Culture, Aestheticism, and Ethics: Sontag and the "Idea of Europe"

Author(s): Susan Rubin Suleiman

Source: PMLA, Vol. 120, No. 3 (May, 2005), pp. 839-842
Published by: Modern Language Association
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1 2 o .
3
J
AFTER HER
DEATH,
SUSAN SONTAG WAS PORTRAYED IN MANY OBITU
ARIES
(INCLUDING
ONE I WROTE FOR THE FRENCH DAILY LE
MONDE)
as an intellectual who had moved from the formalism and aestheti
cism of her
early
work to the
ethically engaged
stance of her later
essays, right up
to the last one she
published
in her
lifetime,
the
stinging
indictment of American torture of
Iraqi prisoners
at Abu
Ghraib.
Sontag
was
eloquent,
as well as somewhat
despairing,
in her
diagnosis
of an
"increasing acceptance
of
brutality"
and a "culture
of shamelessness" in American life
("Regarding
the Torture"
28-29);
similarly,
after
September
11, 2001,
she did not hesitate to denounce
(in
a brief
essay
that earned her the label of "un-American" in some
quarters)
the
"sanctimonious,
reality-concealing
rhetoric
spouted
by
American officials and media commentators" in the
days
follow
ing
the attack
("Comment").
One clear manifestation of
Sontag's
evolution from aestheticism
to
ethics,
according
to this
view,
is the contrast between an
early
essay
like the 1965 "On
Style"
and the 1975
"Fascinating
Fascism,"
both of which deal?the former almost in
passing,
the latter in a ma
jor way?with
the work of Hitler's favorite
filmmaker,
Leni Riefen
stahl. In "On
Style," Sontag emphasizes
Riefenstahl's
"genius
as a
filmmaker" and claims that the two films Riefenstahl is most famous
for,
glorifications
of Hitler and the Third
Reich,
"transcend the cat
egories
of
propaganda"
because "their 'content'... has come to
play
a
purely
formal role"
(26).
Ten
years
later, however,
Sontag
is much
more worried about Riefenstahl's fascist aesthetics and its
apparent
appeal
to American
popular
culture,
noting
that "Fascist art
glo
rifies
surrender,
it exalts
mindlessness,
it
glamorizes
death"
("Fas
cism"
91).
One could also contrast this
worry
with the
essay
"The
Pornographic Imagination,"
written a decade
earlier,
in which Son
tag expressed
her own fascination with
Georges
Bataille and other
modern artists who
sought,
in the
footsteps
of
Rimbaud,
"to advance
one
step
further in the dialectic of
outrage"
(45).
Bataille fascinated
her because he understood the "subterranean connections" between
theories and
methodologies
Culture, Aestheticism,
and Ethics:
Sontag
and the 'Idea
of
Europe"
SUSAN RUBIN SULEIMAN
SUSAN RUBIN SULEIMAN is C.
Douglas
Dillon Professor of the Civilization of
France and
professor
of
comparative
lit
erature at Harvard
University.
Her works
include Subversive Intent:
Gender,
Poli
tics,
and the Avant-Garde
(Harvard UP,
1990)
and
Budapest Diary:
In Search
of
the Motherbook
(U
of Nebraska
P, 1996).
Her new
book,
Crises
of Memory
and the
Second World
War,
will be
published by
Harvard
University
Press in 2006.
?
2005
BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA
839
840 Culture, Aestheticism,
and Ethics:
Sontag
and the "Idea of
Europe"
PMLA
*Sb
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o
?
E
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c
ft
*z
o
a*
eroticism and death: works like his Histoire
de Voeil
(Story of
the
Eye)
indicated,
better
than
any
other,
"the aesthetic
possibilities
of
pornography
as an art form"
(65).
It is
tempting
to link the evolution in
Sontag's thought
to her encounter with ill
ness, since she was
diagnosed
with cancer in
the
mid-1970s,
around the same time as she
was
writing "Fascinating
Fascism." It is as if
the
provocatively
aestheticist theorist of the
1960s,
who railed
"against interpretation"
and dedicated her "Notes on
'Camp'"
to Oscar
Wilde,
had
suddenly
discovered the
reality
of
human
suffering,
and with it the
necessity
of
ethical
engagement.
