In Time of Plague

"In Time of Plague": AIDS and Its Significations in Herv Guibert, Tony Kushner, and
Thom Gunn
Author(s): George Piggford
Source: Cultural Critique, No. 44 (Winter, 2000), pp. 169-196
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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"IN TIME OF PLAGUE"
AIDS AND ITS SIGNIFICATIONS IN HERVE GUIBERT,
TONY KUSHNER, AND THOM GUNN
George Piggford
There is no available discourse on "AIDS" that is not itself diseased.
-Edelman, Homographesis
It started with sweats in the night and swollen glands. Then the black cancers
spread across their faces-as they fought for breath TB and pneumonia
hammered at the lungs, and Toxo at the brain. Reflexes scrambled-sweat
poured through hair matted like lianas in the tropical forest. Voices slurred-
and then were lost forever. My pen chased this story across the page tossed
this way and that in the storm.
-Jarman, Blue
In the late 1980s and early 1990s a number of textual practices

emerged that took on the subject of AIDS variously as signifier, signi-
fied, metaphor, and pathology. Literary and cultural critics attempted
in this period to intervene in these practices, particularly those
employed by the medical establishment. They thereby produced
what I will term "AIDS theory," a set of discourses that both critiqued
and helped to construct what Thomas Yingling has called the "dis-
cursive universes" (45) of the epidemic. Typically from a poststruc-
turalist perspective, these theorists generally argued that anyone
willing to engage in a public discourse about AIDS does so at his or
her own risk. Unguarded, careless discourse about AIDS is, accord-
ing to writers such as Yingling, Cindy Patton, Eric Savoy, and Lee
Edelman, just as dangerous as unprotected sex in the age of AIDS.
Because AIDS is understood primarily as a signifier in these cultural
Cultural Critique 44-Winter 2000-Copyright 2000 Regents of the University of Minnesota
170 I GEORGE PIGGFORD
analyses of the syndrome, the job of AIDS theorists has been to read
the discourses of the syndrome that construct it and in a sense are it.1
In contrast, most writers of creative texts in the 1980s and 1990s
responded not only to the public discourses that have continued to
reshape the epidemic, but also to individual narratives of experience
with AIDS. These literary discourses also attempt to read AIDS, but
they emphasize the private sphere. However, literary texts, them-
selves published and therefore public discourses, have necessarily
contributed to the overdetermined significations of AIDS in late
twentieth-century Western culture.2 For Lee Edelman any discourse
of AIDS is "diseased": for him, the illness is manifest in language.
But, for creative writer and filmmaker Derek Jarman, AIDS is a con-
dition that ravages the body; it is the writer's job to "chase" the
"story" of AIDS "across the page." In short, theoretical writing about
AIDS has focused on language, and literary responses have used
language as a means to attempt to inscribe the body-with-AIDS. This
essay will explore the relationship of two prominent textual practices
produced in response to the AIDS crisis roughly in its first decade. I
will first examine theoretical discourses of AIDS and then apply the
body of AIDS theory to three literary texts: Herve Guibert's fictional-
ized memoir A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauve la vie, Tony Kushner's two-
part play Angels in America, and Thom Gunn's poetry collection The
Man with Night Sweats.
JUST THE FACTS: THE SIGNIFICATIONS OF "AIDS"
Many theorists have emphasized the point that there are no inc
vertible facts about AIDS. Even at the turn of the twenty-first cen
AIDS remains enigmatic, even though medical science is now a
treat more effectively those with HIV and AIDS.3 "AIDS" came t
nify by the mid-1980s an arena of competing discourses or refe
sites that attempted to generate meaning about the syndrome
arena included texts by AIDS theorists themselves and numero
others, particularly medical researchers and doctors, news repo
politicians, and well-known personalities-Elizabeth Taylor,
Johnson, Elton John-who became self-appointed spokespeople
AIDS. Medical discourse was and continues to be privileged in m
"IN TIME OF PLAGUE" | 171
discussions of AIDS. This is the case generally because the medical

establishment has from the beginning of the epidemic been expected
by many to find the eventual cure for AIDS, a Holy Grail whose exis-
tence at the time of my writing is by no means certain. From the early
days of public awareness of the epidemic, researchers, particularly
Robert Gallo, were roundly criticized for a lack of zeal or for failing to
communicate the "truth" of AIDS to the "general population." At the
same time, the media, politicians, and figures well known in popular
culture continued throughout the 1990s to maintain almost a blind
faith in the power of medicine to provide this cure sometime in the
future. As Simon Watney noted in the 1996 preface to Policing Desire,
"Media coverage continues to dwell on supposed miracle cures" (xv).
In response to this shortsightedness, a group of AIDS theorists
(including Watney) have taken as their task a close examination of
the discourses that construct the signifier "AIDS" in popular culture.
In medical terms and for those who rely on medicine for their
truth, AIDS has generally been understood as a physical condition
that manifests itself in certain symptoms associated with AIDS; in
theoretical discourses, "AIDS" tends to signify an overdetermined set
of possible referents. These include a physical condition (overlapping
with the notion of AIDS constructed through medical discourses); an
American, politically conservative conspiracy to eliminate homo-
sexuality; a threat to the singularity and uniqueness of one's own
body; an opportunity to reconceptualize the significations of homo-
sexuality and the homosexual community; an opportunity for large
pharmaceutical companies to exploit economically those infected
with HIV; fear; death; etc. For the medical community, "AIDS" has
consistently signified a set of symptoms associated with an epidemic
syndrome that needs to be eliminated. For theorists, "AIDS" can sig-
nify both physical symptoms and the political, economic, personal,
existential, even ontological conditions that circumscribe AIDS-era
homosexuality at the threshold of a new millennium.
AIDS theorists of the 1980s and 1990s closely associated the dis-
courses of the syndrome with cultural perceptions of homosexuality;
AIDS is seen in many theoretical texts as a horrifying literalization of
the disease that homosexuality is already perceived to be in homo-
phobic discourses. As Leo Bersani has pointed out, the rectum has
been read historically as a grave. The assumed connection between
172 | GEORGE PIGGFORD
HIV infection and anal intercourse in many discourses connects

sodomy and death in a fashion not unfamiliar to a medicalized tradi-
tion of reading homosexuality as a synonym for morbidity. AIDS
theory has often taken as its task to reveal the rhetorical maneuvers
behind such associations. It has also been frequently noted that the
North American and European conflation of AIDS and homosexual-
ity both perpetuates homophobic stereotypes and erases the experi-
ences of people living with AIDS (PLWAs) who are not necessarily
male or homosexual. Watney, for example, contests this conflation by
defining AIDS as "a series of unfolding and overlapping epidemics
within and between different population groups" (Practices 148), and
Cindy Patton examines the predominantly heterosexual AIDS of
Africa as a means of rethinking the significations of "AIDS."
The ways that AIDS is sexualized, gendered, racialized, ethni-
cized, and nationalized are of profound interest to AIDS theory. At
the same time, many theorists are self-identified gay men, just as
much literature that has taken AIDS as a theme is also gay male liter-
ature. The fact that gay-identified men are deeply concerned about
AIDS testifies to the devastating impact of AIDS on gay and queer
communities; this fact does not however nullify or, at least intention-
ally, marginalize the experiences of other communities coping with
AIDS. This body of theory attempts to produce a counterdiscourse
that neither denies the impact of AIDS on gay men nor conflates
AIDS and homosexuality. AIDS theory speaks in many ways for a
cultural minority, made up of gay men and others, who have lost
their faith in medical science.
An encounter with medical authority will serve to illustrate the

