Overreading Illness: Interpretation and Narrative Absence

Abstract:Narrative medicine is an interpretative practice. Endorsing close reading as its signature method, narrative medicine encourages the reader or listener to pay close attention to narrative gaps, absences, and silences and to question what has been left out as a salient but secret element of the patient's story. In this paper I interrogate these principles and practices by suggesting that narrative medicine's concern with what the patient doesn't say poses ethical and epistemological risks and responsibilities. In foregrounding absence, practitioners of close reading encourage an essential mistrust that risks overreading silences as unspoken stories. Drawing on criticism of overinterpretation in literary theory, including the works of Jameson, Sontag, and Eco, and a recent work of French fiction, Mélissa Da Costa's Tout le bleu du ciel (2020; All the blue of the sky), I argue that narrative absence may not always present an invitation to interpret but rather demand humility in the face of insurmountable difference and ambiguity. Ultimately, I suggest an interpretative humility that exercises caution and vigilance in the interpretative act, not only because the interpretation may be wrong or incomplete but because it may be entirely unnecessary.