“I think I’m going to be struck!”

On the Literary (In)Narratability of Strokes in the 19th and Early 20th Century

Abstract

As an acute focal-neurological deficit, a stroke has since antiquity been a disease that in many cases profoundly disrupts a person’s physical and cognitive constitution and has a lasting effect on those affected even after the immediate stroke. While strokes have nowadays moved to the centre of medical examination, the disease and its aesthetic treatment have received surprisingly little attention in literary studies. This essay will therefore attempt to analyse the narrativization of stroke in German-speaking literature in the 19th and early 20th century. Against the backdrop of an extensive corpus of texts, basic characteristics of the literary descriptions of strokes are outlined, before it is shown in two in-depth readings (Wilhelm Raabe: Der Hungerpastor, Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks) that strokes have specific inherent characteristics (suddenness of the illness; aphasic sequelae) which counteract efforts to narrate them in literary form and which therefore affect their representation in narrative texts. The article concludes with a brief anticipation of three further research questions (differentiated diachronic development of stroke narrativization; literary gender index; representations of strokes in poetry and drama from a genre-poetological point of view), which could expand the literary analysis of strokes in a productive way.