relationship between theoretical and scientific discourses of AIDS. In
1994 I participated in a seminar at McGill University in Montreal
entitled "AIDS and Representation." In it "Richard," a medical doctor,
sought to provide his audience with medical facts concerning AIDS.
Richard explained the process of HIV infection as follows: First, he
drew a cell featuring a small circle-its nucleus-surrounded by a
larger circle-its wall. He explained that the master genetic code of
the cell, its DNA, is located exclusively in the nucleus, and that the
nucleus, like a photocopy machine, replicates DNA in the form of
RNA. The RNA, "faxed" into the cell itself from the nucleus, directly
controls all cellular activity. HIV (the human immunodeficiency
"IN TIME OF PLAGUE" I 173
virus), which "invades" cells after entering a person's bloodstream,

contains a piece of RNA. He next informed us that what makes HIV
a retrovirus is that the RNA in HIV catalyzes the "reverse transcrip-
tion" of DNA on the RNA "template"; "infected" DNA can then be
grafted into cellular DNA. That is, HIV's RNA-which can meta-
phorically be understood as a copy-attaches itself to a cell's DNA,
the metaphoric original from which copies are made. Viruses, Richard
noted, are not supposed to be able to make an original from a copy.
Stated in an oversimplified way, the mystery of HIV is this enigmatic
ability to "rewrite" a cell's DNA.
Richard's presentation, read as an example of a simplified med-
ical discourse of AIDS aimed at a lay audience, contains two partic-
ularly striking features. The first, typical of medical discourses of
AIDS, is that his explanation assumes that generalizable facts exist
concerning HIV infection and that those facts are closely related to a
syndrome termed AIDS. The second is that Richard's explanation uti-
lizes highly metaphoric language in order to make HIV infection
comprehensible. His presentation can be summed up as an attempt
to "read" HIV infection and its effects in/on bodies synecdochically
through the example of one typical cell.4 This talk, delivered by a
practitioner who has worked with HIV-infected individuals, points
toward actual cells in bodies of "real" people. Also at this time I was
reading through the texts of AIDS cultural theorists. Like Richard,
these theorists and others are engaged in a project of reading AIDS;
however, for them AIDS is primarily a cultural text rather than a bio-
logical phenomenon. They examine the signifier "AIDS" and explore
the dissemination of its signification.
In general, theorists of AIDS have been suspicious of the medical
establishment. Douglas Crimp warns, "Blind faith in science, as if it
were entirely neutral and uncontaminated by politics, is naive and
dangerous" (6). However, some, like Simon Watney and Cindy Pat-
ton, have formed an often uncomfortable alliance with medicine, at
least in some of their writing. They often presuppose the reliability of
medical facts and focus their readings on the communication of those
facts to people at risk and to PLWAs. Watney defines the problem that
he is attempting to overcome: "The most fundamental facts con-
cerning HIV and AIDS remain all but universally misunderstood"
(Policing 46-47). Implicit in his statement is the assumption that
fundamental facts about AIDS are potentially understandable if they

are communicated properly. Watney asserts that his writing "pro-
vides information; it counters lies" (Practices 259). He argues that his
responsibility is to communicate the "truth" of AIDS, which for him
is related to medical research, specifically "the isolation of the HIV
retrovirus" (Practices 46).
Watney's writing, rather than questioning the authority of med-
ical discourse, critiques the "cultural agenda that is as medically mis-
informed as it is socially misleading and politically motivated" (47).
This cultural agenda (promoted by the government of his native Great
Britain) emphasizes both "gloating over the fate of those deemed
responsible for their own misfortune"-gay men-and planning for
the "real" epidemic that threatens the "general population" (47). His
criticism of cultural discourses is based on their homophobic assump-
tions and obsession with protecting the putative "innocence" of the
family (51).5 He argues that political agendas interfere with the com-
munication of AIDS information.
Patton bases at least some of her writing on assumptions similar

to Watney's. In critiquing the Western media discourse of African
AIDS, for example, she argues that the invention of an African "Pat
tern Two" AIDS epidemic as opposed to a Western "Pattern One"
version relies on racial stereotypes.6 Like Watney, she asserts that
political and cultural assumptions obscure the "truth" about AIDS.
Popular discourses assume that AIDS has spread quickly in certain
heterosexual African communities because Africans are more promis-
cuous than Westerners; therefore, health workers in Africa attempt to
instill the values of the "safe" bourgeois family into African cultures
where such a notion has never existed (128). This project is counter-
productive in Africa because it diverts energies away from safe-sex
education. It also gives Western heterosexuals a false sense of secu-
rity because "Euro-American heterosexuality is [understood to be]
'not at risk' as long as local AIDS is identified as homosexual and
heterosexual AIDS remains distant" (130). In this way, the popular
method of distinguishing between "our" (Western) AIDS and "their"
(African) AIDS "inverts the crucial epidemiologic issues" (130). Pat-
ton's critique puts a certain amount of faith in Western medicine,
taking for granted its understanding of the way AIDS is spread. In
this essay the crucial issue for Patton is to demystify the "facts" by
critiquing politically motivated cultural discourses that obscure the

epidemiology of AIDS.
In other work Patton is more suspicious of medicine. She argues
in Inventing AIDS: "The impression that what we know is most
importantly based in science forecloses the exchange of crucial forms
of information about transmission interruption both within and
between communities" (54). For her, medical science should not be
the final arbiter of information about AIDS. Patton does, however,
focus here on the transmission of medical knowledge rather than on
that knowledge itself. She clarifies this by noting, "I want to chal-
lenge here the basis of the cultural acceptance of science's claims,
not the results of its work" (55). Science remains for her an important,
if not the only, arbiter of AIDS knowledge. In her later Fatal Advice,
Patton turns from an interest in medical discourses to an examination
of the discourses of "safe sex," particularly in the 1980s. She argues
that queer theory might provide a solution to the difficulties of sex
educators by enabling a reconceptualization of both the body and its
sexuality. She asserts: "Queer codes define as a space the linkage
between interlocutors who recognize that they know and share a par-
ticular sexual vernacular" (151). This model of queer coding suggests
an alliance between activists and theorists: the assault on the "New
Right" "must unite 'academics' and activists'" (154). I, too, would
like to call for such an alliance, with the added element of creative
writers who have taken AIDS as a subject.
Watney and Patton share similar goals: an end to AIDS. For this
end they are willing to put some trust in medical research and its
assertions about the characteristics of AIDS, at least in certain
instances. Most theorists are more wary of the medical establishment
Susan Sontag asserts that "AIDS marks a turning point in current
attitudes toward illness and medicine" (160). According to Sontag,
AIDS has undermined our trust in Western medicine-"AIDS rein-
states something like a premodern experience of illness" (122), an
experience based on fear and uncertainty. More recently, Eric Savoy
has associated AIDS with a premodern, "apprehensive" (70), rather
than comprehensive, experience of disease, and he has also argued
for the "postmodernity of the invention of AIDS" (69). That is, not
only is AIDS incomprehensible (its premodern aspect), it is simul-
taneously centrally textual (its postmodernity). The association of
AIDS with "the dismantling of the 'identified' subject" (Savoy 69)

