Showing papers in "Narrative in 2005"

Narrative Medicine: Attention, Representation, Affiliation

Abstract: Sick persons and those who care for them become obligatory story-tellers and story-listeners. Hippocrates knew this, Chekhov knew this, Freud knew this, and yet knowledge of the centrality of storytelling was obscured in medicine throughout much of the last century. With the rise of interest in the humanities in general and lit erary studies in particular among medical educators and practitioners, today's medi cine is being fortified by a rigorous understanding of narrative theory, appreciation of narrative practice, and deepening respect for what great literary texts can con tribute to the professional development of physicians and the care of the individual patient (Hawkins and McEntyre; Anderson and MacCurdy). This rise of the power of storytelling in medicine helps me to conceptualize what has been evolving in my own practice of internal medicine and in the emerging field of narrative medicine. You'd think that doctors, nurses, and social workers know of the centrality and privilege of storytelling in their practice. What else do we think we are doing when we ask someone in pain about their situation? Even the junior medical student who says, "What brought you to the clinic today?" and is met with the answer, "The M104 bus" knows that he or she is in search of a story. And yet, there has been an odd diminishment of the status of storytelling in medicine ever since we decided we knew enough about the body by virtue of reducing it to its parts that we did not need to hear out its inhabitant.

Narrative Speed in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract: Many contemporary novels subject their readers to a breathless sense that the events are hurtling past too quickly for real understanding. Scenes and focal figures change rapidly, and helpful transitions are missing. The resultant feeling of excessive rapidity is what I mean by narrative speed. Why has speed become a commonplace in fiction? What effects do authors seek by using it? How does such a frantic pace af- fect audiences and their attitudes towards the texts? (Quite differently, one assumes, since some readers glory in the effect while others fight it or dislike the discomfort it causes them.) These questions confront readers of numerous recent novels, and they invite us to ask how one might best understand speed as a narrative technique. Nar- rative theory to date seems to offer relatively little insight into these problems. Crit- ics have so far theorized pace (fast or slow) in just four basic fashions: (1) prose portrayal of physical speed; (2) narrative retardation; (3) the amount of story time covered per page; and (4) fictional reflections of cultural speed. Critical concern with portraying physical speed focuses on the modernist fasci- nation with physical speed and how to represent it in painting, sculpture, and writing. This is only marginally relevant to the kind of frantic narrative I am trying to ana- lyze, because narrative speed does not necessarily increase as one describes physical speed, though the two sometimes coincide. DeQuincey's prose, for example, actu- ally slows down as he attempts to catalog the sensations of fear provoked by a speed- ing mail coach. One significant connection between mechanical speed and prose speed has been helpfully analyzed by Stephen Kern. In exploring the speed-up mechanisms of the modernist era—bicycle, telegraph, telephone, car, and film—he notes that reporters wired stories to their newspapers. Kern attributes to this practice

The Liberated Woman

Abstract: In 1976, already a confirmed feminist, I wrote my doctoral dissertation (in French literature) on the Marquis de Sade. In preparation for the dissertation, I read and reread Sade's oeuvre. I had started reading Sade, in the 1965 Grove Press Eng lish translation, when I was in high school, and that was likely one of the things that had directed me into the study of French literature. After finishing my dissertation, I wrote several additional essays on Sade?the last, published in 1982. Shortly there after, I moved out of the discipline of French, into a job teaching Women's Studies. For the next twenty years, I did not read Sade. Just a few months ago, I had occasion to reread La Philosophie dans le boudoir, one of Sade's best-known works. I had read this book at least a half-dozen times be fore?although, admittedly, not for two decades. It had been the specific focus of my doctoral exams, as well as the subject of that 1982 essay, the last time I had written on (and read) Sade. I still remembered all the characters vividly, their physical at tributes and tastes, and most everything that happened in the book; but within a few dozen pages of reading this time around, I was stunned. Not by what happened or what was said. (Although Sade's characters of course did and said the most outra geous things, this was to be expected. Not only had I long been inured to it; it was what I liked about Sade.) What shocked me were things about the text that were glar ingly obvious and yet which I had not seen before, not in the multiple careful read ings I had devoted to this text, over the course of a decade of studying Sade. I was upset by what I saw. What troubled me was not exactly in Sade. I was looking right at what I simply could not see twenty-five years ago; I was looking at the blind spot of the girl I was back then. I really did not like what I saw; looking at

