Another great nineteenth-century realist who sees the figurative value of illness is Henrik Ibsen. In his
breakthrough play A Doll’s House (1879), he includes a neighbor to the Helmer family, Dr. Rank, who
is dying of tuberculosis of the spine. Dr. Rank’s illness is uncommon only in terms of its location in the
body; tuberculosis can settle in any part of the body, although the respiratory system is the one we
always think of. Here’s the interesting part: Rank says he inherited the disease from his father’s dissolute
living. Aha! Now instead of being a mere ailp. 221ment, his condition becomes an indictment of parental
misdeeds (a strong thematic statement in its own right) and, as we latter-day cynics can recognize, a
coded reference to an entirely different pair of letters. Not TB, but VD. As I suggested earlier, syphilis
and its various brethren were off-limits for most of the nineteenth century, so any references needed to be
in code, as here. How many people suffer from consumption because their parents led immoral lives?
Some, certainly, but inherited syphilis is much more likely. In fact, emboldened by his experiment here,
Ibsen returned to the notion several years later in Ghosts (1881), in which he has a young man losing his
mind as the result of inherited tertiary syphilis. Intergenerational tensions, responsibilities, and misdeeds
are some of Ibsen’s abiding themes, so it’s not surprising that such an ailment would resonate with him.
Naturally, what gets encoded in a literary disease is largely up to the writer and the reader. When, in the
course of Justine, the first novel of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, the narrator’s lover,
Melissa, succumbs to tuberculosis, he means something very different from what Ibsen means. Melissa,
the dancer/escort/prostitute is a victim of life. Poverty, neglect, abuse, exploitation have all combined to
grind her down, and the grinding nature of her illness—and of Darley’s (the narrator’s) inability to save
her or even to recognize his responsibilities to her—stands as the physical expression of the way life and
men have quite literally used her up. Moreover, her own acceptance of the disease, of the inevitability of
her mortality and suffering, mirrors her self-sacrificing nature: perhaps it is best for everyone else, Darley
especially, if she dies. What’s best for her never seems to enter her mind. In the third novel of the series,
Mountolive, Leila Hosnani contracts smallpox, which she takes as a sign of divine judgment against her
vanity and her marital lapse. Durp. 222rell, however, sees it otherwise, as symptomatic of the ravages
that time and living take on us all. In each case, of course, we’re free to draw our own conclusions.
What about AIDS?
Every age has its special disease. The Romantics and Victorians had consumption; we have AIDS. For
a while in the middle of the twentieth century, it looked like polio would be the disease of the century.
Everyone knew people who died, or wound up on crutches, or lived in iron lungs because of that terrible,
and terrifying, disease. Although I was born the year Dr. Jonas Salk made his blessed discovery of a
vaccine, I can remember parents during my youth who still wouldn’t let their children go into a public
swimming pool. Even when conquered, polio had a powerful grip on the imaginations of my parents’
generation. For some reason, though, that imagination did not become literary; polio rarely shows up in
novels of the period.
Now AIDS, on the other hand, has been an epidemic that does occupy the writers of its time. Why?
Let’s run the list. Picturesque? Certainly not, but it shares that terrible, dramatic wasting quality of
consumption. Mysterious? It was when it showed up, and even now this virus that can mutate in infinite
ways to thwart nearly any treatment eludes our efforts to corral it. Symbolic? Most definitely. AIDS is
the mother lode of symbol and metaphor. Its tendency to lie dormant for so long, then make an
appearance, its ability because of that dormant period to turn every victim into an unknowing carrier, its
virtual one hundred percent mortality rates over the first decade or so of its history, all these things offer
strong symbolic possibilities. The way it has visited itself disproportionately on young people, hit the gay
community so hard, devastated so many people in the developing world, been a scourge in artistic
circles—the tragedy and despair, but also the courage and resilience andp. 223compassion (or their
lack) have provided metaphor, theme, and symbol as well as plot and situation for our writers. Because