The Uncollected Susan Sontag
Nonfiction
Although Susan Sontag collected a substantial body of her work in book-length publications, significant articles and essays published in newspapers, journals, and magazines are uncollected and reflect important aspects of her thinking and of her career as writer. Discussing these pieces in chronological order is another way of gauging the range and implications of her interests.
Sontag’s review of H. J. Kaplan’s novel, The Plenipotentiaries in Chicago Review (Winter 1950, 49–50) was her first professional publication. Set in Paris, the novel concerns the love and powerful struggle between a couple that is reminiscent of Duet for Cannibals. The expatriate flavor of this fiction would naturally appeal to a writer already versed in the journals of André Gide and more attuned to cultural events in Europe than in the United States, as her memoir “Pilgrimage” reveals.
In her first years as an independent writer living in New York City, Sontag published a review in the Columbia Daily Spectator (November 18, 1960, 3–4, 8) of Tom F. Driver’s The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama. In “The History of Drama,” she revealed her strong interest in the history of religion. Drawn to Driver’s exploration of the Biblical (linear) and the cyclical senses of time in Hegel, Marx, Tillich, Nietzsche, Spengler, and Eliade, she confirmed Driver’s argument that these different senses of time were muddled in discussions of drama. She also took issue with Daniel Bell’s influential book The End of Ideology (1960), which contended that ideologies had been exhausted and are irrelevant. She rejected Bell’s views because they simply endorsed the status quo.
In “Demons and Dreams,” a review of I. B. Singer’s novel The Slave (Partisan Review, Summer 1962, 460–63), Sontag favored his “power of sensuous evocation”—so different from most contemporary novels that psychologize characters. She called his depiction of Polish Jewry “pre-modern.” His characters, products of a traditional society with a powerful sense of community, seemed to her to point the way to a revival of fiction that could “renew our capacities for emotional catharsis.” Sensuous, a key word in the Sontag lexicon, defined for her the art she extolled in Against Interpretation.
The Garden by Yves Berger is a first novel Sontag touted in “Virginia Is a State of Mind” (New York Herald Tribune Book Week, September 15, 1963, 18, 28) as an “interior meditation,” the kind of nouveau roman she would endorse in Against Interpretation. She called the novel a philosophical romance—a term that could also apply to her first novel, The Benefactor. In fact, the novel is revealed as the book Berger has just written, just as Sontag’s novel is an extension of Hippolyte’s dreams.
“A Voluptuary’s Catechism” (New York Herald Tribune Book Week, October 6, 1963, 6, 21) clearly foreshadows Sontag’s later writing about pornography in Styles of Radical Will. In her review of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, she insisted that his indulgence in cruelty and sexual perversity is not pornographic, but spiritual, because of his “shamelessly aesthetic” manner of presentation.
“A New Life for an Old One,” a review of John Hawkes’s novel Second Skin (New York Times Book Review, April 5, 1964, 5), staked out Sontag’s quarrel with the contemporary American novel. Unlike Bernard Malamud’s novel A New Life, which just reports the story of a man experiencing joy in a reborn life, Hawkes enacts this sense of renewal in a style that transcends the boundaries of Malamud’s realism. If Hawkes’s handling of certain details and emotions seems too understated, she contended, his work nevertheless is a considerable achievement. Sontag revealed a similar bias in “Laughter in the Dark,” a review of James Purdy’s novel Cabot Wright Begins in the New York Times Book Review (October 25, 1964, 5), preferring his antirealistic novel Malcolm to his current novel’s snapshot picture of small-town American life.
In general, during this period, Sontag welcomed work that brought new energy not only to fiction but also to the theater. She reviewed Inadmissible Evidence by British playwright John Osborne, commenting in “Vogue’s Notebook: Theatre” (Vogue, August 15, 1965, 51–52) that the London production brought “new energy” into the predictable well-made play patented in West End theaters. But in performance the play also seemed “shallow, exhibitionistic, fragmented.”