Transforming Musical Sounds into Words: Narrative Method in Virginia Woolf's The Waves

Abstract: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was fascinated by the connections between litera ture and music. From the start of her discussions about the sonorous art, Woolf is concerned with its imbrication in social circumstances. Her early essays?"Street Music" (1905), "The Opera" (1906), and "Impressions at Bayreuth" (1909)?deal with music as subject-matter and address its affect on community. Often Woolf ex plores the different reactions of the audience members to the sounds of the music or the behavioral expectations of such events. In her fiction, Woolf frequently uses tra ditional Western music figuratively, from The Voyage Out (1915)?the protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, is a passionate amateur pianist?to the scraps, orts, and fragments of Between the Acts (1941).1 From The Waves (1931) onward, I shall argue, Woolf de liberately attempts to reconstitute novelistic methods by looking to the "classical" tradition of music as a potential model. In 1940 Woolf acknowledges explicitly to Elizabeth Trevelyan2 that she con ceives of all her writing as music before she pens it, explaining that Trevelyan has "found out exactly what I was trying to do when you compare [Roger Fry] to a piece of music ... there was such a mass of detail that the only way I could hold it together

Your Cheatin' Art: Double Dealing in Cinematic Narrative

Abstract: Have you ever gone to a film showing and, as the end titles roll, heard from the hostile audience in different parts of the hall not only catcalls but the shouted word "cheat"? Obviously there is something here greater than mere disappointment. To claim that a film cheats is to imply that there is a tacit narrative contract between the film and the viewer, and that the film in some way breaches that contract. This essay explores a variety of film cheats, seeking not only to offer insight into the workings of particular films but also to identify kinds of cheating and, thus, some clauses in that contract between film and viewer. The essay takes its cues from my own re sponses, those personally communicated to me,1 and ones I have found in published reviews, both professional pieces and amateurish displays on Internet message boards (i.e., I looked into those films that people told me "cheat big time"). But I must admit from the start that the question of cheating actually provokes a lot of dis agreement in the real audience. People writing in to a message board that they are outraged by some aspect of a film are often told, "Get over it, it's only a movie." In general a cheat is what fraud is in the world at large, a dishonest effort to get something for nothing: in aesthetic terms, an effect that one hasn't earned. For example, unless a film has defined itself as being in some "anything goes" mode of comic fantasy, for a surprise ending to work it has to be both surprising and probable, and so the groundwork of the probability has to have been previously filled in. More later on this. We talk about films that cheat much more often than about novels that cheat.2 It may be that, to the extent that films present the "reality" of a narrative with clarity, specificity, and apparent objectivity in ways that prose fiction cannot match, cheats

Jane Austen's Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise

Abstract: ����� ��� In a memorable scene in Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding likens Lady Booby, sexually rebuffed by her virtuous servant, to “the statue of surprize” spoken of by poets. 1 Presumably, he invokes an old metaphor of astonished or fearful people as petrified, but the ambiguity of his phrase raises the possibility of a sculpture fashioned to represent an allegorical figure named “Surprize.” 2 If such a deity did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it as the presiding spirit of the eighteenthcentury novel, an emergent genre that signally promised to exceed the reader’s expectations, as well as the equally new discourse of aesthetics, which adopted surprise as a key term in the emotional lexicon of artistic experience. The full title of Robinson Crusoe’s narrative, to cite only one example, advertises the wayward sailor’s Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, the adjective of the new modifying an old signifier of romance. Defoe’s title indicates both the strangeness and veracity of the narrator’s experiences: real rather than fantastical, and thus all the more surprising; or, in Michael McKeon’s formula for the epistemology of seventeenth-century newsballads and early novels, “strange, therefore true” (5‐6). What the adjective “surprising” adds to “strange” is affect—the emotional response activated by the extraordinary, the foreign, or the inexplicable. It also encompasses a wider range of experience, since not everything that is surprising is necessarily strange; the mundane, too, can be arresting. In its participial ambiguity, the word aptly suggests the intersection of characters and readers in the eighteenthcentury novel: both are meant to be jolted out of ordinary patterns of perception and thought; both will be seized by an experience of the new. As an adventure-narrative, Crusoe promises an aesthetic form of surprise (delight in the new); and as a spiritual autobiography of self-correction, it delivers a salubrious moral surprise (the experience of being jolted from inattention into awareness).

