Susan Sontag: Illness as Metaphor

[kaberett]

There is a one-page introduction, and this is it:

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

I want to describe, not what it is really like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and live there, but the punitive or sentimental fantasies concocted about that situation: not real geography, but stereotypes of national character. My subject is not physical illness itself but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor. My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness--and the healthiest way of being ill--is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one's residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped. It is toward an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them, that I dedicate this enquiry.

I am feeling decidedly well-disposed towards the rest of it; I might not report back on overall impressions until my end-of-year books post, but I think there's enough value in these two paragraphs for them to be worth sharing before I get any further. (This is not to say I agree, necessarily; but thought-provoking? Yes.)

Comments

[jjhunter]

Susan Sontag is one of my favorite writers. Don't forget to check out her followup essay 'AIDS and its metaphors'.

[forthwritten]

My copy has never been the same since the rats chewed a perfect half circle in it.

I liked it very much; been a few years since I last read it though. I'd second AIDS and its metaphors as a companion/followup read.