PETER
BROOKS
443
Freud (and before him in Schopenhauer): hysteric illness is quite
precisely metaphor to Freud, the symbolic representation of the uncon–
scious repressed. Freud indeed may represent a last stage in the
nineteenth-century enterprise of trying to reconquer for meaning areas
of human experience threatened with a loss of meaning in the wake of
the collapse of traditional signifying systems, but in a mode of thought
that moves beyond traditional scientific
not~ons
of causality toward a
complex semiotic premise, in its attention to a rhetoric of representa–
tion, which is most fully elaborated in the analysis of the dream work.
Freud himself carefully avoids the facile characterological approach.
And when Miss Sontag writes, "The promise of a temporary triumph
over death is implicit in much of the psychological thinking that starts
from Freud and lung," one must underline the " starts from, " since
Freud himself can hardly
be
accused of the denial of death, nor held
responsible for the dumb optimism that so much psychotherapy has
become. Freud's views remained imbued with the inheritance of tragic
humanism, and some of the most remarkable of the metapsychological
essays-I think in particular of
Mourning and Melancholia
and
Beyond the Pleasure Principle-represent
heroic attempts to rethink
the significance of the incorporation of death with life.
The word "cancer" itself, we should note, is not the scientific label
or description of a disease, but the description of the visible effects of
the disease, the tumor, likened to the legs of a crab (the Greek
karkinos
and the Latin
cancer,
both meaning crab). Miss Sontag cites this
etymology, but refers to it as the "literal" definition of the disease,
whereas it is clear that the literal, as so often turns out to
be
the case, is
radically figural. The radical metaphoricity of the term perhaps makes
it inevitable that it will be used
as
metaphor, in a doubly metaphoric
way, as a kind of equation with two unknowns.
In
traditional rhetori–
cal terms, I suppose that cancer might be typed as a
catachresis:
the
name used where there is no literal, no "proper" name for a thing, as in
(the traditional example) the "leg" of a chair. Indeed, some contempo–
rary theoreticians of rhetoric would have it that the peculiarity of
literary language is that it constitutes an act of discovery that all
language is radically metaphorical, always in a state of displacement
from literal denomination of its referents. When Miss Sontag argues
that it is not morally permissible to use cancer as metaphor, we may
find her ethically noble but utopian, caught in a Platonic dream of a
language which would give direct accesss to realities rather than the
displaced symbols of realities. No doubt she is not so naive as to mean
this literally: really she wants us to get rid of metaphors whose