In “Pop Goes the Easel” (New York Herald Tribune Book Week, July 25, 1965, 1, 12–13), Sontag reviewed two books (John Rublowsky’s Pop Art and Henry Geldzahler’s American Painting in the Twentieth Century), deploring their vapid styles and labeling of pop art, which misread artists like Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, whose work have an ironic sensibility and consciousness of the history of art that these critics failed to acknowledge. In short, she was calling for a more sophisticated criticism. This piece probably was not included in Against Interpretation because its tone departs from her desire to endorse good work and promising critical approaches. Similarly, “Apocalypse in a Paint Box” (Washington Post Book World, November 21, 1965, 4, 26–27) faulted Maurice Nadeau’s The History of Surrealism for not clearly assessing what no longer was important about the movement or what remained of it that was relevant. She argued that more attention should be directed to Surrealism’s modernist thrust, concerned with “complexities and contradictions” that remain a challenge to traditional definitions of art. In this article, Sontag began to work out her extended argument about Surrealism that appears in On Photography.
At the earliest stages of her publishing career, Sontag took on reference book assignments. Thus in the “Literature” entry for The Great Ideas of Today, 1966 (146–91), she divided her discussion of the year into five categories: “Realism,” “The Avant-Garde,” “The Joycean Tradition,” “The Literature of Extreme Situations, and “Literature: Between Art and Life.” Her discussion of these categories was bound by three principles: By literature she meant works of art, works of thought, which, in turn, narrowed to art or literature that was “in a state of crisis.” She discussed writers such as Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, and Flannery O’Connor, who remained in the realist tradition, creating plots considered credible and complex characters who speak in an “ordinary” language easily assimilated by readers. Realism was still the dominating force in fiction, written as though such great experimentalists as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Gertrude Stein had never existed. A few contemporaries, such as William Burroughs and Laura Riding, wrote in a more analytical and intellectual mode, in styles she deemed cinematic, plotless, fragmented, and from shifting points of view. A writer such as William Gass, in Omsetter’s Luck, continued the Joycean tradition of poetic prose filled with an exuberant, experimental energy. Writers as various as Foucault and Nabokov explored extreme states of consciousness, including madness, and employed an inventive language that implicitly undermined the realist tradition. Sontag concluded this survey with recommending Robbe-Grillet’s playful, mind-altering prose, which elevated the creativity of art and liberated it from the realist tradition.
In “Transmitting His Master’s Voice,” a review of A Psycho-Analytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907–1926 (Washington Post Book World, April 3, 1966, 2–3, 12–13), Sontag emphasized the two men’s shared Jewishness and dedication to making a map out of psychoanalytic ideas presented in a clear, rational system. This is the scientific model, she pointed out, which Freud insisted on because his system could then be shared and replicated by others. The alternative, treating psychoanalysis as an art, necessarily places emphasis on the creator, on the individual and on art’s quest not exclusively for knowledge but for pleasure. Pleasure, of course, is a key value that Sontag associated with Roland Barthes, who emphasized that art is a means of discovery but does not lead to some end outside of itself. In her preface to Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero (1968), she contrasted Barthes’s interest in literature as process with Sartre’s notion of writing as product.
“Yugoslav Report: Writers and Conferences” (Partisan Review, Winter 1966, 116–23) reflects Sontag’s early interest in PEN long before she became president of the American PEN Center. While expressing disappointment in the talks, which seemed to ignore the specific concerns of writers, and with the sparse attendance of important writers, she was impressed with the goodwill of those who considered themselves part of a worldwide literary community. For an American, Sontag noted, such conferences helped dispel provinciality. She was cool toward Arthur Miller’s plan to increase the American role in the organization, thus signaling her already well-established preference for European modes of thoughts and for those European writers who exemplified her own dedication to literature.
Sontag’s lack of interest in the contemporary American novel, evident in Against Interpretation, may explain why she did not include “The Avant-Garde and Contemporary Literature” (Wilson Library Quarterly, June 1966, 930–32, 937–40) in her collection of essays. Her definition of avant-garde went beyond the generally understood notion of a movement that challenges traditional art and creates new art form. The avant-garde has an epistemology, Sontag argued, which rejects the contemporary novel’s slavish adherence to representation and imitation. The novel, Sontag suggested, can stand by itself and create its own meaning, rather then remain dependent on some construct of reality outside itself to which it must be faithful.
