SOURCE: Rollyson, Carl. “AIDS.” In Reading Susan Sontag: A Critical Introduction to Her Work, pp. 143-55. Chicago, Ill.: Ivan R. Dee, 2001.

[In the following essay, Rollyson examines Sontag's short story “The Way We Live Now” and her book-length essay AIDS and Its Metaphors, comparing and contrasting the two, their respective critical appraisals, and includes some commentary on each by Sontag herself.]

Stirred by the deaths of friends who had succumbed to a new, terrifying, and bewildering disease, Susan Sontag responded by writing two very different treatments of how AIDS attacked the health of individuals and society. Her story “The Way We Live Now” (1986) and book-length essay AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989) epitomize the way she has tried to bridge the gap between the dramatic and expository modes of her imagination. The story became an instant classic, reprinted at the beginning of The Best American Short Stories, 1987, dramatized in performances across the country, and widely discussed in books and articles surveying the literary treatments of AIDS. Why the story much more than her essay has won critical acclaim will be explored in the critical commentary section of this chapter.

“THE WAY WE LIVE NOW”

SYNOPSIS

The word “AIDS” is never used in the story, which is, like so much of Sontag's fiction, generic and allegorical, a moving away from the specifics of culture to the platonic universals or first principles she has pursued so persistently. What makes “The Way We Live Now” compelling, however, is her grounding in the human voice, in the twenty-six narrators (one for each letter of the alphabet) who comprise the society that reacts to the AIDS phenomenon. The story's title is taken from Anthony Trollope's monumental novel, a classic study of mid-Victorian society, especially of its social manners and political life.

The plight of Max, who has AIDS, is told entirely through the voices of his friends. They observe his first reactions to his illness—denying that he has it and delaying a trip to the doctor for the blood test that will establish his condition definitively. Each friend has a different reaction to Max's dilemma. Some sympathize with his state of denial; others worry that he is not seeking medical attention early enough. Aileen thinks of herself. Is she at risk? She doubts it, but her friend Frank reminds her that this is an unprecedented illness; no one can be sure he or she is not vulnerable. Stephen hopes that Max realizes he has options; he should not consider himself helpless at the onset of the disease.

The next stage is Max's hospitalization. Ursula says that Max has received the AIDS diagnosis almost as a relief after his months of anxiety. Friends wonder how to treat him. They decide to indulge him with the things he likes—chocolate, for example. They visit him frequently, and his mood seems to lighten.

But does Max really want to see so many people? Are they doing the right thing by visiting him so frequently? Aileen asks. Sure they are, Ursula answers, who is certain Max values the company and is not judging people's motives. Friends such as Stephen question Max's doctor, trying to assess the gravity of this stage of Max's illness. The doctor is willing to treat him with experimental drugs, but she disconcerts Stephen by saying the chocolate might bolster Max's spirit and do as much good as anything else. Stephen, who has followed all the recent efforts to treat the disease, is dismayed by this old-fashioned advice.

Kate shudders when she realizes that Max's friends have started talking about him in the past tense, as if he has already died. Several friends suspect their visits have begun to pall on him. Other friends argue that he has come to expect their daily presence. There is a brief respite from anxiety as Max's friends welcome him home and observe him put on weight. Xavier thinks they should stop worrying about how their visits affect Max; they are getting as much out of trying to help him as he is. They realize that they are dreading the possibility that they might also get the disease, that it is just a matter of time before they or their friends succumb to it. Betsy says “everybody is worried about everybody now … that seems to be the way we live, the way we live now.”

Max's friends think about how he has managed his life. He practiced unsafe sex, saying it was so important to him that he would risk getting the disease. But Betsy thinks he must feel foolish now—like someone who kept on smoking cigarettes until he contracted a fatal disease. When it happens to you, Betsy believes, you no longer feel fatalistic; you feel instead that you have been reckless with your life. Lewis angrily rejects her thinking, pointing out that AIDS infected people long before they took any precautions. Max might have been more prudent and still have caught AIDS. Unlike cigarettes, all that is needed is one exposure to the disease.

Friends report the various phases of Max's reaction to the disease. He is afraid to sleep because it is too much like dying. Some days he feels so good that he thinks he can beat it. Other days he looks upon the disease as giving him a remarkable experience. He likes all the attention he is getting. It gives him a sort of distinction and a following. Some friends find his temperament softened and sweetened; others reject this attitudinizing about Max as sentimental. Each friend clings stubbornly to a vision of Max, the story ending with Stephen's insistent statement that “He's still alive.”

