- This book contains one of Susan Sontag’s most famous sentences.
I must begin by saying that I have not read Illness as Metaphor, the key text in Trisha Ready’s brilliant essay “How Listening to Music and Fighting with Susan Sontag Helped Me Cope with Chemo,” an essay you need to read right now. But I have read a lot of Sontag’s other books, not only because she was a great commentator of the theories of the French semiotician (a philosopher of language) Roland Barthes, but also because she also employed his mode of writing in her own words. Indeed, one of her greatest sentences, which is found at the very end of the essay “Against Interpretation,” is pure Barthes: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” What Barthes argued, and what made peak Sontag a very sensual writer, is that language and the body cannot be separated. The book in which he best expressed this fundamental unity is Pleasure of the Text. Barthes: “The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas…”
I bring this up because Trisha Ready’s main criticism of Sontag’s book on illness is that she “advocated for the elimination of any symbolic language around diseases…” Sontag, who like Ready underwent heavy rounds of chemotherapy for stage IV breast cancer, took this position because she believed that metaphors clouded thinking and led to misunderstandings. To avoid confusion, language needed to be direct and even clinical. Ready thinks this is not at all the way to go, that metaphors are not only useful but also cannot be separated from the body itself.
In my view, metaphors may be as essential for humans as are light, shelter, and food. The battle metaphor will remain in the public discourse until we actually DO decode and cure cancer, which, like terrorism, seems to grow cells in secret, change, and evade, and as with the war on terror, the rhetoric brings urgency and a sense of purpose to the work.
What Ready’s defense of metaphors shows is that one of the defining components of literary production must not be abandoned when health abandons the body. Meaning, the sick body needs metaphors as much as the one that is well, or the one that is walking down a street on a rainy day, or is dreaming, as mine did last night, of a dead person (namely my father, who, like my mother, died of cancer), or that is erotic. Ready not only defends the importance of literature for all somatic states, but the essay itself, written at a time she is fighting for her life, is literary from flesh to bone. With Ready we come to understand that we always need an art of illness.