points directly toward its postmodern aspect. For most theorists, the
terms "uncertainty," "textuality," and "AIDS" become linked; this
uncertainty is played out in various discourses, representing
attempts to claim ownership of and authority over a syndrome that
remains incomprehensible.
For some theorists, readings that assume that anything can be
determined for certain about a signified AIDS have misunderstood
the ways in which the signifier "AIDS" is deployed culturally. This
perception of AIDS underlies Jan Zita Grover's comment that AIDS is
"one of our culture's profoundest confusions of a signifier for a sign"
(145). AIDS can be understood primarily as "an epidemic of mean-
ings, or signification" (Treichler 32) that is "almost literally unthink-
able in its mathematical defeat of cognitive desire" (Yingling 38). For
these writers, nothing is certain about the signification of the term.
Lee Edelman has articulated this position more fully than has
any other theorist. He contends that AIDS "resists our attempts to
inscribe it as a manageable subject of writing ... to the extent that ...
it has itself taken shape-has been given shape-as that which writes
or articulates another subject altogether" (94). This displaced subject
refers both to the multifarious medical conditions that AIDS repre-
sents and to its association with male homosexuality, but it is not
limited to either of these referents. For Edelman, "The discursive field
of 'AIDS' thus unfolds as a landscape of displacements, and given
those displacements and the slipperiness of the subject, every effort
to resist ideological enforcement in one place carries with it the threat
of resowing the seeds of ideological coercion in another" (94). He
argues that discourses of AIDS are perpetually displaced from their
unknowable subject, and he contends in a separate essay that HIV
infection functions as "a type of metaphoric substitution" (90). As
Richard the M.D. explained, HIV somehow convinces a cell's DNA
that it is a part of that cell's genetic code, just as metaphor asserts that
something is something else. As in metaphoric substitution, the
"other" becomes indistinguishable from the "self" in the process of
HIV infection on a cellular level.
The difficulty for the production of a politically motivated AIDS
theory using this exclusively discursive model has been recognized
by Edelman himself: "Readers [of his essays] will be dismayed,
infuriated, or bored" (xvi). One might infer that some readers-in

particular, those activists who speak the "language of the street"-
will reject Edelman's analyses because they employ "jargonistic
code" (xvi-xvii). But Edelman argues in convincing fashion that his
use of jargon is seen by conservative politicians as part of a leftist,
subversive political project, and that theory and practice should
inform, even enlighten, each other (xvii-xviii). One might argue,
however, that the main impediment to an informed, useful, and
lively exchange between theory and activism has to do with their
often widely divergent assumptions. From an activist'" "common-
sense" perspective, there is a material body outside of lI.tguage that
can be infected with the retrovirus HIV and that can die of AIDS. In
Edelman's theory the "body" is constructed through discourses, and
rhetorical analysis will reveal its various significations.
Eric Savoy has summarized the danger inherent to such AIDS
theory: "The distinction between body and text tends to blur" (73).
Particularly for those who apprehend AIDS on their own or others'
bodies, Edelman's "intellectual arabesques" (92) seem to ignore the
importance of a material body in the construction of AIDS. Edelman
acknowledges the "gravity" of his subject; he is aware that his theory
inscribes "the horrors experienced by my own community, along
with other communities in America and abroad ... within the neu-
tralizing conventions of literary criticism" (92). But in the context of
human suffering, discourse analysis seems to provide an incomplete
reading of the significations of AIDS. One is able to deconstruct
"AIDS," flattening its biological "reality" onto a depthless field of
immanent discursivity. But an activist might argue that people are
dying in this "plague of discourse," this language game. For Edel-
man, "AIDS" signifies a syndrome that refers to the homosexual male
as constructed through popular discourses and to a particular pattern
of symptoms related to diseases that are themselves constructs of
language. However, AIDS certainly seems real enough to subjects
treating it-like Richard-and living with it.
Judging from this quick survey of AIDS theory, it seems clear that
anyone who attempts to discuss AIDS must contend with at least two
epidemics, both of which are featured in the "authoritative" medical
explanation of AIDS summarized at the beginning of this essay. The
first, AIDS as "an epidemic of signification" (Treichler 31), Edelman's
"plague of discourse," is demonstrated through Richard's use of sus-

piciously discursive metaphors in order to make sense of HIV infec-
tion. Richard's language indicates the inherent representationality of
any discourse about AIDS. His use of the metaphor of photocopying
in order to explain the process of HIV infection contextualizes and
emphasizes the analogical function of a specifically medical term like
"reverse transcription." The second epidemic, which certainly seems
more real, is the one that Western medical research is attempting to
cure. We must trust the medical establishment in order to believe
that this one exists, because it can only be constructed through

medium of language. But this is what is commonly referred to
the "real" epidemic-the one that is associated typically with
seropositivity, Kaposi's sarcoma, and pneumocytosis, and until fa
recently led almost invariably to death.
From the vantage of most AIDS theory, the first epidemic is
only one to which we must be most carefully attentive, but in the su
jectivities of those for whom AIDS signifies an everyday struggle
second seems much more real. The former, constructed through
ular discourses and critiqued in theoretical discourses, I would lik
term, albeit artificially, the tropic discourse of AIDS, which rega
AIDS as a metaphor constructed in language. The latter, viewabl
the bodies of PLWAs, I would like to term the empirical discou
which assumes AIDS is extra-discursive and exists in physical bo
ies.7 I do not mean to binarize AIDS through the use of these ter
rather, I would emphasize their irreducible difference. As Ying
argues, regarding "the question of AIDS, we find a true incomm
surability of discursive universes" (45). These discourses cannot
integrated. It is impossible to reconcile a reading of AIDS as disco
only (or as a sign of difference) with an epistemology that posit
extra-discursive material "reality" in which a physical body exi
But AIDS signifies in both epistemes, so both ought to be accou
for and acknowledged.8
I would like, therefore, to employ a mode of reading that in
cludes both: tropic discourse, characterized by an attempt to de
or to comprehend AIDS, should be contextualized within an atte
to apprehend AIDS as an object of empirical study whose mater
manifestations can be read on-and in-bodies of PLWAs. Thomas
Yingling asserts that "the gap between the apprehension
comprehension of the disease is ... an asymptotic space where alle-

gory persistently finds itself at play" (38). Rather than reading the
representations that construct AIDS at the expense of its material
manifestations, or apprehending its material effects without attempt-
ing to comprehend its function as metaphor, I propose to attempt to
read this "asymptotic space" that exists between the tropic and
empirical discourses of AIDS. The proper arena for this sort of AIDS
reading is, I would like to argue, literature: literary texts can inscribe
both discourses in an attempt to make sense of AIDS in a way that is
not strictly scientific, theoretical, or rationalistic. The writing of liter-
ature, as a creative or imaginative endeavor, can inscribe what is
often unwritable in more strictly organized and limited forms of dis-
course such as the medical text or the theoretical inquiry. In this way,
literature provides a context in which one might attempt to read the
illegible.
THRESHOLD OF REVELATION: READING AIDS LITERATURE
AIDS literature of the past decade has allowed for textual modes
that undermine the metadiscourse of scientific rationalism and that
attempt to reconceptualize disease and the body in terms of the sub-
ject's relationship to language. By confronting "death," the signifier
that ostensibly silences all discourse, within a frame of literary writ-
ing, the texts of Herve Guibert, Tony Kushner, and Thom Gunn
attempt to incorporate the various significations of "AIDS" and
thereby to gain some authority over the signifier. This attempt paral-
lels the project of AIDS theorists, but, unlike their counterparts, liter-
ary writers emphasize the materiality and mortality of the body, the
signified, along with the signifier and its place in discursive systems.
Guibert writes in his journal Cytomegalovirus,
Ecrire dans le noir?
Ecrire jusqu'au bout?

