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The Novelization of the Body, or, How Medicine and Stories Need One Another

We are contained by the spaces and times given us, chosen by us, or that simply, randomly, befall us. Like the water jug or the sonnet form, containers simultaneously confine and give shape. The freedom we achieve during and beyond our lives is, perhaps, not unrelated to the containers that hold us and from which we free ourselves. How we live in and become free from what contains us—our mother’s uterus, for example, or the town we grew up in—influences the attained freedom. Whether the stricture of genre, the structure of language, or the constructs of culture, that which frames the stage on which we perform self will alter the outcomes of the dance. The boundaries of our containers, as we know well, determine the grounds for meaning. Defining what is outside and what is inside of a text or a frame or a discipline orients us toward the work of understanding or interpreting it. Paying attention to the border zones between one space and its contiguous but different neighbors is one way to locate ourselves in the spaces we find ourselves in. Once located, we can more ably identify what we do, who we are, and even, sometimes, what it all might mean. The boundaries themselves have become our loci of work and life at the limens of fields, cultures, genders, or biological structures. Knowing about the placenta or adolescence is not unlike knowing about Pashtun or graphic novels. Such boundary positions undermine certainty and stay the hand of the totalizer. Not only does one live in such zones around doubt and the enduring state of being a misfit; one also has a rare chance to transfigure what one sees or understands about one’s originary site. Boundary questions are essentially questions about location, about contiguity, about the situation of “hereness.” Mobilizing the elemental question of space itself, boundary questions enable us to contemplate our very stature as spatial creatures