Illness as Metaphor

In Illness as Metaphor, it’s author, Susan Sontag, argues that we cannot think or interpret something without the use of metaphors and seeing that “something is or like something-it-is-not is a mental operation as old as philosophy and poetry”. (93) He acknowledges that some metaphors are very useful in helping others understand how something works or acts, however, in this reading he persuades us to abstain or retire the many metaphors regarding health and the body.

He begins his article with examples of other metaphors that we use in our daily life and understanding. He talks of how we contrast social moments with being “left” or “right” and how this particular metaphor can be traced all the way back to the seating arrangements during the French Revolution when the republicans sat to the presiding officer’s left and the monarchists sat to the right. He argues that the idea of using terms such as “left”, “right”, “up”, and “down” work well when describing social conflict but it was Plato and Aristotle’s metaphor of government being like a body, “which is ruled by a head” (94), that made authoritarian governments seem inevitable and even justified repression. Sontag also includes the history of Western medicine when “metaphors for the unity of the body were adapted by the arts” (95); these included, harmonic and rhythmic living. It was these metaphors and their use that was the first to be argued against. Sontag references Lucretius, “who argued that it could not do justice to the fact that the body consists of essential and unessential organs” (95). Lucretius believed that not all the organs are equally important and to “let the musicians keep that [harmony] term” (96).

After metaphors regarding the arts and the body came to be, architecture and the idea of the body being “like a fortress”, “like a factory”, or like “a temple”, a term coined to Saint Paul, was now very popular. Each of these metaphors has a specific purpose and idea associated with it, but in the reading, Sontag focuses very heavily of the “body like fortress” metaphor. She notes that itself is a metaphor for the morality and human frailty. She quotes John Donne in his 1627 article Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, during which he describes illness as an enemy that “lays siege to the body-fortress” (96), a metaphor that Sontag would argue against the use of. However, it wasn’t until the “invader was seen not as the illness but as the microorganism that causes the illness…did the military metaphors took on new credibility and precision” (97). Since then, Sontag argues, has disease been seen as an alien invasion and the body is perceived to put up it’s own natural “military defenses” with medicine being “aggressive” warfare.

Sontag argues against this prominent use by saying how war-making is “one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view ‘realistically… In all-out war expenditure is all-out” and no sacrifice is excessive (99). Military metaphors contribute to the “stigmatizing of certain illnesses” and those who are ill (99). It was this stigmatization against Sontag herself, when she was diagnosed with cancer that led her to write Illness as Metaphor. What enraged her the most was how the sheer reputation of the disease added to the suffering of those who have it. She observed how the patients showed disgust at their disease “and a kind of shame” toward themselves for having it (100). Cancer is regarded as a disease in which the “physically defeated” and the “repressed” are prone and it was very similar to tuberculosis throughout the nineteenth century before a cure was found. It was the differences between myth and fact regarding tuberculosis that gave Sontag the main strategy of her book regarding the “mystifications surrounding cancer” (101). She says how she wanted to tell a useful story different from those that came before hers. The purpose, she wanted, was to calm the imagination and to work away from the ideas that the medical metaphors had implanted.

She concludes that, in a way, metaphors kill. They “make people irrationally fearful of effective medical measures such as chemotherapy, and foster credence in thoroughly useless remedies such as diets and psychotherapy” (102). She urges terrified people who are ill to consult doctors or change them to those who would give proper or better care, and to regard cancer as if it was just another disease; not a curse, punishment, without meaning, and certainly not a death sentence. Cancer is now seen, as tuberculosis once was, the illness that society had identified with evil. The society’s disease gives blame to its victims but its hard to have more than one at a time.

Works Cited

Sontag, Susan. “Regarding Illness as Metaphor.” AIDS and its Metaphors. New York: Picador, 1988. Print. 92-104