As the narrators speculate about what Max is going through, it is as though they are suffering from the disease themselves, trying to keep him alive in their thoughts and wishes. How they react to his disease depends very much on the kind of people they are. They argue with each other and sometimes support each other, desperately seeking ways to cope with the imminence of death. Max's approaching fate forces them to confront their own mortality, though they rarely acknowledge that they are indeed thinking of themselves as much as they are of him.

Death has many faces, many manifestations, Sontag seems to be implying. For some, it is to be evaded. Some of Max's friends visit him rarely—one supposing that they have never been close friends anyway. Other friends—such as Stephen—almost seem to want to take over the fight against death, quizzing the doctors, boning up on the latest medical research, and conducting a kind of campaign against any capitulation to the disease. Very few friends are fatalistic; almost all of them hope for a medical breakthrough that will rescue Max.

They live in fear. One friend finds out that his seventy-five-year-old mother has contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion she received five years ago. No one is immune to the disease; even if everyone does not get it, someone close to them probably will. It is the extraordinary vulnerability of these people that makes them argue with or reassure each other, to question what is the best behavior. Everyone encounters an ethical dilemma about how to lead his or her life and how to respond to those who are afflicted with the disease.

The blending and clash of voices reveals a society in argument with itself, testing ways of responding to AIDS, advancing, then rejecting, certain attitudes. Voices overlap each other, as they do in real conversation:

He seemed optimistic, Kate thought, his appetite was good, and what he said, Orson reported, was that he agreed when Stephen advised him that the main thing was to keep in shape, he was a fighter, right, he wouldn't be who he was if he weren't, and was he ready for the big fight, Stephen asked rhetorically (as Max told it to Donny), and he said you bet. …

A complex layering of speeches within speeches, and of social and psychological observation, are emphasized by long sentences that continually switch speakers, so that a community of friends and points of view get expressed sentence by sentence. The story is like compressing the one hundred chapters of Trollope's novel into one hundred sentences.

It is the rhythm of these voices, of the ups and downs in their moods, of the phases people go through in responding to the disease, that is one of the most impressive accomplishments of Sontag's techniques. She presents the tragedy of one man, yet from the first to the last sentence the story is also a society's tragedy as well. It is the society that is ill. The speakers retain their individuality, yet they also become a chorus—almost like one in a Greek tragedy. They do not speak the same thoughts at once, but the syntax of the sentences make them seem bound to one another—as enclosed by their community of feeling as are the clauses in Sontag's sentences enclosed by commas. The speaker's thought at the beginning of a sentence is carried on, refuted, modified, or added to by speakers in later parts of the sentence. The sentence as a grammatical unit links speakers to each other. Whatever their attitudes toward the disease, they cannot escape the thought of it. Thinking of it is, as one of them says, the way they live now.

SONTAG READING SONTAG

Sontag told interviewer Kenny Fries that she wrote her story after receiving a phone call from a friend who told her he had AIDS. Later that night, crying and unable to sleep, she took a bath and the story began to take shape: “It was given to me, ready to be born. I got out of the bathtub and starting writing standing up,” she told Fries. “I wrote the story very quickly, in two days, drawing on experiences of my own cancer and a friend's stroke. Radical experiences are similar.” The urgency of creation and the frankness of fiction appealed to her: “Fiction is closer to my private life, more immediate, direct, less constrained—more reckless. Essays involve more effort in layering and condensation, more revisions.” Fries noted that Sontag was “very proud” of her story.

In a radio interview, Sontag called the story a “stunt” but also one of her best pieces of writing, because it captured both the “velocity” and the “static quality” of enduring a mortal illness. She thought the story explored the human issues of illness more deeply than an essay could, for the former reveals deep emotions and feelings whereas the latter has a tendency to encourage “superficial” moral judgments.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

Novelist David Leavitt thought the story therapeutic, making him feel “less alone in my dread, and therefore brave enough to read more.” The story “transcended horror and grief, and … was therefore redemptive, if not of AIDS itself, then at least of the processes by which people cope with it. … It offered a possibility of catharsis, and at that point catharsis was something we all badly needed.” Leavitt is referring to a time when contracting AIDS seemed an immediate death sentence, when artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, suspecting they had AIDS, refused to be tested for the disease. Sontag saw that the stigma attached to AIDS made patients feel isolated and fearful, much as cancer had earlier made society shun the ill and the ill shun society. (Mapplethorpe was finally diagnosed with AIDS in the fall of 1986, about two months before Sontag published her story.)

