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for Medicine and the Arts: University of Cape Town (on Futurelearn)

Assignment topic: experiences of illness depicted in art

There are two parts to this assignment.

First, briefly describe some form of creative or artistic creation that helps to communicate experiences of illness. This week looked at episodes of mental illness as an example, but you can consider any illness or condition. Please avoid providing any personal information. In your brief description of the artistic creation you have selected, specifically identify the illness or condition as well as who made the artistic creation and where it was seen. If appropriate, include a web link (URL) to information on or pictures of the artistic creation.

Second, discuss how the artistic creation has in your view helped communicate experiences of the illness or conditions that might have been difficult to explain or convey to others. You can draw on the issues raised in the discussions in this week. What did you consider interesting or insightful in the artwork?

This written assignment should be between 350 and 500

An Elegy: R.R. 1916-41 by David Gascoyne concerns the suicide of Roger Roughton in April 1941. Roughton was a ‘slender, hyperactive youth’ who had just left Uppingham school after being bullied for his aestheticism. Sharing a Thameside flat with Gascoyne, one drunken night they had sex leading to a ‘certain coolness’ though ‘the incident seemed promptly forgotten’.^[5] ‘Seemed’ here is part of the complexity of this poem, particularly since in its first collected appearance it followed a poem addressing a ‘you’, whom ‘could not dare / To face the last fear, which is that of Love’.^[6]

It’s a complicated poem addressed to a suicide. As with all mental phenomena ‘illness’ models are questionable yet the intention of the simile ‘like a clumsy wound that will not heal’ points that way. Gascoyne was committed involuntarily to psychiatric hospital many times in and after 1944.^[7] However when he presented himself to the Tavistock Clinic he was told, ‘I am afraid I can do nothing for you’; not even pray for him.^[8] Thoughts of suicide sometimes took the upper hand.

I think psychiatry can congratulate ourselves too easily in saying that mad voices are means of achieving harmony based on its own interpretation of utterances. Sometimes they rail against injustice, unfairness or just bad luck in the contingencies which have aroused your love of another. Gascoyne knows Roughton’s death (‘the mere turn of a [gas] tap’ in Dublin: that ‘sordid city’) is difficult to understand. He won’t attempt to:

… explain, deplore nor yet exploit

The latent pathos of your living years –

Hurried, confused and unfulfilled –

They were the shiftless years of both our youths.

Being left ‘to sit at times alone and dumb’ is noisy with ‘most pure intensity of thought / And concentrated inmost feeling’. In his relationship with psychiatry, Gascoyne knew: ‘Few quizzed the concealed countenance of fear’. The final image of the ‘secret candour of that lonely child’ feels to me to satisfy the abandonment Gascoyne felt that both experienced as children and that their inner vulnerability replicated in a world that presents no invitation to commonly share its goods: ‘resigned / To join in every complicated game / adults effect to play’. This leaves only metaphors of appetite and needy self-destruction, of which war is an outer mirror, whilst you ‘seek to lose / yourself in swift devouring of white roads’ and ‘heavy drink’. And there’s another puzzle – destructive appetites such as those found in eating-disorders or addiction – are they an illness or a sign of injustice against which we need to raise a public voice? It communicates vulnerability as a kind of secret that depends on temporary sharing the imminence of ‘Catastrophe’ and helplessness against it so redolent in the poem.

498 words

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[5] Robert Fraser (2012: 72) Night Thoughts:  The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne Oxford & New York, Oxford University Press

[6] To A Contemporary in David Gascoyne and Graham Sutherland Poems 1937-1942 (1943: 36f.)London, Poetry London, Nicolson and Watson.

[7] Fraser op.cit.: 335

[8] ibid: 232

The poem’s text:

Friend, whose unnatural early death
In this year’s cold, chaotic Spring
Is like a clumsy wound that will not heal:
What can I say to you, now that your ears
Are stoppered-up with distant soil?
Perhaps to speak at all is false; more true
Simply to sit at times alone and dumb
And with most pure intensity of thought
And concentrated inmost feeling, reach
Towards your shadow on the years’ crumbling wall.

I’ll not say any word in praise or blame
Of what you ended with the mere turn of a tap;
Nor to explain, deplore nor yet exploit
The latent pathos of your living years –
Hurried, confused and unfulfilled –
That were the shiftless years of both our youths
Spent in the monstrous mountain-shadow of
Catastrophe that chilled you to the bone:
The certain imminence of which always pursued
You from your heritage of fields and sun …

I see your face in hostile sunlight, eyes
Wrinkled against its glare, behind the glass
Of a car’s windscreen, while you seek to lose
Yourself in swift devouring of white roads
Unwinding across Europe and America;
Taciturn at the wheel, wrapped in a blaze
Of restlessness that no fresh scene can quench;
In cities of brief sojourn that you pass
Through in your quest for respite, heavy drink
Alone enabling you to bear each hotel night.

Sex, Art and Politics: those poor
Expedients! You tried them each in turn,
With the wry inward smile of one resigned
To join in every complicated game
Adults affect to play. Yet girls you found
So prone to sentiment’s corruptions; and the joy
Of sensual satisfaction seemed so brief, and left
Only new need. It proved hard to remain
Convinced of the Word’s efficacity; or even quite
Certain of World-Salvation through “the Party Line” …

Cased in the careful armour that you wore
Of wit and nonchalance, through which
Few quizzed the concealed countenance of fear,
You waited daily for the sky to fall;
At moments wholly panic-stricken by
A sense of stifling in your brittle shell:
Seeing the world’s damnation week by week
Grow more and more inevitable; till
The conflagration broke out with a roar,
And from those flames you fled through whirling smoke,

To end at last in bankrupt exile in
That sordid city, scene of Ulysses; and there,
While War sowed all the lands with violent graves,
You finally succumbed to a black, wild
Incomprehensibility of fate that none could share …
Yet even in your obscure death I see
The secret candour of that lonely child
Who, lost in the storm-shaken castle-park,
Astride his crippled mastiff’s back was borne
Slowly away into the utmost dark.