Writer
Early Novels and Essays
Although Susan Sontag was formally trained as a philosopher and literary critic, neither term ever suited her. She preferred the designation of writer—to her an honorific title that reflected her aspirations to create works of literature that included novels, stories, and plays. She ranked her essays as a lower category of composition, as a kind of public service but not as part of an enduring legacy that she hoped would distinguish her in the art of fiction. Most critics have nevertheless considered her essays to be her most significant contribution to the world of modern letters.
To understand Sontag’s own sense of her literary mission, it is important to begin with her decision to publish her first book-length prose as a novel. For her, the decision to write fiction was a bold undertaking. Nothing in her previous education had prepared her to be a creative artist. At the University of Chicago, she had spent a semester critiquing Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory, and at Harvard she had taken master’s degree courses in literature, but this work prepared her to be a critic, an analyst, not a writer of narrative prose. Her graduate work at Oxford and then at the Sorbonne extended her understanding of philosophy. At Columbia University in the early 1960s, she taught philosophy and the history of religion.
What, then, prompted her to write fiction—other than her very early and precocious reading of authors such as Thomas Mann and Jack London? Mann had left Germany before World War II and had become an influential public voice in America and London, the author of Martin Eden, a novel about the heroism of the writing life, inspired her as yet inchoate dreams of becoming an author. Her sojourn in France in 1957–58 seems to have stimulated an overweening ambition to project her deep learning into novels that had little precedent in American literature but which she saw as a vital aspect of European fiction. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which combined the story of a young hero, Hans Castorp, with a profound probing of the nature of civilization itself, had powerfully affected the teenage Sontag. Reading Mann’s novel took her out of what she considered her provincial upbringing in Arizona and California and put her in touch with the main currents of European culture. Similarly, the world-traveling Jack London, the very model of a writer who lived by his own wits, demonstrated how the individual could triumph over all kinds of unpromising circumstances—even though his eponymous hero ultimately commits suicide. Art was worth living and dying for, the young Sontag concluded. But with no mentor in college encouraging her to write fiction, she applied herself to an academic understanding of literature and philosophy. And as she later confessed, she was in a hurry to grow up, and that meant, to begin with, marrying and establishing her own family and household.
At Oxford, toward the end of 1957, Sontag began to realize that a conventional career in higher education would not fulfill her highest ambitions—that, in fact, saddling herself to employment in an academic institution might very well extinguish any talent she had as a creative artist. She would continue to teach courses in the early 1960s in order to earn a living, but her ultimate goal was to succeed as an independent public intellectual and, even more important, as a writer.
In Paris at the beginning of 1958, she began to meet and to observe a wide range of Europeans and Americans living as artists. She went to hear Simone de Beauvoir lecture. And Sontag began reading contemporary French novelists like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Natalie Saurrate, who challenged conventional narratives depending on character development, plot, and theme. The realistic novel, as then written in Europe and America, seemed moribund to them—and to Sontag, who believed that fiction should not mimic or simply represent reality but should, rather, create its own worlds and ideas. Indeed, reality as a concept seemed to her artificial, an agreed-upon convention that merely replicated the status quo. For Sontag, fiction had to be adventurous and innovative.
So Sontag began to imagine a novel with the working title “Dreams of Hippolyte,” eventually published as The Benefactor. But instead of creating a young first-person narrator for readers to identify with—as so many authors of the bildungsroman do, she took on the voice of a sixty-one-year-old aesthete attempting to live in his dreams, or at least to construct a life that followed the logic of his dreams. The result is displacement. Although Paris seems to be the capital city he resides in, the city is never named—perhaps because what the novel rejects is a spurious specificity. What does it matter, in the end, where exactly Hippolyte lives, since he does not feel bound by place and time but only by his imagination? His quest to jettison everything that is jejune in favor of the originality of his own conceptions is apparently a thrilling possibility that Sontag expected would beguile her readers—as it did for some of her contemporaries. But it is virtually impossible to empathize with what Hippolyte actually does, when, for example, he sells his lover, Frau Anders, into slavery. Or is this just a dream too, since, as in a dream, she returns after she has been seemingly dispatched for good? Sontag told an interviewer that she purposely kept open many different interpretations of what is real in the novel—that is, of what actually happens and what Hippolyte dreams as happening. That it is impossible to draw a sharp distinction between dreams and reality is both what makes the novel tantalizing and frustrating.
