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PARTISAN REVIEW
Sacks questions the common assumption that memory is a permanent
and accurate record or store, a sort of audio-visual tape of one's whole
past, and instead quotes approvingly the British psychologist Frederic
Bartlett, who in the 1930s argued that remembering is not the reproduc–
tion of fixed memory traces but an imaginative reconstruction which is
hardly ever really exact. Sacks omits pointing out the relevance of this in–
sight to the current debate about child and sexual abuse and the false
memory syndrome.
Discussing autism, Sacks seems to endorse the idea that the central
defect of autistic people is that they "have no true concept, or feeling for,
other minds, or even their own," but goes on to say that this is only one
hypothesis among many and that, as yet, no one theory encompasses the
whole range of phenomena to be seen in autism.
It
seems to me that in
view of such skepticism, Sacks is more confident than he should be that
autism is a genetic, neurological illness and not psychogenic, and indeed
that all cases now diagnosed autistic do in fact suffer from the same disor–
der. Sacks is, I think, himself infected by something of which he is also
skeptical, something that might be called neurological imperialism, the
drive to explain everyone and everything in terms of cerebral function -
rather similar to the drive that led Freud to try to explain everything, in–
cluding creativity, psychoanalytically. Sacks quotes, without disapproval
or agreement, a neurologist who wonders whether Bartok and Wittgen–
stein were autistic, and mentions that "many autistic people now like to
think of Einstein as one of themselves."
The main reason why
An Anthropologist on Mars
is not just a collection
of case histories is that Sacks himself is a central character in the tales he
tells: larger than life, inexhaustible, enthusiastic, exuberant, loquacious,
gifted with total recall, eager to share his insights. Some will enjoy being
carried along by the flood he generates, but others, I suspect, will find
him exhausting, will wish he had been more selective and economical,
and may wonder whether they really needed, for instance to be informed
that, as he feels the heat, Sacks always carries a Japanese fan, or that as a
child he was allowed to sit in on his surgeon-mother's outpatient clinic.
Atl
Anthropologist on Mars
is in one important respect successful.
It
demonstrates convincingly that the neurologically damaged can some–
times achieve a mode of being-in-the-world that is both viable and
admirable; and that the lands to which they travel are not absolutely uni–
maginable.
CHARLES RYCROn
