1. Overture – Agamben and Sontag
Within Giorgio Agamben’s Idea of Prose, in the essay The Idea of the Muse, we encounter the following tract:
That a hiddenness be maintained in order that there be disclosure, a forgetfulness maintained in order that there be memory, this is inspiration, the rapture of the muses which brings man, word, and thought into accord with one another. Thought is close to the thing only if it gets lost in this latency, only if it no longer sees its thing. It is this which is dictated in it: the dialectic hiddenness/disclosure, oblivion/memory, so that the word can come, and not be simply manipulated by the subject (I cannot –obviously– inspire myself).
This distinction of hiddenness/disclosure is borrowed from Heidegger, first generally articulated in his book Being and Time and then specifically in relation to art in The Origin of the Work of Art, referring to how things become intelligible and, perhaps more importantly, meaningful to human beings (Dasein). Namely, some ‘thing’ becomes intelligible by whit of the context in which it is encountered, which furnishes it (or rather the being interpreting it) with a set of presuppositions as to what that thing means when encountered at a later date. There are linguistic, cultural, and material considerations that form these presuppositions, and these are consequently changeable, but nonetheless deterministic. That is to say, what a pencil or a cigarette or a handgun means may change over time, but to those that encounter it in any culturally conditioned context, a set of expectations will form thereof.
Agamben takes this idea in an interesting direction within the aforementioned essay, as it relates to the notion of a muse, that which inspires a given work of art. The proposition forwarded above supposes that the work can never derive from the essential characteristics of some ‘thing’ as encountered in the world, but must be a little off, must be relative, partly concealed, partly hidden, and only then might the necessary idea disclose itself. In this sense the idea destroys the muse, the disclosure destroys the thing.
This is also, functionally, how metaphor operates.
In her book Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag enumerates the historicophilosophical development of tuberculosis (TB) and cancer as metaphors. The two diseases share the quality of being historically mysterious, insofar as there was no known cure, and so were imaginatively fatal in every instance. Likewise, they were both -not altogether inaccurately- imagined as consuming the body, a candle that burns too quickly. However their metaphors are typically mirrored, insofar as TB is a disease of ‘low energy and heightened sensitivity’, whereas cancer is a disease of ‘unexpected energy and anesthetized sensitivity’, and the latter displaced the former when a TB vaccine was developed by Albert Calmette in the early 1900s.
Nonetheless, Sontag elucidates in remarkable detail the development of their respective symbolic attributes, extracting examples as diverse as Alice James (‘this unholy granite substance in my breast’), Kafka (‘[TB] is no special disease, or not a disease that deserves a special name, but only the germ of death itself, intensified’), Keats (‘if I had any chance of recovery, this passion would kill me’), and Baudelaire (‘A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours the rest’), among many others. The assiduous reader may note that all these authors, in fact all those Sontag mentions in relation to the twin diseases, post-date the Enlightenment. This is neatly explained in the following fragment by Novalis, which is also quoted:
The ideal of perfect health is only scientifically interesting. Sickness belongs to individualisation.
Which is to say that disease (or at least TB and cancer) as a metaphor in its most common form, that which delineates the relative characteristics of a given individual, only becomes a subject of interest when the individualising philosophy of the Enlightenment displaces the perhaps collectivised philosophy of the prior Medieval Period. This kind of illness, which appears random in its distribution, is singularising. It takes the person out of their established social context. All this is done in service of discrediting the metaphor, as Sontag believes it is not in the best interests of those that suffer from cancer to be mythologised. Her view is that the reification of diverse metaphors as to the terror and evil of cancer reinforces medical paternalism and eventually leads to the demoralisation of the patient. This single-sentence summarisation may strike the reader as flippant, but herein lies the primary weakness of the book.
Between outlining her initial aims at the onset of the text and prosecuting her argument against illness as metaphor, which only begins on the antepenultimate page of the book (that is, third to last), Sontag catalogues a profusion of examples that seem to demonstrate why it is indeed a very useful metaphor. Just prior to commencing her closing remarks, Sontag evokes the Nazis’ use of cancer as a metaphor for the Jewish people, thus justifying their ‘violent excision’ and appears to lean on this when she then states that only ‘paranoids, crusaders, the fatalistic, and those subject to revolutionary optimism’ might employ the metaphor. But this doesn’t make sense. Prior to that grotesque example she quotes or paraphrases, among many others, Baudelaire, Marx, D. H. Lawrence, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Wolfe, Ibsen, Rousseau, Keats, and Brontë. Are these paranoids? Crusaders? Fatalists? It is gauche to step beyond the bounds of the text itself, but she has at times praised these disparate writers elsewhere, and this undermines the proposition that illness as a metaphor ought to be dispensed with on the basis of its attribution.
This is the most obvious and urgent criticism that ought to be levelled at the book. However, there is another means by which the text may be evaluated and ultimately dissevered, and it is here that Agamben’s tract is of interest. Namely, that it is not only illness that operates as metaphor, but metaphor that operates as illness.
