Reading Silences of Suffering: Narrative Medicine Approach to George Saunders’s “Home”
Shannon R. Wooden | Missouri State University
Publication: Volume 5 Issue 2
Abstract | Literary writers have for centuries professed literary language’s unique ability to convey those aspects of the human condition which are too deep, complex, or painful to simply tell. From Romantic poets insisting on literature’s divine vision of truth to Virginia Woolf’s exhortation to “turn to the poets” for language compatible with the inexpressible experience of illness, writers have championed the pleasure, the mutuality, and the ambiguity of reading as paths to these profound human experiences and the potential ethicality of reading/listening well. More recently, interdisciplinary thinkers in medical settings have explored the specific tension between a suffering person’s urgent need to speak their suffering and the limits of language’s capacity to convey its depth and complexity. This essay borrows from medical sociologist Arthur Frank, and the founding director of Columbia University’s Program in Narrative Medicine, Rita Charon, the purposeful critical vocabulary they have lent to this ongoing conversation. Frank describes various narrative shapes that may contain the “chaotic” disruption that illness, injury, and trauma may make into a person’s life, but even more powerful is the attempt to honor the chaos itself. In the classroom, such an endeavor may provide rich ethical training for readers, students, and teachers alike. In this paper, I read George Saunders’s short story “Home” as exemplary of this practice, arguing that attention to the silences and gaps where trauma cannot be spoken affords a teaching tool for cultivating empathy, within and beyond the classroom.
Key words | George Saunders, “Home,” Short Fiction, American Literature, Trauma, Suffering, Narrative Medicine, Narrative Practice, Pedagogy
Shannon R. Wooden (srwooden@missouristate.edu) is Professor of English at Missouri State University, where she directs the programs in Lliterature and Disability Studies. Her research and publications address literature, popular culture, medicine, disability, and gender. Dr. Wooden is currently working on an analysis of disabled masculinity at the turn of the 21st century, exemplified by the television show Breaking Bad, as well as a reflection on teaching in the pandemic as both professor and mother to reluctant online students.