‘What Fools These Mortals Be’:
What do mortals play at when they play with fiction?
Teresa Casal
Abstract
‘Lord, what fools these mortals be’ is Puck’s pronouncement on Shakespeare’s
lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet Puck is the creature of a mortal’s
imagination, featuring in a play performed by and for mortals and facing them with
several mirror images of the enterprise they are engaged in. This raises the question
addressed in this paper: what do mortals play with when they create non-human
creatures through whose estranged eyes they view humans’ predicament?
Following Puck’s lead, this paper focuses on the role played by angels in Wim
Wenders’s film Wings of Desire (1987) and Jennifer Johnston’s novel Two Moons
(1998). In both cases, playing with the immortal, incorporeal angels illuminates the
joys and sorrows of humans’ embodied and mortal condition. Between them, these
works offer complementary views on the encounter between humans and angels,
presented through the angels’ perspective by Wenders, and a human perspective by
Johnston. This paper explores how the angels’ invisibility is rendered in the
different means of film and literature, hence how we are invited to play our role in
this imaginative encounter; and how the angels’ bodiless and aerial perspective
faces humans with our embodied mortal condition, the confines of our perception,
and the faculties of our imagination. It argues that even as the interplay between
angels’ and humans’ perception highlights the constraints of mortals’ condition, it
does so by enacting the possibilities of human imagination.
Finally, this paper considers how these works depict the role of fiction in our
effort to make sense of life, while challenging us to engage in an imaginative
experience that defies verisimilitude and ‘mimetic persuasion’ (Wood 2008). Both
works offer a poetics that validates their imaginative endeavour by setting it
alongside conventional forms of ‘transitional phenomena’ (Winnicott 1971), such
as children’s play, art, and religion.
Key Words: Fiction, play, imagination, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Wim
Wenders, Jennifer Johnston.
*****
1. Playing with fiction: terms of engagement
What do we do when we play with fiction? Is fiction-making part of play? Does
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fiction bear any relation to reality – or to truth? Does it meet any human need?
This paper addresses these questions by examining three works covering
different periods and media that overtly enact and ask us to engage with the powers
of fiction, namely Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1590s), Wim
Wenders’s film Wings of Desire (1987) and Jennifer Johnston’s novel Two Moons
(1998). They depict a fictional world that is familiar enough to be recognisable, but
preclude mechanical recognition by featuring encounters between humans and
invisible others; they provoke viewers’ and readers’ awareness of their own agency
by facing them with specular images of the imaginative endeavour they are
engaged in; and they propose a poetics that situates our engagement alongside
other human activities such as playing, dreaming, acting, and praying. The aim is
twofold: to examine how these works depict the encounter between humans and
non-humans, the challenges it poses and the responses it prompts; and to consider
whether these encounters enact a model for readers’ and viewers’ engagement with
the fictional world and discuss its implications.
The underlying suggestion is that these works’ poetics can bring interesting
insights on the role of play and on our critical practices. First, their poetics
corroborates Donald Winnicott’s claim that ‘[t]here is a direct development from
transitional phenomena to playing, and from playing to shared playing, and from
this to cultural experiences.’1 In their different registers, these works present their
fictional enterprise as part of ‘creative living first manifested in play,’2 which
occurs in a ‘potential space’ that ‘depends on experience which leads to trust.’ 3
Secondly, the emphasis on fiction and trust poses critical challenges: in a postmodern age ruled by a ‘[d]istrust of texts’ errors, lies, and manipulations,’4 what
room is there for trust? Do these playful works work at all if they fail to elicit their
audience’s engagement?
Interestingly, the questions raised by these playful engagements with such
serious issues as love and death converge with recent discussions of critical
approaches prompted by nonfictional genres and specifically by illness narratives
and their use as pedagogical tools in programmes of medical humanities.
