So it would happen, with variations, every time—with improvisations, always prompt, often funny, sometimes brilliant, and ultimately tragic. Mr Thompson would identify me—misidentify, pseudo-identify me—as a dozen different people in the course of five minutes. He would whirl, fluently, from one guess, one hypothesis, one belief, to the next, without any appearance of uncertainty at any point—he never knew who I was, or what and where he was, an ex-grocer, with severe Korsakov’s, in a neurological institution.
He remembered nothing for more than a few seconds. He was continually disoriented. Abysses of amnesia continually opened beneath him, but he would bridge them, nimbly, by fluent confabulations and fictions of all kinds. For him they were not fictions, but how he suddenly saw, or interpreted, the world. Its radical flux and incoherence could not be tolerated, acknowledged, for an instant—there was, instead, this strange, delirious, quasi-coherence, as Mr Thompson, with his ceaseless, unconscious, quick-fire inventions, continually improvised a world around him—an Arabian Nights world, a phantasmagoria, a dream, of ever-changing people, figures, situations—continual, kaleidoscopic mutations and transformations. For Mr Thompson, however, it was not a tissue of ever-changing, evanescent fancies and illusion, but a wholly normal, stable and factual world. So far as he was concerned, there was nothing the matter.
On one occasion, Mr Thompson went for a trip, identifying himself at the front desk as ‘the Revd. William Thompson’, ordering a taxi, and taking off for the day. The taxi-driver, whom we later spoke to, said he had never had so fascinating a passenger, for Mr Thompson told him one story after another, amazing personal stories full of fantastic adventures. ‘He seemed to have been everywhere, done everything, met everyone. I could hardly believe so much was possible in a single life,’ he said. ‘It is not exactly a single life,’ we answered. ‘It is all very curious—a matter of identity.’
Jimmie G., another Korsakov’s patient, whom I have already described at length (Chapter Two), had long since cooled down from his acute Korsakov’s syndrome, and seemed to have settled into a state of permanent lostness (or, perhaps, a permanent now-seeming dream or reminiscence of the past). But Mr Thompson, only just out of hospital—his Korsakov’s had exploded just three weeks before, when he developed a high fever, raved, and ceased to recognise all his family—was still on the boil, was still in an almost frenzied confabulatory delirium (of the sort sometimes called ‘Korsakov’s psychosis’, though it is not really a psychosis at all), continually creating a world and self, to replace what was continually being forgotten and lost. Such a frenzy may call forth quite brilliant powers of invention and fancy—a veritable confabulatory genius—for such a patient must literally make himself (and his world) up every moment. We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative—whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a ‘narrative’, and that this narrative is us, our identities.
If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story—his real, inmost story?’—for each of us is a biography, a story. 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. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives—we are each of us unique.
To be ourselves we must have ourselves—possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must ‘recollect’ ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.
This narrative need, perhaps, is the clue to Mr Thompson’s desperate tale-telling, his verbosity. Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of nar-rational frenzy—hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania. Unable to maintain a genuine narrative or continuity, unable to maintain a genuine inner world, he is driven to the proliferation of pseudo-narratives, in a pseudo-continuity, pseudo-worlds peopled by pseudo-people, phantoms.
What is it like for Mr Thompson? Superficially, he comes over as an ebullient comic. People say, ‘He’s a riot.’ And there is much that is farcical in such a situation, which might form the basis of a comic novel.[13] It is comic, but not just comic—it is terrible as well. For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing—and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him.
But does Mr Thompson himself know this, feel this? After finding him ‘a riot’, ‘a laugh’, ‘loads of fun’, people are disquieted, even terrified, by something in him. ‘He never stops’, they say. ‘He’s like a man in a race, a man trying to catch something which always eludes him.’ And, indeed, he can never stop running, for the breach in memory, in existence, in meaning, is never healed, but has to be bridged, to be ‘patched’, every second. And the bridges, the patches, for all their brilliance, fail to work—because they are confabulations, fictions, which cannot do service for reality, while also failing to correspond with reality. Does Mr Thompson feel this? Or, again, what is his ‘feeling of reality’? Is he in a torment all the while—the torment of a man lost in unreality, struggling to rescue himself, but sinking himself, by ceaseless inventions, illusions, themselves quite unreal? It is certain that he is not at ease—there is a tense, taut look on his face all the while, as of a man under ceaseless inner pressure; and occasionally, not too often, or masked if present, a look of open, naked, pathetic bewilderment. What saves Mr Thompson in a sense, and in another sense damns him, is the forced or defensive superficiality of his life: the way in which it is, in effect, reduced to a surface, brilliant, shimmering, iridescent, ever-changing, but for all that a surface, a mass of illusions, a delirium, without depth.
And with this, no feeling that he has lost feeling (for the feeling he has lost), no feeling that he has lost the depth, that unfathomable, mysterious, myriad-levelled depth which somehow defines identity or reality. This strikes everyone who has been in contact with him for any time—that under his fluency, even his frenzy, is a strange loss of feeling—that feeling, or judgment, which distinguishes between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’, ‘true’ and ‘untrue’ (one cannot speak of ‘lies’ here, only of ‘non-truth’), important and trivial, relevant or irrelevant. What comes out, torrentially, in his ceaseless confabulation, has, finally, a peculiar quality of indifference ... as if it didn’t really matter what he said, or what anyone else did or said; as if nothing really mattered any more.
A striking example of this was presented one afternoon, when William Thompson, jabbering away, of all sorts of people who were improvised on the spot, said: ‘And there goes my younger brother, Bob, past the window’, in the same, excited but even and indifferent tone, as the rest of his monologue. I was dumbfounded when, a minute later, a man peeked round the door, and said: ‘I’m Bob, I’m his younger brother—I think he saw me passing by the window.’ Nothing in William’s tone or manner—nothing in his exuberant, but unvarying and indifferent, style of monologue—had prepared me for the possibility of. . . reality. William spoke of his brother, who was real, in precisely the same tone, or lack of tone, in which he spoke of the unreal—and now, suddenly, out of the phantoms, a real figure appeared! Further, he did not treat his younger brother as ‘real’—did not display any real emotion, was not in the least oriented or delivered from his delirium— but, on the contrary, instantly treated his brother as unreal, effacing him, losing him, in a further whirl of delirium—utterly different from the rare but profoundly moving times when Jimmie G. (see Chapter Two) met his brother, and while with him was unlost. This was intensely disconcerting to poor Bob—who said ‘I’m Bob, not Rob, not Dob’, to no avail whatever. In the midst of confabulations—perhaps some strand of memory, of remembered kinship, or identity, was still holding (or came back for an instant)—William spoke of his elder brother, George, using his invariable present indicative tense.
13
Indeed such a novel has been written. Shortly after ‘The Lost Mariner’ (Chapter Two) was published, a young writer named David Gilman sent me the manuscript of his book Croppy Boy, the story of an amnesiac like Mr Thompson, who enjoys the wild and unbridled license of creating identities, new selves, as he whims, and as he must—an astonishing imagination of an amnesiac genius, told with positively Joycean richness and gusto. 1 do not know whether it has been published; 1 am very sure it should be. I could not help wondering whether Mr Gilman had actually met (and studied) a ‘Thompson’—as I have often wondered whether Borges’ ‘Funes’, so uncannily similar to Luria’s Mnemonist, may have been based on a personal encounter with such a mnemonist.