Illness As Metaphor

“In Stendhal's Armance (1827), the hero's mother refuses to say ‘tuberculosis,’ for fear that pronouncing the word will hasten the course of her son's malady.”

By citing this example from the writer Stendhal, Sontag accomplishes three things in short order: First, she unveils her methodology, which involves looking to art and literature for examples of human behavior; secondly, by going as far back as 1827 for examples, she establishes this problem across the span of centuries; and finally, and most importantly, she expresses that even uttering the name of disease has a longstanding association with harmfulness.

“Of course, many tuberculars died in terrible pain, and some people die of cancer feeling little or no pain to the end; the poor and the rich both get TB and cancer; and not everyone who has TB coughs. But the mythology persists.”

The social understanding of a disease, its mythology, proceeds and succeeds any singular experience or outlying data, which is to say, even if cancer is not always painful or if TB does not always include a cough, this knowledge will have no effect on changing the terms on which each disease is understood or discussed.

“Cancer is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to aestheticize the disease.”

Tuberculosis, with its believed increases in sexual drive and appetite, has stoked a number of authors, like Henry David Thoreau, to glamorize it, but cancer’s symptoms (denigration of the body, emaciation, slow death) have made it unfathomable to give it poetic terms.