Where’s the Great Hep C Novel? Hepatitis C & Literature Writing about writing about hepatitis C has its problems (beyond the convolutions of that sentence). Most bodies of literature have a core of thematically strong works, and a fringe of associated books which cover the same concerns, but spread their focus wider. An obvious and relevant example is the AIDS novel. The AIDS novel developed through the 1980s and ’90s as an attempt to capture and commemorate the experiences of those who lived in the thick of the coming of the ‘gay plague’.
Looking beyond AIDS, there have been numerous works of fiction which explore mental illness. From the fainting, neurasthenic women of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels to the inside-the-asylum narratives of writers like Sylvia Plath, mental illness is a topic writers have been comfortable dealing with (though not always well).
Part of the problem is that, just as being ill for a long time is tremendously boring, so is reading about it, unless the writer, like Solzhenitzyn, is particularly skilled. Here is where the AIDS novel has its advantages. An AIDS story is also often a gay story, with all that extra potential, just as, politically, the AIDS lobby has always been closely allied with the gay lobby.
Physical illness, though, is something else entirely. Alexander Solzhenitzyn is a rarer exception— his excellent Cancer Ward, as you might expect, explores the
Hepatitis C as a subject for stories suffers in comparison because of the lack of any equivalent political force which has led to a distinct lack of any equivalent visibility. Everyone who lives with or works with hepatitis C knows about this. You might think that an associated group of novels—those about people who inject drugs—might involve hepatitis C. However, you’d be wrong. Many of the best novels in this genre are autobiographical, and set in the era before hepatitis C was known about. Those with more recent settings tend to simply ignore it. All of this means that there is no canon of novels or stories or plays about living with hepatitis C. Its appearances in literature so far are almost entirely ephemeral, and tend to fall into one of four groups.
To quote critic Lisa Garmire, many of these novels “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”. In other words, a central character with AIDS did not have to be a character who died at the end of the book—contrast this with Hollywood treatments of the same material. Garmire’s Resisting the Apocalypse is an excellent guide to these works, and can be found online at www.geocities.com/ lisagarmire/index.html.
experience of living with and being treated for cancer. Otherwise, physical disease is usually just used as texture and colour: the cause of death of a lover to give the book’s main character a usefully tragic background, or perhaps a sick child to be saved by the hero in an exciting climax. Yet there is potential. As Jeffrey Meyers, author of Disease and the Novel, has said, “The creation of literature is one way of transcending mortality and celebrating human existence, despite the threat of death.”
Group 1: The Dreary List This is probably the most common way in which hepatitis C gets a mention. A character is in a mildly apocalyptic mood, and makes a list of everything wrong with the world. Hepatitis C gets a namecheck, usually alongside ebola. For example, here’s Janet Fitch’s Oprah-approved White Oleander: “Everywhere, people were frightened […] there was poison in supermarket toothpaste. Ebola, hepatitis C. Husbands disappeared on the way to the liquor store. Children showed up dead in ditches without their hands.”
Hepatitis C Community News • June 2007 Internal Pages - June 07.indd 2
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