GABRIELA GLĂVAN
AS HE LAY DYING: MAX BLECHER’S MEDICAL BODY
Max Blecher, a Jewish Romanian writer whose short life and literary career
bloomed in marginal, hostile environments such as the provincial town of Roman
and the bone tuberculosis sanatoria of Berck-sur-Mer, in France, Leysin, in
Switzerland, or Techirghiol, in Romania, is a paradigmatic writer of the medical
body. His experience with illness infused his imagination with the lucid awareness
that all material surfaces, including his own biological presence, hide and disguise
another dimension, the immediate unreal. His three novels, Adventures in
Immediate Irreality (1936), Scarred Hearts and The Lightened Burrow (published
posthumously, in 1971) render the obsessive mapping of this foreign, unfamiliar,
barely visible reverse side of the hostile real. Illness is a powerful agent that makes
the unreal perceptible by awakening biological consciousness, correlating the
precarity of bodily existence with a high intellectual tension and therefore
translating suffering into literature. Diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis at the age
of 19, complex medical intervention was Blecher’s only hope for recovery.
I intend to argue that a consistent part of Blecher’s writings articulate a
distinctive dimension in which medical procedures, along with medical language
and the medicalization of the body itself sustain particular affective strategies of
great importance in the young writer’s life. I will explore Max Blecher’s
correspondence and his last two novels, Scarred Hearts and The Lightened Burrow
in order to reveal how medical knowledge and intervention informed his literature
and thought. Blecher’s poetics of the cavern, closed spaces, claustrophobic
captivity in a broken, unfunctional body lies on a solid structure of affective
dialects, the most prominent surfacing in his correspondence with his friends. Both
in his fictions and in his private writings, the writer keeps a close eye on the
workings of his estranged, painful body. His entire oeuvre could be read as an
account of the secret biological and metaphysical movements of his body,
understood as an infinitely complicated mechanism that made his presence in the
world possible. However, the tragic daily excitement of still being alive is most
visible in his letters to his close friends Geo and Elly Bogza. Much like his
literature, although not as obviously, Blecher’s letters harbor true affection and
friendship, alleviating the bitter disappointment of unsuccessful medical treatment.
Fictional and personal, all of Blecher’s writings follow the same hidden pathways
leading into the unreal, as it grows extravagantly on the territory of an astounding
revelation – sickness alienates one from one’s body, favoring a unique, acute
perception of the myriad pains and processes that, in turns, support and undermine
life.
DACOROMANIA LITTERARIA, V, 2018, pp. 115–133
116
GABRIELA GLĂVAN
Blecher’s writings at the crossroads of literature and medicine
The rising interest in the common ground, interpretive methods and metaphors
literature and medicine share is reflected in the prominence gained by new research
fields and disciplines such as medical humanities, disability studies or the more
general domain of literature and medicine itself. Numerous dedicated journals have
emerged in recent decades and a growing amount of scholarship has revealed the
many connections between literary art and medical science. In the inaugural issue
of Literature and Medicine, Edmund Daniel Pellegrino, professor of medicine and
bioethics, wrote a seminal essay in which he argued in favor of the affinities that
bridge the gap between the two apparently incompatible fields. His most
expressive and meaningful statement is that both domains “are ways of looking at
man and both are, at heart, moral enterprises. Both must start by seeing life bare,
without averting their gaze. Yet, neither can rest in mere looking. To be authentic
they must look feelingly— with compassion”1. Pellegrino also argues that the two
modes of exploration and knowledge are bound by their fundamental inquisitive
nature, standing on a ”unremitting paradox”2: “the need simultaneously to stand
back from, and yet to share in, the struggle of human life. They must see clearly
but they must also be involved in the outcome of the struggle”3. Ultimately, both
rely on a narrative essence – diagnosis and clinical investigation mainly involve
storytelling, as the physician must uncover “a patient’s odyssey in the dismal
realms of disease, distress, disability and death”4.
The present investigation could have, as a starting point, Pellegrino’s
observation that the symmetries and shared interests of science and art favor
“subtle encounters of persons and matters medical with persons and matters
literary”5. Blecher, the medical student preparing for a career focused on exploring
bodies and interpreting other people’s symptoms and afflictions, veered towards a
literary career that uniquely shaped his work in the form of a confession
emphasizing his tragic medical experience with his own body – one that presents
the estrangement of the familiar while at the same time familiarizing the reader
with the strange. Blecher’s main fictional focus is on the body, therefore it
becomes means and instrument in an interior journey that follows a double path –
that of the body as metaphor, as the material surface of inner life and that of the
literal body, painfully diseased, wasting itself away, captive in a medical,
anatomical fate that cannot be transcended.
Bone tuberculosis, or Pott’s Disease, is a rare form of the disease that has
1
Edmund D. Pellegrino, “To Look Feelingly – The Affinities of Medicine and Literature”,
Literature and Medicine, Volume 1, 1982, p. 19.
2
Ibidem.
3
Ibidem.
4
Ibidem, p. 20.
5
Ibidem, p. 23.
AS HE LAY DYING: MAX BLECHER’S MEDICAL BODY
117
permeated and influenced a great part of nineteenth century European literature. As
a romantic affliction, consumption generated an entire system of cultural and
literary representations, metaphors, specific languages and characters. Scholars
investigating the cultural imprint of tuberculosis revealed its impact at the level of
individual identity, arguing that the disease shapes a “consumptive identity”6,
while David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder consider that the conscious
identification of writers and living affected individuals with others in the same
situation or with certain fictional characters generates a kind of “disability
consciousness”7 that reunites them in an imaginary community allowing them to
share a common ground. Susan Sontag, in her seminal Illness as Metaphor
expressed her surprise at the fact that tuberculosis was, in most part of Romantic
literature, a glorified subject that bore little resemblance to the reality of the
condition8. In a recent exploration of 19th century tuberculosis literature, Alex
Tankard has a pertinent explanation for the Romantic myth of consumption: “it
seems that consumptives were usually depicted in a sympathetic light in both
fiction and non-fiction texts as their disease had positive associations with
spirituality, sensitivity, and virtue”9. Max Blecher, a writer of pure modernist
sensitivity, profoundly despised the sanctification of the sick. In a 1935 letter to
his friend, Geo Bogza, he expressed his refusal to expose “the filth” of suffering:
All of last week it was impossible for me to write to you (I have been unwell, but
I’ve set my mind to not writing to anyone details concerning my illness as I find it
repulsive to describe and flaunt the filth as a ʻmartyr’s windowʼ)10.
