SUSAN SONTAG (1933-2004)

SUSAN SONTAG IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

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American 'new intellectual' and writer, a leading commentator on

modern culture, whose innovative essays on such diverse subjects
as camp, pornographic literature, fascist aesthetics, photography,
AIDS, and revolution have gained a wide attention. Sontag has
published novels and short stories, and written and directed films.
She had a great impact on experimental art in the 1960s and
1970s and she introduced many new ideas to American culture.
Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is
addictive. However, despite the extravagances of ordinary
language and advertising, they are not lethal. In the hyperbole that
markets cars like guns, there is at least this much truth: except in
wartime, cars kill more people than guns do. The camera/gun does
not kill, so the ominous metaphor seems to be all bluff -like a man's
fantasy of having a gun, knife, or tool between his legs. (from On
Photography, 1977)

Susan Sontag was born in New York, N.Y. She grew up in Tucson,
Arizona, and Los Angeles California, and entered at the age of
fifteen (1948) the University of California at Berkeley. After a year
she transferred to the University of Chigaco, and graduated in
1951. Sontag continued her studies at Harvard, where she was a
Ph.D. candidate from 1955-1957.
In 1957-58 Sontag studied at the University of Paris. She worked
as a lecturer in philosophy at the City College of New York and
Sarah Lawrence. From 1960 to 1964 she was an instructor in the
religion department of Columbia University, and then a
writer-in-residence for one year at Rutgers. In the 1960s Sontag's
connection with the Partisan Review brought her in close contact
with the 'New York intellectuals'. She contributed to various other
periodicals, including New York Review of Books, Atlantic Monthly,
Nation, and Harper's.
As a novelist Sontag started her career at the age of 30 with THE
BENEFACTOR.
The heavily symbolic work was partly a pastische of the
19th-century Bildungsroman, a novel about the formation of
character. In the story the protagonist, Hippolyte, a wealthy man,
attempts to make his daily life conform to his bizarre dreams and to
have them to serve as solutions to his normal life.
Hippolyte finally achieves complete freedom by rejecting outside
interpretations of his real/dream life, and finds peace at living in
silence. The novel prepared way for Sontag's essays about art -she
stated that people should not attempt to find the 'meaning' in a
work of art but experience it as a thing in itself.
On the bohemian New York scene of the early sixties, Sontag
swiftly acquired a reputation as the radical-liberal American
woman, who had not only deep knowledge ancient and modern
European culture, but could also reinterpret it from the American
point of view. A selection of her writings appeared in AGAINTS
INTERPRETATION AND OTHER ESSAYS (1968), where she stated
that the understanding of art starts from intuitive response and not
from analysis or intellectual considerations.
A work of art is a thing in the world, not just text or commentary
on the world. Rejecting interpretation, Sontag advocated what she
called 'transparency', which means 'experiencing the luminousness
of thing in itself, of things being what they are'. The 'meaning' of

art lies in the experiencing both style and content together without
analysis. Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Sontag's other influental works include THE STYLE OF RADICAL
WILL (1969), which continued her explorations of contemporary
culture and such phenomena as drugs, pornography, cinema and
modern art and music. On Photography (1976) was a study of the
force of photographic images which are continually inserted
between experience and reality. Sontag developed further the
concept of 'transparency'. When anythig can be photographed and
photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a
viewer can approach a photograp freely with no expectations of
discovering what it means. ILLNES AND METAPHOR (1978) was
written after her cancer treatment. Sontag's point was that
although illness is used often punitatively as a figure or metaphor,
the most truthful way is to resist such metaphoric thinking. The
book was later revised and expanded as Aids and its Metaphors
(1988).
Sontag's second novel, Death Kit (1967), a was a nightmarish
meditation on life, death and the relationship between the two. Like
in The Benefactor, the fragmented protagonist cannot always
distinguish between dream and reality.
Sontag's short stories, I, Etcetera, appeared in 1977. In 1992
Sontag published her third novel, The Volcano Lover, which became
a bestseller. It has been translated among others into Finnish. The
story was set in the 18th century, and depicted a drama between
the 56-year- old ambassador sir William Hamilton, his 20-year-old
wife Lady Emma Hamilton, and the hero of the age, Lord Nelson,
who won Napoleon but lost his victory for a woman. It is also a
story of revolution and the position of women, written in a manner
that approaches the formality of late 18th-century English. After
the appearance of the book Sontag has declared that she will
concentrate on writing fiction rather than essays.
Sontag's novel In America (1999) was based on a real story. It
depicted a woman's search for self-transformation. The protagonist
is Maryna Zalewska, an actress, who travels in 1876 with her family
and a group of Poles to California to found a utopian commune.
When the commune fails, Maryna returns succesfully on the stage
-now in America.

In addition to essays and novels, Sontag has written screenplays

for experimental films and edited selected writings of Roland
Barthes and Antonin Artaud (1976). Homo Poeticus (1995) is a
selection of Danilo Kis' essays and interviews, in which Sontag has
written an introduction. Among Sontag's several awards are
American Academy Ingram Merrill Foundation Award (1976),
National Book Critics Circle Award (1977), Academy of Sciences and
Literature Award (Germany, 1979). She was appointed in 1979
Member of American Academy. In 1990 Sontag received a five-year
fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.
For further reading: Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist by
Sohnya Sayres (1989); Conversations with Susan Sontag by Leland
Poague (1995); Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion by Liam Kennedy
(1995) -Films and filmscripts: Duet for Cannibals (1970), Brother
Carl (1974), Promised Lands (1974), Unguided Tour (1983) Selected
works: FREUD: THE MIND OF THE MORALIST, 1959 (with Rieff Philip)
The Benefactor, 1963 LITERATURE, 1966 Death Kit, 1967 -Musta
aurinko Against Interpretation AND OTHER ESSAYS, 1968 Styles of
Radical Will, 1969 TRIP TO HANOI, 1969 -Matka Hanoihin DUET FOR
CANNIBALS, 1970 BROTHER CARL, 1974 ANTONIN ARTAUD:
SELECTED WRITINGS, 1976 (transl. by Helen Weaver, edited with
introduction by Susan Sontag)
On Photography, 1977
-Valokuvauksesta ILLNESS AS METAPHOR, 1977 -Sairaus
vertauskuvana I, Etcetera, 1978 THE STORY OF THE EYE, 1979
UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN, 1980 A SUSAN SONTAG READER,
1982 Aids and its Metaphors, 1988 ITALY, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF
PHOTOGRAPHY,
1988
(with
Cesare
Colombo)
CAGE-CUNNINGHAM-JOHNS: DANCERS ON A PLANE, IN MEMORY OF
THEIR FEELING, 1990 (with Richard Francis) THE WAY WE LIVE
NOW, 1991 (with Howard Hodkin) VIOLENT LEGACIES, 1992 (with
Richard Misrach) The Volcano Lover, 1992 -Tulivuoren rakastaja
ALICE IN BED, 1993 CONVERSATIONS WITH SUSAN SONTAG, 1995
(ed. by Leland Poague) Homo Poeticus, 1995 In America, 1999
Sontagilta on mys suomennettu essee Lihan estetiikka: teatteri
Artaud'n mukaan (1968) ja Vallankumouksen taide (1971).
*

Susan Sontag, Social Critic With Verve, Dies at 71

By MARGALIT FOX
Published: December 28, 2004
Susan Sontag, the novelist, essayist and critic whose impassioned
advocacy of the avant-garde and equally impassioned political
pronouncements made her one of the most lionized presences and one of the most polarizing - in 20th-century letters, died
yesterday morning in Manhattan. She was 71 and lived in
Manhattan.
The cause was complications of acute myelogenous leukemia, her
son, David Rieff, said. Ms. Sontag, who died at Memorial SloanKettering Cancer Center, had been ill with cancer intermittently for
the last 30 years, a struggle that informed one of her most famous
books, the critical study "Illness as Metaphor" (1978).
A highly visible public figure since the mid-1960's, Ms. Sontag
wrote four novels, dozens of essays and a volume of short stories
and was also an occasional filmmaker, playwright and theater
director. For four decades her work was part of the contemporary
canon, discussed everywhere from graduate seminars to the pages
of popular magazines to the Hollywood movie "Bull Durham."
Ms. Sontag's work made a radical break with traditional postwar
criticism in America, gleefully blurring the boundaries between high
and popular culture. She advocated an aesthetic approach to the
study of culture, championing style over content. She was
concerned, in short, with sensation, in both meanings of the term.
"The theme that runs through Susan's writing is this lifelong
struggle to arrive at the proper balance between the moral and the
aesthetic," Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic and
an old friend of Ms. Sontag's, said in a telephone interview
yesterday. "There was something unusually vivid about her writing.
That's why even if one disagrees with it - as I did frequently - it was
unusually stimulating. She showed you things you hadn't seen
before; she had a way of reopening questions."

Through four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained

irreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as explosive,
anticlimactic,
original,
derivative,
nave,
sophisticated,
approachable, aloof, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic,
sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing,
profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, ambivalent,
lucid, inscrutable, visceral, reasoned, chilly, effusive, relevant,
pass, ambivalent, tenacious, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous,
humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, cantankerous and clever. No one
ever called her dull.
Ms. Sontag's best-known books, all published by Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, include the novels "Death Kit" (1967), "The Volcano Lover"
(1992) and "In America" (2000); the essay collections "Against
Interpretation" (1966), "Styles of Radical Will" (1969) and "Under
the Sign of Saturn" (1980); the critical studies "On Photography"
(1977) and "AIDS and Its Metaphors" (1989); and the short-story
collection "I, Etcetera" (1978). One of her most famous works,
however, was not a book, but an essay, "Notes on Camp,"
published in 1964 and still widely read.
Her most recent book, published last year, was "Regarding the
Pain of Others," a long essay on the imagery of war and disaster.
One of her last published essays, "Regarding the Torture of Others,"
written in response to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Americans at
Abu Ghraib, appeared in the May 23, 2004, issue of The New York
Times Magazine.
An Intellectual With Style
Unlike most serious intellectuals, Ms. Sontag was also a celebrity,
partly because of her telegenic appearance, partly because of her
outspoken statements. She was undoubtedly the only writer of her
generation to win major literary prizes (among them a National
Book Critics Circle Award, a National Book Award and a MacArthur
Foundation genius grant) and to appear in films by Woody Allen
and Andy Warhol; to be the subject of rapturous profiles in Rolling
Stone and People magazines; and to be photographed by Annie
Leibovitz for an Absolut Vodka ad. Through the decades her image strong features, wide mouth, intense gaze and dark mane crowned

in her middle years by a sweeping streak of white - became an

instantly recognizable artifact of 20th-century popular culture.
Ms. Sontag was a master synthesist who tackled broad, difficult
and elusive subjects: the nature of art, the nature of consciousness
and, above all, the nature of the modern condition. Where many
American critics before her had mined the past, Ms. Sontag
became an evangelist of the new, training her eye on the culture
unfolding around her.
For Ms. Sontag, culture encompassed a vast landscape. She wrote
serious studies of popular art forms, like cinema and science
fiction, that earlier critics disdained. She produced impassioned
essays on the European writers and filmmakers she admired, like
Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Luc
Godard. She wrote experimental novels on dreams and the nature
of consciousness. She published painstaking critical dissections of
photography and dance; illness, politics and pornography; and,
most famously, camp. Her work, with its emphasis on the outr, the
jagged and the here and now, helped make the study of popular
culture a respectable academic pursuit.
What united Ms. Sontag's output was a propulsive desire to define
the forces that shape the modernist sensibility. And in so doing, she
sought to explain what it meant to be human in the waning years
of the 20th century.
To many critics, her work was bold and thrilling. Interviewed in The
Times Magazine in 1992, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes
compared Ms. Sontag to the Renaissance humanist Erasmus.
"Erasmus traveled with 32 volumes, which contained all the
knowledge worth knowing," he said. "Susan Sontag carries it in her
brain! I know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded, with a
capacity to link, to connect, to relate."
A Bevy of Detractors
Others were less enthralled. Some branded Ms. Sontag an
unoriginal thinker, a popularizer with a gift for aphorism who could
boil down difficult writers for mass consumption. (Irving Howe
called her "a publicist able to make brilliant quilts from
grandmother's patches.") Some regarded her tendency to revisit

her earlier, often controversial positions as ambivalent. Some saw

her scholarly approach to popular art forms as pretentious. (Ms.
Sontag once remarked that she could appreciate Patti Smith
because she had read Nietzsche.)
In person Ms. Sontag could be astringent, particularly if she felt
she had been misunderstood. She grew irritated when reporters
asked how many books she had in her apartment in the Chelsea
neighborhood of Manhattan (15,000; no television set). But she
could also be warm and girlish, speaking confidingly in her rich, low
voice, her feet propped casually on the nearest coffee table. She
laughed readily, and when she discussed something that engaged
her passionately (and there were many things), her dark eyes often
filled with tears.
Ms. Sontag had a knack - or perhaps a penchant - for getting into
trouble. She could be provocative to the point of being
inflammatory, as when she championed the Nazi filmmaker Leni
Riefenstahl in a 1965 essay; she would revise her position some
years later. She celebrated the communist societies of Cuba and
North Vietnam; just as provocatively, she later denounced
communism as a form of fascism. After the attacks of Sept. 11,
2001, she wrote in The New Yorker, "Whatever may be said of the
perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." And in
2000, the publication of Ms. Sontag's final novel, "In America,"
raised accusations of plagiarism, charges she vehemently denied.
Ms. Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in Manhattan on Jan. 16,
1933, the daughter of Jack and Mildred Rosenblatt. Her father was
a fur trader in China, and her mother joined him there for long
periods, leaving Susan and her younger sister in the care of
relatives. When Susan was 5, her father died in China of
tuberculosis. Seeking relief for Susan's asthma, her mother moved
the family to Tucson, spending the next several years there. In
Arizona, Susan's mother met Capt. Nathan Sontag, a World War II
veteran sent there to recuperate. The couple were married - Susan
took her stepfather's name - and the family moved to Los Angeles.
For Susan, who graduated from high school before her 16th
birthday, the philistinism of American culture was a torment she
vowed early to escape. "My greatest dream," she later wrote, "was
to grow up and come to New York and write for Partisan Review and
be read by 5,000 people."

She would get her wish - Ms. Sontag burst onto the scene with
"Notes on Camp," which was published in Partisan Review - but not
before she earned a bachelor's and two master's degrees from
prestigious American universities; studied at Oxford on a
fellowship; and married, became a mother and divorced eight years
later, all by the time she turned 26.
After graduating from high school, Ms. Sontag spent a semester at
the University of California, Berkeley, before transferring to the
University of Chicago, from which she received a bachelor's degree
in 1951. At Chicago she wandered into a class taught by the
sociologist Philip Rieff, then a 28-year-old instructor, who would
write the celebrated study "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist" (Viking,
1959). He was, she would say, the first person with whom she
could really talk; they were married 10 days later. Ms. Sontag was
17 and looked even younger, clad habitually in blue jeans, her
black hair spilling down her back. Word swept around campus that
Dr. Rieff had married a 14-year-old American Indian.
Moving with her husband to Boston, Ms. Sontag earned her
master's degrees from Harvard, the first in English, in 1954, the
second in philosophy the next year. She began work on a Ph.D., but
did not complete her dissertation. In 1952 she and Dr. Rieff became
the parents of a son. Ms. Sontag is survived by her son, David Rieff,
who lives in Manhattan and was for many years her editor at Farrar,
Straus & Giroux. (A journalist, he wrote "Slaughterhouse: Bosnia
and the Failure of the West," published by Simon & Schuster in
1995.) Also surviving is her younger sister, Judith Cohen of Maui.
After further study at Oxford and in Paris, Ms. Sontag was divorced
from Dr. Rieff in 1958. In early 1959 she arrived in New York with,
as she later described it, "$70, two suitcases and a 7 year old." She
worked as an editor at Commentary and juggled teaching jobs at
City College, Sarah Lawrence and Columbia. She published her first
essays, critical celebrations of modernists she admired, as well as
her first novel, "The Benefactor" (1963), an exploration of
consciousness and dreams.
Shaking Up the Establishment
With "Notes on Camp" Ms. Sontag fired a shot across the bow of
the New York critical establishment, which included eminences like

Lionel and Diana Trilling, Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe. Interlaced
with epigrams from Oscar Wilde, that essay illuminated a particular
modern sensibility - one that had been largely the province of gay
culture - which centered deliciously on artifice, exaggeration and
the veneration of style.
"The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that
the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly on refinement," Ms.
Sontag wrote. "The man who insists on high and serious pleasures
is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he
can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will
eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp
taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism.
It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the
risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion."
If that essay has today lost its capacity to shock, it is a reflection of
how thoroughly Ms. Sontag did her job, serving as a guide to an
underground aesthetic that was not then widely known.
"She found in camp an aesthetic that was very different from what
the straight world had acknowledged up to that point, and she
managed to make camp 'straight' in a way," Arthur C. Danto, the
Johnsonian professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia and the
art critic for The Nation, said yesterday in a telephone interview. "I
think she prepared the ground for the pop revolution, which was in
many ways essentially a gay revolution, through Warhol and
others. She didn't make that art, but she brought it to
consciousness. She gave people a vocabulary for talking about it
and thinking about it."
The article made Ms. Sontag an international celebrity, showered
with lavish, if unintentionally ridiculous, titles ("a literary pinup,"
"the dark lady of American letters," "the Natalie Wood of the U.S.
avant-garde").
Championing Style Over Content
In 1966 Ms. Sontag published her first essay collection, "Against
Interpretation." That book's title essay, in which she argued that art
should be experienced viscerally rather than cerebrally, helped
cement her reputation as a champion of style over content.

It was a position she could take to extremes. In the essay "On

Style," published in the same volume, Ms. Sontag offended many
readers by upholding the films of Leni Riefenstahl as masterworks
of aesthetic form, with little regard for their content. Ms. Sontag
would eventually reconsider her position in the 1974 essay
"Fascinating Fascism."
Though she thought of herself as a novelist, it was through her
essays that Ms. Sontag became known. As a result she was fated to
write little else for the next quarter-century. She found the form an
agony: a long essay took from nine months to a year to complete,
often requiring 20 or more drafts.
"I've had thousands of pages for a 30-page essay," she said in a
1992 interview. " 'On Photography,' which is six essays, took five
years. And I mean working every single day."
That book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for
criticism in 1978, explored the role of the photographic image, and
the act of picture-taking in contemporary culture. The crush of
photographs, Ms. Sontag argued, has shaped our perceptions of
the world, numbing us to depictions of suffering. She would soften
that position when she revisited the issue in "Regarding the Pain of
Others."
The Washington Post Book World called "On Photography" "a
brilliant analysis," adding that it " merely describes a phenomenon
we take as much for granted as water from the tap, and how that
phenomenon has changed us - a remarkable enough achievement,
when you think about it."
In the mid-1970's Ms. Sontag learned she had breast cancer.
Doctors gave her a 10 percent chance of surviving for two years.
She scoured the literature for a treatment that might save her,
underwent a mastectomy and persuaded her doctors to give her a
two-and-a-half-year course of radiation.
Out of her experience came "Illness as Metaphor," which examined
the cultural mythologizing of disease (tuberculosis as the illness of
19th-century romantics, cancer a modern-day scourge). Although it
did not discuss her illness explicitly, it condemned the often
militaristic language around illness ("battling" disease, the "war" on
cancer) that Ms. Sontag felt simultaneously marginalized the sick
and held them responsible for their condition..

In "AIDS and Its Metaphors" Ms. Sontag discussed the social

implications of the disease, which she viewed as a "cultural plague"
that had replaced cancer as the modern bearer of stigma. She
would return to the subject of AIDS in her acclaimed short story
"The Way We Live Now," originally published in The New Yorker and
included in "The Best American Short Stories of the Century"
(Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
Although Ms. Sontag was strongly identified with the American left
during the Vietnam era, in later years her politics were harder to
classify. In the essay "Trip to Hanoi," which appears in "Styles of
Radical Will," she wrote glowingly of a visit to North Vietnam. But in
1982 she delivered a stinging blow to progressives in a speech at
Town Hall in Manhattan. There, at a rally in support of the Solidarity
movement in Poland, she denounced European communism as
"fascism with a human face."
In 1992, weary of essays, Ms. Sontag published "The Volcano
Lover," her first novel in 25 years. Though very much a novel of
ideas - it explored, among other things, notions of aesthetics and
the psychology of obsessive collecting - the book was also a big,
old-fashioned historical romance. It told the story of Sir William
Hamilton, the 18th-century British envoy to the court of Naples; his
wife, Emma ("that Hamilton woman"); and her lover, Lord Nelson,
the naval hero. The book spent two months on The New York Times
best-seller list.
Reviewing the novel in The Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote: "One
thing that makes 'The Volcano Lover' such a delight to read is the
way it throws off ideas and intellectual sparks, like a Roman candle
or Catherine wheel blazing in the night. Miniature versions of 'Don
Giovanni' and 'Tosca' lie embedded, like jewels, in the main
narrative; and we are given as well some charmingly acute cameos
of such historical figures as Goethe and the King and Queen of
Naples."
Ms. Sontag's final novel, "In America," was loosely based on the
life of the 19th-century Polish actress Helena Modjeska, who
immigrated to California to start a utopian community. Though "In
America" received a National Book Award, critical reception was
mixed. Then accusations of plagiarism surfaced. As The Times
reported in May 2000, a reader identified at least a dozen passages
as being similar to those in four other books about the real

Modjeska, including Modjeska's memoirs. Except for a brief preface

expressing a general debt to "books and articles by and on
Modjeska," Ms. Sontag did not specifically acknowledge her
sources.
Interviewed for The Times article, Ms. Sontag defended her
method. "All of us who deal with real characters in history
transcribe and adopt original sources in the original domain," she
said. "I've used these sources and I've completely transformed
them. I have these books. I've looked at these books. There's a
larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of
references and allusions."
Ms. Sontag's other work includes the play "Alice in Bed" (1993); "A
Susan Sontag Reader" (1982), with an introduction by Elizabeth
Hardwick; and four films, including "Duet for Cannibals" (1969) and
"Brother Carl" (1971). She also edited works by Barthes, Antonin
Artaud, Danilo Kis and other writers.
Ms. Sontag was the subject of an unauthorized biography by Carl
Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, "Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon"
(Norton, 2000), and of several critical studies, including "Sontag &
Kael:
Opposites
Attract
Me,"
by
Craig
Seligman
(Counterpoint/Perseus, 2004). She was the president of the PEN
American Center from 1987 to 1989.
In a 1992 interview with The Times Magazine, Ms. Sontag
described the creative force that animated "The Volcano Lover,"
putting her finger on the sensibility that would inform all her work:
"I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested
in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says, be
serious, be passionate, wake up."
AN APPRECIATION | SUSAN SONTAG
A Rigorous Intellectual Dressed in Glamour

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Navigating the world of ideas: the writer Susan Sontag in 2000.
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: December 29, 2004
A RETROSPECTIVE
Susan Sontag
A look at the career of Susan Sontag, including reviews of "Against
Interpretation," "On Photography" and "In America," and articles
about and by the author.

Photoreporters
A social critic and polemicist: Susan Sontag in 1970.

Susan Sontag, who died yesterday at 71, was one of the few
intellectuals with whom Americans have ever been on a first-name
basis. It wasn't intimacy that gave her this status; it was that like
Marilyn and like Judy, she was so much a star that she didn't need
a surname. In certain circles, at least, she was just Susan, even to
people who had never met her but who would nevertheless talk
knowledgeably and intimately about her latest piece in The New
York Review of Books, her position on Sarajevo, her verdict on the
new W. G. Sebald book. She brought to the world of ideas not just
an Olympian rigor but a glamour and sexiness it had seldom seen
before.
Part of the appeal was her own glamour - the black outfits, the
sultry voice, the trademark white stripe parting her long dark hair.
The other part was the dazzle of her intelligence and the range of
her knowledge; she had read everyone, especially all those
forbidding Europeans - Artaud, Benjamin, Canetti, Barthes,
Baudrillard, Gombrowicz, Walser and the rest - who loomed off on
what was for many of us the far and unapproachable horizon.
Nor was she shy about letting you know how much she had read
(and, by implication, how much you hadn't), or about decreeing the
correct opinion to be held on each of the many subjects she turned
her mind to. That was part of the appeal, too: her seriousness and
her conviction, even if it was sometimes a little crazy-making.
Consistency was not something Ms. Sontag worried about overly
much because she believed that the proper life of the mind was
one of re-examination and re-invention.
Ms. Sontag could be a divisive figure, and she was far from
infallible, as when she embraced revolutionary communism after
traveling to Hanoi in 1968 and later declared the United States to
be a "doomed country... founded on a genocide." But what her
opponents sometimes failed to credit was her willingness to change
her mind; by the 80's she was denouncing communism for its
human-rights abuses, and by the 90's she had extended her
critique to include the left in general, for its failure to encourage
intervention in Bosnia and Rwanda. She had found herself "moved
to support things which I did not think would be necessary to
support at all in the past," she said in a rueful interview, adding,
"Like seriousness, for instance."

Not that she was ever unserious for very long. There was about
most of her work a European sobriety and high-mindedness and an
emphasis on the moral, rather than sensual, pleasures of art and
the imagination. Her reputation rests on her nonfiction - especially
the essays in "Against Interpretation" and "Styles of Radical Will"
and the critical studies "On Photography" and "Illness as Metaphor"
- while the 1967 novel "Death Kit," written to a highbrow formula of
dissociation, now seems all but unreadable.
For a while Ms. Sontag took the French position that in the right
hands criticism was an even higher art form than imaginative
literature, but in the 80's she announced that she was devoting
herself to fiction. She wrote the indelible short story "The Way We
Live Now," one of the most affecting fictional evocations of the
AIDS era, and in 1992 she published a novel, "The Volcano Lover,"
that had all the earmarks of the kind of novel she had once made
fun of. It was historical and it was a romance, about the love affair
of Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton. Being a Sontag production, it
was of course brainy and stuffed with fact-laden research, but as
many critics pointed out, there was also a lightness and even - who
would have guessed? - an old-fashioned wish to entertain. Much
the same was true of her last novel, "In America," which came out
in 2000, about a Polish actress who comes to the United States at
the end of the 19th century.
Ms. Sontag was too much a critic and essayist to stick to her
resolve; her last book, "Regarding the Pain of Others" (2003), was
nonfiction, an outspoken tract on how we picture suffering. Last
May she expanded on those ideas for an article in The New York
Times Magazine about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. This piece
was classic, provocative Sontag. But those late novels, playful and
theatrical, are a reminder that behind that formidable, opinionated
and immensely learned persona there was another Sontag, warmer
and more vulnerable, whom we got to see only in glimpses.

1963
By DANIEL STERN

THE BENEFACTOR
By Susan Sontag
For her first book Susan Sontag, a 30-year-old New Yorker, has
chosen to write a carefully modern work, a picaresque anti-novel.
The tone is detached, the action almost nonexistent, and the
characters do not lead lives, they assume postures. We are not told
the hero's surname or the name of his city, though this last is
clearly Paris during the past 40 or 50 years.
The Benefactor is the supposed memoir of an aging man named
Hippolyte, who has dreamed his way through an ambiguous life. As
a young man without any of the usual human ambitions, he
abandons his university education and is supported by his wealthy,
indulgent father. His primary purpose is solitary speculation, and to
further this he lives only on the periphery of other lives. In line with
this he frequents the salon of a foreign couple, the Anderses, a
salon peopled by virtuoso talkers. At about this time Hippolyte
has the first of a series of disquieting dreams. Shortly afterward he
makes his great decision: instead of using his dreams to interpret
his life, he will use his life to interpret his dreams. Cued by a dream,
he begins an affair with his hostess, Frau Anders. She is a plump,
sensuous woman in her late thirties, and there is much talk about
sensuality; yet it remains a curiously cerebral affair.
From this point on the novel alternates cinematic descriptions of
dreams with what, for want of better words, must be called waking
life. Both are cryptic, both devoid of identifiable drives and
emotions. Along the way Hippolyte does some occasional acting in
films, flirts with an experimental religion, has frequent
conversations with a thief and sometime homosexual, takes a trip
to an Arab country with Frau Anders, where he sells her into white
slavery, marries and becomes a widower.
None of these activities, however, has any dimensional life.
Obviously meant to be emblematic, they are thin as experiences,
undeveloped as ideas.
Hippolyte also dreams numerous repetitious dreams, ponders
(cavila) them endlessly and keeps encountering Frau Anders, like a
guilty conscience.
The intent is to present waking life as if it were a dream. And, to
present dreams as concrete as daily living. The result is that

whatever Hippolyte does, participating in the making of a film,

having an affair with a ludicrous leftist named Monique, visiting his
dying father and mourning his young wife... all are without motive
or feeling.
It has been said of the French that they develop an idea and then
assume that it is the world. Hippolyte has decided that he is the
world, and has proceeded to explore it. However, Miss Sontag has
furnished her protagonist with an empty spirit. And, she uses irony
as the chief instrument for her examination. The problem, here, is
that genuine irony illuminates because it measures actions, or
ideas, by implication, against an unspoken moral attitude or vision
of life. Of these neither Hippolyte nor the author gives any
indication.
Part of the obligatory method of the roman nouveau is the use of
the novel as a vehicle for the retelling of an ancient myth. Towards
the end of The Benefactor what might have been suspected is
revealed.
Hippolyte is, of course, Hippolytus of the Greek myth, whose
stepmother, Phaedra, attempts to seduce him; he refuses and she
wreaks her revenge.
We are told this, typically, in the form of a dream. In the dream,
Hippolyte recounts, I am my famous namesake of myth and
drama vowed to celibacy. Frau Anders is my lusty stepmother. But
since this is a modern version of the story I do not spurn
(menosprecio) her. I accept her advances, enjoy her, and then cast
her off. As the goddess in the opening of the ancient play declares,
those who disregard the power of Eros will be chastised. Perhaps
that is the meaning, or one of them, of all my dreams. The
analogy, like the other themes in the book, remains an abstraction,
unfleshed and, finally, unimportant. When, at the end, Hippolyte is
relieved of his compulsion to dream, the significance is as cloudy as
that of the dreams themselves.
Miss Sontag is an intelligent writer who has, on her first flight,
jettisoned the historical baggage of the novel. However, she has
not replaced it with material or insights that carry equal, or
superior, weight. Instead she has chosen the fashionable imports of
neoexistentialist philosophy and tricky contemporary techniques.
She has made an unfortunate exchange.

Mr. Stern is the author of Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die and
other books.
*

October 25, 1964

Laughter in the Dark
By SUSAN SONTAG
CABOT WRIGHT BEGINS
By James Purdy
James Purdy's third novel, Cabot Wright Begins, is more like his
first, Malcolm, than his second, The Nephew. That is, it's a
fantastic and ironic tale, told with great plainness and wit. As in
Malcolm, the theme is both funny and bitter: the travails of
innocence. Malcolm, which is more strictly picaresque in form,
relates the encounters, with various worldly and decadent types, of
a very young man, innocent to the point of uproarious (ruidoso)
numbness (entumecimiento). In Cabot Wright Begins, the figure
of innocence is more complex. Indeed, it is split (dividir) in two.
One innocent is Cabot Wright, recently released from prison after
serving a sentence for raping more than 300 women. He is from a
good family and was a model husband and rising young man on
the Stock Exchange; now he is hiding out in a disreputable
boarding house in Brooklyn Heights.
The other innocent is Bernie Gladhart, also young but already a
professional schlemiel, most recently a used car salesman from
Chicago, who has been dispatched by his middle-aged wife to
Brooklyn Heights to find Cabot Wright and write the Great American
Novel about him.

In the earlier novel, the young Malcolm dies, literally exhausted to

death by his experience of the world, but in Cabot Wright Begins
both of the innocents survive and even achieve a kind of wry
triumph. Bernie returns to Chicago and selling cars, disabused of
both man-eating wife and dreams of literary glory. And Cabot
Wright, after running the gantlet of a number of wacky mentors,
soul-healers and prophets, finally purges himself in a paroxysm of
laughter.
Cabot Wright Begins is, in many ways, the most ambitious of
Purdy's novels. It might be loosely described as a bravura work of
satire -a satire on pornographic fantasy, a satire on New York
literary life, a satire on affluent eccentric mid-century America.
Except that satire is perhaps too narrow a term to convey the kind
of comedy that Purdy writes, comedy in the tradition that included
both Candide and The Goon Show. Purdy shares comedy's
traditional preoccupation with states of emotional anesthesia (the
dead pan) and with emotional deformity; his characters are
humors, parodies; and the particularities of social satire are not
so particular as they may seem, but rather the vehicle for a
universal comic vision. It is a bitter comic vision, in which the flesh
is a source of endless grotesqueness, in which happiness and
disaster are equally arbitrary, and equally unfelt.
Not all of Purdy's fiction is like Cabot Wright Begins. Within the
substantial body of work which he has published in the last decade
- three novels, a novella, two books of stories and two short plays
one can discern at least three Purdys. There is Purdy the satirist an
fantasist; Purdy the gentle naturalist of American, particularly
small-town American, life; and Purdy the writer of vignettes or
sketches, which give us a horrifying snapshot image of helpless
people destroying each other. In other words: a Purdy that can be
compared, respectively, with Nathanael West, with Wright Morris,
with Carson McCullers. (I'm speaking of possible companions, not
influences.) I must admit that I prefer the Purdy represented in
Cabot Wright Begins and Malcolm -the side of Purdy that can
be compared with Nathanael West -to the others. Purdy's most
impressive gift seems to me to be for dark comedy, that is, for the
rhetoric of exaggeration.
This is not to slight his other gifts. He has a marvelous ear,
especially for a certain kind of crankish earnest American speech,

Midwestern or Middle Southern, that is beautifully used in his

stories.
But it doesn't seem to me that Purdy has the gift for great realistic
writing; his work lacks the body, the vigor, the unselfconsciousness
that realistic writing requires. Realistic fiction would also demand
that he transcend his rather limited vocabulary of character, in
which such types as innocent young men, predatory middle-aged
women, and saintly half-cracked old people recur with insistent
regularity. Cabot Wright Begins is not, then, a realistic novel,
though it is, surely, a powerful vision of a very real America. And it
is a very American book, too; at least since Hawthorne, the
romance or tale has often prospered in our fiction at the
expense of the novel.
Anything Purdy writes is a literary event of importance. He is, to
my mind, indisputably one of the half dozen or so living American
writers worth taking seriously. Any reservations about his work I
have suggested should be understood to assume the deservedly
high place he now holds in contemporary letters. Yet the question
remains as to whether Purdy, a brilliant writer, will become
something even more. Cabot Wright Begins does nothing to
indicate that this will happen.
Purdy's new novel is a looser, freer, gayer book than Malcolm.
But it lacks Malcolm's formal perfection and hardness. Its targets
seem more gross, its argument more diffuse, its construction
uneven. There are moments in Cabot Wright Begins when the
joke (of a man toujours pret, of the central compliance of all
women, of a literary scene of unending corruption and fatuity)
seems to go on too long. But there are also admirable passages
-especially, in the later part of the book the excerpts from Mr.
Warburton's sermons -where Purdy pulls out all the stops and
writes at the top of his form. Purdy's dangerous tendencies to
sentimentality and to flatness, exhibited most of all in The
Nephew, seem wholly conquered when he gives vent to the
inspiration of fantasy, and to his marvelously inventive gift for
parody.
Cabot Wright Begins may not be Purdy's best book, but it is one
of his best. It is a fluent, immensely readable, personal and strong
work by a writer from whom everyone who cares about literature
has expected, and will continue to expect, a great deal.

Miss Sontag, a well-known critic, is a writer-in-residence at

Rutgers.
She is the author of a novel, The Benefactor, published last year.
*
January 23, 1966 Lady on the Scene
By BENJAMIN DEMOTT
Against Interpretation
By Susan Sontag
The lady swings. She digs the Supremes and is savvy about Camp.
She catches the major Happenings and the best of the kinky flicks.
She likes her hair wild and her sentences intense (I couldn't bear
what I had written, etc.; I could not stand the omnipotent
author, etc.). She mocks Establishment biggies (Charles Snow,
Arthur Miller) and worships little mag kings (Genet, Resnais, Artaud,
that whole unruddy gang). And time and time over she flaunts
intellectual pieties, as with her hint that critical problems are like
Kleenex and the mind is a runny nose.
(I have the impression not so much of having, for myself, solved...
problems as of having used them up.) Yet despite all this, despite
coterie ties, clever girlisms, a not completely touching softness
toward the cant of the Edie & Andy world the author of the
collection of essays and reviews at hand stands forth as a genuine
discovery. Her book, which includes 26 pieces published between
1961 and 1965 in periodicals ranging from Partisan Review to Film
Quarterly, is a vivid bit of living history here and now, and at the
end of the sixties it may well rank among the invaluable cultural
chronicles of these years.
That this is so owes much to the alertness and integrity with which
Susan Sontag details her own responses to the more startling and
symptomatic esthetic inventions of recent days. These inventions
don't figure, to be sure, in every piece assembled here. A
substantial portion of this book is about other books -plain,
ordinary, print-and-paper works of Pavese, Sartre, Simone Weil,
Leiris, Lukacs, Levi-Strauss. What is more, the critical argument
patched on as a unifying line, in introductory and concluding
essays, appears to derive less directly from experience with

new-wave films, pop art and the like, than from overexposure to
certain fringe movements of literary criticism.
And, as has to be added, that argument isn't especially fresh or
well-informed. Miss Sontag's announced cause is that of design, the
surface art in the Jamesian sense in fine, the cause of style. She
invokes a (predictable) string of sages from Ortega y Gasset to
Marshall McLuhan in support of the claim that interpreters
-people who translate the elements of the poem or play or novel
or story into something else -are philistines. And, impatient with
theorists who continue to treat novels and movies as means of
depicting and commenting on secular reality, she insists that art
now is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying
consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. One
weakness of the case, in the present version, is it rather beamish
dependence on crude distinctions between form and content.
Another is that it lacks urgency. The author believes her sort of
thinking is out of favor and that lit-crit generally in the last few
decades has avoided matters of structure and style. She is wrong
by a country mile on this point, and the embattled sections of her
book seem, in consequence, more like tomboy fantasies than
reactions to critical things as they are.
Competent chatterers about critical things as they are, though,
aren't in short supply these days. What is rare is the writer who has
moved beyond the Gee Whiz or See Here response to the new art
the observer who breathes naturally in encounters with a Godard
film or a nouveau roman and takes as his critical purpose the
re-creation of these encounters as known an experienced by the
feelings and the imagination. Miss Sontag at her best is such a
writer. She doesn't simply view a Happening, for instance; she
inhabits the moment of its performance and gives it back to her
reader as an inward disturbance as well as a set of odd outward
events. We, the audience, feel teased and abused, she
reports.
Nobody caters to our desire to see everything, events occur in
semidarkness or simultaneously in different rooms, we are
deliberately frustrated,
enveloped, mocked, turned into scapegoats: I, and other
people in the audience, often laugh during Happenings. I don't
think this is simply because we are embarrassed or made nervous

by violent and absurd actions. I think we laugh because what goes

on in the Happenings is, in the deepest sense, funny. This does not
make it any less terrifying. There is something that moves one to
laughter... in the most terrible of modern catastrophes and
atrocities. There is something comic in modern experience as such,
a demonic, not a divine comedy. As every schoolboy knows, no
critic can recover and re-create an esthetic experience in its
wholeness. Formulas and summarizing ploys inevitably turn up in
Against Interpretation -the key words and phrases are: mixtures
of attitude,
contradiction and radical juxtaposition. And in a few sections
there is laziness and fudging.
Miss Sontag notes that Pop art lets in wonderful and new
mixtures of attitude which would before have seemed
contradictions but analyzes the mixtures too sketchily and doesn't
specify the quality of the relevant feelings.
Her patience now and again fails her: she calls up the weird
images in Jack Smith's film Flaming Creatures, claims the film is
a brilliant spoof on sex that is also full of the lyricism of the
erotic impulse -but races away with too few words about how this
simultaneity of lyric and satiric modes feels on the pulses. And,
since a good deal of the book consists of reviews, the best work of
the artist under consideration is sometimes scanted. (A piece about
Nathalie Sarraute focuses for most of its length on this writer's
fictional manifesto and deals only dryly, in a paragraph, with her
novels.) But the final impression, to repeat, is by no means that of
perfunctory writing. Miss Sontag drives herself hard, more often
than not, in the interest of adequacy of response. Her passing
remarks on figures as dissimilar as Taylor Mead, Tammy Grimes,
the Beatles and Harpo Marx are alive with a sense of what it is like
to watch these performers. Her descriptions of the sensations and
feelings engaged or disengaged during Brecht plays, good and bad
Ionesco, Peter Weiss's Marat-Sade, and the films of Bresson and
Godard are at once subtle and exact. And there are moments at
which, pressing toward a perception of the kinds of feeling
articulated in a particular esthetic taste, she rises to analysis that is
nothing less than exhilaratingly shrewd -witness the swift,
unpretentious, deliciously comprehending remarks on sweet
cynicism and tenderness in her famous Notes on Camp. More

piquant than any of this, there is at every moment the achieved

character of the observer herself. He I of Against Interpretation
isn't a mere pallid, neutral register; it is a self clear enough in
outline to provide answers to many of the cultural historian's bald
questions -as, for example, the question who needs the new art
and why? Spiky, jealous of her preferences, seemingly exacerbate
by the very notion that others may share them, Miss Sontag
obliquely confirms that enthusiasts of the new art tend to be
people who need badge of difference from the herd. Impatient,
restless, her nerve ends visible in sentence after sentence (can't
bear it, can't stand it), she further testifies that one pleasure
offered by the new art is a release from that prison of patience and
ploddingness into which traditional art locks its audience.
Finally: suspicious of order, certain beyond doubt that sanity itself
is but a cozy lie, she reveals that the new art is, most profoundly, a
mode of self-torment -a means by which guilty men who know the
real truth of existence (life is meaningless) can punish themselves
for finkishly ignoring it and dallying day by day with the
comfortable old deceits of good sense.
To make this last point, is, of course, to say that a thoroughly
American figure stands at the center of Against Interpretation.
The dress is new, true enough, and the images strange. The
haunting image is that of a lady of intelligence and apparent
beauty hastening along city streets at the violet hour, nervous,
knowing, strained, excruciated (as she says) by self-consciousness,
bound for the incomprehensible cinema, or for the concert hall
where non-music is non-played, or for the loft where cherry bombs
explode in her face and flour sacks are flapped close to her, where
her ears are filled with mumbling, senseless sound and she is
teased, abused, enveloped, deliberately frustrated until - Until we,
her audience, make out suddenly that this scene is, simply, hell,
and that the figure in it (but naturally) is old-shoe-American: a
pilgrim come again, a flagellant, one more Self-lacerating Puritan. A
few readers, mainly swingers, will be vexed by the discovery of this
radical juxtaposition, for it does rather mock the gospel of
liberation. But most readers will acknowledge, at the least, that
to have brought such a complex figure to life in a collection of
essays is a feat. Miss Sontag has written a ponderable, vivacious,
beautifully living and quite astonishingly American book.

Mr. DeMott, the author of Hells and Benefits, is professor of

English at Amherst.
Some art aims directly at arousing the feelings; some art appeals
to the feeling through the route of the intelligence. There is art that
involves, that creates empathy. There is art that detaches, that
provokes reflection.
Great reflective art is not frigid. It can exalt the spectator, it can
present images that appall, it can make him weep. but its
emotional power is mediated. The pull toward emotional
involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that
promote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. Emotional
involvement is always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed.
-From Against Interpretation.
*
By ELIOT FREMONT-SMITH
Death Kit
By Susan Sontag
Published: August 18, 1967
An old saw has it that the critical and creative imaginations are in
some sly way antithetical, that their sensibilities are mutually
subversive, that one cannot successfully do the job to the other.
Like most old saws, this one is dull, bent and missing teeth; but
beneath the flaking rust there is still an edge of truth. Lacking
something better, one can use the instrument to hack away at
least part of the mystery of how it happens that a critic of Susan
Sontag's refined sensibilities can write fiction that is both tedious
and demonstrably insensitive to the craft of fiction. As a critic, Miss
Sontag has been original, provocative and intellectually rigorous.
She is best known for her Notes on Camp (1964), but her essays
on happenings, science-fiction movies, French writers and thinkers,
etc. (collected in Against Interpretation, 1966), have also had
conspicuous and deserving impact on current critical thought,
combining as they do, hawkish intellectuality with gem-like flame
estheticism, and conventionally relativistic moral concerns with
what virtually amounts to an ethic of pure style and relativity to

sensation. If her critical writing has not always been entirely lucid,
it has been fresh and fascinating, and idiomatically true to itself.
Her novels are a different matter. In The Benefactor (1963), she
explored, at tedious and wandering length, the dream- and
waking-life of a fellow who wants to fashion actuality from his
dreams -a seemingly easy chore because his dreams are so
undreamlike, and a chore because so dull. The novel was infused
with ideas that had little dramatic relation to the narrative; voices
where confused (the novel's and Miss Sontag's) or at any rate
confusing, and the pacing was erratic. On the positive side, the
novel was an attempt at innovation and -one is grateful for
surprises -the tone throughout was not French and decadent, as
one might expect, but resolute and even cheery.
Much of the same may be said of Death Kit, which skips,
shuffles and snoozes over very similar territory. Its nonhero and
occasional quasi-narrator is a 33-year-old, expensively educated,
Pennsylvania businessman who is moderately thoughtful, entirely
dependable in everyday matters, and nicknamed Diddy -the sort
of man it's hard to dislike, and whom disaster avoids. But: Diddy,
not really alive, had a life. Hardly the same. Some people are their
lives. Others, like Diddy, merely inhabit their lives. In fact, the life
that Diddy inhabits is also unreal, as Miss Sontag evolves it. But
this is as nothing compared with Diddy's immediate problem, which
is: Did he bludgeon to death a railroad worker while his train was
halted in a darkened tunnel -as he himself believes -or was he
sitting all the time quietly in his seat, as Hester, the sensuous blind
girl who hears all, testifies.
The answer, or nonanswer, is suspected all along, though Miss
Sontag seems not to care overmuch, and all along is a long, long
way. During the lulls -Diddy's dreams, who-knows-who's
philosophical ruminations, Miss Sontag's epistemological riddles,
the reader's daydreams, art vs.
life, Gide, Camus, Freud vs. Jung vs. Wilhelm Reich, authenticity vs.
reflection, action as indecisive evidence of no death quite yet, and
so on and on and on -one comes to think that Miss Sontag may
have been taken in by Hester's post-tryst (in the train's bathroom)
admonishment to Diddy: There's no point in not doing what you
want, is there? I mean, if nobody's stopping you. A novelist might
have stopped before even this early point, and rethought character

development, pacing, authenticity of tone and other antiquarian

matters of craft. For instance, the small but nagging matter of the
use of now, in parentheses, presumably to heighten immediacy.
What is its real effect? Or the much larger matter of Diddy's
potentialities for thought.
Death, thought Diddy, Miss Sontag writes, is like a
lithographer's stone. One stone, cool and smooth to the touch, can
print many deaths, virtually identical except to the expert eye. One
lightly inscribed stone can be used, reused indefinitely. Well, no.
Not the Diddy I know, anyway. He wouldn't have had a thought
remotely like this, not in a million years. After a rousing beginning
(except for those silly and reductive parenthetical nows), it
heralds, I'm afraid, a rather meandering and fretful middle; the
ending is a slight but well-done shocker, patterned perhaps on the
classic thriller film, Dead of Night. Did Diddy do it? Is Hester a
loving liar? Is the railroad worker truly dead? Can Diddy prolong his
tenancy in life? Are dreams more real that real? The persevering
reader will earn what answers he can, with Miss Sontag's
good-natured, earnest and (too) occasionally brilliant help, deduce.
*

August 27, 1967 Speaking of Susan Sontag

By CAROLYN G. HEILBRUN
Look. This is how I interviewed Susan Sontag.
Of course I knew who she was. Everyone knows who she is. Even
the man from whom she rents a car lifts his head in recognition at
the name. One need not have read her books, nor even have heard
of Partisan Review.
The daily press, Vogue, Time, Life, The Atlantic Monthly have
conspired to project an image: she writes, she is uncommonly

brainy and darkly beautiful, smart enough to tell America off, and
glamorous enough to make America like it. Susan Sontag is
definitely in. To meet her, to write about her, to rent her a car is
to edge a little in oneself.
But I decided to begin as though I didn't know who she was.
First, I read the facts. Born: 1933, New York. Moved to Arizona,
then California. High school diploma at 15 (North Hollywood High
School), Bachelor's degree at 18 (Chicago). Graduate work
(Harvard). A marriage, a child, a divorce. Then, New York again.
Teaching, articles, books, fame.
Next, I studied the photographs, wondering at the different women
I saw.
A photographer, unable to capture an unphotographic subject,
invents her. On the dust jacket of her first book (The Benefactor)
she looks like the woman aviator who parachutes through the
greenhouse roof in Shaw's Misalliance. On the second dust jacket
(Against Interpretation) like someone not gentle, made to appear
so. On the third (Death Kit) like a beautiful woman, period.
Finally, I found myself looking in Vogue and The World Journal
Tribune, at a lovely exurbanite woman with her dark-eyed son, who
strikingly resembled the young Marcel Proust.
Third, I read the reports and opinions: American culture-dealers at
work. They write about someone who is news; everyone will read it;
fame rubs off. (Your are reading this because it is about Susan
Sontag; not because I wrote it). Their wit triumphs over her fame.
(Susan Sontag is the most serious young writer we have in
America today. She has also been called the Nathalie Wood of the
U.S. Avant Garde.) (When she published her novel, 'The
Benefactor,' in 1963, and received a Merit Award from
Mademoiselle, her somber posture in the magazine was splendid.
Barbra Streisand appeared no more exemplary as Singing
Comedienne, of Valentina Tereshkova as Cosmonaut, than Susan
Sontag as Writer.) They make jokes about her alliterative name as
though, like Marilyn Monroe's, it had been publicity, not
mother-invented. The great American sport: have it and eat it too.
Fourth, I read the other interviews. These seem designed to show
her playing the have it and eat it game, (For weeks they've been
bombarding Miss Sontag with telegrams, offering huge fees for her
participation. 'I wouldn't dream of it,' she says calmly. 'I'm not

about to prostitute myself.'), reaping the establishment's rewards

with the right hand, damning the establishment with the left. They
describe her Greenwich Village apartment whose walls are
covered with dozens of movie stills. They describe her son's room:
David's room, while cluttered with the usual boy junk, also
includes such unlikely pre-teen reading matter as The New
Statesman, The New York Review of Books, and I.F. Stone's
Weekly. But the describers haven't been in her apartment, haven't
seen her son's room, haven't, therefore, described them accurately.
True interviewers, they have talked to someone who has been
there.
Fifth, I read three books, what articles I could find, and a short
story, Man With a Pain, which I think is part of the same creative
moment as Death Kit, but I didn't ask.
Sixth, I talked to some people, not many, because I wasn't learning
anything. Not, that is, about Miss Sontag. How could I?
Seventh, I met her. Not in her apartment (I have never been
there), but in a windowless, cluttered room in her publisher's office,
where we drank coffee out of cartons and talked a while.
When I first began reading about Susan Sontag I thought: My God,
she is Marilyn Monroe, beautiful, successful, doomed, needing (it is
Arthur Miller's best phrase) a blessing. We have heard there are no
second acts in American lives. Death kit indeed. And the reviewers
will look for Miss Sontag in her new novel. (But she isn't there. It
isn't her book any more, except in the sense that it's my book, your
book. She knows it's no longer even the sort of book she would like
to read.) Later, when I read her essays I thought: Susan Sontag,
thank God, is the spokesman for the other side. The one who
understands, can explain and speak for: happenings, boredom,
nouvelle vague films, drugs, the young.
In short, the voice which can provide me with a dialogue: defend
what I do not find defensible, show me the order in what I find
chaotic, the meaning in what I find meaningless. Like the others I
wanted to freeze her into one pose, as slander will try to freeze one
act into a destiny.
Against Interpretation, her book of essays, was then, that year,
part of the weather. Because it is criticism, it is not now. But I had
chosen her to go on explaining my culture to me forever, using the
same words, letting me argue, tolerate; letting me recognize, not

her brilliance, which lights complexity, but her cleverness, which

can be made to simplify and darken.
Now what I think is this: That she knows what novels are, now,
always now (though literary historians will try to kill them off and
make them then). That she knows the price she has been made to
pay (she did not read the fine print) and that it will not ruin her.
That she knows Death Kit will be treated more as news than
novel, and drubbed the harder because it is news, and that it may
survive even that. That she knows how easily a label sticks to a
woman, let alone to one capable of glamour, let alone to a career
woman. Men do not have careers. The central characters in
both her novels are men, because to be a woman in a novel today
is to be a set of circumstances. (To be a man was that for James,
Lawrence, Shaw, Ibsen and other, who therefore wrote about
women, once upon a time.) If she criticizes, some reviewer says
she is using a riding crop. Male critics are not accused of assuming
sexual roles.
What I learned in my interview is this: that I must not quote her,
for those words, too, crystallized, wrenched from the conversation
which evoked them, become simplified, false. That she is not like
her photographs: academy portraits never lied more. That she feels
bound to act when she thinks the issues are important -for
example, by publicly opposing our involvement in Vietnam. That
she may be able, unlike the hero of Death Kit, not to assume a
mask: to live her life, not inhabit it. That she has a mind which not
only has learned and retained numberless books and five
languages, but which can see meaning, and then release that
meaning, and see again.
That her plans, after Death Kit, are to go to the film festival in
Venice, then, soon, to write her doctoral dissertation, probably on
modern French philosophy, and earn her Ph.D. from Harvard. To
make the money she needs by lecturing in colleges. To write more
novels. To continue to spend a third of each year in Europe. To shun
television, which is not her medium.
Look. Susan Sontag is not America's Simone de Beauvoir,
America's Iris Murdoch, or a younger Mary McCarthy. (How short
the world is of famous, intelligent women: one per country per
generation.) She is not even, as for a time I thought (hoping,

perhaps, to recapture her for the Academy) a younger Susanne

Langer.
Like all public figures, Miss Sontag has lent herself to others.
Knowing Montaigne, she has given herself to herself.
Mrs. Heilbrun teaches English literature at Columbia and is writing
a literary history of Edwardian England.
*
February 4, 1969
Victory in the Ashes of Vietnam?
By HERBERT MITGANG TRIP TO HANOI
By Susan Sontag NO MORE VIETNAMS?
The War and the Future of American Foreign Policy Edited by
Richard M. Pfeffer usan Sontag, last season's literary pin-up, spent
a couple of weeks in Hanoi in the spring as a reward for what the
North Vietnamese regarded as a proper anti-American war attitude.
Was this trip necessary? Not for the ordinary purposes of her Trip
to Hanoi, which is an interior journey with reportorial blinders.
Although Miss Sontag proves herself still capable of ascending
peaks of obscurity, her self-examination as a troubled American
trying to balance the immorality of Vietnam and a sense of
conscience makes her journey a thoughtful experience.
A more dense discussion of the war and the future of American
foreign policy is found in No More Vietnams?, edited by Richard
M. Pfeffer for the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs.
The book grew out of a conference of 26 certified scholars with
relevant expertise, former government officials and journalists.
The intellectual varsity is all here but the book is difficult to digest
because it has been arranged in dialectical form.
The reason for mixing everybody together is explained in
foundationese: We judged, writes Stevenson Institute director
William R. Polk, that at this stage of our awakening understanding
of the implications of Vietnam, conflicts in interpretation and
opinion need to be emphasized rather than synthesized. The
result is that No More Vietnams? has many voices talking at
once.

