Resistance and Desire: Autofictional Satire and Intersubjectivity in Samuel Shem’s The House of God

Abstract

ABSTRACT One essential function of autobiographical writing is to provide not an account of oneself but rather a model for others. Creating the self as a narrative object involves establishing an ambiguous intersubjective space, where complex acts of mirroring—the writer’s ego imposed upon the reader, the reader’s desire fulfilled within the writer’s life—complicate the assessment of authenticity. This article examines how this effect is both amplified and undercut by autofictional satire in Samuel Shem’s famous novel about his year-long medical internship, The House of God (1978). Considering the text in light of aesthetic theory, philosophy, and narrative medicine reveals how the novel’s own form deliberately resists its reader’s pursuit of an intersubjective identification. Just as The House of God’s narrator establishes an identity equally disorienting and empowering, so too does the novel’s deployment of competing genres and traditions use humour to blur the lines between aesthetic mimesis and social role-modeling, forcing us to reassess utilitarian and cathartic reading practices in the medical professions. In the era of COVID-19—a timewhen aspirational medical narratives have taken on new cultural power—Shem’s troubled negotiation between what ‘should be’ and what ‘is’ continue to challenge how we should read.