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114 5 WRITING PAIN The Infirm Author Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. —Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill While Virginia Woolf finds the motif of illness rare in literature, it has certainly not been infrequent in films that feature the writer as protagonist. Clearly, the most common form that sickness takes is the mental kind—a recurrent cliché in visions of the artist. As Philip Sandblom writes: “The proportion of individuals with a borderline mental constitution is high among great creators. Aberrant psychic traits which in ordinary people would seem morbid may add to the originality and infatuation of artistic creation; they may even constitute its basis or origin.”1 Already, we have discussed such films as Adaptation (2002) and Deconstructing Harry (1997), in which the writer is a full-fledged neurotic, as well as Swimming Pool (2003), in which the author is sexually repressed. Finally, we have examined works like Barton Fink (1991) and Stranger Than Fiction (2006), in which the protagonist fears he is going mad. In this chapter, however, we also discuss illnesses of a more corporeal kind— in keeping with our focus on authorial incarnation. Here, it is of interest to note that Virginia Woolf finds verbal discourse inadequate to the task of representing infirmity: To hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language . English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other . . . so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable.2 Writing Pain 115 Aside from the limitations of discourse, Woolf sees literature as selectively preoccupied with consciousness versus the body (despite the former issuing from the anatomical part known as the brain): “[Literature] does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and save for one or two passions . . . is null, and negligible and non-existent.”3 So, we might wonder, can the moving image (with its requisite corporeal embodiment) do any better than that? According to Sander Gilman, the tradition of “seeing disease” is a longstanding one. As he notes: “The idea of representing the diseased through visual images reaches back through the ages.”4 The Long-Suffering Artist Skin Deep The first text to be considered is a televisual one, The Singing Detective (1986), a six-episode miniseries produced by the BBC, directed by Jon Amiel, and written by Dennis Potter. It was later adapted unsuccessfully as a 2003 American movie. In discussing the miniseries, I focus on the first two episodes, which set up the narrative and introduce techniques utilized in the overall program. The film concerns a mystery writer, Philip Marlow (Michael Gambon), clearly a misspelled version of Raymond Chandler’s detective hero (e.g., The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye). So already we have a merging of author and character figures .5 Marlow is plagued by chronic psoriasis, a scaly and eruptive skin condition that requires him to be frequently hospitalized. Basically, the narrative wanders (without clear delineation) among four levels: Marlow ill in the hospital (the present tense of the film); his writerly, noir fantasies (with him pictured as his privateeye hero and others from his life cast as supporting players); recollections of his traumatic childhood (marred by his mother’s adultery and suicide); and elements of his world outside the hospital (e.g., his wife and her lover’s attempt to swindle him out of the rights to a film scenario he has written).6 The layers of reflexivity in the text are dazzling. Marlow speaks of having penned a screenplay named The Singing Detective, and another patient in the ward is reading the novel on which it is based. In attempting to gain the...

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