How to Read Literature Like a Professor

by Thomas C. Foster

  24 – . . . And Rarely Just Illness

  p. 213 AT THE BEGINNING of James Joyce’s wonderful story “The Sisters” (1914), the unnamed young narrator mentions that his old friend and mentor, a priest, is dying. There is “no hope” for him this time, we’re told. Already your reader’s radar should be on full alert. A priest with no hope? Not hard to recognize in such a statement a host of possibilities for interpretive play, and indeed those possibilities are realized throughout the story. What’s of immediate interest here, though, is how the priest got that way. He’s had a stroke, not his first, and it has left him paralyzed. “Paralysis” is a word that fascinates the young boy, quite apart from its meaning; he yokes it with “simony” and “gnomon” in a triad of words to obsess over. For us, however, it’s the notion of paralysis—and stroke—that intrigues.

  p. 214 Anyone who has ever had to watch a loved one deteriorate after a massive stroke will no doubt look askance at the very idea of such frustration and misery being in some way intriguing, fascinating, or picturesque, and quite rightly. But as we’ve seen time and again, what we feel in real life and what we feel in our reading lives can be quite different. In this instance, our interest is not in the deterioration of the old priest but in what his condition is telling us about him, about the boy, about the story at large, and about Joyce’s collection, Dubliners, in which it is the first piece. The boy has witnessed James, the priest, begin the slow decline after earlier strokes (his clothing covered with bits of tobacco and ash, his movement awkward, his speech affected). But it’s the paralysis after the recent, massive stroke that commands the boy’s attention. Within the story, the paralysis shows up in several ways, not least of them a sort of madness that set in at the time the priest was relieved of his parish over some incident involving an acolyte. All references to the event are sidelong and somewhat secretive, with shame a distinct component of James’s and his sisters’ responses. Whether the matter involved sexual impropriety or something to do with the litany we never learn, only that James was found in the confessional laughing softly and talking to himself. That he spent his last years a virtual recluse in a back room of his sisters’ house indicates the degree to which emotional or mental paralysis had already set in before his stroke.

  From this little story the condition of paralysis grows into one of Joyce’s great themes: Dublin is a city in which the inhabitants are paralyzed by the strictures laid upon them by church, state, and convention. We see it throughout Dubliners—a girl who cannot let go of the railing to board a ship with her lover; men who know the right thing to do but fail because their bad habits limit their ability to act in their own best interest; a man confined to bed after a drunken fall in p. 215 a public-house rest room; political activists who fail to act after the death of their great leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, some ten years earlier. It shows up again and again in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Ulysses and even in Finnegans Wake (1939). Of course, most maladies in most short stories, or even novels, are not quite so productive of meaning. For Joyce, however, paralysis—physical, moral, social, spiritual, intellectual, political—informs his whole career.

  Until the twentieth century, disease was mysterious. Folks began to comprehend the germ theory of disease in the nineteenth century, of course, after Louis Pasteur, but until they could do something about it, until the age of inoculation, illness remained frightening and mysterious. People sickened and died, often with no discernible preamble. You went out in the rain, three days later you had pneumonia; ergo, rain and chills cause pneumonia. That still occurs, of course. If you’re like me, you were told over and over again as a child to button your coat or put on a hat lest you catch your death of cold. We’ve never really accepted microbes into our lives. Even knowing how disease is transmitted, we remain largely superstitious. And since illness is so much a part of life, so too is it a part of literature.

  There are certain principles governing the use of disease in works of literature:

  1) Not all diseases are created equal. Prior to modern sanitation and enclosed water systems in the twentieth century, cholera was nearly as common as, much more aggressive than, and more devastating than tuberculosis (which was generally called consumption). Yet cholera doesn’t come close to TB in its frequency of literary occurrence. Why? Image mostly. Cholera has a p. 216 bad reputation, and there’s almost nothing the best public relations firm in the world could do to improve it. It’s ugly, horrible. Death by cholera is unsightly, painful, smelly, and violent. In that same period of the late nineteenth century, syphilis and gonorrhea reached near-epidemic proportions, yet except for Henrik Ibsen and some of the later naturalists, venereal diseases were hardly on the literary map. Syphilis, of course, was prima facie evidence of sex beyond the bounds of marriage, of moral corruption (you could only get it, supposedly, by visiting prostitutes), and therefore taboo. In its tertiary stages, of course, it also produced unpleasant results, including loss of control of one’s limbs (the sudden, spastic motions Kurt Vonnegut writes of in his 1973 Breakfast of Champions) and madness. The only treatment known to the Victorians employed mercury, which turned the gums and saliva black and carried its own hazards. So these two, despite their widespread occurrence, were never A-list diseases.

