Illness as Narrative by Ann Jurecic (review)

Drawing on a range of literary, journalistic, and popular texts, Ann Jurecic’s Illness as Narrative serves as a touchstone for a range of responses to stories of illness. It begins, however, with the assertion that both literary critics and medical humanities scholars have failed to attend fully to such stories because they have not recognized the biases of their own disciplinary reading and writing habits. On one hand, Jurecic argues, literary critics have remained committed to what Paul Ricoeur calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” which has led them to discount most contemporary writing about illness as unreliable and stylistically unimportant. Medical humanities scholars, on the other hand, have tended to read writing about illness as a documentary record of individual experience and this has led to an oversimplification and underappreciation of the textuality of the stories themselves. Both readings—and the writing they engender—miss the important work these stories do outside of the academy and beyond the professional school curriculum. For Jurecic, attending to the “split in critical attitudes” toward illness narratives is a necessary first step toward valuing and addressing the “ordinary motives for reading and writing” that produce them (3). When we ignore the differences among critical approaches to these texts, her book demonstrates, we miss opportunities to understand how health and illness shape our intellectual commitments and to connect meaningfully with the realities of others.

Illness as Narrative directly challenges the contemporary “disinterested critic” by pointing toward an “empathy gap” between “creators of art about suffering and illness” and the expert readers of the academy (13). This gap has opened as the expansion of literary engagement has moved beyond traditional English and Comparative Literature departments and into medical humanities and public health programs. It has widened as the range of narrative responses to illness has proliferated over the twentieth century. Jurecic sees the growth of illness memoirs in this time period not as the collapse of literary standards, but rather as a logical consequence of changes in culture, medicine, and society. Thus, she argues, such texts require new reading practices in order to understand how they “test the possibility that a narrative will do meaningful work in the world” (11). Each of the chapters in Illness as Narrative engages with two foundational questions: what meaningful work is accomplished by illness memoirs? And, how might critics respond “to the complex ways writing and reading sustain individuals, communities, and cultures” (112)?

In chapter 2, “Life Narratives in the Risk Society,” Jurecic notes the rise of illness narratives alongside the growing consciousness of statistical risk in countries such as the United States. Making “personal meaning out of the impersonal statistics that represent one’s life ‘at risk’” appears to be one of the primary functions of contemporary illness narratives (18). As society places greater emphasis on norms and probabilities, individual lives must be lived without the familiar structures of religious and cultural narratives that have traditionally provided meaning. In this context, illness narratives work to construct, however partially, coherent responses to changeable physical and mental realities. This chapter points out the value of a literary response to the indeterminacy of risk. Such a response exploits narrative’s ability to manipulate its own conventions and to resist (and also to fulfill) its normal demand for closure. Jurecic identifies several textual resolutions to the tension between narrative closure and indeterminacy in literary works: Ian McEwan’s Saturday offers an “overly manufactured” but ultimately reassuring conclusion (38); Suzanne Antoinetta’s Body Toxic concludes by proliferating new narratives; and David Reiff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death closes “in equivocation” (39). In her analyses of these texts, Jurecic demonstrates the value of narrative theory for attending to stories of illness. At the same time, however, she identifies the possibilities for multiple readings of risk narratives, some of them informed by purely personal engagement. Readers of these texts intervene by superimposing their own experiences, drawing conclusions that may not be objectively justifiable, and recalling master tropes...