Following Sedgwick, Latour and Felski, Ann Jurecic argues in Illness as Narrative
that Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion has displaced his concurrent claim for a
‘willingness to listen,’ noting that ‘[s]uch a suspicious critical position is not
necessarily wrong, but it is incomplete,’ and an inappropriate response to illness
narratives. Jurecic’s observation that literary critics’ ‘disdain for or disinterest in
illness memoirs suggests (…) that contemporary critics have become alienated
from ordinary motives for reading and writing’5 resonates with Conway’s
argument that autobiography appeals to the contemporary reader and writer
because it meets a basic human need: ‘We want to know how the world looks from
inside another person’s experience, and when that craving is met by a convincing
narrative, we find it deeply satisfying.’6 That need is no longer met by
postmodernist fiction, which, unlike the nineteenth century realist novel, does not
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invite ‘the suspension of disbelief’ and faces readers with ‘switching points of
view, (…) leaving open the possibility of many endings for the story,’ 7 so that only
(auto)biographers’ ‘attempts to narrate the history of a life’ are accorded ‘the
suspension of disbelief.’8 Conway adds that the experience afforded by exposure to
other perspectives meets the emotional and cognitive need of ‘being allowed inside
the experience of another person who really lived and who tells about experiences
which did in fact occur.’ 9 The appeal of (auto)biography would rest on a
trustworthy exposure to alterity by means of imaginatively accessing another’s
experience.
Winnicott’s themes of trust and perspective, and the relation between playing
and reality, resurface in these critical debates. Does a suspicious approach to
fiction’s fictionality render it untrustworthy and make readers crave for a more
trusting relation to narrative? Does trust lie in belief and does belief rely on
referentiality?
In How Fiction Works, James Wood echoes Brigid Lowe’s argument that ‘the
question of fiction’s referentiality (…) is the wrong one, because fiction does not
ask us to believe things (in a philosophical sense) but to imagine them (in an
artistic one).’10 Noting that ‘all fiction is conventional in one way or another’ and
‘[n]arrative can be conventional without being a purely arbitrary, non-referential
technique,’11 Wood invokes Aristotle’s notion of mimesis to argue that the issue is
not ‘simple verisimilitude or reference,’ but ‘mimetic persuasion’ so that
‘[i]nternal consistency and plausibility (…) become more important than
referential rectitude.12 If emotional truthfulness rather than factual truth is the
criterion for mimetic persuasion, then the relation between fiction and reality
becomes skewed rather than specular: fiction does not seek to document reality,
but to apprehend the human experience of reality.
If Jurecic’s approach to narrative via illness memoirs highlights the need to
counterbalance suspicion with practices of ‘reparative reading’ 13 capable of
fostering acknowledgement (‘which entails recognizing one’s own ignorance and
vulnerability’14), fictions that play with fictionality and rely on readers’ willingness
to play along reconnect cultural experience to the ‘creative living first manifested
in play,’ and invite us to examine how and why we engage with fiction.
2. ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be’
A Midsummer Night’s Dream creates and explores a liminal space by juggling
with ‘multiple levels of representation, with plays-within-plays and visions within
dreams,’15 which unsettle the characters’ and the audience’s sense of order, so that
players constantly shift roles between actors and spectators, and the security of
comic laughter is upset as we find ourselves reflected on the fooled spectators on
stage.
‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ (MND III.2.115) is Puck’s verdict on the
confounded lovers, yet both Puck and the audience know that the lovers’ behaviour
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in the fairies’ forest is the result of Puck’s own fooled vision: since all Athenians
look the same to him, he administers a love potion on the wrong lover. The vexed
lovers’ exchanges focus on truth and falsity and the trustworthiness of sense and
senses, yet the boundaries between appearance and reality are elusive and
potentially deluding: no matter how serious to the lovers, their afflictions are a
‘fond pageant’ (III.2.114) in Puck’s eyes; and subject as they are to Oberon’s spell,
when they ‘next wake, all this derision / Shall seem to them a dream and fruitless
vision’ (III.2. 370-1). The lovers’ experience is deemed ‘More strange than true’
by Theseus who ‘never may believe / These antique fables, nor these fairy toys’
(V.1.1-2). Like Theseus, let us consider what kind of endeavour we are involved
in: do we believe or dismiss it? Are these ‘antique fables’ and ‘fairy toys’ anything
but childish and fanciful? If so, are they apart from, rather than a part of, reality?
