Speaking with Frankenstein
- PDF / 334,006 Bytes
- 16 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 100 Downloads / 178 Views
Speaking with Frankenstein Jayne Lewis 1
& Johanna Shapiro
2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
This collaborative essay experimentally applies the insights of Mary Shelley's 1818 gothic fantasy Frankenstein to clinical interactions between present-day physicians and the patients they, akin to Shelley's human protagonist, so often seem to bring (back) to life. Because that process is frequently fraught with unspoken elements of ambivalence, disappointment, frustration, and failure, we find in Shelley's speculative fiction less a cautionary tale of overreach than a dynamic parable of the role that the unspoken, the invisible, and the unknown might play in contemporary physician/patient relationships. Playing with that parable, we consider its relevance to four often unacknowledged dynamics that shape physician/patient interaction: commitment to a false binary of life and death; the tyranny of normative aesthetics; shared negative affect; and the ethics of care and care-denial. To "speak with Frankenstein" is, we show, to make space for the otherwise unspeakable. The result is a more complete model of narrative medicine that accommodates to its ideal of open communication and full attention the persistence of what cannot be said, seen, or known–only imagined and approximated. Keywords Medical aesthetics . Narrative medicine . Gothic fiction . Medical ethics . Affect theory
Introduction Is there anything left to say about Frankenstein? Probably not, says a flood of reassessment on the occasion of the book’s two-hundredth birthday in 2018. Yet in itself that flood tells us that Mary Shelley’s iconic novel is still very much here to be spoken with, at once a revelatory interlocutor in its own right and a versatile facilitator of other conversations. As a professor of literature and a professor of medicine, we are especially interested in what it might mean to “speak with” Victor Frankenstein and his Creature because this process can provide creative insight into the relationships that develop between modern-day physicians and the patients * Jayne Lewis [email protected]
1
Department of English, University of California, Irvine 92697, USA
2
School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine 92697, USA
Journal of Medical Humanities
whom they so often, in a sense, bring (back) to life. Such relationships are themselves signified by verbal exchanges between physicians and patients—by the ways in which they speak or do not speak with one another. Here, however, we speculate as to how imaginative dialogue with a work of literary fiction that is itself grounded in speculation might illuminate such exchanges, thereby fostering previously unthinkable and indeed unspeakable forms of mutual understanding. What do we mean by speaking with? How does it differ from speaking about? In the clinical setting, the distinction between speaking with and speaking about is easily grasped, especially when we map it onto the work of the medical sociologist Arthur Frank, who wrote perceptiv
Data Loading...
