Guest Editors’ Introduction: On the Limits of Disciplinarity: Literature, Medicine, Religion

“A man burdened with a secret,” observes the narrator of The Scarlet Letter, “should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician.”¹ Good advice, we might think, if only the world in which we lived could be easily divided into tidy, sacrosanct categories—one domain for our doctors, another for our shameful secrets, and yet another for our good books about the foibles and frailties of the human condition. But we all know (as did Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850) that no such separation exists. One of the things we continue to value about The Scarlet Letter is the way in which it artfully reveals how, when it comes to dealing with a personal predicament, we are apt to draw on the resources of our clergy, our caregivers, and our wordsmiths. As the scarlet “A” on Hester Prynne’s bodice implies, with its simultaneous significations of adulterous misconduct, angelic ministrations to the ill, and an American mythology, we inhabit a world made of inevitable intimacies amongst our various ways of knowing. In this special issue, our contributors examine precisely those moments when individuals resolve a specific, immediate crisis of knowledge by turning to the fields of literature, medicine, and religion simultaneously.

By drawing our attention to the interdependencies of these three fields, this issue brings into focus an acute problem for disciplinary scholarship: its lingering dependency on the one-for-one substitution narratives naturalized by the secularization thesis.² To be sure, in recent years the secularization premise—the idea that religion has lost its prominent place in post-Enlightenment public life—has come under fire. Critics deem too crude the notion that science or, in the humanistic version, literature supersedes religion as a site of authority and experience.³ Modern secular life, we have come to realize, remains deeply religious: individuals and communities retain religious identifications even when (and sometimes because) “religion is cast as modernity’s ‘other.’”⁴ Nevertheless, even the multi-disciplinary subfields that make such problematizing possible tend toward the dyadic thinking of secularization: literature and medicine, medicine and religion, religion and literature. But these academic pair bonds rarely tell the whole story about an event or idea. If we are looking for the “oyster-like irritability” that Catherine Belling put forward as a condition for this journal in her inaugural foreword as editor, then we can find in a triangulated approach among literature, medicine, and religion the “grit” that gives rise to new, productive ways of conducting research.⁵

A challenge, certainly, because of how our own institutions prime us to see the literary, the medical, and the religious as terms describing fields with mutually exclusive norms and practices. To train within the disciplined academy (even one increasingly invested in interdisciplinarity) still means that one emerges with a dominant professional identity. A doctor, a writer, a minister—these are all distinct vocations. Their professional trajectories may tread the same paths at times (think of Columbia University’s Program in Narrative Medicine, for instance), but in general we expect our doctors to tell us what’s wrong physically, our writers to tell us what it means existentially, and our spiritual leaders to tell us how it points to a cosmic plan. Specialization, it often seems—and we know this well, whether we train as scholars or as practitioners—offers the only path to any “really definitive and good accomplishment,” as Max Weber trenchantly observed nearly a century ago.⁶ That is, in theory, taking responsibility for a small parcel of knowledge and leaving the rest to an army of similarly trained professionals supposedly works best.

Abundantly evident in this theme issue, however, is the fact that in practice experts regularly confront the insufficiency of their specialized knowledge in the face of exigent circumstances that demand a response, whether or not secularized disciplinarity can provide it. Take for instance crises of medical knowledge. David B. Morris delves into his experience at the bedside of his wife in “Medical Eros: Caregivers, Loss, and an Ethics of Waiting.” He asks how we should deal with a disease like...