The "family" is usually assumed to be a stable term; indeed, contemporary political rhetorics would have it to be the "bedrock" of society; references to "hard-working families" abound, and are therefore, of course, reduced to the level of cliché. The so-called "originating text" of gothic fiction was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. The Gothic is absorbed, through and through, with the family: with its habits, with its disruptions, with its development. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, of course, have developed Freud's ideas in further directions: toward, for example, the crypt, the place where the secrets of the family might be held, but forever sealed. To return to that arch-nationalist, Dracula: his sense of family is both overt and hidden. He is, in one sense, the acme of a good family man, while on the other he represents arrant individualism.

In this characteristically concise, witty, and lucid book, Terry Eagleton turns his attention to the questions we should ask about literature, but rarely do. What is literature? Can we even speak of "literature" at all? What do different literary theories tell us about what texts mean and do? In throwing new light on these and other questions he has raised in previous best-sellers, Eagleton offers a new theory of what we mean by literature. He also shows what it is that a great many different literary theories have in common. In a highly unusual combination of critical theory and analytic philosophy, the author sees all literary work, from novels to poems, as a strategy to contain a reality that seeks to thwart that containment, and in doing so throws up new problems that the work tries to resolve. The "event" of literature, Eagleton argues, consists in this continual transformative encounter, unique and endlessly repeatable. Freewheeling through centuries of critical ideas, he sheds light on the place of literature in our culture, and in doing so reaffirms the value and validity of literary thought today.

Many a political philosopher has argued that at the origin of civilisation lies some primordial crime. What we call normality is simply the process by which we thrust this original sin into the political unconscious, so that we all come to be pleasantly oblivious of it. The human animal is an amnesiac creature, which needs to forget if it is to flourish. If the Fall at the source of human history is a fortunate one, as Christianity teaches, it is among other things because the energy we invest in repressing the past is what drives us forward into the future. Yet our oblivion can never be perfect. We need to suppress the past in order to thrive, rather than find ourselves paralysed by the nightmare of history; yet the more we do so, the sicker our psyches become. Most nations, if you press history far back enough, turn out to be the fruit of invasion, occupation, revolution or even extermination. “What country wasn't a charnel house of its own history?” one character in this novel reflects. But this is not a trauma men and women can easily absorb, which is why they escape into that set of agreeable fantasies and consoling fictions we know as everyday reality. Some such primordial disaster haunts the pages of Howard Jacobon's J, but it is one that can be glimpsed only fitfully, gilded over with elaborate euphemisms and coy disavowals. It is not even clear that it happened at all. It has been put under erasure, like the letter J itself in the novel's title—a letter which stands for a word neither the author nor his characters utter from one end of the book to another, yet which screams through the narrative like an eloquent silence. J stands for Jews, who are no longer to be found in this Britain of the middle-distance future. Their surnames, to be sure, live on; in fact, every character in the novel has a Jewish family name, even though none of them is actually Jewish. But this is because, having wiped the Jewish population out, the nation has chosen to make recompense to them by apologetically adopting their names. Otherwise, as the current postmodern platitudes have it (and J is in some ways as much a report on the present as on a dystopian future), the country has decided to draw a line in the sand, turn its back on the barbarism of the past and “go forward”. It does not see that the past is what we are mostly made of, and that whatever cannot be recollected and repented of is likely to be repeated. Instead, as one character remarks, “The past exists in order that we forget it.” There is, however, a problem in this post-Semitic social order. For its rulers maintain that antagonism of some kind is vital to the moral health of the nation. Social stability depends on knowing what one is not; and by ridding itself of its frightful Other the British no longer know who they are. The country has accordingly declined into a mixture of cultural pap and freakish brutality. On the one hand, it is full of mushy musicals and rose-tinted hypocrisy; on the other hand, men casually beat their wives and urinate in the street. Behind all this lurks a disquieting question: if great art thrives on satire, polemic, contention, and acerbic wit, does this mean that it needs what the novel calls an “equipoise of hate” in the society which produces it? Love, even so, has not been obliterated, despite the fact that as the book's sombre conclusion would suggest, it, too, can be co-opted, pressed into the service of hatred. Picking their way through these dismal cultural ruins are the book's two main characters, Kevern Cohen and Ailinn Solomons, both artists who stand apart from social life, both afflicted by nameless anxieties, both of shadowy origins