337-

Pictures of a virus:

ideological choices
and the representation of HIV
MIREILLE ROSELLO*

Literary

critics have developed a whole range of rhetorical tools to describe

the ways in which words invite us to visualize abstract concepts. Scholars
know how to use their interpretive expertise to decode the presence and
meaning of such images. For example, if one witness says:

Jai touche

dures et jestime metre salie. Dieu nous a donne

doit le respecter (...) Jai eu une periode dgarement. Je
regrette infiniment ~a. [my emphasis]
un

aux

corps et

drogues

on

any self-respecting reader or viewer will probably ignore the image of the
person (in this case an unremarkable close-up shot of a woman) to
concentrate on the powerful images produced by her words. We would not
only be able to identify the recourse to verbal images but we would also be
capable of appreciating the ideological value of her metaphors. Losing ones
way, getting dirty, those are easily identifiable, easily analysed images. And
to say that a specific cluster of words is an image is the most basic of
formulations. We tend to be more precise, to specify whether we are in the
presence of a metaphor, of a comparison, or of a simile. In other words, we
are capable of naming and of interpreting the type of visual narrative that
words can produce. This is what Susan Sontag did in her AIDS and its

Metaphors as early as 1990.2

When it

to television images, however, I suggest that our critical

tends to fall somewhat short of the mark. I am often content,

comes

sophistication

* Address for correspondence: Prof. Mireille Rosello, Department of French and Italian,
University, 152 Kresge, Evanston, IL 60208, USA..

Northwestern
1

Woman interviewed during the TV programme entitled: Savoir Plus, Santé: Sida, Ceux
1 April 1995. FR2, 13:39.
S. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Doubleday, 1990).

résistent;
2

Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at GEORGE MASON UNIV on December 12, 2014

qui

338

example, to oppose words and images, or print culture and television,

forgetting, first of all, that television programmes are a combination of
images and sounds that would become meaningless if separated, and
secondly that the visual narratives that I see on the screen are also of many
different types, using both what we commonly call images (as opposed to
words) but also the whole range of rhetorical figures that we identify in texts.
There are layers of images within images. Some images are metaphors:
others are not. Visual narratives, like printed narratives, have a grammar;
they belong to different genres. What I propose to do here is to unpack the
for

visual narratives used to represent the HIV virus in different discursive

universes: animated sequences, scientific programmes, a film and a novel. I
will try to compare the function of visual constructions and their ideological
consequences regardless of whether the visual narrative is produced by
images or by words.
The representation of contaminating agents is not a new genre but the
choices made when selecting a type of image - a type of visual narrative that
we will identify as the HIV virus - reflect not only the current state of what
we think of as scientific knowledge (before the invention of electronic
microscopes some images were simply not possible) but also the currently
acceptable limits of the debate within which the Yaiammers of thought are
circumscribed. The various ways in which we represent the virus delineate a
territory of critical inquiry.
Before analysing scientific programmes or fictional texts, I want to
examine images that treat the HIV virus as an icon, or more exactly, as a
visual bite. In the same way as sound bites both create and signal the
presence of a pre-packaged unit of thought, a visual bite reflects the
existence of a debate whose terms and limits are already defined within our
culture. We have all seen many times the little round object that appears on
the right or left-hand corner of the page, or of the screen when the topic is
AIDS. Even when the programme is produced by different channels, on
French television, the virus that appears to the right or the left of the
journalists head is not only strangely similar but immediately recognizable.
We all know that this is the supposedly realistic - but in fact highly stylized
representation of the HIV virus and the fact that we can recognize it is
due less to our increased scientific knowledge than to the existence of a code
of visualization that has become intertextual, international and culturally

compulsory.
I would readily admit,
3
For

for

example,

that I

am

not

capable

of

identifying

of the similar merging between science-fiction and cutting-edge imaging

Cartwrights account of the discovery of X-Rays and of their both gothic and
modernist applications. L. Cartwright, Decomposing the body: X rays and the cinema, in
Screening the Body: Tracing Medicines Visual Culture (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota Press,
an

techniques,

analysis

see

1995), 107-42,

Lisa

107.

Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at GEORGE MASON UNIV on December 12, 2014

339

old and familiar viruses such as the one that triggers measles or one of the
viruses that cause the flu. The type of knowledge we have accumulated
about those organisms and about the diseases does not need to be supported
by a visual icon of the virus. In the case of HIV, I would argue that the virus
was fetishized as a mandatory and minimalist icon. From its emergence on
the international scene, since its highly publicized and controversial
discovery, images and the HIV virus were inseparable: after all, the team of
French researchers were able to accuse their American counterparts of
having used their data when it realized that the picture of the virus chosen
to illustrate US conclusions was exactly the same as the one sent by

Montagniers team.
The fetishized virus does not have to be

unique and the variations of the

hegemonic image
ideologically meaningful. Although it is assumed that
we only recognize an object once we know about it, the different
representations are both recognizable and still capable of providing
are

information. Like the ink stains of the Rorschach test where we read our own
fears, but also like drawings suggested by psychologists where children
express unconscious and repressed stories, a fetishized virus is an image that
packs its narrative very tightly and is therefore able to smuggle metaphorical
meaning without taking responsibility for it.
Let us look at three similar yet different representations of the same
hegemonic model. The first one is analysed by Paula Treichler in her classic
article on AIDS as an Epidemic of Signification. Here, the virus is drawn
and interpreted as a grenade, and Treichler points out that it is deorganicized : it is a time bomb, its inner mechanism is exposed as if the virus
had been dissected, understood if not mastered.4
On the cover of the book, Le Sida, connaitre et agir, the explosive weapon
has lost its transparency but acquired colours: the core is yellow, the familiar
excrescences are blue.5 The scientific aura lent to the black and white
representation of the grenade-like virus is replaced by an engaging threedimensional and multi-coloured construction. Here, the virus is selfcontained, and does not connote danger because it looks like one of those
objects sold in craft shops: an orange decorated with cloves or perhaps a
little pin cushion. Like the first drawing, this rendition is self-contained, cut
off from the immediate environment that it no longer threatens.
This visual narrative of neutrality is contradicted by a much more
widespread representation: the spiky version that regularly appears on TV
because it is part of the archives reused by authors of animated sequences.
On television, we often see a three-dimensional rendition with different

P. Treichler, Aids, homophobia, and biomedical discourse: an epidemic of signification, in D.

Crimp (ed.), Aids, Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 31-70.
5
P. Marchand and J. Marzion, Le Sida: Connaitre, Comprendre, Agir (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).

Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at GEORGE MASON UNIV on December 12, 2014

340

connotations: the points are very prickly, evoking some sort of medieval
weapon, perhaps a mace that is not so much ready to explode as it is ready
to crush its opponents, or to penetrate fragile membranes without allowing
anything to penetrate its solid core. Once again, the image pretends to be
realistic but adds its own myth to the code. We are so used to such images
that if we were to be shown the actual photograph of the HIV virus, we
might be incapable of deciphering that image.
While photographs of viruses may make them appear inert and lifeless,
spiky icons are half way between sophisticated machines and space invaders
or alien creatures: so that the virus as icon implicitly refers to the
commonplace visual narrative of the science-fiction model. And, this figure
is even more evident if we turn to scientific programmes from which the
visual icon is often excerpted.
Often, scientific explanations are illustrated by animated images that are
as neutral and objective. High levels of technology are usually
involved in the creation of such representations of the virus. But an analysis
of the visual components or logic of short films reveals that the illusion of
scientific or medical expertise is guaranteed by our familiarity with fictional
creatures and space invaders. The aesthetics and poetics of science fiction
are ~n powerful that they make us forget that science fiction is neither
science or even science-fiction but fiction passing as science.
In a programme called Savoir Plus, Sante which in April of 1995 was
devoted to Sida: Ceux qui resistent, the viewer is confronted with
remarkable images that seek to explain the principle of infection of a cell by
the virus. An animated film shows the cell penetrated by the virus, then a
multicoloured sequence illustrates the gradual process of fusion between the
DNA of the cell and that of the virus. And finally, new copies of the virus are
shown to leave the cell and migrate to infect others.
A similar sequence presented as part of a weekly 30 minute late show on
FR3, Sidamag, borrows the same convention of science-fiction aesthetics.
Provided by a prestigious French research institute (Centre national de la
recherche scientifique, or CNRS), this visual narrative is a different conceptualization of the third stage of the infection when new viruses break
through the membrane of the original host and float away from it.6
What these images have in common is their exquisite beauty. The virus is

