So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.
SUSAN SONTAG, Regarding the Pain of Others
In Making It, Norman Podhoretz’s 1967 Horatio Alger story of his climb from immigrant poverty to the pinnacle of the intellectual world, the Partisan Review, he takes a jab at Susan Sontag, his younger and much more famous colleague among the New York Intellectuals:
Her talent explains the rise itself, but the rapidity with which it was accomplished must be attributed to the coincidental availability of a vacant position in the culture. That position—for which, by virtue of their unmistakable authority, her early pieces constituted an implicit, though not of course intentional application—was Dark Lady of American Letters, a position that had been carved out by Mary McCarthy in the thirties and forties. But Miss McCarthy no longer occupied it, having recently been promoted to the more dignified status of Grande Dame as a reward for her long years of brilliant service. The next Dark Lady would have to be, like her, clever, learned, good-looking, capable of writing family-type criticism as well as fiction with a strong trace of naughtiness.1
That same year, Carolyn Heilbrun, a pioneer of feminist literary criticism at Columbia University, echoed Podhoretz’s observation in her interview with Susan Sontag for the New York Times, though in a very different key: “How short the world is of famous, intelligent women: one per country, per generation.”2 Podhoretz’s “position” for which a woman makes an “application” might leave room for more than one woman intellectual, the Dark Lady being only style, perhaps, among others; Heilbrun’s lament strips the position down to its barest element: Dark Lady or not, there’s only one token woman. When Mary McCarthy supposedly quipped to Sontag at a cocktail party, “So I hear you’re the new me,” she might have been either buying into the system or joking with Sontag at Podhoretz’s (and everyone else’s) expense. Since no one can locate the origin of this story (least of all Sontag), its circulation says more about the eagerness of the Partisan Review “boys,” as both McCarthy and Sontag called them, to see these two women as interchangeable and to sow the seeds of discord between them.3 That it continues to circulate long after the principals are dead suggests the enduring appeal of a catfight.
Their similarity has been difficult to process in all but these most superficial terms, and it has been made increasingly implausible by the exaggerated and increasingly narrow generational demarcations of the late twentieth century. Though both were children of wartime—McCarthy the First World War and Sontag the Second—Sontag came of age in the comparatively peaceful and prosperous Cold War 1950s as opposed to the worldwide economic depression of the increasingly fascist 1930s. However, like McCarthy and Arendt as well, Sontag was deeply troubled by the loss of faith in the senses and called for a renewed commitment to aesthetic pedagogy in the most urgent (but, unlike them, ecstatic) terms. As excoriating as it is, her manifesto, “Against Interpretation,” is infused with optimism more than dread and colored by the emerging body politics of the 1960s. “Against Interpretation” made two slightly different claims about the distrust of the senses: one, that the hypertrophy of the intellect had made sensual experiences of art irrelevant to criticism; and two, that the overcrowding of objects and sensations and the overstimulation of everyday life in late capitalist society had had an anesthetic effect, dulling to the point of deadness the individual’s capacity for sensation. In a spirit of euphoria in the 1960s, surrounded by aesthetic experimentation in all forms, Sontag called for an “erotics of art” rather than a hermeneutics, asking her readers “to see more, to hear more, to feel more,” to experience through the senses “the luminousness of things being what they are.”4
Sontag’s fundamental insight differs little from McCarthy’s and Arendt’s however much more passionately she argued. There is also nothing new in her critique of the anesthetic quality of modernity. The German sociologist Georg Simmel made this argument in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” in 1903; the essay was widely read when it was republished in the 1950s and had a profound impact on the Chicago School of Sociology at the University of Chicago, where Sontag was an undergraduate and where she met her husband, the sociologist Philip Rieff.5 Sontag ventures into new territory, however, when she takes note not simply of the anesthesia of modern culture and the adaptive coldness and detachment of its inhabitants but also of its opposite: its cultivation of feeling, especially extreme states of feeling, and its wild mood swings between intensity and affectlessness. In her essays collected in Against Interpretation, she explored the extremity of painful feeling in the “Artist as Exemplary Sufferer” and “Simone Weil”; the emotional reserve of Robert Bresson and the “gift of strong emotion” in Michael Leiris; the horror inspired by affectlessness in “The Imagination of Disaster”; and emotional coolness in “One Culture and the New Sensibility.” Because she was not a systematic thinker, or at least not a very good one, these moods became a central feature of her taxonomies of art and literature without ever being the subject of her own sustained reflection in an essay. If Raymond Williams introduced the “structure of feeling” to cultural analysis in the 1950s,6 Sontag supplemented it with the feeling of feelings in the 1960s—that is, her acute rendering of the aesthetics of feeling in art: how it was produced in medium-specific ways in the reader/viewer of literary, visual, theatrical, and cinematic works of art. Emotional style was a symptom to be appreciated, one of her key terms, and then analyzed in her ongoing diagnosis of contemporary culture.
If, like McCarthy and Arendt, Sontag also favored emotional self-regulation, she was less invested in an embargo on emotional display and vastly more concerned with the struggle to retain agency over one’s inner state. Moreover, she understood aesthetics as a tool not merely of apprehension and knowledge, as they did, but also of feeling management. The capacity to feel more sensually was the antidote to feeling too much or too little emotion. Nowhere is this aspect of Sontag’s work more important to note than in her essays from the 1970s when “things being what they are” began to look less “luminous” than ominous. By 1975, with the ignominious end of the Vietnam War and her own diagnosis with breast cancer, Sontag extended and deepened her inquiry into the contemporary culture of emotions, provoked by her retreat from the euphoria and optimism of the 1960s, her increasing discomfort with the body politics and utopianism of the New Left, and her attention to ugliness, both political and aesthetic. The 1974 New York Review of Books essay “Fascinating Fascism,” on the photographs and films of Leni Riefenstahl, has been thought to mark an abrupt reversal of Sontag’s aesthetics. I want to argue instead that she never gave up the aesthetic philosophy articulated in her early work, but that she began to reevaluate it in relation to painful reality in On Photography and Illness as Metaphor, which she called a new version of “Against Interpretation.” Both texts plumb the root causes of emotional disregulation in contemporary culture and recalibrate her aesthetic program in the aim of recovering emotional self-management.
