Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 66

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Popular Culture Review

with the new invasion model of disease, which led to public health advances but
also to “misunderstandings, myths, and vague, ill-defined dangers.” Popular im
ages of illness well into the twentieth century remained resolutely the result not of
germs but of weakness of will or heredity. Even in the writings of such well-read
women as Edith Wharton and Ellen Glasgow, illness is rarely the result of a tan
gible (or curable) disease but the result of weakness of will, character, or inherit
ance (154-6).
Similarly, American proponents of New Thought notions of will, or Social
Darwinist versions of genetics, embraced this new “scientific” basis for their ide
ology. So did Adolf Hitler, who repeatedly analogized European Jewry to syphilis
or “racial tuberculosis” which should be “treated like ... bacilli with which a healthy
body may become infected” (Sontag Illness 80, Shermer 218). As Charles Rosenberg
observes in The Cholera Years, new scientific ideas infuse a culture in “slow and
complex way[s] . . . not necessarily in the minds of a few great men, but in that
substrate of assumption and accepted wisdom which constitutes the intellectual
texture of an age” (9).
The twentieth century has put the idea of microbial contagion to remarkable
use, appropriating the language of virology and bacteriology to represent any num
ber of border crossings having little to do with disease or medicine. The 1997 book
Border Theory: The Limits o f Cultural Politics waits only until its second sentence
to describe the U.S.-Mexico border as “virulent” and proposes to study that
boundary’s “multiple paranoid discourses of national and racial contagion” (Johnson
1). Pressed into metaphorical service the virus has become, as Dorothy Nelkin has
said of the gene, not just a biological fact but “a cultural icon...almost a magical
force” (2). Thus turn-of-the-century censorship battles were marked by calls for
“social hygiene” to stop the spread of bad books, whose “Words and ideas... enter”
us, according to a 1906 advocate of obscenity laws, like “other germs” and require
“moral quarantine.”
A contemporary likened modern fiction to “bubonic plague” (Boyer 43-44,101).
Antonin Artaud drew the same analogy to another art form in Le Theatre et la
peste (1934), in which he argues that the experience of theatrical play involves a
kind of psychological contagion. This has much in common with the attitude of
the English Puritans, but unlike them Artaud could draw on a scientific model to
articulate his metaphor. So could George Orwell, who mused in a 1949 essay that
Gandhi’s intercession between India and Britain may have “disinfected the politi
cal air” (335). And so could Freud and Jung, whose theories of the subconscious as
unseen controller and of the collective unconscious as a series of submerged, rep
licating images also seem to share imagery with the discipline of virology, which
arose at about the same time as their own. It is at least plausible that they kept such
parallels in mind: Freud is famously reported to have remarked to Jung, as they