which the novel will finally, dramatically, bring to light. Like the rest of us, they imagine that they are autonomous beings only to discover that they are, in every sense of the word, part of a plot, and a sinister one at that. That the plot in question isn't wholly plausible fails to diminish its force. Despite a certain structural diffuseness, J is a rare combination of moral vision and subtle emotional intelligence. That it is a deeply disturbing narrative, with only the odd touch of Jacobson's customary comic spirit, adds to its power. It broods with impressive insight on the twisted logic of love and enmity, attraction and repulsion, affinity and antagonism. What if there is no community without exclusion? It is an ancient belief that human solidarity requires a scapegoat. Can there be a form of social existence that neither falsely defuses conflict, as with the phony pluralism of J‘s Britain, or whips it up for its own wicked ends? How can we steer a course between blandness on the one hand and butchery on the other? If it is really true, as Kevern insists, that you can't have belief without intolerance, then we would seem caught on the horns of a dilemma from which J wisely refuses to rescue us. The last time I met Howard Jacobson, many years ago, he had been looking through the titles of novels which had won the Man Booker Prize over the years and noticed that several of them contained either the word “hotel” or the word “children”. He was, he solemnly informed me, engaged on a novel which was to be entitled Children of the Hotel of the Parrot. That didn't win the prize because it never got written; if this superb piece of fiction bags it, it will be a small instance of the kind of justice so signally lacking between its covers. Terry Eagleton is Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster. Terry Eagleton is Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster.

The Body as Language Terry Eagleton Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks in his Philosophical Investigations that if you want to see the soul, you should take a look at the human body. He means, one assumes, the body as a form of practice, not as a material object. Practice constitutes the life of the body rather in the sense that meaning is the life of the sign. As for bodies as material objects, the ultimate objectification of the body is known as death, though it is notable that Thomas Aquinas refuses to use the word ‘body’ of a corpse. He speaks instead of the remains of a body, as we sometimes do ourselves today. It is just part of the damage inflicted by a Cartesian tradition that when we hear the phrase ‘the body in the library’, the last thing that springs to mind is an assiduous reader. Bodies as material objects are not greatly in fashion in these dogmatically culturalist days. Even so, it is worth pointing out that whatever else human beings are, they are in the first place natural lumps of matter, and that anything more sexy or glamorous they can get up to can go on only within this constraining context. If men and women are more than just parcels of matter, it is not because they harbour within themselves a mysterious entity known as the mind or soul, but because they are parcels of matter of a highly specific kind–a specificity is, in fact, precisely what mind-language or soul-language is trying to account for. Like Aristotle, Wittgenstein regards the soul as the ‘form’ of the body–as its animating principle or uniquely particular mode of self-organisation. And this is not an especially mysterious affair. It is perfectly open to view. You can see someone else’s soul, just as you can see their grief or rage. It is not particularly helpful to speak of our emotions as being ‘inside’ us. Howling or snarling or emptying bottles of Scotch over other people’s heads is not an internal affair. If nobody in the world had ever witnessed grief behaviour, we would not be able to use the word ‘grief’. How would we know in our own case that this was the name of what we were experiencing? In these [End Page 11] situations, our consciousness is inscribed on our bodies as the meaning is present in a word. It is true that we can conceal our emotions, but this is a complex social practice that we have to learn, just like lying. We can see that Hoovers and hat stands do not have souls simply by looking at what they do, or rather at what they don’t do. We do not need to peer into their innards to establish this fact. Indeed, to claim that they do not have souls is to claim that they don’t have such innards–that they lack of the kind of complex interior depths observable in the behaviour of Colin Firth or Judi Dench, though less evident in the case of Mel Gibson and Sarah Palin. It is important to recognise, however, that if Colin Firth has internal depths, it is by virtue of his participation in a set of social and material forms of life. Consciousness just is such a form of participation. It is not something one can achieve all alone. How do I know that what I am feeling is fear rather than envy? It would be enough to say that I belong to a public language which provides me with the concepts by which I can discriminate between the two states. The idea that I can spontaneously or intuitively know that I am furious is absurd. An infant cries because it is wet and hungry, but it does not know that it is. Nor does an adult know that he or she is wet, hungry or in pain, since our relationship to our bodily experience is not a question of knowledge. An adult, however, can reflect that what she is feeling is pain or dampness or jealousy, as an infant cannot. And this is because she is a body that has become articulate...

