418 RüdigerKunow
from Sontag's list is the trope invoked at the beginning of this chapter,
that of the "silent killer" or the "hidden assassin / Waiting to strike at
you"^112 (Auden 71-72). The idea of a surprise attacker, for which we
wouldtodayprobablyprefertheterm"terrorist,"seemsabletotranscend
bordersoflanguageandculture.
Against the crushing weight of the available cultural archives,
Sontag proposes a kind oflinguisticcleansing:"My point is that illness
[such as cancer] isnota metaphor, and that the most truthful way of
regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most
purified of, mostresistantto, metaphoric thinking" (IllnessasMetaphor
3). This assertion clearly has a utopian undertone. Even more so since,
ironically, Sontag herself is not quite immune from the lure of
metaphors. Right at the beginning of her text, she resorts to one of the
most conventional narrative tropes: "Now it is cancer's turn to be the
diseasethatdoesn'tknockbeforeitenters,cancerthatfillstheroleofan
illness experienced as a ruthless, secret invasion—a role it will keep
until, one day, its etiology becomes as clear and its treatment as
effective as those of TB have become" (5). Later, she speaks of cancer
as a "deadly arrow" (38), and, more politically, of "the white race [as]
thecancerofhumanhistory"(85).
Criticizing the growing numbers of misrepresentations of cancer,
especially ones that are saturated with affect, is an important
ideological-critical venture, and one that will never be finished. At the
same time, I have deep reservations about both the viability, even the
desirability, of Sontag's project of linguistic cleansing. Medical
researchersandpractitioners,patientsandtheirfamilieswillusethefull
linguisticarsenal,includingmetaphors,inanattempttocometoterms—
quiteliterally—withthe"mostelementalandmagisterialdiseaseknown
toourspecies"(Mukherjee466).
And so, rather than embarking on a chase for metaphorical
representations of cancer in favor of what Adorno derisively called the
"jargonofauthenticity,"thetaskforculturalcritiqueratherseems,inmy
view,tooffercriticalreadingsofthesocialandculturalworkperformed
by these representations. One example here is the metaphor of growth
which Sontag also uses repeatedly (IllnessasMetaphor62-64, 87), and
(^112) "MissGee"isapoemfromthe1930s.