“What the Book Told”: Illness, Witnessing, and Patient-Doctor Encounters in Martha Hall’s Artists’ Books — Page 3:
11 It is clear then that reading Jane, with Wings does not only entail handling it with care so as not to tear the pages. It also demands taking up the interactive/ethical challenges the book presents. Radley and Bell, drawing on Bruno Latour, write that the work of re-presentation in artworks is “aimed at engaging the viewer in order to bring before her the ideas and values that are mediated by the signs” (385). As they are right to point out, “[t]heir message is about the viewers/readers currently engaging the work, and what these individual might do now. It is not just about the disease in general, or the fate of individuals who once shared their diagnosis” (Radley and Bell 385, emphasis in the original). Coming back to Mitchell’s idea of performance, Jane, with Wings can be thought of as a kind of interactive art which constructs the reader as responsible, in Kelly Oliver’s sense of “response-able” (7), and therefore engages him or her as witness: Whether one chooses to advance in the reading of the book or not, there is no way not to interact; the piece already through its form and text establishes a relation between writer and reader/viewer.
12 While Jane, with Wings seems to compel a specifically ethical form of engagement, the reader (even the “ideal” one who reaches the book’s centre) is paradoxically told that he or she is to close the book without knowing, without seeing. The book demands and exceeds a response at the same time. However, what may initially seem like a performance of failed interaction can in fact transform us as readers in that it compels us to bear witness to what is, in Oliver’s phrase, “beyond recognition”, namely the process of witnessing itself. Oliver writes that “we must be vigilant in our attempts to continually open and reopen the possibility of response” (19), and Jane, with Wings does precisely that by drawing attention to both the necessity and the impossibility of fully witnessing another’s experience. In my conclusion I return to this idea and consider the significance of my own particular mode of encountering Hall’s work “in the here and how”, which, through its mediated proximity to the other, keeps open the possibility of future witnessing.
II
I would like a doctor who enjoyed me. I want to be a good story for him, to give some of my art in exchange for his. […] Just as he orders blood tests and bone scans of my body, I’d like my doctor to scan me, to grope for my spirit. […] Without some such recognition, I am nothing but my illness. […] [The doctor] has to dissect the cadaver of his professional persona; he must see that his silence and neutrality are unnatural. It may be necessary to give up some of his authority in exchange for his humanity. […] He has little to lose and everything to gain by letting the sick man into his heart. (Anatole Broyard)
13 Hall’s books critique medicalisation and objectification, namely how bodies of cancer patients are handled during surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, in various ways. Several of Hall’s books were inspired by specific interactions with her physicians and nurses. As in Anatole Broyard’s essay “The Patient Examines the Doctor,” from which the epigraph of this section is taken, through her books Hall shows what kind of qualities she would like her doctors to have. In her book Just to Know, she literally examines the female technician who administers radiation therapy:
“Take in a deep breath. Hold it.” The test. The technician’s voice sounds eerie, comes from a speaker in the machine. She is in the other room, eyes on the computer, not me. The machine whirls softly as if something is spinning around and around at high speed inside. “Breathe.” The machine moves forward a fraction of an inch. “Take in a deep breath. Hold it.” Then the muted whirling sound. “Breathe.” Again and again. Perhaps a hundred times. She must be tired of repeating the same phrase. (20)
In his memoir The Desire to Heal, Campo draws a compelling comparison between “withholding words” through the conscious process of “forbidding [him]self the application of heartfelt, meaningful language” and that of commanding his patients “to hold their breath” (114). Hall seems to suggest something similar about the technician in the above excerpt. In Test Day, like Broyard, Hall distinguishes between scanning the body and scanning the self, expressing her anger at her doctors’ unwillingness to see her as anything more than her illness:
I will light up their screens,
My insides black and white.
Circles, shadows, lines.
But the watchers will not see me;
Will not see my self, my soul; (38)
14 Broyard writes: “To the typical physician, my illness is a routine incident in his rounds, while for me it’s the crisis of my life. I would feel better if I had a doctor who at least perceived this incongruity” (43). Small Rooms, a book which is made to look as a series of examination rooms, dramatises this incongruity: “The nurse asks [Hall], ‘And how are you today?’ I answer, ‘I’m in terrible pain.’ And she responds, ‘Oh. I like the color of your sweater.’ She doesn’t look at me” (70). The text evokes a never-ending cycle of superficial interaction rather than meaningful communication between patients and doctors: “I leave the long corridors, the waiting women, the nurses and doctors asking someone else, ‘And how are you today?’” (72). Another book in which repetition is central is Prescriptions. Hall expresses her agony with the number of pills she needs to take and with her doctors who are quick to prescribe them. The pages of this book, which consist of transparent leaves with photocopies of prescriptions and pill containers, and the refrain in the text “I have too many prescriptions” foreground her feelings of frustration.
15 In his study The Renewal of Generosity, Arthur Frank argues that “the physician dreams the monological authority of being the single unquestioned voice. The patient dreams the monological passivity of having this other pronounce their truth” (103). Letha E. Mills, one of Hall’s physicians, who opens Holding In, Holding On with a statement on Hall’s books, notes that because “medical evaluation of disease has become highly technical” there is so much waiting that a patient’s “future hangs in the balance, determined by ‘how well they did’ on the test” (8-9). In the book Test Day, already mentioned, the condition of passive waiting is communicated by bringing together the idea of women’s infantilisation with the kind of infantilisation inflicted upon patients by the medical community, which has been heavily criticised in illness narratives of the eighties and early nineties. The silent patient is also compared to an obedient pupil who needs to do as told in order to earn a passing mark:
I will be obedient,
As if my desire to please
Will earn me good grades,
A passing mark.
Small child thoughts
In my woman head.
[…]
I will do as I am told. (38)
In her book Anxiety (to Martin Antonetti), Hall emphasises waiting by alluding to her double identity as artist and cancer patient. The book starts with Hall waiting for Martin (curator of rare books in Smith’s Mortimer Rare Book Room) to call in order to let her know whether he will buy her book entitled “The Rest of My Life,” but her anxiety quickly shifts; the book closes with Hall waiting for her doctor, this time, who will call her “about The Rest of My Life” (59, emphasis in the original), not a book with this title, but literally the rest of her life. Anxiety emphasises feelings of dependence by evoking Hall’s insecurity about the future of her art and of her life, which remain inextricably connected. The book is an atlas foldout, and symmetry is created as the top part concerns the curator and the bottom the doctor. Since its form does not dictate a single way of reading it—as it does not involve turning pages, the book can be read either horizontally or vertically—the conflation of identities and positions intended by Hall is foregrounded.