Introduction
Popular discourse typically frames dementia in the same way that it frames most disabilities: as a pitiable experience of loss and degeneration.1 Indeed, the editors of the collection Beyond Loss: Dementia, Identity, and Personhood claim that much dementia research assumes that “the loss of cognitive and linguistic abilities'' necessarily results in “a loss of selfhood and identity” (3). Lily Brooks-Dalton’s 2016 novel, Good Morning, Midnight, instead presents dementia as a gainful experience, capable of transforming relationships and enabling personal growth at the close of life. This article relies on disability studies scholarship on disability gain, cognitive disability, and animality in order to explain how Brooks-Dalton’s careful portrayal of Augustine’s implicit dementia offers an important intervention in common representations of the condition. This analysis is also grounded in the theory of allegory put forth by American scholar of rhetoric Robert Hariman. Hariman’s theory of allegory helps explain how the novel’s protagonist, Augustine “Augie” Lofthouse, uses allegorical composition to cope with the limits of normative time and the baffling circumstances of semiotic excess. Health humanities researcher Martina Zimmermann writes that “literary explorations have developed important counterweights to a more fatalistic view of Alzheimer’s disease as a condition that strips patients of their humanity” (19). As this article will demonstrate, Brooks-Dalton takes great care to show that Augustine is anything but stripped of his humanity by dementia. On the contrary, his dementia is the only force powerful enough to restore it.
The novel opens on the aging astronomer Augustine as he gazes across the desolate Arctic tundra. Augustine is the last man standing at a remote research center; when the base was evacuated months ago, he refused to comply, condemning himself to a lonely death at the edge of the world. Shortly after the hasty departure of his colleagues, however, Augustine discovers a young girl named Iris and develops a fatherly bond with her. As Iris and Augustine eke out their existence together on the Arctic base, Augustine futilely searches the radio airwaves for signs of life. Meanwhile, the novel’s parallel plot follows Specialist Iris “Sully” Sullivan, an astronaut aboard the Aether spaceship, slowly returning to Earth after touring Jupiter’s moons. As Sully’s crew begins their journey home, radio communication signals with Mission Control on Earth go silent. Floating through vast space and painfully aware of the post-apocalyptic implications of this new quiescence, the crew struggles to maintain internal cohesion. Each encapsulated in their isolating yet hauntingly beautiful environments—outer space on the one hand, and the Arctic archipelago on the other—Augustine and Sully find themselves drifting in and out of memories and present-moment awareness, striving subconsciously to make sense of their lives and the fate of their species. The two narratives are bound together not only by shared circumstance, but by blood. At the end of the novel, readers learn that not only is the adult Sully actually Augustine’s real and long-estranged daughter, Iris “Sully” Sullivan, but also that the young Iris living at the Arctic base with Augustine is, in fact, a hallucination or projection of his own mind. Ultimately, Augustine’s relationships with himself and his daughter are transformed through the use of what Robert Hariman calls “allegorical coding,” an inventive strategy that allows Augustine to make meaning out of his extraordinary circumstances and unprocessed past.
Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias are commonly described as “a living death, a neverending funeral, and a private hell of devastation” (Kontos 195). In Good Morning, Midnight, Lily Brooks-Dalton intervenes against representations of dementia that reinforce these cultural conceptualizations. By crafting the character of Augustine as someone with implicit dementia through the careful juxtaposition of old age, animality, and madness, Brooks-Dalton promotes a novel vision of dementia as a time of growth and renewed relationships. As we will see, it is the creative power of allegorical composition made possible by Augustine’s dementia that defends him from the semiotic excess and bizarre paratactic positioning of his past and present. Through dementia, Augustine not only experiences the impossible, but harnesses its uncanny power in service of renewed life even at the hour of death.
Theoretical Foundations in Allegory and Disability Studies
In his article “Allegory and Democratic Public Culture in the Postmodern Era,” Hariman constructs a theory of allegory wherein postmodern art forms generate allegorical encoding through “fragmentary appropriation, paratactic association, encyclopedic range, and non-linear temporality” (268). Parataxis, roughly translated from the Greek to “arranging side-by-side,” is a manner of expression in which two fragments are arranged in parallel. In this parallel, the author defines no clear relationship, leaving the reader to determine the relationship between terms. In Hariman’s words, the allegorical text is “radically paratactic” because it “associates signs without tying them together in a grammatical or narrative sequence that would imply a single order of things” (284). For Hariman, postmodern allegory requires active participation in the construction of meaning. Allegory engages the reader in an interpretive mode that requires them to make sense out of “semiotic excess” and “the endless reproduction of signs” (270). Invoking a psychological element, Hariman writes that “within capitalism’s incredible overproduction of signs, allegorical coding becomes a defense mechanism—albeit one that appears to be scrambling reality itself” (269, emphasis mine). As this article demonstrates, the defense mechanism of allegorical coding is vital to making sense of the bewildering paratactic associations and layered temporal realities which threaten to overwhelm Augustine. Without allegory, he would have no defense against the vast incomprehensibilities of landscape and circumstance in which he finds himself.
