It seems as if in "On Being Ill" Virginia Woolf is probing the idea that in sickness the gulph between what literary artists normally pursue, i.e. thoughts, the mind, imagination, comes in contact with body by way of contamination. The body, no longer remaining transparent, begins to insist upon the author's mind which then closes off the liminal potential of the mind to other-worldly things. As she points out, there are no novels devoted to an individual illness despite the fact that many authors have been seriously ill while writing them (Keats being a good example of this). It is as if there are two spaces which cannot both be opened simultaneously, a world of the sick author and the world of the well author. They may come in contact, they may bleed into one another, but they can never cross. Our openness to one is at the expense of our openness to the other. Woolf says that being ill discloses "undiscovered countries," harking back to Hamlet's soliloquy, which no doubt could not be discovered with being "spiritually" altered by sickness (I wonder if she is also trying to say that as sickness approximates death the more altered we become? Perhaps, but she also talks about how diminutive or perhaps "ordinary" it can seem to be on one's death bed. I wonder how this works with the references to Hamlet who is clearly thinking of death).
It is so abundantly true how little literature (or philosophy for that matter) approaches the realms of illness. I think Woolf senses, rightly so, how difficult it really is to describe in words, ordinary enough words which other people can understand, just what it is like for oneself. Physicians and patients produce a literature of general explanation, but it is not description or even the careful use of words Woolf requires of herself (as do most good authors!). There is a courage required of a writer, as Woolf writes (the courage of a lion tamer), who wishes to look these things "squarely in the face." And I wonder, at the behest of Woolf's essay, to what degree is it even possible? (This is why I have not introduced any major theorist; I cannot think of any who speak compellingly about illness!). "Theory" was synonymous with philosophy for the ancient Greeks, and they shared a common emphasis on sight and also therefore clarity. Sight of course is a bodily function but one that has been easily disembodied throughout history. The body of the philosopher has little to do with the boldness of their thought which aims to penetrate the mundane darkness of the world with a ray of abstract and noble light. They too are in search of "undiscovered countries," and can be quite bold in the pursuit of those places of the mind. Thinking, per a traditional concept of philosophy and also literature, takes place outside the body in order to see things beyond the appearance of the world. But of course, as Woolf points out, no one is able to do so while being ill. It is a simple but profound truth that when one is ill the body begins to interrupt all abstract thinking with its own opacity. If in order to perceive the truth beyond appearance, which, as philosophers tell us, has its own spacial configurations and logics that exist apart from the body, one must forget the body as much as possible, then we must concede that sickness is the limit of theory in terms of the body. Human capability to theorize (if we think of theory as I have articulated it here generally) exists only to the extent to which the body allows itself to become transparent to thought. If this is not the case, as with illness, theorizing cannot properly take place. The mundane, the ordinary, the common intrude upon the life of the mind, perhaps overrunning it from time to time.
But Woolf wonders if there is a philosophy of sickness after all, or at least if there could be one. It would have to be, she suggests, a "reason rooted in the bowls of the earth." It would have to become as opaque as the body itself, as dumb and obvious before profound philosophers as soil from which they attempt to remove themselves eternally. I don't think it is a stretch to say that Woolf's literature tends toward this soil, this opacity as much as it is spiritual. But what of theory contemporary with it? Could it still, in contradiction to a literature of sickness, still attempt to ascend beyond the body and its chaos? Of course not. This theory would perhaps have to become blind if that is what is required for it to begin seeing the "undiscovered countries" disclosed in the body and its illness, in the ordinary and every-day reality. A theory without eyes, but with a body.
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