Nevertheless, the blackbirds in the pie do take wing when singled

out: Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department consultant on
pacification: The lesson which can be drawn here is one that the
rest of the world, I am sure, has drawn more quickly than
Americans have -that, to paraphrase H. Rap Brown, bombing is as
American as cherry pie. If you invite us in to do your hard fighting
for you, they you get bombing along with our troops. Stanley
Hoffmann, professor of government at Harvard: The ethics of
foreign policy must be an ethics of self-restraint. The saddest
aspect of the Vietnam tragedy is that it combines moral aberration
and intellectual scandal. Sir Robert Thompson, former Secretary
for Defense in Malaya: The prospect of going in as a political
reformer frightens me more than anything else. I would not touch
political reform in these territories with a barge pole -and I certainly
would not touch it with an American political scientist. Edwin
Reischauer, former Ambassador to Japan: Vietnam has shown the
limited ability of the United States to control at a reasonable cost
the course of events in a nationally aroused, less developed
nation.... I believe we are moving away from the application to Asia
of the 'balance of power' and 'power vacuum' concepts of the cold
war. It is unfortunate, though hardly to be anticipated, that this
book's round table took place several months before McGeorge
Bundy's speech at DePauw University last October calling for an
end to bombing of North Vietnam. Since Mr. Bundy was more
responsible than any Presidential adviser for the bombing and
escalation of the war in Vietnam, his speech could have helped to
focus the lessons set forth in No More Vietnams? For Mr. Bundy
reversed himself not on grounds of the immorality of the war but of
the lack of success (its penalties upon us are much too great).
Most of the voices for sanity in this book, who seek to avoid future
Vietnams, stress not success but morality.
It is fortunate, on the other hand, that Miss Sontag arrived in Hanoi
after the decision had been made in Washington to stop bombing
the North Vietnam capital. For it gave her the opportunity to look
inward.
Being Susan Sontag, she quotes not Ho but Hegel after her interior
journey to Hanoi: As Hegel said, the problem of history is the
problem of consciousness... anything really serious I'd gotten from
my trip would return me to my starting point: the dilemmas of

being an American, an unaffiliated radical American, an American

writer.... Radical Americans have profited from having a clear-cut
moral issue on which to mobilize discontent and expose the
camouflaged contradictions in the system. And that, if one may
draw a conclusion from her conclusion, may bring the ultimate
victory here of a lost war there: Cold-war concepts are being turned
inside-out because the defeat, and convulsive social changes may
result in a more humane America at home and abroad. Miss
Sontag's Trip to Hanoi was indeed necessary and is well worth
reading because it blows the mind's cobwebs.
*

July 13, 1969

Susan Sontag, Indignant, Stoical, Complex, Useful -and
Moral
By LAWRENCE M. BENSKY
Styles of Radical Will
By Susan Sontag
The subjects of the essays in this important book - Susan Sontag's
second collection of essays, containing pieces written since 1966
-are major subjects of relevant intellectual concern in 1969: the
avant-garde esthetics of science, the pornographic classics of
The Story of O and The Image, French philosopher E.M. Cioran,
Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard.
Is this to say she is fashionable? Readers can certainly find
excuses for thinking so. The techniques she employs have
something for everyone in the mind game: vast fields of reference,

an easy use of traditional philosophical and literary analysis,

ruthless self-criticism, a shifting focus of investigation. But since
she uses such techniques better than almost any other writer
today, Susan Sontag cannot be called fashionable, any more than a
statue can be called statuesque. She's simply there, thoroughly
herself.
Where she is can best be seen in her own words. On esthetics: As
the activity of the mystic must end in a via negativa, a theology of
God's absence, a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond
knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, so art must tend
toward anti-art, the elimination of the 'subject' ('the object,' the
'image'), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of
silence.... Art is unmasked as gratuitous, and the every
concreteness of the artist's tools... appears as a trap. Practiced in a
world furnished with secondhand perceptions, and specifically
confounded by the treachery of words, the artist's activity is
cursed.... Art becomes the enemy of the artist, for it denies him the
realization -the transcendence -he desires. Therefore, art comes to
be considered something to be overthrown. (And the esthetics of
silence come to be written.) Or, on politics: What the Mongol
hordes threaten is far less frightening than the damage that
Western, 'Faustian' man, with his idealism, his magnificent art, his
sense of intellectual adventure, his world-devouring energies for
conquest, has already done, and further threatens to do.... [In
Vietnam] an unholy dialectic is at work, in which the big wasteful
society dumps its garbage, its partly unemployable proletarian
conscripts, its poisons and its bombs upon a small, virtually
defenseless, frugal society whose citizens, those fortunate enough
to survive, then go about picking up the debris, out of which they
fashion materials for daily use and self-defense. Who she is can
be glimpsed in the following passage from her essay 'Thinking
Against Oneself': Reflections on Cioran, for it provides something
of an auto-portrait of Susan Sontag: More and more, the
shrewdest thinkers and artists are precocious archeologists of...
ruins-in-the-making, indignant or stoical diagnosticians of defeat,
enigmatic choreographers of the complex spiritual movements
useful for individual survival in an era or permanent apocalypse.
The key words are clear: indignant,
stoical,

enigmatic,
complex,
useful. But one major adjective must be added: moral
-because the eight essays in Styles of Radical Will are mainly
exercises in moral definition, as far as moral definition can be
accomplished today on the two supremely and terrifyingly insecure
areas of modern art and modern political brutality.
Like all moralists, Miss Sontag hopes to inspire readers with the
desire to act upon her principles. But there are insurmountable
difficulties in acting upon them, and this is the final, most
maddening element in the world she so brilliantly describes.
For example: How is art -even radical art -useful for individual
survival in an era of permanent apocalypse? As Miss Sontag has
convincingly argued, good and bad have become useless concepts;
the most valid forms -in art, in philosophy -are those which
accommodate the greatest ambiguity; they are profoundly
disturbing but are psychologically appropriate to our condition.
Thus Bergman's Persona and the films of Godard are exemplary
esthetic models. But art is not life; life drives one crazy and
corrupts the language with which one could recognize one's
condition, while art reinvents language and makes sure one
recognizes just how badly off one is. Can such a vicious circle aid us
in a moral definition? How useful to individual survival can it -or
similar intellectual structures -be?
This issue -like so many -reaches the point of crisis when Miss
Sontag confronts the question of Vietnam in her essay Trip to
Hanoi, based on her visit there in the spring of 1968. It is her
triumph that by being true to what she sees and feels -her first
concern -she is able to transfer her artistic and philosophical values
to politics without distorting them or losing herself, and find value
and meaning where others have lapsed into political cliches or
been struck dumb with horror. The placement of Trip to Hanoi as
the concluding piece in the book is symbolic of the way in which
Vietnam has wrenched many students, writers, teachers and
intellectuals away from their guarded concerns into a field of
experience where they must suddenly cope as never before.
When Trip to Hanoi appeared last year in Esquire and later as a
paperback, inmates of the liberal and radical wards in the cultural
asylum roared in pain. How dare Susan Sontag use the Vietnamese

as foils for her own personal psychological development? How dare

she claim to be a radical and still spend time agonizing over
agonizing at the typewriter? Aren't we getting gassed, clubbed,
taxed, drafted, jailed while she is trying to decide what to say?
Reading Trip to Hanoi now as a part of a collection, one sees how
Miss Sontag's sensibility allowed her to risk these painful
accusations.
What I'd been creating and enduring for the last few years was a
Vietnam inside my head, under my skin, in the pit of my stomach,
she writes, adding that she is a stubbornly unspecialized writer
who has so far been largely unable to incorporate into either novels
or essays my evolving radical political convictions and sense of
moral dilemma at being a citizen of the American empire. Hanoi
changed that -and Trip to Hanoi enables us to see how her
attitude toward Vietnam does follow logically from the moral
philosophy which she applies so successfully to esthetic questions.
In art, she glories in the discovery of tact and poise amidst the
roaring babble. On her trip, she delighted in the painful recognition
of the virtues of the Vietnamese who were fastidious and
whole in the unspeakable holocaust.
To understand the nature of this achievement -the clear-eyed
translation of a vocabulary of art and philosophy into politics -one
must note again that Miss Sontag has been deeply influenced by
the contemporary radical French intellectual tradition that
concentrates on searching for the underlying structures -often of an
awesome complexity -beneath the tangled and chaotic surface of
individual acts.
By creating a personal vocabulary that can permit her to define
esthetic expression or political behavior as tactful,
poised,
fastidious and whole, she is demonstrating an intellectual
achievement both foreign to contemporary American usage and
difficult to appropriate in times of artistic and political change.
Even if one does not accept the annoying and sometimes difficult
validity of intellectual accomplishment in a period of ferment and
horror, one ignores the best of human creativity and personal
honesty at one's peril. It should be remembered that Miss Sontag
has now written four of the most valuable intellectual documents of
the past 10 years: Against Interpretation,

Notes on Camp,
The Aesthetics of Silence, and Trip to Hanoi. In the world in
which she's chosen to live, she continues to be the best there is.
Mr. Bensky, a critic and former managing editor of Ramparts, lives
in San Francisco.
*
September 25, 1969
Susan Sontag's 'Duet for Cannibals' at Festival
By ROGER GREENSPUN
The special providence that protects movie critics decrees that
when they do take up honest work they often make surprisingly
good movies. Godard and Truffaut come to mind at once, but also a
whole line of Cahiers du Cinema critics including Chabrol,
Rivette, and Eric Rohmer.
In America, we have Peter Bogdanovich (Targets) and now Susan
Sontag with Duet for Cannibals, which played last night at the
New York Film Festival. Miss Sontag's credits extend, of course, a
considerable distance beyond movie criticism, but she has been
one of the best of critics, and I have heard some of her colleagues
remark, with disarming generosity, that she has proved herself so
good at making movies you'd never guess she had written about
them.
Except for some bandages out of Godard, two wigs out of
Antonioni, and a leading lady out of Bernardo Bertolucci (Adriana
Asti, who is more interesting here than she was in Before the
Revolution), Duet for Cannibals doesn't seem to owe much to
anybody except to Miss Sontag and her own idiomatic, uncluttered
sense of the medium.
The film is in Swedish, made in Sweden for a Swedish producer,
but the subtitles are Miss Sontag's, and I suspect that as much has
been gained as lost in the various translations and transpositions
required in realizing the project.
The cannibals are a middle-age radical German political activist
and the theoretician, Bauer -Hans Erborg -living with his young
Italian wife Francesca -Miss Asti -in Sweden. Their victims are a
young Swede who goes to work as Bauer's secretary, and his

mistress, who eventually finds herself working as the Bauers's cook

and companion. For all the movie tells us, Bauer's credentials are
real enough (down to a chrome-plated cigarette lighter -gift of
Bertolt Brecht), but everything in his present life partakes of fraud
calculated to intrigue, upset, and entrap his assistant.
His erratic and violent behavior, the temptation palpably and
leeringly offered of his beautiful young wife, eventually the
intellectual challenge of what move he will make next, engage the
young man and put him repeatedly off balance.
Before it is all over the girl is at work too, making love to the
master, accepting advances from the mistress, feeding and being
fed by both of them, and lying between them in their connubial
bed.
There are too many insane people in the world, comments the
young hero after he is attacked by a madman on a city street and
of course he included the Bauers, who also attack -and win
-because they try anything and stand by nothing.
Nevertheless, I don't think Duet for Cannibals means to be a
parable about the power of the insane over the sane, or the strong
over the weak, or even the inventively absurd over the rational and
passionate. I don't know what it does mean to be, and I am content
for a while to rest with its moods and its complicated, often funny
motions.
But if the movie fails -as I think it does -to open up beyond the
strength and the tact of its specific scenes, it invites that failure in
the limitations of its own point of view and in its insistence on
insoluble mystery to the point where mystery grows boring without
getting less mysterious.
The young couple's final escape offers relief of a rather low level mostly that the charade is over for them and us. The personal
games increase in intensity, but nothing very much is at stake, and
personality is never deeper than the next level of plausible
disguise.
Duet for Cannibals will be shown again at Alice Tully Hall on
Friday at 6:30 P.M.
*

October 3, 1969
Susan Sontag Talks About Filmmaking
By MEL GUSSOW
Novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, esthetician,
superintellectual -Susan Sontag is an awesome literary lady. For
many years she has harbored one large unfulfilled ambition. She
wanted to direct movies.
I would have taken any offer just to show I could do it, she says.
I would have gone to Afghanistan. As it turned out, she only had
to go to Sweden.
The offer came suddenly last year. It gave her complete freedom.
The only suggestion from the producer was that the film not be too
expensive. In the end, it cost $180,000. The genius of the Swedish
films, she says, is the invisibility of the producer. Mine didn't see
the picture until it was finished. The result, Duet for Cannibals,
written, directed, edited, and subtitled by Miss Sontag, filmed
entirely in Sweden, in Swedish, has been one of the hits at the New
York Film festival. It will begin a regular run Oct. 14 at the Carnegie
Hall Cinema.
Miss Sontag is now, officially, a movie director.
During a break in film festivities, she relaxed in her sparsely
furnished West Side penthouse and reflected on her movie debut.
When she arrived in Sweden, last summer, she said, they didn't
know what I was going to do, but I had five movies in my head that
I had wanted to make for years.
They were in embryonic form, stories for films, she added.

The one she chose to make first was a grotesque chamber film
about two couples, one older and perverse (the cannibals), one
younger and vulnerable.
In three weeks in her hotel room she wrote a 100-page shooting
script, then chose locations and actors and began filming it exactly
as she had written it. Everything was so relaxed and
unhysterical. There wasn't even a language problem. English was
the language of the set.
I had never made a film, she continued, but I've been around
the film world. I've been on sets of many films. I've been an extra. I
used to act -until I was 21. I've read a lot of books. I knew enough
about the camera and lights and actors and editing. I don't know
how I knew but I knew I knew. She has spent a large part of her
life in theaters seeing movies. She has watched many directors
work, including her friend Mike Nichols. I admire the way he gets
people to do what he wants them to do without making them feel
oppressed. That's my way. While she was shooting, she thought
her film morbid. I didn't like that aspect, she said, but that's
what it was. I was making a dark, depressing Swedish movie. In the
rushes people started laughing, and she realized that she was
making a black comedy.
In a way it didn't surprise me. I don't think the author is the best
judge, she conceded, and so when people began analyzing the
film, she listened.
Richard Roud said, 'Obviously, Dr. Bauer is a descendent of Dr.
Mabuse.' Not that there was a conscious influence, Miss Sontag
said, but there is a relationship. Someone else said something
about Hitchcock, and I thought, 'Yes.' Or, 'I love the theme of the
pornography of eating in your film.' Yes. How marvelous! Her own
feeling on seeing it, she said, was one of surprise, pleasure,
amazement that it exists independent of me. At the Cannes
festival, she sat through it twice listening to the people in the
seats. She has seen it about 100 times. On the other, she said,
I've never reread anything I've published. She thinks there is a
similarity between novels and screenplays. I'm so inside [a film].
The story is really happening. I'm reporting it. My novels are also
conceived very quickly. In a few hours I see the whole story. It's just
getting it down. But the techniques are strikingly different. A
director has to be an amateur psychiatrist. He has to have certain

executive and administrative skills. The film thing is a big machine.

Eisenstein, as I remember, was either an architect or an engineer.
There is something in it like building a bridge. It's an art form which
involves teamwork. A writer is like a painter. Alone in the studio.
Would someone like Dostoevski have been a good director? She
laughed and answered, Dostoevski's personal problems would get
in the way of being a film director. She is comfortable in the
movies. I feel freer on film. I think a lot about images. That's why I
say my film is a film and could never have been a novel. I never
found that language could do all I wanted it to do. I always found
language a somewhat resistant medium. I feel more at home in
films. It's the sequence and rhythm of images that's important.
Language is secondary. I hope to go on writing fiction and making
films. She is now writing her third novel. Possibly I will have to
make some kind of choice. A number of writers gave up writing to
be directors. The film thing is tremendously seductive. The simple
pleasure of working with people. Writing is such an ascetic solitary
occupation. You can get hooked -as I am -on the fun of making
films. About her film future, she said: I'm not addicted to the
form of the chamber film. I would love to make a big outdoor film
with lots of people. My second film, which will be made next
summer in Sweden, will be much less claustrophobic. It takes place
in a seaside resort. It has six main characters, one a child. The third
will have 25 characters. I don't know whether I want to do it in
Sweden. Naturally, I would like to make films in English. I would
love to do a science-fiction film. I would like to make a political film,
but it would be much more of a documentary, not a fiction. At
least one of her literary talents will suffer from her filmmaking. I
don't feel like writing about film anymore, she said. My judgment
has been deformed by making films. Now that I see it in so
subjective a way, I don't think my opinion is valuable. I may like
things just as much, but I don't feel confident about telling other
people something is good.
*
October 11, 1970
What Makes Susan Sontag Make Movies?
By LETICIA KENT TOCKHOLM

-Long shot: The eye tracks forward as the film company's bus pulls
into the square and stops. The driver checks his watch (7:15 A.M.)
and makes an impatient gesture in the direction of two figures
hurrying hand-in-hand toward the bus.
Medium shot: It is SUSAN SONTAG and her 17-year-old son, DAVID,
they get into the bus and drive off. Sounds: bus door slamming and
motor starting.
Credits: SUSAN SONTAG, 37, American writer, lapsed philosopher,
abdicated critic, radical intellectual, daughter of a traveling
salesman, mother but no longer wife, existential voyager and
filmmaker.
So far.
Medium shot: We are in the bus speeding toward a location
outside Stockholm where SONTAG is making -writing, directing,
editing -her second film, an elliptical tale called Brother Carl.
Seated behind the driver, SONTAG and DAVID are leaning close
together, speaking in low, intimate tones. They look very tired.
SONTAG (tenderly): David arrived unexpectedly from Africa last
evening.
He is on his way to college at Amherst. We talked all night.
Closer shot of the two: Both SONTAG and DAVID are dark and very
handsome. The eye pans on her. She is thinner and taller than in
her photographs -though just as mysterious looking. She has long,
straight, black hair and she moves as warily as a young Indian
brave.
She is dressed in jeans and white sneakers.
Long shot: Forty minutes later the bus comes to a halt in a field.
Background: the Baltic Sea. Foreground: an ancient wooden
cottage, no electricity and no running water.
Full shot: Now we are inside the cottage, where a scene is being
rehearses between French star GENEVIEVE PAGE and Swedish actor
KEVE HJELM. HJELM is having trouble with his lines -not in recalling
them, but in the nuances of English.
HJELM (aside): I'm losing my identity -I can't think in English.
Acting is thinking. It becomes a sort of talking-by-ear, without my
knowing exactly what I'm saying.
Two-shot of HJELM and SONTAG in profile seated on opposite sides
of the camera. She reads his lines huskily, emphasizing the verbs.

SONTAG: Yes, I loved her... extravagantly... But I've always been

better at loving people when they don't ask for it, when they don't
need my love to survive. HJELM imitates her somewhat flatly.
Cut to SONTAG standing beside the camera. Her directorial
manner is firm, self-confident, cool.
SONTAG: Ready for a take!
ASSISTANT: Tystnad!
SONTAG: Camera!
SOUND MAN: Gor!
CAMERA MAN: Rolling!
SONTAG: Action!...
Three minutes later.
SONTAG: Cut! Tack. Merci. Print that.
ASSISTANT: Tack!
Medium shot of SONTAG, who suddenly looks apprehensive.
SONTAG (aside): I'm the director, so I decide everything. The
trouble is that I can't execute everything.
DAVID touches SONTAG lightly on the arm and proffers a cigarette.
She takes it and smiles. Dissolve.
It is past midnight, three days later. We are in SONTAG'S
apartment in the Old Town, where she is being interviewed by the
REPORTER. SONTAG is stretches out on a couch, smoking, left arm
crooked under her head, eyelids half closed. The REPORTER is
seated in a straight chair drawn up near the couch. SONTAG is as
dressed up as she's ever willing to be: a yellow wool dress, stone
beads, and high boots. Sounds: the hum of a refrigerator;
SONTAG'S voice, low and expressive.
SONTAG: It's terrible to give an interview, to have the illusion that
you have some connection with the interviewer -and then to be so
disappointed. Only once have I read an article about myself which
seemed to me to have any connection with me. It's a little
depressing, but it's the nature of being reported that a couple of
things you do get singled out as captions, as handles, as labels
-and they stand, in a way, for your whole work. For example, I don't
write essays any more. That's something in the past, for me. For
two years I have been making movies.
And it's somewhat of a burden to be thought of primarily as an
essayist.

I'm sure that Norman Mailer didn't like being known for 20 years as
the author of The Naked and the Dead when he had done a lot of
other things. It's like referring to Frank Sinatra in terms of the
Frankie of 1943.
REPORTER: Ah, but Against Interpretation, your first collection of
essays, was published four years ago, and Styles of Radical Will
came out last year.
SONTAG: They don't interest me at all. You see, I don't love my
work, I like it. But I'm not attached to it in the sense that I feel a
responsibility now to be consistent with my past work. In fact, I
would be delighted to be inconsistent -I'm interested in leaving my
past work behind.
REPORTER: But you do love making movies.
SONTAG: What I love about making movies is the chance to
exercise a part of my imagination and my powers in a way that I
can't as a writer. A visual sense, a structural sense, a musical
sense. The pleasure of working with people. Writing is a very
solitary occupation.
REPORTER: But earlier you complained that although you decide
everything, you can't execute everything. Isn't there an area of
compromise in filmmaking that's absent in writing?
SONTAG: Did I say that? If I want to be in total control of
something, I write -but not for films. Filmmaking is an entirely
separate career.
I'm not interested in films as a writer, but as a director and an
editor. As it happens, I have written the scripts for both of my films,
but that's not the side of filmmaking that interests me. The side
that interests me is precisely what you call the area of
compromise. Film directing is film directing. It's not a compromise
any more than conducting a symphony orchestra is a compromise.
REPORTER: I know that you're working in Sweden because you
were invited here by Sandrews, the Swedish film company. But I
wonder if anyone, particularly an American, can do his best work
abroad. Wasn't Antonioni's first American film, Zabriskie Point, a
failure?
SONTAG: I don't think there's anything inherently difficult in
working abroad -just that it's hard for some people. It's really a
question of temperament and empathy. I think Zabriskie Point is
a brilliant film -far better than some of Antonioni's Italian films. So

Antonioni can take his art abroad, but, judging by Fahrenheit

451, Truffaut can't.
As for me, I spend a large part of my time abroad, so you might
say it's natural for me to be abroad. And I had assumed that I
would begin making films here in Europe simply because the
conditions for a beginner are more congenial: lower budget, smaller
crew, more artistic control.
REPORTER: Does it concern you that, despite good reviews, you
first film, Duet for Cannibals, had a fairly small audience?
SONTAG: Well, needless to say, it would please me if it had a large
audience as opposed to a small one. But I can't say that I would do
anything to get a large audience as opposed to a small one. But I
can't say that I would do anything to get a larger audience. I don't
know how tothink that way. I start by having an idea for a film
which interests me and then I do it the best way I can. The
audience is not part of my consideration -which is not to say that
I'm making the film for myself any more than I'm making it for
other people. I'm just doing it because I want to do it, because I like
to do it, because I think it's worth doing. And then I hope people
will like it. It's not that I want a large or a small audience; I want the
audience that the film deserves.
REPORTER: Would you like to work in Hollywood?
SONTAG: Of course. I've always been more interested in the work
of the independent American filmmakers, beginning with Kenneth
Anger. But Arthur Penna and Stanley Kubrick are not to be
condescended to. Good films still come out of Hollywood. I don't
know how, but they do. I'd like to work in wide screen and in color.
I'd like to make a science fiction film and a western.
REPORTER: And a political film?
SONTAG: Yes, although I'm not so involved in my own opinions as,
say, someone like Mailer is in his. I have a lot of opinions, but I
consider my opinions to be a by-product of my work. I don't think of
myself as someone trying to persuade other people to share my
opinions, except on very special subjects. My essay on my trip to
Hanoi was an act of persuasion -so were my essays on Godard.
REPORTER: As an early admirer of Godard, do you have an opinion
of his renunciation of his former work?
SONTAG: My reaction is respect, patience and bewilderment. I
think anyone who's done as much good work as Godard has

deserves sufferance - not uncivilized harshness -on the part of his

audience. I think Godard's conversion should be respected. I can't
imagine not being interested in what he does. And I suppose I'm
secretly pleased that he has had the courage to stop doing what
everyone finally learned to like so much -although I'm one of the
fans he's left behind. And I wish he'd do those marvelous movies
some more.
REPORTER: Is the question of the woman as director worth
discussing?
SONTAG: It's a pleasure to be working in a country where the
question is never raised. And, on the whole, I think it's not a
problem. Of course, there's still discrimination, but there's no
longer a taboo. It's not, in this respect, like becoming an orchestra
conductor. There one is really breaking ground. But there have
been women as directors since silent films. And now there's Cavani,
Chytilova, Clarke, Varda, Zetterling....
REPORTER: And Sontag.
*
August 12, 1972
Screen: 'Brother Carl'
By ROGER GREENSPUN
Bother Carl is Susan Sontag's second movie. But it is the first
movie in which she seems to see film as a means to life rather than
as a repository for ideas. Duet for Cannibals (1969) really dealt
with a kind of rarefied mental cannibalism. In a very open way,
Brother Carl really deals with human relationships.
Two women, Karen and Lena, visit an island, a Swedish resort,
where Lena's ex-husband, Martin, lives in comparative seclusion
with a mentally disturbed ballet dancer named Carl. Carl is brother
by guild rather than blood, for Martin is somehow responsible for
his breakdown, and Carl, who totally depends upon him, regards
him as an enemy.
Lena is young and full of life, and to some extent Brother Carl is
the story of how she offers her life, first to Karen, then to Martin,
and finally to Carl -before committing it in total and apparently
wasteful sacrifice. Karen is older and very tired, and to some extent

the film is the story of how her life is saved by the enigmatic Carl,
who forms a bond with her own desperately withdrawn young
daughter, Anna, and effectively brings the girl out of her private
distances and back into the world.
I have greatly simplified the story, which is very complex and full
of symbolic event and confrontation, and which is also a little
foolish. In a sense, Brother Carl is all about learning to give, and
its climactic miracle (Miss Sontag's word) is essentially to evoke
laughter from a little girl. These suggest sentiments worthy of
Hollywood in the 1930's and 1940's, but that Miss Sontag is willing
to treat them openly and seriously is, paradoxically, perhaps her
greatest source of strength.
There are a directness and an awkwardness of gesture and of
larger movement in Brother Carl that count among its most
attractive qualities, and that go a long way to compensate for its
occasionally strained pretensions. It is a very imperfect film, with
one bad performance (Genevieve Page as Karen) and several
performances that seem to have been directed toward an
excessive inexpressiveness.
But I think that it indicates the taking of considerable imaginative
and emotional risks, as Duet for Cannibals did not, and the result
is a real movie.
Brother Carl was filmed in Sweden with an English-language
sound track. It opened yesterday at the New Yorker Theater.
*
July 12, 1974
Screen: Sontag's 'Promised Lands'
By NORA SAYRE
Susan Sontag's film about Israel, Promised Lands, which was
made in October and November of 1973, isn't intended to be a
documentary.
However, that country's situation is just too factually complex to
be treated as a tone poem. In an effort to eschew talking heads,
there's a lot of voice-over narration, as people walk through the
streets, but sometimes we don't know who's talking. There's some
handsome photography -especially of figures in landscapes

-although what's seen and what is said often don't go together, and
many shots seem irrelevant. The movie opened yesterday at the
First Avenue Screening Room.
One's ready to be moved by the subject. But the viewer almost
has to function as an editor, since the selection of the footage is so
haphazard. Hence the emotions of or about Israel don't come
through, even though glimpses of graveyards and corpses and the
consciousness of Auschwitz, the lingering shock of the October
attack and the awareness that the struggle between Arabs and
Jews may be insoluble -as one man says, There's no solution to a
tragedy -run through the marrow of the picture. Throughout, the
ideas and the people and the machines of war are examined from a
distance, as though everything had been observed through some
kind of mental gauze.
The Israelis -particularly those in robes -are filmed as if they were
extremely foreign or exotic. Also, Israel seems like a nearly all-male
country, since few women appear and none have been
interviewed.
There are a few sympathetic words for the Arabs, but their
existence seems shadowy and abstract -almost as bloodless as the
statues in a wax museum devoted to Israeli history.
Two scenes are particularly disturbing. At a mass burial, the
camera rushes in on a weeping profile in a way that's intrusive
-because we've been given so little sense of the dead or even of
the war. Later, in a hospital, a shell-shocked soldier relives his
battlefield experiences under drugs, while a psychiatrist and the
hospital staff recreate the noises of shooting and bombing. (This is
said to be therapeutic for the patient. The staff looks as though it
rather enjoys the task.) It should be devastating to watch this man
burrow into the pillow, shudder, dive beneath the bed. But these
moments have been filmed with such confusion that we can't
respond to his suffering - indeed, suffering's hardly conveyed in
Promised Lands. Because the movie is dull and badly organized,
the war is made to seem unreal.
Unlike Claude Lanzmann's very fine documentary, Israel Why,
which was shown at the 1973 New York Film Festival, the Sontag
film won't increase your understanding of Israel. Perhaps the latter
should have been a book instead of a film.

*
February 9, 1975
The Evolution of Susan Sontag
By HILTON KRAMER
In place of hermeneutics, Susan Sontag wrote at the close of her
famous essay Against Interpretation, in 1964, we need an
erotics of art. It was this essay, with its stunning declaration of
independence from the traditional obligations of criticism, that
gave the title to Miss Sontag's first volume of essays, published in
1966, and it was this sentiment -for it was clearly a sentiment more
than an idea -that helped to make Against Interpretation one of
the most widely read and widely influential works of criticism in the
1960's. Hermeneutics, the attempt to analyze or interpret works of
art for their hidden meanings, was resoundingly rejected in favor of
an erotics that, though never defined, invoked a promise of
untroubled esthetic delight: untroubled precisely because it would
no longer be burdened by intrusions of moral discrimination.
In the cultural climate of the late 1960's, this was a position of
immense consequence. It conferred on the experience of art the
same kind of radical freedom that was already at work in the realm
of politics and personal moral, in modes of dress and sexuality and
social manners -in everything, indeed, that came to be lumped
under the rubric of life-style. What was upheld as the highest
value was the sensuous surface of art, and anything in our
response that complicated or modified or abridged our surrender to
the sensory experience of the work of art was dismissed as a
form of life-denying philistinism. The fiercest opprobrium was
reserved for criticism that concerned itself with the so-called
content of a work of art, for it was this content that was
alleged to prompt these despised efforts of interpretation. It is no
exaggeration to say that Miss Sontag's views on this question
-abetted, as they were, by so many other voices joined in the
celebration of style at the expense of moral analysis -had a
far-reaching effect on the way an entire generation conceived the
very nature of esthetic experience. Exactly how this erotics of art
might differ from that powerful current of estheticism that had
been a significant factor in both art and criticism, at least since the

Decadent movement in 19th-century France and England, was

never very clear. Miss Sontag seemed at times only to be extending
the concept of art-for-art's-sake to a larger and more
encompassing terrain.
Miss Sontag never lacked courage in applying her ideas to difficult
cases. Thus, in another of the key essays that were collected in
Against Interpretation -the essay On Style -she wrote as
follows: In art 'content' is, as it were, the pretext, the goal, the lure
which engages consciousness in essentially formal processes of
transformation.
This is how we can, in good conscience, cherish works of art
which, considered in terms of 'content,' are morally objectionable
to us.... to call Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will and
The Olympiad masterpieces is not to gloss over Nazi propaganda
with aesthetic lenience. The Nazi propaganda is there, too, which
we reject at our loss. Because they project the complex movements
of intelligence and grace and sensuousness, these two films of
Riefenstahl (unique among works of Nazi artists) transcend the
categories of propaganda or even reportage.... Through
Riefenstahl's genius as a filmmaker, the 'content' has -let us even
assume, against her intentions -come to play a purely formal role.
A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot -whatever the
artist's personal intentions -advocate anything at all. The greatest
artists attain a sublime neutrality. Never had the case for formalist
aestheticism been so boldly stated in the face of such obvious
-and, one might have thought, such unarguable -moral objections.
From the essay On Style, one could only conclude that there
existed absolutely no basis on which a work of art, so far as it is a
work of art, could be called to moral account.
All of this is worth recalling now, not only because of the influence
this notion once wielded -Against Interpretation as one of the
very few works of serious criticism to be reprinted in a mass market
paperback edition -but because Miss Sontag has now completely
reversed her position. Writing at length in the current (Feb. 6)
number of The New York Review of Books, she has taken the recent
publication of The Last of the Nuba, a handsome book of
photographs by Leni Riefenstahl as an occasion to explore the
meaning -which is to say, the content -of what she does not
hesitate to identify as fascist aesthetics. In this remarkable

essay, entitled Fascinating Fascism, she not only anatomizes the

nature of fascist art, as exemplified in the photographs and films
of Leni Riefenstahl, but excoriates the kind of dumb taste that has
led to the purification of Leni Riefenstahl's reputation of its Nazi
dross. The result is one of the most important inquiries into the
relation of esthetics to ideology we have had in many years, and
the only really troubling aspect of its publication -so welcome in
every other respect -is the author's refusal to acknowledge her own
contribution to a phenomenon she now vehemently deplores.
Miss Sontag is under no illusion about the basis of Riefenstahl's
recent return to favor among Western esthetes. She speaks of the
change of attitude that lies in a shift in taste which simple makes
it impossible to reject art if it is 'beautiful.' Now the photographs in
The Last of the Nuba, which takes as its subject the life of an
African tribe distinguished for both its physical beauty and its
complete isolation from the corruptions of modern civilization,
are indeed beautiful by almost any standard we care to apply.
That is why, Miss Sontag writes, 'The Last of the Nuba' is the
final, necessary step in Riefenstahl's rehabilitation. It is the final
rewrite of the past; or, for her partisans, the definitive confirmation
that she was always a beauty-freak rather than a horrid
propagandist. For Miss Sontag, however, these photographs of a
primitivist ideal constitute the third in Riefenstahl's triptych of
fascist visuals. It is impossible here to do justice to the wealth of
analytical detail that Miss Sontag lavishes on her thesis that The
Last of the Nuba is consistent with some of the larger themes of
Nazi ideology and on the conjunction of esthetics and ideology
both in the photographs and in Riefenstahl's celebrated
documentary movies. But I do want to quote several passages in
which the implications of this conjunction are discussed. We are a
long way, in Fascinating Fascism, from that sealed chamber of
style in which content is a pretext for some transcendent
esthetic avowal.
Riefenstahl's films are still effective, Miss Sontag writes,
because, among other reasons, their longings are still felt,
because their content is a romantic ideal to which many continue
to be attached, and which is expressed in such diverse modes of
cultural dissidence and propaganda for new forms of community as
the youth/rock culture, primal therapy, Laing's anti-psychiatry,

Third World camp-following and belief in gurus and the occult.

(Italics added.) Noting that one of Riefenstahl's main projects has
lately been to photograph Mick Jagger, Miss Sontag comments:
Riefenstahl's current de-Nazification and vindication as
indomitable priestess of the beautiful -as a filmmaker and, now, as
a photographer -do not augur well for the keenness of current
abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst. The force of her
work is precisely in the continuity of its political and aesthetic
ideas. What is interesting is that this was once seen so much more
clearly than it seems to be now. Again, one admires the insight,
but can only marvel at the lack of self-awareness it suggests.
Miss Sontag understands very well the kind of esthetic and even
sexual appeal that Nazi iconography has lately acquired among
artistic and sexual adventurers. (Along with The Last of the Nuba,
she also discusses a paperback volume on SS Regalia.) She is
interesting on what she calls the eroticization of fascism, but she
remains curiously aloof -not exactly approving, but remarkably
gentle about drawing the obvious implications -about some recent
examples of the esthetization of fascist iconography. Thus she
writes about last year's notorious Robert Morris poster: The poster
Robert Morris made for his recent show at the Castelli Gallery in
April, 1974, is a photograph of the artist, naked to the waist,
wearing dark glasses, what appears to be a Nazi helmet, and a
spiked steel collar, attached to which is a large chain which he
holds in his manacled, uplifted hand. Morris is said to have
considered this the the only image that still has any power to
shock: a singular virtue to those who take for granted that art is a
sequence of ever-fresh gestures of provocation. But the point of the
poster is its own negation. Shocking people in this context also
means inuring them, as Nazi material enters the vast repertory or
popular iconography usable for the ironic commentaries of Pop
art. But is the point of such a poster really its own negation? I
wonder, especially when Miss Sontag herself, in the very next
sentence, adds that the material is intransigent. The Morris
poster was no surprise to anyone who visited the 1972 Documenta
exhibition in Kassel, West Germany, for in that gigantic assembly of
artists, works of art and ideological frameworks, fascist
iconography -both in its kitsch and its more solemn high art

varieties -was clearly to be seen making a successful comeback

among advanced artists and intellectuals. Mr.
Morris drew the obvious conclusions: that there was a
scandalous taste now waiting to be satisfied. The discussion of
the Morris poster is one of the few disappointing passages in Miss
Sontag's essay.
This essay is one of a series Miss Sontag has written during the
last year or so on the subject of photography. (These essays are, I
understand, now being revised for publication in a book, to be
called On Photography, later this year.) I think it is interesting
that photography, even more than the movies, has prompted her
to move beyond the boundaries of a purely esthetic criticism. It
lead one to wonder if the current excitement over photography as
art is going to accomplish something more than a belated
appreciation of an art form long neglected by serious criticism.
Will it, perhaps, lead to a general reopening of the question of
content in art -a question long considered impermissible in the
higher criticism? Miss Sontag's essay -important in its own right
-suggests that this might indeed be the case.
*
February 8, 1976
Notes on Art, Sex and Politics
By SUSAN SONTAG
The following excerpts are taken from an interview which
appeared in the Fall 1975 Winter 1976 issue of Salmagundi, a
quarterly magazine published by Skidmore College.
Intellectuals who want to defend our poor sick culture should resist
the all-too-understandable temptation to fume about the
unlettered masses and accuse other intellectuals of joining the
enemy. Any distinction between the cultural elite and the
instinctual mass suggests a contempt for the instincts, a facile
pessimism about people, and a lack of passion for the arts that is
not confirmed by my own instincts, pessimism, passions.
If I'm leery of talking about a cultural elite, it's not because I
don't care about culture but because I think the notion is virtually
unusable and should be retired. Early modernists like Rimbaud,

Stravinsky, Apollinaire, Joyce and Eliot showed how high culture

could assimilate shards of low culture. (The Waste Land,
Ulysses, etc., etc.)
By the 1960's the popular arts, notably film and rock music, had
taken up the abrasive themes and some of the difficult
techniques (like collage) that had hitherto been the fare of the
university-educated, museum-going, cosmopolitan audience for the
avant-garde or experimental arts. That the modernist sensibility
had created new boundaries for popular culture, and was
eventually incorporated into it -this is a fact that nobody who has
cared for culture can ignore or should fail to treat with high
seriousness.
It seems rather late to stop identifying culture with some
Masterpiece Theater of World History and to respond -on the basis
of contemporary experience, and moved by pleasure rather than
resentment -to how complex the destiny of high culture has
become since Matthew Arnold whistled in the dark on Dover Beach.
The notion of culture implied by the distinction seems to me awfully
middlebrow, and plausible only to someone who has never been
really immersed in or gotten intense pleasure from contemporary
poetry and music and painting. Toryish labels like cultural elite
and instinctual mass do not tell us anything useful about how to
protect that endangered species, high standards.
Diagnoses of cultural sickness made in such general and
self-congratulatory terms become a symptom of the problem, not
part of the answer.
I've been asked whether there is something about works of art that
make them objectively conservative or reactionary. I doubt that
there is anything more conservative or reactionary about
artists than there is about people. And why shouldn't people be
naturally conservative?
That the past necessarily weighs more on the axis of human
consciousness is perhaps a greater liability to the individual than to
society, but how could it be otherwise? Where is the scandal? To be
scandalized by the normal is always demagogic. And it is only
normal that we are aware of ourselves as persons in a historical
continuum, with indefinite thicknesses of past behind us, the
present a razor's edge, and the future -well, problematic is one
damp word for it.

Dividing the time into Past, Present & Future suggests that reality
is distributed equally among three parts, but in fact the past is the
most real of all. The future is, inevitably, an accumulation of loss,
and dying is something we do all our lives. If artists are memory
specialists, professional curators of consciousness, they are only
practicing -willfully, obsessionally -a prototypical devoutness.
There is a tilt in the very experience of living which always gives
memory an advantage over amnesia.
To reproach artists for having an insufficiently radical relation to
the world has to be a complaint about art as such. And to reproach
art is, in more than one way, like reproaching consciousness itself
for being a burden. For consciousness can be conscious of itself, as
Hegelians quaintly say, only through its sense of the past. And art
is the most general condition of The Past in the present. To become
past is, in one version, to become art. (The arts that most
literally illustrate this mutation are architecture and photography.)
The pathos that all works of art reek of comes from their historicity.
From the way they are overtaken by physical decay and stylistic
obsolescence. And from whatever is mysterious, partly (and
forever) veiled about them. And simply from our awareness, with
each work, that no one would or could ever do exactly that again.
Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part
of the past.
Doesn't demanding that artists cut themselves loose from the
inherited past, as some radical critics do, mean wanting them
not to be artists any more? Such a talent for jettisoning everything
has to be extremely rare. And its promised benefits have yet to be
demonstrated. The clean sweep being proposed as a goal for
radical therapy as well as art (and, by extension, for politics)
suggests that liberation can be very confining. That is, it seems
regressive in relation to the full range of our possibilities -among
which civilization tries, to almost everyone's dissatisfaction, to
arbitrate. The price we would pay for liberation in that sense is at
least as steep as the price we've been paying for civilization.
If one is going to be forced to choose between defensive fantasies
of liberation and ruling corruptions of civilization, let's work fast to
soften the harshness of that choice. It's sobering to realize that
both options seemed just as morally defective a century ago when
Henry James made his prescient, melancholy analysis of our

post-1960's cultural dilemmas in The Princess Casamassima,

with imaginary London anarchists anticipating American New Left
and counter-culture ideologues.
Question the self-designated radicals who appear to be calling for
a cultural tabula rasa, and I think you'd find that they are seldom as
modernist as their rhetoric would imply. They confuse a moralistic
political radicalism (assumed to be a Good Thing) with an amoral
revolt against the inherited past that is in full complicity with the
status quo. A radical in that sense would be Andy Warhol, the
dandy prince and ideally passive avatar of an economy in which
everything of the past is scheduled to be traded in for newer
goods.
In the 19th century, ideologues of provocation and transvaluation
like Nietzsche and Wilde expounded on the esthetic view of the
world, one of whose superiorities was that it was supposed to be
the most generous and large-spirited view, a form of civility,
beyond politics. The evolution of fascism in the 20th century has
taught us that they were wrong. As it turns out, the esthetic view
of the world is extremely hospitable to many of the uncivilized
ideas and dissociated yearnings that were made explicit in fascism,
and which also have great currency in our consumer culture. Yet it
is clear -China has made it very clear -that the moralism of serious
communist societies not only wipes out the autonomy of the
esthetic, but makes it impossible to produce art (in the modern
sense) at all. A six-week trip to China in 1973 convinced me -if I
needed convincing -that the autonomy of the esthetic is something
to be protected, and cherished, as indispensable nourishment to
intelligence.
When official art in the soviet Union and China isn't resolutely
old-fashioned, it is, objectively, fascist. Unlike the ideal communist
society -which is totally didactic, turning every institution into a
school -the fascist ideal is to mobilize everybody into a kind of
national gesamtkunstwerk: making the whole society into a
theater. This is the most far-reaching way in which esthetics
becomes a politics. It becomes a politics of the lie.
I don't like party lines. They make for intellectual monotony an bad
prose. I want armies of women and men to be pointing out the
omnipresence of sexist stereotypes in the language, behavior and
imagery of our society. But I'd like to see a few platoons of

intellectuals who are also feminists doing their bit in the war
against misogyny in their own way, letting the feminist implications
be residual or implicit in their work, without risking being charged
by their sisters with desertion.
Some feminist critics, for example, have labeled Ingmar Bergman
as a reactionary artist. That's the weapon of repressive and
ignorant officialdom in you-know-which countries, where
reactionary is also associated with a kind of pessimistic content
or with not providing positive images. Being very attached to the
benefits of pluralism in the arts and of factionalism in politics, I've
grown allergic to the words reactionary and progressive. Such
judgments always support ideological conformity, encourage
intolerance -even if they aren't originally formulated to do that. As
for Bergman, I'd say that anyone who reduces his work to its
neo-Strindbergian views of women has jettisoned the idea of art
and of complex standards of judgment. The harsh indictment of
Bergman simply inverts the slack standards that prevail in much of
feminist criticism. To those critics who rate films according to
whether they make moral reparations, it must seem snobbish to
cavil about the low quality of most recent movies made by women
which do convey positive images.
It's not the appropriateness of feminist criticism which need to be
rethought, but its level -its demands for intellectual simplicity,
advanced in the name of ethical solidarity. These demands have
convinced many women that it is undemocratic to raise questions
about the quality of feminist discourse, if it is sufficiently militant,
and the quality of works of art, if these are sufficiently
warm-hearted and self-revealing. Hatred of the intellect is one of
the recurrent themes of modernist protest in art and in morals.
Though it is actually quite inimical to effective political action, it
seems like a political statement.
Both avant-garde art and feminism have made large use of, and
sometimes seem to be parodies of, the languages of failed political
movements. One common denominator of New Left polemics was
its zeal for pitting hierarchy against equality, theory against
practice, intellect (cold) against feeling (warm). Feminists have
tended to perpetuate these philistine characterizations of
hierarchy, theory and intellect. That kind of second-hand militancy
may appear to serve feminist goals in the short run. But it means a

surrender to callow notions of art and of thought and the

encouragement of a genuinely repressive moralism.
What distinguishes the work of the pornographic imagination
from other accounts of the erotic life is that it treats sexuality as an
extreme situation. That means that what pornography depicts is, in
one obvious sense, quite unrealistic. Sexual energy is not endlessly
renewable; sexual acts cannot be tirelessly repeated. But in
another sense pornography is rudely accurate about important
realities of desire. That voluptuousness does mean surrender, and
that sexual surrender pursued imaginatively enough, experienced
immoderately enough, does erode pride of individuality and mocks
the notion that the will could ever be free -these are truths about
sexuality itself, and what it may, naturally, become.
Because it is such an ascesis to live completely for
voluptuousness, only a few women and men ever do pursue
pleasure to this terminal extreme. The fantasy of sexual apocalypse
is common enough, however - indisputably, a means for
intensifying sexual pleasure. And what that tells us about the
inhuman, as it were, character of intense pleasure is still being
slighted by the humanist revisionist Freudianism that most
feminists feel comfortable with, which minimizes the intractable
powers of unconscious or irrational feeling.
There seems to be something inherently defective or
self-frustrating in the way the sexual impulse works in human
beings -for instance, an essential (i.e. normal), not accidental (i.e.
neurotic), link between sexual energy and obsession. It appears
likely that the full development of our sexual being does clash with
the full development of our consciousness. Instead of supposing
that all our sexual discontent is part of a tax sexuality pays for
being civilized, it may be more correct to assume that we are, first
of all, sick by nature -and that it is our being, to begin with, what
Nietzsche
called
sick
animals,
that
makes
us
civilization-producing animals.
It is the innate incongruence between important achievements in
the realms of sexual fulfillment and of individual consciousness that
is exacerbated by the enlarged use to which sexuality has been put
in modern, secular culture. As the credibility of religious experience
has declined, erotic experience had not only gotten an inflated,
even grandiose significance, but is itself now subjected to

standards of credibility (thereby attaching a whole new sort of

anxiety to sexual performance). In particular, the quest for the
experience of complete psychic surrender now no longer enclosed
within traditional religious forms has become increasingly, and
restlessly, attached to the mind-blowing character of the orgasm.
My interest in the pornographic novel, Story of O, is in its candor
about the demonic side of sexual fantasy. The violence of the
imagination that it consecrates -and does not at all deplore -cannot
be confined within the optimistic and rationalist perceptions of
mainstream feminism. Pornography's form of utopistic thinking is,
like most of science fiction, a negative utopia. Since the writers
who have insisted on how fierce, disruptive and antinomian an
energy sexuality (potentially, ideally) is, are mostly men, it's
commonly supposed that this form of the imagination must
discriminate against women. I don't think it does, necessarily.
Evidence about the feelings and sexual tastes in our culture before
it was wholly secularized, and in other cultures past and present,
suggests that voluptuousness was rarely pursued in this way, as
the organon to transcend individual consciousness. Perhaps only
when sexuality is invested with that ideological burden, as it is now,
does it also become a real, and not just a potential, danger to a
person-hood and to individuation.
We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance
altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an
instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only
intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical,
disimplifying. An intelligence which aims at the definitive resolution
(that is, suppression) of conflict, which justifies manipulation always, of course, for other people's good, as in the argument
brilliantly made by Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, which haunts
the main tradition of science fiction -is not my normative idea of
intelligence.
Not surprisingly, contempt for intelligence goes with the contempt
of history. And history is, yes, tragic. But I'm not able to support any
idea of intelligence which aims at bringing history to an end substituting for the tragedy that makes civilization at least possible
the nightmare or the Good Dream of eternal barbarism.
I am assuming that the defense of civilization implies the defense
of an intelligence that is not authoritarian. But all contemporary

defenders of civilization must be aware -though I don't think it

helps to say it often -that this civilization, already so far overtaken
by barbarism, is at an end, and nothing we do will put it back
together again. So in the culture of transition out of which we can
try to make sense, fighting off the twin afflictions of hyperesthesia
and passivity, no position can be a comfortable one or should be
complacently held.
Susan Sontag is a writer and filmmaker. Her latest book, On
Photography, will be published in the spring.
*
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Susan Sontag
The metaphors that Artaud uses to describe his intellectual
distress treat the mind either as a property to which one never
holds clear title (or whose title one has lost) or as a physical
substance that is intransigent, fugitive, unstable, obscenely
mutable. As early as 1921, at the age of twenty-five, he states his
problem as that of never managing to possess his mind in its
entirety. Throughout the nineteen-twenties, he laments that his
ideas abandon him, that he is unable to discover his ideas,
that he cannot attain his mind, that he has lost his
understanding of words and forgotten the forms of thought.
In more direct metaphors, he rages against the chronic erosion of
his ideas, the way his thought crumbles beneath him or leaks
away; he describes his mind as fissured, deteriorating, petrifying,
liquefying, coagulating, empty, impenetrably dense: words rot.
Artaud suffers not from doubt as to whether his I thinks but from
a conviction that he does not possess his own thought. He does not
say that he is unable to think; he says that he does not have
thought -which he takes to be much more than having correct
ideas or judgments.
Having thought means that process by which thought sustains
itself, manifests itself to itself, and is answerable to all the
circumstances of feeling and of life. It is in this sense of thought,
which treats thought as both subject and object of itself, that

Artaud claims not to have it. Artaud shows how the Hegelian,
dramatistic, self-regarding consciousness can reach the state of
total alienation ( instead of detached, comprehensive wisdom )
-because the mind remains an object.
The language that Artaud uses is profoundly contradictory. His
imagery is materialistic (making the mind into a thing or object ),
but his demand on the mind amounts to the purest philosophical
idealism. He refuses to consider consciousness except as a process.
Yet it is the process character of consciousness -its unseizability
and flux -that he experiences as hell. The real pain, says Artaud,
is to feel one's thought shift within oneself. The consequence of
Artaud's verdict upon himself -his conviction of his chronic
alienation from his own consciousness -is that his mental deficit
becomes, directly or indirectly, the dominant, inexhaustible subject
of his writings.
Some of Artaud's accounts of his Passion of thought are almost too
painful to read. He elaborates little on his emotions -panic,
confusion, rage, dread. His gift was not for psychological
understanding (which, not being good at it, he dismissed as trivial)
but for a more original mode of description, a kind of physiological
phenomenology of his unending desolation. Artaud's claim in The
Nerve Meter that no one has ever so accurately charted his
intimate self is not an exaggeration. Nowhere in the entire
history of writing in the first person is there as tireless and detailed
a record of the microstructure of mental pain.
The quality of one's consciousness is Artaud's final standard. thus,
his intellectual distress is at the same time the most acute physical
distress, and each statement about his body. Indeed, what causes
his incurable pain of consciousness is precisely his refusal to
consider the mind apart from the situation of the flesh.
The difficulties that Artaud laments persist because he is thinking
about the unthinkable -about how body is mind and how mind is
also a body. This inexhaustible paradox is mirrored in Artaud's wish
to produce art that is at the same time anti-art. The latter paradox,
however, is more hypothetical than real.
Ignoring Artaud's disclaimers, readers will inevitably assimilate his
strategies of discourse to art whenever those strategies reach (as
they often do ) a certain triumphant pitch of incandescence.

