Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 5A - Literary Perspectives on Health, Illness and Disease
Chair: Vera Kalitzkus

Trauma Narratives in Canadian Fiction: A Chronotopic Analysis of Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces and Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost
Patty Kelly
Department of English, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

The convergence of trauma theory with the novel produces a new generic category known as trauma fiction. Trauma fiction offers new conceptions of the disruptive impact of traumatic events that fail to integrate into narrative memory. If a traumatic event comprises an experience that resists integration and expression in narrative memory, how then is it possible for this event to be represented in fictional narratives?
In Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost the fraught and ambiguous history of cataclysmic events elides memory and produces trauma narratives. In these novels, metaphors contribute to the fragmented and reiterative nature of survivors’ partial recollections and non-integrated memory schemes that erupt, unbidden, into the present and demand reconstruction. I identify a chronotopic (time-space) motif in these novels which I call ‘trauma-time’ as well as three distinct chronotopes ‘diaspora,’ ‘fugue,’ and ‘anomie,’ each with their own defining characteristics. The temporal structures of Fugitive Pieces and Anil’s Ghost exhibit the dislocations, delays, and paradoxes characteristic of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and trauma theory provides the terms with which to analyze these chronotopes.
Ondaatje and Michaels rely upon the ambiguity of poetic tropes to represent the pathologies of memory and locate compulsive repetitive actions in geographic sites rich with geologic stratification. Whether in a peat bog in Biskupin or a forest grove in Sri Lanka, these trauma narratives’ preoccupations with place and memory, truth and history entangle with the reiterative elements of poetry to produce landscapes where history and memory share time and space. Individuals, psychologically damaged and struggling with their fragmented histories, record the wounded geography of persons and places. These novelsdemonstrate the emergence of the chronotopic motif ‘trauma-time’ that operates in tandem with poetic tropes in fictional trauma narratives to portray the ambiguous relationships between history, truth, and memory.

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"You're the foreign body now": Making Sense of leukaemia in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body
Maria Vaccarella
Department of English, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy

This study examines the narrative use of leukaemia in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992) in an attempt to discover to what extent the emotional, artistic knowledge implied in fictional writing functions as a healing treatment, complementary to medicine, for both the patient and those close to him/her.
The love triangle, typical of Winterson’s novels, is here further complicated by the discovery of Louise’s chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. The genderless narrator abruptly leaves her, persuaded that Louise’s going back to her husband Elgin, an unemotional leading oncologist, will save her life, thanks to his exclusive access to the very latest medicotechnologies. Yet, this apparently rational solution fails, since the two lovers cannot stand their forced separation. This awareness is slowly achieved throughout the novel, particularly in the well-known section, in which the narrator obsessively reads medical textbooks and responds to their scientific aloofness, rewriting the anatomical descriptions with the help of his/her own poetic sensibility.
I argue that what has traditionally been perceived as a feminine appropriation of the masculinist scientific discourse, carried out by a supposedly female narrating voice, is best explained as a model of creative struggle against the disease. The objective study of the disease – both professionally achieved by doctors, and compulsively carried out by the patient’s alarmed family/friends, as portrayed in the novel – runs the risk of othering the patient’s body, thus replicating the same mistake at the origin of cancer, the inexplicable othering of self cells. On the contrary, Written on the Body vividly exemplifies the absolute need for an emotional approach – along with the scientific one – to the suffering body, on the part of both the doctor and the patient’s family/friends.

'The Body at Various Stages of Decline: Health, Illness, Disease and Disability in Samuel Beckett's Drama'
Eleftheria Kavazi
Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford

Health, illness, disease, disability and the body remain crucial themes throughout Beckett's drama. They are treated either explicitly or implicitly in the plays, with early plays such as 'Waiting for Godot,' 'Endgame,' 'Happy Days' and 'All That Fall' presenting characters at various stages of physical decline. Middle plays like 'Embers' and 'Play' portray less well-defined images of the body and disease, with the former, a radio play, highlighting the absence of a body while the latter presents three characters buried up to their necks in urns and speaking from beyond the grave. Later plays feature the most interesting images of all with regard to illness, disease, disability and, above all, the body. They consist of stark images of disembodied voices coming to us through mechanical means (megaphone in 'What Where') or tape recordings ('Krapp's Last Tape' and 'That Time'). Even in plays where health and illness are not explicitly considered, they haunt the text ('Footfalls,' 'Come and Go'), the characters and even the stories that the characters narrate ('Embers'). The paper will examine the way health/illness, disease and disability are portrayed at the different stages in Beckett's drama, as well as across the different media for which he wrote (stage, radio, television) and the constraints and idiosyncrasies that each medium imposes. The image of the body dominates Beckett's drama and undergoes severe scrutiny and transformation: thus, it is problematised (through the radio medium for instance, in 'All That Fall' and 'Embers'); hidden (in bins in 'Endgame,' a mound of earth in 'Happy Days,' urns in 'Play,' or a hooded djellaba in 'Not I'); abstracted ('Not I,' 'That Time'); made 'un-whole' or dismembered ('Film' features a camera as an 'Eye,' while 'Not I' presents a disembodied mouth on stage delivering its speech at a frenetic pace); and, finally, rendered irrelevant ('What Where'). The portrayal of the body at various stages of dissolution and 'disrepair' creates haunting and highly significant images in Beckett's theatre. The paper will explore the metaphors employed in the plays to portray the 'well' body but, above all, the body in decline. Death will also be touched upon in this context, the dead bodies in Beckett's drama, both in their presence on stage from beyond the grave ('Play,' 'Embers') and their absence ('A Piece of Monologue'), but also in terms of "The dying and the going"; for as one of the characters puts it, one may be, "Treating of other matters. Trying to treat of other matters. Till half hears there are no other matters. Never were other matters. Never two matters. Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and the going. From the word go. The word begone" ('A Piece of Monologue').