Narratives of life with illness, disability or trauma occupy a rapidly growing field in literary
studies, and increasingly so over the last thirty years. Among the illnesses, cancer is the one most
often addressed. It is obviously an experience that is enormously difficult to put into language:
how should the suffering, the uncertainty, and the fear of dying be stated? Many patients, some of
whom were writers before the fact, struggle to find a language that can represent their experience
adequately. To them, cancer is not only a biomedical story, but their lived experience. For some,
pain and changes in the body that accompany cancer may escape communication through words
altogether. Along with other life-threatening diseases, cancer can make one face the very limits of
linguistic expression. Therefore, cancer discourse abounds with imaginative tropes such as
metaphors. In fact, as Anatole Broyard has noted in "Intoxicated by my Illness" (1992), his
autobiographical narrative about life with cancer, "the sick man sees everything as metaphor" (7).
Broyard's text, replete with metaphors, is itself a metaphor of his experience. Given the
pervasiveness of metaphor in cancer discourse, it is important to examine how these tropes are
used in the struggle for meaning. Which metaphors can give expression to, or help people deal
with such crises? Cancer is evidently an extreme experience that puts every theory of language
developed over the last thirty years to the test.
Despite these challenges, cancer narratives have undergone a remarkable explosion,
covering the full narrative spectrum from self-help books to highly aestheticized works of art.
The language and organization of the writing depend on a variety of factors, including, in addition
to writerly skill: the individual's type of illness, its stage, its prognosis, progression and treatment,
and the resources at the person's disposal, including support from family and the community. The
texts as metaphor and the metaphors in the texts can reveal a writer's general orientation towards
the body and self, illness, life and death. As such factors and orientations differ, often radically,
from person to person, each cancer narrative tells a unique story. Moreover, the language of each
narrative reveals an astonishing variety of attributed or assumed meanings that appear particularly
crucial in cancer. Metaphors that may seem constructive and therapeutic to one patient, or writer (or
to his/her readers) can be entirely destructive and further traumatizing for others. The language that
patients use reveals an ambiguity in meaning whose range is so perplexing that writers—indeed,
most people—are only now beginning to come to terms with it. Those who do not have cancer and
live in relative certainty may, in fact, enjoy the excess of meaning that metaphor can present.
However, when faced with overwhelming existential uncertainty, and longing for more stable
ground, the ambiguity of language can become problematic. Despite all these difficulties, many
people with cancer struggle to make meaning of their experience and tell or write their story. This
ambivalence, between the impossibility of adequately narrativizing radical illness experiences and a
fundamental need to try, is the central structuring principle of my study, and constitutes the core
problem I will be investigating.
The purpose of this thesis is to establish the crucial importance of metaphor in cancer
discourse and to analyze its resources, ambiguities and ambivalences in narratives of life with
cancer, written in English and German. Primarily a comparative literary analysis, it involves a
"synthetic" methodological approach. I examine not only the literary, but also the psychological
and therapeutic properties of metaphors, drawing upon my literary training, my skills as a social
scientist, and my practice as a nurse. This "therapeutic psychopoetics," as it were, is based on an
empirical, cross-cultural study of metaphors in cancer discourse. Metaphors shape our ability to
frame our experience. Because our meanings vary so radically, we need to analyze the range of
metaphoricity in cancer discourse and map the resources of language for conceptualizing cancer.
Elaine Scarry (1985) has described the move from unspeakable pain to speech as the birth
of language. In cancer, metaphor can help to make this birth of language possible. Appropriating
the unknown, conveying the unspeakable through the known, metaphor provides the building
blocks of language and narratives. A fuller awareness of this resource and its ambiguities can help
us find patterns of narrative forms and language used to give voice to the experience of life with
cancer and improve our sense of the complexity of problems involved in cancer therapy.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/11199 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Teucher, Ulrich C. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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