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This essay marks a development and a shift of emphasis in my work on illness narratives. Until now, I have brought my tools as literary theorist, and more specifically a narratologist, to bear upon texts that have been studied by medical humanists, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists of medicine, each from his or her own perspective. In this way, I hoped both to shed new light on specific texts and to contribute to the fairly new interdisciplinary junction between medicine and narrative theory. In the course of my research, however, I have become increasingly aware that just as narrative theory can elucidate illness narratives, so can illness narratives illuminate, and sometimes problematize, central notions in narratology and narrative theory. It this mutual relationship that I wish to begin articulating here. More specifically, I shall explore the complex interaction between the collapse of the body and that of the narrative, the problem of narrating the unnarratable, the author-reader relationship, and the subsequent implications for narrative ethics.1
Order and Chaos
"Order begins with the body," writes the medical anthropologist Gay Becker. "That is, our understanding of ourselves and the world begins with our reliance on the orderly functioning of our bodies. This bodily knowledge informs what we do and say in the course of daily life. In addition, we carry our histories with us into the present through our bodies. The past is 'sedimented' in the body; that is, is embodied."2
Becker thus suggests connections among the body, a sense of order, and temporal continuity. She also adds an archeological overtone to the geological metaphor of "sedimentation" to emphasize the effect of the past, of "our histories," on the formation of our layered present. Archeological (and geological?) sites, however, are always in danger of crumbling. And so is the body. When this happens, the network of connections outlined by Becker may disintegrate. What follows one self-conscious description of the impact of the loss of embodied coherence in the case of illness. It is taken from a diary entry written by Barbara Rosenblum, an American sociologist who died of breast cancer at the age of forty-four:
When you have cancer, you have a new body each day, a body that may or may not have a relationship to the...