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PARTISAN REVIEW
The attention to and romanticizing of the TB victim must in a
larger sense have corresponded to a desire and a need to recuperate the
disease and its effects to a system of human meanings, to make it
signify in human terms. Miss Sontag points out that for the Ancients,
disease was often an instrument of divine wrath, a judgment meted out
to the community. (The same could be said of later visitations of the
plague.) The Romantic era, which was busy making the individual ego
the center of the universe-since traditional transcendent Sacred terms
of meaning had lost their coherence and assent-needed a modern,
individual fatality: a disease which selected the individual, and con–
ferred on him a special destiny. Miss Sontag writes:
It
is with TB that the idea of individual illness was articulated, along
with the idea that people are made more conscious as they confront
their deaths, and in the images that collected around the disease one
can see emerging a modern idea of individuality that has taken in the
twentieth century a more aggressive, if no less narcissistic, form.
This is absolutely right, but when Miss Sontag goes on to argue that
the notion of the "interesting" (illness makes the individual stand out
as "interesting") is "nihilistic and sentimental," she lets her ethical
sensibility get in the way of her job as cultural critic.
For the point is surely, as the above quotation suggests, that the
nineteenth-century use of TB belongs to a continuing need to recuper–
ate the fact of death to our sense-making systems. Mortal disease
becomes an important literary and cultural
tapas
because it represents
a dramatized approach to death, a threshold to the final unknown, and
becomes exemplary as the inhabitation of future death within life. It
becomes the vehicle by means of which a culture seeks an articulation
of the meaning of life through that death-exemplary, summary,
articulate-which defines the meaning of life. Walter Benjamin argued
in one of his essays ("The Storyteller," in
Illuminations)
that we feel
that the "meaning of life" is defined by death, by the final endstop that
gives the whole statement of a life its closure, and hence its intelligibil–
ity. According to Benjamin, what we seek in fictions is knowledge of
death: that knowledge which is denied to us in terms of our own lives.
The great storyteller is he who can make us feel that a certain death, the
right death, lies in wait for his fictional characters. In that typically
modern form, the novel, the genre of man's transcendental homeless–
ness (Benjamin here is citing Lukacs), death becomes the moment of
illumination and communication, the candle at whose flame "we
warm our shivering lives." Death is to Benjamin "the sanction of
everything the storyteller has to tell."
