Editors' Introduction -- The Unruly Mise-en-Corps: Body, Text, and Healing

To call for papers on “unruly texts” implies, by some default, that texts ordinarily discussed in the pages of this journal tend toward the ruly. By and large, the field of literature and medicine has, until recently at least, limited itself to realist fictions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that center, to some extent, on illness, health professionals, or patients. The so-called canon of literature and medicine, most would agree, includes such works as “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” Middlemarch, The Magic Mountain, and William Carlos Williams’s short stories about doctors and patients. Of late, however, teachers and students in the field have demonstrated poetic courage in seeking out unconventional texts, noncanonical texts, or texts that demand great literary skill from their readers. Mirroring, in part, the contemporary literary culture’s attraction to diverse and newly heard voices, scholars of literature and medicine have engaged themselves in the study of forgotten, impenetrable, or otherwise overlooked texts of all periods that might contribute to the enterprise of clarifying the storied dimensions of sickness and healing. As a result, we have heard at our meetings or read in our journals papers on such authors—deemed unruly for any number of reasons—as Dante, Alice James, D. M. Thomas, and Derek Walcott. We have permitted ourselves the latitude to teach and write about texts that have nothing to do with medicine or sickness but whose study may, generically or creatively or conceptually, bear some relation to the enterprise of healing.

Heralding a new stage in literature-and-medicine studies, this attention to difficult or off-plot works seems to suggest a deepening of scholarly rigor. Layer by layer, we are examining—with a botanist’s attentiveness to structure, function, and beauty—the intricacies of the relation between medicine and literature, not only in the “plots” of works or medical backgrounds of authors, but in the deep parallels between literary acts and healing acts. If Jacques Lacan asserts that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” we might want to assert that disease is a language, health another, and healing a translational enterprise allowing them to speak to one another. ¹ The result of our call for papers about unruly texts supports such assertions. Not only did we receive papers treating complex texts with contemporary theoretical approaches, we also received papers that dealt with no recognizable text at all. It is as if the field, accelerating, moved straight from the canon to a land beyond literary boundaries and beyond generic rules altogether.

The essays in this special issue complicate the already generative and untameable connections between body and text. In the first set of essays, collected under the subtitle Unruly Texts: Text as Body, two authors examine novels and stories that make explicit in one way or another the fundamental, wordless ability of the sick body to stand for culture and spirit or to become transparent to the gaze that would understand the self. In an essay of such clarity and reach that an introduction to this issue is superfluous, Arnold Weinstein advances the notion that all texts, like all bodies, are unruly, if the reader is expert enough to recognize the organic chaos. Presenting three works that explicitly deal with sick bodies—selections from Winesburg, Ohio, “The Country Doctor,” and Mood Indigo—Weinstein methodically unearths elements of plot and form that undermine a superficial order, thereby revealing great chasms in the chain of signification of the works. The fictions adopt sickness as mode, embodying such living processes as dreaming and bleeding and digesting in their drive toward meaning or in their representation of end-stage failure.

The lack of order also characterizes the society delineated by Leslie Marmon Silko in Almanac of the Dead: A Novel. If Weinstein finds all texts, like all bodies, unruly, Ann Folwell Stanford shows how Silko uses bodies and body parts as symbols of an unruly society, one in which medicine is not only corrupted by but also infects the culture. Drawing on Mayan beliefs and prophecies as well as on contemporary social realities, Silko...