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Oliver Sacks: The P.T. Barnum of the Postmodern World?

The historic problem in representing disabled people’s lives has always been the control of that representation. When others speak for the disabled, they often point the way to the freak show and the medical theater, two arenas of human objectification. The freak show, which flourished well into the twentieth century, depended on the spectacular mystification of disability; promoters exhibited disabled people as wondrous creatures of stupefying difference. Medical discourse has been fairly credited with killing off the freak show by rendering its fantastic displays in prosaic terms as medical anomalies. But in place of the freak show’s alienating presentations, medicine has substituted a different kind of objectification, reducing disabled people to case studies of their “defects” and turning them into props in a theatrical display of pathology. Typically, contemporary narratives of disabled lives treat the freak show and the medical case study as Scylla and Charybdis—the author usually designs a course to avoid them, often seeking to repudiate one or both along the way. Within this conventionally straitened genre, Oliver Sacks is a one-man countertrend. Rather than setting a course between the freak show and the case study, he has combined aspects of both. And, as I will suggest, his stillevolving methodology has become increasingly collaborative within these parameters.