Introduction: Contemporary German-Language Illness Writing as Literature; Analyzing Narrative Strategies, Aesthetic Forms, and Experimentations with Genre through the Lens of Disability Theory

Summary

IT IS AN IMPRESSIVE, paragraph-long sentence with which Virginia Woolf sets out to explore the relation of illness to literature, and creativity more generally, in 1925:

Consider how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down in the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Motivation for her then to write On Being Ill was to lament the lack of attention paid to illness. The literary world, she claims, has not explored illness adequately. In her elegant ways, and loaded with poetic imagery— maybe to prove exactly that it is possible to write illness “literarily,” although the role models may be lacking—Woolf emphasizes the extraordinary point of view the experience of illness and pain can give writers (and other artists), grounding them in, rather than enabling them to transcend, the body. Dropping out of “the army of the upright,” thrown back onto their own physicality, ill writers not only recognize nature's indifference but can also appreciate illness, for the intensity of feeling it brings and as a liberating force in the social realm. In this sense, Woolf does “romanticize” the illness experience, with a view to valorizing it.