Theseus’s famous speech about ‘Lovers and madmen’ whose ‘seething brains
(…) apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends’ (V.1.2-6) articulates
the terms of the debate without ever settling it. To all appearances, the duke is the
voice of ‘cool reason’ and dismisses ‘The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / [who]
Are of imagination all compact’ (V.1.7-8). Yet in the eyes of the audience the duke
shares the stage with fairies, and is a lover and a creature of the poet’s imagination.
The duke’s cool scepticism is set against his wife’s organic imagery that opens up
the possibility that the lovers’ nocturnal experience may ‘grow to something of
great constancy’ (V.1.26). In the play’s playful specular structure, the ducal pair’s
discordant remarks frame the artisans’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, ‘very
tragical mirth’ (V.1. 57), a play with a tragic plot akin to Romeo and Juliet, but
‘translated’ (III.2.32) into comedy by the artisans’ literal-minded performance.
Their distrust in the audience’s imagination shows by default the power of ‘fancy’s
images’ (V.1.25): failing to trust the audience’s ability to imagine the wall that
parts the lovers or the moonshine above them, the artisans impersonate Wall as a
‘man with lime and roughcast’ (V.1.130) and Moonshine as a ‘man with lantern,
dog, and bush of thorn’ (V.1.134). Roles switch as the lovers previously viewed as
‘foolish mortals’ now fail to empathise with the tragic lovers and consider this ‘the
wittiest partition that ever I heard discourse’ (V.1.164-5); the duchess who had
previously trusted the Athenian lovers’ ‘transfigured’ minds, now dismisses the
artisans’ play as ‘the silliest stuff that ever I heard’ (V.1.207); and the cool-minded
duke now points out that ‘The best of this kind are but shadows; and the worst are
no worse, if imagination amend them.’ (V.1.208-9) The remark articulates what the
artisans fail to see, namely that what happens on stage is a co-creative imaginative
process that involves the audience as much as the actors. The ambiguity between
dream and reality is sustained to the end when the mercurial Puck addresses the
audience in a final plea:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended:
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That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
Gentles, do not reprehend. (MND V.1.413-19)
If the world is a stage, as Calderón had it, Shakespeare likens the experience of
the stage to dreaming, that ‘potential space’ that visits us in our sleep and is as real
as it is intangible. The Dream is an incarnated dream, played on the stage before
our eyes as much as in the stage of our mind’s eye in a co-creative process in
which, like Puck, we are both ‘auditor[s]’ and ‘actor[s]’ (III.1.72-3). Give me your
hands if we be friends’ (V.1.427) is Puck’s tangible challenge for us to explore the
connections between the visions and role-playing in fairyland and everyday life.
3. ‘When the child was a child’
Everyday human life seen and then inhabited by angels is what Wim Wenders’s
film Wings of Desire (1987) presents us. Entitled Der Himmel über Berlin in
German,16 the word ‘Himmel’ has the double meaning of ‘heaven’ and ‘sky’:
Inhabited as it is by angels, is the space over Berlin heaven? Crossed as it is by
airplanes, is it sky?
Announcing its referential setting in its German title, the film disrupts realist
expectations by featuring angels and perceiving the world from their perspective. It
is set in the divided city of Berlin two years before the fall of the Wall would
change Berlin’s cityscape and redesign the world’s geopolitical map. How does the
film depict the relation between a scarred city and the sky above it? Is the sky a
mirror image of a divided city or an alternative image of an undivided space? What
kind of transit happens between city and sky? Whose desire and whose wings do
the wings of desire refer to, angels’ and/or humans’?
The film is framed and punctuated by the ‘Song of Childhood’ delivered, we
soon realise, by angel Damiel: ‘When the child was a child it didn’t know that it
was a child.’ The child’s wonderings are passwords out of the Eden of innocence
to the awareness of not knowing, and the search for knowledge: why am I me and
not you, why am I here and not there, when does time begin and where does space
end, does evil really exist? The child’s wonderings are the beginning of physics
and metaphysics. Are they the beginning of angels’ and humans’ desire?
The film opens with an aerial view of Berlin seen by an angel standing on the
remains of the Church of Remembrance. We are on the side of the angel: we see
the city in black and white, and notice that the faces that look up and see the angel
are those of children. Since we, too, see the angels, we are invited to ‘suspend
disbelief’ and adopt children’s openness to wonder and wondering. As it is, angels
remain invisible to most adults but a few who sense but they do not see them: the
actor Peter Falk, a fallen angel; a blind woman who touches her watch when she
senses an angel; and Marion, the French acrobat who flies on the trapeze with
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angel’s wings, senses Damiel’s presence and recognises his bodily frame when he
incarnates.
