In their review of Motherless Brooklyn, The Guardian includes excerpts from interviews with Jonathan Lethem:
“I came across Tourette’s the way anyone might,” says the 35-year-old Lethem, “by reading about it in Oliver Sacks. The germ of inspiration, that really freeing sense that this was an image of human life that I could inhabit, turn inside out and make my own, was right there in Sacks’s essay.
Lethem describes his decision to tell a fictional story through the eyes of a detective with Tourette’s in aesthetic terms. In his words, “I’ve always had an element of Joycean wordplay in my books, some characters who were in charge of the babbling or frothing at the mouth. I began to wonder what I was getting at, and what I was avoiding by keeping that on such a tight rein. Tourette’s gave me the opportunity to put the wordplay and the free association front and centre.”
What do you think of Lethem’s choice to use symptoms of Tourette’s as an aesthetic device, to shape what he calls “Joycean wordplay”?
I think Lethem’s choice to use symptoms of Tourette’s as an aesthetic device is interesting. I wondered why he would want to have the main character in Motherless Brooklyn to say things such as “Alibi hullabaloo gullible bellyflop smellafish,”… I guess it would be to bring more attention to a disorder that can’t be controlled. I have come across people who have Tourette’s one of them would always bark involuntarily, triggered by certain objects. It is something that can’t be controlled. When Lethem says Joycean Language is he referring to James Joyce the novelist and poet? If so I think that is a unique take to describe Tourettes.
Yes, he is referring to James Joyce. It’d be interesting to compare some Joyce to Lionel Essrog’s echolalia.