Abstract
This paper probes the possibilities and limits of the concepts of “narrative identity”, and “counter-narrative” in dementia life writing. Considering first the problematic status of autopathographies by people with dementia as counter-narratives, it then moves on to explore collaborative life stories co-produced with persons suffering from dementia. Focusing on the collection Tell Mrs Mill Her Husband Is Still Dead (Clegg in Tell Mrs Mill Her Husband Is Still Dead, 2010), it draws on ideas from conversational storytelling and small story research to reconsider how identity claims and counter-narratives are made in collaborative dementia life writing. Despite the fact that life stories by people with dementia may be considered “broken narratives”, the present analysis highlights how people with dementia continue to use these fragmentary narratives to make identity claims, to critique their care environment, and to make sense of their often confusing world.
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Notes
The terms “self”, “subjectivity”, “life”, and “identity” are frequently used interchangeably. I see these as located at both overlapping and distinctive intersections of a Venn diagram. Although I cannot provide hard and fast philosophical definitions here, I distinguish between selfhood, on the one hand, as basis of or perspective on our everyday experience, and identity, on the other, as something we construct in social interaction with others. I argue here that not all levels of selfhood can be adequately accounted for narratively. Identity, however, is partially constituted through narrative in interaction. Depending on the theoretical background, subjectivity can be seen as coextensive with either term or as encompassing both.
This is not to say that dementia does not damage the capacity to tell (life) stories.
Abbreviated henceforth as Tell Mrs Mill.
See Clegg’s project website for further information: http://www.trebusprojects.org/.
Evaluative sections here address the continuity—change axis that Michael Bamberg (2011) pinpoints as one of three dilemmatic spaces that identity narratives negotiate. As other examples from the collection show, dementia narratives may not always foreground constancy, but may instead highlight change to a previous identity in order to make identity claims in the here in now. The narratives also negotiate other dilemmatic spaces: the sameness—difference axis (with relation to others) and the agency—passivity axis (depending on whether storytellers want to garner sympathy as victims of a situation or present themselves as heroes of their situation).
The ellipses are part of the original manuscript. They are used to suggest hesitation in the storyteller’s speech.
Martin Conway’s research (2005) suggests that when we create and recreate autobiographical memories, there is a constant conflict between coherence (with self-image) and correspondence (to experience/reality). In this example, emotional (self-)coherence wins out over correspondence to reality. Coherence equally wins out over correspondence in the recall of long term memory in healthy individuals. The memory processes of people with and without dementia may then be different in degree rather than in kind.
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Bitenc, R.A. “No Narrative, No Self”? Reconsidering dementia counter-narratives in Tell Mrs Mill Her Husband Is Still Dead. Subjectivity 11, 128–143 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-018-0049-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-018-0049-y