Artaud's work denies that there is any difference between art and
thought, between poetry and truth. Despite the breaks in
exposition and the varying of forms within each work, everything
he wrote advances a line of argument.
Artaud is always didactic. He never ceased insulting, complaining,
exhorting, denouncing -even in the poetry written after he emerged
from the insane asylum in Rodez, in 1946, in which language
becomes partly unintelligible; that is, an unmediated physical
presence. All his writing is in the first person, and is a mode of
address in the mixed voices of incantation and discursive
explanation.
His activities are simultaneously art and reflections on art. In an
early essay on painting, Artaud declares that works of art are
worth only as much as the conceptions on which they are founded
Artaud's criterion of spectacle is sensory violence, not sensory
enchantment; beauty is a notion he never entertains. The
experience of his work remains profoundly private. Artaud is
someone who has made a spiritual trip for us -a shaman. It would
be presumptuous to reduce the geography of Artaud's trip to what
can be colonized. Its authority lies in the parts that yield nothing for
the reader except intense discomfort of the imagination.
Artaud's work becomes usable according to our needs, but the
work vanishes behind our use of it. When we tire of using Artaud,
we can return to his writings. Inspiration in stages, he says. One
mustn't let in too much literature. All art that expresses a radical
discontent and aims at shattering complacencies of feeling risks
being disarmed, neutralized, drained of its power to disturb -by
being admired, by being ( or seeming to be) too well understood,
by becoming relevant. Most of the once exotic themes of Artaud's
work have within the last decade become loudly topical: the
wisdom (or lack of it) to be found in drugs, Oriental religions,
magic, the life of North American Indians, body language, the
insanity trip; the revolt against literature, and the belligerent
prestige of non-verbal arts; the appreciation of schizophrenia; the
use of art as violence against the audience; the necessity for
obscenity.
Both in his work and in his life Artaud failed. His work includes
verse; prose poems; film scripts; writings on cinema, painting, and
literature; essays, diatribes, and polemics on the theater; several

plays, and notes for many unrealized theater projects, among them
an opera; a historical novel; a fourpart dramatic monologue written
for radio; essays on the peyote cult of the Tarahumara Indians;
radiant appearances in two great films (Gance's Napoleon and
Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc) and many minor ones; and
hundreds of letters, his most accomplished dramatic form -all of
which amount to a broken, self-mutilated corpus, a vast collection
of fragments. What he bequeathed was not achieved works of art
but a singular presence, a poetics, an aesthetics of thought, a
theology of culture, and a phenomenology of suffering.
Artaud in the nineteen-twenties had just about every taste (except
enthusiasms for. comic books, science fiction, and Marxism ) that
was to become prominent in the American counterculture of the
nineteensixties, and what he was reading in that decade -the
Tibetan Book of the Dead, books on mysticism, psychiatry,
anthropology, tarot, astrology, Yoga, acupuncture -is like a
prophetic anthology of the literature that has recently surfaced as
popular reading among the advanced young. Susan Sontag
-whose new novel, In America, has just been published -doesn't
feel at home in New York, or anywhere else. And that's the way she
likes it April 13, 2000
*
December 18, 1977 A Different Kind of Art
By WILLIAM H. GASS On Photography
By Susan Sontag
Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable, the anonymous narrator of
one of Borges's apocalyptic tales tells us, because they multiply
and disseminate an already illusory universe; and if this opinion is,
as seems likely, surely true, then what of the most promiscuous
and sensually primitive of all our gadgets -the camera -which
copulates with the world merely by widening its eye, and thus so
simply fertilized, divided itself as quietly as amoebas do, and with a
gentle buzz slides its newborn image into view on a coated tongue?
No simple summary of the views contained in Susan Sontag's brief
but brilliant work on photography is possible, first because there

are too many, and second because the book is a thoughtful

meditation, not a treatise, and its ideas are grouped more nearly
like a gang of keys upon a ring than a run of onions on a sting. I can
only try, here, to provide kid of dissolute echo of her words. The
hollow sounds are all my own.
Susan Sontag not only has made films -and written critical essays
(Notes on Camp,
Against Interpretation) and fiction -she also has a passionate
interest in the Nikon's resonant echo or the Brownie's little print, as
this beautiful book attests. Every page of On Photography raises
important and exciting questions about its subject and raises them
in the best way. In a context of clarity, skepticism and passionate
concern, with an energy that never weakens but never blusters,
and with an admirable pungency of thought and directness of
expression that sacrifices nothing of sublety or refinement, Sontag
encourages the reader's cooperation in her enterprise. Though
disagreement at some point is certain, and every notion naturally
needs refinement, every hypothesis support, every alleged
connection further oil, the book understands exactly the locale and
the level of its argument. Each issue is severed at precisely the
right point, nothing left too short or let go on too long. So her book
has, as we say, a good head: well cut, perfectly coiffed, uniform or
complete in tone of color, with touches of intelligence so numerous
they create a picture of photography the way those grains of gray
compose the print.
Sontag's comments on the work of Diane Arbus are particularly apt
and beautifully orchestrated, as she raises the level of our
appreciation and understanding of these strange photographs each
time, in the course of her exposition, she has occasion to remark
upon them. But these six elegant and carefully connected essays
are not really about individual photographers, nor solely about the
art, but rather about the act of photography at large, the plethora
of the product, the puzzles of its nature.
Principal among these problems is the fact that the line between
'amateur' and 'professional,' 'primitive' and 'sophisticated' is not
just harder to draw with photography than it is with painting -it has
little meaning. Naive or commercial or merely utilitarian
photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced
by the most gifted professionals: there are pictures taken by

anonymous amateurs which are just as interesting, as complex

formally, as representative of photography's characteristic powers
as Stieglitz or a Walker Evans. Technical finish is not a measure.
Intention scarcely maters. The subject alone signs no guarantee. I
once took a terribly overexposed photograph of a Spanish olive
grove, but if you thought I had intended the result, you could
admire the interplay of the trees' washed-out form, the heat that
seems to sweep through the grove like the wind. The fact is that,
although there are many calculations which can be made before
any photograph is taken, and of course tricks can be played during
the developing afterward the real work is executed in a single click.
A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.
The decisions a photographer must make, compared to those of
the flower-arranger or salad chef, are few and simple indeed. The
effects of his actions are dominated by accident: the ambiance of
an instant in the camera's apprehension of the world. The formal
properties of photographs, even the most formal ones, are too
often exhausted in a glance, and we return to the subject, again
and again, with other than esthetic interest. So far, certainly, the
artistic importance of the camera has been secondary to its effect
on society, on our knowledge of processes like aging, of things and
beings (like the body of the opposite sex), on our standards of
illustration an documentation, our ability to influence others with its
powerful rhetoric, its untiring surveillance. It has changed the
composition of our amusements and pastimes beyond return,
altered our attitudes toward seeing itself.
One realizes, reading Susan Sontag's book, that the image has
done more than smother or mask or multiply its object. My face is
only photography, and people inspect me to see if I resemble it.
The family album demonstrates to me what I don't yet feel: not
that I was young once, but that I'm old now. Time, so long as it
lingers in the look, is visible to us in this photographic age in a way
it was never visible before, among familiar things, we fail to
measure change with any accuracy; but the camera records one
step upon the stone, and then another, until the foot has worn a
hollow like a hand cupped to catch rain. Process has become
perceptible in the still.
And that is strange. For the still photograph is rarely of a still
subject, although in slower days one was cautioned not to move;

and the image the camera caught, and was made to cough up, was
an image already stopped, seized, like the victims of Pompeii's
lava, in the slow flow of the subject's will. We can easily see the
difference now, because, out of the continuities of experience, the
sitter (that was the word) selected the slice that was to stand for
his or her life, the prettiest or most imposing self (although this
itself took skill that few possess); whereas it is normally the camera
that makes the choice these days, and we are encouraged to relax,
to guard against being on our guard, as if the pose were merely
that, and the candid camera, more likely to serve up a fairer, fuller
share of us that our own decision would supply. Besides,
ceremonies are another thing of the past, and a visit to the
photographer is itself something to be photographed before it
disappears like the Aborigines. What was once a black box with a
backwards beard, a menacing presence, a merciless eye, has
become as discreet as a quick peek, friendly as an old chum,
ubiquitous as bees at a picnic or Japanese school children at a
shrine.
But camera enthusiasts are nor always fans of the photograph.
There are too many benefits in the point and click itself. The
business of taking a picture is, first of all, a flattering and righteous
one, as Sontag points out, so the shooter is accorded considerable
respect: If the subject, we are pleased to have been found
pictorial, worthy of homage or memorial; if a bystander, we do
not wish so come between the lens and its love, so we stop or turn
aside or otherwise absent our image. It is bad manners to block the
view or be insensitive to the claims of the camera.
We have learned to read resemblance as easily as English. A
photograph is flat, reduced, rigidly rectangular like the view-finder,
cropped out of space like a piece of grass, sliced from time like
cheese or salami, fixed on a piece of transportable paper, soft or
glossy as no perception is, often taken at artificial speeds,
positions, distances, so we can see both shatters and implosions,
the pale denizens of caves or the deep sea, the insides of minerals,
as she says, crystals, sky, the speed of bees; and almost invariably,
in the case of the serious camera, the photograph is composed
wholly of shadow, its shades going from gray to gray like night or
our moods in a state of depression; yet we breathe in its illusions
like a heavy scent.

Sontag omits none of these matters, touching on them frequently,

each time in a more complex and complete way, though her
method (exactly appropriate to the vastness of her subject, the
untechnical level of her language, the literary nature of her form)
allows only the brush, the mention, the intriguing suggestion. Given
my own philosophical biases, I should have been pleased to see her
weigh more heavily the highly conventional character of the
simplest Polaroid. However, the belief in the realism of its image is
fundamental to the cultural impact of the camera, and since that is
an important part of her theme, she is right to stress it.
Even if the camera were more like the eye than it is, and Sontag is
both put off and beguiled by the parallels, it sits steady as the
spider for the fly, sees only in a blink, and is sightless 99 percent of
the time -while we see between blinks as between Venetian blinds,
and our sight is thus relatively uninterrupted, in a sense continuing
even through our sleep.
When we see, there is always the I as well as the eye. There is
the frame of the eye socket, the fringe of hair, the feel of the face,
our hungers, hopes and hates -that full and exuberant life in which
objects seen are seen because they're sought, complained of, or
encountered - though no photograph contains them. And when we
carry away from any experience a visual memory (remote,
conventional, schematic in its own way, too... no souvenir), that
recollection is private, not public; it cannot be handed round for
sniggers, smiles or admiration; it cannot lie a lifetime in a box to be
discovered by distant cousins who will giggle at the quaintness of
its clothing.
No. I think that I would want to say that the camera only pretends
to be an eye. It creates another object to be seen, yet one that
exists quite differently than a perception; not merely differing as
people differ who come from different climates and geography, but
as entities differ which have their homes in different realms of
Being. It is not sight the camera satisfies so thoroughly, but the
mind; for it creates in a click a visual concept of its object, a sign
whose substance seems seductively the same as its sense, yet
whose artificiality is no less than the S's that line the sentence like
nervous sparrows on a swaying wire.
Sontag discusses, it seems to me, a number of separate, though
not necessarily equal or even exclusive views of what the serious

purpose of photography might be, apart from the immediate needs

of sentiment and utility it so obviously serves. The camera certainly
confers an identity on whatever it isolates, however arbitrary the
framing. It permits its subject to speak to the world, in a way it
would otherwise never be able to do, by multiplying its presence,
taking it from its natural environment and placing it within the
reach of many, as though it could live well anywhere, like the
starling.
The lens removes reality from reality better than a surgeon, and
allows us to witness killing with impunity, nakedness without
shame, weddings without weeping, miracles without astonishment,
poverty without pain, death without anxiety. It discovers a desirable
titillation in overlooked, humble, ugly, out-of-the-way or unlikely
objects, often reflecting the interest of a social class in what the
camera considers exotic.
It can create an image that will interpret its object , so that the
shot will not be a cartoon balloon fixed to something real, but a
caption of commentary, like an epitaph, beneath. In addition, the
camera finds forms in nature that are the same as those which
establish beauty in the other arts, an thus proves that photography
is itself an art -an art of structural epiphany, if God has had a hand
in the laws of Nature.
The camera is a leveler. It makes everything photogenic. Every
angle of an object has an interest, as has every object from any
angle, every entrance, every exit, however odd or quick or small or
previously proscribed. A scullery maid may make a better picture
than a queen. And the eye is omnivorous as an army of army ants.
The perfect cook, the camera can make anything, in a photograph
as on a platter, look good. Of course, the camera may be
registering exactly that relation of eye and apprehension which
give the machine is particular epistemology.
The image is magically superior to the word because, though a
gray ghost, the photo is believed to possess actual properties of its
object.
Furthermore, the relation between image and object has been
made by machine -a device that lifts off a look with less wear than
a rubbing -yet what in the image is the same as its source?
In a sense, what one catches in a photograph is reflected light, and
film is like river sand that receives the imprint of the drinking deer,

or mud that preserves the tire tread of a robber's car; but the
causal connection is loose, and can be faked. Suppose, for
instance, we contrived to dimple up an image, by artificial means,
created the picture of a person who never existed (doctored
photographs do that for events). The photo would still look like a
man, but it would not be the image of anybody, and so (without its
of) would not be an image.
Would it any longer be a photograph?
The great equalizer, the camera has brought democracy to the
visual levels of the world. Now images accompany us everywhere,
even attesting to our quite fragile and always dubious identity (to
paraphrase Gertrude Stein: I am I because my shrunken photo
shows me). Though only a hundred years old as an art,
photography seems already ageless as a skill, its product without
limit, even if its images are not immortal and do decay, and even if
some species are endangered. Perhaps they move us too easily, as
though we stood on skates. Perhaps, at the same time, we have
grown too familiar with the way the camera makes our common
clay seem strange. Now, not even strangeness is unfamiliar.
Instead of text accompanied by photographs, Susan Sontag has
appended to her book a collection of quotes, framed by
punctuational space and the attribution of source. These are
clipped from their context to create, through collage, another
context -yet more words. And for a book on photography that shall
surely stand near the beginning of all our thoughts upon the
subject, maybe there is a message, a moral, a lesson, in that.
William H. Gass is the author of Omensetter's Luck,
Fiction and the Figures of Life,
On Being Blue and other books. He is professor of philosophy at
Washington University, St. Louis.
*
On Photography (by Susan Sontag)
reviewed by Philip Greenspun for photo.net.
On Photography by Susan Sontag, 1977 Anchor Books.
Go into a bookstore with a photography criticism section. Pick up a
book and open it to a random page. If the text on the page seems

laughably incoherent then you've gotten hold of something written

by a university professor. These books really ought to be pulped at
the bindery with a few copies reserved for the author's tenure
committee but for some reason they occasionally make it past the
book buyer at a reputable store and hence you end up reading
feminist deconstruction of a diamond jewelry ad.
It is a shame that the university types manage to take up shelf
space that could be devoted to more copies of these essays from
The New York Review of Books and books by real photographers.
Sontag first explains why it is necessary to step back and think
about photographs: Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's
cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.
But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by
older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many
more images around, claiming our attention.... In teaching us a new
visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is
worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a
grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.
Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is
to give us the sense that we can hold the whole word in our heads
-as an anthology of images.
Sontag quickly dispenses with the notion that photography is a
form of note-taking: [The Farm Security Administration
photographs] would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their
sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the
right look on film -the precise expression on the subject's face that
supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture,
exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look,
in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always
imposing standards on their subjects. People take pictures of their
family: A family's photograph album is generally about the
extended family -and often, is all that remains of it. People take
pictures on vacation: The very activity of taking pictures is
soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are
likely to be exacerbated by travel.... [Taking pictures] gives shape
to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on. The method
especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic
-Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using a camera appeases the
anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they

are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. Anyway, people

take pictures.
Subjects In many portions of On Photography, Sontag considers
why photographers love taking pictures of losers. She notes that,
unless there is already favorable public sentiment, these pictures
very seldom persuade anyone to care.
Technique Sontag doesn't seem to know much about how
photography is accomplished. Rather than just say this, she
casually drops random comments throughout her text intended to
show the opposite (e.g., she thinks that a Hasselblad is somehow a
typical camera for taking pictures of distant animals in Africa).
Despite this handicap, she has an interesting section about how
photographers pretend to be artists. For example, Ansel Adams
claiming that A photograph is not an accident -it is a concept. The
'machine-gun' approach to photography -by which many negatives
are made with the hope that one will be good -is fatal to serious
results. Sontag notes (correctly in my opinion) that there is an
element of luck in most great pictures.
Warts No Index.
Text and photos copyright 1991-1998 Philip Greenspun.
The story of the dolphins is chronicled at the end of my
underwater photography primer.
I was here to find the date and publisher of the book because in
writing a master's thesis on photography I felt, for some reason,
the need to quote from it. Somewhere in the book I remember
Sontag refering to the act of photographing (especially for tourists)
as one that distances the photographer from the reality that is the
subject -objectifying strange cultures with the camera so that they
might not experience culture shock. I am actually interested in this
idea, not because I agree with all of it, but because I agree with the
part about photography distancing one from reality, yet I have a
different interpretation. I think of this aspect of photography as one
that can help be a vehicle for the artist to see in a more broad way
the reality that he or she has grown used to ignoring. I feel that
because the viewfinder unifies what is within it, this can be seen as
a tool for discovering harmony between realities that are generally
seen (incorrectly) as dichotomies. There is a Zen Buddhist term
that is best translated as beginner's mind that speaks of the

mental openness and receptivity characteristic of a beginner or a

child. This is often what the poetry of the camera speaks about;
that through photographing, one can see in a new way and can
begin to break down the dichotomies such as beautiful/ugly,
sacred/profane and discover a more wholistic and harmonious
world.
-James Kevin Hutchens, October 21, 1997 I like Sontag's work a lot.
I think she could be a little more receptive to postmodernism, as
such. Especially since she admires Baudrillard and Barthes. I mean,
if you drink beer, you like to drink? Sometimes? No?
I agree with Sontag viz. television -the soul destruction of the
universe.
I would like to know what Sontag thinks of the horrible (yet
horribly attractive to a 26 year old straight male) Spize Gurls?
ADD as a methaphor?
-Mr. Full Name, February 3, 1998 Before reading Sontag's book,
you may want to start with Walter Benjamin's famous and
enormously influential essay The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction. As his title suggest, Benjamin discusses
much more than photography, and I think his reflections would be
of interest to any photographer. You can find the essay in a
collection entitled _Illumuminations_, edited with an introduction by
Hannah Arendt.
-Charles G. Ruberto, April 20, 1998 Re: above comments by
Charles G. Ruberto, concerning Susan Sontag interpreting Walter
Benjamin (philosophicaly that is). Please see her astonishing essay,
actually a review, __ The Last Intellectual__ which appeared
originally in The New York Review of Books on October 10, 1978,as
a review of Reflections: Essays, Aporisms, Autobiographical
Writings by Walter Benjamin.
-Brian Arthur, May 13, 1998 Mr. Greespun displays an
anti-intellectualism and contempt for academics that betrays his
own ignorance. Part of what makes Sontag and her work so special
is that she has a constrained yet sharp critical faculty, not one as
blind and naive as Greenspun's blanket condemnations of
academic analysis.
At least I agree that Sontag's book is one of the best I have ever
come across.
-Pierre de Laplace, October 11, 1998

*
December 18, 1977
Sontag Talking
By CHARLES SIMMONS.
Why is there more critical attention being paid to photography
nowadays? Is photography getting better?
A. In the time, the three years or so, that I was working on these
essays, it seemed to become much more central. As late as 1973,
photography books in bookstores tended to be in the back with
gardening books and cookbooks. Now they have a section of their
own, right up front near the cash register. The audience for
photography books - which is an important index to the interest in
photography -enormously enlarged just in that brief period.
There have been many times more photography shows in
museums in the past couple of years than there were, say, 10
years ago. There are many more photography galleries in large
cities than there were 10 years ago.
There's an interest everywhere. The New Yorker started an
occasional photography column about two years ago.
But I can't believe it's because photography is better. In fact, I'm
sure it isn't. There's no reason to think that there are more great
photographers now than in the past. But now photography has
respectability. The battle that has been going on since 1840 for
photography to be acknowledged as an art form has finally been
won.
Indeed, photography as an art form interests a lot of people who
were formerly interested mainly in painting and sculpture.
Q. Could it be that painting and sculpture are simply less
interesting?
A. That's sometimes said. One hears that painting and sculpture
are in a state of demoralization, that there are no exciting new
figures conveying a sense that these are arts in which very
important things are happening, such as people had in the 1950's
and 60's.
Another explanation that's often given is that the enormously
inflated market for painting in the 60's priced many collectors out

of the market and there was a need for a cheap object that people
cold collect.
And the third idea that you hear sometimes is that there's a
reaction against difficulty in art. Not only is photography an art
more easily practiced by large numbers of people, it's also easier to
understand, easier to grasp. It makes fewer demands. For example,
understanding serious contemporary photography doesn't involve
knowing about the history of photography. But to understand
serious contemporary painting one has to know something about
the history of painting.
Q. Did serious music complicate itself in recent years and lose its
audience, so that popular music is now taken more seriously?
A. If that is so, I think the fault is with the audience. In the past
decade people have been less and less willing to take on difficult
things. The very notion of professionalism came into disrepute as
authoritarian, elitist. I don't think it's that the work got too
complicated, I think it's that the audience got lazier. Seriousness
has less prestige now.
I don't mean to suggest that individual photographers aren't
serious.
But I think that the audience -and we're still talking about a fairly
small audience -is less willing to be serious is that old-fashioned
way that modernist art demands. It's very complicated, because
part of modernism is the idea of antiart. So modernism itself, while
being the breeding ground for all these great works of art starting
from the end of the last century, contained the seeds of its own
destruction. Too much emphasis was placed on outrage, and
people got used to taking short cuts. Enough artists said we had to
close the gap between art and life.
Now people aren't willing to put in the work involved in entering
these realms of discourse which distinguish art from life.
Q. Modern art taught people how to be ironic about art, and that
was a relief for a time.
A. Enough artists said, Down with art! No more masterpieces! So
it was inevitable that one day audiences would take this in a much
simpler form and say, Yes, down with art! No more masterpieces!
We want an art that's comfortable, that's ironic, that's easy. I think
we see the results everywhere.

More and more, audiences want quick results, they want punch
lines from the beginning. Modernism always assumed that the
recalcitrant bourgeois audience that could be shocked was going to
hang onto its own standards.
But when modernism became the established mode, it also
became a contradiction in terms. And that, I think, is the situation
in which photography has prospered.
Q. There's a particularly intimate passage in your book in which
you describe seeing in a bookstore in Santa Monica in 1945, when
you were 12, photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, and you
make the extraordinary statement that you divide you life in half
-before seeing these photographs and after. And you say that
something in you died at that midpoint. Do you know what that
was, and do you want to talk about it?
A. I think that that experience was perhaps only possible at that
time, or a few years after. Today that sort of material impinges on
people very early -through television, say -so that it would not be
possible for anyone growing up later than the 1940's to be a horror
virgin and to see atrocious, appalling images for the first time at
the age of 12. That was before television, and when newspapers
would print only very discreet photographs.
As far as what died -right then I understood that there is evil in
nature. If you haven't heard that news before and it comes to you
is so vivid a form, it's tremendous shock. It made me sad in a way
that I still feel sad. It wasn't really the end of childhood, but it was
the end of a lot of things. It changed my consciousness. I can still
remember where I was standing and where on the shelf I found
that book.
Q. While you were writing this book did your attitude toward
photography change? I had a sense that you credited photography
more by the end of the book than at the start.
A. I don't think it changed. What I did come to appreciate as I was
writing these essays is how big a subject photography really is. In
fact, I came to realize that I wasn't writing about photography so
much as I was writing about modernity, about the way we are now.
The subject of photography is a form of access to contemporary
ways of feeling and thinking. And writing about photography is like
writing about the world.

In fact, as I said in the preface, I never intended to write all those

essays. I wrote one essay in late 1973 and discovered when I was
finishing it that I had more material left over that I though would be
enough for a second essay. And while writing the second essay, I
realized that I had enough material left over to write a third. And it
became a sorcerer's apprentice situation.
By the fourth essay I was seriously worried whether I could ever
end it. And I would have gone on.
I don't think I could have gone on from the sixth essay -because
that was consciously written in the spring of this year to close it off
and to state the most general themes. But I could have written
another essay between the fifth and the sixth. I have a lot more
material, and the subject became deeper as I was working on it.
Q. I was very interested in everything you said about Diane Arbus.
You raised the question of how she got her models to pose for her.
That's something of a mystery, isn't it?
A. As Arbus said, the camera is a tremendous license in this
society.
You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will
think they should serve it. I was in a restaurant recently , and
someone decided to take photographs at a neighboring table. It
was a very expensive restaurant, the people who were there
wanted it to be worth the money they were spending. The taking of
photographs at this neighboring table involved flashbulbs, yet
nobody seemed to mind that this monopolized everybody's
attention for about 15 minutes. I stopped eating, stopped talking to
the people who had invited me, and just watched -as did practically
everybody else. Everyone was fascinated; nobody minded the
intrusion. The camera gives license to disturb people without
offending them. It's a license to stop people on the street, ask to be
admitted to their private space by saying, I want to photograph
you. Everybody's made nervous by it, but they're also flattered, as
Arbus said, by the attention.
Q. Are you put off by Richard Avedon's distorted photographs?
Why do people sit for Avedon?
A. It's difficult to refuse a photographer. This role, this activity, has
a privileged place in our experience and in our lives. You have to be
a professional recluse like Salinger or Pynchon to refuse being
photographed. More generally, it's hard to resist the invitation to

manifest oneself. I'm doing it with you now. If Richard Avedon asked
to photograph me I would go and be photographed by him. He may
not ask me, because we're friends, and he tends not to photograph
people he knows.
Q. The one he did of Renata Adler is awfully nice.
A. Well, there are two photographs of Renata. There's the beautiful
one with the hat, and there's another, which he told me he took the
day they met; that was the way he wanted to photograph her. He
has told me that he prefers to do that sort of photograph.
Q. What sort?
A. The kind you call distorted -I say revealing. You could say that
the way he photographs emphasized skin blemishes very much,
because it's extremely accurate, sharp-focus photography. The
image is unflattering in that way. But I don't agree that Avedon's
photographs distort. I think, on the contrary, that we expect to be
flattered by photography, we expect in fact that the photograph
will show us to be better looking than we really are.
Q. Photogenic.
A. That notion of being photogenic actually means that you look
better in a photograph than you do in real life. We all want to be
photogenic; that is, we all want -since the photograph is this thin
slice of time -to be photographed at that moment when we are
looking better than usual. What Avedon has done is to take
photographs which do not contain in any way the idea of the
photogenic.
Q. Which writers are you reading now?
A. I don't know where to start. Since his death I've been reading all
of Nabokov, I'm overwhelmed by how good he is. He gets better
and better every time I reread him. I'm sad that he didn't get the
Nobel Prize. So many second-rate writers have gotten it, one wants
first-rate writers to get it too. And I've been reading and rereading
Viktor Shklovsky, Sinyavsky, Joseph Brodsky.
Q. What are you writing now?
A. I'm finishing an essay called Illness as Metaphor. And I'm
writing a story, which will be called either Act 1, Scene 2, or The
Letter. And then I've been at work on a novel for several years, off
and on.
I'll get back to that after the first of the year.
Q. Is it a relief to get off one project and onto another?

A. It's always a relief to do fiction; it's always a trial to do essays.

They're much harder for me. An essay can go through 20 drafts, a
work of fiction rarely goes through more than three or four drafts.
With fiction, I'm almost there after the first draft. The second, third
and fourth drafts are mostly cutting and fixing up. These
photography essays took, each one of them, about six months.
Some of the stories are done in a week.
Q. On the other hand, the photography book is very ambitious,
perhaps the first literary book on the subject.
A.
By literary book, do you mean it's a book by a writer?
Q. I mean you brought a literary sensibility to it. You don't agree
with that?
A. Well, many people seem to think that one should be a
photography insider to write about photography as I've done. But
no insider would do it. Only an outsider would write this kind of
book. However, I'm not a literary, as opposed to visual, person. The
distinction is trivial. It's because I do see photographically that I
came to understand what a distinctive and momentous way of
seeing that is. More generally, people don't like trespassers, and to
people on the inside I'm a trespasser - even though in fact I'm not.
Also, I am not and don't want to be a photography critic. This isn't
that kind of book.
*

January 30, 1978

Susan Sontag
Found Crisis of Cancer Added a Fierce Intensity to Life
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
She didn't even have a doctor -I'd always been in excellent
health, she shrugs -and Susan Sontag made the appointment for
herself as an afterthought while arranging a checkup for her son.
Fortuitous timing, as it turned out: Not only did she have breast
cancer, but they said I'd have been dead in six months if I hadn't
caught it. That was two years ago. In the meantime, Susan Sontag

has, among other things, has a mastectomy and various follow-up

operations; written another book (the provocative On
Photography, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and
last week won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism);
undergone chemotherapy, started her third novel, and re-evaluated
her whole life.
Being Susan Sontag, a name regularly coupled with the description
the intellectual (if not the essayist,
the filmmaker or the novelist), she has also put her critical
mind to work on the matter at hand, and come up with a thoughtful
treatise called Illness as Metaphor. The work, which started out
as a lecture and is now being converted into another book, deals
with the cultural and literary associations that have long
surrounded such potent diseases as cancer and tuberculosis.
Her own first responses, Miss Sontag admits, were on a more
visceral level: Panic. Animal terror. I found myself doing very
primitive sorts of things, like sleeping with the light on the first
couple of months. I was afraid of the dark. You really do feel as
though you're looking into that black hole. These days Miss
Sontag, who turned 45 last week, neither looks nor sounds like a
woman in the grip of terror. Tall, rangy and handsome, her
coal-black hair streaked dramatically with silver, she exudes energy
and warmth. Nonetheless, she makes a point of openness about
her illness, because it can be helpful to other people, and because
it's very important to break the taboo. People are very reluctant to
deal with the thought of death; they see it as some shameful
secret, and to many people cancer equals death. I thought that,
too. And I had to rethink everything -what I thought, what I wanted
to do. After considering such possibilities as abandoning routing
and taking off for exotic, faraway places, Miss Sontag decided what
she most wanted was just to continue her normal life: living with
her son, David (my best friend), who at 25 is commuting to
Princeton University, writing, going to movies, seeing friends.
For the first eight months, all I wanted was to be with loved ones
and hold hands and talk. The entire first year I was thinking about
death all the time, but in many ways it's been a positive
experience, she said. It has added a fierce intensity to my life,
and that's been pleasurable. It sounds very banal, but having
cancer does put things into perspective. It's fantastic knowing

you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to

follow them very real to you. That has somewhat receded now;
more than two years have gone by, and I don't feel the same sort
of urgency. In a way I'm sorry; I would like to keep some of that
feeling of crisis. Despite a couple of later scares that the cancer
might have spread, Miss Sontag's doctor announced cheerily not
long ago: Your actuarial prospects are sprucing up.
I laughed, she says, grinning. I laugh a lot, which is partly my
black sense of humor, but also I think it is good to be in contact
with life and death. Many people spend their lives defending
themselves against the notion that life is melodrama. I think it is
good not to damp down these conflicts and dramas and agonize.
You get terrific energy from facing them in an active and conscious
way. For me, writing is a way of paying as much attention as
possible.
In addition to living her illness -and thus her life -as fully as
possible, Miss Sontag is concentrating on her fiction. She now says
she regrets all the years spent writing the essays for which she
became renowned on subjects ranging from the esthetics of camp
to Cuba, Vietnam and political radicalism.
Fierce intensity does not appear to be a new element in the life of
Miss Sontag, who grew up in Arizona and California, where she
attended dreadful high school where she was reprimanded for
reading Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason instead of the
assigned portion of Reader's Digest.
She graduated from high school at 15, married at 17, graduated
from the University of Chicago at 18 and went on to graduate work
in philosophy at Harvard. Along the way she bore a son and began
evolving the esthetic and political iconoclasm that became the
hallmark of her work.
Having cancer has prompted Miss Sontag to re-examine, among
other things, her early and unhappy marriage to Philip Rieff, who is
now a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is
disturbed by current notions about a cancer-prone character type:
someone unemotional, inhibited, repressed.
I immediately thought, I'm exactly the type, she says with a
laugh.
You look back on you life and think, I was married for eight years,
why did I stay married that long; why was I a good student in

school, maybe I was repressing my delinquent impulses; I repress

my emotions! And then I realized, who doesn't? That's also called
being civilized. I don't know a single person who doesn't repress
emotions. How can you now, if you're educated and involved in
mental activity that requires control, planning, routine?
But of course I identified with that profile, because those are the
things we all fear now, that we're not expressive enough. That's the
going psychological dogma, just as in the 19th century it was the
opposite. But I don't believe emotions are the cause of disease.
Among Miss Sontag's present emotions is a little bit of glee, she
concedes, looking pleased with herself. I have this irrepressible
optimism now that so far I'm getting away with it. Damocles over
your head, Susan Sontag says with a gentle smile. It's an
important truth. Death is part of the dignity and seriousness of
life.
*
This play in eight scenes presents the fictionalized character of
Alice James, sister of Henry and William James, who after a sickly
childhood, succumbed at 19 to a variety of vague and recurrent
illnesses that made her a lifetime invalid. She died at 43 of breast
cancer.
In a series of encounters (with her nurse; her father; her brother,
Henry; several Victorian female figures: Margaret Fuller, Emily
Dickinson, and mythological figures from Victorian fantasy fiction
and from Parsifal; and a burglar), as well as a long dramatic
monologue, her various forms of internal conflict are hilariously and
poignantly articulated. They converge on the implications of her
recurrently deciding whether or not to get out of bed and do
something, and her confusion, often discussed by biographers and
critics, about her place in her brilliant family, her vocation as a
woman, and her own desires.
CommentaryIn a note on the play, Sontag explains the echoes of
Pirandello and of Alice in Wonderland in this whimsical and
provocative play. She conceived of it while directing a Pirandello
play in Rome. As she thought about Alice, Carroll's Alice kept
coming to mind, and the convergence produced, most notably, a
mad teaparty scene between Alice and her historical and literary

predecessors where there is much talk at cross-purposes, advice

given, and frustration over objectives.
Cryptic and never heavy-handed, the play forcefully raises
questions about the social and familial constraints that bind
intelligent women and limit their scope of achievement. Alice's
combination of bitterness, resignation, wit, morbidity, and longing
directly invokes the self-representations in her diary. A sharp,
restrained, finely focused work that opens doors to discussion of
psychosomatic illness, family pathologies, and links between
femaleness and invalidism.
PublisherFarrar, Straus & Giroux (New York) Edition1993 Annotated
byMcEntyre, Marilyn Chandler Date of Entry6/19/97 Felice Aull,
Ph.D.
Copyright 1993-2000
*
Illness as Metaphor
Susan Sontag's Alice in Bed
by Robert Scanlan
A.R.T.
New Stages will present the American premiere of Susan Sontag's
only play, Alice in Bed -a work which picks its subject from a
prominent Cambridge family: the Henry James's who lived from
1868 to 1882 in the house that was on the site that is now the
Harvard Faculty Club. Susan Sontag has been drawn, perhaps by
her own landmark 1978 essay, Illness as Metaphor, to a study of
the pathetic invalid life endured by the youngest member of the
James family (and the only girl), Henry James' little sister, Alice.
Deeply challenging the moral precepts she set out in Illness as
Metaphor, Sontag discovers patterns of prostration in the
imaginary and actual lives of nineteenth century women, and in her
play, she boldly explores the metaphorical ramifications of lives
apparently repressed into pathology.
In 1980, Jean Strouse published an award-winning study of the
short, pathetic, life of Alice James (in photo below). Alice died of
cancer in 1892, at the age of 43, and the enormous fame and
accomplishment of her two eldest brothers -Henry (the novelist)

and William (the psychologist/philosopher) -eventually brought

attention to her terrible life of illness and , as W.H. Auden so
unforgettably put it, her all-too human unsuccess. In the preface
to Alice James, Jean Strouse introduced the subject of her complex
and carefully researched biography as follows: When I am gone,
Alice James wrote to her brother William as she was dying, pray
don't think of me simply as a creature who might have been
something else, had neurotic science been born. (ix) Alice clearly
foresaw that her famous psychologist brother -and perhaps others
-would interpret her life, and she expressed a wish to forestall
this indignity. Jean Strouse introduced the subject Sontag took up in
her play: how did Alice collect the separated fragments of her
shattered life into an identity, however dismal and disappointing it
might appear to others. Strouse reports that Alice herself
acknowledged her life to have been a failure, by all conventional
measures: She never married. She did not have children. She was
not socially useful, particularly virtuous, or even happy. Her
interests and talents might have led her to become the something
else she referred to in her letter to William... Instead she became
an invalid... she was delicate, high-strung, nervous, and
given to prostration. She had her first breakdown at the age of
nineteen, and her condition was called, at various points in her life,
neurasthenia, hysteria, rheumatic gout, suppressed gout, cardiac
complication, spinal neurosis, nervous hyperesthesia, and spiritual
crisis. (p. x) Thus the title, Alice in Bed (not to be confused with
Cathleen Schine's 1983 novel, which bears the same title), for the
significant portion of Alice James' life was spent in prostration,
bedridden and waiting for death. Such a severely afflicted figure
translates with difficulty into the title heroine of a play.
But the metaphorical resonances of her medical and psychiatric
plight give her a narrative dramatic utility she did not find in life.
Most of the interest that attaches to Alice James is generated by
the genius and enormous accomplishment of her two famous
brothers -and this is a fact rife with feminist complications. Why did
she not become a famous and accomplished person? Was it her will
that failed her, and was her career as an invalid somehow chosen?
The remainder of our fascination with Alice is fueled by the
frequently forceful, sometimes startling letters and journals she left

behind, for she belonged to a family that had perfected the art of
self-regard and self-recording.
The elder Henry (a ponderous (volumioso) Victorian patriarch) was
himself a gentleman-writer, and he fostered in at least three of his
children an astonishingly articulate hypersophistication. The four
writing Jameses -Henry, Sr., William (in photo, left), Henry, Jr. (in
photo, right) and Alice -were graphimaniacal phenomena, turning
all their minutest experiences into words-about-experience. The
entire family anticipated by a generation the literary
accomplishment of Marcel Proust, who transmuted his life (during
years he spent in a cork-lined bedroom) into an all-but endless
narrative discourse that could be cut off only by the death of the
author. Some consider this death a mercy, and the now fashionable
metaphor, the death of the author, has come to characterize the
modern condition of fiction. But the historical Alice James left no
doubt that she welcomed the literal death that brought her acute
physical and emotional torments to a close.
Henry Sr. had loomed over the childhood of his five offspring (the
two younger boys, Wilkie and Bob remain even more obscure than
Alice) in a magisterial way, for he was thought in his time to be a
prominent intellectual whose name would live on. He knew and
associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau,
Bronson Alcott, William Ellery Channing, and Margaret Fuller, the
great American Transcendentalists who became familiar names to
his children. Henry James, Sr.
made his mark as a loopy Swendenborgian mystic whose religious
insights were derived from a mental life destabilized by a horrible
childhood burn, the indolence of inherited wealth, and an
inexplicable mental collapse he learned (following Swedenborg) to
call his vastation. History, however, bypasses many
self-important intellectuals who seem to themselves and to their
contemporaries unretrenchably established as important figures,
and Bloomian theorists of the anxiety of influence can have a
field day analyzing the example of the two prodigious James
brothers decisively usurping their venerable pater's imposing
cultural pretensions.
But Alice was also afflicted with anxieties of influence and she
has left us a startling description of her earliest nervous
breakdown: I used to sit immovable reading in the library with

waves of violent inclination suddenly invading my muscles, taking

some one of their myriad forms, such as throwing myself out of the
window, or knocking off the head of the benignant pater as he sat
with his silver locks, writing at his table... Post-sixties feminism
could not fail to be drawn to the immobile, yet raging and
neglected female in the famous house. It sheds a different light on
her sickly, neurasthenic life to read her confession to suicidal
and/or patricidal impulses which were so strong they debilitated
her. Susan Sontag has followed an irresistible tendency of recent
feminism in lifting Alice James' suppressed rage and pathetic
inconsequence into the realm of metaphor, exploiting her condition
(whatever it may have been medically) to illustrate the suppression
of women and the destruction of their potential in heavily
paternalistic settings. No family, it seems on the surface, better
illustrates the success (for the men) and the terrible cost (for the
women) of nineteenth-century patriarchy. Yet this metaphorical
reading of the James's family history ignores the dire (and
equally-well documented) unhappiness and unsuccess of the two
younger boys, Wilkie and Bob. They illustrate no currently popular
paradigm of victimology, however, and consequently have no
advocacy group ready to revive interest in their obscure destinies.
Director Bob McGrath, as he prepares to stage Alice in Bed at the
Hasty Pudding, has noted that Alice in Susan Sontag's play is high
on some drug in almost every scene of the play. First she receives
an injection of painkiller, then she takes laudanum, a widely
prescribed nineteenth-century opiate. Later she smokes opium
from a hookah, and finally she polishes off a flask of gin.
Under the influence of one or another of these palliatives, Sontag's
Alice is visited by strange hallucinations, and a mad tea party
modelled on the tea party in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland
assembles various significant female figures from the
nineteenth-century in a central allegory in the play. The great
Cambridge educator, transcendentalist, and early feminist,
Margaret Fuller is brought face to face with the reclusive belle of
Amherst poet Emily Dickinson (in photo), and both join Alice
James and the apparition of her dead mother in a scene which
explores by comparison and contrast various alternatives which
might have been available to Alice. This chorus of female role
models is supplemented by two purely fictional women, the guilty

sexual temptress Kundry from Wagner's opera Parsifal, and the

angry Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis, who, in the ballet Giselle, leads a
fanciful corps de ballet of wronged and vengeful female spirits.
This scene in particular suggests a dream-like treatment of
Sontag's play, and A.R.T. artistic director Robert Brustein has asked
a visionary young director from New York to work his stage magic
on this play. Bob McGrath is the artistic director of an experimental
opera and theatre company, the Ridge Theatre, which has been
active in New York City since 1987. His productions blend
conventional stage craft with film images, slides and other
multi-media effects. He won an Obie in 1994 for sustained
excellence while directing all of Ridge's productions since its
inception. He will be directing a stage adaptation created by John
Moran of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for the A.R.T. Loeb Stage in the
1996-97 season.
*
Sontag argues against the use of illness as metaphor. She states
her main point on the first page of this long essay : The most
truthful way of regarding illness -and the healthiest way of being ill
-is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.
Tuberculosis and cancer serve as her two central examples of the
human tendency to use metaphoric thinking about illness. In the
19th century, tuberculosis was considered a disease of passion, of
inward burning, of the consumption of life force. Sufferers
were thought to have superior sensibility; the illness purified them
of the dross of everyday life. The romantic image of the TB sufferer
became the first widespread example of that distinctively modern
activity, promoting the self as an image (p. 29). Metaphoric
thinking about TB declined in the early part of the 20th century as
the disease succumbed to science and public health measures.
Cancer has now become the predominant disease metaphor in our
culture. Cancer is considered a disease of repression, or inhibited
passion. The cancer sufferer characteristically suppresses emotion,
which after many years emerges from the unconscious self as
malignant growth. As in Auden's poem, Miss Gee, reproduced on
page 49, (see annotation in this database): Childless women get
it, / And men when they retire.... Sontag uses the 19th century

view of insanity as another example of malignant metaphoric

thinking, while metaphor related to syphilis was somewhat more
benign. She concludes the essay with an eloquent prediction that,
as we learn more about the etiology and treatment of cancer, its
metaphorical system will die on the vine. (I wonder if Sontag would
consider my die on the vine an appropriate metaphor here?)
CommentaryThis essay is provocative and astringent. Prickly ideas
and metaphors leap from every page.
Sontag stimulates a careful re-evaluation of the place of metaphor
in our thinking about illness. She touches upon, but doesn't do
much with, metaphor intrinsic to medicine; she alludes to the war
against cancer, but doesn't develop the general notions of
physician as warrior, physician as priest, physician as engineer, etc.
While very provocative, the essay has several limitations. First, the
cancer metaphor that Sontag describes was much more limited
than she claims. While the psychosomatic movement may have
conceived of cancer as an emotional failure, this view was never as
widespread in Western culture as the romantic consumptive. I'm
even skeptical about the latter. While it was well-known in the 19th
century that the urban poor died in droves from consumption, I
doubt whether the romantic culture considered the
poverty-stricken to be exceptionally fine or sensitive.
Second, Sontag never makes the second half of her case. Why is it
unhealthy to think metaphorically about illness? What harm does it
do to the sufferers? Has metaphoric thinking about TB or cancer
inhibited our scientific study of them as diseases? Finally, Sontag
seems never to consider the obvious: metaphoric (imaginative)
thinking is the way we humans discover meaning in our lives.
Serious illness is an important event in a life narrative. Thinking
about illness (as opposed to thinking about disease) without using
metaphor is probably neither desirable nor possible.
PublisherFarrar, Straus & Giroux (New York) Edition1978 Annotated
byCoulehan, Jack Date of Entry1/2/96 Last Modified5/20/97 Felice
Aull, Ph.D.
Copyright 1993-2000
*
Sontag, Susan Aids and its Metaphors

MediumLiterature GenreTreatise (95 pp.)

