ABSTRACT
Introduction Besides science and the novel, fact and fiction, the discourse on mortality that seems to materialize in the writing machine includes as part of its interpretive structure beliefs that are neither provable or testable but seem as if coherent figures of speech that seek to make facts meaningful and meanings factually relevant, various ways of transferring meaning we see as metaphoric and metonymic. For example, the sweep and currency of dementia as an apparent concerted tendency can be identified as a plague as if an impersonal force, perhaps without rhyme or reason and yet menacing and ever-present in the present. The notion of dementia as a plague is an interesting and provocative figure of speech that enables us to approach medical science as an order based upon notions of its legitimacy and validity that need to be opened to question if we are to engage ways in which the complexity of representations of dementia gloss their entanglement with anxiety over mortality.
