Anne Boyer's The Undying and the knotty question of representational practice
'Pain doesn’t destroy language: it changes it. What is difficult is not impossible.'
This might be a longer read than my usual posts. I’ve been wanting to write about one of my favourite authors, Anne Boyer, for a while. It would be entirely possible to write an entire book about Boyer’s writing, but here I will focus on The Undying and throw a little Garments Against Women in too.
One of my preoccupations for my research on illness, was to do with how possible it is to textually represent experiences of pain, the body, and suffering when much of that language is ineffable and linguistically indescribable. Anne Boyer offers some answers, but before I get to that, I thought it might useful to look at the form and ask what genre the work is, what is happening on the page, what type of constructions can we find here, and crucially, as writers, what methodologies might we use for our own creative practice?
Genre
The Undying is memoir, specifically autopathography. It is writing about illness, but also auto-ethnographic, which for the uninitiated, is a communicative mode that enables subjective and individual expression by linking to existing historical, social and cultural knowledge on a subject (the subject here is cancer, diagnosis, and treatment).
It is worth thinking about what ‘subjective expression’ means. It is personal lived experience and ideally offers new models of thinking on the experience it is focusing on. Here, it means an individual narrative but also a global narrative, a shared concern, since we are all future sick persons.
The beginning pages introduce us to a broad range of writers that her work is in dialogue with, writers and artists who have written about breast cancer, who have died of breast cancer, who are part of the canon of illness writing. It is also worth mentioning that she finds that Cancer vloggers offer her something that canonical texts like Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor” and Audre Lorde’s “The Cancer Journals” cannot offer— perhaps a sense of how it is to be living with cancer now, four decades later.
Here we have a 40 something year old woman, moving through the world as a sick person, informed by all that that experience encompasses, and nothing is left out of the inquiry, we are given access to the dynamic interaction of the author’s mind, the physical encounter, the sensory, to her body.
The Undying is truly “genre defying” to borrow from Shoshana Olidort.
‘Some passages float like prose poems, while others read as chapters, short essays, or disquisitions, sometimes instructions or imperatives […] In form is multiple, wayward, fragmented, rebellious, lucid, furious, beautiful, disorienting, unhappy, profound, painful, exquisite, precise, abstract, unfathomable. It ranges through space and time, its voice at times specific, at others dislocated and hovering; but always there is a careful awareness of overall structure, how each piece fits in, what repeats, echoes, expands. In content, it moves between descriptions of Boyer’s illness and ongoing treatment and the life that surrounds it — friends, ex-lovers, family, teaching, writing. There are meditations on, to name a few, John Donne and his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), Bertolt Brecht, Diane di Prima, D. G. Compton’s The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1973) and its 1980 film adaptation, Death Watch, starring Harvey Keitel and Romy Schneider; close readings of Sontag, Lorde, Acker, and Fanny Burney on breast cancer, theirs and in general; the American health-care industry; cancer and aesthetics; culture and commodification; pain and language; illness and pretence; fear, loss, and spectral dreams.
-Emily LaBarge
Prose poems are, to borrow from David Lehman’s introduction to The Great American Prose Poem, an insistently modern and subversive form of writing. A prose poem is simply a poem written in prose rather than verse. So, the unit is a sentence, not a line. The lineation is the margin. The tone is often more lyrical than you’d find in prose. As Lehman suggests, various characteristics of poetry give it a polythetic classification so (no single poetic device is essential).
“I'd meant for The Undying to be much more straightforward, but it kept swaying and bending toward poetry. Ultimately, I just let it bend and sway. Poetry made, and continues to make, all prose possible.”
As Lehman writes, though ordinary prose in appearance, the writing takes on various registers of language, masquerading as different sorts of literary or non literary prose ‘heteroglossia’ ( different- language/tongue) – here, Boyer appropriates discourses of medicine and theory (I will return to this).
As Lehman suggests of the prose poem, Boyer uses speech patterns of the everyday, anti-poetical qualities e.g. ‘It’s usually someone’s mother with cancer, at least in books, or their sister or lover or wife […] I once had hair […] A person with aggressive cancer is rarely in a position to reject anyone’s prayers, magic or money’.
Frequently it is necessary to pull apart sentences, to re-read them. For example:
‘The history of illness is not the history of medicine–it is the history of the world –and the history of having a body could well be the history of what is done to most of us in the interests of the few.’
There is frequently a slightly altered versions of the same idea, an echo of the former construction, and often the syntax and sentence structure upsets our linear idea of how a sentence should work. Arguably a representation of the fragmented mind, suggesting that it is not one piece of organised knowledge that is produced in illness.
