Aesthetics and Social Critique in Anatole Broyard's Intoxicated by My Illness

Abstract

Anatole Broyard, former book critic and editor of The New York Times Book Review, died of metastatic prostate cancer in October 1990. For the fourteen months after his initial diagnosis and prior to his death, Broyard chronicled his experience as a person with cancer, paying particular attention to what it was like to be a patient, a subject of contemporary biomedical practice. These writings, along with journal entries and previously published musings on the nature of and death, were published posthumously as Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death (1992). As a product of a mind steeped in the redemptive power of art, Intoxicated stands as a call to arms against conventional culture; indeed, Broyard hopes readers will understand that the best way to have a life-threatening is to develop a pose, a style, in reaction to socially-acceptable patient behavior: Being ill and dying is largely, to a great degree, a matter of style .... [People with a serious illness] can go on being themselves, perhaps even more so than before. They can make a game, a career, even an art form of opposing their illness (61). In its elevation of style as a form of aesthetics and as a way to be ill, this text raises a series of important questions about the relationship of art to life, about the function of narrative in assuaging the pain of serious illness, and about the role of the artist as social critic. Inevitably we are asked to consider the potential failure of identity that often follows upon the experience, and whether art and narrative are the appropriate