The Politics of Dementia

Forgetting and Remembering the Violent Past in Literature, Film and Graphic Narratives

Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff, Nina Schmidt, Sue Vice

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110713701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Im Kontext der kulturwissenschaftlichen Gedächtnisforschung widmet sich diese interdisziplinär ausgerichtete Reihe dem Verhältnis von Medien und kultureller Erinnerung. Die hier vorgestellten Studien behandeln die ganze Bandbreite der durch Medien konstruierten, tradierten und verbreiteten Erinnerung. Schrift und Bild, das Kino und die 'neuen' digitalen Medien, Intermedialität, Transmedialität und Remediation sowie die sozialen, zunehmend transnationalen und transkulturellen, Kontexte der mediatisierten Erinnerung gehören zu den Forschungsinteressen der Reihe. Ziel ist es, eine internationale Plattform für die interdisziplinäre Medien- und Gedächtnisforschung zu schaffen. Eingereichte Manuskripte werden im peer review Verfahren durch externe Experten begutachtet.

Den Herausgebern, Astrid Erll (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main) und Ansgar Nünning (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen) ist ein internationaler Beirat aus renommierten Wissenschaftlern assoziiert:

• Aleida Assmann (Universität Konstanz)
• Mieke Bal (University of Amsterdam)
• Vita Fortunati (University of Bologna)
• Richard Grusin (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
• Udo Hebel (Universität Regensburg)
• Andrew Hoskins (University of Glasgow)
• Wulf Kansteiner (Binghamton University)
• Alison Landsberg (George Mason University)
• Claus Leggewie (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen)
• Jeffrey Olick (University of Virginia)
• Susannah Radstone (University of South Australia)
• Ann Rigney (Utrecht University)
• Michael Rothberg (University of Illinois)
• Werner Sollors (Harvard University)
• Frederic Tygstrup (University of Copenhagen)
• Harald Welzer (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen)

Dementia and Meaning Making

In the Shadow of No Memories? The Role of Dementia in Contemporary Aftermath Writing

Kirstin Gwyer

The mechanisms of our metaphorical conceptualisation of dementia have been the subject of extensive scrutiny in recent research at the intersection of neuroscience, sociology and pathography studies. Foregrounding the “range of emotionally charged metaphors about dementia” that “pervades the popular imagination” (Zeilig 2014a, 258) in contemporary Western societies – from the media and political discourse to film and literature but also medico-scientific terminology – current work in this area has been aimed at sensitising us to the assumptions informing the cultural narratives we tell ourselves about this complex of disorders that remains empirically and medically beyond our full grasp.¹ Particularly in the contact zone between dementia studies and gerontology, significant advances have been made in exploring how the interrelation between social construction and biomedical condition has coloured not only cultural images but also the clinical picture of dementia. In highlighting “the problematic consequences of popular discursive practices that associate dementia with disaster” (Zeilig 2014b, 88) and frame it “as a dread disease and major public health crisis” (Ballenger 2017, 716) in a society on the brink of being overwhelmed by the “apocalyptic demography” (Robertson 1990) of its growing older dependent population, these investigations are contributing in essential ways to an emerging trend in the theory of dementia care away from an emphasis on cognitive and mental deterioration and towards a more embodied approach to notions of subjectivity and personhood.²

And yet, running counter to this push for an embodied, decatastrophising approach, an apocalyptically heightened figurative use of dementia in popular culture not only persists but is apparently proliferating to the point where, two decades into the twenty-first century, dementia seems to have come to represent “the locus of and repository for all society’s fears” (Zeilig 2014b, 89). Accordingly, while investigations to date have concentrated primarily on the metaphors through which we evoke dementia, a secondary research focus on our invocation of dementia as metaphor is taking shape. The scope of the enquiry is expanding to take in the growing body of cultural productions where the “only seemingly individual or ahistorical” diseases of dementia, as Krüger-Fürhoff, Schmidt and Vice put it in the introduction (3) to the present volume, are enlisted “to represent or respond to violent historical and political events” and figure dynamics of remembering and forgetting at a collective, societal level.

The focal point of this essay will be the intersection where dementia as a lived reality connects with, and risks being displaced by, dementia as a way of making sense of the world. Through an exploration of the shared fund of imagery used to paint both dementia as an apocalypse and apocalyptic scenarios through dementia, I shall suggest that the metaphorical relationship between the two should in fact be thought of as one of analogical participation rather than simple correlation: though dementia undoubtedly represents a “locus” and “repository” of societal fears (Zeilig 2014b, 89), they are fears that feed on, and feed into, a greater and more complex set of cultural anxieties. The images we use to think about dementia, often in the synecdochal figure of Alzheimer’s disease, point to “the biomedical aspects of the condition that are most dreaded by society” (Zimmermann 2017b, 74), chief among them “the patient’s dependence, inertia, and loss of self” (90). However, our use of dementia as an image suggests that the constellation of memory erosion leading to a loss of self and sense of inertia also resonates with us in more general and abstract terms, through what it captures about our perception of our own present reality. Drawing on examples from current popular and scientific practice, as well as from two representatives of recent post-trauma fiction, where dementia is commonly invoked as a theme and trope, I will propose that the ‘dementia turn’ we observe in contemporary literature, film and comics may be understood as an illustrative paradigm for a far broader cultural sense in which neoliberal global-capitalist societies experience themselves as existing in a twilight zone of (post-genocidal, post-conflict, postcolonial, post-nuclear, post-terrorism) post-traumatic aftermath, wracked with “mnemonic convulsions” but “terminally ill with amnesia” (Huyssen 1995, 7, 1). In this twilight zone, the amnesiac state diagnosed by Huyssen at the end of the twentieth century is increasingly acutely experienced as a degenerative condition at once irremediable and inexorable, without hope for either retrospective or prospective recuperation.

