The Invading Body: Reading Illness Autobiographies (review)

A great deal has been written in the past few decades on the subject of autobiographical writing, particularly with regard to theories of the social construction of identity. If one's identity is a social construct, then how much more might writing about the self be merely the representation of the unstable self as defined by outside forces? Or so many theories go. However, it is hard to imagine anyone dismissing autobiographical writing about illness as only socially constructed. After all, despite the differences societies, and groups within societies, have in their attitudes toward illness and death, one seems bound to respect expressions of illness from another. Similarly, although one cannot know another's pain, one's own pain amply confirms the existence of pain, which hardly seems "socially constructed" when one experiences it.

Einat Avrahami opens The Invading Body: Reading Illness Autobiographies with the claim that "few theoretical concepts seem as happily resolved as the fictive nature of the autobiographical self" (2). This resolution, she finds, is contradicted by various theorists, among them Paul John Eakin. Critics like Eakin depend on the reliability of the autobiographical writer, while admitting that memory is fallible and that life writing is selective. In addition, memoirs about the Holocaust ask readers to bear witness to experiences that are sometimes unbelievable; readers expect the writer to tell a story that is dependable. When Imre Kertész believed that he could not rely enough on his memory to give a completely factual account of his experience at fourteen years of age, he published his holocaust memoir, Fatelessness, as a novel. His decision does not suggest that autobiographical writing is fiction, but that we continue to expect those writings called "autobiographical" to be reliable in the report of facts.

In The Invading Body, Avrahami argues that theoretical arguments that selves and bodies are cultural or discursive constructs are drawn into question by personal narratives about terminal illness. "Terminal illness narratives and photographs," she writes,

alert us to the problems that arise from treating historically specific bodies as textual, and rather passive, surfaces whose meaning is determined by social institutions and discourses. They question the prevailing poststructuralist perspective that has generated neat formulations of materiality, and of the body, as always already a discursive construct, the product of conscious or unconscious political inscription…. They highlight, instead, the interrelatedness and interconstituitive dynamics of embodied experience and discursive constructs. Such a dynamics is established on the phenomenological and cognitive tension between the already known and the drastically changed circumstances of a lived body that can no longer be accommodated by past experience and therefore demands openness to new embodied knowledge.

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Avrahami selects a number of narratives, or pathographies, "to provide an account of the unique status of illness autobiographies and to acknowledge the idiosyncratic ethical and cultural work they do" (16–17). Including theoretical discourses on illness and self-representation in each chapter, Avrahami explores the benefits and limitations of the received theoretical wisdom that has informed our understanding of illness narratives and of autobiography in general.

The first book that Avrahami examines, Gillian Rose's Love's Work, introduces the reader to the extraordinary work done by ill writers and artists who insist on confronting the body's response to illness and treatment. Rose intends to represent the "uncharted"; however, she worries about whether, in writing about her colostomy, she will be excessive or too reserved. Before writing about the colostomy, Rose writes about Robert Jan van Pelt's experience in writing about the architecture of Auschwitz when he suddenly thinks of "the practicalities of excrement" (quoted in Avrahami, 35). Similarly, Terence Des Pres's The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps includes a chapter titled "Excremental Assault," which deals at length with the ways in which bodily functions intensified the terrible conditions of the camps and argues against the (at the time) prevailing psychiatric conclusion that attention to bodily functions evidenced victims' "regression to 'childlike' or 'infantile' levels...