"in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick…"

May 18, 2020 8:57 AM

"So it might seem that my friend was skirting some dangerous ground in suggesting that we need new metaphors. “The healthiest way of being ill,” Sontag advised, “is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.” But this underestimates the role metaphor plays in helping us make sense of a world that has fundamentally shifted around us. The term’s origin is in the Greek expression to be carried across. Metaphors make meaning by substituting one term for another. Since the pandemic arrived we have all found ourselves carried across into a new reality, the world we knew replaced by one that resembles it but is also radically changed." With Apologies to Susan Sontag, We’re Going to Need Metaphor to Get Through This Global Illness (LitHub)
posted by not_the_water (14 comments total)

Post title comes from Sontag's quote: Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
posted by not_the_water at 8:57 AM on May 18, 2020 [4 favorites]

In particular, it was metaphors—military metaphors of “frontline” NHS staff “battling” an “invisible enemy”—that were bothering him.

It's hard for me to be objective about this sort of trope, as Trump has been enamored of military metaphors for the crisis, and that colors my dislike of them. But I think there is also a core element of being offended at their lack of truthfulness. This isn't a war, its a pandemic, and they are very different things. To some extent, people are trying to say that we need a total societal and economic mobilization, like we had in World War 2, and that is well-intentioned, but it also isn't even how wars have been done since then. If we took this metaphor seriously, and fought the coronavirus pandemic like we fought the war in Iraq, would that be a good thing?

It's a lazy metaphor, more suited to making a certain sort of person feel self-satisfied than it is to providing a better understanding.
posted by thelonius at 9:33 AM on May 18, 2020 [8 favorites]

Understanding ourselves as possibly ill—carried between the kingdoms of the sick and well—allows us to go beyond what we know and enter the experiences of others.

I have to keep reminding myself how dangerous COVID-19 is because it seems so abstract in the immediate. It's been a little like watching reports of a far off conflict until I remember that anyone I know could get infected; it's just dumb luck that don't know anyone who has.
posted by octothorpe at 9:54 AM on May 18, 2020 [3 favorites]

A thought I had, which I think is related to this, is that this is the first that most people have heard the term "social distancing", so people who heard it were more receptive to being told what it meant. It was like a new, trendy thing, which helped it stick in the mind.

Related to this is how the alt-right invent new terms all the time to try and dominate the Google rankings for these terms, as a recruitment strategy to spread their ideas.

When satire is effective, it's typically because it puts a name to something that already exists, or expresses something in a way that is more convincing than the 'official' explanation. I've only seen satire work a couple of times in my life - Sarah Palin's image was defined for her by Saturday Night Live - but again, there's ways to get at the essential truth of things by framing them with something that's not strictly true but has the right shape.
posted by Merus at 10:26 AM on May 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

This essay name drops Sontag, but it doesn’t really address or begin to refute or wrangle with her (very thorough) criticism of metaphor as applied to illness, nor does it really provide a convincing reason to use metaphor in spite of her very specific and detailed objections.
posted by Gymnopedist at 12:49 PM on May 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

Military metaphors (‘lost their battle with cancer’, ‘the war on drugs’) seem particularly likely to have problematic aspects.
The weird thing here is that ‘spreading like a plague’ is itself a common metaphor, which suggests that the concept of plague is a basic, well-understood idea, at least in some respects; one that can lend clarity, not one that needs to borrow it.
posted by Segundus at 1:51 PM on May 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

It suggests that plague was a vivid model once. Phrases can outlive the meanings of the words in them - "show your metal", etc.
posted by clew at 2:11 PM on May 18, 2020

The phrase is "show one's mettle", not "metal". (No demonstration of one's ability to shred a guitar solo or look good in tight leather pants is required.)
posted by Lexica at 2:46 PM on May 18, 2020

The phrase is older than the distinction in spelling between metal and mettle, which both come from the Latin for mining. (Quarrying, maybe.) Cf. a metalled road, which is one well-laid with gravel.

You show your metal/mettle when you show the stone chips in your hands and forearms, I was told by a mason. Not afaik a linguist mason. Maybe a linguist will check me before I get to my OED. Else I’m gravelled for lack of matter.
posted by clew at 3:01 PM on May 18, 2020

...Uh, dragging this back to the OP, metaphors aren’t very stable. What does one bad apple do?
posted by clew at 3:02 PM on May 18, 2020

Spoil the punchline?
posted by cgc373 at 5:03 PM on May 18, 2020 [3 favorites]

I remember reading Sontag's Illness as Metaphor when it came out. At the time, we had a very different view of cancer than we do now. Cancer was a death sentence, period. If someone had cancer, you mourned them, even while they were still alive. People would talk in hushed tones if near someone diagnosed with cancer. To talk of a cure was to give false hope, so such discussions were frowned upon, at least among the general public.

This book opened my eyes to how the way we look at disease can affect the way we react to it. Already the medical profession was starting to figure out how to cure some types of cancer and for the first time I started paying attention to this and to look at the disease in a different, more hopeful way.

I'm not going to try to come up with some wise statement on how we should be approaching the pandemic except to be careful about getting stuck in depressing thought patterns and to look forward to the very real progress doctors and researchers are making in treatment and possible vaccines.
posted by eye of newt at 9:50 PM on May 18, 2020

What s even more frustrating about the ' invisible enemy' rhetoric is the pains the president took to keep COVID 19 invisible. The United States ' success depends on keeping cases visible, the population tested, and contacts traced.
posted by eustatic at 10:00 PM on May 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Thank you for posting this. Reading Susan Sontag's lllness as Metaphor / AIDS and Its Metaphors and Virginia Woolf's "On Being Ill" was transformative for me. To use another (mixed) metaphor, those works and a few others crystallized some vague ideas swimming around in my head; my career took a left turn, and now I teach literature to medical students. Sontag, Woolf, and Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking are always on the syllabus. The last two years we've been over-subscribed.
posted by basalganglia at 4:40 AM on May 19, 2020 [2 favorites]