But as Sontag would say about AIDS and Its Metaphors, “The Way We Live Now” is not just about AIDS, it is about extreme changes in society. Like the overarching theme of Trollope's great novel, Sontag's story is about “a loss of community and ethical value,” to quote Elaine Showalter. Joseph Cady calls “The Way We Live Now” a “counterimmersive” story, one of several that do not involve readers directly with scenes of suffering and physical descriptions of AIDS but rather avoid specific mention of the disease, concentrating instead on the stages of denial among the ill and society at large. Such counterimmersive stories he calls “deferential,” since they protect readers from “too jarring a confrontation with the subject through a variety of distancing devices.” In “The Way We Live Now,” the relay race of narrators provides the distancing, which is perhaps why Sylvie Drake called a dramatization of the story “bloodless.” Cady finds it troubling that the disease is not named in counterimmersive stories, thereby playing to society's sense of delicacy and phobia about the illness: “Sontag offers no forceful alternative to the characters' perspective in her text, and denying readers could still finish the story with their defenses largely intact.”

On the other hand, critic Emmanuel S. Nelson argues that in Sontag's story “there is no reassuring voice the reader can comfortably connect with; her insistence that AIDS puts all of us at risk disrupts the complacency of those readers who consider themselves quite safe from the epidemic.” True, the story does not name the disease, but Nelson notes this sentence: “And it was encouraging he was willing to say the name of the disease, pronounce it often and easily, as if it were just another word, like a boy or gallery … because … to utter the name is a sign of health.”

Annie Dawid, who taught the story to students born after 1972, reports they found its fast pace and multiple narrators confusing and upsetting. It was hard to root for Max because they never got to know him. Of all the AIDS stories Dawid taught, “The Way We Live Now” was the “harshest … the least gentle by way of assuring the readers that they can all return to their lives, business as usual.”

To some extent, these differences in critical opinion mirror Sontag's own swaying arguments about the import of literature, about art as form and art as content, art that makes a statement and art that is all style and refuses to be pinned to a point. There is a kind of decorum observed in the story, a “none dare speak its name” resonance, a reticence about “coming out” that certain gay and lesbian critics in the late 1980s and early 1990s would scorn. For them, the story's reluctance to be more specific drains it of potential power. For the proponents of reticence (see Rochelle Gurstein's provocative The Repeal of Reticence), on the contrary, “The Way We Live Now” is powerful precisely because it is not explicit; it does not strip the person with AIDS of his most intimate moments; it does not provide the gory details; it is not, in short, pornographic in its handling of the disease. “The Way We Live Now” might almost be taken as an illustration of Gurstein's brief for a reticence our society no longer respects, a reticence that once preserved the “inherent fragility of intimate life, the tone of public conversation, standards of taste and morality, and reverence owed to mysteries.”

AIDS AND ITS METAPHORS

SYNOPSIS

Sontag begins by examining the compulsion to use metaphor, by which she means Aristotle's definition: “giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.” Metaphors are inescapable, Sontag concedes, but that does not mean that some of them should not be “retired” or that, in some instances, it is not correct to be “against interpretation.” For inevitably metaphors distort as much as they describe phenomena. Based on her own experience with cancer, Sontag doubts that military metaphors do anything more than victimize the sufferer—and it does not matter whether the victim of the “war” against disease is regarded as innocent or guilty. Either way the ill feel attacked, invaded, and vulnerable.

AIDS shares with earlier illnesses this overwrought use of metaphor. To contract AIDS is tantamount to receiving a death sentence. AIDS stigmatizes individuals. Like cancer, the reputation of the disease isolates the patient. During her own cancer treatment Sontag saw how patients became disgusted with themselves. The metaphorical atmosphere around such diseases simply increases suffering and is unnecessary, Sontag asserts. By stringently abstaining from the use of metaphors, her aim is to deprive illness of its accreted meanings. Illness, in other words, has been interpreted too much. Sontag feels her approach has been vindicated in the new attitude evinced by doctors, who now treat illnesses such as cancer more frankly and without the secrecy or mystery that once surrounded sickness.

As a sexually transmitted disease, AIDS has been subject to the vehement use of metaphors. It is an invasive virus that must be combated. It is an alien that victims harbor in their bodies, and it is a contaminant—in other words, a spreading evil. In the first phase of awareness of the disease, AIDS patients were thought of as guilty parties punished for their sexual deviancy—especially since the first cases were discovered in homosexuals. Unlike such diseases as tuberculosis or cancer, however, AIDS speaks to a more primitive sense of disease, for the AIDS sufferer is thought to be morally blameworthy. In other words, his illness is not merely a function of his psychology; rather the disease is a condemnation of character. Thus AIDS is a throwback to medieval notions of a plague—in this case a “gay plague.”

