With insomnia, asthma, a fever of 103, the pox, the shakes \u2013 unable to leave the bed, unable to sleep, the TV is migrainous \u2013 there\u2019s still a book. Without distractions, the relationship is closer, more intense. <\/p>\n
Some books mesh with the reader\u2019s febrile state \u2013 maybe not social comedies or measured critiques, but the more uneven the better. Invented language such as those used by Anthony Burgess, Russell Hoban or in Eimear McBride\u2019s Goldsmiths-winning A Girl is a Half-formed Thing can be initially off-putting after the broadsheets\u2019 standard Reuters-style neutered prose.<\/p>\n
\u2018Puk blodd over me frum. In the next but. Let me air. Soon I\u2019n dead I\u2019m sr. Loose. Ver the aIrWays. Here. mY nose my mOuth I. VOMit. Clear. CleaR.\u2019<\/p>\n
The fevered mind may be closer to the spirit of McBride\u2019s wayward narrator and her fragmented thought process. Quite apart from the subject echoing our sickness and hypochondriac longing for imminent death, our expectations of formal scene-setting and exposition are undermined by our own sick-room squalor, we\u2019re in there, in Sylvia Plath\u2019s ‘Fever 103\u00b0’.<\/p>\n
Greasing the bodies of adulterers
\nLike Hiroshima ash and eating in.
\nThe sin. The sin.<\/p>\n
Darling, all night
\nI have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
\nThe sheets grow heavy as a lecher\u2019s kiss.<\/p>\n
Or in the rotunda \u2018all white in the whiteness\u2019 of Beckett\u2019s \u2018Imagination Dead Imagine\u2019: \u2018The light that makes all so white no visible source, all shines with the same white shine, ground, wall, vault, bodies, no shadow. Strong heat, surfaces hot but not burning to the touch, bodies sweating.\u2019<\/p>\n
The temperature inside goes up and down like the waves of fever, hot and cold, white and dark, until the narrator\u2019s voice is the sound of our own fever humming in the rotunda of our skull.<\/p>\n
\u2018The light goes down, all grows dark together, ground, wall, vault, bodies, say twenty seconds, all the greys, the light goes out, all vanishes. At the same time the temperature goes down, to reach its minimum, say freezing-point, at the same instant that the black is reached, which may seem strange. \u2019<\/p>\n
The shivering of fever is in there, weaving and guttering like a flame as our strength drains away.<\/p>\n
A great deal is written about writing \u2013 about reading, not so much. It is passive to the writer\u2019s active, with the reader as a spectator to genius, it\u2019s the same for everybody and so not worth talking about. But reading is as solo, as individual as sexuality and no doubt as various. It is a Faustian pact we strike with a writer, a surrender of our critical faculties in the suspension of disbelief and entry into their imaginary world. Illness can undermine our defences, so we go further into the writer\u2019s world on a mission to intensify the experience. <\/p>\n
This type of reading is one of moment by moment identification with a voice, not measured appreciation or an overview of a writer\u2019s achievement. But it is much more powerful \u2013 writers who have helped us to endure some low point are more likely to have an impact, to stay with us. <\/p>\n
It may be more difficult to follow a plot or recall an array of characters, but the transition to the shifting dream logic of modernist or experimental works, such as Renata Adler\u2019s Speedboat or J.G. Ballard\u2019s The Atrocity Exhibition is effortless. The Speedboat carried me through nights of hallucinations with glandular fever, segueing seamlessly from one non sequitur to the next.<\/p>\n
Motifs reappear with the instinctive force of art rather than logic, as they do in a night of dream sequences, with variations on a theme; the dreamer is chased by rats, their fingers are trapped in the change slots of cabs, Janis Joplin sings \u201cFreedom\u2019s just another word for nothing left to lose\u201d as an earworm we can\u2019t shake. The narrator slip-slides from one detailed yet affectless dream to the next, disconnected from their life. <\/p>\n
While every imagination is a disconnect from reality, when this alienation or flight is the subject of the work, illness brings us closer to this separation, a falling away from normal life. <\/p>\n
A narrator in drink or drugs, in extremis, then comes into their own. Geoffrey Firmin\u2019s last moments in Under the Volcano, as he loses control of his mind in the final flare of fantasy accompanying his death are akin to the hallucinatory thought processes in a fever spike: <\/p>\n
\u2018It was crumbling too, whatever it was, collapsing, while he was falling, falling into the volcano, he must have climbed it after all, though now there was this noise of foisting lava in his ears, horribly, it was in eruption yet no, it wasn\u2019t the volcano, the world itself was bursting, bursting into black spouts of villages catapulted into space, with himself falling through it all, through the inconceivable pandemonium of a million tanks, through the blazing of ten million burning bodies, falling into a forest, falling–\u2019<\/p>\n
In this moment of lucid dreaming, relieved at being shot, he sees all his life hurtling towards this end, his body and mind disintegrating, unable to contain his torment any longer. As the body breaks apart it can contain everything \u2018the world itself was bursting\u2019 and the \u201910 million burning bodies\u2019. <\/p>\n
The suspension of disbelief is easier, the analytical voice demanding to know what the author means is further away \u2013 the experience of reading is intensified, aiming at merging with the work rather than \u2018literary criticism\u2019. I\u2019ve tried this artificially, listening to CAN, drinking and smoking, so that reading is almost like being at Gerald\u2019s Party. Time seems suspended in the novel, in the way it does to a drunk, and it is still possible to admire Coover\u2019s ability to juggle multiple storylines in one seemingly endless take.<\/p>\n
This approach favours apprehension over comprehension, assuming literature can act on the reader\u2019s subconscious as well as conscious mind, as music and the visual arts do. The repetition of sound in mantra or nursery rhyme bypasses consciousness, as does the repetition of motifs and non-linear plot, released from the shackles of realism\u2019s cause and effect. <\/p>\n
First published at http:\/\/humag.co\/features\/sick-books<\/p>\n
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With insomnia, asthma, a fever of 103, the pox, the shakes \u2013 unable to leave the bed, unable to sleep, the TV is migrainous \u2013 there\u2019s still a book. Without distractions, the relationship is closer, more intense. Some books mesh … Continue reading