Taken as a group, the narratives, plays, poems, films, and critical essays about AIDS (Nelson, 1992) are fervently contesting the ethical boundaries of language itself. For a start, some of the creative writers and critics who write about AIDS are activists. Larry Kramer, author of The Normal Heart, was an early and loud voice. These activists insist that the first goal of AIDS literature must be to change the critical circumstances of the disease and its sufferers. They call for "stridently interventionist cultural practice" (Nelson, 1992, p. 8, citing Douglas Crimp). They say that to write about AIDS at all is automatically to be a moralist, for, in this battle, no sidelines exist. Demurrers about art for art's sake are irrelevant and themselves immoral. So one question about activist AIDS literature is: Does such work fit into the artistic genre called "social realism" or is it not art at all, but, instead, blatant propaganda whose first and last goal is social change? To the first category, literary historians have assigned, for instance, Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, which is an ardent piece about an idealistic doctor's crusade to warn tourists about his town's polluted public baths in the face of community pressure, as represented by his brother the mayor, to keep his mouth shut. The play is comparable to Kramer's The Normal Heart, in which another doctor battles to get money for AIDS research in a New York whose mayor seeks to prevent would-be tourists from knowing about the epidemic. But where do we draw the line between taking a stand and propaganda, wherein the end shapes, even justifies, the means?

What might any writer, activist or not, be excused for saying in order to bring about a desired end? What language--which images, which metaphors--may validly be used to inflame audiences with a just passion? One of the most common metaphors for the AIDS epidemic in the homosexual community is the Holocaust (Nelson, 1992), which was said in the early days of activism to be recurring through the establishment's lack of a plan to prevent the genocide of gay men. Is this horrifying image apt? Is it logical? Alternatively, are these questions themselves out of place in view of the absolute primacy, for some people, of subjective data about illness?--that is, "I have AIDS, and it feels as though I am living through another Holocaust. What do you know about it?"

The morality of metaphor is the territory famously covered by Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor (1978). There she argues that to substitute metaphors, especially negative metaphors, for the reality of bodily suffering is to impose a spurious meaning on illness and a sense of guilt on the patient. If cancer, in the common military metaphor, is a battleground, then the patient can be blamed for not winning. Sontag comes back to her point in AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), where she contends that "plague," the most common metaphor for AIDS, implies judgment on a corrupt society. In her own story about AIDS, "The Way We Live Now" (1987), there are no metaphors for the illness. Moreover, in what would seem to be a further attempt to free AIDS from contaminating linguistic associations, she does not even name it.

Sontag's reasoned approach to this crisis is similar to the theories of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). Unlike the AIDS plays, most of which are designed to be deeply cathartic, Brecht's plays aimed for the "alienation effect" in order to limit his audience's emotional involvement in the work. He used various devices to remind audiences that they were watching illusion, not reality--a play, not life. This distancing, he hoped, would free their minds to reason clearly that humanitarian action was needed in the world outside the theater. A former medical student, Brecht wanted to achieve the theatrical equivalent of clinical objectivity. His goal, like that of AIDS activists, was to change society, but, unlike some of them, he thought it unethical to reach minds by manipulating emotions.

In arguing against metaphor, Sontag seeks to chip away at the use of language as a shield to protect people from difficult experience. Given the symbol-making nature of the human mind, she has chosen a position that finally may be impossible to defend. She seems to know that, and yet she thinks it eminently worthwhile to fight for the "thereness" of the human body, for the indisputable fact of its physical presence. So does literary and film critic James Morrison, who is worried that postmodernism (read: "language-oriented thinking") has infected criticism about AIDS literature. Defining allegory as "a series of metaphors arranged in sequence" (Nelson, 1992, p. 169), Morrison complains that the postmodern attraction to allegory--that is, to expressing experience as an abstract text that refers only to other language and not to the real world--has moved readers further away from the actual experience of AIDS. In his eyes, allegories dictate that both AIDS and the person with AIDS be classified as "other"--something, at any rate, that cannot be approached without the intervention of elaborate figures of speech. The allegory to which he objects most vehemently is the series of metaphors that describe the body as text. When logically extended, he says, such an allegory would allow someone to "read," as it were, "the lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma as indexical signs" of the body-book (Nelson, 1992, p. 171). This he thinks a ludicrously unsympathetic way to approach the body in pain.

Morrison may not realize it, but his challenge implicitly goes out to the scholars in the interdisciplinary field of literature and medicine for whom the patient-as-text is both metaphor and method. He might just as well challenge every one of us, because the process of abstracting that he condemns in the case of literary criticism and AIDS seems to be a universal human phenomenon. The combined evidence of the writers examined here suggests that all of us are trapped between our suffering bodies and our symbolizing minds--that is, between a world whose existence we can prove simply by stubbing a toe and the engrossing stories that we are constantly creating about that world. It would appear to be nearly useless to ask which level of experience, the physical or the imaginative, is more real; or to look to one, at the exclusion of the other, for ethical insight.

In a sense, this brings us back to the values/language split with which this entry began. In calling for a clear-sighted view of every specific person with AIDS, Morrison aligns himself with the values-oriented camp. He wants not only creative writers but also commentators on literature to write justly. So does Sontag. But, as she demonstrates in her own fictional works, language is a powerful and playful human trait that tends to seek its own ends, regardless of its possible relationship to the real world of ethical problems. Language, in fact, creates new worlds all the time. Consider only Tony Kushner's Angels in America, so magnificent an achievement that it transcends the category of AIDS play. In short, the values/language dichotomy is more properly seen not as a true division but as a perpetual ethical tension.

Bibliography:

1)         Kramer, Larry. 1985. The Normal Heart. New York: Samuel French.

2)         Kushner, Tony. 1993. Angels in America. New York: Theatre Communications Group.

3)         Nelson, Emmanuel S., ed. 1992. AIDS: The Literary Response. New York: Twayne.

4)         Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

5)         Sontag, Susan. 1989. AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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