Telling Time: Resisting the Apocalypse in American AIDS Novels, 1982-1992

By Lisa Frieden

Telling Time is a scholarly book that explores how novelists wrote about AIDS during the first decade of the epidemic, when HIV and AIDS were considered death sentences and most often associated with homosexuality and the gay community. The book explores the different narrative strategies used by novelists to represent the temporality of AIDS, looking at Paul Reed’s Facing It: a Novel of AIDS, David Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion, and Paul Monette’s Afterlife and Halfway Home, and how a few novels did manage to resist the apocalyptic dominant rhetoric of AIDS. The book also discusses the difficulties of publishing AIDS novels by people of color and such writers as E. Lynn Harris and Steve Corbin. Telling Time includes a comprehensive annotated bibliography of all American AIDS novels published from 1982-1992 as a reference guide for further reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lisa Frieden
• Release date: May 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463732021

Lisa Frieden

Lisa Frieden grew up in California, with a side trip around the world as a kid, college in Cambridge, and a few unforgettable years in Santa Barbara. She’s read everything from William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison, to Sue Grafton, Elizabeth Lowell, and Jayne Ann Krentz. Her own books reflect this diversity, from Dialysis: a Memoir, to her romantic suspense books: The Offering and Finding Clarity, to her mystery, Love and Money. For updated author info, please visit: www.lisafrieden.com.

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Chapter 1: AIDS Novels in Context

The obvious consequence of believing that all those who harbor the virus will eventually come down with the illness is that those who test positive for it are regarded as people-with-AIDS, who just don't have it... yet. It is only a matter of time, like any death sentence. — Susan Sontag

1.1 Introduction

As Paula Treichler has noted, the AIDS epidemic is simultaneously an epidemic of transmissible lethal disease and an epidemic of meanings or signification (32).  This was especially true during the first decade of the epidemic in the 1980’s, when the lack of literal knowledge about AIDS generated an explosion of the figural meanings of AIDS. Susan Sontag's provocative words, It was only a matter of time, like any death sentence, describe one of the most powerful ways AIDS was first signified in the United States. Biomedical discourse, the media, and much politically charged rhetoric of the 1980's emphasized a linear and mortal trajectory of AIDS, the effect of which was to collapse the time between diagnosis and death such that an AIDS diagnosis or even an HIV+ test result was represented as a death sentence. It was within this highly charged context that the early novels about people living with AIDS (what I will call AIDS novels) were written, and a key issue at stake within them is the problem of how to represent the temporality of AIDS.[1]

In this dissertation, I will examine the narrative strategies by which the significant AIDS novels I consider both address and resist the apocalyptic significations of time that dominated the rhetoric of AIDS in the first decade of the epidemic in the United States.

1.2 Disease and the Novel

AIDS novels can be linked in part to a larger literary tradition about physical disease. Though much has been written about the relationship between mental illness and literary production, little has been written about the relationship between physical disease and literature.[2]

One exception has been the important contribution made by Jeffrey Meyers in Disease and the Novel. In this book, Meyers identifies and describes a particular literary tradition that relates physical disease and artistic production, one that asserts that The creation of literature is one way of transcending mortality and celebrating human existence, despite the threat of death (2). He entitles this tradition of linking physical disease with literary production, Romantic, not to be confused with the British and German Romantics, though he asserts that The poet-hero whose life and writings most perfectly embody the Romantic idea of the diseased and doomed artist is John Keats...who lived the last year of his life under the constant threat of death (6). Central to Meyers' conception of a Romantic tradition that links literature and disease is the idea of the artist as an outcast who renounces life in order to create art... (11). The experience of disease also places the artist in an existential situation... Man knows he is mortal; disease makes mortality visible and forces the victim to realize what it means to be an isolated being - irreparably condemned to death (14).

Thus, the key elements of Meyers' Romantic tradition include isolation (the sense of both the distance and the difference of the artist from the healthy), individualism (the sick person's ability to act and think separately from a larger social context), and mortality (the sick person's direct confrontation with the time limits of existence). Also active within this tradition is a particular belief about the relationship between time and art, which asserts that timeless art is an important strategy by which to resist the temporal, mortal trajectory of human time. Paradoxically, however, though the sick artist struggles to escape diseased life by privileging an art of timelessness, this desire yet confirms the linear and mortal trajectory of his life.[3]

Though Meyers' articulation of this Romantic tradition makes an important contribution to the study of the relationship between disease and the novel, his tradition describes only one possible relationship between them. As he himself notes, Alexander Solzenhitzyn is an important exception to the tradition he describes:

Unlike Tolstoy, Hemingway and Mann, who observed illness objectively, Solzhenitsyn earned his insight through actual experience. He writes in the tradition of Russian realism, of Tolstoy and Chekov, and resolutely renounces the Romantic attitude toward disease. He does not believe the artist is sick or that disease inspires creative genius, aesthetic insight, spiritual knowledge or human dignity. And he does not think that the artist must stand outside society. (16, my emphasis)

