Refusing to be silenced: Claiming chaos narrative

In the Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank proposed three types of narrative told by people attempting to reclaim their voice and the body made alien by illness – restitution, quest, and chaos. Restitution narrative has dominated media; in it, the patient simply experiences the disease and is presented passively, and the medical community is presented as having agency. In quest narrative, the experiencer becomes their own hero; their suffering brings knowledge which is then shared with the audience who bears witness and is charged with learning the lesson the experience conveys. In quest narrative, while speakers have agency that they are often robbed of in the restitution narrative, they are saddled with the imperative to inspire others. This makes the narrator a hero, but we need to ask, where does the imperative come from that demands that the narrator become a hero and an example for others? If that imperative comes from the audience and market demands, we need to recognize how they are dictating the manner in which stories are told, determining which are selected by publishers and media venues to be disseminated. The third type, the chaos narrative, is rarely encountered by audiences because the chaos narrative is usually erased. This “anti-narrative” can only be lived and cannot be told. The individual living with chronic physical or mental illness or a disability, who cannot be stoic and turn their story into a quest narrative, is rendered mute. Since restitution narrative is also unavailable to these individuals, their stories are left unspoken or unwritten. Their stories have largely been controlled by external agents. Failure to meet normate expectations has meant rejection. How prescriptive norms arose that delegitimatized the authority of chaos narrative must be understood if authentic chaos narrative is to be spoken and written.

„Teraz, myślę, ale wcale nie”1 Zdrój Barbary Klickiej jako narracja maladyczna

This article presents Barbara Klicka’s novel Zdrój as an example of an illness narrative.The novel is discussed in the context of both other examples of the genre and the theoretical works devoted to the topic. The fact she is experiencing illness determines the protagonist’s existence and her perception of the world. It influences her emotions. As a hypersensitive individual, she is ableto recognise the mechanisms of oppression embedded in the process of treatment, such as the objectification of patients. The narrator’s status is peculiar – she is not losing the battle with her illness, neither is she recovering. She is a “wounded storyteller,” remaining in a liminal state. Illness is one of the essential elements of the protagonist’s identity, and not simply the theme of her story but rather a condition without which the story would not exist.

Endings and Beginnings: An Autoethnography of a Father’s Journey through His Son’s Madness, Loss, and a Quest for Meaning

In our society, individuals with mental illness often are stigmatized due to misunderstanding and fear. Families with a member diagnosed as a person with mental illness may find themselves forced to restructure themselves around the idea that they are now coping with a family member who may be subject to social stigma and who may draw them into that same negative framework. In this autoethnographic story, I recall and describe the moment my relationship with my son changed forever—the moment he revealed his mental illness to me. This moment altered my own life course—from businessman, to academic, to wounded storyteller. Personally, transformative experiences like mine tend to create writers because we feel compelled to share our experiences in the form of stories. This is my story, but it could be the story of any parent and child in any family.

Narrating Chaos: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s "DICTEE" and Korean American Fragmentary Writings

In The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, sociologist Arthur Frank uses narratology to typologize the stories people tell about illness. Next to teleological stories of survival, which “reassure the listener that however bad things look, a happy ending is possible”, Frank discusses “the chaos narrative” in which “events are told as the storyteller experiences life: without sequence or discernible causality” 97. While the storytellers discussed by Frank mostly suffer from physical ailments and traumas, I would argue that the chaotic mode of telling also characterizes texts that explore other kinds of traumas, including those related to displacement and shaming experienced by several generations of Koreans and Americans of Korean descent. Drawing on affect studies, I analyze Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE 1982 alongside two essays, by Grace M. Cho and Hosu Kim published in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social 2007, all of which use the collage form to challenge the expectation that “in life as in story, one event [leads] to another” Frank 97. The speech act is foregrounded in all three texts; it is de-naturalized, deformed, shown as a recitation of prescribed language, and repeatedly interrupted. Nonetheless, as Frank suggests, “the physical act becomes the ethical act” because “to tell one’s life is to assume responsibility for that life.” It also allows others to “begin to speak through that story” xx–xxi.

