Qin Huining: How to Reveal the Truth Covered by Metaphor —— Comment on susan sontag's Metaphor of Disease

Tuberculosis, cancer and AIDS are all sickening diseases. The first two diseases have a long history, and AIDS has been an infectious disease since the 20th century. They are all called terminal diseases because they have never been cured or can't be cured so far, so they are attached with various imaginations and symbolic meanings that have nothing to do with the disease itself. Susan sontag, an American woman writer, put her sharp cultural criticism into the field of diseases through years of struggle with diseases, and wrote Disease as Metaphor (1978), and then published AIDS and its Metaphor (1989). These two articles were compiled into a book, Diseases as Metaphors and Their Metaphors (1990), which was published in China (Shanghai Translation Publishing House) in 2003 as one of susan sontag's collected works. These two articles have become models of social criticism. Although Sontag died of cancer last year, it is still full of energy and inspiration for us to reflect on the way to expose the truth that was covered up. 1. How diseases are metaphors These two papers deeply analyze the explanations of these diseases in Europe and America from ancient times to the present, as a cultural criticism extending to medicine. [1] In Disease as Metaphor, Sontag said that the original intention of her writing was because she "observed sadly again and again in the process of treating cancer, and metaphorical exaggeration distorted the experience of cancer and brought definite consequences to patients: it hindered. And she believes that "metaphors and myths can kill people. "Sontag used various texts to analyze the mystery and fear brought by tuberculosis and cancer in the west because it is difficult to cure, and how to reinterpret it for people again and again for various purposes. Although people's fantasies about tuberculosis in the19th century are different from those about cancer and AIDS in the 20th century, they have the same law: although the mysterious way of the disease is placed in a new expectation background, the disease itself (once tuberculosis, now cancer) evokes a completely ancient fear. Any disease that is regarded as mysterious and truly frightening, even if it is not contagious in fact, will be felt to be morally contagious. [2] Although she didn't discuss it in the book, it is obvious that the process of explaining the diseases around us by metaphor and making it an imaginary image of a society is still going on. No matter in the west or the east, people's fear of disease and metaphors created by association are hiding the true face of disease. Sontag saw that tuberculosis was treated emotionally and romantically from the texts of centuries. Tuberculosis patients are often regarded as sensitive and emotional people, and their pallor and flushing are also regarded as enthusiastic obedience and excessive behavior. Tuberculosis has always been thought to bring high mood, extensive appetite and strong sexual desire. It is also a disease about time-it accelerates life, and because the lungs where it occurs are located in the upper part of the body, that is, in the mental part, tuberculosis has acquired a spiritual quality corresponding to its position. The death of tuberculosis patients has also been beautified and endowed with moral color, thus making this disease a "noble disease". "The cause of cancer is thought to be that the patient's personality does not show outward, and the passion turns inward, disturbing and hindering the deepest cells. Cancer is portrayed as such an image, which contains all kinds of negative behaviors of brokers in the 20th century: abnormal growth and energy depression, the latter refers to refusing to consume or consume. The interesting thing about cancer metaphor is that it refers to a disease with too much mystery and too many doomed illusions. However, when people look at cancer, they will have an irrational aversion and regard it as a kind of self-degradation. On top of Cancer, there are some similar false words about responsibility and personality composition: Cancer is considered as such a disease, which is easy for those who are psychologically frustrated, unable to vent and depressed, especially those who suppress their anger or sexual desire, so Cancer is considered as a disease of the bourgeoisie and the nouveau riche who suppress themselves. In the 1980s, cancer was no longer the most terrible disease. As a disease full of more stigma, AIDS has gradually shouldered the burden imposed on cancer in the past. It is described as an "invasion", a "pollution" and is considered to have much stronger ability to destroy personality. " As far as most AIDS cases are concerned, it is found that people with AIDS are only one of the' high-risk groups' and one of the groups despised by society. AIDS exposes the identity of AIDS patients, which was originally concealed from neighbors, colleagues, family members and friends. [3] Finally, AIDS is regarded as an infectious disease of those marginalized groups and sub-cultural groups. At the same time, the metaphors of these diseases not only stay in the economic class expression, but also "often enter the political and racial categories and become the