KeywordsAIDS, Cancer, Disease and Health, Epidemics, History of
Medicine, Infectious Disease, Narrative as Method, Public Health,
Society SummaryThis essay was written ten years after the
author's Illness as Metaphor
Sontag begins by explaining the stimulus for her earlier essay: her
own experience as a cancer patient. During that time, she
discovered that cultural myths about cancer tended to isolate and
estrange cancer patients. They suffered needlessly because of
meaning attributed to their illness by society. A decade later,
Sontag observes that attitudes about cancer have become more
open and truthful. However, a new illness (AIDS) has arisen to carry
forward the metaphorical banner.
AIDS brings together two powerful metaphors about illness. First,
AIDS develops further the theme (seen earlier in cancer) of disease
as invader: the enemy invades and destroys you from within. Thus,
AIDS strengthens the use of military metaphors in medicine. The
war against cancer is reincarnated as a war against AIDS. Secondly,
because AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease, it also evokes the
theme of plague-as-punishment.
Sontag's project in this essay is more focused than in the earlier
book. She acknowledges that the medical and public health
response to AIDS explicitly counters these myths. She concludes
that not all metaphors applied to illnesses and their treatment are
equally unsavory and distorting (p. 94). The metaphor she is most
anxious to see eliminated is the military metaphor, both on an
illness level (illness invades the person) and a societal level (social
problems invade society).
CommentaryThis essay is considerably less shrill and polemical
than Illness as Metaphor. The author brings her own story (albeit
only briefly) into the picture. The tone is more balanced as she
discusses the themes of plague, invasion, and retribution
surrounding AIDS.
There is still some confusion between justified interpretation of
facts and unwarranted prejudice or metaphor. Much of this may be
accounted for, however, by the advance in knowledge about HIV
virus since the essay was written in 1988. For example, the out of
Africa scenario about the origin of HIV virus is a well-supported

hypothesis, not simply a Western bias. Likewise, Sontag's assertion

that AIDS is unlikely to be a new disease (p. 71) is unsupported.
Perhaps because the medical and public health response to AIDS
has explicitly avoided metaphor and has worked toward dispelling
societal myths, Sontag writes more evenhandedly about Aids and
its Metaphors. Her focus is narrower than in the earlier essay.
PublisherFarrar, Straus & Giroux (New York) Edition1989 Annotated
byCoulehan, Jack Date of Entry1/2/96 Last Modified7/3/98 Felice
Aull, Ph.D.
Copyright 1993-2000
*
July 16, 1978
Disease Should Be Itself
By DENIS DONOGHUE ILLNESS AS METAPHOR
By Susan Sontag
Illness as Metaphor first appeared as three long essays in the
New York Review of Books last January and February. The essays
have been revised in a spirit of discretion. Wilhelm Reich's
language is no longer described as having its own inimitable
looniness; now it has its own inimitable coherence. Laetrile is a
dangerous nostrum rather than a quack cure. John Dean is not
reported as calling Watergate the cancer on the Presidency. The
revised version has him explaining Watergate to Nixon: We have a
cancer within -close to the Presidency -that's growing. Far-right
groups no longer have a paranoid view of the world; now they
have a politics of paranoia. All the textual changes I have come
across serve the cause of moderation.
But Susan Sontag is still angry. Her book is not about illness, but
about the use of illness as a figure or metaphor. She is particularly
concerned with the metaphorical sue of tuberculosis in the 19th
century and cancer in the 20th. Most of these metaphors are lurid,
and they turn each disease into a mythology. Until 1882, when
tuberculosis was discovered to be a bacterial infection, the
symptoms were regarded as constituting not merely a disease but
a stage of being, a mystery of nature. Those who suffered from the

disease were thought to embody a special type of humanity. The

corresponding typology featured not bodily symptoms but spiritual
and moral attributes: nobility of soul, creative fire, the melancholy
of Romanticism, desire and its excess. Today, if Miss Sontag's
account is accurate, there is a corresponding stereotype of the
cancer victim: someone emotionally inert, a loser, slow, bourgeois,
someone who has steadily repressed his natural feelings, especially
of rage. Such a person is thought to be cancer-prone.
Most of Miss Sontag's evidence for attitudes about tuberculosis is
taken from 19th-century novels and operas. Evidence for attitudes
about cancer is rarely cited at all, except from wild men like Reich
and George Groddeck. At one point Miss Sontag says that there is
peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of
disease, as of everything else and that these explanations are
popular because psychology is a sublimated spiritualism,
a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of
'spirit' over matter. But she does not produce any respectable
evidence for these assertions.
If a doctor gave me a psychological stereotype instead of a cure or
an alleviation, I'd demand my money back. If doctors have nothing
better to say than that you have cancer because you are the type
of person to get cancer, then indeed they should keep quiet. But
because they don't know what causes cancer, their offense is
venial if they hazard a guess.
Miss Sontag says that the most truthful way for regarding illness is
the one most purified of metaphoric thinking. A disease should be
regarded as a disease, not as a sign of some terrible law of nature
or an otherwise unnamable evil. I agree with her. But anger drives
her to the point of asserting that our views about cancer, and the
metaphors we have imposed on it, are so much a vehicle for the
large insufficiencies of this culture, for our reckless improvident
responses to our real 'problems of growth,' for our inability to
construct an advanced industrial society which properly regulates
consumption, and for our justified fears of the increasingly violent
course of history. Very little evidence is produced that would
sustain this list of charges.
The gross mythology of tuberculosis did not persist after the
discovery of streptomycin in 1944 and the introduction isoniazid in
1952. I cannot believe that the sinister mythology of cancer will

persist after the causes of the disease are known and a successful
treatment is produces.
It is appalling that the disease retains its secret. So long as it dies,
the secret is likely to turn itself into a mystery and to stand for
nameless evils of every kind. In the meantime we should be alert to
our attitudes and to our words. Miss Sontag's book is bound to help
in this respect, even though it is short of evidence. As long as a
particular disease is treated as an evil, invincible predator, not just
a disease, most people with cancer will indeed be demoralized by
learning what disease they have. I'm sure that's true, though I'm
not convinced that many cancer patients are encouraged or forced
to think of their disease in that way. What they fear is not an evil,
invincible predator, but the terrible probability that their disease
will result in death. If the metaphorical use of cancer discouraged
doctors from trying to discover its cause and its cure, the situation
would indeed be obscene, but there is no evidence that this is the
case. Still, we are careless in our language. Miss Sontag is right in
that charge.
But she is not innocent in her practice. She confesses that once, in
despair over America's war on Vietnam, she wrote that the white
race is the cancer of human history. That is the kind of statement
she would now repudiate, not for its political sentiment but for its
recourse to the metaphor of cancer. In the last chapter of her book
she comments on the fact that the same vocabulary is used in
reference to cancer, aerial warfare and science fiction. Cancer cells
invade the body, patients are bombarded with toxic rays,
chemotherapy is chemical warfare: the enemy is a nameless Other
to be conquered and destroyed. Tumors are malignant or benign.
And so on. The use of cancer in political discourse, Miss Sontag
maintains, encourages fatalism and justifies 'severe' measures -as
well as strongly reinforcing the widespread notion that the disease
is necessarily fatal. Miss Sontag is sensitive to this issue partly, I
think, because she knows that her own rhetoric has often been
guilty. Her victims have mostly been literary critic, so they have not
deserved better treatment, but the habit of mind in her sentences
has regularly been punitive. In the first pages of Against
Interpretation, for instance, she wrote that like the fumes of the
automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban
atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our

sensibilities. The works of Beckett, she went on, have attracted

interpreters like leeches. A few pages later she wrote of the
infestation of art by interpretations.
Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every
one of us, she continued, superadded to the conflicting tastes
and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our
senses. And the first sentence of her review of Sartre's Saint
Genet reports that it is a cancer of a book, grotesquely verbose,
its cargo of brilliant ideas borne aloft by a tone of vicious solemnity
and by ghastly repetitiveness. If any other critic were to write that
sentence, Miss Sontag would italicize cancer,
grotesquely and ghastly and accuse him of having an obscene
mind.
None of these sentences represents Miss Sontag at her best. At
her best she is tough but fair. I have found Illness as Metaphor a
disturbing book. I have read it three times, and I still find her
accusations unproved. But the book has some extraordinarily
perceptive things about our attitudes: how we view insanity, for
instance, of heart disease.
Nearly everything she writes demands to be qualified, but that
demand is rarely met: she silences it before it has a chance to utter
itself. I think her mind is powerful rather than subtle; it is impatient
with nuances that ask to be heard, with minute discriminations
that, if entertained, would impede the march of her argument. She
is happiest when attacking a prejudice or a superstition or
whatever she deems to be such, some force at large in the world
that doesn't deserve the qualification that a more scrupulous mind
would feel obliged to propose.
She had the mind of a person who wants results and wants them
now. So the elective affinity between her mind and its object is
explained by the fact that each is present in the world as a form of
power.
To Miss Sontag, writing is combat. If I wanted to see a fine
discrimination made, with precisely the right degree of allowance
for and against, I wouldn't ask Miss Sontag to supply it. She would
be bored by the request. But if I badly wanted to win, at nearly any
cost, I would do anything to have Miss Sontag on my side. As in
Against Interpretation,
Styles of Radical Will,

Trip to Hanoi and now Illness as Metaphor, she would use lurid
metaphors to fight lurid metaphors, believing that a good end
justifies any means, any language, any style.
It is my impression that Illness as Metaphor is a deeply personal
book pretending for the sake of decency to be a thesis. As an
argument, it seems to me strident, unconvincing as it stands, a
prosecutor's brief that admits nothing in defense or mitigation. The
brief is too brief to be just. So the reader is left with a case not fully
made but points acutely established; enough, at any rate, to make
him feel not only that he must in future watch his language but,
with the same vigilance, watch his attitudes, prejudices,
spontaneities.
Denis Donoghue is professor of Modern English and American
Literature at University College, Dublin. His most recent book is
The Sovereign Ghost. He will teach at the Graduate Center in the
City University of New York next fall.
*

November 26, 1978 Verbal Constructs

By ROBERT TOWERS I, Etcetera
By Susan Sontag
Any reader familiar with the critical pronouncements of Susan
Sontag in Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will
(especially the essay on The Aesthetics of Silence) will be
prepared for the fact that her short stories would not have been
accepted as such by Poe, Maupassant, Hemingway, Joyce (at least
the Joyce of Dubliners), Chekhov, Lawrence or even Kafka. On
the other hand, they are not quite the autonomous and
self-sufficient verbal constructs that her esthetic position would
seem to advocate. They are chock-full of reference to the
exhausted world we inhabit; they abound in meaning -meaning

that calls not for interpretation but for small, repeated signs of
recognition. All of them bear the impress of an active, questing
intelligence that can apply language with neurosurgical skill to
isolate and cut away the necrotic tissues of our collective modern
consciousness.
Some are decidedly more successful than others. Project for a Trip
to China is an autobiographical reverie that is well enough written
in the self-catechizing mode Miss Sontag uses in several pieces,
but it is so resolutely unfictional that I can see no reason for its
inclusion in this collection. American Spirits (the erotic career of
Miss Flatface, a young woman of irreproachable white Protestant
ancestry) and Doctor Jekyll (an eccentric updating of the
Stevenson tale) are both fables in which the demonstration of
themes becomes much too mechanical -as it does in Baby (the
well-meant mutilation of a male child by its parents), where the
piling-on of psychological cliches of a Southern California variety
amounts finally to overkill. But only one story, Old Complaints
Revisited, is, in my opinion, a nearly total failure -a tedious
allegory on the subject of being Jewish that perversely calls
attention to its own dullness.
The remaining three are very good indeed. My favorite is the story
called Debriefing. Using a technique of collage similar to that
perfected by Renata Adler in Speedboat, Miss Sontag produces
an image of New York life that is both delicate and haunting. This
city, she writes, metaphorically pushing the buttons of the most
technologically advanced equipment, is neither a jungle nor the
moon nor the Grand Hotel. In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a
conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible
printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data
bank for asthmatic voice-prints. Only some of its citizens have the
right to be amplified and become audible. Among the latter is the
narrator's friend Julie, a poor moneyed waif, verging on anorexia,
who has given up on human relations and now seldom leaves her
apartment. Then there are three suffering black woman (one of
them Julia's maid) who are all named Doris and who have all, one
way or another, lost their children (in Doris I's case, they have died
in a Harlem fire; Doris II's daughter has been bewitched by a
muscularly fat and rich black woman who is, among other things,
a voodoo priestess third-class; Doris III's daughter is serving time

for prostitution). And there is Lyle, a precociously talented,

self-destructive boy who at 19 has written a story that is not so
accomplished as the ones published when he was 11. Snippets
from the lives of these and other characters are interspersed
with the narrator's comments, self-questionings, aphorisms and
prescriptions for surviving (Living is much too positive a term).
She exhorts, interferes, gives advice. Often she is unheeded.
I told Julia how stupid it would be if she committed suicide. She
agreed. I thought I was convincing. Two days later she killed
herself, showing me that she didn't mind doing something stupid.
The Dummy is a wry fable about a businessman who -in order to
free himself from an intolerable situation -constructs a perfectly
lifelike dummy to go to the office, sleep with his wife, watch
television with her every evening, eat her wholesome dinners,
quarrel with her about how to bring up the children. The dummy
proves an adept substitute until he (it?) falls in love with his new
secretary, Miss Love, and finds his situation intolerable. The
narrator, who has meanwhile degenerated (happily enough) into a
seedy bum, now has to construct a new dummy to lead the original
dummy's -and the narrator's -life. All of this is very cleverly worked
out. Schematic though it is, The Dummy is dense enough and
quirky enough in its concrete detail to avoid the danger of
becoming a mechanical demonstration of its theme.
The last story in I, Etcetera is Unguided Tour, another
assemblage of phrases and tags and scraps of luminous detail that
shape themselves into a unified and witty composition. Resorting to
every cliche of European travel, it provokes the astonished assent
of anyone who has attempted -in the company of a spouse or lover
-to see the beautiful things, the old things, under the conditions of
modern tourism.
Everything is included; cafes, postcards, the seduction of waiters,
standard complaints, unrequited yearnings. Unguided Tour
contains both the ghosts and the seeds of a dozen stories. Far from
being merely a verbal artifact, self-contained and self-validating, it
is almost too painful (and funny) in its wealth of reference to
experience beyond the very stylish arrangement of words on the
page. Though even less a traditional story than Debriefing,
Unguided Tour adds a special luster to this eccentric, uneven
and nearly always interesting collection.

Robert Towers, who teaches at Queens College, is the author of

The Necklace of Kali and The Monkey Watcher.
*
October 10, 1980
Publishing: The Eclectic Susan Sontag
By HERBERT MITGANG
Susan Sontag said, I'm not a Renaissance woman. If the social
critic and author of a new book of essays, Under the Sign of
Saturn, says she is not capable of trying everything in the arts,
followers of her work must take her word for it. But that still leaves
a little room for what she is: literary critic, novelist,
essayist-journalist, film scenarist and director, theater director and
-she said at home in New York the other morning -someone who
would love to direct an opera. The essays, most of which first
appeared in The New York Review of Books in somewhat different
form, will be published next week by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. They
include Miss Sontag's observations on the work of Paul Goodman,
Leni Riefenstahl, Antonin Artaud, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin
and Roland Barthes. None is a household name in the popular
journals, but all provide Miss Sontag with a forum for her views on
literature, philosophy, culture, politics, the arts, film, feminism and
fascism.
What's a Renaissance woman? Miss Sontag wondered. It's not a
particularly useful phrase. I think there are many writers who have
had my range of interests. It's quite common in Europe, but not in
the United States, to have writers who are involved in many
activities. Chekhov went to Sakhalin Island to investigate prison
conditions there.
There are many problems for a concerned modern writer without
turning back to the Renaissance. Is there a general theme
underlying her work in all its forms? She replied, in one of her
offhand conversational remarks that somehow, even at breakfast,
come out as large statements: Literature and society -what else is
there? As an example of someone she admired and who had
influenced her because of his large vision, Miss Sontag mentioned
the late Mr. Goodman. She said he had put himself at the service of

literature, looking for its human possibilities, written honestly about

his homosexuality, had been a connoisseur of freedom and had
gifts that neither Sartre nor Cocteau had -an intrepid feeling for
what human life is about, a fastidiousness and breadth of moral
passion. She notes in Under the Sign of Saturn that in every
apartment where she has lived, most of Goodman's books could be
found on the shelves. In her two-story apartment in an 1850's
brownstone off Third Avenue not far from Union Square, the walls
are lined with thousands of books - arranged by literary periods, by
countries, by Romance languages. But there is no television set.
I like reading, she said. It's my television. Miss Sontag is
generous in her judgments of writers who are reaching for
something other than the marketplace. Norman Mailer is not a
model, she said. Although at one point she was moved by his
writing, she does not now appreciate his subjects, such as his
forthcoming book on Marilyn Monroe, Of Women and Their
Elegance. Miss Sontag admires E.L. Doctorow and his new Loon
Lake, because he is one of the few contemporary writers who is
playing for the real stakes. The fact that he is also a commercial
success is a fluke. He's still different because he is trying to write
books that are first-rate. There are not many American writers in
the international class, she said, although there are any number
who know how to make narratives. Among those who are playing
for the real stakes, in her opinion, are Donald Barthelme, Elizabeth
Hardwick, William Gass and Harold Brodkey. They are involved,
she said, in the enterprise of literature. On the international
level, she mentioned Italo Calvino of Italy, Danilo Kis of Yugoslavia,
George Konrad of Hungary and Luisa Valenzuela of Argentina.
Miss Sontag will soon be off to Italy to redirect Pirandello's As You
Desire Me for the National Theater.
It was a big hit last summer in several cities, and she is breaking in
new actors in preparation for a Dec. 1 opening in Florence. She
likes directing because it's wonderful to work with people. She is
writing a novel and short stories, but avoiding what she is famous
for -essays and criticism. I've been to Poland and Japan recently
without writing about either country, so I think my resistance is
strong. Stanley Kunitz has been named winner of the Lenore
Marshall poetry prize for The Poems of Stanley Kunitz 1928-1978,
published by the Atlantic Monthly Press/Little, Brown. The $5,000

prize, given to the author of the outstanding book of poems

published in the United States, is sponsored by the New Hope
Foundation and administered by The Saturday Review.
The judges were William Jay Smith, Cynthia Macdonald and Quincy
Thomas Troupe.
New York: Poems, edited by Howard Moss, poetry editor of The
New Yorker, will be published as an original paperback by Avon
Books at the end of the month. It includes 200 poems by 130
poets, past and present, celebrating the city. Among them are W.H.
Auden, Hart Crane, Denise Levertov, Carl Sandburg, Anne Sexton
and Walt Whitman. The city's neighborhoods are romanticized in
the verse.
The first numbered copy of The Vatican Frescoes of
Michelangelo, published by the Abbeville Press of New York, was
presented to Pope John Paul II by Robert E.
Abrams, president of the New York art-book house, at the Vatican
last week. The book is the result of a half-year of work by Takashi
Okamura, a Japanese photographer whose remarkable color
close-ups were taken from a scaffold that had to be put up and
removed daily. The publisher is Kodansha of Tokyo. The edition is
limited to 600 copies worldwide. Each book is priced at $4,500 (and
no review copies, please).
*
November 11, 1980
For Susan Sontag, the Illusions of the 60's Have Been
Dissipated
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
The sensibility that resides in this particular town house is an
eclectic one indeed. Although the 8,000-book library, neatly
arranged by historical epoch from the Egyptians and Greeks
through Fascism and Communism, encompasses the disciplines of
philosophy, literature and history, the walls are adorned with
artifacts from popular culture - photographs of Greta Garbo and
Gary Cooper and Fred Astaire, and a large pop art poster of a
typewriter. The record collection spans Wagner to the Beatles,
Schubert to Patti Smith. Over Susan Sontag's desk hang the

pictures of five writers she admires and who presumably serve as

her resident muses: Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Simone Weil,
Virginia Woolf and the critic Walter Benjamin.
At the age of 47, Miss Sontag is still preoccupied with the
questions that have animated her writing from the beginning -the
relation of the esthetic and the ethical, the shifting boundaries
between popular culture and high art, and the meaning of the
modern. As she discusses her latest book, Under the Sign of
Saturn -a collection of essays recently published by Farrar Straus
& Giroux -her low, resonant voice glides from subject to subject,
emending phrases for precision and effect. Strewn with literary
allusions and quotations, her conversation, like her essays,
resembles an ongoing interior dialogue.
Intellectual Celebrity In the early 60's, when Miss Sontag first
began writing such essays as the famous Notes on Camp in
Partisan Review, she quickly achieved a kind of intellectual
celebrity. To many, she seemed the very avatar of radical
intellectual taste, and she was heralded in the press as the Natalie
Wood of the U.S. Avant-Garde and as Mary McCarthy's successor
as the Dark Lady of American Letters. Concerned with the
underlying structures of thought, her essays were influenced by the
French intellectual tradition, and in turn were influential in shaping
contemporary criticism. For instance, in Against Interpretation,
one of the most important and widely read critical documents of
the 60's, she defined a new formal estheticism, arguing that art
and morality have no common ground, that it is style, not content,
that matters most of all.
Although she maintains that her current attitudes are not
inconsistent with her former positions, Miss Sontag's views have
undergone a considerable evolution over the last decade and a
half. In 1965, her celebration of style at the expense of moral
analysis led her to declare that Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi films The
Triumph of the Will and Olympiad were masterpieces.
Because they project the complex movements of intelligence and
grace and sensuousness, she wrote, these two films transcend
the categories of propaganda or even reportage. In an essay in
her new book, however, she attacks Triumph of the Will, calling it
a film whose very conception negates the possibility of the
filmmaker's having an esthetic conception independent of

propaganda. Exactly what brought about this change? I've

become more aware of what a historical perspective brings, she
said.
A decade-long residence in the 60's, with its inexorable
conversion of moral and political radicalisms into 'style,' has
convinced me of the perils of overgeneralizing the esthetic view of
the world. Political Views Changed, Too Her political views too, it
seems, have experienced a similar sea change. A decade ago, she
was speaking at Students for a Democratic Society rallies,
demonstrating against the Vietnam War, and making such
observations as, the white race is the cancer of human history.
But in the recent Presidential election Miss Sontag was engaged in
what she called the most minimal political aspiration of all -hoping
that Carter would be re-elected. And, looking back at the 1960's,
she feels that while the justice of the protests (against the war)
was undeniable, there were also illusions and misconceptions about
what was possible in the rest of the world.
It was not so clear to many of us as we talked of American
imperialism how few options many of these countries had except
for Soviet imperialism, which was maybe worse, she went on.
When I was in Cuba and North Vietnam, it was not clear to me
then that they would become Soviet satellites, but history has been
very cruel and the options available to these countries were fewer
than we had hoped. It's become a lot more complicated. But if
politics are more complicated now, Miss Sontag feels that at least
the climate for artistic creation has improved: We now have a
situation where people are denied the hectic consolations of being
part of movements, she said. Now there are just individuals
doing their work.
That's important. The people whose work is very good are usually
people who are very singleminded, who are quite separate. Kafka
said once you could never be too alone to write, and in the end the
life of a writer is very solitary. Work-Oriented Life In Miss Sontag's
case, the life is not exactly solitary - she spends the hours when
she is not at the typewriter going to movies and rock concerts -but
it is willfully work-oriented nonetheless. Somehow the work and the
play eventually become one: she has said she can appreciate a
Patti Smith concert because she has read Nietzsche, and no doubt
one day Patti Smith will appear in one of her philosophical essays.

Because she is a slow, painstaking writer -some of the pieces in

Under the Sign of Saturn took as long as a year to write -Miss
Sontag feels anxious when she is not working. She always worries,
she says, that there is not enough time. That sense of urgency, of
course, was further heightened several years ago when she
learned that she had cancer. Although her prognosis is now quite
bright, in the beginning it was not, and she says she felt she had
crossed some threshold in relation to death.
Death becomes quite real to you, she explains, and you never
return to that more innocent relation to life you had before. It really
makes having priorities and trying to follow them very real to you.
In both her writing and in person, Miss Sontag has always been
reluctant to discuss herself. She has a strong sense of privacy, she
says, and she has only recently begun, shyly and tentatively, to use
autobiographical material in some of her short stories. Like most
writers, however, she projects her own temperament into her work
and that temperament has determined, to a great degree, what
she has chosen to write about.
'The Saturnine Personality' In the title essay of her new book, for
instance, she describes the saturnine personality as someone
afflicted by melancholy, someone who possesses a self-conscious
and unforgiving relation to the self. He who lives under the sign of
Saturn, she writes, tends to be analytic,
solitary,
fiercely serious and condemned to work. The essay was
written as a portrait of Walter Benjamin, but it could well serve as
one of Susan Sontag herself. I felt I was describing myself, she
said. I'm trying to tell the truth, but of course I know I am drawn to
the part of people that reminds me of myself. Miss Sontag says
that she writes out of her own obsessions - in the case of On
Photography, her preoccupation with images and their meaning;
in Illness as Metaphor, her own experience with cancer. Because
she regards writing as a means of getting rid of something, its
effects are almost therapeutic. It feels hygienic, she says. I feel
I'm finally free of those obsessions and free to go on to other
things. Throughout her work, in fact, there is a theme of
transcendence, of overcoming history, both personal and cultural.
In the well-known essay, The Esthetics of Silence, she wrote on
the intentional emptiness, the silence, in the work of such modern

artists as Cage and Beckett, and she admired their ability to

jettison
the inherited anguish and complexity of this civilization. Even
her arguments for formalist criticism assumed that one could
approach a work of art free from preconceptions.
In her own life, certainly, Miss Sontag has traveled a long way from
her rootless childhood in Arizona and California, the daughter of a
traveling salesman and a teacher. And she has traveled quickly
-college at 15, marriage at 17, teaching at 20 -but she says that
she is still trying to create herself. She is at work on a novel, and
after directing a play in Italy this winter, plans to teach two small
seminars at the New School. I feel restless, she says. I'm always
trying to move on, and when I bring a book out, I want it to be
done, over, so I can do something different. I feel that my best
work is ahead of me.
*
November 23, 1980
Large and Dangerous Subjects
By DAVID BROMWICH
UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN
By Susan Sontag.
Susan Sontag's third book of essays has meditations on Antonin
Artaud, Elias Canetti, Leni Riefenstahl, Walter Benjamin and
Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's film about Hitler, along with brief eulogies
for Paul Goodman and Roland Barthes. Her subjects bear witness to
Miss Sontag's range as well as her diligence. She keeps up
-appears, at times, to do the keeping-up for a whole generation
-and has long been an effective publicist for the more imposing
European offshoots of high modernism. The theater of cruelty, the
death of the author: From ground to summit, from oblivion to
oblivion, she covers the big movements and ideas and then sends
out her report, not without qualms.
For the art she most admires, an inward and recalcitrant art, exists
in tension with her own role as its advocate. It stands outside the
mainstream of culture, and sometimes at the very periphery of
human experience: It refuses to belong. Nevertheless, Miss Sontag

tries to help it belong, by explaining it to us in calm, reasonable,

sympathetic tones. Her job is to spread the avant-garde word with
evangelical warmth. But what if the word was a curse? To repeat it
too complacently may lead to the domestication of agony. The
phrase is Miss Sontag's, and she is troubled by it. Yet for her there
seems to b e no way out of the predicament it describes. Her
fondness for the extreme case inclines her to believe that the
extreme case must somehow be exemplary (a favorite
praise-word). To be exemplary it must first be widely known, and
here Miss Sontag faces a dilemma. She can either do justice to the
subtlety of the thinker in question and increase his following by a
very few; or reduce him to manageable slogans and greatly
increase the frequency with which his name occurs in the
intellectual chatter of the age.
She has chosen the latter course. Her message is always: Read
these writers; but do not suppose that you can possess them. Yet
one critic cannot argue both points with equal efficiency, and in
reading Miss Sontag we are apt to forget the warning. Thus
Benjamin's ferocity and Artaud's unassimilable voice are brought
into line with our own readiness to benefit from what is fierce and
unassimilable.
By this route, dangerous ideas come to sound wonderfully acute or
wonderfully daring and, of course, ahead of their time. Eventually
they are domesticated.
Miss Sontag's essay on Benjamin shows most plainly how this can
happen, and it is worth a long look in any case.
Benjamin -a German-Jewish essayist, celebrated as a commentator
on Baudelaire and Kafka, who committed suicide in 1940 when his
escape from Nazi Europe seemed impossible - is both the greatest
and the most dangerous of her subjects; she gets her title from his
Saturnine temperament and writes of him with a brave though
slightly strained familiarity. Benjamin composed some unsettling
aphorisms on The Destructive Character, in which the note of
self-reference is unmistakable. He sketched an attitude roughly
comparable to that of Nietzsche's Critical Historian. For both
writers, the cultural achievements of the past have become
overwhelming and therefore oppressive; in the present, we are
condemned merely to preserve or repeat them. Both writers go on
to suggest an alternative: deliberate forgetfulness. Where the

critical historian rewrites history to make room for himself, the

destructive character adopts a wholly negative relation to the
present.
His life becomes one continuous act of destruction: What exists
he reduces to rubble. But here is the way Miss Sontag interprets
the same idea: The ethical task of the modern writer is to be not a
creator but a destroyer -a destroyer of shallow inwardness, the
consoling notion of the universally human, dilettantish creativity,
and empty phrases. Who would not wish to see those things
destroyed? Benjamin, however, when he said destruction meant
destruction, without any dash followed by a limiting clause. It is an
uncompromising credo, and has had consequences for those who
stuck by it. One cannot be sure which of the available forms of
intellectual terrorism Benjamin himself might have encouraged in
the hope of clearing the air. But we have at least a clue in the
admiration he professed for Brecht during the most intolerant
Stalinist phase of Brecht's career.
Even more temperate, assured and remote from Benjamin is her
interpretation of his belief in a hidden self. For this, Miss Sontag is
indebted to Gershom Scholem's essay Walt er Benjamin and His
Angel, which she alludes to but never names. She thinks that for
Benjamin, the process of building a self and its works is always too
slow. But in the writings she has in mind, Benjamin seems to have
denied that the self could be built at all.
For the self, as Benjamin conceived it, does not belong to the
world of ordinary experience; it does not learn from or even
participate in our daily lives. The part of us that is engaged with the
world grows up separate from the self, and we live in the unhappy
awareness that this exile from the self makes our existence
unintelligible. Benjamin spoke in apocalyptic language about the
day when this hidden self would return to bless him: It would be the
day of judgment.
That is why he announced his intention not to build but to wait,
and said of his attitude toward the self, nothing can overcome my
patience. His distinction between two realms -a hidden realm of
complete knowledge and a fallen realm of existence -and his
argument for destruction as a weapon to break the tyranny of an
existence that seems a kind of exile, both have points in common
with Gnostic religious doctrine. Elsewhere, in her essay on Artaud,

Miss Sontag describes Gnosticism as a sensibility, and by doing

so goes some way toward domesticating it.
About the dates and places of Benjamin's career, Miss Sontag is
oddly precise. Oddly, because they are given in no special order; a
beginner could not use them to reconstruct even the broad outlines
of the life. Their real importance for Miss Sontag seems to be
magical rather than expository.
But her largest difficulty, and this holds for many of the essays, is
a certain vagueness in her conception of her reader. She seems to
be addressing a reader who knows Benjamin's writings so well that
he can pick up glancing allusions to a dozen titles, but who needs
to be told that Scholem and Theodor Adorno were his friends, that
what the French call un triste is a person marked by a profound
sadness.
Approaching Artaud, the longest essay in the book, originally
appeared as the introduction to a selection of Artaud's writings.
Miss Sontag has a gift for sympathy but none at all for quotation,
and with Artaud the balance works very much to her advantage. He
took a passion for literature, and a resentment of literature, as far
as it could go, and ended in the sort of madness that makes better
reading in French than in English. Even here, for all her caution,
Miss Sontag cannot help making the subject tamer than he sounds
in his own words. But she offers a richly conscientious survey of
Artaud's career, and adds a defense of madness in the familiar
style of R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault. The result may not
convince anyone to read beyond The Theater and Its Double,
which remains Artaud's best-known work; but the next generation
of students, when they decide to approach him, will be using Miss
Sontag's notes to ease the first rigors of contact.
Fascinating Fascism, on the art of Leni Riefenstahl - the German
movie star and Nazi movie director and, more recently,
photographer of primitive African tribes -is written in a less friendly
spirit. Here Miss Sontag wants to establish the reality of fascist
art, and to expand that category beyond works called fascist
simply because of their sponsorship or avowed aim. She names
Fantasia,
2001 and Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here as examples
of fascist art -an intriguing list, and one only wishes she would
say something about it. Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl's 1935

propaganda film of a Nuremberg rally, doubtless belongs in this

company. Its chief apologists have been those who affirm the total
separation of art from the political vision that it serves. But Miss
Sontag once counted herself among them, and her essay is
curiously indifferent to her own earlier position.
At the end Riefenstahl is linked to the sadomasochistic scenario
now available to everyone, and it is this that Miss Sontag
denounces. She calls it, in an awkward but true enough phrase, an
experience both violent and indirect, very mental. Yet her
peroration spoils the effect by rhetorical overreach: The color is
black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the
justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.
That slips into bathos because the freight is too heavy; but in any
case the details of costume, which become an absorbing concern in
the second part of Miss Sontag's attack, are beside the point. Black
leather is a symptom and not a cause of the brutal estheticism she
deplores. A better conclusion would have looked beyond the
costumes and more deeply at the specialized emotions that they
satisfy.
But to do so might have led to a reappraisal of the camp
sensibility, of which Miss Sontag was once an excited interpreter.
About camp she now says only, art that seemed eminently worth
defending ten years ago, as a minority or adversary taste, no
longer seems defensible today because taste is context, and the
context has changed. And yet there were many who felt 10 years
ago as she feels now. Is it possible that Miss Sontag has simply
changed her mind and wishes at all costs to avoid saying so?
After Fascinating Fascism many readers will supppose that she
has indeed changed her mind. But in general, the extent of Miss
Son tag's commitment to a language of sensibil ity, and of her
willingness to revise it by stating a moral o bjection in moral
terms,remains uncertain even to herself. Of Benjami n's
experiments with hashish she observes, almost pertly: In fac t,
melancholics make thebest addicts. So the moralist in her is fre e
to depart without a trace.
To make a strength of Miss Sontag's mixed qualities, it might be
argued that her shifting point of view has fostered her catholicity of
taste. There is probably no other writer who could feel attached to

the ideas of Paul Goodman and Roland Barthes, and passionately

inhabit both their worlds.
For the rest of us, one would drive out the other: They are too
different in tone, interest and specific density. Miss Sontag unites
them, and seems all the luckier for it.
Incidentally, the eulogy for Goodman also gives us our clearest
picture of her: I am writing this in a tiny room in Paris, sitting on a
wicker chair at a typing table in front of a window which looks onto
a garden; at my back is a cot and a night table; on the floor and
under the table are manuscripts, notebooks, and two or three
paperbacks. She still cares then, in her own life, for the romantic
ideal of the solitary artist. Having shown us her fidelity to this ideal,
she can afford in the future to be more suspicious of her occasional
desire to make a clean sweep of things: interpretation, the
institution of authorship, even her apartment in Paris. The
important work gets done in spite of the manifestoes.
David Bromwich teaches English at Princeton and has contributed
to The (London) Times Literary Supplement, Dissent and other
jurnals.
*

February 27, 1982

Susan Sontag Provokes Debate on Communism
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
A speech earlier this month by the writer Susan Sontag equating
Communism with Fascism has provoked an outburst of discussion
among New York intellectuals -a group that is always ready for a
duel with words.
Miss Sontag, a leading figure among intellectuals here for the last
20 years, startled a gathering in Town Hall on Feb.
6 with her remarks, which drew boos and shouts from the
audience.
The thesis she presented to her colleagues was that they - she
included herself in the phrase -had been misunderstanding the
nature of Communist countries at least since the 1950's. The

motive, she said, appeared to be a desire by intellectuals to

disassociate themselves from the virulent anti-Communism of the
McCarthy era.
I have the impression that much of what is said about politics by
people on the so-called democratic left -which includes many
people here tonight -has been governed by the wish not to give
comfort to 'reactionary' forces, Miss Sontag said.
With that consideration in mind, people on the left have willingly
or unwillingly told a lot of lies. The Feb. 27 issue of The Nation
contains an edited version of the writer's speech as well as replies
to it by a variety of contributors and a reply to the replies by Miss
Sontag.
The speech I gave at Town Hall has now flushed out a fascinating
array of responses, she says, and then goes on to contest most of
them. Five Pages of Replies This week's issue of The Soho News
also contains five pages of replies to Miss Sontag from American
and European intellectuals. The weekly had printed a version of her
original speech prepared from a tape, and Miss Sontag is now suing
the publication for $50,000 for using it without her permission.
Miss Sontag has refused to discuss the issue further. She said
through a spokesman that she had already spent enough time on it
and wanted to go on to other things.
The rally at Town Hall was in support of the Solidarity movement in
Poland and against the military regime there. It included labor
leaders, writers and artists as diverse as Pete Seeger and Gore
Vidal. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. sang a song in Polish to the tune of Are You
From Dixie? that he had learned as a prisoner in Germany during
World War II.
Several speakers touched on the nervousness of the group in
finding itself aligned in protest with two unlikely allies - the Reagan
Administration and the Roman Catholic Church. To point out the
difference, opposition to Administration policy in El Salvador was
frequently mentioned. Overly Considerate Too Long Miss Sontag,
speaking early in the program, sprang to the attack. She said that
people like her had been overly considerate of Communism for too
long and had failed to cry out at the repression in Communist
countries. She recalled that, as a student in 1953, she had been
unconvinced by The Captive Mind, the book by the Polish exile

and Nobel Prize winner, Czeslaw Milosz, but now found its
description of coercion in Poland if anything, underestimated.
Why did we not have a place for, ears for, their truth? Miss
Sontag asked. The answers are well-known. We had identified the
enemy as Fascism. We heard the demonic language of Fascism. We
believed in, or at least applied, a double standard to the angelic
language of Communism.
Now we take another line. Now it seems easy to do so. But for
many decades, when horrors exactly like -no, worse than -the
horrors now taking place in Poland took place, we did not meet to
protest and express our indignation, as we are doing tonight.
We were so sure who our enemies were (among them, the
professional anti-Communists), so sure who were the virtuous and
who the benighted.... And we were countenancing a great deal of
untruth. Miss Sontag compared the measures in force in Poland
with the repression found in right-wing regimes in Argentina, Chile
and elsewhere.
What the recent Polish events illustrate is something more than
that Fascist rule is possible within the framework of a Communist
society, whereas democratic government and worker self-rule are
clearly intolerable and will not be tolerated, she concluded.
'I would contend that what they illustrate is a truth that we should
have understood a very long time ago: that Communism is Fascism
-successful Fascism, if you will. What we have called Fascism is,
rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown -that has,
largely, failed. 'Facism With a Human Face' I repeat: not only is
Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all
Communist societies -especially when their populations are moved
to revolt -but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful
variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face. In a passage
eliminated from The Nation version, Miss Sontag also criticized
liberal publications. Imagine, if you will, someone who read only
the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the
same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman.
Which reader would have been better informed about the realities
of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it
be that our enemies were right? The replies to her speech so far
have been varied. Some have said Miss Sontag's current
sentiments were, in fact, held by many on the left for years, others

described her use of the words communism and fascism

obfuscating or meaningless, and several said she had betrayed
radical ideas.
Among those who replied were Garry Wills, Diana Trilling, Noam
Chomsky, Seymour Martin Lipset, Edward W. Said, Aryeh Neier and
Andrew Kopkind.
Miss Sontag said that her remarks were only a starting point for
discussion of Poland. These hard truths mean abandoning many of
the complacencies of the left, mean challenging what we have
meant for many years by 'radical' and 'progressive.' The stimulus
to rethink our position, and to abandon old and corrupt rhetoric,
may not be the least of what we owe to the heroic Poles, and may
be the best way for us to express solidarity with them.
*
Advertisement
October 24, 1982
Susan Sontag: Past, Present and Future
By CHARLES RUAS
Susan Sontag Reader, composed of selections Miss Sontag made
from the two decades of her work, has just been published by
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I recently spoke with her about the
Reader, her work in general and the controversial speech she
made last February in New York. At a Town Hall rally in support of
Poland's Solidarity movement, Miss Sontag criticized the American
left's attitude toward Communism, unleashing a wave of attacks
against her from all political factions from the extreme left to the
extreme right, and feelings are still running high.
I think that the problem at Town Hall was simply that I was
breaking ranks, she explained. The real story about Town Hall is
that the writers who came there didn't do anything. They just came
as a good deed. Gore Vidal and I had been chatting in the
greenroom, and he saw that I had something written, and he said,
'Oh, I don't have anything written -I don't even know what I'm
going to say.' He was first on the program, and he got up and told a
couple of Reagan jokes. His first sentence was 'My heart is cool, but

my head is empty.' I didn't stay past my own contribution, but I

heard that Doctorow, Vonnegut and Ginsberg also said nothing. Of
the writers, I think I was the only person who said anything. I said
something I wasn't supposed to say, and I knew what I was doing. I
knew I would be booed and I would make some enemies there. The
idea of it is you were supposed to be a good guy and be mobilized
for the pro-Poland rally on Feb. 6 and the antinuclear rally on June
12. I didn't want to do that anymore. That was deeply resented,
and that was the first wave of reaction on the part of the so-called
left. Miss Sontag and I were sitting at the table on which she
works in a spare white room on the top floor of her brownstone
duplex. What I am saying is so obvious, but it's never too late to
say the truth, and it's important to have people argue the truth. I
think that a very large portion of the left has underestimated the
wickedness of the Communists. It's a mistake I shared from the
early 60's, when I went to Cuba and was terrifically impressed with
the Cuban revolution (which was not then even Communist),
through the invasion of Czechoslovakia in '68. One forgets that the
period between '63 and '68 was one of impressive liberalization in
the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn won the Lenin Prize. Well, all of that
was ended by the decision to invade Czechoslovakia. So my
political views began changing 14 years ago.
The statement at Town Hall that was considered the most insolent
and provocative was: Imagine the preposterous case of somebody
who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and
somebody else who read only The Nation between 1950 and 1970.
Who would be getting more truth about the nature of Communism?
There's no doubt it would have been the Reader's Digest reader,
and for a specific reason, which I'm sorry I didn't explain, because
that too has been misunderstood. It's because the Reader's Digest
was open to a lot of immigrant writers and their testimony about
life in the Soviet Union. The scope of the response to her speech
took Miss Sontag entirely by surprise. I have gotten so many
grotesque attacks as a result of this Poland speech; they're violent,
sneering, vituperative in a way which is very different from
expressing strong disagreement. I'd never been the object of it
before. I have been persuaded, rather reluctantly, that some of this
publicity is just the inevitable kind of nastiness that people unleash
on you when they feel you have gotten too much approval. They

just wait for you to become a target, and there are a lot of people
out there just waiting to jump in. It's not as if they're seriously
disagreeing with views, they just say in effect, 'Let's get her.'
Suddenly she laughed and exclaimed, All of this politics is taking
up too much time, and what I really want to do is get back to my
novel. It's out of character that she has not replied to her
attackers more extensively, because she enjoys a debate. But,
pointing to the stacks of books and papers surrounding us, she
said, At the moment I have to admit I am writing a long essay on
intellectuals and Communism. That's what these books are.I'm not
going to reply to any of these attacks, because they are totally silly,
but I do feel I have something to say. The subject of the essay is
the whole history of people having some kind of double standard. I
hope I'll be able to do it, and that's the last I'll ever want to say on
the subject. She leaned back in her chair, smiling, and cupped her
hands behind her neck. Writing well is the best revenge. When
Roger Straus, her publisher, proposed doing A Susan Sontag
Reader, she at first refused. I felt what I imagine a painter feels.
I'd like to have another show, but I don't think I'd like to have a
retrospective. The convention of a 'Reader' is, after all, for writers
whose work is finished.
Not only don't I think of my work as finished, I think of myself as
only a little way past the starting point, which may sound odd,
since I've been publishing for close to 20 years. At any rate, in
looking over her early essays Notes on Camp and Against
Interpretation, she reacted with contradictory feelings, which
made the process of selection difficult. On the one hand, the early
pieces have that 'first voice' from which I have since evolved. Then
there are other moments, of course, when it seems, oh, God, you
just do it over and over again. You try to make it different, but it is
always the same thing. Both are true; both prove that I am in flight
from my past work. That's part of the problem: to open your writing
to more and more things. At least in my case I certainly don't feel
that I want just to have the same repertoire all my life. But I don't
know, it's very mysterious. The actual selection for the Reader
was made very rapidly. I know I wanted to remind people that the
first book I ever published was a novel, and I'm quite fond of my
two novels. Included in the Reader are 17 chapters of The

Benefactor and the end of Death Kit, excerpts that stand by

themselves.
She continued: I've written an enormous amount, I always
thought I was going to write, and the only question was how well
would I do it. Certainly I never felt consciously or unconsciously
that there was any conflict between my vocation and being a
woman. Writing is the one art, perhaps, where there are a great
many first-rate women. So that's the one activity where one would
probably have, even in the benighted bygone days, the least
problem.
I know that many women have a problem with ambition, or in
pursuing a vocation in a single-minded way. They seem to
internalize some kind of inhibition. They don't seem able to
mobilize their energy. Well, it can be a problem for anyone.
I certainly know men who can be described that way. I never
thought, There are women writers, so this is something I can be.
No, I thought, There are writers, so this is something I want to be.
HER first venture into publishing now seems incredibly naive to her.
When I first finished something I thought was publishable, I simply
took it to a publisher. I made a list: Farrar, Straus & Giroux was my
first choice in 1962, because they had published 'The Djuna Barnes
Reader'; second was New Directions, but somehow I had the
impression they were less accessible; and third was Grove Press,
because they were publishing Beckett. It was ridiculous! she said
and laughed. I really didn't even know what a literary agent was. I
simply took the manuscript of 'The Benefactor' in a box and left it
at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Two weeks later I got a call, and they
gave me a contract and published it.
So I'm in the unique position of having published nine books while
staying with the same publisher. I still don't have an agent, so
Farrar, Straus & Giroux is in fact my agent. My first editor was the
late Cecil Hemley, then Robert Giroux, and starting with Under the
Sign of Saturn, my editor has been David Reiff, who also happens
to be my son. Someone said to David, 'Don't you think you're
mixing church and state?' But I'm very pleased with the
arrangement. I have great confidence in Mr. Rieff's judgment. With
her essay Notes on Camp, she began a public dialogue that has
continued throughout her career and has made her oral
pronouncements almost as well known as her writing. I find myself

in a very ambivalent relationship to this dialogue. Of course, I want

readers, and I want my work to matter. Above all I don't just want
the work to be good enough to last, I want it to deserve survival.
That's a very great ambition because one knows that 99.9 percent
of everything that's written at any given time is not going to last. I
am perceived as a controversial writer. That's not the way I
perceive myself. But maybe I'm wrong; maybe they're right. I just
wish that they'd read more and react less. I do want to contribute
to some kind of dialogue, but I don't want to be caught in that
dialogue. An example of this conflict is the professional
photographic world's reaction to her book On Photography.
There is always an ostensible subject and a metasubject, she
explained. 'On Photography' is a complicated account of a lot of
different ways in which one can think about the presence of
photographic images; ultimately it's about the modern world, about
consumerist consciousness, about capitalism; it's about all sorts of
moral and esthetic attitudes that photography seems the most
extraordinary and rich example of. While her involvement with
photography remained intellectual, Miss Sontag's interest in films
led her to become a film maker. I write the script, I conceive of all
the shots and determine how it looks, and I work with the composer
to make the music, and I direct the actors, and I edit the film. I do
all those things myself from beginning to end, so that it is the
creation of a work in terms of images and sound, as the writing of
fiction is a creation of a work in language. Yet the two feature
films she made in Sweden in 1969 and 1971, Duet for Cannibals
and Brother Karl, caused her a crisis when she realized that she
had become an expatriate and possibly alienated from her
fundamental aspirations. I thought: Where am I? What am I doing?
What have I done? I don't seem to be a writer anymore, but I
wanted most to be a writer. IN 1975 a second crisis occurred when
she was hospitalized for cancer, which led her to write Illness as
Metaphor, an impassioned attack on the cultural myths that have
developed around certain diseases and, as in the case of cancer,
have placed upon the patient the double burden of suffering from
the disease and bearing the guilt of the disease as a psychic
manifestation. Becoming ill, facing one's own death, being in the
company of people who are suffering terribly -and many of them
dying -for several years is, of course, a watershed experience. You

are not the same person afterwards. I was told that very likely I was
going to die. I didn't die, I was lucky. But the fact is that I have
survived, that I am not now ill. I'm in a remission, and perhaps that
means I am cured. It doesn't mean I can cancel that experience.
One is on the other side of something that changes your relation to
life, that brings you close to death in a such a way that you can
never come completely back.
And it has changed a lot of things for me. In some ways it has
been a strengthening experience. It's like any one of the great
emergencies that bring out the best and worst in people, and that's
very impressive. I saw it in other people, not just in myself -other
people with the most extraordinary amount of courage, intelligence
beyond anything that they were capable of before. It's also
weakening, because you realize in a very painful way your own
mortality and once again the extent of all this needless human
suffering, which enraged me, which is why I wrote 'Illness as
Metaphor.' The book was met with general admiration, and it won
the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Illness as Metaphor does not appear in the Reader, but the
most serious omission for Miss Sontag herself is Trip to Hanoi,
which was written in 1968, when writers like Mary McCarthy, Muriel
Rukeyser and Denise Levertov also made the trip as a protest
against the war.
Asia has always been important to Miss Sontag, whose parents
were old China hands and had settled in Tianjin, where they were
in the fur trade. Therefore she was actually conceived in China, but
out of medical precaution, her mother returned to New York to give
birth. The first lie that Miss Sontag remembers telling was to her
classmates in the first grade, when she claimed to have been born
in China. Her parents had decided against taking her back, so she
grew up in the United States. From old photographs her mental
picture of her parents is of their playing Gatsby and Daisy inside
the British Concession. HER childhood home in New York City was
filled with Chinese curios that colonialists collect. She learned to
use chopsticks as an infant and remembers being told by her
parents' Chinese friends that she looked Chinese. Her father died of
tuberculosis in China when she was 6. As a child she even dug a
hole in the front yard to tunnel her way to China.