In 1928, a few months after he started a new life, as a medical student in
France (as many biographical clues indicate, it is uncertain whether he was a
student in Paris or Rouen11), during a long-due medical consultation, Blecher is
diagnosed with bone tuberculosis. A brief survey of the pathology of this disease
6
Alex Tankard, Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Century Literature. Invalid
Lives, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
7
David T. Mitchell, Sharon L. Snyder, “Representation and its Discontents: The Uneasy Home of
Disability in Literature and Film”, in Gary L. Albrecht, Katherine D. Seelman and Michael Bury
(eds.), Handbook of Disability Studies, Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications, 2001, p. 208.
8
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, London, Allen Lane – Penguin Books, 1979, p. 30.
9
Alex Tankard, Tuberculosis, p. 5
10
M. Blecher, Opere. Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Proză
scurtă. Aforisme. Poezii. Traduceri. Publicistică, Scrisori. Arhivă. Documentar. Mărturii.
Iconografie [Works. Adventures in Immediate Irreality. Scarred Hearts. The Lightened Burrow,
Short prose. Aphorisms. Poetry. Translations. Newspaper writings, Letters. Archive. Documentary.
Confessions. Iconography]. Ediție critică, studiu introductiv, note, comentarii, variante și
cronologie de Doris Mironescu, București, Academia Română, Fundația Română Pentru Știință și
Artă, Muzeul Național al Literaturii Române, 2017, p. 694. When not specified otherwise, the
English translations from Romanian are mine.
11
See Dora Wechsler Blecher, “M. Blecher era un om delicat și superstițios” [“M. Blecher was a
delicate and superstitious man”], in M. Blecher, Opere, p. 963.
118
GABRIELA GLĂVAN
uncovers a plethora of ailments that greatly affect the patient’s body and mind.
Michel Martini, one of the most prominent orthopaedic surgeons specialized in the
treatment of Pott’s disease, editor of the seminal Tuberculosis of the Bones and
Joints, outlined a brief history of the disease12, pointing out from the very
beginning that before 1882, when Robert Koch discovered that tuberculosis was
caused by a microorganism he named plainly “Bacillus tuberculosis”, there was
little, if any, scientific knowledge regarding the disease. Indeed, in 1779, Percival
Pott wrote a pioneering study that described the illness and some surgical
approaches to ameliorating its symptoms; the elaborate title summarizes Pott’s
view on all the major clinical aspects concerning it: Remarks on that kind of palsy
of the lower limbs: which is frequently found to accompany a curvature of the
spine, and is supposed to be caused by it; together with its method of cure: to
which are added, observations on the necessity and propriety of amputation, in
certain cases, and under certain circumstances13. However, Pott was unaware of
the actual bacterial origin of tuberculosis, and, even after Koch’s discovery, bone
tuberculosis could not be approached surgically, as the risk of spreading the
disease after targeted surgery or biopsy was too high. For 60 years, the
recommended course of treatment was “rest and sunshine”14.
With the advent of antibiotics, new, radically more efficient treatments became
widely available. In 1944, Selman Waksman discovered streptomycin, along with
more than 20 other natural inhibitory substances that had bactericidal properties,
and this new class of antibiotics were used along with surgery in order to provide a
more efficient approach to bone tuberculosis. During the 1950s and the 1960s,
surgery and chemotherapy became the standard treatment, and the patient’s
prognosis improved greatly. The course of the disease is, up to a point, clear cut
and predictable: the infectious process begins in the lungs, where the primary
lesion spreads through the blood system, reaching bones or connective tissue
lining joints and tendons.
The course of Blecher’s disease was uncertain. Although he was formally
diagnosed at 19, he might have had symptoms since early adolescence. The
writer’s biographer, Doris Mironescu, notices that the protagonist of Scarred
Hearts mentions to his Parisian doctor who diagnosed him that “the previous year,
when he had spent a month at Techirghiol in order to cure his supposed
rheumatism (this being the diagnosis every previous doctor had given for his back
pain) he had become obsessed with the idea that he would be living in a
12
Michel Martini (ed.), Tuberculosis of the Bones and Joints, Berlin, Springer Verlag, 1988, p. 3.
Percival Pott, Remarks on that kind of palsy of the lower limbs: which is frequently found to
accompany a curvature of the spine, and is supposed to be caused by it; together with its method of
cure: to which are added, observations on the necessity and propriety of amputation, in certain
cases, and under certain circumstances, J. Johnson, No. 72, St. Paulʼs Church-Yard.
MDCCLXXIX, 1779.
14
Michel Martini, Tuberculosis, p. 3.
13
AS HE LAY DYING: MAX BLECHER’S MEDICAL BODY
119
sanatorium very soon”15. In an interview with Radu G.Țeposu16, the writer’s sister,
Dora Wechsler Blecher, offers some relevant insight into the unusual
developments surrounding Blecher’s sickness. As he had passed the baccalaureate,
he and his friend Edy Haimovici decided leave for Paris in order to study
medicine. He was already having severe back pain following a football accident in
school, when he was hit by a fellow player with a boot in the lumbar region. The
pain persisted even after Max (or, more precisely, Maniu, as his sister called him)
had passed the entrance exam at the faculty of medicine in Paris. Dora’s firm
opinion is that her brother had been misdiagnosed: “The diagnosis was wrong. It
was a badly treated microbial infection, not tuberculosis, as doctors had said”17.
The interview offers interesting details concerning Blecher’s early interest in
anatomy, which probably fueled his later academic interest in medicine and,
collaterally, the medical component of his literary pursuits. While a patient in
Berk, Blecher wrote his father asking him to check his book cupboard at home and
search for a human vertebra, then bury it in the cemetery. Dora sees this moment
as proof of Blecher’s “superstitious” character. Indeed, the Berk experience was
doubtlessly cardinal in Blecher’s biography, permeating his entire oeuvre and
transforming his physical disability in a means of exploring otherwise inaccessible
levels and corners of consciousness and imagination. The vertebra he had left
behind in Roman could be seen as an allegory of his fractured existence – an
essential building block of the spinal column, the vertebra is anatomically
fundamental to verticality, as distinguishing trait of the human condition; Blecher
was far away from home, with tremendous pain in his back, receiving invasive
treatment, while an irreplaceable part of him had been left behind, perhaps lost.
