The Holistic Literary Character: The Body and the Soul The Holistic Medicine in Literature
The Holistic Literary Character: The Body and the Soul The Holistic Medicine in Literature

Author(s): Simona Liutiev
Subject(s): Short Story
Published by: Scientia Moralitas Research Institute
Keywords: somatic diagnosis; intimacy; authenticity; character decentralisation; holistic medicine;
Summary/Abstract: Intimacy in fiction is an aesthetical, symbolical and emotional choice. Medicine and novel writing seem to prolong the disease nature has given to mankind. Some writers’ propensity for structural themes and motifs from pathology can be considered both a professional and a somatic diagnosis predisposition. Life as a fate leading to death was a general idea at the end of the 19th century. To suddenly utter, that the soul is the body could have destabilised humanistic sciences, and it meant the decentralisation of literary character, the shift of narrative techniques, the conversion of psychology to physiological analysis emphasising the authenticity of sensation. Hortensia Papadat Bengescu’s characters are so fleshless, that it’s easy to see their soul. Illness is their only connection to the world. Each character tragically aspires to a common life, refused to all of them by their psychological or physiological condition.

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