Volume 25, Number 1 · February 9, 1978
Images of Illness
By Susan Sontag
In Death in Venice passion brings about the collapse of all that has made Gustav von Aschenbach singular—his reason, his inhibitions, his fastidiousness. And disease further reduces him. At the end of the story Aschenbach is just another cholera victim, his last degradation being to succumb to the disease afflicting so many in Venice at that moment. When in The Magic Mountain Hans Castorp is discovered to have tuberculosis, it is a promotion. His illness will make Hans become more singular, become simply more than he was before. In one fiction, disease (cholera) is the penalty for a secret love; in the other, disease (TB) is its expression. Cholera is the kind of fatality that, in retrospect, has simplified a complex self, reducing it to a sick environment. The disease that individualizes, that sets a person in relief against the environment, is tuberculosis.
Feature, 3942 words
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