Tropical Malady: Illness as Metaphor in Stefan Zweig’s Amok

Abstract

This paper attempts to examine how illness is employed as a metaphor for the trauma of colonial displacement and degeneration in Stefan Zweig’s novella Amok (1922). The novella tells the story of a doctor from Leipzig who is encountered by the unnamed first person-narrator aboard an Ocean liner, Oceania, whilst they are returning to Europe from the Dutch East Indies and India respectively. The doctor, an unusually anxious and reclusive man, recounts the events that are responsible for his peculiar presence on the boat. As a physician assigned to a remote outpost of the Empire, he is deprived of the company of his fellow white colonialists, and suffers due to unmitigated isolation. Reduced to spending his time with indigenous women, who he qualifies as repulsively animalistic in their slavish devotion to him, he is struck by the unexpected appearance of a white woman at his rural clinic who secretly seeks to procure an illegal abortion. This consequential encounter results in a paroxysm of manic, obsessive desire in the doctor which he defines as ‘amok’: the Indonesian term fora psychological condition that results in the sudden eruption of violent and disruptive behaviour in an otherwise passive individual. Zweig’s decision to invoke the language of the indigenous subjects, rather than the language of Western science, in defining the doctor’s emotional affliction helps situate the malady within the corrupt nexus of the colony. Meanwhile, the body of the white gentlewoman, who treats her illicit pregnancy as an unwanted disease, functions as a vector for the material and spiritual excesses of the colony. Both doctor and patient struggle to hide the metamorphosis of their diseased bodies from colonial society. Such deceptiveness serves as a metaphor for the greater chicanery that underlies the project of Western imperialism.