The cartography of pain: spatial, social, and biographical disorientation in Suzanne E. Berger’s Horizontal Woman: The Story of a Body in Exile (1996)

ABSTRACT

This article deals with the concept of disorientation as intrinsic to the experience of chronic pain and disability, implying the disruption of spatial directionality and biographical continuity. This experience of spatial and existential displacement is the critical point of Suzanne E. Berger’s chronic pain memoir Horizontal Woman: The Story of a Body in Exile (1996). Building upon Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of orientation, this essay looks into two dimensions of the experience of disorientation narrated by Berger: (1) the dismantlement of the familiarity with the domestic realm and the transformation of affective relationships in that space; (2) the impact of illness and disability in the public world and the dynamics of power between “straightness” and otherness. The textual analysis concludes with a reflection about the regained sense of possibility or potential for change that biographical writing brings to the ill subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Horizontal
• disorientation
• chronic pain
• Suzanne E. Berger
• memoir

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish National Research Programme under Grant PID2019-109565RB-I00, and the Government of the Principality of Asturias under the programme “Severo Ochoa para la formación en investigación y docencia.”

Notes on contributors

Shadia Abdel-Rahman Téllez

Shadia Abdel-Rahman Téllez works as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English, French, and German Philology in the University of Oviedo under the programme “Severo Ochoa para la formación en investigación y docencia.” Her research is primarily about chronic illness, disability, and autobiographical literature in the context of the medical humanities and gender studies. Recent publications include her analysis of metaphoric speech used by chronic pain sufferers, “The Poetics of the Body in Pain: Wordlessness, Figurative Language and the Chronic Pain Experience” (2018). She is also part of the funded research project PID2019-109565RB-I00: “Illness in the Age of Extinction: Anglophone Narratives of Personal and Planetary Degradation (2000–2020),” directed by Dr. Luz Mar González Arias.