Reminiscence: Music, Memory, and Science

The story begins with a very descriptive detail of Mrs. O`C’s first encounter with the musical problem. The beginning is quite literary, and one is captivated right from the beginning: Mrs. O’C. was somewhat deaf, but otherwise in good health. She lived in an old people’s home. One night, in January 1979, she dreamt vividly, nostalgically, of her childhood in Ireland, and especially of the songs they danced to and sang. When she woke up, the music was still going, very loud and clear. “I must still be dreaming,” she thought, but this was not so. She got up, roused and puzzled. It was the middle of the night. Someone, she assumed, must have left a radio playing. But why was she the only person to be disturbed by it? She checked every radio she could find—they were all turned off. Then she had another idea: she had heard that dental fillings could sometimes act like a crystal radio, picking up stray broadcasts with unusual intensity. “That’s it,” she thought. “One of my fillings is playing up. It won’t last long. I’ll get it fixed in the morning.” She complained to the night nurse, who said her fillings looked fine. At this point another notion occurred to Mrs. O’C.: “What sort of radio station,” she reasoned to herself, “would play Irish songs, deafeningly, in the middle of the night? Songs, just songs, without introduction or comment? And only songs that I know. What radio station would play my songs, and nothing else?” At this point she asked herself, “Is the radio in my head?” (Sacks 147) Right from the beginning, we see that Sacks has introduced the heteroglossia of voices. Freud maintained that “the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (Freud). The “vividity” of Mrs. O`C’s dreams signifies the neurological nature of the unconscious mind. Sacks began by inculcating the three voices: Mrs. O`C’s dreams (the present), of Mrs. O`C’s childhood and of music. The Mrs. O`C wakes up but the sound of music continues. The comment she makes is suggestive of the duality of consciousness that she is battling with: “I must still be dreaming.” The vivid nature of the dream points to how Sacks perceives, and expresses, ideas, and events in the neurological sense. Bakhtin maintains that “the novel, however, is associated with the eternally living element of unofficial language and unofficial thought (holiday forms, familiar speech, profanation)” (Bakhtin 24). For Bakhtin, the unofficial language is the “eternally living element Mufti 7 of a novel.” Sacks actualizes it in the above description of the medical phenomenon. There is no medical jargon. The story begins in the middle of the action. Sacks masterfully describes the character’s confusion by juxtaposing past and present. As discussed above, the notion of time is very important in Bakhtin’s universe of discourse. He believes that novel has challenged with “absolute past” of epic that was the source of creativity. He noted that it is memory that lies at the heart of epic writing. A past that was known to the community. The function of the epic was not to create a new story but to present the old story with a newer expression. That is why there are multiple renditions of the same plot. Novel, on the other hand, Bakhtin insists, “is determined by experience, knowledge and practice (the future)” (Bakhtin 22). Considering the above, Sacks’s narration is but an amalgamation of “experience, knowledge and practice” in the truest sense. His knowledge of medicine allow him a glance into the inner world of his character (patient). His prose comprises of creative and scientific elements simultaneously. Mrs. O`C’s use of the process of elimination in triangulating the problem that was happening to her is very scientific. She begins by suspecting that I is the radio. The claim is “falsified” by an observation that the radios are turned off. Then she observes that no one else is being disturbed by it. Her mind goes to her dental fillings. She somehow knows that dental fillings can sometimes pick up frequency and act like crystal radios. She gets the nurse to falsify that claim. Ultimately, she ends up finding that the music was in her head. The “soliloquy”, at this point, is brilliant. Naturally, Sacks was not present there, so the self-talk in Mrs. O`C’s head is but a creation of Sacks. This self-talk builds up to the realization that the radio was in Mrs. O`Cs head. To focus on the notion of time and temporality, there is a clear indication of past and present. The word ‘reminiscence’ naturally indicates memory and, to put it vividly, Mrs. O`C, at Mufti 8 this moment, is undergoing a neurological fit of memory. She is in the present and in past at the same time, listening to music from her childhood. Mrs. O`C was taken to a psychiatrist who told her that her mind was functioning fine and that she must visit a neurologist. She was brought