Poet and physician, honoured with a CBE by the British Establishment yet with more than a touch of the mischievous Welsh maverick, Dannie Abse has spent a lifetime moving between the pen and the stethoscope. In one poem in this new collection he speaks of wanting to “hear the heartbeat of words”, an image which neatly combines both instruments. Elsewhere in Speak, Old Parrot he describes the prose of a medical textbook as “arrhythmic”, a term which is both medical and aesthetic. Approaching death, he writes, “there's hardly time to fuss for more vascular speech”, where “vascular” suggests a language which would have the complex intricacy of a system of blood vessels. The poetic (or mythological) and medical converge once more in a finely humorous poem entitled “The Old Gods”, which sees the deities of Mount Olympus as having been superannuated by a prosaic modern age: “Glum Bacchus talks ad nauseam / of cirrhosis and small bald Cupid, fiddling / with arrows, can't recall which side the heart is.” True to Abse's impatience with fussing, the language of Speak, Old Parrot is for the most part low-key, unassuming, and at times rather slack, without much meticulous shaping or richness of texture. This is the work of a poet too conscious of his mortality to bother overmuch with verbal form. When he aims for a more packed, dense mode of expression, the result can be overwrought: “…while spiteful silks of rain sulkingly fell / on neighbouring macs that smelt of stale”. (Is rain really spiteful, and how can you smell of stale as opposed to staleness?) There is a similar clunkiness about this description of a cricket bat—”…the long rubbered handle ready for / the shuddering and thrill of a three-spring / slyly leaning winking flagrant leg-glide”—which crams in too many adjectives to be either lucid or agreeable to the ear. Musicality is perhaps not this poet's strongest point. There is, however, an intriguing contrast between the deliberate off-hand slightness of some of these pieces and the momentous, thoroughly traditional poetic subjects on which they turn: death, loss, ageing, sexuality, and lost love. A poem entitled “Moonbright”, which speaks of the “effrontery” of a moon which shines “too blatantly”, without regard for human sickness and death, ends with the resonant line “Men become mortal the night their fathers die”. “In the mildew of age”, Abse writes elsewhere in the volume, “all pavements slope uphill / slow slow / towards an exit”. The image is more complex than it appears: pavements may feel uphill to older people, yet we tend to imagine a descent rather than ascent to death. Elderly poets, 90-year-old Abse suggests, don't get out so much, but poetry involves the kind of journeying you can do without stretching a limb: “Old poets stay at home to become explorers; / the older they get, the smaller they get / and, relentlessly, the trees grow tall.” Old people do indeed tend to shrink in stature, which then provides Abse with a deft piece of symbolism: the older the poet, the more conscious he is of the contrast between his own fragility and the daunting magnitude of the world around him, signified by those relentless trees. All the more reason, then, for not plunging physically into the impenetrable forest of human experience but dealing with it at arm's length. Solemn though their subjects are, the poems are laced with an impish wit. The poet's lover seems so radiant that “I almost need to wear / (muses help me, cross my heart) sunglasses / each time I think of you”. One of Abse's indolent uncles “did nothing, / and he didn't even do that till after lunch”. Two earnest Evangelists who doorstep the poet, asking him whether he knows the end of the world is nigh, retreat in disarray when he solemnly informs them that he does indeed, and always keeps a packed suitcase ready upstairs. As this collection demonstrates, Abse is indeed aware enough of the impending end of everything not to need reminding of it by a couple of callow missionaries. “Nothing lasts except nothing”, he reflects at one point in the book. One poem wryly describes a person in Istanbul stoning a couple of copulating cats because they both happen to be male. Sexuality is also the subject of a series of poems entitled “The Summer Frustrations of Dafydd ap Gwilym”, a wild old wicked Welshman who serves as one of the poet's more ebullient personae. When the woman whom Dafydd is trying to bed suddenly gets up and leaves, “Gentlemen, my feelings I'm sure you understand. / Like trying to open a heavy jammed door / and the damned knob comes away in your hand.” The woman's door is firmly closed to the poet's entry, but to keep in mind the colloquial meaning of “knob” is to see that this also