Opera: Desire, Disease, Death by Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon (review)

124 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Inshort, Finding Philosophy is a profoundly disappointing book. Bunge's greatest contribution has been his dogged advocacy of 'science-oriented philosophy,' now extended to the social sciences. Unfortunately, Bunge fails to follow his own advice and, as a result, contributes little to the range of initiatives that are now beginning to vindicate his early claims on behalf of an lamphihious' philosophy of science. (ALISON WYLIE) Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon. Opera: Desire, Disease, Death University of Nebraska Press. xvi, 296. $63-90 This book, by a literary scholar and a doctor, looks at some fourteen nineteenth- and twentieth-century operas and (inthe epilogue) some plays, a musical, and a mass, from the perspective of the diseases they either explicitly thematize or implicitly depend on for their meanings. The diseases represented in these works are all fatal if untr~ated, and were incurable at the time the relevant works were written. (Bernstein's comic commentaries on syphilis in Candide are the exception to this, and the Hutcheons argue that the comedy was possible precisely because the work postdated the discovery that penicillin was effective in curing the disease.) The diseases discussed here were also associated in their time not just with terrifying physical pathologies, but with a variety of psychological and social 'disorders,' many of them linked in one way or another to gender and/or sexuality. (The analogies to AIDS in contemporary culture are obvious, and the authors do not fail to point them out.) After an introduction pointing out that opera is a form of social representation rendered particularly powerful by the effects of music and the presence of achtal singing bodies on stage, the book is organized by disease. Operatic tuberculosis, as represented implicitly in The Tales of Hoffmann, and explicitly in La Traviata and La Boheme, is described as a female disease implying in part a hypersensitive or artistic temperament, an excessive capacity for physical sensation, and a concomitant but contradictory etherealization in its final stages. One implication of their description of the contrast between the febrile excitement and the pallid exhaustion represented as characteristic of the disease is that it allowed heroines afflicted with it to be simultaneously virgin and whore. The Hutcheons see the balance between these two poles shifting somewhat . between La Traviata and La Boheme, following the discovery that it was infectious rather than hereditary. The central chapters on syphilis and cholera are thebest in the book. The authors' study of syphilis produces perhaps their subtlest and most interesting close reading: namely, ofParsifal,inwhich Amfortas's non-healing wound is interpreted as a syphilitic result of his encounter with Kundry, HUMANITIES 125 and in the authors tie the lonl£-~;ta]1dJn£ with contacts between and prt)stitutes J..'U. Lll"." ....... ofthe Grail and the Flower iVlallaE~ns. of The associations of cholera with sex and ......o~.. rI<".... are less obvious than those that as of or understand which Susan Go.ldenbt~rg. :::,teltlWIW ...