Time Between Then and Now: Temporality in Pathographies and Thanatographies

Thanatographies and pathographies are both concerned with a specific situation of the body and life phase. Illness and dying, and death, which often overlap, are not just a peripheral topic in these two different modes of life writing, but an extratextual situation that drives the writing process and affects their narrative structure. The key for distinguishing thanatographies and pathographies is not, however, solely their subject matter, but more importantly their temporality and perspective. Drawing on the reinterpretations of chronos and kairos, two ancient Greek words stressing different dimensions of time, we can see that while the pathographical mode is concerned mainly with the present time of the recovering, practicalities of everyday life, and chronic experience of suffering, in the thanatographical mode authors take death to be a rupture that divides time to before and after, looking in the future to anticipate mourning and in the past to evaluate life as it was lived. The hospital memoir Čas mezi tehdy a teď (The Time Between Then and Now) by Czech poet Bohumila Grögerová, written about and for her partner (and poet) Josef Hiršal, shows how these modes can shift from one to the other, while at the same time remaining mutually exclusive.