But that
is,
of course, far too
simple
a view.
For one
thing,
as
early
as 1966
Sontag
was de
ploring
the
"indecency"
of unchecked Ameri
can
power,
as well as the "national
psychosis"
of
self-righteousness
and violence: with a few
changes
in dates and
proper
names, her
essay
"What's
Happening
in America
(1966)"
could
have been written in 2001
(194,196). (Reread
ing
it now, I am astonished at how current it
seems?have we
always
been like
this?)
Much
later,
in AIDS and Its
Metaphors,
she herself
emphasized
the
continuity
between her
early
(she
calls it
"quixotic")
refusal of
interpreta
tion in the
literary
realm and her later
attempt
to divorce
illness,
whether tuberculosis or
cancer or
AIDS,
from the
metaphoric
mean
ings
that had been attributed to it: "To
regard
cancer as if it were
just
a disease..
..
Not a
curse,
not a
punishment,
not an embarrass
ment. Without
'meaning.'
And not
necessarily
a death sentence"
(AIDS 102).
I
suggest
that
Sontag
was concerned with
ethical
questions
not
only
in her later work but
from the
beginning;
furthermore,
in her
view,
ethics was indissociable from a certain idea of
culture that she identified as
European,
even
as she mourned its
passing. Although
she was
famous as an advocate of all
things
modern
and
postmodern, especially
if
they
came from
Europe?it being
understood that these two
adjectives
refer to a combination of aesthetic
self-consciousness and
skepticism
about ab
solute
categories
of moral
judgment?she
was
also drawn to what she called a
quasi-nostalgic
desire for universal moral
values,
values that
she associated with
European
culture and
thought.
In the
introductory chapter
of her
last
novel,
In
America,
the
modern-day
narra
tor finds herself at a
party
in late-nineteenth
century
Warsaw,
where the
guests speak
of moral
obligations, "right"
and
"wrong,"
"should" and
"shouldn't,"
words the narra
tor considers both outmoded and
fascinating:
"Dare I
say
I felt at one with them? Almost.
Those dreaded
words,
dreaded
by
others
(not
by
me),
felt like caresses"
(8).
Sontag's
almost
may
be
self-ironic,
but it is not
"camp."
She
knows full well that the world in which
"good"
and "bad" could be
pronounced
without scare
quotes
no
longer
exists,
swept away
as irrevo
cably
as
gas lamps
and hand-cranked tele
phones.
But she is not
ready
to dismiss those
words,
does not dread them as others?less
ambivalent
postmodernists, perhaps??do.
Was she an old-fashioned
moralist,
then?
No?she was too self-conscious and
skeptical
for
that,
as well as too aware of the
traps
of
self-righteous
absolutism. "Notes on
'Camp,'"
the
essay
that
catapulted
her to fame in
1964,
is often read as a manifesto of
postmodern
irony
and aestheticism:
"Camp
...
incarnates
a
victory
of
'style'
over
'content,'
'aesthetics'
over
'morality,'
of
irony
over
tragedy"
(287).
But
Sontag's
own attitude toward
camp,
as
she makes clear in the
essay,
was ambivalent:
"I am
strongly
drawn to
camp,
and almost
as
strongly
offended
by
it." That ambivalence
was
precisely why
she
thought
herself best
suited to write about
camp:
"To name a sensi
bility,
to draw its contours and to recount its
history, requires
a
deep sympathy
modified
by
revulsion"
(276).
Later in the
essay,
she delineates three
distinct sensibilities: that of
"high
culture"
(Dante, Beethoven, Socrates, Jesus),
char
acterized
exclusively by
moral
seriousness;
that of
camp,
which is
"wholly
aesthetic" and
120.3
1
Susan Rubin Suleiman
841
indifferent to
morals;
and that of the "avant
garde"
(Sade,
Rimbaud, Kafka, Artaud),
which thrives on "the tension between moral
and aesthetic
passion"
(287).
