The Voices of Fiction
Stories and Later Novels
In her diary entry for November 21, 1978, Sontag wrote, “In fiction I can do what I’ve done in essays, but not vice versa” (470). She did not explain to herself what she meant, but certainly one aspect of her fiction is its essayistic quality even as it is far more personal—more directly autobiographical than any of her essays. Fiction gave her permission to include herself, as she does in I, etcetera, her collection of stories. There one learns about her childhood, her marriage, especially the years just after her son, David, was born, her travels, and many of the private feelings that appeared in her diaries. Her fiction approaches the form of a memoir; her essays seem almost studiedly impersonal.
As with many writers, fiction gave Sontag more latitude to say her work was based on her experience and yet was not, exactly, her experience, because she had put her autobiography in the service of her stories. She had used herself as material in her fiction, but in her nonfiction she seemed wary of arguing merely from personal experience, as though ideas attached to a personality were less valuable as ideas per se. The one exception, of course, was her political journalism, where she was virtually obliged to deliver opinions that were hers, opinions derived from her travels and participation in public events and discourse. But those political essays did not loosen her style in the way that fiction, especially stories, could. In I, etcetera she explores what she called in a diary entry (February 25, 1979) “my ‘Cubist’ method, telling story from different angles” (483).
“Project for a Trip to China” was composed before Sontag actually traveled there. And as she later admitted in her diary, her China was not the country she visited, but rather a projection of her imagination, the construct of a lonely girl who missed her father, who had died in China. The actual journey there produced almost nothing in the way of writing. In the story, China figures as the elsewhere Sontag would have preferred to be instead of living with M (obviously based on her mother). The story is really about mind traveling, about how the mind composes a world—in this case, out of remnants of her father’s existence: a photograph and the few other objects he left behind. The fiction he represents to her is more real than the daily life she has to endure with her dour mother. The primacy of the imagination, the victory of mind over matter, is a familiar theme in Sontag’s first two novels, although her narrators in those narratives are so estranged from their environments that their recourse to their own dreams and illusions proves ultimately self-destructive. Why does this not occur in “Project for a Trip to China”? Precisely because Sontag anchors the narrative in herself, an observant child/adult notating not merely her fancies but also the dreary facts of her childhood. She does not turn away from reality so much as she asserts the superiority of her imagination to transcend that reality without ever denying reality the way Hippolyte and Diddy do. What is more, as her own narrator, Sontag is able to probe the nature of literature, of why it is more satisfying than the actual, real materials out of which it is built. Literature itself, the imagination, becomes a subject in this story as it might in one of Sontag’s essays, but she does not have to pretend that the literature-reality nexus is just a topic for the intellect. On the contrary, this story is Sontag’s story in every sense of the word. It is hard to see how Sontag could have written such fiction at the beginning of her career, since “Project for a Trip to China” depends on the public persona she had already established for herself. Part of the keen interest in this story—which several reviewers regarded as her best—is that she actually trades on her own fame. The story shows why she had to build up her own sense of the world and her place in it. To do otherwise would have meant capitulating to the morose M, who seems in this story to have given up on life, on the expectation of a better world that her daughter so desperately craves to discover by creating it in her own story. This is why the actual China could never measure up to the child’s conception of it.
“Debriefing,” the second story, centers on Julia, a life-denying character—anorexic and agoraphobic—a stay-at-home like M. Julia seems immobilized by the existential questions she asks. She is bothered by the way people simply conform to the ordinary conceptions of how to live. The suicidal Julia sees such behavior as useless, and the narrator—another Sontag stand-in—is both disturbed by Julia’s penetrating intellect and determined to assert the very connections to others that Julia scorns. The tension in the story, however, resides in the narrator’s affinity with Julia. Julia speaks for the narrator’s darker self. Julia is one of the many doubles that appear in I, etcetera. Indeed, Julia is the etcetera, one of the proliferating versions of the self that the Sontag narrators encounter. Julia appeals to the narrator’s own sense of disaffection with others, with commonplace ideas. And yet without establishing a connection to others, to the world, the inevitable result is self-annihilation. Sontag’s diaries clearly show that she never contemplated suicide herself and that, indeed, the very idea appalled her; and yet she could not let it alone, because she understood that the act of suicide represented a rejection of the world that she understood and even identified with—as she demonstrates in her essay on Simone Weil, a brilliant thinker and a suicide. The idea of a debriefing, of an explanation of a mission accomplished, is given an ironic turn in this story, since Julia’s mission is, in effect, to kill herself. The harrowing aspect of this story is that Sontag explores the insane and yet logical behavior of a character like Julia, whose thinking leads her to take her own life.