By decoupling himself from conventional norms, Hippolyte does indeed become independent of society, but at tremendous cost to himself. Even as Sontag wanted to create antirealistic fiction, she seems to have understood that Hippolyte was the reductio ad absurdum of her own desire to repudiate traditional civilization along with the norms of story telling. In this respect, the novel seems to cancel itself out, so to speak, undermining the very quest that has motivated Hippolyte to tell his story. French critic Michel Mohrt characterized Sontag’s narrator as suffering from a “sickness of self-love,” writing a narrative akin to Borges’s narratives of a fable-like purity.1
Although the influence of the French new novel has often been discussed in accounts of The Benefactor, Sontag pointed to the impact of Epitaph of a Small Winner by Portuguese novelist Machado de Assis on her choice of a male narrator’s retrospective on his life as a dream, which, in her words, permitted a “display of mental agility and inventiveness which is designed to amuse the reader and which purportedly reflects the liveliness of that narrator’s mind,” but which “mostly measures how emotionally isolated and forlorn the narrator is.” She also explained why a male narrator was necessary: “a woman with the same degree of mental acuity and emotional separateness would be regarded as simply a monster.”2 That observation is especially telling in the light of a remark from one of Sontag’s lovers in the documentary Regarding Susan Sontag that Sontag lacked the ability to empathize with the feelings of others close to her. To select a female narrator, then, would jeopardize the novel’s independence if readers associate the narrative voice directly with Sontag.
Reviews of Sontag’s novel noted its anti-psychological bias—that, in Granville Hicks’s words, “personality is mysterious.”3 Sontag’s evocation of the self in a labyrinthine world called up comparisons to Kafka.4 While few first responses to the novel seemed enthusiastic, Robert M. Adams in the New York Review of Books seemed quite taken with Sontag’s portrayal of a “mind lost in its own intricate dialectic” and compared her work to Candide, although he concluded that Sontag lacked Voltaire’s “sharp sword of comedy.”5
Some critics viewed Hippolyte as a Poe-like narrator, mad all along, as Stephen Koch argued.6 Alfred Kazin detected a tactic employed in women’s fiction: an “inordinate defensiveness against a society conceived as the special enemy of the sensitive.” Hippolyte’s “detached consciousness” becomes his antidote to society’s norms—but an antidote that becomes lethal since it led to self-destruction.7 That insight seems, again, to refer back to Poe, whose narrators evince a sense of superiority even as the stories they tell result in their doom. Bruce Bassoff attributed this self-negation to a repudiation of the individual’s role in history—an especially intriguing observation given Sontag’s later turn toward the historical novel.8 Barbara Ching and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor call the novel a “dead end,” a youthful disguise of what Sontag “finally allows to emerge from her thought and writing: faith in art, and a commitment to changing the world with art”9—a position that neither Sontag nor her narrator Hippolyte broach as even a possibility.
The more immediate impact of The Benefactor on Sontag herself seems to have been, as critic Bernard F. Rodgers Jr., notes, the confirmation of her belief that an “‘unceasing self-consciousness’ that Hippolyte embodies, the ‘hypertrophy of intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability’ was the ‘classical dilemma’ of advanced bourgeois civilization.” His verdict on this ambitious novel seems just. If it is too long, too “self-consciously literary,” and “too repetitive,” it is not, as Ted Solotaroff claimed, simply “all literature” and “lifeless.” The novel’s distinctive narrative voice remains intriguing and propels the reader, as it did Sontag herself, into producing some of her most memorable and perceptive essays.10
Against Interpretation, which appeared in early 1966, blasted Sontag out of The Benefactor’s solipsism and into a fully engaged and panoramic account of the current cultural scene. The book contains twenty-six essays, culled from the several dozen she published between 1961 and 1965. Section I presents her critical credo in “Against Interpretation” and “On Style”; section II concerns her studies of artists, critics, philosophers, and anthropologists; section III gives her take on modern drama; section IV offers her dissection of film (science fiction, the avant-garde, and the European New Wave); and section V presents her evocation of the new sensibility as exemplified in camp and Happenings. This astonishing array of subjects, presented with great authority and panache, constituted, in effect, a revamped Partisan Review, the influential journal Sontag had grown up admiring. Reading Against Interpretation was like enrolling in a curriculum that includes philosophy, aesthetics, literary and film criticism, biographical profiles, arts journalism, and science. It became possible, in other words, to major in Susan Sontag. All at once, she was, in herself, a school of liberal arts—even taking issue with C. P. Snow’s famous argument that sciences and the arts had split off from one another. Not so, said Sontag, in exhilarating prose. On the contrary, the arts were as much the province of discovery as was science, and scientists and artists were making common cause in what she deemed the “new sensibility.” She was learned, but she was also iconoclastic. She took a studied view of art, and yet there she was reporting on the latest trends. Putting these occasional pieces in a book also codified them, creating a kind of canon of the au courant.
