LaBarge on Anne Boyer (Excerpts)

"In The Undying, history and its attendant illnesses are also linguistic, literary, narrative, formal. We are sick in our bodies, minds, words, cells, neurons, phonemes — a sickness that exists reflexively within the material world around us".

“The history of illness,” she writes, “is not the history of medicine — it’s the history of the world — and the history of having a body could well be the history of what is done to most of us in the interest of the few.” And, later, “It’s all made up. I mean having a body in the world is not to have a body in truth: it’s to have a body in history. The history Boyer takes particular aim at is 20th and 21st century, and Western — the history of industry and capital, carcinogenic manufacturing and big business; a history that is structurally racist, misogynist, classist, invested in profitable inequality, and blind to the suffering it produces. This history has produced our physical bodies and their illnesses, as well as the systems that order them, extract value from them, and ultimately treat them when they break down."

“Boyer does not hear or see herself, or the realities of her world, in...good-attitudes-will-be-rewarded blogs spun across the web; nor in literature and public readings in which sickness exists for the epiphanies of the well, and is always described as a matter of appearance — a sick woman’s fragility, her paleness, her vulnerable beauty. None of this literature is bad,” Boyer writes, “but all of it is unforgivable.” Such narratives inherently reproduce the world as it is, with its cruel inequalities, deflections of truth, misrepresented causalities, cynically reapportioned blame. They are the reification of the individual and her experience, which becomes a story with a legible narrative arc and familiar language — a product, an object to be sold and consumed, which then disperses and repeats itself, delimits and defines the contours of other products like it, even those that have yet to come into being."

"The common struggle gets pushed through the sieve of what forms we have to make its account, and before you know it, the wide and shared suffering of this world is narrowed and gossamer, as thin as silk and looking as special as the language it takes to tell it.…The telling is always trying to slide down into a reinforcement of the conditions that made us want to say something in the first place, rather than their exposé, as if the gravity of our shared diminishments is more powerful than any ascendant rage."

"We fall ill, and our illness falls under the hard hand of science, falls onto slides under confident microscopes, falls into pretty lies, falls into pity and public relations, falls into new pages open on the browser and new books on the shelf."

"Another section, in which Boyer copies a passage from her notebook, shows what it means for language as one knows it to fall apart on the page, for syntax to be painful, 10 on the pain scale as “the panicking inadequacies of all genres, a new crisis of transmission”:

My pain’s naked grammar was:

how doe sone go on like htis the days gone finally in a way that can’t be though I have a light on my face to hceer me and I took an advicl will take more take vitamin d fake every sunlight the world on fire last night while I slept in such rgitheous pain.

While The Undying pointedly eschews modes of confession and sentimentality, I found this passage so bare that I could barely read it. Yet still I read it again and again for its plain, searing truth. In Boyer’s work, pain is not invisible or ineffable; it does not destroy language. We simply do not want to see or to hear pain’s realities — or, rather, we do not know what we are seeing or hearing, never having encountered it before within accepted modalities of expression".

"Boyer explores the possibility of pain as idealism, of pain as revolution, honesty, equality — not as something to aspire to or idealize, but as something that cuts to the quick and necessarily alters everything around you, everything inside of you, and demands a new form — a new world — that can meet it. As Boyer writes, “pain’s education should be in more than pain’s valorization,” and “we can’t think ourselves free, but that’s no reason not to get an education.” This is the space from which The Undying is written and from which perhaps it takes its name".

 Emily LaBarge