At the end of each day, Damiel and Cassiel exchange notes, thus allowing
human viewers to eavesdrop on their thoughts. Yet, for all that they can see and
hear, for their ability to walk across the Wall unseen to its guards and to invisibly
comfort distressed humans, the angels cannot experience the sensorial world –
hence the film’s rendering of their perspective in black and white. Attracted to
humans, particularly to Marion flying on the trapeze, Damiel voices his desire to
become human. If Marion’s feathered wings on the trapeze indicate the human
desire to transcend human constraints, Damiel’s desire to become human presents
the human predicament as desirable. Living the immortal life of angels,
unencumbered by time or a mortal body, Damiel is tired of his aloofness and longs
for closeness. His wish to live ‘now’ rather than ‘forever’ is voiced in the no man’s
land between West and East Berlin, and he awakens into embodied human life
beside the Wall that scars the city and separates its citizens. This awakening entails
the experience of colour and cold, love and longing, and perspective shifts from
black and white to colour – we are now on the side of humans.
Bowers notes that ‘[u]nusually for magic realist narratives,’ Wenders’s film
celebrates ‘the realist element (…) in contrast to the magical.’ 17 In Wings of Desire
the angels, like the world narrator, are the curators of world memory. In a divided
city of atomised citizens, their encompassing view across space and time provides
the ground for potential reconnection: they gather and weave individual stories;
they carry the memory of the long history of how the world began, grass grew,
water found its way into rivers and one day the two-legged being in their own
image exclaimed in wonder ‘ah’ and ‘oh’ and learned to speak. They remember
thunder and lightning and the ongoing history of warfare, which has co-existed
with the history of grass, water, and wonder. And it is as they reminisce and cross
the Wall that Damiel confirms his wish to carry what he has learned through
‘eternal contemplation’ into embodied experience. Damiel and Marion’s encounter
is one of mutual recognition: each recognises in the other the stranger that they
sought and whom they need so as to be alone, an aloneness that is the wholeness
from which they may relate to the other and become the parents of humankind.
Their encounter re-enacts the beginning of humankind after Eden: whatever
innocence they carry into the encounter comes after and not before knowledge,
happens in and not before history, their individual history and that of the scarred
city and the divided world in which they meet. The film ends with the world
narrator’s reminder of humankind’s shared predicament: ‘Nous sommes dans la
même barque.’
If this flight into heaven brings us down to earth, how is our view of the earth
changed in the process? How do we fly into heaven in the first place? For all its
ethereal incursions, the film relies on human-made fictional and narrative
conventions: thanks to the conventions regulating fiction, we pretend that the
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visible is invisible in the ostensibly visual medium of film, while the spatially and
temporally encompassing perspective of angels is rendered within the discursive
sequence of narrative. In the process we engage with the angels’ perspective,
which combines a child’s wonder(ing) with a non-judgemental acknowledgement
of humans’ predicament and is then embodied in Marion and Damiel’s encounter.
Wenders relies on his audience’s willingness to engage in a fictional pact whereby
we are expected to reconnect to a child’s wonder and look at a wounded world
through eyes that combine the wonder of innocence with the wisdom of ‘eternal
contemplation.’
4. ‘Suppose that sort of thing is possible’
If Wenders’s film ends with an encounter between an angel and a human that
re-enacts the beginning of humankind after Eden, the encounter between the angel
and the human in Jennifer Johnston’s novel Two Moons (1998) amounts to an
annunciation – of death rather than birth; if in Wenders we view the encounter
from the side of the angels, in Johnston we perceive it from the side of the humans;
and if Wenders’s film culminates with the ‘test of the stranger,’ 18 Johnston’s novel
opens with it. Both raise ethical and aesthetic questions as to how that test is
depicted and viewers / readers experience it.