In two widely quoted essays, “Against Interpretation” and “On Style,” Sontag takes on the history of literary criticism, considering whether art is mimetic (imitative), with a content that reflects the world outside itself, or expressive—sufficient unto itself with a form that is the product of the artist’s imagination. These distinctions she traces to Plato and Aristotle and to a tension always present between content and form, between thinking of art as making a statement about the world and art as its own experience, valued in and for itself. Sontag favors a criticism that appreciates the contours of the artwork rather than searches it for some exportable message relating to the world outside itself. And yet there are times, she concedes, when a concern with content, with what a work of art is saying, is crucial because art, left to its own devices, can become a species of the solipsistic and self-regarding that condemns characters in her fiction like Hippolyte to a life-denying isolation.
In “On Style,” Sontag argues that “style and content are insoluble,” even if, in practice, critics speak of certain styles such as Mannerism and Art Nouveau as if they are separable from the content they convey. In other words, the work of art is a form of knowledge, not a container of knowledge about something that is not itself. As a result, a work of art cannot be judged in terms of the morality of any particular culture or historical period. Art is self-justifying. It is not surprising, then, that in the next essay, “The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer,” she praises Cesare Pavese’s fiction and diaries for their “self-cancellation” so that his work becomes an exploration of subjects such as modern love and suicide in terms of the work of others and not simply a product of his own psychology. Similarly, Simone Weil is celebrated as the self-abnegating artist, full of “intellectual ardor,” and committed to an investigation of truth above all so that she becomes a saint of the “aesthetic,” because her person becomes less important than her work. Sontag’s understanding of the aesthetic is clarified in her portrayal of Camus in his notebooks, which express a “moral beauty”—two words that encapsulate Sontag’s notion of an art intact in itself, so exquisitely perfect that it is true in the sense of creating its own authority, its rightness. Sontag does speak of Camus the man, whom she seems to conflate with the artist because of his nobility, his acts (such as joining the French Resistance and denouncing the Communist Party) that are taken without consideration for his own wellbeing or safety. In effect, she suggests that Camus’s life, like his work, is of a piece, a unity that is art.
Sontag selects writers like Michel Leiris for their refutation of the Romantic idea of the writer and of writing as a form of self-expression. Unlike Montaigne, Leiris’s confessional writing undermines his own authority and questions whether the writer can understand himself. He is the opposite of a writer like Norman Mailer, whose manhood is bound to the idea of the heroic self. Leiris is the writer as antihero, “hermetic and opaque” and even bored with himself. Like her portrayal of Leiris, her depiction of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Straus emphasizes his resistance to empathy and the “psychological ordeal” he experiences in his study of other cultures. He resists the inclination to identify with the societies he studies, preferring to observe, in the manner of a Sontag-defined artist, the forms that certain societies take. He remains aloof, an outsider.
Lévi-Strauss is, in effect, the alienated artist celebrated in so many of Sontag’s essays, which also include critics like Georg Lukács, although she deplores his moralizing, which tends to subvert the autonomy of art. A truer exile intent on expressing his art in the very face of a hostile society was Jean Genet, whom Sontag attempts to rescue from Sartre’s biography because the philosopher tried to turn Genet into an exemplification of Sartre’s own style of political engagement. Sontag’s Genet is less assimilated, more of an outcast, an “other,” than in Sartre’s narrative.
In “Nathalie Sarraute and the Novel,” Sontag sees another writer resistant to psychology, to the personalizing of literature, and to the contrived plots and characters of fiction, favoring—to use one of Sontag’s favorite phrases—“sensory pleasures.” In this view of art, the writer becomes, as in T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a vessel that produces work that is more than and other than herself.
In a rare departure from Sontag’s customary practice, she writes a negative review of Eugene Ionesco’s writing about theater—perhaps because she finds his theories simplistic, contradictory, and all too characteristic of his superficial plays, which she deems anti-intellectual. Sontag abandoned reviewing plays early in her career because she felt uncomfortable rendering judgments required of reviewers. Although she had reservations about The Deputy, a play set in the Nazi era, she was attracted to its staging, which, on the one hand, seems to suggest that the personalities of those attracted to Nazism are not as important as the roles they function in and, on the other hand, presents two main characters whose opposition to Nazism demonstrates their uniqueness. In like fashion, in “The Death of Tragedy,” she objects to critic Lionel Abel’s term “metatheatre” to describe the self-conscious productions of playwrights since Shakespeare. To use one term like metatheatre to encompass Genet, Beckett, and Brecht is to distort the history of western drama, she concludes.
