j& The Art of the Suture: Richard Selzer and Medical Narrative Robert Leigh Davis At first glance, it would appear that surgery and writing have little in common, but I think that is not so. . . . The surgeon sutures together the tissues of the body to make whole what is sick or injured; the writer sews words into sentences to fashion a new version of human experience. A surgical operation is rather like a short story. You make the incision, rummage around inside for a bit, then stitch up. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. -Richard Selzer, "The Pen and the Scalpel"1 The desire "to make whole what is sick or injured" relates the work of surgery and writing, and the surgeon's instrument of closure, the suture, emerges for Richard Selzer as a sign of this dual concern. Literally , suturing is a technique of wound closure, the art of joining the spUt edges of the skin in a graft or seam. But suturing implies a larger issue in Selzer's writings, and he uses the suture to image textual as well as bodily acts of closure. Writing, for Selzer, can be an instrument of healing and repair—a way of making sense out of chaos, a way of closing off uncertainty and restoring a sense of continuity and shared meaning. Literary closure creates "a sense of appropriate cessation," Barbara Herrnstein Smith writes: "It announces and justifies the absence of further development; it reinforces the feeling of finality, completion, and composure which we value in all works of art; and it gives ultimate unity and coherence to the reader's experience. . . ."2 Whether or not one values "ultimate unity" in "all works of art," its appeal for a medical writer is unmistakable. Narrative heals by restoring a "disrupted connectedness," Howard Brody argues: Literature and Medicine 12, no. 2 (Fall 1993) 178-193 © 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Robert Leigh Davis 179 The sick or anguished patient experiences himself as being in a terrifying and mysterious "middle" that seems to make no sense. The physician comforts and makes the experience understandable and controllable by supplying an account of a beginning and an end that make the "middle" comprehensible in relation to them. . . . [R]elief of suffering comes most often by changing the meaning of the experience for the sufferer and restoring the disrupted connectedness of the sufferer with herself and those around her.3 Responding to the radical disordering of disease, Selzer's stories offer, at times, the assurance of restored control—a beginning, a middle, and an end. Medical narrative, like medical treatment, imposes restraint. It resists the inventiveness of affliction and returns the patient to conservative , recognizably human, forms of experience. In Selzer's story "Imelda," a surgeon asks a Honduran girl disfigured by cleft lip and cleft palate, "What is your name?" "Imelda," she answers, but the name is indistinguishable, inhuman: "The syllables leaked through the hole with a slosh and a whistle." The surgeon works to repair Imelda's lips. He tries to fix her voice and face and restore a connectedness disrupted by the girl's "defect." Her wound is "utterly hideous," the narrator comments, "a nude rubbery insect."4 Medicine responds to this dehumanization , and in this response it is necessarily conservative. Its ethical imperative, Victor Kestenbaum argues, is "to 'restore the patient's humanity / which has been 'wounded' by the diminishments and obstructions characteristic of the experience of illness."5 More than an incidental surgical treatment, suturing names this restorative impulse in Selzer, the conservative impulse to close off disruption and "make whole what is sick or injured." But if suturing is in some way inevitable in medical narrative, a deeply felt, deeply ethical desire to restore connectedness, Selzer remains particularly attentive to the coercive possibilities of this process, the violence implicit in this desire for closure. In a story such as "Brute," for example, Selzer shows how the suture constricts, even mutilates, its subject, to restore control. In this story, a man is taken to an emergency room under police restraint. His head is lacerated and bleeding, and he seems to the physiciannarrator less a human being than a wild...
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Sep 1, 2024
Omar A Mahroq + 6
Open Access
