Part
One: Apocalypse Now and Then I
In her
groundbreaking essay, “AIDS and Its Metaphors”, written in six years into
the epidemic, Susan Sontag points out that among its many metaphors, cultural
discourse about AIDS is understood through metaphors of science fiction.Indeed,
AIDS is understood through the cultural lens provided by science fiction,
but can the reverse be said to be true?How
has science fiction understood AIDS, if at all?In
this paper, I intend to examine how science fiction, specifically three
science fiction texts, has borrowed, directly or indirectly, metaphors
provided by the epidemic begun in the 1980s and continuing today.The
first text I intend to examine is Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark
which, while not specifically about HIV/AIDS, is about the invasion of
an alien microorganism transmitted by body fluids, and specifically blood
and semen, that I intend to argue is an AIDS allegory.Secondly,
I wish to examine Elizabeth Hand’s neo-Gothic novel Glimmering,
an ongoing apocalyptic vision of the future (now past) which has, as one
of its protagonists, an HIV+ gay man.Furthermore,
Hand’s novel explores the issue of finding the cure for HIV/AIDS, among
the first novels to broach the subject in a realistic manner.The
third text I intend to look at is Samuel R. Delany’s “Tale of Plagues and
Carnivals”, part of his larger Nevèrÿon
series, which deals specifically with AIDS in a sword-and-sorcery plague
narrative interwoven with a postmodern autobiographical rendering of the
author’s experiences between 1982 and 1984 in New York at ground zero of
the epidemic.Along with these three
novels, I intend to examine how AIDS has largely failed to be an issue
for most science fiction, surprisingly so among the cyberpunk authors (Walter
Jon Williams, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson[1],
to name a few) who were noted for dealing with the issues of their time.While
other literature, from fiction to theater, has dealt with AIDS, science
fiction, with a few rare exceptions, has ignored the issue for the most
part, even as our understanding of the epidemic relies heavily upon our
understandings of science fictive metaphors.
In 1981,
the Center for Disease Control began tracing a number of unusual deaths
among gay men in San Francisco and New York.In
the following years, this would become known as AIDS, or Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndrome.A variety of
mythologies have sprung up about the origins of the disease, including
the familiar “African” origin myth(s) and the myth of a biological weapons
conspiracy spread among people of color and the developing world.At
the time of this writing, almost exactly twenty years after the CDC’s discovery,
many of the original AIDS issues are recycling themselves: young gay men
are considered, once again, to be prime targets in the U.S., the controversy
within the gay community over whether to close down the sex clubs, akin
to the bathhouses of the 1980s, has resurfaced, and Africa continues to
be characterized as the source of the virus and characterized as being
a plagued continent, for example.Just
this month (June 2001), the Center for Disease Control issued fears that
AIDS may be spreading among gay men between the ages of 23 and 29; the
CDC argues that these men (my generation) view AIDS as a treatable rather
than deadly disease and that they (we) have not seen AIDS devastate our
friends and family, and therefore do not take it as a serious issue.While
the tune may have changed slightly, the band still plays on.
