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The Wounded Storyteller: A Recommended Book (Part 2 of 3)–The Chaos Narrative
The first kind of narrative Arthur Frank writes about in The Wounded Storyteller is the restitution narrative. That’s the one where a person goes through some kind of illness or trouble and then becomes restored to one’s old self. (X = X.) The second kind of narrative possible in the wake of illness or loss is much less tidy. I can’t think of a simple equation that could represent it. The second narrative is the chaos narrative. It’s the kind of narrative that results, often, when the restitution narrative breaks down. Frank writes: Chaos is the opposite of restitution: its plot imagines life never getting better. An example Frank uses here is that of a woman with chronic illness trying to take care of her mother who has Alzheimer’s. She’s trying to tell something of what it’s like—a glimpse of the chaos in the kitchen—as she’s trying to make dinner: And if I’m trying to get dinner ready and I’m already feeling bad, she’s in front of the refrigerator. Then she goes to put her hand on the stove and I got the fire on. And then she’s in front of the microwave and then she’s in front of the silverware drawer. And—and if I send her out she gets mad at me. And then it’s awful. That’s when I have a really, really bad time. Chaos stories can feel really, really bad. They’re hard to experience. They’re hard to tell. They can also be hard to hear. But, Frank argues, it’s necessary that they be heard. He writes: The need to honor chaos stories is both moral and clinical. Until the chaos narrative can be honored, the world in all its possibilities is being denied. To deny a chaos story is to deny the person telling this story, and people who are being denied cannot be cared for. People whose reality is denied can remain recipients of treatments and services, but they cannot be participants in empathic relations of care. To deny a chaos story is to deny the person telling this story, and people who are being denied cannot be cared for. He’s saying a lot here, and I’m quite sure not everyone would agree with him, but I think he’s onto something. He continues: Those living chaotic stories certainly need help, but the immediate impulse of most would-be helpers is first to drag the teller out of this story, that dragging called some version of ‘therapy’. Getting out of chaos is to be desired, but people can only be helped out when those who care are first willing to become witnesses to the story. Chaos is never transcended but must be accepted before new lives can be built and new stories told. Those who care for lives emerging from chaos have to accept that chaos always remains the story’s background and will continually fade into the foreground. He’s walking, I think, a delicate balance here. Getting out of chaos is desirable. But you can’t get out without first honoring it somehow. So how is a person to honor chaos? And how do you eventually find your way out? Can writing help? I’ve found it can sometimes help during chaos just to begin to name it as chaos. Oh, this is chaos. A person could write just...
read moreThe Wounded Storyteller (Part One)–The Restitution Narrative
There are certain books that I can remember where I was when I first began to read them. Perhaps something like this has happened for you. I found this book in the Wake Forest Library, and I took the book and began reading it on a low stone wall near a creek not far from the library. This was several years ago now. As I read I had a feeling as if thoughts and stories inside my head were literally rearranging and falling into new patterns. It was as if the author, Arthur Frank, had taken the thousands of stories of illness and loss I’d heard in my life—many of these told to me by patients—and he’d placed them into a kind of new and pleasing order, one that made an inordinate sense. Arthur Frank is a medical sociologist and a survivor of testicular cancer. He opens The Wounded Storyteller by quoting a woman, Judith Zaruches, with chronic fatigue syndrome. He quotes from a letter that she wrote to him: The destination and map I had used before were no longer useful. The Wounded Storyteller speaks to the stories people tell (and write) when the old story—the one used prior to illness or loss—no longer suffices. The book is a dense book—it contains many things. The part I have found most useful—most illuminating—is in the middle chapters of the book, where Arthur Frank names three kinds of stories that people tend to make in the wake of illness and suffering. He acknowledges, at the outset, the fluid nature of these stories. People move back and forth among the three kinds of stories—the stories intersect and overlap. Still, he points to the value of naming the kind of story one is tending to tell. (It’s a bit like beginning to know where one is on the map—or perhaps knowing which map one is using.) The first story is one he calls the restitution narrative. At its simplest it goes like this: I was sick and then I recovered and now I am my old self again. Or, perhaps: I am sick now but I will recover and then I know I will be my old self. This is the narrative that arises most naturally in the wake of an acute illness—after the flu, or ordinary pneumonia, or a broken bone. It can occur in the wake of certain kinds of cancer, when, for instance, the surgeon comes back with the report that he or she got it all, that the margins are clear. It can also occur in the wake of a replaceable loss. A tree falls on a house and the roof is crushed—but then the roof gets fixed. I tend to picture this first narrative like a simple algebraic equation. If I was X before my illness, then I know the story has come to an end—and a good end—when I am recovered to X again. I am back at work. I’m running again, or swimming, or driving, or dancing, or whatever it is that makes me feel like I am my old and familiar self. X = X. Restored. This is a very useful narrative, I think. It’s a very comforting narrative. It works for many things, including many illnesses. In fact, I don’t know that I...
