In Illness as Narrative, Ann Jurecic examines the unruly questions that personal accounts of illness pose to literary studies and the health humanities: What is the role of criticism and aesthetic judgment in responding to literature about suffering? What are the affordances of both empathic and skeptical responses to stories of suffering? Are illness stories ineluctably pleas for sympathy that no thinking person should fall victim to, as Arlene Croce once indicted? Why do we read, anyway? Jurecic’s questions entice discussion at a contentious cultural moment. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, the number of memoirs and essays about illness—and their inclusion in medical school, humanities, and social science curricula—has increased. However, their escalation, and their potential to encourage empathic readings, coincided with dominant literary theories that advocated rigorously skeptical, error-seeking responses to texts and their authors. Jurecic reminds us that Paul Ricoeur called such responses “the hermeneutics of suspicion” (3).
Jurecic’s astutely researched, nuanced answers to those questions propose a corrective to the extreme skepticism of “disembodied criticism.” Such criticism, she claims, dismisses testimonial writing from “a position of distance and privilege.” At the same time, her answers affirm that intellectually “rigorous” responses to texts are central to the critical humanities (15). To support her position, she offers attentive readings of illness narratives by Virginia Woolf, Reynolds Price, and Jean-Dominique Bauby, as well as the theoretical writing of literary and other scholars. For instance, Jurecic speculates that the condition of a reader’s body aligns with their responses to texts. In a chapter called “Theory’s Aging Body,” she observes that as skeptical scholarly readers aged—think of Stephen Greenblatt, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler—they turned their attention to “illness, vulnerability, and mortality” (93). Jurecic also suggests that criticism’s function to expose cultural conditions turns illness stories into critiques of the effects of contemporary medicine on our experiences of vulnerability and mortality. The relatively new concept of living “at risk” is a case in point. Stories about living with the risk of experiencing a particular illness in the future leave potential patients with uncertainty,” prompting narratives that seek the “personal meaning of the impersonal statistics” that medical encounters now regularly deliver (18).
Jurecic also reflects on the ways theorists have understood the possibilities of representing and responding to pain in the varied approaches of philosophical thinkers Elaine Scarry, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty, along with anthropologists Jean E. Jackson, Byron Good, and Veena Das. In an exceptionally comprehensive and nuanced reading of Susan Sontag’s theoretical, fictional, and journal writing about suffering, Jurecic uncovers Sontag’s inconsistent, yet revelatory positions on the human capacity for responding to representations of pain. The chapter on Sontag is enriched by Jurecic’s reading of Annie Lebovitz’s controversial photographs of Sontag’s final days (included in A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005) and David Reiff’s responses to Sontag’s suffering in his memoir about his mother’s illnesses (Swimming in a Sea of Death).
Illness as Narrative closes with examples of what Jurecic calls reparative writing and reading practices. Reparative writers, such as Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), Jurecic claims, both create “a more coherent sense of themselves” and dislodge culturally “fixed ideas and narratives” about illness or disability (109). Her discussion of reparative reading considers the limits of two competing readings of Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. One assumes that readers will empathically and unreflectively imagine those who are culturally different from themselves. The other looks skeptically at the assumption that what medical educators call cultural competence can be acquired by reading a book. Jurecic suggests that strategies for reading and teaching informed by Janelle S. Taylor, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Rita Felski encourage more complex habits of response, such as Taylor’s concept of “’empathic curiosity’” (122).
Illness as Narrative poses questions so central to discussions in the medical humanities that it should be read by those who teach in the health professions and disciplines. Jurecic’s book advances the groundbreaking case made by Arthur Frank that illness narratives contribute not only to medicine, but also to contemporary culture and individual lives. Since Illness as Narrative rigorously addresses questions of how to respond to and teach the literature of suffering, it has consequential implications for literary studies and the critical humanities more generally. It exemplifies how a marginalized sub-field can offer a perspective that the dominant theories in the larger discipline fail to notice. Perhaps the most urgent professional question Jurecic asks is what we lose if writers and readers attuned to the ill or suffering body are not heard in critical discussions. Fortunately, Jurecic’s clear, jargon-free prose and the texts she writes about also welcome readers in disciplines beyond literary studies and health humanities into the conversation.
Illness as Narrative:
https://upittpress.org/books/9780822961901/
Arlene Croce:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/12/26/discussing-the-undiscussable
Arthur Frank:
The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 2nd ed. Univ of Chicago Press, 2013. (Orig. 1995)
Illness as Narrative
By Ann Jurecic
University of Pittsbugh Press: 2012, 192 Pages
Web Photo by Mostafa Saeed