Not surprisingly, in “Going to the Theatre, Etc.” Sontag deplores Arthur Miller’s concern with the Holocaust and Communism in After the Fall because they are represented primarily as part of the “furniture of a mind” (141)—in this case of the play’s narrator, Quentin, who treats all issues on the same level and thus makes them indistinguishable. In general, she excoriates contemporary drama for its political optimism and inability to deal with tragedy and to make of race issues melodramas about “virtue and vice” (150). In contrast to these formulaic productions, she touts Peter Brook’s production of Marat/Sade, a play of ideas with “intellectual debate” as the “material of the play … not its subject or its end” (165).
In “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson,” Sontag fairly revels in a filmmaker who refuses audiences the pleasure of identifying with his characters because, as is her predilection, she prefers art that does not cater to the audience’s desire to convert what is seen on the screen into the psychology of human character, a psychology that seems to Sontag spurious because it is an “affront to the mystery that is human action and the human heart” (181). It is the movement, the physics, so to speak, of Bresson’s films that fascinates her. It is not the drama but the composition of Bresson’s works that impress. Jean-Luc Godard epitomizes this resistance to art as explanatory, to making coherent what is in fact fragmentary. She fastens on the word “disburdenment” to describe Godard’s dissociation of word and image, making it impossible to construct a neat orchestration of images, sounds, and words. His films do not refer to any world outside of themselves and hence he is due the honor of being the “first director fully to grasp the fact that, in order to deal seriously with ideas, one must create a new film language” (207).
In “The Imagination of Disaster,” one of Sontag’s most influential essays, she discounts the value of the “science” to be found in science fiction films and likens them to horror movies, except that the former deal more lucidly with power, destruction, and violence. Such films can be moralistic (condemning the mad scientist), but they also reflect contemporary anxieties about the state of the world and the role of technology in dehumanizing society. To what extent such films serve a therapeutic function is disputable, in Sontag’s reading, since too often the failings of the world are attributable to individuals and not to systematic problems. What comes through in this essay, however, is Sontag’s enjoyment of these films and her delight in anatomizing their characteristics. The essay is one of her better excursions in sharing with her readers the pleasures of the art she extolls precisely for its pleasure-giving properties.
Similarly, Sontag is an unabashed admirer of films like Flaming Creatures, a work that some dismiss as pornography but which she praises for its enthusiasm and wit. It also has a child-like exuberance that she finds liberating because of an “extraordinary charge and beauty” (228) in its images. Sexuality of all kinds romps through this picture, creating what Sontag calls an “aesthetic space, the space of pleasure” (231). In sum, she finds the moral argument against pornography, if indeed the film is pornographic, irrelevant. The ostensible subject matter—transvestitism—is the occasion for the film’s existence but should not be seen as its raison d’être.
Resnais’s Muriel is harder to like, Sontag implies, because it is undramatic and with a story that decomposes. Rather than drawing the viewer into the film, the director seems to deliberately divert attention from the elaborate plot, suggesting that the true subject cannot be assimilated. But, as Sontag concedes, such a film is hard to endure because it refuses to come to a resolution or to pursue its ideas with vigor and tenacity. Other Resnais films, such as Night and Fog, are more successful since his oblique treatment of the subject matter (the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps) actually makes the film more powerful as there is no need to compel our feelings.
In discussing Resnais, Sontag invokes the French new novel and its subversion of conventional narrative, which she follows with “A Note on Novels and Films,” showing how both forms of art have experimented with narration, with different kinds of films—literary and visual, psychological and anti-psychological, descriptive and expository. In effect, then, motion pictures are a way of reading the history of the novel and its acceptance and rejection of popular tastes and sentiments.
What makes Against Interpretation so impressive is Sontag’s remarkable segues not only from one art to another but to philosophy and religion as well, examining in “Piety without Content” Walter Kaufmann’s study of religion’s decline—a subject in which Sontag, who studied the history of religion at Harvard and taught courses on at Columbia, was well versed. She disputes Kaufmann’s argument that the feelings that religion evokes can survive without religion itself: “one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general” (252), Sontag counters. Religion is rooted in the world in very specific ways that do not make it portable or transferrable to a secular world, and intellectual confusion results when trying to import the values of religion into modern beliefs.
