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PARTISAN REVIEW
And even as I rage at her, I try to see that bare room through the
eyes of Michael's jailer, his wife. Do I condemn her inability to live with her
husband's bargains with God? Was locking Michael in that room her confes–
sion offailure? The idea is as soothing as it is obscene, as if Michael had to be
imprisoned and humiliated, left in the dirt and smell of his affliction, so that his
wife could see herself as something other than servant to his needs. Did she,
I wonder, share Michael's sense that Christians are repositories of suffering?
That their burden is the world's salvation?
Despite Susan Sontag's superb essay, writers will continue to use illness
as metaphor. Disease so easily springs out of control. And what better lan–
guage for condemnation, for evil, for receiving one's just and unjust reward
or punishment? Cancer, heart attack, AIDS, and diseases yet
to
be discov–
ered - a stream ofmetaphors,
all
promising retribution against hedonism and
excess. The body's unconscious revenge upon the depths of depravity of the
modem
body.
And since we are creatures of paradox, we will employ the metaphors
even while we continue to live in a culture that obligates man to be "healthy,"
a culture in which
all
disease can be withstood, conquered through the exer–
tion of the individual
will.
And perhaps it should be. To be "struck down" is a most human vic–
timization. Given the keys to Kafka's House, one approaches his prospective
tenancy there prepared to confront the question of what made one's resi–
dence possible. "The romantic idea that the disease expresses the character,"
Susan Sontag writes, "is invariably extended to assert that the character
causes the disease - because it has not expressed itself." Even for Kafka, the
voice of tuberculosis demanded that he reject disease and assert his longing
for health. How he envied the self-confident and "normal," those who had
neither the time nor the patience required by disease. To claim power is also
to
claim
health.
And the man who is "successful" at creating a life out of the aftereffects
of disease discovers that he must, sooner or later, fight against an inflated
notion of what it is he has achieved. When a mutual friend praised Franz
Rozenzweig's courage in living with the pain and suffering inflicted on
him
by
a long struggle with cancer, Freud, doomed to undergo the same long strug–
gle, is reported to have said, "What else can he do?" Freud understood that
the real question each of us must answer is no different from the question
"normal" men and women face : What are the terms with which one lives
with disease?
For those who have successfully "rehabilitated" themselves feel the
temptation to make disease self-referential. The man who competes in a
wheelchair marathon does not view his effort as a mockery of form but as a
way of turning stigma upon itself. Having "come through," having "overcome
his handicap," he invests what he has done with a morality of its own. "I