2. Recitative – Towards a Viral Metaphor
A text, especially a literary text, never states the idea to which it is gesturing explicitly. When it does, it is almost inevitably poorer for it; as always, this the fatal flaw of autofiction. Why this is the case is not well understood, except that to be told of some subjective thing didactically does not generally affect a change in the reader’s disposition towards that thing, unless it reinforces a preexisting disposition. This is a general truth. Therefore, for any idea or thought or notion, any object, an author must use a relative image, gesturing towards it in the manner articulated by Agamben. This is what is called a sign, comprised of the signifier (the metaphor) and the signified (the object). But what this sign can be is multitudinous, the object may be static, but its signifiers are innumerable. This is what occurs in Sontag’s book, exhibiting entry after entry wherein TB and cancer become the signifier for some other object, or wherein the diseases themselves are consumed by their signifiers.
What metaphor affords a reader is a greater fidelity with which to consider an idea, a greater set of possible images, as though increasing the number of polygons that comprise a polyhedronic object, until it becomes intelligible to the degree that it can be evaluated from various angles. It allows one to rotate the apple in their mind’s eye, so to speak.
This is an important element of intersocial communication, which can be readily observed in communities where this fidelity is lacking. There are impoverished communities in which the underprivileged can barely articulate the dynamism of a football match they just witnessed, unable to say what it was about a particular sequence preceding a goal that struck them so. More importantly, these same communities may contain men who are unable to articulate why they feel compelled to hurt their wives, or why not*. There is in fact some clinical research to support this, although this is not the ideal forum in which to evaluate it. Anna Motz, in her book Toxic Couples: The Psychology of Domestic Violence, articulates one key example derived from these studies:
The tragedy of this case, and so many others like it, is that these boys appear to have had few legitimate ways of expressing their sense of pain, confusion and rage, other than to re-enact the violence to which they had been exposed. The moving description of the younger child bursting into tears upon hearing in plain language the level of sadistic abuse and threats to which his mother had been subjected, indicates that he has repressed his sense of horror and despair. It is as though he had no words to describe it, and simply, rather desperately, expressed it through violent action himself. (Emphasis added.)
This speaks to a dearth of metaphor, which is not just contained within the pages of good books but is an essential element of language. It is the ability to assign concrete descriptors to abstract objects, to describe (in the above example) what is right and wrong, the ability to construct signs. In order for these signs to be applied productively they must be, as aforementioned, multitudinous. This is because violence is itself a sort of sign, but it is the only sign at the disposal of these two boys. In order to examine the object of their grief they must be able to imagine it in a number of contrasting ways, it must be ‘partly concealed’, such that a new idea emerges that may affect a change in their thinking and behaviour.
To reiterate the application of this notion in literature -and a less grave subject matter- this metaphorical multitude is also a necessary requirement of adequate prose. This can be illustrated quite simply. Say an author wishes to describe the straight, triangular nose of a given man, what is sometimes called a Greek nose. She may fabulate in her text that the nose is like ‘the sail of a ship’. Here, we understand only by reference to the extratextual diagnosis of the Greek nose that she must be referring to a jib or lateen sail, but this is not afforded to the reader, who may only rely upon the contents of the book in interpreting the chosen sign. The reader may presuppose that the author intends the flat, square rigging of a frigate or the voluminous, rotund camber sail of a skiff, and so misunderstand whatever set of ideas she intends by the invocation of that particular nasal construction. But suppose our author double-barrels this metaphor and suggests that the nose is like ‘the sail of a ship or the peak of the Matterhorn’, then the Venn diagram of the two signs overlaps in such a way as to exclude alternative interpretations than that which is intended, for the Matterhorn is quite pointed, and so the sail must be as well, and likewise the man’s nose.
If this example seems fatuous, then the reader may consider Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, an enigmatic -perhaps bewildering- book in which the eponymous Tristram goes on such asides as to never share the story that the title implies, that of his own life. Among these asides, there are no less than 45 pages dedicated to the philosophical prevarications of Tristram’s father on the subject of the nose, which despite his keenest objections within the text become a metaphor for virility, piety, fanciness, intelligence, and a variety of other ideas, and then virility again. This section of the book crystallised the nose as a symbol, a manner of exploring themes close to the face in a manner unencumbered by the romantic notions associated with the mouth and eyes. This was later intuited by Nikolai Gogol in his short story The Nose, wherein the eponymous appendage of a Major disembodies and socially transcends its owner in late Imperial Russian society, expositing on the fragility of class and identity. Later still, Nabokov uses this idea in a way with which the reader may be familiar, a murderer unable to realise the full measure of his scheme on account of those affairs taking place beneath his own fleshy protuberance, in the novel Despair.
This speaks to the virality of metaphor, how a signifier can foist itself upon a number of signified objects, can infect creative works across a period of time. But also its limitations, insofar as these symbols are acculturated, segregated by the context in which they are initially imagined. A virus cannot extract free energy from nutrients until it infects a host cell. These three examples are all at least partly satirical, partly comic, and though all three authors can and do summon great stores of emotion even within the aforementioned tales, these emotive passages are peripheral to the precise terms on which their nasal metaphors are afforded.