Her own affini
ties were with the
avant-garde,
an ambivalent
position
between the two others. But she was
also,
at
times,
close to the
high-culture posi
tion,
where universal values can be named
without
quotation
marks.
How is all this related to
Sontag's
"idea of
Europe"?
In an
essay by
that
title,
published
just
a
year
before the fall of the Berlin
Wall,
Sontag
reflected on what the idea of
Europe
meant to her. "The
diversity,
seriousness,
fas
tidiousness,
density
of
European
culture con
stitute an Archimedean
point
from which I
can,
mentally,
move the world. I cannot do
that from
America,
from what American
culture
gives
me
...
"
(286).
But this
appar
ently binary opposition
between
Europe
and America is
immediately complicated,
in
several
ways.
First,
Sontag recognizes
that
Europe
has
changed?the
"Euro-business"
community
is not her idea of
Europe.
Nor is
this
change simply
due to the "Americaniza
tion" of
Europe,
as some anti-Americanists
would
claim?rather,
she sees it as
part
of the
pressure
of
"modernity,"
which should not be
confused with Americanism.
Second,
Euro
pean
culture cannot be seen,
today,
without
an awareness of the "barbarism that was
(need
it be
said?)
entirely generated
from within
the heart of
Europe." Although
she does not
name the
Holocaust,
she is
clearly referring
to it:
European
culture,
for all its
density
and
seriousness,
for all its
high-minded
notions of
civilization,
produced
the
greatest barbarity
in
history.
Yet
Sontag qualifies
this
thought
as
well: "One
might
think that the notion of Eu
rope
would have been
thoroughly
discredited
...
by imperialism
and racism.... In
fact,
it
has not.
(Nor
is the idea of civilization unus
able?no matter how
many
colonialist atroci
ties are committed in its
name)" (287).
Here she
puts
her defense of "civilization"
between
parentheses.
A few
years
later,
asked
by
a French
journal
to define her
conception
of the intellectual's
task,
she writes
(without
parentheses)
that it is twofold: on the one
hand,
to
promote dialogue, skepticism
about
received
ideas,
and resistance to nationalist or
tribal ideas
masquerading
as
"ideals";
on the
other
hand,
to refuse the facile
discrediting
of
"idealism,
of altruism
itself;
of
high
standards
of all kinds"
("Answers" 297).
The
rejection
of false
ideals,
together
with the
rejection
of the
rejection
of idealism
and universal values?that is not an
easy
line
to
walk,
but I think it's what makes
Sontag's
thought
so
interesting
and still
pertinent
to
day.
I cannot
help invoking,
here,
the charm
ing
and
uncharacteristically autobiographical
essay
she
published
in the New Yorker in
1987,
"Pilgrimage."
The
pilgrimage
in
question
is a
visit that
fourteen-year-old
Susan
made,
with
her best
friend, Merrill,
to Thomas Mann a
few
years
after World War II. Mann was liv
ing
in Pacific
Palisades,
a revered and world
famous exile from Hitler's
Germany;
he had
just completed
his most difficult
novel,
Dr.
Faustus,
a
brilliant,
anguished
meditation on
European
culture and its links to barbarism.
Susan and Merrill were
astonishingly
preco
cious
high
school
students,
whose favorite
pastimes
included
arguing
over the relative
merits of two
recordings
of Schubert's "Death
and the Maiden."
They
were also ardent fans
of
Mann,
after Susan had discovered The
Magic
Mountain in her favorite bookstore in
Hollywood:
"this was not
just
another book I
would love but a
transforming
book,
a source
of discoveries and
recognitions.
All of
Europe
fell into
my head?though
on condition that I
start
mourning
for it"
(42).
One
day,
Merrill,
ever the
enterprising
American,
opens
the
phone
book
and,
find
ing
the
listing
for Mann, calls and asks for a
meeting?whereupon
Thomas Mann invites
them to tea. Susan is horrified: "when I was
borne aloft
by
'The
Magic
Mountain,'
I wasn't
thinking
that he was
also,
literally,
'here.' To
say
that I lived in southern California and
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Thomas Mann lived in southern Califor
nia?that was a different sense of
'lived,'
of
'in'"
(44).
