Why Is Illness So Hard to Write About?

Yet the strange disparity Woolf identified persists. We have grown much more willing to put the body on the page without necessarily becoming much better at putting illness there. It isn’t that literature has ever been shy about death, that final health crisis. The canon abounds with wounds, murders, consumptions, and deathbeds. Real people, however, mostly die not from florid and punctual acts of violence but from drawn-out sickness. Even Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” one of the most central depictions of illness in fiction, is more concerned with the existential ramifications of impending mortality than, per Woolf’s prescription, the “daily drama of the body.” Likewise, in the canon of AIDS literature from the nineteen-eighties onward, more attention is paid to loss than to the day-by-day specificities of the ravaging sickness that induces it.

In short, Woolf remains basically right: illness still doesn’t have the salience in literature that it has in life. Why? Shame and decorum are obviously not the whole story. Woolf proposes another explanation: “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.” Let a patient attempt to describe the particular sensation of a headache, she writes, “and language at once runs dry.” A deeper problem, then, may be the strange elusiveness of language for an experience that eludes none of us.

While suffering from tabes dorsalis, a complication of syphilis involving the slow, excruciating degeneration of the spinal cord, the nineteenth-century French writer Alphonse Daudet embarked on the doomed and invaluable project of trying to put his experience into words. The resulting posthumously published book, “In the Land of Pain,” has since come to embody (as it were) the idea of the incommunicability of pain. When the literary scholar Elaine Scarry, in “The Body in Pain” (1985), states that “physical pain has no voice,” and that “the pains occurring in other people’s bodies flicker before the mind, then disappear,” she’s echoing Daudet, who asks, “Are words actually any use to describe what pain (or passion, for that matter) really feels like? Words only come when everything is over, when things have calmed down.” Like many accounts of illness since, “In the Land of Pain” takes the form of jotted notes and fragments. Who, after all, can sustain long, continuous paragraphs while under physical duress? Woolf’s observation that “illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts” refers to reading, but she might as well have been discussing writing.

The theme of inexpressibility shades many of the essays in the new edition of “On Being Ill.” The photographer and writer Lina Scheynius, for example, admits that in trying to describe her migraines, she is “attempting the impossible” since “I know I won’t come close to describing them as they truly were.” Here’s one paradox of illness: during an episode of pain, we can think of nothing else, even as it obliterates all thought. So much so that, as Scheynius admits, “I could never attempt to write anything from that place.” Afterward, another difficulty presents itself. We remember that we suffered, often very vividly; but the sensation itself can be strangely difficult to summon. The writer thus faces a peculiar predicament: when the pain is present, it may defeat language; once language returns, the pain becomes hard to recapture. How then can a writer meet the double challenge: to first imaginatively retrieve, and second, adequately render, their experience of suffering? We all know how it feels to be unable to say how it feels.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay “The Poet,” insists (in keeping with the gendered conventions of 1844) that the poet is “the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience.” As he rather formidably contends, there’s nothing, including pain, that the poet shouldn’t be able to express.

Woolf herself, curiously enough, supplies evidence for Emerson’s case. In the consulting room of her diary, the body is anything but elusive. During her period of ill health in the fall of 1925, convalescence strands her in “that odd amphibious life of headache”; shortly after sending the essay to Eliot, she records “a good deal of rat-gnawing at the back of my head,” while the tiredness of her body is such that “it lay like a workman’s coat.” Whatever difficulty pain presents to language, Woolf clearly possessed a language for her own malaise—at least when writing in private. In this way, her reticence in “On Being Ill” really does look less like incapacity than inhibition.