“American Spirits” puts the questions about human identity, about how a self can both create and destroy a life, into a historical context. Sontag’s essay in Styles of Radical Will about pornography as a kind of literature that can both free and degrade the self is given a fresh and comic expression in the story of Miss Flatface, who is inspired by Tom Paine to revolt, leave her husband, and go off with Mr. Obscenity in order to reinvent herself along the lines of Benjamin Franklin, who ran away from home in quest of a new self. Miss Flatface’s antiseptic husband is contrasted with Mr. Obscenity and his swarthy friends. They represent all that is counter to mainstream, patriotic culture. They like to talk about Communism, miscegenation, and their belief in free love. A man of principle, Mr. Obscenity offers Miss Flatface to his “black chum,” Honest Abe, to whom Miss Flatface reports in patriotic fashion. The range of reference in this story—from Henry Adams, Stephen Crane, and James Fenimore Cooper to William James and Fatty Arbuckle, as well as Edith Wharton and Ethel Rosenberg—suggests the pervasiveness of Sontag’s effort to show how perverse the American urge for the pursuit of happiness can become. Indeed, this pursuit becomes a veritable orgy that only serves to make Miss Flatface feel “terribly alone” (e-book location 705), especially since she realizes she has become no more than a sexual object for the gratification of her male masters. This feminist aspect of Sontag’s fiction is a new development that heralds her focus on women in her last two novels, a reversal of her penchant for subsuming herself in male voices in The Benefactor and Death Kit. Indeed, Miss Flatface seems determined to bank on the male gaze by turning herself into a prostitute, although the spirits of William Jennings Bryan and Leland Stanford deplore her low prices for services rendered. But at least she eludes various characters that would seduce and enslave her. She declares herself a “free woman,” which not only liberates her from prostitution but also fosters her falling in love for the first time. But this fantasy of married life with Arthur turns poisonous when she eats a bad taco—a comment on the country’s fast food fetish, a signal that instant gratification does not equal a seriously satisfying pursuit of pleasure. Laid out in the Easy Come Easy Go Funeral Home, a pun on both the life and the sexual encounters that have dominated Miss Flatface’s life, she is last seen in heaven watching with approval as her two ex-husbands grieve over her death. The contrast with Julia’s fate, with her denial of sexual connection—indeed her denial of fleshly appetite—is ironic, especially since these two characters, from opposite directions, succeed, haphazardly, in extinguishing their own lives.
“The Dummy” arises in part out of Sontag’s interest in science fiction and her groundbreaking essay “The Imagination of Disaster,” which is included in Against Interpretation. As the title of her essay suggests, science fiction, in its broadest sense, is about the dread of apocalypse, of an end to the world that may be avoidable, or may not. How to cope with that knowledge becomes in “The Dummy” a narrator’s effort to create a double of himself, one that will allow him to observe, and thus preserve, himself. After observing his “dummy” on the job, the narrator exclaims, “What a hard life I led!” (e-book location 1046) The trouble is that the dummy falls in love with a secretary, Miss Love, and threatens suicide when his creator says he cannot leave his wife for the other woman. The only solution seems the creation of a dummy for the dummy. And this outcome works surprisingly well, with the narrator and his “relatives” solving the “problems of this one short life” (e-book location 1046). Of course, that is the point: The self cannot really split itself off into other selves, except in the world of fiction, where the very idea of a self, and the pressures to be a self, engenders the creation of other selves. It is as if Sontag is saying that the only solution to selfhood is fantasy or science fiction. This short story is essentially a comic inversion of the suicide narrative of her first two novels.
“Old Complaints Revisited” is a rather murky monologue featuring a translator who wants to leave “the organization” but cannot. He is like a Kafka character who cannot quite fathom the source of his anxiety. He enjoys the sense of exclusivity that comes with membership in a group, even though the group is a party of error. Although the organization is never named, the story reads like a Cold War narrative, the account of a Communist Party member who remains in the fold even after realizing the folly of his membership. The party has become the basis of the individual’s identity, and to forsake the party, or in this case the organization, is to abnegate that identity. And then there are the distinguished writers who still belong to the organization, and there is its history to consider, as well as its virtues and vices. In effect, the story is about the sense of belonging and the need for it. Group membership can be comforting insofar as one does not have to act by oneself, and yet the urge to declare independence is also undeniable even as the very idea of exile is forbidding. Part of the problem is translation. How to put into words what the narrator feels? Whatever the narrator declares can only be partially true insofar as words cannot represent the whole person. In the end, it is life itself, the organization of life, that seems to trouble the narrator, who cannot translate its meaning. One way to read this story is as a gloss on Sontag’s famous essay “The Aesthetics of Silence,” which probes the inadequacy of language and the inability of the artist to say, in words, precisely what he means, or to convey a sense of life with which words can never be commensurate. I, etcetera, as its title announces, is a book of self-reflexive fiction, fiction that is about itself, and the fraught ways in which language both creates and destroys or distorts the world—language as merely a translation of the original: life itself.
The clashing and coordinating voices of “Baby,” the parents of the child in question, seems a warm-up for the orchestration of varied voices in “The Way We Live Now.” A child’s anxious parents visit a psychiatrist on alternating days to talk about their boy, although the details they reveal about his life match those of Sontag’s own upbringing. Baby’s voice is never heard directly and, in fact, he seems unreal insofar as he is projection of his parents’ conflicting testimony. Both parents become obsessed with a child who has a mind of his own, a mind that feels threatened by his parents, a “baby” who plots to poison them. The trouble seems to be that he is their “baby”—that is, a projection of their paranoid fears. So perverse is their obsession with their own child, with their idea that they are under threat, that they decide to dismember him. In this cruel parable of childrearing and popular notions of talk therapy, Sontag skewers the psychologizing of family life that results in yet another form of mutually assured self-destruction.