presented

6
7

Sidamag, 21 November 1995, FR3, 22:19.

Compare the representation of the HIV virus in such films and the representation of germs and
bacteria in TV commercials that advertise disinfectants. Typically, germs are hideous cartoon
characters, they are slimy, shapeless, noisy and tastelessly coloured. If insecticides are advertised,
then insects will be portrayed as horrible and grotesque animals that commonsensical people will
want to kill instantly. In a culture where the culprit and the scapegoat are always portrayed as ugly
and where ugliness is a code for the representations of villains, it is curious to notice that science
does not buy into the paradigm.

Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at GEORGE MASON UNIV on December 12, 2014

341

represented as a weapon. The sophisticated pattern of encounters

organisms is portrayed as a beautiful encounter between beautiful
creatures. Not only is the plot easily understandable and intellectually
gratifying but the colours and shapes tap the alphabet of special effects. This
is science-fiction passing as science, a science-fiction narrative where the
virus is not the villain or the enemy but one of the players in a game from
which humans and human suffering seem completely absent. Gender, race,
and gayness are also conspicuously unrepresentable in this paradigm. The
advantage of this de-socializing of the infection is that no moral panic can
be inserted into this story.8 But the erasure of human differences is of course
no guarantee of justice. Besides, looking at these wonderful animations, it is
not

between

difficult not to suspect that there is more than respect and intellectual
for this object of study at play here: this is almost seduction. The
virus becomes the hero of the film like the space creature in the first of the
Alien series films, where we discover, towards the end, that some official
power was determined to sacrifice the crew to save the killer life form and
bring it back to earth to study it.99
If the code of science-fiction can be used to create a science effect,
scientific programmes can also use other genres to produce similar results.
Science-fiction thinks of itself as a second-degree realism: it does not
foreground its literarity, nor does it expose its fictional mechanism. Other
visual narratives, on the other hand, will overtly present themselves as
fiction, as metaphors, and they will seek to explain scientific phenomena
through images that mediate science as if it were a transcendental discipline,
some unattainable truth that must be translated. A series called Cest pas

curiosity

8
See J. Weeks, Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity (London: Rivers Oram
Press, 1991). He denounces the rituals of decontamination resulting from the moral panic that,
according to him, lasted between 1982 and 1985: Lesbians and gay men were refused service in
restaurants, theatre personnel refused to work with gay actors, the trash cans of people suspected of
having AIDS were not emptied, children with the virus were banned from schools and the dead
were left unburied (:119).
9

Hervé Guibert has

another metaphorical model in A lami qui ne ma pas sauvé la vie

In the first few pages, in a paragraph teeming with more or less
he compares the virus to a video game character, then to a cartoon character.

tapped

(Paris: Gallimard, 1990).

irreconcilable images,
The word gloutons will evoke liquid detergent commercials that popularized the phrase enzymes
gloutons in the 1970s. Guiberts vulnerability is also visualized in three different ways: his cells
are plankton threatened by a predator, his blood is like the contents of a vessel whose lid has been
removed, it is a naked man in a nightmare. This proliferation of metaphors contrasts with the
visual narratives presented on television because the abundance of representations prevents the
reader from latching onto a single and coherent interpretation:
Avant lapparition du sida, un inventeur de jeux électroniques avait dessiné la progression
du sida dans le sang. Sur lécran du jeu pour adolescents, le sang était un labyrinthe dans
lequel circulait le Pacman, un shadok jaune actionné par une manette, qui bouffait tout
sur son passage, vidant de leur plancton les différents couloirs, menacé en même temps
par lapparition proliférante de shadoks rouges encore plus gloutons (Guibert, A lami,

14-15).

Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at GEORGE MASON UNIV on December 12, 2014

342

sorcier: le magazine de la d6couverte et de la science uses fiction to mediate

science.&dquo; It is addressed primarily to adolescents and its title signals that
science (or science as defined here) is neither magic (no sorcerer, no magic is
involved) nor beyond the pale for the lay person (cest pas sorcier could
translate as its a piece of cake).
The programme devoted to AIDS takes the implications of the title of the
collection to their logical consequence, presenting us with radically different
images of the virus. Unlike the spiky sphere that functions as iterable icon,
the virus is here visibly constructed as a pedagogical representation that
never pretends to be realistic. In fact, the overarching metaphorical or even
allegorical system is formulated from the very beginning. Let us, the host
says, imagine that the human body is a fortress, a castle.11 He uses the phrase
chateau fort which belongs to the vocabulary of childrens games and
familiar toys.
He manipulates large and cartoonesque objects with garish colours, he
shows us how intruders, dark green viruses, are immediately escorted by
the generals (T4 cells) who check their identity.12 The reaction of the
immune system is symbolized by a loud burglar alarm. Every phenomenon
is explained by means of three dimensional objects that look more like
pieces of a construction game than like cmamies from another planet. 1 call
this bricolage thinking because each object had to be invented for the
purpose of the film. The bricole virus has nothing to do with high tech
synthetic images and it loses all glamour. This programme also refuses
subtlety and aesthetically pleasing visions. As a result, the audience is
offered a completely different set of connotations and will presumably
process the narrative in radically different ways.
On the one hand, the heavy-handed comparison between the human body
and the fortress clearly tells the story of a war, or at least of a struggle. It is
obvious that the virus is an enemy, an intruder. The encounter is never

10

Cest pas sorcier: le magazine de la découverte et de la science: Sida, January 1996, produced
by11 Oliver Chevillard, FR3.
The metaphor is particularly banal but, perhaps more importantly, it proposes a literal
construction of the most commonplace of military images to be found in literature on AIDS. See
Christopher Robinsons Scandal in the Ink (London: Cassell, 1995). In the chapter devoted to Aids
writing in France and the gay self-image (:117-43), the author identifies and criticizes the same
phallocratic military vocabulary in Alain-Emmanuel Dreuilhes Corps à corps: journal du sida and
in Jean-Noël Pancrazis Les Quartiers dhiver.
12
Cartoons have played an important role in the discourse of prevention and information. In
their study of French, Belgian and American cartoons addressed to young readers by professional
cartoonists or by institutions, Philippe Videlier and Pierine Pirass note that cartoonists (like the
authors of animated sequences) face potentially serious ideological choices: La bande dessinée de
communication, en effet, trouve rarement un équilibre satisfaisant entre lefficacité du propos et
celle de lesthétique (tant linguistique quiconique). La nécessaire simplicité du message, voir le
souci de coller au public, conduit souvent à des développements assez discutables (:123). See P.
Videlier and P. Piras, Limage des maux,
LHomme contaminé: la tourmente du sida, C. Thiaudière

with B.

Ajchenbaum-Boffety (éds) (Paris: Autrement, 1992), 120-30.

Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at GEORGE MASON UNIV on December 12, 2014

343

portrayed as a mysterious and therefore potentially seductive meeting

between two beautiful organisms (when watching the scientific animations, I
couldnt help thinking of the film Roger Rabbit where the rabbits wife, who
is stereotypically represented as a gorgeous femme fatale, exclaims in a sexy
low-pitched voice: I cant help it, I was drawn that way...). In Cest pas
sorcier, viruses do not need to make excuses for the artists intentions: they
are balloons that burst docilely when the general-in-chief approaches a
prickly white cell.
That scenario also tends to avoid the representation of suffering and the
consequences of the disease for human beings: it is quite upbeat, it does not
shy away from the intellectual pleasure of discovery. It is also constructed as
a boys game. It is difficult to see this game working with dolls, let alone
Barbie dolls: endearing dolls would distract from the bricolage aspect that is
a necessary part of the MacGyver atmosphere. It is also important that no
ethical dilemma should be introduced at this level. Soldiers are there to kill
and win the war, and playing means having total control over objects that we
manipulate like pawns. The potentially problematic mirror side of the
metaphor (is it clear that we want to treat intruders, strangers, like viruses?)
is

brought up.
At the same time, this optimistic, if slightly disturbing, aspect of the
visual narrative is offset by the highly visible presence of the puppet master
which continuously re-emphasizes the fictional character of this rendering.
This narrative knows perfectly well whose side it is on (the body against the
ugly virus), but it does not visualize what happens when no God-like player
moves little pieces of plastic on a set. This bricolage distances itself from a
supposedly neutral scientific discourse, but this distance is not necessarily
critical. Science itself remains some sort of external truth that must be
never

simplified to be understood.
How can we interpret these types

of images that either use the idea of

science to validate a fiction or borrow the rules of fiction to legitimize official
science? Both imaging strategies have, I think, one element in common: they
have nothing to do with testimony. The PWAs body, the caretakers, friends
and families, in other words, those who suffer, are strangely absent from the
picture. This is not a prescriptive comment: I suppose there is a place for
non-testimonial discourse. Such images are meant as messages of hope. They

believe,

as one

recent French

prevention campaign recently put it,

that la

science progresse. Electronic or allegorical representations of the virus give

us the impression that some people are in control of the plot, that some
people know and work very hard at transmitting knowledge, the truth. As a
result, those images do not generate any discomfort. They elicit feelings of
mastery or even aesthetic appreciation and intellectual pleasure. I would not
want to suggest that only anxiety and anxiety-producing discourses are
legitimate and I can take on board arguments that say that the soothing

beauty

of

electronically generated

fictions

serve

therapeutic

Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at GEORGE MASON UNIV on December 12, 2014

purpose,

344

alleviating fear and the effects of stress. But I wonder if the taming of the
virus that results from this strategy does not confuse the serenity caused by
the impression that we understand with the relief that we would experience
if patients were treated successfully, if the epidemic receded everywhere, in
a word if suffering decreased.
Like the virus used as a sound bite, science-fiction viruses dictate the preconditions of the cultural debate. Turning the virus into a toy or a beautiful
alien asks certain questions and refuses others. The visual narratives I have
discussed invite us to ask if research is making progress (presumably, the
answer is yes), if what we know about AIDS is true or false, if we are well or
badly informed. Again, such questions are legitimate: we are now in a
position to correct earlier myths about the responsibility of green monkeys,
or about the idea that some populations are intrinsically at risk, and we can
even analyse and critique the racist underpinnings of previous hypotheses.
But the question that is never asked is what a subject should do when
science and grass-root interventions are in rivalry (for symbolic or financial
legitimacy) rather than in a relation of complementarity. The virus as
science-fiction does not want to know if tritherapies are produced at the
expense of African populations or if it is ethical to universalize the value of
research without wondering if science should be thought of as a discipline
that is in competition with others, rather than encompassing all others.
When funding is at stake, that point is hardly moot. The fact that the
science-fiction virus can successfully erase racial and class dimensions is
also

reminder that scientific discourses do not

necessarily

know how to

invest in subcultural work. In his 1993 written report to the Prime Minister,
Luc Montagnier remarks that the Caribbean islands are particularly affected
by the disease and recommends that the work of prevention should be
funded more adequately. He mentions the work done by AIDES among
maroons:

Citons en particulier des pieces de theatre itin6rantes r6alis6es par les

Haitiens sur la prevention du Sida et la campagne de prevention aupres
des noirs marrons avec 1ethnologue Diane Vernon. La encore, il faut
souligner quil sagit toujours des memes benevoles qui doivent faire face
a tous les aspects du quotidien: un permanent salarie est ncessaire.13

13

See L. Montagnier, Le Sida et la société française: rapport au premier ministre (Paris: La

Documentation française, 1994), 225. In rich countries in the West (and especially those in the
Northern Hemisphere), medical research is viewed as one of the most efficient components of the
fight against the disease. The assumption seems to be that what is discovered in the North will
somehow trickle down and benefit poor countries eventually. In the meantime, research in African
states is seen as an impossible luxury, local prevention and information becoming top priorities. It
might be necessary to evaluate the unequal distribution of authority invested in low-tech, grass-root
interventions and highly specialized and mechanized western medical research. The same tensions
occur within Western countries where researchers are not expected to be sheltered by the ivory
tower of pure science. For an analysis of the friction generated when researchers, associations and

Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at GEORGE MASON UNIV on December 12, 2014

345

Montagnier cannot be suspected of privileging social work at the expense

of scientific research. It is therefore remarkable to hear him deplore the fact
that what he calls the daily aspects of the epidemic are implicitly devalorized and de-professionalized. The quotidien is not taken- on board by
representations of the virus that address and fuel our desire for scientific
explanations without questioning or examining the potentially fetishistic
aspects of such a desire. In order to find visual narratives that actually
critique scientific statements, we need to move away from discourses that
want to explain and closer to voices that will accept to reintroduce the
painful dimension of the infected body. Typically, they will not be found on
television, especially not in programmes devoted to scientific explanations.
We are more likely to find them in films, or in novels. Such stories agree, in
advance, to give up on the aura of legitimacy conferred by the presence of
Science. In exchange, they regain a form of freedom that allows them to
question the very authority they are renouncing. For example, in John
Greysons 1993 Canadian musical, Zero Patience, we find one of the most
whimsical representations of the virus.
In one of the scenes, Patient Zero (a myth which the movie is precisely
trying to debunk) is looking at his own blood through the microscope. In the
film, he is already dead but this is really the least of many inconsistencies.
What he sees through the lens is a sort of swimming pool full of red and
white balloons (white cells and red cells I suppose) and swimmers
grotesquely covered with bulky swimming caps representing their identity
(T cells, B cells). And in the middle of this ludicrous picture looms Miss
HIV, a glamorous blonde wearing a tiara, played by The Flirtations Michael
Callen. We dont know if she is a princess, a fairy, or the wicked witch of the
North. She is seen floating lazily under a black umbrella and is joined by the
virus of syphilis and that of CMV. These viruses insist that they should be
held responsible for AIDS. Quite unexpectedly, Miss HIV insists that no
one has ever proved that the virus is the real culprit. Not only is this virus
endowed with agency, but it is also capable of responding to accusations.
Here, viruses converse animatedly with a dead human, Patient Zero, about
the real cause of AIDS. The strange dialogue may come as a surprise to
educated spectators who have their views on the topic. But what I find
important is that the movie does not provide a final explanation. Whether or
not the episode manages to cast doubts in our minds regarding the role of
HIV, the film refuses to treat scientific knowledge as a truth that gets
narrativized. Here, the story stages the questioning, the unresolved
problems, perhaps even errors and lies.
the media confronted their priorities during the 1989 Congress in Paris (researchers insisting on
their need for serenity and the public demanding that knowledge circulate), see Bernard Debrés Le
Voleur de vie (Paris: Fallois, 1989), 139-47.

Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at GEORGE MASON UNIV on December 12, 2014

346

Finally, certain visual narratives are bold enough to completely reinvent

the relationship between science and fiction as well as between the body and
the virus. I dont think it is a coincidence that the two operations occur at
the same time but it is perhaps paradoxical that the following example
should be a visual narrative generated within a text. I offer this last example
not as a model that I would like to prescribe but as one of the possible
consequences of the mental process involved in the imaging of the virus.
In Christopher Coes Such Times, Timothy, the I-narrator, has done
research on the virus, has seen one through the microscope, has studied the
process of infection and is now in a position to try to impart his knowledge
to Jasper, his infected lover. He seems capable of putting together a very
sophisticated scientific report on what the virus is and does once inside the
body. But interestingly enough, this is written as the story that he precisely
refuses to tell his lover:
going to tell him that the virus begins as RNA. I didnt want to
confound him. He did not need to know that it is the conversion of RNA
to DNA that characterizes a retrovirus, that the conversion, also called
polymerase, is achieved by an enzyme, reverse transcriptase; Jasper did
not need to know that it is the presence of this one enzyme that tells a
scientist that he is looking at a retiuviiLm.~
I wasnt

a paradoxical rhetorical move, the narrator tells the reader what he is

telling his lover and he makes us the recipients of a story not narrated.
The question is not whether certain facts are true or false, whether
information circulates or not but whether telling serves the right purpose or
not. For two pages, Timothy writes about what remains unsaid. Prefacing his
account with: I told JaspeT what I thought is essential for him to know
(:209), he repeatedly explains:

In

not

I did not burden him (...) I gave him no account of the difficulty I had
put myself to in order to learn what little I had. I didnt tell for example
(...) This wasnt something Jasper had to know. I did not speak about

another American doctor (...)I did not tell Jasper that one of the slides
had the name Gallo writt3n on the top and bottom of its white cardboard
frame (...)I did not tell Jasper how reluctant half a dozen scientists had
been to talk to me. I didnt want Jasper to know the difficulty or how
humbling it had been for me to talk to these inaccessible, almost lordly
researchers. (:210-11)

Timothys

decision thus eliminates the

possibility

for

Jasper

to

see

the

type of visual narratives I have been discussing. His testimony is a multilayered text whose double address filters the different possible representations of the virus

14

according to what he wants to achieve.

C. Coe, Such Times (New York and London:

Penguin Books, 1994).

Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at GEORGE MASON UNIV on December 12, 2014

347

When he is finally ready to tell us what he did tell Jasper, he switches to a

different medium: he draws a picture and, pointing with his fingertip, asks
Jasper to imagine something that he has never seen, that he does not
understand. Unlike the visual narratives that are meant to make us grasp a
pre-existing and impersonal truth, here, Timothy will desperately try to
make Jasper visualize something that no scientific tale will ever tell: the
personal, intimate, unique relationship between Jaspers body and his virus,
the virus that has penetrated his cells and fused with his genetic heritage.
For Timothy, this appropriation of the virus would allow Jasper to be
protected against the indifference of general and supposedly objective
reports that do tend to objectify the virus as a completely generic organism.
Timothy, pointing at the picture he has just drawn, suggests:
All these are nucleotides, I said.
I dont see it, Jasper said.
I looked at him. I thought for a moment.
Think of this nucleotide as an emerald, I said, and jabbed again. And of
this as a diamond. I jabbed the concrete again. And here is a sapphire,
and here a ruby. Thats it, that is the virus (...). Close your eyes and try to
picture them. Make them gleam in the dark. Let each one glisten infinitesimally, each one separately. (:212)

