“You Are Older, although You Do Not Know That”: Time, Consciousness, and Memory in “A Kind of Alaska” by Harold Pinter (1930–2008)

Abstract

<i>“A Kind of Alaska”</i> is a one-act play by the British playwright and Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter (1930–2008), based on the book <i>Awakenings</i> by the neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933–2015). This play, first performed in 1982, is centered around the character of Deborah, a middle-aged woman, struck by <i>encephalitis lethargica</i> (“sleeping sickness”) at the age of 16, who wakes up after 29 years of apparent sleep following the injection of an unnamed drug. This article analyzes how Pinter’s drama investigated the mysterious and fascinating relationship between time, memory, and consciousness. The term “awakenings,” chosen by Sacks himself, clearly refers to the restoration of voluntary motor function in patients with postencephalitic parkinsonism who responded to levodopa. However, it also suggests that these patients had an impairment of awareness. Actually, beyond the acute phase, subjects with postencephalitic parkinsonism were not sleeping but severely akinetic and therefore probably aware of the passage of time. Oliver Sacks probably did not entirely recognize the intrinsic contradiction between prolonged sleep (with consequent impairment of awareness and subjective “time gap”) of the acute lethargic phase and the severe akinesia with preserved awareness of the time-passing characteristic of postencephalitic parkinsonism. This confusion was further compounded by Harold Pinter in his play.