In yet another angle on the idea of the double, “Doctor Jekyll,” a surrealistic version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one of Sontag’s favorite childhood stories, concentrates on Dr. Utterson, the director of the “Institute for Deprogramming Potential Human Beings.” Like “Debriefing,” deprogramming deals with the unraveling of the self, of its splitting apart into the eventual disaster that science fiction imagines. Utterson seems to be the author of the story, of the events that follow, insofar as he merges with Dr. Jekyll, although everything in the story is conjectural: “It is possible that a line extends from the flattish back of Utterson’s head to Jekyll’s striped tie” (e-book location 2289), suggesting that Jekyll is Utterson’s projection. As Poague and Parsons suggest in their annotated bibliography of Sontag’s work: “The complexity of the twenty-four unnumbered segments of ‘Doctor Jekyll’ resists sequential annotation. A given segment might link two spatially distant characters—usually Utterson and Jekyll—in a kind of ‘subjunctive’ doubling.”1 In effect, the story denies the possibility of biography, of chronology, as a way of explaining human character. To rewrite Stevenson is to acknowledge the modern atomizing of the self, with Jekyll at one point suggesting that he can only complete himself by going off with Hyde, who accuses Jekyll of a homosexuality Hyde rejects. And since Jekyll and Hyde are facets of the same personality as now reimagined by Utterson, there seems to be no way out of the labyrinth of a self that denies part of its own identity.
As the concluding story, the aptly named “Unguided Tour,” implies, the self is decentered, fractured into a number of different voices that all go traveling, so to speak, as Sontag does in her opening story. The changing scenery does nothing to allay the uneasy recognition that nothing has changed, as narrators—male and female—swap observations that are difficult to attribute to one voice since no quotation marks are used. As Poague and Parsons observe, the difficulty of distinguishing among speakers suggests that the dialogue is really an internal monologue—a final discourse on “I, etcetera,” in which the self cannot contain itself but must double and split off and argue with itself, as Sontag so often said that she did in her essays. The tour can have no guide any more than the self can have a program or a briefing that will clarify the quest to become a self. The Susan Sontag whose work is a product of so many of her travels to Europe and Asia acknowledges that there can be no guidebook to the world or to the self. And yet, unlike her suicidal figures, the final voice of Unguided Tour is not defeated and seems buoyed by the journey itself, declaring that this is not “the end.”
What more fitting way to conclude I, etcetera’s stories about the indeterminacy of the world, which can be harrowing but also exhilarating, than by announcing that like the tour, the book itself can, properly speaking, have no end, no false conclusion that can reassuringly resolve this volume’s upsetting but also stirring antinomies?
Reviewers like Anatole Broyard praised Sontag’s probing of the problematic nature of language and the writer’s efforts to capture reality. Others like Daphne Merkin admired Sontag’s daring experimental fictions but deemed some of them failures. Todd Gitlin, in the Progressive, faulted the collection for its incoherence and lack of historical context. Novelist Anne Tyler put the case somewhat differently, suggesting that the stories were bold but incomplete, the result of an author too absorbed in herself to provide a satisfying experience for the reader.2 The fragmentary quality of the stories, in fact, resembles, in certain respects, Sontag’s diaries, which would be published posthumously.
Although Sontag would continue to publish short stories, she would not again attempt a major collection of her fiction, turning instead backward toward a kind of woman-of-letters approach in Under the Sign of Saturn, a series of portraits of writers who expressed various aspects of herself and who served as models for her own aspirations. Less blatantly autobiographical than I, etcetera, Under the Sign of Saturn seems like a mid-career retreat or regrouping of her interest in artist-intellectuals. From here on she experiments only fitfully with the forms of fiction until she discovers the resources of the historical novel, adapting narratives of the past to her modernist sensibility with mixed results.
Although the different voices of Sontag’s short stories are admirable efforts to try on all manner of temperaments, in truth, “Project for a Trip to China” proves to be her most enduring accomplishment in I, etcetera precisely because she hews so closely to her own voice, playing with her own experience and investing her narrator with a grounding in history that most of her unmoored narrators in both her stories and first two novels lack. Only when Sontag sets her own sensibility against the sweep of history in The Volcano Lover and In America is she able to give herself permission, after the hiatus following her first two novels, to produce novel-length work. If her desire to subsume the data of the past in her own perceptivity becomes bogged down in the documentary longueurs of In America, her ploy seems right to begin with, because, as in her essays, she realizes that her real subject is herself writing and what it means to write. In The Volcano Lover, the characters are powerful enough to withstand her prodding and interference; in In America, they eventually wear poorly because she is all too attentive to them, so that they become too precious, too much an extension of their author’s self-regard. She never quite lets go of them so that they can be themselves.
The Volcano Lover opens with a prologue that introduces the novel’s narrator, clearly a contemporary figure with many of Sontag’s own interests and tastes. She is dressed casually in jeans and a silk blouse as she wanders through a flea market speculating on where her desire will lead her. The brilliant opening aligns the narrator with her characters—all of whom will be driven by different states of passion. From this perch in the present, the narrator segues to London in the autumn of 1772 and to a meditation on the male and female terms used for volcanoes, and on those who are attracted to danger and those who flee from it. Thus Sontag sets the historical stage for the story of William Hamilton (referred to only as the Cavaliere), his wife, Catherine, his second wife, Emma, and her eventual lover, Lord Nelson (referred to only as “the hero”).