This article also relies on scholarship in a range of disability studies subfields, including disability gain, cognitive disability, and animality. A brief overview of each of these subfields will prepare readers for how Brooks-Dalton uses ableist and speciesist tropes against themselves to associate Augustine (and Iris) with animality in service of a new vision of dementia gain. Further, disability studies scholarship on cognitive disability enriches the reading that follows by deemphasizing diagnostics in favor of the narrative functions made possible through dementia. As an interdisciplinary field of scholarly inquiry, disability studies considers the lived experiences and literary representations of body-minds with impairments and perceived impairments which can and often do incur social stigma.2 Disability gain was first theorized in terms of Deaf gain by Deaf Studies scholars H-Dirksen Bauman and Joseph Murray. Bauman and Murray formulated the concept of Deaf gain as a counterweight against the prevailing notion of hearing loss as a kind of lack. As they define it, “Deaf gain is the notion that the unique sensory orientation of Deaf people…provides opportunities for exploration into the human character” (216). Though only recently articulated explicitly as a kind of gain, the premise of Deaf gain has long circulated in pro- and proto-disability communities. Elizabeth Bearden, a scholar of disability studies in the Renaissance, writes about how the early modern English physician John Bulwer’s “close examination of deafness theorizes how one specific impairment might be advantageous in and of itself” (80). Other scholars in disability studies have broadened these vital insights on the long arc of Deaf gain to encompass a wide range of disability gain.3
Disability gain has also been theorized in terms of disability as a manifestation of biodiversity. In “Building a World with Disability in It,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson considers “what disability might be good for” and how we might “reframe it as a resource rather than restriction” (54). In Brooks-Dalton’s novel, we see a careful depiction of dementia as a “potentially generative resource,” both intra-textually as generative of Augustine’s self-understanding, and intertextually in relation to readers who read—perhaps for the first time—an important intervention in contemporary literary depictions of dementia that tend to promulgate narratives of decline (Case for Conserving, 339). Garland-Thomson’s framing of disability as a “potentially generative resource” echoes that of narrative medicine sociologist Arthur Frank, who writes that “unmaking can be a generative process” (172). My claim in what follows is not necessarily that dementia is a vital aspect of biodiversity (although it may well be, to the extent that cognitive disability can teach us something about human nature). Rather, it is that Brooks-Dalton’s careful construction of Augustine shows us a way for dementia to manifest in literature without clinging to the typical domains of degeneration, confusion, and disappearance. Instead, dementia in Good Morning, Midnight is portrayed as an experience rich with its own potential, capable of transforming relationships and enabling personal growth.
Just as previous scholarly work on deaf gain informs the present work, so too does prior scholarship on cognitive disability in narrative. Cognitive disability in narrative is a growing research area that draws an impressively disparate group of scientists, gerontologists, narratologists, medical humanists, and psychologists. Some, like Michael Bérubé, operate explicitly within a disability studies framework and focus on narrative deployments of cognitive disability in literature. In The Secret Life of Stories, Bérubé critiques trends in disability studies that limit the field to the practice of criticism as “reading a literary text in one hand and the DSM-5 in the other” (20). Bérubé’s reminder is vitally important; disability studies limits itself to playing doctor if all we are doing is squabbling over diagnostics. The point, when we talk about disability in narrative, should not be whether “X character has Y disability,” as Bérubé describes it (15), but rather why, how, and for what purpose does an author construct X character (or X narrative) in such a way as to conjure the linked pathologies of Y and Z? It is this second question that motivates this article, rather than any simple diagnostic approach.