As David Lehman writes ‘What makes prose poems poems is that they are self contained, and once you read you have to go back and read it again. That’s what a poem does.’
Titles
Here we have the USA and UK covers. Notice the different titles.
The UK version is The UnDying: A mediation on modern illness, far more reserved than the American version: The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care. The American subtitle rejects the typical function of a title, to narrow and define and make more specific. Instead it multiplies out, expanding to encompass all of the concerns of the text, weaving the emotional, physical and mental hazards and hardships that accompany illness. With the title alone, we have the impression of a complex saga.
In her interview Undying and Reparative Magic: A Conversation With Anne Boyer with SHOSHANA OLIDORT Boyer says:
‘The book is about the process of undying—that is, of both being subjected to a catastrophic, medically-induced process of mass cell death via chemotherapy yet not entirely dying along with the death of my cells, and not entirely losing myself as I lost the parts of me I associated with me—my memories, my looks, my capacity to think as I once did, my body parts, even the certainty of my own existence.’
Surviving
One of the aspects Boyer found most surprising is that she had to sign all sorts of release forms for the damage that the chemotherapy would do to her and none of them were for the brain damage. As she writes:
‘there’s a federal law so that everyone with health insurance who gets breast cancer can get a free breast reconstruction. You would think that there would be a social value to making sure that this huge part of the population—people who have undergone chemotherapy—would be able to think clearly and work and to engage in life in a productive way.’
She questions the important of things, drawing attention to the fact that it is inscribed into law that a person with health insurance may access free breast reconstruction but do not receive help for chemo-fog and brain damage. With this, she draws our attention to what is important to a society, that people look a certain way, whilst their performance in a functioning cognitive world, is given less importance.
Going back to the title, The Undying, Boyer describes this as a liminal space:
‘For a long time after treatment, I suspected I was actually dead and being tricked by some semi-interesting afterworld. I'm not the only cancer survivor I know who has had the same doubts. For others, they live, but with trauma, depression, disability, and negative social consequences so heightened that they sometimes wish they hadn't, so that they, too, feel trapped in that hallway between death and life, not knowing which door to open.’
It is clear that the title is guiding us towards the experience of undergoing treatment which places the sick person in the borderlands between sickness and health, between death and life. Even when she uses the word to describe surviving, “Now that I am undying, the world is full of possibility.”there is a sense that it is a multiple existence, the word ‘undying’ is a gerund verb but it sort of performs the function of a noun ‘undie’ ‘undead’ or ‘not-dead’ by suggesting it is a state and not an action. It is clear that she has thought a lot about this in-between state, and what the word ‘undying’ provokes:
‘I had and have an ambivalent relationship to the term "survivor," but to be among the undying, not just someone in its process, is to recognize all that remains is a mix of death and life, and some live and some die but parts of all of us remain as other parts are lost. The dead are always with us, and the living aren't all entirely here. The Undying seems, also, to fit the world right now, which we are always being told is ending, but which we wake up to each day, the no-future future that is always unfurling right before our eyes, in which we have to go to work, wash dishes, and otherwise endure when we are told that the conditions that support life on the planet are becoming quickly inhospitable. Undying is also a term usually associated with immortal love or immortal literature, and I wanted to rip it out of those sentimental contexts a bit, to ironize it, too, in that if creating a book is supposed to be a bid for a kind of immortality, a book about losing yourself is a suspect terrain in which to try to live forever.’
Exposing capitalism and Big Pharma
Her impetus moves from gratitude to vengeance. Whilst her friends are clearly gentle and nurturing, and she conveys her gratitude to them, Boyer retells the toxic and violent cancer experience and journey, as she unravels the misconceptions of medical territories. Her vengeance then is to be critical of the “capitalist medical universe” a universe in which women are given “drive-through mastectomies”. Concerned with wealth and capitalism, Boyer focuses on the corporate lies, the ecological costs of chemotherapy. Her fury is detectable in her writing, she repeatedly points to issues of gender, race and class, intersectional social factors that determine who has access to healthcare, who can survive in the late capitalist world, as she describes the economic toll cancer takes on women of limited means.
I had to write the book for two reasons. The first one was gratitude for all that kept me alive and made life worth living, and the second was vengeance against all that diminishes life, the arrangement of a racist, misogynist, capitalist world that sickens people, profits from their illnesses, and then blames them for their own deaths.
