Somatosphere Presents

a book forum on
Herv Guiberts

cytomegalovirus
Contributions from

Edited by

Catherine Belling
Northwestern University,
Feinberg School of Medicine

Lukas Engelmann
CRASSH

Thomas Cousins
Stellenbosch University

Amy Moran-Thomas
MIT

Eugene Raikhel
University of Chicago

Somatosphere Presents
A Book Forum on

Cytomegalovirus
by Herv Guibert
Fordham University Press
2015, 96 pages
Contributions from:

Catherine Belling
Northwestern University,
Feinberg School of Medicine

Thomas Cousins
Stellenbosch University

Lukas Engelmann
CRASSH

Amy Moran-Thomas
MIT

Edited by

Eugene Raikhel
University of Chicago

A quarter-century after it was written, Herv Guiberts Cytomegalovirus reads both as a vital
document of a particular moment in the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and as a
wonderfully spare account of the banal humiliations and little triumphs of hospitalization in
the shadow of a then-terminal illness. Republished with a luminous Introduction by David
Caron and a wide-ranging and erudite Afterword by Todd Meyers, this slim volume is by
turns poignant, humorous, and startling. We are very pleased to bring you a set of
commentaries on Cytomegalovirus.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
http://somatosphere.net/2016/11/book-forum-cytomegalovirus.html

Blindingly Bright
CATHERINE BELLING
Associate Professor, Medical Education-Medical Humanities & Bioethics, Northwestern University
Feinberg School of Medicine

Does beauty exist in the eye of the beholder or in the object he beholds?
Herv Guibert, Blindsight (Des aveugles, 1985) trans. James Kirkup, p. 24.

CYTOMEGALOVIRUS, THE BOOK, is a beautiful object. The intense red and royal blue of the
cover art, taken from Ross Bleckners Inheritance, echo the paradoxical aesthetics of Herv
Guiberts perspective on the clinic where, for instance, the catastrophic spray from a
carelessly ruptured artery could be very beautiful, a deep red blood-works, a blood
bouquet (45). The painted forms on the cover: are they flowers or erythrocytes? Or can we
not help but see them as cytomegalovirions? There is, after all, some beauty in the name.
Cytomegalovirus: say it aloud. Huge cell virus, because in replicating it massively enlarges
the host cells until, bloated, they explode. I like that Guiberts diary is named after AIDSs
grandiose opportunist. Cytomegalovirus, word and book, seem to embody Guiberts resistance
to the anti-aesthetics of the clinic.
He begins by describing a woman, unconscious on a stretcher, with a very beautiful,
made-up face. He has us see her red lips and also something on her uncovered neck that
looks like a wound, as if someone had tried to cut her throat. Then he adjusts what we see:
the wound, he says, apparently turned out to be a long smear of lipstick, but the first
impression is not erased, leaving a more tenacious double imprint of wound and lipstick,
blood and paint, depth and surface. As readers, we see both, just as those gorgeous objects
on the cover may (apparently) end up being, but will never be only, flowers.
This book made clear to me that to write is to make readers see without their eyes. All
readers (that is, listeners to the voice of the text) are effectively blind, for they depend on
the writers words to convey what he would have us see, in much the way a sighted person
might describe things to someone who cannot see them (because they are in a different
room, or they happened long ago, or because cytomegalovirus has destroyed the listeners
retinas). Guiberts entire diary is, as Todd Meyers observes, premonitory, of death,
blindness, and loss, but these dark futures also map backward onto CMV (and beyond it to
HIV) just as Cytomegalovirus maps back on a younger Guibert, taking a job as volunteer
reader at the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles and writing a novel about blindness, in
which the question Does beauty exist in the eye of the beholder or in the object he
beholds? is itself a backward premonition. A philosophy teacher asks it because he always
Somatosphere | December 2016