Beyond Bérubé’s disability studies approach, others like Anne Davis Basting and Lars-Christer Hydén approach cognitive disability in narrative with an explicit focus on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) to foreground the power of collaborative storytelling for people experiencing cognitive decline. As Hydén writes, “persons with dementia can be expected to have many troubles telling stories on their own, but will be more successful telling stories with support” (340). This principle manifests in Basting’s TimeSlips workshops, wherein people with ADRD are invited to express themselves without “the demands of memory and rational language” (193). Though these researchers approach cognitive disability in narrative differently than Bérubé, they share the premise that cognitive disability is not the end of narrative. Instead, they see it as a point of departure from which one can explore “vast domains of human thought, experience, and action” (Bérubé 2).
The final critical conversation in which my argument is embedded is that of disability and animality. Many critical disability studies scholars have written on the chain of cultural representations linking idiocy, cognitive disability, and animality in Western discourse from the Enlightenment to modern day.4 Patrick McDonagh’s discussion of the 19th century “wild boy of Aveyron'' shows how physicians and philosophers who studied the boy (later named Victor) considered him to be animalistic and limited to physical sensations (62). Pinel, one of the physicians who studied Victor, described him in these eerily relevant terms: “the boy ‘must be classed among children suffering from idiocy and dementia’” (qtd. in McDonagh 63). This positioning of individuals with cognitive disabilities at the intersection of “dementia” and animality persists to the present day. In her chapter on the metanarrative of Down syndrome, scholar Helen Davies investigates how representations of Down syndrome construct “both humans with intellectual disabilities and non-human animals as deviant and inferior” (109). Davies pays particular attention to juxtaposition throughout her argument, arguing that Down syndrome is frequently positioned in close proximity to animality, as if Down syndrome occupies “a sort of mid-point in a hierarchical chain of human and non-human animals'' (107). Here Davies’ theory of proximity differs from Hariman’s theory of parataxis: while both authors are interested in the meaning that results from the positional relationship between terms, Hariman’s parataxis places greater demand on the reader to confer and contest meaning. As Hariman writes, paratactic association “implies but never articulates a strong commonality of meaning” (272, emphasis mine). For our purposes, both concepts are useful: while Hariman’s emphasis on participation is useful for understanding Augustine’s dementia as a defense mechanism, Davies’ emphasis on the sociocultural power that operates implicitly through positioning better illustrates how Brooks-Dalton associates Augustine and Iris with animality and, concomitantly, disability.
The foregoing theoretical approaches—Hariman’s theories of paratactic allegory and allegorical coding as a defense mechanism on the one hand and disability studies’ contributions on gain, narrative, and animality on the other—have laid the foundation for this article’s ensuing argument that Brooks-Dalton’s choice to situate Augustine at the intersections of madness, animality, and old age provides an intervention against common literary representations of dementia as a totalizing experience of loss. Instead, we shall see that Augustine stands to gain much from dementia. Notably, this argument does not claim that either the impairments or social stigmas of dementia are wholly beneficial. In real life, dementia is often a deeply challenging life transition, both for the individuals that experience it and for the communities of care that surround them. Yet a nuanced correction in the pervasive conceptualization of dementia as “a condition both of death-in-life and of life-in-death” is sorely needed (Kaufman 23). In what follows, I argue that Brooks-Dalton’s careful construction of Augustine’s character is one vital step in that direction.
Augustine’s Implicit Dementia
A word on language is necessary to foreground the ensuing discussion on how Brooks-Dalton crafts the character of Augustine at the intersection of madness, old age, and animality to imply dementia. In what follows, I use several terms to describe Augustine, including mad, cognitively impaired, and intellectually disabled. Here intellectual disability is conceptualized as it is in Michael Bérubé’s The Secret Life of Stories when he describes the out-of-mind Don Quixote as intellectually disabled. In Berube’s words, Don Quixote “has become synonymous with a kind of madness, the madness of one who takes fiction for reality” (142). So too, Brooks-Dalton’s Augustine takes fiction for reality, or rather lives doubly inside of a fiction that he understands as reality. Of course, I also use the term ‘dementia’, not to stress any diagnostic ethos, but rather in reference to the term’s Latin roots, where de- (out from) pushes against mens (mind).5 This etymological emphasis echoes the tension embodied in Brooks-Dalton’s construction of Augustine: he is still “in-mind” enough to survive alone on the Arctic archipelago, and yet “out-of-mind” enough to build a relationship with his hallucinated companion, Iris. Thus it is sensible to use these terms to underscore the historical and cultural proximity of dementia with concepts like madness and animality, especially insofar as these themes are evoked repeatedly in Brooks-Dalton’s character building.6 While the following analysis makes recourse to a limited diagnostic reading, it does so in order to provide evidence of Brooks-Dalton’s deliberate, subtle efforts to imply dementia in particular as a defining component of Augustine’s experience. In other words, we are first answering the question of how Brooks-Dalton implies dementia (or something quite like it), before moving on to the richer questions of why and for what purpose. By first documenting the signs of dementia, readers will be better prepared for the deeper discussion about the narrative functions of dementia that follows.
