Narratives
of Disorder - Disorders of Narrative
What is order, what is
disorder? Consecution
of temporal events (things happen in sequences which are easy to
follow,
flashbacks and –forwards are clearly marked) and causality (cause
precedes
effect) is normally regarded as a prerequisite for understanding
narratives.
What happens when narratives become disorderly by violating the
principles of
consecution?
One approach might be to
look at
narratives about disorder, or narratives where protagonists
or narrators
suffer from disorders. Such disorders as amnesia, attention
deficiencies,
involuntary tics and compulsions (such as Tourette Syndrome symptoms),
and
other perception and communication related disorders, such as
autism/Asperger’s
syndrome or certain forms of schizophrenia all pose challenges to
narratives:
interruptions, lacunae, disruptions, inversions, surpluses can all
become
narrative manifestations of these disorders. Can non-sufferers of these
disorders still decode such disturbed narratives? (If so, why and how?)
Can we
even learn things from them, we cannot learn from more orderly
narratives?
A proposition
would be that by
reading both fictional and non-fictional disorder narratives, we might
gain
insights into both the orders and disorders of brains and psyches and
the workings of narratives as a medium of carrying meaning.
A tentative corpus for this lecture consists of the following recent
fictions:
Mark Richard: Fishboy: A Ghost's Tale
(1993)
Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club
(1996)
Gwyn Hyman Rubio: Icy
Sparks (1998)
*
Jonathan Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn
(1999) *
Jonathan
Lethem (ed.): The Book of
Amnesia
(2000) (excerpts)
Myla Goldberg: Bee Season
(2001)
Don De Lillo: The Body Artist (2001)
Craig
Clevenger: The Contortionist's
Handbook (2002)
Nicholson
Baker: A Box of Matches
(2003)
Mark Haddon: The Curious
Incident of
the Dog
in the Night-time (2003)
* - covered in my recent paper
on Tourette
in Fiction