Literature and Sickness (review)

■Sà -Book Reviews rm David Bevan, ed., Literature and Sickness. Rodopi: Amsterdam, 1993. iv + 116 pp. Paperback, $23.50. The editorial principles by which this volume was compiled are none too clear. David Bevan's one-and-a-half-page introduction claims that the essays herein "constitute further interdependent facets of that growing critical mass which seeks new illumination from the black sun of the night-side of life" (p. 4). Of its six essays, two engage the topic of "sickness" only under the loosest construction: one is devoted to melancholia in Franz Kafka's work and another to physical handicaps in Flannery O'Connor's short fiction. The essays range from brief papers to lengthy articles, and their quality fluctuates just as drastically. The only consistent rationale I can discover is an attempt at comparative Uterary breadth: thus, each article approaches a different national literature , with the exception of Kafka's greater Austria, which is touched on twice. In sum, Literature and Sickness is a mediocre volume. One essay, however, is very fine. I wiU describe the others and then concentrate on it. Literary editors engaging literal medical topics should be wary of rhetorical duplicity. Lynne S. Vieth's "From Melancholic to Parabolic Expression: Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka" is a competent short treatment of the Benjaminian themes of melancholy and allegory in Kafka's texts, but it has nothing to do with sickness and is, thus, unsuited as a lead article. Its focus is rather the melancholic vacillations of allegorical structure, the saturnine complexion, and "the pathology of the family organism" (p. 12). Metaphors of sickness remain metaphors, and one immediately feels shortchanged by such figurative slipperiness. Kathleen A. Patterson's "Negotiating Elevators and Hay Lofts: DisabiUty and Identity in Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction" is similarly debilitated by an unwarranted stretching of the volume's rubric. Disabled persons in general would probably resent the implication that they are "sick." However, O'Connor's own disabling case of lupus provides Patterson's brief essay with a thin margin of literal cover, and the essay stands out from several of the others by adhering to a coherent thesis: "in these Literature and Medicine 12, no. 2 (Fall 1993) 239-276 © 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 240 BOOK REVIEWS stories, O'Connor rehearses potential solutions that persons with disabilities , like herself, might choose to the problem of imposed identity" (P- 97). The inclusion of Pamela S. Saur's "The Triumph of Sickness in Modern Austrian Literature" cannot be faulted for misrepresentation. A plodding traditional survey, it examines the works of Kafka, Joseph Roth, Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Schönherr, Ernst Weiss, Christine Lavant, Thomas Bernhard, and Gerhard Roth in pursuit of the thesis that the doctors and diseases described by these authors confirm traditional cultural stereotypes of Austrian Uterature as gloomy, melanchoUc, fatalistic, and obsessed with death. Elisabetta Nelsen's "'L'invasione smisurata': The Themes of Neurological Disease and Madness in Elsa Morante's Novels" is a jargon-laden short treatment that gestures toward psychoanalytical , feminist, and structuraUst theory while focusing on Morante's depictions of epileptic and cancerous women as metaphors of social oppression. Steven G. Kellman's "Reading Shilts Reading Camus Reading a Plague" is the third essay, along with Vieth's and Saur's, that focuses on the topic of allegory in relation to sickness. Here, if anywhere, was a chance for the editor to draw some general significance out of the collection. "IUness as Allegory" would be an appropriate update of Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, extending her treatment of metaphor to include whole structures, allegories, of transposed meanings. In any event, Kellman's essay-review of Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic is pleasantly energized by its attentions to Albert Camus's The Plague. However, in Camus's novel the ostensible plague is an allegorical vehicle for the Nazi occupation of France. Kellman mostly jettisons The Plague's poUtical tenor to concentrate on its literal surface details, rather than finding the passageways by which Camus's aUegory of Fascism could interpret the biological pathologies and social dysfunctions of the aids crisis. Jan B. Gordon...