Session 1: Suffering, Meaning & Literature

Rob Fisher - Redeeming the Memory of Suffering
Inter-Disciplinary.Net

Suffering provokes us to undertake a journey - one which is narrative in character, and leads us to an uncompromising world of illness, pain, and loss. It is a journey prompted by the jarring shock of untamed feelings and untamable passions aroused by the suffering of another human being. In the event of the death of someone we cherished, the searing realisation of loss penetrates and submerges us as waves of anguish irrupt over and intrude into our more relatively settled moments. The loss of a person, the sudden absence of a uniquely familiar presence in our lives, the likes of which will never be seen on this planet again, confronts and astounds us. It calls us on a voyage for which we are usually ill-equipped; and we are destined never to set foot on the same shores again.

This paper examines the journey from a detached to an involved view on suffering. Using the literature of Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich) and Michael Ignatieff (Scar Tissue), alongside reflection on personal experiences, the course of the 'journey' initiated by illness and suffering is explored. Suffering is not a riddle to be solved, but something to be lived through. It is and has to be deeply and intensely inter-personal. The integrity of person suffering is the key to redeeming suffering; the memory of the 'person' is the hope which can be built within suffering and taken into the future.

Susanna Gilbert - "Blood Brother": Care-taking and the Fear of Falling in Paul Monette's Borrowed Time
Visiting Scholar, Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas USA 77555

In Borrowed Time, Paul Monette’s moving memoir of his lover, Roger Horwitz’s, struggle with, and eventual death from, AIDS, Monette comments on a distinctive characteristic of the AIDS epidemic as he recalls the tumultuous days immediately following Roger’s diagnosis with the syndrome: “Has anything ever been quite like this? Bad enough to be stricken in the
middle of life, but then to fear your best and dearest will suffer exactly the same. Cancer and the heart don’t sicken a man two ways like that” (83).

While deadly diseases have simultaneously stricken individuals and those closest to them before (syphilis and tuberculosis are two examples of diseases that in the past often spelled death for, and seemed in fact to target, intimates), HIV’s attack on self and most significant other to which Monette refers in this passage (and the inverse situation of watching your “best and dearest” be stricken and fearing you “will suffer exactly the same”) was indeed a distinguishing aspect of AIDS in the early years of the epidemic that deserves further critical scrutiny.

In my paper, I will focus on the psychological and literary effects of “sickening two ways” through AIDS as those effects appear in Borrowed Time. More specifically, I will show that because Paul and Roger are united or “one” or “the very same”—as a result of gender, their sexual orientation with its attendant social burdens, romantic love, and, last but not least,
their common viral status—what is ostensibly a pathography of his lover’s struggle with AIDS served at the same time as a veiled and proleptic autopathography for Monette. In order to unveil this “spiral subtext” (Borrowed Time 73) of the memoir, I will base much of my analysis on a seemingly tangential reference Monette makes to Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Vertigo, a reference which then develops in the rest of the text into important tropes of doubling, fear of falling (into illness), “spiraling down,” riding AIDS’ “emotional roller-coaster,” and more.

Drawing on studies of the pathography or “illness narrative” penned by scholars like Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, G. Thomas Couser, Arthur Frank, and Arthur Kleinman; as well as theories of AIDS that consider not only what Paula Treichler has called the “epidemic of signification” that surrounds the syndrome, but the psychological and artistic responses of people living with AIDS (PWAs), I will come to conclusions about the uniquely stressful position in which HIV+ gay men found themselves when they were caring for their dying life partners early in the American AIDS epidemic. Finally and most importantly, in addition to shedding light on the psyches of a relatively small group of men struggling with a mysterious disease in the 1980’s, the conclusions I arrive at should also illuminate the relationship of the (always temporarily) healthy to the ill, caretakers to their patients/sick loved ones, and ill authors to their imaginations.

Harold Schweizer - The Question of Meaning in Suffering
Professor of English, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837

My paper is an inquiry into the temporal and narrative processes of suffering and illness. The narrative structure of suffering, I argue, allows for questioning and argument, establishing a social space in which healing or mourning can take place. Rather than a conception of meaning as transcendental signified, I propose that the meaning of suffering consists in its narrative temporality, or the processes of its articulation over time. Often curtailed by economic and scientific imperatives, such an understanding of suffering as I propose is to attempt to legitimize suffering in its complex or indeterminable signification.

For the sufferer the endurance of an illness is accompanied by a sense of injustice and protest and these, as I will try to show,
prompt the question of meaning. In order to identify some philosophical assumptions and narrative complexities in the emergence of meaning out of suffering, I would like to interrogate two exemplary narratives of suffering: the biblical Book of Job and Kafka's "In the Penal Colony." While the book of Job demonstrates that we can bear the question of suffering to remain unanswered, Kafka's stories demonstrate that we cannot bear to have it unasked. While in Job the question of meaning leaves open the possibility of an answer, in Kafka the absence of that question at the moment of suffering seems the most fundamental negation of hope. While philosophically dichotomous, both of these narratives seem to call into question the concept of meaning as apposite to suffering

Literature, I argue, does not promise the meaning of suffering (according to which Job would suffer from sin or Hamlet from doubt). Rather it is an articulate acknowledgement of the difficulty, even the impossibility, of attaining the meaning of suffering. The literary narrative creates the social space within which suffering can, in all its irresolvable complexities, be told. Or to say this differently, the task of literature is not to articulate meaning but to represent the process and difficulty of that articulation. In this sense, I argue, literature is therapeutic. In its pages the sufferer finds her language, and in this language the legitimacy of her own story of suffering -which is frequently cancelled in the name of meaning.