Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books by Peter Fifield (review)

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• Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books by Peter Fifield
• Jeremy Colangelo (bio)

Peter Fifield. Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 272 pp. Hardcover, $80.00.

Peter Fifield's monograph Modernism and Physical Illness comes out at a time when modernism studies has been re-discovering illness and the body, with major texts like Elizabeth Outka's Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature, Michael Davidson's Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic, and Maren Linett's Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature showing the steady interest among scholars in this area.¹ Fifield's book is a worthy contribution to the research on illness in modernist literature, and a necessary one as well, for it serves as an important corrective to the broader tendency to see the major canonical works of modernist literature as disembodied, cerebral, and concerned mainly with abstractions. Instead, as Fifield argues, "illness is a central preoccupation of literary modernism," not only in the sense of it being a recurrent topic, but also in the sense of illness helping create literary modernism as it eventually became (1). Modern medical technology, he writes, results in "a transformation of bodily experience that renders the human subject at once more and less than its antecedents" (224). Changes in medical technology alter how subjects relate to their bodies, and by extension alter the way those bodies become the subject of art. In chronicling this process, Fifield shows how the medicalized subject is "both private … and collective," at once isolated in the sickbed and plugged into a complex social and technological network (227). Illness and medicine thus played a key role in producing "modernism's capacity for estranging the world," a capacity which is characteristic of the movement (228). [End Page 229]

Fifield frames his book against Virginia Woolf's essay "On Being Ill," where she argues that literature has in general neglected illness. The broad strokes of her argument are likely familiar to the readers of this journal—"novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid"²—but of special interest here is her subsequent claim that the lack of writing on illness has left authors without a vocabulary to describe it, leading to a retreat into abstraction. Fifield provides ample evidence to the contrary, though in doing so he also hitches his argument to Woolf's, a choice with both benefits and drawbacks. When discussing literature, British literary modernists could indeed divert into the transcendental, but they were just as able to focus on the mundane and the minute, the everyday business of being ill, and the way that illness merged with the business of having a body at all. Situating himself explicitly in the context of the medical humanities, Fifield approaches the question of diseases through their role in the "entanglement" of the body "in a rich and complex experiential world, rather than an objective phenomenon that floats above subjects, culture, institutions, language, and practice" (28). His point here is not that the objective element of a disease is unimportant, but rather that diseases, in persisting across vast and sometimes ancient networks of transmission, acquire important figurative and symbolic value which then affects the ways those diseases are understood, experienced, and represented. One need only look at the cultural history of tuberculosis, as Fifield does in his chapter on D. H. Lawrence, to see that process at work. Fifield, in casting his book against Woolf's essay, therefore performs a task that is as much an excavation as it is an explication, looking past her claim that the writing of illness lacks a history to link modernist studies with the discourse of which her essay was already a part.

Yet I also wonder what kind of book Modernism and Physical Illness could have been had it not comported itself in a largely reactive way or had not put so much emphasis on disproving Woolf. Certainly, a corrective is needed here, but at the same time the text seems to leave some questions tantalizingly open. In the book's epilogue, Fifield describes how, in an earlier plan for...