There are several reasons for readers to suspect dementia in Augustine’s character, the first of which is the consistent hallucination of his young daughter, Iris. While as readers we aren’t certain that Augustine has dementia (the condition is never named), his recurrent hallucinations of Iris and other entities like the polar bear clearly imply an errant mind.7 Augustine himself describes Iris’ presence as “ridiculous” and “inexplicable” (13) and even describes her humming as a melody that seems to “rise and fall with the sound of the wind” (10). Recurrent visual hallucinations like Augie’s are prevalent in certain types of dementia, such as Parkinson’s and Lewy body (Mosimann 154). In these cases, dementia can manifest “well-formed complex hallucinations of people, animals, or objects” that often recur (154). Given the utter unlikelihood of finding an abandoned child on an Arctic astronomy base, readers are primed to look carefully between the lines of Augustine’s narration in order to determine how, in fact, Iris ended up there. Brooks-Dalton leaves plenty of signposts for the attentive reader, each of which we will discuss.
The novel’s first chapter repeatedly entwines Augie’s old age with mental instability to conjure dementia in the reader’s mind. For example, when the Arctic base was evacuated and Augie refused to board the plane, “the captain searched Augustine’s face and saw only a crazy old man, crazy enough to mean what he was saying” (11, emphasis mine). Dementia is readily implied by the juxtaposition of the terms “crazy” and “old.” Such emphasis on senselessness and age is repeated in other descriptions of Augustine in the same chapter: “he had been old for years now, closer to death than birth…He began to lose track of time…[and] also of his own thoughts.” (9). Given the prevalence of dementia in Augustine’s age group—the text specifies that he is 78 years old—it is clear that Brooks-Dalton’s emphasis on Augustine’s agedness alongside his mental deterioration is designed to point towards Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.8
Brooks-Dalton also repeatedly associates Augustine and Iris with animality. We read that Augie “had the look of a wild animal” as he refused to evacuate the station, and the captain had “no time for reasoning with the unreasonable” (11). Recalling Davies, attentive readers will note this proximal association between animality and unreasonability (a keen euphemism for madness) which echoes throughout the novel’s early descriptions of Iris. Iris is described as a girl with “wild hair,” “a wary animal,” “a stray,” and a “baby carnivore” (13-15). Iris, being a hallucinatory composition made possible by Augustine’s dementia, signals her intimate connection with his madness through these bestial descriptions and links herself to Augie like “a pet” (14). These examples mimic what Valerie Pedlar has called “animalistic hyperbole” and “the usual animal characteristics” of madness (98). In fact, she names these “animalistic connotations” as one of the “themes familiar to the representation of madness” (108).9 Clearly, there is ample evidence of Brooks-Dalton’s repeated choice to position Augustine at the intersection of madness and animality.
Once the pair arrive at the summer weather station along the shore of Lake Hazen, physical signs of Augustine’s dementia begin to emerge. Soon after their arrival, Augie and Iris strike out from the camp across the frozen lake towards the island, “but halfway there Augustine began to stumble. It was as if his legs weren’t obeying him” (161). The pair make one more attempt to reach the island, but when Augustine “fell to his knees they turned around” (161). People living with dementia have a much higher risk of falls compared to their peers without dementia (Lynds) and some types of dementia can cause muscle weakness over time (NHS). As the duo enjoys the summer at Lake Hazen, Augustine’s mobility declines. We read that Augie “struggled to his feet, pulling himself up by the rough plywood arms of the chair” (190) and “struggled to sit up” (232), before eventually becoming bedridden with another fever (234). Augustine’s physical deterioration alongside his cognitive decline tracks with the typical progression seen in various kinds of dementia.
