In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

In this essay, I explore Paul Monette’s attempts in and through various forms of writing to bear witness to the early years of the aids crisis in the United States.1 In his work, including Borrowed Time, an aids memoir, and Love Alone, a collection of elegies for his lover Roger Horwitz, who died of aids on October 22, 1986, Monette offers an account of the heroic struggles in the early days of the epidemic, not only against the virus, but also against the general sense that death was the inevitable outcome of having aids. The heroes of Monette’s account are the “men of ’85,” the countless gay men afflicted in the first years of the plague in the U.S. The “men of ’85” include Roger, who, Monette shows us, faced his illness bravely and with sōphrosynē, a classical Greek idea that defines virtue as “an inner harmony of the soul, a reasonableness which reveals itself in every action and attitude” (1988b, 65). If Roger is the epitome of restraint and reasonableness in virtually every situation, Monette is the opposite: a whirlwind of nervous, unfocused energy that only finds its focus in caring for Roger, and after his death, in writing about him. But, as Monette recognizes in the first weeks after Roger’s diagnosis, “[w]hatever happened to Roger happened to me” (65), and this recognition of shared experience in the present but also in the future both fuels and haunts Monette’s account. Although Monette is telling of the death of Roger and the deaths of countless others in the present, he is also in many ways describing his own death in the future. The borrowed time of his title refers both to the desperate attempts to extend Roger’s life in the face of almost certain death, and Monette’s own hiv+ status at the time of his writing, which places him in some sense ahead of time, or outside of time, awaiting death. 53 lisa diedrich Between Two Deaths AIDS, Trauma, and Temporality in the Work of Paul Monette His own death will come both too late—Roger will die first, leaving Monette as survivor and witness—and too soon, as Monette will die in 1995 just as protease inhibitors come onto the aids treatment scene. Monette’s writing is a symptom of this death that is both too soon and too late. I also am interested in Monette’s position as witness in relation to what I call the time of AIDS, which refers on the one hand to the historical time of the emergence of the aids epidemic, and on the other hand to a particular temporality that the diagnosis of hiv/aids brings into being. In my examination, I will introduce briefly Freud’s theory of latency and trauma as well as Lacan’s theory of being between two deaths in order to look at the temporal structure of hiv/aids as described in Monette’s writing, before considering Monette’s politicization as he quests for a magic bullet to save Roger, himself, and others. The political, for Monette and other aids activists, becomes a means to a future time, but whether that future time is a time after aids is a question I consider in the conclusion to this essay. Are we still in the time of aids? Can we begin to imagine a time after aids, and how does such imagining transform the time of aids and those still in it? Past and Future Repetitions In Moses and Monotheism, Freud says that latency is a feature of not only infectious disease but of trauma as well. In other words, there is a gap between the traumatic event and the appearance of symptoms (1939, 84). To take Freud’s analogy full circle, hiv/aids is an infectious disease that also has the temporal structure of a trauma. While latency is a characteristic of all infectious diseases, hiv/aids has added a peculiar twist to the phenomenon of latency, partly because latency in hiv/aids is such an unknown quantity; there is no standard amount of time from the point that one becomes infected with the hiv virus to the point that one becomes ill. As Monette writes on the first page of Borrowed Time, “No one has solved the puzzle of its timing” (1988b, 1). In AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag also seeks to understand aids in temporal terms, noting that “with the most up-to-date...

Share