Diagnosing Discourse: Poetry and Cancer in Peter Reading’s C

Abstract

The paper proposes to analyze Peter Reading’s C (1983), an entire poetic collection devoted to cancer and the ways of speaking about cancer. The significance of this work has been largely underestimated by critics, frequently hostile to Reading’s innovative attitude to poetry, yet the collection remains unprecedented in its ambitions to highlight both the potential and the danger of any attempt to contain cancer within a chosen discursive structure, be it scientific or literary. The analysis of Reading’s collection is embedded in a theoretical frame constituted by Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, Jacques Revel and Peter Jean-Pierre’s “The Body: The Sick Man and His History,” and Clifford Geertz’s “Ideology as a Cultural System.” The thematic axis of the collection is constituted by the history of the poet-narrator’s illness, though the narrative also includes stories of other cancer patients, as well as fragments from medical journals and dictionaries. The characters in the collection are distinguished not by individual personality traits but by the distinctive language in which they express their predicament. In relation to language that attempts to appropriate disease, Reading creates a fundamental opposition between poetry (health and life) versus prose (illness and death). This distinction explains why the narrator, who has cancer, chooses the form of prose units in order to express his predicament, but also “tries out” various poetic forms which constitute his desperate hold on life. Reading draws a similarity between the hospital surgeon and the poet - the former dissecting human bodies, the latter dissecting poetic kinds and poetic meter. Reading’s narrator becomes ultimately the surgeon-poet, carrying out his experimentations in “amputated” rhetoric. It is precisely in this quest for a more down-to-earth, prosaic poetry that Reading is truly an inheritor of the war poets - in the case of both war and cancer, poetry must sacrifice its figurative potential, because any type of linguistic defamiliarization of cancer destroys the true nature of the illness