CorporealSemiotics:TheBodyoftheText/theTextoftheBody 411
matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the
dream rather than the homogeneous representation of the symbol"
("Third-World Literature" 73). It allows Solzhenitsyn to hold together
the dazzling details of his fictional world with its multiple characters,
their life-stories, the urgencies of life under the shadow of cancer, the
hopesgeneratedbythe"thaw"afterStalin'sdeath,etc.^107
StoriesWeDieBy:CancersasStoryGenerators
Ithinkitisfairtosaythatcancerhasbecomepeople'sgreatestdread
inU.S.-Americatoday(Sontag,IllnessasMetaphor6,58).Eventhough
or perhapsbecausethis is the case and cancer is often regarded as "the
great unmentionable" (Mukherjee 26), many highly charged but only
cautiously expressed fantasies have accreted around the disease. This is
also the reason why, like many mass illnesses, the unmentionable is in
dialectical fashion a highly effective story generator: the "negative
multipliereffects"(Massumi,Power5)ofthediseasearereflectedinthe
sheer endless multiplicity of cancer patient stories that circulate outside
the journals of clinical medicine, in internet blogs like Susan Gubar's
"Living with Cancer" blog in theNew York Times, in patient self-help
groups,and,ofcourse,thesocialaswellasthepublicmedia.Andmuch
of what has been said about illness narratives in general also goes for
narrativesaboutthecancerexperience,namelythatthey"makemeaning
oftheexperiencesoflivingatrisk,inprognosis,andinpain"(Jurecic4).
This meaning-making, however, seems hard to come by in the case of
cancer, so terms like "misery memoir" or "victim art" (Jurecic 10) have
attained somecurrency.Forthe people invoking them, they seem to be,
(^107) Such a reading takes a distance from the many interpretations which regard
cancer or rather cancers as broadly symbolic: "disease is both the literal subject
of the novel and the symbol of moral, social, or political pathology" (Meyers
56). My quarrel with these interpretations is that they mute the presence of the
terrors of cancers, which play such an important part throughout the text.
Whether Solzhenitsyn himself acceded to view cancer as a symbolic code is
difficulttodetermine.Ashewroteinthe"AppendixtoCancerWard,"cancer"is
specifically and literally cancer, a subject avoided in literature.. ." (qtd. in
Meyers59)butthismayhavebeenapoliticalmanoeuvercausedbypressurein
theSovietUnionwherehewasstilllivingwhenthenovelwasfirstpublished.