ABSTRACT
Susan Sontag’s short story “The Way We Live Now,” first released in The New Yorker in 1986, told a harrowing but heartfelt story at the center of the AIDS crisis, charting the trajectories of the friends of a man who may or may not be dying from AIDS himself. In the process, Sontag’s treatment of time, space and narrative is extraordinarily fluid, utilizing point of view and dialogue in incredibly poignant ways to inject a sense of understanding and empathy towards alternative sexuality at a time in American history when homosexuality and AIDS was being treated as a dirty little secret. Sontag’s purposefully meandering narrative encapsulates the disorientation of the AIDS crisis and its subsequent diagnosis, and questions conventions of traditional narrative structure just as sexuality itself was questioned by these individuals.
Susan Sontag’s short story “The Way We Live Now,” first released in The New Yorker in 1986, told a harrowing but heartfelt story at the center of the AIDS crisis, charting the trajectories of the friends of a man who may or may not be dying from AIDS himself. In the process, Sontag’s treatment of time, space and narrative is extraordinarily fluid, utilizing point of view and dialogue in incredibly poignant ways to inject a sense of understanding and empathy towards alternative sexuality at a time in American history when homosexuality and AIDS was being treated as a dirty little secret. With the help of “The Way We Live Now,” Sontag managed to create a dreamlike narrative whose formal intangibility corresponded intriguingly with the fluidity of sexuality and the devastating effect of the AIDS virus on the gay community of the 1980s.
The interconnectivity and close-knit nature of the gay community surrounding AIDS in the 1980s is illustrated through effective use of narrative and linguistic style in Sontag’s short story. From the beginning, Sontag’s storytelling is fragmented and chaotic, utilizing entire run-on sentences to breathlessly tell a single story. From the beginning, Sontag’s sentences are long-winded and meandering, which is done purposefully to give time a fluid, invisible feel. The major through-line for the major narrative beats are the citing and repetition of names, as the diagnosis and its news are spread from person to person like a virus. In the first sentence alone, Sontag’s narrator breathlessly asserts the story’s passing from Max to Ellen to Greg to Tanya to Orson. The entire story is framed like one giant game of telephone, each narrator relaying different information to each other with an overarching narration describing this same narration in a more omniscient voice. Pointedly, the disease itself is not named, nor is the name of the main character who is ill; this solidifies the allegory and makes the struggle itself more universal in nature (Warner 492).
Each of these people take on a different portion of the story, and their role as narrators and conveyors of the tale emphasizes the ripples the main character’s diagnosis has throughout his friends and lovers. In the tight-knit world of the gay community in the 80s, one diagnosis affects the whole, and Sontag connects these people in their intrigued concern for the patient and their desire to tell their story. Each of these characters is a narrator of the same story, each of them sharing a role in the narrative out of both concern for the patient’s well-being and, naturally, their own. That being said, each of the characters speak second and third-hand in a number of different voices:
“I’ve never spent so many hours at a time on the phone, Stephen said to Kate, and when I’m exhausted after the two or three calls made to me, giving me the latest, instead of switching off the phone to give myself a respite I tap out the number of another friend or acquaintance to pass on the news” (Sontag 253).
This passing on of the news is ostensibly the goal of the different characters in the story, but the vagueness of the story’s presentation echoes the invisibility and intangibility of the AIDS crisis at the time. Just as no one in mainstream America understood the nature of the disease and its effect on the LGBT population of urban areas, the main character’s diagnosis is itself understood only half-heartedly and explained in equally nebulous terms (Peloquin 272).
All of Sontag’s rhetorical and literary stylistic choices contribute to an overall picture of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s as something of an open secret, something affecting a deeply intimate but highly fearful community that feels ignored and cast aside. In many ways, Sontag’s own literary language takes on the structure of an epidemic, the tale passing from one person to another until everyone is infected (Rollyson and Paddock 265). The central character’s diagnosis, in a way, becomes secondary to the reaction of his friends to the disease – they become the focal point, melding into a single whole that represents the gay community altogether. As one character notes about the disease, “everyone is at risk, everyone who has a sexual life, because sexuality is a chain that links each of us to many others, unknown others, and now the great chain of being has become a chain of death as well” (Sontag 262). These literary devices help to mold “The Way We Live Now” into a potent allegory for the AIDS crisis and the outsider nature of the LGBT community in the 80s, depicting an invisible group of people who had just as little understanding of what was happening to them as anyone else, but were justifiably confused and terrified as a result.
In many ways, the story’s title, “The Way We Live Now” is personified in this elliptical, desperate and immediate writing style. Through the unified yet fractured points of view presented in the story, Sontag depicts the community surrounding the main character’s diagnosis as both closely knit and innately complex, an endless string of friends, lovers, family and acquaintances who know only so much about the person they are discussing or the condition from which they suffer. Sontag argues that the ‘way we live’ is in this kaleidoscopic, scattershot view of the world – rather than knowing details and the truth, we can only rely on the hearsay of others to give us the reality of a person’s situation, which invariably makes it alien to everyone else. Through the constant string of relayed information espoused by the characters who seek to ‘pass on the news,’ the truth is further obfuscated, giving the real situation less immediacy as everyone brings their personal baggage into the story. From Betsy’s macrobiotic diet fads to Yvonne’s problems with her New York store, each narrator mentions something personal about their lives. This demonstrates their real priorities in dealing with the everyday lives they have to contend with, all while working to fit in the character’s illness into their own routine. Through these literary conceits, Sontag demonstrates an innately selfish and fragmented society that struggles to do the right thing, or even to get the details right, about their friend’s condition.
Through this use of impersonal, run-on personal narrative and its ties to sexuality, Susan Sontag’s “The Way We Live Now” proves itself a powerful and innately poignant portrait of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. While mainstream culture treated AIDS and homosexuality as a distant aberration (if they acknowledged it at all), Sontag’s story screams for advocacy towards a faceless, voiceless group of people scrambling for help and security, only finding it in the swirling kinship of each other. In the end, the disease only physically affects the main character in an immediate sense, but spends the rest of the gay community into a spiral that sends them into a deep sense of fear and uncertainty, illustrated by the story’s scattershot narrative style. Sontag’s purposefully meandering narrative encapsulates the disorientation of the AIDS crisis and its subsequent diagnosis, and questions conventions of traditional narrative structure just as sexuality itself was questioned by these individuals.
Works Cited
Peloquin, Suzanne M. "AIDS: Toward a compassionate response." American Journal of
Occupational Therapy 44.3 (1990): 271-278.
Rollyson, Carl Edmund and Lisa Olson Paddock. Susan Sontag: the making of an icon. 2000,
264-6.
Sontag, Susan. “The Way We Live Now.” The New Yorker. November 24, 1986.
Warner, Sharon Oard. "The way we write now: the reality of AIDS in contemporary short
fiction." Studies in short fiction 30.4 (1993): 491.