Solzhenitzyn's actual experience of cancer and of life in a cancer ward influences his representation of the disease in his novel. For him, disease does not  figure simply as a literary tool for imagining the philosopher poet contemplating his doom. Rather than focus on isolation, individualism, and mortality, Solzhenitzyn emphasizes the importance of relationships, interpersonal responsibilities and the process of living. Like him, many of the AIDS novelists this dissertation considers, including Paul Monette, David Feinberg and Robert Ferro among others, renounce this Romantic attitude toward disease. And, like Solzenhitzyn, they too write from actual experience, but instead of cancer, they live with HIV, ARC or AIDS.

Though Meyers notes that Solzhenitzyn is an exception to the tradition he traces, it is beyond the scope of his project to consider what alternative relationship between disease and art Solzhenitzyn's novel might express. This dissertation will contribute to enlarging the understanding of the relationships between disease and the novel by considering how AIDS novelists write about their disease. A crucial distinction must be made, however, between different kinds of diseases, because different diseases carry different cultural interpretations.[4]

Unlike cancer, AIDS is contagious, and, during the first decade of the epidemic, it appeared to be spreading exponentially through an entire community rather than sporadically affecting isolated individuals. Quests for explaining the origin of the virus, the rates of spread, the projected lifetime after an HIV+ diagnosis, and the latest mortality figures led to an increased emphasis on linear history and the propagation of apocalyptic rhetoric about AIDS as plague.[5]

The rhetoric of AIDS became increasingly tied to a language of time. To better understand the significance in the AIDS novels of the narrative strategies for depicting time, we need to understand the tremendous power that the language of apocalypse has had on the American imagination.

1.3 AIDS and Apocalyptic Rhetoric

The vision of Apocalypse has played a crucial role in the literary and cultural imaginations of the Judeo-Christian West. As Frank Kermode has written, We project ourselves - a small, humble elect, perhaps - past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle (8). In the United States, the cultural importance of the apocalyptic imagination can be traced from as far back as the founding of the Puritan colonies to the more recent time of the nuclear age. In his Introduction to In a Dark Time, Joseph Dewey provides a thorough description of the attributes that are manifested in apocalyptic thinking:

A belief in the incessant linearity of history; an unashamed sense of cosmic scale; a sobering belief that history is best understood as a cooperative structure of beginning, middle, and end; the strong possibility of a fast-approaching end; a general dissatisfaction with the moral life of the present culture; a strong awareness of contemporary crisis that draws a definite line between good and evil; an inherently dramatic approach to history that is as riveting as any drama rushing toward a shuddering climax. (12)

Dewey's analysis of the apocalyptic temper of the nuclear age goes no further than 1985. Indeed, the mid to later 1980's saw a distinct bracketing of the nuclear age, with Gorbachav, glastnost, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and ultimately the dissolution of the USSR. AIDS replaced nuclear war as the global threat and became the latest site for apocalyptic rhetoric in the United States, as Richard Dellamora has observed in  Apocalyptic Overtures, By 1990, an array of apocalyptic narratives had been inscribed in mystified, homophobic representations of AIDS in the mass media (6).

Though AIDS novels invoke the apocalyptic representations of AIDS, many of them also seek to resist the dangerously mythic power of apocalyptic thinking. Kermode has drawn a useful distinction between myth and fiction. He writes, myth operates within diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures (39). With myth, the past, the present, and most importantly, the future are predetermined. Fictions, on the other hand, are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change (39). Because fictions emphasize the process of finding things out, they privilege time in the present. Kermode's distinction between myth and fictions is a useful one for understanding some of the key issues involved in the novels about AIDS. Like the fictions Kermode describes, many of the AIDS novels we will consider insist on the possibilities available in the present. Biomedical discourse, not to mention that of the media and the Right Wing, has generated an AIDS myth, the facts, which imposes a linear, temporal trajectory on AIDS and which focuses on the inevitable future of an AIDS diagnosis, such that AIDS=death. Many of the AIDS novels resist the mythic power of this temporal representation of AIDS, often by emphasizing the possiblities available in the present time or by envisioning alternative futures to the mortal End imposed by medical diagnosis.

The AIDS novels, however, cannot wholly extricate themselves from the medical myths. Indeed, Paul Reed's novel, Facing It: a Novel of AIDS, for example, is wholly dependent on the medical facts about AIDS for its structure, even though this dependency is not mere submission. Ultimately, all of the AIDS novels address the apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding AIDS, though they develop differing strategies for alternatively conceptualizing the time of AIDS. The stakes involved in resisting the apocalyptic rhetoric of AIDS are greatly intensified in those AIDS novels that describe the experiences of gay men, because homosexuality has traditionally been so often equated with apocalypse. As Dellamora notes, The threat sodomy was traditionally taken to pose to both the secular and the religious orders suggests that the association of sex between men with end times is embedded in the political unconscious of Christian societies (3).

