Marie-Elisabeth Lei Holm earned her PhD in literature and sociology from the University of Southern Denmark in 2020 while working at the center Uses of Literature. The Social Dimensions of Literature led by Professor Rita Felski. Currently, she works as a postdoctoral researcher within narrative medicine and literature-based social interventions at the National Institute of Public Health in Copenhagen. Her paper “Temporality, Reader Recognition and Literary Consolation: A Reading of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air with Narrative Medicine” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.
In the vivid poem “The Good Thing about Almost Dying” (Fall 2020 Intima), Steven Lewis recounts a year of turmoil, reflecting on his experiences of living during a raging pandemic, becoming sick and returning to life, and his home. Confronted with objects from what seems like a distant past–sheds, campfires, and children’s playthings–Lewis offers readers access to the soothing, yet at times also somewhat unnerving, realization that some things remain the same, even when so much has changed.
But what about our sense of self, or inner being? Does it stay unchanged during major life changes, and unforeseen events like illness, divorce or death of a loved one? Can we even talk about a chore of selfhood? Lewis suggests that it does, and that we can. “I did not wake up a new man,” Lewis writes, “reborn or reimagined, no one other than who I am, the same me returning.”
My academic piece “Temporality, Reader Recognition and Literary Consolation” (Fall 2020 Intima) considers the neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s gripping memoir When Breath Becomes Air in the light of his new-found appreciation of time in the wake of serious illness. Facing death, I note, led Dr. Kalanithi to grasp the flow of time in an entirely different way. From being a steady currency – a predictable resource of skill-building and career advancement – it dawned on him that time does not always follow a linear path of progress: his increasingly vulnerable state dyed his view of temporality in arbitrary and merciless colors – ranging from incredibly far stretched to intensely short, from brutal to beautiful and, above all, deprived of logic.
Did this realization lead Kalanithi to become a new person? Did illness not only change his worldview, but his self? No–and yes–would be my ambivalent answer. Kalanithi’s basic subjectivity and sense of being-in-the-world remained unchanged during the tribulations of lung-cancer, and even in death. But the wider story about his life; whom he would like to be, his lifegoals and the networks of meaning that supported his choices and beliefs did in fact change. His narrative identity changed. We all experience a degree of ‘for-me-ness’, a minimal notion of unchanging selfhood, as philosopher Dan Zahavi argues. But in addition to this minimality, convictions, memories, narratives and pain are layered in unique, and constantly shifting patterns. We stay the same while we change.
In a certain way, I’m the same person as before I had twins as a financially insecure undergraduate student. Even though nothing in my life, including my understanding of self, ever became the same again.
Marie-Elisabeth Lei Holm earned her PhD in literature and sociology from the University of Southern Denmark in 2020 while working at the center Uses of Literature. The Social Dimensions of Literature led by Professor Rita Felski. Her dissertation examines aesthetic and political forms of recognition and asks how literary works might enable social acknowledgment around issues of marginalization and the politics of identity. Currently, she works as a postdoctoral researcher within narrative medicine and literature-based social interventions at the National Institute of Public Health in Copenhagen. Her paper “Temporality, Reader Recognition and Literary Consolation: A Reading of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air with Narrative Medicine” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.
©2021 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine