- Email: [email protected]
Let us now praise famous (wo)men
Perspectives
Introducing the author/character relationship into a novel is hardly an original device, but it is a powerful image of the vexed relation between freedom and determinism. Can Rayment really make ethical decisions, or is he already rigorously scripted by his author? If so, is the same true of us non-fictional types, out here in the real world? Perhaps, like characters in fiction, we have freedom to act, but only within the severe limits set upon us. Most novelists feel that their characters come to assume an autonomous life of their own, behaving with surprising unpredictability and slipping rebelliously from their control; and this is certainly true of Rayment, who resents Costello’s intervening in his life. Yet wouldn’t “freedom” for a fictional character mean simply disappearing into thin air?
Rayment can indeed shuck off Elizabeth—but only (like a successfully cured psychoanalytic patient) if he sheds his erotic fantasies about Marijuana, confronts the truth about himself, takes control of his own existence, and thus renders his “author” redundant. Elizabeth wants to “bring him to life”, which is what all writers want to do to their characters; but he can be restored to life only by bringing life to another. And this, in a magnificent final scene, he does not by extravagantly giving, but by the rather more arduous act of receiving. This, then, is a novel about redemption, as Rayment learns that he has to be worthy of being a fictional hero by bringing his heart out of hiding. Like the rest of us, he has to become a more engaging character than he
actually is—which means viewing himself with something of the starkly demystified honesty with which his author dissects him. Perhaps, then, that nasty crash on the road, as in classical tragedy, was the seed of a mysterious renewal. It has put Rayment in touch with his flesh, in more senses than one; and he ends the novel by refusing to settle for anything less than love. Slow Man may be a grimly disenchanted narrative; but it is detached enough from its own bleakness to reflect at one point that there is something curiously comic about losing any part of the body—especially, Rayment adds with his steely lack of self-pity, “one that sticks out”.
Terry Eagleton c/o The Lancet, London, UK
In brief Book Let us now praise famous (wo)men
The Excellent Doctor Blackwell: the Life of the First Woman Physician Julia Boyd. Sutton Publishing, 2005. Pp 314. £20·00. ISBN 0-75094-140-5.
Harvey Cushing: a Life in Surgery Michael Bliss. Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp 591. US$40·00. ISBN 0-195-16989-1.
1918
There can be few literary genres so unfashionable academically and yet so successful commercially as biography. (Well, actually there are lots: Da Vinci Code spin-offs, Little Books Of . . ., or Management Secrets Of Grigori Rasputin, to name but three. But you see what I mean.) Historians—and I write as one—detest the notion that history consists of a parade of genius rather than a complex web of cultural influence. We aren’t supposed to care any more about the lives of Great Men (of either sex), especially those who have been so inconsiderate as to distinguish themselves in the fields of science or medicine: how Victorian, how naive. But we do and, so the publishers tell us, in spiralling numbers. What is the appeal of these books, and to whom? Entertainment and human interest for the public? A Samuel Smiles-esque example to the next generation of geniuses?
Perhaps one key to success is the choice of subject. Julia Boyd has chosen well. Although well known in the USA, Elizabeth Blackwell— the first woman physician on the Medical Register, and an influential campaigner for female education and against slavery—has tended, in the UK, to be overshadowed by her contemporaries Florence Nightingale and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. Boyd sidesteps the obvious temptation to present her subject as a heroine in the modern feminist mould, giving us instead a rich account of Blackwell in her social and intellectual milieu. We follow her remarkable invasion of a misogynistic profession, but also her opposition to the contemporary feminist movement and her vision of an army of women doctors healing the moral, as well as the physical, ills of society. The Excellent Doctor Blackwell is well turned history that should speak to the historian, the physician, and the intelligent lay reader.
Michael Bliss’s Harvey Cushing is a very different beast—an innovative and widely respected surgeon who was immersed from birth in the American social and intellectual elite. Cushing is an established figure in the history of modern medicine, and Bliss’s modus operandi involves a mountain of new archival sources. The result, Harvey Cushing: a Life in Surgery, is monumental. Bliss begins before the cradle and ends beyond the grave, touching both on the material facts of Cushing’s remarkable successes and on his convoluted inner life. There is no radical reinterpretation of his historical eminence—for Bliss, Cushing is rightfully a hero—but frankly this was never on the cards. It is difficult to imagine how any future writer might improve on this masterpiece of compassion and erudition.
Richard Barnett [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 366 December 3, 2005
Introducing the author/character relationship into a novel is hardly an original device, but it is a powerful image of the vexed relation between freedom and determinism. Can Rayment really make ethical decisions, or is he already rigorously scripted by his author? If so, is the same true of us non-fictional types, out here in the real world? Perhaps, like characters in fiction, we have freedom to act, but only within the severe limits set upon us. Most novelists feel that their characters come to assume an autonomous life of their own, behaving with surprising unpredictability and slipping rebelliously from their control; and this is certainly true of Rayment, who resents Costello’s intervening in his life. Yet wouldn’t “freedom” for a fictional character mean simply disappearing into thin air?
Rayment can indeed shuck off Elizabeth—but only (like a successfully cured psychoanalytic patient) if he sheds his erotic fantasies about Marijuana, confronts the truth about himself, takes control of his own existence, and thus renders his “author” redundant. Elizabeth wants to “bring him to life”, which is what all writers want to do to their characters; but he can be restored to life only by bringing life to another. And this, in a magnificent final scene, he does not by extravagantly giving, but by the rather more arduous act of receiving. This, then, is a novel about redemption, as Rayment learns that he has to be worthy of being a fictional hero by bringing his heart out of hiding. Like the rest of us, he has to become a more engaging character than he
actually is—which means viewing himself with something of the starkly demystified honesty with which his author dissects him. Perhaps, then, that nasty crash on the road, as in classical tragedy, was the seed of a mysterious renewal. It has put Rayment in touch with his flesh, in more senses than one; and he ends the novel by refusing to settle for anything less than love. Slow Man may be a grimly disenchanted narrative; but it is detached enough from its own bleakness to reflect at one point that there is something curiously comic about losing any part of the body—especially, Rayment adds with his steely lack of self-pity, “one that sticks out”.
Terry Eagleton c/o The Lancet, London, UK
In brief Book Let us now praise famous (wo)men
The Excellent Doctor Blackwell: the Life of the First Woman Physician Julia Boyd. Sutton Publishing, 2005. Pp 314. £20·00. ISBN 0-75094-140-5.
Harvey Cushing: a Life in Surgery Michael Bliss. Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp 591. US$40·00. ISBN 0-195-16989-1.
1918
There can be few literary genres so unfashionable academically and yet so successful commercially as biography. (Well, actually there are lots: Da Vinci Code spin-offs, Little Books Of . . ., or Management Secrets Of Grigori Rasputin, to name but three. But you see what I mean.) Historians—and I write as one—detest the notion that history consists of a parade of genius rather than a complex web of cultural influence. We aren’t supposed to care any more about the lives of Great Men (of either sex), especially those who have been so inconsiderate as to distinguish themselves in the fields of science or medicine: how Victorian, how naive. But we do and, so the publishers tell us, in spiralling numbers. What is the appeal of these books, and to whom? Entertainment and human interest for the public? A Samuel Smiles-esque example to the next generation of geniuses?
Perhaps one key to success is the choice of subject. Julia Boyd has chosen well. Although well known in the USA, Elizabeth Blackwell— the first woman physician on the Medical Register, and an influential campaigner for female education and against slavery—has tended, in the UK, to be overshadowed by her contemporaries Florence Nightingale and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. Boyd sidesteps the obvious temptation to present her subject as a heroine in the modern feminist mould, giving us instead a rich account of Blackwell in her social and intellectual milieu. We follow her remarkable invasion of a misogynistic profession, but also her opposition to the contemporary feminist movement and her vision of an army of women doctors healing the moral, as well as the physical, ills of society. The Excellent Doctor Blackwell is well turned history that should speak to the historian, the physician, and the intelligent lay reader.
Michael Bliss’s Harvey Cushing is a very different beast—an innovative and widely respected surgeon who was immersed from birth in the American social and intellectual elite. Cushing is an established figure in the history of modern medicine, and Bliss’s modus operandi involves a mountain of new archival sources. The result, Harvey Cushing: a Life in Surgery, is monumental. Bliss begins before the cradle and ends beyond the grave, touching both on the material facts of Cushing’s remarkable successes and on his convoluted inner life. There is no radical reinterpretation of his historical eminence—for Bliss, Cushing is rightfully a hero—but frankly this was never on the cards. It is difficult to imagine how any future writer might improve on this masterpiece of compassion and erudition.
Richard Barnett [email protected]
www.thelancet.com Vol 366 December 3, 2005