Boyer places the lens on these social issues, the cost of the chemo is high. Pharmaceutical companies,
“charged everyone in the world $107 billion for cancer drugs in 2015”
and after one infusion she writes that she feels like:
“a person in thrift store luxury with platinum running through her veins”
The treatments that are part of a cycle. Cancer is caused by, among other genetic and epigenetic factors, weapons that release toxins into the environment which are then harnessed to make medicines that are imbibed and then flushed back into the environment. It is Big Pharma profiting. Chemotherapy as a cure is utterly toxic to the human body, the severity of the treatment itself can kill patients, as one nurse suggests:
“it takes a wolf to catch a wolf.”
The limits of language
Boyer is a single mother with no savings, who had to return to her job 10 days after her surgery and give a lecture of Walt Whitman because her medical leave had run out; she is so weak that friends had to carry her books and she had drainage bags stitched to her chest. One of the reasons for writing is that she released that she had thought cancer was a blip that most people recovered from, but undertaking the ‘oncology journey’ herself she was surprised to find that only 5% more people survive now than 100 years ago and wants to highlight the intersectional issues that have direct impact on whether a person lives or dies. As she says in one interview,
‘I’m deeply ambivalent toward the word “survival” and the term “survivor.” I don’t know what else to use, but I also know that I cringe at it, because I don’t want to suggest in any way that those who die died because they were weak or died because they’d done something wrong. [The survivor framing] turns the entire world into some sort of sports game in which there are winners and losers. I hate sports. I hope we can develop a new language for it, one that would give adequate form to the complexity of our experience.’
The body-at-war metaphors are entrenched in clinical understandings of the immune system, and common illness narratives and are ongoing in the contemporary clinical encounter. Boyer’s concern over surviving is in dialogue with Illness as Metaphor (1978) within which Susan Sontag wrote about the metaphorical burden placed upon our conceptions of illness, metaphors that are riddled with threats of winning and losing, and anxiety inducing language. For Sontag, military terminology, languages of warfare and metaphors of hostile invaders, make the person culpable for not being able to ‘fight’ their illness. She writes,
‘Illness is interpreted as, basically a psychological event, and people are encouraged to think that they get sick because they (unconsciously) want to, and that they can cure themselves by the mobilization of will’ (Sontag, 2009, p58).
Throughout Boyer is attempting to find a language to write about pain as well as illness. If we think about theories on pain, we understand from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition it is ‘the most private and least communicable’ of all experience, and from Elaine Scarry’s 1985 text The Body in Pain we are introduced to the idea that the body in pain regresses to a primordial, pre-linguistic state: pain actively destroys language, is resistant to language, existing outside of the verbal, we are not able to articulate it, it is ineffable. For Boyer, there is the question of how to translate or shape the lived experience into non-fiction, when that knowledge seems in-articulable within the limits of language is a large preoccupation. Boyer has countered the claims that pain is ineffable or untranslatable, by writing in Lit Hub:
A widely held notion about pain seems to be that it “destroys language.” But pain doesn’t destroy language: it changes it. What is difficult is not impossible. That English lacks an adequate lexicon for all that hurts doesn’t mean it always will, just that the poets and marketplaces that have invented our dictionaries have not—when it comes to suffering—done the necessary work. (LitHub, Boyer, 2019)
Garments
I would like to also think about Boyer’s Garments Against Women, because, for me, the two works are in conversation with each other. In Garments (2015), Boyer reimagines the conventional characteristics of confessional illness poetry, commonly tragic representations that focus on struggle or reinforce stigmatisation of the ill body as helpless. They are often linear, coherent narratives that are written from a position of restitution, where the writer usually has what Arthur Frank in his text, The Wounded Storyteller calls a ‘reflective grasp over their narrative’. Commonly, in the confessional poem, there is a moment that is magnified, a moment that is held in time, as the poet experiences a sudden epiphany and plumbs the depths of the peculiarity of that moment.
The reader strives often expects a recovery narrative but Boyer resist the possibility of that easy gaze. Instead, she intertwines theory, memoir, poetry, and newsfeed into a series of essayistic prose poems. Boyer moves between embracing the personal in this way and bypassing it entirely with complex spatial, geographical and behavioural metaphors. In Garments she reveals far more about cultural reactions to the sick body than she reveals about the intricacies of her illness. She does not focus on the physical symptoms and manifestations of cancer — we are never made implicitly aware of her diagnosis. Instead, she fixes her focus on her psyche, her mind’s impressions and thoughts that she suggests are both trivial and significant, and this becomes as a way of ordering and exploring human consciousness. This introspection and examination is a focus that shapes her inquiry, rather than the details of the body undergoing chemotherapy.
