another longish one

Alice Munro is easily my favorite contemporary writer--the Nobel people should hang their heads low for snubbing her as they do, year after year--and I was delighted to see her on the syllabus. She’s a particularly apt choice, given the subject of the class. Sacks, Luria, Skloot--perhaps Nabokov and even LeDoux, though less so, and others--they all write to enlarge our view of the world, to heighten our sensitivity, to wake us up to a certain kind of diversity, and that’s cognitive diversity. One common trait of these writers is empathy; they seek to increase ours and their own. What makes me love Alice Munro is her empathy, her ability to see through another’s eyes, to be sympathetic but impartial, to accept the subtle shifts and interchanges among our strengths and weaknesses and quirks. She’s the ideal writer to tell this particular story.

Alice Munro--very much like Sacks, I think--is aware of our contradictions, of the push and pull of personality. A classic Munro touch: “She looked just like herself on this day--direct and vague as in fact she was, sweet and ironic.” Who better to capture the convolutions of neurological disorder, the constellations of gifts and deficits and sensibilities and disabilities that we’ve been discussing?

When I think back on my own grandmother’s unraveling--she had Alzheimer’s--I remember some of the weird contraries in her behavior. She did the goofy things Fiona does (placing a book in the refrigerator), and the dangerous things (attempting to drive her car over train tracks), and the maddening things (losing a valuable ring, a family heirloom), and the sad things (failing to recognize her own children, whom she saw weekly till the end). But--like Fiona with her “little yellow notes” or like the “motor genius” that Sacks describes--she had unexpected brightenings, flashes of energy and focus and capability, with a slight compulsive quality. She could recall trivia from decades before, even when she forgot to put pants on. She could read the newspaper from front to back, really read it and understand it, although she couldn’t retain the information for long. She could beat almost anyone in almost any card game. Strange contradictions.

It’s interesting that Fiona so obviously holds on to the ability to fall in love, feel great attachment, and show great affection and devotion. Many people, watching relatives succumb to Alzheimer’s, note an emotional unresponsiveness, affective deadness--at least outwardly, as with the “masking” Sacks talks about--and presumably parts of the brain implicated in those emotional functions are vulnerable to decay as well. But this wasn’t the case with Fiona--and to some extent I buy it. I remember feeling vaguely that, even as my grandmother didn’t recognize us or really respond to us, there was some warming-up, some rise in her emotional temperature, when we were present--something of her old self remained. Some part of her remembered us.

And an even older self, hidden before, may now get the chance to emerge from the depths of Fiona’s unconscious, as layer upon layer of her higher mental functioning is stripped away, “pulling everything to rags. All rags and loose threads.” She must have had some dim awareness, if not full awareness, of her husband’s infidelity, and in a sense, in her earlier life, she was always protecting him from his own folly, but the unconscious often stands in a compensatory relation to the ego, taking the exact opposite attitude. Naturally, when she’s ill, she adopts her husband’s particular vice--a vice that isn’t entirely bad, the narrator suggests: “Nowhere had there been any acknowledgment that the life of a philanderer . . . involved acts of generosity, and even sacrifice”--and there is that element in her behavior towards Aubrey.

All right. I’m tired. Time for bed. Sorry for the abrupt ending.