TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 137
above. Aside from such innovations, however, a stable and not too
copious repertory of cultural scripts has governed the representation of
massmedicalevents.
What is more remarkable than formal innovation, then, is the
histrionics at work in many disease representations, a certain
dramaturgywith characteristic beginnings, twists and turns, and, not
always, a happy end. This distinctive dramaturgy at work in many
culturalrepresentations(writtenorfilmic)ofbioticmobilityfurthermore
registers in a series of typical emplotments: narratives of epidemic
diseasesareeitherinvestedinsurpriseandaccident—theboltoutofthe
blue-model—or they are engaged in backtracking (Albertini 456),
tracingtheemergenceofthediseasefarbackinspaceandtime.
One attempt to organize this narrative repertory into a system has
been made by Arthur W. Frank in his Wounded Storyteller, first
published in 1995. I begin with him here because his schema, even
though rigorously focused on individual and not collective diseases, is
stillclosestto myoverallinterest,theepistemic andideologicalchoices
underwriting mass disease narrativizations. Broadly speaking, Frank
proposes a triadic system, composed of a) "the restitution narrative," b)
"the chaos narrative," and c) "the quest narrative." The "restitution
narrative" is basically a discursive instantiation of the socio-cultural
norm of the healthy body: "contemporary culture treats health as the
normal condition that people ought to have restored.... The plot of
restitution has the basic storyline: Yesterday I was healthy, today I'm
sick,buttomorrowI'llbehealthyagain"(77).Herethe"configurational
operation"(White,Content51) ofsuch a tale is the narrativeequivalent
ofthere-configurationofabodycommonlycalledhealing.Withregard
to this story type,the epistemic,if notideological, underpinnings of the
narrative itself are more obvious than in the other two types of Frank's
system.Scriptingdiseaseasadeviationfromthenormofahealthybody
thus remains beholden to the ideology of ableism to which I will return
in more detail in the chapter on disability. His second model is the
diametrical opposite of the first and deconstructs both the norm and the
configurative potential of the narrative itself: "Chaos is the opposite of
restitution:its plotimagineslifenevergettingbetter.Storiesarechaotic
in their absence of narrative order. Events are told as the storyteller
experiences life: without sequence or discernable causality" (97).
Amplifying Frank's argument, one might detect in this "anti-narrative"