Corpses of Metaphor. Images of Death in David Leavitt and Jamaica Kincaid

Corpses of Metaphor. Images of Death in David Leavitt and Jamaica Kincaid by Fiorenzo Iuliano Both David Leavitt’s “Saturn Street” and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother feature the dying and dead male body as a trope capable, on the one hand, of conflating a variety of problematic semantic areas, and, on the other, of accounting, thanks to its rhetorical potential, for the different apparatuses of biopolitical power that construct the corpse as a linguistic and ideological figure. Published in 1997, “Saturn Street” and My Brother both deal with the story of a male protagonist, whose AIDS-related bodily collapse is minutely described and elegiacally celebrated. My argument is that both My Brother and “Saturn Street” equate the homosexual male body with the corpse, a sterile and unproductive organism that aptly embodies its feral and, ultimately, non human nature. Moreover, the dehumanizing presence of death, so strong in both texts, accounts for culture-specific ways of constructing homosexual identity, by insisting on the opposition between the visibility and the invisibility of corpses as symbolic repositories of biopolitical injunctions. The distinction between the visible and the non-visible dead body, which is the most noticeable difference between the two texts, bespeaks the differences between the two regimes of political and cultural signification at stake. In both texts, the realistic representation of the body and its assimilation to heterogeneous semantic areas continually overlap and resort to each other, suggesting that referential language can neither adequately term and define the dying body nor provide its accurate phenomenological description. Saggi /Ensayos/Essais/Essays 104 N. 4 – 10/2010 Nevertheless, the reading of AIDS as a metaphor is the topic of a famous book by Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors, published in 1988. Severely criticizing the metaphorization of AIDS and its usage in different political and socio-cultural discourses, Sontag insists on the peculiar nature of AIDS, so arguing: That AIDS is not a single illness but a syndrome, consisting of a seemingly open- ended list of contributing or “presenting” illnesses which constitute (that is, qualify the patient as having) the disease, makes it more a product of definition or construction that even a very complex, multiform illness like cancer. (28) This approach to the discursive rendering of AIDS sounds particularly interesting if related to Leavitt’s and Kincaid’s texts, which produce structurally similar mechanisms of representation of the sick body, resorting to the power of different metaphors (technological and digital, in one case, vegetal in the other). Sontag’s remark about the ‘open-ended’ nature of AIDS seems to me an important point, in terms of linguistic productivity; the diagnostic indeterminacy of AIDS is paralleled by a linguistic polymorphism of the narrative renditions I am discussing, which make use of complex figurative detours to address their object. AIDS as a linguistic and semiotic phenomenon is an issue widely discussed by Tim Dean (1993: 84), who, in an interesting essay on the relationship between AIDS (as a) narrative and psychoanalysis, suggests that “AIDS is structured, radically and precisely, as the unconscious Real of the social field of contemporary America”. This complex statement unveils some assumptions that will prove crucial to my argument. First, AIDS is something that can be structured. This implies that, besides being (obviously) a disease whose impact on society has been quite strong in the past, AIDS is a construction that, not unlike a discourse, has the power to affect and transform the representation of the very elements setting up its own structure. Secondly, according to Dean, AIDS works as the “unconscious real”. I do not mean to delve here into the complex Lacanian jargon from which Dean borrows its lexicon; suffice it to retain his point that AIDS, structurally similar to the Lacanian real, lies at the very core of American society, and, through a process of rejection and foreclosure, is its secret object of jouissance, namely, what an organism needs to expel in order to enjoy its own equilibrium, stability, and internal harmony. Finally, Dean refers to “contemporary America”. What AIDS represented for the US society and US homosexual communities in the 1980s is well known: it was wielded as a powerful means of repression and control by conservatives and Christian fundamentalists. While in the US context the role of AIDS as a menace and, at the same time, as a reason for chauvinist nationalistic and homophobic backlash finally resulted in the necessity, for gay men and activists, to speak out against every kind of discrimination, in the Caribbean, where My Brother is set, it