Aphasic Modernism: Languages for Illness from a Confusion of Tongues

In the late 1940s, the physician Théophile Alajouanine wrote an essay about a ‘rare group’ of people who had been left with the condition of aphasia following strokes or other cerebral ‘accidents’. Rare because they had all been professional artists prior to their illness, these patients were particularly useful to their doctor because they offered the intriguing possibility of studying the effect of aphasia – the loss or disturbance of the ability to use language intentionally – on aesthetic representation. The literary author Alajouanine treated was later revealed to be Valéry Larbaud, whose right-sided hemiplegia and aphasia had left him at first with an unusual lexical speech automatism, ‘Bonsoir, les choses d’ici-bas’ (‘Farewell, things down below’), which emerged whenever he tried to speak.