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body, often attacking parts considered ignoble, does not lend itself to
the aesthetic. And Miss Sontag is surely right in suggesting that it is
madness (specifically, I think, schizophrenia) that has taken on some of
the glamor of TB for a certain tradition of modern writers. But if cancer
has not generally become a literary
topos,
it may have to do also with
some breakdown in the recuperative power of the human imagination,
and this may be less a factor of the nature of cancer than of a changed
conception of death. As Miss Sontag writes, " For those who live neither
with religious consolation about death nor with a sense of death (or of
anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate
affront, the thing that cannot be controlled.
It
can only be denied. " To
cite Benjamin once again, dying as a public act has been lost from the
culture, and with this the sense of any possible relation between death
and life.
In dealing with cancer, as with death itself, we are mainly reduced
to the writings of the "experts," either the medical profession itself, or
those professionals of associated therapies who treat the terminall y ill.
The business of dying, like undertaking at an earlier stage of the
culture, is becoming professionalized, and the literature of cancer is not
the work of poets and novelists but of thanatologists. I don 't mean to
sneer at the motives of the therapists of death, or to belittle the help that
they provide, but only to suggest that in the perspective of cultural
history they constitute another step in the desacralization and de–
signification of death. The story told by Philippe Aries in his recent
monumental history of human attitudes toward death,
L'Homme
devant la mort,
is one of a progressive loss of relation between the
living and the dead. We have reached the point in our culture where
there is precious little relation left between life and death, and the
consequences seem to be variously despair, denial or (since the human–
ist tradition tenaciously hangs on) a certain stoicism.
In a desacralized culture, it is perhaps inevitable that a prevalent
form of thinking about cancer should be the psychosomatic, the
argument, which Miss Sontag forcefully rejects, that cancer strikes at
certain "character types," that it is a symbolic exaction of payment for
repression, a vicious form of return of the repressed. Miss Sontag finds
her best spokesmm for this view in the Freudian fringe represented by
Wilhelm Reich and Georg Groddeck. Groddeck, for instance, describes
illness as "a symbol, a representation of something going on within, a
drama staged by the It ...." We may think of this as a final, perverse
version of the peculiarly modern attempt to recover illness and the
body for meaning symbolically. The source of such a view is indeed in
