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PARTISAN REVIEW
implications we can't control, which are loosely used and come to be
taken as literal. What is needed is not elimination of the metaphor, but
the constant showing up of metaphor for what it is, through counter–
metaphor, through the rhetoric of exposure, which Miss Sontag so
effectively manages.
Illness as Metaphor
is wholly successful as polemic and as provo–
cation to the rethinking of cultural metaphors. Without wishing it
otherwise, I cannot help but feel that Miss Sontag could tell us much
more about the subject, that she is in a position to undertake, some–
what in the manner of Michel Foucault, a more sustained "archeol–
ogy" of the idea of illness in our culture. In particular, one would like
to hear her at greater length on the perception that madness has
become the modern glamor disease: what was originally a brilliant
metaphor for the decentering of perception (in Rirnbaud, for instance,)
has degenerated into an irresponsible literalness, so that one can find
serious writers proclaiming that the discourse of schizophrenia is the
only authentic language of our time. Susan Sontag sometimes deni–
grates the essay, suggesting that her real creative work lies in her novels
and films . But the creative essay in the critical history of cultural ideas,
a form more honored in the European tradition than in ours, is
something we need, at present, even more than good novels and films.
Illness as Metaphor
is so richly suggestive, in its brief compass, that I
wish Miss Sontag would return at greater length to the essay, to that
elucidation of the modern cultural unconscious which she performs so
well.
