When Cancer Wins A Pulitzer | May 20 2022

May 20, 2022

I. The Shortage

Earlier this week, I learned that the contrast material used in CT-scans-with-contrast is in short supply, due to the Chinese manufacturer being shut down by Covid. I have no idea how I discovered this. (Maybe I need more brain work? Could you imagine, elective gamma knife? Sort of like plastic surgery, except for the memory.)

With a checkup scan scheduled for Monday, I don’t want to have the experience of showing up for the scan, only to be told there’s no contrast. People in some parts of the country have reported that happening and being told, don’t worry, the doctor will still be able to see things. Me being me (for better or worse), I called– or tried to call– the diagnostic imaging department. I left a message, waited a day, didn’t hear anything, then called the cancer center. “Oh, them,” sniffed the triage nurse. “It’s impossible to get through to them.” She reassured me the radiology people will call if there’s a problem.

But I actually got a call back from the head of the scheduling department. They are monitoring the situation daily, she told me. I am still on the schedule for Monday. Good, ‘cuz recreational radiation is not my jam, even though I still have not reached the minimum requirement for spontaneous glowing in the dark.

II. The Pulitzer

(Skip to part III if the following is not your cup of tea.)

It’s not often that I leave a book feeling ticked off, and when I do, I need to understand why. The Undying, by Kansas City poet Anne Boyer, is one book that had me irritated barely halfway through the prologue. The 2020 winner of  a Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, and a NY Times Notable Book, The Undying is the chronicle of Boyer’s diagnosis and treatment of aggressive breast cancer. More accurately, Boyer uses her breast cancer experience as a leaping off point for reflections on suffering, exhaustion, the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’s ruinous carcinogenosphere,” pain, The Patient (as opposed to herself), etc. I read this book wearing three of my hats: that of a cancer person, a literary/research person, and a poet. This probably made me triply annoyed. Below, I write responses as each of these three.

First, to give you a sense of how this book has been received, here are only two of the book’s breathless and adoring blurbs. (Please understand that I think they are horse hockey.)

“…a startling, urgent intervention in our discourses about sickness and health, art and science, language and literature, and mortality and death. In dissecting what she terms ‘the ideological regime of cancer,’ Anne Boyer has produced a profound and unforgettable document on the experience of life itself.” —Sally Rooney, author of Normal People

“Anne Boyer’s radically unsentimental account of cancer and the ‘carcinogenosphere’ obliterates cliche. By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together. The Undying is an outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique.” —Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School

The cancer person (credentials: I am one)

The speaker presents herself as a victim of the medical system that has taken over her body. Boyer suggests the medical establishment reduces her case to mere “data,” processed by mostly women who are underpaid for their labor. (I’m not sure what to make of this, given that roughly half of my nurses were/are men.)

In her first chapter, Boyer writes, “It is decided without ceremony that the doctors will eventually take my breasts from me and discard them in an incinerator….” It is decided? Passive voice, baby; it makes you sound like a victim of invisible forces. And, I discover, she is! In alluding obliquely to cancer as All That Is Wrong With The World,  she wants us to imagine treatment– and her body– as things that are historically wrenched from an individual’s control.

Even some of her chemo is evidence of a patient’s victimhood. She writes that a very dangerous and awful-sounding chemo with long-term side effects is a sign of “how little progress has been made.” What does she expect? Of this illness, of her doctors? Perhaps it is simply a sign of her ignorance, but cancer is a scientific mystery. Progress is slow. Doctors don’t know everything. There are bad doctors. Doctors who know a lot of stuff and who are researchers often do suck at relating to patients on a human level. Honey, honey, I want to say, you just can’t take this stuff personally.

But her many remarks like this are also signs of a person who entered their cancer experience with a deep-seated faith in Doctors As Healers, and who, in finding something different, has thus been Betrayed. And not just her, all women. I wonder how she would respond if I asked whether medicine betrays women as a class more than it does the poor, people of color, non-native speakers of English, those inexperienced with a medical system.

