“Whether ill people want to tell stories or not, illness calls for stories” — Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller.
Frank’s assertion that illness calls for stories captures the central mission of ANTH 272/ENGL 264: Healing in Ethnography and Literature, a class taught by Professors Jane Thrailkill and Michelle Rivkin-Fish in the Spring 2024 semester The two professors intertwined their disciplines, English Literature and Anthropology, to teach students about healing narratives.
This class covered a diverse collection of stories in which authors reflected on first-hand suffering, loved ones’ assistance in medical care, the pressure of being a practitioner, and anecdotes of generational trauma. While reading these stories, the professors taught the class about structural issues that have barred some people from quality healthcare and still might today. For example, the course discussed class inequalities in the U.S. dental care system and racist immigration policies. In Western narratives, themes of recognition and identity play a central role in many illness stories.
The class’s grounding text, Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller, operated as an example of a work that introduced individual narratives alongside literary critique. Frank writes about the absolute necessity of telling stories and that by doing so, a person can reclaim their illness and heal themselves in the process.
Professor Rivkin-Fish introduces her anthropological work in Russia as a cultural alternative to Western scholarly perspectives. One of her pieces, in particular, “Tracing landscapes of the past in class subjectivity: Practices of memory and distinction in marketizing Russia,” established the idea of “social memory” that draws on experiences with generational trauma. Since social memory is influenced by culture, coping with past trauma becomes a cultural problem as well. One example of this in our class was in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which was a story told about the Holocaust from the author’s father’s perspective. By writing this story in a graphic narrative form, Spiegelman processed the social memory of his family’s suffering.
Professor Thrailkill expanded upon storytelling as coping and asked students to interrogate how these narratives act to relieve suffering. By assigning readings like Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, Professor Thraikill challenged the class to look past the words themselves and into the inherent values that Bauby writes about. Through this analysis, we saw the full scope of Bauby’s diagnosis, locked-in syndrome, and how it may uniquely affect him.
My favorite pieces were stories written from the caretakers’ perspective. Dana Walrath, in her graphic novel Aliceheimers, depicts her mother’s experience with Alzheimer’s through collaged images with corresponding anecdotes. The idea of “patient” is expanded to correctly fit “person” as well. In the face of an illness that is seen from the outside as restrictive, Walrath works to expand people’s perceptions of Alzheimer’s by recounting the depth of her mother’s intelligence and imagination. The same thing is true of Jonathan Franzen’s “My Father’s Brain,” which also touches on how his father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis impacted their entire family. Near the end of the piece, he writes about the purpose of his essay on Alzheimer’s in a way reminiscent of Arthur Frank: “The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies.”
In ANTH 272, the professors asked students to consider the very same idea that the biomedical experience of illness is just one aspect of an all-consuming circumstance. To truly communicate those circumstances, one must start by writing a story. Professors Thrailkill and Rivkin-Fish encouraged us to read those stories, analyze their deeper meanings, and draw connections between works to attempt to truly understand healing through many diverse voices.
Isabel Kakacek is an undergraduate student in her senior year at UNC majoring in English and Comparative Literature with a concentration in Science, Medicine, and Literature with a second major in Medical Anthropology and a minor in Media & Journalism.