Body Fluids and Fluid Bodies: Trans-Corporeal Connections in Contemporary German Narratives of Illness

Medicine uses body fluids for the construction of medical knowledge in the laboratory and at the same time considers them as potentially infectious or dirty. In this model, bodies are in constant need of hygienic discipline if they are to adhere to the ideal of the closed and clean organism without leakage of fluids. In contrast, psychoanalytical feminist body theory by Julia Kristeva (1982), Elisabeth Grosz (1989) and Margrit Shildrick (1999) has deconstructed the abject body and its fluids in Western culture and medicine. While postmodern feminism has often focused on discourses about bodies and illness to the neglect of their materiality, more recently, material feminism has drawn particular attention to lived material bodies with fluid boundaries and evolving corporeal practices (Alaimo and Hekman 2007). Stacy Alaimo has developed a model of the trans-corporeal body that is connected with the environment through fluid boundaries and exchanges (2010, 2012). Influenced by these trends in feminist body theory, illness narratives, often based on autobiographical experiences of female patients or their caregivers, have increased in recent decades in the West (Lorde 1980; Mairs 1996; Stefan 2007; Schmidt 2009; Hustvedt 2010). Such narratives often describe explicitly the material and affective aspects of intimate bodily experiences. In this article, I analyze two German quest illness narratives: Charlotte Roche’s pop novel Feuchtgebiete (2008) and Detlev Buck’s German-Cambodian film Same Same But Different (2010) that is based on the memoir Wohin Du auch gehst by German journalist Benjamin Prüfer (2007). In both narratives, the protagonists and their partners struggle in their search for love and identity with illness or injury in relation to body fluids, including hemorrhoids and HIV. I argue that Feuchtgebiete and Same Same But Different not only critique medical and cultural discourses on body (fluids) and sexuality but also foreground a feminist trans-corporeal concept of the body and of body fluids that is open to fluid identities and material connections with the (global) environment. At the same time, the conventional and sentimental ending of these quest narratives undermines the possibilities of the trans-corporeal body and its fluid exchanges.

Narrating Disability

Music tells stories, including stories about disability (culturally stigmatized, nonnormative minds and bodies). Modernist music has particular sorts of stories it tells about disability, and particular ways of telling them. Surveying the long history of disability narratives, it is possible to identify four principal sorts of stories: overcoming/restitution/cure narratives, conversion/quest narratives, chaos narratives, and acceptance narratives. The stories that modernist music tells about disability tend to avoid traditional overcoming and quest narratives in favor of chaos and acceptance narratives. Chaos narratives represent disability as permanent, incurable, and incomprehensible; acceptance narratives represent disability as a potentially desirable way of being in the world, with no impulse toward normalization or cure.

Fantasy

Fantasy films can be traced to the early years of film history and Georges Méliès, cinema’s first great fantasist, in particular. Méliès is often presented (somewhat simplistically) as embodying one of the two fountainheads of cinema, alongside the documentary realism of the Lumière brothers, placing fantasy as a vital founding impulse in film. Fantasy films represent hopes and desires for better or alternative worlds, and through the technical developments required to portray those worlds, they have contributed significantly to the development of cinema and how we experience it. For many, fantasy films are typified by formulaic products—fairy tales for children and heroic quest narratives in magical pseudo-medieval realms for adolescents—but the range of fantasy films is remarkable, taking in popular mainstream “classics” (e.g., The Wizard of Oz [1939]), big-budget franchises (e.g., Harry Potter), small-scale independent projects (e.g., Tideland [2005]), and films by prominent figures in so-called art-house cinema (e.g., Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander [1982]). That diversity and perceived emphasis on the populist and juvenile has contributed to the academic literature on fantasy film being slow to develop. Although the Freudian notion of fantasy as a psychic process to help negotiate and repress traumatic memories meant that the psychoanalytical term “fantasy” was often evident, especially in the “grand theory” flourishing across film studies in the 1970s–1990s, there was relatively little discussion of fantasy films in the sense of narrative fictions featuring worlds or events that in some way break empirically (or magically) and ontologically with the known laws of our universe. From the 1980s, science fiction and horror cinema began to accumulate a substantial literature, but the more amorphous notion of fantasy would lag far behind: scattered articles rather than sustained dialogue, despite the early and mid-1980s seeing sustained fantasy filmmaking, especially from Hollywood. Defining fantasy has been problematic (e.g., is it a coherent genre? Is it a broader impulse to move away from mimetic representations of what is understood to be empirical and ontological reality? In what way can (or should) it be distinguished from science fiction and horror?), but it has also suffered from suspicious intellectual schools of thought (Marxism not least). Perhaps inevitably, given the influx of films released in the wake of the phenomenal success of The Lord of the Rings (2001–2003) and Harry Potter films revealing a “global hunger” for fantasy, as Susan Napier refers to it in Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (Napier 2005, cited under Individual Genres), the 2000s witnessed a welcome change with the publication of several introductory texts on studying fantasy film, collections on aspects of fantasy film, monographs on individual films, and articles from a wealth of theoretical perspectives.

Bunyan and Beckett: The Legacy of in

This article will consider Samuel Beckett's and John Bunyan's as quest narratives, in terms of their similarities as well as their differences. An important point of comparison is the common genre background that these two texts share, and the very different treatments that the two writers give to this traditional theme and structure.