Her treatment, where a reader can find details about it, is dreadfully difficult, as is her recovery. And she didn’t die. That seems like a big deal to me. I think it was to her, too. But by the end, the book seems to be less about surviving her cancer than about the importance of recognizing  “the ideological regime of cancer.” This means “that to call myself a survivor still feels like a betrayal of the dead.” She has assigned herself the role of representative, of women with cancer, of the patient inside the system; she is emblematic of a Being that exists across the sweep of history, economic systems, the structures of power in society we are powerless to change. Jeez, some part of me feels like saying, just get over yourself.

The literary/research person (credentials: lots of time studying books)

The book is sprinkled with references to her concern about “telling the story.” I kept that in mind as I read. I’ve suggested the story she tells– or, the story she wants us to see– is not that of her own cancer.  She uses particular mechanisms to show that the story is neither singular nor individual. Each section features artists, writers, philosophers. Each of these individuals has a story or a quote that introduces or extends the main theme of the section. The Prologue alone features Susan Sontag, Rachel Carson, Audre Lorde, Jaqueline Susann, novelists Kathy Acker and Fanny Burney (1810), queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and writers S. Lochlann Jain and Ellen Leopold. Quotes from all of these women build to Sontag’s final statement:

“My way of thinking has up to now been both too abstract and too concrete. Too abstract: death. Too concrete: me.” She admits, then, what she calls a middle term: “both abstract and concrete.” The term—positioned between oneself and one’s death, the abstract and concrete—is “women.” “And thereby,” Sontag added, “a whole new universe of death rose before my eyes.”

Thus, Boyer announces the scope she will take on in the discussion to follow. She uses the same mechanism in each section. Artists, philosophers, writers appear as if of their own volition. I imagine Boyer wants them confirm and expand the thematic territory of the book. But there’s no interpretation of all the quotes or stories. These simply pile up, one upon the other, their significance proven only by the sheer volume of language, their relevance to cancer proven only by their proximity to a mention of it.

I was taken to task for doing the same thing in my dissertation; perhaps that’s why I’m so sensitive to it here. I had to comb through my manuscript and tease out the connections I wanted my readers to get. Without that, it is as if Boyer is relying on all the people she’s quoted to do her work for her. For me, it’s especially maddening that she titles one chapter The Birth of the Pavilion, after philosopher Michel Foucault’s book, The Birth of the Clinic, daring to justify that with the single quote by Foucault in the whole book. (And, yes, I am fond of Foucault. One simply does not boil down his complex thinking to one or two sentences and a chapter title that gestures to one of Foucault’s essential works.)

I could go on. In fact, in the original draft of this post, I did. But then I cut it; nobody likes to witness a dead horse being beaten.

The former poet (published+[see above], therefore, credentials)

If a draft of this appeared at a workshop roundtable, I would suggest it is overwritten, dramatic without being clear, and, in trying to situate her experience within the larger contexts of philosophy, history, literature, economics, feminism, (and maybe more but who can keep track) Boyer runs the risk of coming off as self-aggrandizing. (See? I told you I was ticked off.)

OK, enough. I’m guess I’m glad she got a prize and the acclaim that comes with it; I always want writers to succeed. But over-intellectualizing something doesn’t make it universal. Arguing that something (cancer) is analogous to some other system or way of thinking doesn’t mean the argument is successful. I hear what Boyer is saying, I’m just not buying it. And sadly, even after thinking about the book in this post, I’m not even any less ticked off about it.

I like to keep things simple. 1) Cancer is just cells run amuck, 2) cancer treatment is hard, and 3) there are no guarantees.

I didn’t have to read this blasted book to know that, and you don’t either.

III. The Orange: Truth

Here’s a lovely something I found on the Instagram, Poetry Is Not a Luxury.

I imagine the “you” British poet Wendy Cope loves is her husband, poet Lachlan Mackinnon.

Thanks for reading. I hope your day brings you something lovely. Perhaps a huge orange and someone to share it with.

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• Images
• Covid by chiplanay
• “Temporarily Closed” by Gerd Altmann
• Book by Mystic Art Design
• Chemotherapy by klbz
• Bookheads by Tumisu
• Meeting by StartupStockPhotos
• Orange  by PublicDomainPictures