read moreQuest: An Image for Writing and Healing
In The Wounded Storyteller, a book I plan to write about soon, the author, Arthur Frank, writes about the possibility of illness being transformed by an image of quest. He writes [p. 115]: Quest stories meet suffering head on; they accept illness and seek to use it. Illness is the occasion of a journey that becomes a quest. What is quested for may never be wholly clear, but the quest is defined by the ill person’s belief that something is to be gained through the experience. This is not to say that illness is ordinarily welcome—or that it’s all for the good. Not like that. In my experience, it’s rarely like that. (And I doubt that Arthur Frank is implying that it’s like that.) Rather, he’s pointing to that possibility that illness—or grief—or loss—or difficulties of different sorts—the possibility that any one of these can serve as an occasion that can initiate something that can be called, for lack of a better word, a journey. As Frank himself mentions [p. 117], the use of the word journey for various experiences may have become something of a fad of late, but that doesn’t mean that it has no meaning—or that it can’t be useful. For me, the most useful thing about these words—journey—quest—is that they raise the possibility that illness and suffering might not merely be lost time. One can be moving even when it doesn’t feel as if one is moving. One could begin a journey of this sort and end up somewhere entirely unexpected—or one could come home at the end and begin to realize that one has brought something back—something of value—something of beauty. Which is not to say that most of us don’t resist these kinds of journeys, especially at first—or as long as we think we can get away with...
read moreMarch Index
Index (in chronological order) Quest: An Image for Writing and Healing The Wounded Storyteller I–The Restitution Narrative The Wounded Storyteller II–The Chaos Narrative Chaos: An Image for Writing and Healing Mary Swander’s Fifth Chair: Honoring the Chaos Narrative The Wounded Storyteller III–The Quest Narrative Quest: A Word-Map from Visual Thesaurus Writing Idea #26: Figuring Out Where One is on the Map Toni Morrison on Beowulf and Grendel The North Star and a Small Beautiful Boat Writing Idea#27: What Am I Here For? (I) Writing Idea #27: What Am I Here For (II) Writing Idea #28: Consulting with the Wizard of Oz Swimming to Antarctica: A Recommended Book The Wreck and the Treasure Writing Idea #29: A Title for Your Quest Writing Idea #30: Choosing Chapter...
read moreWriting and Healing Idea #25: A Memo at Your Breakfast Plate
It occurs to me that it might be okay to borrow Salinger’s Seymour for an idea for writing and healing. You could imagine that you write some piece of your story, and you could imagine that Seymour reads it while you are sleeping. You could imagine that when you wake in the morning there is an envelope at your breakfast plate. You open the envelope. Inside is a memo. Inside he has written—what? That he can see the leaps in your story? That he’s seen how all your stars have come out? That he’s seen—what? What would you most long for him to say? You could write this down–what you most long for him to say–or for someone to say. You could write this on a piece of notepaper, or on a shirt cardboard, or on a piece of hotel stationery. You could write it at night perhaps and place it on the table where you eat your breakfast. You could write it early in the morning and place it in an envelope beneath a half of a grapefruit. And then you could read this memo with your breakfast as a way to begin your...
read moreA Memo from J.D. Salinger’s Seymour: An Image for Writing and Healing?
One of the first writing workshops I ever took—this at the University of Missouri in Columbia—was taught by Janet Desaulniers, a woman who I’ve written about here before. One evening she began class by reading to us an extended passage from a J.D. Salinger story. The workshop was a fiction-writing workshop. She’d been reading our stories for weeks. And she prefaced these pages by Salinger by telling us that she sometimes felt a lot of responsibility, knowing that, at least for some of us, she was our first reader. She took this seriously—being a reader. It was one of the things that made her a good teacher. The passage she read was from, “Seymour, an Introduction,” this one in a series of stories that Salinger wrote about the Glass family. In this particular story, Buddy Glass, a writer, is telling about his older brother, Seymour, a young man whom he idolized and who is now dead. In the passage she read to us Buddy Glass is telling about a time when he was twenty-one years old and living with his brother, and had the habit of reading his stories aloud to him. And Seymour would then write responses to these stories, lengthy responses, sometimes writing them on shirt cardboards, or on whatever he could find at hand. Here is one particular memo, this written by Seymour on notepaper from the Bismarck Hotel in Chicago and placed on Buddy’s breakfast plate beneath a half a grapefruit. It’s daylight out, and I’ve been sitting here since you went to bed. What bliss it is to be your first reader. It would be straight bliss if I didn’t think you valued my opinion more than your own. It really doesn’t seem right to me that you should rely so heavily on my opinion of your stories. That is, you. . . . You must know yourself that this story is full of big jumps. Leaps. When you first went to bed, I thought for a while that I ought to wake up everybody in the house and throw a party for our marvelous jumping brother. What am I, that I didn’t wake everybody up? . . . Excuse this. I’m writing very fast now. I think this new story is the one you’ve been waiting for. And me, too, in a way. You know it’s mostly pride that’s keeping me up. I think that’s my main worry. For your own sake, don’t make me proud of you. I think that’s exactly what I’m trying to say. If only you’d never keep me up again out of pride. Give me a story that makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all of your stars are out, and for no other reason. Excuse the underlining, but that’s the first thing I’ve ever said about one of your stories that makes my head go up and down. Please don’t let me say anything else. . . . I could write more here. But I’m thinking perhaps that I shouldn’t write anything else. Except perhaps to say that I think this whole notion of a first reader—and how that first reader responds—or how one imagines that this first reader might respond—has something to do with writing and...
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