En finir pour ne pas arriver a la peur de la mort?9 (93)
Guibert seeks to read the effects of AIDS on his own body "until the
very end," or at least as close to death as possible. By recording those
180 I GEORGE PIGGFORD
readings for eventual publication, he attempts to overcome "the fear

of death" and, one might infer, even death itself as that which cannot
be written. By writing as close to death as possible, Guibert, along
with other creative writers who take AIDS as their topic, attempts to
write that which cannot be written at what Kushner terms the
"threshold of revelation" (Kushner, Perestroika 85), at the moment of
the apprehension of death.
Herve Guibert's best known memoir, A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauve
la vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life), documents the author's
attempt to come to terms with his own empirical experience with
AIDS, the suffering of his friends (particularly Muzil, a fictionalized
version of Michel Foucault), and the medical discourses that attempt
to retain authority over the bodies of PLWAs.10 Guibert's text, accord-
ing to Emily Apter, is "intent on capturing the existential solitude
of AIDS anguish together with the shocking propulsion of the sub-
ject into a reality composed of medicalized particulars" (83). This
anguish, and the inability of the medical establishment to cure it,
centers on a contradiction that informs and structures the text. At the
same time that the narrator expresses an obsessive compulsion

toward death and the attempt to read death from the perspective of a
subject "living-in-death," he expresses an irrational belief that he will
"cheat" death.
This contradiction is expressed on the first page of the text: "J'

eu le sida pendant trois mois. Plus exactement, j'ai cru pendant tro
mois que j'etais condamne par cette maladie mortelle qu'on appelle
le sida"11 (9). Here, the writer gives voice to his feeling that he was
condemned to die. However, a few sentences later he states that, at
the same time that he tells his friends that he is sure to die from AIDS,
he insists to them that he will be one of the its first survivors:
De meme que je n'avais avoue a personne, sauf aux amis qui se

comptent sur les doigts d'une main, que j'etais condamne, je n'avouai a
personne, sauf a ces quelques amis, que j'allais m'en tirer, que je serais,
par ce hasard extraordinaire, un des premiers survivants au monde de
cette maladie inexorable.12 (9)
The narrator's oscillation between his certainty that he will die from
AIDS and his unfounded belief that he will survive it produces a nar-
rative voice that speaks and exists in a space between comprehension
and apprehension, reality and fantasy. The fact of Guibert's AIDS

infection is both paralyzing (a condition similar to death) and liberat-
ing: "Cela modifiant tout en un instant, tout basculait et le paysage
avec autour de cette certitude, et cela a la fois me paralysait et me
donnait des ailes"13 (41).
In Guibert's text this oscillation is produced by the conflicting
information that he receives from doctors. His doctors utilize clinical
language to read his body, but their readings are often contradictory
and do not always correspond with Guibert's experience of his own
body. For example, the appearance of "de petits filaments blancha-
tres" (Guibert 143) on his tongue represents for one doctor "un signe
statistique"14 (144), but eventually the filaments disappear. This sign
leads Guibert to a search for certainty, so he decides to take an HIV
test, which confirms his seropositivity. But his newfound certainty
both reinforces and undermines the reality of his body's infection by
HIV and of his body itself. When Guibert finally concedes his
seropositivity, he realizes,
l'aveu comprenait quelque chose d'atroce: dire qu'on etait malade ne

faisait qu'accr6diter la maladie, elle devenait reelle tout a coup, sans
appel, et semblait tirer sa puissance et ses forces destructrices du credit
qu'on lui accordait. De plus c'etait un premier pas dans la separation
qui devait conduire au deuil.15 (175)
As the illness gains power over him, he is in a state of mourning for a

body already dead or absent.
Eventually, medical discourses correspond in no way to Gui-
bert's own experience of his body; a total disjunction between appre-
hension and comprehension occurs. When he feels most ill and weak,
a medical report informs him that the virus is in remission and that
his T4 level is very close to normal:
A ce moment oui je m'etais senti tellement affaibli par ma maladie, je me

trouvais en fait dans une phase de repit et meme de repli de cette mal-
adie car mon niveau de T4 etait remonte a plus de 550, dans une
fourchette avoisinant la normale, et a un degre qu'il n'avait jamais
atteint depuis qu'on entreprenait ces analyses specifiques de l'action
du virus HIV sur la depopulation des lymphocytes, mon corps avait
accompli ce que le docteur Chandi appelait un redressement spontane.16
(207)
Later, when Guibert feels strong enough to live forever ("je me sen-
tais puissant et eternel" (210-11), he discovers on visiting the doctor
that "ma sante s'etait vertigineusement degradee en l'espace de
quatre mois"'7 (211). That is, his own apprehension of his diseased
body is completely at odds with the attempted comprehension pro-
vided to him by medical discourses.
If, as Foucault has argued, "Clinical experience-the opening up
of the concrete individual ... to the language of rationality" was "a
major event in the relationship of man to himself and of language to
things" (xiv), then the breakdown of the ability of medical science to
make the body rational must also be a significant moment in the rela-
tionship between humans and their bodies and between language
and things.18 David Caron suggests that Guibert's text resists "the
violence ... of the medical gaze, which legitimates the subject/object
relation and freezes it in the objectivity of medical discourse, a dis-
course constantly reinforced by the authority it enjoys far beyond the
field of medicine" (239). Guibert turns from the rationalistic dis-
courses of medicine toward irrationality and fantasy. The discourses
of the body inexorably edge toward incomprehensibility in his mem-
oir, as AIDS undermines both the narrator's trust-relationship with
his doctors and his ability to make sense of his body as a living, mate-
rial entity rather than as a conceptual category on the threshold of
death. Guibert eventually realizes that he has become a pariah. He
will never again be a member of "la communaute des hommes" (216)
and that in the eyes of the medical community in particular "je suis
deja un homme mort"19 (241-42).
It is in a process of writing that Guibert comes to terms with his
being-in-death, but he realizes that, ultimately, his book becomes
more than a record of his experience of disorientation and confusion.
He comes to realize that his body will never again be readable
through a frame of rationality, but that through his memoir he will
leave a record of a life on the threshold of death. Ultimately, he
decides to remain calm and to exchange the notion of survival for the
textual record that is A I'ami qui ne m'a pas sauve la vie. His book itself
becomes the friend who cannot save Guibert's life:
J'ai decide d'etre calme, d'aller au bout de cette logique romanesque,