Book Forum: Cytomegalovirus by Herv Guibert

asks his blind pupils sight-related questions, out of stupidity rather than cruelty (24).
Guibert works out this aesthetics now, perhaps cruelly, on himself and us. Seeing is
displaced onto reading and writing, such that Guiberts willful apprehension of beauty
demolishes all that is inimical about the clinic, that enemy territory that David Caron
admits expecting to be more hostile that it is (8). A smear of lipstick opens up to Guibert
and to us, though we cannot seethe possibility of seeing the beautiful blood vessels in that
throat. It is in an act of anti-clinical description.
Compare: the clinicians see beauty in Guibert, no longer in his beautiful eyes but in
excavating deeper layers. The nurses tell him You have beautiful veins; on ultrasound his
abdominal interior leads to exclamationsLook at how beautiful that is!and to jealous
efforts at recording his truly exceptional and very rare interior configuration. We are also
going to take some pictures for ourselves (30). They autopsy Guibert, seeing for themselves
before his death.
Foucault observed of Laennecs patho-anatomical description the extraordinary formal
beauty of the text, of this language in pursuit of perception (BoC, 169). The aesthetic in
the clinic, for Foucault, arises in writing the invisible into sight, in the incisive, patient,
eroding language that offers at last to common light what is visible for all, a visualization
wrought not by seeing but by language and death (170). For Foucault, it is not what the
autoptic gaze sees that is beautiful, but the text itself, the form by which knowledge and
body are beheld without being seen. I wonder about the nurses image specimens of
Guiberts interior configurations. Were they framed? Do they exhibit them somewhere still?
In his introduction, Caron deplores an-aesthetic hospital art, the faux Georgia OKeefe
pastel crap on the walls whose inoffensive tastefulness offends taste to the point of
merciful invisibility. But there is also an active anti-aesthesia, the clinical vision that
subsumes desire, disgust, pleasure, agony to the numb binary of comfort/discomfort as if
the aesthetic passions, flattened by clinical light, might act as foils to objectivity and
efficiency. So, I was surprised by Guiberts choice against a softer light: personally, he
writes, I love this leaden, blinding white neon (34).
The obvious and inadequate reason: Guibert is losing his sight, blindness is darkness, the
more light the better. Perhaps any qualification of brightness now diminishes the quantity
of visibility. But Guibert acknowledges that such light is itself blinding, as light always is
when turned upon the eye itself, the beholder now beheld. Of course, Guibert seeks to be
seen, through and into, if by seeing the virus in his eye the doctors can thwart it. What his
hospitalization diary achieves is to continue to see by writing, and make us see, even under
leaden, blinding clinical light.
Guibert sees portents: The day I learned that it was cytomegalovirus that had attacked
my eye, alone in the outpatient room, I saw a huge black spider come out of a hole in the
heating ducts (51). Guibert doesnt tell us whether he saw the spider before or after his
diagnosis that day. Is it just a spider (more evidence of the hospitals insouciant filth) that he
Somatosphere | December 2016

Book Forum: Cytomegalovirus by Herv Guibert

retrospectively reads as premonitory, or is it an artifact, like the three black butterflies, of a

field of vision newly inhabited by shadows? Cytomegalovirus opens a recursive abyss of
foresight and retrospect right up to its not-end where, in the last sentence before he stops,
Guibert presents a choice: between putting an end to itto life? to writing? to sight?and
ending up in anticipation. Fear is always proleptic. The writing must end before the life can.
So, what else is it to end up fearing death than a forward memory that is the mirror image
of a backward premonition?
One of the last things Guibert shows us is the second figure in his pair of patients, a
young man, sitting naked on a cart, the bottom of his body hidden by a sheet, covered in
dried blood. A white bandage at the level of his spinal column. They must have given him a
spinal tap. He doesn't want to lie down, he resists. Everything in that body is sublime: its
power, its elegance, the joint linking the arm to the shoulder. (69). Unlike the
unconscious woman with the lipstick-slashed throat, this figure is tensely at odds. Together,
the two patients, sculpted in words, conjure up for me Michelangelos so-called slaves. There
is the dying one, his white bandage, though thoracic not lumbar, pulling him into the rock,
one arm jointed upward in ecstatic agony, the other exquisitely fingering his bondage. And
there is the rebellious slave, torso twisted against his restraints, arms locked behind his
body, glaring his insistence on respect. But Guiberts supine woman and resistant man are
also illuminated with red/lipstick/blood.
Seeing beauty in them (his beauty or theirs?) revivifies Guibert: When I rediscover an
erotic emotion, its like finding a bit of life while drowning in this [bath] of death (69). Clara
Orban translates bain de mort as sea of death, but I prefer the less idiomatic bath, which
avoids the vitality of the sea, even a sea of the dead, even a sea of busy decomposition. For
the clinic is a chemical bath, immersion in a leaden kind of darkroom, where images are
developed or halted or reversed. When Guibert closes one eye, the object observed is erased
slowly from the bottom up, until it becomes invisible, nonexistent (70). As if, for the blind,
the world does not exist at all. But words remain.
Online: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/blindingly-bright