represents a kind of castration. It is as though the shy young girl has metaphorically yanked his penis off by her sexual refusal. There's an affectionate poem here to the memory of Abse's dead brother Leo, Labour Member of Parliament and another man with a dash of the flamboyant Celt about him, and a splendid piece of poetic cursing on the part of a character whose sister has been made pregnant by a local villain: I shall appropriatehis jaspers and his ivorieshis goats and his guinea-fowl,slaughter his six sons,but spare his elder women-folk.As for my disgraced sisterI shall slit her throat cleanlyrather than she be stoned.Storm-god, would you beas merciful?Mighty Mother-wombAm I not justified? It is the contrast between the implacable violence of the content and the cool, poised, scrupulously ritualised quality of the language that is most impressive. If the volume has a fault, it is that this kind of verbal meticulousness is too little in evidence. Even so, Speak, Old Parrot shows that if art and humour will both be overtaken by death, they refuse to yield ground without a struggle. What will survive the endless nothingness is wit and love. Poetry quotations are reproduced with permission of Hutchinson (Cornerstone Publishing, the Random House Group).

How is a novelist like a neuroscientist? Sebastian Faulks's novel A Possible Life proposes one or two answers: because a writer is fascinated by connections and disconnections between things, rather like an analyst of the brain; but also because creating fictional characters involves identifying with them, and the condition in which selves seem to fuse together is of interest to students of human consciousness. A Possible Life contains five separate stories set in different periods, all of which revolve around the subject of connection and disconnection, fusing and separating. In this sense, the very structure of the volume reflects Faulks's concerns, as its various parts both reflect one another and radically diverge. The protagonists of most of the tales are friendless, solitary, sometimes orphaned, cut off from their pasts and incapable of belonging fully to their own experience. In the first of these studies in human destruction and occasional renewal, Geoffrey Talbot joins a special operations unit during World War 2, is captured in France, and transported to Poland to work in a Nazi concentration camp. With proper diplomacy, Faulks's terse, impassive language makes no vacuous attempt to prove equal to the horrors its hero witnesses, as Jews are casually shot through the head or thrown straight into furnaces. Back in England, Talbot sits in a cafe and suddenly finds himself unable to speak or move. He is admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he sits immobile for many weeks, earning the name “Statue” from his fellow inmates. We are in a world of catatonia and mental paralysis, emotional stupor and spiritual exhaustion. Yet just when he is utterly fatigued with living, pressed up against the extreme limit of his powers, Talbot is granted a strange kind of resurrection, feeling that “some subtle rearrangement of particles had taken place within him; he felt with joy and resignation that he was not the same man”. The fractured self is a constant motif of Faulks's book. If identity, on a physicalist theory of the brain, is just a constant reconfiguration of random material particles, can we really speak of a consistent selfhood at all? The narrator of the final story in the book reflects sombrely of his life-experiences that “they could be mine, they might be yours”. What is it, if anything, that makes a feeling or sensation peculiarly mine? Yet the discontinuity of the self is as consoling as it is disturbing, since it seems to make space for sudden, incalculable shifts of consciousness, which by this theory are perhaps the nearest we can approach to freedom and regeneration. Besides, if we all belong to the same universal flux of atoms, it becomes hard to say where one person ends and another begins; and the traditional word for this, in the humanistic rather than scientific sphere, is love. One of the book's less impressive episodes, a rather flat, threadbare effort entitled “Everything Can be Explained”, takes theories of the brain as its explicit topic, as another solitary, friendless human being, this time a young Italian neuroscientist, Elena, probes the mystery of self-awareness, but in the process of doing so loses her own newly awakened ability to relate to others. The connections she discerns in the brain are missing in her own personal life, so that science and individual experience belong to separate categories: “Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion”, the young