That missing element, irretrievable and forever gone, essentialized by a single
vertebra, could be his upright presence in the world, his health, his youth, his
ability to be with others and feel among equals. Blecher was stuck in horizontal
position for years, until he died: at first, doctors were hoping that a cast and lying
on his back would help his bones to heal, then lying down became the norm. He
wrote his entire oeuvre on a light wooden box placed on his elevated knees.
Medically, the mystery of Blecher’s diagnosis deepens once the clinical picture
of bone tuberculosis, described by Martini, becomes clearer. The old primary
lesion in the lungs, the starting point of bone tuberculosis, may have formed in
childhood, remaining silent for many years, with its tubercle bacilli inactive until
adulthood. In few cases, Martini notes, the illness could be the result of a newly
acquired exogenous infection. This could validate Dora Wechsler Blecher’s
opinion that her brother’s health misfortunes started from an accident. Moreover,
15
Max Blecher, Scarred Hearts. Translated by Henry Howard with an introduction by Paul Bailey,
London, Old Street Publishing, 2008, p. 9.
16
Dora Wechsler Blecher, “M. Blecher”, p. 961.
17
Ibidem, p. 964.
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GABRIELA GLĂVAN
Dora touches upon the rarely discussed issue of her brother’s drawings (reproduced
in the Blecher edition quoted in this paper). It appears that their parents refused to
show Max’s drawings to his siblings, as they were a faithful representation of his
inner turmoil. Dora hadn’t seen them until 1946, and they left an indelible mark on
her:
They were pen drawings, in black and red ink, a lot of black and a lot of red,
with lines expressing powerful explosions. They were, doubtlessly, metaphors of his
own suffering, transfigurations of the disease that was wearing him away. The
drawings showed mystical figures, horrible monsters, diabolical creatures with
sticking tongues and bulging eyes, aggressive dragons. Upon seeing them, one would
feel horror and pain18.
Blecher’s drawings are, indeed, disturbing, expressing a raging despair that
could only be triggered by a concrete form of pain. It is, after all, one of Blecher’s
trademarks to depict the sick as screaming flesh and bone. In a less obvious
manner, but with the same effect, that is the manner the writer chooses to begin the
story of Scarred Hearts – with an episode exploring the naked, vulnerable
anatomy of a body whose tragic destiny was about to be sealed with a cruel
diagnosis. This episode is a faithful illustration of one of Blecher’s most pertinent
metaphors regarding the medicalization of the body – identical to the title of his
only volume of poetry, published in 1934 – the “transparent body”. The body of
the patient offers itself to the doctor’s perspective, to an act of scientific
exploration made possible by several epistemological changes that have taken
place in Western Europe since the Enlightenment.
In The Birth of the Clinic, a study of modern medicine and medical practice, a
philosophical and historical research concerning the relationship between medical
knowledge and discourse and various power structures, Michel Foucault proposes
the concept of the “medical gaze”19 – a complex interplay of discourse and
observation that makes modern medical investigation possible. Assuming that 18th
century rational discourse had a vast epistemological impact, Foucault examines
the ways in which medical discourse used its essential tools, observation and
discourse in order to reveal the inner workings of the body and its malfunctioning,
signaled by illness and pain. Foucault’s concept of “regard”, closer to the meaning
of “perception” than its English variant, widely used, “gaze”, easily lends itself to
literary critical analysis, and I intend to fully exploit it for the purposes of this
paper. Blecher’s fiction is fundamentally a reflexive act, one that turns the gaze
18
Ibidem, p. 965.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. Translated by A.M. Sheridan, London, Routledge,
2004, p. 9; Foucault observes “the strange character of the medical gaze; it is caught up in an
endless reciprocity. It is directed upon that which is visible in the disease – but on the basis of the
patient, who hides this visible element even as he shows it; consequently, in order to know, he
must recognize, while already being in possession of the knowledge that will lend support to his
recognition”.
19
AS HE LAY DYING: MAX BLECHER’S MEDICAL BODY
121
inwards, with the narrator doubling his role as objective authority questioning
what and where it hurts, mapping the inner territories of inflammation and decay.
Literature, as discourse of the self, involves medicine as powerful argument
translating the unseen metamorphosis triggered by illness. Concerning Foucault’s
study of the medical gaze, Deleuze wrote:
Each historical medical formulation modulated a first light and constituted a
space of visibility for illness, making symptoms gleam, [restoring] depth to the eye
and volume to the pain (illness here being an 'autopsy' of the living)20.
Notions such as seeing, observing, exposing are directly correlated in Blecher’s
works with the hidden, “unreal”, abnormal, “sickly” spaces of the inner body,
overflowing their transforming, defamiliarizing powers onto the outside world.
Blecher’s eerie, marginal geographies are the result of such processes. Literature
and fiction construct the “lightened burrow” and the “transparent body”, both
central metaphors of the writer’s medical imagination; with medicine as its
auxiliary, fiction makes visible and comprehensible the invisibility of concealed
anatomy.
Disease narratives are numerous in literary history, but modern sensitivities
have had a great impact on the way physical ailments become stories. As a
modernist writer himself, Blecher inscribed his fictions in a long line of impactful
writings that have molded a new awareness regarding the body/mind divide.
Blecher’s Scarred Hearts was warmly received by critics when it was first
published, but it was also (unfortunately) compared21 to Thomas Mann’s Magic
Mountain by one of the most important Romanian literary historians, George
Călinescu. In his decisive 1941 History of Romanian Literature from Its Origins to
the Present, Călinescu dismisses Blecher’s novel as a mere tuberculosis novel
written in the shadow of Mann’s masterpiece, and it took numerous contemporary
re-readings and a film adaptation22 to restore the novel’s reputation as an original
work, part of Blecher’s tri-fold biographical project that begins with Adventures…
and ends with The Lightened Burrow.
More recently, a new dimension of the literary/medical connection has
commanded critical attention and clinical relevance recently – narrative medicine.
20
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault. Translated by Sean Hand, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press,
1988, p. 58.
21
Călinescu wrote: “Scarred Hearts seems to be an imitation of Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg.