Catherine Belling is Associate Professor of Medical Education-Medical Humanities & Bioethics at

Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago. Her first book, A Condition of Doubt:
The Meanings of Hypochondria (Oxford UP, 2012), won the SLSA Kendrick Book Prize, and she is
currently writing a monograph with the working title Morbid and Disturbing: Horror in
Medicine. She edits the journal Literature and Medicine (Johns Hopkins UP).

Somatosphere | December 2016

Book Forum: Cytomegalovirus by Herv Guibert

Reading Guibert in South Africa

THOMAS COUSINS
Lecturer, Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University

HERV GUIBERTS VOICE reaches powerfully beyond the diary of 1991, beyond the ordinary
and vital struggle of hospitalization; and the finality of death; it even exceeds the excellent
introductory and concluding commentaries of David Caron and Todd Meyers. We have its
publication (1992) and re-publication (2016) partly to thank for that. It is a particular voice
that provides an account not only of an affliction of the eye, cytomegalovirus infection, and
the immune system failure that inaugurates it, namely HIV, but of the medical encounter
and an existential confrontation with pain and death that is both singular and universal. In
this hospitalization diary, Guiberts is a voice that points as much to the historically situated
experience of AIDS, of hospitals, and of French public institutions, as it does to experiences
and conditions elsewhere in other times. It is an account whose accent indeed invites other
accounts; draws them together in solidarity; and defies the forces of (in)efficiency,
standardization, and dehumanization that characterize many a social response to plague. I
write from South Africa, where voice and representation of and in AIDS are acute questions.
In his introduction, David Caron draws out Guiberts capacity to show the system of
organised humiliation and subjugation of patients within an institution whose purpose, it
seems, is to do just that (4). His account is composed of the minutiae of ordinary
deprivations, exposures, and dressings down. The human experience that emerges, not from
this or that description, but from the strength of the voice (modulated constitutively by the
translator, to be sure), is what resonates so powerfully with South African experiences not
only of AIDS, but also of affliction beyond AIDS, through forms of public discourse and
institutions.
Is this not the power of a literary voice such as Guiberts, to enter into call-and-answer
with a chorus of other voices? The whole question is a difficult one: what kind of public, by
means of what kind of literature, is able to attend to this quality of experience, both of HIV
now that it has become a chronic illness, and of public health care, as a southern African
(and global) problematic?
What happens if we consider Guibert alongside the brilliant Zimbabwean writer
Dambudzo Marachera who died of HIV in 1987 at age 35? Through Flora VeitWilds biographical efforts we have an appreciation of his life and literary efforts. Or Yvonne
Vera, who was also silent about her HIV status, and died age 40? Or Fana Khaba,
aka Khabzela, the popular South African DJ who died in 2004, memorialised in Liz
McGregors account? What of Nkosi Johnson, who died in 2001 at age 12, an icon of the

