The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: A Literary Analysis

Aimed at academic readers, the intention of scientific writing is to communicate original research findings using proper language and grammar (Pandey, 2014). Robert Sapolsky’s ‘Junk-Food Monkeys’ (1998) and Oliver Sacks’ ‘The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat’ (1998) collapses these aesthetics and scientific genres to evoke philosophical agendas through storytelling techniques, literary devices and self-referentiality. Storytelling techniques incorporated in ‘Junk-Food Monkeys’ and ‘The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat’ breakdown scientific genre through the informality and linguistic choices, influenced by the literary devices. Collapsing the scientific genre further, Sapolsky and Sacks integrated literary devices such as metaphors, symbolism,

Sapolsky’s ‘Junk-Food Monkeys’ conveys the literary devices of metaphor, symbolism and motif; reinforcing narrative form. Referring to metaphors, Sapolsky links ‘Junk-Food Monkeys’ to Hieronymus Bosch’s surrealistic art Garden of Earthly Delights, “…rotting in ninety-degree heat, infested with flies and circled by vultures and hyenas, the pits look like a scene from Hieronymus Bosch…a Garden of Earthly Delights…in the middle of its territory” (Sapolsky, 1998, p.106), the painting is westernised representing the intersection of divine energy with earthly life, an allegory into Christianity (Laer, 2013). Symbolism has also been amalgamated in ‘Junk-Food Monkeys’ by unifying the motif of Utopia and fall, governing the imposition upon the Masai baboons that alludes the animal subject and reinforces anthropocentricism “Masai Mara is a wonderful place…a fairly idyllic place to be a baboon, a vast untouched landscape of savannahs and woodlands” (Sapolsky, 1998, p.106). Through the motif of Utopia and fall, Sapolsky’s conflation breaks the nature-culture split from nature writing, where species are given equality. Sacks’ ‘The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat’ conveys the literary devices of repetition, paradox and metaphor; subsiding scientific writing through the improper language use. Dramatic repetition is evident within the extract “loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of identity” (Extracts from Sacks, 1998, p.1) reinforcing the meaning of deficit to help indicate the significance of these dysfunctions “denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function” (Extracts from Sacks, 1998, p.1). Like Sapolsky, Sacks draws on paradox in ‘The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat’ by illustrating his opinion to make the reader think in innovative ways (Literary Devices, 2018). Through Sacks’ home visits, metaphors are