Irritative modernism and its stoic patients: free indirect narration of illness in British modernist literature

Abstract

‘Illness’ has been discussed in British literary modernism almost exclusively in the medical sense of the word. Especially concerning authors who battled with chronic illnesses, criticism tends to narrowly circumscribe the epistemology of illness by quoting biography and medical history while bypassing other implications that followed ‘illness’ in literary representations. Drawing on modernist narrative techniques in Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, this thesis seeks to disentangle ‘illness’ from medicine and explores the affective residues of diagnostic practice. I postulate free indirect discourse (FID) as a narrative technique my chosen authors deploy to de-medicalise pain, illness, and disabilities since it reveals the slipperiness of formative elements in the diagnostic practice, including patient’s autonomy, pain receptivity, subjective intentions, and identity. Divulging distinct depths of consciousness while leaving its intention inaccessible and attention irretrievable, FID irritates the expectation of a transparent pathogenesis as well as medical categorisation of bodyminds as either ‘pathological’ or ‘normal’. Being attentive to the narrativization of pain (rather than its symptoms) will generate new knowledge and identification when we are patient with our irritations. I therefore argue that literary modernism, contra the instrumental role Rita Charon’s Narrative Medicine (2006) assigned to literary studies, explicitly intervenes in pain, depressive moods, or other afflictions. This intent to reconfigure medical narratives of health, recovery, and suffering by involving literary modernism beyond symbolic registers is what Irritative Modernism aims to achieve.

My original contribution to the modernist field is the forwarding of a narratological approach to illness and disability that informs the minor narratives of pain and other irritations, including their lesser discussed – ‘uglier’ – aspects such as the uses, ethics, and even the relief or joy we may discover in these afflictions. My use of ‘narrative’ (with a focus on narrative techniques) also departs from its usual connotations, as I neither adopt its broad definition as simply ‘stories we tell’ nor its narrow definition as ‘coherent organisation of experience’. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this study will draw on the narrative aspects in discussing illness across the critical medical humanities, disability studies, and Stoic philosophy. The convergence between these disciplines will inform how literary narrative has been shaping and can reshape the epistemology of pain and suffering. The broader implication of this study is that humanities and science are not necessarily in opposition to each other nor does one need to be the other’s subordinate. While this thesis seeks to de-medicalise illness, my intention is to open up alternative ways to confront pain and other uncomfortable feelings rather than to antagonise medical-science. To implement changes in both medical practice and literary criticism, our conversation must transcend narrow disciplinary boundaries that disabled innovative thinking.