The Shadow Factory

Paul West

3 ideas

1. A novelist reduced to one syllable

   In 2003 the British-born novelist Paul West, author of dozens of verbally extravagant books, had a stroke that left him with global aphasia; at first he could produce little more than the repeated syllable "mem." Working with his wife, the writer Diane Ackerman, and with speech therapy, he slowly rebuilt enough language to dictate The Shadow Factory, a book about the condition written from inside it. The case shows that severe aphasia need not end a writing life, though the recovered language is partial and has to be reassembled.

2. The mind as hidden shadow factory

   West uses it for the brain after injury: language is no longer produced in one central place but by improvised, hidden subsidiary workshops. What comes out still works, but it is slower, cruder and routed through detours.

3. Damaged language as new style

   West treats the malapropisms, neologisms and odd collisions his injured brain produces as material to use, not simply errors to fix. Seen this way, recovery is not a return to the old fluent self. It becomes a working partnership with a strange new instrument whose distortions can be shaped into expression.

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