Certainly, there is a biographical connection between the two works. Sontag’s cancer treatment interrupted the publication of the last two essays in what would become On Photography. She edited them into final form for the book while she was researching and then writing the first of the essays for Illness as Metaphor. On Photography and Illness as Metaphor are both taxonomies in the pattern of her earlier work, but they are also pathographies in that they attempt to deal with illness and the way that it shapes the social world. Though taken from the German Pathographie, whose first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1848, “pathography” in English is a twentieth-century invention.7 The first meaning—a description of a disease—is now rare; instead, the second definition—“the study of the life of an individual or the history of a community with regard to the influence of a particular disease or disorder; (as a count noun) a study or biography of this kind”—is Sontag’s task. Broadly defined, for Sontag that illness is disregulation: On Photography bemoans the surplus of photographs and concludes with a call for an ecology of images; Illness as Metaphor understands excess and dearth (energy, consumption, expressivity) as the conditions that tuberculosis and cancer metaphors illustrate. Alongside material surplus and in conjunction with it, there is the troubling disregulation of feeling, which Sontag believes undermines art and politics in similar ways. Feelings get in the way of feeling (seeing, hearing, touching), which is to say they are anesthetic or, when not properly managed, can be. Scholars of the late twentieth century in the United States tend to characterize it as a period marked either by intense authentic feeling or by irony and the erosion of feeling. In more general public debate, there are repeated attempts to regulate feeling, to admonish or celebrate displays of emotion, to admire or rebuke emotional containment. Sontag observed this confusion about the place of feeling in public life in the latter half of the twentieth century and began to link feeling states to problems of agency as she encountered them in the realms of art, politics, and the body. For Sontag, emotions are only problematic insofar as they threaten agency, which they always do.
I feel like the Vietnam War. . . . My body is invasive, colonizing. They’re using chemical weapons on me. I have to cheer.
I feel my body has let me down. . . . And my mind, too. For, somewhere, I believe the Reichian verdict. I’m responsible for my cancer. I lived as a coward, repressing my desire, my rage.8
Sontag wrote these words in her journal during her harrowing regimen of chemotherapy for breast cancer in the late fall of 1975, shortly after her radical mastectomy and six months after the end of the Vietnam War.9 She was then in the grip of the cancer war metaphors that she would deconstruct so deftly in Illness as Metaphor, the book that came out of her experience, just as she was in thrall to the Reichian psychological explanation of cancer, which she also dismantles in that work. The way she knew the effect of the war metaphor and the psychological theories of disease from personal experience is not, however, a part of that book and only recently has become available to her readers via her son David Rieff’s memoir of her death. Autobiography and personal experience are important to Illness as Metaphor in their absence, but for the moment, I want to consider how densely Sontag’s journal signals the historical context of her disease in these two quotations. The Vietnam War and, more obliquely, the sexual revolution shape Sontag’s thinking in her two major essays from the 1970s, On Photography and Illness as Metaphor, and suggest how the problems of feeling exacerbated by both war and sexual freedom would in some ways complicate and in other ways clarify Sontag’s response to the feeling culture of the late twentieth century. Suffering and desire, as forms of emotional intensity that compromise agency, get mapped onto one another, and aesthetics becomes the tool by which to regulate their intrinsic excess.
Though Illness as Metaphor was published a little more than thirty years ago, the cultural syndrome that she attacks is now so remote or so firmly associated with New Age mind-body therapies that it is difficult to remember how mainstream her reading of cancer was. If Sontag’s essay concerned only a discourse of cancer that is now a relic of history, its value as a document of the period might be more circumscribed. It is, however, a pathography of feelings in modern Western societies, particularly the United States, and the norms of feeling she describes are by no means remote. The most important system of tropes in coding disease comes from the domain of emotions and emotional style.10 Both tuberculosis and cancer in Illness are defined by their enactment of a culturally preferred or abhorred relationship to personal emotion—that is, an emotional style that is valued and one that is not. Echoing the bipolarity of emotion that Sontag had been tracking since the early 1960s, tuberculosis represents intense emotional states and fluent personal expressivity; cancer, emotional anesthesia and inarticulacy. As a result of this bifurcation, Sontag argues that while tuberculosis is an erotic and glamorous disease, cancer can be neither aestheticized nor eroticized. Taken together, what Sontag finds pathological (among other things, of course) is the extreme overvaluation of feeling, not just as a capacity of the modern individual, but also as a requirement of full cultural citizenship. Illness as Metaphor constitutes a pathography in its original, most clinical meaning: a description of a disease. Precisely because of Sontag’s distrust of feeling, Illness is antipathographic in the contemporary use of the term inaugurated by Joyce Carol Oates in the late 1980s to name a morbid and sensational genre of life writing.11 By her own logic, Sontag’s personal experience—and, more particularly, her feelings about it—could not be part of her study, however central it was to her motivation for writing.12
What would come to be called “the war on cancer” was unveiled by Richard Nixon in his State of the Union address in 1971 as part of a major initiative to make America the “healthiest nation on earth”:13 “I will also ask for an appropriation of an extra $100 million to launch an intensive campaign to find a cure for cancer, and I will ask later for whatever additional funds can effectively be used. The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease. Let us make a total national commitment to achieve this goal.”14 Despite popular mythology, his announcement did not employ military terms and he did not use the word “war,” which appears only twice elsewhere in the speech. As the Vietnam War dragged on, martial rhetoric was more likely to depress or enrage his listeners than inspire them. Discovering a cure for cancer, then (and now) the second leading cause of death in the United States, was to be the most ambitious scientific project of his presidency, Nixon’s equivalent of the Manhattan Project and Project Apollo. The “war on cancer” rhetoric was derived later by implication when the president signed the National Cancer Act of 1971 and housed its new research facilities at Fort Detrick, Maryland, which had been the army’s biological warfare research center since 1942. Nixon named two rationales for this decision: one pragmatic, one symbolic. He had shut down research on biological weapons unilaterally in 1969; by executive order, the army’s stockpiles of spores and viruses were destroyed in the face of an impending international agreement outlawing biological warfare. Since there were now underutilized (but very advanced) research facilities—biological weapon defense remained on-site—Nixon assigned Fort Detrick as the new home for the National Cancer Institute, declaring that the United States had the rare opportunity of “turning swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks,” “changing the implements of war into instruments of peace.”15 Symbolically, the war on cancer was a beneficiary of the other, nonmetaphorical kind of war, which is not the same thing as a peace dividend. When the war in Vietnam finally and officially ended in 1975, Fort Detrick had been a cancer research center for three years. Sontag’s troping of her body as the Vietnam War plays out this symbolic conversion, turning napalm into chemotherapy, which retains the toxicity and aggression of both. Nixon, however, was trying to work the metaphor in the opposite way, applying the medicinal properties of cancer research to a war-torn United States.
Every historical account of cancer research marks the 1970s as its watershed moment, the before and after of the treatment of the disease. Moreover, as Sontag’s essay predicted, greater understanding of cancer, spurred by an additional 1.6-billion-dollar appropriation,16 was already transforming the culture of the disease. One simple example: cancer became a subject for the movies, one that could be seen and named, not merely implied. If in the 1970 movie Love Story, Ali McGraw’s character, Jenny, dies of some unspecified but not unrecognizable disease (leukemia), by the end of the decade, cancer was no longer unspeakable in popular culture. In Promises in the Dark (1979), the cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment are all spelled out to the patient in the film, and by a woman doctor no less, a similarly remarkable, though not as unprecedented, novelty. By 1983 the Academy Award–winning comic melodrama Terms of Endearment spends fully half the movie following its main character’s treatment and painful death from cancer. As it was demystified, cancer had rapidly lost its capacity to shame its victims, who were less likely to be understood as psychologically complicit in their physical breakdown.