to Sacks. He notes down the first interaction: “Conversation was far from easy, partly because of Mrs. O’C.’s deafness, but more because I was repeatedly drowned out by songs—she could only hear me through the softer ones” (Sacks 148). The present moment is “drowned out” by past. The music not only occupies Mrs. O`C nostalgically but also as an aesthetic experience. She is at the intersection of present and past. She sees Sacks but listens to her past. The optics of that moment drag her out, into the now of her life, when she is in her eighties, but the auditory part of the same moment pulls her back inside the past. Bakhtin comments on the nature of time in novel: “The novel, from the very beginning, developed as a genre that had at its core a new way of conceptualizing time” (Bakhtin 29). The novel nature of Sacks’s narrative, playing at the crossroads of medicine and humanities could only be housed in a dialogic narrative. Thus, Sacks novelizes his experience. Sacks quotes another neurologist who believed that the totality of our experiences is save in the neurological cells of our brain. Different triggers bring them on the front. The triggers can range from psychological to physiological. The interplay of psychological and somatic changes in our body can result in different kinds of psychological and physiological events. Mrs. O`C is going through one of such experiences. Her present moment is overwhelmed with the past. Here, the presentness of the past is physiological in notion. Moreover, we see that at this moment, Sacks, who is the narrator of the story, has also become a character. As a narrator, he seems omniscient but as a character, he expresses his difficulties of guessing what is happening within his patient’s mind. Sacks uses his “knowledge” of neurology and psychology to question things Mufti 9 that might lead him to the details of the ailment. The Bakhtinian notion of novelization, where creativity is owed to knowledge rather than memory, relates naturally with Sacks’s condition here. Four voices have entered the narrative so far. Mrs. O`C in her eighties, Mrs. O`C in her childhood, Dr. Sacks as the narrator (author or storyteller), and Dr. Sacks as a neurologist. This woven tapestry of multi-layered narratives brims with meanings and it becomes difficult to move on. As has been mentioned recurringly that Dr Sacks’s multidisciplinary approach is key to his success as a medical narrator. Moving on, Sacks steers the plot towards a scientific turn. He says (in scientific jargon): “I wanted to do an electroencephalogram straightaway, paying special attention to the temporal lobes, the “musical” lobes of the brain, but circumstances conspired to prevent this for a while” (Sacks 148). Bakhtin held that the narrative of a novel is in simple language, and commenting on the first part of this story, it was argued that Sacks uses simple language. This part, however, seems to contradict the above claim, but that is not the case. Sacks uses technical jargon sometimes. It is not to distance the non-technical (or rather non-medical) reader from the intricacies of his patient’s conditions, but to bring them closer to the scientific side of those realities. He initiates a process in the reader that leads to an enlightenment, on one hand, and inspires quest, on the other. Also, he almost always translates, or explains, the phenomenon behind the technical term. For example, here he elaborates right away the meaning of “temporal lobes” that is “musical” lobes of the brain. Bakhtin refers to the Socratic dialogues as the one of the oldest forms of novel. He believes that this is “document that reflects the simultaneous birth of scientific thinking and of a new artistic-prose model for the novel” (Bakhtin 25). He call this genre apomnemoneumata “that is, as a genre of the memoir type, as transcripts based on personal memories of real conversations among contemporaries” (Bakhtin 25). Sacks’s narrative is quite in relation to that. His conversations with the patient are written down, giving voice to the common man, who becomes the hero of this novel. Sacks’s treatment of the ailment was successful, and the music was gone. When Sacks conversed with Mrs. O`C and asked whether se missed the songs, she replied: “It’s funny you should ask that,” she said with a smile. “Mostly, I would say, it is a great relief. But, yes, I do miss the old songs a little. Now, with lots of them, I can’t even recall them. It was like being given back a forgotten bit of my childhood again. And some of the songs were really lovely.” (Sacks 149) We see here how Mrs. O`C’s nostalgia was neurologically brought to the front. She considers it a “forgotten bit of … childhood.” Sacks’s success in recreating the narrative has not only brought to the front the delicate and somewhat interesting details of the ailment but has also given voice to an unknown person.