One of Sontag’s earliest political pieces, “We Are Choking with Shame and Anger,” published in Teach-Ins: U.S.A.; Reports, Opinions, Documents, 345–49), edited by Louis Menasche and Ronald Radosh and published by Praeger in 1967, is a speech originally delivered at Town Hall in Manhattan, urging Vietnam War protestors not to be consumed by their outrage, converting it only into rhetoric. Indignation, she cautioned, was not enough. On the contrary, she recommended self-questioning, a form of inquiry into one’s own motivations that she would later conduct (fitfully) on herself in “Trip to Hanoi.”
The more strident, programmatic side of Sontag’s thinking is displayed in her untitled piece in ¡Viva Che! Contributions in Tribute to Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, edited by Marianne Alexandre (London: Lorrimer, 1968, 106–10). She extolled the Cuban revolutionary as the “most unequivocal image of the humanity of the world-wide revolutionary struggle.” At this stage in her career, Sontag still believed that contemporary Marxists, especially those in the postcolonial and developing countries, could develop a model of Communism that would redeem the “traumatic betrayal” by Stalinists. Guevara was important because of his commitment to the international cause of liberation, which, Sontag insisted, was founded on “democratic practices.”
In part, Sontag looked to Guevara as a kind of redeemer because of her view of her own country as “a vast sickening menace to the peace of the world,” as she put it in “Perspectives on the Coming Elections” in Win (March 31, 1968, 3–5). American society would change only over a long period if radicals continued to organize into effective groups and promoted a deepening consciousness of the radical changes required in American society. While the two-party system prevailed, and voting for one party or the other would make a concrete difference, radicals nevertheless had to work at enlarging the scope of debate.
“Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution” appeared in Ramparts magazine (April 1969, 6, 10, 14, 16, 18–19)—then perhaps the most important widespread vehicle for radical thought and coverage of contemporary events. This article was also the culmination of Sontag’s early period of radicalization, when nothing seemed more urgent than finding new models of revolutionary and democratic societies to serve in the protest against what Sontag saw as America’s rapacious and corrupt capitalism with imperialistic designs on the rest of the world. But the New Left no longer viewed itself as merely opposing a political system in the same terms as the old left. The former was engaging in what Sontag called a “psychic revolution” that challenged “basic cultural norms.” Members of the New Left focused on freedom of the self and were more provincial than their radical predecessors. This very individualism made the New Left misinterpret the Cuban revolution, which was not so much about the liberation of individuals as it was about empowering a whole society with a revolutionary consciousness. Unlike American radicals, Cuban revolutionaries had no Protestant ethic to rebel against, no tradition of concern with the reform of the soul and self, and as a result Cubans were more community minded then their radical American counterparts. Cubans therefore did not share the American radicals’ rejection of American culture. A Cuban revolutionary’s commitment to the public sphere, in other words, did not come with the kind of psychological baggage that informed American radicals rebelling against their upbringings. Cuban internationalism was more connected to what was happening in world capitals such as Rome or Stockholm than was the case with the New Left. Sontag saw a certain lack of discipline in American dissenters fixated on what was wrong with American culture. She urged the new generation of Americans to think more in terms of what was happening in other parts of the world and less on their quarrel with traditional American values. In effect, she was suggesting that the Cuban Revolution had its own value that Americans needed to absorb, instead of projecting an American program on what was happening in Cuba.
In “Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity,” included in The Art of Revolution, edited by Dugald Stermer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970, vii–xxiii), Sontag situated her reading of Cuban posters in terms of how this genre began as commercial art but was soon adapted to fine art by French artists and others for their own aesthetic and ironic purposes. Posters had always been associated with causes and social movements, she noted in a discussion of World War I patriotic posters, before pivoting to a discussion Cuban posters aimed at “firing moral sympathies rather than promoting private appetites.” Compared to contemporary avant-garde French political posters, the Cuban variety tended to be straightforward and understated. Once again Sontag invoked the idea of “pleasure” in the Cuban articulation of “complex moral ideas,” attitudes, and “ennobling historical references.” She did recognize, however, that for the individual artist the sociocultural element of posters could be problematic: How to be part of a revolutionary society and still maintain an individual vision and art? Then she shifted the ground of her argument to suggest that Cuban posters reflected revolutionary internationalist values as opposed to the socialist realism of conforming Soviet artists. And unlike fascist posters, Cuban posters did not seek to “purify” or “glorify” a nationalist culture. She doubted whether a revolutionary poster art could survive in a capitalist society, where poster art was a “mass addiction.”
