Narrating a Traumatic Death from Cancer

Review of Dave Eggers A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. New York: Random House, 2000. ISBN 0-330-48455-9. 395 paqes, $14.95.

When he was a twenty-one-year-old college student, Dave Eggers lost both of his parents to cancer in the space of thirty-two days; his father’s death was quick and unexpected, while his mother’s followed years of battling stomach cancer. Eggers had to find a way to regain his balance in what felt like a “world with neither floor nor ceiling” that had left him “rootless, ripped from all foundations.” His effort to cope with the overwhelming “black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow” of these catastrophic losses taught him that “one’s past either becomes useful or else mutates and becomes cancerous.” Eggers chose health, and immediately began writing the hundreds of journal entries that would become the basis of his 2000 autobiography, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Like the physicians who examined his father and diagnosed his mother, Eggers probes into, and anatomizes in sometimes graphic detail, the effects of meaning-defying loss on the psyche of a writer. His self-aware and genre-conscious approach to autobiographical writing has the effect of taking a literary X-ray of the nature of trauma and loss, and of the possibilities of moving beyond them through the written words of literature or the spoken ones of the analytic hour.

Death and dying can feel like “a blow” to the “tissues of the mind” that ends up “smashing through whatever barriers your mind has set up as a line of defense,” Kai Erikson states in “Notes on Trauma and Community.” By “compelling victim survivors to remember and to repeat stories suffused with terror, panic, and pain,” Deborah Horvitz claims in Literary Trauma: Sadism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in American Women’s Fiction (2000), writing can organize the psyche and even facilitate healing. Eggers is not so sure. By shifting readers’ attention to the messy processes of working through that which precedes containment or resolution, Eggers forces his audience to confront the wreckage left when human psyches collide with the unspeakable and unknowable, and he also raises questions about distinctions between the dying and their witnesses or survivors. At the beginning of Heartbreaking, the distinctions between Eggers and his mother have already begun to dissolve. Heidi is tumor-ridden, leaking all sorts of fluids, some into a “small plastic container” that “can be cupped around the mouth of a reclining person, just under the chin, in a way that allows the depositor of green fluids to either raise one’s head to spit directly into it, or to simply let the fluid dribble down, over his or her chin, and then into the receptacle waiting below” (p. 3). When Eggers lifts what is left of his mother’s body, he is “afraid of what is under her nightgown—bruises, spots, holes.” Her insides “have rotted through,” and so, it seems, has her son’s capacity to hold himself together as he witnesses her ordeal (p.31). When he goes to the kitchen to empty the plastic receptacle, he worries that its contents will overflow and “burn through my pants” (p. 23).

Like his dying mother’s bodily fluids, Eggers feeling of horror and helplessness, and then later, disorientation and devastation, can hardly be contained, organized, contemplated. Eggers’s mother’s death is a traumatic death, because her son is an eyewitness of it from the perspective of a caretaker, who is not afforded any detachment, but who instead observes the process of dying in slow-motion, missing no detail of bodily or emotional pain. Heartbreaking makes it clear: pain and loss are not necessarily words for private, discrete, internal experiences, but rather, are fluid states that can leak and overflow onto or into other people, who are then filled up themselves. This presents a special problem for witnesses of trauma, those who watch a loved one die, and then re-experience that loss in the telling of it.

African American writer Audre Lorde, who died of breast cancer in 1992, is intimate with the kind of flooding, invasiveness, and toxicity Eggers is recalling. Six months after her mastectomy, she describes in The Cancer Journals (1980) how the “pain fills me like a puspocket and every touch threatens to breach the taut membrane that keeps it from flowing thru and poisoning my whole exis-

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tence.” Like Eggers, Lorde understands the paradoxes of pain and its narration; that is, the ways that writing can either be a form of chemotherapy or can become a deadly carcinogen. On the one hand, writing sometimes helped her feel as if “part of me flew like a big bird to the ceiling of whatever place I was in, observing my actions and providing a running commentary” (p. 30). But on the other hand, detachment and perspective can only come after an initial flooding. If she doesn’t allow the pain to “flow through me and pass on,” it might “detonate inside me.” Lorde needs to hold onto her feelings and memories long enough to make sense of them, but she has to be careful that her “despair” does not become “like another cancer” that will “metabolize into cells of itself” (pp. 9-10). Instead of being repressed, projected, denied, or discharged, chaotic memories and feelings, Lorde seems to intuit, must reside within the psyche long enough to be converted into thoughts, symbols, and stories. But instead of focusing on the end product of these internal processes, as I think scholars of trauma sometimes do when they theorize, Lorde constructs a text that captures acceptance, integration, and sublimation while they are occurring or perhaps even before.

But surely there is a difference between Lorde’s or Heidi Eggers’s suffering and Eggers’s; that is, between “first-hand” experiences of trauma “victims and survivors” and a “[s]econd-hand or vicarious perception of trauma,” which for many scholars is “not tantamount to experiencing it,” as Horvitz would suggest. Not to Eggers, who has a relationship to his mother’s pain that blurs distinctions between victim and witness, between the person dying and the person in mourning, between the physical suffering of the mother and the emotional pain of her son. In The Body in Pain (1985), Elaine Scarry explains that “the events happening within the interior of” someone’s body “may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth” (p. 3). But for Eggers, it is not possible to observe his mother from the kind of distance or detachment Scarry is describing. There is nothing remote or mysterious about his mother’s agonies, in part because, as one of her caretakers, he must remain close to her excretions, her moans. Nursing her puts Eggers in a unique narrative position of proximity and responsibility. Instead of being forms of imagination, attention and empathy take Eggers so close to his mother’s point of view that he sees right through her, as he does when he recalls one of her surgeries. When surgeons cut into her abdomen to remove the “offending portion” of her stomach, Eggers thinks “there was suddenly light thrown upon the world of cancer-podules,” who “glared at the doctor, each podule… having one single eye, one blind eye in the middle, which stared imperiously, as only a blind eye can do, out at the doctor” (pp. 3-4). Eggers’s narrative point of view in passages like this seems just as eviscerating as the physicians’ instruments. Like the surgeons who went in and ‘“opened her up’—a phrase they used—and had looked inside,” Eggers repeats their incisions by writing about them. An ability to see into the interior of another might help Eggers to pretend that he can identify dangers before doctors can, but it also leaves him with an overwhelming, sometimes unwelcome access into the organs, feelings, and thoughts of others.

Sometimes a “discourse on trauma appears, in some aspects, as if it has itself undergone trauma,” Linda Belau argues in Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Memory (2002). Both Lorde’s Cancer Journals and Eggers’s Heartbreaking suggest that the nature of grief and trauma alters the format and dislodges the structures of form and narrative. Lorde can only manage periodic journal entries (her last one is dated March 30, 1979, and she died in November of 1992), and thus she does not complete or conclude her book, which instead ends with a series of eulogistic essays written by friends and colleagues who, like Eggers, live to tell their own story. Yet, to those who tend the dying or are left to mourn them, the boundaries between deceased and survivor, dead and living seem insignificant. It is perhaps no surprise that, at the end of Heartbreaking, Eggers announces, “I was a cancer,” as if he also in some way has lost the battle with the carcinogens of pain and trauma (p. 435). Cancer took Lorde as well as Eggers’s parents; writing about the dead and dying nearly killed him.

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