On Wednesday 15th February, Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst held an event on the top floor of Blackwell’s to promote his new book, Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces. His previous publications include literary criticism and editorial work, most recently working on J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, but Metamorphosis is a step away from the critical into the deeply personal. In theory, it’s a book about Douglas-Fairhurst’s relationship with multiple sclerosis, or MS – a highly varied disease that affects both brain and body function. In practice, however, Metamorphosis is much more than that.
There are many categories that Metamorphosis could fit into, and therefore none that perfectly encapsulate it. Its core is autobiography, the story of one man and his body, or one body and its man. Douglas-Fairhurst doesn’t leave literary criticism behind, however, and his body is not the only one affected by MS within the 300-odd pages: Bruce Cummings, author of The Journal of a Disappointed Man, is another central figure, while characters such as Peter Pan and Kafka’s Gregor Samsa appear and reappear throughout. His lectures, especially those given to freshers in their first few weeks, are referred to several times in the first few chapters. As one of this year’s crop of freshers attending said lectures last term – one of which he turned up to with a stonking black eye that he joked was won in a ‘fistfight in the Magdalen SCR’, although parts of Metamorphosis might suggest a more likely cause – it is with some shame that I must admit that a good handful of the book’s literary references were lost on me. There are parts of Metamorphosis which I think will be enjoyed more by readers with an (at least superficial) understanding of the canon Douglas-Fairhurst draws from, especially the comparisons between his own life and that of Gregor Samsa. It’s certainly clear you’re reading a text written by someone whose whole life is literary. Having said that, the real core of the book is his own experience, terrifying but fascinating in equal measure. It requires no literary qualification except the willingness to read.
It will not be a surprise to anyone who has ever attended a Douglas-Fairhurst lecture to hear that he writes with real warmth, even while describing his harshest experiences in the ‘Kingdom of the Sick’. While the story of his illness and diagnosis continues chronologically, his dips into the past are what give the book this character – a past that touches on embracing his sexuality, falling in love, and reassuring students with imposter syndrome, to name but a few themes. A constantly evolving theme is that of uncertainty within one’s own identity, both as a child and an adult, from a social or personal uncertainty to an uncertainty in the body. It is a fact of life with MS. The collage of textual materials that Douglas-Fairhurst draws upon jumbles around a missing central point, the answer to the question posed by Chapter 27: ‘Who are you?’. Who are you if your body doesn’t act how it did last year? Who are you if your brain becomes cloudy or unreliable? Who are you if you are, like the Ship of Theseus, stripped of all your essential components and reconstructed? It would be an impossible goal to ask any book to answer these questions, but Metamorphosis does at least respond to the parallel challenge posed by multiple sclerosis: with a disease so variable, what ‘kind of story’ is each patient in? For Douglas-Fairhurst, the answer appears to be every story he can remember.
About halfway through the book (whose chapter numbering system is a little too esoteric to delve into), aHSCT is introduced. It is a proposed experimental treatment plan for preventing the symptoms of MS from worsening. It is also ‘playing with fire’, or ‘as straightforward as pressing a switch’, or ‘a magic spell’, or maybe none of these things. More than anything, it is intense. The trial process leaves patients incubated in a barrier-nursed room in hospital for weeks, with any visitor dressed head to toe in PPE. Between the introduction of the idea of aHSCT, and the hospital stay where it would be trialed, there are long swathes of the book dedicated to the power of reading as a healing force – an unsurprising diversion, perhaps, coming from a man who interprets the world around him through his mental and physical libraries. As with any writing about reading, Metamorphosis forces the reader to question the physical act they are taking part in while interacting with the book; questioning this usually undetected relationship in a similar way to how Douglas-Fairhurst began to question the relationship between his mind and body. Of course, being left on tenterhooks as to the success or failure of the treatment while dozens of pages are devoted to the mystical power of reading is not a pleasant experience – but his ‘strange limbo period’ between consultancy, the process, and the healing wasn’t exactly rosy. Paralleling the drugs that ‘scour’ the inside of the body, there is a lot of ‘scouring of shelves’ in Metamorphosis; books and the worlds they create are presented as a way of finding control over, or escape from, a disease that didn’t offer much of either.
Metamorphosis swirls with theory, both literary and scientific, and while it is never explicitly mentioned, it is a perfect demonstration of Dr Rudine Sims Bishop’s theory of books serving as ‘windows and mirrors’. We read books to see into other people’s lives, and we read books to see ourselves reflected. At different stages of his illness, Douglas-Fairhurst searches for differing combinations of windows and mirrors; some readers will read this book as a window, and some as a mirror. It’s a mirror which seems to have been missing from MS literature for a long time. It’s hard to read about people in pain, but it’s even harder to be in pain and have nothing to read about it. As an autobiography, and not fiction, there is no perfect ending to Metamorphosis. Douglas-Fairhurst isn’t healed by the power of love, or godliness, or through some kind of self-actualisation. Healing as the end goal of sickness narratives is a reductive and often implausible structure. The final chapter is for each reader to arrive at on their own, but I found it a poignant way to end what was, in many parts, a book about endings.
[Alongside my whole-hearted recommendation of Metamorphosis, it’s worth giving some content warnings: there’s (of course) a lot of discussion of illness, but also of suicide, both medically-assisted and not.]