I Know That I Know That I Know: Reflections on Paul John Eakin's "What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?"

Abstract: Paul John Eakin's recent article in Narrative, "What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?" illustrates, although sometimes inadvertently, the value of re flecting on literary narrative, in this instance autobiography, in light of research in the cognitive sciences. Eakin's particular context is Antonio Damasio's account in The Feel ing of What Happens of "extended consciousness" and the "autobiographical self" as neurobiological phenomena. Eakin raises the provocative possibility that writing about ourselves, like talking about ourselves, "may be grounded in the neurobiological rhythms of consciousness" (130), and suggests some outcomes of speculating on this linkage. The speculation is itself grounded in a speculation, since Damasio's description of more complex states of consciousness is, as he readily admits, hypothetical, although a hypothesis built on extensive clinical and research experience. Eakin's speculation is useful for narrative theory, even in its gaps, for the questions and implications that Eakin does not voice are as revealing, I think, as those he does. My resistance to Eakin's (and Damasio's) conclusions circles around two topics: one, "the teller-effect" (in Eakin's fe licitous phrase) and its erasure of agency; two, the paradoxes of what I call "the critic effect" and "deep subjectivity." The complications, at the least, that I would want to add to Eakin's speculation have large significance for the phenomenology of I-tale-telling.

Telling and Listening: Constraints and Opportunities

Abstract: Dr. Charon makes an eloquent and convincing case for the importance of narra tive competence in medical practice and medical training. My contribution to this discussion of storytelling and medicine is from the perspective of cultural studies and its application to medical education and practice. I want to insert culture into the narrative model of physician-patient interaction and make the argument that cul ture?the "situatedness" of physician and patient?influences telling and listening in important ways. Situatedness presents both constraints and opportunities for narra tive medicine; the model of attention, representation, and affiliation that Rita Charon proposes may provide a way to negotiate the constraints. I should note that I do not interact directly with patients (I have no clinical or psychoanalytic training) nor do I conduct "case" interviews of any kind; examples that I cite in this paper are derived from memoirs, essays, and other written materials as well as from my work with medical students and physicians in an academic medical center, and even from my own experiences as a patient and as a relative of patients. Cultural studies applied to medicine can take several forms. The two forms I will invoke here are an anthropologie-ethnographie-sociologie approach and a criti cal theoretical approach. Ethnographic studies examine practices and characteristics of human societies, interpret behaviors and draw comparisons. In the context of medicine and our current discussion, this involves studying how different cultures perceive illness, communicate about illness, and what treatment options they expect, and then developing generic methods to apply these insights to medical practice.

Resisting Attrition in Stories of Trauma

Abstract: From my perspective as an oral historian who is interested in narratives of trauma, Rita Charon's essay prompts the reminder that memory is something that sets out to capture something else that is already lost. As I think about the project of telling in the profession of medicine, which seeks to repair that which may be already broken, it occurs to me: oral history does have a place at this grand table if in even a very humble way (stealing up to it as a service worker perhaps, an eaves dropper on what is being said, while refilling those great empty Jamesean cups). I am reminded of the paper a wonderful intellectual, Parita Mukta, recently pre sented at the meeting of the International Oral History Association in Rome enti tled The Attrition of Memories: Ethics, Moralities and Futures. Attrition she defined as that process of friction or gradual wearing out that leads to a loss of feeling sorry for sin or contrition that is required for ethical life. The question she asked in her paper was why, with the rise of the spectacular media coverage of vi olence against ethnic groups in her own home country of India, and terrorism across the globe, is there an attrition of real understanding, communication, and sorrow over that which has been lost. She writes, "It is as if despite the most so phisticated and committed use of various media in exposing and laying bare the flagrant abuse of power by brutal governments, civic authorities and those often (faceless) murderers ... there is both an overload of evidence testifying to the vio lence of the contemporary times that permeates all aspects of life, as well as a lack of knowledge of real suffering" (Mukta). Her purpose is to understand how the "attrition of memories" occurs, where the very heart of the communications

