Monday 4th July - Thursday 7th July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 10B: Writing the Experiences of Illness 1
Chair: Isabelle Lange

Writing Size Zero Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary World Literatures
Isabelle Meuret
Centre des Langues, Facultés Universitaires Catholiques de Mons, Mons, Belgique

Anorexia, defined as a mental illness by both William Gull and Charles Lasègue in 1873, will be explored in this paper on the basis of experiential texts written at the end of the 20th century. Although self-starvation has always existed, it took epidemic proportions at the turn of the millennium. As a result, the anorexic body has been dissected ad nauseam, and the fascination for this enigmatic disease has been growing without any satisfying treatment being found.
Self-starvation is a very complex endeavour, whose objective is to approach one’s limit as a living being, but without dying. By focusing on experiential texts, this paper aims to bring to light new epistemologies and to debunk the myth of anorexia – anorexia nervosa – as it is represented in contemporary medical and cultural discourses. Anorexia is not a disease of young female white Westerners, as it is often claimed. Indeed, testimonies from America and Europe abound, but texts from Algeria, Zimbabwe, or Mauritius, also refer to the phenomenon. In these texts, anorexia is figured as a pathology of language, an act of terrorism, a cultural disease, or a search for the sacred, to name just a few examples.
Surprising is also the fact that a number of prominent authors suffered from anorexia, like Byron, Gide, Woolf, or Blixen. This paper will therefore also highlight some intriguing features about the relation between writing and starving. In all instances, anorexia appears as a writing disorder. While anorexia is a debilitating experience, its writing, or Writing Size Zero – as I venture to call it – is an ethical process. By appending a message to their mysterious pathology, the authors convey meaning to anorexia and are thereby sentenced to life. Writing Size Zero is a gift of life.  

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Empathic Witnessing in Patient Pathographies
Melinda Rosenberg
University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

The purpose of my paper is to discuss “empathic witnessing” in patient narratives of illness, or pathographies. I will call upon the work of Arthur Kleinman to facilitate this discussion. Arthur Kleinman has written extensively about illness narratives. Kleinman, a medical doctor, has lamented the traditional approach to the clinical encounter that most physicians adopt. There is more to the patient than simply taking down her medical history and asking where it hurts. Kleinman has christened his approach the “Alternative Therapeutic Approach”. Kleinman recommends this approach because if two goals he ahs in mind for a healing relationship:

• empathic witnessing of the existential experience of suffering
• practical coping with a major psychosocial crisis that constitutes the menacing chronicity of that experience. (Kleinman 1988, p. 10)

There is nothing facile about “empathic witnessing”. Many assume that a person can be empathetic only if she has been through a similar experience of illness. With this interpretation, a physician could perhaps have a vicarious experience of an illness through the patient's narrative, but he could never be an empathic witness. I believe this interpretation is mistaken. I believe Kleinman to be arguing along with myself that empathy is an imaginative identification with another person's subjective state. This is not to behoove the physician to become the patient as an actor becomes Hamlet or Othello. Rather, being an empathic witness enjoins the physician to be able to identify with the sudden fragmentation of a person's being-in-the-world after an illness strikes. The physician witnesses the patient describe the loss of normalcy that comes with her illness. As the physician witnesses the patient search for meaning that has been stripped away by illness, he can participate in the patient's feelings and ideas of which she speaks. This witnessing transcends the medical terminology, microscopy, magnetic resonance imagery. Empathic witnessing also permits the patient to cope with her situation because she can trust that her physician is listening and not merely showing “detached concern” for her. The physician can keep some aesthetics distance from his patient to preclude becoming too emotionally invested and committed to his patient. However, it is incumbent upon me to substantiate the claim that he must never chart too deep a clinical distance between himself and his patient lest empathic witnessing will be nothing more than an empty philosophical concept.

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Writing Over the Illness: (Mis)interpreting Albinism
Charlotte Baker
Nottingham University, Nottingham, United Kingdom

The manifestation of albinism in the whiteness of albino skin makes it a condition that is loaded with symbolism and meaning in terms of racial difference. The lack of pigment that marks the albino apart in Black Africa is also frequently portrayed as symbolic of his or her links to the spirit world, or functions purely as a marker of difference and deviance. Underlying all such representations of albinism is a failure to see albinism for what it is; a medical condition.
The albino experience portrayed in the work of Williams Sassine, Patrick Grainville and Didier Destremau is firmly located in an African context, a context that aggravates an already difficult predicament. The African albino suffers overt discrimination that results from a fundamental and recurrent misunderstanding of the condition. Apart from the real disability caused by albinism, the albino body is often attributed other inadequacies that are imagined or assumed, such as deafness and muteness. Furthermore, albino skin is frequently perceived as a sign of physical weakness that is often interpreted as indicative of mental inadequacy.
The small amount of critical attention to the albino body that exists has focussed simply on its whiteness, indicative of a general inability to see beyond it to the person beneath. As a result, there has been a distinct failure to address the other differences or supposed deficiencies that mark the albino apart; differences that explain why the albino body is invariably depicted in representation as damaged, lacking, or flawed. This paper will attempt to redress this tendency and will expose the ways in which albinism and those with the condition are consistently (mis)represented.

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