most convenient rhetorical tool to deal with opposition, opponents, dissidents or hostile forces at home and abroad". [4] Second, opposing interpretation-revealing the truth behind metaphor. Sontag continued Foucault's efforts to reconnect "word" and "thing". From the standpoint of "opposite interpretation", he made a subtle and profound anatomy of the explanation of diseases and the process of explaining the world with diseases, an unnoticed corner of people's social life, in an attempt to peel off these diseases and patients layer by layer. The process of trying to dig out the metaphors of these three diseases and other diseases and the connotation behind them is actually practicing her opposite interpretation theory in order to restore the truth of things: "This time, I applied the' opposite interpretation' strategy with Don Quixote and high argument to the real world and my body. "This attempt provides an opportunity for western society to revise its understanding of diseases: in the ten years since I wrote" Diseases as Metaphors "-and recovered from cancer (…)-my attitude towards cancer has changed. Cancer is no longer such a shameful thing, and it is no longer regarded as the number one player of "destroying personality" (to borrow Owen Goffman's words). [5] At the beginning of the article "AIDS and its Interpretation", Sontag, starting with quoting the disease discourse in politics, art and military science, and quoting the political discourse in cytopathology, once again expounded the imagination of the disease and the resulting metaphor, which demonized the disease, especially the metaphor of taking the disease as the expression of the military act of war-the war against the disease, not only appealed to people to invest more enthusiasm and more research work. This metaphor also provides a way of looking at diseases, that is, treating those particularly terrible diseases as foreign others, like enemies in modern politics; Demonizing the disease will inevitably lead to such a shift, that is, blaming the patient for the mistake, regardless of whether the patient himself is considered to be the victim of the disease. Sacrifice means ignorance. Judging from the ruthless logic that dominates all interpersonal words, ignorance means crime. [6] To this end, she clearly declared "opposing interpretation". She opposes interpretation, because she thinks that interpretation presupposes some inconsistency between the clear original intention of the text and the requirements of the (later) readers. "Interpretation tries to solve this inconsistency." To solve this inconsistency, "the interpreter didn't really erase or rewrite the text, but changed it." [7] So the truth and original intention became increasingly blurred in various efforts to explain, and "word" and "thing" began to deviate from each other. Therefore, Sontag regards the metaphorical explanations of these three diseases written in various literary works, letters and books as a series of texts to analyze this deviation process, and the way she examines these texts, such as anthropological field work, is different. What she faces is sentences written in words, and what she wants to analyze is the context behind the sentences and the information conveyed in them-instead of facing real people and things as we usually do in field work. The purpose of fieldwork is nothing more than to understand the cultural characteristics and laws related to it from the respondents, to find the motive force and composition of cultural operation, and to extract the value and significance of this culture. Sontag combed the texts related to these diseases. It was in the "community" of "metaphor of diseases" that he searched for the expression of people's cognition of this "culture", from which he analyzed people's psychology of this "culture" and its changing motivation, and from it. Demonizing the disease will inevitably lead to such a shift, that is, blaming the patient for the mistake, regardless of whether the patient himself is considered to be the victim of the disease. Sacrifice means ignorance. According to the ruthless logic that dominates all interpersonal words, ignorance means crime. [8] It seems that it can be said that this is a field work from the perspective of sociology of knowledge, and its purpose is to "calm the imagination, not stimulate it". It is not deductive meaning (which is the traditional purpose of literary activities), but something is stripped from meaning ... "[9], which can also be regarded as the opposite explanation of metaphor and theory of disease. Unfortunately, Sontag only demonstrated the existence of the phenomenon of disease being metaphorical and the way and purpose of metaphor, but did not finally reveal what the real image of the disease was, nor did he really provide a way to understand the truth of the disease. What is the true face of the disease? Foucault's research on the emergence of clinical medicine can form the basis of Sontag's analysis of disease metaphor. In The Birth of Clinical Medicine, he believes that the precise superposition between the' entity' of the disease and the patient's body is only a historical and temporary fact. Their meeting is only self-evident to us, or more accurately, we have just begun to look at this meeting objectively. In