Oliver Sacks seeks for meaning in the chaos of neurological deficit. He has that in common with his patient Mr Thompson, one of two Korsakov amnesiacs described in The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, who, says Sacks, 'must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him'. Mr Thompson invents personal narratives over and over again with endless variation, but, according to Sacks, they fail to work 'because they are confabulations, fictions, which cannot do service for reality while also failing to correspond with reality'.

LRB 17 October 1996 | PDF Download