Conservatives find in AIDS a convenient metaphor for the ravages of a permissive society, in which permitting all abominations leads to certain death. AIDS is a calamity that society has brought upon itself, according to this line of reasoning. AIDS and permissiveness become, through the agency of metaphor, one and the same thing: contagious. Sontag rejects this argument, pointing out that AIDS, which has only recently been identified, cannot be regarded as always leading to death. (In the decade since her book was published, this aspect of her argument has been vindicated.)

Concentrating on AIDS as an inevitable death warrant obscures the fact that early deaths from the disease were at least in part the result of ignorance and ineffective therapies. It is the disease that has to treated without the emotional overlay of metaphors—especially since so much about the etiology of the disease has yet to be studied.

Yet Sontag acknowledges that AIDS must also be viewed in terms of a society that has become more sexually permissive and ever more consumer oriented. “How could sexuality not come to be, for some, a consumer option: an exercise of liberty, of increased mobility, of the pushing back of limits.” This broad change in cultural mores is “hardly an invention of the male homosexual subculture,” she points out. And the response to AIDS has been to adopt “programs of self-management and self-discipline (diet, exercise). Watch your appetites. Take care of yourself. Don't let yourself go”—these are the watchwords, Sontag suggests. These calls to “stricter limits in the conduct of personal life” earn her approval—as do a return to the conventions of society that help to regulate individual behavior.

Sontag understands but wants to resist the sense of apocalypse associated with diseases like AIDS. The world is not coming to an end, but each new campaign or “war” on disease makes it seem as though it is. “Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not ‘Apocalypse Now’ but ‘Apocalypse from Now On,’” she quips. Such constant evocations of catastrophe are, in the end, exhausting and counterproductive. The worst outcome, she concludes, is to treat AIDS or any other disease as a “total” anything. She argues that illness should be regarded as “ordinary” and treatable.

SONTAG READING SONTAG

To Kenny Fries, Sontag characterized her book as a “literary performance. It is an essay, a literary form with a tradition and speculative purpose.” Her reiteration of the obvious was in response to a barrage of reviews that took issue with both her facts and her arguments. She was not trying to take a position on AIDS in the way an activist might but rather exploring the mind-set about AIDS and other diseases. “My ideas of AIDS alone, stripped of the associations, are the same as any civilized, compassionate, liberal's.” In a similar vein, she pointed out to Margaria Fichtner: “This book … isn't really about AIDS. It's what AIDS makes you think about. It's about things that AIDS reveals or points to.”

Sontag also acknowledged that her rational view of disease and her resistance to psychologizing it with metaphors was a position she arrived at only during the sixth draft of her book. Until then, she too had succumbed to calling AIDS a plague. Her book was an effort to reject both “hysteria and facile pessimism.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

AIDS and Its Metaphors appeared in a cultural climate far different from the one that acclaimed Illness as Metaphor. Charles Perrow, in the Chicago Tribune, spoke for many reviewers when he regretted that Sontag's emphasis on metaphors obscured practical matters—what could be done immediately in terms of education, social conditions, and politics to combat the disease. Simone Watney, in the Guardian Weekly, chastised her for writing in a vacuum; she failed to take account of the mounting literature on AIDS. Jan Grover, in the Women's Review of Books, criticized Sontag for her apparent ignorance that AIDS was being psychologized in the gay community. Similarly Gregory Kolovakos, in the Nation, rejected her praise of monogamy as “shallow revisionism.” Her insensitivity to the mood and mores of the gay community was an underlying theme of many responses to the book.

There were many positive responses to Sontag's approach as well, including Patricia W. Dideriksen and John A. Bartlett in the New England Journal of Medicine who called the book “noble.” Deborah Stone, in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, found the book “brilliant,” and Francine Prose, in Savvy Woman, admired Sontag's compassion and intensity. While Randy Shilts, one of the country's foremost authorities on AIDS, was severely critical of Sontag, he admired the way she integrated AIDS into her discussion of other diseases. Perhaps the highest compliment paid to AIDS and Its Metaphors came from Anatole Broyard in the New York Times Book Review who asserted that Sontag's book was to “illness what William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity is to literature”—that is, she had written a classic text certain to become part of the canon of modern literature.

