of the demographic distribution of its infection history, AIDS adds another property to its literary usage:
the political angle. Nearly everybody who wants to can find something in HIV/AIDS that somehow
works into their political view. Social and religious conservatives almost immediately saw the element of
divine retribution, while AIDS activists saw the slow response of government as evidence of official
hostility to ethnic and sexual constituencies hardest hit by the disease. That’s a lot of freight for a disease
which is really just about transmission, incubation, and duration—which is what all diseases have always
been about.
Given the highly charged nature of the public experience, we would expect to see AIDS show up in
places occupied by other ailments in earlier times. Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (1998) is a
reworking of Virginia Woolf’s modern classic, Mrs. Dalloway, in which a shell-shocked veteran of the
Great War disintegrates and commits suicide. In the aftermath of that terrible war, shell shock was a
hot-button medical item. Did it exist, were these men simply malingerers, were they predisposed to
psychological unfitness, could they be cured, what had they seen that caused them but not others to
succumb? With each modern war the term has changed, from shell shock to battle fatigue in World War
II and Korea to post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam, and each time the illness had its believers and
its detractors. In a bizarre twist, the gulf war syndrome, which seemed to be physiological in nature, was
dismissed by authorities as simply a modern version of shell shock; these would be the same authorities,
of course, who in that earlier age would have denied that shell shock existed. Cunningham clearly can’t
use shell shock and is even too far out of the Vietnam era for PTSD to have much resonance.
p. 224Besides, he’s writing about the contemporary urban experience, as Woolf was doing earlier in the
century, and part of that experience for him is the gay and lesbian community and part of that experience
is HIV/AIDS. His suicide, therefore, is a patient with very advanced AIDS. Other than the illness that
occasions them, the two deaths resemble each other greatly. We recognize in them a personal calamity
that is particular to its time but that has the universality of great suffering and despair and courage, of a
“victim” seeking to wrest control over his own life away from the condition that has controlled him. It’s a
situation, Cunningham reminds us, that differs from age to age only in the specific details, not in the
humanity those details reveal. That’s what happens when works get reenvisioned: we learn something
about the age that produced the original as well as about our own.
Often, though, the most effective illness is the one the writer makes up. Fever—the non-Roman
sort—worked like a charm in times past. The character merely contracted fever, took to her bed, and
died in short or long order as the plot demanded, and there you were. The fever could represent the
randomness of fate, the harshness of life, the unknowability of the mind of God, the playwright’s lack of
imagination, any of a wide array of possibilities. Dickens kills off all sorts of characters with fevers that
don’t get identified; of course, he had so many characters that he needed to dispatch some of them
periodically just for housekeeping purposes. Poor little Paul Dombey succumbs with the sole purpose of
breaking his father’s heart. Little Nell hovers between life and death for an unbearable real-time month as
readers of the original serialized version waited for the next installment to be issued and reveal her fate.
Edgar Allan Poe, who in real life saw plenty of tuberculosis, gives us a mystery disease in “The Masque
of the Red Death.” It may be an encoding of TB or of some other malady, but chiefly it is what no real
disease can ever be: exactly what thep. 225author wants it to be. Real illnesses come with baggage,
which can be useful or at least overcome in a novel. A made-up illness, though, can say whatever its
maker wants it to say.
It’s too bad modern writers lost the generic “fever” and the mystery malady when modern medicine got
so it could identify virtually any microbe and thereby diagnose virtually any disease. This strikes me as a
case where the cure is definitely worse than the disease, at least for literature.