By the time she was officially invited by the Chinese Government

to visit China, she was six years older than her father at his death.
As she wrote in Prospect for a Trip to China about the emotional
pull of her father's absence: I still weep in any movie with a scene
in which a father returns home after a long, desperate absence, at
the moment when he hugs his child. Or children.
Trip to Hanoi is about her larger interest in the Far East and the
culture shock that one feels going to Asia for the first time. She
has since visited China twice, Vietnam once more and Japan three
times. Trip to Hanoi is held against her, she says: I am
represented as having been a Communist and having written these
very fatuous, uncritical things about Vietnam.
By and large the book concerns the impossibility of knowing
anything about the North Vietnamese and what the truth is. She
wishes she could have included Trip to Hanoi, if only as a gesture
of defiance against the present piecemeal rejection of the 60's and
growing cultural conservatism.
The final essay in the Reader is about Roland Barthes but
entitled On Writing Itself because the exploration of his work
brought her back full circle to the preoccupation of her earliest
writing. One of the things that I have been thinking about all my
writing life -it's in 'The Benefactor,' it's in 'Notes on Camp' -is the
question of what the esthetic way of looking at the world is. At the
time I was writing 'Notes on Camp,' I felt the deepest ambivalence
towards the subject. I understand the sensibility, it's partly my
sensibility, but I also repudiate it. I love and honor Barthes's work,
but that kind of ambivalence is in the essay too. I'm arguing with
myself, making the best case for these ideas and trying to go
beyond them. It's really an essay on what writing is, and Barthes is
the example. I feel that I finally have understood what prose is, and
what language is.
I want to write fiction which is not solipsistic, in which there is a
real world that is not just a depressed world of someone very
pained, as so much contemporary fiction is. I think that the novel is
far from being exhausted. On the contrary, a lot of it hasn't ever
been explored. I'm trying to do something in a mixed form. I have
letters, excerpts of journals, dialogues, anecdotes. The example of
this freedom of form is Milan Kundera's 'Book of Laughter and
Forgetting.' BARTHES, before his accidental death two years ago,

was turning from writing criticism to commenting on his own

writing and especially to creating a final synthesis in a work of art.
The intellectual's responsibility to create an artistic synthesis is a
tradition in France. Although Barthes longed to make this jump to
art, Miss Sontag said, I don't think he was capable of it, because
creating a work of art is a different kind of letting go and a
different kind of rigor. And speaking of the career of Paul
Goodman, whom she admires, she said, The essay form is very
powerful. If you practice it long enough, it will take over.
Goodman's fiction, which was extraordinary, became less and less
good.
The essay voice will silence the fiction voice. Aware of this conflict
within some writers, she sees herself differently: I do consider
myself, however reticent in practicing it, in some respects primarily
a fiction writer.
But, obviously, all these things are for me to do rather than talk
about. Her own sense of the progress of her work is always that of
a break with past work in order to be set free for future work on
a superior level. In this spirit she sees the Reader both as a
summation and a release.
Now, she concluded, I'm up to something else. Charles Ruas
is writing a book on trends in contemporary American fiction.
*
January 24, 1985
Stage: Milan Kundera's 'Jacques and His Master'
By FRANK RICH AMBRIDGE, Mass.
-If ever there was a Cultural Event, it is Jacques and His Master,
the Milan Kundera play now at Harvard's American Repertory
Theater. Not only is this production the American premiere of the
Czechosolovak writer's sole stage work, but it also marks the
American debut of Susan Sontag as a theater director. Leafing
through the program, one half expects to discover Irving Howe and
Philip Roth in the cast list. They're not, alas -although one is
pleased to find such sturdy theatrical hands as Robert Drivas and
Priscilla Smith.

There's nothing wrong with a Cultural Event, of course, provided

that its perpetrators don't let the event upstage the culture. I'm not
convinced that this trap has been avoided in Cambridge. Mr.
Kundera's play, as translated by Michael Henry Heim, is a liberating
folly -a playful homage to Denis Diderot and his protomodernist, late 18th-century novel, Jacques the Fatalist. Miss
Sontag has staged it with fastidious care, but also with a pomposity
that can drain away the fun. It's all too characteristic of the
production that the director advertises the play's pedigree by
gratuitously dragging a bust of Diderot on stage.
Mr. Kundera wrote Jacques and His Master in 1971 -after his
literary banishment in Czechoslovakia, before his emigration to
France. Like its source -and like much of Mr.
Kundera's own fiction -the play is an ironic construct of
philosophical paradoxes; its meaning is to be found as much in its
prismatic form as in the anecdotes filtered through that form. In
one beguiling digression, a character laments those plays that
proclaim unnecessary truths, such as The world is rotten!
Rather than ply us with unnecessary truths, Mr. Kundera asks us if
-and how -we can ever know what the truth is.
During the work's three acts (played without intermission), the
servant Jacques (Thomas Derrah) and his aristocratic Master (Mr.
Drivas) trudge rudderlessly through a void inhabited only by an
innkeeper (Miss Smith). Along their way to nowhere, the men swap
tales of their past romantic misadventures. But Jacques and his
Master keep interrupting and amending their stories -and are
themselves interrupted by the innkeeper, who recounts still
another tale of sexual betrayal.
Each of the narratives is a variation on the others -as the
playwright didactically explains near the end.
By interweaving their disjointed anecdotes, Diderot and Mr.
Kundera throw the nature of existence into flux. The fatalistic
Jacques would have us believe that man's fortunes are written on
high, while his Master often holds out for the potency of free will
and fortuity. Both positions are affirmed and contradicted in the
play -as are the differing ethical systems they foster -but what
remains inviolate is the creative spirit. Whether or not a divine
master has written man's history on high, Jacques and his Master
both see themselves as inventions of the literary masters -Diderot

and Mr. Kundera -who dreamed them up. As the playwright's own
experience in Czechoslovakia exemplifies, the man who chooses to
imagine can still, to a point, know freedom.
Mr. Kundera has long championed Diderot -and Diderot's esthetic
forebear, Laurence Sterne -as influences on his fiction. In
Jacques, we're reminded of how strong that influence has been.
The play's techniques -the contrapuntal use of multiple narrators,
the variational structure, the interjected metaphysical debates
-take us from Mr.
Kundera's first novel, The Joke, through The Book of Laughter
and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. On
stage, these devices often play as Pirandellian -even as the
symbiotic servant-master pairing pointedly evokes a literary
continuum stretching from Cervantes to Moli ere to Beckett.
Yet, for all that baggage, Jacques usually achieves its disquieting
effects through ribald comedy. Miss Sontag's staging lacks the
requisite velocity and fizz, and the performances, especially those
of the seven actors populating the internal narratives, are mostly
flat and sexless. While Mr. Drivas summons up the appropriate
dandified style of the Master, Mr. Derrah's nondescript Jacques
denies him a foil. Only Miss Smith brings the play fully alive. As the
lowly innkeeper acts out the cautionary tale of the high-born
Marquise de La Pommeraye, the actress leaps between wildly
disparate social and theatrical roles with perfect timing and sly
humor. Her performance alone unlocks the explosive laughter in
existential anxiety.
Even if the other actors rose to Miss Smith's level, the production
would still be hobbled by its set and score. In both his stage
directions and dialogue, Mr. Kundera demands an empty stage; he
writes in his published introduction that Diderot's contribution to
the anti-Naturalistic novel was a stage without scenery. So why
has Miss Sontag asked her talented designer, Douglas Stein, to
provide an eggshell-colored Roman ruin abstractly patterned after
a Piranesi engraving? For no reason I can tell, except to add
intellectual window dressing and accompanying documentation in
the program. Worse, the actors enter through sets of sliding doors
that, as crowned with recessed lights, resemble an elevator bank in
a convention hotel.

The music is by Elizabeth Swados, who punctuates every sexual

reference with distracting percussion noises that are arty
equivalents of the drumrolls that fleck a Johnny Carson monologue.
The evening's conclusion -in which master and servant march
forward -is frozen into an ominous tableau, with still more
portentous underscoring. While such theatricality may befit a
Cultural Event, it doesn't fulfill Jacques and His Master. The A.R.T.
hasn't so much staged Mr. Kundera's play as annotated it with
unnecessary truths.
*

January 5, 1986
When Writers Talk Among Themselves
By SUSAN SONTAG
Fame, prestige and sheer seniority make the writer a public figure,
in some countries a very public figure. And this is when writers not
only tend to get more service-minded but are expected to be more
collegial. With age, and with a certain volume of accomplishment
-whose vol-ume depends precisely on the writer's having been able
to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone -comes a stack of
invitations to board planes, cross borders and sometimes oceans,
check into large hotels, in order to palaver...
with each other.
Every writer I admire speaks condescendingly of these meetings
and probably would be displeased never to be invited. One is as
likely to hear us confiding how much we like conferences and
congresses of writers as to hear us declaring how much we enjoy

literary cocktail parties. They (the conferences) are generally

dismissed as tiring, often tiresome, an amiable waste of time. At
best, a pious duty.
(Which is more than you can usually say for a cocktail party.)
Starting out as the sole devotee, as well as deity, in a sect of one,
the writer eventually is convened to take part, as an elder, in the
Church of Writers -to congregate periodically to discuss the crisis of
culture, the future of literature, the relation of the writer and the
state.
Perhaps it's because writing means being self-driven and alone
that (most) writers are game for these highly organized
get-togethers. The writer is either a practicing recluse or a
delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.
Lately I've become more and more delinquent, or dutiful whichever way you want to look at it. In recent years I've gone to
more than a few such meetings of writers, grumbling about
precious time subtracted from writing and delighted at the
company. Nadine Gordimer, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Mario
Vargas Llosa, Alberto Moravia, Octavio Paz, George Konrad,
Umberto Eco, Danilo Kis, Joseph Brodsky, Carlos Fuentes -these are
some of the reliables, fellow graying and gray eminences who I
know, from past conferences, are likely to be future co-invitees. At
the smaller conferences, which tend to be designed on the
one-of-each principle of a World War II bomber crew in old
Hollywood movies, I am often the only American -as, for instance,
in mid-October, when I was in Budapest under the auspices of the
International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, one of nine
writers brought from as many different countries to hold
discussions with Hungarian writers on Writers and Their Integrity
and The Future of European Culture. I have a certain feeling of
deja vecu at these roundtables. For it's as odd - and as easy, too
easy -to be the only American as it was when, once upon a time, in
many professional situations, I used to be the only woman.
There's some fun in it -the snatches of sightseeing, the hanging
out with writer friends you haven't seen since the last such
gathering -though these conferences are not that much fun.
They're grueling, even if you do only half of what you're asked to
do. It's an honor, and a star turn (interviews, etc.) with possible
bonuses -especially if the conference is taking place in a foreign

country the writer doesn't usually visit -like the chance to meet
with one's local translator or publisher. Nobody hates a free trip. Of
course, there are a few writers I admire -Milan Kundera, V.
S. Naipaul, Gore Vidal -whom, as I understand it, no congress of
writers can tempt. When I think about them I can see their point
too. W HAT gets discussed at these meetings?
Although there is some lit talk -the Death of the Novel has long
been replaced by the Revival of Historical Fiction, and there is
usually a colloquium on translation -the main themes of most
congresses of writers are much broader, about cultural relations
rather than about literature.
Literature and Culture, History and Literature, the Writer and the
State, the Future of Literature, the Future of European Culture, the
Writer and National Identity -the diction and the possible
permutations are pretty obvious.
The custom is to devise a title, drawing on a small packet of such
seasoned abstractions, that says as little as possible. Such a
classical title promotes an ecumenical spirit: encourages
compromise, mutes confrontation. To be sure, some words have
become a little too worn. Spiritual Values (as in Literature and
Spiritual Values) and Humanism are far from the robust concepts
they once were; New is looking a little peaked too. (Toward a New
Humanism - the theme of the writers' congress held in Budapest
in June 1936, a session of the League of Nations' Commission
Internationale de Cooperation Intellectuelle, attended by Thomas
Mann, Karel Capek, Bela Bartok, Paul Valery, Salvador de
Madariaga, et al. -is unthinkable now.) Next week the American
Center of PEN, the international writers' organization (chapters or
centers in more than 80 countries) will be host in New York to the
organization's 48th annual international congress, and in its zeal to
produce a first-rate, memorable congress -the last one held here
was 20 years ago -the program committee (of which I'm a member)
may have bent custom a little, by choosing as the theme The
Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State. But one can
probably count on the piquant, slightly original topic being brought
back firmly in the course of our weeklong discussions to its familiar,
authentic substratum: the Writer and the State.
Meetings of writers, at least of a certain size, tend to resemble
each other physically, no matter where they take place, in the way

of all professional conventions: the back-to-back appointments

between the official sessions; the overeating; too much sitting and
talking and (everyone except the Americans) smoking; not enough
sleep. The moral conditions of the writers' congress are timeless
too. Each congress tackles the same questions afresh, under
slightly altered rubrics. All international writers' congresses are
episodes of the same master effort, sessions of a peripatetic
seminar on the status of the writer in a (politically, morally) divided
world that has been assembling and regrouping for well over half a
century. And its veteran participants continue to orate and
deliberate with the same diligence, as if this latest congress were
the very first. (However, I infer from some discreet sighing and a
greater reluctance to speak at length that the very senior figures
still at it after decades, like Francois Bondy and Stephen Spender,
have a harder time pretending to be virgins.) Moral pep talks,
featuring uplifting definitions of the writer, are one response to all
the continuing bad news of state interference and persecution and
of cultural barbarism.
Literature does not need freedom. It is freedom - Heinrich Boll.
Or: If there exists an interest shared by all writers and resulting
from a basic human right that may be considered absolute, then
that interest is freedom of expression. Every writer in the world is
concerned with the freedom of literature all over the world
-George Konrad.
Boll is proposing definitions of literature, of freedom, to argue that
no government can give literature what it already has. But any
definition of literature is a rhetorical sleight of hand. (As Nietzsche
observed, only what doesn't have a history can be defined.) Nor is
it more true that every writer in the world is concerned with
freedom, alas.
(Mr. Konrad's next point is even more rhetorical: Accordingly the
archenemy of literature everywhere is censorship. Its synonyms are
punishment,
intimidation,
defense-lessness,
cliches
and
commonplaces, dullness.) The notions that lie behind the writers'
meetings -of literature, of the writer, of freedom -seem like timeless
entities. It is important, and chastening, to realize that they are not.
There is a specific historic process, starting in the 18th century, by
which literature is separated off from other forms of writing (such
as journalism, belles lettres, hack fiction, history) and the

profession of the writer (someone who creates literature)

comes into being. I subscribe entirely -the correct word might be
devoutly -to this modern, secular idea of literature as a calling,
which assumes an artistic hierarchy, which assumes literature as
privacy -as a social contribution, if you will, but only because the
writer knows how to distance herself or himself from the collective
din, above all, the din of the state. In my view, literature entails the
right to be apolitical (what some would read as irresponsible).
But I am aware that this is not the conception held by most writers
in the world -two-thirds of whose population lives outside North
Atlantic affluence.
Attending international meetings of writers reminds me of all that I
assume. For example: about the solitude I am forgoing, that I take
to be definitive of my condition as a writer.
We meet under the auspices of many fictions about who writers
are and what they do. Writers are often said to belong to a shadow
state -the republic, as some call it, or the aristocracy of letters. For
all the contrasting implications of the two metaphors (that
difference is another, long story), in either version it is felt that, as
a transnational caste, we have essential interests in common. I am
not sure when, as a step in the process whereby literature became
a profession, not just an activity, the very flattering notion arose
that its creators belong to an international community. But it seems
obvious that the now venerable institution of international writers'
conferences and congresses is a European idea; indeed, it is a
transposition to the whole world of the very idea of Europe, a
transnational federation of idiosyncratic communities unified by
common interests and ideals. My own sense of literature and of the
writer's vocation has always been enthusiastically international,
which must be why I'm more susceptible than most American
writers to the lure of these international meetings -where I meet
representatives of literatures that count as much for me as, if not
more than, the literature of my own country. But even as I adhere
to it, passionately, I know that the meta-European image of the
writer is not that of most writers in most of the world (including a
large number of European writers too), for national
self-identifications seem far more important and decisive.
WHATEVER the marvelously broad abstractions about society
involved in the conference's theme, the main issue is inevitably the

writer's vocation itself. Birds are expected to behave like

ornithologists. The paradox of the discussions that take place is
that, in the very affirming of the rights of the individual writer to
create freely, as an individual voice, the writer is being considered
as a member of a group -writers. The subject is, inescapably,
collectivities and their cultural relations.
One often hears various forms of the argument, once made by
Orwell, among others, that every book is ultimately political. This is
not true, I think, except in a trivial or tautological sense. I don't
agree that there is no such thing as nonpolitical literature. But I do
think there is no discourse about writers that is not political. All
images of the writer imply a politics. To talk about what the writer
is, is to project an idea of how society ought to be.
In the 1930's, the heyday of international writers' conferences, no
one doubted that political concerns of a very general sort ought to
head the agenda of these meetings. But politics as dealt with in
writers' meetings tends to seek a base that is not merely
political, to invoke a moral consensus that is beyond politics.
The moral consensus that dominated the writers' conferences of
the 1930's was the struggle against fascism and Nazism.
Now, in retrospect, we see what more complex and often
duplicitous politics that seemingly self-evident struggle concealed.
The issue on which writers feel secure today is censorship -as if it
were a self-evident cause, beyond politics. Censorship and the
larger questions of the fate of writers imprisoned, tortured,
murdered have been the liveliest issue at writers' meetings. I date
the current character of international writers' gatherings from an
ambitious congress on dissidence organized under the aegis of the
Venice Biennale in December 1977, attended by Joseph Brodsky,
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Alberto Moravia, George Konrad,
Stephen Spender, Francois Bondy and myself, among many others.
Remarkably enough, Mr. Moravia was the only Italian writer among
the many invited to this meeting held in an Italian city who had the
courage to come, for the word had gone out that the Venice
conference was essentially an exercise in protest against the
cultural policies of the Soviet Union and the oppression of culture in
the countries occupied by the Soviet Union. It was. And hard as
that is to believe now, in 1977 it still felt premature for

bien-pensant Italian writers to be anti-Communist in this blunt a

fashion. (With one exception, the Hungarian Mr.
Konrad, the writers from the Soviet bloc countries, who included
Mr. Brodsky, Andrei Sinyavsky, Efim Etkind, were all in exile.) But
after 1977, statements that had still seemed to be controversial
-and could, in certain Western European contexts, seem like cold
war-mongering -became obviousness itself.
THAT most international writers' conferences ever since have been
dominated by the issue of dissidence and human rights is one
example of the enormous impact that the presence of writers in
exile from the countries in the Soviet camp has had, starting in the
mid-1970's. (The Solzhenitsyn effect is not the whole story, of
course. It is possible that testimony by some who did not emigrate,
notably the two great books of Nadezhda Mandelstam, has had at
least as much authority and influence.) There is a modified agenda,
a new sense of cultural relations. Not only is there a livelier
interest, and far more information, about the situation of writers
worldwide -thanks to the work of Amnesty International, the
Helsinki Watch committee, PEN itself (which has more and more
been functioning as a human-rights organization), that invaluable
journal Index on Censorship, and many emigre publications. Writers
everywhere are more sensitive to related topics, such as
self-censorship, than a decade ago.
Context, of course, is all. Views that I had expressed about the
similarity of Communist and fascist tyranny in discussions about
Soviet tyranny in Venice in 1977, at an international conference on
writing and censorship held at New York University in 1980 and at
an ad hoc writers' conference in Toronto (in support of Amnesty
International) in 1981 had an entirely different impact when I
expressed them in a political meeting in support of Solidarity at
Town Hall in 1982. That meeting was addressed mostly by writers,
but its audience was not writers; and afterward those remarks were
blown up on the wide screen of the media. One reason for
cherishing the writers' congress is that it may be one of the last
places in our current cultural life where the closed session still has
some viability. It is the character of our culture, as exemplified by
television, to make all utterances context-less. To have a context
for one's remarks, so that they can be addressed to some and not
others (not to everyone), has become an endangered privilege!

What is most valuable about these events is that they are, or

should be, meetings of writers among themselves. Not talking to
the media. Not state-sponsored, or even welcomed by
representatives of the state. Of course, this is not necessarily what
the writers want. The truth is that most writers love power, are far
more frequently courtiers than adversaries. Nevertheless, in the
institution of writers' conferences, the cosier relations to the state
and to power are at least not taken for granted.
Being a famous writer has been a bully pulpit since the 18th
century. And perhaps in the beginning the idea of a world
community of writers, incarnated in the creation of PEN, in 1921,
was inspired by the achievement of individual writers who have
been virtuosos at denouncing political and moral infamy (think of
Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Zola, Mark Twain, Tolstoy), the hope being
that a community of writers acting in concert with one another for
irreproachable goals -for peace, against censorship -would be even
more influential.
But the history of writers' conferences has not demonstrated that
writers acting collectively can do much to mobilize public opinion,
and League of Nations idealism has been scaled back to United
Nations realism: even if writers cannot save the peace, it's still
valuable that they go on talking. Meanwhile, rare individual writers
continue to have an incalculable moral influence. Think of the
difference Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has made; that Nadine Gordimer
and Joseph Brodsky, among others, are making now.
ACTING alone, in his or her books, the writer addresses a public at
large. The real opportunity of writers' congresses and conferences
isn't to attract the attention of the press or television, with the
resulting, necessarily abridged and simplified version (for an even
larger public) of what is being said, but precisely to talk among
ourselves. For whatever we may say to cheer ourselves up in the
face of the enormities of state power, in fact we have more
disagreement (about our relation to power, about what we mean by
freedom), less commonality of principle and interest, than is
generally admitted. As exercises in self-education and mutual
education, the international writers' conferences and congresses
are rarely a waste of time. Further, it is likely that, among all the
speeches, there will be two or three complex, inspiriting

statements, for among these writers there are a few great writers.
And from a great writer one may and should expect some wisdom.
Susan Sontag's most recent books are I, Etcetera (stories),
Under the Sign of Saturn (essays) and A Susan Sontag Reader.
She is a vice president of American PEN.
*
September 7, 1986
What's New Among Executive Pitchmen
By SUSAN SONTAG
Executives and economists are not only gracing board meetings
and Congressional hearings these days. They are also showing up
on billboards, on television and in magazines, hawking clothing,
computers, liquor, all kinds of products made by companies other
than their own. Roger A. Enrico, president and chief executive
officer of Pepsico Inc., and Ted Turner, president of Turner
Broadcasting, have taken turns as the man in the Hathaway
shirt. F. Ross Johnson, president of RJR Nabisco Inc., has shown off
Oleg Cassini suits on television Alan Greenspan, former chairman of
the Council of Economic Advisers, has advised people to use the
Apple IIc computer.
Money
is
not
the
motivating
factor
for
these
businessmen-cum-actors. Most of them are paid far less than
sports figures and other celebrities who endorse products.
Designer Oleg Cassini says Ted Turner and Ross Johnson appeared
in his ads for free. Part of the reason, he guesses, is that they enjoy
the limelight. A few years ago, the big corporation man wanted
anonymity, Mr. Cassini said. Now the big businessman wants to
have his name known. Indeed, some of the executives say the ads
help their image in the sense of identifying them with classy or
youthful products, or giving them a public forum for their views.
Others say they do endorsements as favors for friends. And a
great many echo Alan Greenspan, who says simply: It was fun.
From the advertisers' point of view, the burgeoning number of
executives appearing in ads represents a recognition that the
general public no longer perceives business as boring.

After all, Dynasty,

Dallas and other highly successful nighttime soaps revolve
around board room dealings. And in real life, corporate takeovers
are followed like tales of derring-do played out by modern
buccaneers.
Businessmen have achieved star status, said Terrence N.
Hill, senior vice president of Brouillard Communications, a division
of J. Walter Thompson that specializes in business-to-business
advertising.
Still, the bulk of the executives appearing in ads have been
involved in campaigns directed toward their peers, not the general
public. For example, Hathaway's line of dress shirts is directed
primarily at businessmen. The audience does not have to go
through considerable effort to establish the quality of the shirt if
they identify it with a Turner or Enrico, said John A. Quelch,
associate professor at the Harvard Business School.
In contrast, I don't think you'll ever see the president of a big
corporation doing anything like Shake & Bake, said Lloyd Kolmer,
president of Lloyd Kolmer Enterprises Inc, a talent agent. It would
be demeaning.
*
The Way We Live Now consists entirely of fragments of
conversation among friends concerned about a friend with AIDS.
They confer on the telephone, over coffee, in the halls of the
hospital, about the patient and his illness. They speculate,
prognosticate, share anxieties, trade innuendoes of guilt and
blame, pool their medical knowledge, and criticize the medical
establishment.
The patient never appears, and indeed, we never meet a
fully-fledged character, but only hear the orchestra of voices that
wryly and accurately reflect the mediated and fragmented
character of modern community life. News travels among them like
an electric current, carrying shock waves of fear and pain. Their
pooling of medical lore results in an eclectic mix of remedies that
reach from chicken soup to the patient's favorite jelly beans.
By the end, several of the characters, represented only by voices
in the conversation, have had to come to terms not only with the

impending loss of their friend, but with their own various and
unsettling responses. The disease, clearly AIDS, is never mentioned
by name.
CommentaryThe person at the center of the story serves as a
mirror and sign of his friends' own vulnerability. They don't really
know how to become a functioning healing and helping community,
but figure it out as they go along. The dark side of this story is its
exposure of the fallibility of friendship and good intentions; some
friends just back off.
The heartening message is that communities of friendship, despite
that fallibility, can be strong, flexible and resilient even as they
construct themselves ad hoc and ex tempore in a time of crisis. The
story suggests and demonstrates how conversation quite literally
creates a community of healing. The whole of this network of
friendship eventually becomes bigger than the sum of the parts.
SourceThe New Yorker, November 24, 1986
*
June 4, 1987
Sontag Heads PEN Center
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Susan Sontag was elected president of PEN American Center
yesterday at the organization's annual meeting. She succeeds
Hortense Calisher as president of the group, the largest of the 86
centers of International PEN, the worldwide association of writers,
translators and editors. Ms. Sontag, a member of the American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, is the author of many
books, including Against Interpretation,
On Photography and Illness as a Metaphor.
*

August 31, 1988

Susan Sontag, in Seoul, Speaks on Jailed Writers

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SEOUL, South Korea, Aug. 30 -The American writer Susan Sontag
and writers from seven countries held a reception tonight at the
International PEN Congress to dramatize the imprisonment of five
South Korean literary figures.
To be at this gathering while our colleagues sit in prison, some of
them ill, all of them, ironically, deprived of pen and paper, is a
profound disappointment and morally troubling to many of us,
said Ms. Sontag, who is the president of the American PEN center.
Honoring the South Korean writers in absentia allows us to
express our admiration and support for the courage of the
democratic movements in Korea at the same time that we are
deliberating over the problems and literary concerns of writers all
around the globe, Ms. Sontag said.
The last time an International PEN Congress was held in a nation
where writers were imprisoned was nine years ago in Brazil, she
said.
Delegations from Australia, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands,
Sweden and West Germany were co-hosts with the American
delegation for the reception honoring the imprisoned Koreans.
*
January 22, 1989 Against Fatalism
By PAUL ROBINSON Aids and its Metaphors
By Susan Sontag.
Susan Sontag's purpose in Aids and its Metaphors is to show
how the way we talk and think about AIDS makes the disease even
worse than it actually is. The metaphorical packaging of AIDS, she
argues, increases the suffering of the afflicted while creating
unneeded anxiety among the population at large. Readers familiar
with Ms. Sontag's Illness as Metaphor (1978) will recognize a
familiar intellectual tactic. In that work she directed her critical
skills at the metaphorical uses of tuberculosis in the 19th century
and cancer in the 20th, revealing how language distorted the

reality of both diseases and, in the case of cancer at least, kept

patients from pursuing the most rational course of treatment.
With AIDS, she sees the metaphorical process at work even in the
way the disease is defined. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome,
she points out, is above all a disease of stages.
Full-fledged or full-blown AIDS, said to be invariably fatal, is
preceded by infection by HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus,
and AIDS-related complex (ARC). The metaphor at work is a
botanical or zoological one. It insinuates that the evolution from the
original infection to AIDS is a biological inevitability; the stages
stand in relation to one another as acorn to oak tree. The effects of
this linguistic sleight of hand is to create the impression that not
only AIDS but HIV infection leads inexorably to death. It is an
invitation to despair, causing much misery in its own right and also
diverting victims from a sensible medical attitude toward their
condition.
Virtually alone, Ms. Sontag hopes to combat the fatalism
associated with AIDS. She will not allow that the disease, even in its
mature form, invariably results in death: It is simply too early to
conclude, of a disease identified only seven years ago, that
infection will always produce something to die from, or even that
everybody who has what is defined as AIDS will die of it. The high
mortality rate, she speculates, could simply reflect the early,
generally quick deaths of those most vulnerable to the virus. Above
all, however, she resists the illicit deduction that HIV infection, as
the metaphor implies, is just as lethal as the final manifestations of
the disease. Currently the authorities estimate that between 30
and 35 percent of those testing HIV positive will develop AIDS
within five years, and they further hedge their bets by suggesting
that over a longer stretch of time most or probably all of those
infected will fall ill. For Ms. Sontag this is metaphorical double talk,
an insidious apology for medical failure.
One wonders whether Ms. Sontag hasn't allowed her experience
with cancer to color her interpretation of the present epidemic. She
was herself a cancer patient in the 1970's, and she triumphed over
not only the disease but her doctors' gloomy prognosis as well.
AIDS, however, differs from cancer in one striking respect: there
has not been a single known case of recovery. Given this awesome
fact, the bleak view of AIDS implied in its conceptualization as a

disease of stages seems less a metaphorical trick than a sober

assessment of reality. Likewise, the suspicion that HIV infection
may in the long run prove 100 percent fatal reflects the sober fact
that we have seen that figure rise from well under 10 percent to
over 30 percent in the period the disease has been under
observation. A measure of fatalism seems altogether in order.
A second metaphor Ms. Sontag wishes to exorcise is the notion of
AIDS as a plague (in contrast to an epidemic, the neutral term
she prefers). Her principal objection to the plague metaphor is that
it represents the disease as a punishment, a visitation inflicted
not only on the ill but on society at large. The punishment, of
course, is for moral laxity -a view supported by the disease's
association with homosexual license and illegal drugs, although
contradicted by the absence of either of these connections with the
disease in Africa. The plague image is also regrettable, in her view,
because, like the botanical or zoological metaphor of stages, it
contributes to the aura of inevitability: The plague metaphor is an
essential vehicle of the most pessimistic reading of the
epidemiological prospects. From classic fiction to the latest
journalism, the standard plague story is of inexorability,
inescapability. Curiously, some of the epidemic's most
sympathetic and profound chroniclers have self-consciously
employed the language of plague to very different moral effect.
Particularly striking in this regard is Andrew Holleran, some of
whose columns in the magazine Christopher Street have recently
been published in book form as Ground Zero. In Mr. Holleran's
eloquent usage, the plague conveys not only the physical agony
of the disease itself, but the reverberant sense of catastrophe and
reasonable despair the epidemic has unleashed. The word also
suggests something of its character as an ironic atavism. It remains
a metaphor, to be sure, but an appropriate one.
Ms. Sontag also objects to the idea that AIDS is somehow
particularly dehumanizing or degrading. She observes that these
characterizations are invariably applied to diseases that transform
the body, especially the face. AIDS (notably when it results in
Kaposi's sarcoma) is similar in this respect to syphilis or leprosy.
The judgment is merely esthetic, in Ms. Sontag's view, and adds an
illegitimate psychic burden to the patient's physical sufferings. She
seems not overly impressed that, alone among epidemics, AIDS

typically seeks out its victims in their prime, at the moment when
physical attractiveness is most integral to one's sense of self.
Indeed, for homosexuals this esthetic concern is far from
arbitrary: not only is the disease hideously disfiguring, but it
originates in a moment of erotic attraction, when physical beauty is
very much to the point. The supremely ironic structure of the
disease - one readily thinks of Blake's Sick Rose -makes its
metaphorical association with dehumanization, once again, seem
entirely appropriate.
As Ms. Sontag admits, one cannot think without metaphors, so
the correct question to ask regarding the way we think about AIDS
is whether its metaphors are well or ill chosen. They would be ill
chosen if they misrepresented the disease or contributed to its
victims' pain. Despite her ingenuity and her manifest good will, Ms.
Sontag doesn't convince me that either is the case.
By comparison with earlier diseases, the metaphors associated
with AIDS have tended to be both tame and apposite. The disease
itself, and not the way we talk about it, is the true source of its
horror.
Paul Robinson, a professor of history at Stanford University, is the
author of The Modernization of Sex.
*
January 26, 1989
Susan Sontag, as Image and as Herself
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
The first exhibit -as Susan Sontag might begin if she were writing
an essay about herself -is a thin volume entitled Aids and its
Metaphors, which adds itself to a growing collection of volumes
sharing a widely recognized characteristic. They all strive to be on
the cusp of cultural discovery.
The second exhibit is Susan Sontag herself, sitting in her sparely
furnished apartment in lower Manhattan, speaking of her values,
her ambitions, the nature of the highly visible public role she plays
and, finally, perhaps the most elusive question of all regarding her
25-year career: why is she so famous?

What emerges is that Ms. Sontag's self-portrait is rather different

from the public portrait of her. The author of Aids and its
Metaphors is perhaps most commonly viewed as one of a
vanishing breed called an engaged and independent intellectual.
She is seen as a commentator on all sorts of things, from American
foreign policy, which she has generally opposed, to the proposed
equal rights amendment, which she supported. She is president of
the American chapter of PEN and has played a visible role working
on behalf of imprisoned writers around the world.
But the 56-year-old Ms. Sontag, while not denying an occasional
public role, dismisses with considerable annoyance the notion that
her goal is to be a public figure.
She is foremost a writer of essays and stories, she said, a
wanderer through the world of ideas and art, striving to create her
own understanding. All the Things She Doesn't Do Think of the
things that I don't do, she said. I don't appear on television. I
don't write for any newspaper or magazine regularly. I'm not a
journalist. I'm not a critic.
I'm not a university teacher. I don't speak out on most public
issues. If I wanted to play a pundit role, I would be doing all of
these things. Still, the legend goes on.
My life is entirely private. My interests are not those of a pop
celebrity, she said. My only interest is in literature and doing
work that, if I have the talent and the energy and the devotion to
accomplish it, will be a permanent part of literature. Ms. Sontag's
latest sustained concern arose out of a battle against cancer that
she waged a decade ago, producing a book called Illness as
Metaphor, which applied some of her polemical techniques to a
new subject. Aids and its Metaphors is a sequel, written, she
said, in the anguish at the death, or the expected deaths, of some
close friends.
The main idea of both volumes is that illness has its deep, often
irrational cultural associations. Some illnesses, like tuberculosis, are
romantic, surrounded by favorable, even heroic, associations. But
others, she maintains, in particular cancer and acquired immune
deficiency syndrome, are shameful and embarrassing, their
sufferers not merely victims but pariahs as well. 'Language of
Paranoia' There is, Ms. Sontag argues, a language of political
paranoia filtering into the descriptions of AIDS, with the disease

explained as a losing battle of ill-equipped defenders against

insidious invaders. These very metaphors, she says, reflect a
distrust of a pluralistic world. Its underlying suggestion is that
AIDS patients have done something wrong and immoral and have
brought the condition down on themselves as a kind of retribution.
The metaphors people use to talk about AIDS, she says in an
already controversial passage, lead to unnecessary hopelessness
among patients and panic on the part of the public. This central
argument has been criticized by some reviewers, who have
contended that the dread metaphors associated with AIDS -calling
it a new plague, for example -are in fact entirely suitable, given the
dread nature of the disease.
There is much in Ms. Sontag's new book that echoes themes in her
early writings, whose startling originality gave her instant fame.
Notes on Camp became a classic of cultural observation. It was
an attempt to provide a complex and nuanced definition to an
emerging sensibility, which Ms.
Sontag identified, in part, as a product of homosexual estheticism
and irony. The essay on camp helped thrust Ms.
Sontag into the familiar position of avant-garde polemicist,
gatekeeper for intellectual fashion, identifier of what is new within
a culture that prizes newness above all things.
All of which raises that other question, the one about her role in
American life, her fame.
Some years ago, Norman Podhoretz, now the editor of
Commentary, said Ms. Sontag was a particular type of intellectual,
one he called the dark lady of American letters. Mr. Podhoretz
said there was, in a sense, a slot available for a female writer,
preferably a dark-haired one with supreme intellectual
self-confidence and a keen desire for prominence, whose place
would be assured, not so much because of the content of her
writings as because of the culture's need for somebody to fill that
role. 'Oh, You're the Imitation Me' Ms. Sontag bristles at that idea,
even though she doesn't reject it altogether. She remembers once,
some 20 years or so ago, meeting the novelist, memoirist and
social critic Mary McCarthy, a combatant in many literary
controversies who was often identified as her predecessor in the
dark lady role. Ms. McCarthy told Ms. Sontag, Oh, you're the
imitation me.

She said it to embarrass me, I suppose, Ms. Sontag said, going

on to denounce as misogynous any effort to give her or any
another woman a pre-ordained role.
It reeks of an assumption that I find grotesque, she said. You
can have one smart woman and you can have one talented,
passionate black. Then, obviously, if there is a slot and you're
waiting for the next woman to come along that has a bit of pizazz
and authority, then she's going to be praised beyond her merits
because, look, she's finally arrived.
Yes, it's true, she continued. I suppose that if I were a man, and
if I were a professor at the University of Michigan, and I had written
everything that I have written, then, yes, maybe I wouldn't have
my picture in the paper, or something like that. But it really doesn't
matter. And I certainly can swear that I don't think any of this
attention that I've gotten has affected my work. And the public
role she has played: how does it fit into the tasks of a writer? Ms.
Sontag in 1982 drew attention with a speech she made denouncing
communism as a form of fascism.
The statement was viewed as a major turnabout for an important
woman of letters who had not only criticized the American role in
the Vietnam War, making a highly publicized visit to Hanoi in 1969,
but who was also believed to admire such Marxist revolutions as
those in Cuba and North Vietnam.
I couldn't believe that that was taken as a kind of mea culpa,
she said of her 1982 speech. Like many others in the mid-1960's,
she said, she had hoped that some of the small countries, like
Cuba and Vietnam, could evolve toward socialism in a non-Stalinist
way.
O.K., she said, I was wrong. But so were a lot of other people.
But, she continued, she had begun speaking out against the
Stalinist mistakes of some of those small countries as early as
1970, when she spoke out against Cuban repression of
intellectuals.
Ms. Sontag regards her goals not as political, but as a striving to
see many things clearly, to remove them from the obscurantist
dross of unexamined assumptions and conventional wisdom that,
in her view, often paves the way to political dictatorship.
There is such a thing as nihilism, you know, she said.

There is something that was predicted by Nietzsche and others,

and they were right. It's an inability to connect with reality and with
one's own experience, as if something in the culture tends to drain
things of meaning and sense and weight and seriousness, to make
them shallow and superficial.
I have a lot of anxiety about being understood, Susan Sontag
said.
*
March 1, 1992 In Short
By GARDNER McFALL
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
By Susan Sontag. Illustrated by Howard Hodgkin.
Susan Sontag's short story The Way We Live Now, which depicts
the reactions of a group of New Yorkers to the news that a friend
has AIDS, was originally published in The New Yorker in 1986. Its
reincarnation as a book is enhanced by the sensuous etchings of
the British artist Howard Hodgkin, who, along with Ms. Sontag, will
donate the book's royalties to AIDS charities in the United States
and Britain. While the story's title echoes Trollope's 1875 satiric
novel, and its strategy recalls something of The Plague by
Camus, its haunting effect belongs entirely to Ms. Sontag, whose
critical views mesh with her innovative instincts for the short-story
form and with the concerns voiced in such works as Aids and its
Metaphors. As Max begins manifesting the symptoms of AIDS,
then is hospitalized, his friends follow his progress: the craven, the
brave, the generous are all obsessed with him, in part for what he
signifies about their own mortality. While they report his behavior
and thoughts (he is, we learn, keeping a diary), Max himself never
speaks, nor is his ailment named, confirming his isolation and
society's failure to demystify the disease. Ms. Sontag has written
an allegory for our time, inspired by deep feelings about what is
becoming such a common destiny.
*
August 9, 1992

By Lava Possessed
By JOHN BANVILLE
The Volcano Lover A Romance.
By Susan Sontag.
At a literary festival some years ago, the critic George Steiner
expressed his impatience at the arrogance of poets and novelists,
most of whom, it seemed to him, believe that theirs are the only
areas of literature in which a writer can be truly creative. For his
part, he declared, he would happily swap any number of
second-rate sonnets for one page of Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes
Tropiques, and whole shelves full of indifferent novels for a single
chapter of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. His remarks aroused
anger and vituperation, of course, yet many in the audience
thought he had a point. That point, however, loses some of its
acuity when one recalls that Mr. Steiner has committed fiction of
his own -three books of it, in fact. Would he exchange his first
volume of tales, Anno Domini, for a page of his Language and
Silence? Perhaps he would; yet it seems that even the
profoundest critics are not content merely to criticize fiction, but
itch also to produce the stuff.
The Volcano Lover is a surprise. A historical novel by Susan
Sontag? And a historical novel that declares itself (shamelessly,
one almost wants to say) to be a romance, at that? Who would
have thought it? Although she has written fiction in the past, Ms.
Sontag is best known as a critic who for the last 30 years has been
one of the leaders of the avant-garde in the United States, the
American champion and interpreter of such quintessentially
European figures as Roland Barthes and E. M. Cioran. Surely the
author of that seminal essay Against Interpretation would look
with nothing but scorn upon a modern-day attempt to produce
something worthwhile in such a tired old genre as the historical
novel? Well, not a bit of it. The Volcano Lover, despite a few nods
of acknowledgment toward post-modernist self-awareness, is a big,
old-fashioned broth of a book. Sir Walter Scott would surely have
approved of it; in fact, he would probably have enjoyed it
immensely.
THE volcano lover of the title is Sir William Hamilton, the British
diplomat and antiquary who is best remembered as the

complaisant husband of Emma Hamilton, notorious mistress of

Admiral Nelson. The book is set for the most part in Naples, where,
from 1764 until his recall under a cloud in 1800, Sir William was the
British envoy to the court of the egregious Bourbon monarch
Ferdinand IV, later to become Ferdinand I, King of the Two Sicilies,
and his formidable Austrian wife, Maria Carolina, sister of Marie
Antoinette.
The novel is a kind of triptych, divided among Hamilton, his wife
and Lord Nelson. Ms. Sontag presents her characters in a way that
is at once stylized and intimate; they might be figures from an old
ballad, or even from the tarot pack.
Thus Sir William is referred to throughout by his Italian sobriquet of
Cavaliere, Emma is the Cavaliere's wife and Nelson, of course,
is the hero. This is an effective means of escaping the difficulty
all writers of historical novels face in presenting famous, often
legendary, people from the past as plausible characters in a work
of fiction. (I say, Brahms, isn't that old Beethoven over there?)
The novel opens with a prologue that invites us to accompany the
author on a visit to the flea market of history: Why enter? What do
you expect to see? I'm seeing. I'm checking on what's in the world.
What's left. Some readers may quail at this self-conscious and
rather ponderous (pesada) opening; Ms.
Sontag, however, has set her aim on a broad audience, and very
rapidly -indeed, at the turn of a page -we find ourselves set down
squarely in a solid and recognizable world: It is the end of a
picture auction. London, autumn of 1772. Here we meet the
Cavaliere, and at once some of the main themes of the book are
subtly sketched. He has tried and failed to sell a thing he loves
dearly, a Venus Disarming Cupid by Correggio. Having stopped
loving it in order to sell it, he tells his nephew, I can't enjoy it in
the same way, but if I am unable to sell it I do want to love it
again. Throughout her novel, the author will return repeatedly to
the dichotomies of love and money, art and value, possession and
renunciation.
The Cavaliere is a cold fish, but he has two grand passions.
The first is his collection of art and artifacts, the second is
volcanoes, and in particular Mount Vesuvius, which, thanks to his
posting to Naples, he has ample opportunity to study. It is a
measure of Ms. Sontag's skill and artistic tact that she does not

labor the contrasts between the calmness and frailty of man-made

treasures and the unpredictability and chaotic forcefulness of
nature, while yet managing to keep this theme firmly in view
throughout.
In the love that erupts between Emma and Lord Nelson, the
Cavaliere encounters another of those natural phenomena that he
can only observe, never experience.
The first hundred pages or so constitute a portrait of the Cavaliere
and his world, and although in her central character it might seem
the author is working with poor material, this is, I think, the richest
and most convincingly detailed section of the book. When Emma,
and then Nelson, come on the scene, the perspective broadens,
with a consequent loss of depth. Particularly good is the portrayal
of the Cavaliere's first wife, Catherine, a Welsh heiress, refined,
delicate, unhappy and hopelessly and unrequitedly in love with her
husband. After Catherine, who has always been frail, dies from
what the doctor diagnoses as a paralysis, the Cavaliere's
nephew, Charles Greville, sends his mistress to Naples. She
presents herself as a widow, Mrs. Hart, but she is really the
impossibly beautiful daughter of a village blacksmith who had
come to London at 14 as an underhousemaid, was seduced by the
son of the house and soon found more dubious employment.
Although Emma does not know it, the cynical Charles has sold
her to his uncle in return for an indefinite loan to pay his debts.
So the old man collected the young woman, becoming a kind
of Pygmalion in reverse, turning his Fair One into a statue. EMMA
HAMILTON is a splendid character, and Ms. Sontag does her proud.
She catches Emma's gaiety, her cheerful vulgarity, her selfishness,
her love of life, her cruelty.
Nelson, too, is portrayed with vividness and subtle skill.
The author brings a skeptical sensibility to bear on their grand
passion, yet shows us too how lovers delude and sustain
themselves with fictions that are not only necessary but also
plausible. Emma was a rose, though somewhat overblown by the
time Nelson met her. And he was a hero, though also a martinet, a
muddler and a merciless tyrant, as Ms. Sontag shows when
Ferdinand and his vengeful consort send the British admiral to deal
with the rebellious nobility of Naples after the fall of its short-lived
republic in 1799. The novel closes with the posthumous testament

of Eleonora Pimentel, one of the leaders of the republican

movement, an enlightened thinker and minor poet who was one of
the many important figures of Neapolitan society whom Nelson
summarily executed for their part in the rebellion.
On a visit to Naples, Goethe (referred to, of course, as the poet)
tells Emma: The great end of art is to strike the imagination....
And, in pursuing the true grandeur of design, it may sometimes be
necessary for the artist to deviate from vulgar and strict historical
truth. In this is detectable, I suspect, the voice of Ms. Sontag
herself. And yet, another of the perils of this kind of fiction is the
tendency of the author to become hypnotized by facts, to let them
weigh down the narrative.
In places, The Volcano Lover does become somewhat dropsical,
swollen with the accumulation of historical evidence (no sources
are cited, however), but for the most part it proceeds with an
admirable lightness of step. There is an operatic quality to the tale
(Baron Scarpia makes frequent, villainous appearances), and a
grand, at times majestic, sweep to the telling. The style is
confident, vigorous, witty. (Ah, these English, reflects Goethe.
So refined and so coarse. If they did not exist, nobody would have
ever invented them.) And, for the most part, the narrative is
irresistible in its forward thrust. Some of the set pieces are worthy
of a Marguerite Yourcenar or a Simon Schama, and there are
wonderful touches of grotesque comedy.
When, for example, the ship carrying the Cavaliere's precious
collection of antique vases begins to sink, the sailors save what
they believe is one of his treasure chests, which turns out to
contain the corpse of a British naval officer -an admiral, as playful
fate would have it -pickled in alcohol, being brought home for
burial.
I find The Volcano Lover impressive, at times enchanting, always
interesting, always entertaining; yet it also seems to me curiously
hollow. I wish I could like it less and admire it more. What is missing
is the obsessiveness of art, that leporine, glazed gaze that
confronts us from out of the pages of many a less densely textured
but altogether more concentrated work. Will it seem cantankerous
in the extreme if I say that Ms. Sontag cares too much? Art is
amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The
finest fictions are cold at the heart. For all the author's

evenhandedness, we sense clearly behind her studied fiction a

passionate moral intelligence hard at work; this is to Ms.
Sontag's great personal credit, of course, but peculiarly damaging
to her art. But then perhaps she did not set out to write a work of
pure fictional art. In its almost encyclopedic discursiveness, The
Volcano Lover displays - intentionally, I am sure -the influence of
the 18th-century French philosophe , in particular Denis Diderot. It
operates in that broad but nebulous area between fiction and
essay, in which Hermann Broch's Death of Virgil is the supreme
exemplar, and which in our time is occupied by writers such as
Milan Kundera and V. S. Naipaul.
However, what will stay with me from The Volcano Lover are
those moments when the author forgets about the broad facts of
history and homes in on this or that detail of her grand pageant,
letting her imagination have full and formidable play. When the
doings of heroine, hero, king and poet have faded from my
memory, I shall still have a clear and precise picture of the
Cavaliere's pet monkey, Jack: The monkey put his paw on the
Cavaliere's wig and uttered a small cry. He patted the wig, then
inspected his black palm, tensing and unfurling it. It is in such
seemingly unconsidered corners of the novel that art resides. SEE
NAPLES AND GAPE He lives in a place that for sheer volume of
curiosities - historical, natural, social -could hardly be surpassed. It
was bigger than Rome, it was the wealthiest as well as the most
populous city on the Italian peninsula and, after Paris, the second
largest city on the European continent, it was the capital of natural
disaster and it had the most indecorous, plebeian monarch, the
best ices, the merriest loafers, the most vapid torpor, and, among
the younger aristocrats, the largest number of future Jacobins. Its
incomparable bay was home to freakish fish as well as the usual
bounty. It had streets paved with blocks of lava and, some miles
away, the gruesomely intact remains, recently rediscovered, of two
dead cities.... Its handsome, highly sexed aristocracy gathered in
one another's mansions at nightly card parties, misleadingly called
conversazioni , which often did not break up until dawn. On the
streets life piled up, extruded, overflowed. Certain court
celebrations included the building in front of the royal palace of an
artificial mountain festooned with meat, game, cakes and fruit,
whose dismantling by the ravenous mob... was applauded by the

overfed from balconies. During the great famine of the spring of

1764, people went off to the baker's with long knives inside their
shirts for the killing and maiming needed to get a small ration of
bread.
The Cavaliere arrived to take up his post in November of that year.
The expiatory processions of women with crowns of thorns and
crosses on their backs had passed and the pillaging mobs
disbanded. The grandees and foreign diplomats had retrieved the
silver that they had hidden in convents..
.. The air intoxicated with smells of the sea and coffee and
honeysuckle... instead of corpses....
Living abroad facilitates treating life as a spectacle...
. Where those stunned by the horror of the famine and the
brutality and incompetence of the government's response saw
unending inertia, lethargy, a hardened lava of ignorance, the
Cavaliere saw a flow. The expatriate's dancing city is often the local
reformer's or revolutionary's immobilized one, ill-governed,
committed to injustice. Different distance, different cities. The
Cavaliere had never been as active, as stimulated, as alive
mentally. From The Volcano Lover.
*