Susan
Sontag explored the variety of metaphors, or ideologies, by which we understood
the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and I would argue that many of these ideologies
remain in place.She notes that AIDS
is understood through age-old metaphors of plague, including an ascribing
blame to plague victims for immoral behavior.She
also notes that our current virological model understands AIDS through
a metaphor of invasion—a trope familiar in literature in texts such as
Bram Stoker’s Dracula as well as other colonial and postcolonial
discourses.The use of images and
concepts from science fiction in the medical discourse on AIDS falls within
this category according to Sontag.She
wrote “infection [was] described as high-tech warfare for which we are
being prepared by the fantasies of our leaders and by video entertainments”
(106).Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense
initiative and video games, especially “Space Invaders”, set the stage
for explanation of how viruses attack cells and how those cells “defend”
themselves from invasion.She demonstrated,
in this essay, how AIDS borrows science fiction metaphors, noting “the
invader takes up permanent residence, by a form of alien takeover familiar
in science-fiction narratives.The
body’s own cells become the invader” (106).Specifically,
science fiction narratives such as the film The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers
create an epistemological framework for understanding how viruses work.They
take over and mimic the proper behavior of the cell, but are not the cell
and ultimately work to reproduce themselves.Sontag
wrote “ as viruses attack other cells, runs the metaphor, so ‘a host of
opportunistic diseases, normally warded off by a healthy immune system,
attacks the body,’ whose integrity and vigor have been sapped by the sheer
replication of ‘alien product’ that follows the collapse of its immunological
defenses” (107).The original metaphor
in science fiction from which AIDS discourses borrow itself borrows from
paranoia produced in the Red Scare of the 1950s and the Communist threat.This
shows how recursive these ideologies can become; while McCarthyism involved
the threat of Communists (“pinkos”) in the State Department, it also involved
the threat of homosexuals (also “pinkos”).To
McCarthy and his followers on the House Un-American Activities Committee,
Communists and homosexuals were tantamount to the same thing—a hidden threat
to the security of the U.S., invading undetected from within.Alan
Sinfield noted “Communists seemed to threaten military and political security;
queers (I use the word of the time) undermined family values and the frontier
vision of the manly man” (Cultural Politics 41).In
short, the Red Scare and its concurrent homosexual panic in the 1950s provided
a framework for science fiction narratives, which in turn provided a framework
for comprehending AIDS and its concurrent homosexual panics.In
the case of AIDS, however, invasion has gone from a threat to the body
politic, the nation as a whole, to a threat to the body itself, although
the HIV+ could be understood, using this structure of logic, as the body
politic and the cell as the invaded individual.
The failing is personal—they [Typhoid Mary, Eli, Patient Zero] are irresponsible individuals—and the solution is greater discipline—lock them up.In fact, one of the homophobic responses to the AIDS epidemic has been to “lock them up” or to quarantine those who test positive for HIV.
These processes of blame lead to the construction of those who are considered “innocent victims” and those who are considered “guilty” victims.Jan Zita Grover wrote:
The Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff, who has shown considerably more compassion for unborn fetuses than for people living with AIDS, has found the linguistic device that neatly captures the distinction between guilty and innocent victims, replacing the telling redundancy innocent victims with a less telling one: the innocent are now “victims of AIDS victims”.(29-30)
This dichotomy operates equally in Butler’s novel.Eli preys upon Blake and his two daughters, Keira and Rane, each of whom are constructed as “innocent victims” themselves.Both are young, virgins, and blameless.Yet they become victims of other victims of the microorganism.
The theme of the alien invasion, altered to fit the virological model of AIDS discourses, is a significant one in Clay’s Ark.The microorganism of Proxima Centauri Two invades the human body in order to replicate itself, using infection and reproduction as its two main vectors of transmission.The virus compels those who have it to infect others, a surreptitious alien invader.Butler wrote, in an exchange between Eli and Meda, a woman he infects:
“We could no more imagine ourselves dying than we could imagine not coming straight in to Earth.It was like a magnet for us in more ways than one.All those people…all those billions of uninfected people.”
“You came to infect…everybody?” [Meda] whispered.
“We had to come.We couldn’t not come; it was impossible…” (74-75)
This echoes fears articulated in colonial discourses, the threat of reverse colonization—of the West being overtaken by the colonized through its diseases.This is, of course, an historical irony, as disease was often a weapon used by the colonizers.At first, AIDS discourses were conflicted on the issue of the heterosexual transmission of AIDS.On the one hand, two different patterns were established: homosexual in North America and Western Europe, heterosexual in Africa (and later Asia and South America).Cindy Patton notes that “Euro-American heterosexuality is ‘not at risk’ as long as local AIDS is identified as homosexual and heterosexual AIDS remains distant (“From Nation to Family” 222).”On the other hand, the discourses contradicted themselves with the exact opposite story: the fear that AIDS could cross over into the “general population”(Grover 23).The discourse of AIDS, of course, articulates the fears of a reverse colonization—of the West being overtaken by a microbial alien from Africa.This contradiction reflects an internal incoherency in the mythologies of AIDS itself, and it is this internal ideological inconsistency that creates a “faultline” or breaking point in the mythologies about AIDS.Sinfield wrote “conflict and contradiction stem from the very strategies through which ideologies strive to contain the expectations that they need to generate.This is where failure—inability or refusal—to identify ones interests with the dominant may occur, and hence where dissidence may arise”(Faultlines 41-42).