medical experience, the space of disease configuration and the space of patients' positioning in the body only overlap for a short period of time. During this period, 19 century medicine also changed at the same time ... [10] This is the situation where the concept of "entity" of disease came into being, and Foucault proved the history of disease metaphor discussed by Sontag from another angle. In western classified medicine, diseases have an innate form and time sequence, which has nothing to do with social space. Disease has a' primitive' nature, which is not only its true nature, but also its most disciplined route; It exists in isolation, free from any interference and medical treatment, and it shows its own essence, such as the orderly veins of plant leaves. However, the more complicated the social space, the more unnatural it is. Before the emergence of civilization, people had only the simplest and most basic diseases. Farmers and ordinary people are close to the basic disease classification table ... So with the progress of the times, diseases become more and more unnatural in an increasingly complex social space, and more and more concepts are attached, such as "the allocation of social differences, time gap, political struggle, petition and utopia, economic repression, social confrontation, etc." [1 1], and these dialectical relations are mutually aggregated, which is a kind of modern society. When a disease is transplanted to a hospital, it may lose its basic characteristics. Here, people are regarded as "objects", or people are operated on, or body fluids are taken for various tests, or tubes or needles are inserted, or there is no fluoroscopy. In this process, the sacredness of people's bodies at the beginning of "disease" is dispelled, and disease becomes a metaphor used by different classes and different people to achieve various intentions. And this metaphor has gradually been accepted by people and has become the normal state of life-just as Sontag himself once felt-so patients are often placed in a completely materialized situation, burdened with heavy mental pressure and indulging in diseases. Third, multi-dimensional investigation-continue to pursue the truth behind the disease. From the writing style, perhaps it is because Sontag himself has personally encountered the shadow brought by cancer metaphor. The book Disease as a Metaphor makes a sharp and straightforward analysis of the texts related to tuberculosis and cancer, but in AIDS and its Metaphor, this sharpness is replaced by a more rational analysis, but the two works also have something in common: they are basically western texts and. Just as anthropological ethnography needs to observe the field from the two dimensions of * * * temporality and diachrony, it also aims to reveal the truth behind metaphor and interpret the code generated by metaphor. Sontag analyzed diachronic texts, but did not further demonstrate diachronic texts-that is, comparing the similarities and differences between texts explaining diseases in different regions, looking for more universal laws, or finding other explanations of diseases in other regions. Sontag's investigation of tuberculosis, cancer and AIDS also combined with the study of gonorrhea, syphilis, cholera, leprosy and other infectious diseases, which were attached with various dangerous, disreputable or non-social norms because of their infectivity. This situation not only appears in the west, but also has a similar situation in China. Even today, under the influence of public opinion caused by various folk rumors, people's prejudice against diseases is still metaphorical. For example, there are various interpretations of the "demonization" of chronic hepatitis B, as if hepatitis B is equivalent to unsanitary or even dirty danger; For example, during the SARS epidemic, people panicked and rushed to buy preventive drugs, which also showed that SARS was compared to an extremely dangerous infectious disease. In the modern society where information transmission is becoming more convenient and rapid and the means of communication are becoming more and more diversified, metaphors about diseases first appear in the form of "rumors", so they can have a greater impact on people in a more rapid, extensive and diverse way of communication and expression. It can be seen that the process of Sontag's "metaphor" from the level of public opinion, which is difficult to be involved in text research, may need to be included in our research field of vision on the relationship between disease and people, society and culture today, and more attention and thinking should be given through field text analysis. In any case, the disease research method pioneered by Sontag has far-reaching enlightening and fundamental significance for medical anthropology research. -.[2] Ibid., p. 7. 3 Ibid., p. 10 1. [4] Cheng Wei: "Metaphor of Disease" translator's preface, page 5. [5] ibid., pp. 965-438. 6 ibid., p 88. [7] susan sontag: Against Interpretation, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2003, p. 6-7. 8 Ibid., p. 88. 9 Ibid., p. 90. [10] michel foucault: The Birth of Clinical Medicine, Yilin Publishing House, 200 1, p. 1. [1 1] same as above, 17 pages. The original text was published in the second issue of Northwest Ethnic Studies in 2006.