August 2, 1992
Susan Sontag Finds Romance
By LESLIE GARIS
As soon as Susan Sontag delivered the last section of her new
novel, The Volcano Lover, to the offices of her publisher, she felt
bereft. It was like taking a beloved person to the airport and
returning to an empty house, she says softly, intensely, during a

recent interview in her New York apartment. I miss the people. I

miss the world. The principal characters -although there are many
others -are Sir William Hamilton, the 18th-century English minister
to the Court of Naples; his wife, Emma, and Horatio Lord Nelson,
England's most revered naval hero, whose love affair with Emma
became as famous as his impressive victories over Napoleon.
Under the title (which refers to Hamilton's obsession with Mount
Vesuvius), Sontag has appended the words, A Romance. A
romance by the author of Against Interpretation,
Styles of Radical Will,
Death Kit and Aids and its Metaphors?
A romance by the intellectual champion of modernism; the
eloquent admirer of Roland Barthes, Elias Canetti, Antonin Artaud?
In order to find the courage to write this book, it helped me to
find a label that allowed me to go over the top, she explains. The
word 'romance' was like a smile. Also, the novel becomes such a
self-conscious enterprise for people who read a lot. You want to do
something that takes into account all the options you have in
fiction. Yet you don't want to be writing about fiction, but making
fiction. So I sprang myself from fictional self-consciousness by
saying, It's a novel -it's more than a novel -it's a romance! She
opens her arms and laughs un-self-consciously. And I fell into the
book like Alice in Wonderland. For three years, I worked 12 hours a
day in a delirium of pleasure.
This novel is really a turning point for me. At 59, she has already
had a remarkable career. Although she has written fiction, two
plays and four films, she is primarily known for her learned and
startling essays.
Dealing from a seemingly limitless store of knowledge, she has
examined the 20th century from widely divergent points of
reference, like literature, painting, illness, photography, philosophy,
pornography, film, sociology, anthropology, communism and
fascism. Having lived for long periods in France and Italy,
conversant in three languages (translated into 23), she is a true
polymath internationalist.
Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist and man of letters, and
another writer who straddles many cultures, compares her to
Erasmus, the greatest humanist of the Renaissance: This is one of
the worst-informed eras in history, just like the beginning of the

15th century. Countries are ignorant about each other. And, like
Erasmus, exactly when it is needed, Susan Sontag is a
communicator in this broken-down world.
Erasmus traveled with 32 volumes, which contained all the
knowledge worth knowing. Susan Sontag carries it in her brain! I
know of no other intellectual who is so clear-minded with a capacity
to link, to connect, to relate.
She is unique. As she sits in her kitchen, she does have the air of
one who has wrestled prodigiously, and over a considerable
lifetime, with essential questions. Wrinkles and creases run wild on
her unadorned face. Her skin is as pale as a monk's. Her long,
unruly, onyx-black hair is rent by a dramatic slash of pure white
that runs like an ice flow over the crest of her head. But her candid
expression, her round dark eyes that fill easily with tears, her
frequent laughter and her deep, vibrant voice suggest the
eagerness and avidity of a seeker; a curiously timeworn child who
needs a bit more sleep.
I think I've always wanted to write this book, she is saying. I'm
glad to be free of the kind of one-note depressiveness that is so
characteristic of contemporary fiction. I don't want to express
alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of
passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be
passionate, wake up.
The Volcano Lover anatomizes immense varieties of passionate
engagement. Hamilton loves abjectly not only his art collection,
which he continually augments, but Vesuvius, his beloved volcano,
whose threats and displays of destructive energy hold him in
permanent thrall. He loves Emma as a connoisseur loves a
Leonardo, with cultivated, refined appreciation.
Enter Nelson, the man of action, the genuine hero, and another
sort of passion is ignited in Emma, which relegates Hamilton, the
expert on nature's power, to the status of outsider in the drama of
human forces unleashed under his own roof. And then there are the
passions of revolution and an epic array of 18-century follies
engendered by romantic dreams of reason.
SONTAG, HERSELF, IS A hybrid of reason and romance. One need
only peruse the vast library in her airy five-room apartment for
confirmation. An intellectual who studies the history of ideas might

have many books. But only a person intemperately in love with

reading possesses 15,000.
I'm an addicted reader, she says, a hedonist. I'm led by my
passions. It's a kind of greed, in a way. She laughs happily. I like
to be surrounded by things that speak to me and uplift me. I ask
how the books are arranged.
Ahhh.
By subject or, in the case of literature, by language and
chronologically. The 'Beowulf' to Virginia Woolf principle. I'll show
you.
Nothing is alphabetical?
I know people who have a lot of books. Richard Howard, for
instance. He does his books alphabetically, and that sets my teeth
on edge. I couldn't put Pynchon next to Plato! It doesn't make
sense. We enter a room off the kitchen, where Karla Eoff, Sontag's
assistant, sits at a desk answering what she describes as three
years of correspondence -all let go during the writing of The
Volcano Lover.
Here is English literature, says Sontag by a floor-to-ceiling
bookcase. You need a ladder. It starts here, and here are the
Chaucerians. She sweeps her hand over several shelves, and
then comes Shakespeare, Elizabethan Stuart plays, Marlowe,
Middleton, Webster, the poets, she gestures on through dozens
and dozens of books.
It's very approximate. Here's Beckford, William Blake and then
Wordsworth.
You don't have a separate poetry section?
No. It's all here. It's where they come. There's Byron. I have all of
English literature here. There's Oscar Wilde, and there's Meredith
and Hardy. Of course, when I get into the modern stuff you can see
who I read and who I don't. For instance, I adore V. S. Naipaul.
And here's French literature. Up there is Montaigne, then
Rabelais, Pascal, Racine, but it's not just the main people.
I have a lot of so-called minor writers who aren't minor to me. We
move from shelf to shelf, room to room. Spanish, French, Italian
literature, all untranslated. Japanese, Greek, Chinese and Russian
literature, in English.
In the living room -almost empty except for one couch, the only
rug in the apartment and one Mission chair -is ancient history,

Judaism, a huge library of early Christianity, followed by Byzantium

and the Middle Ages.
In Sontag's study is an oddly giant-size burgundy velvet chair, a
desk with an I.B.M. Selectric II typewriter (she has resisted the
computer) and, of course books: here are philosophy, psychiatry
and the history of medicine.
Discreetly recessed next to a rose-colored marble fireplace is a
tiny room that contains books by Sontag.
I used to keep them in my closet.
Why?
Oh, she sighs deeply, I don't want to look at my own books. A
library is something to dream over, a sort of dream machine.
Have you read everything here?
Oh, yes. Over and over. You see, they're full of slips of paper.
Indeed, narrow strips of white paper stick up from the books like
shoots of wild vegetation. Each book is marked and filleted. I
underline. I used to write in the margins when I was a child.
Comments like 'How true!' And 'I have felt this also!' She roars
with laughter.
I ask what she wrote in Aristotle.
'Aristotle means here that' -Oh, please! It's so embarrassing
now. We enter the long hallway that connects the rooms. The art
river starts here. What appears to be a complete library of the
history of art, all oversize books, runs on low shelves from one end
of the hallway to the other. On the wall above the shelves is a
series of engravings of Vesuvius, the hand-colored originals from a
book commissioned by Hamilton in 1776. Under the prints, on top
of the bookcase, is the skull of a horse and a circle of wishbones
-rather like a pagan altar to nature and death. In the rest of the
apartment is Sontag's collection of black-and-white prints by
Piranesi and other 18th-century artists. The volcano prints -almost
the only color in the house -radiate with the lurid red of flowing
lava.
As I walk down the hall, from Greece into the Renaissance and
through the 19th century, I remark on the uncanny perspective one
has just passing by the titles.
Yes, she says. What I do sometimes is just walk up and down
and think about what's in the books. Because they remind me of all
there is. And the world is so much bigger than what people

remember. SONTAG'S childhood world, although not materially

impoverished, was intellectually and emotionally meager. Her early
years were spent in Arizona, where she rarely saw her alcoholic
mother or her father, who had a fur business in China, because
they spent almost all their time in the Far East. Susan and her
younger sister were cared for by a housekeeper. When Susan was
5, her father died in China of tuberculosis. Her mother remarried,
and the family moved to Los Angeles. Again, the adults traveled
while the children stayed home. Her enormous intelligence further
ordained her solitude. She read at 3, wrote a four-page newspaper
at 8 and had a chemistry laboratory in her garage at 9. Many
ardent, fruitless hours were spent trying to convert neighborhood
children to her interests.
I can remember my first bookcase when I was 8 or 9. This is really
speaking out of my isolation. I would lie in bed and look at the
bookcase against the wall. It was like looking at my 50 friends. A
book was like stepping through a mirror.
I could go somewhere else. Each one was a door to a whole
kingdom.
Did you have a mentor?
No, no, no. I discovered books. When I was about 10 years old, I
discovered the Modern Library in a stationery store in Tucson. And I
sort of understood these were the classics.
I used to like to read encyclopedias, so I had lots of names in my
head. And here they were! Homer, Virgil, Dante, George Eliot,
Thackeray, Dickens. I decided I would read them all.
With absolutely no encouragement? I'm incredulous.
I didn't allow myself to look for it. And these people couldn't
encourage me, since they didn't understand what I cared about. I
very quickly located the source of judgment completely outside my
life -from the great dead. If somebody said, 'Oh, you're very smart,'
I would feel as if I had been told I had black hair. It was such a
given. And compared to the standards I was setting myself, I didn't
think I was so smart. I thought that I cared more than other people.
If they cared as much, they could do what I was doing. I didn't think
I was a genius.
Wasn't your mother proud of you?
My mother was a very withholding woman. You have no idea..

.. Her voice drifts off. We are back in the kitchen. Her hair, which
has been gathered into the semblance of a ponytail, has been
gradually escaping from its elastic band, which she now removes
entirely and plays with in her fingers. Her nails are so short I think
she must have bitten them.
She continues. I would put my report card by her bed at night and
find it signed at the breakfast table in the morning. She never said
a word. She sighs. I have a vision of my mother lying on her bed,
with the blinds drawn, and a glass next to her that I thought was
water, but I now know was vodka. She always said she was tired.
As a consequence, I am happy to sleep four hours a night.
Sontag's sister, Judith, was only 12 when Sontag left home at 15,
and they hardly saw each other until they were both in their 50's.
Judith, who is also extremely intelligent and went to Berkeley, is
married, has one daughter and lives on the island of Maui, where
she owns a small business. The two sisters discovered to their
surprise that they had many things in common -among them a love
of books.
I think a childhood like that, Sontag says, breeds a great talent
for stoicism. If you're going to survive, you say, I can take this; it's
bearable. Otherwise you're lost.
I refuse to see myself as a victim. I'm the most unparanoid person
in the world. In fact, I envy paranoids; they actually think people
are paying attention to them. She laughs. I didn't feel
persecuted, I felt abandoned. When she was 15, her principal told
her she was wasting her time at North Hollywood High and
graduated her. She was delighted. Now her life would really begin.
After one term at Berkeley, she enrolled at the University of
Chicago, which at that time had a set curriculum and no electives.
She took exams when she entered and placed out of most of her
courses. She had already done the reading.
I audited classes in the graduate schools, and that was
wonderful. I would start at 9 in the morning and go all day.
It was a feast. It was there she met Philip Rieff, a young instructor
in a social theory course that Sontag had placed out of. It was
1950, December of her second year. On friends' recommendations
she went to hear him lecture on Freud (his 1959 book, Freud: The
Mind of the Moralist, is essential reading for scholars). Ten days
after the lecture, they were married. She was 17. It was an endless

conversation. He was, she says today, the first person she could
talk to.
He seemed older than his 28 years, and Sontag looked extremely
young. He was a dapper Anglophile, while she, a Westerner, lived in
blue jeans and wore her hair long down her back. They were an
odd-looking couple. Soon after they were married, she attended
one of his lectures and behind her one student whispered to
another, Oh, have you heard?
Rieff married a 14-year-old Indian! For the next nine years, she
and Rieff lived an academic life. Their son, David, was born in 1952.
Sontag received master's degrees from Harvard in English
literature and philosophy and finished her course work for a Ph.D.
when she received a fellowship to Oxford. At the same time, Rieff
was offered a fellowship at Stanford. They went separate ways for
one academic year, but when Sontag returned to America the
marriage unraveled. It was 1959, and Sontag at last realized one of
her childhood dreams: she moved to New York.
She had a child, a furnished mind and no income. I had $70, two
suitcases and a 7-year-old, Sontag recalls. (Her lawyer told her
she was the first person in California history to refuse alimony.)
David Rieff was another prodigy. He calls himself today
overeducated. His two books, Going to Miami and Los
Angeles, Capital of the Third World, were both critically acclaimed.
I asked him about his childhood, if he felt under great intellectual
pressure, and he said he was comfortable with scholarly activities
-athletics would have been a reach. He painted a picture of mother
and son so close in age and interests that separation -even the
ability to distinguish between who was who -was difficult and took
longer than it should have. During the first New York years, I was
very aware of how precarious our life was. We lived in very small,
close quarters for a long time. Life was pretty tough. After that,
things started to go much better. She was making a career. After a
stint of teaching philosophy and the history of religion at various
New York colleges, she wrote her first novel, The Benefactor, and
decided to stake her future on writing full time. In 1964, she
emerged as a literary star with an audacious essay for Partisan
Review, Notes on Camp, which defined for the first time that
esoteric, urban, cult sensibility, which exalted artifice and mocked

seriousness. The essay is peppered with Oscar Wilde quotes, like

To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
On Style, an essay published the following year -an exhortation
to encounter art as an experience, not a statement or an
answer to a question -established her as the seer at the vanguard.
She was dubbed the new dark lady of American letters, the title
previously assigned to Mary McCarthy.
WHEN I ARRIVE AT HER Chelsea apartment for our second day of
talks, she has been correcting the proofs of Emma's death scene
and is awash with emotion. But it is clear that it is the whole
project, the fact of this book -which is so different from anything
she has ever done -that is overwhelming her this morning. I ask her
again about her notion that The Volcano Lover is a turning point.
I think every ambitious writer looks for the right form, and I
always felt whatever form I chose constricted me. Her two novels,
The Benefactor and Death Kit, both published in the 60's,
received mixed reviews. Criticized for being too self-conscious,
more concerned with modernist literary fashion than with the raw
material of life, they were nevertheless praised for their powerful
intelligence, original ideas and precise language.
It has been 25 years since Death Kit, during which time she has
become internationally famous for her essays. Now she says the
essay is a dead form for her.
The essays were a tremendous struggle. Each of the large ones
took nine months to a year. I've had thousands of pages for a
30-page essay -30 or 40 drafts of every page. 'On Photography,'
which is six essays, took five years. And I mean working every
single day.
When you say working, are you looking things up, checking
references?
No, no, I don't look anything up until after I've finished and I'm
checking. No, it's just writing. I'd get started, and then I'd run into a
ditch, and then I would start again -and again. Temperamentally,
Sontag is an admirer. All her best essays celebrate creators,
thinkers or the created work of art.
This quality led her into essay writing -and led her out of it.
The Canetti essay was the beginning of the end. I wanted to
honor Canetti. Her essay probably helped win him the Nobel Prize.
Yet as I was writing, I thought, 'Why am I doing this so indirectly? I

have all this feeling -I'm in a storm of feeling all the time -and
instead of expressing it I'm writing about people with feeling.'
Twelve years ago in London, while poking around the print shops
near the British Museum, Sontag first saw the volcano prints
Hamilton had commissioned. She was immediately drawn to them
and bought several. Years later, she read a biography of Hamilton
and the story began to simmer.
When I started the novel, it seemed like climbing Mount Everest.
And I said to my psychiatrist, 'I'm afraid I'm not adequate.' Of
course, that was a normal anxiety. What worried me was that I
would not be writing essays, because they have a powerful ethical
impulse behind them, and I think they make a contribution. But my
psychiatrist said, 'What makes you think it isn't a contribution to
give people pleasure?' She stops talking and bites her lip. She is
clearly moved and is trying not to cry. She takes a deep breath.
And I thought, ohhhhhh. That sentence launched me. ILLNESS
AS metaphor,
Aids and its Metaphors and On Photography -all book-length
essays -challenge us to consider a deeper view of the concept of
illness and the effects of the visual image than we ordinarily
attempt.
Sontag's object is to liberate perception from the simple and
reductive by offering a more layered analysis. Her essays equate
complexity with clarity and obfuscation with oversimplification.
Ill people are haunted by dread, shame and humiliation, she
says angrily. The two illness books are an attempt to rectify the
human cost of these superstitious, medieval notions. Above all, she
adds, I am always struggling against stereotypes. Robert B.
Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books, which has
published much of her writing, describes her quest to reject lazy
assumptions as the cautionary element in her work. Sontag calls
it the Don Quixote in me. Because her prose is polemical and her
philosophy avant-garde, she has, on occasion, angered many older
and more conservative critics. Richard Poirier, for many years an
editor of Partisan Review, remembers when she was an exotically
beautiful young writer for his magazine and aroused the ire of
Phillip Rahv and others of the New York intellectual establishment,
who distrusted both her enthusiasm for popular culture (film,
dance, music) and her dense academic knowledge.

She was one of those rare creatures, he told me, who knew
about what was going on in the universities and in European
criticism, who had the courage and the force of will and character
to challenge the men in the intellectual community to pay attention
to these things. IF HER INTELLECT IS rigorous and pure, so is her
apartment, for aside from books and papers, the environment is
strikingly Spartan. She says she goes out seven nights a week with
friends for dinner, concerts, plays. She has phenomenal energy and
stays out late, always ready to do one more thing, go one more
place. (Suddenly it's 4 in the morning, she says, and somebody
suggests something else.
You go on. You don't say you're tired or you've had enough.
Because you can never have enough.) Considering her abundant
social life, I am amazed at the absence of furniture -there are so
few places to sit. Doesn't she have friends over?
No. This apartment is the inside of my head. It's a map of my
brain.
Have you always lived alone?
No, no. Not only have I at different times lived with lovers, but
I've had friends come and stay. I like the idea that there are other
bodies in other rooms. She has never remarried, but she has
many intense friendships, which constitute a kind of multifarious
international bond.
FROM THE LATE 1960's to the mid-70's, Sontag was an expatriot.
David had dropped out of Amherst College, and joined her in Paris,
living in separate apartments, entirely absorbed by French culture,
rarely speaking English. She returned to New York in 1976 (by then
David was at Princeton), when she was diagnosed with breast
cancer.
I remember when I was thrown into the world of people with
cancer, one of the things that most surprised me was people
saying, 'Why me?' But I saw that for lots of people these dramatic
illnesses became victim situations. Illness is like a lottery -some
people get ill and you happen to be one of them. I didn't feel a
victim of my illness. The prognosis was grim. At that time, New
York oncologists were more alarmist about chemotherapy than they
are now, so she chose to follow the treatment of Lucien Israel, a
renowned French oncologist, who recommended radically high

doses of chemotherapy, which, in the end, were administered by a

reluctant Sloane-Kettering in New York.
My New York doctors said, 'Don't you realize that this is very
extreme treatment and you're going to suffer a lot?' And I said
-her voice is barely audible -but you people don't give me any
hope. He's not promising anything, but he's offering much more
treatment. She underwent chemotherapy for two and a half years
-an unheard-of amount of time in the 70's. The final cost was near
$150,000. Since she had no medical insurance, Robert Silvers
raised the money for her by writing letters and calling a number of
her friends in the intellectual community. Almost everyone gave
something, and those who were able gave a great deal.
Did you always have hope? There is a long silence. You live
with two feelings. I thought I was going to die. But.... She fingers a
small clock with a double face; one for America and one for Europe.
I really wanted to fight for my life. I was told I had a 10 percent
chance to live two years. I thought, well, somebody's got to be in
that 10 percent.
How did you react to dying?
I was terrified. Absolutely terrified and horrified.
Horrible grief. Above all to leave David. And I loved life so much.
But, I thought, I must believe I will die, because that's the only way
I can have dignity or use the time that's left. But I also thought,
well.... Her voice rises and disappears. I was never tempted to
say, that's it. I love it when people fight for their lives. She knew
Ingrid Bergman during her last illness and tried to persuade her to
see Dr. Israel, but Bergman refused, saying she'd had a good life
and didn't mind dying.
Sontag is incensed as she tells this story. I said, 'Why not have
more of your life?' But she said, 'No, no, it's all right.' It drove me
crazy -that anybody would say that!
It's, again, my mother, of course. Resignation, resignation, it drives
me wild. She is now, except for slight problems with a kidney, in
good health. She says that at 59 she notices no difference in her
energy from her early 20's.
There is a great deal of death -even gore -in The Volcano Lover,
and I ask her if she drew on her cancer experiences for those
sections.

If you think you are going to die, and you are spared, you can
never completely disconnect from the knowledge. You always feel a
little posthumous. But I think one's imaginative participation in the
horrors that are part of history.... She looks outside. Her apartment
has sweeping views of the Hudson River. I can never take my own
unhappiness really seriously because I think so much of how badly
off most people in the world are. She has always had a high
political profile, from her early radical days to her work on behalf
the victims of Soviet totalitarianism. During the Vietnam War, she
made a famous, controversial trip to Hanoi. She remembers a
woman she saw in a factory there, working under the most abject
conditions. When Sontag expressed outrage, the woman told her
she was so much better off than her parents, because, as rice
farmers, they lived up to their hips in water.
I don't think a week goes by when I don't think of that woman.
'I'm dry,' she said. 'I have work in which I'm dry.' I'm reluctant to
believe that social morality can be so internalized, and ask her if it
doesn't seem artificially rational to ameliorate her own grief by
making make such historic comparisons.
No, you don't decide! She is leaning forward passionately.
You either are in touch with that imaginatively or you're not. It's
not deciding -it's the other way around. I can't screen it out. I feel
I'm receiving messages all the time.
And sometimes I'm overwhelmed.
Overwhelmed by what?
By suffering. A friend once said to me, 'You are lacking a skin that
most people have.' I'm also incredibly squeamish.
I cannot watch most American movies. I don't even have
television. AS PRESIDENT OF PEN in 1987 and as an original
member in 1974 (with the founder, Richard Sennett) of the New
York Institute for the Humanities, she has been an effective
advocate for imprisoned writers.
When Sontag conceived of The Volcano Lover, she acquired an
agent (Andrew Wylie) for the first time in her life and won a
lucrative four-book deal with her lifelong publisher, Farrar Straus
Giroux. With that advance, she bought this apartment. Then, in
1990, she was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, which will pay
$340,000 over five years, plus medical insurance. She is at last
comfortably, even luxuriously, set up.

I experience the monkish silence in her apartment and ask her an

odd question. Do you believe in an afterlife in which you'll meet
your literary heroes?
No.
Most people hope to meet their relatives. You don't anticipate
Homer and Dante? I'm only partly joking.
Not at all. What pleases me is just the idea that I'm doing what
they did. That's already so astonishing to me. Because.
... She is speechless. Literature needs lots of people.
It's enough to honor the project.
What is the project?
Oh... to... she sighs deeply ... to produce food for the mind, for
the senses, for the heart. To keep language alive. To keep alive the
idea of seriousness. You have to be a member of a capitalist society
in the late 20th century to understand that seriousness itself could
be in question. Her leg is propped up childishly on the table. Each
day, like a young graduate student, she has worn the same pair of
sweatpants and sneakers, with different rumpled shirts. She is
reluctant to talk about a next project, except to say she wants to
write fiction.
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation.
It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old.
What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts.
That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of
something better. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea
of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to
me is the same. Leslie Garis is a frequent contributer to this
magazine on literary subjects.
*
February 25, 1996
The Decay of Cinema
By SUSAN SONTAG
Cinema's 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an
inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in
the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline. It's not that
you can't look forward anymore to new films that you can admire.

But such films not only have to be exceptions -that's true of great
achievements in any art. They have to be actual violations of the
norms and practices that now govern movie making everywhere in
the capitalist and would-be capitalist world -which is to say,
everywhere. And ordinary films, films made purely for
entertainment (that is, commercial) purposes, are astonishingly
witless; the vast majority fail resoundingly to appeal to their
cynically targeted audiences. While the point of a great film is now,
more than ever, to be a one-of-a-kind achievement, the
commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated, derivative
film-making, a brazen combinatory or recombinatory art, in the
hope of reproducing past successes. Cinema, once heralded as the
art of the 20th century, seems now, as the century closes
numerically, to be a decadent art.
Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia -the
name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired. Each
art breeds its fanatics. The love that cinema inspired, however, was
special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike
any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic
and mysterious and erotic and moral -all at the same time.
Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade.
For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything.
Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life.
As many people have noted, the start of movie making a hundred
years ago was, conveniently, a double start. In roughly the year
1895, two kinds of films were made, two modes of what cinema
could be seemed to emerge: cinema as the transcription of real
unstaged life (the Lumiere brothers) and cinema as invention,
artifice, illusion, fantasy (Melies). But this is not a true opposition.
The whole point is that, for those first audiences, the very
transcription of the most banal reality -the Lumiere brothers filming
The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station -was a fantastic
experience. Cinema began in wonder, the wonder that reality can
be transcribed with such immediacy. All of cinema is an attempt to
perpetuate and to reinvent that sense of wonder.
Everything in cinema begins with that moment, 100 years ago,
when the train pulled into the station. People took movies into
themselves, just as the public cried out with excitement, actually
ducked, as the train seemed to move toward them. Until the

advent of television emptied the movie theaters, it was from a

weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how
to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips
about how to be attractive. Example: It looks good to wear a
raincoat even when it isn't raining. But whatever you took home
was only a part of the larger experience of submerging yourself in
lives that were not yours. The desire to lose yourself in other
people's lives... faces. This is a larger, more inclusive form of desire
embodied in the movie experience.
Even more than what you appropriated for yourself was the
experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on
the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie -and to be
kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the
image. The experience of going to the movies was part of it. To
see a great film only on television isn't to have really seen that film.
It's not only a question of the dimensions of the image: the
disparity between a larger-than-you image in the theater and the
little image on the box at home. The conditions of paying attention
in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of film. Now that a
film no longer has a standard size, home screens can be as big as
living room or bedroom walls. But you are still in a living room or a
bedroom. To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater,
seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.
No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals - erotic,
ruminative -of the darkened theater. The reduction of cinema to
assaultive images, and the unprincipled manipulation of images
(faster and faster cutting) to make them more attention-grabbing,
has produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn't
demand anyone's full attention. Images now appear in any size and
on a variety of surfaces: on a screen in a theater, on disco walls
and on megascreens hanging above sports arenas. The sheer
ubiquity of moving images has steadily undermined the standards
people once had both for cinema as art and for cinema as popular
entertainment.
In the first years there was, essentially, no difference between
these two forms. And all films of the silent era - from the
masterpieces of Feuillade, D. W. Griffith, Dziga Vertov, Pabst,
Murnau and King Vidor to the most formula-ridden melodramas and

comedies -are on a very high artistic level, compared with most of

what was to follow.
With the coming of sound, the image making lost much of its
brilliance and poetry, and commercial standards tightened.
This way of making movies -the Hollywood system - dominated
film making for about 25 years (roughly from 1930 to 1955). The
most original directors, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles,
were defeated by the system and eventually went into artistic exile
in Europe -where more or less the same quality-defeating system
was now in place, with lower budgets; only in France were a large
number of superb films produced throughout this period. Then, in
the mid-1950's, vanguard ideas took hold again, rooted in the idea
of cinema as a craft pioneered by the Italian films of the immediate
postwar period. A dazzling number of original, passionate films of
the highest seriousness got made.
It was at this specific moment in the 100-year history of cinema
that going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies
became a passion among university students and other young
people. You fell in love not just with actors but with cinema itself.
Cinephilia had first become visible in the 1950's in France: its forum
was the legendary film magazine Cahiers du Cinema (followed by
similarly fervent magazines in Germany, Italy, Great Britain,
Sweden, the United States and Canada). Its temples, as it spread
throughout Europe and the Americas, were the many
cinematheques and clubs specializing in films from the past and
directors' retrospectives that sprang up. The 1960's and early
1970's was the feverish age of movie-going, with the full-time
cinephile always hoping to find a seat as close as possible to the
big screen, ideally the third row center.
One can't live without Rossellini, declares a character in
Bertolucci's Before the Revolution (1964) -and means it.
For some 15 years there were new masterpieces every month.
How far away that era seems now. To be sure, there was always a
conflict between cinema as an industry and cinema as an art,
cinema as routine and cinema as experiment. But the conflict was
not such as to make impossible the making of wonderful films,
sometimes within and sometimes outside of mainstream cinema.
Now the balance has tipped decisively in favor of cinema as an
industry. The great cinema of the 1960's and 1970's has been

thoroughly repudiated. Already in the 1970's Hollywood was

plagiarizing and rendering banal the innovations in narrative
method and in the editing of successful new European and
ever-marginal independent American films. Then came the
catastrophic rise in production costs in the 1980's, which secured
the worldwide reimposition of industry standards of making and
distributing films on a far more coercive, this time truly global
scale. Soaring producton costs meant that a film had to make a lot
of money right away, in the first month of its release, if it was to be
profitable at all -a trend that favored the blockbuster over the
low-budget film, although most blockbusters were flops and there
were always a few small films that surprised everyone by their
appeal. The theatrical release time of movies became shorter and
shorter (like the shelf life of books in bookstores); many movies
were designed to go directly into video. Movie theaters continued
to close -many towns no longer have even one - as movies
became, mainly, one of a variety of habit-forming home
entertainments.
In this country, the lowering of expectations for quality and the
inflation of expectations for profit have made it virtually impossible
for artistically ambitious American directors, like Francis Ford
Coppola and Paul Schrader, to work at their best level. Abroad, the
result can be seen in the melancholy fate of some of the greatest
directors of the last decades. What place is there today for a
maverick like Hans- Jurgen Syberberg, who has stopped making
films altogether, or for the great Godard, who now makes films
about the history of film, on video? Consider some other cases. The
internationalizing of financing and therefore of casts were
disastrous for Andrei Tarkovsky in the last two films of his
stupendous (and tragically abbreviated) career.
And how will Aleksandr Sokurov find the money to go on making
his sublime films, under the rude conditions of Russian capitalism?
Predictably, the love of cinema has waned. People still like going to
the movies, and some people still care about and expect something
special, necessary from a film. And wonderful films are still being
made: Mike Leigh's Naked, Gianni Amelio's Lamerica, Fred
Kelemen's Fate. But you hardly find anymore, at least among the
young, the distinctive cinephilic love of movies that is not simply
love of but a certain taste in films (grounded in a vast appetite for

seeing and reseeing as much as possible of cinema's glorious past).

Cinephilia itself has come under attack, as something quaint,
outmoded, snobbish. For cinephilia implies that films are unique,
unrepeatable, magic experiences. Cinephilia tells us that the
Hollywood remake of Godard's Breathless cannot be as good as
the original. Cinephilia has no role in the era of hyperindustrial
films. For cinephilia cannot help, by the very range and eclecticism
of its passions, from sponsoring the idea of the film as, first of all, a
poetic object; and cannot help from inciting those outside the
movie industry, like painters and writers, to want to make films,
too. It is precisely this notion that has been defeated.
If cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too... no matter how
many movies, even very good ones, go on being made. If cinema
can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of
cine-love.
Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of The Volcano Lover,
a novel, and Alice in Bed, a play.
*
May 2, 1999
Why Are We in Kosovo?
By SUSAN SONTAG
The other day a friend from home, New York, called me in Bari
-where I am living for a couple of months -to ask whether I am all
right and inquired in passing whether I can hear sounds of the
bombing. I reassured her that not only could I not hear the bombs
dropping on Belgrade and Novi Sad and Pristina from downtown
Bari, but even the planes taking off from the nearby NATO base of
Gioia del Colle are quite inaudible. Though it is easy to mock my
geographyless American friend's vision of European countries being
only slightly larger than postage stamps, her Tiny Europe seems a
nice complement to the widely held vision of Helpless Europe being
dragged into a bellicose folly by Big Bad America.
Perhaps I exaggerate. I am writing this from Italy - weakest link in
the NATO chain. Italy (unlike France and Germany) continues to
maintain an embassy in Belgrade.

Milosevic has received the Italian Communists' party leader,

Armando Cossutta. The estimable mayor of Venice has sent an
envoy to Belgrade with letters addressed to Milosevic and to the
ethnic Albanian leader with whom he has met, Ibrahim Rugova,
proposing Venice as a site for peace negotiations.
(The letters were accepted, thank you very much, by the Orthodox
primate following the Easter Sunday service.) But then it is
understandable that Italy has panicked: Italians see not just scenes
of excruciating misery on their TV news but images of masses on
the move. In Italy, Albanians are first of all future immigrants.
But opposition to the war is hardly confined to Italy, and to one
strand of the political spectrum. On the contrary: mobilized against
this war are remnants of the left and the likes of Le Pen and Bossi
and Heider on the right. The right is against immigrants. The left is
against America. (Against the idea of America, that is. The
hegemony of American popular culture in Europe could hardly be
more total.) On both the so-called left and the so-called right,
identity-talk is on the rise. The anti-Americanism that is fueling the
protest against the war has been growing in recent years in many
of the nations of the New Europe, and is perhaps best understood
as a displacement of the anxiety about this New Europe, which
everyone has been told is a Good Thing and few dare question.
Nations are communities that are always being imagined,
reconceived, reasserted, against the pressure of a defining Other.
The specter of a nation without borders, an infinitely porous nation,
is bound to create anxiety. Europe needs its overbearing America.
Weak Europe? Impotent Europe? The words are everywhere. The
truth is that the made-for-business Europe being brought into
existence with the enthusiastic assent of the responsible
business and professional elites is a Europe precisely designed to
be incapable of responding to the threat posed by a dictator like
Milosevic. This is not a question of weakness, though that is how
it is being experienced. It is a question of ideology.
It is not that Europe is weak. Far from it. It is that Europe, the
Europe under construction since the Final Victory of Capitalism in
1989, is up to something else.
Something which indeed renders obsolete most of the questions of
justice -indeed, all the moral questions.

(What prevails, in their place, are questions of health, which may

be conjoined with ecological concerns; but that is another matter.)
A Europe designed for spectacle, consumerism and hand
wringing... but haunted by the fear of national identities being
swamped either by faceless multinational commercialism or by
tides of alien immigrants from poor countries.
In one part of the continent, former Communists play the
nationalist card and foment lethal nationalisms -Milosevic being the
most egregious example. In the other part, nationalism, and with it
war, are presumed to be superseded, outmoded.
How helpless our Europe feels in the face of all this irrational
slaughter and suffering taking place in the other Europe.
And meanwhile the war goes on. A war that started in 1991.
Not in 1999. And not, as the Serbs would have it, six centuries ago,
either. Theirs is a country whose nationalist myth has as its
founding event a defeat -the Battle of Kosovo, lost to the Turks in
1389. We are fighting the Turks, Serb officers commanding the
mortar emplacements on the heights of Sarajevo would assure
visiting journalists.
Would we not think it odd if France still rallied around the memory
of the Battle of Agincourt -1415 -in its eternal enmity with Great
Britain? But who could imagine such a thing? For France is Europe.
And they are not.
Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to the Serb
shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The
Europe that let Bosnia die.
A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies don't take
place. Wars, genocides -that happened here once, but no longer.
It's something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are
not really Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I
exaggerate. But having spent a good part of three years, from
1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo, it does not seem to me like an
exaggeration at all.
Living on the edge of NATO Europe, only a few hundred kilometers
from the refugee camps in Durres and Kukes and Blace, from the
greatest mass of suffering in Europe since the Second World War, it
is true that I can't hear the NATO planes leaving the base here in
Puglia. But I can walk to Bari's waterfront and watch Albanian and
Kosovar families pouring off the daily ferries from Durres -legal

immigrants, presumably -or drive south a hundred kilometers at

night and see the Italian coast guard searching for the rubber
dinghies crammed with refugees that leave Vlore nightly for the
perilous Adriatic crossing. But if I leave my apartment in Bari only
to visit friends and have a pizza and see a movie and hang out in a
bar, I am no closer to the war than the television news or the
newspapers that arrive every morning at my doorstep. I could as
well be back in New York.
Of course, it is easy to turn your eyes from what is happening if it
is not happening to you. Or if you have not put yourself where it is
happening. I remember in Sarajevo in the summer of 1993 a
Bosnian friend telling me ruefully that in 1991, when she saw on
her TV set the footage of Vukovar utterly leveled by the Serbs, she
thought to herself, How terrible, but that's in Croatia, that can
never happen here in Bosnia... and switched the channel. The
following year, when the war started in Bosnia, she learned
differently. Then she became part of a story on television that other
people saw and said, How terrible... and switched the channel.
How helpless our pacified, comfortable Europe feels in the face
of all this irrational slaughter and suffering taking place in the other
Europe. But the images cannot be conjured away -of refugees,
people who have been pushed out of their homes, their torched
villages, by the hundreds of thousands and who look like us.
Generations of Europeans fearful of any idealism, incapable of
indignation except in the old anti-imperialist cold-war grooves. (Yet,
of course, the key point about this war is that it is the direct result
of the end of the cold war and the breakup of old empires and
imperial rivalries.) Stop the War and Stop the Genocide, read the
banners being waved in the demonstrations in Rome and here in
Bari. For Peace.
Against War. Who is not? But how can you stop those bent on
genocide without making war?
We have been here before. The horrors, the horrors. Our attempt
to forge a humanitarian response. Our inability (yes, after
Auschwitz!) to comprehend how such horrors can take place. And
as the horrors multiply, it becomes even more incomprehensible
why we should respond to any one of them (since we have not
responded to the others). Why this horror and not another? Why
Bosnia or Kosovo and not Kurdistan or Rwanda or Tibet?

Are we not saying that European lives, European suffering are

more valuable, more worth acting on to protect, than the lives of
people in the Middle East, Africa and Asia?
One answer to this commonly voiced objection to NATO's war is to
say boldly, Yes, to care about the fate of the people in Kosovo is
Eurocentric, and what's wrong with that? But is not the accusation
of Eurocentrism itself just one more vestige of European
presumption, the presumption of Europe's universalist mission: that
every part of the globe has a claim on Europe's attention?
If several African states had cared enough about the genocide of
the Tutsis in Rwanda (nearly a million people!) to intervene
militarily, say, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, would we
have criticized this initiative as being Afrocentric? Would we have
asked what right these states have to intervene in Rwanda when
they have done nothing on behalf of the Kurds or the Tibetans?
Another argument against intervening in Kosovo is that the war is
-wonderful word -illegal, because NATO is violating the borders of
a sovereign state. Kosovo is, after all, part of the new Greater
Serbia called Yugoslavia. Tough luck for the Kosovars that Milosevic
revoked their autonomous status in 1989. Inconvenient that 90
percent of Kosovars are Albanians -ethnic Albanians as they are
called, to distinguish them from the citizens of Albania.
Empires reconfigure. But are national borders, which have been
altered so many times in the last hundred years, really to be the
ultimate criterion? You can murder your wife in your own house, but
not outdoors on the street.
Imagine that Nazi Germany had had no expansionist ambitions but
had simply made it a policy in the late 1930's and early 1940's to
slaughter all the German Jews. Do we think a government has the
right to do whatever it wants on its own territory? Maybe the
governments of Europe would have said that 60 years ago. But
would we approve now of their decision?
Push the supposition into the present. What if the French
Government began slaughtering large numbers of Corsicans and
driving the rest out of Corsica... or the Italian Government began
emptying out Sicily or Sardinia, creating a million refugees... or
Spain decided to apply a final solution to its rebellious Basque
population. Wouldn't we agree that a consortium of powers on the
continent had the right to use military force to make the French (or

Italian, or Spanish) Government reverse its actions, which would

probably mean overthrowing that Government?
But of course this couldn't happen, could it? Not in Europe.
My friends in Sarajevo used to say during the siege: How can the
West be letting this happen to us? This is Europe, too. We're
Europeans. Surely they won't allow it to go on.
But they -Europe -did.
For something truly terrible happened in Bosnia. From the Serb
death camps in the north of Bosnia in 1992, the first death camps
on European soil since the 1940's, to the mass executions of many
thousands of civilians at Srebrenica and elsewhere in the summer
of 1995 -Europe tolerated that.
So, obviously, Bosnia wasn't Europe.
Those of us who spent time in Sarajevo used to say that, as the
20th century began at Sarajevo, so will the 21st century begin at
Sarajevo. If the options before NATO all seem either improbable or
unpalatable, it is because NATO's actions come eight years too late.
Milosevic should have been stopped when he was shelling
Dubrovnik in 1991.
Back in 1993 and 1994, American policy makers were saying that
even if there were no United States intervention in Bosnia, rest
assured, this would be the last thing that Milosevic would be
allowed to get away with. A line in the sand had been drawn: he
would never be allowed to make war on Kosovo. But who believed
the Americans then? Not the Bosnians. Not Milosevic. Not the
Europeans. Not even the Americans themselves. After Dayton, after
the destruction of independent Bosnia, it was time to go back to
sleep, as if the series of events set in motion in 1989 with the
accession to power of Milosevic and the revocation of autonomous
status for the province of Kosovo, would not play out to its obvious
logical end.
If Europe is having a hard time thinking that it matters what
happens in the southeastern corner of Europe, imagine how hard it
is for Americans to think it is in their interest. It is not in America's
interest to push this war on Europe. It is very much not in Europe's
interest to reward Milosevic for the destruction of Yugoslavia and
the creation of so much human suffering.
Why not just let the brush fire burn out? is the argument of some.
And the expulsion of a million or more refugees into the

neighboring countries of Albania and Macedonia? This will certainly

bring on the destruction of the fragile new state of Macedonia and
the redrawing of the map of the Balkans -certain to be disputed by,
at the very least, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. Do we imagine this
will happen peacefully?
Not surprisingly, the Serbs are presenting themselves as the
victims. (Clinton equals Hitler, etc.) But it is grotesque to equate
the casualties inflicted by the NATO bombing with the mayhem
inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people in the last eight years
by the Serb programs of ethnic cleansing.
Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally
unjust.
No forceful response to the violence of a state against peoples who
are nominally its own citizens? (Which is what most wars are
today. Not wars between states.) The principal instances of mass
violence in the world today are those committed by governments
within their own legally recognized borders. Can we really say there
is no response to this? Is it acceptable that such slaughters be
dismissed as civil wars, also known as age-old ethnic hatreds.
(After all, anti-Semitism was an old tradition in Europe; indeed, a
good deal older than ancient Balkan hatreds. Would this have
justified letting Hitler kill all the Jews on German territory?) Is it true
that war never solved anything? (Ask a black American if he or she
thinks our Civil War didn't solve anything.) War is not simply a
mistake, a failure to communicate. There is radical evil in the world,
which is why there are just wars. And this is a just war. Even if it
has been bungled.
Stop the genocide. Return all refugees to their homes.
Worthy goals. But how is any of this conceivably going to happen
unless the Milosevic regime is overthrown? (And the truth is, it's not
going to happen.) Impossible to see how this war will play out. All
the options seem improbable, as well as undesirable. Unthinkable
to keep bombing indefinitely, if Milosevic is indeed willing to accept
the destruction of the Serbian economy; unthinkable for NATO to
stop bombing, if Milosevic remains intransigent.
The Milosevic Government has finally brought on Serbia a small
portion of the suffering it has inflicted on neighboring peoples.
War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community
that imagines itself to be history's eternal victim can be as

intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize
that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for
Serbia, the net result of Milosevic's policies being the economic and
cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several
generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not
happen soon.
Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of The Volcano Lover:
A Romance. She is completing a new novel.
*
A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?
in Women (Random House, 1999) by Annie Leibovitz.
Essay
by Susan Sontag
Undertake to do a book of photographs of people with nothing
more in common than that they are women (and living in America
at the end of the twentieth century), all -well, almost all -fully
clothed, therefore not the other kind of all-women picture book...
Start with no more than a commanding notion of the sheer
interestingness of the subject, especially in view of the
unprecedented changes in the consciousness of many women in
these last decades, and a resolve to stay open to whim and
opportunity...
Sample, explore, revisit, choose, arrange, without claiming to have
brought to the page a representative miscellany...
Even so, a large number of pictures of what is, nominally, a single
subject will inevitably be felt to be representative in some sense.
How much more so with this subject, with this book, an anthology
of destinies and disabilities and new possibilities; a book that
invites the sympathetic responses we bring to the depiction of a
minority (for that is what women are, by every criterion except the
numerical), featuring many portraits of those who are a credit to
their sex. Such a book has to feel instructive, even if it tells us what
we think we already know about the overcoming of perennial
impediments and prejudices and cultural handicaps, the conquest
of new zones of achievement. Of course, such a book would be

misleading if it did not touch on the bad news as well: the

continuing authority of demeaning stereotypes, the continuing
violence (domestic assault is the leading cause of injuries to
American women). Any large-scale picturing of women belongs to
the ongoing story of how women are presented, and how they are
invited to think of themselves. A book of photographs of women
must, whether it intends to or not, raise the question of women
-there is no equivalent question of men. Men, unlike women, are
not a work in progress.
Each of these pictures must stand on its own. But the ensemble
says, So this is what women are now-as different, as varied, as
heroic, as forlorn, as conventional, as unconventional as this.
Nobody scrutinizing the book will fail to note the confirmation of
stereotypes of what women are like and the challenge to those
stereotypes. Whether well-known or obscure, each of the nearly
one hundred and seventy women in this album will be looked at
(especially by other women) as models: models of beauty, models
of self-esteem, models of strength, models of transgressiveness,
models of victimhood, models of false consciousness, models of
successful aging.
No book of photographs of men would be interrogated in the same
way.
But then a book of photographs of men would not be undertaken
in the same spirit. How could there be any interest in asserting that
a man can be a stockbroker or a farmer or an astronaut or a miner?
A book of photographs of men with sundry occupations, men only
(without any additional label), would probably be a book about the
beauty of men, men as objects of lustful imaginings to women and
to other men.
But when men are viewed as sex objects, that is not their primary
identity. The traditions of regarding men as, at least potentially, the
creators and curators of their own destinies and women as objects
of male emotions and fantasies (lust, tenderness, fear,
condescension, scorn, dependence), of regarding an individual man
as an instance of humankind and an individual woman as an
instance of... women, are still largely intact, deeply rooted in
language, narrative, group arrangements, and family customs. In
no language does the pronoun she stand for human beings of
both sexes. Women and men are differently weighted, physically

and culturally, with different contours of selfhood, all presumptively

favoring those born male.
I do this, I endure this, I want this... because I am a woman. I do
that, I endure that, I want that... even though I'm a woman.
Because of the mandated inferiority of women, their condition as a
cultural minority, there continues to be a debate about what
women are, can be, should want to be. Freud is famously supposed
to have asked, Lord, what do women want? Imagine a world in
which it seems normal to inquire, Lord, what do men want?... but
who can imagine such a world?
No one thinks the Great Duality is symmetrical -even in America,
noted since the nineteenth century by foreign travelers as a
paradise for uppity women. Feminine and masculine are a tilted
polarity. Equal rights for men has never inspired a march or a
hunger strike. In no country are men legal minors, as women were
until well into the twentieth century in many European countries,
and are still in many Muslim countries, from Morocco to
Afghanistan.
No country gave women the right to vote before giving it to men.
Nobody ever thought of men as the second sex.
And yet, and yet: there is something new in the world, starting
with the revoking of age-old legal shackles regarding suffrage,
divorce, property rights. It seems almost inconceivable now that
the enfranchisement of women happened as recently as it did:
that, for instance, women in France and Italy had to wait until 1945
and 1946 to be able to vote. There have been tremendous changes
in women's consciousness, transforming the inner life of everyone:
the sallying forth of women from women's worlds into the world at
large, the arrival of women's ambitions. Ambition is what women
have been schooled to stifle in themselves, and what is celebrated
in a book of photographs that emphasizes the variety of women's
lives today.
Such a book, however much it attends to women's activeness, is
also about women's attractiveness.
Nobody looks through a book of pictures of women without
noticing whether the women are attractive or not.
To be feminine, in one commonly felt definition, is to be attractive,
or to do one's best to be attractive; to attract. (As being masculine
is being strong.) While it is perfectly possible to defy this

imperative, it is not possible for any woman to be unaware of it. As

it is thought a weakness in a man to care a great deal about how
he looks, it is a moral fault in a woman not to care enough.
Women are judged by their appearance as men are not, and
women are punished more than men are by the changes brought
about by aging. Ideals of appearance such as youthfulness and
slimness are in large part now created and enforced by
photographic images. And, of course, a primary interest in having
photographs of well-known beauties to look at over the years is
seeing just how well or badly they negotiate the shame of aging.
In advanced consumer societies, it is said, these narcissistic
values are more and more the concern of men as well. But male
primping never loosens the male lock on initiative taking. Indeed,
glorying in one's appearance is an ancient warrior's pleasure, an
expression of power, an instrument of dominance. Anxiety about
personal attractiveness could never be thought defining of a man:
a man can always be seen. Women are looked at.
We assume a world with a boundless appetite for images, in which
people, women and men, are eager to surrender themselves to the
camera. But it is worth recalling that there are parts of the world
where being photographed is something off-limits to women. In a
few countries, where men have been mobilized for a veritable war
against women, women scarcely appear at all. The imperial rights
of the camera -to gaze at, to record, to exhibit anyone, anything
-are an exemplary feature of modern life, as is the emancipation of
women.
And just as the granting of more and more rights and choices to
women is a measure of a society's embrace of modernity, so the
revolt against modernity initiates a rush to rescind the meager
gains toward participation in society on equal terms with men won
by women, mostly urban, educated women, in previous decades. In
many countries struggling with failed or discredited attempts to
modernize, there are more and more covered women.
SUSAN SONTAG These are the opening pages of the essay A
photograph is not an opinion. Or is it? by Susan Sontag which
appears in Women (Random House, 1999) by Annie Leibovitz.
Essay 1999 Susan Sontag, All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with
the permission of The Wylie Agency.