was only through silence that something similar to a homosexual community Saggi /Ensayos/Essais/Essays 105 N. 4 – 10/2010 was created and defended against external attacks.1 Leavitt’s and Kincaid’s works will help me to substantiate and broaden up these theoretical and historical assumptions, showing their intimate dependence on the mechanisms of linguistic and rhetorical nature both texts enacted. “Saturn Street” is a novella included in Arkansas, a book published by Leavitt in 1997, when the author turned back to autobiographical fiction by collecting three long tales.2 “Saturn Street”, focusing on the unsettled relationship between the narrator, Jerry, a young writer from New York City working in Los Angeles, and Philip, a man suffering from AIDS,3 confronts its readers with death from its very beginning. The protagonist, Jerry, moves to Los Angeles six months after his partner has taken his own life; besides writing, he volunteers delivering lunches to people suffering from AIDS. Philip and Jerry casually meet and start a friendship, always on the verge of a love affair, which lasts until Jerry goes back to New York. Since their first encounter, Philip is described as a sort of relict of the 1970s, a man totally unable to adjust his own habits and perspective to the present time. What Philip regrets is a celebrated golden past of homosexual history, a period in which sexual liberation seemed to be almost within reach, so distant from the paranoia of the AIDS era and its obsession with illness and safe sex. Moreover, through an interesting overlapping between Philip’s life and his social and cultural environment, Leavitt elegiacally celebrates both the end of an era of optimistic homosexual empowerment and an old-fashioned idea of futurity, well epitomized by the Los Angeles neighborhood where Philip lives, Saturn Street, built according to a naive idea of a technological future, as it was possibly conceivable in the 1970s.4 1 The question of AIDS in the Caribbean is extremely complex, especially because of the alleged and never proven Haitian origin of the HIV virus. Among the works on this theme, Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox Source, “The Contemporary Historiography of AIDS”, Journal of Social History, 23: 2, 1989, pp. 303-314 ; Alexander Moore, Ronald D. Lebaron, “The Case for a Haitian Origin of the AIDS Epidemic”, in Douglas A. Feldman, Thomas M. Johnson, (eds.), The Social Dimension of AIDS: Method and Theory, Praeger, New York, 1986; Paula A. Treichler, 1989, “AIDS and Hiv Infection in the Third World: A First World Chronicle”, in Barbara Kruger, Phil Mariani, (eds.), Remaking History, Bay Press, Seattle, 1989; Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation. Haiti and the Geography of Blame, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995; Paul Farmer, “AIDS e razzismo. Medicina, stereotipi ed epidemiologia tra gli immigrati haitiani negli Usa: 1981-1994, in Roberto Cagliero, Francesco Ronzon, (eds.) Spettri di Haiti. Dal colonialismo francese all'imperialismo americano, ombre corte, Verona, 2002. 2 For an in-depth analysis of Arkansas in both historical and thematic terms, see Kekki 2003. 3 In his first works Leavitt had obsessively dealt with cancer, a recurrent theme in several short stories from Family Dancing (1984) and one of the central motifs in Equal Affection (1989). “Saturn Street” is among the first works where Leavitt explicitly writes of AIDS and of its connection with homosexual relationships and community building in the US. 4 There is a noticeable literary tradition that features Los Angeles as the most adequate American city for futuristic, and often catastrophic, scenarios; as David Seed remarks (2010: 133), “The sheer variety of LA futures suggests that the fate of the city and of the nation has become an insistent, if somber, subject for debate. Although disaster and decline repeatedly figure in these accounts, paradoxically they are confirming a general perception of Los Angeles as the site of national experimentation.” Saggi /Ensayos/Essais/Essays 106 N. 4 – 10/2010 At the end of the novella, Philip becomes blind, and Leavitt explains his condition resorting to a metafictional strategy. He compares him to a character from Star Trek, a TV series of which Philip is very fond: Medusan, a monstrous creature “whose thoughts were among the most sublime in the universe, yet whose physical appearance was so hideous no human could look at him without going mad.” (161) In contrast with the mythological narrative and its subsequent elaborations, Medusan here is a male character. He does not have a real body, being described as “‘hideously formless’. Intermittently he was ‘shown’ –a clatter of staticky sparks, intermixed with psychedelic burblings of color.” (161) The reference to Medusan is subtly related to

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