Beyond all this textual evidence of Augustine’s implicit dementia, however, I must echo Bérubé and insist that it does not matter whether or not Augustine really has dementia. Of course he doesn’t. Augustine doesn’t really exist. The point is that Brooks-Dalton has crafted Augustine’s character in such a way as to connote dementia and, in turn, use the unique opportunities provided by it to propel both the narrative and Augustine’s transformation forward. Her evocation is unique in that it does not rely on worn tropes of dementia as a prolonged and frightful loss of identity in the style of much dementia literature.10 As an illustration of this common trope, consider the following excerpt from the 1999 Canadian novel, Daughter. In the novel, the mother of a teenage girl develops Alzheimer’s disease. Upon visiting her mother’s physician, the young daughter is told, “This may sound unkind, Sylvie, but the person you searched for tonight is not your mother. She’s gone, dear” (151). Nothing surprises readers about this depiction of a person with Alzheimer’s disease as “gone.” By contrast, Brooks-Dalton’s depiction of Augustine’s unnamed intellectual disability invites the reader into something rather miraculous: the reconceptualization of dementia as a time not of exclusive loss and disappearance, but also of growth, adventure, and new possibilities.
I must admit what a relief this intervention was for me. As a caregiver for my grandmother with advanced dementia during the writing of this essay, it was a comfort to learn from Brooks-Dalton’s fictional example how to pay attention to not only what my grandmother was losing, but also to what she was gaining. Alongside each fumbled word and bout of frustration, I also noticed how she began to enjoy an imaginary, but no less real, reunification with my pre-deceased grandfather, and how her self-assertion blossomed after a lifetime of tight-lipped propriety. Manthorpe writes that “looking at dementia in stories…can track its social construction” (317). To be clear, neither Manthorpe nor I mean to imply that dementia is mere social construction. Rather, the point is that there is dementia itself, and then simultaneously there is the complex, ever-shifting narrative world of and about dementia that shapes our experience of it, whether we are living it or witnessing it in another. This is what Stephen Gettinger means when he writes about the “graces among the losses” and the “deepening of other capacities” that one might experience in dementia. Studying fictional accounts of dementia—even when the condition goes unnamed, as is the case in Good Morning, Midnight—can help us better elucidate how the social sign of dementia functions, and in turn map how that sign changes over time. In Bérubé’s terms, this is how “fictional disability can change what you see and believe” (194).
Contemplated Madness
Returning to the text itself, let us shift our attention from the abundant evidence of Augustine’s implicit dementia to the terrain and functions of this fictional characteristic. First, the terrain. As Augustine stands outside looking around the polar landscape in the first chapter, we read that “on his best days the blank canvas of the landscape set him at ease; on his worst he contemplated madness” (4). It’s telling that for Augustine, the determinant factor between an empty landscape that inspires ease and one that promotes madness is not the landscape itself; it’s Augustine’s emotions, or his best and worst days. The wide open expanse of the Arctic terrain functions as a blank canvas or, in Hariman’s terms, a “hypertrophied landscape” that enables Augustine to confront himself as a feeling being for the first time (273). The emptiness of the terrain also serves another hidden function. Given that loneliness and social isolation are risk factors for dementia-related disorders (Guarnera et al.), it seems that the isolating environment of the Arctic is necessary for the full expression of Augustine’s dementia. If Augustine were surrounded by others, they might attempt to dissuade him of Iris’ presence, or otherwise point out the unsoundness of his perceptions, causing confusion and stress. His total solitude at the Arctic base is therefore not only the result of his curmudgeonly and lonely past; it is also the first precondition for his dementia-enabled transformation.
Let’s return to the “contemplated madness” of Augustine’s worst days to understand how dementia enables a process of allegorical composition that defends Augustine against the chaos of memories flooding past his repressive walls. There is a compelling contradiction here in the act of rationally contemplating the un-contemplatable—that is, madness. This thoughtful insanity or rational madness is framed as something which Augustine calls upon on his “worst” days, implying that the madness itself acts as a kind of treatment or coping mechanism for overwhelming and difficult emotions. In the novel, dementia is the expressive form that Augustine’s “contemplated madness” takes. Dementia functions as a defense mechanism in the novel in three ways: by splitting the threads of time, by taming semiotic excess, and by allowing Augustine to experience loving community. All three functions open up new horizons in Augustine’s consciousness and transform his relationship with the daughter he had already forgotten long before the plaques and tangles multiplied inside his fictional mind.
