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You and Yours - Transcript 大象传媒 Radio 4 |
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TX: 11.01.08 - Care in Literature PRESENTER: LIZ BARCLAY |
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THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 大象传媒 CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. BARCLAY Now many writers have tackled the subject of care and carers, the emotion inherent in a relationship where one participant is highly dependent on another is a rich source of fictional stories. Today,. We're looking at how social care has been portrayed in literature. Dr David Bolt, editor of The Journal of Literary Disability, is particularly interested in how authors have represented the relationship between carer and the cared for person. And Dr Lucy Burke, senior lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University, has paid particular attention to how care homes are described. BURKE Margaret Forster's Have the Men Had Enough is a kind of meticulous examination of the kind of difficulties people face in making decisions about care for the elderly and in this case for the grandma of the family who's suffering from dementia. It describes the care home in which she eventually ends her life as being a kind of malignant social environment, a place which actively contributes to her decline and to the loss of the faculties that she has. READING: HAVE THE MEN HAD ENOUGH No one came forward to greet us but it was teatime, everyone was busy. All the old women were seated round a long table being fed. There were four staff for the 20 women. The noise was terrible - wild cawings as though a clutch of rooks had settled there. I pushed grandma to the table, glad that I was behind her and couldn't see her face. The four staff members in yellow overalls starred at us. I asked if matron was around, I said we were expected. One of them went of, grudgingly it seemed, and came back with a small squat woman in a blue and white uniform. While she addressed me a white haired sweet faced old lady got up from the end of the table and shuffled down to stand beside me. She put her hand on mine and made some sound, I couldn't distinguish. "Go away Leah," the sister said, "go on off with you, don't bother the lady." I said she wasn't bothering me and asked sister what she'd been trying to say to me. "She's deaf," sister said, "nothing she says makes sense, don't let her bother you, it doesn't bother us." BURKE You'd be very hard pressed to find a positive representation of social care or of institutionalisation in literature and I think there are loads of reasons for that. In part it's because literature is interested in the individuals and there's a kind of general perception that social care and being institutionalised - those things are at odds with individualism. BOLT The portrayal of social care in literature is clearly a complex one but one of the key things that I'd like to stress is the way - the distinction between the care provider and the disabled dependant is blurred. Of course we've got to accept and recognise the role of the care provider and literature does that but what I would argue is that we mustn't do this at the expense of the portrayal of the disabled dependant. READING: JANE EYRE Mr Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union, perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very near, that knit us so very close for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand. BOLT The distinction between disabled dependant and non-disabled care provider is frequently blurred. In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre for example Jane takes on the role of care provider when Rochester is blind. READING: JANE EYRE Never did I weary of reading to him, never did I weary of conducting him where he wished to go, of doing for him what he wished to be done. And there was a pleasure in my services, most full, most exquisite, even though sad because he claimed these services without painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me so truly that he knew no reluctance and profiting by my attendance. He felt I loved him so fondly that to yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest wishes. BOLT It's certainly evident that she is actually receiving more or the care relationship is more beneficial to Jane than it is to Rochester, it blurs the distinction between the care provider and the disabled dependant. BURKE In Michael Ignatieff's Scar Tissue he explores the ways in which the decision to place his mother in care, which is a decision he has to take, leads to her kind of identity loss, she goes within a week from being a person who very decidedly does not want to be placed into care and who exclaims - No, no, no - as he and his brother leave her, to someone who simply becomes part of the environment. READING: SCAR TISSUE Six patients were dosing in front of a TV set fixed high on the wall. An old East Indian man in a tracksuit and pair of slippers was asleep on his wife's shoulder. She was wearing a sari and was reading a newspaper in her own language. A big black man was strapped into his wheelchair next to her and was grinding his teeth while watching a woman on TV demonstrating bleach powder in front of a washing machine. The old Chinese woman was turned to the wall, making spitting noises. Next to her, in the corner, was another old woman in a pink terylene dress sunk in her chair staring out of the window. Hello mother, I said. Hello, she said as if she had never been anywhere else. BOLT In D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover Sir Clifford is paralysed in a war injury. READING: LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER When he rang after a time she would appear at once and then he would say: I think I'd rather you shaved me this morning. Her heart gave a little thrill and she replied with extra softness: Very good Sir Clifford. BOLT And it's this relationship between Mrs Bolton and Sir Clifford that is particularly interesting. READING: LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER At first he had resented the infinitely soft touch of her fingers on his face but now he liked it with a growing voluptuousness. He let her shave him nearly every day, her face near his, her eyes so very concentrated watching that she did it right. And gradually her fingertips knew his cheeks and lips, his jaw and chin and throat perfectly. She now did almost everything for him and he felt more at home with her, less ashamed of accepting her menial offices than with Connie. She liked handling him. She loved having his body in her charge, absolutely, to the last menial offices. BOLT Both characters are benefiting from the dependency relationship. There's no denying that Mrs Bolton is the care provider at this stage in the novel but nor is there any denying that Sir Clifford is playing a large part in the relationship. Recent scholarship has started to perhaps accept that dependency perhaps isn't the dirty word that it once seemed to be, you know it's been perhaps a long time going but we have to recognise that everyone is dependent to some extent. And if we recognise that everyone's dependent to some extent of course the idea of parasitic dependency becomes a myth. BURKE For some writers the experience of social care for the elderly, particularly for those who are severely disabled with conditions such as dementia, becomes a kind of gothic horror in which personhood and dignity are lost. We see this in Annie Ernaux's account of her mother's death from dementia I Remain in Darkness. READING: I REMAIN IN DARKNESS She's eating the strawberry tart I have brought her, picking the fruit out from the custard. Opposite us an emaciated woman, a phantom from Bookenvar [phon.] sitting on her bed. Her back straight, a fearful expression in her eyes. She lifts up her chemise and you can see the diaper. BOLT In Henry Green's Blindness the central protagonist Master John is blinded when a stone is thrown at the window of the train in which he's travelling. One of the results of this incident is that he becomes dependent on his childhood nanny. This is particularly interesting in psychoanalytic terms because Master John ends up being fed by nanny with cake and buttered toast etc., and she points out that this is much like the way in which she used to feed him with the bottle. And of course in psychoanalytic terms that points to the oral phase of development, so in effect John is regressing to a very early stage of life, i.e. he's been infantalised. BURKE I think what's interesting here is that this kind of emphasis, which we see in a lot of novels, upon old people's loss of bodily control, for instance, or their neediness and their dependency on others might say a lot more about how we, as a culture, respond to vulnerability and to the inevitability of our impairment as we get older. There's a kind of horror of mortality here, a horror of neediness, a horror of dependence. But of course these are all things that characterise all of us as humans. And what these texts do is perhaps reflect a set of cultural attitudes towards bodily decline. READING Now in March freezing winds blow across the estuary. Afternoon has drawn in. The long day ends, the lamps are lit, the TV turned on. The visitors depart. And a new life takes over. The private night world of the home. Tonight someone may die because on any night death is always possible. The company is not static, it changes all the time. It is an illusion that these are the same old people sitting in the same chairs with the same chapped legs and swollen feet. I see them in motion. A line awaiting to depart and another line awaiting to enter. And the line stretches back well beyond the doors and I see myself there and see you there. Back to the You and Yours homepage The 大象传媒 is not responsible for external websites |
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