In her essay “On Being Ill” Virginia Woolf ponders (and wanders through) the major themes of literature—jealousy, love, war—and the writers who have taught us how to speak on these subjects. “The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her.” To read, though, and to learn to speak of illness which we experience at least as often as pistols at dawn (or rapiers in the gloaming) and love’s beginning or ending, we must search longer, harder. She does name Thomas De Quincey and Proust as examples, but it is without enthusiasm. Their writing on illness she calls “attempted” or “scattered through the pages.”
Almost ninety years have passed since the essay was first published; consequently, we have more material to consider. In 1926 Woolf didn’t make a distinction between literary and other (sensational, exploitative, etc.) treatments of illness, but I think there may be room for such qualifying today. In her introduction to the 2002 Paris Press printing of the essay, Hermione Lee acknowledges the “burgeoning literature of pathology” and I’d like to give a shout out to young adult novels with titles like “Don’t Die, My Love” and “Sixteen and Dying” that use illness and the related suffering to fuel drama outside the body. Opinions of these books aside (I was properly chastised by a veteran middle school English teacher who said everyone has the right to read bad books), if we acknowledge them as part of the landscape of illness in writing, we may better see the scarcity of literature examining “how tremendous the spiritual change” brought on by “common illness,” “what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals”—that is, the inherent interior drama of illness.
For example, where are the “epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache”? This little list strikes my fancy and my funny bone, but that’s point. Illness is so frequent an event in our lives, so often laying us low, and yet? Where is it on the page? First there is the practical difficulty we have in expressing our surreal, transformed world of exhaustion, fever and NyQuil (or “that mighty Prince with moths’ eyes and feathered feet, one of whose names is Chloral”) once we have left it. Unless there is a scribe standing by or we manage to scribble legibly for later review, the brilliant incoherence or loosening of logic experienced in sickness is difficult to rediscover. There is the father whose hepatic encephalopathy transported him to a tattoo parlor. I wonder now what design sleeved in plastic he pointed to and said, “that one.” I did not ask and cannot now know.
And there are the limits of language. We can say we feel too hot, too cold, our head hurts, but of the heat, cold, ache, what? “There is nothing ready made” in the English language. The sick one must take “pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.” Moreover, Woolf says it will be American writers doing this smashing, this alchemy, for “who of English birth can take liberties with the language”? For them “it is a sacred thing and therefore doomed to die.” I’m flattered? But what about Foghat which is both British and a potentially apt description of a head cold? But seriously! Of course there are ready made expressions, but they are cliché and we aren’t looking for simple phrases. We are looking for illness in literature—evocative passages we turn to in sickness and health for their clear, just, and eloquent treatment of our symptoms, their impact.
[Continued in Part 2–coming shortly!]