*
February 29, 2000
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
'In America': Love as a Distraction That Gets in the Way of
Art
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI In America By Susan Sontag.
387 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
With her last book, The Volcano Lover (1992), Susan Sontag, the
onetime high priestess of the avant-garde, demonstrated that she
could set aside modernist theorizing to create an enthralling
historical novel. In retelling the story of the love affair of Lady
Hamilton and Lord Nelson, she managed to write a book that was
at once an old-fashioned romance and an encyclopedic novel of
ideas, a novel whose emotional wisdom and virtuosic story-telling
formed a perfect bookend to the cerebral dazzle (deslumbre) of her
essays.
Sontag's latest novel, In America, is another historical
production about a woman caught in a love triangle between her
husband and lover, but it's an altogether more desultory (inconexa)
-and unsatisfying -performance. Despite a playful preface that
introduces the author as a postmodernist commentator on the
story, the novel quickly devolves into a banal, flat-footed narrative
that chronicles the characters' exploits through letters, journals and
corny (cursi), omniscient voice-overs. He was in a dark place,
Sontag writes of one character, where there were only wounds.
Though In America plays with the Jamesian dialectic between
America and Europe, though it reverberates with echoes of
Hawthorne's
Blithedale
Romance
and
George
Eliot's
Middlemarch, it turns out to have little in common with those
novels. It turns out to be a thoroughly conventional imitation of a
thoroughly conventional 19th-century novel.
The heroine of In America, Maryna Zalewsky, we are told, is
Poland's most celebrated actress; like Sir William Hamilton in
The Volcano Lover, she is what Sontag once dubbed (llam) a
saturnine personality -one of those fiercely serious souls
condemned to work and possessed of a self-conscious and
unforgiving relation to the self. Maryna's autocratic bearing and

seductive charm make others want to please her, make them

feel they would not want to be anywhere else on earth than here
with her, acting out her vision. In 1876, when she decides to
abandon her acting career in Europe and start a utopian
community in America -a community devoted to the purifying
simplicities of a communal, rustic life- her husband, Bogdan, her
suitor, Ryszard, and a group of friends obediently pack up and
follow her across the Atlantic.
It's not long, however, before that dream of building a kind of
Brook Farm (the utopian community satirized by Hawthorne in The
Blithedale Romance) in the desert farmlands of Southern
California flounders (tropiezos) over poor finances and internal
disputes. And while Maryna says she will temporarily go back to
acting to raise some money for the farm, Bogdan says he realizes
that it wasn't a new life M. wanted, it was a new self: Our
community had been an instrument for that, and now she is bent
on returning to the stage. She will not consider going back to
Poland, she says, until she has shown what she can do before the
American public.
In fact, while we are repeatedly told that Maryna -or Marina, as she
now calls herself- has a great soul, that there is something
heroic about her dedication to her art, she comes across as a
simple narcissist, a chilly careerist who will always put her work
before everything else. She figures that her marriage to Bogdan
-who is really attracted to men- has endured because he is just
circumspect enough that I still feel free and she abruptly breaks
off her affair with Ryszard, telling him that this a deux thing isn't,
can never be that important to me. She needs to be calm to focus
on her work, she says; in any case, she prefers the quasi-amorous
approval of innumerable, never to be known or barely known,
others to the love of a single man.
Although Sontag does a convincing job of depicting Maryna's
restless nature and penchant for exertion, she too often resorts
to explaining her behavior in terms of tired cliches about actresses
and acting. She has Maryna repeatedly say she does not know
what she is feeling when she is not onstage, and in another
passage writes: an actor doesn't need to have an essence.
Perhaps it would be a hindrance for an actor to have an essence.
An actor needs only a mask. The men in Maryna's life are

curiously coldblooded and opaque as well. Bogdan is a faceless

consort, compliant, indulgent and faintly patronizing while Ryszard,
who is supposed to be madly in love with Maryna, shrugs off the
end of their affair, thinking of the books he could now write with
only lesser obsessions to distract him. None of these lapses in
characterization would matter so much if Sontag had employed the
sort of confiding, erudite voice she'd used in The Volcano Lover
(and toys with briefly in the opening pages of this novel) or if the
narrative bristled (erizada) with the sort of provocative asides and
historical cameos that energized that earlier novel.
Instead, this writer, who in essay after essay celebrated an art of
complexity and ambiguity, gives us numbingly (entorpecidas)
familiar comparisons of Europe and America delivered in stark
(rgidos), uninflected tones. Europe is about the past, about roots
and tradition; America is about the present, about freedom and
newness and change. In Europe, an artist can embody the
aspirations of a nation; in America, an artist is an entertainer with
eccentric foibles and extravagant needs. America, we're told, is
where the poor can become rich and everyone stands equal
before the law, where streets are paved with gold. America is
where the future is being born. America is where everything is
supposed to be possible. The American, Ryszard declares in a
letter, is someone who is always leaving everything behind. No
doubt Maryna's decision to exchange the rustic simplicities of her
failed utopia for the luxurious life of a cosseted actress with as few
regrets as she expended in her decision to leave Poland for the
United States is supposed to underscore the freedom America
gives people to reinvent themselves. It also points to the theme of
transcendence -of overcoming cultural and personal history- that
runs through the author's work. The problem is that the gifted
Sontag has said what she has to say in this novel more
persuasively and with far more nuance and subtlety many times
before.
*
March 12, 2000
Diva

Susan Sontag's novel follows the fortunes

19th-century actress and her entourage.
By SARAH KERR In America By Susan Sontag.
387 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

of

The narrator of In America is unidentified save for a cool,

cerebral voice and some quickly dropped biographical details, like
youth in Arizona and California and early marriage to a formidable
intellectual many years her senior, that self-consciously call to
mind the novel's famous author, Susan Sontag. When we first meet
the narrator, she is out walking in a winter storm. Shivering from
the cold, she passes by a hotel, notices a party on the ground floor
and decides to slip inside and warm up. And then something
strange happens. She speaks an up-to-date lingo (she crashed
the party, she talks of upgrading information). But inside the
hotel, the guests chatter away in a language she doesn't know.
Odder still, the ladies are wearing floor-length gowns, while the
gentlemen have on waistcoats; the room is lighted by stinking gas
lanterns, and the cabs everyone arrives in are powered not by
engine but by horse.
Is this some kind of gimmicky costume affair? Has the narrator
unwittingly boarded a time machine? Not quite.
Although she can't speak to the revelers, with a little effort she is
able to suss out who they are and what era they belong to. The
time and place are Russian-occupied Warsaw, 1876. The guest of
honor is the leading Polish actress of the day, the lovely and
charismatic Maryna Zalezowska. But here is the weird (misteriosa)
part: our guide knows all this because, it turns out, she herself has
made the whole scene up. Such an actress really existed, and lived
out adventures roughly resembling those the book is about to
chronicle. But everything else about this party, from the small talk
to the church bells echoing across the city, the red-faced servant
huffing beneath a load of firewood and the baked black grouse with
partridges (perdices), comes courtesy of the narrator's mind. She
had, she confesses, been struggling to work up a story about a
different gathering (another self-reference: the hotel party she first
set out to describe would have taken place in the same era but in
Sarajevo, a city Sontag is widely known to have visited, bravely, at
the height of the bombing in the early 1990's).

Instead, her imagination flew to this party in Warsaw, and here she
has decided to stay. I thought if I listened and watched and
ruminated, she reasons, taking as much time as I needed, I could
understand the people in this room, that theirs would be a story
that would speak to me, though how I knew this I can't explain.
Settling into a story -choosing a setting and characters, working out
the particulars -is an awkward process for the novelist, part whim
(capricho), part a matter of waiting for the authentic detail to
suggest itself; in dramatizing that process Sontag has hit on a neat
metafictional truth.
I dwell on this opening scene because she moves readers through
it with sure-footed and wonderfully daring technique. At the same
time (prelude to a battle that will rage throughout this book), the
ideas about fiction that Sontag proposes seem the opposite of
daring. Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be
furnished and peopled, the narrator announces, sounding a little
passive and complacent. Imagination, she seems to say, is not
much more than a survey of the contents of your own brain.
But back to the story, which improves tenfold (diez veces ms)
once the narrator gets out of the way and lets the characters do
their thing. Our heroine, Maryna, is heavy-jawed and sturdily
(firmemente) built, too old, at 35, to be strictly beautiful, but with a
diva's skillful gestures and commanding gaze, which make her
seem like the most gorgeous creature anyone has ever seen. Still
weak from a recent battle with typhoid and fed up with the
indignities of Russian occupation, she worries that she is losing her
passion for acting. So she decides to give up her career and sail to
America, and she persuades a full entourage -including her decent
but sexually absent husband and a young journalist who longs
above all else in life to be her lover- to accompany her. Maryna's
plan, rather vague, is for everyone to pitch in toward a humble
communal life somewhere, a more authentic existence; the group
is inspired in part by Fourier's then fashionable ideas but most of all
by the weary actress's desire to be done with the tired part of
Maryna Zalezowska and take on a meaty new role.
The arrival of these Polish idealists in kitschy America sets the
scene for some charming historical set pieces: they nibble on that
bizarre native delicacy, dry airy lumps (masas) made by exploding
kernels (almendras) of white corn, and at the Philadelphia

Exposition Maryna marvels at a huge sculpture of Iolanthe made

entirely of butter. Two members of the party who travel ahead to
scout locations pick the unlikely setting of Anaheim, Calif. (today
home to Disneyland, but back then, apparently, a magnet for
Europeans attempting to learn farming). Living off their savings,
the Poles rent a farm, read agricultural pamphlets, lay out a garden
and navely attempt to become vintners. And then, after some
stark but rather beautiful months, the idyll falls apart.
The failure is gradual -drift more than rupture- and most of the
people involved seem to get over it quickly.
Very quickly, in fact. The novel offers little in the way of conflict. To
support her family, Maryna moves to San Francisco and returns to
the stage under the easier-to-swallow name Madame Marina
Zalenska. At this point in the story, some novelists might choose to
focus on her insecurities about reviving her abandoned career. But
this heroine is too steely to admit such doubt. You feel strong,
the narrator says, saluting her willpower. You want to feel strong.
The important thing is to go forward. Maryna kicks down barriers
as if they were Styrofoam props (puntales).
Auditions are a cinch (bagatela), and famously tight-fisted
(tacaos) impresarios stand in line to put her up in lavish (prdigas)
penthouse suites.
As in her essays, Sontag has a terrific feel for the way theatrical
styles evolve (desarrollo), seeming vital and true when they burst
on the scene, and embarrassing and bizarre the minute audiences
decide they are dated. Maryna appears to stand on a threshold.
Besides Shakespeare, she specializes in the corny (cursi) but
undeniably moving plays that dominated the 19th-century stage:
weepies in the tradition of Camille, starring a heroine whose love
violates social mores, leading inexorably to her gorgeous
(suntuosa), swooning death. The poignant implication is that in a
few decades Maryna may be regarded as a high priestess of dreck.
But for her time she is an artist of the highest caliber: night after
night, crowd and critics alike get out their handkerchiefs for her
performances.
That Maryna never phones in a sluggish (perezosa) performance,
never even flubs a line, is hard to believe, but then belief may not
be the point. Sontag's fiction, always ripe (madura) with ideas, has
often flirted with fantasy. Early on, in the avant-garde Death Kit

(1967), she probed an average man's dissociative dreams. Later,

she abandoned novel writing for some 25 years, and when she
returned, with The Volcano Lover (1992), her virtuosic retelling of
the Lord Nelson-Lady Emma Hamilton affair, she seemed drawn to
fantasy of the more traditional variety. That book, with its famous
lovers and Neapolitan background, had the romantic glamour of an
old Saturday matinee. In America has glamour, too, but it's all
funneled into the character of Maryna, who never goofs, never
seems graceless or cowardly, never does anything to contradict a
worshipful (adorable) saloonkeeper who declares: You're a star.
Everyone loves you. You can do anythin' you want. Even Sontag,
one suspects, would admit that Maryna is part fantasy -a pure
distillation of diva-ness.
'In place of hermeneutics,' Susan Sontag wrote at the close of her
famous essay 'Against Interpretation,' in 1964, 'we need an erotics
of art.' It was this essay, with its stunning declaration of
independence from the traditional obligations of criticism... that
helped to make 'Against Interpretation' one of the most widely read
and widely influential works of criticism in the 1960's....
All of this is worth recalling now... because Miss Sontag has now
completely reversed her position.... Writing at length in... The New
York Review of Books, she has taken the recent publication of 'The
Last of the Nuba,' a handsome book of photographs by Leni
Riefenstahl as an occasion to explore the meaning -which is to say,
the content- of what she does not hesitate to identify as 'fascist
aesthetics.'... The result is one of the most important inquiries into
the relation of esthetics to ideology we have had in many years,
and the only really troubling aspect of its publication -so welcome
in every other respect- is the author's refusal to acknowledge her
own contribution to a phenomenon she now vehemently deplores.
-from an article by Hilton Kramer Febr. 9, 1975.
Almost but not quite as lively as in The Volcano Lover, Sontag's
prose here is lithe (flexible), playful: in spite of the listless
(indiferente) plot, this book has flow (fluir). Indeed, In America
reads so smoothly (suavemente) that one could almost accuse
Sontag of placing too few demands on her readers. Stimulating
ideas, as usual, lurk (esconden) around every corner. But they tend

to arrive pre-interpreted. So marked out are the themes in this

book that within minutes of finishing I felt ready to conduct a
seminar. There is the problem of impermanent utopias. (Brook Farm
is referred to, and Maryna's favorite role is plucky Rosalind from
As You Like It, the saddest of comic heroines, who escapes to the
forest of Arden and feels both free and banished from freedom.)
There is the unexpected kinship (parentesco) between Poland and
the United States, countries that have little in common except the
fantasy that they have been singled out for a remarkable destiny
-America chosen to liberate the rest of the world, and Poland, after
centuries of attacks and occupations, assigned a noble martyrdom.
There is the paradox that Americans then as now were suspicious
of art, preferring loud capitalist spectacles with junk (junco) food,
and yet Shakespeare was so popular in the 19th century that even
a rowdy town like Virginia City had a company of actors who knew
his plays by heart. There is the way Maryna's abrupt change of
roles stands for the changes ordinary 19th-century women may
have wanted to make but couldn't. It is harder for a woman to
want a life different from the one decreed for her, Maryna writes a
friend back home, spelling out her predicament a little too
explicitly. A woman has so many inner voices telling her to behave
prudently, amiably, timorously. And of course there is the classic
Henry James problem turned inside out, with refined intellectuals
set loose in vast, bumpkin (burda) America. Of all Sontag's themes,
this is both the most lighthearted and the most labored. The
observations she makes about America (it's a place that wants
endlessly to be remade, to shuck off the expectations of the past,
to start anew with a lighter burden) have been made for
centuries, rather forcefully, by many of our greatest writers, not to
mention by Madonna. Nor is this the only instance where Sontag
plays with imagery that is startlingly familiar. When the journalist
first crosses the Atlantic, his boat trip matches to a T what you
expect from the movies. Ditto the comic-relief character of Miss
Collingridge, a sexless spinster (soltern) diction coach who
beseeches Maryna to say Idiot. Not eediot. And kill, not keel; she
could have been invented by James or Trollope, and played on film
by a young Eve Arden. As for Maryna, with her aristocratic ennui,
eroticized yet asexual glamour, cement-thick but enchanting
accent and stardom lived as a kind of exile, it's hard not to be

reminded of Garbo in Grand Hotel, tearfully pleading, I vant to

be alone! Much of this dj vu may well be on purpose. Sontag
was the great champion of camp, after all. Throughout her career
she has been ravenously (vorazmente) curious about all categories
of aesthetic experience, and the stereotype is a perfectly
legitimate, even fascinating category to explore. But if American
culture can claim any particular virtue right now, surely it's a highly
evolved (desarrollada), ironic awareness of many of the clichs
Sontag is describing as if for the first time.
We have VH1 to tell us all about divas, and talk shows to remind us
that we like to change identities at the drop of a hat. And didn't
Sontag raise the stakes (estacas) slightly higher in that opening
chapter, when she said, essentially, Here is what my imagination is
capable of; here is what I have been able to see? The irony is that
Sontag's mind has such a rigorous, dauntingly (intimidante) original
reputation; her thoughts, it is generally assumed, run on ahead of
her sometimes dry prose. Maybe elsewhere but not here. Sentence
by sentence, scene to scene, the writing in In America is utterly
nimble (gil). It's the ideas, somehow, that lag behind.
Sarah Kerr is a writer on culture and politics.
*
CHAPTER ONE
In America
By SUSAN SONTAG
Farrar Straus Giroux
PERHAPS IT WAS the slap she received from Gabriela Ebert a few
minutes past five o'clock in the afternoon (I'd not witnessed that)
which made something, no, everything (I couldn't have known this
either) a little clearer. Arriving at the theatre, inflexibly punctual,
two hours before curtain, Maryna had gone directly to her star's
lair, been stripped to her chemise and corset and helped into a
fur-lined robe and slippers by her dresser, Zofia, whom she
dispatched to iron her costume in an adjoining room, had pushed
the candles nearer both sides of the mirror, had leaned forward
over the jumbled palette of already uncapped jars and vials of
makeup for a closer scrutiny of that all too familiar mask, her real

face, the actress's under-face, when behind her the door seemed to
break open and in front of her, sharing the mirror, hurtling toward
her, she saw her august rival's reddened, baleful face shouting the
absurd insult, threw herself back in her chair, turned, glimpsed the
arm descending just before an involuntary grimace of her own
brought down her eyelids at the same instant it bared her upper
teeth and shortened her nose, and felt the shove and sting of a
large beringed hand against her face.
It all happened so rapidly and noisily -her eyes stayed closed, the
door banged shut- and the shadow-flecked room with its hissing
gas jets had gone so silent now, it might have been a bad dream:
she'd been having bad dreams. Maryna clapped her palm to her
offended face.
Zofia? Zofia! Sound of the door being opened softly. And some
anxious babble from Bogdan. What the devil did she want? If I
hadn't been down the corridor with Jan, I would have stopped her,
how dare she burst in on you like that! It's nothing, Maryna
said, opening her eyes, dropping her hand. Nothing. Meaning:
the buzz of pain in her cheek.
And the migraine now looming on the other side of her head,
which she intended to keep at bay by a much-practiced exercise of
will until the end of the evening. She bent forward to tie her hair in
a towel, then stood and moved to the washstand, where she
vigorously soaped and scrubbed her face and neck, and patted the
skin dry with a soft cloth.
I knew all along she wouldn't-
It's all right, said Maryna. Not to him. To Zofia, hesitating at the
half-open door, holding the costume aloft in her outstretched arms.
Waving her in, Bogdan shut the door a bit harder than he intended.
Maryna stepped out of her robe and into the burgundy gown with
gold braiding (No, no, leave the back unbuttoned!), rotated
slowly once, twice, before the cheval glass, nodded to herself, sent
Zofia away to repair the loose buckle on her shoe and heat the
curling iron, then sat at the dressing table again.
What did Gabriela want?
Nothing.
Maryna! She took a tuft of down and spread a thick layer of
Pearl Powder on her face and throat.
She came by to wish me the best for tonight.

Really?
Quite generous of her, wouldn't you agree, since she'd thought
the role was to be hers.
Very generous, he said. And, he thought, very unlike Gabriela.
He watched as three times she redid the powder, applied the
rouge with a hare's foot well up on her cheekbones and under her
eyes and on her chin, and blackened her eyelids, and three times
took it all off with a sponge.
Maryna?
Sometimes I think there's no point to any of this, she said
tonelessly, starting again on her eyelids with the charcoal stick.
This? She dipped a fine camel's-hair brush into the dish of burnt
umber and traced a line under her lower eyelashes.
It seemed to Bogdan she was using too much kohl, which made
her beautiful eyes look sorrowful, or merely old.
Maryna, look at me!
Dear Bogdan, I'm not going to look at you. She was dabbing
more kohl on her brows. And you're not going to listen to me. You
should be inured by now to my attacks of nerves. Actor's nerves. A
little worse than usual, but this is a first night. Don't pay any
attention to me. As if that were possible! He bent over and
touched his lips to the nape of her neck. Maryna...
What?
You remember that I've taken the room at the Saski for a few of
us afterward to celebrate -
Call Zofia for me, will you? She had started to mix the henna.
Forgive me for bringing up a dinner while you're preparing for a
performance. But it should be called off if you're feeling too...
Don't, she murmured. She was blending a little Dutch pink and
powdered antimony with the Prepared Whiting to powder her hands
and arms. Bogdan? He didn't answer.
I'm looking forward to the party, she said and reached behind
for a gloved hand to lay on her shoulder.
You're upset about something.
I'm upset about everything, she said dryly. And you'll be so
kind as to let me wallow in it. The old stager has need of a little
stimulation to go on doing her best!

MARYNA DID NOT RELISH lying to Bogdan, the only person among
all those who loved her, or claimed to love her, whom she did in
fact trust. But she had no place for his indignation or his eagerness
to console. She thought it might do her good to keep this
astonishing incident to herself.
Sometimes one needs a real slap in the face to make what one is
feeling real.
When life cuffs you about, you say, That's life. You feel strong. You
want to feel strong. The important thing is to go forward.
As she had, single-mindedly, or almost: there had been much to
ignore. But if you are of a stoical temperament, and have a talent
for self-respect, and have worked hard with another talent God
gave you, and have been rewarded exactly as you had dared to
hope for your diligence and persistence, indeed, your success
arrived more promptly than you expected (or perhaps, you secretly
think, merited), you might then consider it petty to remember the
slights and nurture the grievances. To be offended was to be weak
-like worrying about whether one was happy or not.
Now you have an unexpected pain, around which the muffled
feelings can crystallize.
You have to float your ideals a little off the ground, to keep them
from being profaned. And cut loose the misfortunes and insults,
too, lest they take root and strangle your soul.
Take the slap for what it was, a jealous rival's frantic comment on
her impregnable success -that would have been something to
share with Bogdan, and soon put out of mind.
Take it as an emblem, a summons to respond to the whispery
needs she'd been harboring for months -this would be worth
keeping to herself, even cherishing. Yes, she would cherish poor
Gabriela's slap. If that slap were a baby's smile, she would smile at
the recollection of it, if it were a picture, she would have it framed
and kept on her dressing table, if it were hair, she would order a
wig made from it... Oh I see, she thought, I'm going mad. Could it
be as simple as that? She'd laughed to herself then, but saw with
distaste that the hand applying henna to her lips was trembling.
Misery is wrong, she said to herself, mine no less than Gabriela's,
and she only wants what I have. Misery is always wrong.
Crisis in the life of an actress. Acting was emulating other actors
and then, to one's surprise (actually, not at all to one's surprise),

finding oneself better than any of them were -including the pathetic
bestower of that slap.
Wasn't that enough? No. Not anymore.
She had loved being an actress because the theatre seemed to her
nothing less than the truth. A higher truth.
Acting in a play, one of the great plays, you became better than
you really were. You said only words that were sculpted, necessary,
exalting. You always looked as beautiful as you could be, artifice
assisting, at your age.
Each of your movements had a large, generous meaning. You
could feel yourself being improved by what was given to you, on
the stage, to express. Now it would happen that, mid-course in a
noble tirade by her beloved Shakespeare or Schiller or Slowacki,
pivoting in her unwieldy costume, gesturing, declaiming, sensing
the audience bend to her art, she felt no more than herself. The old
self-transfiguring thrill was gone. Even stage fright -that jolt
necessary to the true professional -had deserted her. Gabriela's
slap woke her up. An hour later Maryna put on her wig and
papier-mch crown, gave one last look in the mirror, and went out
to give a performance that even she could have admitted was, by
her real standards for herself, not too bad.
BOGDAN WAS so captivated by Maryna's majesty as she went to
be executed that at the start of the ovation he was still rooted in
the plush-covered chair at the front of his box, hands clenching the
rail. Galvanized now, he slipped between his sister, the impresario
from Vienna, Ryszard, and the other guests, and by the second
curtain call had made his way backstage.
Mag-ni-fi-cent, he mouthed as she came off from the third
curtain call to wait beside him in the wings for the volume of sound
to warrant another return to the flower-strewn stage.
If you think so, I'm glad.
Listen to them!
Them! What do they know if they've never seen anything better
than me? After she'd conceded four more curtain calls, Bogdan
escorted her to the dressing-room door. She supposed she was
starting to allow herself to feel pleased with her performance. But
once inside, she let out a wordless wail and burst into tears.
Oh, Madame! Zofia seemed about to weep, too.

Stricken by the anguish on the girl's face and intending to comfort

her, Maryna flung herself into Zofia's arms.
There, there, she murmured as Zofia held her tightly, then let go
with one arm and delicately patted Maryna's crimped, stiffened
mass of hair.
Maryna released herself reluctantly from the girl's unwavering grip
and met her stare fondly. You have a good heart, Zofia.
I can't stand to see you sad, Madame.
I'm not sad, I'm... Don't be sad for me.
Madame, I was in the wings almost the whole last act, and when
you went to die, I never saw you die as good as that, you were so
wonderful I just couldn't stop crying.
Then that's enough crying for both of us, isn't it? Maryna started
to laugh. To work, you silly girl, to work. Why are we both
dawdling? Relieved of her regal costume and reclothed in the
fur-lined robe. Maryna sponged off Mary Stuart's face and swiftly
laid on the discreet mask suitable to the wife of Bogdan
Dembowski. Zofia, sniffling a little (Zofia, enough!), stood behind
her chair embracing the sage-green gown Maryna had chosen that
afternoon to wear to the dinner Bogdan was giving at the Hotel
Saski. She put the gown on slowly in front of the cheval glass,
returned to the dressing table and undid the curls and brushed and
rebrushed her hair, then piled it loosely on her head, looked closer
into the mirror, added a little melted wax to her eyelashes, stood
again, inspected herself once more, listening to the ascending din
in the corridor, took several loud, rhythmical breaths, and opened
the door to an enveloping wave of shouts and applause.
Among the admirers well connected enough to be admitted
backstage were some acquaintances but, except for Ryszard,
clasping a bouquet of silk flowers to his broad chest, she saw no
close friends: those invited to the party had been asked to go on
ahead to the hotel. And more than a hundred people were waiting
outside the stage door, despite the foul weather. Bogdan offered
the shelter of his sword-umbrella with the ivory handle so she could
linger for fifteen minutes under the falling snow, and she would
have lingered another fifteen had he not waved away the more
timid fans, their programs still unsigned, and shepherded Maryna
through the crowd toward the waiting sleigh. Ryszard, finally

pressing his bouquet into her hands, said the Saski was only seven
streets away and that he preferred to walk.
How strange, in her native city to be receiving friends in a hotel,
but for the last five years -her talents having led her inexorably to
the summit, an engagement for life at the Imperial Theatre in
Warsaw -she no longer had an apartment in Krakw.
Strange, she said. To Bogdan, to no-one, to herself.
Bogdan frowned.
A thunderbolt, like the crack of gunfire, as they arrived at the
hotel. A scream, no, only a shout: an angry coachman.
They walked up the carpeted marble staircase.
You're all right?
Of course I'm all right. It's only another entrance.
And I have the privilege of opening the door for you. Now it was
Maryna's turn to frown.
And how could there not be applause and beaming faces,
customary welcome at a first-night party -but she really had given
a splendid performance -as Bogdan opened the door (in answer to
her Bogdan, are you all right? he had sighed and taken her hand)
and she made her entrance. Piotr ran to her arms. She embraced
Bogdan's sister and gave her Ryszard's silk flowers; she let herself
be embraced by Krystyna, whose eyes had filled with tears. After
the guests, gathering closely around her, had each paid tribute to
her performance, she looked from face to face, and then sang out
gleefully: May you a better feast never behold, You knot of mouth
friends!
Upon which words everyone laughed, which means, I suppose (I
had not arrived yet), that she said Timon's lines in Polish, not
English, but also means that nobody except Maryna had read
Timon of Athens, for the feast in the play is not a happy one, above
all for its giver. Then the guests spread about the large room and
began talking among themselves about her performance and, after
that, about the larger question afoot (which is more or less when I
arrived, chilled and eager to enter the story), while Maryna had
forced herself toward humbler, less sardonic thoughts. No jealous
rivals here. These were her friends, those who wished her well.
Where was her gratitude? She hated her discontents. If I can have
a new life, she was thinking, I shall never complain again.
MARYNA? No answer.

Maryna, what's wrong?

What could be wrong... doctor? He shook his head. Oh, I see.
Henryk.
That's better.
I'm disturbing you.
Yes -he smiled -you disturb me, Maryna. But only in my
dreams, never in my consulting room. Then, before she could
rebuke him for flirting with her: The splendors of your performance
last night, he explained.
He saw her still hesitating. Come in -he held out his hand -Sit
-he waved at a tapestry-covered settee -Talk to me. Two steps
into the room, she leaned against a bookcase.
You're not going to sit?
You sit. And I'll continue my walk... here.
You came here on foot in this weather? Was that wise?
Henryk, please! He sat on the corner of his desk.
She began to pace. I thought I was coming here to besiege you
with questions about Stefan, if he really -
But I've told you, Henryk interrupted, that the lungs already
show a remarkable improvement. Against such a mighty enemy,
the struggle waged by doctor and patient is bound to be long. But I
think we're winning, your brother and I.
You talk rubbish, Henryk. Has anyone ever told you that?
Maryna, what's the matter?
Everyone talks rubbish
Maryna...
Including me.
So -he sighed -it isn't Stefan you wanted to consult me about.
She shook her head.
Then let me guess, he said, venturing a smile.
You're making fun of me, my old friend, Maryna said somberly.
Women's nerves, you're thinking. Or worse.
I? -he slapped the desk -I, your old friend, as you acknowledge,
and I thank you for that, I not take my Maryna seriously? He
looked at her sharply. What is it? Your headaches?
No, it's not about -she sat down abruptly- me. I mean, my
headaches.
I'm going to take your pulse, he said, standing over her. You're
flushed. I wouldn't be surprised if you had a touch of fever.

After a moment of silence, while he held her wrist then gave it

back to her, he looked again at her face. No fever. You are in
excellent health.
I told you there was nothing wrong.
Ah, that means you want to complain to me. Well, you shall find
me the most patient of listeners. Complain, dear Maryna, he cried
gaily. He didn't see the tears in her eyes. Complain!
Perhaps it is my brother, after all.
But I told you -
Excuse me -she'd stood -I'm making a fool of myself.
Never! Please don't go.
He rose to bar her way to the door. You do have a fever.
You said I didn't.
The mind can get overheated, just like the body.
What do you think of the will, Henryk? The power of the will.
What sort of question is that?
I mean, do you think one can do whatever one wants?
You can do whatever you want, my dear. We are all your servants
and abettors.
He took her hand and inclined his head to kiss it.
Oh -she pulled away her hand -you disgusting man, don't
flatter me!
He stared for a moment with a gentle, surprised expression.
Maryna, dear, he said soothingly. Hasn't your experience
taught you anything about how others respond to you?
Experience is a passive teacher, Henryk.
But it -
In paradise -she bore down on him, her grey eyes glittering
-there will be no experiences. Only bliss. There we will be able to
speak the truth to each other. Or not need to speak at all.
Since when have you believed in paradise? I envy you.
Always. Since I was a child. And the older I get, the more I believe
in it, because paradise is something necessary.
You don't find it... difficult to believe in paradise?
Oh, she groaned, the problem is not paradise. The problem is
myself, my wretched self.
Spoken like the artist you are. Someone with your temperament
will always -

I knew you would say that! She stamped her foot. I order you. I
implore you, don't speak of my temperament! (Yes she had been
ill. Her nerves. Yes she was still ill, all her friends except her doctor
said among themselves.) So you believe in paradise, he
murmured placatingly.
Yes, and at the gates of paradise, I would say, Is this your
paradise? These ethereal figures robed in white, drifting among the
white clouds? Where can I sit? Where is the water?
Maryna... Taking her by the hand, he led her back to the settee.
I'm going to pour you a dram of cognac. It will be good for both of
us.
You drink too much, Henryk.
Here. He handed her one of the glasses and pulled a chair
opposite her. Isn't that better? She sipped the cognac, then
leaned back and gazed at him mutely.
What is it?
I think I will die very soon, if I don't do something reckless...
grand. I thought I was dying last year, you know.
But you didn't.
Must one die to prove one's sincerity!
FROM A LETTER to nobody, that is, to herself: It's not because my
brother, my beloved brother, is dying and I will have no one to
revere... it's not because my mother, our beloved mother, grates
on my nerves, oh, how I wish I could stop her mouth... it's not
because I too am not a good mother (how could I be? I am an
actress)... it's not because my husband, who is not the father of my
son, is so kind and will do whatever I want... it's not because
everyone applauds me, because they cannot imagine that I could
be more vivid or different than I already am... it's not because I am
thirty-five now and because I live in an old country, and I don't
want to be old (I do not intend to become my mother)... it's not
because some of the critics condescend, now I am being compared
with younger actresses, while the ovations after each performance
are no less thunderous (so what then is the meaning of
applause?)... it's not because I have been ill (my nerves) and had to
stop performing for three months, only three months (I don't feel
well when I am not working)... it's not because I believe in
paradise... oh, and it's not because the police are still spying and

making reports on me, though all those reckless statements and

hopes are long past (my God, it's thirteen years since the
Uprising)... it's not for any of these reasons that I've decided to do
something that nobody wants me to do, that everyone regards as
folly, and that I want some of them to do with me, though they
don't want to; even Bogdan, who always wants what I want (as he
promised, when we married), doesn't really want to. But he must.
PERHAPS IT IS a curse to come from anywhere. The world, you
see, she said, is very large. I mean, she said, the world comes
in many parts. The world, like our poor Poland, can always be
divided. And subdivided. You find yourself occupying a smaller and
smaller space. Though you're at home in that space -
On that stage, said the friend helpfully.
If you will, she said coolly. That stage. Then she frowned.
Surely you're not reminding me that all the world's a stage?
BUT HOW CAN you leave your place, which is here?
My place, my place, she cried. I have none!
And you can't abandon your -
Friends? she hooted.
Actually, Irena and I were thinking of your public.
Who says I am abandoning my public? Will they forget me if I
choose to absent myself? No. Will they welcome me back should I
choose to return? Yes. As for my friends...
Yes?
You can be sure I have no intention of abandoning my friends.
MY FRIENDS, she repeated, are much more dangerous than my
enemies. I'm thinking of their approval. Their expectations. They
want me to be as I am, and I cannot disabuse them entirely. They
might cease to love me.
I've explained it to them. But I could have announced it to them,
like a whim. Recently, I thought I was ready to do it. At dinner in a
hotel, the party after a first-night performance. I was going to raise
my glass. I am leaving.
Soon. Forever. Someone would have exclaimed, Oh Madame, how
can you? And I'd have replied, I can, I can. But I didn't have the

courage. Instead, I offered a toast to our poor dismembered

country. (Continues...) (C) 2000
*
The Dark Lady of the Intellectuals
By DAPHNE MERKIN
Published: October 29, 2000, Sunday
SUSAN SONTAG
The Making of an Icon.
By Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock.
Illustrated. 370 pp. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company. $29.95.
As literary culture continues on its downhill trajectory -- sliding
from the heights of serious thinking to the crass demands of the
bottom line -- it becomes ever harder to believe in that not too
distant past where intellectuals qualified as contenders for
something other than dusty symposiums and the mingy rewards of
academic prestige. We suppose it to be so; certainly the nostalgic
history of American letters has it so. For a brief period from the 40's
to the 60's, that is, you could publish an essay in small-circulation
journals like Partisan Review, Commentary or Dissent and become
an overnight sensation, the talk of the town.
Nowadays, no one is sure whether Partisan Review still exists (it
does), and it is impossible to imagine that anyone once rushed to
read the latest issue so as to be able to discuss it at the the
Trillings' next cocktail party. Indeed, it was Diana Trilling who at the
close of her memoir, ''The Beginning of the Journey,'' wrote
elegiacally of ''the life of significant contention,'' which that cranky,
opinion-toting group known as the New York Intellectuals
specialized in. It's unclear that their moment was ever as
auspicious or luminous as later accounts depicted, but there is no
doubt that it was drawing to an end by the time the Beatles arrived
on the scene. It was the groovy 60's, after all, and there was scant
interest in ideological debates conducted by unmediagenic
eggheads. In their place a hipper type of thinker was emerging, one
who made an engagement with ideas seem like the epitome of cool

-- a teasing erotics of the mind for a brain-addled, sensationseeking generation.

Enter Susan Sontag, who almost single-handedly imbued the
sober, increasingly disregarded disciplines of close reading and
intense brooding with a very contemporary glamour. From the
start, Sontag was different from Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt
and the other bluestockings who preceded her, in part because of
the oracular, aphoristic quality of her prose, and in part because of
her ability to strike a camera-friendly pose. It didn't hurt that she
was darkly beautiful, with a sensuous mouth, a thick helmet of hair
and a direct, wide-set gaze. Or that well before the Age of Prada
she outfitted herself in chicly underdesigned clothes and shades of
black. (Elizabeth Hardwick, in her introduction to ''A Susan Sontag
Reader,'' suggests that Sontag ''is herself a sort of pictorial object,
as the many arresting photographs of her show.'')
Then there was the mystique of her self-creation, the lack of
prosaic data -- whether in the form of biographical clues or personal
revelations. One was familiar, of course, with the rapid ascent of
her cultural star, as precipitous in its way as the fabled discovery of
Lana Turner at a drugstore counter. But for the longest while,
Sontag's background remained hazy, giving her an aura of
impenetrability; it was as though she had sprung, fully formed and
discoursing on Godard, from the head of a moody French
existentialist. This image of fearless, almost masculine selfinvention was carefully polished in interviews, where she gave the
impression of having followed her own wunderkind inclinations
without any grown-up encouragement. One magazine profile had
her explaining that she liked to read encyclopedias as a 10-yearold, only to move on to the classics -- all the classics. Of her early
mental prowess, she once said dismissively, ''It was such a given.'' I
remember coming upon Sontag in the mid-70's, after she was
already established as America's pre-eminent woman of letters,
and wondering not so much who her parents were but whether in
fact she had any.
Sontag burst into panoramic view with the publication of ''Notes on
'Camp' ''in Partisan Review in the fall of 1964. The huzzahs that
greeted this essay, prescient as it was, are inconceivable from the
vantage point of the present day, when polemical writing in
prestigious journals generally gets treated, as the writer David

Brooks has observed, ''as just another scrap in the media confetti.''
Sontag was 31, and had already written a slim and stylized novel,
''The Benefactor,'' as well as a bunch of essays, including one on
Simone Weil for the inaugural issue of The New York Review of
Books. Her formidable brain and dramatic physical presence had
been causing a stir in cerebral circles for several years, but with
this piece her audience widened to include the masses who read
Time, which took up both Sontag and her bold conception of the
camp sensibility with wild enthusiasm.
In the decades since, Sontag has voiced shifting, sometimes
contradictory opinions on matters political, intellectual and literary.
These have included incendiary manifestoes (on the ''pornographic
imagination'' and the unredeemable malignity of America, which
she once called ''a doomed country... founded on a genocide'');
arrogant miscalculations (about the politics of North Vietnam and
Cuba); thoughtful reconsiderations (of the nature of Communism
and of the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl); and unabashedly esoteric
artistic judgments (favoring foreign over home-grown writers, and
form over content). If consistency is truly the hobgoblin of little
minds, Sontag's mind must be very large, for she has never been
stopped by her own last pronouncement. In the past decade, for
instance, while continuing to champion the kind of elliptical
European fiction that meets her much elaborated and stringent
critical standards, she began writing best-selling, plot-heavy
novels. But whatever the position or wherever the situation, Sontag
has managed to hold the limelight as few of her kind have done.
Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock's unauthorized, gossipy account of
the life and times of Susan Sontag is built around two reductive
suppositions: that the real source of their subject's cultural
influence is her keen insight into ''the machinery of self-promotion
which she could have patented,'' and that she rules over the house
of intellect like a highbrow Lucrezia Borgia, by fear and
intimidation. Their biography broadcasts its debunking intentions
right up front, in the resolute wording of its subtitle: ''The Making of
an Icon.'' In their chatty introduction, the authors describe their first
encounter with Sontag, at an academic conference in Poland in
1980. ''We approached her,'' they write, ''with a proper sense of
awe, yet Carl found it remarkably easy to sit next to her at a table
and talk for 15 minutes about contemporary literature.'' One can

only conclude that behind every fan is a detractor struggling to get

out, for somewhere along the way the pair's admiration soured -helped along, no doubt, by Sontag's refusal to cooperate and by
her effort to keep others from talking. Having decided to take a
closer look at the woman they once idolized from afar, Rollyson and
Paddock found her to be just another flawed mortal: ''So Susan
Sontag as the world now knows her is a dream of Susan Sontag.''
Quelle surprise.
Sontag was born on Jan. 16, 1933, in Manhattan; her mother had a
second daughter, Judith, three years later. The circumstances of
Sontag's young life, although financially comfortable, weren't
particularly charmed: her parents spent much of their time in
China, where Sontag's father, Jack Rosenblatt, had a fur trading
business, while she lived with her grandparents in New York. When
she was 5 her father died, and her mother, Mildred, moved the
family to Miami and then Tucson in search of a hospitable climate
to relieve her older daughter's asthma. Sontag is described as a
classic writer-in-the-making, a lonely and bookish child who
identified early on with professionally driven women like Marie
Curie. When she was 12, her mother married Capt. Nathan Sontag,
a decorated war hero, and the family moved to California. Sontag
seems to have been preternaturally poised from the start, buoyed
by an unshakable belief in her own august destiny. The authors
quote a classmate from North Hollywood High whose memories of
Sontag are of an awe-inspiring creature: ''She was so focused -even austere, if you can call a 15-year-old austere. Susan -- no one
ever called her Susie -- was never frivolous. She had no time for
small talk.'' While still in high school, Sontag and one of her chosen
pals visited Thomas Mann; never one to be overly impressed, she
later recalled that the great novelist talked like a book review.
After attending Berkeley for a semester, Sontag, at 16, went to the
University of Chicago, where her scores on the placement exams
enabled her to take graduate courses. She studied with Leo Strauss
and Kenneth Burke; the latter apparently recognized the attractive,
contained young woman as ''a genius in the making.'' In her
sophomore year, a mere 10 days after meeting him, Sontag
married a sociology instructor, the 28-year-old Philip Rieff, whose
class she had drifted into. Within two years, she and Rieff had
moved to Boston, where Rieff taught at Brandeis, and became the

parents of a son, David. Sontag took English classes at Harvard and

went on to receive her master's degree in philosophy, ranking first
among the department's doctoral candidates and attracting such
powerful mentors as the theologian Paul Tillich. She contributed
significantly to the book that would make Rieff's academic
reputation, ''Freud: The Mind of the Moralist'' (the biographers point
out that ''although Sontag was not officially a co-author, the work
had become their baby every bit as much as little David''), and in
1957 won a fellowship to pursue her Ph.D. studies at Oxford. (Her
proposed dissertation, which she never finished, was on the
''metaphysical presuppositions of ethics.'') Sontag took off for
Europe, leaving her husband and son behind, and four months into
her British stay transplanted herself to Paris. There she became
friendly with Alfred Chester, a gifted, openly gay writer who
became obsessed with Sontag (to the point of considering marrying
her) and introduced her to the reigning New York literati. Just as
important for her future career, Sontag discovered the dense,
boundary-blurring mode of French thought -- which embraced
popular culture with the same intensity it applied to lofty critical
theories.
The 26-year old Sontag returned to America in 1959 and asked
Rieff for a divorce on the way home from the airport. She reclaimed
the 6-year-old David from Rieff's parents, who had been looking
after him, and moved to a West End Avenue apartment in
Manhattan. Frequenting literary parties all the while, she taught,
worked as an editorial assistant at Commentary and began work on
the -- according to Chester -- very boring'' novel that would become
''The Benefactor.'' In 1961, after her manuscript was accepted for
publication by Robert Giroux of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sontag met
the firm's publisher, Roger Straus, who would become her devoted
literary impresario. Her biographers describe Straus's commitment
as an ''all-encompassing care'' of Sontag's needs. ''It is not an
exaggeration to say that Straus engineered Sontag's career,'' they
observe, ''making certain that the novels, for example, were always
in print, that even the most insignificant Sontag piece was
translated and marketed abroad. No detail was too trivial.''
As it turns out, Rollyson and Paddock's book raises more questions
than it answers, a prime one being whether it is possible to write a
serious biography of a serious person while the subject is still alive.

Biographies contemporaneous with the lives of show-biz folk and

other celebrities sidestep the question most of the time, mainly
because there isn't anything all that weighty hanging on the issues
involved: the childhood, the first professional break, the spouse(s),
the lovers, the personal demons, the heartbreaks, etc. But unless
one wants to give her radically less than her due and characterize
Susan Sontag as a ''personality'' along the lines of Diana Ross or
Barbara Walters, a more rigorous standard of inquiry and more
muscular criterion of assessment is required than is offered here.
For one thing, it is impossible much of the time to figure out how
the authors have obtained their information; many of the
quotations are unattributed, culled from other sources and treated
as definitive, or taken out of context entirely. One also wonders how
the authors could have discovered what Sontag told intimate
confidants, like Silvers and Straus, if they didn't consent to being
interviewed for the book, or why they chose to rely on the
spotlight-craving Camille Paglia (whom they refer to as an ''open
lesbian,'' which is one of the few things she has been ambiguous
about) for insight into Sontag's self-marketing tactics. (Paglia, it
emerges, originally worshiped Sontag, only to turn against her
when Sontag rebuffed her stalkerlike tactics, demanding to know:
''What is it you want from me?'') And too often their writing, which
is lackluster, is marred by simple sloppiness, as when they refer to
themselves in the third person as ''Sontag's biographers'' or
carelessly repeat information.
Too many of the questions the book does set out to answer -- What
is Sontag's relationship with her son? How much behind-the-scenes
power does she really wield? Is she gay? -- are handled on a Page
Six level, in alternatingly snippy or breathless tones. The issue of
Sontag's sexuality is not nearly as riveting or potentially
illuminating as the authors seem to think, but in any case it is a
subject that deserves to be linked up with other aspects of her -including the gay aesthetic underlying her fascination with camp
and with issues of dominance and enslavement -- rather than
mined for its salacious appeal. Her liaisons, passing or long-term,
are faithfully recorded, as though they added up to an overall
indictment of her disingenuous presentation of her public image. In
fact, one could as easily argue that Sontag's refusal to use
lesbianism as a trendy lifestyle accessory speaks to her credit, and

that her silence on gay issues, rather than adding to her ''iconic
power,'' as the authors claim, actually detracts from it.
Sontag is, finally, too faceted and elusive a creature to be caught
in the flash of a paparazzo's lens. Whatever is wrong with her is not
easily waved away by her fans, and whatever is right about her is
not easily dismissed by her critics: she is difficult to categorize,
much less analyze. One particularly problematic aspect of her
writing for me is her insistently antipsychological stance, which has
led to a kind of moral obtuseness about the subtler implications of
political events as well as to a convenient opacity about her own
motivations. There is also her unsettling tendency to see the world
in terms of a hierarchy of intellect, in which basic human concerns
are given short shrift. But no one would deny Sontag's enduring
romance with the world of ideas, or her ability to translate that
romance into an urgent, if occasionally wrongheaded, conversation
with the reader. I will never forget the thrill I felt upon coming to
the conclusion of her piece ''Fascinating Fascism,'' when it first
appeared in The New York Review of Books in 1975. I was 20, a
literature-besotted senior at Barnard, and here was evidence of a
woman with the intellectual stamina equal to that of the male
critics I studied. The essay's final paragraph connects the erotic
theater of sadomasochism -- severed from personhood, from
relationships, from love'' -- with the visual allure of Nazi imagery.
''The color is black,'' she writes, ''the material is leather, the
seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy,
the fantasy is death.'' In its violent yoking together of disparate
emotional and aesthetic references, Sontag's thesis is an uncanny
presentiment of cultural preoccupations to come.
Precisely because Susan Sontag is an influential, even
paradigmatic figure, for both good and bad, gaining a fuller
understanding of her would help us to understand the times we live
in better. From this perspective, ''Susan Sontag: The Making of an
Icon'' falls woefully short, for it delivers the dish, but not much
more. If you're looking for the sort of bitchy nuggets that go to
prove that people of achievement -- and intellectuals in particular -are invariably miserable characters, this will suit you just fine.
Meanwhile, the real Sontag has eluded us -- and will undoubtedly
continue to do so until such time as she gets the smart, serious
biography she deserves.

Daphne Merkin, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of

''Dreaming of Hitler,'' an essay collection.
*
INTERVIEW
By Harvey Blume
Atlantic Monthly Magazine
By the late seventies, books such as Against Interpretation (1966),
Styles of Radical Will (1969), and On Photography (1977) had
established Susan Sontag as an essayist whose concerns stretched
from high culture to low before it was fashionable for writers to
have this kind of range. Sontag wrote on subjects like film,
photography, pornography, and camp with the same zeal she
brought to the great European writers whom she helped introduce
to American readers. The title essay of her collection Under the
Sign of Saturn (1980) is about the German critic Walter Benjamin,
and it is no wonder he had special meaning for her. In Benjamin's
work many of the contrasting cultural and political concerns of his
day -any one of which would have sufficed for a lifetime's
preoccupation by more narrowly focused thinkers- flourished side
by side.
Similarly, in Sontag's essays there is an inclusiveness that may be
the closest thing to intellectual unity we should hope for in our
multi-dimensional culture. As Sontag says in the following
interview, she does not like to exclude.
Having written two novels -The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit
(1967) -in the 1960s, in the 1990s Sontag turned from essays back
to her first love. Her novel The Volcano Lover was published in
1992, and In America came out last month. Sontag's novels and
essays cover many of the same themes, including theater,
collecting, illness, memory, and social injustice, but the novels give
her more room to roam than did the essays, with less need to
exclude. In the novels she moves through love affairs, lava storms,

revolutions and restorations, the Shakespearean stage, and

transatlantic steerage (gobierno).
The Volcano Lover is set in eighteenth-century Naples, under the
shadow of Vesuvius and the French Revolution. The venues of In
America range from a nineteenth-century California commune
composed of Polish migrs, to the mind of famed actor Edwin
Booth, brother of John Wilkes. Snatches of Sontag's voice as
essayist resurface in the narrative voices of these novels, teasing
apart the meaning of events. Whether writing as an essayist or a
novelist, Susan Sontag is the best of literary company.
Harvey Blume had a chance to talk with Susan Sontag on her
recent visit to Boston.
Susan Sontag Over the years, you have given the word
intellectual a good name. You have shown that it's possible to be
an intellectual in this culture without being an academic.
And I'm very proud of that. But I'm always being introduced with
You are so bookish, you are what most people think an intellectual
is. I could live until I'm 200 years old and I'd still be introduced
that way. It drives me nuts that I have to constantly deal with what
I represent as opposed to what I actually have written. I mean, I've
lived my whole life convulsed with various admirations, but I would
admire people for their work.
Let's take a really outlandish but perfectly true example. I
worshipped T. S. Eliot when I was a teenager at the University of
Chicago. I'm of that generation for which Eliot was God. But I
worshipped the work, I worshipped the ideas. If anything, that
person, if I ever thought about him, was slightly embarrassing. And
I didn't think, what does this work represent? That's another
barrier, another kind of mediation. I was just convinced by some of
the ideas, one of them being (it's probably no accident I bring up
Eliot) that essentially the work isn't about you; it's impersonal.
I spend a good part of my public conversation dealing with
people's ideas about what I represent, as opposed to what I
espouse or what the work is worth. In the end, we come back to
intellectual and smart. If I were a man, would people always
be talking about me being an intellectual or being so smart? I don't
think they would.