Surely one of the reasons Sontag's book sparked critical animosity was because of its rather lofty tone. She deliberately divorced herself from the crisis atmosphere that surrounded her subject. Whereas she saw herself as advocating a quieter but just as determined an attitude toward treating the disease as those who were militantly calling for a national campaign or war against AIDS, her critics saw an aloof and even conservative figure apparently out of touch with people's feelings and needs.

Unlike cancer, which for all its threatening associations had become (in part thanks to Sontag) more like an ordinary disease afflicting people, AIDS was put into a special category because it still seemed in 1989 like a plague that modern medicine had not learned how to control, let alone eradicate. Sontag's reflective temper collided with the very hysteria she was attempting to alleviate. Instead of being received as therapeutic, the book was rejected as abrasive.

Sontag herself realized that another kind of book was wanted from her. But it was a book she was not prepared to write, a book that did not appeal to her sensibility, a book that would have looked too much like the other books written about AIDS. Sontag's own notion of herself as a writer destined her to write a book that many readers could not accept. As she pointed out to Kenny Fries, “I have the kind of mind that, whenever I think of something, it makes me think of something else. With this book I do what I do best. This book has more to do with Emerson than with Randy Shilts.” Like Emerson, Sontag was using AIDS as another instance of how people use metaphor and how they think about illness. To those readers exercised more about the devastating spread of AIDS and more concerned with the disease itself than with its cultural or historical context, Sontag's approach seemed almost callous. She had not focused specifically enough on the anguish of the dying and on their caretakers. And she seemed to show almost no sympathy at all for gays—the first major community to be affected by the disease.

Perhaps the only way Sontag might have remained true to her sensibility and at the same time satisfied her critics would have been to reveal more of the process by which she came to reject the emotional metaphors used to describe and treat the disease. For example, what happened to her on that sixth draft when she rejected the plague metaphor? Throughout her career, Sontag has tended to use the interview form as a substitute for autobiography, evidently equating autobiography with a more informal, inexact mode of expression that conflicts with the formal elements of her essays—the decorum and rationality she has cultivated as a nonfiction writer. That sense of propriety has contributed significantly to her authority as an essayist, but it has also put off many readers who cannot connect a human voice with the ideas she explores in her essays.

Works Cited in the Text

Note. For the biographical details of this study I draw on Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon. Where I have used traditional print (hard-copy) sources, I have cited page numbers. For articles retrieved from websites, I have supplied the website address.

Broyard, Anatole. “Good Books About Being Sick.” New York Times Book Review, April 1, 1990, 1, 28-29.

Cady, Joseph. “Immersive and Counterimmersive Writing About AIDS: The Archives of Paul Monette's Love Alone,” in Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and Analysis, ed. Timothy F. Murphy and Suzanne Poirier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 244-264.

Dawid, Annie. “The Way We Teach Now: Three Approaches to AIDS Literature,” in AIDS: The Literary Response, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Dideriksen, Patricia W., and John A. Bartlett. [Review of AIDS and Its Metaphors.] New England Journal of Medicine, February 8, 1990, 415.

Drake, Sylvie. “Bearing the Pain of AIDS in ‘The Way We Live Now.’” Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1989, Section 6, p. 8.

Fichtner, Margaria. “Susan Sontag's Train of Thought Rolls into Town.” Miami Herald, February 19, 1989, 1G.

Fries, Kenny. “AIDS and Its Metaphors: A Conversation with Susan Sontag.” Coming Up (March 1989): 49-50. Reprinted in Poague, 255-260.

Grover, Jan. “AIDS: Metaphors and Real Life.” Christianity and Crisis, September 11, 1989, 268-270.

Gurstein, Rochelle. The Repeal of Reticence: A History of American Cultural and Legal Struggles Over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.

Kolovakos, Gregory. “AIDS Words.” The Nation, May 1, 1989, 598-602.

Leavitt, David. “The Way I Live Now.” New York Times Magazine, July 9, 1989, 28-32, 80, 82-83. Reprinted in Ann Charters, ed., The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction (Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1991).

Nelson, Emmanuel, S., ed. AIDS: The Literary Response. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Perrow, Charles. “Healing Words.” Tribune Books (Chicago Tribune), January 22, 1989, 6.

Prose, Francine. “Words That Wound.” Savvy Woman, January 1989, 100-101.

Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. New York: Viking, 1990.

Stone, Deborah. [Review of AIDS and Its Metaphors.] Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 14 (1989): 850-852.

Watney, Simon. “Sense and Less Than Sense About AIDS.” Guardian Weekly, March 26, 1989, 28.