CorporealSemiotics:TheBodyoftheText/theTextoftheBody 409
But it seems Solzhenitsyn wants to have it two ways. While the
narrative voice repeatedly insists that "life around him [Rusanov], to
which he normally reacted with approval or censure, had faded" (298),
this outside world repeatedly and insistently intrudes into the world
represented, and also into the representation. Not only are there
recurring references to the larger scheme of things in the Soviet Union
(Stalin's death, tidbits of everyday life outside the clinic), the patients
themselves engage in heated debates about politics, chiefly "that
excellent and honorable time," as Rusanov, the NKVD informer, looks
backonthe1930s(207;cf.241).
One of the most disturbing characteristics of Rusanov's halcyon
days, the sudden unexplainable removal of people to the gulag is
insertedintothenarrativethroughoneofitsvictims,Kostoglotov.Inthe
verbal exchanges between Rusanov, an operative of the system, and its
victim, the line dividing the medical condition called "cancer" from the
political condition called Stalinism becomes progressively blurred. The
semiotics of cancer, recorded in the text in all its detail, becomes the
material on which the political semantics of the novel are built. Both,
cancer and Stalinism, are in essence "silent killers" which destroy their
unwittingvictims.WhatSusanSontagnotesaboutleprosyintheMiddle
Ages, namely that it was "a social text in which corruption was made
visible" (Illness as Metaphor58), can also be said about cancer in the
Soviet Union in the 1950s, as Solzhenitsyn sees it. The elective affinity
between cancer and the cankerous spreading of the gulag is present
throughout this novel (written under the shadow of censorship) as a
subtext, in side remarks and innuendos. Toward the end, the parallel
between medical and socio-political pathologies is made quite explicit,
asthenarrativevoice,articulatingOlegKostoglotov'smusings,asks:"A
mandiesfromatumor,sohowcanacountry survivewith growthslike
laborcampsandexiles?"(556).^105
Onemightreasonablysupposethattheanswertothisquestionneeds
to be relegated to the extradiegetic world. Inside the cancer ward itself
andalsoinsideCancerWard,thefeasibilityofaradicalimprovementof
(^105) Thus,SusanSontagseemsdeadwrongwhensheremarksthat"Solzhenitsyn's
CancerWardcontainsvirtuallynousesofcancerasametaphor—forStalinism,
orforanythingelse"(82).