To follow a discussion of religion with a dissection of Freud and psychoanalysis brings Sontag back to contemporary America, “anxious, television-brainwashed” (259)—sweeping terms that overburden her historical and political analyses. She deplores the American tendency to emphasize those aspects of Freud that reinforce conformism to societal norms, and yet she finds a thinker like Herbert Marcuse, who tries to reconcile Marxism and Freudianism, closer to revolutionary thought. She is attracted to Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death because of its effort to liberate psychology from the Freudian obsession with repression. Indeed, the next essay, on “Happenings,” with its interest in the unpredictable and focus on the present, seems an antidote to Freud’s concern with the past that shapes the psyche. The undermining of conventional certitudes suggests a subversive intent that Sontag seems to welcome but also distances herself from when she notes the demonic nature of some Happenings that turn upon and even attack the audience.
“Notes on ‘Camp,’” Sontag’s most famous essay in Against Interpretation, is a miniature of the book’s tendency to take a taxonomic view of art—in this case by creating fifty-eight numbered points. The first two become the basis for an impressive array of examples that shore up her observations:
To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical.
There follows lists of films, novels, plays, objects, and so on that are camp items—that is, they are valued for their style, shape, manner of presentation. Thus, Tiffany lamps, Swan Lake, and King Kong are all included in the camp camp, so to speak. For this way of regarding the world focuses on how that world makes itself up, not on what the world amounts to. Perhaps this distrust of finding a message, of reducing art to a conclusion, is best summed up in Sontag’s quotation from a character in The Nihilists: “Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it” (286). The great value of camp, in Sontag’s view, is that it liberates art from the dictates of social and political thought; the liability of camp, as she also understands quite well, is that it cannot engage with social and political thought and cannot, as a result, make art count for anything outside itself.
No matter what position a reviewer might take toward her work, Sontag cannot be dismissed. She writes in such a way that commentators are compelled to argue for or against her. In this respect, it hardly matters whether she is deemed right or wrong. Arguments often begin by quoting her out of a need to either borrow her authority or challenge it. A reader could come away from The Benefactor never wanting to read it again, but the words of Against Interpretation continue to reverberate precisely because, unlike Hippolyte, Sontag’s words touch on so many cultural indicators. An astute connoisseur, Sontag rarely engages in the critic’s desire to hand out grades, specifying the degree to which a work of art succeeds or fails; instead, her judgments are implicit in the very intensity of her interest in a writer, a work, or a cultural event. She opens the way for appreciation; she rarely closes down thinking about a subject. She pays attention and, in the act of observing, expresses her avidity for art; and avidity, her son and editor suggests, is the word that best sums up his mother.11
Sontag’s main points—that the intellect had come to dominate discussions of art and had therefore diminished the enjoyment of art as a sensual experience, and that seeking out the content (message) of art had obscured the pleasure of appreciating the artist’s creation of form—received mixed reviews. Critics praised her fresh, vigorous prose while suggesting, with some irony, that Sontag, too, was presenting an argument or interpretation of art, even if she refused to critique individual works. Some reviewers, like Burton Feldman in the Denver Quarterly, thought her distinctions were overwrought. Many critics welcomed her quest to expunge moralizing from literary and art criticism. From the vantage point of 1996, Sontag herself seemed less concerned with the extent to which her arguments held up than to note that her book was an attack on the philistines—those who would use art for their own purposes rather than valuing it for its own sake. She wanted, as always, art to be untamed and not subordinate to criteria outside itself.
Sontag’s favorite ploy in Against Interpretation is to discuss one work of art in terms of another, or many others. The range of her cultural references is bewildering to all but the most highly educated readers, and though the effect of allusions to so many other writers and works is, in Bernard Rodgers’s words, “staggering,” he is right to say that she is doing much more than “name-dropping…. Susan Sontag is not simply familiar with the work of all these figures, but knows them thoroughly enough to select exactly the right work from the oeuvre of any one of them to make her point.” Coupled with this encyclopedic knowledge is, as Rodgers also notes, her aphoristic style, which allows her to sum up her ideas in pithy phrases: “Interpretation is the revenge of intellect upon art” (7); “Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist’s will” (32). If the reader is not familiar with all of her allusions to artists, writers, and works of art and philosophy, the nub of her argument is nevertheless close to hand in her epigrams.
