Summary
In the introduction to this last section of the book, Sacks confesses that when he first began “working with retardates,” (173) he thought the experience would be miserable. He feared that mentally handicapped patients, lacking refined emotional and intellectual sensibilities, would be difficult if not impossible to relate to. However, aided by some written encouragement from A.R Luria, Sacks finds that although the mentally handicapped are “defective” in some ways, they are also mentally complex and, in a sense, whole. Like children and “savages,” (174) the mentally handicapped have a grasp on a world that most of us don’t: the world of the simple, the concrete. Those who live in this world understand better than most the elemental aspects of existence that make reality ‘real.’ However, this understanding also often confines them to meaningless and disconnected particulars. Sacks writes that his goal in this section is to highlight, as science almost never does, the graceful command that the simple-minded possess over the concrete, symbolic dimensions of existence.
The section’s first essay “Rebecca” features a young woman of the same name who comes to Sacks’ clinic at the age of 19. She has a partial cleft palate, short, stumpy fingers, and a degenerative eye disease that requires her to wear glasses with thick lenses. Due to a congenital condition, she has severe cognitive defects, and, according to her grandmother, she is still much like a young child. Rebecca loves her grandmother deeply and is very fond of nature. She’s also taken with stories, and although she is illiterate, she frequently demands that her grandmother read to her. Sacks remarks that Rebecca has no difficulty interpreting and understanding symbols and metaphors, even in deep and complex poetry.
When she visits Sacks for the first time, Rebecca proves to be totally inept at every cognitive test he administers. The second time they meet outside, on a bench near the clinic. After hearing her make a few remarks about the world coming to life in spring, Sacks sees something in Rebecca that he hadn’t before. Her descriptions, though odd and broken, are also incredibly poetic. While the clinic is designed to bring out a person’s deficits and inadequacies, in the real world Rebecca demonstrates a calm and profound connection with the natural world.
In November her grandmother dies, and Rebecca is then enrolled in a variety of workshops and classes with the hopes that she might overcome her developmental limitations. These classes prove to be ineffective and frustrating. Having gained a sense of clarity and decisiveness after her grandmother’s death, Rebecca tells Dr. Sacks that she wants “no more classes, no more workshops … They do nothing for me. They do nothing to bring me together” (184). Instead, she joins an acting class, which Sacks says she loves and excels in. “[N]ow if one sees Rebecca on stage, for theater and the theatre group soon became her life, one would never even guess that she was mentally defective” (185).
In “A Walking Grove,” a 61-year-old man named Martin is admitted into hospice care. As an infant, Martin suffered a near-fatal bout of meningitis that for the rest of his life caused mental deficits and impulsive behavior. The son of a famous opera singer, he had lived at home with his parents until their deaths. Martin tells Sacks that despite not being able to read music, he knows over 2,000 operas. Although his voice is “gruff, with some spastic dysphonia,” (187) Martin sung in local church choirs for many years and performed at both the Met and at Lincoln Center. He has a photographic (eidetic) memory, but this fantastic ability has helped very little to develop Martin’s understanding of the world at large. His only true interest is music, which he had spent his life completely immersed in. He knows by heart, in its entirety, the Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, a nine-volume collection. Martin is often childish, spiteful, prone to tantrums, and blows snot into his sleeve, which does not help his popularity in the hospice facility.
Martin doesn’t fare well under Sacks’ care, misbehaving often and showing signs of developmental regression. He tells Sacks that he needs to go back to church to sing. This turns out to be a miracle remedy. With a renewed sense of purpose and belonging, all that had been defective about Martin appears to fall away: “the stigmatised retardate, the snotty, spitting boy–disappeared; as did the irritating, emotionless, impersonal eidetic. The real person reappeared, a dignified, decent man, respected and valued now by the other residents” (192). This solution proves to be of radical help, and Martin continues living in hospice feeling both healthier and more whole.
Analysis
Sacks makes notions of the “concrete” integral to his attempt to redeem and defend the capacities of the mentally handicapped. This last section of the book can be seen, then, as a counterpoint of sorts to “Transports,” which was about the pathways that take patients out of concrete reality.
Despite his basically good intentions, the author relies on some of our existing ideas about the mentally handicapped in order to paint them into the narrative frame of this final section. Use of the word “concrete” evokes a double meaning with images of stone, rock, and brick–dense and unwieldy objects that are often symbolically associated with those of low IQ. More directly, Sacks puts the minds of the “simple” in the same category as children and indigenous people, drawing in an ugly history of narratives from European colonizers about the “savage” peoples of the New World. At its worst, the introduction sets this section up as a colonizer narrative, where Sacks represents the “complex” world as he voyages into “The World of the Simple.” However, Sacks also makes a very earnest point that a concrete understanding of reality is more elemental than abstract thought. The author’s express wish in telling stories about the simple-minded is to lift them up as perfectly whole, capable, and even profound human beings.
In both “A Walking Grove” and “Rebecca,” Sacks’ clinic is taking on the responsibility of care that was once held by Martin’s and Rebecca’s families. The transition from the support of a family to the institution of a clinic is never fun for anybody, but the author highlights the unique toll it takes on the mentally handicapped. When Rebecca comes to the clinic for the first time, Sacks immediately proves with a volley of tests that she is inept and incapable in almost every way. In the outside world she is allowed to be a beloved daughter, an appreciator of nature, a captive audience during plays and stories, but in the clinic, her inadequacies become everything about her. This is also quite true for Martin, and further, the longer Martin spends in hospice care the more he begins to play into his deficits. With no other identities to exercise, he exaggerates his reputation in the Home for being a childish and unpopular troublemaker.
It is significant that for both of these patients, their road to wholeness is through performance; Rebecca joins a theater group and Martin re-joins his church choir. These activities share an emphasis on expressing who Rebecca and Martin really are, with no attempt to cover up that which makes them “defective.” Ultimately both stories are meant to be tales that express the importance of unequivocal self-acceptance and self-expression, regardless of the flaws and setbacks one might have.