  Well, then, what makes a prime literary disease?

  2) It should be picturesque. What, you don’t think illness is picturesque? Consider consumption. Of course it’s awful when a person has a coughing fit that sounds like he’s trying to bring up a whole lung, but the sufferer of tuberculosis often acquires a sort of bizarre beauty. The skin becomes almost translucent, the eye sockets dark, so that the sufferer takes on the appearance of a martyr in medieval paintings.

  p. 217 3) It should be mysterious in origin. Again, consumption was a clear winner, at least with the Victorians. The awful disease sometimes swept through whole families, as it would when one member nursed a dying parent or sibling or child, coming into daily contact with contaminated droplets, phlegm, blood for an extended period. The mode of transmission, however, remained murky for most people in that century. Certainly John Keats had no idea that caring for his brother Tom was sealing his own doom, any more than the Brontës knew what hit them. That love and tenderness should be rewarded with a lengthy, fatal illness was beyond ironic. By the middle of the nineteenth century, science discovered that cholera and bad water went together, so it had no mystery points. As for syphilis, well, its origins were entirely too clear.

  4) It should have strong symbolic or metaphorical possibilities. If there’s a metaphor connected with smallpox, I don’t want to know about it. Smallpox was hideous in both the way it presented and the disfigurement it left without really offering any constructive symbolic possibilities. Tuberculosis, on the other hand, was a wasting disease, both in terms of the individual wasting away, growing thinner and thinner, and in terms of the waste of lives that were often barely under way.

  Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, TB joined cancer in dominating the literary imagination regarding illness. Here’s a partial list: Ralph Touchett in Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and Milly Theale in p. 218 his later The Wings of the Dove (1902), Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Paul Dombey in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848), Mimi in Puccini’s opera La Bohème (1896), Hans Castorp and his fellow patients at the sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1924), Michael Furey in Joyce’s “The Dead,” Eugene Gant’s father in Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River (1935), and Rupert Birkin in Lawrence’s Women in Love. In fact, Lawrence encodes his illness into the physiognomy, personality, and general health of his various alter egos. Not every one of these was labeled “tubercular.” Some were “delicate,” “fragile,” “sensitive,” “wasting away”; others were said to “have a lung” or “suffer from lung disease” or were merely identified as having a persistent cough or periods of low energy. A mere symptom or two would suffice for the co
ntemporary audience, to whom the symptoms were all too familiar. So many characters contracted tuberculosis in part because so many writers either suffered from it themselves or watched friends, colleagues, and loved ones deteriorate in its grasp. In addition to Keats and the Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson, Katherine Mansfield, Lawrence, Frédéric Chopin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Franz Kafka, and Percy Bysshe Shelley form a fair beginning toward a Who’s Who of artistic consumptives. In her study Illness as Metaphor (1977), Susan Sontag brilliantly discusses the reasons for the disease’s popularity as a subject and the metaphorical uses to which it was put. For now, we’re less interested in all the implications she identifies, and more interested in recognizing that when a writer employs TB directly or indirectly, he’s making a statement about the victim of the disease. His choice, while no doubt carrying a strong element of verisimilitude, also very likely houses symbolic or metaphorical intentions.