The tension in Sontag’s own thinking about art is encapsulated in a later essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” in which she takes issue with her own contention that Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will could be appreciated aside from its fascist politics. In Sontag’s own course correction, she came to believe that a work of art’s form could not so easily be disengaged from its content. Or, to put it another way, she could not simply divide into two separate categories fascism and aesthetics but rather felt compelled to insist on such a thing as fascist aesthetics, a term that fuses content and form in ways she resisted in Against Interpretation.
But in the late 1960s Sontag remained committed to creating an art not bound by the categories of history or morality. In Against Interpretation, she defends Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, even though reviewers had complained about his protagonist, Stephen Rojack, who gets away with murdering his wife. It is a novel that does not purport to promulgate or repudiate a standard of morality, she insists. Sontag herself wants to go even further than Mailer in detaching the novel not only from morality but also from the conventions of realism. Although Diddy, her main character in Death Kit, is a businessman traveling by train from Manhattan to Albany, much of what the narrative presents seems like a dream, a patently Freudian one at that, since his journey is halted in a tunnel, literally blocking him from the light of day. His altercation with a workman on the railroad tracks ends with Diddy murdering him with a crowbar. When he returns to the train, he has sex with a blind woman, Hester, who insists that Diddy has never left the train compartment. Diddy accompanies Hester to the institute where she is scheduled for an eye operation even while scanning the papers for news of his crime. After learning the name of his victim, Diddy, impersonating a railroad official, visits the man’s wife, who threatens a lawsuit, and Diddy departs, still obsessed with his crime and tormented by thoughts about death. Even when he reenacts his crime in a second visit to the tunnel, in a kind of Freudian repetition-compulsion scene, Hester refuses to see what he has done. He shouts, “I want to be seen” (289), implying that the narrative as dream is really about how unreal he feels—unacknowledged in a life that is of no consequence save for his belief that he has murdered a man and that his own death is an inescapable consequence of his actions. Ultimately, the novel seems to be posing a dilemma: Which is more real—the life that goes on day to day or the disturbed, erratic world of the human imagination? And even more perplexing is the novel’s suggestion that all of the narrative has been a contrivance of a moment, the “now” that constantly recurs in the story as Diddy’s life ebbs away, making the whole account the phantasmagoric tale of a dying man.
Death Kit seems a relentless effort to show how human beings, through their dreams and obsessions, have much less control over the content of their lives than they imagine. Indeed, Diddy’s story, in this respect, becomes a fable about how human beings lose control of the meaning of existence. In his Commentary review, Theodore Solotaroff suggested that in Death Kit, the “unconscious is an artist—an endlessly cunning metaphysical poet.”12 The content of lives, as of works of art, is not a stable phenomenon, Sontag implies. And because content is constantly shifting in meaning, paying attention to the form—in this case of Diddy’s experiences or, perhaps, dreams—is a way at least to encompass both the experience of art and of life, if not to explain them.
Many reviewers condemned Death Kit, and a few celebrated it. Eliot Fremont-Smith called it “tedious and insensitive to the craft of fiction.” Doris Grumbach, herself a distinguished novelist, hailed Sontag’s work as “a masterpiece of surrealism.” Most reviewers came out somewhere in between these extremes, although few showed much enthusiasm for the novel. Richard Lehan called Sontag’s work “a philosophical tour de force,” even while suggesting that both Diddy and the narrative remained “inchoate.”13
The reviewers, and even later critics, did not see that Death Kit and The Benefactor were responses to Kierkegaard’s book Either/Or (1843), a dialogic presentation of the aesthetic and ethical views of life. As Sontag put it in her diary: “Benefactor is a reductio ad absurdum of aesthetic approach to life—i.e. solipsistic consciousness.” In Death Kit, reality keeps trying to break through Diddy’s dreams and illusions. But neither the ethical nor the aesthetic positions were “enough,” Sontag supposed. “And now? The third stage?” she queried herself.14 She had no answer and would not present one for another twenty-five years, when she recast the aesthetic/ethical conundrum in terms of a new category: history.
In both novels, Sontag focuses on characters either determined to create their own worlds or suffer a kind of psychic break when that self-created universe cracks open. These are characters in novels that will themselves into existence just as Sontag saw her fiction as a projection of her will to create. Indeed, she vouchsafed to her diary that writing worked for her because it expressed her “autonomy,” “strength,”15 and her pride in going it alone—as she did in the positions she set out in Styles of Radical Will.
