Healing Machines? Medical Technology and Notions of Personhood in Two Swiss Hospital Narratives (Diggelmann, Ulrich)

This article examines the narrative representation of high-technology clinical spaces and their challenging effects on the personhood of patient-protagonists in two Swiss hospital narratives: Walter Matthias Diggelmann’s Schatten (1979), a fictionalized autopathography on lung cancer, and Ulrike Ulrich’s Hinter den Augen (2013), which narrates an MRI examination. Combining classical narratology with the narratology of space, the paper delineates a shift from the twentieth- to the twenty-first-century text that moves from a critical representation of technologized hospital space as an antagonistic environment to a nuanced embrace of medical technology that intricately intertwines the machine and the self. As the analyses show, this shift from opposition to embrace of technology is accompanied and engendered by distinct structural characteristics: While both texts work with artistic forms of representing inner states, such as internal monologue and unreliable narration, their respective ‘poetics of the high-tech hospital’ diverge significantly, from a fundamentally dichotomous semantic setup (Diggelmann) to an integrative narrative based on formal mimesis (Ulrich). Focusing on how literary prose uniquely renders the experience of increasingly technologized hospital landscapes, the article contributes to literary scholarship at the intersection of the medical humanities, the cultural history of the hospital, and science and technology studies.