1.4 AIDS as the Gay Plague

Much of the recent work done in the study of sexuality, including aspects of the newly emerging field of queer studies, has noted the cultural tendency to yoke male homosexuality with death. Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray has become a classic source for the analysis of male-male desire and, as Jeff Nunokawa writes, Wilde's novelization of the homosexual male subject casts this most common sentence as the gay signature, concentrating fatality in the figure of a male homosexual identity, as the figure of male homosexual identity (316). Other theorists have claimed that the desire to link male homosexuality with death is a fearful response to imagining homosexual practices. In his disturbing essay, Is the Rectum a Grave?, Leo Bersani puts it quite vividly, when he writes of the horror of imagining The infinitely more seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman (212). He argues that the intolerableness of imagining male anal intercourse stems from certain prevailing notions about sexual intercourse in patriarchal Western society: To be penetrated is to abdicate power...It is the self that swells with excitement at the idea of being on top, the self that makes of the inevitable play of thrusts and relinquishments in sex an argument for the natural authority of one sex over the other (217, my emphasis).

If we consider the ramifications of Bersani's point, then the very naturalness of heterosexuality assigns an unnatural designation to homosexuality, and, through a similar oppositional logic, where heterosexual intercourse traditionally is viewed as life-affirming and procreative, homosexual intercourse then is perceived as deathly destructive. In its pursuit to explain Nature, science has historically reflected these sexual binarisms, and homosexuality was medicalized as an illness until the 1970's.[6]

To a large extent, the gay rights movement in the United States and Western Europe involved combating images of isolated, doomed homosexuals like Dorian Gray and creating communities of highly visible, typically white, urban gays, who celebrated life, freedom, sexuality and success, and who sought to make homosexuality a publicly recognized, acceptable lifestyle.

Part of the tragedy of AIDS in the early 1980's was its ominous emergence in the United States as a gay plague, which threatened to undo a decade of trying to demedicalize and legitimate male homosexuality. In fact, AIDS was initially known in the medical journals not as AIDS but as something that specifically targeted gays, GRID (Gay-Related Immune Disorder).  In 1982, the CDC officially changed the name to AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), when it first outlined a surveillance case definition, which was modified again in 1983, and then much later in 1987, to include a larger number of diseases that affected individuals other than homosexuals.[7]

It wasn't until January 1, 1993, however, more than a full decade since tracking of the epidemic began, that the CDC added a clinical condition that specifically affected women with AIDS.[8]

Until this expanded definition was implemented, many people, including many women, were invisible to medicine, the insurance industry and all of the other health-related organizations that operate under the mandate of the CDC.[9]

Additionally, with Clinton's election to the presidency in 1992, and with more media attention paid to heterosexual AIDS, public perceptions about AIDS have begun to change. During the first decade of AIDS in the United States, however, the bulk of public perception, exacerbated by media representations of figures like Rock Hudson and Liberace as well as by the slow moving public policy of the Reagan years, imagined AIDS not only as a modern day apocalyptic plague but as a homosexual one in particular.

To talk about the first decade of AIDS in the United States is to inevitably confront the yoking of homosexuality with disease and apocalyptic rhetoric. Because so little was initially known about it (and even today, because we as yet have no cure, no magic bullet),[10]

AIDS constitutes a site over which multiple discourses and rhetoric vie for the power to alleviate fear of the unknown. In her reading of Camus' The Plague, Treichler explains the dynamic in the novel whereby scientific facts combine with people's fears to make plague more imaginable and thus more manageable:

The townspeople of Oran in The Plague experience relief when the plague bacillus is identified: the odd happenings - the dying rats, the mysterious human illnesses - are caused by something that has originated elsewhere, something external, something objective, something medicine can name, even if not cure. The tension between self and not-self becomes important as we try to understand the particular role of viruses and origin stories in AIDS. (47)

With AIDS, the general population was contrasted to the high risk groups, and because public perception viewed AIDS as the gay disease, the not-self became figured as the homosexual.

