Broyard, Adorno, Freud, and Dickinson

“Illness is primarily a drama and it should be possible to enjoy it as well as to suffer it.”
-- Anatole Broyard, 1989


Human life is conditional, we are born and we die.

Along the way yesterday I stopped at the “Scotch Palace,” where I was pulled aside by S., a kindly employee who only the day before had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Having seen me regularly through the Fall and Winter, he undoubtedly needed a sympathetic ear that might relate to hearing what we most dread. For him, I represented a sort of cancer veteran. He knew something was coming, but was unsure of what. He spoke of being unable to sleep with the thought of what might happen, and of trying to take comfort in the fact that we all die.

After reassuring him that the U-M cancer center, where he will be treated, is the best in the world, I got back in my car and thought about having cancer. In a way, our conversation involved two people who had moved beyond abstraction. He, faced with a traumatic adjustment, living with uncertainty; and me, trying to explain the wisdom that arises out of this painful process.

For me, having cancer has been an epiphanous, depressing, exhilarating, distressing, and, to coin a descriptor of Anatole Broyard, “intoxicating” experience. Broyard’s point is that the diagnosis is analogous to be inoculated with a dose of truth. The abstract, and untenable, idea that death comes to us all is banished and is replaced by the knowledge that existential enlightenment is only achieved by embracing our finitude. What Broyard calls, the ‘nausea of the uninitiated’ is replaced by the comfort of rejecting homely truths and ontological delusions. And with this curious comfort comes the intoxication of a heightened desire, which in turn produces a lightheartedness, and hence, reproach to reality. It follows then, that those dear to us who care, who rally around us like “birds rising from a body of water into the sunset” fumble with “pious and inspirational” conversation, with sobering responses to our refusal of seriousness.

Over time, the diagnosis directed my attention to the real, and has proved itself to be, as ironic as it may seem, salvific. My narrative has a beginning, middle, and end, and while I can’t predict future agonies, I am learning to accept that anxiety, like time itself, is ever fleeting. As the wisdom of the Lear’s Fool has it, the worst is never the worst as long as we can say it’s the worst.

But over and above the fact that we all must die lies the more important issue of how we face death. Do we confront our demise by seeking to understand it, or by flight and denial? More than one nurse in the MRI, CT, and PET scan areas spoke of patients who learned the worst and never came back. I might understand this were they in late stage disease, but to displace hope with delusion--the idea that ignoring the worst will make it go away—is a secular betrayal of the sanctity of existence, an existential folly.

A constant trope in the rhetoric of cancer has to do with toughness, courage, and attitude, and this is all well and good. But I think Broyard gets it right in saying that dealing with illness “has nothing to do with courage.” He sees ‘desire’ as a key coping mechanism. Broyard’s point is that facing our own mortality forces us to focus, to channel the awareness that forever always ends into a pressing desire “to live, to write, to do everything.” My idea of calling this blog “Disease as Performance” suggests that illness produces a mental state much like that of the artist, where, as Freud contends, “the unconscious is less repressed or hidden,” and where expression, artistic or otherwise, articulates “the fulfillment of concealed wishes.” Tripping the circuit of desire offers a model of immortality closely akin to producing aesthetic objects. As Adorno puts it, “art is a critique of the brute seriousness that reality imposes on human beings. Art imagines that by naming this fateful state of affairs it is loosening its hold.” Art represents “freedom in the midst of unfreedom.” The artist projects their all too human desire for immortality onto the artwork. What Wilde does with Dorian Gray is reverse the idea of the immortality of art.


There’s certainly no dearth of literature on the theme of our mortality. And at the end of the day (excuse the pun) we’re probably never ready to hop in the grim reaper’s hearse. So let’s end with the queen of eloquent death poems, Emily Dickinson.

Because I could not stop for death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played
At wrestling in the ring;
We passed the field of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We passed before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ‘tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.