Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (65 page)

the Marquis de Sade, selected novels: these cruel and often pornographic texts from the late eighteenth century are hard to read, but go a long way toward sketching the geography of the body, its wants, and the horrible abuses that can be imagined; some treat Sade as a huge bad joke, but others see his work as exploring the limits of self and power

Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Uncle Tom's Cabin:
classic account of the institution of slavery in which others own your body; the key precursor to Morrison's
Beloved

Whitman,
Song of Myself:
hypnotic breakthrough long poem celebrating the body and acknowledging its frailties as well as strengths, with which American poetry came of age

Chapter 3. Diagnosis: Narratives of Exposure

Works in which issues of diagnosis—reading the body, reading the mind—are both central and problematic.

Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes stories: the chronicler of the deductive feats of this great genius of detective fiction was a doctor, and the clinical tone of these stories is no accident

Atul Gawande,
Complications:
restless, probing contemporary examination of how medicine moves forward and how all diagnoses are keyed to an evolving paradigm of what the body is and what doctors do

Henry James,
The Ambassadors
and "The Beast in the Jungle": two vintage Jame-sian tales about reading and misreading the other's motives, and the consequences

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos,
Les Liaisons Dangereuses:
classic eighteenth-century French account of erotic warfare and diagnostic prowess; unrivaled psychological fiction

Thomas Mann,
The Magic Mountain:
classic German novel of the 1920s set in a Swiss sanatorium, in which "reading the body" and diagnosing its ills becomes tantamount to diagnosing the health of European culture

Sherwin Nuland,
How We Die:
compassionate, informative discussion of how lives end, and how we go about understanding the process, culled from the life experiences of a distinguished surgeon

Edgar Allan Poe, "Murders in the Rue Morgue": the beginning of the detective story genre, written by a master of psychology

Hjalmar Soderberg,
Doctor Glas:
brilliant turn-of-the-century Swedish story of a doctor who spends his life "reading" and "controlling" his patients, with echoes of our own Dr. Kevorkian

Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
The Cancer Ward:
allegorical but hard-hitting account of medicine, death, dying, and politics, often seen as successor to Mann's opus

William Carlos Williams,
The Doctor Stories:
candid account of the trials and joys of diagnosing and treating poor emigrant patients, by America's best-known doctor/ poet

Chapter 4. Plague and Human Connection

Works that either focus on the impact and ramifications of plague or deal with the mysteries of transmission and contagion.

Boccaccio,
The Decameron:
contemporaneous account of the antics of those seeking to escape the Black Plague in Italy; said by many to represent the birth of narrative literature

Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Love in the Time of Cholera:
sultry yet surgical treatment of the mix of eros and death in times of crisis; reminiscent of Artaud's thesis about plague as revelatory

Henrik Ibsen,
Ghosts:
Ibsen's most scandalous play, about inherited disease; theme of infection as something destructive happening in the dark now seen as metaphor for what was wrong with nineteenth-century Scandinavian society

Jerzy Kosinski,
The Painted Bird:
harrowing account of a Jewish child's efforts to survive in World War II Poland, revealing the scapegoat logic of plague with considerable horror

Roman Polanski,
Chinatown:
film noir classic about a drought in Los Angeles, in which concealed private incest is inseparably linked to the public dilemma; a stylish, beautifully acted modern version of the Oedipus story

Susan Sontag,
AIDS and Its Metaphors:
brilliant assessment of how deep the scapegoating logic cuts when it comes to understanding and dealing with the impact of infectious diseases

Bram Stoker,
Dracula:
fascinating story of outside threats, in the form of disease and blood-sucking, arriving in London and the heroic efforts to combat them as well as the social anxieties brought to the fore

Chapter 5. Saying Death

Works in which the experience of dying—whether that of the dying person or the mourner—is front and center, as well as works that explore the meaning of death.

Aeschylus,
The Oresteia:
classic Greek dramatic trilogy about the processes ol grieving and revenge, seen as a fatal cycle of violence requiring some counterforce such as the law

Ingmar Bergman,
Cries and Whispers:
Bergman's most exquisite and most unbearable film about the dying of Agnes, who is surrounded by her two loving/hating sisters with heavy pasts of their own; a unique effort to choreograph dying as something at once painful, social, and imaginative beyond our expectations

Jorge Luis Borges,
Ficciones:
wry, metaphysical, mind-bending short stories by the Argentine master, many of which show that dying may not be the final act of a life, inasmuch as that life continues to unfurl in history and in the minds of others

Anatole Broyard,
Intoxicated by My Illness:
moving narrative of a well-known jour-nalist's fatal bout with cancer, filled with insights, courage, humor, and eloquence

Don DeLillo,
White Noise:
DeLillo's comic masterpiece about the antics of the academy, the threats to the environment, and the culture of death, as seen both in

the Hitler phenomenon and in our never-ceasing anxiety and search for a "cure" for dying

Henry James,
The Wings of the Dove:
rich, elaborate late novel depicting the complex moral issues involved in the friendships and entanglements of the dying female protagonist, Milly Theale

Michel de Montaigne,
Essays:
this sixteenth-century French philosopher wrote about death and the need to face it with a clarity and humor that were to influence Shakespeare, Emerson, and many others

Blaise Pascal,
Pensees:
seventeenth-century French perceptions and beliefs about the scandal of flesh, the certainty of death, and the need for religious belief; searing, eloquent, often called a proto-existential document

Philip Roth,
Patrimony:
moving, unpretentious account of the death of Roth's father, told with humor and pain and a relentless willingness to look the ultimate straight in the eye

Sophocles,
Antigone:
foremost classical text about burial rituals and the tug-of-war between one's duties to the living and to the dead; also the story of a young woman who chooses self-assertion to the point of death

Paula Vogel,
The Baltimore Waltz:
zany yet intensely moving play about a sister attending the last act of her dying brother

Concluding Thoughts on Depression

Works in which the theme and experience of depression are prominent.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-Up": lucid and unsparing account of what it feels like to come apart, written by someone who knew

Adam Haslett,
You Are Not a Stranger Here:
stunning collection of contemporary short stories focusing on a variety of nervous disorders, including depression, through the lenses of both family and sexual orientation

Kay Redfield Jamison: selected works on madness, bipolar disorder, and the connection between psychological distress and artistic creation

Andrew Solomon,
The Noonday Demon:
recent large-scale investigation of depression's manifestations, written by an author who has gone through it

William Styron,
Darkness Visible:
narrative of the author's "descent into Hell" via his experience of depression, written with flair, honesty, and a sharp eye for the reverberations of his theme in other works and other lives