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Book Forum: Cytomegalovirus by Herv Guibert

struggle for life, according to Nelson Mandela? Or Phaswane Mpe (Welcome to Our
Hillbrow), Zackie Achmat of the Treatment Action Campaign and Judge Edwin Cameron?
South Africa has become the epicentre not merely of a plague, but also of a literary
response that has helped to make of HIV a social fact and a political object (Woods 2013).
From Packard and Epsteins (1991) early critique of social science of HIV, we have a
voluminous archive of public health, physiology, virology, and ethnography. But not many
grapple with the difficult question of experience, of the self in relation to this experience. In
pulling the literary threads together to see the weave of the structure of experience of HIV
and of its painful entailments, what can be said of the question of voice and silence and the
constitutive destruction of sensuous life? Kylie Thomas argues, in Impossible Mourning, that
the question of representation is at the heart of the invisibility of those (the multitudes) who
have suffered and died of HIV in South Africaand that while HIV has appeared large in the
public sphere as an undifferentiated figure of plague, the experiences and lives of those who
have lived and lost through HIV have gone publicly unmourned. Tim Woods (2013) argues
that a sustained literary response since the mid-2000s has helped to reveal the ways in
which HIV raises semiotic and political complexities, amongst other concerns, to engineer a
symbolic reorganization of subjectivity in the public sphere.
Just as health as a constitutional right and public good entered into South African life
after 1994, the terrible irony of HIV1 shattered the dream of a life of freedom and
flourishing, as a general aspiration, and sharpened the desperate need for a working health
system for all. (In 2016, the state has begun to plan seriously for a National Health Insurance
that might overcome the constitutive wound of a history of racialised access to healthcare).
Shula Markss history of the nursing profession in South Africa is crucial reading here for an
understanding of the complex dynamics of race and class in the forging and destruction of
nursing and its post-Apartheid legacies. For a more proximate account of experience in a
contemporary South African medical ward, see Le Marcis and Grards (2015) ethnography of
care-givers ethics in action2the tight embrace of nurses, patients, and the afflictions of
epidemic South Africa give a sense of the difficulty of thinking about, and enacting, care.
The inimitable Improvising Medicine, Julie Livingstones (2012) searing account of life and
death in a cancer ward in Botswana, captures something of the complexity of care, on all
sides, in the midst of structural deficiency, in the period before mass treatment became
available. The descriptive powers of the historian are marshalled intensely here to try to
bring the reader very close to the agony of the cancer ward, and the efforts of surgeons,
patients, families, to bear up under impossible conditions.
Jonny Steinbergs Three Letter Plague tries to get close to experience, in a more ordinary
register; Didier Fassins When Bodies Remember offers a theory of experience with HIV; Ross
Parsons One Day This Will All Be Over offers an account of the pain of children with HIV in
Zimbabwe; Patti Hendersons3 A Kinship of Bones4 captures exquisitely the delicate navigation
of care, shame, and dying in the mountains of rural KwaZulu-Natal. These are compelling
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Book Forum: Cytomegalovirus by Herv Guibert

ethnographic accounts, replete with the powers and limitations of narrative and voice that
attend this literary technique. One can think of the first full length feature film in isiZulu,
Yesterday5 (20046), as coming even closer to figuring the experience of HIV in the rural
former Bantustan of Zululand, and the tragedy of a failed health care system, but, again, the
challenge of representation7 is critically in question8.
In Cytomegalovirus, we have the unnerving directness of an author acutely aware of voice
and throat, perspective and vision, diary and death. A report from the frontline of a war still
raging and not simply the physiological challenge to global health that bedevils serious
efforts to cancel the transmission of the disease; but equally a struggle, collective and
existential, to bring into relation the self and the virus, in a way that grasps the unnecessary
injustices of suffering, of medical care, and the jettisoning of the human qualities and
capacities of ourselves in the midst of physiological decline and finality. From an intimate
record of the self in the midst of despair, we now have a powerful ethical and political tool in
which the techniques of the self at stake are made available to us anew via this generous
republication and commentary. We are burdened immensely by this untimely gift of
Guiberts.
Online: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/reading-guibert-in-south-africa
Notes
1

See especially Deborah Posels Sex, Death, and the Fate of the Nation (2005).
In de Herdt, Tom; Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre. Real governance and practical norms in
Sub-Saharan Africa : the game of the rules, Routledge, pp.160-185, 2015
3
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo13213213.html
4
http://www.ukznpress.co.za/?class=bb_ukzn_books&method=view_books&global%5Bfields
%5D%5B_id%5D=423
5
http://www.altfg.com/film/yesterday-by-darrell-roodt/
6
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0419279/
7
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02500160508538001?journalCode=rcsa20
8
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0010.006/--film-review-hi1rendiyesterdayhi1-2004?rgn=main;view=fulltext
2

Thomas Cousins is a social anthropologist with particular interests in health, labour, kinship, and
science studies. He completed a PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 2012 and now teaches in the
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University.