This putative complicity lies at the heart of Illness as Metaphor, where Sontag claims “the source for much of the current fancy that associates cancer with the repression of passion is Wilhelm Reich” and states that Reich “did more than anyone else to disseminate the psychological theory of cancer.”17 Nonetheless, the conspicuous role that Reich plays in Illness as Metaphor as the avatar of psychological theories of cancer seems vastly out of proportion to his actual influence. Sontag’s own footnotes list an array of contemporary medical research projects linking cancer and the emotions, and she does not exhaust the bibliography. In June 1978 the same year Illness came out in both essay and book form, Constance Holden published a substantial review essay in Science called “Cancer and the Mind: How Are They Connected?,” which tracked research from the 1950s forward linking cancer and emotions.18 Reich is, unsurprisingly, not mentioned in the article. Moreover, Sontag understands Reich to have described cancer principally as a disease of repressed rage; Holden, too, shows that the majority of research linking cancer and emotion also identifies rage and suppressed rage as possible influences on cancer. Reich, however, according to Sontag, understood cancer as “a disease following emotional resignation—a bio-energetic shrinking, a giving up of hope” (IAM, 23).19 For Reich, a lack of emotional intensity rather than a surplus caused cancer. In fact, he only rarely mentions rage in The Cancer Biopathy (four times in four hundred plus pages), though this is Sontag’s focus, and she might have attributed that to him by way of Norman Mailer’s infamous comment that stabbing his wife saved her from cancer. Sontag is clearly taking her cue from nearly every other study linking repressed emotions and cancer but Reich, though she will understand the cancer patient as emotionally anesthetized in ways that echo Reich’s conclusions.
Reich explains his theory of the origins of cancer in The Cancer Biopathy, initially published in small release from the Orgone Institute Press in 1948 and reissued by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 1973 in the course of republishing much of Reich’s out-of-print work. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, also Sontag’s publisher, benefited from (or capitalized on) two things: one, the resurgent interest in Reich among the New Left and sexual revolutionaries of various political stripes; and two, the dramatic increase in attention to cancer after the National Cancer Act. “Wilhelm (The Function of Orgasm) Reich,” as Time magazine called him in their 1957 obituary,20 had died in prison, having been sentenced to two years for fraud in distributing the orgone accumulator; only seven years later, in 1964, he was being hailed, if somewhat ironically by Time, as the father of the “second” sexual revolution. Reich’s cancer theories had probably reached the peak of their influence in 1947 when Mildred Brady wrote her infamous report in the New Republic on the dangerous “cult of Reich” and sexually titillating orgone accumulators that were to treat cancer patients.21 This essay got the attention of the FBI, which already had a file on Reich, and set in motion his eventual conviction for fraud.
To say that Reich’s orgone research, which is the basis of his cancer theory, was suspect is to put it mildly. No aspect of his work had been less well received or less credible than the research he did on orgone energy toward the end of his career. He did, however, exert a great deal of influence on US writers—William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, J. D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac make the short list—and on postwar psychoanalytic innovations like gestalt therapy and primal therapy. Only Burroughs and to a lesser extent Mailer found Reich’s experiments with orgone energy compelling, and while these experiments continue to attract followers at the fringes of psychoanalytic and medical research, Reich in 1978 was not a formidable target. And yet, Sontag continually returns to him to expose what she sees as the most noxious form of metaphorical thinking in contemporary cancer discourse.
The pathographic link to Reich is not, I want to argue, The Cancer Biopathy so much as it is The Sexual Revolution and its influence on the culture of the 1960s and 1970s.22 Reich’s prescription for cancer is identical to his prescription for authoritarianism and for individual psychological health: heterosexual genital pleasure culminating in orgasm. Sontag signals Reich’s theories in Illness as Metaphor when she says, “What is called a liberated sexual life is believed by some people today to stave off cancer, for virtually the same reason that sex was often prescribed to tuberculars as a therapy” (IAM, 21). Sontag’s popular reputation as a sexual revolutionary, based on some of her essays, the famously alluring photographs by well-known photographers, and her not-very-secret lesbianism, overshadows her lack of commitment to its foundational assumptions. Indeed, in the early 1960s she wrote a glowing review of Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death, in which she admires his repudiation of the body politics of the United States (referring only once to the “ill-fated Wilhelm Reich”).23 And in 1967 in Partisan Review, she published one of her best-known essays, “The Pornographic Imagination” (reprinted in Styles of Radical Will in 1969), which defined pornography as a genre of literature, described its generic features, and illustrated the merits of some of its outstanding examples. But Sontag was hardly alone at the vanguard in taking up the topic of pornography, which any number of public intellectuals and academic scholars addressed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the category of literary obscenity from 1957 to 1966.24 In a more important sense, Sontag was a very skeptical fellow traveler, one who embraced the relaxation of sexual hypocrisy while standing well apart from the Reichian optimism about sexuality that guided the sexual revolution. Her trepidation about sexual intensity may offer another explanation for Sontag’s unwillingness to disclose her sexual orientation, even in the midst of gay liberation in the 1970s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, a fact that has always puzzled and often enraged her queer readers. Given what we now know about Sontag’s sexual anxieties from her recently published journals, the social opprobrium heaped on homosexuals, which she feared, may also have provided her with an excuse to contain her sexual adventurousness, which would allay her fear of being overwhelmed by her own desire.
In “The Pornographic Imagination,” working primarily from the French pornographic tradition, Sontag opted out of the polarized dichotomy in the United States between advocates of liberalization and those of censorship. She says: “What seems to be decisive in the complex of views held by most educated members of the community is a more questionable assumption—that human sexual appetite is, if untampered with, a natural and pleasant function; and that ‘the obscene’ is a convention, the fiction imposed upon nature by a society convinced there is something vile about the sexual functions, and by extension, about sexual pleasure” (SRW, 56–57). Instead, Sontag argues that sexual appetite is “demonic” and something “like nuclear energy, which may prove amendable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not” (SRW, 57). We might explore the extreme realms of sexuality to understand extreme forms of consciousness, she advised, but certainly not because it is good for us. Unlike Reich, Sontag did not believe that sexuality, freed from what he called “sex-economic regulation,” would be health inducing for either the individual or the social body. It would instead have variable effects, not because of neurotic sexual malfunction but because of the unruliness, obsessiveness, and extremity of sexual desire itself. Moreover, sexual feelings were too explosive, to continue her metaphor, too potentially annihilating, to be safely handled by everyone. Sontag closed by arguing that “pornography was only one item among many dangerous commodities being circulated in this society,” that “perhaps most people don’t need a ‘wider scale of experience,’” and that, without extensive preparation, “any widening of experience and consciousness is destructive for most people” (SRW, 71–72, emphasis mine). Confined to aesthetic experimentation and to what she supposes to be the sturdier psyches of an elite or coterie audience, extremity is merely interesting, not dangerous, because it maintains its status as experimental, pedagogic, and even quasi-scientific. The mass participation in extreme states of feeling and of sexual feeling in particular made her increasingly uneasy about its volatility and its increasing saturation of public culture. This concern guides On Photography as well, though in the opposite direction, with its apprehension about extremes of suffering and its distaste for the an-aesthetics of the contemporary avant-garde.
