Narrating a Life

“A Matter of Identity” is the story of William Thompson who cannot recognize anyone, but he can create fictional characters on the spot. He desperately seeks to make his world feel normal. The story occurs in a book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1970, 1985), by Oliver Sachs. It occurs under his account of excesses of the brain. Tragically, William has an excess of amnesia. We may forget where we put the keys. William has no recent memory, so he must connect what he experiences now with the remote past. If you have seen the movie Fifty First Dates (2004), you have an image of what this might be like.

Dr. Sacks walks into a room to meet with William. When William sees Sacks, he identifies him first as a customer in the deli William used to operate, then as an old friend, then as Hymie the butcher next door, and finally as a doctor. The progression from one identity to the next is rapid fire, but the result is that William becomes scared at his inability to correctly identify who he is with and where he is. As soon as correct recognition begins to take hold, William begins the series all over again, assuming once more that Sacks is a customer in his deli. William suffers from Korsakov's Psychosis, but does not realize it. He dances from one confabulation to the next with the ability to make those around him believe he is perfectly normal. He seems to have an anxiety within him that results in making every effort to make the world around him feel normal to him. He does it by making up identities and stories of the people with him. Due to the way he could quickly and without hesitation identify a real person in his world, his brother, but without distinguishing the real person from the fantasies he had developed, Sachs describes it as “equalization,” the process of depriving of any meaning the real things in your world. William possessed an incredible charisma and an irresistible ability to tell stories, but also has a severe case of amnesia. He cannot remember the conversations he has had in the past few minutes. Think of it. He must continually create a world and self to replace what was continually being forgotten and lost. Such frenzy calls forth quite brilliant powers of invention and fancy. He became a confabulatory genius. He must make himself and his world every moment.

The account reminds me of how important memory is to our identity or our sense of who we are. Of course, we forget things and may not have a good recollection of some events or people in our lives. Some of that may be a good thing. Yet, our ability to connect the various elements of our lives into a story requires something as simple as memory. We take it for granted, until we lose it, or someone we love loses it.

For Sachs, here is the problem William faces.

"If we wish to know about a man, we ask, 'what is his story-his real, inmost story?-for 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....To be ourselves we must have ourselves-possess, if need be repossess, our life stories...A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self...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.(110-111)"

Given the disease that afflicts William, I would suggest that Sachs has correctly identified the problem William faces.

Yet, I would also offer that Sachs has not correctly defined the problem that Sachs himself faces in being confronted with William. I say this because of his encounter with Jimmy G, another Korsakoff’s patient that he describes in “The Lost Mariner.” He says that he keeps wondering about a lost soul. He wanted to establish some continuity and roots in someone who had roots only in the remote past (29). He wonders if Jimmy G had been “de-souled” by the disease. If what gives humanity “soul” was only our individual ability to make our lives into a story, then the inability to do so raises this question.

To be clear, I hope that if you no longer have that ability to tell your story, other people will discover ways of helping you become a meaningful part of the story of their lives.

Such reflections lead me to consider a different way of looking at the notion of lost soul and de-souled. Maybe “soul” is not simply an individual matter. To use the example of William, we might consider defining such abnormalities in individuals in a way that does not isolate the individual from a much larger story of which their lives are only a part.  People like William say much about our souls, if you will. They raise the question of our humanity and respect toward another, regardless of the disease they face. For that reason, William may well be a lost soul, but we find our souls when we treat such persons with respect and dignity.

I do not think the story of William is not just his story. When you meet him, his story has become part of your story.

We see a ray of light in the life of William in that he does find a few moments of peace, which Sachs describes with great respect and generosity of spirit.  

"Our efforts to 're-connect' William fail...[b]ut 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 his quietness he recovers his own quiet...the presence of plants, a quiet garden, the non-human order, making no social or human demands upon him, allow this identity delirium to relax to subside;(110)"

If you are interested in the formation of human identity and how human beings make sense of their lives, you will likely find the case studies Sachs offers of interest. It reminds me that human identity is always open-ended. We are always in the process of forming our identity, which is why human beings are so open to change through their experiences with others. We struggle with identity because “we are not yet what we shall be,” as I John 3:2 puts it.

Sachs wants to place the human subject back at the center of scientific endeavor. My caution in such a project is this. You do not get to simply narrate your world and give it meaning. You cannot discover the significance of your life by remaining within yourself. Your life has meaning as you move outside yourself, so to speak, and engage with others. You have a responsibility to tell a story with your life as it intersects with the stories of other people.

Come to think of it, maybe humanity itself is not simply narrating its story. Maybe God has a story of humanity as formed in the image of God, and now, with the coming of Christ, is forming us into the image of his Son (Romans 8:29). In that sense, the image of God is still on the way and forming in us. Human misery is deep, we fall back from the purposes God has for us, and we fall short of what God intended. We are separated from self, from others, and from God.

Healing the various forms of separation and alienation is what the coming of Jesus Christ into our world means. Actually, we may gain our true identity in recognizing that this is the world God has made, and therefore, we discover our identity as we discover our place in that story.

By the way, such a theme might even be a significant aspect of the message of the Advent and Christmas season.