Instead of a mountain sanatorium for lung tuberculosis patients we have before us a sea sanatorium
of bone tuberculosis ones” – Istoria literaturii române de le origini până în prezent [History of
Romanian Literature from Its Origins to the Present]. Ediție îngrijită de Al. Piru, Craiova, Vlad &
Vlad Publishing, 1993, p. 966.
22
Radu Jude’s film Scarred Hearts, 2016. Besides its obvious artistic qualities, Jude’s film
problematizes Blecher’s political body in light of the writer’s Jewishness in the context of
Romania’s turbulent history of the 1930s, when the extreme right fascist organization The Iron
Guard gained influence and public support.
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GABRIELA GLĂVAN
In Rita Charon’s definition, the notion refers to “medicine practiced with these
narrative skills of recognizing, absorbing, interpreting, and being moved by the
stories of illness”23. With the aid of narrative medicine, healthcare “can become
more effective than it has been in treating disease by recognizing and respecting
those afflicted with it and in nourishing those who care for the sick”24. The
therapeutic qualities of literature could finally be recognized and included in
targeted protocols.
Confessions on a deathbed
Blecher’s correspondence with Geo Bogza began in 1934, when the two young
writers hadn’t met in person yet. It comprises 126 letters, all of them published at
this moment25. They are solid proof of the bond they shared until the end of
Blecher’s life, four years later. This part of Blecher’s writings could be read as a
diary of his physical ailments, covering three main themes – the cult of friendship,
paramount in Blecher’s personal ethics, his writing and creative difficulties and his
physical suffering, constantly counter-balancing his efforts to be culturally present
and active. It is also a revelator of the affective bond that supported Blecher
through his medical misfortunes. In the summer of 1934, Blecher and Bogza were
neighbors in Brașov for a few months, then, after Blecher returned to Roman,
Bogza would visit him relatively often. Their correspondence is relevant to the
present investigation from two perspectives: it exposes, with candid authenticity,
the depth and loyalty of a unique friendship between kindred spirits, and it brings
forth aspects of Blecher’s real, unfictionalized experience with bone tuberculosis.
“You have no idea how much energy and comfort your words give me, they are
like a transfusion of good, living blood”26, he would write to his friend in July
1935. Exorcising his illness through friendly exchanges, Blecher felt invigorated,
reborn. Wrapped in the affective vocabulary of a fortunate intellectual and human
connection, his medical adversities can be explored from a new perspective. In the
dim light of his private life, Blecher would forge dramatic descriptions of his daily
struggles with his severe condition. Secondly, this body of letters offers a glimpse
into his efforts to maintain a minimal scientific interest in medical literature and
practice, as some letters and a published article from 1934 seem to indicate.
There is a safe familiarity emerging in small islands in the majority of
23
Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine. Honoring the Stories of Illness, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2006, p. 4.
24
Ibidem.
25
Mironescu mentions that the 2017 critical edition of Blecher’s works includes an inedited letter,
part of a private collection, sent to Bogza by Max Blecher from Techirghiol where he was in
treatment in 1934.
26
M. Blecher, Opere, p. 725.
AS HE LAY DYING: MAX BLECHER’S MEDICAL BODY
123
Blecher’s letters to his friends. The writer’s affective language27 is less transparent
in his fictional writings, but, quite obviously, flourishes in a private context.
Lonely, bored and lacking intellectual stimulation in a marginal small town in the
region of Moldova, Blecher does not hesitate to express his longing for the
company of Bogza and his wife directly. In a letter from October 1934, he wrote:
“I have received all the postcards and I thank you so much for them as I consider
them protoplasmic threads that prolong your presence. I shall write you a lot,
countlessly”28. He had recently moved at his sister’s, where he had a room of his
own. His medical condition seemed pervasive, contaminating all spaces with
markers of disability and disease:
Where do I live? For the moment at my sister’s where I have a wonderful room
with clear walls, parquet, a good stove that heats so well, a large window, separate
entrance, direct door to an enormous terrace, a porcelain lavabo with running water,
well, a room that is hygienically and aesthetically similar to those of the greatest
Swiss sanatorium, all that is missing is the altitude…29.
Later that month, he would continue, effusively: “Thank you again for all the kind
signs of friendship. They fall on a ground that burns like hot charcoal, and they
touch me in my deepest and most hidden sensitivity”30. He confessed his isolation
and loneliness, ending each and every letter with a warm invitation to Roman,
where he lived in seclusion: “Roman is a filthy city with people who are moldy on
the outside and, especially, ESPECIALLY, on the inside. I keep myself isolated in
my room, I get no visitors – not relatives, nor acquaintances”31. He deplored the
“atmosphere of provincial uselessness and undefined melancholy”32. As his efforts
to write his first novel, tentatively called Exercises in Immediate Irreality,
intensified, his health seemed to decline progressively. In a letter dated January
2nd, 1935, Blecher described his situation in clear pathological terms:
I have not celebrated New Year’s Eve, that night an abscess broke and I felt
greatly liberated as until then it felt swollen and it hurt terribly; now I feel a lot better
and I can sleep well during the night – it is a great blessing33.
He did to hesitate to share digestive intimacies – “I have what could be the start of
27
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth offer a comprehensive survey of contemporary theories
of affect in private and public contexts in “An Inventory of Shimmers”, in Melissa Gregg and
Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham – London, Duke University Press,
pp. 1-25.
28
M. Blecher, Opere, p. 672.
29
Ibidem, p. 673.
30
Ibid., pp. 676-677.
31
Ibidem, p. 676.
32
Ibidem, p. 683.
33
Ibidem, p. 692.
GABRIELA GLĂVAN
124
a dysentery episode, I have a cold in my stomach from some ice-cream”34.
It is important, at this point, to touch upon the issue of Blecher’s persistence in
his medical education. Traces of it are present in his cultural collaborations and
even in his correspondence. At one point, in the second part of a letter to Bogza
addressed to his wife, Elly, Blecher offers to interpret Bogza’s Xray: “…I forgot to
ask Geo to bring along, when he comes to see me, the Xray he had had, so that I
could take a look; I am no doctor, but I’ve seen dozens of Xrays so far and I can
«read» them easily”35. Indeed, Blecher was no doctor, but his experience as a
patient almost compensated for it. Moreover, Blecher seemed to have become
familiar with many health issues concerning the back, as he was quick to
contradict the doctor who had examined Bogza:
I believe that the doctor who said that there was something suspicious either is
not a specialist or he greatly exaggerated, because usually one can see the suspicious
things immediately, hence my conclusion that there is nothing wrong with Geo’s
back. Perhaps just a bit of scoliosis due to his height but that happens to all tall
people, almost without exception36.