woman ponders, “did not take away the aching of the heart”. By contrast, Jeanne, the heroine of “A Door Into Heaven”, who has endured a lifetime of dreary solitude as a servant, experiences in the company of a kindly young priest “what it might be to let another creature see inside herself”, rather as a novelist seeks to see inside his or her characters. The instability of the self makes for empathy as well as for alienation. The pièce de résistance of A Possible Life is the final tale,”You Next Time”, a hauntingly evocative love story set in the febrile world of the US music industry, which brings its central character, Anya King, a young, superbly talented yet spiritually restive woman singer, stunningly alive. Here, above all, it is sexual love, tenderly yet unsentimentally rendered, which breaks down the barriers between isolated selves, though only for a fleeting stretch of time. The singer can give herself to her art, but not to another person. The whole of her genius is distilled in one particular song she writes, and in most of the book's episodes there are such precious configurations, as the random particles of human existence fall for an exhilarating moment into exactly the right pattern, before disengaging and drifting off again. Art is indeed one word for this little miracle.

Poetry is about the experience of meaning as well as the meaning of experience. To read a poem is to feel one’s way into the inner workings of its language, rather than to peer through that speech to an extractable truth. It is to treat words as constitutive of meaning, not simply as reflective of it. This, to be sure, is true of all verbal acts, even the most banal, but poetry is the place where the performative, rhetorical dimensions of speech rise to supreme self-consciousness. No poem reports on an experience without casting a continual sideways glance at itself. It is this, among other things, that marks the difference between Wallace Stevens and a report on the sanitation system of southeast Montana. The early poetry of T.S. Eliot, for example, tempts us to read through its verbal density to a determinate meaning, while mischievously withholding any such semantic consolation. To write “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table,” as Eliot does at the opening of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” is to cajole the unwary reader into wondering how on earth the evening can resemble an anesthetized patient, whereas the true effect of the lines is surely to draw ironic attention to the kind of dislocated modern sensibility that could come up with such an incongruous simile in the first place. The image concerns form, not content. What matters is its rhetorical effect, not its abstractable sense. Acad. Quest. (2012) 25:546–551 DOI 10.1007/s12129-012-9318-3

A couple of centuries ago, if you had a touch of Wanderlust and the knack of hacking off a diseased limb, you could sign on as a ship's doctor. Or, if you preferred, a barber-surgeon. Not many senior medical consultants nowadays would be happy to shave their patients as well as treat them, but the 18th century had rather more flexible notions on the subject. The line between surgeon and barber was never very well-defined. The conditions on board ship were harsh. The drinking water would be purified with quicksilver, but would soon start to turn foul and smell of putrefaction. The vessel would be regularly fumigated with juniper berries and lighted gunpowder, then sprinkled with vinegar to ward off scabies, but the stink of the animals in the hold was never easy to eradicate. In this splendid novel by the Swedish writer Per Wästberg, Anders Sparrman is a young barber-surgeon who joins a voyage from Stockholm to Cadiz, where they take on board “jars of olive oil, wine vinegar, lemon juice against scurvy, brandy mixed with up to a third of water, six oxen, six calves, ten sheep, eight pigs and several hundred hens”. The ship sails on to China, where Sparrman fills his medicine chest with “the podded fruits of the taramind tree for stomach complaints, quinine for venereal diseases, liquorice root, yellow wax, saltpetre, camphor, camomile flowers, linen for plastic bandages”. Not quite what today's medic would regard as covering all contingencies. Sparrman's medical instruments, rather ominously, consist of trepanning irons, needles, brass pestle and mortar, suction cap, and cauterising iron. Not an ECG in sight. He “performed his bloody handiwork” under a flickering tin lamp in a cabin near the forecastle, while “flying fish streaked across their bows like evil spirits” and the fetid atmosphere almost suffocated him. Many of the crew members died of malaria, whose origins were then not