Little attention has been paid to the fact that the 1972 retrospective of the photography of Diane Arbus at the Museum of Modern Art produced Sontag’s landmark On Photography. Certainly, critics always mention Sontag, now mostly in passing, in criticism of Arbus’s work, but Arbus’s importance to Sontag is rarely noted, if at all. Sontag’s unofficial (and only) biography tells us that On Photography itself, not just the essay “America, Seen through Photographs, Darkly,” grew out of her fascination with Arbus’s photographs and the unusually intense popular reaction to her retrospective, mounted the year after Arbus’s suicide. Photographed herself by Arbus six years earlier, Sontag was “knocked out” by the work and equally astonished at the crowds visiting the exhibit (some 250,000 people saw this show; the book that accompanied the exhibition sold 100,000 copies).25 No collection of photography had achieved such mass appeal since Edward Steichen curated the “Family of Man” exhibit at MOMA in 1955. Sontag noted about the analogy: “Instead of people whose appearances please, representative folk doing their human thing, the Arbus show lined up assorted monsters and borderline cases—most of them ugly: wearing grotesque or unflattering clothing; in dismal or barren surroundings—who have paused to pose and, often, to gaze frankly, confidentially at the viewer.”26 In 1955 unprecedented crowds had congregated to take pleasure in what Sontag defined as “sentimental humanism,” a representation of a world without conflict; in 1972 similar numbers assembled to be confronted by its inverse, a world united by pain. The Arbus show epitomized for Sontag a disconcerting shift in the art and politics of suffering, one that she understood to be inescapably “anesthetic.”
The problem of anesthetics weighed heavily on Sontag’s reflections on the photographic image. In 1972, the year of Arbus’s show, the most famous photograph in the country was of a naked Vietnamese girl running down a dirt road, her arms outstretched, her mouth wide open, her face contorted. Though she was not alone in the photograph (there are other children who are clothed, a boy whose face betrays his agony, and others who appear more frightened than injured; there are US soldiers walking nonchalantly down the side of the road paying no attention to the children), the photograph came to be called “napalmed girl”; it won a Pulitzer Prize and was named the World Photograph of the Year. Sontag called these kinds of photographs “novelt[ies] of misery” and argued in the opening essay of her book that the ubiquity of such images deprived them of the novelty that was meant to shock. The images themselves were not anesthetizing, but the volume of images “upped the ante,” creating a vicious cycle that swelled the number and horror of images while simultaneously diluting their effect. Sontag’s criticisms of Arbus are couched in much the same terms as her concerns about war photojournalism. In fact, so close are they that in Sontag’s miscellany of quotations at the end of On Photography, Arbus becomes a war photographer, as she indeed sometimes saw herself. Though Sontag does not explicitly link Arbus’s images to the photojournalism of the Vietnam War, she quotes some of Arbus’s lesser-known statements on photography: “I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies” and “God knows, when the troops start advancing on you, you do approach that stricken feeling where you perfectly well can get killed” (OPS, 39). It is the context of the Vietnam War and of the photographs of atrocity that leads Sontag to condemn Arbus’s—and her peers—an-aesthetics.27
Conventional wisdom about the photojournalism of the Vietnam era takes for granted the force of these photographs in provoking the outrage of the antiwar movement. However, many, if not most, accounts of post–World War II photography now consider the Vietnam War to mark a decline in the power of documentary and photojournalism to incite social protest.28 The glory days of documentary dissent, the Depression-era photographs of the Farm Security Administration, whose most famous practitioners were Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, set the aesthetic terms and political standards for documentary photography in the United States, neither of which seemed intact by the late 1960s for a wide variety of reasons. Moreover, critics of photography in the early 1970s were acutely conscious of the unpredictable effect of images of trauma. The extremity of the photographs did not have the effect, or at least not as directly as many had assumed, of building the movement to end American involvement in Vietnam. This concern, coupled with the transformation of photography in the 1960s from a commercial, journalistic, amateur, scientific, and art project into a museum collectible, spurred a renewed attention to the photographic image, an attempt to theorize it, as well as to display and catalog it. Along with photographers and museum curators like John Szarkowski of MOMA, critics who had no particular training in the medium, like Sontag, Roland Barthes, and Stuart Hall, as well as art critic John Berger, wrote important essays about the photographic image. Berger’s and Sontag’s shared interest in war photography and their mutual influence in thinking about it will be elaborated later.
Given that Arbus is frequently called “tough,” “unsentimental,” and “cool,” the stylistics of her work seem to correspond to the sensibility that Sontag extols in “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” and the emotional content of her work appears to comport with Sontag’s own distrust of immoderate feeling. It should therefore strike us as surprising that Sontag exhibited such antipathy to Arbus’s portraits. Certainly, Sontag was not alone in her distaste. The response to Arbus’s work was volatile, generating tremendous esteem and equally severe censure (curators at MOMA had to clean the spit off her photographs at the end of each day, as some viewers of the exhibit rendered their judgment in a visceral way). But there is a more complex argument at work than disgust for a gallery of freaks. Of course, we cannot know whether the spitters in the MOMA crowds were reacting to what Arbus photographed or how she photographed it. For Sontag, however, it is not merely the subjects of Arbus’s interest but the way Arbus photographed them that induced her moral queasiness.
Sontag has many objections to Arbus’s work but chief among them is the following: “She seems to have enrolled in one of photography’s most vigorous enterprises—concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate—but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve” (OPS, 33). Oddly, however, in much of On Photography, Sontag devotes herself to demonstrating how unreliable the document of suffering and its compassionate motive are for engaging conscience. First, photography’s aestheticizing of reality renders human misery beautiful. Second, repeated exposure exhausts shock, which defuses the jolt to conscience that mobilizes action. And third, and perhaps most important, the photograph of suffering elicits no predictable ethical response. Its ethics are, she says, “fragile” (OPS, 20). Sontag argues that a photograph can only intensify or mobilize an ethical sentiment that preexists it. Her example is the Vietnam War. In the Civil War, the photographs of Andersonville that circulated inflamed feelings of hostility toward the South, but not antipathy toward the war. Unlike the Korean War, where no photographs of war atrocity appeared in the mass media, Vietnam produced a documentary protest because an ethical sentiment against the war already existed. The photograph needs the “appropriate context of feeling and attitude” (OPS, 17) in order to have a political meaning; it cannot create that context. While Sontag argues that the Vietnam protests provided the “appropriate context of feeling and attitude” for war photography, her essays also demonstrate how inappropriate a “context of feeling and attitude” the war photographs had landed in. On the one side, there was the protest movement; on the other, the anesthetics of contemporary visual culture.
