The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: "A Matter of Identity"

Abysses of amnesia continually opened beneath him, but he would bridge them, nimbly, by fluent confabulations and fictions of all kinds. For him they were not fictions, but how he suddenly saw, or interpreted, the world.

Its radical flux and incoherence could not be tolerated, acknowledged, for an instant—there was, instead, this strange, delirious, quasi-coherence, as Mr Thompson, with his ceaseless, unconscious, quick-fire inventions, continually improvised a world around him—an Arabian Nights world, a phantasmagoria, a dream, of ever-changing people, figures, situations—continual, kaleidoscopic mutations and transformations.

For Mr Thompson, however, it was not a tissue of ever-changing, evanescent fancies and illusion, but a wholly normal, stable and factual world.

But Mr Thompson, only just out of hospital—his Korsakov’s had exploded just three weeks before, when he developed a high fever, raved, and ceased to recognise all his family—was still on the boil, was still in an almost frenzied confabulatory delirium (of the sort sometimes called 'Korsakov’s psychosis’, though it is not really a psychosis at all), continually creating a world and self, to replace what was continually being forgotten and lost.

Such a frenzy may call forth quite brilliant powers of invention and fancy—a veritable confabulatory genius—for such a patient must literally make himself (and his world) up every moment.

Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us—through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations.

This narrative need, perhaps, is the clue to Mr Thompson's desperate tale-telling, his verbosity. Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy—hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania.

Unable to maintain a genuine narrative or continuity, unable to maintain a genuine inner world, he is driven to the proliferation of pseudo-narratives, in a pseudo-continuity, pseudo-worlds peopled by pseudo-people, phantoms.

Superficially, he comes over as an ebullient comic. People say, ‘He's a riot.'

And there is much that is farcical in such a situation, which might form the basis of a comic novel.

...a young writer named David Gilman sent me the manuscript of his book Croppy Boy, the story of an amnesiac like Mr Thompson, who enjoys the wild and unbridled license of creating identities, new selves, as he whims, and as he must—an astonishing imagination of an amnesiac genius, told with positively Joycean richness and gusto.

...a young writer named David Gilman sent me the manuscript of his book Croppy Boy, the story of an amnesiac like Mr Thompson, who enjoys the wild and unbridled license of creating identities, new selves, as he whims, and as he must—an astonishing imagination of an amnesiac genius, told with positively Joycean richness and gusto.

'He's like a man in a race, a man trying to catch something which always eludes him.'

And, indeed, he can never stop running, for the breach in memory, in existence, in meaning, is never healed, but has to be bridged, to be 'patched', every second.

What saves Mr Thompson in a sense, and in another sense damns him, is the forced or defensive superficiality of his life: the way in which it is, in effect, reduced to a surface, brilliant, shimmering, iridescent, ever-changing, but for all that a surface, a mass of illusions, a delirium, without depth.

And with this, no feeling that he has lost feeling (for the feeling he has lost), no feeling that he has lost the depth, that unfathomable, mysterious, myriad-levelled depth which somehow defines identity or reality.

What comes out, torrentially, in his ceaseless confabulation, has, finally, a peculiar quality of indifference...as if it didn't really matter what he said, or what anyone else did or said; as if nothing really mattered any more.

Nothing in William’s tone or manner—nothing in his exuberant, but unvarying and indifferent, style of monologue—had prepared me for the possibility of...reality.

Further, he did not treat his younger brother as ‘real’—did not display any real emotion, was not in the least oriented or delivered from his delirium—but, on the contrary, instantly treated his brother as unreal, effacing him, losing him, in a further whirl of delirium—utterly different from the rare but profoundly moving times when Jimmie G. met his brother, and while with him was unlost.

This was intensely disconcerting to poor Bob—who said ‘I’m Bob, not Rob, not Dob’, to no avail whatever.

‘Aye, George is always the joker!' William quipped, apparently ignoring, or indifferent to, Bob’s comment, and went on blathering of George in his excited, dead way, insensitive to truth, to reality, to propriety, to everything—insensitive too to the manifest distress of the living brother before him.

‘Aye, George is always the joker!' William quipped, apparently ignoring, or indifferent to, Bob’s comment, and went on blathering of George in his excited, dead way, insensitive to truth, to reality, to propriety, to everything—insensitive too to the manifest distress of the living brother before him.

There is an utter pathos, a sad sense of lostness, with Jimmie G. which one does not feel, or feel directly, with the effervescent Mr Thompson.

There is an utter pathos, a sad sense of lostness, with Jimmie G. which one does not feel, or feel directly, with the effervescent Mr Thompson.

Jimmie has moods, and a sort of brooding (or, at least, yearning) sadness, a depth, a soul, which does not seem to be present in Mr Thompson.

Doubtless, as the Sisters said, he had a soul, an immortal soul, in the theological sense; could be seen, and loved, as an individual by the Almighty; but, they agreed, something very disquieting had happened to him, to his spirit, his character, in the ordinary, human sense.

Doubtless, as the Sisters said, he had a soul, an immortal soul, in the theological sense; could be seen, and loved, as an individual by the Almighty; but, they agreed, something very disquieting had happened to him, to his spirit, his character, in the ordinary, human sense.

But for William—with his brilliant, brassy surface, the unending joke which he substitutes for the world (which if it covers over a desperation, is a desperation he does not feel); for William with his manifest indifference to relation and reality caught in an unending verbosity, there may be nothing 'redeeming' at all—his confabulations, his apparitions, his frantic search for meanings, being the ultimate barrier to any meaning.

If only he could be quiet, one feels, for an instant; if only he could stop the ceaseless chatter and jabber; if only he could relinquish the deceiving surface of illusions—then (ah then!) reality might seep in; something genuine, something deep, something true, something felt, could enter his soul.

For it is not memory which is the final, 'existential’ casualty here (although his memory is wholly devastated); it is not memory only which has been so altered in him, but some ultimate capacity for feeling which is gone; and this is the sense in which he is ‘desouled’.

Zazetsky (in The Man with a Shattered World) is constantly described as a fighter, always (even passionately) conscious of his state, and always fighting ‘with the tenacity of the damned' to recover the use of his damaged brain.

But William is so damned he does not know he is damned, for it is not just a faculty, or some faculties, which are damaged, but the very citadel, the self, the soul itself.

William is ‘lost', in this sense, far more than Jimmie—for all his brio; one never feels, or rarely feels, that there is a person remaining, whereas in Jimmie there is plainly a real, moral being, even if disconnected most of the time.

But when we abdicate our efforts, and let him be, he sometimes wanders out into the quiet and undemanding garden which surrounds the Home, and there, in its quietness, he recovers his own quiet.