Part one centers on the marriage of the Cavaliere and Catherine. In London during his first trip home in seven years, the Cavaliere is making preparations for a return to Naples, where he serves as His Majesty’s diplomatic representative. The Cavaliere is a collector, an eighteenth-century man of reason who is nonetheless attracted to the “kingdom of the cinders” (9). Although the narrator does not say so, the Cavaliere is neoclassical man on the verge of transforming himself into a Romantic, driven by his passions as much as by his rationality. His wife, Catherine, seems like the perfect consort for him since her devotion is absolute and his tender care of her is apparent. She does not burn with his desire to explore Vesuvius, but then he does not expect such intensity from her. She has her place in his life just as every piece in his collection has.
Contrasted with the Cavaliere is the king of Naples, a glutton and an ignoramus. If the Cavaliere easily abides the king’s vulgarity, it is because of the Cavaliere’s aloof nature and sense of duty. So long as he is free to collect his Etruscan vases and other precious objects, the Cavaliere seems quite content at the Naples court. He does not share Catherine’s revulsion—even when at the opera the king starts throwing food at his subjects. The Cavaliere takes his role as courtier so seriously that he does not balk at following the king to his toilet, where the king empties his bowels. Indeed, the Cavaliere also accompanies the king on his hunts, which really amount to slaughtering parties. Unconcerned about the ignorant court he attends, the Cavaliere is content with the status quo, even though the revolution in France threatens to spread to parts of Italy, including Naples.
And yet the Cavaliere’s uneasiness is apparent in his scenes with Efrosina Pumo, a tarot card reader. He scoffs at her prognostications, but he returns repeatedly to read his fate in the cards. These scenes are an indication that he is not quite as certain of himself or what will happen to him as he imagines. Indeed, the volcano is an obvious symbol of volatility. As Efrosina Pumo tells him: “The future is a hole…. When you fall in it, you cannot be sure how far you will go” (53). The Cavaliere, as collector, takes possession of his world, but as the narrator notes, collections also “isolate” (27).
The Cavaliere’s life is about to change because the asthmatic Catherine weakens, even though he tries to divert himself with a pet monkey. This “littlest citizen” (76), as the Cavaliere calls the creature, stimulates a sadistic streak in his master, who enjoys taunting the monkey even as he becomes attached to the pet. As the Cavaliere becomes absorbed in the monkey’s mimicry and volatile emotions, Catherine finds comfort in the visit of the Cavaliere’s second cousin, William Beckford, who becomes her “soul mate and shadow son” (85). They are lovers of literature and unite around their reading of Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), one of the founding texts of the Romantic period, establishing the central role of passion in the hero’s life and the brooding nature that results in his suicide. Like the Cavaliere, the seemingly sedate Catherine is in fact a kind of transitional figure, on her way to becoming a Romantic. Only her sense of decorum and her place as the Cavaliere’s wife restrain her passion for Beckford. When Beckford departs, his letters seek to console Catherine, but she slowly succumbs to her illness and dies. A surprised Cavaliere then realizes how deeply he loved his wife, and in his sorrow believes he will never be able to love again.
In part two, the Cavaliere accompanies Catherine’s body back to England. He carries with him a prized possession that would later become known as the Portland vase because he sells this item to the Duchess of Portland. As much as such objects mean to him, they are also at his disposal when he is in need of money to support his collecting habit. Up to this point the Cavaliere has been in complete control of himself and his interests, bargaining up the price of collection when necessary, and intent on amassing yet other treasures. His nephew Charles, hoping to inherit the Cavaliere’s fortune (in truth it is not nearly as much as Charles supposes), turns over to his uncle his mistress, Emma, since Charles is courting a rich heiress. Emma, unaware of Charles’s plans, comes to Naples thinking her stay is but a visit. She writes long, plaintive letters to Charles, who does not answer; and she is shocked when the Cavaliere, smitten with her beauty, makes advances. She stubbornly refuses to believe her shrewd mother, who understands that Charles has abandoned her daughter and placed her in proximity to the Cavaliere for the Cavaliere’s pleasure. Emma, although taken aback, is grateful for the Cavaliere’s attentions, gradually capitulating to his desires and, in taking on the role as his mistress, begins to exhibit diplomatic skills that serve the Cavaliere well, especially with the queen of Naples, who is much smarter than her husband. Life at court becomes ever more pleasurable for the Cavaliere now that the queen treats Emma as a confidant. Emma quickly learns the Neapolitan language and is admired for her great beauty (she has been painted many times by Romney, who regards her as his favorite model). Emma’s stock at court rises as she learns to impersonate various important historical figures in scenes called “attitudes.” Only Goethe, on a visit to Naples, seems immune not only to Emma’s charms but also to a court life he deliberately rejects, as though to emphasize that the romance that others invest in his novel are not those of its author, who remains aloof and unamused. More than once, as in the novel’s final monologues, Sontag introduces a character that has the effect of destroying the romantic aura of her characters and the solipsism of their passions.
