Queerview: Susan Sontag
In her essay, On Being Ill, published in 1930, Virginia Woolf complained about the inability of language to communicate an apt description of illness: “Let a sufferer describe a pain in the head to a doctor,” Woolf wrote, “and language runs dry.”
Not only is the language insufficient, but in trying to communicate, Woolf felt, one could only invoke derision:
“Suffering serves but to wake memories in his friends’ minds of their influenza, their aches and pains which…now cry aloud…for the divine relief of sympathy.”
Woolf believed that an entirely new language was needed to describe illness. “To look these things squarely in the face,” Woolf wrote, “would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth.”
Susan Sontag was one of the most prominent American intellectuals. In 1976, she was diagnosed cancer, told she had a one in four chance to live five years. In 1978, she wrote Illness as Metaphor, condemning the use of tuberculosis [Sontag’s father died of TB in 1938] and cancer as metaphors to make victims believe they have brought suffering on themselves.
“Illness is fact, not fate.” she wrote.
In 1988, she extended her argument on illness as metaphor to include the AIDS epidemic.
In March 2003, she was diagnosed with leukemia, thought to be a consequence of chemotherapy.
Sontag died on December 28, 2004. She was 71.
In Poetics, Aristotle defines, “metaphor,” as, “giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.” Sontag describes the method by which illness becomes metaphor:
“First…the subjects of deepest dread…are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor; then, in the name of the disease…horror is imposed on others…said to be disease-like.”
The controling metaphor for cancer, AIDS and other diseases is that of warfare:
Cancer cells INVADE
Cancer cells COLONIZE
There is a FIGHT or CRUSADE against cancer
Cancer is a KILLER disease
The body’s DEFENSES are useless
Cancer patients are seen as VICTIMS of THEIR disease
In radiotherapy patients are BOMBARDED with TOXIC rays
Treatment aims to KILL or DESTROY cancer cells
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can LURK for many years; it is a viral ENEMY remaining inactive until TRIGGERED.
Some people with HIV or AIDS are viewed as INNOCENT VICTIMS while others are viewed as JUDGED or PUNISHED for their lifestyle.
Because cancer and AIDS are considered evil and invincible, patients are demoralized.
Because cancer and AIDS are “intractable…capricious…mysterious” and therefore “morally, if not literally, contagious” patients are shunned. No wonder that concealment of the diseases is common: Logically, a disease that is regarded as a synonym for evil and death would be something to hide. Likewise, cancer and AIDS patients lie or are lied to about their diagnosis because cancer and AIDS are viewed as obscene. Concealment leads to social stigmatization:
“the illness is the culprit…the patient is made culpable.”
Once the disease has been established, metaphorically, as evil, it can be given punitive and moralistic social meaning:
Cancer is a metaphor for rejection of the city or urban life
Cancer is a metaphor for rampant industrialization and capitalism gone awry.
AIDS is a communal punishment. With its history traced back to Africa, its current status as a disease of the urban poor in the United States, and
“the migration of the under-privileged” from village to city, from country to country thought to spread the disease, AIDS is viewed as apocalyptic; the dystopia of the global village.”
As Sontag concluded:
““We are not being invaded. The body is not a battlefield. The ill are neither unavoidable casualties nor the enemy…About the metaphor, the military one, I would say, if I may paraphrase Lucretius: Give it back to the war-makers.”
Sontag was openly bisexual, commenting in the Guardian,
“Shall I tell you about getting older? When you get older, 45 plus, men stop fancying you. Or put it another way, the men I fancy don’t fancy me. I want a young man. I love beauty,”
though she maintained several relationships with women, most notably the photographer, Annie Liebovitz who
chronicled Sontag’s final illness and their fifteen year relationship in a book titled, A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005. Said Liebovitz:
“The moment I put this book together, I felt such a sense of strength and something from Susan, something Susan gave me from her death. And she is still giving me things. It’s funny because – although in the end she wanted her diaries published – Susan always said she felt that art really had to rise above the personal.”
Sources:
Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill, Paris Press: 2002.
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and It’s Metaphors, Picador: 2001.
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