Session 1: Identity and Character in Health, Illness and Disease
Chair: Peter Twohig

"This Ever-transient Accidental Crossing of Momentums": On Alan Shapiro's Poem, The Accident
Harold Schweizer
Department of English, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA

The "momentums" are of beauty and suffering; the crossing of two accidents, embodied by "a sudden see / through whir of wings" and "my brother" falling "three hundred miles away."  Lightness and heaviness, a flying and a falling. beauty and suffering intersect here in the chiasmus of their terrifying phenomenology: both are accidental, "the absolute / not me," the "blind urge of its happening." How then to know this, put it together, tell it - the "it" in which these momentums cross - without becoming a blabbing "trickster of solace"?  The poem's narrative structure is launched, but vainly, by the (once) repeated temporal conjunction "while"; "while" is the narrative artifice of the presentation of this awful co-incidence between two incompatible, incomparable, but simultaneous realities.
"While" the bird "dips its beak into the funnel of blossom" ... "my brother" falls, tearing the "loose papery gown" and lies "naked, / utterly exposed."  Shapiro finds this accidental co-incidence of temporal sameness and spatial separateness unthinkable.  The apparition of the tiny bird (a kind of Rilkean angel that disdains to annihilate us) and the brother's accident are both occurrences that are analogous in that they announce nothing but themselves, no truth beyond their phenomenology.
Both beauty and suffering are events eluding our grasp. The gratuity of time materializes into the discontinuity of space that we have to endure as each other's absence.  Poetry, Shapiro reminds us, does not help, and "Time nor place / distance avails not, makes us neither present to each other, nor does it make our absence bearable. " In the event of beauty and suffering, I propose, we experience not time, not space, not poetry but, as I would like to propose, our sheer, vulnerable, gratuitous, separate presence. 

Coping with Lupus: Images of Illness in the Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor
Gretchen Dobrott
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain

“Coping with Lupus: Images of Illness in the Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor”

In 1956, Flannery O’Connor wrote, “In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive that a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.” Just four years earlier she had been diagnosed with lupus erythematosus, the same disease that her father had died from when she was a child.
Yet despite this apparent acknowledgement of the relevance of her poor health to her literature, O’Connor seldom made public manifestations regarding the role lupus played in her stories. When she did, they were more in the line of one of her most quoted statements: “The disease is of no consequence to my writing, since for that I use my head and not my feet.” Thus, determining the implications of this author’s illness on her writing is no easy task. Her written correspondence reveals little, since she never yielded to self-compassion. O’Connor’s apparently stoic acceptance of her condition, as Josephine Hendin points out, is rooted in southern convention which frowned upon expressing emotion in any form.
It is in O’Connor’s literature, however, that we can see signs of the impact of this author’s illness on her personal life and professional career. Recurring themes of death and violence, characters with diverse disabilities, and alienated, dysfunctional families present the reader with an interpretational challenge, for it seems that lupus, which she allegedly accepted and embraced as a “blessing,” could have caused her more anxiety and apprehension than she would have liked to admit. In this paper, I will examine the omnipresence of these elements and the intensity with which they are used as a likely means of manifesting O’Connor’s feelings towards her circumstances, and the way in which she coped with lupus by venting her anger and frustration through her female characters.

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"I have epilepsy but it's not who I am." Making Sense of Epilepsy in Roy Robinson's Electricity
Maria Vaccarella
Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy

This study examines the narrative use of epilepsy in Roy Robinson’s Electricity (2006) in an attempt to discover to what extent the highly experimental style of this novel yields insight into the sufferer’s perception of her/his illness, thus dismantling the manifold prejudices and superstitions, which have marked the cultural history of this disease.
In order to describe his protagonist Lily’s experience of her temporal-lobe epilepsy, Robinson develops an impressive narrative style, whose originality lies in the blending of epilepsy-related metaphors and typographic devices – such as pages of overlapping fonts for fits, or rows of anti-epileptic pills dividing both paragraphs and chronological sequences. At the same time, Lily emerges as a convincing character with her own story, free from any traditional iconographic connotation. In terms of plot, there is a significant relationship between Lily’s eventual coming to terms with her traumatic childhood and the urge to face her disease once and for all by means of surgery.
I argue that, far from being a mere theme of the novel, epilepsy is here best described as a narrative filter, which thoroughly sifts both subjective and objective views of the disease. Thus, the book becomes a useful dialectical space for the interaction between the sufferer/narrator and the observer/reader. As a result, Electricity could lead doctors, caregivers, as well as readers in general to develop greater empathy towards people like Lily, who happen to have epilepsy, yet would not and cannot be hastily labelled as ‘epileptic’.

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