Sontag’s mention of Stockholm in her Ramparts article about the Cuban revolution reflected her nearly two-year stay in Sweden to work on two films, Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl. Although Stockholm might have seemed like a model society for Sontag to tout when decrying American provincialism, in fact in “A Letter from Sweden” (Ramparts, July 1969, 23–38), her disaffection with her Scandinavian sojourn is evident. She found the Swedes complacent. Compared to Americans, Swedes seemed even more isolated and passive. They seemed to think very little about the implications of their behavior, as if they were deliberately avoiding any sort of conflict. Alcoholism was one of the few ways repressed Swedes could let out their feelings. Otherwise they appeared to have a mania for locking things up—another sign of their repression. Underlying such behavior was a pervasive anxiety that made conversation difficult and was only relieved by their love of nature. This last point is a curious one, perhaps saying as much about Sontag as about the Swedes, since she had almost no feeling for nature, no understanding of how it functioned as a constituent of the human psyche. Even the tepid nature of Swedish pornography offended her. Compared to Japanese erotica, the Swedish variety was “anti-erotic.” Not even Swedish food got a good review. Its bland flavors reflected the conflicted nature of Swedish reactions to sensuality. Swedish socialism was hardly more appealing. If it eschewed the competitiveness of capitalism, it was not based on any genuine cooperative spirit. This virtually soporific society only awakened in its protests against the Vietnam war, which galvanized Swedes to make common cause with the New Left. This passionate commitment to protest was one of the few outlets Swedes permitted themselves; otherwise they were in a chronic state of depression.
Sontag’s grim view of Sweden is reflected in the films she made there, especially in her view of the cannibalistic nature of radical politics, which she saw as a primitive, raw desire for power. Primitivism in both its historical and cultural dimensions fascinated Sontag, as is shown in her entry on “Primitivism” for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (vol. 18, 1970, 531–32), in which she explored how attitudes toward nature define the idea of the primitive. She discussed the idealization of nature in the Greco-Roman world, the corruption of nature in the Garden of Eden story, and the conflict-ridden working out of the classical and Christian traditions in medieval culture, which viewed nature as part of a corrupt creation and, in turn, expressed an anti-intellectual attitude that rejected the classical notion of nature as the source of wisdom. She then explored how in later periods Romantic writers invested primitivism with a liberating power that was expressed in widely different ways by Rousseau, Nietzsche, Wordsworth, Freud, Artaud, and Picasso.
In “The Double Standard of Aging” (Saturday Review, September 23, 1972, 29–38), Sontag began to explore ideas about the plight of women that she later developed in her play Alice in Bed and in her introduction to Women, Annie Leibovitz’s collection of photographs. A woman’s age, and how that age is interpreted, Sontag contended, differs from responses to a man’s age—no matter whether the society was pre- or postindustrial. And no matter which society is examined, responses to aging are “much more a social judgment than a biological eventuality.” For women their sexual attractiveness is a matter of their youth, and women beyond the age of thirty-five are deemed less desirable even though biologically in the years between thirty-five and fifty they are at their sexual peak. All women, Sontag argued, are actresses in the sense that they are concerned with an image of themselves, with stabilizing that image, since the societal concept of beauty demands that the face and body do not change. Aging female flesh is regarded with horror because what is desirable is the girl, whereas for men at least two attractive standards are possible: the boy and the man. In response to this double standard, women must begin to treat themselves as “full human beings,” allowing their faces and bodies to tell the truth about themselves.