qui m'hypnotise, au detriment de toute idee de survie. Oui, je peux
l'ecrire, et c'est sans doute cela ma folie, je tiens a mon livre plus qu'a
ma vie; je ne renoncerais pas a mon livre pour conserver ma vie, voila ce
qui sera le plus difficile a faire croire et comprendre.20 (274)
Guibert accepts and embraces death generally and his impending

death particularly; the clearest indication of this and of his rejection
of medical authority is his decision to stop taking AZT. But simulta-
neously he hopes to achieve some sort of transcendence through his
attempt to textualize death. By exiting the community of the living,
he becomes a member of a group of living dead. This form of exis-
tence contains qualities of the fantastic, because it is beyond the
authority of rationalistic metadiscourses such as those of the Western
medical establishment. Because reality and fantasy begin to overlap
for subjects in such situations, it is possible for Guibert, though
resigned to his death, to imagine other possibilities of existence that
are yoked neither to life nor to death, but exist in an epistemological,
even existential, space between the two. He personifies such a possi-
bility as an angel: "Je me reposais, seul et apaise, la majeure partie du
temps, en attendant qu'un ange me delivre"21 (181). Unfortunately,
this angel never arrives to deliver him; rather, A l'ami ends with its
narrator "dans la merde"22 (284).
In contrast, the text of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, a two-
part play, allows the fantastic to interplay freely with the realistic in a
humorous way: characters participate in each other's dreams, Emma
Goldman returns from the dead to chastise Roy Cohn, an angel
descends into the protagonist's bedroom, "wax" figures come to life,
and finally Prior Walter (the protagonist) climbs a ladder to heaven.
In Kushner's play, the Angel, long awaited by those living-in-death,
arrives, but it does not deliver them from life. Prior, diagnosed as
HIV-positive before the play begins, exists in a world between reality
and fantasy, apprehension and comprehension, life and death. Angels
in America, like A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauve la vie, inscribes various
AIDS discourses, focusing on "the far side of language" (Savoy 82),
what Kushner terms the "threshold of revelation."23
As in Guibert's text, the first mention of AIDS in Millennium
Approaches, the first part of Angels in America, associates AIDS with
death and AIDS infection with living in death on the threshold of fan-
tasy or myth. Prior announces to his lover Louis his new symptomatic
184 1 GEORGE PIGGFORD
condition bluntly: "K. S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-
dark kiss of the angel of death" (21). The reference to "the angel of
death," though it first appears to be an innocent metaphor, hints at
the fantastic sequences that will follow. This scene also raises the
issue of the authority of medical discourse. Louis challenges Prior's
reading of his body when he states incredulously, "That's just a burst
blood vessel" (21); Prior rejoins, "Not according to the best medical
authorities" (21). At this early point in the play, Prior maintains a cer-
tain faith in the authority of medical discourse and in its ability to
comprehend his body. He also, however, clearly states, "I'm going to
die" (21): although he trusts medicine to define his condition, he is
certain that the medical establishment will not be able to eliminate it.
Roy Cohn, the other PLWA in Angels in America, asserts the im-
portance of the signifier AIDS by refusing to associate that signifier
with his condition. When his doctor informs him, "You have AIDS"
(Millennium 45), Cohn replies, "Your problem, Henry, is that you are
hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they
seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are
names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don't tell you
that" (45). Cohn explains that labels such as "AIDS" and "homosex-
ual" signify not, respectively, a syndrome and a sexual identity, but
an absence of power.
Cohn realizes that such signifiers are synecdoches as well as spe-
cific labels for a syndrome or an identity. He asserts: "Like all labels
they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual
so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order" (45). Cohn
reasons that homosexuals have no political clout and that he has an
excess of such power, so he could not possibly be a homosexual. Also,
because homosexuals are closely associated with AIDS, he could not
possibly have AIDS. Therefore, he is not a homosexual, but "a het-
erosexual man ... who fucks around with guys" (46). And when his
doctor insists, "You have AIDS, Roy," Cohn replies, "No, Henry, no.
AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer" (46). Cohn here
undermines medical authority at the same time that he exposes the
social, economic, and political associations attached to an ostensibly
neutral medical term.
This reading of AIDS as a signifier of disempowerment is furthe
emphasized in a conversation between Louis and Belize, a former

lover and now a close friend of Prior's:
LOUIS: ... what AIDS shows us is the limits of tolerance, that it's
not enough to be tolerated, because when the shit hits the fan you
find out how much tolerance is worth. Nothing. And underneath all
the tolerance is intense, passionate hatred.
BELIZE: Uh huh.
LOUIS: Well don't you think that's true?

BELIZE: ... Power is the object, not being tolerated. Fuck assimila-
tion. (90)
For both Louis and Belize, as for Cohn, AIDS signifies a paucity of
power, particularly for the homosexual "dans le merde." AIDS is
synecdochically related to homosexual culture and its lack of clout. It
signifies the condition ravaging the bodies of both liberal gay men
such as Prior and ultraconservative "heterosexual [men] ... who fuck
around with guys" such as Cohn, and it is a term that indicates the
disenfranchisement of the homosexual in late twentieth-century
American culture.
In the second part of Angels in America, Perestroika, Cohn contin-

ues to insist that his AIDS be labeled "liver cancer" (25), a diagnosis to
which his doctor reluctantly acquiesces. Belize further undermines the
authority of the medical establishment by arguing that clinical proce-
dures damage rather than heal the body-with-AIDS. He tells Cohn:
They have you down for radiation tomorrow for the sarcoma lesions,
and you don't want to let them do that, because radiation will kill the
T-cells and you don't have any you can afford to lose. So tell the doctor
no thanks for the radiation. He won't want to listen. Persuade him.
Or he'll kill you. (29)
Belize, as Cohn's nurse, represents medical authority to a certain

extent, but he speaks authoritatively not as a nurse but as a queer. He
explains, "[Henryl's not queer. I am" (29). Although Cohn insists that
he is suffering from cancer, Belize knows enough about AIDS both to
read his "real" condition and to speak to him as one queer to another.
Though Cohn rejects the label "homosexual," he finds himself, as an