By featuring an angel’s eruption into an apparently realistic narrative, Two
Moons dramatises the challenges and possibilities of a hospitable encounter with
the other. The protagonist, dying Mimi, and the reader, are faced with an apparition
that looks like a man but announces that he is ‘an angel.’ The test challenges Mimi
and the reader to accept a pact that stretches the possibilities of the familiar:
‘Very well, Bonifacio, suppose you are an angel. Suppose that sort of
thing is possible. What are you doing here in Dalkey, County Dublin?’
‘I’ve come to mind you.’19
If the story is to unfold, Mimi and the reader need to be willing to imagine that
such a thing is possible. Mimi’s response asserts her freedom and her hospitality:
‘You can tell me about yourself. There is always the possibility that I would prefer
you to vanish.’20 Bonifacio acknowledges Mimi’s freedom and when she protests
that she does not ‘need to be minded,’21 he rephrases the relation in more
egalitarian terms: ‘Nonetheless, I have come to look after you. To keep you
company perhaps would be a better way of putting it.’22 Nor is he ‘offended’ by her
agnostic reservations, disclaiming any pretence to convert her and admitting
freedom of belief as part of the pact between those who ‘see beyond reality’:
‘You’re at liberty to believe or disbelieve in what you wish.
That’s not why I’m here. I don’t want to change the way you
think. You see, sometimes we come to people and they don’t see
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us or hear us. We just walk with them for a while, quite
unnoticed. You, though, see beyond reality. Some people do, not
many.’23
Bonifacio articulates the terms of the fictional pact that sustains Two Moons,
and likewise shapes the Dream and Wings of Desire: the characters, no less than
the audience, viewers or readers, are challenged to step into a reality ‘beyond
reality.’ As indicated by Shakespeare, the question is whether this ‘beyond reality’
belongs to reality. Indeed, Bonifacio, whom Mimi names Bonnyface, is the benign
face of Mimi’s late husband Benjamin who has come to escort her to the ultimate
foreignness of death. Bonifacio is Benjamin’s bonny face, who cares for Mimi’s
physical and emotional well-being like Benjamin never did and eventually confides
the secret reasons for his estrangement from her: a converted Roman Catholic,
Benjamin struggled with the guilt of his homosexuality. Uncertain of how she
would have reacted if he had revealed his secret in their youthful days, dying Mimi
knows only that she ‘was a different person then,’ and Ireland ‘was another
country.’ Her only regret is that he had not trusted her. In a story set in Dublin in
1996, three years after homosexuality was decriminalised in the Republic and at a
time when the Northern Ireland peace process leading up to the 1998 Belfast
Agreement was underway, Mimi’s reply indicates the interdependence between the
domestic and the public sphere and foregrounds trust as the cornerstone in human
relations: ‘I forgive you (…). For not trusting me. All the rest is nonsense.
Absolute nonsense.’24
‘All the rest is nonsense’ echoes Hamlet’s final sentence, ‘the rest is silence’
(Ham. V.2.311). For Mimi, to trust or not to trust is the question: ‘If only you had
trusted me (…) [w]e could have managed.’25 Trust is also what Bonifacio asks of
her and us if we are to ‘see beyond reality’ and approach what ‘cool reason’ cannot
comprehend (MND, V.1.6). Johnston incorporates Hamlet as an intertext by way of
Mimi’s daughter Grace, who is rehearsing her part as Gertrude. As in Dream or
Hamlet, the juxtaposition of plotlines, voices and perspectives amplifies the
dynamic frameworks within which we perceive this composite fictional world.
Lines from Hamlet echoed by Grace resonate upon Mimi’s encounter with the
angel, which is replayed in the reader’s mind as a variation upon Shakespeare’s
words: ‘And with the in-cor-por-al air do hold discourse? Hum. Eye on vacancy.
