'Alone and in close company': Reading and Companionship in Brenda Walker's Reading by Moonlight (original) (raw)
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Diegesis, 2017
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Focusing on the concepts of narrative empathy and recognition, this article aims to explore ways in which personal narratives may promote a renewed perception of illness and disability. Taking its cue from studies by Rita Felski (2008) and Su-zanne Keen (2013), it investigates how empathic experience reflects the force and intensity of aesthetic encounters. Specifically, it addresses two texts that deal with the experience of illness and disability: Christina Middlebrook's Seeing the Crab. A Memoir of Dying Before I Do (1996) and Harriet McBryde Johnson's Too Late to Die Young. Nearly True Tales from a Life (2005). These authors write their lives in order to influence the way we perceive and understand illness and disability. Their major cultural mediation lies in their willingness to connect with their readers both affectively and cognitively, counter-arguing the culture of denial of death and rejecting pity and compassion in the face of illness and disability .
Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins
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Inviting the Other T he Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön offers the blessing: "May we go to places that scare us." That may express best why I value the writing of Josephine Ensign. She takes us to places that, if they don't exactly frighten us, do unsettle us; places that disturb our comfort, that make us realize that we have become more complacent than we thought we ever would. In the movements known variously as health humanities and narrative medicine, nurses have not been as vocal as their numbers would warrant. It may be indicative that Ensign's ongoing clinical nursing work is not in hospitals, but rather in what might best be called outreach clinics, because they serve those who would otherwise drift out of reach, those who need to be pulled back to some form of safety. In contemporary nursing, it may be most possible to speak from the margins. Ensign works in places where institutional strictures are looser because people's needs are more primary: something to eat, a place to sleep, a moment of feeling clean. In one of this book's most important chapters, nurses learn to wash the feet of people who are not, strictly, their patients. Calling them guests seems more appropriate. Ensign practices medicine in its most basic form of hospitality. She invites those who would not be welcome elsewhere, even in hospital emergency departments. Her clinical practice begins with making these people feel valued. Ensign also can be funny. Maybe you have to have written some grant proposals to get the humor, and also the serious truth, of her career-changing decision to write based on her own experiences-personal, teaching, and clinical-rather than spending her time seeking funding to gather data. The data, she realizes, are already all around her. What's difficult is not gathering data; that requires fairly blunt effort. What's truly difficult is saying something about those data that moves people to do something differently, whether that doing differently takes place in readers' thoughts, their personal lives, their political lives as citizens, or their professional lives. Responding to this difficulty, this book is, on one level, a series of stylistic experiments in which Ensign plays with different ways of telling stories. Some of these experiments seem more successful than others, but I would not presume that all readers would agree x Josephine Ensign
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In Night's City (Dorothy Nelson, 1982) is a novel which, stylistically, looks back to modernist experimentation in order to present a harrowing story of paternal incest and maternal neglect and hatred. Dorothy Nelson addresses these unpalatable issues indirectly, though effectively, creating narrative, fantasy, and hallucinatory scenarios which are brutal while still being oblique. Many passages in the novel have the texture of dreams morphing into nightmares. Synesthesia, displacement, replacement, condensation, repetition: these are some of the rhetorical strategies used in steam of consciousness passages which undo one of the enduring dichotomies in Western thought: that between the mind and the body, since in these passages in the novel it is the body that thinks-feels. The novel's emphasis on the female body as site of pain and violation, together with its grotesque view of the human body as the interface between outside and inside, forever subject to bodily fluids coming out and/or coming in, transforms this narrative into a paradigm for theories on abjection and/or trauma. Blood, urine, sweat, faeces, saliva, dirt, filth, grotesque human bodies whose fluids are forever coming outside, defiled female bodies, always tainted and impure: these recurring elements evince the novel's encoding of Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection and of the concept of trauma, as has already been pointed out by different critics (Heather Ingman, Asier Altuna and Roberta Gefter Wondrich). The text's events and characters point to reiterated incest, from the time Sara, the protagonist, is three years old to the time of her first menstruation, as originating her traumatised condition and her dissociative process.
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Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) and Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2012) are highly literate memoirs. In terms of their eloquence and their many references to literature; but most importantly of all in terms of their tendency to read a life-story as just that – a story. All autobiography, and indeed the act of remembering itself, involves narrativizing the chaotic. As humans, we have to omit, enhance and alter details in order to understand our memories, or tell a coherent story. Narration is how we create meaning from meaninglessness. Bechdel and Winterson take this process to its logical extremes. They imagine themselves and their relatives into pre-existing stories, from Greek myths to children’s books; they portray the imaginary with the same fidelity as the “real”, such as when Winterson psychically splits from her inner child, or when Bechdel draws herself as an “Eisenhower-era butch” walking past her own parents before she was born (p. 108); most of all, they see symbols everywhere, and treat them as though they were deliberate plot devices employed by an unseen author. If narrativization creates meaning, these writers hyper-narrativize in a bid to solve the potentially unsolvable riddles of their parents: Winterson’s abusive, adoptive mother, Mrs W, and Bechdel’s distant and taciturn father, Bruce.
Narrating and navigating troubling times: writers and readers
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Questions about the relationship between memoir, what really happened, and public history especially in times of significant societal change and disruption – troubled times have no doubt been around since the earliest examples of the genre, most likely predating Ceasar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Memoir and biography readers encounter life’s suffering, dread and loss, alongside hope, achievement, redemption. For life writers, recalling and ordering in memoir, events that shape them, is there a danger of forgetting or expunging the discomfort, pain or distress those events provoked for the self or others? Do writers have responsibility in terms of their self curation to those others either inside or outside of the text? Beyond the text what imperative if any, exists for the reviewer or critic to raise ethical questions arising from the writer’s recollections? This article considers two recent examples of life writing presenting narratives of bohemian lives which have fulfill...
Embodied Experiences of Caregiving: Literature as a Lens for the Health Humanities
2019
In an age where rates of burnout and compassion fatigue are soaring, interrupting the throughline of care, both patients and caregivers alike are falling through the cracks. These bodies and persons, each of them both giving and receiving care, point to the critical need to understand the human cost and human triumph of healthcare. Each chapter herein engages with the embodied experiences of caregivers, informal and formal, demonstrating the weight of their work and how they are othered from those they care for, the community that surrounds them, and themselves. Departing from conventional methods of querying caregiving, this project bridges health and humanities, medicine and literature, in an effort to reframe care-who, with what body, voice, and illness experience, has access to that care. In probing several experiences of caregivers, I investigate the gaps in caregiving, thus calling for more attentive and holistic care for those bodies and persons that have fallen outside of the purview of routine Western medicine. The pain they endure, the disease or disability with which they are diagnosed, and the care that they give and receive, are located beyond the normative medicalized optic, in other words, the normative way that medicine sees and categorizes people and bodies. In engaging with a variety of texts, novels such as Marilynne Robinson's Home, Anne Enright's The Green Road, Tommy Orange's There There, and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange, alongside Stephen Frears's film Dirty Pretty Things and Porochista Khakpour's memoir Sick, I argue that the unsharability of pain, the gap between patient and provider, afflicted and othered, is greatly diminished by literature, no matter how queer or alt-normative their experience. My analysis thus attends to such experiences, as they are a stand-in and a voice for those real-world bodies and people like them. vi Acknowledgements "Just pay attention, then patch a few words together, and don't try to make them elaborate, this isn't a contest, but the doorway into thanks…"-Mary Oliver, "Praying" I am deeply grateful to Creighton University for enriching my Jesuit spirituality-without the interdisciplinarity emphasized throughout my Jesuit education I would not have been so urged to marry my love for literature with my passion for medicine. That education was best given by the dear professors that have helped me so greatly throughout my