Peter Fifield - Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books

Madame Sosostris, cameo clairvoyant in The Waste Land, is the first note of humour in a serious poem. A figure of ill-judged gravity, her exotic name and mystic profession sit comically alongside the fact of her bad cold. Eliots joke is at her expense: she didnt see this coming. Her illness also provides one of the first instances where The Waste Lands characteristic qualities emerge. The cultural and mythic scaffoldingthe domain of the fisher king, the sibyl, and the tarotrub up against the mundane grubbiness of everyday modernity, typified by a cold. Eliots nevertheless indicates that Sosostriss peerless wisdom is to be believed in the face of contrary evidence: she can prognosticate from the man with three staves and the drowned Phoenician sailor, but appears to have missed the prognosis of that first sniffle. However, by being the butt of the poets joke, she does in fact indicate what is to come, both for her poem and for modernism more widely. Her cards and her cold are, as it were, symptomatic of modernism. They mix the high and low, the sacred and profane, the arcane and universal, the intellect and the body. And this is all foregrounded by Eliot by means of that most ubiquitous, least symbolically freighted, of ailments.

Illness is a central preoccupation of literary modernism. The periods intense concentration on interiority, non-normativity, and the varied experiences of the embodied consciousness calls, for a critical response that accounts for the ill subject quite as much as the healthy. Modernist responses to illness help to bridge the gap that the philosopher Havi Carel has described between the naturalistic and phenomenological accounts of being sick. The former, she argues, establishes a description of illness constituted of physical facts alone. This description is objective (and objectifying), neutral and third-personal.

Modernist writing does not enter this debate on either side but encompasses and imbricates elements of both. Its sense of formal experiment and the defamiliarization that this brings to the reader is itself resonant with the lived experience of illness given in phenomenological accounts. To fall ill unexpectedly is to have ones natural attitude thrown into relief: what was once so simple that it fell beneath notice is suddenly and vividly impossible. In sickness and modernism alike, a world that may otherwise appear self-evident is made newly strange by an altered, thickly-textured means of engagement: everything is transformed utterly. Modernism shows this to be true not only for first-person experience of illness, but for that of third parties as well. As such, the present work discusses numerous depictions of an inability, refusal, or indifference to entering sympathetically the sensations of the ill subject, notably T. S. Eliot, for whom illness often marks distance from and disgust with the bodies of racial and social others. Illness thus brings home the strangeness of other humans, as well as the renewed foreignness of an experiential world once habitual. As such, just as in illness, where the otherness of my body becomes problematically visible because of its capacity to go wrong, the characters, places, voices, and events of the modernist text are vigorously present to the reader in their resistance to ready comprehension. In the place of a strong plot there may be no clear sense of development or even eventfulness with which to navigate a novel. The narration of a modernist text is, then, likely to deepen the sense of dislocation and disorientation, with plural, ambiguous, non-linear, limited, contradictory, or partial characteristics.