Paper short abstract:

Taking the case of a patient with traumatic brain injury, I consider the limits of narrative as a genre of repair. Instead, I unpack a non-textual, relational archive of injury, charting the processes that sustain care and recognition in conditions of extreme rupture.

Paper long abstract:

Taking the case of a young woman ("Nellie") afflicted by brain injury after a car accident, I reflect on the limitations of narrative genres, as demarcated by the boundaries of language and discursive memory, instead highlighting relational practices and forms of recognition that attend to “the pain, disruption, and alienation of illness” (Woolf 1925). At the time I met her, Nellie remembered very little of the accident and her life prior. As she slowly re-learned basic skills, such as how to brush her teeth and get dressed in the morning, she also asked few questions about the events that had transpired, demonstrating a seemingly paradoxical indifference in light of expectations that subjects of illness must know and understand their affliction. Building on critiques of illness narratives (Mattingly and Garo 2000, Buchbinder 2010), I attempt to re-open overdetermined modes of individual testimony by attending to the relational methods through which Nellie and her caregivers interact, share, love, explore, and sometimes remain silent. I attempt to document these activities as an alternative archive of illness that nevertheless indexes suffering and its responses while charting paths toward repair. Taking narrativizing as an ability rather than a precondition of understanding, ethical contract, and care, I attempt to learn from Nellie and her family to understand what kinds of recognition can begin to repair extreme rupture in the context of traumatic injury.