At the same time, both Vesuvius and Europe seem to be erupting, and life at court becomes more fretful as the course of the French Revolution seems to threaten the very idea of monarchy even as Emma becomes more celebrated for posing as Medea, Niobe, and Joan of Arc, among other mythic and historical women. The Cavaliere, overcome with love for Emma, does the unthinkable: he marries her, a commoner with a dubious past as a kept woman. And yet she thrives at court and makes the Cavaliere’s world a “theatre of felicity” (177). She solidifies his relationship with the king by becoming indispensable to the queen. Yet the queen dreads the fate of her sister, Marie Antoinette, in France, and worries about the loyalty of her Neapolitan subjects.
A new character enters, Lord Nelson, as “the hero,” victor of the Nile, who set back the French revolutionary advance. Imbued with a sense of his own historical importance, the hero befriends the Cavaliere and his wife. Already they look to him for protection as the Cavaliere begins to make arrangements to save his collection should the revolutionaries capture Naples. And Emma comforts the queen as conflicts between royalists and republicans intensify. The king, ignoring the precarious state of his rule, continues to hunt while the Cavaliere takes inventory of his collection, not knowing what will happen as the Neapolitan army marches on Rome. The hero, honored by the Neapolitan court, is also regarded as its savior.
The Cavaliere’s treasures are sunk on the way to England, and from Palermo the English exiles amuse themselves with parties, cards, and gossip. Emma, still fond of the Cavaliere, becomes enthralled by the hero and begins to behave outlandishly—as far as the English exiles are concerned. Even worse, the hero becomes an object of scornful criticism back home among his superiors. The Cavaliere, who no longer has sexual relations with Emma, tolerates her infidelity—in part because he is as devoted to the hero as she is. Even so, the aging Cavaliere is becoming irrelevant and now clearly an adjunct to any event that includes the hero and Emma. The characters in this triangle all seem at one remove from the reality represented by Baron Vitellio Scarpia, an agent of the king, who is as skeptical of the aristocracy, and those members of it who sympathize with the republicans, as he is of the people. Scarpia calmly stands by as a mob flays a duke, dismembering him and then roasting him alive. While the French take Naples, the court, the Cavaliere, and his wife retreat to Palermo. Scarpia bides his time—and indeed the revolutionaries retreat at the onslaughts of Cardinal Ruffo’s peasant army.
Now comes the period of reaction when the hero arrives in Naples to punish the revolutionaries, even though Ruffo has made peace terms guaranteeing their safety and removal to exile. Emma becomes the hero’s translator and is blamed for his revoking of Ruffo’s terms of peace. The narrator depicts the hero as devoid of common decency and in violation of the rules of war as he consigns so many to be hanged. The hero’s superiors are aghast at reports of his affair with Emma and his unprofessional and immoral behavior. As the narrator exclaims: “Eternal shame on the hero!” (296). The consequences of his cruelty are given in graphic detail. The hero remains implacable. But the Cavaliere is out of favor and is summarily recalled to England, his replacement as envoy a young man fresh from his first diplomatic posting. Rumors spread that the hero had become besotted with Emma and lingers in Naples while the French solidify their victories. Emma, already quite fat and no longer beautiful, is pregnant and seeks to hide her condition by the clever use of shawls.
The hero, with both Emma and the Cavaliere in tow, brazenly arrives in England to a rousing welcome from the British people but a decidedly cool reception from his superiors. He dines with his wife and Emma, much to the shame of his wife, and then the hero publicly snubs his wife and hardly makes an effort to conceal his infatuation with Emma. And yet he remains—as is shown in his appearance at a Drury Lane theater—the favorite of a grateful and admiring public. During this period an Irishman shatters the Portland vase, which is painstakingly put back together—in a way that lives cannot, the narrator pointedly observes. Somehow Emma is able to keep up public appearances dancing the tarantella in a way that suggests “pure energy, pure defiance, pure foreboding” (349). Part two ends with the Cavaliere growing enfeebled. He retires to a farmstead in Surrey, dying and dreaming about his losses.
Part three initiates the first of several monologues, a device that Sontag will repeat in In America, to express the shifting perspectives of biography and history, the role of the individual witness, and the concatenation of events that otherwise subsume and overwhelm individuals. It is as if she seeks to disrupt historical narratives, which tend to flatten out the role of individuals, making them seem only vessels of the moment, and restore to her characters the vitality of their contributions to history. The delirious Cavaliere on his deathbed recalls and sometimes distorts his memories, confusing and conflating people and events, as he remembers his wife, Catherine, the roles of Emma and the hero in his life, the drawing power of the volcano, his mania for collecting, his waning energy, and his personal extinction. He thinks of Pliny the Elder, who perished in Vesuvius, and then muses on his own place in history: “I would like to be remembered for the volcano” (370). This part, as in the previous parts, begins with one of the plates from the Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Hon. Wm. Hamilton, as if Sontag is honoring Hamilton’s dying wish.
Part four concludes the novel with a series of monologues, beginning with Catherine, who can now speak for herself and not just as a projection of the Cavaliere’s own account. She demonstrates that she was quite aware of her role as faithful wife, and how she had an almost ascetic sensibility but was aroused by her love of the Cavaliere, although she subdued her passion in response to his self-contained personality. She expresses a discontent, however, that her husband never imagined. She is disturbed by how women are thought to be different from men, and though she is no feminist or rebel, her uneasiness is palpable. “I should be able to imagine a life without him, but I cannot” (378), she admits. This confession from the grave is rather like the monologues in Sontag’s play, Alice in Bed, in that a conflicted feminine consciousness is probed, and the reasons why women do not go out into the world are canvassed from a point of view that suggests how estranged women have been in a world dominated by men.