Eye.’26
If Bonifacio’s apparition confronts Mimi and the reader with the challenge to
‘see beyond reality’ and interact with what they do not rationally understand, the
novel offers various interpretations for these unconventional encounters, from
those discussed by Mimi, Bonifacio, and other characters, to those suggested by
the structural juxtaposition of those colloquia with comparable encounters with the
invisible that are traditionally accepted as familiar, such as acting, dreaming, or
having imaginary friends in childhood. Mimi familiarises what her daughter
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perceives as the ‘odd things (…) happening in [Mimi’s] head’ by arguing that they
are ‘no more odd than Gertrude and all those people [Grace] has floating inside
her.’27 Not only is Hamlet an intertext for Two Moons, but the novel stages theatre
as a metaphor for the spectral world of the imagination, so that the terms of
Grace’s experience as an actress echo those of Mimi’s encounters with the angel,
as the passage describing the opening night illustrates:
The dead had raised themselves up again and taken their curtain
calls. (…) [Grace] always felt like a ghost after she had taken off
her make-up, her face like some pale, wan thing in the mirror, no
vitality, no character left.28
Two Moons juxtaposes the psychological experience of dreams and the desire
for ‘someone to whom you can talk,’29 materialised in childhood imaginary friends,
God or conversations with oneself, with that of artistic creation, presenting the
theatre as one of the ways of acting out human loss and desire and a simile for
Mimi’s seemingly extraordinary encounters. The reverberations of this web of
juxtapositions reach Mimi and the reader, who is faced with the fictional world
conjured by words. Just as in Hamlet the play within the play is crucial to the plot,
so do Mimi’s visions and interlocutors play a part in the reckoning with life that
dances her acceptingly to the inscrutable otherness of death. As in Shakespeare,
readers may find in Mimi’s ‘discourse with incorporeal air’ a mirror image of their
own experience of reading, which similarly involves an imaginative engagement
with insubstantial but potentially affecting voices.
By bringing poetic vision into a realist novel and welcoming the disturbing
nature of desire and death into the contingent world of finitude, Two Moons invites
the reader to acknowledge into prosaic reality the otherworld and inner world
otherwise consigned to an ‘unreal’ double sphere of human life, namely the
marginal fringes of childhood, old age, dreams, art, and religion.
5. ‘At liberty to believe or disbelieve’
Like Mimi, Puck’s audience or Wenders’s mortals, readers and viewers are ‘at
liberty to believe or disbelieve’ what they sense but cannot make sense of. This is
the threshold that prompts fictional play in works that invite us to wonder what we
see when we ‘see beyond reality’30: they stage the uncertainties of our sensorial
perception and the confines of our cognitive understanding; they resort to fiction to
allow us to safely sense and try to make sense of this perplexing threshold; and
they thereby invite to imaginatively stretch the boundaries of the conceivable and
reframe our perception of the real.
The emphasis on perspective and trust suggests that the hermeneutic questions
raised by illness and disability narratives 31 are relevant to playful approaches to
human perplexities. As Bonifacio makes clear, readers and viewers are free to ‘to
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believe or disbelieve’ the challenge he embodies. As Mimi’s response indicates,
this requires both a discriminating alertness and the willingness to trust. By staging
liminal areas of human experience and playfully exploring the fluid transits
between the corporeal and the incorporeal, senses and sense, the known and the
unknown these works invite multifaceted and exploratory modes of engagement.
To play along remains our choice.
Notes
1
D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 69.
Winnicott, Playing, 135.
3
Ibid., 139.
4
Ann Jurecic, Illness as Narrative, 3.
5
Jurecic, Illness as Narrative, 3.
6
Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks, 6.
7
Ibid., 5.
8
Ibid., 5.
9
Ibid., 6.
10
James Wood, How Fiction Works, 178.
11
Wood, How Fiction Works, 176-77.
12
Ibid., 179-80.
13
See Jurecic, ‘Reparative Reading,’ Illness as Narrative, 113-131.
14
Ibid., 63.
15
Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare, 110.
16
A German-French production with a script by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke, the film circulated internationally under
the French title Les Ailes du Désir. In 1997 Brad Siberling directed its American remake, City of Angels, which transferred
Berlin to Los Angeles.
17
Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, 111.
18
Antoine Berman’s ‘l’épreuve de l’étranger,’ apud Richard Kearney, Anatheism, 179.
19
Jennifer Johnston, Two Moons, 7.
20
Ibid., 9.
21
Ibid., 7.
22
Ibid., 8.
23
Ibid., 8.
24
Ibid., 224.
25
Ibid., 224.
26
Ibid., 10.
27
Ibid., 207.
28
Ibid., 216.
29
Ibid., 114.
30
Ibid., 8.
31
See Jurecic, Illness as Narrative, 2-4.
2
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