Editor's Column: Contested Spaces

As I read the articles in this issue of Literature and Medicine as a whole, searching for a common theme among such seemingly disparate topics, I found myself remembering David Morris’s use of the term bioculture in his recent book, Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age. Morris describes the point “where biology and culture converge,” a point at which illness becomes “a mental, emotional, bodily event constructed at the crossroads of biology and culture.” ¹ He identifies this phenomenon as a particularly “postmodern” one, and he begins by giving a fair amount of consideration to what he means by postmodern illness. Historically, he places postmodern illness in “the second half of the twentieth century,” at a time of “a new, transitional, and unfinished understanding of illness” (p. 11). It is a time when rapid and radical changes in medical knowledge, medical technology, and health care systems have caused many people to look with new skepticism at what medicine knows, can cure, and may even want to cure. It is a time when Western patients are looking beyond their tradition of allopathic medicine for explanations and treatments. Postmodern illness can be seen as a microcosm of a world characterized by uncertainty and a search for new explanations. Morris uses chaos theory as a metaphor for this Zeitgeist, as physicists use mathematics “to describe the nonmathematical coherences at work within irregular, multilevel, turbulent scenes of change” (p. 18).

Postmodernism also is a time when mass communication unites people around the globe. “The postmodern world is a place where 90 percent of teenagers across the globe recognize the Chicago Bulls,” Morris writes (p. 26), a statement that may seem puzzling to readers in a few years, as the Bulls’ fame and visibility plummets one season after Michael Jordan retires. Such a phenomenon, however, only reinforces Morris’s position that a postmodern world is one marked by “rapid and uncertain change” that, moreover, “is constructed not so much with cement and steel...as with images and representations” (pp. 17, 25). Equally important to Morris as this construction, though, is our awareness of it. This postmodern time is a self-conscious time, in which people are, often painfully, aware how science, politics, or their own particular class or racial background also contributes “multilevel[s]” of understanding of every event in their lives, including illness. Where we as individuals are constantly seeking the meaning of these events, we are also receiving messages—from family, from the media, from our physicians—about how to construe our world and ourselves.

Morris notes that his historic placement of postmodernism is not exact, that certain artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Samuel Beckett exhibited both the consciousness of the structures that defined or surrounded art and the self-consciousness to play with and against those structures. He also cautions against seeing postmodernism as the same kind of “monolithic and homogeneous” voice it serves to unseat; instead, he urges us to see postmodernism as “self-consciously pluralistic and multicultural, a freewheeling consortium of heterogeneous parts, where underlying consistencies are often less visible than the outward play of difference” (p. 24).

It is with this encouragement—and in this spirit—that I invite readers to think about the articles in this issue, two of which examine texts from the historical period that Morris identifies most clearly as postmodern, but two of which examine texts written far before that time. We could call all of the authors of the articles postmodern in the sense that they are all aware of the notions of illness that have constructed the texts they examine. But I would go further. William Shakespeare and Emily Brontë seem at times more conscious of both the conflicts between the culture and the biological theories of their time and the constructed nature of people’s lives than are the defendants and plaintiffs in the Libby Zion case or the physicians, nurses, and parents who move in and out of neonatal intensive care units—situations described in the two other articles printed here. All people and authors (and even many of the characters) are united, however, in their awareness of...