In her poem, “THE INNOCENT QUESTION” Boyer questions what a writer or translator should do with ‘information-that-is-feeling’ speculating how this information might be processed and translated. This question is rendered through the anecdote of a telephone transcriptionist facing the dilemma of how to transcribe sobbing for people who cannot hear. This brings a larger trajectory of critical thinking surrounding the representation of non-verbal communication: how to translate the emotional experience of living with any type of difference, or non-normative body/health.
Boyer’s belief that pain changes language rather than destroys it, acknowledges that writing about pain requires further development: we have not yet created the vocabularies to adequately describe how it is to be in pain. In an attempt to do this necessary work, Boyer questions the complexities of describing emotion in language.
In “THE INNOCENT QUESTION” the transcriber ‘puts the sobs in parenthesis’, an apparently elegant solution to this translation issue. Boyer’s rendering of the non-linguistic, ‘This is the problem of-what-to-do-with-the-information-that-is-feeling’ is a complex extension of the knotty area of representational practice: it highlights the productive tensions that occur when using language to communicate emotional experience. This paves the way for The Undying.
Across both works, Boyer returns to question of why she should write, in Garments ‘Some of us write because there are problems to be solved’. She wants to ‘know how to write, also to know no words’. Throughout, there is a sense that finding a language for pain and illness is fuelled by a desire to provoke readers to adjust their perceptions of illness and non-normativity. It becomes clear that these are the problems to be solved, rather than illness itself which cannot be solved. But as her inquiry continues and progresses, her search for ways to translate the illness experience is thwarted by exhaustion and this causes her to consistently question the importance of her inquiry.
The Undying allows for brief moments of clarity, the poetry encompasses far more than the singular moment commonly found in traditional expressions of illness. Boyer upends the linear narrative with introspective conundrums and analogies that swerve conceptually, suggesting that the psychological experience of illness cannot be described in simplistic terms: there is nothing simple about this type of inquiry.
Boyer momentarily sacrifices the complexity of the philosophical riddle and gives way to a flatter and more accessible narrative, so we have access to glimpses of coherence but the work produced is insistently radical: it doesn’t simply subvert traditional modes of writing and diverge from the cornerstones of confessionalism as we know them, it sidesteps sentimentality, it is linear and ordered in the sense that it follows the arc of diagnosis-treatment-remission, and yet each piece contains a complex temporality, on account of the way each passage unfurls thought by thought.
Suffice to say, whilst avoiding sentiment, it is working with a completely different set of constraints and concerns, linguistic registers that challenge the foundations of the capitalist society that the Big Pharma is built upon.
Returning to Boyer’s suggestion that ‘pain doesn’t destroy language, it changes it’, with her two texts Garments Against Women and The Undying, Boyer has begun to invent a new mode of writing that expresses the fragmented social and political experience of being in the world as a sick person—modes that synchronise the personal experience with the social, revealing the shocks, discomforts and cultural responses to abnormality, such as the fact that an insured person is offered a free breast reconstruction mastectomy but receives no help with cognitive impairment.
So Garments comes before and sets the ground for The Undying. There are frequent moments where, for me, it seems she is nodding to the mode of articulation used in Garments, for example ‘I didn’t know anything about having cancer, but I knew something about how to avoid telling a story.’
My inference from this is that Garments, for all its successes was avoiding telling the story because there is a significant lack of focus given to the physical symptoms and manifestations of cancer. The modes of telling operating in The Undying are less evasive. Boyer retains a subtle and shifting syntax, playfully obscuring ideas and complicating readerly comprehension and she preserves the philosophical, introspective and riddle-like tone of Garments. Take again, this sentence:
‘the history of illness is not the history of medicine–it is the history of the world –and the history of having a body could well be the history of what is done to most of us in the interests of the few.’
By using five instances of the word ‘history’, each different iteration in such close proximity, it becomes a riddle, requiring the reader to further unpack the writing, break it down, examine the meaning.
She quotes the German Socialist Patients’ Collective, who wrote in 1993, “Illness becomes the undeniable challenge to revolutionize everything — yes, everything! — for the first time really and in the right way.”