His own rather intimate indisposition becomes the subject of an abrupt
introduction, in a letter from September 1935. His horizontal lying in bed proved,
quite often, the source of multiple other complications:
I am tortured terribly by some hemorrhoids I got because of my lying position; I
must permanently have warm water compresses on my bottom; I can’t even urinate,
as I get very painful contractions. Oh well, filth37.
Unbearable pain could only be alleviated with powerful drugs. Blecher resorted to
opiates when he could no longer endure the intensity of his discomfort. While he
was being helped by Bogza with the publication of his first book (he paid for the
publication, therefore regularly sent him various amounts of money), he wrote to
his friend of his desperate treatment, as all week he “had suffered terribly, I had a
pain the leg, last night I finally took a strong opium drug and I feel better now”38.
As I have stated earlier, Blecher’s correspondence contains hints at the fact that
he continued to make efforts to read medical literature long after he had to abandon
his medical studies. When Geo Bogza sent Blecher some envelopes, he noticed
that “they were wrapped in Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, where I was
about to resume reading some articles I began in Brașov”39. Earlier that year,
Blecher sent a scientifically themed article to the Viața Românească magazine,
Teoria cromozomică în biologie [Chromosome Theory in Biology], proving his
34
Ibidem, p. 710.
Ibidem, p. 719.
36
Ibidem, p. 720.
37
Ibidem, p. 733.
38
Ibidem, p. 735.
39
Ibidem, p. 677.
35
AS HE LAY DYING: MAX BLECHER’S MEDICAL BODY
125
interest in the innovative area of heredity research. It was published on March 31,
1934.
It can be argued, therefore, that, in many ways, Blecher’s career had
maintained its medical essence. The writer could not complete his formal medical
education and he did not succeed in becoming a doctor. Instead, he became a
patient, and the raw matter of his physical suffering was turned into a brutal yet
visionary fiction of the self.
Wounds that won’t heal
Blecher wrote Scarred Hearts in 1936, shortly after his debut novel,
Adventures in Immediate Irreality had been published. He intended it as part of a
trilogy, covering his experience in the three sanatoria that he had been to in the
past few years – Berck-sur-Mer, Leysin, Techirghiol. His project remained
unfinished, but both of the novels Blecher managed to write, Scarred Hearts and
The Lightened Burrow are autobiographical fictions of his sanatoria experience. It
is important to mention that Blecher’s initial title for his novel was Țesut
cicatrizat40 (Scar Tissue), bearing a deeper connection to the profoundly alienating
medical experience of the French sanatoria, where he received treatment for Pott’s
disease mainly by having most of his upper body cast in plaster, or, more
precisely, “entombed in plaster”41. The patient would also lie down on a trolley,
abandoning his verticality in exchange for a pale hope of healing.
Scarred Hearts is both medical and affective; along with The Lightened
Burrow, it is unrivalled in Romanian literature in its clarity of vision as literature
of sickness and medical intervention. Emanuel, Blecher’s Romanian protagonist, a
Chemistry student in Paris, is examined by a Parisian doctor: the Xray shows a
destroyed vertebra and direct palpation reveals a cold abscess. Shortly after that,
Emanuel becomes a patient at Berck, where his medical odyssey would soon turn
sexual and sentimental. His love affair with Solange, although dissolved by
boredom and routine, highlights Blecher’s intention to explore the modernist
tension between illness or even the proximity of death and an all-consuming sexual
rage.
Upon hearing his diagnosis, Emanuel fears his fragile, unstable body, would
crumble under its own weight:
…wouldn’t his spine shatter on his way to the pension, wouldn’t he collapse on the
street, wouldn’t his head tumble from his shoulders and go rolling along the pavement
40
Doris Mironescu outlines the remarkable differences between the initial variant, Scar Tissue, and
the final one, Scarred Hearts, in “Studiu introductiv” [“Introductory Study”], in M. Blecher,
Opere, p. XXVIII.
41
Paul Bailey, “Introduction”, in Max Blecher, Scarred Hearts. Translated by Henry Howard, with
an introduction by Paul Bailey, London, Old St. Publishing, 2008, p. V.
126
GABRIELA GLĂVAN
like a bowling ball? Within the last few minutes, he had begun to feel how very
tenuously he was held together. […] Wouldn’t a single splintered vertebra be enough,
possibly, to transform his whole body into dust? While he was walking down the
street the diseased bone might come away, and Emanuel would crumble on the spot,
with nothing left of him but a heap of smoking ash42.
Frightened and insecure, Emanuel can only rely on the specialist’s word for
reassurance: “the doctor calmed him with scientific and medical arguments”43 and
recommended treatment in a special facility, a sanatorium in Berck-sur-Mer. Berck
was an enclave of the disabled, as the maritime small city was structured around
the bone tuberculosis sanatorium. Most of the year it was inhabited almost
exclusively by current and former patients, therefore it could be argued that the
social divide between the healthy and the sick is not necessarily visible. This
exclusivity enhances the bleak tones that articulate the atmosphere of the place, as
all inhabitants seem to have suffered, at one moment or another in their life, of the
unfortunate affliction that crushed their verticality and condemned them to long
periods of horizontal rest, tightly immobilized in a cast. Blecher describes this
strange, isolated society from the perspective of an all-knowing insider, whose
awareness of the unsoundable depths of despair and humiliation brought about by
disease gives weight and credibility to his writing, turning it into a penetrating
narrative, a fictional document revolving around an essential, personal truth.
Literature is a faithful means of describing life with impairment, potentially the
only manner in which the writer could ultimately render a highly subjective and
medically extreme experience.
Medical space is cold and alienating in Blecher’s prose, resembling a
foucauldian heterotopia44. In his defining principles that articulate the structure and
meaning of heterotopias, two are of interest here: the sanatorium could be
considered a heterotopia of crisis45, a place where the severely sick and the dying
are isolated until they either get better or expire, and a heterocronia46 as well, as it
interrupts traditional passage of time, isolationg patients in a suspended interval,
with rules of its own. The novel favors a double perspective, clearly visible in the
structure of Scarred Hearts; Emanuel receives the most difficult part of his
42
Max Blecher, Scarred Hearts, pp. 11-12.
