Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma

Re-sounding Images: Outsiders in Persimmon Blackbridge’s Sunnybrook

This essay constitutes a return in that it enacts a dialogue with concepts introduced by Ross Chambers in his keynote address to the 1999 symposium “Facing Life: The Body in Dis-ease.”1 The symposium, held at the University of British Columbia in February of that year, immediately preceded the start of the Narratives of Disease, Disability and Trauma project, that culminated in the conference at which the paper that forms the basis of this essay was first presented in 2002. First, I will first introduce Persimmon Blackbridge’s book Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies (1996), and investigate its relation to the concept of “agencing” as formulated by Ross Chambers. Next, I will offer a Nietzschean reading of Blackbridge’s text as a basis from which to perform a re-sounding of Chambers’ ideas concerning the functions of audibility and amplification in processes of agencing. Reading Sunnybrook through Friedrich Nietzsche’s understanding of the multifarious ways of experiencing that make up a life allows us to stand back from particular assumptions embedded in theories and practices of narrativity. Once these assumptions are suspended, it becomes possible to hear the singularities of the refrain that runs through Sunnybrook, and to understand how the text works to activate spaces from which there is the potential for multiple subjectivities to emerge. My involvement with Chambers’ use of the concept of agencing, and its attendant notions of audibility and amplification, has revolved around questions about how new ways of existing are imagined by those who are designated/diagnosed as outlaws and outcasts. By necessity, this research has taken me into the realm of those who perform acts of designation and 149 joy james Re-sounding Images Outsiders in Persimmon Blackbridge’s Sunnybrook diagnosis, as well as those who suffer their imposition. This aspect of my study has resulted in my recognizing that moral considerations are ultimately unproductive in attempts to understand the “becomings” entailed in the generation of subjective modalities. Persimmon Blackbridge’s book Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies entertains these questions from the outset. The ambiguity of Blackbridge’s title in relation to definitions of “truth” sets the tone for the duration of the readers’ engagement with the text. It is not without significance that the book’s title calls to mind Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (Nietzsche 1999, 139–53). Like Nietzsche, Blackbridge shows that notions of “truth” and “lying” are not moral propositions , but rather consist of determinations that are thoroughly context based. In so doing, she takes on the weight of Western logocentric thought. This is a particularly apt move, in that Blackbridge’s book counters the moral imperative towards rationality and coherence with a celebration of the productive possibilities present in processes of fragmentation. Blackbridge ’s revaluation of what constitutes “normal,” “mental illness,” and “the realm of the rational” complicates any easy understanding of these terms and their histories in Western discourse. Moreover, Nietzsche’s admonition to approach serious and weighty issues as play can be seen to have been illustrated to good effect in Sunnybrook. The playfulness of the text is in keeping with its content in that it provides modes of access that are not dependent on—that, indeed, eschew—dominant narrative forms that privilege linear ways of thinking. Instead, Blackbridge uses the entire field of the page to blast open spatial and temporal continuums, incorporating textual strategies that allow her to animate a multiplicity of subject positions while steadfastly refusing to construct unifying concepts within which to contain, codify, and overwhelm the specificity of experience. The “Sunnybrook” from which the book takes its name was an Ontario psychiatric institution that was closed down by the province during a period in which systems of care for those designated as “mentally ill” were reorganized in compliance with changing perceptions of treatment protocols . Blackbridge’s highly imagistic, autofictive form of mock hypertext is the most recent emanation of a transdisciplinary project that began as a testimony to the struggles of those who have been psychiatrized. The book incorporates and then goes beyond its earlier life as a fine art installation —a large scale exhibition of painting and sculpture that was shown in venues across North America—to engage in a form of witnessing that chronicles a litany of complex difficult topics: adult illiteracy, learning disabilities, mind problems, and outlawed sexual identities. The many sce150 representing the subject [18.222.125.171] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 15:46 GMT...