The Undying is revolutionary. It includes her diagnosis, medical encounters, reports on the whole experience of cancer; there is not one idea or direction, one cause, one treatment, there is one message or moral that she is offering. Every thought, feeling, anecdote and experience pertaining to cancer has been exposed. References to social media, medical forms, illness literature, dreams, art, film and TV, intertextual references either chime with or require the reader to enquire beyond the text. We are given excerpts from brochures, images, advice, guidance, and basic post-treatment requirements. The reader has complete access to her illness, medical exams and encounters. So it is educational too. We learn about HER2 positive, triple negative, the procedures, stats, machinations of the female body layered onto the body politic, giving the book a sense of wholeness and further dimensionality.
Intersubjective Knowledge
The theorist Donna Haraway argues that scientific perspectives offers only ‘partial’ insight into the lived experience of disease and that subjective knowledge is considered revelatory. Haraway suggests that lived experience produces a ‘situated knowledge’ that is also an authority on the subject at hand. When integrated with ‘disembodied’ objective knowledge, it furthers our understanding of illness. It is important because it carries cultural currency and political weight as it forms part of shared knowledge as it becomes ‘intersubjective knowledge’.
By repurposing this language and feeding it throughout the work, Boyer challenges hierarchical power structures in place and transgresses the standard practices and positioning of the specialist and patient. Snyder and Mitchell suggest that writers appropriating clinical medical language are subverting the usual terms and power structures at work. Using such language, they argue, ‘proffers an entrance into an otherwise closed system of representation that would silence the disabled body […] By refusing a passive compliance with the dehumanising vocabulary of medicine, the disabled body steals the medical stage and rejects terms of its professional reception’.
Exploring this medical language allows for a mode of engagement where the technical and human boundaries are porous, included as they are alongside the psychic experience. The reconfiguration of clinical discourse enmeshed with her own experience allows her to pull at the tension between embodiment and disembodiment that is permanently at work in the clinical, social, and cultural experience of being chronically and acutely sick with cancer. By transporting us to a more human dimension, drawing us into a reality that is all the more acute for the inclusion of personal and emotional registers that smash against the precise, scientific, objective language. The emotional language in the poem is charged by the technical and this is representative of the lived experience of illness and the clinical encounter, whereby the patient can experience an absurd clash of emotions set against a background of medical information. Doing so, disrupts the notion of the doctor as a gatekeeper of discourse, it upsets the fixities of the patient who is deemed to be outside of knowledge.
Often there is a question or idea underpinning each section and Boyer uses them as a launchpad for the inquiry or to meditate on something else: often the unexpectedness of the inquiry unfurls in this space:
Should I stay I should I go? […] What will be the outcome of this illness?
All the while, Boyer attempts analogise, looking for a way to describe the lived experience in terms that someone without illness might appreciate.
‘In the week before chemotherapy, it is like preparing for a winter storm, or a winter storm and a houseguest, or a winter storm, a houseguest, and the birth of a child; also maybe it is as if preparing for all these and a holiday, a virus and a brief but intense episode of depression, all while suffering the effects of the previous storm, houseguest, birth, holiday, virus, and depression.’
This lens examines each of these questions through delicate and gritty language play, riddles that play with the terms and push against the borders and frames that would ordinarily hold one idea.
In the epilogue, another question:
Are you going to be the snake or are you going to be the snake’s cast off skin?
Which she answers:
“I am confident that every person who has ever lived knows exactly what I mean when I describe feeling like a snake on the path in the dappled sunshine that turns out, on close inspection, only to be a snake’s discarded skin.”
The snake regenerates, grows new skin, leaving its old self behind; it is forever in the process of becoming. Fresh scales shine and slither hopefully beneath — we endure, we continue.
‘Out of the grave and into the streets’ she writes into the epilogue, again making us consider the borderlands of life and death.
The epilogue is the place where Boyer brings many of these questions and answers together:
‘…my friend Cara told me that it was clear that when I was at my lowest, what I needed most was art, not comfort.’
Every sentence of this book is complex and considered, even ordinary tasks like doing dishes are attended to, and often such subjects digress into huge philosophical meanderings. Despite the all-encompassing subjects and themes that are included, experiences with friends, ex-lovers, family, teaching, writing, the meditations on previous works, film, social media, dreams, art, TV, the American health-care industry; cancer and pain, Boyer is ‘sorry she was not able to write everything down’ and yet the work feels like no stone has been left unturned.
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Boyer, A. (2015) Garments Against Women. Idaho: Ahsahta Press.
Boyer, A. (2019) What is the Language of Pain? An Ugly Gathering of Adjectives. Lithub [Online] Available from: https://lithub.com/anne-boyer-what-is-the-language-of- pain/ [Accessed on 19/09/2019].
Boyer, A. (2019) The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness. London: Penguin Random House
Frank, A. (2013) The Wounded Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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