It is no accident in Butler’s novel that Eli is a black male and Meda a white woman, either.Along with the fear of a reverse colonization, colonialism found racially mixed relationships, and especially racially mixed children, problematic around the turn of the century—problematic in ways that have not been entirely resolved.Children born to mothers with the Proxima Centauri microorganism also carry it and are, themselves, altered significantly.Eli’s oldest child Jacob, by Meda who was among the first he infected, is described as cat-like, walks on all fours, and has superhuman speed and agility, able to pace with a car at the age of four.Jacob is a hybrid, racially and in terms of species—multiracial but also alien and human at the same time.One of the fears articulated in the novel by Eli and others is that if others discover the children, they will be feared and killed as monstrous.
Part
Three: Apocalypse Later II
Not
long before the turn of the millennium, Elizabeth Hand wrote Glimmering,
“a novel of the coming millennium”.In
her novel, the globe has been wracked by an ecological disaster called
“the glimmering”; in short, the ozone layer has been completely devastated,
with all the attendant problems this would cause.One
of the multiple narrators (and one of the novel’s protagonists) is Jack
Finnegan, a gay male who is HIV+.Jack
lives in rural New England on an estate called Lazyland.Hand’s
novel reflects Butler’s in that society has become unraveled and the caste
of drifters, the fellahin, are beginning to encroach on Jack’s retreat.Through
the course of the novel, Jack’s childhood friend Leonard Thrope, an artist
who takes what he calls momento moris of the deaths of unique beings
and of species’ extinctions, comes to Jack with a cure for AIDS labeled
“Fusarium Aperiax Sporotrichellia” or “Fusax 687”.Fusax
687, it turns out, is a fungus of some sort that takes over Jack’s body,
much like the Proxima Centauri Two microorganism of Butler’s novel, but
it does successfully fight off AIDS and strengthens Jack.Leonard
is involved in a group called Blue Antelope, an ecoterrorist organization,
who Leonard uses to bring about an end-of-the-millennium disaster at the
end of the novel.
The
hunt for the AIDS vaccine contributes to the ecological disaster of the
glimmering and becomes itself a disaster of monumental proportions.Hand
wrote:
And it was worse now, of course—everything was worse.The experimental AIDS vaccine that had been given via lottery mutated into the petra virus, whose hosts were immune to HIV but died of other things.Even the drugs that worked no longer worked, because who could afford them, and the glimmering interfering with the labs producing them, and the factories that distributed them, and the doctors who no longer went to their offices because they couldn’t get gas for their Mercedeses and Range Rovers.(24)
The search for a vaccination has gone horribly awry, contributing to Hand’s dystopic vision of the future.This passage also reflects current problems in AIDS treatment, especially the difficulty of all but the most wealthy, which Jack is, being able to find treatment.Furthermore, Jack and others have found themselves becoming resistant to the other treatments for AIDS much like people have been finding that AIDS is becoming resistant to current drug treatments.Hand wrote:
But then one day it happened.You began to die.In spite of the drugs, the acupuncture therapies, the shiatsu massages and fungus teas and wave after wave of chemicals and vitamins; in spite of everything, you died.One day you were home with your geraniums and cats and a hundred bottles of medicine.The next you were in ICU with flowers brought up from that vendor in midtown who was the only person who had fresh flowers anymore.Then you were gone, and they were holding white roses at a memorial service and trying not to notice who else had a rattle in the throat and shaky hands.(23)
This passage could come right out of many autobiographies of those currently living with HIV, who also complain of the hundreds of bottles of medicines and who have resorted to nontraditional medical practices such as acupuncture and other holistic approaches.Jack’s friend and doctor, Emma, comes to him with a variety of herbal remedies:
“—but anyway here.I brought you these.”She placed a number of small brown glass dropper-bottles on his nightstand, each with its hand-lettered label in Emma’s miniscule penmanship.“Skullcap, that’ll help you sleep only not too much because it can cause bad dreams plus there’s a possible reverse effect of insomnia.Valerian, blessed thistle.More Echinacea.Here’s some goldenseal.And garlic.”She dropped a fat papery corm in his lap.