On being a discontinuous person: Ontological insecurity, the wounded storyteller and time in Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon

This article explores ontological security and insecurity in Daniel Keyes’s novel, Flowers for Algernon. It opens with a very brief overview of the 1960s counter-culture to contextualise not only Keyes’s novel but also Laing’s theories of ontological (in)security. After a discussion of Laing’s concept of ontological security and insecurity, the focus shifts to Arthur W. Frank’s notions of the wounded storyteller and how Charlie Gordon’s entry into the medical world constitutes a colonisation of the body that brings with it a deepening sense of ontological insecurity. In entering the world of medical research, Charlie becomes the wounded storyteller, offering a first-person account of his experiences during the experiment and its aftermath. As the initial success of the surgery deteriorates steadily into failure, with the protagonist’s intelligence returning steadily to its pre-operation level, the question of time and how he can make the best use of it to record the experiment becomes paramount. The final section of the article centres on the growing link between the surgery’s failure and how it increases the protagonist’s ontological insecurity. He uses the diminishing amount of time available to him in search of understanding the fuller implications of the experiment. Eventually, he reverts to his initial rudimentary ontological security when he finds himself with the same intellectual level, as prior to the experiment.

The Marathon Journey of My Body-Self and Performing Identity

In this autoethnography, I provide voice to the wounded storyteller (Frank, 1995) in my journey to address issues of embodiment, ‘the body’, and illness in relation to my performing identity, with a particular focus on how I was able to overcame a spinal injury, partial paralysis, and lower back surgeries to cross the finish line as a ‘runner’. I explore how my embodied identity was initially centered on my athletic identity early on in my life to how my sense of body-self has been translated due to an unexpected ‘illness’ and deteriorated physical conditions I have encountered over the past decade, causing me to question, challenge, and critique my perceptions of my performing identity in my altered and new ‘body.’

‘a grate contribyushun for sience’: Promise, threat, and the trauma of failure in Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon

Using aspects of Arthur Frank’s The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics as its basis, this article explores promise, threat and the trauma of failure in Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, and in so doing, offers two alternative metaphors for the curative journey. The first is the plateau or medical model which begins in health, declines into illness and subsequently seeks to restore health to the ill individual. The second, parabolic metaphor begins in illness, rises out of that state but, eventually, regresses into ill-health again. This metaphor is akin to the inverted U-curve. As the novel’s protagonist, Charlie Gordon is the first human to undergo experimental surgery to ameliorate his mental retardation by raising his intelligence to a level approximating normality at least. The experiment has been carried out successfully on laboratory mice, including one named Algernon. Charlie’s progress through the experiment and its consequences is charted through a series of progress reports he writes. The language of the reports themselves epitomises his progress whilst providing an account of what transpires in Algernon’s case. Promise, threat and the trauma of failure, characterised by the ascent, apogee and descent of the parabolic metaphor, provide a tripartite structure for the article.

“I had to make a hero of myself: Leonard Kriegel’s The Long Walk Home as Autopathographical Quest Narrative.”

Leonard Kriegel’s autobiographical memoir, The Long Walk Home can be read as an autopathographical quest narrative, or hero’s journey. While the quest-like nature of Kriegel’s memoir grounds his work in the masculine tradition of American literature, and masculine autobiography in particular, Kriegel’s work also performs functions indicative of the historical emergence of the contemporary illness narrative, which Arthur Frank says in The Wounded Storyteller, “reclaims the author’s right to tell what is her own experience, it reclaims a voice over and against the medical voice, and it reclaims a life beyond illness, even if illness is the occasion of writing” (5). As a result of the tensions inherent in “reclaiming” voice, Kriegel’s work functions politically, offering a counter-voice to the dominant discourse of illness and disability in the modern era.