Now it would be tempting to reduce metaphor to these somewhat anthropological terms, to say they are merely the circumstantial expression of ideas that may be adequately described in a number of ways. For instance, it would be possible to say, in a crude and unsatisfying way, that all -Western- symbology must derive at least in part from the Crucifixion, that this is the first viral metaphor: Christ imparting, infecting his followers with absolution through his symbol, his wound. This would be the first sign. And this would make some sense, as most -Western- literature prior to a certain point is in direct dialogue with the Bible, and all literature after that same point is in dialogue with that preceding period. Gogol and Nabokov were novelists, but Sterne was a preacher. One could contrast Sinitic four-character idioms such as the Chinese Chengyu 成语, which tend to be fixed and didactic in their form, to reinforce the notion that metaphors, signs, are merely dependent sociological artefacts.
But there must be something irreducible in the sign. For one, and to quickly refute the abovementioned proposition, the historical Nazarene rabbi would have had to implicitly understand the power that the metaphor of his crucifixion would have over and above the actuality of the event itself to eventuate it (and a close reading the Gospel will demonstrate that it was hardly an accident that he ended up on a cross). It is not the execution that matters, but what it represents. Here we approach the object of this study, which is that metaphor is a necessary feature of how a given subject processes the world as it is encountered, as they suffer for it. It is almost like a sense, an interpretive mechanism, by which the precarity of the natural world might be rationalised and understood. It is in this way that, as Agamben proposes, that the signifier consumes the signified, that the metaphor destroys the object, and this is what Sontag does -albeit unconsciously- in the writing of Illness as Metaphor.
3. Ensemble – Demoralising Disease
The book is not autobiographical, there is an absence of the “I” in Illness as Metaphor as there is here, in this essay. This is a sensible approach when prosecuting any argument, as any subjective grounding for a positive (that is, constructive) case can be readily dismissed as dependent upon circumstances unique to that author, that interlocutor. This is why empiricism is so highly regarded in the domain of rhetoric. Even where additional empirical data is provided to substantiate an initially subjective argument, it can be attacked on the basis of ‘reading causation’ into the data, of drawing conclusions. Sontag is correct in her approach, structurally, to elide this possibility. However, there is another face to this coin. When one prosecutes a positive case without acknowledgement of circumstances that may be relevant to its origination, this can undermine the authority of the case through omission. It is a fine line to tread between the two. Keep this in mind.
In the second half of the book, over the course of a few pages and footnotes, Sontag indicates that at time of writing psychotherapy was often included in a given cancer patient’s treatment plan. She views this critically, and of this we are in agreement, as bordering at best on pseudoscience. The view afforded is that there is a ‘type’ predisposed to cancer, thought to be self-piteous, depressed, emotionally deprived, and hopeless, among other things, and that a cure to the illness can only be affected via a thorough reorientation of the patient’s purportedly negative thinking. This is an insane proposition, sitting in the same category of cancer treatments as aromatherapy and hypnosis. This psychotherapy was invariably psychoanalytical in character, deriving from Freud, and this was and is rich in metaphor. That aside, Sontag also speaks to the military vocabulary associated with chemotherapy, that cancer is an ‘invader’ or ‘infiltrator’ that must be ‘bombarded’ or -indeed- ‘excised’ using radiological and chemical means. Metaphors abound.
In 1975, three years before the publication of Illness as Metaphor, Sontag underwent extensive and invasive treatment for breast cancer. Stated elsewhere, this was a traumatic period for her. A woman well acquainted with literature, with the precarity of language, she would have been attuned to every synecdoche, parallelism, and allegory spoken by her doctors -and possibly by her psychotherapists- and this would have been intolerable to a scholar so familiar with their limitations, and almost certainly impinged upon the writing of her famous book. We should not begrudge her this reaction and it is not right to say that Illness as Metaphor is flawed in its origination, that such a tract must derive from a ‘disinterested source’, but in fact quite the opposite.
We have examined how metaphor operates, what it achieves, and why it is important. In order that some object may be adequately abstracted and evaluated, we must have a plethora of images by which to illuminate it. In doing so, the object becomes concealed, consumed, and destroyed by these images, and gives way to something new. The ultimate proposition of this essay is that Illness as Metaphor is itself a sort of metaphor, a sign, a kind of petri dish containing Sontag’s myriad experiences receiving treatment for a persistent cancer swallowed by the popular metaphors ascribed to it, the examination of which allowed her to critically evaluate and ultimately reconcile with the former. When she was better, she wrote that she was ‘gleaming with survivorship’, that she had encountered ‘the sex appeal of death’. These too are metaphors.
Sontag encountered cancer thrice over, in different forms, the last of which took her away. One has to think, to hope, she was better prepared then. In her final days, she would sometimes quote Samuel Johnson:
Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
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*This is the trouble with phrasing an essay in the third person and then relying upon anecdotal evidence. Obviously, I am speaking, here, to personal experience in the community in which I was raised.