“This Image of My Humiliation”: writing and reading embodied illness in John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

Abstract

The great paradox of illness is that embodied suffering is an inevitable shared experience of mortality, but at the moment suffering occurs, the embodied experience appears unshareable. Sickness is profoundly ordinary, in the sense that any one of us will experience it in multiple iterations, many times over, but each experience of sickness is unique and particular to the perceptions and interpretations of its host. When the sick patient attempts to communicate their experience, language mediates and transforms the experience. In spite of the distance created between the experience of illness and the experience of witnessing another’s illness, however, many writers turn to sickness as a motivating theme of personal narratives, as does John Donne in his prose work, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Donne’s Devotions constructs a container of one speaker’s isolating experience of illness that transports the reader, through formal moves that create an extended present tense to reflect the consuming effect of illness on the body, as close as possible to the experience of illness itself.