AIDS sufferer, an unwilling member of the gay community, a com-
munity at odds with the institution of medicine. Belize also suggests
that Cohn attempt to procure AZT. This he eventually does, but he
dies anyway, having accepted neither the label "homosexual" nor the
label "person living with AIDS."
In contrast, Prior remains alive at the end of the play (set in 1990),
having made an arrangement with the fantastic, represented in the
play by various angels. Unlike Guibert, Prior does not embrace or
accept death. After his visit to heaven, he asks for a blessing from the
angel who appeared to him at the end of Millennium. He claims that
human beings live through terrible times, but survive, and that
death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal.
I don't know if it's not braver to die. But I recognize the habit. The
addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere,
that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough, so inadequate
but ... Bless me anyway. I want more life. (136)
Prior decides ultimately that he desires neither to refuse nor to tran-

scend life. He rejects the category of life-in-death, and decides to
reenter the realm of the community of the living by descending the
ladder from heaven back to earth. On earth he is greeted by Belize,
who gives Prior the dead Cohn's AZT stash. The Angel's blessing
takes the physical form of AZT tablets, and Prior receives a prover-
bial new lease on life.
Angels in America ultimately rejects a discourse of AIDS focused

on the threshold of death. By rejecting his role as prophet, Prior for
sakes his opportunity to live at the "threshold of revelation," a new
form of being situated at the far side of life and of language. He
accepts the divine gift of AZT and places his trust in a teleological
view of history: "The world only spins forward" (Perestroika 148). As
Charles McNulty points out, it is at this point in the play that Kush
ner turns from Walter Benjamin's notion of history as catastrophe and
instead "rushes headlong into a fairy tale of progress" (91).24 Unlike
Guibert, who rejects AZT and embraces death, Prior denies death
and chooses to wait for a utopian future in which disease and preju
dice will be unknown:
We will be citizens. The time has come.
Bye now.
You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.
And I bless you: More Life.
The Great Work Begins. (Perestroika 148)
The play ends with a vision of liberal pluralism (see Savran 208), and
thereby downplays crucial factors that produce the conflicted and
contested discursive construct "AIDS."
If A l'ami can be understood as a text that successfully inscribe

the threshold of revelation and Angels as a text that finally turns from
it, Thom Gunn's poetry collection The Man with Night Sweats might be
read as an attempt to recontextualize AIDS discourse within an
ordered structure that focuses both on representation and language:
the metered poem. Gunn, like Guibert and Kushner, explores mean-
ings of AIDS, though the signifier "AIDS" is conspicuously absent
from his collection. While Guibert uses minute detail to communicate
his experience of life-in-death and Kushner uses humor to undercut

the seriousness of the overdetermined nature of the significations of
AIDS, Gunn's mode utilizes the decorousness of traditional verse in
an attempt to order and to frame the irrational and incomprehensible
process of AIDS infection. Robert K. Martin utilizes the term "deco-
rum" (221) as a defining notion of Gunn's style. For Martin, his
"sense of decorum is a desperate response to a disordered universe,
an attempt to hold things in their places by sheer effort of the will"
(221). The poems in The Man with Night Sweats respond both to a
disordered universe and to the disordered and disorienting subject of
AIDS.25
A poem in the collection that is exemplary of Gunn's decorous-

ness ends the first section (of four) in the text: "Seesaw." This poem,
a "song," displays decorum in its form: generally, each line consists
of two stressed and usually one unstressed foot, each of the six stan-
zas contains four lines. The rhyme scheme of each stanza is A-B-A-B.
The text of the poem, too, is evenly balanced, as in the first stanza:
Days are bright,

Nights are dark.
We play seesaw
In the park. (15)
The universe for this poem's narrator is perfectly ordered. There are
no dark days or bright nights; in fact, he drops "down / Like the
night" (15) only to rise back up again. The whole experience is de-
fined as "Give and take, / Take and give" (16). However, as with all
binaries, the "balance" of this poem disguises a central inequality.
Day and night are not the same, they are defined by lack or excess of
light. Likewise, the speaker in this poem is distinguishable from his
"Freckleface" (15) friend through the use of this pejorative nickname.
The poem represents an attempt that ultimately ends in exhaustion:
"My legs ache" (16). Tired, the singer of this poem and his friend
climb off the seesaw and "no one wins" (16). Actually, the speaker of
this poem wins, he defines this situation as exemplary of an order that
privileges his discourse over that of his silent, frecklefaced friend.26
Other poems included in The Man with Night Sweats attempt to
order AIDS using methods similar to those employed by the speaker
of "Seesaw" to order the universe. To this end, the poem "Yellow
Pitcher Plant," in the third section of the collection, attempts to com-
prehend the biological reality of AIDS through an extended conceit.
In the poem, a "seely fly ... is lured to sloping / pastures at the trum-
pet's lip" (35) of a yellow pitcher plant. Having pushed through an
"underbrush / of hairs" (35), the fly finds itself trapped. Eventually
the fly falls into a "pool that digests protein" (35),
to become mere
chitinous exoskeleton,
leftovers
of a sated petal
an enzyme's cruelty. (36)
This poem might be read as an objective description of a digestive

process. However, if one reads it as an extended conceit representin
HIV infection, which seems reasonable in the context of a poetry col
lection that takes AIDS as its overarching theme, then the process
described in this poem becomes comprehensible within a framing
discourse of biological order. From the moment that the fly come
into contact with the outer lip of the pitcher plant's trumpet, it might
be understood as a being-toward-death, a creature for whom death i
shortly inevitable.
If the seely, or blind, fly entering "sloping / pastures" (35) is read

as a metaphor for anal penetration, then the fly's entrapment and
death become situated within the natural enzymatic processes of
living entities, whether plants or human bodies, which are ordered
and taxonomized by the discourses of biology and medical science.
The narrative voice of this poem seems quite content to operate a-
metrically within a secure structure of biological rationalism. Though
we can mourn the unfortunate fate of an AIDS victim-"oh alas!"
(35)-we are also encouraged to comprehend that fate within a "nat

ural" order.
But this comprehension can be achieved only though an overt

discourse of trope (the poetic equivalent of Kushner's use of fantas-
tic), only if the "victim" of a biological process can be transformed
through metaphor into something other than a person living with
AIDS. When, in the last section of The Man with Night Sweats, the
author turns his attention to the inscription of AIDS onto human bod-
ies, he moves from a metaphorically charged discourse to a discourse
of empiricism, from an apprehension of biological processes to an
examination of the body-with-AIDS. Generally, Gunn's poems exam-
ine and attempt to inscribe not the AIDS present in/on his own body,
but on the bodies of others, and in the poems of the fourth section,
AIDS often is associated with the sensation of living-in-death.27
This movement is enacted within a particular poem, "To a Dead
Graduate Student," the first stanza of which utilizes overtly meta-
phorical discourse:
The whole rich process of twined opposites,

Tendril round stalk, developing in tandem
Through tangled exquisite detail that knits
To a unique promise- (79)
A promising graduate student is regarded in this poem as a tendril

tangled around the stalk of the poem's narrator. Because these two
elements twine around each other, a promise of something unique and
new develops. Like "Yellow Pitcher Plant," this poem presents an ex-
tended conceit based on assumptions of biological nature, with sexual
overtones. Unlike the previous poem, however, "To a Dead Graduate
Student" utilizes explicit metaphor. The direct connection between
enzymatic processes and AIDS in "Yellow Pitcher Plant" is absent,

while plant development and human experience are directly related
to each other in "To a Dead Graduate Student." Importantly, the first
stanza of the latter poem ends with an abrupt break-a dash-that
interrupts the structure of orderly pentameter established in the poem.
The second stanza continues after the break, slowly recovering
metrically from the interruption:
checked at random,
Killed, wasted. What a teacher you'd have made:
Your tough, impatient mind, your flowering looks
Would have seduced the backward where they played,
Rebels like you, to share your love of books. (79)
Apart from the tropic participle "flowering," the second stanza of