To drive her point home, Sontag tells a personal story in the opening essay about her first exposure to a “novelty of misery” before familiarity has set in and weakened the shock of the photograph:
For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July, 1945. Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Ever since then, it has seemed plausible to me to think of my life as being divided into two parts: before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after. My life was changed by them, though not until several years later did I understand what they were about. What good was served by seeing them? They were only photographs—of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve. When I looked at those photographs, something was broken. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying. (OPS, 19–20)
As important as the suffering itself, the “limit”—“not only that of horror”—that Sontag experiences remains unnamed. What seems to divide her life in half, leaving her grieved, wounded, and partly dead, is her own lack of agency, her helplessness. She sounds that note twice in describing the photographs: “could do nothing to affect” and “could do nothing to relieve.” (With somewhat more equanimity, she will confront this as the “unappeasable past” in Regarding the Pain of Others.)
This passage clearly affected John Berger’s thinking about photographic images because he quotes it in his well-known essay “The Uses of Photography,” his homage to On Photography, as he wound up to his conclusion about the alternatives to current exploitative uses of the camera. But their mutual influence, or maybe confluence, extends backward to 1972, when both began to write about photographs. At the peak of his own cultural influence following the tremendous success of Ways of Seeing, the title of both his BBC television series on painting and the book he wrote to accompany the series, Berger turned his attention to war photographs and the feelings of helplessness photographs of extreme suffering inspire. Published just before Sontag began publishing her essays on photography in the New York Review of Books, Berger’s “The Photographs of Agony” is a short piece on the appearance of horrifying photographs from the Vietnam War in mass-circulation newspapers, and it attends to exactly the problem of helplessness that Sontag describes. Like Sontag, Berger comments on the fact that these photos were recent arrivals in mass media but instead wonders why organizations that supported the war would publish them. In other words, the effect of these photos must be something other than we expect. He argues that these photographs produce a dislocating and disabling sense of moral inadequacy that leaves the viewer with no response of sufficient moral efficacy. What the viewer experiences, then, from the shock produced by the photographs (we are “seized” and “engulfed” by suffering) is yet another shock, the shock of her own moral failure, which overrides—even suppresses—the suffering and violence depicted in the photograph. This produces, he says, either despair or a compensatory penance, like donation to a charity, but it does not produce political will. Instead of confronting the real lesson of the photos, he argues, which is our own political helplessness to stop wars fought in our name by our own governments, we are left in a state of moral and political paralysis. We suddenly see ourselves without agency, and this revelation of helplessness allows the photos to be published in the first place.29
For Berger, these photos operate like a traumatic event—that is, they take place out of time. When the observer returns to ordinary time, the suffering in the photograph is discontinuous and inassimilable to normal life. The suffering in the photograph in effect vanishes, displaced by the viewer’s experience of his moral irrelevancy, which pushes the subject matter of the photo back into the discontinuity in time that it produced. What both Sontag and Berger require when witnessing suffering in the photograph is the possibility of agency on the part of the viewer. This agency is part of a fundamental assumption of a politics of suffering, one in which we know what pain means and we know what to do about it. In Berger’s terms (not yet Sontag’s), witnessing can become a form of moral trauma when agency is vacated, incomplete, or incommensurate with the viewer’s moral dilemma. Without the viewer’s agency, suffering drops out of view and perhaps into exile, to borrow from Illness as Metaphor, where Sontag acknowledges that illness changes one’s citizenship, deporting the sick to their own kingdom and granting their return only when well. It is not then, the mere presence of the witness, but instead, the agency of the viewer must seem intact to offer the suffering a passport to visibility. This, then, is the power of the viewer: to make suffering visible by being there to witness it in the form of an invitation to action.
This feebler agency, the flip side of paralysis and moral irrelevance, is more familiar to us as sympathy. Whether a viewer derives pleasure from or merely enjoys her own feelings of sympathy or outrage, even of pain, when viewing the suffering of others has preoccupied a great deal of criticism for more than twenty-five years as the effects of the arts of sympathy have been examined and reexamined across genres and historical periods. These feelings are repulsive to Sontag when she returns to them toward the end of her life in Regarding the Pain of Others. Sontag revisited On Photography to amend her arguments about images of suffering explicitly in terms of agency. If feelings are anesthetized, and she now doubts that they are, it is “passivity” rather than the surfeit of images that “dulls feeling.” She might very well have learned this from Berger. In resuscitating the capacity to respond emotionally to these images, Sontag nevertheless exhorts the reader to “set aside” sympathy because it “proclaims our innocence and impotence” while masking our complicity in horror.30
Not surprisingly then, as indeterminate as the ethical effects of photographs of suffering are, Sontag grounds the ethics of documentary squarely in its solicitation to action. She excoriates Arbus for deploying the visual rhetoric of documentary to display suffering without any of the form’s implicit call to action. Arbus’s display of pure suffering without an attempt to mobilize conscience becomes an anesthetic, a pain that acts as a painkiller. The whole point of Arbus’s photographs, she argues, is to teach you “not to flinch,” to raise the threshold for feeling anything, much less pain. This erosion of revulsion, she believes, has dangerous consequences. That is, it makes it increasingly difficult to respond to the misery of the world. In this way, Sontag saw Arbus as producing a “self-willed test of hardness” (OPS, 40)—a toughness that was for Sontag a project of becoming insensate. Obviously, characterized this way, Arbus produces precisely the opposite of what art should cultivate in a world Sontag describes as so overproduced that it has overwhelmed our senses; instead of stimulating and enlarging our capacity to feel, Arbus had weakened it further still. Moreover, if every additional image of suffering further erodes the capacity to feel, Arbus’s work accelerates the Vietnam era’s depletion of moral sentiment.
It would be easy to mistake Sontag’s criticism of Arbus as a preference for emotional appeal, which is one component of the gaze of documentary. However, Sontag is no fan of direct emotional address, and throughout her career she ignored the art associated with or produced from within the postwar social movements entirely. The art that she most admires is that which is the most emotionally well regulated. In “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” Sontag claims that “today’s art, with its insistence on coolness, its refusal of what it considers to be sentimentality, its spirit of exactness, its sense of ‘research’ and ‘problems,’ is closer to the spirit of science than of art in the old-fashioned sense” (AI, 297). Only a few pages later, she argues that “the interesting art of our time has such a feeling of anguish and crisis about it, however playful and abstract and ostensibly morally neutral it seems” (AI, 302). Sontag insists above all that art has a responsibility to shape consciousness by providing new sensations, not feelings, and that its importance to us is to provide the education necessary to cope with the rapidly changing sensorium of modernity. In “The Spiritual Style of Robert Bresson,” she comes closest to articulating this ideal: “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 counter-balanced by elements in the work that promote distance, disinterestedness, and impartiality. Emotional involvement is always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed” (AI, 177). Emotional regulation stands in the narrow middle ground between the threat of affectlessness and the overpowering emotional claims of anguish.