Jack grimaced.“Jeez.Vampires now, I’m worried about vampires?”(100)
Hand makes an overt reference to vampires that Butler’s novel suggests, but never overtly, except in Hand’s novel the vampiric figure is not the HIV+ individual.In fact, the vampire is a threat to Jack who must be warded off, placing Emma’s medical epistemology in line with Van Helsing’s from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Leonard
Thrope himself is an interesting figure.He’s
introduced to us as readers shocking Jack’s grandmother Keely by showing
her his apadravya[2](8).Later,
Jack reflects that he “was always slightly unnerved at the way Leonard
kept these businessman’s hours; such discipline gave weight and credence
to Leonard’s work, which even after all these years Jack preferred to think
of as a repellent hobby, like Leonard’s penchant for S/M and body piercings”
(101).Leonard, in one scene in the
novel, has oral sex with a younger man named Trip, a Christian Rock singer
who he has seduced with promises of fame and, as teenagers, had had sex
with Jack as well.Leonard can be
viewed as “queer” (rather than “gay”) through a number of critical lenses,
including Michael Warner’s definition: “for both academics and activists,
‘queer’ gets its critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather
than the heterosexual” (xxvi).Jack
is respectable, having inherited his family’s wealth and growing it through
efforts of his own with the family’s magazine The Gaudy Book.Leonard’s
work, however, is described by Jack as “a repellent hobby”; in more than
one passage, Jack and other characters in the novel express disgust with
Leonard’s fascination with the dead, the dying, and apocalypse.He
is certainly regarded, within the context of the novel, as being outside
the normal as well as being outside the heterosexual.In
fact, he is characterized as enjoying varieties of (homo)sexuality that
the other gay characters find distasteful.
Part
Four: Apocalypse Now and Then II
Samuel
R. Delany is credited with writing one of the first stories in literature
to have the AIDS epidemic as its focus.His
“Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” is part of his Nevèrÿon
series, from the book Flight From Nevèrÿon.This
story is like many of the other stories in this series in that it uses
critical literary theoretical ideas and gives them shape in its plotlines
and characters.However, this story
is unlike the rest of the cycle in that half of the story is semi-autobiographical.The
story is actually a postmodern pastiche weaving of several tales.The
first is the story of Delany’s own present-day (1982-1984) encounters and
discussions with Joey, a gay junkie in New York who manages, despite all
odds, not to contract AIDS.Woven
with this are several stories set in Kolhari, Delany’s fantasy milieu.A
mysterious plague is striking the men who congregate at the Bridge of Lost
Desire—primarily men who sleep with other men.The
plague affects a young student, Toplin, an artisan named Pheron, and a
noble named Lord Vanar.Largely,
however, these characters are on the periphery of the story rather than
at its center.Toplin’s story is
told through the voice of the Master of his school, who bemoans the loss
of his student some but does not dwell much upon it:
Toplin would have been in the thick of their ball tossing . . .
Can I hear his absence through their games?Eyes all but shut, the Master caught the shadow of three dashing by his left indoors and, a moment later, one sauntering out on his right.With a tiny joy, he (who claimed to know all his children by their footsteps, even around corners) recognized none of them.Then, as if in reaction to the joy, there was . . .
Nothing,
he thought.An absence.But
it’s an absence in me.(196-197)
Toplin returns
home to his mother’s, presumably to die.Pheron’s
story, however, is treated with somewhat more care.It’s
told through the eyes of others, his barbarian friends Zadyuk and Nari,
who do care about him, and on occasion in his own voice.Pheron
tells the story of how he “came out” to his father, who brought a young
Pheron to the Bridge of Lost Desire to buy a prostitute for each of them
and was informed by Pheron that he on occasion was known to sell himself
on the Bridge.Lastly, Lord Vanar
exists almost completely in the margins of the story, a figure talked about
but never seen and never given his own lines.