understood. Another prevalent malady was the Guinea worm, which entered the intestines and emerged from muscles, toes, and testicles. The average length of the worm was 18 inches, which could be pulled out an inch a day. The patients were bled, bathed in stagnant pools, and fed a nutritious snail soup (some might prefer to have Guinea worm). Rose water and lavender were used to alleviate a stench that could even cause silver cutlery to tarnish. Anders Sparrman, who actually existed, was no ordinary surgeon. In Sweden today, his name would be as familiar in scientific circles as Charles Darwin's is with us. Being a ship's surgeon was only his day job; his true eminence was as a botanist. He sailed with Captain Cook and encountered little-known African tribes. (“I have six wives”, one tribal chieftain proudly informed him, “and I am faithful to them all”). He studied under Carl Linnaeus, one of the greatest botanists of all time, and did so in an era when science was still struggling to break free from the clammy clutches of superstition. Listening reverently to his master, the young Sparrman learns that “science has no sacred documents, knowledge has no Bible, but jumps from tussock to tussock, from generation to generation, along paths slippery with leaves and tracks newly formed”. What Linnaeus teaches Sparrman is how to look—delicately, minutely, observantly—with a well-nigh religious dedication. Looking of this kind is a fairly recent invention. These, one must recall, were the days before the distinction between science and poetry was anything like as clear-cut as it is today. In 18th-century England, scientific treatises counted as “literature”, whereas drama and the novel did not. Literature meant “polite” writing, writing fit for a gentleman, which would cover an essay on the inner ear but not something as vulgar as fiction or the theatre. For Linnaeus and Sparrman, it is science, not the arts, which represents the creative imagination at its most fertile and audacious. Only later, in the 18th century, would students of the humanities come to disdain scientific inquiry as fit only for unspeakable nerds with a row of biros in their top jacket pocket and leather patches on their elbows. Science was lowly, prosaic, earth-bound; art was sublime, transcendent, and on first-name terms with divinity. For a more traditional view, however, science was in love with the beauties and intricacies of the natural world. If that world was the work of God, then you could not divorce its truth from its beauty, its prose from its poetry, since the Almighty was the author of both. Close observation was the hallmark of the poet as well as the biologist, and both had a proper sense of the mystery and enigma of Nature, its maiden-like shyness in yielding up its secrets. “Be a vagabond in the true meaning of the word”, Linnaeus advises his disciple, “seeing all the beauty and profundities of the world, from its deep ravines to its droplets of resin and sap”. If Dante regarded the whole of Creation as his patch, so did science. If this blend of fact and imagination is true of the novel's heroes, it is equally true of the novel itself. The Journey of Anders Sparrman is a work replete with scientific information, accounts of botanical expeditions, and the politics of museum curating; but it is also a marvel of literary creation, with a sinewy, muscular style and some passages of shimmering lyric beauty. “Her body”, the author says of one of Sparrman's lovers, “entranced him with its valleys, meadows, dark pastures, little pink-titled roofs”. This is the thought not of a poet but of a great scientist, even if it is not quite the language of The Lancet. The same lover—a young woman forced into prostitution by poverty—tells Sparrman that “You will see a pattern in Creation, but I shall never find my place in it”. The scientist is at home in the world, as the outcast and destitute are not. Yet this turns out to be only a partial truth. There was a restlessness about Sparrman which amounted at times to world-weariness. Back in Sweden he was almost reduced to despair by the ingratitude of his bureaucratic superiors and the adverse reaction to his work of the general public. In the end, the scientist seems to have become as spiritually vagrant as the prostitute. This, then, is by no means a simple-minded tale of the triumph of science. It is also one which darkly reckons its human cost. The Journey of Anders Sparrman is a superbly evocative, lovingly crafted work of literature “unlike any one has read before”, as Nadine Gordimer remarks on the dust-jacket. In the scrupulous artistic hands of Wästberg, the ghost of the great Anders Sparrman finally triumphs over his contemporary detractors.