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Book Forum: Cytomegalovirus by Herv Guibert

The Devastation of Normalcy

LUKAS ENGELMANN
Research Associate, CRASSH

GUIBERTS CYTOMEGALOVIRUS stands alone. Soon after it was first published and
subsequently translated into English, the text became trusted as the artful encapsulation of
a particular time of AIDS. When Guibert died in 1991 his experience spoke of the Western
generation hit hardest by an immunodeficiency which was then still an indisputable and
untreatable death sentence. But Guiberts writing was always more than just reportage from
the trenches of a dark age, more than a captivating portrait of a bygone epidemic in Europe
and the USA. It is a text that bears witness to the skillful way Guibert arranged his own
illness within and against the genre of the hospital diary. Guiberts articulated awareness of
the historicity of his own experience leaps into the texts contemporary present to ask us
what kind of AIDS history we want to tell, and how we will enable voices, taken by the
epidemic, to participate in its narration today.
This excellent new edition clearly marks the lasting significance of Guiberts writing. Its
publication is timely, as the persistent relevance of this history of the present has last week
acquired a new urgency. We find ourselves at the beginning of an American government
whose policies might turn out all too reminiscent of Reagans, if not worse. In such a climate
of uncertainty, AIDS history gains a renewed compulsion.
The old ACTUP slogan Silence=Death bears witness to the pervasive effects of ignorance,
silencing and formation of an unseen crisis within the governmental maintenance of a
normalized status quo. But expressing pain and making suffering visible was far from
Guiberts agenda. He aimed instead to forcefully inhabit the experience of hospitalization as
himself, and to assert his persona against becoming a patient. Not just a case, not merely the
vessel of a disease, his voice rejects pity as much as it demands acknowledgement. He
achieves this not merely through glimpses of his bodily predicament but we observe an
encounter between his shameless writing ego and the disastrous, complex epidemic of AIDS.
Never a victim, he wrote elsewhere of AIDS as a disease that gave death time to live and its
victims time to die, time to discover time, and in the end to discover life (To the friend who
did not save my life, 1990).
Cytomegalovirus earns much of its brilliance through Guiberts winding commentary of
tedious procedures, his fragmented description of the medical administration of his body
through nursing-as-governance, and his obsession with the technical details of vein-saving
necessities such as the hep-lock and the port-a-cath. His meticulous attention to detail
sets the text apart from raw confessional of the generic patient account, revealing instead a

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Book Forum: Cytomegalovirus by Herv Guibert