The literalization of AIDS into a gay plague, as a spreading and infectious homosexual epidemic, has had material consequences.[11]

As Lee Edelman points out,

It is, after all, the citation of the pressing literality of the epidemic with its allegedly literal identification of homosexuality and disease, that fuels the homophobic responses to AIDS and demands that we renounce what are blithely dismissed as figural embellishments upon the real, material necessities of human survival - embellishments such as civil rights and equal protection under the law. (316)

The gay community came under attack for the very thing it had fought so hard to legitimate, namely its sexuality, and yet again, but now with horrific evidence, this sexuality was yoked to a ghastly death. An example of this resurrected yoking of homosexuality with death can be seen in Randy Shilts' tremendously popular novelization of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On. Shilts attributes the spread of AIDS to a single, suicidally murderous homosexual, which reinforces homophobic stereotyping of gay men. As Nunokawa notes, The story of [Gaetan] Dugas singlehandedly infecting an entire community with HIV serves to narrate his status, in Shilts' novelization, as a reflection of that community (313).[12]

Important for our discussion is the way that homophobic attitudes toward homosexuality have influenced and reinforced assumptions about the mortal trajectory of AIDS. In a cogent articulation of this point, Nunokawa writes:

If the notion that gay men are subject to extinction encourages the continued homosexualization of AIDS it may also help to account for the continued resistance to the idea that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus is not uniformly fatal, the persistent failure to perceive HIV-related infections as things that people live with, as well as die from. AIDS is a gay disease, and it means death, because AIDS has been made the most recent chapter in our culture's history of the gay male, a history which sometimes reads like a book of funerals. (312, my emphasis)

Though HIV infection does not yield immediate death, indeed it is something people live with, because of its association with homosexuality, AIDS continues to be seen as fatal, that it means death.

1.5 Cultural Narratives and Plotting AIDS

To link AIDS with male homosexuality, plague and death is to describe a particular cultural narrative about AIDS, one which James Jones has described as, one of the most potent American cultural narratives about AIDS - and the one with the most dangerous implications for affecting attitudes towards those with AIDS - [which] is that AIDS is a 'plague' (74). One of the dangerous implications of this cultural narratives is that it imposes what we could call an AIDS plot on the life of a person diagnosed with HIV, ARC or AIDS. To borrow from Peter Brooks, a succinct definition for plot is ...the principal ordering force of those meanings we try to wrest from human temporality (xi). Thus, to describe the plot of a novel is to describe the temporal ordering of its events. The principal ordering force of an AIDS plot is that AIDS means death, or the end of human temporality; in other words, AIDS robs a person of life, of time. Because this AIDS plot plays such an integral part of the cultural narratives about AIDS, any novelist who attempts to write about AIDS must address it. Indeed, many writers have found themselves asking, as Adam Mars-Jones has, How do you tell a fresh story when the structure [plot] is set? (1) Though many of the AIDS novels succumb to the AIDS plot, there are also those novels that question its authority. Many of these are by novelists who themselves live with AIDS, to whom challenging the AIDS plot is of mortal concern. Their efforts are courageous, as Treichler notes, To challenge biomedical authority - whose meanings are part of powerful and deeply entrenched social and historical codes - has required considerable tenacity and courage from people dependent in the AIDS crisis upon science and medicine for protection, care, and the possibility of cure (40).

1.6 The AIDS Novels of the First Decade

Artistic responses to the experience of the epidemic were initially slow in coming. As others have noted about horrendous historical experiences, such as nuclear war and the Holocaust, writers usually need time to assimilate their experiences, and only later do they have the emotional endurance and strength to express that experience in novels.[13]

Indeed, with AIDS, the earliest artistic expressions about people living with AIDS (PLWAs) took the forms of plays, poetry, and short stories. Many of the plays sought to raise public consciousness and promote activism about the government's slow response to the epidemic. An important early figure was Larry Kramer, a gay activist and one of the founders of both the Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT UP, who wrote a series of plays, including The Normal Heart, which were intended to express his rage at governmental inaction and to incite his audiences to become engaged in fighting the epidemic. Many of the poems, short stories and memoirs acted as testimonies, remembering figures who had died and speaking of the tremendous tragedies and changes AIDS has wrought on gay life. Susan Sontag's short experimental piece, The Way We Live Now, appeared in The New Yorker in 1986, and introduced the experience of AIDS to the literary imaginations of a wide, general audience.

Many of these early artistic expressions sought to challenge cultural narratives about AIDS, including the authority of biomedicine, which, when it assigns an AIDS diagnosis, plots time in an apocalyptically mortal way, emphasizing the impending End. Though people have continued living upwards of twelve years after an AIDS diagnosis, the common perception continues that, in Sontag's words, It is only a matter of time, like any death sentence. These artists also addressed the feelings of apocalyptic doom, which were exacerbated for gay men living with AIDS whose homosexuality had been already metaphorized in apocalyptic terms. Indeed, early on, it seemed as if the Christian Moral Majority had God on its side, bringing the Apocalypse and striking down the accursed.[14]

Because AIDS initially decimated large numbers of gay men within the gay communities of New York and San Francisco, not only did HIV+ gay men have to deal with feelings about their own possible mortality, but often were simultaneously trying to cope with the myriad of losses of loved ones and friends. At work in many of the artistic responses to