Neurological Impairment and Literary Empowerment in Nicole Krauss’s Man Walks into a Room

Abstract

In Man Walks into a Room, a neuronovel staging an amnesiac, Nicole Krauss challenges the memory-identity equation. While she draws on neuroscience, she also writes against it, as she emphasizes the explanatory gap and the problem of qualia. To resist the growing authority of neuroscience and its often reductionist discourse, Krauss features a neurosurgeon as a mad scientist coming straight out of a science-fiction novel, who uses discursive strategies borrowed from the humanities. She also displays the power and plasticity of literary narrative. Hence, her generic experimentations—borrowing from traditional genres, revising and combining them—are far more successful than her scientist’s brain experiments. In numerous passages focused on ordinary moments of life, Krauss draws her reader’s attention to the singularity of experience and the power of storytelling, through figuration in particular, to account for it.