struggle about identity, subjectivity and historical legacy that occurred within the spatial
and technical coordinates of his treatment.
This virus the books title is not forthcoming about what awaits. Combining the
name of a common but nowadays rarely mentioned pathogen with the diarized report of a
hospitalization does not suggest to the nave reader such as the clueless student Caron
mentions in his foreword a story of AIDS. Here, the text is perhaps most committed to the
peculiarities of its time. 80% of the worlds population has this virus, and so such cases of
hospitalization lay bare the capacity of AIDS to corrupt normalcy into devastation. Today,
these opportunistic infections in cases of AIDS, such as the common cold s transformation
into fatality, have been relegated to the (medical) history books. Cytomegalovirus has
probably returned to being a medical curiosity for many, a cousin of herpes, a familiar
inhabitant of our bodies, predominantly harmless, and usually as invisible as it is
insignificant.
But Guiberts staccato description of clinical subjectification (or as M. would have said,
subjectivation) leaves us blind to the clinical mechanics, the medical vocabulary and the
underlying details of a medical condition. His words deliberately remain on the surface of
the procedures he underwent and treatment he received, which asks the reader to accept a
signification of cytomegalovirus through his self-observing account. Guibert forces on
readers a narrative of partiality, ignorant to diagnostics, prognostics and into a ruthlessly
partisan observation of his own condition. His text has appropriated the semantic space of
the opportunistic virus, building nothing short of a monument to the intruder that dared to
threaten his sight and his life with AIDS.
Never just a diary, nor a confession of the patient of AIDS, resistant to the medical frame
of the case study, the text seeks to define cytomegalovirus purely through impressions of
protocols, technologies, practices, routines, anxieties and fatigue. Like Thomas Bernhard,
with whom Guibert hoped to share an elusive doing good (we should not expect a tale of
noble illness) when writing on the experience of disease, Guibert claimed his disease and
illness as his own. He identified as a person with AIDS; he owned cytomegalovirus.
This new edition of Guiberts seminal text is a rich contribution to this queer piece of the
AIDS archive. It allows the text to resonate between a time of AIDS and the epidemics
imagined contemporary aftermath. Fore- and afterword grant Guibert his semantic weight
and raise the question, after this text has been encountered, can cytomegalovirus ever
return to seem like the inconspicuous and harmless virus it once was? Or will medical
definitions fail to revive a cleansed pathological object freed from its past impact and the
haunting writing of Guibert?
Online: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/the-devastation-of-normalcy

Somatosphere | December 2016

Book Forum: Cytomegalovirus by Herv Guibert

Lukas Engelmann is a post-doctoral research associate at CRASSH, working on the visual

representations of plague in North and South America. His PhD focused on the position of AIDS in a
visual history of science and medicine. His current research focuses on digital epidemiology, bubonic
plague mappings, the history of fumigation in early global health and the historical comparison of the
plague-driven enforcement of bacteriology in public health reasoning in North and South America.

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Book Forum: Cytomegalovirus by Herv Guibert

11

I didnt bring my camera

AMY MORAN-THOMAS
Assistant Professor, Anthropology, MIT

THE DAY THAT I LEARNED that it was cytomegalovirus that had attacked my eye, alone in
the outpatient room, I saw a huge black spider come out of hole in the heating ducts.1 The
hospital scenes described by Herv Guibert often hinge on disquieting details like this,
piercing minutiae that hover between the absurdly mundane and surreally existential.
Although his hospitalization diary spans the course of only some 22 days September
17th to October 8th Guiberts rendering of those weeks feels expansively saturated with the
tedious and delirious details of dying. He describes an epic clinical world populated with
heroes and villains, just like in fairy tales, medical carts with wheels that squeak like birds
in the hallways, cries of pain at night from adjacent rooms, sleeping pills that seem like
amphetamines, gestures of strain and intimacy in friends visits and erratic phone calls and
peculiar gifts (a boxing monkey with a tender yet menacing expression2), meticulous
observations of the sky and changing moon from the window that opens up and closes off
his hospital room from anything beyond it. And, in the distance, Paris.3
Although Guibert is often best remembered as a writer and photographer who helped
give public voice to a rising HIV/AIDS epidemic in France and beyond, the title of this book
marks a particular swerve. Cytomegalovirus the sudden primacy of a secondary
complication, the indignity of indirect assault, the encroaching comorbidity that unleashes a
cascade of iatrogenic complications. But perhaps most jarring, for a longtime photographer
and visual critic, is what it means for him to struggle with a virus that causes loss of
eyesight. Backward premonition is the name Guibert gives to the strange fact he had long
had an obsession with eyes4 not only in making images, but also in his fiction writing.
Almost a decade before Cytomegalovirus, Guibert wrote Des Aveugles, a novel loosely
inspired by time he spent as a volunteer reader at the national institute for blind youth. The
book was translated into English as Blindsight, the phenomenon through which blind people
at times can perceive visual information that science cannot fully explain (mysteries of the
body,5 Guibert writes elsewhere). Its chapters feature scenes such as a visiting
photographer bringing blind students into contact with cameras, leading Guibert to pen
questions like Should they not rather graft on these machines in place of their eyes?6 The
fact that his lifelong fixation with blindness foreshadows Guiberts onset of visual symptoms
is an uncanny puzzle he keeps returning to in sorting through their significance. He even
gives a copy of his earlier book to his new eye doctor in the hospital, inscribed with the
dedication Explanation of an obsession?7
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Book Forum: Cytomegalovirus by Herv Guibert

