AIDS and Its Metaphors. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 24, 1989 by Joseph Sobran

AIDS AND ITS METAPHORS is Susan Sontag's protest against ways of talking about AIDS that result in "the excommunicating and stigmatizing of the ill" and that, ultimately, "kill."

"It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades," she writes. Certain diseases have traditionally been discussed in metaphors of invasion, warfare, punishment, contamination, and mutation, so that their natural pain is compounded with the social shame of what Erving Goffman called "spoiled identity." Until recently, cancer was such a disease. Now we treat it more matter-of-factly, and obituaries call it by its name, dropping the old euphemism "a long illness." But not so long ago, the shame attending cancer was such that many people were afraid to have themselves examined for it, until it was too late. Now AIDS produces the same dread.

Miss Sontag tends to be dazzling on a first reading, but slightly silly on a second. What seemed like an insight the first time around often sounds like overreaching on re-examination.

She has read a lot of medical history, and one of the virtues of this little book is that it's informative. One learns about the forgotten horrors of cholera and tuberculosis. And there is real perception in her observation that we have always been especially horrified by diseases that disfigure the face in the process of killing.

She is also on target in noting the human habit of ascribing new diseases to foreign influences. Syphilis wa"the 'French pox' to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the.Chinese disease to the Japanese." From which, however, Miss Sontag proceeds rather dubiously to this: "There is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness. It lies perhaps in the very concept of wrong, which is archaically identical with the non-us, the alien." She doesn't explain such assertions; she leaves them dangling, content that they have served the purpose of illustrating her moral theme, which is that people tend to hate and fear the alien.

This deplorable tendency, it would seem, is especially typical of people of white European stock. Reading over the relevant European literature, she concludes that "Europe is assumed to be by rights free of disease." But "Europeans have been astoundingly callous about the far greater extent to which they-as invaders, as colonists -have introduced their lethal diseases to the exotic, 'primitive' world: think of the ravages of smallpox, influenza, and cholera on the aboriginal populations of the Americas and Australia." That adverb, "astoundingly," is suspect. Does our record fall below that of other conquering peoples? Is self-preoccupation so unnatural in this world? Speaking of disease metaphors, this is the same Susan Sontag who once called the white race "the cancer of history."

It is true that military metaphors for disease may be useful in unifying a population to take measures to contain it. It is not so clear that this is a bad thing, though of course it may result in tyranny. Miss Sontag has an irritating way of taking for granted that we will go to the worst extreme. She also writes "fears" and "phobias" were obviously baseless. This is especially true of "homophobia," a term she doesn't bother defining. She simply assumes that revulsion against homosexuality and its characteristic practices is wicked. Conservatives who see in AIDS a sort of retribution for those practices-which can be, at least, recklessly unsanitary-are a "predictable . . . sector of bigots," mighty loose language to come from a careful analyst of rhetoric. She can excommunicate and stigmatize when she wants to.

Miss Sontag even objects to the standard distinction between "risk groups" and "the general population," which she regards as invidious to members of the former. You eventually wonder how, in practice, she would allow the distinction to be made. These are clinical terms, not Falwell fulminations. They've been advanced and adopted by people who are taking great care not to stigmatize even the hygienically heedless. "But 'the general population' may be as much a code phrase for whites as it is for heterosexuals."

As you may be gathering, Miss Sontag's discontent with the way people talk knows no bounds. She offers no useful substitutes for our habitual language, and the line between the metaphorical and the literal, after all, isn't necessarily clear. When we speak of the body's "defenses," are we really using a military metaphor? Is it even a metaphor at all?

As you also may be gathering, Miss Sontag counts heavily on her readers to share her cultural and political attitudes, as a way of supplying the ellipses in her argument, which at times gets phantasmagoric. If you don't accept her tacit premises, you are, spiritually speaking, from the wrong side of the Hudson.

There's a certain smugness in her style of thought. She writes as if to expose the implication of a phrase were ipso facto to discredit it. She's keenly aware of reactionary taboos that are pretty much defunct anyway, but she doesn't notice the active progressive taboos she herself invokessuch as the taboo against disapproving of sodomy (incorporated in the word "homophobia"). She seems to suppose that her own pet rhetoric is immune from debunking analysis.