Universal Symbolism: Illness

... And Rarely Just Illness
(from Chapter 24 of Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor)

At the beginning of James Joyce’s wonderful story “The Sisters” (1914), the unnamed young narrator mentions that his old friend and mentor, a priest, is dying. There is “no hope” for him this time, we’re told. Already your teacher’s radar should be on full alert. A priest with no hope? Not hard to recognize in such a statement a host of possibilities for interpretative play, and indeed those possibilities are realized throughout the story. What’s of immediate interest here, though, is how the priest got that way. He’s had a stroke, not his first, and it has left him paralyzed. “Paralysis” is a word that fascinates the young boy, quite apart from its meaning; he yokes it with “simony” and “gnomon” in a triad of words to obsess over. For us, however, it’s the notion of paralysis - and stroke - that intrigues.

Anyone who has ever had to watch a loved one deteriorate after a massive stroke will no doubt look askance at the very idea of such frustration and misery being in some way intriguing, fascinating, or picturesque, and quite rightly. But as we’ve seen time and again, what we feel in real life and what we feel in our reading lives can be quite different. In this instance, our interest is not in the deterioration of the old priest but in what his condition is telling us about him, about the boy, about the story at large, and about Joyce’s collection, Dubliners, in which it is the first piece. The boy has witnessed James, the priest, begin the slow decline after earlier strokes (his clothing covered with bits of tobacco and ash, his movement awkward, his speech affected). But it’s the paralysis after the recent, massive stroke that commands the boy’s attention. Within the story, the paralysis shows up in several ways, not least of them a sort of madness that set in at the time the priest was relieved of his parish over some incident involving an acolyte. All references to the event are sidelong and somewhat secretive, with shame a distinct component of James’s and his sisters’ responses. Whether the matter involve sexual impropriety or something to do with the litany we never learn, only that James was found in the confessional laughing softly and talking to himself. That he spent his last years a virtual recluse in a back room of his sisters’ house indicates the degree to which emotional or mental paralysis had already set in before his stroke.

From this little story the condition of paralysis grows into one of Joyce’s great themes: Dublin is a city in which the inhabitants are paralyzed by the strictures laid upon them by church, state, and convention. We see it throughout Dubliners - a girl who cannot let go of the railing to board a ship with her lover; men who know the right thing to do but fail because their bad habits limit their ability to act in their own best interest; a man confined to bed after a drunken fall in a public-house rest room; political activists who fail to act after the death of their great leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, some ten years earlier. It shows up again and again in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses and even in Finnegans Wake (1939). Of course, most maladies in most short stories, or even novels, are not quite so productive of meaning. For Joyce, however, paralysis - physical, moral, social, spiritual, intellectual, political - informs his whole career.

Until the 20th century, disease was mysterious. Folks began to comprehend the germ theory of disease in the 19th century, of course, after Louis Pasteur, but until they could do something about it, until the age of inoculation, illness remained frightening and mysterious. People sickened and died, often with no discernible preamble. You went out in the rain, three days later you had pneumonia; ergo, rain and chills cause pneumonia. That still occurs, of course. If you’re like me, you were told over and over again as a child to button your coat or put on a hat lest you catch your death of cold. We’ve never really accepted microbes into our lives. Even knowing how disease is transmitted, we remain largely superstitious. And since illness is so much a part of life, so too is it a part of literature.

There are certain principles governing the use of disease in works of literature:
1) NOT ALL DISEASES ARE CREATED EQUAL. Prior to modern sanitation and enclosed water systems in the 20th century, cholera was nearly as common as, much more aggressive than, and more devastating than tuberculosis (which was generally called consumption). Yet cholera doesn’t come close to TB in its frequency of literary occurrence. Why? Imagine mostly. Cholera has a bad reputation, and there’s almost nothing the best public relations in the world could do to improve it. It’s ugly, horrible. Death by cholera is unsightly, painful, smelly, and violent. In that same period of the late 19th century, syphilis and gonorrhea reached near-epidemic proportions, yet except for Henrik Ibsen and some of the later naturalists, venereal diseases were hardly on the literary map. Syphilis, of course, was prima facie evidence of sex beyond the bounds of marriage, or moral corruption (you could only get it, supposedly, by visiting prostitutes), and therefore taboo. In its tertiary stages, of course, it also produced unpleasant results, including loss of control of one’s limbs (the sudden, spastic motions Kurt Vonnegut writes of in his 1973 Breakfast of Champions) and madness. The only treatment known to the Victorians employed mercury, which turned the gums and saliva black and carried its own hazards. So these two, despite their widespread occurrence, were never A-list diseases.

Well, then, what makes a prime literary disease?
2) IT SHOULD BE PICTURESQUE. What, you don’t think illness is picturesque? Consider consumption. Of course it’s awful when a person has a coughing fit that sounds like he’s trying to bring up a whole lung, but the sufferer of tuberculosis often acquires a sort of bizarre beauty. The skin becomes almost translucent, the eye sockets dark, so that the sufferer takes on the appearance of a martyr in medieval paintings.

3) IT SHOULD BE MYSTERIOUS IN ORIGIN. Again, consumption was a clear winner, at least with the Victorians. The awful disease sometimes swept through whole families, as it would when one member nursed a dying parent or sibling or child, coming into daily contact with contaminated droplets, phlegm, blood for an extended period. The mode of transmission, however, remained murky for most people in that century. Certainly John Keats had no idea that caring for his brother Tom was sealing his own doom, any more than the Brontes knew what hit them. That love and tenderness should be rewarded with a lengthy, fatal illness was beyond ironic. By the middle of the 19th century, science discovered that cholera and bad water went together, so it had no mystery points. As for syphilis, well, its origins were entirely too clear.

4) IT SHOULD HAVE STRONG SYMBOLIC OR METAPHORICAL POSSIBILITIES. If there’s a metaphor connected with smallpox, I don’t want to know about it. Smallpox was hideous in both the way it presented and the disfigurement it left without really offering any constructive symbolic possibilities. Tuberculosis, on the other hand, was a wasting disease, both in terms of the individual wasting away, growing thinner and thinner, and in terms of the waste of lives that were often barely under way.

Often, though, the most effective illness is the one the writer makes up. Fever - the non-Roman sort - worked like a charm in times past. The character merely contracted fever, took to her bed, and died in short or long order as the plot demanded, and there you were. The fever could represent the randomness of fate, the harshness of life, the unknowability of the mind of God, the playwright’s lack of imagination, any of a wide array of possibilities. Dickens kills off all sorts of characters with fevers that don’t get identified; of course, he had so many characters that he needed to dispatch some of them periodically just for housekeeping purposes. Poor little Paul Dombey succumbs with the sole purpose of breaking his father’s heart. Little Nell hovers between life and death for an unbearable real-time month as readers of the original serialized version waited for the next installment to be issued and reveal her fate. Edgar Allan Poe, who in real life saw plenty of tuberculosis, gives us a mystery disease in “The Masque of the Red Death.” It may be an encoding of TB or of some other malady, but chiefly it is what no real disease can ever be: exactly what the author wants it to be. Real illnesses come with baggage, which can be useful or at least overcome in a novel. A made-up illness, though, can say whatever its maker wants it to say.

It’s too bad modern writers lost the generic “fever” and the mystery malady when modern medicine got so it could identify virtually any microbe and thereby diagnose virtually any disease. This strikes me as a case where the cure is definitely worse than the disease, at least for literature.