410 RüdigerKunow
the current conditions (medical and socio-political) remains remote at
best. And even though there are moments of medical healing in the
text—both protagonists can, in the end, leave the clinic—this healing
seemsprovisionalatbestwithlittlehopeforabetterfuture:"Itwashere,
hislong-awaitedhappiness,itwashere!ButforsomereasonOleghadn't
recognized it" (562). And so, even if cancer in the bodies of individual
persons can occasionally be cured, there is no hope for healing the
collective socio-political malaise and the cultural pathologies which it
produces.
In view of this distinctive undertone of the novel, I propose to read
CancerWardas a"nationalallegory" in the sensedevelopedby Fredric
Jameson, namely a fictional narrative where "the story of the private
individualdestinyisalwaysanallegoryoftheembattledsituationofthe
public third-world culture and society" ("Third World Literature" 69). I
will leave aside the critique Jameson has (justly) drawn for this essay,
especially for its implied understanding of the "Third World." What is
more important in the present context is his resolutely political
understanding of the allegorical form—something to which he has
returned in his most recent publications.^106 Theories of allegory often
emphasize their capacity for re-semantization; seemingly disconnected
from what they originally signify, what they then represent "can be
determined only by virtue of its being placed before (vorgest ellt )
someoneelse"(Benjaminqtd.inWeber154-55).Thissomeoneisinthe
presentcontextrathersomethingelse,namelytheinvisiblemachinations
oftheSovietsecuritystate.Thus,Jameson'sformulaalsodescribesvery
well the ambitions of Solzhenitsyn's novel, where the individual
condition is constantly projected onto a collective that, because of its
secret and at the same time sweeping nature, eludes the grasp of the
conventional realist novel. Rusanov or Kostoglotov are not getting
condensedintounambiguous"symbols"ofthemultitudinousrealitiesof
post-Stalinist Russia. Rather, we are made aware, again and again, of
structural homologies but also of breaks and idiosyncrasies. For such a
set-up, allegory is more congenial, it is "profoundly discontinuous, a
(^106) On "transcoding" and the allegorical operation with "a system of levels, in
whichwefindourselvesobliged to translatefromoneto theother,inasmuchas
each of these levels speaks a different language and is decipherable only in
termsofaspecificcode"cf.Ancients282-84.