The secret lives of things: a phenomenological approach to Oliver Sacks’ narrative of the life course

Abstract

Framed within the phenomenological turn that literary studies have experienced through the last few decades, this article analyses Oliver Sacks’ narrative of the life course in Uncle Tungsten (2001) and Gratitude (2015) as about the very act of embodied perception from an object-oriented perspective. Sacks presents himself as what French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty depicted as a «phenomenal body», a sentient body playing an active and intentional role ‒ in the phenomenological sense of being directed toward something ‒ in his/her relation to and perception of the self, nature, and the other. Sacks’ narrative will be analysed in light of four central concepts in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception: perspective, enigma, chiasma, and flesh. This study reads Sacks’ narrative as an outstanding literary illustration of Gilbert G. Germain’s presentation of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception as a return journey to a world permeated by an affective, lyrical, and enigmatic understanding of science where the embodied perception of natural objects is central to the recognition of the self and what surrounds it.