this poem generally utilizes bald, descriptive language; the image of
the graduate student as a developing plant is rejected in favor of a
more objective description-a life that is "killed, wasted," not a plant
that is, for example, "withered, pruned." One senses in this poem a
frustration with the conceit developed in the first stanza because,
faced with the empirical reality of this inscription of AIDS onto a par-
ticular body, the narrator cannot escape incomprehension.
The general tone of another representative poem in this section,
"Still Life," is locatable between gestures toward tropic comprehen-
sion and attempts at empirical apprehension. Whereas the language
of "Still Life" centers on the apprehension of a body-with-AIDS, its
apprehensive focus exists in tension with its status as a metaphoric
inscription of AIDS. The language of "Still Life" displays a paucity of
metaphor. In the first stanza particularly, adjectives such as "greyish-
yellow" for the observed body's skin and "tight" for its closed eyelids
are descriptive rather than comparative (66). The poem's only partic-
ularly metaphoric image occurs in its second stanza, in which the ob-
served body's head is described as "reared back / On the crisp field
of bed," suggesting a horse risen on its hind legs. The viewed body is
here paralyzed in this position by "what he could neither / Accept ...
/ Nor ... / let go" (66). In general no attempt to comprehend this
"still life" is made by the narrator; rather, a body-with-AIDS is pre-
sented in a moment of immobility. Generally, the language of the
poem is transparent, mimetic. The poem ends with the detached
image of "The tube his mouth enclosed / In an astonished 0," pro-

viding an empirical apprehension of astonishment (66).
But "Still Life" also concludes with the image of a letter, an "O."
The poem ends with an emphasis on both textuality and (suspended)
articulation. The text ultimately emphasizes the opacity rather than
the transparency of language, by gesturing toward its existence as a
collection of signs/letters. This ending privileges the signifier over
the signified, undermining the empirical apprehension of a material
body developed in the rest of the poem. Not unaware of its own sta-
tus as discourse, Gunn's poem generally represents an attempt to
move through a less-than-transparent medium-language-in order
to arrive at an apprehension of AIDS as it is inscribed on the surface
of a body. Although Gunn effectively minimizes the metaphoric func-
tion of language in this poem, his description of the "astonished 0"
gestures toward a consciousness of language itself as trope. At the
same time, an "O" suggests the rhetorical device of apostrophe, which
is often deployed to address the dead. But this address is terminated
at the moment it begins, perpetually suspended by an intrusive tube.
The "O" becomes an overdetermined signifier simultaneously articu-
lated and silenced, privileged and erased.
This signifier functions therefore in the "illegible" space where I
would like to direct the attention of AIDS critics and theorists. For
Gunn, Guibert, and Kushner, this space becomes an arena simultane-
ously within and alongside of language in which the significations of
AIDS can be examined, challenged, explored. While Kushner's play
rejects the space of being-in-death in favor of clinging to a fantastical
and utopic notion of life, he does frequently use the signifier AIDS in
fraught and ambiguous ways. Guibert's text presents a subject who
embraces death and the disorienting condition of being a PLWA.
Gunn's collection also finally inscribes the "threshold of revelation,"
which is clear both from the overdetermined "O" of "Still Life" and
from a less complicated admission that opens the poem "In Time of
Plague":
My thoughts are crowded with death

and it draws so oddly on the sexual
that I am confused
confused to be attracted
by, in effect, my own annihilation. (59)
To write and to read in this area of desire, "situated," to reiterate

Savoy's phrase, "either in silence or somewhere on the far side of lan-
guage" (82), is potentially to locate and to explore an area between
life and death, apprehension and comprehension, reality and fantasy.
I have here thus attempted to find the space in which literary writers
such as Guibert, Kushner, and Gunn have essayed to write that
which cannot be written and thereby to rewrite the "diseased" dis-
courses of AIDS.
Notes
1. Many writers emphasize the fact that AIDS is not a disease but a
drome. This is significant because while diseases can be contagious and com
nicable, syndromes cannot. Jan Zita Grover has explored this distinction m
thoroughly in her "AIDS: Keywords." She defines a syndrome as "a patte
symptoms pointing to a 'morbid state,' which may or may not be caused by in
tious agents"; like a text, a syndrome can be read and interpreted in nume
sometimes contradictory ways. A disease, conversely, represents a deviation
or interruption of the normal functioning of a bodily organ, system, or part.
simply, "a syndrome points to or signifies the underlying disease process(e
disease, on the other hand, is constituted in and by those processes" (144).
2. The public/private distinction is generally, of course, an artificial o
see Foucault, Discipline, and Miller. No published literary text can be consi
private, though texts often attempt to reconstruct a fictional private spher
cumscribed by the frame of the text.
3. A number of writers, particularly Andrew Sullivan, appointed them
selves in the late 1990s heralds of an imminent "post-AIDS era," optimistic
treatments discussed at the Eleventh International Conference on AIDS (July
7-12, 1996), particularly the use of protease inhibitors along with other drugs,
would effectively end the epidemic. Sullivan claims "a diagnosis of H.I.V. infec-
tion is not just different in degree today than, say, five years ago. It is different in
kind" (54). Many, however, were and are more skeptical, concerned about the
toxicity of the new treatments and the lack of testing to confirm their long-term
efficacy (see, e.g., "Mixed"). Should new treatments be successful in transforming
AIDS from a life-threatening to a chronic illness, there will be a corresponding
change in the ways that AIDS is read. Whatever the future of AIDS, this essay
will, I hope, remain useful as an analysis of the discursive practices of a particu-
lar historical moment and its concomitant and conflicting epistemic assumptions.
4. Steven Kruger and John Nguyet Erni, among others, have carefully ana-
lyzed the importance of tropes in biomedical discourses of AIDS. Kruger, for
example, emphasizes the importance of "the metaphors of 'coding' and 'reading"'
in discussions of HIV infection (8). Erni notes that both "media and biomedical
discourses ... frequently invok[e] familiar characters in science fiction and detec-
tive stories" (41).
5. Watney uses the term "anti-Freudian" to describe the social project that
takes as its goal the preservation of the family as a private, innocent space,
because this notion of family ignores disruptive sexual drives exhibited by indi-
vidual family members within this private space (209).
6. The World Health Organization has labeled Western AIDS "Pattern
One," encompassing "epidemiologic scenarios where 'homosexual behavior' and
'drug injection' are considered the primary means of HIV transmission"
("Nation" 129). "Pattern Two" has been associated with Africa and a primarily
heterosexual method of transmission. (129-31).
7. Of course this second discourse is, like the first, "just" a discourse-a
way of using language that assumes the existence of something(s) outside of that
language, e.g., the body qua body.
8. The discourses outlined here might be understood in terms of what
Emmanuel Levinas calls a "face-a-face," a confrontation with an unknowable
"Other" (Autrui) that produces a relationship of mutual responsibility, or ethics.
For a concise discussion of the unknowable and "absolute other" see Levinas,
"Meaning," especially pp. 52-57.
9. "To write in the dark? To write until the very end? To put an end to it so
as not to reach the fear of death?"
10. "Le sida" is constructed through French discourses much as "AIDS" is
in English-speaking countries, but these two terms are not simply synonyms. For
an insightful analysis of the differences between sida and AIDS, see Apter.
11. "I had had AIDS for three months. More exactly, for three months I
believed that I was condemned by that moral illness that is called AIDS."
12. "Just as I had told no one, except those friends who could be counted on
the fingers of a hand, that I was condemned, I had told no one, except these same
friends, that I was going to pull through, that I was going to be, by some extraor-
dinary stroke of luck, one of the world's first survivors of this inexorable malady."
13. "This [certainty that he had AIDS] changed everything in an instant;
everything was inverted, even, with this certitude, the landscape, and I was
simultaneously paralyzed and given wings."
14. "small whitish filaments," "a statistical sign."
15. "The confession included something terrible: to say that one was ill only
validated the illness; it suddenly became real, without the possibility of an
appeal, and it seemed to take its power and destructive force from the credibility
it was given. As well it was the first step in the separation that would lead to
mourning."
16. "At the moment when I felt so weak as a result of my illness, I found
myself in fact in a phase of remission and of release from this illness because my
T4 level had risen above 550, in a bracket approaching the normal, to a degree it
had not reached since the beginning of the specific analyses of the action of HIV
on the elimination of my lymphocytes. My body had accomplished what Dr.