It is important, then, to return to Sontag’s notion of erotics, the other stress point in her calibration of art and emotion, in order to perceive the difference between the “distant,” “mediated,” “disinterested,” or “postponed” emotional involvement and what she defines as Arbus’s anestheticism. “Erotics” is one of Sontag’s master terms—also one of her most confusing and counterintuitive—and it is closely linked to capitalism, which is the plane on which feeling, images, and suffering meet through the metaphor of economy. For Sontag, the erotics of art does not seek to cool affect, as it might first seem in her description of Bresson’s films; rather, it seeks to manage powerful feeling, even while augmenting its force. Put another way, eroticism enhances the capacity to feel intensely while maintaining agency over one’s desire. Rather than abandon, it promotes self-control. The ability to experience as much feeling as possible without being overcome or controlled by desire is as necessary for the consumption of images as it is for the experience of sexual desire, whose terms are often interchangeable in On Photography. For Sontag, the ideal economy—for images, sexual desire, or commodities—is highly regulated, dictated less by demand than by fiat because demand always threatens to be excessive. She famously concludes On Photography: “If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well” (OPS, 180), a fantasy that draws on the burgeoning environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s to impose limits on consumption and waste. Overproduction and overconsumption make demand, or desire, unreadable, produced as much from the outside as from within. Sontag worries that we can no longer enjoy our own desire because we have lost control over it. Our agency has been compromised.
Buried beneath the explicit anxiety about the erosion of sensation (which is propelled by the overproduction of capitalist economies) and the erosion of feeling (which is speeded up by the overproduction of images of suffering) lies the equally distressing sense that feeling on its own tends to run out of control, to dominate rather than to enrich, to overwhelm agency rather than fuel it. Recall from “The Pornographic Imagination” that sexual feelings are potentially annihilating. Toward the end of the final essay of On Photography, Sontag equates images and sexual feeling: “The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied: first, because the possibilities of photography are infinite; and, second, because the project is finally self-devouring. The attempts by photographers to bolster up a depleted sense of reality contribute to its depletion” (OPS, 179). Both economies—the economy of eros and the economy of images and commodities—require a form of discipline and self-control that art can teach, but somehow photographs cannot. To have one’s agency vacated by a photograph means to have no capacity to resist its seduction. This suggests that the menace of Arbus’s photographs is at the same time the opposite of what Sontag argues, that her photographs, rather than deadening feeling, propel the viewer into feelings that are at once irresistible and impossible to act on.
Sontag was not immune to the seduction of strong feeling even while her more typically analytic and dispassionate voice warned of its dangers. If the wariness of “The Pornographic Imagination” centered on the potentially annihilating feelings of sexual desire, and if the anxiety of On Photography arose in the context of overwhelming feelings of helplessness, the essay that concludes her work of the 1960s, in contrast, enters fully into the culture of feeling of the New Left. “Trip to Hanoi” (1968), one of her most controversial essays, represents a striking anomaly in the body of her work for two reasons: first, the essay takes a diary form, making it one of the rare pieces of autobiography of her career; second, her longing for personal emotional expressivity is neither repeated nor echoed anywhere else in her writing. The first half of the essay, taken from her journals, recounts her initial discomfort and alienation from North Vietnam, its people, and its revolutionary project. She locates this discomfort in the aesthetic and psychological flatness of her experience: the flatness and simplicity of their language and the moral universe it describes; the flatness of her personal interactions with her emotionless and sexless Vietnamese ambassadors. She says that “in Vietnam, everything seems formal, measured, controlled, planned. I long for someone to be indiscreet here. To talk about his personal life, his emotions. To be carried away by ‘feeling’” (SRW, 227). In the face of what she perceives to be affectlessness, she swings toward the opposite pole. The seemingly unnecessary quotation marks around “feeling” are the only indication of her internal debate over emotional expressivity, whether her own or others.
The second half of the essay reads like a conversion narrative, not only in its change of heart but also in the literal conversion of all the properties that initially disturbed her. Linguistic and moral simplicity become a kind of honor; personal and sexual reserve become a commendable “emotional tact” and “sexual discipline.” Converting these properties into things she can (and generally does) admire, Sontag no longer resists but enters into the “two-dimensional . . . ethical fairy-tale” she felt she had been offered. Checking herself against the pastoral and primitivist clichés of Western revolutionary intellectuals, she nonetheless concludes: “I found, through direct experience, North Vietnam to be a place which, in many respects, deserves to be idealized” (SRW, 258). She claims to have been changed, fundamentally, because she was experiencing “new feelings” and therefore new consciousness, noting in an extended footnote that “what brings about revolutionary change is the shared experience of revolutionary feelings—not rhetoric, not the discovery of social injustice, not even intelligent analysis, and not any action considered in itself” (SRW, 263–64n). This is a rather stunning statement for Sontag’s work even in the sixties, much less for the years that followed. As she wrote to Adrienne Rich during their heated exchange over Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” in the New York Review of Books in 1975: “I do dissociate myself from that wing of feminism that promotes the rancid and dangerous antithesis between mind (‘intellectual exercise’) and emotion (‘felt reality’). For precisely this kind of banal disparagement of the normative virtues of the intellect (its acknowledgement of the inevitable plurality of moral claims; the rights it accords, alongside passion, to tentativeness and detachment) is also one of the roots of fascism.”31 Having been seduced by the suffering but stoic North Vietnamese into embracing the American enthusiasm for shared feeling, she will spend the 1970s trying to historicize—and politicize—the seductions of sympathy, what might be called the Western romance with powerlessness.
Let’s return to Sontag’s description of her illness: “I feel like the Vietnam War.”32 Crucially at this moment as the war ends in futility, as she revises On Photography for publication in book form, and as she begins writing Illness as Metaphor, Sontag imagines herself as the Vietnam War, not Vietnam or by extension the Vietnamese people. If she were Vietnam, she could extend to herself the sympathy meant for the invaded, colonized, and brutalized victims of the war with whom she had long expressed solidarity. Instead, reversing all of her actual positions during the war, she is the patriot cheering US military aggression; her body initiates a war with itself as invader and colonizer, emphasizing her identification with the United States, while suppressing her identification with Vietnam as the invaded and colonized body; and “they,” her doctors, figure the US military as her deadly but potentially life-sustaining allies. Sontag figures herself primarily not as the victim but as the aggressor and as the helpless bystander who can only root for destruction. It’s difficult not to hear that famous Vietnam-era military justification turned paradigmatic irony: We had to destroy the village in order to save the village. But it is important to note, even in Sontag’s physical distress, she does not become the object of sympathy, even her own. And while she will figure her own lack of agency (“I have to cheer”), she will not turn herself into an image of suffering whose function, as she understands it in On Photography, is to appeal to the agency of others.