Sontag’s second collection of essays bookends her two novels, elaborating on their themes but also bringing to a close the programmatic phase of her work. In the future, she would be less prone to stake out positions on a wide range of topics and instead would focus, in greater depth, on photography and illness, and then even more exclusively on writers’ lives and works. While Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will were heralded as cutting-edge work, in retrospect they seem a summa of a writer who would need to change course and write a very different kind of fiction than her early essays and novels promulgated. Even that quest to become a different kind of writer, however, would be interrupted by her continuing involvement in politics, her filmmaking projects, and her desire to exert an extraliterary influence on her times.
Styles of Radical Will is divided into three parts with eight essays dealing with aesthetics, theatre and film, and politics. The lead essay, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” goes beyond positions in Against Interpretation, exploring the uses to which modern artists have put silence as a commentary on art that fails to resolve or transcend the “painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation” (1). And yet silence is no solution because it implies its opposite. Silence, too, in other words, has a rhetoric that may take the form of suicide, renunciation, or madness (options in Sontag’s first two films and in her fiction). Silence can be as eloquent as speech—even more so in a culture surfeited with words—and can serve to focus attention and recover the power of words or to undermine them, evoking a significance that is beyond the work of art’s ability to articulate. Invoking silence may also be a way for the work of art to preserve itself.
“The Aesthetics of Silence” can be read almost as a primer for Brother Carl, in which the eponymous main character refuses to speak. His silence can be interpreted as the artist’s revulsion at a world polluted with words that merely obfuscate the agony and mystery of human existence. And yet the urge to communicate, to create art, to save the self, is an effort to overcome a silence that can lead not only to alienation but also to suicide. If silence defines the limits of speech, so speech becomes an inevitable reaction to silence, as it does in Brother Carl, in which Carl’s friends both reveal in their words why he has retreated from the world in disgust even as their words seek to bring him back to that very same world. Silence, in other words, reveals the paradox that art can both reveal the world to us even as it also exposes art’s own limitations. The political dimensions of the essay are apparent when Sontag argues that certain artists have used silence to resist the encroachment of bourgeois capitalist culture, which commodifies everything, including art. The silences in Samuel Beckett’s plays, for example, concentrate the mind on the play itself, preserving its autonomy. In effect, the resort to silence is a therapeutic effort, part of the artist’s spiritual project, the antidote to a materialistic culture.
Like Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will is an attack on philistines, on those who would reduce works of art to a message or theme, or demand that art observe certain moral standards. Not surprisingly, then, in “The Pornographic Imagination” Sontag opposes the traditional rejection of pornography as lacking any purpose other than sexual fantasy, making it less than art because of its single-mindedness, lack of complexity, and inability to create rounded characters. These arguments would also exclude as art other forms of fantasy literature, melodrama, and other popular kinds of literature, Sontag suggests. She cites a number of works, such as The Story of O and several works by Sade to suggest that pornography, like other forms of literature, can be a critique of society. Indeed, she goes so far as to contend that pornography represents capitalism’s inability to “satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness” (68). Such comments underpin Sontag’s concerted effort to undermine the power of a capitalist society to assert its authority over all forms of literature.
The subversive nature of Sontag’s radicalism becomes even more apparent in the next essay, “Thinking Against Oneself: Reflections on Cioran.” She praises the Romanian philosopher for his anti-systematic and yet Hegelian dialectic in which “it is the destiny of every profound idea to be quickly checkmated by another idea, which it itself has implicitly generated” (77). In Hegel, however, the dialectic leads to a synthesis, a development of history, whereas in Cioran and Sontag, the spirit of contradiction, of recanting previous views, seems a form of intellectual honesty that prevents them from codifying their thought. In her first film, Duet for Cannibals, Sontag tries to embody this notion of contrariety in the behavior of her characters. Thus Thomas Bauer, an aging German radical, welcomes a young disciple, Tomas, as a collaborator, encourages him to take care of Bauer’s disaffected but attractive young wife, Francesca, and then turns on Tomas, accusing him of seducing Francesca and thwarting Bauer’s efforts to compose his memoirs and carry on his political work. Tomas is perplexed. Bauer keeps inviting him to become more intimate, and then Bauer accuses Tomas of betraying his trust. The world, as Bauer creates it, is the artifice that human consciousness constructs, according to Cioran. And like Cioran, Bauer is in exile, a man severing his roots, and enacting Cioran’s claim that we “must become metaphysically foreigners” (84).