Brooks-Dalton first foreshadows dementia’s power to split the threads of time by structuring the novel along two parallel plot lines. Throughout the novel, readers shift back and forth between Augustine and Sully’s narratives chapter by chapter. Eventually, these two narratives converge as Augustine and Sully make contact through the radio airwaves. Across vast, interstellar distance, father and daughter spend only about four cumulative minutes speaking to each other before their narratives diverge again: hardly enough time to rebuild a broken familial relationship. Brooks-Dalton keeps their meetings brief to underscore the limits of normative time. Within the normal flow of time, there is no time left for Augustine and Sully to connect on a deeper level. Augustine now requires a certain degree of freedom from normative time to experience meaningful connection with his estranged daughter. Fortunately, his dementia loosens the grip of normative time just enough to allow for such connection.
Brooks-Dalton then uses Augustine’s dementia as a defense mechanism against the limits of normative time. As Ellen Samuels describes in her essay on crip time, disability can sometimes inspire the wish for "time to split and allow two paths" so that one might "move back and forth between them at will" (3). This is exactly the realm of possibility that dementia opens up for Augustine. He lives simultaneously between two threads of time: one in utter solitude, at the end of humanity and the edge of the world, and another in imagined, yet paradoxically real, companionship with his long-lost daughter. This intermingling of time, made possible by dementia, allows Augustine to access new knowledge and self-awareness. We see this manifest when, towards the end of the novel, Augustine is caught in another escalating fever. He drifts in and out of consciousness, mingling distant memories with dreams and other imaginings. He “couldn’t distinguish the passage of time from the blur of waking dreams he’d been caught up in” (234). It is in this blur of time and “waking dreams” that Augustine finally realizes what he had “known all along”: that his companion Iris isn’t real (235). Or rather that she is real inasmuch as she was once a real girl (Iris) who grew up into a real woman (Sully), but that she does not exist corporeally alongside him. In this way Brooks-Dalton ensures that dementia itself is the precondition for Augustine to build a meaningful relationship with his estranged daughter. Augustine’s hallucinations allow him to shift back and forth between simultaneous realities: utter solitude on the one hand and deeply meaningful companionship on the other. It is this latter form of “hallucinated” time that allows Augustine, against the devastating realities of “real” time, to experience true human connection, for the first and last time. Thus we have seen that these multiple and dyadic veins of time—two narratives (Augustine’s and Sully’s) and, within Augustine’s narrative, two realities—ultimately conspire to allow Augustine to build a relationship with his estranged daughter, a relationship that would never have been possible within the limits of normative time.
The second function of Augustine’s “contemplated madness” is as a defense against what Hariman calls “semiotic excess” (270). Through his imagined relationship with Iris, Augustine can make sense of the bewildering paratactic associations of his past, such as being and then begetting an unloved child. At the start of the novel, we read that Augustine “was trapped in memories. He never used to think of the past, but somehow the tundra brought it all back to him” (17). By composing Iris, Augustine is able to tame these overwhelming memories. This compositional allegory, in Hariman’s terms, “scrambles reality itself” by juxtaposing the idealized past (a loving, fatherly relationship with his daughter) with the desperate present (the Arctic tundra and the end of the world). Paradoxically, this scrambling of reality, this “contemplated madness,” is exactly what defends Augie against an unintelligible excess of signs. As a career scientist, Augustine had long believed that “keeping track of the data…was all that had stood between him and madness” (18). But it isn’t “logging the sequence of the stars” that eventually heals Augustine—he’d been watching the stars all alone, all his life (18). Instead, it is through the compositional allegory of Iris that Augustine is able to face, interpret, and even partially rewrite his woeful past. She is a final irruption of nonsense that, sensibly, allows him to heal.
Brooks-Dalton presents bizarre paratactic positioning not only in the “semiotic excess” of Augustine’s narrative past, but also in the settings of the two narratives. Each narrative unfolds in a remarkably strange setting: the outer reaches of the solar system on the one hand and an anthropically desolate Earth on the other. Each of these frames, when positioned side-by-side, beg some kind of interpretation from the reader. In Hariman’s terms, we can say that they are “incommensurable realms” that require some degree of “imperfect translation” to make sense of their relationship (268). Brooks-Dalton intensifies that need for explanation when we realize that the two protagonists—Augustine and his estranged adult daughter Sully—are an astronomically unlikely pair to be left alive at the end of humankind. Against such overwhelming and seemingly inexplicable parataxis, Augustine’s dementia provides a defense against the chaos of incoherent circumstances. Through his allegorical composition of Iris, Augustine bridges the gap between his narrative and Sully’s. Without Iris’ presence in the Arctic, Augustine and Sully would remain but strangers, and in the vein of real time, they mostly do. Yet through Iris, the two “hypertrophied landscapes” of the novel link together at the Lake Hazen radio station: the place that “felt more like a home than anywhere Augie had lived in years” (154). Iris, as the powerful projection of Augustine’s dementia, is uniquely capable of bridging the vast distances of time and space, giving Augustine and Sully a second chance to live together as a family.