  This fourth consideration—the metaphorical possibilities a disease offers—generally overrides all others: a sufficiently p. 219 compelling metaphor can induce an author to bring an otherwise objectionable illness into a work. A good example would be plague. As an instance of individual suffering, bubonic plague is no bonus, but in terms of widespread, societal devastation, it’s a champion. In two works written a mere twenty-five hundred years apart, plague successfully takes center stage. In Oedipus Rex Sophocles has Thebes hit by various plagues—withered crops, stillborn children, the works—but here as in general use, plague carries with it the implication of bubonic. It comes to mean what we think of as plague, in fact, because it can lay waste to whole cities in short order, because it sweeps through populations as a visitation of divine wrath. And of course divine wrath is the order of the day at the beginning of Sophocles’ play. Two and a half millennia later, Albert Camus not only uses plague, he calls his novel The Plague (1947). Again, he is not interested so much in the individual sufferer as he is in the communal aspect and the philosophical possibilities. In examining how a person confronts the wholesale devastation wrought by disease, Camus can set his existentialist philosophy into motion in a fictional setting: the isolation and uncertainty caused by the disease, the absurdly random nature of infection, the despair felt by a doctor in the face of an unstoppable epidemic, the desire to act even while recognizing the pointlessness of action. Now neither Camus’s nor Sophocles’ use is particularly subtle or hard to get, but in their overt way they teach us how other writers may use illness when it is less central.

  When Henry James has had enough of Daisy Miller and decides to kill her off, he gives her Roman fever or what we would now call malaria. If you read that beautiful little novella and neither of these names suggests anything to you, you really need to pay more attention. Malaria works great, metaphorically: it translates as “bad air.” Daisy has suffered from figurative bad air—malicious gossip and hostile public p. 220 opinion—throughout her stay in Rome. As the name implies, it was formerly thought that the illness was contracted from harmful vapors in hot, moist night air; no one suspected that the problem might lie with those darned mosquitoes that were biting them on those hot, moist nights. So the notion of poisonous vapors would work nicely. Still, the older name used by James, Roman fever, is even better. Daisy does indeed suffer from Roman fever, from the overheated state that makes her frantic to join the elite (“We’re dying to be exclusive,” she says early on) while at the same time causing the disapproval of the Europeanized Americans who reside permanently in Rome at every turn. When she makes her fatal midnight trip to the Colosseum and she sees the object of, if not her affections, then at least her interests, Winterbourne, he ignores her, prompting her to say, “He cuts me dead.” And the next thing we know, she is dead. Does the manner of her death matter? Of course. Roman fever perfectly captures what happens to Daisy, this fresh young thing from the wilds of Schenectady who is destroyed by the clash between her own vitality and the rotten atmosphere of this oldest of Old World cities. James is a literary realist, hardly the most flamboyantly symbolic of writers, but when he can kill off a character in a highly lifelike way while employing an apt metaphor for her demise, he doesn’t hesitate.

  Another great nineteenth-century realist who sees the figurative value of illness is Henrik Ibsen. In his breakthrough play A Doll’s House (1879), he includes a neighbor to the Helmer family, Dr. Rank, who is dying of tuberculosis of the spine. Dr. Rank’s illness is uncommon only in terms of its location in the body; tuberculosis can settle in any part of the body, although the respiratory system is the one we always think of. Here’s the interesting part: Rank says he inherited the disease from his father’s dissolute living. Aha! Now instead of being a mere ailp. 221ment, his condition becomes an indictment of parental misdeeds (a strong thematic statement in its own right) and, as we latter-day cynics can recognize, a coded reference to an entirely different pair of letters. Not TB, but VD. As I suggested earlier, syphilis and its various brethren were off-limits for most of the nineteenth century, so any references needed to be in code, as here. How many people suffer from consumption because their parents led immoral lives? Some, certainly, but inherited syphilis is much more likely. In fact, emboldened by his experiment here, Ibsen returned to the notion several years later in Ghosts (1881), in which he has a young man losing his mind as the result of inherited tertiary syphilis. Intergenerational tensions, responsibilities, and misdeeds are some of Ibsen’s abiding themes, so it’s not surprising that such an ailment would resonate with him.