While I hesitate to put too much pressure on the journal notes of someone recovering from surgery and undergoing chemotherapy, Sontag’s formulation suggests how much the Vietnam War had become emblematic of helplessness itself. That she could so easily imagine herself on the sidelines cheering the war effort might underscore what she came to perceive as the fundamental misguidedness of the antiwar effort, which she argued exhibited an investment in feeling that rendered it powerless to alter US involvement in Vietnam and, worse (to her mind), valued the moral drama of helplessness more than the political efficacy of agency. (That “Trip to Hanoi” celebrated this culture of feeling goes unremarked.) In June 1975 the New York Review of Books published a special supplement in which they asked some of their contributors to reflect on the meaning of the war and its ending. Sontag contributed a brief, bitter piece on the futility of the antiwar movement that she organizes around the movement’s romance with powerlessness. Her point—“The Vietnamese won politically; the antiwar movement lost”—is at the heart of her dismay and disillusion. She explains: “The reasons why ‘we’ lost are complicated. While for some Americans the Vietnam War was an extraordinary, decade-long political education in the nature of imperialism, state power, etc., for many more it was an éducation sentimentale which quite underestimated the nature and extent of state power. The Movement was never sufficiently political; its understanding was primarily moral; and it took considerable moral vanity to expect that one could defeat the considerations of Realpolitik mainly by appealing to considerations of ‘right’ and ‘justice.’”33 As she turns her back on the antiwar movement with the ambivalent “we,” Sontag rebukes the “many” in the movement for finding in it an opportunity to cultivate their feelings, not their understanding of global politics. She finds part of this “sentimental education” to have been both self-deluded and narcissistic, a moral vanity that depended on feeling good about one’s capacities for feeling bad. Complaining that the movement was always antipolitical and too invested in its own innocence, she claims that “living with their victory (however devoutly that was to be wished) will not be as edifying or as simple morally as protesting their martyrdom—a matter which is already clear as they busy themselves installing a social order in which few of us who supported the DRV and the PRG would care to live, and under which none of us, as ‘us,’ would survive.” If the sixties had made life “interesting again,” as she noted, the task for the 1970s would be to achieve a political moral adulthood, one “with a growing and history-minded distrust of all slogans of historical optimism” and a “lessening affection for our own innocence.”
Sontag found the ineffectualness of the antiwar movement to lie in its orientation toward feeling: its vanity in its innocence and virtue, its enjoyment of its capacity for sympathetic identification. She seems to hold in her mind two things: first, that powerlessness, by guaranteeing virtue, was its own reward; second, that sympathetic identification carried with it the grandiosity of agency, which was measured not against effectiveness but against the agencylessness of the suffering Vietnamese. On the one hand, it is easy to see Sontag berating herself for embracing just this dynamic of feeling in “Trip to Hanoi.” On the other, her gross oversimplification of the antiwar movement grows out of the ambivalence toward feelings that increasingly marked her work, her sense of their threat as well as their seduction.
Illness as Metaphor takes up just this romance with powerlessness by tracing it back into the nineteenth century, providing a longer cultural history for the claims of Sontag’s critique of the antiwar movement. One link between Illness and the short piece in the New York Review of Books special supplement is the word “interesting,” a favorite term of approbation for Sontag in the 1960s and perhaps the most damning word in her lexicon in the 1970s. In an interview with Roger Copeland in Commonweal in 1981, Sontag was asked about the term “interesting” and its application to her by Elizabeth Hardwick. Sontag answers: “I was astonished by Elizabeth’s remark. She was 100 percent wrong. In fact, for a couple of years now, I’ve been accumulating notes toward a critique of this notion of ‘the interesting.’ It started with the sixth essay in On Photography where I argued that one of the ways in which photographs are untrue is that they make everything interesting. And then, of course, in Illness as Metaphor, I talk about this 19th-century notion that tuberculosis makes one more interesting.” Responding to Copeland’s assertion that at one time she liked the term, she says that in the 1960s John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, and Marcel Duchamp used the word “interesting” all the time and “it sounded very glamorous and aristocratic.”34
Therefore, when Sontag says in 1975 that the 1960s made politics “interesting again,” she indicates that the sixties both animated politics and reanimated the Romantic drama of individuality, emotional intensity, and powerlessness that she had come to find so disturbing. On the one hand, tuberculosis “is celebrated as the disease of born victims, of sensitive passive people who are not quite life-loving enough to survive” (IAM, 25), while on the other, it was a “way of affirming the value of being more conscious, more complex psychologically” (IAM, 26). By affirming the value of psychological complexity, “Sickness was a way of making people more ‘interesting’” and “perhaps the main gift to sensibility made by the Romantics is . . . the nihilistic and sentimental idea of ‘the interesting’” (IAM, 30–31). Sontag is at pains to establish the logic equating “interesting” and “powerless”: interesting derives from sadness or sickness, which implies refinement and sensitivity, and refinement and sensitivity are the special attributes of the powerless. “For more than a century and a half, tuberculosis provided a metaphoric equivalent for delicacy, sensitivity, sadness, powerlessness; while whatever seemed ruthless, implacable, predatory could be analogized to cancer” (IAM, 61). The modern version of Romantic individualism is not the cancer victim, who is too anesthetized emotionally to enjoy his or her powerlessness, but the mentally ill, who like the tubercular “[retires] from the world without having to take responsibility for that decision” (IAM, 34). The romance with powerlessness—one’s own and others—is then necessarily a political liability, but it turns out to be an aesthetic one as well.
Illness as Metaphor has been seen primarily as a departure for Sontag, unique in its goals for direct social impact, which she affirmed many times in interviews around its publication. However, Sontag also described Illness as Metaphor to Fritz Raddatz of Die Zeit in this way:
But what I was attacking at that time in my essay and what I would continue to attack is interpretation in a much narrower sense—namely interpreting away the facts of a case by means of words. Released by my cancer illness, I have concerned myself in a newer, longer work with how words and concepts cover the reality of sickness (it used to be TB, now it’s cancer). Actually, it’s been clear to me for only three weeks that my essay about cancer is a different version of “Against Interpretation.” It is in this way that one has to understand my attack and it is in this way also that my analysis of Leni Riefenstahl is to be seen. What does “beautiful” mean anyway?35 (emphasis mine)
There are two important steps here: one is Sontag’s attack on “interpreting away the facts of a case” with words that “cover the reality of sickness,” and the other is aligning Illness as Metaphor with her aesthetic manifesto “Against Interpretation.” By the logic of On Photography and her argument about the representation of suffering, the “reality of sickness” cannot appear in Illness as Metaphor. Her illness, anyone’s illness, is not a form of suffering that solicits action from the viewer or the reader. It is private, even though Sontag hoped to reach those ill with cancer. By the logic of “Against Interpretation,” being “against metaphor” is to dismantle the meaning-making enterprise when it affects the sick. In Illness, she wants disease to remain a fact of physical, not metaphysical, distress. In denying meaning to disease, Sontag intends to deflect the burden of responsibility for illness that disease metaphors, particularly of cancer, inflict on the suffering. In other words, Sontag wants to deflect responsibility for being ill and in so doing restore to the sick agency over their diseases. This restoration comes out of an aesthetic strategy or pedagogy of the senses.
