Literature and Medicine II

I

In the old art the writer writes texts. In the new art the writer makes books. (Ulises Carrión)

6 Artists’ books challenge reading conventions associated with ordinary books. Breon Mitchell characterises the reading of an artist’s book as “a performance”; the “ideal” reader is someone who “plays” the book, “actualising” the various elements the artist has built into it, such as its shape, size, format, colour, texture, typography, and, possibly, sound (162). While Mitchell emphasises the unique aesthetic experience artists’ books offer, and argues that very few people have really “read” artists’ books, in turning to Hall’s books I wish in this section to consider how the central question of how one reads artists’ books becomes modulated when the topic is life-threatening illness.

7 There are many ways in which the formal means of realisation and production are integrated with the thematic or aesthetic issues in Hall’s books. Breast cancer writing has focused on embodied imagery such as the surgical scar, but, through the process of making books, Hall seems to perform her own version of surgery in ways that are not merely symbolic or metaphorical. The binding of a book is similar to the scar as it is the site where the pages of the book stitch together and come apart. Campo suggests that “writing good iambic pentameter feels like putting stitches into the anonymous, eternally gaping wound of being human, and [that] rhymes can be intertwined like surgical knots” (Desire to Heal 116); Hall’s stitches are clearly more tangible. In 1999, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who had become more and more interested in art and weaving after her cancer diagnosis, exhibited a series of cloth figures she had made—“stuffed forms dressed in blue leggings and tunics, draped with woven cloth”—and hung from the ceiling as part of an installation that temporarily filled the lounge of the City University of New York Graduate Center (Miller 221). As Sedgwick explains, “[t]he figures’ strongest representation ties were to the disorienting and radically denuding bodily sense generated by medical imaging and illness itself on the one hand; and on the other, to material urges to dress, ornament, to mend, to recover, and heal” (qtd. in Miller 221-22). While most of Hall’s books are the result of an urge to mend or ornament (Hall was a former professional weaver), in other cases the process of creation is driven by a desire to destroy. A good example is the book What You Don’t Want to Know which functions like a palimpsest. Hall created this sculptured book by pulling apart and reassembling a publication of the National Cancer Institute entitled What You Need to Know about Breast Cancer. In her artist’s statement, she writes that “the process of stitching, crumpling, tearing, cutting, and stapling the pages helped [her] express and release anger” (13). But this book does not only have therapeutic value. Erasing parts of the original text, altering the title and substituting new words and images, Hall “writes back” to the official medical narrative and reclaims part of her agency. Given that the new book is composite as it is held together by different voices, it becomes a site of struggle over the meanings ascribed to breast cancer.

8 The binding of a book is not only the site of trauma and healing. Canadian book artist Lucie Lambert suggests that the binding “is a container, a wrapping, a skin, a meeting point between the content and the potential reader” (qtd. in Plesch 221, emphasis added). Artists’ books, like other physical objects, do not exist primarily as vehicles through which ideas are accessed “but as objects that mark and incite bodily contact, exerting the force of the tangible upon the touching body” (Tanner 202). Hall’s books also bear the body’s marks and hold its traces through the inclusion of hairs as well as autobiographical objects, such as used medical appointment cards and original prescription bottles. [6]Other artists’ books by women explore bodily emissions and traces left by the body. The most well known, perhaps, is Emissions (1992), a collaboration between Susan Johanknecht and Katharine Meynell. Writing about objects of grief, such as the AIDS memorial quilt, Laura Tanner argues that “thinking about the way we know objects […] in and through the body allows us to resist the pressure of immaterialization that would exclude palpable, multisensory experience not only from the realm of knowledge in general but from our understanding of grief in particular” (209). Still, Hall seems to perceive the threat posed by the viewer’s literal contact with her books: “People may not want to ‘touch’ the topics I explore in my books; yet the books invite handling, touching, interaction” (14).

9 Touch constitutes a central element in the reading process of artists’ books. The choice of paper conditions and enhances the viewer’s tactile experience of a book and of its contents. In the book Shell Bones, for instance, thick and strong heavyweight wrapper is used. This conveys through touch what the story of the book is about: finding thick and strong shells on the beach, which remind Hall of bones, and taking them home. In the case of other books, their construction requires a specific way of interacting with them. A good example is Jane, with Wings, which uses a multi-layered folding structure. A polished stone serves as a knob for lifting the red cover of the black box that houses this book; it is an invitation as much as it attests to the need of secrecy. Radley and Bell are right to note that “to read this book is perhaps above all to learn to handle it”:

To read the words one has to handle the book very carefully, going deeper into the ‘origami’ folds so as not to tear the paper; unwrapping (not turning) the pages so as to read the words. […] The power of the book is in the physical unfolding, in the contiguous relation of revealed pages of text that speak of closing, hiding, and ultimately of difference. (381-82)

While the construction of Jane, with Wings invites opening, the text advises the reader to “close it away,” creating, I would argue, a productive tension:

Close it away.

The fear …

Close this page.

You are not

The one

Who is dying.

You do not

Need to see

Beneath the surface

The skin,

The scars. (56)

10 The delicate boundary between concealing and revealing that this book negotiates seems apt when it comes to thinking about narratives that explore illness as well as other traumatic experiences. An appeal for recognition and empathy is made more difficult when the narrative addresses people who do not suffer from the same condition as in the case of Jane, with Wings; through the pronoun you, this book does not only relate the reader to the author but also the healthy to the sick. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan examines the narrative strategy employed in Gillian Rose’s memoir Love’s Work, whose first part does not read as an illness narrative at all. Rose, who recounts her experience with ovarian cancer, confronts the anxiety of losing the (presumably disease-free) reader in a self-reflexive moment in the middle of the narrative, but through her deferred account effectively “manipulates the reader into continuing to read in spite of the emotional difficulty” (Rimmon-Kenan 248). Hall’s books present a similar challenge to both “our conventions of reading as well as to our attitude toward illness” (Rimmon-Kenan 248), but utilise strategies specific to the genre of the artist’s book: At first glance, the reader/viewer is faced with the creativity and uniqueness of the books as works of art, as well as with their inaccessibility, and is therefore lured into opening them (or the boxes in which they are housed) without, in most cases, knowing what to expect. Given that the books are handmade, and, in many cases, handwritten, there is a much more immediate sense of exploring privacy; the reader, inevitably, takes the role of voyeur but soon realises that the book makes different demands on him or her. By that time, however, it is difficult to withdraw, not only because this goes against reading conventions (namely, against the desire to reach the end), but also, because, not unlike Rose’s memoir, it is as if the text says: “You can’t leave me now that you know my condition” (Rimmon-Kenan 248).