Illness as Narrative

Chapter 2: Life Narratives in the Risk Society

18 As we have seen, there are many explanations for why and how illness memoirs evolved into a thriving genre in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. When science developed better explanations for disease and more effective treatments, personal stories of illness were displaced from clinical settings in the United States and surfaced elsewhere. With the growth of the publishing industry, changed attitudes toward personal disclosure, patient activism about women’s health and AIDS, and the rise of the Internet, more people turned to the written word to give illness meaning. At least one more factor that motivated the emergence and popularity of this subgenre of life writing has been hidden in plain sight: our increasing awareness of statistically calculated risk.1 During the twentieth century, with the rise of the field of statistics, a vast quantity of information about health risks became available. In the United States, increasing numbers of people have some knowledge of the health risks indicated by their blood pressure and cholesterol, smoking, drinking, and eating habits, as well as, in recent years, their genetics. As health statistics have proliferated, so have illness memoirs. Although we do not fully understand the function of these narratives, one of them appears to be to make personal meaning of the impersonal statistics that represent one’s life “at risk.” The concept of the “risk society” emerged in the 1980s when Ulrich Beck coined the term in his treatise, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, about T∑o} Life Narratives in the Risk Society lIfe narratIves In the rIsk soCIety 19 the central role of risk in the social transformations that took place in the shift from the modern to the late-modern era. Beck’s Risk Society is one of the most influential academic books of the late twentieth century, having been translated into twenty languages and selling more than eighty thousand copies.2 Before industrialization, Beck points out, natural hazards and disease constituted the greatest threats to survival. Later, during the industrial and modern eras, people grew confident that scientific and technical progress would enable humans to control the natural world. In the late-modern era, however, although natural threats remain, human-generated risks—global threats that are a hybrid of nature and culture—now occupy center stage, especially “ecological and high-tech risks” (22). Think, say, of planetary risks such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Japanese nuclear crisis, climate change, the global economic recession, and terrorism. These hazards are examples of what Beck calls “reflexive modernization,” in which such risks are, in fact, the effects of modernization (12).3 Among the changes late modernism has brought to the common citizen is that probabilistic assessments of the nature and degree of particular risks compete with or supplant master narratives based on beliefs in fate or a divine plan.4 If we accept that the prevalence of statistical assessments of risk has altered contemporary experience in much of the world, then for literary and cultural critics a key question should be, “What kinds of stories emerge and flourish in such conditions?” A small body of work in literary studies addresses the question of how statistics and risk have affected literature, and in these texts critics generally take the position that statistical science is a tool of the state and the medical establishment. Although none of this work directly addresses illness memoirs, some of it can inform a study of what I call “risk narratives,” autobiographical and literary explorations of the meanings of risk. In Enforcing Normalcy, for instance, Lennard J. Davis argues that statistical understanding of health and disease in the nineteenth century brought into being the idea of normalcy, a concept that was “promot[ed] and symbolically produc[ed]” by the novel (41). Statisticians studying facts and figures about the body saw that graphs of data generally looked like bell-shaped curves with most of the data points clustered in the middle. This central group of data came to be understood as representing what was normal. Consequently, in science and government—anywhere that data about populations was collected—the norm was redefined as desirable. The novel then evolved into a literary form suited to portraying normal, rather than ideal, lives. Davis maintains that “the very structures on which the novel rests tend to be normative, ideologically emphasizing the universal quality of the central character whose normativity encourages us to identify with him or her” (41). The genre’s representation of the norm...