As she says in “Against Interpretation,” “the function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means” (AI, 14). This approach treats art like a fact and makes criticism a type of scientific investigation, a Linnaean endeavor in the description of species, which the volume Against Interpretation accomplishes so brilliantly in its taxonomies of camp, science fiction films, Happenings, etc. But if we are to take her comments seriously, we have to ask what it means to think of Illness as Metaphor as an aesthetic manifesto. At the risk of being too literal, can we imagine telling the readers whom she’s most concerned with reaching—those ill with cancer—to see, hear, and feel more? If we were to substitute “illness” for “art” in “Against Interpretation” or “art” for “illness” in Illness as Metaphor, we would get statements that sound perfectly compatible with both essays. “Real art has the capacity to make us nervous” becomes “real illness has the capacity to make us nervous.” “Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable” becomes “metaphor makes illness manageable, comfortable.” However apt these might be in context, the statements would not displace any of our conventional understanding of disease or language. Illness does make us nervous, particularly if we agree with Sontag (and so many others) that illness and death are nearly invisible in modern life, and euphemism does manage, however unsuccessfully, the distress of uncomfortable reality. But how far do we go with this analogy? Where Sontag states her aesthetic values most clearly (“transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are” [AI, 13]), would she—or we—be able to value transparence with respect to illness? “In place of a hermeneutics” do we really need “an erotics of illness” (AI, 14)?
That Sontag might indeed wish for something like an awakening of the senses with regard to illness—even grave, depleting illness—does not seem implausible when we think of other exhortations to the senses, to the aesthetic, in times of suffering and distress. We might have to understand that far from ever repudiating “Against Interpretation,” Sontag rewrote the essay several times over the course of her career, but in areas we normally do not understand to require an aesthetic pedagogy. One of her most controversial pieces came after the attacks on the World Trade Center. Published together with several other short responses by noted writers in the Talk of the Town section of the New Yorker thirteen days after September 11, Sontag blistered the media and national political figures for their “sanctimonious reality-concealing rhetoric . . . unworthy of a mature democracy,” which she argued infantilized the US citizenry. Infuriating the political Right, Sontag also questioned whether the attackers could properly be understood to have lacked “courage,” in her terms a “morally neutral” term. Whatever they were, she said, they were not “cowards.” But most of all, she objected to the failure to think about the event, what its causes might be or what it represented in the arena of world politics. “Let’s by all means grieve together,” she said, “but let’s not be stupid together.”
If we imagine her implying the root meaning of “stupid”—let us not have our faculties deadened or dulled; let us not be stunned with surprise and grief—we can see Sontag imploring the reader to remain attuned, even sensitive, to reality in this most extreme state of emotional distress. This argument against stupidity is another version of “Against Interpretation”: “All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of the senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed” (AI, 13–14). Her remarks on the events of September 11 renew this petition to critical, aesthetic intelligence. In fact, this is probably the most consistent position Sontag ever held. In art and in politics as in illness, the aesthetic—meaning the cultivation of our capacity to sense the world—needed to be reanimated, and to do this cultivation always required the suppression or negation of emotional response.
More than her angry reprimand to the media and to politicians, Sontag was faulted for the absence in that essay of two other things. She made no address to the victims or their families. She expressed no solidarity with the residents of New York, her home for forty years. Should even the victims of this attack, which obviously included readers of the New Yorker, like those struck with cancer, be asked to remain alive to sensation, to complexity, to reality, when reality itself was so overwhelming, so unimaginable, so “monstrous”? Obviously, Sontag said yes, and did not demur on this point when challenged aggressively and angrily after the fact. As many readers have noted, Illness as Metaphor also says nothing about Sontag’s own experience of cancer, and indeed we could go so far as to say it says nothing very much about the physicality or “reality” of the disease. As her son notes along with countless others, the essay was almost “anti-autobiographical.” One’s own pain is simply never a tasteful or ethical subject of contemplation, taste being a form of ethics for Sontag.
In her last collection of essays, Where the Stress Falls, she seems to admire most in Elizabeth Hardwick her refusal in Sleepless Nights to dwell on wounds to the self: “Not a breath of complaint (and there is much to complain of).”36 Indeed, disciplined self-transcendence in form is a value extolled in everything from writing to dance (Lucinda Childs, Lincoln Kirstein, and Mikhail Baryshnikov) to painting (Howard Hodgkin). Moreover, speculating on why this might be violates the terms of reading that she lays out in “Singleness,” one of the essays in which she describes her relationship to her own writing. She warns strenuously against making assumptions about her person from either what she has chosen to write or what she hasn’t: “I write what I can: that is, what’s given to me and what seems worth writing, by me. I care passionately about many things that don’t get into my fiction and essays. . . . My books aren’t me—all of me. And in some ways, I am less than them.”37 While Sontag is more willing to insert herself into some of these essays than one might expect, the entire collection is laced with caveats about autobiography, its capacity to conceal as well as reveal, and her dismay at the indefatigable self-exposure of so much contemporary writing. Autobiography can be a “wisdom project” but only when, like Adam Zagajewski’s Another Beauty, it “purges [one] of vanity,” or, like Roland Barthes’s late work, it is “artfully anti-confessional.”38
But Sontag’s arguments against self-expression and emotional disburdenment are not merely aesthetic, or not aesthetic in a simple notion of that word. While many critics of late twentieth-century culture have bemoaned the expressive turn in the arts, they have done so for several reasons, none of which I think is primary to Sontag. They have argued that this self-expression is simply inartistic: poorly written, boring, excessive, amateurish, and self-indulgent, therapy masquerading as art. Sontag’s problem is more complex and more, well, interesting. While she does question the value of some expressivity, her primary complaint is not aesthetic as a question of beauty (“what does ‘beautiful’ mean anyway?”) but aesthetic as a question of knowledge—that is, knowledge through the senses. Feelings are an impediment to feeling—that is, sensation—and thus to knowing what something is and how it is what it is. And in the terms of Illness as Metaphor, feelings and expressivity are ways of enjoying one’s own powerlessness while also enjoying the moral superiority and the lack of accountability that that powerlessness confers. Her autobiographical absence in Illness is a withholding with a mission. Denying the reader access to her experience, her feelings of and about disease, is part of the larger strategy to scale back the importance of feelings altogether. They are not enough, as her son says quite plaintively in his memoir of her death. Worse, they are the very fallacy she’s writing against, that tuberculosis and cancer are diseases of feeling—extreme feeling in the case of tuberculosis and affectlessness in cancer. Feelings are, instead, the disease of modern life, not just the terms in which modern people misunderstand and seek to disown their corporeality.