The most famous literary work ever written by a doctor is perhaps the Gospel of St Luke. Luke is traditionally thought to have been a physician on the staff of St Paul; but although this may well be a myth, his Gospel, like those of his fellow Evangelists, is much concerned with pain, disease, and disability. Remarkably, Jesus is nowhere presented in the New Testament as urging the sick to reconcile themselves to their afflictions. There is no suggestion that suffering may be character-building or spiritually uplifting, or that you may reap a reward for it in the life to come. For the Gospel writers, suffering is simply bad for you. Jesus clearly views illness as evil. In fact, he seems to subscribe to the myth that it is the work of Satan, which was probably Luke's opinion as well. It would be odd to run across a doctor today who regarded the devil as the cause of cancer or diabetes. But in 1st-century Palestine it was perfectly possible to cure illness while regarding it as demonic. Besides, the state of medicine at the time was so primitive that it needed nothing short of a few miracles to help it out. Healing the sick is part of Jesus's proclamation of the impending kingdom of justice and comradeship, since the sick are bound to be outsiders, cut off from full cooperation with their fellows. For the New Testament, to heal someone, and to reintegrate them into the community, are aspects of a single activity. Healing is about power, and thus about authority. In the modern age, the physician comes to accrue a formidable authority in the eyes of the community. Dr Livesey of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, who quietly faces down a drunken, murderous pirate in the Admiral Benbow inn, is a far cry from the squalid sawbones of the 17th century. By the 19th century, doctors in literature have finally become more respectable. But there were precedents for this even in William Shakespeare's time. The most powerful figure of the day was the king; and it was a sign of his divine status that he could combat disease simply by his touch. These beautiful lines from Shakespeare's Macbeth about King Duncan make the point: “…strangely-visited people,All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,The mere despair of surgery, he cures,Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,Put on with holy prayers; and ‘tis spoken,To the succeeding royalty he leavesThe healing benediction. With this strange virtue,He hath a heavenly gift of prophecy;And sundry blessings hang about his throneThat speak him full of grace.” No subsequent writer-physician has equalled St Luke's pre-eminence. On the whole, physicians have been presented in literature as dolts, cranks, quacks, and manslaughterers. As, indeed, many of them were. The great 17th-century diarist Samuel Pepys has left us a horrifying account of the removal of his “bladder stone” without anaesthetic (and without alcohol too), by one of the more skilful surgeons of his day. Having trussed his patient up like a chicken with long linen strips, the surgeon first inserted a thin silver instrument lubricated with warm water and milk of almonds through Pepys' penis into his bladder to hold the stone in place. Then he made an incision between the scrotum and anus into the neck of the bladder, grasped the stone with pincers and extracted it. It was said to be as large as a tennis ball of the period. Pulling this object through a three-inch incision was no mean feat. The wound was not stitched, simply left to heal itself and kept open with a small roll of soft cloth dipped in egg white. A cold syrup of lemon juice, radishes, and marshmallow was prepared for the great author, now fainting with shock and pain, to drink. His belly was anointed with oils, and oil of earthworm was held in readiness for possible convulsions. Astonishingly, Pepys recovered in 35 days, proudly preserving his stone in a specially made case. A great many others did not recover at all. Doctors are of interest to writers as objects as satire, but also because they combine three roles that are not generally found consorting in the same person. They are intellectuals of a kind, the product of a rigorous education; they are also practical men and women, unlike many an intellectual; and most are purveyors of care and compassion. Such figures, standing as they do at the crossroads of the mental, practical, and moral, are bound to fascinate writers, who reveal a rather similar blending. To write well, you have to know quite a lot; but writing is also a matter of practical techniques, and the writer, like the physician, deals with ethical affairs as well. When Charles Dickens wants an example of practical social reform in Bleak House, he turns to the figure of a doctor, Alan Woodcourt, who works in the fetid East End slums. When George Eliot wants to portray an intellectual in Middlemarch, she creates the character of Tertius Lydgate, who seeks to harness research to social progress. Doctors look for symptoms of hidden disorders, and so do poets and novelists. In this sense, both resemble the detective. It