Chandi called a spontaneous remission."
17. "I felt powerful and eternal," "my health had deteriorated dizzyingly in
the space of four months."
18. Ralph Sarkonak argues that "much of Guibert's work can be read as a
fictionalization of Foucault's theories" (180).
19. "the community of men," "I am already a dead man."
20. "I decided to be calm, to follow to the end the novelistic logic, which
hypnotizes me, to the detriment of any idea of survival. Yes, I am able to write,
and this is without a doubt my madness, my book is more important to me than
my life; I would not renounce my book to save my life, and this will be the most
difficult thing to make people believe and understand."
21. "I rested, alone and peaceful, most of the time, waiting for an angel to
deliver me."
22. Literally, "in the shit."

23. Most reviews (see Brustein, Lahr) and critical readings (see Savran,
Clum) de-emphasize the importance of AIDS in Angels in America, choosing to
focus on the play as a reading and rewriting of American history and of
utopian/dystopian myth. For example, Clum asserts: "Angels in America focuses
on four homosexual men who represent, in various ways, not only positive and
negative possibilities for homosexuals, particularly the perils of the closet, but the
moral and spiritual plight of America" (315). Readings like Clum's and Savran's
are insightful and important for understanding the play as the product of certain
American traditions, but they downplay the significance of the private and pub-
lic (particularly medical) discourses of the body that inform the play's represen-
tations of AIDS.
24. McNulty analyzes Kushner's implicit rejection of Benjamin at the end of

Perestroika (91-95). He persuasively argues that "Kushner's brand of progress ...
seems dangerously close to that uncritical optimism on which Social Democratic
theory, the antagonist of Benjamin's entire vision, relies" (94). Also, Savran help-
fully discusses the relationship between Angels in America and Benjamin's concep-
tion of history; like McNulty, Savran argues that Angels ultimately "champions
rationalism and progress" (214).
25. Paul Giles, in contrast to Martin, contends that Gunn's typical "poetic
world of duality and balance" implies that "no object or idea can remain undis-
turbed by its contrary" (164). Giles's dialectical approach suggests that Gunn's
insistence on order should be understood not as an attempt to "hold things in
their place" but to reveal the modes of displacement on which order, particularly
"the chronometric regularity of poetic form," depends (165). Certainly Gunn's
poems do present, whether consciously or unconsciously, "landscapes of perpet-
ual destabilization and radical ambiguity" (165).
26. This poem might also be read as an asymmetrical sexual encounter: the
narrator's "Shiny board / Between my legs" suggests a penis, and the reference
to his friend's "Freckle[d] ... other end" (15) might imply anal penetration.
27. The title poem of the collection does however represent an attempt to
inscribe the relationship between a PLWA and his own body. In "The Man with
Night Sweats," the speaker hugs his body tightly "As if hands were enough / To
hold an avalanche off" (58). The "avalanche" suggests both overwhelming pain
and burial, suffering, and death.
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In Time of Plague

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"In Time of Plague": AIDS and Its Significations in Herv Guibert, Tony Kushner, and

There is no available discourse on "AIDS" that is not itself diseased.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s a number of textual practices

Cultural Critique 44-Winter 2000-Copyright 2000 Regents of the University of Minnesota

JUST THE FACTS: THE SIGNIFICATIONS OF "AIDS"

discussions of AIDS. This is the case generally because the medical

HIV infection and anal intercourse in many discourses connects

An encounter with medical authority will serve to illustrate the

virus), which "invades" cells after entering a person's bloodstream,

fundamental facts about AIDS are potentially understandable if they

Patton bases at least some of her writing on assumptions similar

critiquing politically motivated cultural discourses that obscure the

AIDS with "the dismantling of the 'identified' subject" (Savoy 69)

infuriated, or bored" (xvi). One might infer that some readers-in

"plague of discourse," is demonstrated through Richard's use of sus-

that this one exists, because it can only be constructed through

Yingling asserts that "the gap between the apprehension

comprehension of the disease is ... an asymptotic space where alle-

THRESHOLD OF REVELATION: READING AIDS LITERATURE

Ecrire dans le noir?

Ecrire jusqu'au bout?

readings for eventual publication, he attempts to overcome "the fear

same time that the narrator expresses an obsessive compulsion

This contradiction is expressed on the first page of the text: "J'

De meme que je n'avais avoue a personne, sauf aux amis qui se

and apprehension, reality and fantasy. The fact of Guibert's AIDS

l'aveu comprenait quelque chose d'atroce: dire qu'on etait malade ne

As the illness gains power over him, he is in a state of mourning for a

A ce moment oui je m'etais senti tellement affaibli par ma maladie, je me

J'ai decide d'etre calme, d'aller au bout de cette logique romanesque,

Guibert accepts and embraces death generally and his impending

This reading of AIDS as a signifier of disempowerment is furthe

emphasized in a conversation between Louis and Belize, a former

LOUIS: Well don't you think that's true?

In the second part of Angels in America, Perestroika, Cohn contin-

Belize, as Cohn's nurse, represents medical authority to a certain

Though Cohn rejects the label "homosexual," he finds himself, as an

Prior decides ultimately that he desires neither to refuse nor to tran-

Angels in America ultimately rejects a discourse of AIDS focused

We will be citizens. The time has come.

If A l'ami can be understood as a text that successfully inscribe

his experience of life-in-death and Kushner uses humor to undercut

A poem in the collection that is exemplary of Gunn's decorous-

Days are bright,

an enzyme's cruelty. (36)

This poem might be read as an objective description of a digestive

If the seely, or blind, fly entering "sloping / pastures" (35) is read

(35)-we are also encouraged to comprehend that fate within a "nat

But this comprehension can be achieved only though an overt

The whole rich process of twined opposites,

A promising graduate student is regarded in this poem as a tendril

enzymatic processes and AIDS in "Yellow Pitcher Plant" is absent,

Apart from the tropic participle "flowering," the second stanza of

image of "The tube his mouth enclosed / In an astonished 0," pro-

My thoughts are crowded with death

To write and to read in this area of desire, "situated," to reiterate

on the elimination of my lymphocytes. My body had accomplished what Dr.

22. Literally, "in the shit."

24. McNulty analyzes Kushner's implicit rejection of Benjamin at the end of

"A Mixed Report Card." The Advocate, 16 March 1999, 13.

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