Ibidem, p. 12.
44
Mironescu makes this observation in his “Introductory Study”, p. XX; Foucault defines
heterotopias in opposition with utopias, hence they do not refer to spaces that cannot exist, but
rather as spaces that “have the curious property of being connected to all the other emplacements,
but in such a way that they suspend, neutralize, or reverse the set of relations that are designated,
reflected, or represented [riflechis] by them. Those spaces which are linked with all the others, and
yet at variance somehow with all the other emplacements….” (Michel Foucault, “Different
Spaces”, in James Faubion (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault. 1954–1984. Aesthetics, Method and
Epistemology, New York, New Press, 1998, pp. 175-180).
45
Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces”, p. 180.
46
Ibidem, p. 182.
43
AS HE LAY DYING: MAX BLECHER’S MEDICAL BODY
127
treatment during his first days as a patient at Berck, then he observes, interacts and
develops relationships with his fellow sufferrers. His first love affair, with
Solange, reunites a sick man with a woman whose health had been restored.
Blecher suggests that the overpowering smell of medicinal substances is a
powerful agent of the unreal, infusing the atmosphere with a strangeness
reminding of the “cursed spaces”47 of his Adventures in Immediate Irreality: “an
antiseptic, clinical smell of iodoform permeated the bedroom; it gave the room a
new reality, medical and extremely severe”48. Medical intervention is alienating
and strange, creating the illusion of an unfamiliar, cold reality. Concrete medical
procedures, done firmly and precisely, in an impersonal, professional cold manner,
involve minimal rapport. In the small universe of the sick, medicine distances and
separates, it is pain and suffering that bind. Gradually, Emanuel starts feeling like
“no more than a mass of meat and bones, sustained only by the rigidity of a
profile”49. When an attendant comes to see Emanuel, while he is maneuvered by
him, he thinks: “He’s dressing me exactly like he would a corpse”50. Later, after
being put in a cast, he feels that “the shell held him hermetically sealed, immobile,
overpowered, crushed as if by a boulder. ʻFarewell, Emanuel!ʼ he tells himself.
ʻYou’ve turned into a dead manʼ”51.
This metamorphosis takes place when Emanuel, without anticipating the
magnitude of the impact the procedure would have on his life, accepts his fate
almost gladly and is placed in a cast. This second, less aggressive, but equally
alienating procedure is described on a tone that resembles a silent scream:
In places the plaster was heavy with water. Next to the ribs a neutral space
emerged where his breathing could break free from time to time before quickly gluing
itself again to the coldness. The electric light intensified his surroundings and
increased his anguish at each and every object. Darkness was easier to bear52.
The body becomes heavy, burdened by an alien, suffocating shell, painfully felt at
every breath. This aggression seems to trigger multiple other aggressions from
everywhere around – the alien body, encased in an alien frame, awakens the
essential hostility of the material world, while at the same time becoming part of
it. This state of consciousness heightens his awareness in relation to others, and his
social and erotic sensitivity shapes new relations and communication codes. Still,
there is a palpable solidarity of the ill and suffering – Emanuel befriends a few
patients with whom he shares moments of closeness and serenity, despite the tragic
47
Max Blecher, Adventures in Immediate Irreality. Translated by Michael Henry Heim, New York,
New Directions, 2015, p. 5.
48
Ibidem, p. 13.
49
Ibidem.
50
Ibidem, p. 63.
51
Ibidem, p. 72.
52
Ibidem.
128
GABRIELA GLĂVAN
fate that awaited some of them. Ernest, Zed, Tonio and Quintoce all affected by
illness in various degrees, were his comrades, his accomplices and it is with their
help that Emanuel survives the experience and returns to his old life. Blecher’s
perspective radically opposes spiritualization, as he did not believe in the purifying
power of pain. The fever ignited by the infectious process translated into a constant
torment of carnal desire, triggered by a permanent vicinity with death. The demise
of the priapic Quintoce, who gave his last breath absurdly laughing, although he
was probably in great pain, was a fitting final spectacle to his predominantly
grotesque life. Emanuel describes the moment in warm tones, despite his variable
attitude towards his fellow sufferer:
Quintoce died two days before Christmas, in a bout of uproarious laughter. The
illness mocked him till the end. His death-throes were marked by bursts of hilarity in
the way other peoples’ are usually filled with howls and moans. But how else could
Quintoce die, who went hurling his legs around like a clown his entire life, other that
in a fit of convulsive and grotesque laughter?53
The Berck experience intensified Emanuel’s inner life, as if the punctured,
inspected, washed, disinfected medical body helped blur the border between the
real and the unreal, closing the imaginary arch of his first novel:
What was happening? Was it actually him, Emanuel, that body lying on the
trolley, in the middle of a dining-room where all the guests are lying down at tables
decorated with flower arrangements? What did it all mean? Was he living?
Dreaming? In what world precisely, in what reality was all this taking place?54
These questions echo the interrogations of Blecher’s adolescent protagonist of
Adventures in Immediate Irreality, where the “cursed places” that would give him
extraordinary “crises”, extracting him out of the banality of his provincial town
and projecting him straight into the marvelous, strange territories of the unreal, are
bizarrely connected by a doctor to a concrete pathological state:
The doctor I consulted about my crises pronounced a strange word: “paludism”.
I was amazed that my secret and intimate afflictions could have a name, and a name
so bizarre to boot. The doctor prescribed quinine – another cause for amazement. I
could not comprehend how an illness, it, could be cured with quinine taken by a
person, me55.
The Lightened Burrow, Blecher’s last novel, published more than three
decades after his death, was finished shortly before his demise, in May 1938.
Subtitled A Sanatorium Journal, the novel reunites the oneiric, visionary style of
Adventures...with a brutal awareness of physical pain and death. It could be argued
that, in this extreme final effort, the writer ultimately found his particular,
53
Ibidem, p. 125.
Ibidem, p. 38.
55
Max Blecher, Adventures in Immediate Irreality, p. 13.