The third function of Augustine’s “contemplated madness” is as a defense against his own repressive tendencies that, once overcome, allow him to embrace loving communion with another person for the first time. Throughout his life, Augie went to great lengths to suppress his own emotions. He perpetually turned his head skyward and refused to confront the reality surrounding him. We witness an example of this tendency just after Augustine shoots an Arctic wolf. He “looked up to the stars, waiting for them to dwarf the immensity of emotion welling inside of him…But it didn’t work this time. He felt everything” (51). Now, at the end of his life, Augustine is finally able to shift his attention towards what truly matters here on Earth: loving relationships. Hariman writes that “allegorical composition provides the means for moving...to systems of interpretation that can double as models for community” (271). This is exactly the role that Augustine’s dementia-enabled allegorical composition of Iris plays. Dementia provides Augustine with a new “system of interpretation” that also doubles as an experiential model of community, one he benefits from immensely even if his interlocutor is not strictly real. Remember that before dementia, Augustine had forgotten his child altogether (8). Yet through the progression of his dementia, Augustine builds with Iris a powerful albeit unusual family system. She becomes his new and deeply loved community.
Thus, we have seen that Augustine’s dementia, far from being a mere symptom designed to add characterological depth, functions as a defense mechanism in the novel in several ways. First, it allows him to shift into a new thread of time in order to create more time to bond with his long-lost daughter. It also gives him a way to cope with and make meaning out of the semiotic excess and bewildering paratactic associations of his past and present. And finally, Augustine’s dementia allows for his allegorical composition of Iris, in turn allowing him to access a new “model of community” for the first and last time. In all these ways, Augustine uses his dementia as a “resource rather than restriction” to open up new emotional and intellectual possibilities (Garland-Thomson 54). As we will see, these new possibilities soon converge to allow for Augustine’s penultimate transformation.
Dementia, Allegory, and Transformation
The terrains and functions of Augustine’s “contemplated madness” entwine throughout Augustine’s multiple encounters with a polar bear to create an ongoing allegorical manifestation of transformation. One day, when Augie and Iris find themselves on a long walk out on the tundra, Augustine spots a distant bear. Staring at the bear, he feels as if “he were riding high on its massive, arched back, his fingers dug deep into the matted fur, heels locked around the wide, padded rib cage” (81). Here Augustine’s imagined, compositional physical relationship to the bear has changed since his first encounter with the animal months earlier. Rather than wishing to embody the lonely bear like before, he now wants to ride on top of it, implying a wish to conquer the loneliness it personifies. We read that Augustine “felt a piercing sadness for the bear” and “an emotion stirred in his stomach and [he] realized it was discontent—for the bear, but also for himself” (82). After turning back to see Iris playing happily in the snow, he returns his gaze to the bear, but it is gone. Here we see that the allegorical composition of Iris, made possible through Augustine’s dementia, has changed his relationship to loneliness and enabled him to feel sympathy for the indelibly lonely bear. Fittingly, the bear disappears just as Augustine looks to his young companion, solidifying the transformative power of Iris as a compositional allegory which defends Augustine against the looming promise of a lonely death. As Brooks-Dalton writes, seeing the great polar bear “moved something inside him, something old and heavy and stubborn. In its wake there was an opening” (83). And in that opening, his love for Iris grew.
At the end of the novel, Augustine’s awareness of Iris’ corporeality is transformed. Though readers may have suspected something unusual about Iris’ physical form since her frostbite-free adventure out on the mountain (113), Augustine is notably slower on the uptake. In his final moments inside the tent at Lake Hazen, just before venturing outside to take his last breath, Augustine experiences a moment of revelation. Staring at Iris, he “struggled to understand what he had known all along…‘Why are you here?’ he whispered. Iris cocked her head and lifted her shoulders as if to say You tell me” (234). Thus, it seems that some part of Augustine knew all along that Iris wasn’t conventionally real. Readers might associate this revelation with terminal lucidity, a plausible end-of-life experience for someone with dementia (Nahm 87). Nearing the end, Augustine understands that Iris has no independent corporeality; she is a projection, a composition of his own mind. The appropriately named Iris has enabled Augustine to see what he was missing in his life all along: meaningful relationships. In a literal way, then, Iris embodies the argument advanced by dementia consultant Julian Hughes, who writes that “our personhood can be held by others” (19). Iris is the personified allegorical code, the “contemplated madness,” which saves Augie from his otherwise isolated Arctic fate.
