PETER BROOKS
441
In this perspective, TB in nineteenth-century literature, from the
sentimental moralities of
La Dame aux CameLias
to the introspective
debates of
The Magic Mountain,
appears as one strategy in the
recuperation of death to human meaning, making death the signifi–
cant, revelatory, achieved endpoint of the individual's life: that final
moment which casts retrospective illumination on the whole of a life.
TB was in the nineteenth century a particularly apt representation of
what the signifying death should be since, as Miss Sontag points out, it
was a death that preserved and even heightened consciousness at the
end, while the earthly self was, as the metaphor had it, consumed. It
was an illness leading inexorably to death (at least in literature), and
accompanying the movement toward death with an increasing lucidity
about the meaning of the self and its individual destiny. To paraphrase
a remark of Sartre's, such characters became their own obituaries. The
deathbed scene has great importance in the nineteenth-century novel
precisely because it is a privileged moment in the clarification of
meaning, a moment where the sense of a life is passed on to the
witnesses of the death, as to the reader. Death very often takes the form
here, not so
mu~
of a labelled and documented TB as of a general
consumption, the eating away of flesh by spirit, the consumption of
matter by meaning, of life, finally, by literature. The literary death by
consumption is ultimately perhaps an image of the processes of
writing and reading: the transformation of life into meaning.
Hence while Miss Sontag undoubtedly is right that literature in
the Romantic tradition glamorizes and moralizes what was surely a
beastly and degrading illness, we should at least recognize the motive
and intent of such literary presentations of TB and acknowledge that
they had a certain logic, perhaps necessity, in the long history of man's
attempts to come to terms with death through making it a significant
statement about life. The death of the individual by TB-that is, of a
person chosen by a special fatality to undergo death in the midst of
life-o££ered at a certain moment in the history of ideologies and
mentalities, in a world where traditional Christian consolation in
"meditation on the happy end" no longer possessed the force of
conviction but where death still had
to
be confronted with the fragmen–
tary ruins of Christian humanism, a choice literary
topos
by which to
speak of death, of life, and of the very project of literature itself.
When we move from TB
to
cancer, from the Romantic tradition to
postmodern culture, it is striking and ominous that we appear to have
left the realm of literature. As Miss Sontag notes, "Cancer is a rare and
still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to
aestheticize the disease." Cancer, an unseen disease within the opaque
