Literature and Medicine II

31 As Lund, Barry does not thus offer a report in the section “The Beginning” but rather a retrospective narrativization of events. This situation changes remarkable, however, as soon as Barry starts to blog about her experiences. Suddenly, things come unexpectedly, and Barry is no longer in control of the narrative. On December 27, 2007, three months after Keeghan had been considered cured after his first round of treatments and two days after the doctors started to suspect a relapse, Barry writes:

Very quick update. Keeghan had his spectroscopy scan yesterday, and the PET scan today. [...] I spoke with Keeghan’s oncologist briefly today. Honestly, the information that I got from him felt more like bullet statements than answers.

· spot larger

· enhances differently

· new tissue · will consider sending to Houston to M.D. Anderson if surgery necessary

· need to schedule follow-up appointment with neurosurgeon

So, we won’t have true answers until next week. [...] I won’t lie. I’m terrified. [...] My mind is fried just from all the “what if’s.”

Torn between desperation and hope, Barry’s language becomes monosyllabic. She no longer has the power to order and explain her experiences because she does not know their outcome yet; rather than writing her story, she seems to be a character of a story someone else is writing. In a blogged narrative, it seems, narrativization is not possible any longer—a period of a few days may be overlooked and structured, but since the narrative is always open-ended and dependent on an uncertain future, it can never achieve the same degree of closure, structure, and coherence as a text written in retrospect.

32 The concept of narrativization is thus no fruitful theoretical basis for the analysis of blogged narratives of illness and death. Instead, Byron Good suggests, Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory might offer a useful methodological approach. Focusing on oral illness narratives, Good notes: It is my contention that reader response theory has special relevance for our investigation of illness narratives. The narrators of most illness stories [...] are typically in the middle of a story. The narratives they produce are more akin to the “virtual text” of the reader of a story than the “actual” narrative text of a completed novel. They are stories that change as events unfold. They point to the future with both hope and anxiety, and they often maintain several provisional readings of the past and the present. (144) For both the reader of an unknown text and those trying to describe an ongoing experience, Good argues, the story is incomplete, and plot is “less a finished form or structure than an engagement with what has been told or read so far in relation to imagined outcomes that the story may bring” (145).

33 Byron Good, one must note here, is analyzing oral interviews from an anthropological perspective, and he interviewed patients who were suffering from chronic (but not life-threatening) diseases. These interviews were conducted as part of a research project, and Good respects his patient’s privacy by using pseudonyms rather than their real names, and he also only publishes short excerpts from his patient’s narratives rather than their complete stories. Even though Good speaks of “illness narratives” when he describes these interviews, the narratives he refers to have thus little in common with traditional forms of life writing. In spite of this anthropological interest, however, Good’s analysis is extremely interesting in connection to literary and narrative analyses of grief and illness blogs since blogs resemble Good’s interviews in one important aspect: in both cases, the narrating subject is still part of the story it tells.

34 This immediate perspective precludes narrativization and turns interview partners and bloggers alike into readers of their own stories. Like readers, both evaluate the past in light of an emerging present, and they both try to make sense of their situation using an available body of typical plots drawn from their cultural repertoire (cf. Good 146; 153). They are, to use Goods terms, “still actively engaged in ‘emplotting’ the condition from which they suffer” (146). Emplotment according to Good’s definition—“the activity of a reader or hearer of a story who engages imaginatively in making sense of the story” (144)—is similar to the process of narrativization as both activities try to make sense of a situation. In contrast to narrativization, however, emplotment tries to influence the outcome of a still open situation, as an unfinished text always offers multiple readings and perspectives and thus allows for different interpretations. As long as death has not set a definite end to a life, healing is thus still possible for those telling an illness narrative (and those in the middle of reading it), even if miracles are necessary.

35 While printed grief narratives talk about the past only and evaluate this past from the detached position of the present, both grief blogs and Good’s illness interviews are characterized by “a teleology, a sense that the story is going somewhere. The narratives are aimed not only at describing the origins of suffering, but at imaging its location and source and imagining a solution to the predicament” (Good 121). As long as the story is still incomplete, this sense of direction can provide the narrator’s story with meaning, and it can structure experiences and events in a similar way as the process of narrativization. “When the imagined outcome of the story fails to materialize, however, when suffering is not relieved [...] the self is threatened with dissolution” (Good 121).