Spelling out the gaps of the everyday : the contexts of narratives on aphasia

Individuals who have experienced aphasia often create narratives about beginnings - about relearning language and cultural codes, about finding one’s bearings in space, about expressing experiences. Many of these narratives form an idiom of personal experience, an account of regaining oneself through language. In this article Muca describes and analyses the work of Karolina Wiktor. Wiktor portrays her episode of aphasia as an experience of a deficiency, loss and renewed creation, through the smallest particles of words, that is to say letters, coming together as a narrative about "an explosion of the brain". For an aphasiac, the creation of a narrative is a sort of (self-)therapy. Analysing such accounts allows us to tackle fundamental questions about cognition, such as the relationship between language and the creation of identity.