Graham Matthews

Illness Narratives and the Consolations of Autofiction

In the late twentieth century, illness narratives—personal accounts of illness and dying, authored by physicians, patients, and novelists—became established as a literary genre. Illness narratives are valuable because they foreground the lived experience of the patient instead of the dominant biomedical narrative that occludes the experience of suffering with its exclusive focus on physiology. Although medical humanists tend to read illness narratives as powerful and moving stories that honour the experience of sickness, literary critics often distrust affect and value indeterminacy and ambiguity over sentimentality. Whereas illness narratives are typically read as a subgenre of the memoir, this chapter identifies the ways in which a selection of autofictional pathographies blur the boundary between fiction and autobiography and as a consequence problematize notions of truth and authenticity in any illness narrative. The first part details the ways in which the act of narrating the experience of illness through autofictional pathographies produces a provisional, varying and performative self while the second part identifies a series of autofictional theatre and dance performances that literally instantiate this performative aspect. Autofictional pathographies disrupt typical standards of judgement and set aside rigid distinctions between truth and falsity, criticism and sentimentality, consequently empowering sufferers to recount their pain on their own terms. Consequently, autofictional illness narratives reclaim patients’ voices from the biomedical narratives imposed upon them by modern medicine, challenge readers to reconsider their expectations of truth and authenticity and develop awareness of the fungible relationship between the discourse of the clinic and the lived experience of being ill.

Framing risk in China: precarity and instability in the stories of Li Yiyun*

ABSTRACT Drawing on the ‘risk society’ approach of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, which is characterised by the constant state of concern, anxiety, and dread people feel in relation to environmental threats to human health, this article explores the ways in which the Chinese author Li Yiyun presents the relationship between Chinese and Western conceptions of risk. By orchestrating a series of imagined encounters between Chinese nationals and Chinese living overseas, Li’s fiction challenges ethnocentric conceptions of identity and signals the inadequacy of any understanding of risk that is not culturally, historically and geographically situated. Li’s narratives indicate the ways in which new conceptions of risk, influenced by but not identical to the uncertain dynamics of the ‘risk society’, are developing in post-Mao China. Whereas the ‘risk society’ is the result of scepticism towards modernity, contemporary Chinese culture is broadly optimistic regarding progress and industrialisation. Li’s work is unique insofar as it signals the ways in which conceptions of risk from the West are subtly interacting with and altering conceptions of fragility and uncertainty in China and in turn sheds light on the constructed nature of ‘risk’ under globalisation.

‘The Unfailing Regularity of Dr Busner’: Will Self and the Psychiatrists

Throughout his rich and wide-ranging oeuvre, Will Self has been concerned with psychotropic states and the abuse of institutional power; these are often combined in his satiric representations of the psychiatric profession. Recurrent tropes such as metamorphosis, exaggerations of scale, distortions of inner and outer space, the combination of elevated language with the vernacular, and the creative juxtaposition of typically non-fungible spheres of human experience, cumulatively challenge assumptions made on the basis of direct sensory experience. Consequently, like many satirists, Self urges readers to exert their intellectual capacity over sensory instruction in order to interrogate the rhetoric employed by those in positions of authority. This, in turn, licenses us to make ethical judgements concerning the uses of institutional power.

‘Fucking and Fighting’: Will Self and Gender

Self has always evinced a fascination with gender relations and repeatedly engaged with various forms of masculinity. At various points throughout his oeuvre, he has staged the conflict between essentialist and social constructionist perspectives on gender and sexuality. Although the satiric form risks replicating simplistic gender binaries, his work tends to problematize assumptions about gender in contemporary British society. This chapter reads Self’s work as a series of attempts to destabilize monolithic representations of sexual difference. Although Self does not straightforwardly celebrate the fluidity of gender roles, his work constitutes a sympathetic and critical engagement with the effects of evolving cultural views on what masculinity and femininity can and might mean. This chapter discusses the depiction of ‘gender trouble’ in novels such as Cock and Bull and Dorian, and short stories such as ‘Chest’, ‘The End of the Relationship’, ‘Caring and Sharing’ and ‘Flytopia’.

‘These Artisans of the Body’: Will Self and the Doctors

It is a common trope in Self’s fiction, and satiric literature more generally, to find the vaunting ambitions and pretensions of the intellect brought low by the material needs of the body. Satirists ranging from Juvenal and Horace through Pope and Swift to Huxley and Waugh have employed the grotesque, vile, or diseased body as a metaphor for the ‘body-politic’ in order to harness the visceral revulsion associated with sickness and decay to more abstract instances of immorality, vice and corruption. For instance, Dryden transforms his victims into ‘fantastic dinosaurs of bulging flesh and peanut brains’ while Aldous Huxley confronts his readers with a range of simian grotesques in novels ranging from After Many a Summer (Dies the Swan) (1939) to Ape and Essence (1949). Self frequently presents readers with representations of the obese, diseased and addicted body as a metaphor for the excesses of consumer society and a wider cultural malaise. Unlike tragedy and romance, satire debunks spiritual and aesthetic ideals by emphasizing corporeality and finitude and it is in this respect that the satirist finds common ground with aims and methods of the medical practitioner. Whereas doctors treat their patients using palliatives and cures, which can be invasive and demanding, the satirist attempts to treat society by seeking out and displaying vice and corruption within the body politic.