There's not always an obvious split between the work and the
writer, is there? Sometimes the personality of the writer emerges
from the work and becomes a force in its own right. I'm thinking of
the way Walter Benjamin emerges as a personality in Under the
Sign of Saturn, your essay about him.
Yes, and that's when I realized I should stop writing essays. I
thought, I better quit, this isn't an essay anymore, this is a portrait.
I'm writing about a certain temperament, the melancholic, and
since I'm not really dealing with ideas, I should go back to fiction.
In your essay One Culture and the New Sensibility you say,
Literary men, feeling that the status of humanity itself was being
challenged by the new science and the new technology, abhorred
and deplored the change. But the literary men... are inevitably on
the defensive. They know that the scientific culture, the coming of
the machine, cannot be stopped. That was written more than
thirty years ago, but it applies pretty well to current debates about
the Internet.
What strikes me now is not that technology can't be stopped, but
that capitalism can't be stopped. I'm stunned (aturdida) by what I
call the total takeover (toma de posesin) of capitalism.
Mercantilist values and motives now seem absolutely self-evident
to people. I don't mean to say people weren't previously interested
in their own prosperity or material advances, but they did
understand that there were some zones of activity where
materialist criteria didn't apply. Or that you could have a conflict:
you're going to be very well paid for something you think is shoddy
(falso) or unworthy, and you might actually not do it! I think more
and more people don't even understand why in the world you
wouldn't do anything to make a buck, and why everything isn't
about property.
Technology extends capitalism. With eBay, the market reaches into
your closets.
I don't have a problem with technological culture. I have a problem
with capitalism. I use a word processor. It's the greatest typewriter
ever invented. I don't use the Net. So far, the information I get

through books and magazines suffices, but anytime I feel that

some online magazine -which may very well be this one- is
something I want, I'll stay with it. And listen, the digital world
produces art on a very high level. For me by far the most
interesting work in photography could not be done without digital
manipulation. And there's some video I like, too, though I think
some of it is very thin. You want more density.
The wildlife photography we see in films, books, and periodicals is
often stunning in its design, import, and aesthetics. It may also be
fake, enhanced, or manufactured by emerging digital technologies
that have transformed -some say contaminated -the photography
landscape.
I think depth is not so easy to obtain in digital media.
It's as if the work isn't expecting to get your full attention. I know
lots of people who have two television sets in the room; they'll
have two pictures on and keep switching the sound. So one thing
that's happening with the new technology is the stretching and
layering of attention.
But I see the empowering aspect. I can see it empowering patients
who can now access medical information for themselves. I have
twice been a cancer patient, once in the late seventies and now
again. The difference between how much patients know about their
cancers is night and day. Personally, I'm a different case -I'm a
frustrated doctor. My earliest idea of how I wanted to spend my life
was to be a physician, so I'm good at assimilating medical
information. In the late seventies, when I had cancer for the first
time, I was very curious and read medical books and asked a lot of
questions, to the great annoyance of some of my physicians.
And I remember sitting day after day, month after month, getting
chemotherapy. There were five, ten, fifteen people in the room and
day after day I was with them. I'm talkative, curious, and I would
ask what drugs they were taking -this was before I even knew I was
going to write Illness as Metaphor. Nobody knew the names of their
drugs. I knew the names of my drugs. They were polysyllabic
words, but it's not rocket science. Chemotherapy, they'd say. But
what particular chemotherapy? It's always a cocktail; it's always
more than two drugs.
Cut to twenty-two years later, I have a new cancer, I'm back in the
hospital in the chemo room, and every single person knows the

names of their drugs. Not only that, but they are chatting away
about having read a protocol from the University of Indiana, or
research from somewhere else, and they give you the Web site.
And that's wonderful.
As you observed thirty years ago, it's often literary intellectuals
who are the least enthusiastic about the prospects for technology.
The great leap (salto) is the Gutenberg leap. Someone was
marveling that I moved with so much pleasure to the word
processor. And I said, The leap is from writing by hand to the
typewriter. From writing with a typewriter to using a computer is no
leap at all. In the same way, the real leap is when books are set in
type and they become uniform, reproducible objects. They can
then be uniform reproducible objects in some non-paper-based
form, and I don't feel in any way threatened by that. I don't need
the OED in book form. I'm delighted it's a CD and I can stick it in my
computer.
But if you're going to read the poems of Jorie Graham, which are
really hard, you can't read them hyperkinetically. Either you don't
read Jorie Graham at all, or you read her real slow, and over and
over. It's an effort of immersion and decipherment. You can't read
The Brothers Karamazov hyperkinetically. Either you're going to get
the good of it, or you're not.
I know people who find it hard to watch a movie. They want
shorter attention units. And I know other people who listen to
Morton Feldman -hours of music just above the threshold of
audibility.
So maybe we're getting more varieties of attention.
I think that's exactly what that essay, One Culture and the New
Sensibility, as I dimly (confusamente) recall it, was about. It was
about not having to exclude, which seemed very heretical then.
Now, of course, the question is, Does anyone want to listen to
Morton Feldman? Are people being rewired so they are kind of
jumpy? It's the neurological and the anthropological issues that
concern me.
But, in the end, isn't this all a function of prosperity? Will there be
eternal prosperity in a small part of the world? Maybe there will,
maybe Keynes is obsolete. But suppose there are hard times

ahead, and people have real material problems. Don't you think
they'll slow down a little? It's almost a function of luxury, this
hyperkinetic thing.
You have also been seen as the European connection, showing
that an American could be an intellectual the way Europeans were.
And I wanted to do that. I thought that was a useful thing to do, a
thing nobody was doing, and I knew how to do it.
In your essays you often presented European writers -Benjamin,
Canetti, Barthes, Artaud -to Americans. And in the new novel the
main character is a Polish actress who comes to America. You
maintain the European connection.
It's a question of affinities. When I left this place -and it actually
was this place, Cambridge, Harvard- I ended up for the better part
of a year in Paris. Everything until then was mediated through
painting and music and especially books; everything was canonical.
It was precisely in Europe that I had more of a confrontation with
the modern and the contemporary. It was through films. It was
probably Godard. I felt my life was divided into before Godard and
after Godard.
Before, I hadn't understood the force of the modern. I just felt the
past is bigger than the present and European culture is obviously
bigger than American culture. And America has been so much
about disburdenment, getting rid of the past. I thought, Why can't
one have it all? -a very American thought, I hasten to add. And
wouldn't it be nice to look at these things in a fresh way, and not
make the sorts of distinctions that have to do with notions of the
canon? Though I was totally a product of the canonical way of
thinking, and still am. But we can open up a lot of annexes and
branches, can't we? Why choose? Very American.
When I started trying to do fiction, though, I didn't know how to
open up. The fiction was mostly taking place in somebody's head.
So I thought, I don't want to just be talking about the commotion in
someone's head. Why don't I make movies? Then, a story idea
came my way, and it started with something visual. In a print shop
near the British Museum, in London, I discovered the volcano prints

from the book that Sir William Hamilton did. My very first thought -I
don't think I have ever said this publicly- was that I would propose
to FMR (a wonderful art magazine published in Italy which has
beautiful art reproductions) that they reproduce the volcano prints
and I write some text to accompany them. But then I started to
adhere to the real story of Lord Hamilton and his wife, and I
realized that if I would locate stories in the past, all sorts of
inhibitions would drop away, and I could do epic, polyphonic things.
I wouldn't just be inside somebody's head. So there was that novel,
The Volcano Lover.
And there was the notion of the foreigner. I have done a novel
about English people in southern Italy, a novel about Poles in
America, and the next one is going to be about French people in
Japan. I say it's a privilege to be a foreigner, it's such an intensifier
of experience.
The narrator of In America is a foreigner in the sense that she is
foreign to the past; she time travels.
The book begins with her time traveling. I like foreigners. I feel like
a foreigner in New York. I like not being too comfortable.
Harvey Blume is a contributing writer for Atlantic Unbound and The
Boston Book Review.
Copyright 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.
*
The Radical Imagination
By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ
Published: November 4, 2001, Sunday
WHERE THE STRESS FALLS
Essays.
By Susan Sontag.
351 pp. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
A NEW collection of essays by Susan Sontag is a major cultural
event. Or is it? It depends upon whether you think Sontag is
America's leading intellectual -- a view long held by the press, by
Europeans, indeed by just about everybody except other American

intellectuals. It certainly seems to be Sontag's view. While ''Where

the Stress Falls'' won't do much to enhance her stature as a thinker,
never before has she made such large claims for her moral preeminence, her exemplary fulfillment of the intellectual's mission as
society's conscience. In effect, she's the first person in a long while
to nominate herself so publicly for sainthood.
Sontag's reputation rests on the five volumes of nonfiction she
published between 1966 and 1980. Each is a concentrated
exploration, in strenuous, densely knotted prose, of a small range
of aesthetic questions, cultural phenomena, representative
thinkers. She has since turned to other endeavors; ''Where the
Stress Falls,'' which reprints much of her nonfiction from the last
two decades, is a very different kind of collection. Its 41 pieces,
which cover a wide variety of writers and visual and theatrical
artists, are mostly brief -- appreciations, elegies, reflections -- and
mostly occasional: prefaces, catalog copy, talks. This is
connoisseurial prose, not sustained argumentation. But a belletrist
Sontag has never been; a few of these pieces are quite fine, but
most reproduce the faults of her earlier essays while eschewing
their virtues. Still there the opacities and self-contradictions, the
verbal infelicities, the thundering announcements of the obvious or
dubious. Gone the analytic energy, the synthesizing reach, the
lightning insight. Trying to sound lyrical, she merely sounds silly.
The real interest of this collection lies in the way Sontag uses it to
reshape her critical persona and cultural stance. When she burst
onto the scene in the mid-60's, it was as a radical in the tradition of
Nietzsche and Artaud. Modern (and especially American)
civilization, enfeebled by the narrow morality of bourgeois culture,
had cut itself off from the instinctual sources of life. She would
transmit the purgatorial fire of what was most spiritually extreme in
European art and thought. Thus, though she emerged within the
New York liberal intelligentsia -- she has cited Lionel Trilling as a
major influence -- she jettisoned its liberalism, rejecting the twin
pillars on which Trilling stood: Matthew Arnold (criticism as a
humane discipline) and Sigmund Freud (the need to ground
understanding in self-understanding).
The political corollary of that stance was an embrace of
revolutionary Communism, as in ''Trip to Hanoi'' (1968). That
aspect of her radicalism she repudiated long ago, most notably in a

pair of speeches in 1981-82 denouncing Cuba and other

Communist regimes for their human rights violations and her fellow
leftists for closing their eyes to such abuses. ''Where the Stress
Falls'' provides the most extensive evidence yet of a parallel shift in
critical posture. In four essays published within the last two years,
she pays homage to a set of writers very different from Nietzsche
and Artaud. W. G. Sebald, Adam Zagajewski, Witold Gombrowicz
and, in the title essay, the American writers Glenway Wescott,
Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Hardwick: refined, contemplative,
elegiac -- writers of delicate remembrance and sober self-reflection.
Once she hungered for the abyss; now the terms of approval are
apt to be ''calm,'' ''courteous,'' ''civilized,'' ''mature.'' She sounds
like Matthew Arnold.
In one respect, however, she fails to sound like Trilling. One of the
essays in ''Where the Stress Falls'' looks back at ''Against
Interpretation,'' her first collection, 30 years later. Sontag is aghast
at the ''barbarism'' and ''nihilism'' that her advocacy of ''cultural
mixes and insolence and defense of pleasure'' has helped bring
about. Trilling, while the rest of the Old Left was rejecting the
excesses of the New, is reported to have told his colleagues,
''Those are our children.'' In other words, it's a little late in the
century to preach revolution and then be surprised when it doesn't
go as you'd hoped. It's a matter of what Wendell Berry, a great
American intellectual (though probably not one they've heard
about in Paris), calls ''standing by words.''
But Sontag has always claimed the right of continuous selfinvention. She doesn't hold beliefs, she excretes them. How she
can also claim to be a moral agent is a good question, but this
rejection of accountability is of a piece with two other
characteristics: her refusal of self-examination and her related
disidentification as an American. Here she proclaims, ''I try to do as
little seeing of myself as possible.'' And her references to America
are as superficial and dismissive as ever. She has the right to revile
American culture, art and thought, but if she wants to be a true
American intellectual, let alone the ''leading'' one, she doesn't have
the right to ignore them. Her claim that ''New York isn't America''
only underscores her incomprehension of both place and self.
(While I admire, and broadly agree with, her recent New Yorker
piece denouncing the drift of pundits' and politicians' responses to

the Sept. 11 attacks -- which I discovered only after writing this

review -- it would be nice to hear her on domestic issues more
often than once every couple of decades, and she would have more
credibility speaking about Americans as ''us'' if she actually meant
it.) Sontag may still reject Freud, but the authors of both ''Oedipus''
and the Oedipus complex knew that the flight from self, from
home, is futile, and only results in the obsessive repetition of the
same self-blinding, self-revealing gestures.
Which brings us to her claims of moral pre-eminence. These are
based on her having repeatedly gone to Sarajevo during the siege,
at great personal danger, to direct plays. This was unquestionably a
noble, even heroic act. But Sontag also seems to regard it as a
sanctifying one: ''You find that the only people you feel comfortable
with are those who... know, firsthand, what a war is.'' For the rest of
us benighted sinners, she hands down the following
commandment: ''You have no right to a public opinion'' -- on any
event -- unless you've been there,'' to the country where it's taking
place. It's no wonder she chose not to reprint those two speeches
from the early 80's here. Then she claimed that intellectuals should
speak out against repression no matter where it occurred. But
Sontag's new principle is a recipe for silence, not to mention an
assault on the very imagination that makes art, and most other
forms of knowledge, possible. How familiar it all is: another sacred
pilgrimage, another attack on her fellow intellectuals, another
grand pronouncement ripe for future repudiation. Another
collection of essays by our leading intellectual.
William Deresiewicz, who teaches English at Yale University, is on
leave this year in India.
*
'Regarding the Pain of Others'
By SUSAN SONTAG
In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, her brave,
unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war. Written during the
preceding two years, while she and most of her intimates and

fellow writers were rapt by the advancing fascist insurrection in

Spain, the book was couched as the very tardy reply to a letter
from an eminent lawyer in London who had asked, "How in your
opinion are we to prevent war?" Woolf begins by observing tartly
that a truthful dialogue between them may not be possible. For
though they belong to the same class, "the educated class," a vast
gulf separates them: the lawyer is a man and she is a woman. Men
make war. Men (most men) like war, since for men there is "some
glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting" that women
(most women) do not feel or enjoy. What does an educated-read:
privileged, well-off-woman like her know of war? Can her recoil
from its allure be like his?
Let us test this "difficulty of communication," Woolf proposes, by
looking together at images of war. The images are some of the
photographs the beleaguered Spanish government has been
sending out twice a week; she footnotes: "Written in the winter of
1936-37." Let's see, Woolf writes, "whether when we look at the
same photographs we feel the same things." She continues:
This morning's collection contains the photograph of what might
be a man's body, or a woman's; it is so mutilated that it might, on
the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead
children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb
has torn open the side; there is still a bird-cage hanging in what
was presumably the sitting room...
The quickest, driest way to convey the inner commotion caused by
these photographs is by noting that one can't always make out the
subject, so thorough is the ruin of flesh and stone they depict. And
from there Woolf speeds to her conclusion. We do have the same
responses, "however different the education, the traditions behind
us," she says to the lawyer. Her evidence: both "we"-here women
are the "we"-and you might well respond in the same words.
You, Sir, call them "horror and disgust." We also call them horror
and disgust... War, you say, is an abomination; a barbarity; war
must be stopped at whatever cost. And we echo your words. War is
an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped.
Who believes today that war can be abolished? No one, not even
pacifists. We hope only (so far in vain) to stop genocide and to
bring to justice those who commit gross violations of the laws of
war (for there are laws of war, to which combatants should be

held), and to be able to stop specific wars by imposing negotiated

alternatives to armed conflict. It may be hard to credit the
desperate resolve produced by the aftershock of the First World
War, when the realization of the ruin Europe had brought on itself
took hold. Condemning war as such did not seem so futile or
irrelevant in the wake of the paper fantasies of the Kellogg-Briand
Pact of 1928, in which fifteen leading nations, including the United
States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, solemnly
renounced war as an instrument of national policy; even Freud and
Einstein were drawn into the debate with a public exchange of
letters in 1932 titled "Why War?" Woolf's Three Guineas, appearing
toward the close of nearly two decades of plangent denunciations
of war, offered the originality (which made this the least well
received of all her books) of focusing on what was regarded as too
obvious or inapposite to be mentioned, much less brooded over:
that war is a man's game-that the killing machine has a gender,
and it is male. Nevertheless, the temerity of Woolf's version of
"Why War?" does not make her revulsion against war any less
conventional in its rhetoric, in its summations, rich in repeated
phrases. And photographs of the victims of war are themselves a
species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They
create the illusion of consensus.
Invoking this hypothetical shared experience ("we are seeing with
you the same dead bodies, the same ruined houses"), Woolf
professes to believe that the shock of such pictures cannot fail to
unite people of good will. Does it? To be sure, Woolf and the
unnamed addressee of this book-length letter are not any two
people. Although they are separated by the age-old affinities of
feeling and practice of their respective sexes, as Woolf has
reminded him, the lawyer is hardly a standard-issue bellicose male.
His antiwar opinions are no more in doubt than are hers. After all,
his question was not, What are your thoughts about preventing
war? It was, How in your opinion are we to prevent war?
It is this "we" that Woolf challenges at the start of her book: she
refuses to allow her interlocutor to take a "we" for granted. But into
this "we," after the pages devoted to the feminist point, she then
subsides.
No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at
other people's pain.

Who are the "we" at whom such shock-pictures are aimed? That
"we" would include not just the sympathizers of a smallish nation or
a stateless people fighting for its life, but-a far larger constituencythose only nominally concerned about some nasty war taking place
in another country. The photographs are a means of making "real"
(or "more real") matters that the privileged and the merely safe
might prefer to ignore.
"Here then on the table before us are photographs," Woolf writes
of the thought experiment she is proposing to the reader as well as
to the spectral lawyer, who is eminent enough, as she mentions, to
have K.C., King's Counsel, after his name-and may or may not be a
real person. Imagine then a spread of loose photographs extracted
from an envelope that arrived in the morning post. They show the
mangled bodies of adults and children. They show how war
evacuates, shatters, breaks apart, levels the built world. "A bomb
has torn open the side," Woolf writes of the house in one of the
pictures. To be sure, a cityscape is not made of flesh. Still, shearedoff buildings are almost as eloquent as bodies in the street. (Kabul,
Sarajevo, East Mostar, Grozny, sixteen acres of lower Manhattan
after September 11, 2001, the refugee camp in Jenin...) Look, the
photographs say, this is what it's like. This is what war does. And
that, that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open,
eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.
Not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them, not to
strive to abolish what causes this havoc, this carnage-these, for
Woolf, would be the reactions of a moral monster. And, she is
saying, we are not monsters, we members of the educated class.
Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to
hold this reality in mind.
But is it true that these photographs, documenting the slaughter of
noncombatants rather than the clash of armies, could only
stimulate the repudiation of war? Surely they could also foster
greater militancy on behalf of the Republic. Isn't this what they
were meant to do? The agreement between Woolf and the lawyer
seems entirely presumptive, with the grisly photographs confirming
an opinion already held in common. Had the question been, How
can we best contribute to the defense of the Spanish Republic
against the forces of militarist and clerical fascism?, the

photographs might instead have reinforced their belief in the

justness of that struggle.
The pictures Woolf has conjured up do not in fact show what war,
war as such, does. They show a particular way of waging war, a
way at that time routinely described as "barbaric," in which
civilians are the target. General Franco was using the same tactics
of bombardment, massacre, torture, and the killing and mutilation
of prisoners that he had perfected as a commanding officer in
Morocco in the 1920s. Then, more acceptably to ruling powers, his
victims had been Spain's colonial subjects, darker-hued and infidels
to boot; now his victims were compatriots. To read in the pictures,
as Woolf does, only what confirms a general abhorrence of war is to
stand back from an engagement with Spain as a country with a
history. It is to dismiss politics.
For Woolf, as for many antiwar polemicists, war is generic, and the
images she describes are of anonymous, generic victims. The
pictures sent out by the government in Madrid seem, improbably,
not to have been labeled. (Or perhaps Woolf is simply assuming
that a photograph should speak for itself.) But the case against war
does not rely on information about who and when and where; the
arbitrariness of the relentless slaughter is evidence enough. To
those who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and
injustice on the other, and that the fighting must go on, what
matters is precisely who is killed and by whom. To an Israeli Jew, a
photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria
in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child
killed by a Palestinian suicide-bomber. To a Palestinian, a
photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of
all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance. To
the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be
explained or falsified by their captions. During the fighting between
Serbs and Croats at the beginning of the recent Balkan wars, the
same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were
passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings. Alter
the caption, and the children's deaths could be used and reused.
Images of dead civilians and smashed houses may serve to
quicken hatred of the foe, as did the hourly reruns by Al Jazeera,
the Arab satellite television network based in Qatar, of the

destruction in the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002. Incendiary as

that footage was to the many who watch Al Jazeera throughout the
world, it did not tell them anything about the Israeli army they were
not already primed to believe. In contrast, images offering
evidence that contradicts cherished pieties are invariably dismissed
as having been staged for the camera. To photographic
corroboration of the atrocities committed by one's own side, the
standard response is that the pictures are a fabrication, that no
such atrocity ever took place, those were bodies the other side had
brought in trucks from the city morgue and placed about the street,
or that, yes, it happened and it was the other side who did it, to
themselves. Thus the chief of propaganda for Franco's Nationalist
rebellion maintained that it was the Basques who had destroyed
their own ancient town and former capital, Guernica, on April 26,
1937, by placing dynamite in the sewers (in a later version, by
dropping bombs manufactured in Basque territory) in order to
inspire indignation abroad and reinforce the Republican resistance.
And thus a majority of Serbs living in Serbia or abroad maintained
right to the end of the Serb siege of Sarajevo, and even after, that
the Bosnians themselves perpetrated the horrific "breadline
massacre" in May 1992 and "market massacre" in February 1994,
lobbing large-caliber shells into the center of their capital or
planting mines in order to create some exceptionally gruesome
sights for the foreign journalists' cameras and rally more
international support for the Bosnian side.
Photographs of mutilated bodies certainly can be used the way
Woolf does, to vivify the condemnation of war, and may bring
home, for a spell, a portion of its reality to those who have no
experience of war at all. However, someone who accepts that in
the world as currently divided war can become inevitable, and even
just, might reply that the photographs supply no evidence, none at
all, for renouncing war-except to those for whom the notions of
valor and sacrifice have been emptied of meaning and credibility.
The destructiveness of war-short of total destruction, which is not
war but suicide-is not in itself an argument against waging war
unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is
always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances
wrong-wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay
on war, "The Iliad, or The Poem of Force" (1940), violence turns

anybody subjected to it into a thing. No, retort those who in a given

situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt
someone subjected to it into a martyr or a hero.
In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a
modern life supplies for regarding-at a distance, through the
medium of photography-other people's pain. Photographs of an
atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry
for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually
restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.
Who can forget the three color pictures by Tyler Hicks that The New
York Times ran across the upper half of the first page of its daily
section devoted to America's new war, "A Nation Challenged," on
November 13, 2001? The triptych depicted the fate of a wounded
Taliban soldier in uniform who had been found in a ditch by
Northern Alliance soldiers advancing toward Kabul. First panel:
being dragged on his back by two of his captors-one has grabbed
an arm, the other a leg-along a rocky road. Second panel (the
camera is very near): surrounded, gazing up in terror as he is being
pulled to his feet. Third panel: at the moment of death, supine with
arms outstretched and knees bent, naked and bloodied from the
waist down, being finished off by the military mob that has
gathered to butcher him. An ample reservoir of stoicism is needed
to get through the great newspaper of record each morning, given
the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry. And
the pity and disgust that pictures like Hicks's inspire should not
distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose
deaths are not being shown.
For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be
made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the
outrageousness, the insanity of war.
Fourteen years before Woolf published Three Guineas-in 1924, on
the tenth anniversary of the national mobilization in Germany for
the First World War-the conscientious objector Ernst Friedrich
published his Krieg dem Kriege! (War Against War!). This is
photography as shock therapy: an album of more than one hundred
and eighty photographs mostly drawn from German military and
medical archives, many of which were deemed unpublishable by
government censors while the war was on.

Continues...
*
'Regarding the Pain of Others': Sontag Changes Lenses
By JOHN LEONARD
Toward the end of ''Regarding the Pain of Others,'' her coruscating
sermon on how we picture suffering, Susan Sontag loses her
temper. As usual she's been playing a solitary hand, shuffling
contradictions, dealing provocations, turning over anguished faces,
numbing numerals, even a jumping jack (''we have lids on our
eyes, we do not have doors on our ears''). But she seems
personally offended by those ''citizens of modernity, consumers of
violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk'' who ''will
do anything to keep themselves from being moved.'' And she is all
of a sudden ferocious:
''To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking
provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small,
educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news
has been converted into entertainment.... It assumes that everyone
is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no
real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with
those zones in the well-off countries where people have the
dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be
spectators, of other people's pain... consumers of news, who know
nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror.
There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far
from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the
luxury of patronizing reality.''
So much, then, for Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard and their Frenchfried American fellows in the media studies programs, looking down
on staged events as if from zeppelins, or like the kings of Burma on
the backs of elephants, remote and twitchy among the pixels, with
multiple views in slo-mo, intimate focus or broad scan, and an IVfeed of chitchat. When we think about the pictures we have seen
from Bosnia, Rwanda and Chechnya, about the videotapes

available to us of Rodney King being beaten and Daniel Pearl being

murdered, media theory seems merely impudent.
Yet Sontag has no more use for the pure of heart and perpetually
incredulous who are always shocked by the wounds of the world,
by evidence of ''hands-on'' cruelty and proof ''that depravity
exists.'' Where have they been? After a century and a half of
photojournalistic witness, ''a vast repository'' of ''atrocious images''
already exists to remind us of what people can do to each other. At
this late date, to be surprised is to be morally defective: ''No one
after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of
superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.''
So there is suffering, and there are cameras, and it is possible to
worry about the motives of the men and women behind the
cameras, whether one may be too arty, another a bit mercenary, a
third a violence junkie, as it is possible to worry about whether our
looking at the pictures they bring back from the wound is
voyeuristic or pornographic; whether such witness, competing for
notice among so many other clamors, seems more authentic the
more it's amateurish (accidental, like satellite surveillance);
whether excess exposure to atrocity glossies dulls Jack and jades
Jill; or whether.... But then again, maybe these worries are selfindulgent and beside the point, which should be to think our way
past what happened to why. ''It is not a defect,'' Sontag says, ''that
we do not suffer enough'' when we see these images:
''Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about
the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames.
Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to
reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering
offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture
shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is
there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that
ought to be challenged?''
Photographs ''haunt'' us; ''narratives can make us understand.'' As
thinking people used to do, before what Sontag calls ''the era of
shopping,'' we are invited to make distinctions and connections,
and then maybe fix something. Or have all of us already sold,
leased or leveraged our skepticism, our intellectual property rights
and our firstborn child for a seat at the table and a shot at the
trough?

Sontag of course has done our homework for us, her usual
archaeology. She follows the trail of photojournalism from Roger
Fenton in the Valley of Death after the charge of the Light Brigade,
to Mathew Brady's illustrating of America's Civil War, to Robert
Capa among Spanish Republicans, to the horrors of Buchenwald
and Hiroshima, to famine in India and carnage in Biafra and napalm
in Vietnam and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. After consulting
Goya on what a victorious army does to a civilian population, she
takes us to Tuol Sleng, near Phnom Penh, to look at the
photographs the Khmer Rouge took of thousands of suspected
''intellectuals'' and ''counterrevolutionaries'' (meaning Cambodians
who had gone to school, spoke a foreign language or wore glasses)
after they were tortured but before they were murdered.
She reminds us of how hard it is for the image makers to keep up
with improvements in the technology of torture and execution,
from the stake, the wheel, the gallows tree and the strappado to
smart bombs dreamed up on bitmaps in virtual realities. (Longdistance mayhem gets longer by the minute. The British who
bombed Iraq in the 1920's and the Germans who bombed Spain in
the 1930's could actually see their civilian targets, whereas the
recent American bombings of Afghanistan were orchestrated at
computer screens in Tampa, Fla.) She has shrewd things to say
about colonial wars, memory museums, Christian iconography,
lynching postcards, Virginia Woolf, Andy Warhol, Georges Bataille
and St. Sebastian; about ''sentimentality,'' ''indecency'' and the
''overstimulation'' Wordsworth warned us would lead to to (lovely
phrase!) ''savage torpor.''
And, as usual, she provokes. It probably isn't true that ''not even
pacifists'' any longer believe war can be abolished, that photos
have a ''deeper bite'' in the memory bank than movies or
television, that ''the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is
as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked,''
and that ''most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do
arouse a prurient interest.'' I don't know, and neither does she. On
the other hand, when she revises her own conclusions from ''On
Photography'' to say she's no longer so sure that shock has ''term
limits,'' or that ''repeated exposure'' in ''our culture of spectatorship
neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities,'' I agree

with her for no other reason than I want to. Her job is not to win a
verdict from a jury, but to make us think.
And so she has for 40 years. Never mind that Cyndi Lauper
reputation from those essays in ''Against Interpretation'' on
happenings, camp and science fiction. Maybe in the early 60's girls
just wanted to have fun. By the time of ''Styles of Radical Will,'' she
was already Emma Goldman, if not Rosa Luxemburg, reviewing
Vietnam as if it were a Godard film. But there was nothing playful
about ''On Photography,'' which deserved all those prizes, or
''Illness as Metaphor,'' which actually saved lives, or ''Under the
Sign of Saturn,'' where essays so admiring of Walter Benjamin and
Elias Canetti reminded us that she had always been the best
student Kenneth Burke ever had, and could be relied upon to value
Simone Weil over Jack Smith. ''If I had to choose between the Doors
and Dostoyevsky,'' she would write years later, ''then -- of course -I'd choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?''
Yes, she had to, with the culture she cared about going down the
tubes. Against that gurgle and flush, she sent up kites and caught
the lightning bottled in ''Where the Stress Falls,'' asking us to think
the prose of poets and the ''excruciations'' of everybody else, from
Machado de Assis to Jorge Luis Borges to Adam Zagajewski to
Robert Walser to Danilo Kis to Roland Barthes, before he was struck
down by a laundry truck on his way to his mother's, not to mention
side excursions to the dance of Lucinda Childs, the photography of
Annie Leibovitz and the 15-hour version of Alfred Doblin's ''Berlin
Alexanderplatz'' that Rainer Werner Fassbinder managed to make
for German television. All this, plus what she found out about
herself under the influence of morphine and chemotherapy, and an
essay, hilarious in its very conception, on ''Wagner's Fluids.''
Then there were the novels. If the early ones, ''The Benefactor''
and ''Death Kit,'' smelled of the lab, the recent ones, ''The Volcano
Lover'' and ''In America,'' are full of ocean and desert airs. It is an
amazing, buoyant transformation, by a writer with as much staying
power as intellectual wherewithal -- a writer, moreover, who went a
dozen times to Sarajevo while the rest of us were watching the
Weather Channel -- and still she's niggled at even by people she
hasn't sued.
Late in the first act of ''Radiant Baby,'' the new musical about Keith
Haring, they bring on a highfalutin critic. She is trousered and

turtlenecked in black, with a white streak in her dark mane. She is,
of course, a Susan Sontag doll, maybe even a bunraku puppet. You
almost expect her to quote Kleist. How remarkable, when even the
best-known critics in the history of Western culture pass among us
as anonymously as serial killers, that this one should end up
emblematic, a kind of avant-garde biker chick, and also be so
envied and resented for it. From the political right, you'd expect
vituperation, a punishment for her want of piety or bloodthirstiness
about 9/11, as if all over hate radio, Fox News and the blogosphere,
according to some mystical upgrade of the Domino Theory, every
pip was caused to squeak. But in our aggrieved bohemias?
Who cares that her picture has been taken by Harry Hess, Peter
Hujar, Irving Penn, Thomas Victor, Diane Arbus, Robert
Mapplethorpe and Annie Leibovitz, not even counting Woody Allen
for purposes of ''Zelig''? That she's shown up as a character in
unkind novels by Judith Grossman, Alfred Chester, Edmund White,
Philippe Sollers, Francis King and Sarah Schulman? The only Sontag
who matters is the one who keeps on publishing her own books.
''One result of lavishing a good part of your one and only life on
your books,'' she wrote in 1995, ''is that you come to feel that, as a
person, you are faking it.'' I hope not, but I don't have time to find
out because I have to look up, at her recommendation, another
writer I've never read, Multatuli, who's written another novel I
never heard of, ''Max Havelaar.'' Anyway, in the course of admiring
so many serious thinkers, she became one.
If, however, we must plight some troth to the cult of Gaia, this is
how I imagine her, as the poet Paul Claudel saw the ornamental
sandstone dancing maiden in the jungles of Cambodia, one of
those apsaras that Andre Malraux tried to steal -- smiling, writes
Claudel, her ''Ethiopian smile, dancing a kind of sinister cancan
over the ruins.'' She knows lots of things the rest of us only wish we
did. Think of Susan Sontag as the Rose of Angkor Wat.
John Leonard reviews books for Harper's Magazine and The Nation,
movies for ''CBS News Sunday Morning'' and television for New
York magazine.
***

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A Writer Who Begs to Differ... With

Herself
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: March 11, 2003, Tuesday
REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS
By Susan Sontag
131 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $20.
Throughout her long career Susan Sontag has remained
preoccupied with certain enduring themes -- most notably the
relationship between the ethical and the aesthetic and the meaning
of the modern -- but her work and thought have been subject to a
constant process of revision. For instance, she famously argued in
''Against Interpretation'' (1966) that style trumps content, but in
the years since, she has grown increasingly aware of the pitfalls of
adhering to a purely aesthetic view of the world.
In 1965 she celebrated Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi films ''The Triumph
of the Will'' and ''Olympiad'' as masterpieces that ''transcend the
categories of propaganda or even reportage,'' thanks to their
projection of ''the complex movements of intelligence and grace
and sensuousness.'' In a 1980 book she contested this notion,
writing that ''Triumph of the Will'' was ''a film whose very
conception negates the possibility of the filmmaker's having an
aesthetic conception independent of propaganda.''
Now in her latest book, ''Regarding the Pain of Others,'' Ms. Sontag
reappraises many of the opinions she laid out in her well known
1977 book ''On Photography.'' That earlier volume gave us a
searing indictment of photography, arguing that it limits
''experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting
experience into an image, a souvenir.''
''Although the camera is an observation station,'' she wrote, ''the
act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual
voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly,
encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening. To take a
picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo
remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a 'good'
picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject

interesting, worth photographing -- including, when that is the

interest, another person's pain or misfortune.''
''Regarding the Pain of Others,'' which focuses on how we look at
photographs of calamities and the moral implications of such
observation, is a much more nuanced -- even ambivalent -- book. A
revisionistic coda of sorts to ''On Photography,'' it is essentially an
internal dialogue between Ms. Sontag and herself, which makes for
dense, sometimes vexing reading, especially for anyone not
interested in the evolution of her thinking.
Throughout this slender volume Ms. Sontag refutes or qualifies
assertions made in ''On Photography.'' In that earlier book she
argued that ''images anesthetize,'' that ''photographed images of
suffering'' can corrupt ''conscience and the ability to be
compassionate'' by making terrible events seem less real: ''At the
time of the first photographs of the Nazi camps, there was nothing
banal about these images. After 30 years, a saturation point may
have been reached. In these last decades, 'concerned' photography
has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.''
In her new book, however, Ms. Sontag writes that she is ''not so
sure'' that ''photographs have a diminishing impact,'' reasoning
that ''people don't become inured to what they are shown -- if
that's the right way to describe what happens -- because of the
quantity of images dumped on them.''
She adds: ''Flooded with images of the sort that once used to
shock and arouse indignation, we are losing our capacity to react.
Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb. So runs the
familiar diagnosis. But what is really being asked for here? That
images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More
generally, that we work toward what I called for in 'On
Photography': an 'ecology of images'? There isn't going to be an
ecology of images. No Committee of Guardians is going to ration
horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors
themselves are not going to abate.''
In ''On Photography'' Ms. Sontag suggested that photographers
were war tourists and voyeurs, choosing to record rather than to
intervene in the suffering they witnessed, and she suggested that
people who look at such photographs were spectators, who had
depersonalized their relationship with the world. ''The feeling of
being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful

pictures,'' she wrote, ''and looking at them suggests and

strengthens the feeling that one is exempt.''
In ''Regarding the Pain of Others,'' however, she acknowledges
that in the case, say, of the siege of Sarajevo, ''pursuing a good
story was not the only motive for the avidity and the courage of the
photojournalists'' covering the story, adding that ''the Sarajevans
did want their plight to be recorded in photographs: victims are
interested in the representation of their own sufferings.''
As for viewers of atrocity photographs, she writes: ''Let the
atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot
possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they
still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human
beings are capable of doing -- may volunteer to do,
enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don't forget.''
In ''On Photography'' Ms. Sontag asserted that ''the knowledge
gained through still photographs will always be some kind of
sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist.'' She added, ''It will
be knowledge at bargain prices -- a semblance of knowledge, a
semblance of wisdom.''
In ''Regarding the Pain of Others'' she is more philosophical: ''That
we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the
page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical values of an
assault by images. It is not a defect that we are not seared, that we
do not suffer enough, when we see these images. Neither is the
photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and
cause of the suffering it picks out and frames. Such images cannot
be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to
examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by
established powers.''
Certainly Ms. Sontag is to be commended for acknowledging how
her thinking has changed over the years, but it seems paradoxical
that so many of the views she now disputes as conventional
wisdom among the intelligentsia are views informed or shaped by
her earlier writings. And because so many of the ideas laid out in
''On Photography'' were so shrill and doctrinaire, the refutations in
''Regarding the Pain of Others'' -- often served up with an air of
Delphic wisdom -- tend to feel like belated and common-sense
statements of the obvious.

Is it really a revelation that a picture can sometimes be worth a

thousand words? (''Photographs lay down routes of reference, and
serve as totems of causes: sentiment is more likely to crystallize
around a photograph than around a verbal slogan.'') Is it really a
revelation that photographic images can help cement historical
knowledge and serve as prods to the conscience of the world, that
''it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one's
sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is
in the world we share with others''?
*
'Regarding the Pain of Others'
Reviwed by JOHN LEONARD
Published: March 23, 2003
Toward the end of ''Regarding the Pain of Others,'' her coruscating
sermon on how we picture suffering, Susan Sontag loses her
temper. As usual she's been playing a solitary hand, shuffling
contradictions, dealing provocations, turning over anguished faces,
numbing numerals, even a jumping jack (''we have lids on our
eyes, we do not have doors on our ears''). But she seems
personally offended by those ''citizens of modernity, consumers of
violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk'' who ''will
do anything to keep themselves from being moved.'' And she is all
of a sudden ferocious:
''To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking
provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small,
educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news
has been converted into entertainment.... It assumes that everyone
is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no
real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with
those zones in the well-off countries where people have the
dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be
spectators, of other people's pain... consumers of news, who know
nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror.
There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far

from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the
luxury of patronizing reality.''
So much, then, for Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard and their Frenchfried American fellows in the media studies programs, looking down
on staged events as if from zeppelins, or like the kings of Burma on
the backs of elephants, remote and twitchy among the pixels, with
multiple views in slo-mo, intimate focus or broad scan, and an IVfeed of chitchat. When we think about the pictures we have seen
from Bosnia, Rwanda and Chechnya, about the videotapes
available to us of Rodney King being beaten and Daniel Pearl being
murdered, media theory seems merely impudent.
Yet Sontag has no more use for the pure of heart and perpetually
incredulous who are always shocked by the wounds of the world,
by evidence of ''hands-on'' cruelty and proof ''that depravity
exists.'' Where have they been? After a century and a half of
photojournalistic witness, ''a vast repository'' of ''atrocious images''
already exists to remind us of what people can do to each other. At
this late date, to be surprised is to be morally defective: ''No one
after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of
superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.''
So there is suffering, and there are cameras, and it is possible to
worry about the motives of the men and women behind the
cameras, whether one may be too arty, another a bit mercenary, a
third a violence junkie, as it is possible to worry about whether our
looking at the pictures they bring back from the wound is
voyeuristic or pornographic; whether such witness, competing for
notice among so many other clamors, seems more authentic the
more it's amateurish (accidental, like satellite surveillance);
whether excess exposure to atrocity glossies dulls Jack and jades
Jill; or whether.... But then again, maybe these worries are selfindulgent and beside the point, which should be to think our way
past what happened to why. ''It is not a defect,'' Sontag says, ''that
we do not suffer enough'' when we see these images:
''Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about
the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames.
Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to
reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering
offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture

shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is

there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that
ought to be challenged?''
Photographs ''haunt'' us; ''narratives can make us understand.'' As
thinking people used to do, before what Sontag calls ''the era of
shopping,'' we are invited to make distinctions and connections,
and then maybe fix something. Or have all of us already sold,
leased or leveraged our skepticism, our intellectual property rights
and our firstborn child for a seat at the table and a shot at the
trough?
Sontag of course has done our homework for us, her usual
archaeology. She follows the trail of photojournalism from Roger
Fenton in the Valley of Death after the charge of the Light Brigade,
to Mathew Brady's illustrating of America's Civil War, to Robert
Capa among Spanish Republicans, to the horrors of Buchenwald
and Hiroshima, to famine in India and carnage in Biafra and napalm
in Vietnam and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. After consulting
Goya on what a victorious army does to a civilian population, she
takes us to Tuol Sleng, near Phnom Penh, to look at the
photographs the Khmer Rouge took of thousands of suspected
''intellectuals'' and ''counterrevolutionaries'' (meaning Cambodians
who had gone to school, spoke a foreign language or wore glasses)
after they were tortured but before they were murdered.
She reminds us of how hard it is for the image makers to keep up
with improvements in the technology of torture and execution,
from the stake, the wheel, the gallows tree and the strappado to
smart bombs dreamed up on bitmaps in virtual realities. (Longdistance mayhem gets longer by the minute. The British who
bombed Iraq in the 1920's and the Germans who bombed Spain in
the 1930's could actually see their civilian targets, whereas the
recent American bombings of Afghanistan were orchestrated at
computer screens in Tampa, Fla.) She has shrewd things to say
about colonial wars, memory museums, Christian iconography,
lynching postcards, Virginia Woolf, Andy Warhol, Georges Bataille
and St. Sebastian; about ''sentimentality,'' ''indecency'' and the
''overstimulation'' Wordsworth warned us would lead to to (lovely
phrase!) ''savage torpor.''

And, as usual, she provokes. It probably isn't true that ''not even
pacifists'' any longer believe war can be abolished, that photos
have a ''deeper bite'' in the memory bank than movies or
television, that ''the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is
as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked,''
and that ''most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do
arouse a prurient interest.'' I don't know, and neither does she. On
the other hand, when she revises her own conclusions from ''On
Photography'' to say she's no longer so sure that shock has ''term
limits,'' or that ''repeated exposure'' in ''our culture of spectatorship
neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities,'' I agree
with her for no other reason than I want to. Her job is not to win a
verdict from a jury, but to make us think.
And so she has for 40 years. Never mind that Cyndi Lauper
reputation from those essays in ''Against Interpretation'' on
happenings, camp and science fiction. Maybe in the early 60's girls
just wanted to have fun. By the time of ''Styles of Radical Will,'' she
was already Emma Goldman, if not Rosa Luxemburg, reviewing
Vietnam as if it were a Godard film. But there was nothing playful
about ''On Photography,'' which deserved all those prizes, or
''Illness as Metaphor,'' which actually saved lives, or ''Under the
Sign of Saturn,'' where essays so admiring of Walter Benjamin and
Elias Canetti reminded us that she had always been the best
student Kenneth Burke ever had, and could be relied upon to value
Simone Weil over Jack Smith. ''If I had to choose between the Doors
and Dostoyevsky,'' she would write years later, ''then -- of course -I'd choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?''
Yes, she had to, with the culture she cared about going down the
tubes. Against that gurgle and flush, she sent up kites and caught
the lightning bottled in ''Where the Stress Falls,'' asking us to think
the prose of poets and the ''excruciations'' of everybody else, from
Machado de Assis to Jorge Luis Borges to Adam Zagajewski to
Robert Walser to Danilo Kis to Roland Barthes, before he was struck
down by a laundry truck on his way to his mother's, not to mention
side excursions to the dance of Lucinda Childs, the photography of
Annie Leibovitz and the 15-hour version of Alfred Doblin's ''Berlin
Alexanderplatz'' that Rainer Werner Fassbinder managed to make
for German television. All this, plus what she found out about

herself under the influence of morphine and chemotherapy, and an

essay, hilarious in its very conception, on ''Wagner's Fluids.''
Then there were the novels. If the early ones, ''The Benefactor''
and ''Death Kit,'' smelled of the lab, the recent ones, ''The Volcano
Lover'' and ''In America,'' are full of ocean and desert airs. It is an
amazing, buoyant transformation, by a writer with as much staying
power as intellectual wherewithal -- a writer, moreover, who went a
dozen times to Sarajevo while the rest of us were watching the
Weather Channel -- and still she's niggled at even by people she
hasn't sued.
Late in the first act of ''Radiant Baby,'' the new musical about Keith
Haring, they bring on a highfalutin critic. She is trousered and
turtlenecked in black, with a white streak in her dark mane. She is,
of course, a Susan Sontag doll, maybe even a bunraku puppet. You
almost expect her to quote Kleist. How remarkable, when even the
best-known critics in the history of Western culture pass among us
as anonymously as serial killers, that this one should end up
emblematic, a kind of avant-garde biker chick, and also be so
envied and resented for it. From the political right, you'd expect
vituperation, a punishment for her want of piety or bloodthirstiness
about 9/11, as if all over hate radio, Fox News and the blogosphere,
according to some mystical upgrade of the Domino Theory, every
pip was caused to squeak. But in our aggrieved bohemias?
Who cares that her picture has been taken by Harry Hess, Peter
Hujar, Irving Penn, Thomas Victor, Diane Arbus, Robert
Mapplethorpe and Annie Leibovitz, not even counting Woody Allen
for purposes of ''Zelig''? That she's shown up as a character in
unkind novels by Judith Grossman, Alfred Chester, Edmund White,
Philippe Sollers, Francis King and Sarah Schulman? The only Sontag
who matters is the one who keeps on publishing her own books.
''One result of lavishing a good part of your one and only life on
your books,'' she wrote in 1995, ''is that you come to feel that, as a
person, you are faking it.'' I hope not, but I don't have time to find
out because I have to look up, at her recommendation, another
writer I've never read, Multatuli, who's written another novel I
never heard of, ''Max Havelaar.'' Anyway, in the course of admiring
so many serious thinkers, she became one.
If, however, we must plight some troth to the cult of Gaia, this is
how I imagine her, as the poet Paul Claudel saw the ornamental

sandstone dancing maiden in the jungles of Cambodia, one of

those apsaras that Andre Malraux tried to steal -- smiling, writes
Claudel, her ''Ethiopian smile, dancing a kind of sinister cancan
over the ruins.'' She knows lots of things the rest of us only wish we
did. Think of Susan Sontag as the Rose of Angkor Wat.
John Leonard reviews books for Harper's Magazine and The Nation,
movies for ''CBS News Sunday Morning'' and television for New
York magazine.
*
The Critical Gaze
By A. O. SCOTT
Susan Sontag's new book, ''Regarding the Pain of Others,'' an
extended essay on the documentary imagery of war, is a reminder
that whatever else she is -- best-selling novelist, political
polemicist, director of films and plays -- Sontag is one of our most
powerful critics of photography. She also happens to be among the
most photographed of critics.
Twenty-five years ago, Sontag began an essay on the German
writer Walter Benjamin with a reading not of his prose but of
photographs from his young manhood and middle age, in search of
clues to his restless literary spirit and his entanglement in the
political catastrophes of 20th-century Europe. A similar method
might be applied in approaching Sontag herself, who has sat for
some of the leading photographers of the day, including Irving
Penn, Robert Mapplethorpe and Annie Leibovitz. The dust-jacket
photograph from the first edition of ''Against Interpretation,'' the
1966 collection of essays that established her reputation as a
fearsomely erudite champion of the international multimedia
avant-garde, shows a woman of startling youth gazing down past
the bottom of the frame, her mouth in a strange half-smile. The
gray streak of hair that will become a visual signature is just
starting to be visible. In the picture (taken by Leibovitz) that adorns
some of the recent paperback editions of Sontag's books, the
streak is all but absorbed into the silver of the mane that surrounds

it. The gaze drifts upward. The smile is still enigmatic, but it seems
calmer and wiser, as though guarding a different set of secrets.
Sontag, like Benjamin before her, has been consistently suspicious
of the power and pervasiveness of images in the culture. In ''On
Photography'' (1977), she called for a restrictive ''ecology of
images,'' and she often writes with deep exasperation about the
banality of image-saturated, celebrity-driven contemporary culture.
Even so, she has become a fixture, or at least an occasional
ornament, in that culture, appearing in Woody Allen's ''Zelig'' and
popping up as a knowing allusion in an early episode of ''The
Simpsons'' and in the lyrics to Jonathan Larson's ''Rent.'' She has
also written the introduction to Leibovitz's most recent book,
continuing a longtime affiliation with the glossiest of celebrity
photographers.
Her most identifiable public image remains that of an icon of
seriousness, the embodiment of the intellectual in a culture
pathologically ambivalent about the very category. Which means
that she has been revered for her range and erudition, and also
attacked for arrogance and irresponsibility. Her brief essay about
media and political responses to the 9/11 attacks caused a squall of
rage and ridicule far out of proportion to her arguments
themselves, which in retrospect seem tone-deaf and insensitive but
not altogether wrong. ''Let's by all means grieve together,'' she
wrote. ''But let's not be stupid together.''
The assumption of general stupidity, and the implication of her
own superiority, were no doubt part of what infuriated her critics.
But her vilification as an avatar of the ''anti-American left'' also
seemed to involve a settling of old scores, left over from the late
1960's, when she argued that America was ''doomed'' and far
inferior to the North Vietnamese model of social organization. Since
then, however, her politics have shifted, more or less in line with
the rest of the international literary and artistic class. She annoyed
many former allies when, in 1982, she identified communism as
''fascism with a human face'' and, in the 1990's, called for Western
intervention against Serbian aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Her current stance against war in Iraq may well mask the extent to
which she has become, though not in the usual sense of the term,
a leading cultural conservative. In the mid-60's, she was the
prophetess of a ''new sensibility'' that would demolish the

boundaries between high and low culture, between irony and

seriousness, between pleasure and thought. But though her
prophecy was accurate, she became a sort of reverse Cassandra,
lamenting the vulgarity and nihilism of the new sensibility and
retreating into high culture and historical fiction. Even as her early
criticism anticipates every academic trend from Cultural Studies to
Queer Theory, she has been resolute in her resistance to
everything postmodern, insisting on standards, morals and
distinctions and the authority of art, experience and truth.
She is, above all, a believer in difficulty, and it is the ardor with
which she embraces it that makes her criticism, whatever its blind
spots or overstatements, worth reading. ''Regarding the Pain of
Others'' bristles with a sense of commitment -- to seeing the world
as it is, to worrying about the ways it is represented, even to
making some gesture in the direction of changing it. The book
churns with contradictory impulses: to bear firsthand witness to
political atrocities, to study images of those atrocities, to do so
while ''standing back and thinking'' about what it all means. And it
is not necessary to agree with its claims, or to endorse the
querulous, grandiose worldview behind them, to find the
performance thrilling to witness.
''The photographer's look is looking in a pure state,'' she has
written. ''In looking at me, it desires what I am not -- my image.''
The image at right, a daguerreotype made by Chuck Close, is
jarring -- unfamiliar, unglamorous, certainly, and also a little
uncanny -- as photographs made by this archaic process often are.
Etched onto a metal plate, it is literally a graven image, suggestive
of a time before photography became a ubiquitous and disposable
medium. With some adjustment of pronouns, the end of Sontag's
essay on Benjamin might serve as a caption: ''At the Last
Judgment, the Last Intellectual -- that Saturnine hero of modern
culture, with his ruins, his defiant visions, his reveries, his
unquenchable gloom, his downcast eyes -- will explain that he took
many 'positions' and defended the life of the mind to the end, as
righteously and inhumanely as he could.''
A.O. Scott is a movie critic for The New York Times.
*