Tourette in
Fiction: Lethem, Lefcourt, Hecht, Rubio, Byalick
(Re)Constructing Pain
and Joy in Language, Literature, and Culture
HASE 6,
The National &
Kapodistrian
Disorder seems omni-present today, and
trauma and syndromes proliferate. The terminology of trauma and
symptomology is
familiar to us and no longer belongs to a narrow professional register.
We are
more disorder-, syndrome- and trauma-aware than ever before, and
disorder
labels have entered a wider cultural field. The reason could be that we
enjoy
mirroring ourselves in the available trauma images, trying on trauma
for size.
Hence the increasing number of popular culture treatments of
psychological
disabilities in books, TV or films. [Click here
for examples of pop culture references to Tourette]
The late 1990s and early 2000s have especially brought us numerous portraits of Tourette’s sufferers. A search on Amazon.com reveals hundreds of references to books with the word Tourette in them, many of them offering personal testimonies about living and coping with the syndrome. This number alone suggests that the syndrome is widely known in the general public, and that a voyeuristic interest in it has developed.
Of particular interest is the growing number of American fictional treatments of Tourette’s. At least 5 recent novels centre on Tourette sufferers: Peter Lefcourt, The Woody (1998); Daniel Hecht, Skull Session (1998); Gwyn Hyman Rubio, Icy Sparks (1998); Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn (1999); and Marcia Byalick, Quit It (2002). Of the five titles, one is a detective novel, one a thriller, one a political satire, and two are tales of girls growing up in rural America.
Typical of these narratives is that they
depict a character’s journey through confusion and pain, towards a
greater
acceptance of their syndrome as that which lends them an identity
position.
Particularly provocative are the narratives that dare celebrate this
otherness
as a joyful position, usually connected with the representation of
Tourette’s
as a source of linguistic innovation and creativity akin to or
identical with
that of a poet or artist.