Like the synthetic images produced for Savoir Plus, this virus is
visualized as an exquisitely beautiful combination of colours and precious
textures. But if the virus is imagined as a collection of gemstones, as a sort of
treasure accumulated in the lovers body, it is not because a complex and
mysterious organism has mesmerized inaccessible, almost lordly researchers.
The virus as precious stone is born out of a lovers imagination: as much as
the narrator would like to reify the virus, he realizes that this particular virus
is now completely indistinguishable from Jasper. The retrovirus has merged
with him. And it is no longer a virus, or even the HIV virus but Jaspers
virus, his to conceptualize and also, hopefully, his to deal and live with. 15
Comparing my virus and your virus, a concept that is radically absent
from any of the previous visual narratives, Timothy goes on:
virus may begin with an emerald, and then go: diamond, diamond,
sapphire, ruby, emerald, emerald, ruby.
Your virus may begin with a sapphire, and if read from end to end, which
they can do now, in a laboratory, it might go something like this:
sapphire, diamond, diamond, sapphire, ruby, emerald, diamond, ruby,
ruby. (:212)

My

This is

15

visualization strategy but it is somewhat different from the

Similarly, Jean-Paul

Aron talks about mon sida and not le sida See

J.-P. Aron, Mon Sida

(Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1988).

Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at GEORGE MASON UNIV on December 12, 2014

348

that seek to help the body cure itself: here, the text seeks to
impose
image of the virus. Treatment and scientific information are
not different disciplines. Personal, unique, and yet informed by the latest
scientific constructions, this virus is no enemy, no alien, no space intruder. It
is both inside and outside, both us and the other, it is conceived as a part of
oneself, a metaphor for ones limited control over life itself, a life that we
can, to a very limited extent, shorten or perhaps, at times, avoid shortening.

techniques
its

own

The reason it matters, papa, the reason why it should matter to you, is
that another mans virus may have killed him, but your virus, yours,
hasnt killed anybody yet. (:214)

Christopher Coes images do not worship science as a transcendental

discourse nor do they critique one specific myth as Zero Patience does. The
virus beautiful is not an alien organism and its precious nature is linked to
the fact that it has merged with the precious body of a loved one. Coe refuses
to let the virus entertain him or perhaps distract him out of his grief and
suffering. His unique visual constructions do not reduce AIDS to just any of
the diseases that will, fatally, eventually kill humans: Jaspers HIV virus is
not a generic, dissectable organism. At the same time, his definition of the
virus takes into account the intimate relationship between )asper
and tile
the
jasper ariu
invaders identity: once acknowledged, the fusion no longer authorizes
heroic tales of resistance, and military metaphors of castles under siege.
Instead, it invites the author to produce a different discourse that no longer
differentiates between testimony and scientific images.&dquo;
The representation of HIV is a tiny part of the enormous ideological and
rhetorical apparatus that the AIDS epidemic has spawned for more than a
decade. But even this microscopic portion of the issue* reveals much about
the dominant paradigms that frame the possible dialogue between doctors,
patients, associations, political leaders and institutions. Coes images are
made of words and they belong to the realm of what we think of as fiction.
Yet they provide a forceful comment on the other network of images that the
media tend to propose as more objective, more scientific, more neutral. Such
Times pretends to operate according to the same logic as scientific narratives:
the narrator apparently shares with researchers the notion that only once the
virus is perfectly understood (by science here, or by himself) will it then be
possible to delegate the rest of the work to other agents, to use the resources
of other disciplines to help patients overcome disease and pain. But the
narrators efforts also demonstrate that the words that create images do not
have to be systematically drawn from one set of references: the virus does
not have to be confined within the boundaries of science-fiction or war
stories or bricolage. To suggest that the virus, the privileged object of science,
~~L vY

16
Thank you to
draft.

Jean-Pierre Boulé and Wendy Michallat for their generous reading of the first

Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at GEORGE MASON UNIV on December 12, 2014

349

also be represented through the medium of poetry is not an attempt at

shifting the debate from hard science to escapist fantasy: Coes images are
acutely aware that there is a link between research and medicine, between
scientific inquiry and healing. But they ask pointed questions about the
unavoidable political aspects of such links.
can

Downloaded from frc.sagepub.com at GEORGE MASON UNIV on December 12, 2014