The closing moments of Augustine’s life are already foretold by the novel’s title, Good Morning, Midnight. This paradoxical title succinctly performs what Hariman calls “the key to allegorical composition,” that is, juxtaposition. For Hariman, juxtaposition is used “to point toward a common theme that is otherwise tacit in its totality” (273). Paratactic positioning in postmodern allegory exposes an otherwise hidden theme; the things side-by-side illuminate each other and, in turn, reveal the whole that is otherwise obscure. By pairing two unlikely bedfellows—a greeting that heralds the dawn of day on the one hand, and the end of the 24-hour cycle on the other—Brooks-Dalton underscores the central aspiration of her novel: to say “good morning,” to offer a greeting and a beginning to a life experience typically understood as always, and inevitably, an end. Yet through the compositional allegory of Iris made possible by his dementia, the close of Augustine’s life is its own new dawn. It is, indeed, a good mo(u)rning.
Conclusion
In Augustine’s final scene, the polar bear returns once more. These accumulating visitations invite the reader to make sense of the bear as a repeating signifier. As Hariman notes, the “accumulation of metaphors is an important element in allegorical composition” (275). As Augustine collects his terminal strength and strikes out towards the radio shed, determined to “hear...and be heard,” he stops upon noticing a set of tracks in the snow. Realizing that the tracks belong to the bear, he follows the tracks and realizes that the bear, too, is dying. Collapsing beside the bear, Augustine decides that “the radio shed could wait...this was the moment he’d been looking for” (238). Why should Augustine turn away from this last opportunity for human connection? Perhaps, as Quinn and Blandon write, it is because “dementia is a stage of life where...speech becomes more difficult to understand, less frequent and eventually may disappear altogether” (579). Perhaps part of Augustine knew that speech was now beyond his means. But if Augustine’s verbal language has deteriorated as a result of his dementia, it is not a totalizing loss. In fact, Augustine’s ability to connect with others has only been strengthened through his experience of intellectual disability. This is why he turns to embrace the polar bear in silent, adoring union. As the wind picked up heaps of snow and swirled it through the sky until “there was nothing left but Augustine and the bear” (238), Augustine finds the communion he craves through loving proximity rather than verbal exchange. It is fitting that in the end for Augustine there should be nothing left besides himself, the bear, and the whirling snow. The desolation of the landscape enabled Augustine’s dementia to flourish and to compose Iris. Iris, in turn, enabled Augustine to see his own past in a new light and enter a world of loving human connection, even if only in his mind. His final embrace with the bear underscores that without dementia, Augustine would never have been able to transform the neglectful relationship he had with his estranged, interstellar daughter. Without dementia, Augustine would never have learned how to love, and in turn, how to heal.
This article demonstrated how Lily Brooks-Dalton uses implicit dementia as a literary mechanism in Good Morning, Midnight to allow the novel’s protagonist to experience personal growth. Given current cultural trends that depict dementia as an experience of exclusive loss and degeneration, this unique literary representation of dementia as a kind of disability gain is worth our attention. As Hariman writes, the “postmodern allegory arises out of an excess of representation” (269). We have already seen that literary and cultural representations of dementia as a living death utterly abound. Out of and against this excess, Brooks-Dalton does something different: she harnesses the creative possibilities of dementia to show us another way of conceptualizing the experience. Bérubé reminds us that “disability has a funny way of popping up everywhere without announcing itself as disability (1, original emphasis). Though Augustine’s dementia is never named, Brooks-Dalton’s clear efforts to position him at the intersections of old age, madness, and animality deliberately imply it. In turn, Augustine’s dementia enables him to subconsciously use Harimanian-style compositional allegory in the form of his persistent hallucination of Iris, a young girl lost in the Arctic at the end of the world. This hallucination of the young daughter he never knew opens up new ways to process his lonely life and ultimately imparts a modicum of healing. Channeling Benjamin, Hariman writes that allegories become “a means for reflection on a beautiful ruin” (278). Augustine’s persistent hallucination of Iris—fueled by something quite like dementia—allows for just such reflection.
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