Illness as Narrative

Chapter 5: Theory’s Aging Body

92 To ask about the funCtIon of criticism at the present time is to invite nearly as many answers as there are critics. The profession has traveled a long way from Matthew Arnold’s confident declaration in 1865 that the only rule a critic must follow is “disinterestedness” in order “to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind” (“Function,” 17). While a good number of today’s critics might define their work as motivated by “interest,” rather than disinterest, there is no consensus on what the focus of that interest should be. Even those who use criticism to draw attention to the ways that suffering, pain, and illness challenge representation, do not not agree on criticism’s function. As we have seen, Susan Sontag, Veena Das, and Elaine Scarry define the relationship of language and pain in divergent ways and see literature as performing different roles in the systems of power that create and control embodied experiences of suffering . In addition, those who write about literature and medicine—such as Rita Charon, Arthur Frank, and David B. Morris—would have difficulty reconciling their approaches to narratives about illness with Lauren Berlant’s arguments against empathic or compassionate reading practices.1 In “Poor Eliza,” Berlant offers a particularly negative assessment of the kind of commonplace reading practices that might be called “reading to connect ”—that is, reading with the hope or intention of experiencing an affective connection with the subject of a text or its author. Berlant unveils the hidden Five} Theory’s Aging Body theory’s agIng body 93 politics of such sentimental reading practices. Feeling an empathic connection allows one to appear to transcend structural problems such as racism and sexism , but, of course, this is a false transcendence. She warns that “witnessing and identifying with pain, consuming and deriving pleasure and moral selfsatisfaction ” from reading sentimental literature has no public consequence (“Poor Eliza” 645). Indeed, she argues that, when readers consume narratives of suffering privately, the experience prompts passivity rather than political action .2 Working within Berlant’s framework, the ethical function of criticism is clear: the critic must intervene to ensure that lay readers do not lose sight of the differences between themselves and those who suffer.3 To be a serious, theoretically engaged critic requires attention to the systems that produce suffering, not local and particular examples of suffering. From this position, it appears that contemporary memoirs about pain, trauma, illness, and disability should be read, if they are to be read at all, with caution. Readers must guard against manipulation that renders them sympathetic to the trials and tribulations of individuals in pain and distracts from more significant issues, such as the degradation of reality for Sontag, the use of torture for Scarry and, for Berlant, the manipulation of affect to perpetuate the status quo. What is lost when distrust and suspicion shape critical reading practices? In an effort to distance criticism from humanism’s unexamined belief in the wholeness and autonomy of selves, suspicious criticism has swung to the other extreme and now disrupts and invalidates ordinary approaches to reading. In Uses of Literature, Rita Felski reframes the issues at stake for criticism. Because critics have disregarded ordinary motives for reading for too long, the field has lost an understanding of why literature matters to most readers—and, I would add, to many writers as well. Critics do not possess a deep, collective understanding of the everyday uses of literature as a form of “social knowledge” (Felski 14). Nor do they have a vocabulary for what interested, rather than disinterested , criticism might accomplish. This is a deficiency for many reasons, among them that literature about illness, pain, and suffering—which engages readers intellectually, affectively, and socially—can appear unserious and unworthy of critical attention. Criticism is not stable or unified, however, and numerous literary theorists who built their reputations during the theory boom of the 1980s have begun to argue openly for connecting their work with everyday concerns, among them illness, vulnerability, and mortality. The body of theory has aged, as the theorists themselves have, and issues that once seemed only opportunities for suspicion and critique have risen to attention in new ways. For these critics, professionally honed modes of reading now seem inadequate to the task of providing insight into a mundane fact that has not changed over time: we are all [52.14.221.113] Project MUSE (2024-04...