AS HE LAY DYING: MAX BLECHER’S MEDICAL BODY
AS HE LAY DYING: MAX BLECHER’S MEDICAL BODY

Summary/Abstract: Max Blecher’s decade-long illness permeates his literary oeuvre much like an incontestable biographical truth. Documented in his correspondence with some prominent Romanian intellectual friends, the writer’s life as a patient of tuberculosis sanatoria and his prolonged agony could be assumed as the dominant background of his works. I intend to argue that Blecher’s exploration of the body as the object of medical investigation projects a particular regime of affective expression. Blecher’s fiction of the body favors a double approach to the issue of identity and self, as revealed throughout his work: the intimacy of suffering is a potent coagulant that favors the illusion of a coherent of identity, mediated by the body, while medical intervention reveals its objectification and foreignness. My analytical endeavor intends to identify the connections between affective discourse, in the context of Blecher’s real relationships (as proved by his correspondence) and his fictional ones (as outlined mainly in his two novels Scarred Hearts and The Lightened Burrow, concerning the body, illness and medical intervention). I would also highlight the periphery as an amplifier of isolation and suffering, revealed through his native city of Roman, where he spent his last years, and the sanatorium, where he sought treatment, and which is also the topos of his last two novels. Sickness and medical aid are minimally present Max Blecher’s debut novel, Adventures in Immediate Irreality, as the experiences of the protagonist are mainly metaphysical and erotic. Deepening the perspective, his other two novels, Scarred Hearts and The Lightened Burrow are brutal confessions of the pain and physical deterioration caused by disease. Blecher’s protagonists, obvious auctorial alter-egos, are entrapped (literally and metaphorically) in shell-like bodies, enduring exhausting, unbearable pain and desperately seeking sexual relief. In language and in narrative, medicine reveals its potential as an agent of hope, emotion, despair and, at times, of the promise of death. Fueled by the conscience of imminent demise, laced with harsh existentialism and forged by the Powerful, surreally calibrated awareness of his biological vulnerability, Blecher’s dreamlike, visionary prose is a defining instance of a reunion between fiction and biographical affective contexts expressing medical trauma and bodily breakdown.

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