by Martha Stoddard Holmes
Genre, Vol. 44, No. 3 Fall 2011a
Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors critiqued the use of metaphoric language, particularly... more
Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors critiqued the use of metaphoric language, particularly military metaphors of invasion and battle, to describe illness experiences. Metaphors generate explanatory narratives, just as stories often use a resonant metaphor as shorthand for theme. Metaphors and narratives can suggest reductive or stereotypical ways of imagining illness, disability, and other experiences of embodiment. Rather than an end to metaphoric framing of illness, however, the agency to make metaphors needs to be conferred to a larger constituency that always includes the patient. The author’s first-person ovarian cancer narrative illustrates that not having the capacity to make metaphors for one’s embodied experiences can mean late diagnosis; the dearth of effective public metaphors for imagining some internal organs, such as the ovaries, contributes to the problem. Metaphors can be reductive, but they can also generate a wide range of relationships between illness and the person experiencing it, as illustrated by examples including Margaret Atwood’s short story “Hairball.” Simile in particular, which expresses similarity but not equivalence and thus does not erase difference, can generate a healthy way of imagining illness. Some recent literature has suggested that doctors use metaphor to communicate with patients; this gives doctors the power to determine which metaphors will frame the illness and direct its narrative. The lessons of narrative medicine, which advocate that patients and doctors use narrative collaboratively to generate a more effective understanding and treatment of illness, need to be extended to include metaphor.
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