When
they finally
meet the
great
writer,
Susan is
disappointed,
for the man
is less
impressive
than his books
(this
was a
lesson she could have learned from
Proust,
who
evidently escaped
her voracious
teenage
reading).
Yet she is
grateful
for the admira
tion she felt for
him,
for that admiration freed
her from the
"asphyxiations"
of childhood in
a Los
Angeles
suburb
(54).
Europe,
embodied in the
writing
of the
greatest
German novelist of his
time,
who
sought
to come to
grips
with what was best
and worst in his
country
and his
century,
lib
erated the
young
American
girl
who would
go
on to become Susan
Sontag. Curiously,
she never told
anyone
about her
meeting
with
the flesh-and-blood
author,
in his house over
looking
the Pacific
(54).
Nor did
Sontag
ever
devote an
essay
to Mann or even mention
him
among
the
European
writers and artists
she most admired.
Indeed,
this late autobio
graphical essay
itself seems to have remained
uncollected,
not included in
any
of her books.
Was Mann too "tame" or too
"high"
a mod
ernist for her later taste? Or was he an intel
lectual
model,
someone she identified with
(like Barthes,
whom she did write
about),
albeit with some embarrassment? She
begins
"Pilgrimage"
with the
extraordinary
sentence
"Everything
that surrounds
my meeting
with
him has the color of shame."
I have no answer to these
questions.
I'll
just say
that
I, too,
was an avid
youthful
reader of Thomas
Mann,
whose work
changed
my
life. That was in
college
(I
wasn't as
preco
cious as
Sontag),
when
reading
Dr. Faustus
after The
Magic
Mountain made
me
change
my
life choice from
chemistry
to literature.
The life of the mind is a
passion,
as
Sontag
often said. In
my
case,
as in
hers,
the
pas
sion for literature was tied to a certain idea
of
Europe, though
I didn't
fully
realize that
for some
years. Sontag
was an American with
central
European Jewish
roots three
genera
tions
back,
who was
looking
for a
way
out
of the southern California climate in which
she felt
asphyxiated;
I was an American born
in central
Europe,
who had
spent my high
school
years trying
to fit into midwestern
America. Mann
provided
a
way
for both of us
to
connect,
or
reconnect,
to a
European
cul
ture that had been
irreversibly
wounded
by
the
Holocaust,
but whose seductive idea still
lingered?and lingers
still.
Works Cited
Sontag,
Susan. AIDS and Its
Metaphors.
1989. Illness as
Metaphor
and AIDS and Its
Metaphors.
New York:
Doubleday,
1990. 89-183.
-. "Answers to a
Questionnaire."
1997. Where the
Stress Falls:
Essays.
New York: Farrar,
2001. 294-98.
-.
"Comment:
Tuesday,
and After." New Yorker 24
Sept.
2001: 32.
-.
"Fascinating
Fascism." 1975. Under the
Sign of
Sat
urn. New York: Farrar, 1980. 73-102.
-.
"The Idea of
Europe (One
More
Elegy)."
1988. Where
the Stress Falls:
Essays.
New York: Farrar, 2001. 281-89.
-.
In America. 2000. London:
Vintage,
2001.
-. "Notes on
'Camp.'"
1964.
Against Interpretation.
New York:
Doubleday,
1990. 275-92.
-. "On
Style."
1965.
Against Interpretation.
New
York:
Doubleday,
1990. 15-36.
-.
"Pilgrimage."
New Yorker 21 Dec. 1987: 38-54.
-. "The
Pornographic Imagination."
1967.
Styles of
Radical Will. New York:
Dell,
1981. 35-73.
-.
"Regarding
the Torture of Others." New York
Times
Magazine
23
May
2004: 24+.
-.
"What's
Happening
in America?
(1966)." Styles of
Radical Will. New York: Dell,
1981. 193-204.