is no accident that Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the greatest detective in literary history, began life as an Edinburgh physician but was forced into a writing career by poverty. Perhaps the finest use of medicine by a writer in the 20th century is Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, set in a tuberculosis sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps at the time of the First World War. This sanatorium is the kind of place that would plunge our own inspectors of hospitals into deep alarm. Nobody ever seems to get cured, nobody ever leaves, and the healthy who drop in for a brief visit end up becoming infected. So, indeed, do the doctors. The clinic is, in fact, a microcosm of a sick Europe. Here, as often throughout literature, physical disease is a potent symbol of moral ailments. Physical sickness in Shakespeare is almost always spiritual sickness as well. Lady Macbeth's insomnia is the outward sign of her inner guilt. “This disease is beyond my practice”, observes the physician. He cannot, he comments, “minister to a mind diseased”. When it does finally get invented, the science of the mind causes extraordinary problems for writers. It is a notable fact that authors, rather like the public in general, continually confuse psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and psychoanalysts. In novel after novel in modern times, psychiatrists are to be found stretching out their patients on couches, psychoanalysts handing them drugs, and psychotherapists burbling about the Oedipus complex. Perhaps writers don't know quite a lot after all. Yet one of their goals is to deliver a shapely narrative about the world; and this is an aim they share with psychoanalysts. It is when the patient is able to recount a more-or-less coherent story of his psychical career that he is en route to health. With characteristic modesty, Sigmund Freud admitted that there was little original in his findings: the poets, he confessed, had said it all before him. One place where literature and medicine have converged is in the idea of pain. One of the problems with pain is that it is shapeless and nameless. If, then, literary metaphor can come to the patient's aid here, lending his or her pain a name and a shape, it may help in the managing of it. To be able to say that one's pain is like something may be a way of bringing it partly under control. The 20th century has also witnessed a preoccupation with pain on the part of some philosophers. Why? Because pain would seem one of the most private and intense of all our sensations, and thus raises questions of language, consciousness, and communication. Perhaps the greatest of all modern English language philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, continually alludes to pain in his Philosophical Investigations. At one point, he remarks that it sometimes makes sense to say that one knows that someone else is in pain, but that it never makes sense to say that one knows that one is in pain oneself. Why not? To elucidate that problem, we would need to examine the grammar of the verb “I know”. Wittgenstein also imagines that there is a room full of people with a pain floating around in it, and as each person suddenly doubles up in agony, we say “Ah, now he's having it!” What is the point of such an absurd fantasy? To establish a point about the nature of our sensations in general. Wittgenstein also fantasises about two people literally sharing the same pain, once again to make an illuminating philosophical point. This, of course, can't happen; pains are private. But the word “compassion” literally means “suffering with”; and if this is what it means to share a pain, then there are many kindly physicians in literature who do just that.

Sigmund Freud writes of the trauma of unveiling what he calls the primal scene – the scene of our parents' copulation, and so the dark and fearful origins of ourselves. But a rather similar sort of...

There is a performative contradiction in Fredric Jameson' s famous "Always historicise!" which is both a trans-historical imperative and a historical act. Another mistake that Jameson and most of the cultural left make is to imagine that there is something inherently radical about historicizing and returning literary texts to their historical contexts. In fact it is a position that the left share with the right; the quarrel between the two camps is not in the first place over whether to read historically, but over the way one reads history itself. For Marxists, history is a narrative of civilization and barbarism, emancipation and oppression at the same time. The task of literary criticism is to X-ray documents of civilization so as to reveal within them the traces of barbarism. As what Benjamin said, the past is in some sense alterable, as the present and the future come to rewrite it and cast it in a radically new light. This has an application to literary matters as well. Criticism is in one sense part of the work itself. The work is inherently incomplete and it is a never-ending process of supplementing it.