Selfhood, Autobiography, and Interdisciplinary Inquiry: A Reply to George Butte

Abstract: In my essay "What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?" I investi gate narrative identity, the idea that what we are could be said to be a story of some kind. Attracted by neurologist Antonio Damasio's belief that both self and narrative are deeply rooted in our lives in and as bodies, I explore the possibilities of a neuro biological approach to self-representation in autobiography. Integral to conscious ness is reflexive awareness, the sense we have that we not only participate in but witness our experience. As Walt Whitman puts it in "Song of Myself," we are "both in and out of the game." We embody this doubleness of our first-person perspective in the I-narrators who tell the stories of our I-character selves. Yet neurologically speaking, the free-standing observer/teller figure that is so central a feature of both autobiographical discourse and the life it describes cannot be extrapolated from the general matrix of consciousness. There is no site-specific location for self in the brain, no phrenological bump, no homunculus to house the reality of our phenome nological experience of selfhood. To express this puzzle, the disjunction between the testimony of experience and the reality of its neurological underpinnings, Damasio likens the play of consciousness to a "movie-in-the-brain." While consciousness inevitably generates "the appearance of an owner and observer for the movie" unfolding in our heads, Damasio stresses that the owner-observer figure is located "within the movie" it seems to witness and not outside it (11). Damasio's movie metaphor suggests that the distinctions we draw

Listening in Psychoanalysis

Abstract: Analysands continuously give signs of feeling ambivalent toward their analysts and their being in analysis at all. Some of them repress the negative side of this am bivalence; others, trying to avoid their positive feelings of love, gratitude, or desire, project the negative feelings onto their analysts and then feel unwanted, despised, or hated. I will be focusing on ambivalence in the psychoanalytic situation and rela tionship as a way to respond to Charon's essay. It seems that, in their ambivalence, analysands hope simultaneously to get rid of their problems and to hang on to them. Taking the negative, they fear to try for change; in keeping with their life-historical stories, they feel hopeless about ever finding someone who will listen to them in a way that is reliably empathetic rather than self-interested, exploitative, or rejecting. When Rita Charon refers to the health worker's making room within the self for the patient's story, she is, among other things, pointing to empathetic listening for ambivalence. The analyst, too, is required to listen in this way. There is no better way to develop an atmosphere of trust and safety; that is, one in which an analysand might muster hope, dare to try to turn in ward, and accept and ultimately acknowledge openly another person's help in work ing toward a better life than she or he has been living. Being alert and responsive to ambivalence, analysts do not take at face value what they hear from analysands (or from their students); rather, they listen for the chorus of mixed voices relaying the analysand's life stories and present experiences. In one respect, they listen in line with what Paul Ricouer has referred to as "the hermeneutics of suspicion." Here, suspicion implies not hostile surveillance but

Multiple Indemnity: Film Noir, James M. Cain, and Adaptations of a Tabloid Case

Abstract: The original conclusion to Billy Wilder's Academy-Award nominated film noir Double Indemnity (1944) depicted its protagonist entering the gas chamber for execution. Walter Neff, having helped his lover Phyllis Dietrichson kill her husband for insurance money, has come to the end of the line to meet his own fate in a fog of cyanide fumes. Ac cording to the shooting script, the film's last scenes followed the facial expressions of Neff's friend and former boss, Keyes, who registered horror at the state-sanctioned death. Unfortunately, although Wilder claimed that this ending was one of the two best scenes he'd ever shot, scholars must rely on the shooting script, production file notes, and a few stills to picture it, for it was excised before the film hit the theatres and to this day remains locked in the Paramount archives.1 Wilder himself said many years after the film's release that he felt the execution was unnecessary, although correspondence in the Production Code files suggests that conflicts with the censors likely caused the scene's elimination.2 Paramount, of course, had the film's box-office promise foremost in mind, and as James Naremore notes, the final film, released with an ending that shows Neff dying from a gunshot inflicted by Phyllis, "is a lighter entertainment than the original and a much easier product for Hollywood to market" (More than Night 94-5). The reasons for its excision notwithstanding, the disappearing death chamber scene graphically suggests the film's debt to a largely unacknowledged source: a sensational tabloid murder story from the 1920s that ended with its perpetrators'