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During her cancer treatment, the theorist Susan Sontag rejected everything but the tumorous facticity of her condition. It was 1975. She had breast cancer. And this, she reasoned, was all that she had.
She was told that she would die. Instead, she produced Illness as Metaphor, a polemic that argued against viewing the sick body as an incubator of significance. Sontag hated how illness was attended by the language of war and battle. She wanted to render it meaningless. She wanted to purify it of symbolism. And yet, she began her essay with one of the most memorable metaphors in American literature. “Everyone who is born,” she wrote, “holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Illness, for her, was a country of the night. Even if we rarely visit, we all enjoy its “onerous citizenship”.
This week, Covid-19 obliged the British Prime Minister to take up residence in that country. It was a migration that shocked and troubled the nation with its speed. The virus is present in Boris Johnson’s body, his body is present in the national discourse, and the language that Sontag so despised is now attached to him like hospital wires and tubes. His designated sub, Dominic Raab, declared his boss “a fighter”, as if he could fell a virus with a strong right hook. The Prime Minister’s father said his son was “optimistic” and “determined”, as if viruses took these attitudes into account as they deform the proteins in the cells of their hosts. “A lot of my son’s character,” Stanley Johnson told the Mail Online, “was formed here and in the local village of Winsford.” (Viruses know about Somerset, too.)
Boris Johnson is the most corporeal of Prime Ministers. We know his appetites and frailties. He drinks, and sometimes ruins sofas when he drinks. He fucks. He touches himself. He’s always touching himself. It is his most visible form of promiscuity. His fingers thresh at his hair. His belly resists the restraint of the trouser belt and the tucked shirt. His torso struggles inside his suit, like the Rhinoceros in Kipling’s Just So stories who can’t rid his itchy skin of cake crumbs and burned currants. This discomfort may be confected: it is mysteriously undetectable in that young man in the Bullingdon Club photo, lounging on the steps in Peckwater Quad.
The bulletins from his colleagues insist on the idea of his comfort, but we know this is a medical euphemism for the absence of any immediate mortal crisis. The Prime Ministerial body we now picture is in a state of genuine discomfort. We are not his family — we are, particularly, not his pregnant fiancée — and cannot know the painful intensity of their experience, but we are thinking about the temperature of his skin, the depth of his breathing, the condition of his lungs and throat. We all know the symptoms, because we’ve been checking ourselves for them for weeks.
There’s a difference, however, between our bodies and his. The Prime Minister’s body has a metaphorical dimension. He is in intensive care, and through mechanisms that are hard to imagine in any detail, he is also running the country. If Dominic Raab sounds hesitant and uncertain when discussing this process — he has sometimes resembled John Cleese in that episode of Fawlty Towers in which Basil cannot admit to his friends that Sibyl has left him — then it’s understandable. He is trying to explain an idea that is, in essence, mystical.
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SubscribeWell, that started off well. Then meandered a bit and by the end I hadn’t really got a clue what Matthew Sweet was trying to convey.
Anyhow, I sincerely hope Boris is better soon. I for one think he is exactly the right man to be our PM at this time of crisis.
TBH I felt like I was being led into some very dark woods with this article. I was alright at first until I found myself alone in the middle and completely lost. Come on BoJo your county needs you!
Yes, Jennie; I’m from New Zealand, the first thing I read in the morning is the latest on how he’s doing.
Kia Kaha Boris.
I left the Telegraph for fear of left wing trojan horses. I fear I may be on the move pretty soon.
Similar. The Telegraph became unreadable as Her Majesty’s Opposition.
This piece? I am clueless what to think.
“Boris Johnson is the most corporeal of Prime Ministers. We know his appetites and frailties. He drinks, and sometimes ruins sofas when he drinks. He fucks. He touches himself. He’s always touching himself. It is his most visible form of promiscuity. His fingers thresh at his hair. His belly resists the restraint of the trouser belt and the tucked shirt. His torso struggles inside his suit, like the Rhinoceros in Kipling’s Just So stories who can’t rid his itchy skin of cake crumbs and burned currants”
What a bizarrely grotesque statement of judgement. I’m not sure where to start, but the word ‘projection’ sprung to mind.
We are, I think, of ‘like mind’. My thoughts on reading this weird parody of historical analysis, included the word “grotesque” and, after the quote with which you begin your comment … the word ‘transference’.
It sounds like Matthew is actually sweet on Boris. He certainly seems to spend an unhealthy amount of time imagining the PM’s body, his shapes, his secretions even, in very high resolution detail.
Ot the other hand, he appears to have a steretypically mechanical and sterile view of health. Typical of a bureaucrat. “as if viruses took these attitudes into account” he says. Why yes, Matthew, it is a scientific fact that your emotions affect your health – definitely your immune system. Stress definitely lowers your defenses and laughter raises them.
How true.