"The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" or "A Wife Is like an Umbrella"--Fantasies of the Modern and Postmodern

Abstract

On the front the paperback edition Oliver Sacks's Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a reproduction one Rend Magritte's best-known paintings--The Betrayal Images--a picture a bowler hat held in the center the frame.' Across the bottom the picture the illustrator for the book has added the caption Ceci est ma femme in graphics lifted from another Magritte's paintings Ceci n'est pas une pipe. Without its caption, The Betrayal Images comments on the tricks the visual, which allows itself to suspend such an object in space (the of in the title is, however, ambiguous, not just betrayal by the image but the image as that which is betrayed). painting the pipe belongs to a related order deception. It appears first as disavowal and then as a comment on the disjunction between visual image and referent, between visual icon and verbal sign.2 addition the caption--Ceci est ma femme-to the first these drawings, however, moves it into a completely different realm. From negative (Ceci n'est pas une pipe) to positive (Ceci est ma femme), from disavowal to blind misrecognition, from betrayal to outrage, a gap opens up in which the question sexual difference makes itself felt. Let's start by taking this as a way thinking about the transition from the modern to the postmodern and note how it turns on the (mis)naming the woman, at once utterly known and yet altogether in the wrong place. By entitling his collection case studies Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks turns his book into something a (like the unending joke his patient William substitutes for the world [109]). is clearly at the expense the woman who finds