Sontag’s fullest exploration of female beauty occurs in The Volcano Lover in passages about the Cavaliere’s wife (Emma Hamilton) whose early beauty captures the imagination of her husband, a connoisseur and collector of beautiful objects but also of “the hero” (Lord Nelson), who falls in love not with the young beauty but with the aging, corpulent Emma. The nature of this couple’s intense love fascinated Sontag because even as their society scorns their liaison they remain enraptured with one another. In effect, the hero and the Cavaliere’s wife actuate the kind of mutual love that Sontag suggested is nearly impossible because of society’s very restricted sense of beauty. Emma’s fate, however, is grim: Both her husband, Sir William Hamilton, and her hero, die, leaving her unprotected and no longer immune to society’s condemnation. The very uniqueness of her love and life render her unfit by conventional standards, so she must perish alone and despised.
“Susan Sontag Tells How It Feels to Make a Movie” (Vogue, July 1974, 118–19) is essentially a promotional piece for her documentary Promised Lands. Unlike the writer, she explained, the filmmaker is vulnerable to accidents, the casting of certain actors, funding, and even the weather. Even though Promised Lands is a documentary, Sontag saw the film as a reflection of her own sensibility, meaning that there was a continuity between her writing and her work in cinema. Thus the term documentary seemed too narrow when applied to her film. She compared Promised Lands to Brechtian drama, which is not plot driven but presents “a condition rather than an action.”
Although Promised Lands fully reflects the stalemated condition of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it also evinces Sontag’s belief in a dialogue that could conceivably lead, eventually, to peace. Thus it is not surprising that in “Notes on Optimism,” an article in Vogue (January 1975, 100, 148, 154), coauthored with her son David Rieff, she argued essentially that optimism can be the only viable position to take, since pessimism is simply an acceptance of the status quo. She saw promising developments in China, North Vietnam, and Cuba in encouraging a sense of community. Similarly, protests against capital punishment as cruel and unusual and women’s efforts to lead independent lives suggested to her that it is pointless to take a defeatist attitude, and thus we must act to enforce our beliefs even if we expect the worst.
One of Sontag’s least effective pieces is a short article on artist Francis Bacon for Vogue (March 1975, 136–37). She believed he was less English than European because of his affinity with the heroic figures of Western painting, including Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, and Goya. The painter’s persona was that of the late developer cultivating the aura of the elusive artist, immune to fame. It would seem, in this case, that Sontag was projecting some of her own sensibility, suggesting that the artist’s paintings do not have a theme so much as they exemplify “being in pain.”
In “A Woman’s Beauty: Put-down or Power source?” (Vogue, April 1975, 118–19), Sontag returned to the singular way women are measured against a standard of beauty, which encourages self-absorption, dependence, and immaturity. Women are fragmented into parts, making it difficult for them to assess their whole beings. Beauty must be recontextualized, Sontag argued, so as to separate it from the “mythology of the ‘feminine.’” How to counter that mythology was the thrust of a follow-up piece, “Beauty: How Will It Change Next?” (Vogue, May 1975, 116–17, 174), which noted that ideas of beauty and freedom are incompatible, since beauty is equated with the exceptional and contrasted with what is common. Beauty, in short, is an “ideology,” a cultural construct that does not exist in China, for example. That ideology, however, is subverted in the androgynous performances of David Bowie, for example, and the 1960s craving for a “plurality of styles.” Sontag extended her discussion of beauty in the lead essay in Where the Stress Falls.
Sontag’s articles in Vogue seem to be, in part, a response to the second wave of feminism that began in the 1970s, although she never associated herself directly with the women’s liberation movement and did not adopt its jargon. In “Women: Can Rights be Equal?” (Vogue, July 1976, 100–101), Sontag did address a decade of feminist activism, noting that the drive for the Equal Rights Amendment actually suggested the waning powers of the cause. The ERA had been regarded, to begin with, as a reformist measure and hardly the goal of revolutionary feminism, but had since become part of a “front line of struggle.” The ERA had symbolic value, but Sontag did not wish to see it become so all important. Most important still was changing the way men and women thought about equal rights.
