Cancer from a spatial perspective : locating the unspeakable, healing, and hope

Abstract

Illness narratives in all their variety have become a central focus of the cultural study of health and disease. These stories inform other patients of what it is like to be living with a certain illness, or about treatment options, or about the possibilities of transcendence. They represent efforts on the part of the narrator to make sense of their suffering from the illness and they thereby promote empathic understanding of the illness experience. However, narratives in general rely on a temporal structure in which each event is located in a linear sequence, and this can limit the way illness is represented, especially in relation to a disease like cancer. The story of cancer is often flattened into some kind of personal history or reduced to a strive-to-survive story. This thesis challenges the dominant linear approach to telling cancer stories and argues that a spatialised account is needed to articulate the wider, multi-dimensional cancer experience. Drawing on a range of written and filmic texts, the thesis is an attempt to free cancer from the temporal plot. Even though this is a cultural study of cancer, it is not concerned with the sociocultural/historical reconstruction of the illness. It is not about the voice of patients and the subjective illness experience, either. In fact, it attempts to move away from the very subject of cancer and look at what is outside of this frame. The notion of space offers us an alternative based on its two properties. First, space does not propel its inhabitants to move in any linear direction, but it requires us to explore it in order to know it. Second, space may contain objects and people, and their various relationships formed with one another, which, in turn, give all kinds of meanings to space. The spatial understanding of cancer can thus decentre the scientific reasoning of biomedicine and redefines healing as located within the very experience of illness itself. The spatial perspective, I argue, offers a fuller and more complex vision of the relationship between illness, death and dying that can encompass hope, despair, bad luck and miracle, which are all part of what living with cancer means. A holistic approach is utilised in the thesis, integrating literary, architectural and filmic material. Section One, Stories of Cancer, focuses on what is not being spoken in stories of cancer. It analyses scientific narratives, Dorothea Lynch's memoir Exploding into Light and the films The Bucket List and 2 Become 1. Section Two, The Spatial Story of Cancer, looks at how space tells stories through an analysis of Helen Garner's novel The Spare Room and the network of cancer support centres known as Maggie's Center. Section Three, Hope and Miracles examines the experience of hope among family members and the holistic practice of Chinese medicine. Show more