54
AS HE LAY DYING: MAX BLECHER’S MEDICAL BODY
129
inimitable voice, one that reveals his infernal journey through the uncanny worlds
of bodily degradation and suffering. The novel recounts, as a first person fictional
narrative, Blecher’s experiences as a patient in the sanatoria where he sought
treatment: Berck-sur-Mer, Leysin and Techirghiol, distinctly underlining the
changing landscape as the story progressed. The proximity of death is remarkable
and overwhelming, with long, exhausting accounts of patients taking their last
breath in the next room, dark fantasies with the protagonist voluptuously craving
his own death, and a permanent longing for the “anaesthetic sleep”56 that briefly
suspends all aches, screaming and convulsions. The novel is a vast fictional
encyclopedia of medical procedures described by a lucid consciousness that finds
perverse pleasure in analyzing the torturous interventions meant to alleviate one’s
sufferings instead of sadistically increasing them. The patient finds comfort in
contemplating his body from the inside, hidden from all external aggression in the
“lightened burrow” of his anatomical interior. The comforting darkness of his
organic self is the final refuge of a fatigued consciousness, the ultimate cavern that
protects and preserves the fragile balance between body and mind. Blecher
orchestrates majestic poetical tones, coagulating an elegy that conflates the sterile
adventures of the material body with the surreal hallucinations of a captive mind.
Blecher’s medical body surfaces as the supreme instance of The Lightened
Burrow. Life is marginally lived in between interventions, and when he is not the
subject of various procedures, the protagonist suffers vicariously, while witnessing
the pains of his sanatorium friends. A very young boy would endure excruciating
pain as pure aether would be poured onto his testicles, other patients would
suffocate coughing in the vicinity of the protagonist’s room, while his own
experience with post-surgical treatment would prove unbearable. As I have
mentioned before, Blecher firmly rejects the false glory of physical suffering,
considering it “abject, meaningless”, undeserving of being considered a “noble and
admirable source of artistic inspiration”57. The narrator describes the torturous
experience of postoperative banadaging:
It was towards the end of summer and, in order that the wound wouldn’t become
infected during those still extremely hot days, they left it completely open, meaning
they did not sew it at the margins, so that it was open to the bottom of the muscles,
like a splendificent piece of red bleeding butchery meat.58
The only way to escape torment would be a self-imposed detachment from the
material physiology of pain. Blecher’s narrative voice describes what probably was
the writer’s strategy to mentally survive the years spent in ceaseless pain:
…while pain attacks a certain nerve, irritating it, all other organic functions continue
56
Max Blecher, Vizuina luminată [The Lightened Burrow], in M. Blecher, Opere, p. 455.
Ibidem, p. 392.
58
Ibidem, p. 394.
57
GABRIELA GLĂVAN
130
their activity, including the brain. [...] I have noticed that this is the essence of the
torment of suffering, and the conclusion was simple – in order to get rid of pain one
must not try to “rid” oneself of it, but on the contrary, “focus” on it carefully. As
attentive and as close as possible. Until observing it in its finest fibers59.
Multiple aggravations lead to a comical response – while still in Berck, “I had
gathered, in a few days, all possibile complications. And this very fact would
become, by excess, extremely comical”60. Visitors would walk on tiptoes in order
not to disturb sensitive wounds, a swelling full of pus would need to be punctured
and a forced extension was imperious, in order to correct the position of an
ankylosed knee:
It is incredible how painful the slackening of a long-ankylosed joint can be,
constantly kept motionless, without the slightest movement, with muscles atrophied
to an extreme. I was, therefore, in this situation, with cramps, alcohol in my thigh
and an extension hanging off my leg61.
The heterotopia of the sanatorium is reinforced through all active senses:
When I returned to the sanatorium I would find in whispers its old pains and its
moldy, chloroform smelling life, enclosed in bleak corridors and numbered rooms,
where dramas would waste away and fade, as if on small stages without spectators,
with a pulled curtain62.
The confined spaces of the sanatorium labyrinth are mirrored in the overarching
metaphor of the novel, the intimate cavern of the body’s lightened burrow, where,
in pure intimacy with himself, Blecher’s alter-ego contemplates the flowing of his
own blood, a carnal torrent of biological zest.
The Lightened Burrow could be read as Blecher’s prefiguration of death, as it
proposes one of the writer’s most powerful creeds regarding biological existence:
“All that surrounds human life is destined to worms and filth exacly like the body
and people end up in stench with the entire cortege of fine objects in their lives”63.
The novel ends with the allegoric image of the sanatorium lying down like a dead
animal, rotting away, disintegrating as it is eaten by beetles and worms. Agony has
ended and death returns organic matter to the foreign and hostile material world.
Blecher’s medical body, a core element of his poetics, could be assumed as the
defining concept of his oeuvre, reuniting biography and fiction in order to reveal
the authenticity of his personal truth, as a lover of medicine, a patient and an
explorer of the unreal.
59
Ibidem, p. 396.
Ibidem, p. 399.
61
Ibidem.
62
Ibidem, p. 403.
63
Ibidem, p. 460.
60
AS HE LAY DYING: MAX BLECHER’S MEDICAL BODY
131
WORKS CITED
BLECHER, M., Opere. Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată.
Proză scurtă. Aforisme. Poezii. Traduceri. Publicistică, Scrisori. Arhivă. Documentar.
Mărturii. Iconografie [Works. Adventures in Immediate Irreality. Scarred Hearts. The
Lightened Burrow, Short Prose. Aphorisms. Poetry. Translations. Newspaper Writings,
Letters. Archive. Documentary. Confessions. Iconography]. Ediție critică, studiu introductiv,
note, comentarii, variante și cronologie de Doris Mironescu, București, Academia Română,
Fundația Română Pentru Știință și Artă, Muzeul Național al Literaturii Române, 2017.
BLECHER, Max, Adventures in Immediate Irreality. Translated by Michael Henry Heim, with a
preface by Andrei Codrescu, New York, New Directions, 2015
BLECHER, Max, Scarred Hearts. Translated by Henry Howard with an introduction by Paul
Bailey, London, Old St. Publishing, 2008.
CĂLINESCU, George, Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent [History of
Romanian Literature from Its Origins to the Present]. Ediție îngrijită de Al. Piru, Craiova,
Vlad & Vlad Publishing, 1993.
CHARON, Rita, Narrative Medicine. Honoring the Stories of Illness, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2006.
DELEUZE, Gilles, Foucault. Translated by Sean Hand, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press,
1988.
FAUBION, James. D., Essential Works of Foucault. 1954–1984. Aesthetics, Method and
Epistemology, New York, New Press, 1998.
FOUCAULT, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic. Translated by A.M. Sheridan, London, Routledge,
2004.
