There's a thing first-time readers like to point out about Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor. Technically, this manifesto about the pitfalls of using metaphor to describe illness starts with—well, some metaphors. “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship,” Sontag (2001: 3) writes. “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Why begin by establishing the subject so vividly through figuration if the “point” we are to learn is that “illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking” (3)? Sontag is playing, ventriloquizing the normative dependency, some say. (Is this camp?) It is simpler to read between the lines: we cannot really get by without metaphor—the key is not to deprive ourselves...
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