  Naturally, what gets encoded in a literary disease is largely up to the writer and the reader. When, in the course of Justine, the first novel of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, the narrator’s lover, Melissa, succumbs to tuberculosis, he means something very different from what Ibsen means. Melissa, the dancer/escort/prostitute is a victim of life. Poverty, neglect, abuse, exploitation have all combined to grind her down, and the grinding nature of her illness—and of Darley’s (the narrator’s) inability to save her or even to recognize his responsibilities to her—stands as the physical expression of the way life and men have quite literally used her up. Moreover, her own acceptance of the disease, of the inevitability of her mortality and suffering, mirrors her self-sacrificing nature: perhaps it is best for everyone else, Darley especially, if she dies. What’s best for her never seems to enter her mind. In the third novel of the series, Mountolive, Leila Hosnani contracts smallpox, which she takes as a sign of divine judgment against her vanity and her marital lapse. Durp. 222rell, however, sees it otherwise, as symptomatic of the ravages that time and living take on us all. In each case, of course, we’re free to draw our own conclusions.

  What about AIDS?

  Every age has its special disease. The Romantics and Victorians had consumption; we have AIDS. For a while in the middle of the twentieth century, it looked like polio would be the disease of the century. Everyone knew people who died, or wound up on crutches, or lived in iron lungs because of that terrible, and terrifying, disease. Although I was born the year Dr. Jonas Salk made his blessed discovery of a vaccine, I can remember parents during my youth who still wouldn’t let their children go into a public swimming pool. Even when conquered, polio had a powerful grip on the imaginations of my parents’ generation. For some reason, though, that imagination did not become literary; polio rarely shows up in novels of the period.

  Now AIDS, on the other hand, has been an epidemic that does occupy the writers of its time. Why? Let’s run the list. Picturesque? Certainly not, but it shares that terrible, dramatic wasting quality of consumption. Mysterious? It was when it showed up, and even now this virus that can mutate in infinite ways to thwart nearly any treatment eludes our efforts to corral it. Symbolic? Most definitely. AIDS is the mother lode of symbol and metaphor. Its tendency to lie dormant for so long, then make an appearance, its ability because of that dormant period to turn every victim into an unknowing carrier, its virtual one hundred percent mortality rates over the first decad
e or so of its history, all these things offer strong symbolic possibilities. The way it has visited itself disproportionately on young people, hit the gay community so hard, devastated so many people in the developing world, been a scourge in artistic circles—the tragedy and despair, but also the courage and resilience and p. 223 compassion (or their lack) have provided metaphor, theme, and symbol as well as plot and situation for our writers. Because of the demographic distribution of its infection history, AIDS adds another property to its literary usage: the political angle. Nearly everybody who wants to can find something in HIV/AIDS that somehow works into their political view. Social and religious conservatives almost immediately saw the element of divine retribution, while AIDS activists saw the slow response of government as evidence of official hostility to ethnic and sexual constituencies hardest hit by the disease. That’s a lot of freight for a disease which is really just about transmission, incubation, and duration—which is what all diseases have always been about.

  Given the highly charged nature of the public experience, we would expect to see AIDS show up in places occupied by other ailments in earlier times. Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (1998) is a reworking of Virginia Woolf’s modern classic, Mrs. Dalloway, in which a shell-shocked veteran of the Great War disintegrates and commits suicide. In the aftermath of that terrible war, shell shock was a hot-button medical item. Did it exist, were these men simply malingerers, were they predisposed to psychological unfitness, could they be cured, what had they seen that caused them but not others to succumb? With each modern war the term has changed, from shell shock to battle fatigue in World War II and Korea to post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam, and each time the illness had its believers and its detractors. In a bizarre twist, the gulf war syndrome, which seemed to be physiological in nature, was dismissed by authorities as simply a modern version of shell shock; these would be the same authorities, of course, who in that earlier age would have denied that shell shock existed. Cunningham clearly can’t use shell shock and is even too far out of the Vietnam era for PTSD to have much resonance. p. 224 Besides, he’s writing about the contemporary urban experience, as Woolf was doing earlier in the century, and part of that experience for him is the gay and lesbian community and part of that experience is HIV/AIDS. His suicide, therefore, is a patient with very advanced AIDS. Other than the illness that occasions them, the two deaths resemble each other greatly. We recognize in them a personal calamity that is particular to its time but that has the universality of great suffering and despair and courage, of a “victim” seeking to wrest control over his own life away from the condition that has controlled him. It’s a situation, Cunningham reminds us, that differs from age to age only in the specific details, not in the humanity those details reveal. That’s what happens when works get reenvisioned: we learn something about the age that produced the original as well as about our own.