The next monologue by Emma’s mother, Mrs. Cadogan, reveals the consciousness of a woman far more worldly than Catherine. Mrs. Cadogan is devoted to her daughter but also recognizes that she cannot control Emma’s singular appetite for worldly experience or Emma’s belief that she can master whatever comes her way. Mrs. Cadogan understands much more quickly than Emma did that Charles Greville never meant to marry Emma and that he has pawned her off on the Cavaliere. And Mrs. Cadogan watches in amazement and admiration as her daughter surmounts her disappointment over Charles and makes a place for herself in the Cavaliere’s life and at the Neapolitan court. Mrs. Cadogan seems an especially reliable witness because she is entirely unaffected and quite willing to acknowledge her misperceptions and mistakes—as in her decision to marry a man who abandons her. She keeps his name as a prudent move that maintains her respectability. This woman of the world understands that her daughter simply cannot resist the “little admiral” (394), an amusing phrase that strikingly brings “the hero” down to earth, as he is seen by a woman who does not engage in hero worship even as she recognizes why others do. It is through Mrs. Cadogan that news of the hero’s death is first announced, making this historic event more of a domestic disaster for a mother and daughter whose circumstances will now be greatly reduced.
Emma’s monologue follows as a kind of brief for her life and the magical aura that seemed to envelop her even as her critics decried her power over men. Emma credits herself with a power to listen and to become absorbed in lives of those she loved, which leads to her plight as scapegoat when the hero dies. She seeks exile in France of all places because England will not have her. Despite having been brought down in shame after her worldly success, Emma seems without self-pity or guilt about her actions and content with the part she had to play in history, although history—its meaning and consequences—hardly enters her consciousness.
The novel ends in a two-part monologue in which the first, the memoir of a poet, describes her fate as a revolutionary hanged in Naples. She goes to her execution without regret and with a sense of dignity that rebukes the dishonorable actions the narrator has deplored. In the second part, Eleonora de Fonsea Pimental, whose republican and revolutionary statements have been contrasted with the hero’s reactionary policies, restores to this part a historical consciousness as well as the mentality of a writer who has stood alone, separated from her husband, rejecting her royal patrons, publicly proclaiming an Ode to Liberty. She has spurned the life of privilege and scorned the way others accommodate to those in power, becoming adept at “abjection” (415). She refuses to become cynical about the power to do good even as she articulates her “hatred and contempt” (416) for the hero. Although this is the concluding monologue, Pimentel is by no means the authoritative voice. For example, she dismisses the Cavaliere as an “upper-class dilettante” (416) and Emma as a “nullity” (417)—judgments that are surely not the narrator’s, or the novel’s last word on these figures. Instead, Pimental’s monologue serves as a demonstration of feminist rage by a writer who specifically condemns the neglect of women’s education and their rights. Nevertheless, her last words do cast a forbidding light on the novel’s main characters: “They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all” (417).
It is not surprising that such an ambitious and daring novel provoked many different kinds of reactions. Daniel Max suggested that Sontag used the historical setting as a way of dealing with “contemporary social and political concerns.” He was not impressed, concluding that the novel is “carried off with little heart.” On the other hand, novelist A. S. Byatt praised the narrator’s “detached, energetic curiosity.” For all the absurdity of certain historical events, the novel achieved a “tragic dignity.” In sum, Byatt lauded a “slippery, intelligent, provocative and gripping book.” Michiko Kakutani admired the work’s “intimate and friendly voice” and its “firm moral and political point of view.” Maria Warner seemed especially impressed with the concluding female dialogues, although only the Cavaliere seemed to “win the author’s own allegiance,” Warner concluded. Similarly John Banville, a well-regarded historical novelist, deemed the Cavaliere Sontag’s finest achievement, although he slighted the novel as “old fashioned” and thought it was “curiously hollow.” Another novelist, David Slavitt, announced his verdict in the title of his review, “Susan Sontag Creates a Bold Historical Romance that Finally Mocks Itself.” Richard Eder said that The Volcano Lover was “both great fun and serious fun.” He noted the irony of the superior Cavaliere, the collector becoming one of the collected.3
As to the form of the novel, Rhoda Koenig suggested that Sontag’s philosophical asides interrupted and jarred the narrative—as did Jonathan Keates and Evelyn Toynton, who deplored the novelist’s “suffocatingly humorless” prose and her “string of verdicts and summations.” R. Z. Sheppard disliked the final female monologues, claiming that “Sontag, like Vesuvius, simply blew her top.” L. S. Klepp thought Sontag’s hatred of the hero destroyed the romance plot and unbalanced the novel. David Gates, on the other hand, extolled the novel’s “small, smart details” and the last monologues but deplored Sontag’s “amateurish” narrative. John Simon suggested that Sontag had written an “anti-romance,” which misfired because of so many contradictory aphorisms. In answer to Banville, Francis L. Bardacke, saw Sontag’s “deromanticizing” as the best way to subordinate the hero so that the love triangle with the Cavaliere and Emma remained credible. Putting The Volcano Lover in the context of her career as a fiction writer, Bernard F. Rodgers noted how Sontag’s expansive polyphonic narrative differed from the interiority of her first two novels.4