GREGG, Melissa, SEIGWORTH, Gregory J. (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham – London,
Duke University Press, 2010.
MARTINI, Michel, Tuberculosis of the Bones and Joints, Berlin, Springer Verlag, 1988.
MITCHELL, David T., SNYDER, Sharon L., “Representation and its Discontents: The Uneasy
Home of Disability in Literature and Film”, in Gary L. Albrecht, Katherine D. Seelman and
Michael Bury (eds.), Handbook of Disability Studies, Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications,
2001, pp. 195-218.
PELLEGRINO, Edmund D., “To Look Feelingly – The Affinities of Medicine and Literature”,
Literature and Medicine, Volume 1, 1982, pp. 19-23.
POTT, Percival, Remarks on that kind of palsy of the lower limbs: which is frequently found to
accompany a curvature of the spine, and is supposed to be caused by it; together with its
method of cure: to which are added, observations on the necessity and propriety of
amputation, in certain cases, and under certain circumstances, J. Johnson, No. 72, St. Paulʼs
Church-Yard, MDCCLXXIX, 1779.
SONTAG, Susan, Illness as Metaphor, London, Allen Lane – Penguin Books, 1979.
TANKARD, Alex, Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Century Literature: Invalid
Lives, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
AS HE LAY DYING: MAX BLECHER’S MEDICAL BODY
(Abstract)
Max Blecher’s decade-long illness permeates his literary oeuvre much like an incontestable
biographical truth. Documented in his correspondence with some prominent Romanian intellectual
friends, the writer’s life as a patient of tuberculosis sanatoria and his prolonged agony could be
132
GABRIELA GLĂVAN
assumed as the dominant background of his works. I intend to argue that Blecher’s exploration of
the body as the object of medical investigation projects a particular regime of affective expression.
Blecher’s fiction of the body favors a double approach to the issue of identity and self, as revealed
throughout his work: the intimacy of suffering is a potent coagulant that favors the illusion of a
coherent of identity, mediated by the body, while medical intervention reveals its objectification
and foreignness. My analytical endeavor intends to identify the connections between affective
discourse, in the context of Blecher’s real relationships (as proved by his correspondence) and his
fictional ones (as outlined mainly in his two novels Scarred Hearts and The Lightened Burrow,
concerning the body, illness and medical intervention). I would also highlight the periphery as an
amplifier of isolation and suffering, revealed through his native city of Roman, where he spent his
last years, and the sanatorium, where he sought treatment, and which is also the topos of his last
two novels. Sickness and medical aid are minimally present in Max Blecher’s debut novel,
Adventures in Immediate Irreality, as the experiences of the protagonist are mainly metaphysical
and erotic. Deepening the perspective, his other two novels, Scarred Hearts and The Lightened
Burrow are brutal confessions of the pain and physical deterioration caused by disease. Blecher’s
protagonists, obvious auctorial alter-egos, are entrapped (literally and metaphorically) in shell-like
bodies, enduring exhausting, unbearable pain and desperately seeking sexual relief. In language
and in narrative, medicine reveals its potential as an agent of hope, emotion, despair and, at times,
of the promise of death. Fueled by the conscience of imminent demise, laced with harsh
existentialism and forged by the powerful, surreally calibrated awareness of his biological
vulnerability, Blecher’s dreamlike, visionary prose is a defining instance of a reunion between
fiction and biographical affective contexts expressing medical trauma and bodily breakdown.
Keywords: literature and medicine, disability literature, tuberculosis, medical narrative,
sanatorium, illness.
PE PATUL DE MOARTE: CORPUL MEDICAL LA MAX BLECHER
(Rezumat)
Boala de care Max Blecher a suferit mai bine de un deceniu se impregnează în opera sa literară
asemeni unui adevăr biografic incontestabil. Descrisă în corespondența cu câțiva prieteni
intelectuali români, viața de pacient a scriitorului în sanatoriile pentru tuberculoși, precum și lunga
sa agonie, pot fi considerate fundalul dominant al operei sale. Intenționez să argumentez că
explorarea corpului ca obiect al investigației medicale de către Blecher proiectează un regim aparte
al expresivității afective. Ficțiunile corporalității favorizează o dublă abordare a problematicii
sinelui și identității, așa cum aceasta transpare în toate scrierile autorului: intimitatea suferinței e
un puternic coagulant ce favorizează iluzia unei identități coerente, intermediate de prezența
corporală, în timp ce intervenția medicală revelează obiectificarea corpului și înstrăinarea lui.
Analiza mea urmărește prezența discursului afectiv – înțeles prin spectrele relațiilor pe care
scriitorul le conturează real (în corespondență) și ficțional (în principal în romanele Inimi
cicatrizate și Vizuina luminată) – în scrieri vizând corpul, boala și intervenția medicală. Consider,
de asemenea, important contextul periferiei, ca amplificator al izolării și suferinței, redat prin
decorul orașului natal al autorului, Roman, unde acesta și-a scris opera de ficțiune și
corespondența, dar și prin cel al sanatoriului, unde scriitorul a urmat numeroase tratamente și unde
se desfășoară acțiunea ultimelor sale două romane. Boala și intervenția medicală sunt prezente
minimal în romanul de debut al lui Blecher, Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată, deoarece
experiențele protagonistului sunt în mare măsură metafizice și erotice. Adâncind perspectiva, Inimi
cicatrizate și Vizuina luminată conțin confesiuni brutale ale suferinței și deteriorării fizice
implicate de boală. Protagoniștii lui Blecher, alter-ego-uri evidente, sunt captivi (literal și
AS HE LAY DYING: MAX BLECHER’S MEDICAL BODY
133
metaforic) în corpuri-carcasă, îndurând dureri atroce și căutând cu disperare eliberarea sexuală. În
limbaj și în narațiune, medicina își dovedește potențialul de agent al speranței, al emoției, al
disperării și, uneori, al promisiunii morții. Alimentată de conștiința iminenței morții, conținând
elemente ale unui existențialism brutal, modelată de o puternică, suprarealist calibrată conștiință a
propriei existențe biologice, proza onirică și vizionară a lui Blecher e un exemplu definitoriu de
reuniune între ficțiune și contexte biografice afective exprimând trauma medicală și dezintegrarea
corporală.
Cuvinte-cheie: literatură și medicină, literatura dizabilității, tuberculoză, narațiune medicală,
sanatoriu, boală.