The plague years : borderland narratives on AIDS in the '90s

The essay tries to elaborate on how AIDS as a deathly physical and social destiny has suggested strategies of selfhood that initiate new signs of identity both in the idea of art and culture, and in the unavoidable permeability that such a matter produces – when dealt with – between science (i.e. medicine) and narration. The analysis is focused on a relatively short, very recent and accessible passage of English culture (end XX c) and concerns Derek Jarman and his work on the subject. My basic assumption is that the diachronic development of feelings, stereotypes, social beliefs, and cultural and artistic representations concerning PWA – Person With Aids – seems to reach a peak in the 90s. It was probably triggered by two diverging influences: on the one hand, the widespread popular opinion that the people who had been infected with AIDS were “swirling around in a cesspit of their own making” (James Anderton on a BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme on AIDS); on the other, the field of medical science produces plenty of ‘narrations’, case studies, reflections and reports meant to tell the truth on what the virus is and to stem the flood of infection. The implicit ambiguity has produced a particular cultural atmosphere and a crucial revision of the gay profile, producing a new, very disturbing subject. Looking for a way to make sense of a world that forces them to feel like outsiders, gay artists – as never before - use familiar genres as instruments to expose the elision of their personal identity in a community where AIDS is commonly perceived as the homosexual plague. Drawing on some of Derek Jarman’s autobiographic texts (listed below), I hope to hint at the process through which AIDS-as-an-actual-disease has copied itself into British – and to some extent Western - culture like a virus, positing itself not only as a definite pathological condition but also as an entrenched, proliferating text. This text seems to be marked by the partial erasure of the depth perspective of the symbolic sign. Doubled, made ambiguous, relocated and displaced by the infection, the signifier – whether human being or text, or both - does not encompass a reciprocal, binary division of form/content, male/female, black/white, self/other. It also contaminates medicine and art in its telling of the body of the artist as marked by a double destiny, combining a physical death with a social death, and producing a commitment to life that is to be articulated through the tools of both sciences and humanities.