In an introduction to Peter Hujar’s Portraits in Life and Death (New York: Da Capo, 1976), Sontag extended the argument she made in On Photography, noting the photograph’s tendency to romanticize reality so that the ordinary could seem unique. Photography records but it also re-creates the world. Even death becomes a subject of the romantic camera eye, and Hujar’s portraits of friends (including Sontag) become posed as part of a meditation on dying. As has often been noted, his photographs of the Palermo Catacombs directly influenced the final scene in Death Kit.
Although Sontag’s contribution to a symposium published in Photography within the Humanities, edited by Eugenia Parry Janis and Wendy MacNeill (Danbury, N.H.: Addison House, 1977, 110–21), repeats the arguments of On Photography, Sontag provided a more personal perspective by calling herself a “photograph junkie” who cut photographs out of magazines. She also suggested that an uneasiness about photography’s status as an art persists. Even so, its place in a study of the humanities can be crucial since photography can be regarded as a “meta-art … where all kinds of sociological and moral and historical questions can be raised.” In a related article, “Looking with Avedon” (Vogue, September 1978, 461, 507–8), she suggested that fashion photography can become “disinterested, ironic,” and a commentary on the “idea of the fashionable.” Sontag implied that photography, like film and the other arts, can be a commentary on itself—as is a film like the seven-hour Hitler, A Film From Germany, which she also discussed in Under the Sign of Saturn. In “Our Hitler: A Masterpiece from Germany” (Vogue, May 1980, 256, 325), Sontag suggested that the director was less concerned with the typical documentary filmmaker’s concern with the “Hitler-that-was” and more with the contemporary view of him. By focusing on the image of Hitler, Hans Jurgen Syberberg transcended the “primal opposition” between “fiction and documentary” by showing how a culture’s perceptions of a figure like Hitler derives from both history and the imagination.
“On Dance and Dance Writing” (New Performance, 1981, 72–81), Sontag explored an art form that, in part, grew out of her relations with dancers like Lucinda Childs, who dances in Sontag’s film Unguided Tour. Sontag believed that choreographers and dancers were producing some of the “best work in the world.” As a form of modernism, dance set new standards as defined by some of the best dance criticism written by Edwin Denby, who was especially attuned to the way dancer’s bodies are used to create new forms. While dance can be appreciated in terms of abstract form, it is also, like the other arts, the product of specific cultures and artists, so that dance, like the other arts, can also be political.
Sontag’s own involvement in politics became the focus of “The Hard Lesson of Poland’s Military Coup” (Los Angeles Times, February 14, 1982, part IV, 2), in which she excoriated the “so-called democratic left” for not engaging in an honest anti-Communism—in part, because of a response to McCarthyism, which made anti-Communism seem like a reactionary movement. Sontag confessed that she, too, had been reluctant to condemn Communism in a forthright fashion in spite of eloquent testimony from Polish exiles such as Czeslaw Miłosz. Like the rest of the left, she spent too much time trying to “distinguish among communisms.” The Polish Communism crackdown on the Solidarity union and its supporters showed that Communism was another form of fascism, a truth that the Left had spent too much time denying.
Sontag’s speech to students “Be Bold! Be Bold!” (Realia, December 1983, 15) reads almost like a coda to her comments on von Stroheim’s fate in Hollywood, since she targeted censorship as a “formal principle” that prevented great art from being created and distributed. What bothered her was the provincialism of censors, which could be countered, she urged, by thinking of art in international terms, which could promote and secure the “existence of liberty.”
In “Images of People Past” (Art and Antiques, May 1984, 66–67), Sontag contrasted the impact of words and images by examining Paul Nadar’s photographs of Proust’s contemporaries with passages from Proust’s fiction. Whereas Proust could narrate the lives of his characters and provide them with a sensual attraction, Nadar’s photographs seemed remote, mask-like. Despite photography’s association with the real and concrete, and with stopping time in an image, Proust’s words capture the effect of time more decisively than an effort to use photographs to illustrate his narration.
