https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.080
The Hermeneutics of Disease: Interpretation, Ethics, and the Literary Imagination
VISMAYA VIJAY
Research Scholar
The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad
vismayavijay333@gmail.com
Abstract: The paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the interpretation of illness in Susan Sontag’s critical essays – particularly Illness as a Metaphor and Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, examining its fundamental tension between demystifying disease and harnessing its symbolic potential. Sontag explicitly identifies The Magic Mountain as a paradigmatic instance of the “pernicious romanticizing” of tuberculosis, wherein the sanatorium becomes a site of spiritual refinement and illness is transfigured into a marker of heightened sensibility. By contrast, Sontag’s polemical project insists upon stripping sickness of its metaphorical burden, exposing how such cultural narratives impose moral and psychological culpability upon patients and obstruct a clear-eyed confrontation with bodily suffering.
This study argues that despite their apparent opposition, these two texts illuminate a shared and enduring problem: whether meaning-making in the experience of illness can be disentangled from the punitive mythologies that Sontag condemns. The analysis proceeds through three comparative axes. First, it contrasts Sontag’s physiological reductionism with Mann’s dialectical treatment of disease as a vehicle for intellectual and spiritual education. Second, it examines the divergent spatial politics of the sanatorium—depicted by Sontag as a regressive enclave fostering self-absorption, and by Mann as a hermetic “pedagogical province” that intensifies existential inquiry. Third, it evaluates the ethical implications of each approach, considering whether Mann’s aesthetic investment in the romance of illness ultimately colludes with or subtly subverts the victim-blaming logic Sontag critiques. The paper concludes that the interpretive chasm between Sontag and Mann reveals a deeper cultural ambivalence: the persistent impulse to derive meaning from suffering, and the danger that such meaning becomes a second affliction.
Keywords: Sontag, Mann, Representation, Illness, Metaphor, Suffering
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