Introduction: ‘The Magus of the Quotidian’

In April 2000, the author, journalist and television personality Will Self wrote a review of the BBC reality TV programme Castaway (2000–1), a show that for one year followed the travails of 36 British men, women and children as they attempted to build a self-sufficient community on the remote Scottish island of Taransay in the Outer Hebrides. Dismissing the notion that participants were simply chosen as social outliers who would create drama and drive ratings, Self lambasts them as a synecdoche for the greater British public insofar as they express the desire to ‘find themselves’, experience ‘nature’ and live in a small community, but only when that lifestyle is bracketed by the presence and resources of a media company and fortnightly supplies from the mainland. Self states: I wouldn’t care if they were building a weather station, or monitoring the island’s deer herd, or producing a study of the environment, or even worshipping the bloody wind god, as long as there were a point to this ‘community’ beyond ego and television. (FF 97) Self challenges the contestants’ and the viewers’ complicit desire for an ‘authentic’ Britain, the image of which is ironically located in the artifice of the television spectacle. He highlights the role of the tabloids, producers, directors and the lone resident camerawoman in constructing a televised ‘social-experiment’ that appeals to nostalgic urbanites whilst pointing out that anyone who genuinely desires the lifestyle promoted by the show can achieve this by simply arriving in the Western Isles, which have suffered the debilitating effects of depopulation over the past century.

‘A Psyche Available for Product Placement’: Will Self and Consumption

In 1995 Will Self wrote a video treatment for the Bristol-based triphop collective Massive Attack. In an inversion of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers (1952), which depicts the lives of tiny people who live in the walls and ‘borrow’ from the occupants in order to survive, Self portrays the Lenders who wear serious business suits and glasses and have ‘built a network of open-plan offices behind the wainscotting’ (FF 155) where they track all the things that they have ‘lent’ to the occupants of the house. At the start the Lenders appear, armed with clipboards and a miniature VDU, and promptly repossess a toy rabbit belonging to one of the children, which they claim was purchased using money lent by them. The father disputes this but upon discussing the matter with his bank manager learns that ‘the money the bank lent was actually lent to the bank by…the Lenders’ (FF 155). Meanwhile the language of business and finance intrudes upon a conventional domestic scene. The mother is apathetic in the face of the needs of her children and learns that she has ‘drawn too heavily on her stock of motherhood. She has exceeded her motherhood overdraft’ (FF 156). In a grotesque scene she must suckle increasing numbers of Lenders in order to make good her debt. In despair the father asks where the Lenders obtained their capital in order to extend a line of credit to the family.

‘This Great Torrent of Verbiage’: Will Self and the Satirists

In 1994 Self wrote an essay concerning the state of English culture in which he suggests that despite the apparent self-loathing, exhaustion and parochialism exhibited by the English novel (as opposed to the English-language novel), the form is thriving as a site of cultural interchange, invention and perversity. Entitled ‘The Valley of the Corn Dollies’, this article portrays English culture as a site of productive antagonisms: colonizer and colonized; bigoted and liberal; introverted and expansive; radical and conservative; monarchical and democratic; a land of both opportunity and inequality; of tradition and modernity. It is as a site of profound and complex oppositions that Self locates what, for him, is its greatest strength: ‘I believe, personally, [England is] the best possible country for someone with a satirical bent to live in. I’d go further: England has the world’s top satirical culture.’1 In a review of Rude Britannia, an exhibition of British comic art and cartoon held at Tate Britain in 2010, he not only claims that ‘the satiric taproot is sunk into British soil’, but comments on how crucial ‘its rigorous propagation has always been to our constitution — both political and psychological’.2 Since the post-war period, which saw unprecedented levels of devolution and decolonization, faltering economic performance and the coupling of technological advancement to national achievement, British culture — and English culture in particular — began to foster a myth of national decline in the face of rising international competition and the steady transition from empire to commonwealth.

‘Dissolving the Mechanised Matrix’: Will Self and Psychogeography

From 2003 to 2008 Will Self’s ‘Psychogeography’ column for The Independent recorded his experience of walking through locations around the world in order to trace the ways in which various psychological states are stimulated by geographical locations. Although, as the column’s title suggests, Self is influenced by the Situationists, unlike their derive (aimless drift) Self’s walks are not without purpose and are invariably stimulated by business commitments, family excursions and the desire to explore. While Self maintains a cynical distance from Guy Debord’s utopian vision of psychogeography as a subversive response to capitalism, he nevertheless takes pleasure in disrupting the mechanisms that ensure the smooth funnelling of diverse individuals into homogenized lines of transit. For instance, during his walk to Heathrow Airport, Self is confronted with the sign: ‘No pedestrian access. Go back to the Renaissance’ (P 15), the Renaissance in question being a hotel on Bath Road from which he is required to take the shuttle bus. This incident allows Self to present himself as an anarchic distorter of time stimulated by venturing into the dead spaces of the urban environment. In his first ‘Psychogeography’ column, entitled ‘South Downs Way’, Self expresses the following rationale: ‘I’ve taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanized matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography’ (P 69).

Chinese Historical Fiction in the Wake of Postmodernism: Two Versions of Yan Geling's The Flowers of War

Abstract:The English translation of Yan Geling’s Jinling Shisan Chai includes several new additions that are suggestive of key differences between Chinese and Western conceptions of narrative and history. Whereas the Chinese original challenges monolithic interpretations of history with a self-consciously mythologized reading of the past, the international version seeks to counter revisionist histories and the cynicism of the assumed Western reader with additions that emphasize the materiality of the historical event. I argue that the additions highlight the impossibility of reconstituting material history through narrative and calls for a reassessment of the ethics of historical fiction.