12

Blindsight is dedicated to a dead friend, widely thought to be Michel Foucault. Foucault

also haunts Guiberts hospitalization diary as M, lingering in images: When M. was in the
ICU, a few weeks before he died, they had to put a guard in front of his door even though it
was closed because they caught a photographer slipping into the room to take pictures of
M., unconscious.8 After years of himself controversially wanting to photograph others as
close to death as possible,9 Guibert seems in a very different place by the time he recalls
this affront, proximity to mortal loss perhaps texturing an increasingly modest gravity in
his descriptions. I have the impression that there are writers who do goodand those who
do evil, he writes. Now Id rather belong to the first group.10
Trapped in a clinical world all too much like the degrading ones he once imagined for his
blind characters, appearances become central to Guiberts ongoing fight against the
hospitals many humiliations. (And, as the moving Introduction and Afterword to this
edition note, these demands of dignity have an embattled political force that manifests on
the miniature scale: routine struggles against paper pillowcases, quests for real cloth towels
and fresh fruit, an insistence on wearing his blue hat that the hospital staff finds
superfluously stylish.) These humanizing particulars desires that gain force precisely
where they exceed mere medical survival occasionally also spill closer to the deliberately
startling sensuality that Guibert was long known for. When I rediscover an erotic emotion,
its like finding a bit of life while drowning in this sea of death.11 At times, the aesthetic
sensibility that flashes through these pages feels uneasily gendered, always on edge. Its a
tension that begins even on the books first page, when Guibert mistakes a smear of lipstick
for a wound. They used to tell me, You have beautiful eyes or You have beautiful lips;
now, nurses tell me, You have beautiful veins.12 The embroilment of violence and beauty
that Guibert spent his life exploring often permeates how he inhabits the hospitals
contradictions and lethal dangers, aesthetics taut with unresolved tension and pain. A
bursting vein could be very beautiful.13
At one point, Guibert envisions a last portrait of himself: I can picture myself in a white
neck brace, a black patch over one eye if its done for, with a great hat. In that case, I would
again agree to be photographed.14 When he asks his ophthalmologist whether blindness
caused by cytomegalovirus will be partial or total, there is a photographic resonance in his
original phrasing blanche, ou noire15 will this blindness be white or black? (It will keep
changing as the condition advances, she says.) Guibert refuses a treatment that would
literally depend on keeping his eyes open to meet the needle, yet there is a similar mood
flickering in his writing as blindness looms (like another backward premonition, this time of
death). Because the final photograph of Guibert never seems to be taken, the images we get
through his eyes during this time are all the more haunting. I see three black butterflies
pass across the light source,16 he writes. Silence, eyes closed. Unbearable radio. I didnt
bring my camera.17
Online: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/i-didnt-bring-my-camera
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Book Forum: Cytomegalovirus by Herv Guibert

13

Notes
1

Herv Guibert, Cytomegalovirus: A Hospitalization Diary (New York: Fordham University Press,
2016), 51.
2
Ibid, 70.
3
Ibid, 32.
4
Ibid, 39.
5
Ibid, 61.
6
Herv Guibert, Blindsight (London: Quartet Books, 1995), 53.
7
Cytomegalovirus, 67.
8
Ibid, 58-9.
9
Herv Guibert, Ghost Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 139.
10
Cytomegalovirus, 44-5.
11
Ibid, 69.
12
Ibid, 30.
13
Ibid, 45.
14
Ibid, 62.
15
Ibid, 67.
16
Ibid, 51.
17
Ibid, 71.

Amy Moran-Thomas is a cultural and medical anthropologist, interested in questions of

environmental change and specializing in ethnographic studies of science, technology, and medicine.
She is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MIT.

Somatosphere | December 2016

Book Forum: Cytomegalovirus by Herv Guibert