In South Africa today there are millions people infected with the HIV virus, close to 10 percent of the population, perhaps the highest percentage in the world. They cannot be treated, purely for economic reasons. A year of AIDS drugs for one person costs, in Europe or North America, between twenty and thirty thousand American dollars. This in Africa (and in most of Asia and in South America) is far beyond a common mortal’s dreams. Local pharmaceutical companies, however, have managed to produce generic drugs (that is to say, the same drugs as their costly European and American counterparts without the designer labels) at a tiny fraction of the price, about four hundred dollars for a year’s treatment. In answer to this, the largest of all pharmaceutical companies, GlaxoSmithKline (born from the fusion of two British giants, Glaxo-Wellcome and SmithKline-Beecham), solemnly declared that “the patent system must be maintained at all costs.” At all costs.
It will be said that without the monetary investment of these companies, scientific research would be impossible. To allow for new discoveries, those with the money must be coaxed into investing in research and, in order to get people with money to invest in anything, they must be convinced that their money will make a profit. Not just a profit, but a large profit. And a guaranteed profit. And what greater guarantee can be found on this earth than sickness leading unto death, and the human desire to overcome it? Therefore the temptation for setting up a pharmaceutical company in our time is clearly strong. The motives behind such companies are not what one would call philanthropic: the call for healing is not foremost in their mandate. There is an illumination in the sixteenth-century French manuscript Chants royaux du Puy de Rouen that depicts Christ as an apothecary, dispensing (at cost, I’m sure) the drugs of eternal life to Adam and Eve. I do not believe that this image is known to the trustees of GlaxoSmithKline.
A few years later, because of international pressure, thirty-nine of the biggest companies dropped their suit in South Africa. The protests and letter campaigns of Doctors Without Borders and other organizations created what one of the pharmaceutical companies called “exceedingly adverse publicity;” carefully balancing profit gained from usury and profit lost from a tainted image, the advertisement-savvy companies chose to negotiate. However, the question of the legitimacy of these gargantuan profits remains unanswered.
How can we (I mean our societies) tempt these companies into investing in scientific research without giving them in exchange the lives of millions of human beings? I leave the practical problem of funds, trusts, rates, and taxes to faith-healing economists, and choose to concentrate instead on the other factor in this equation: the moral context which allows these practices to thrive.
Is it possible for a society to pose convincingly such moral imperatives while addressing effectively the practical demands of the scientific industry? Is it possible for a society to consider, at the same time, the urgencies of science and the context within which that science develops? “Erst kommt das Fressen, dan kommt die Moral,” sniggered Bertolt Brecht some time ago. “First comes the fodder, then the morals.” Is it possible for a society to lend equal importance to both morals and fodder, to the ethos and the business of a society simultaneously? This ancient question keeps cropping up, again and again, in all ages and under all skies. It was asked when Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia for the sake of fair winds that would allow the Greeks to sail to Troy. It was illustrated by George Bernard Shaw in Major Barbara. It was imagined by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein and by H. G. Wells in The Island of Dr. Moreau. Its true essence was put into a story by Oscar Wilde, when the Young King, who refuses to be crowned in jewels crafted by suffering, asks whether the rich man and the poor man are not brothers and receives the answer, “Aye, and the name of the rich brother is Cain.”
This unanswerable question is all-important. Literature, as we know all too well, does not offer solutions, but poses good conundrums. It is capable, in telling a story, of laying out the infinite convolutions and the intimate simplicity of a moral problem, and of leaving us with the conviction of possessing a certain clarity with which to perceive not a universal but a personal understanding of the world. “What in the world is this emotion?” asks Rebecca West after reading King Lear. “What is the bearing of supremely great works of art on my life that makes me feel so glad?” I know that I have come across that emotion in all kinds of literature, supremely great and supremely small, in a line here and there, a paragraph, and sometimes, not often, a whole book, for no obviously discernible reason, when something that is being told about a particular character or situation suddenly acquires for me, its reader, enormous private importance.
Are Don Quixote’s quixotic gestures commendable when, after he has threatened a farmer for viciously beating his young apprentice, the farmer redoubles his punishment once Don Quixote is safely out of sight? Is Hercule Poirot, at the end of his long life, justified in murdering a murderer in order to prevent others from being murdered? Is it excusable for Aeneas to abandon to her tears the welcoming Dido for the sake of the glory of the future Roman Empire? Should Monsieur Homais have received the croix d’honneur after the death of the miserable Bovarys? Is Lady Macbeth a monster or a victim, and should we pity her or fear her, or (this is much more difficult) fear and pity her at precisely the same time?
Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary, so that A Hundred Years of Solitude can help us understand the fate of Carthage, and Goneril’s arguments can assist us in translating the dubious ethical dilemma of General Paul Aussaresses, the torturer of Algiers. I am tempted to say that perhaps this is all that literature really does. I am tempted to say that every book that allows a reader to engage with it asks a moral question. Or rather: that if a reader is able to delve beyond the surface of a given text, such a reader can bring back from its depths a moral question, even if that question has not been put by the writer in so many words, but its implicit presence elicits nevertheless a bare emotion from the reader, a foreboding or simply a memory of something we knew, long ago. Through this alchemy, every literary text becomes, in some sense, metaphoric.
Literature handbooks since the Middle Ages have arduously distinguished between metaphor and image, image and simile, simile and symbol, symbol and emblem. Essentially, of course, the intellectual insight that conjures up these devices is the same: an associative intuition intent on apprehending the reality of experience not directly but once removed, as Perseus did in order to see the face of the Gorgon, or Moses the face of God. Reality, the place in which we stand, cannot be seen as long as we are in it. It is the process of “once removed” (through imagery, through allusion, through plot) that allows us to see where and who we are. Metaphor, in the widest sense, is our means of grasping (and sometimes almost understanding) the world and our bewildering selves. It may be that all literature can be understood as metaphor.
Metaphor, of course, breeds metaphor. The number of stories we have to tell is limited, and the number of images that echo stories meaningfully in every mind is small. When Wallace Stevens tells us that
In that November off Tehuantepec
The slopping of the sea grew still one night,