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The Wounded Storyteller (Part Three of Three): The Quest Narrative

Posted by on March 11, 2007 in Recommended Books

I’m returning now (finally) to The Wounded Storyteller, and to the third and final kind of narrative Arthur Frank suggests a person can make in the wake of illness and suffering—the quest narrative. He defines this narrative thus: Quest stories meet suffering head on; they accept illness and seek to use it. He outlines a structure for this quest story, borrowing from Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces. He describes three key stages of a quest, which I’m including here with a few comments. (These stages may already be quite familiar to many of you.): Departure: This begins with some kind of call. In a mythic hero or heroine story this call might be that moment when something or someone entirely new appears and sets an adventure in motion—say, for instance, a stranger appears with a rumor about a holy grail that needs to be located. In an illness story the call can be a symptom—a call from the body itself. Or it can be that moment when a doctor gives a name to the symptom. Included in this first stage is the typical response to this call—for most heroes and heroines as well as ordinary folks—“the refusal of the call.” No, this can’t be. No, I must have heard wrong. No. “Eventually,” Frank writes, “the call can no longer be refused—symptoms are unmistakable, diagnoses are made—and what Campbell calls ‘the first threshold’ is crossed.” Crossing this first threshold ushers in the second stage of the quest. Initiation: This stage involves what’s called “a road of trials”. This is the long middle part of the quest story. The part where a person may begin to reckon with the fact that this thing—this illness or loss or trouble or adventure—or all of these combined—this thing is going to be something of a big deal. This is not nothing. Something is happening. Often a significant part of this stage can be frightening and uncomfortable. The hero or heroine is tested and tempted. Like Odysseus on his ship steering between Scylla and Charbydis. A key part of this stage is a sense that at some point the hero or heroine is changed. Transformed. Something happens—not just outside the hero or heroine but inside. This is perhaps the key place where this narrative differs, for instance from the restitution narrative. X is no longer quite X. X is becoming Y. This stage of the quest story ends with what Campbell calls a boon. The teller of the story has received something—a blessing of some sort—or treasure—or piece of wisdom. And now is ready for the third stage. Return: Here the teller returns from an experience—an adventure—a road of trials—a journey—somehow marked. (Like Odysseus returning to Penelope. Or Frodo returning to the shire.) Here, Frank makes an interesting distinction. In one kind of hero story the hero returns as one who has conquered. And this conquering hero may, on return, boast of his accomplishments. In another kind of story—what he calls a postmodern kind of hero story—the hero returns not so much boastful as somewhat humbled. Frank writes: The paradigmatic [postmodern] hero is not some Hercules wrestling and slugging his way through opponents, but the Bodhisattva, the compassionate being who vows to return to earth to share her enlightenment with others. Compassion as...

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Mary Swander’s Fifth Chair: Honoring the Chaos Narrative

Posted by on March 8, 2007 in Forms for Writing and Healing

Before I go ahead and finish writing about Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller, and make my way to his third kind of narrative, the quest narrative, I thought I’d put in a passage from an essay by Mary Swander, an essay that manages to convey well, I think, something of the chaos narrative—and how hard it can be sometimes to get someone to listen to, and help hold, the chaos narrative. In an essay, called “The Fifth Chair,” in the anthology, Healing Circle, that she co-edited, Mary Swander writes about her experience with myelitis, an inflammation of the spinal cord, which resulted for her in an extremely painful, chronic, relapsing, and at times immobilizing illness. At one point she finds herself requiring a wheelchair, dreading sunset because her joints had this tendency to lock up during the night, immobilizing her in her bed. And she writes about how listeners—these nearly always able-bodied listeners—had a tendency, to interrupt her story of illness, her at times perhaps chaotic story of illness, and insert their own meaning. She writes: A huge chasm opened between me and the rest of the world. I looked toward others for support and a cacophony of well-meaning voices rose up to fill the empty spaces. You’re making a joke of everything, taking this too lightly, some said. You’re making too much of a deal of this, others said. You’re not asking for enough help. You’re asking too much. . . I know what it’s like, I had gout for five days. You look good. You look like my grandma. I know what it’s like, I had the flu for five days. You must’ve done something really horrible in your past life to bring this on yourself now. You’re such a good person, why’s this happening to you? Are you depressed? I’m glad you can be so cheerful. Why don’t you move to town? Why don’t you go to New York and see your specialist? Why don’t you move to New Mexico? I love that paragraph. It sounds so—right. I think she gets it right—that’s what people do. Or that’s what they sometimes do. And Swander’s grace here, I think, is in seeing these voices as essentially well-meaning. There’s also a nice sense of comedy—juxtaposing these voices—conveying the cacophony they make. But what then? Swander writes in her essay how she turned away from these voices—took a respite. I stopped answering E-mail and the phone. I stopped playing the radio and the stereo. I let the silence fill my room. I read Thomas Merton, Aldous Huxley, Hildegard of Bingen. I read Meister Eckhart, Thomas a Kempis, and the Rule of St. Benedict. I read Walt Whitman, the Book of Job, Lao-Tzu, and Mary Baker Eddy. Whereas before, that cacophony of voices was filling up the empty space, she writes of how—instead—something new——–I let the silence fill my room. And that list of writers she chose to read. I’m not familiar with all of them, but of the ones I am familiar with, they’re writers who seem to know something about silence—and about empty space. Maybe that’s something that the chaos narrative needs—sometimes. Silence. Empty space. Having written that, it occurs to me to ask a next question: what books would you choose to carry along if you knew...

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The Wounded Storyteller (Part 2 of 3): The Chaos Narrative

Posted by on March 6, 2007 in Forms for Writing and Healing, Recommended Books

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...

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The Wounded Storyteller (Part One)–The Restitution Narrative

Posted by on March 4, 2007 in Recommended Books, Stories

The 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...

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