Contaminated Narrative

In these narratives responsibility is absent; evil is named but never judged… ‘What we have instead is not exactly drama and not exactly therapy. It exists between the two, very much of our time, where deniability reigns’

Frank introduces the concept of ‘dysfunctional narratives’ — the clearest analog to contaminated narrative in his corpus — as stories that perform truth-telling while perpetuating denial and evacuating ethical responsibility.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995thesis

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What cannot be evaded in stories told by Holocaust witnesses is the hole in the narrative that cannot be filled in, or to use Lacan’s metaphor, cannot be sutured. The story traces the edges of a wound that can only be told around.

Frank identifies the unsuturable lacuna in chaos and trauma narratives as the defining structural feature of a story contaminated by unbearable experience, one that language necessarily fails to contain.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995thesis

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On the control dimension, the body telling chaos stories defines itself as being swept along, without control, by life’s fundamental contingency. Efforts to reassert predictability have failed repeatedly, and each failure has had its costs.

Frank characterizes the chaos narrative as a structurally contaminated form in which the teller’s capacity for reflective self-authorship has been overwhelmed by contingency and repeated failure.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995thesis

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Gilda Radner’s story of her treatment for ovarian cancer is not a chaos narrative, precisely because it is a narrative. But Radner allows readers some vision of the chaos… chaos is retrospectively remediated.

Frank draws a crucial distinction between the story that approaches chaos and the fully contaminated chaos narrative proper, arguing that narrative form itself is evidence of partial recovery from contamination.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995thesis

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Such a frenzy may call forth quite brilliant powers of invention and fancy — a veritable confabulatory genius — for such a patient must literally make himself (and his world) up every moment.

Sacks presents confabulation as the neurological limit-case of a contaminated narrative, in which the self-story is not merely distorted but entirely fabricated to paper over a hole in memory and identity.

Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985supporting

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Metaphors, as Lorde and Murphy show, can be powerful means to healing. But generalized metaphors, offered as storylines for others’ self-stories, are dangerous.

Frank warns that culturally imposed metaphors — the Phoenix, the serpent — contaminate the ill person’s self-story by replacing authentic witness with a heroic script that forecloses mourning.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting

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Too quick explanations of ‘fear of reentry’ trivialize what Sacks faced… That explanation, with its emphasis on cure, turns their stories into restitution narratives.

Frank demonstrates how premature interpretive closure imposes a restitution framework onto experience that resists it, producing a narratively contaminated account that silences genuine suffering.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting

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If calling stories true requires some category of stories called false, I confess to being unsure what a ‘false’ personal account would be. I have read personal accounts I considered evasive, but that evasion was their truth.

Frank complicates any simple taxonomy of contaminated versus authentic narrative by arguing that evasion itself is a form of truth, demanding a more nuanced ethics of narrative evaluation.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting

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Susan DiGiacomo proposes one variant of this form, the ‘victimization narrative.’ Here identity derives from being a victim of some person, group, or institution, and the narrative telos involves punishing that victimizer.

Frank catalogs variant narrative forms — victimization, ecological, political — that represent specific modes of contamination in which the illness story is co-opted by social or polemical agendas.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting

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Part of any story of illness is genesis: what caused the disease; why did it happen to me? But in Williams’s case the question is why cancer is happening all around her.

Frank shows how the search for narrative genesis can expand a personal illness story into a politically contaminated account, where environmental causation displaces individual biographical meaning.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting

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It is within the framework of narrative theory that the concrete dialectic of selfhood and sameness — and not simply the nominal distinction between the two terms employed up until now — attains its fullest development.

Ricoeur establishes the philosophical ground for understanding narrative contamination as a disruption of the dialectic between selfhood and sameness that narrative identity normally mediates.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting

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The creation of narrative coherence can be facilitated by social experiences. It is by focusing on this narrative system that we can begin to see the relationship between narrative co-construction and the acquisition of more adaptive self-organization.

Siegel frames narrative co-construction as the developmental mechanism that either facilitates or, when dysregulated, produces contaminated incoherence in the self-organizing story of the self.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting

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Researchers and clinicians alike need to confront the complexity and challenge of the history-taking process in these situations… the controversial study by Rind and colleagues demonstrates how the negative effects of abuse can be distorted by studying these phenomena in certain populations.

Lanius flags how methodological and population-selection factors contaminate the trauma narrative at the level of research itself, distorting the clinical picture that clinicians receive.

Lanius, edited by Ruth A, The impact of early life trauma on health and disease the, 2010supporting

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The ethicist William May reflects on the response of a recent widow to her husband’s sudden death. The question faced by the ill person is not ‘What are we going to do about it?’ May observes; rather, it is ‘How does one rise to the occasion?’

Frank invokes May to establish the ethical stakes of narrative quality, implicitly underscoring why a contaminated — evasive or dysfunctional — story represents a moral, not merely a formal, failure.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995aside

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The hermeneutic and meaning nature of language results, above all, from the process by which words are combined with one another in the establishment of a narrative plot or matrix. It is within this narrative matrix that the individual proactively and creatively constructs a reality of meaning.

Neimeyer’s constructivist framework positions the narrative matrix as the site of meaning-making, providing a theoretical backdrop against which contamination — the breakdown or distortion of that matrix — can be understood.

Neimeyer, Robert A, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Lossaside

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