In a note on the copyright page of In America, Sontag notes that the inspiration of her novel is the life and career of Helena Modrzejewska, a nineteenth-century Polish actress who emigrated to America in 1876 and settled there with her husband, Count Karol Chapowski, and their fifteen-year-old son, Rudolf. She was surrounded by a colony of friends, including the future Polish Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz. Sontag does not disclose the sources she drew on—a decision that later spelled trouble when she was accused of plagiarism. Indeed, she arrogates to herself an absolute freedom from sources, insisting that much of what she has written is her own invention.5
Perhaps this insistence on originality for material that has its provenance in history is why Sontag begins In America, as she begins The Volcano Lover, with a preface in which the narrator takes possession of the story. In this case, however, the narrator is even more strongly identified with Sontag herself, since the narrator, like her creator, grows up in Arizona and California, with Marie Curie as the ideal figure the narrator wishes to emulate, much as Sontag did in her earliest ambition to be a scientist and humanitarian. Sontag even incorporates a recognition that she first made in her diary, dramatizing that entry by writing in the novel that at eighteen she read Middlemarch and “burst into tears because I realized not only that I was Dorothea, but that, a few months earlier, I had married Mr. Casaubon” (24)—that is, Philip Rieff. Sontag’s narrator has been to Sarajevo (the novel is dedicated to “my friends in Sarajevo”) and mistakes at first the Poles she hears in a room of her imagination as Bosnians, since both peoples have suffered occupation and partition.
This preface, titled “Zero,” perhaps because it lies outside the novel’s narrative, is meant, it seems, to suggest an affinity between the author and her material, or even that the characters (their historical actuality notwithstanding) are truly figments of her imagination not to be confused with their real-life originals. In effect, Sontag is trying to subvert the traditional argument against historical fiction: that the genre is not viable as an independent and autonomous art because its characters derive from a realm outside of the fiction itself. Sontag is arguing, in effect, that the characters are not true to history but only to her own sensibility and historical consciousness. It is a slippery maneuver, however, since that consciousness, as with the figures in The Volcano Lover, does have a stubborn extrafictional existence no matter how much Sontag believes she has co-opted them into her narrative. What is more, she will, like most historical novelists, cram in all sorts of detail derived from sources outside the novel. She cannot shuck from her novel the bits and pieces of characters who are, in part, composites of the history she has absorbed. To put it another way, Sontag’s historical consciousness cannot be considered entirely apart from the historical data she has sifted and amalgamated for her own purposes. Other novelists, such as Joyce Carol Oates in Blonde, have acknowledged their indebtedness to history by including an extensive list of sources, which is to acknowledge as well that her story is not entirely separate from those sources but arises out of the very stuff of history the novelist has attempted to reimagine and reinterpret.
“Zero” suggests that Sontag is returning to her beginnings in California even as her novel tells the story of a woman who wishes to make a new beginning for herself in the West. Sontag’s Maryna, like Sontag herself, is not content with her early success or with her status in a troubled land and moves across continents in search of her own salvation. She has Sontag’s charisma, the power of attraction that is apparent in the many letters that her admirers and lovers, female and male, sent to her, and that inspired the artist Joseph Cornell to make one of his famous boxes in tribute to her, a diva who commanded the world stage from California to Europe much as Sontag’s Maryna does in In America.6 But curiously, the narrator of “Zero” appears only once and then only briefly in the narrative proper. As a result, the interaction between the narrator, characters, and history that is such an integral part of The Volcano Lover is absent—and to the detriment of In America.
Chapter one begins with some of Maryna’s friends doubting the wisdom of leaving Poland for a new life in a farming commune in America. Can she really give up the stage and the recognition it brings, not to mention her devotion to Poland, now under occupation by the Russians, the Prussians, and the Habsburg Empire? At the same time, she is seconded by a devoted following of friends, including Ryszard, who hopes that by accompanying her to America he will win her love despite the presence of her doting husband, Bogdan. Maryna wants to jettison fame and create a new self.
Chapter two explores Maryna’s reasons for leaving, her desire to liberate herself in a free country, to make a future for her son Piotr that is not possible in Poland, and her insatiable quest for adventure. That both Bogdan and Ryszard are quite willing to accompany her only solidifies her desire to forge a new identity, one that is not dependent on her Polish audience or the demands of her patriotic contemporaries. She can do no more for Poland, she implies, but there is still much she can do for herself. She is, in fact, tired of dealing with the expectations of others and is willing to risk everything for a fresh start.
In chapter three, Ryszard and his friend, the critic Julien, also a friend of Maryna’s, form an advance party, traveling to America in preparation for her entrance. Here Sontag explores the world of steerage that Ryszard wishes to write about on his way over to America. Below decks the boat teems with poor immigrants, including a woman who sells her body to the Polish writer, who is ashamed of their assignation but also fascinated with her plight, as Maryna would be, he assures himself. The episode aboard ship seems a set piece to contrast the cramped and desperate nature of the journey to America with the arrival in New York City, which seems to contain elements of “everywhere.” It is there that Ryszard sees a poster touting California as the laborer’s paradise.