1 Figuring dementia

Studies investigating the metaphorical evocation of dementia have noted a prevalence of doomsday imagery centred on natural disasters, disease or other cataclysms of biblical proportions across both popular and scientific discourses.³ Dementia is the “quiet epidemic” (Wilson 2014), the “21st century plague” (Smyth 2013) or “leprosy of the early 2000s” (Behuniak 2011, 84), a “rising tide” and “silent tsunami” (qtd. in Zeilig 2014a, 260). Sometimes, the scourge is by flame rather than flood: “a story of hell,” of being ravaged by a “forest fire,” by “the holocaust of my brain” (qtd. in Zimmermann 2017b, 83, 85, 82). Dementia is conceptualised as “a lethal threat at both the individual and social levels” (Behuniak 2011, 85), and its carriers – “zombies,” the “living dead,” the “grey hordes” (77, 79), members of the “apocalyptic demography” (Robertson 1990) – are coming for us. In response to the perception of dementia as a silent but devastating threat, the other semantic field to have been identified as dominating popular rhetoric in the West is the language of “military and war-like metaphors” (Zeilig 2014b, 85). In this rhetoric, dementia is a “killer” (Zeilig 2014b, 84), requiring an “all-out fight-back” (qtd. in Zeilig 2014a, 261), or even – suffused with the righteous conviction of waging a holy war – a “millennium demon” calling for a “crusade” (qtd. in Zeilig 2014a, 260).

However, although it is not unusual for calls for the eradication of a pernicious disease to be couched in the language of warfare – as with HIV/AIDS or cancer – the twist where dementia is concerned is that the militaristic language it elicits tends to be more closely related to the experience of being under siege, taken hostage or hijacked in ways that seem informed not by war in general but by underlying cultural anxieties about specifically terrorist warfare. The image of the “time bomb” recurs frequently, gesturing towards “politically motivated terrorism” (Zeilig 2014a, 261). Susan Schneider Williams (2016), whose late husband, actor Robin Williams, had Lewy body dementia, refers to “the terrorist inside my husband’s brain,” sending “a firestorm of symptoms our way” (1308) and leaving him “trapped in the twisted architecture of his neurons” from which she “could not pull him out” (1309). Even the image of the “crusades” to fight the “millennium demon” has acquired a secondary metaphorical frame following the repeated contentious invocation of crusader history after 9/11, in the context of George W. Bush’s global “war on terror.”⁴

The convergence of apocalyptic zombification and terrorism that emerges from these images is troubling yet telling. As an attempt to evoke the lived reality of a condition, the yoking together of the figure of dementia as a terrorist who takes control of a hostage’s brain to leave them “like a 747 airplane coming in with no landing gear” (Schneider Williams 2016, 1309) and of the ghoulish visions of walking death, of a “living body without a mind” (Gerritsen et al. 2018, 599) is profoundly problematic. As Susan Behuniak has shown with specific reference to the Alzheimer’s variant of dementia, “the social construction of those with AD as zombies generates not only the negative stereotypes and stigma associated with people constructed as ‘other,’ but also the emotional responses of disgust and utter terror” (2011, 72). However, as in earlier incarnations of the runaway zombie metaphor as an evolving receptacle for Western fears for going on a century, the metaphor of the undead reveals far more about the cultural context in which it is figuratively deployed than about the object to which it is temporarily attached.

Since the figure’s initial appropriation from Vodou culture and its application to the bare life of slave labourers in US-occupied Haiti in the 1920s, zombies in the Western imagination have been associated with everything from the Second World War, National Socialism, concentration camp inmates, the threat of communism and nuclear destruction, race relations, the Vietnam War, capitalist brainwashing and mindless consumerism, pandemics including AIDS and Ebola, and the viral spread of information in the mass media to, more recently, globalisation and mass migration, postcolonial or urban-proletarian rage, and terrorism.⁵ The indeterminacy of the image becomes apparent from even this incomplete list. Indeed, indeterminacy might be considered the defining feature of the modern-day zombie, for the one thing that all its recent manifestations have in common is how difficult they make it to locate the perceived threat they are meant to embody. Before they are infected, and sometimes even afterwards, contemporary zombies look just like the next person, and anybody could be one. This is also where the metaphor’s connection to acts of domestic or clandestine terrorism is clearly in evidence: “Like the ‘sleeper-cell’ terrorist, the zombie can potentially be anyone” (Muntean and Payne 2009, 247). In consequence, “as with the friendly suburban foreign students-cum-terrorists of 9/11,” the “inside/outside or us/them differentiation breaks down” (Schmeink 2016, 221), and “fear and terror emerge from the possibility of becoming a victim at any time” (210).⁶

A similar sense of the self/other separation not holding also informs contemporary views of dementia. Societally but even medically, it is conceived as a set of conditions that could not only affect anyone at any time, but which ‘contaminate’ those ‘exposed’ to them long before they develop any active form of the syndrome themselves. A...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Refracting History, Trauma and the Generations through the Prism of Dementia
• Dementia and Meaning Making
• Dementia’s Paradoxical Relation to Buried Truths
• Dementia as Catalyst and Plot Device
• Dementia and Genocide: An Artist’s Approach
• Dementia as Ethical Challenge
• Index