Delany’s
tale takes into account much of the homophobia and hysteria during those
early years of the AIDS epidemic and translates that reaction into several
scenes in Kolhari.For example, Delany
shows us the various phases of the government’s response.At
first, it urges “we must observe this carefully and be prepared to act”
(200).However, this rationalism
begins to give way to veiled homophobia, akin to the Reagan administration’s
handling of the AIDS epidemic:
5.3
‘Now let me restate what you have said.’The
minister pulled his hands to the edge of the stone table.‘First
you tell me that of the hundred-thirty-seven persons who have so far been
reported to have the disease, all are male . . . ?Then
you cast your eyes down, become nervous, and tell me, well, they are not
all
male . . . ?Lord Vanar I am, of
course, personally acquainted with.Should
I assume, then, that this is a way of saying that those men with the disease
are men who, in the eyes of many, might be considered less than
male . . . ?If that is the case,
then it is a truly astonishing illness!’Outside
the small, high window, the sky was hot silver.‘Our
position does not, however, afford us such coyness.We
must observe this carefully and be prepared to act . . .’(210-211)
Of
course, the minister is being coy here.While
veiling his language in the terms of “in the eyes of many”, it is this
unnamed minister who expresses the notion that these “homosexual”[3]
men are less than male.Still, the
plague does not matter as long as it is only affecting “those” men—those
other than heterosexuals, and this is revealed in the next passage of this
unnamed minister’s:
6.2
‘You mean to tell me—‘ and the minister placed his hands on his brocaded
cap beneath the stone table—‘that among the more than three-hundred-fifty
persons with the disease so far reported by our inspectors, which till
now we assumed were all males, and homosexual males at that, there are
at least seven women? and five children under the age of four?’Outside
the high small window, the evening had fallen into a brilliant cobalt.‘So
far, there have been seventy-five deaths and, to date, no recoveries.I
am afraid we are past the time of preparation and observation.We
must act.’The minister turned to
the head of the table.‘Your Highness,
let me propose . . . ‘(214)
One
hundred thirty-seven homosexuals are infected and the government decides
to “prepare and observe”; seven women and five children, and the government
“must act”—this scenario is all too familiar to those engaged in AIDS activism
over the last decade; even in Delany’s Nevèrÿon,
homosexuals are second-class citizens.The
government reacts by deciding to invite Gorgik the Liberator back from
the edges of empire and to throw a Carnival; in essence, it covers up the
plague, behaving as if nothing is happening.Delany
wrote “7.11 And that, said the minister, should get their minds off this
unbearable plague” (244)!The friends
and families of those who are sick, dying, or dead of the mysterious plague,
however, decide to have their own ritual, the Calling of the Amnewor, apart
from the Carnival but during it.
Sander L. Gilman echoes Delany’s argument that within the discourses on AIDS, “health” and “disease” are mutually exclusive.Gilman wrote, “This creation of the boundary between the infected and the healthy rested on the need to see a clear boundary existing between the heterosexual, non-IV drug using, white community and those at risk” (266).Sontag would take Delany’s argument against the metaphorization of AIDS, arguing for uncovering these metaphors to expose them for what they are: “With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the efforts to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling.But the metaphors cannot be distanced by just abstaining from them.They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up” (182).Nonetheless, the metaphors around AIDS continue into the present.Delany’s argument here, that these metaphors make living with AIDS a psychological and social impossibility, extends into writing about AIDS as well.Writing without replicating one of these metaphors requires that a writer be able to think critically about these metaphors, which Delany (and, to a lesser extent, Hand) is able to do.In his story, Delany noted:
3.2 A new illness, AIDS, began to infiltrate the larger cities.Some saw it as a metaphor for the license, corruption, and decay that is the general urban condition.(Well, after all, ‘metaphor’ – a transfer, something that carries something else after it – is as much a metaphor as is ‘disease.’)More interesting to the more interested citizens were, however, the strategies people used to avoid thinking about the illness.Certainly, the relation between the facts of the infirmity and these strategies – as many noticed and several said – was anything but metaphorical.(188)
Delany describes here what
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick would later term an “epistemology of the closet”
with regard to homosexuality but that could equally apply to AIDS—a will
to ignorance rather than a will to knowledge that, nonetheless, leads to
an unequal power relation.Sedgwick
wrote“Just so with coming out:
it can bring about the revelation of a powerful unknowing as unknowing,
not as a vacuum or as the blank it can pretend to be but as a weighty and
occupied and consequential epistemological space (77).”People
do not wish to know, and their active ignorance is used as a weapon against
the person with AIDS.The government
of Delany’s tale depends upon this epistemological framework.Similarly,
however, science fiction as a genre may itself be employing “strategies…to
avoid thinking about the illness”, considering that even with the explosion
in the 1990s of actively gay and lesbian science fiction, including anthologies
of gay and lesbian science fiction literature, little to nothing has been
said about the epidemic within the framework of the genre.
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