be cultivated--through story, music, and art--in a way that liberates the mentally impaired from the prison of their physiological incapacity...
...A singular case, Holmes...
...At the end, however, more needs to be said about how few elderly get to live out the dream of going home one more time...
...Her speech contains both the glory and vulnerability of a dreamer, especially an old one in a Sisyphean spot...
...The brain's record' of everything-everything alive--must be iconic...
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...William Vendley, Associate Dean, Seminary of the Immaculate Conception Huntington, Long Island, N.Y...
...Paun Baumann sense of character that made Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, another English physicianwriter with a profound regard for the spiritual properties of intelligence, a master storyteller...
...Meaningful existence is the product of the spirit's struggle for coherent expression...
...The patient's essential being 'is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology," Sacks asserts...
...People find strange legs -- their own, usually -in their beds," while others suffer from olfactoD= overload or the paradoxical effects of neurosyphilis's return in old age...
...The only false note in the film follows this escape: a bus fide in which Page opens up to a young woman (Rebecca de Mornay) who, in effect, becomes a daughter to her...
...He knows a good story when he treats one, and propounds a conundrum with the same vigor of expression, eye for detail, and vivid TilE NAN WHO lSTNIr Nit WIFE FOR A HAT, AND OTHER CLINICAL TALES Oliver Sacks Summit llmlits, $15.95, 233 pp...
...Being deprived of the ability for such expression can be a form of damnation, a kind of neurologically imposed perdition...
...In other words, the eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, what the good Dr...
...A professor of clinical neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Sacks possesses the gifts of a speculative philosopher and the subtler, rarer skills of an old-fashioned doctor who was taught how to take a history...
...TOM O'BRIEN Books: CEREBRAL MYSTERIES I II I I A T FIRST glance the neurological casualties in Dr...
...Sacks shares with the creator of Sherlock Holmes a fascination with what we might call cerebral mysteries...
...All identity is maintained in the face of chaos, he suggested, and the individual is lost unless "the story of the world . . finally becomes the human thing that mediates between man and the unknown...
...Extraordinary," comes the reply...
...will her heart condition act up again?--to keep us involved despite the languid pace...
...Turning with renewed curiosity to the concrete, personal, and symbolic powers of the mind will help restore the true complexity of the human subject to the center of scientific investigation...
...In another case, Jimrnie, the forty-nine-year-old "ancient mafner,'" is caught in a time warp that would make Rod Serling proud...
...Our cognitive sciences are themselves suffering from an agnosia," he says of the emphasis contemporary neurology places on abstract reasoning alone...
...In accomplishing this, Sacks displays a theoretical audacity not unlike Freud's and the moral perspicuity of a Robert Coles or George Orwell...
...A patient's struggle to maintain his identity in the face of neurological chaos is what interests Sacks...
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...The final form of cerebral representation must be, or allow, 'art'-the artful scenery and melody of experience and action...
...The sense of what is real--as inexplicable as it is rudimentaryis apprehended in concrete, personal, and what Sacks calls iconic terms...
...Our most basic understandings of reality, Sacks says, are affected by this comparatively little known 9 area of the mind...
...On the left side the mental processes are abstract, conceptual, and schematic--what might be regarded as the higher functions...
...In these neurological transactions, the fight hemisphere differs fundamentally from the left...
...But the Commonweal: 182brain-as-computer model does not apply to the right hemisphere, where knowledge is shaped and retained in a more organic and sensorial way...
...Here I could not help recalling Peggy Ashcroft inA Passage to India...
...It is that narrative that doctor and patient use to stave off neurological catastrophe, and that even those untouched by such trauma must use to fashion an identity...
...If you like Americana, The Trip to Bountiful would be worth seeing for the sets alone, which vividly catch the late 1940s, when Coke, beauty shops, and sleek Greyhound buses were in full vogue...
...Sacks's larger ambition is to develop what he calls an "existential neurology" or "romantic science" that will shed the rigid computational paradigms of traditional neurology and open itself up to the dynamic "powers" of the mind...
...Sounding very much like Bruno Bettelheim on the ontological efficacy of fairy tales, Sacks reminds us that only story and symbol give a truly empowering and purposeful "sense of the world" and our unique place in it...
...We must 'recollect' ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves...
Vol. 113 • March 1986 • No. 6