Maryna arrives in Manhattan in chapter four, making friends in the Polish community and dining at the famous Delmonico’s. She accompanies her son Piotr to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Everything is still a wonder to her, and she admires the unfinished quality of the country. Everything is still “under way” (147). To abandon acting, she asserts, is to leave behind the make-believe of bravery. Now she has an opportunity to act on quite another stage. But in chapter five, that new platform, Anaheim, California, represents not so much the reality of America as a utopia, the location of her dreams of unified, collective action of the kind not possible in Poland. She wants her commune to be self-supporting. She claims not to miss the theater and to be entirely committed to living off the land and “being stripped” (173) of her former self so that she can rebuild her life on new principles.
But the actual administration of the farm is a daunting task for Maryna’s Polish converts, who find an agricultural economy precarious and the work tiring. Maryna has trouble adjusting, especially when her son insists on a new name: Peter instead of Piotr. Maryna resists because the new name is Russian to her, but eventually she relents when her son steadfastly remains aloof until she accedes to his wish. Part of the problem is that her followers still regard her as a queen of the stage, and their sojourn in California takes on an unreal quality—a momentary diversion from her life’s work as a performer. An excursion with Ryszard, who briefly becomes her lover, also signals the end of the commune, when Maryna not only desires to return to the stage but to conquer a new audience in America. As Bogdan points out, what Maryna wanted all along was a renewal of herself; the farm, the commune, America, were all a pretext. But in returning to Bogdan, she also forsakes Ryszard, realizing that she needs her husband by her side as she relaunches her career.
In San Francisco, in chapter seven, Maryna engages Miss Collingridge to improve the actress’s English pronunciation, and she auditions for Angus Barton, a theater impresario. At this point, Sontag begins to tread on the ground Mark Twain brilliantly explored in his depiction of American eccentrics. If Maryna is to become an American star, she must jettison certain mannerisms, Barton advises, because audiences “don’t want a steady diet of lady” (241). But she triumphs over his skepticism and realizes that she can live fully only on the stage. Or, as she tells Ryszard, who continues to pursue her without more success: “I never know exactly what I feel when I’m not on a stage” (290). She lives to act.
In chapter eight, Maryna returns for a visit to Poland, but her place now is in America, where she embarks on a grueling cross-country tour. She also tries a series of performances in London and is well received, but without the kind of accolades she had become used to as an American star and as the great Sarah Bernhardt’s rival. Maryna is in such demand and her tours are so profitable that her manager has her own railroad car fitted out so that she can travel in style and comfort. But what to do with Maryna at this point seems uncertain—at least this is one interpretation of how Sontag decides to end the novel. Chapter nine concludes Maryna’s story with a long monologue by Edwin Booth, American’s greatest actor, who is haunted by the infamy of his brother John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin. The jaded Booth hectors Maryna in a very unpleasant, nonstop speech, telling her how to act, saying that she lacks a sense of tragedy (a bizarre comment to an actress from partitioned Poland), and, in sum, dictating how she should treat him. Except for a few instances where Maryna’s gestures or a few words of hers serve to placate Booth, why this monologue should become the novel’s ending is not clear. Perhaps like the monologues in The Volcano Lover, Sontag is content with an ironic commentary on what has gone before in the narrative, but in this case Booth’s insulting sarcasm is very hard to take as other than a mockery of Maryna’s own quest to establish a new identity. Booth, in other words, takes his place in a gallery of tiresome American characters who seem to reflect the disdain for America that Sontag evinces in so many of her articles and interviews.
In America received a much more problematic reception than did The Volcano Lover, although it won the National Book Award. Sarah Kerr had a high opinion of the novel, although the ideas seemed somehow predigested and lagged behind the characters and scenes. Michiko Kakutani, who had hailed The Volcano Lover, expressed her disappointment in a “banal, flat-footed narrative that chronicles the characters’ exploits through letters, journals and corny, omniscient voice-overs. ‘He was in a dark place,’ Sontag writes of one character, ‘where there were only wounds.’”John Sutherland was more blunt: “Let’s face it: if this was a first novel by a literary unknown it would have been lucky to make it into print.” James Woods, considered one of the best literary critics of the last two decades, lauded the novel for its meshing of narrative and history. To Elaine Showalter In America was “inert.” Michael Silverblatt gave the best rationale for “Zero” and Edwin Booth’s monologue, arguing that both were an antidote to Maryna’s “lacquered self-deception.” If true, though, why was Maryna, who dominates the novel, worthy of so much prose in the first place?7
Surprisingly, none of the reviewers noted that Maryna’s gift as an actress had to be taken on faith. What, after all, do we learn about her as an actress other than Booth’s criticism of her stage work? We learn about the plays in which she performed, but how they were performed and what they say about Maryna remains a mystery. She never really comes alive, on stage, which is, after all, where she truly finds herself—as Maryna is the first to confess. Instead Maryna simply stands for the idea of the diva and is something of an abstraction even though she arises out of an actual actress. Somehow, as Adam Begley concluded in the New York Observer, Sontag never allows the story to “do its work.”8