Introduction: Illness as Many Narratives

Summary

This book starts from the premise that illness narratives are characterised by multiplicity. Among the texts and artworks I encountered in my research, few have driven this idea home (in all its different senses) to me more than my father's own cancer narrative. His untitled story is unfinished and remains unpublished, handwritten in a language that would not be accessible to an Anglophone audience without translation. Reading it a couple of years after his death in 2009, as two kinds of readers inhabiting the same body – a daughter and an academic equipped with various critical tools – I found myself being moved and intellectually intrigued by several of its features.

My father was trained as a mathematician, acquiring expertise in what I considered to be the ultimate discipline of abstraction, and never hid his admiration for numbers. Yet, with the exception of one mathematical equation he devises to explore the relationship between finite life and the concept of infinity (often treated as if it were a number in mathematics), the tools he uses to endow his experiences with meaning are narrative tools. This is not to say that his is a straightforward or single narrative. In its multiplicity of styles, it refuses easy categorisation: one can find diary sections with medical facts and details, but these are integrated into a larger life narrative, and the latter, in turn, into what has been described in literary studies as ‘narrative of community’. My father's story was, consciously or not, documenting not only the everyday rituals of illness and a body in crisis but also details of the rich local life of a Cretan village, where he grew up: the lives of its few remaining inhabitants (improvised stories that emerge, as his narrative indicates, as these people pass by the porch where he sat to write on their way to their daily business), small and large events, traditions under threat by a range of social and cultural changes in Greece; in short, a collective story with the ability to ‘re-enchant’ his illness narrative by investing in other stories and encounters outside of the clinical framework of patients and doctors.