In the second part of Styles of Radical Will, “Theatre and Film,” the distinctions often made between stage and screen collapse, since both forms of art are artifice, no matter that theatre explores the “continuous use of space” (106) and film pursues the “principle of connection between” (106) images. Neither medium is more realistic than the other, and both aim for a simultaneity of effect that breaks down distinctions between genres, so that modern theatre and film play their part in demolishing the aristocratic and class-bound tastes of earlier eras.
In discussing Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, then, Sontag resists interpreting the film as a character study, a psychological portrayal of its two female protagonists, because the director has made the distinctions between reality and illusion difficult to decipher. The film is not a story per se, Sontag insists, and not a work about psychology but about ontology and epistemology, about how we know and how we see the world. It is the confident nature of art as the representation of reality that Bergman is intent on challenging, she concludes. For Sontag, Bergman is the quintessential artist because he employs silence as a dramatization of the void, of what cannot be represented but only shown to be absent.
Similarly, Sontag’s essay on Godard extols his “juxtaposition of contrary elements” (161) so that the accustomed notion that film represents reality is dislocated. Another radical, Godard unburdens himself of the cinematic conventions that his society has enforced in its effort to establish the “unified point of view” (165) expected in a film. The continuous present in his work, which seeks to abolish a sense of the past, of precedent, puts into play a deliberate rejection of the traditional search for resolution, for a story with a clear ending. Sontag sees in Godard “a provisional network of emotional and intellectual impasses” (181)—a strategy rather like that of her own films. The language of indeterminacy that Godard’s films foster inform some of Sontag’s own meditations in the political essays that follow.
In part three of Styles of Radical Will, in “Trip to Hanoi,” Sontag confesses that she found it difficult to embed her “evolving radical political convictions” (203) into her earlier prose because she studiously avoided an autobiographical approach. However, in her visit to North Vietnam she confronts a range of factors: her own reasons for the journey (to express her opposition to the war), her relationships with her fellow travelers (also war protestors), the disorienting impact of measuring her Western sensibility against that of the North Vietnamese, and her disconcerting realization that she is being treated like a movie star. Although in basic sympathy with the North Vietnamese, whom she sees as fighting for their independence and fending off an aggressive American attack, she has trouble adjusting to Vietnamese groupthink and is compelled to explain why she judges the North Vietnamese by a different standard—different, that is, from the one she applies to her own government.
Sontag’s discomfort arises from her admitted ignorance. Thrust into an alien culture, she cannot be certain of her judgments. Unlike Cuban revolutionaries, who were passionate and informal, the North Vietnamese seem stolid and hierarchical. In general, though, she strives to overcome her reservations about what she sees and is relieved to find that the North Vietnamese do not suffer from the “complex kind of pessimism” (245) that she associates with Westerners. Although they seem depersonalized and even dehumanized in some respects, she admires their courage and solidarity, which she regards as a passionate form of patriotism.
A good deal of what Sontag seeks in North Vietnam is a result of her anger over American culture and the policies of the American government. In “What’s Happening in America,” the piece that precedes “Trip to Hanoi,” she excoriates the United States as a country founded on genocide. What is more, she ties the depredation of the North American continent with a wave of immigrants ignorant of culture and eager to subdue native peoples and minorities in the quest to develop a crude and materialistic society. She calls American leaders “yahoos” (196, 264), thus linking them to the philistines she deplores in her literary essays. For her, only the radicalism of a new generation can hope to reverse the cancerous legacy of “Western Faustian” (201) man.
Critics understood that Sontag was attempting to make a “radical connection between esthetics and politics,” as John Leonard put it.16 Many of them dismissed her effort, as he did colorfully, by calling her a “deracinated urban griefchik.” Others, like Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, were aghast at her simplistic political judgments and overgeneralizations, especially her comment that the white race was the “cancer of human history”—a comment that seemed unworthy of a writer with such an otherwise impressive critical mind.17 To be sure, other reviewers, such as John Weightman, were impressed with Styles of Radical Will, especially with the opening section, and Jonathan Raban extolled the breadth of her writing, comparing it to Emerson’s “casserole style of essay writing.”18
Sontag herself regarded “The Aesthetics of Silence,” for example, as an advance on her work in Against Interpretation. She emphasized to interviewer Edwin Newman that she had been exploring the limitations of art from the point of view of the artists themselves, and not their critics.19 She might have extended that observation to suggest that “Trip to Hanoi” was an effort to critique herself and the limitations of her own Western, aesthetic sensibility as it encountered an alien culture. It would take, however, more than another decade for her to come to terms with the weaknesses in her political writing, and it would take even longer for her to propose a reading of history that superseded the faults of her earlier work.