This article provides a discussion of the limits of both narrative and culture based on a close textual analysis of the short story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” by Lorrie Moore. In this story, a mother describes her experiences on a pediatric oncology ward when her infant son develops Wilms' tumor. The authors examine how the story satirically portrays the spurious claims of language, story, and culture to protect us from an unjust universe and then exposes their false promises. The various personal, professional, and genre-specific narratives we use to create order and coherence from the terror of serious illness are ultimately ineffective. Similarly, the superficially comforting culture of the hospital ward cares more about creating the illusion of control than it does about the suffering of sick children. Language and culture cannot make sense of human anguish, the article concludes, yet they are all we have to hold back the chaos. Mystery and uncertainty, as part of the human condition, must become part of our stories and part of our culture.
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Lorrie Moore, “People” Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling on Peed Onk,” in Birds of America (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1998), 212–250.
Joseph R. Betancourt, “Cross-Cultural Medical Education: Conceptual Approaches and Frameworks for Evaluation.” Academic Medicine 78 (2003): 560–569.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
John Paul Lederach, Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation across Cultures (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995). Lederach presents an alternative model for pursuing peaceful resolution of political and interpersonal conflicts triggered by encounters between disparate cultures.
Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography, 2nd edn (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1999), 10. Hawkins’ typologies of illness narratives include testimonial or didactic pathography offered for the benefit of others; angry pathography, focusing on the disjunctive of the patient‘s experience in contrast to “official” versions of illness; and what she calls “myths” of journey, battle, rebirth, and transformation.
Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed-Onk,” op. cit., 237. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.
Anatole Broyard, Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1992), 19. Broyard's book also offers an extraordinary essay, “The Patient Examines the Doctor,” in which he ruminates on the ideal doctor-patient relationship from the literary patient's point of view.
Robert Coles, The Call to Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1989), 7, 13–14. Coles’ account of learning to listen to the stories of patients and students is one of the classic writings placing narrative at the center of the physician-patient relationship.
Arnold Weinstein, “The Unruly Text and the Rule of Literature.” Literature and Medicine 16 (1997): 19.
Arnold Weinstein, Literature and Medicine, 3.
Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, op cit.
Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), x. This collection of clinical stories explores the implications of severely altered states of perception, mentation, and consciousness for concepts of self, identity, and personhood.
Robert Murphy, The Body Silent (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). Murphy views his descent into quadriplegia resulting from the effects of an inoperable spinal tumor through the lens of his anthropological training.
Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Bodies, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). This postmodernist analysis of illness narratives discusses narratives of restitution, chaos narratives, narratives of quest and transformation, and narratives of testimony.
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).
Allan Parry and Robert E. Doan, Story ReVisions: Narrative Therapy in the Postmodern World (New York: Guilford Press, 1994). Parry and Doan situate a narrative-based approach to psychotherapy within postmodernist discourse.
Munson P. “Criminal Language and Poetic Jailbreak: Writing Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome.” Literature and Medicine 19 (2000): 19–24.
Harold Schweizer, “Against Suffering: A Meditation on Literature.” Literature and Medicine 19 (2000): 229–240.
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Schaff, P., Shapiro, J. The Limits of Narrative and Culture: Reflections on Lorrie Moore's “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk”. J Med Humanit 27, 1–17 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-005-9000-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-005-9000-7