CorporealSemiotics:TheBodyoftheText/theTextoftheBody 407
illnesssignifies,ismadevisible(ifonlytoalimiteddegree),notonlyin
medical but also social and cultural terms. Against that background,
Lorde moreover aims at some form of community building, at new
relations of solidarity among the sufferers. In the perspective which her
text opens, cancer becomes enmeshed in a system of correspondences
and relations with larger abstract contexts and systems, which are not
always immediately or unambiguously present in the cancer experience
but condition it in multiple ways. I will return to the question of cancer
narrativesasallegoriesinamoment.
Before, I want to offer a brief reading of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's
Cancer Ward(1968), a novel whose allegorical dimension is one, and
indeed the dominant level of reference in an otherwise conventional,
realist novel. The story opens with Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, a
member of the Soviet secret service, being admitted to the ominously
named section "number thirteen," the cancer ward of an inconspicuous
hospital somewhere in the Asian part of the Soviet Union. While the
country is going through the transition to a post-Stalinist order,
Rusanov, one of the faithful servants of Stalinist repressesion, is
receivingtreatmentforatumorin hisneckwhich"hadcomeuponhim,
a happy man with few cares, like a gale in the space of two weeks"
(Solzhenitsyn 9). But immediately after marking his protagonist as a
personinprecariousconditions,Solzhenitsynshiftsgearsanddwellson
the social aspects of being a cancer patient in an allegedly classless
society: "But Pavel Nikolayevich was tormented, no less than by the
disease itself, by having to enter the clinic as an ordinary patient, just
like anyone else" (9). Already at this early point, Solzhenitsyn lays the
foundation for the essential doubleness of his text which is
simultaneously a novel about cancer and about the Soviet system as
cancer.
As the narrative unfolds, Rusanov finds himself in the undesirable
company of a number of people from various social and ethnic
backgrounds. Among them is Oleg Kostoglotov, a man from the other
side of the political divide, a survivor of prison camps and deportation,
who now has to face another life-threatening challenge, this time from
an unspecified form of cancer. In this set-up, there are obvious