In “Model Destinations” (TLS, June 1984, 699–700), Sontag explored the nature of travel in classical, medieval, and modern literature—from the notion of utopia as a travel destination to the ideas of the Romantics, who used travel as way of examining their own mentalities in quest of a paradise lost. She also commented on how modern travelers looked to peasant societies to reflect on the past, on the premodern, and to criticize modern consumer society. Communist governments, well aware of the traveler’s desire to find an alternative to their flawed societies, were careful to present only a positive experience. This was a problem she struggled with in “Trip to Hanoi.”
In “When Writers Talk among Themselves” (New York Times Book Review feature, January 5, 1986, 1, 22–23), Sontag dealt with the contrast between the writer’s solitude, when the writing gets done, and the invitations to public events like writers’ congresses. Such meetings inevitably raised questions about culture and cultural relations that led writers into the political realm, even though the congresses themselves were supposed to be “beyond politics.” To Sontag, the value of such gatherings was the opportunity for writers to converse about their work. When a writer did speak about politics, she noted, the nature of the audience made a key difference—whether it consisted of fellow writers, as in her addresses to writers about Communism and fascism in 1977 and 1980, or nonwriters in 1982, when her words stirred considerable animosity and attacks on her.
“Fragment of an Aesthetic of Melancholy,” in “Veruschka”: Trans-figurations by Vera Lehndorff and Holger Trülzsch (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986, 6–12), reads like an addendum to Under the Sign of Saturn and On Photography. Sontag’s ostensible subject is the actress and model Veruschka, but as the quotation marks in the book’s title suggest, it is not Veruschka per se but rather her representation in photographs that is the true concern. The photographs explore the nature of artifice that could both camouflage the self and make that self a spectacle, as in the theatricality of fashion photography, in which clothes painted on a body, so to speak, entomb it, making, in this case, an object out of the actress, who becomes passive and simply part of the form that the photograph captures. And yet setting some of the photographs in the ruins of abandoned industrial and commercial spaces inevitably suggest ruination and desolation, even though Veruschka remains a dynamic figure opposed to traditional representations of a seated Melancholy.
Sontag’s preface to Maria Irene Fornés: Plays (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986, 7–10), emphasizes the Cuban playwright’s “aversion to the reductively psychological”—a stance that Sontag shared. The intellectual quality of Fornés’s plays impressed Sontag as well as the playwright’s depiction of women’s lives and her understanding of history. Even the more realistic plays, Sontag argued, are of a piece with Fornés’s “theatre of fantasy.”
Politics and cultural commentary merge to some extent in “In Conclusion …” (East-West Journal, December 1987, 99–106), Sontag’s contribution to a conference on humor, which is often defined in the context of particular societies. Folk humor, for example, is related to local, regional, and national traditions. She cited theoreticians such as Bergson, Freud, and Bakhtin, who treated humor as a form of disruptive criticism. How critics react to a film as humorous can say as much about their cultural predispositions as about the film, Sontag noted, when contrasting her view of Kind Hearts and Coronets with the reactions of an Indian colleague.
“Pilgrimage” (New Yorker, December 21, 1987, 38–40, 50, 53–54) is Sontag’s most extended autobiographical essay. It centers on her visit to Thomas Mann. This version of the visit differs markedly from her account in her diary (see chapter eight), relating how, as a high school student, she was cajoled by her friend Merrill into contacting the famous German author living in exile in Los Angeles. The essay contrasts the prisonhood of her childhood and bookish sensibility with the superficial affability of her stepfather and the drivel of the culture around her. She identified with Hans Castorp, the hero of Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, and regarded the novel’s author as a literary god. So she could not conceive of why Mann would want to meet her. He seemed as remote from her existence as movie stars like Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper. But Merrill took the initiative, and Sontag submissively accompanied him to Mann’s home, where the students had little to say, and Sontag was shocked by how frail Mann looked in person. Nevertheless, Sontag was able to exercise her passion for music by discussing Wagner and Mann’s new book. And at least Sontag was heartened to hear Mann say that The Magic Mountain was his greatest novel. In this rendition of tea with a famous author, Sontag portrayed herself as retiring and puzzled as to why Mann was so kind to these nobodies who had looked him up. She also had to agree with Merrill that they hadn’t made “total fools” of themselves. The story, and it reads like a story, seems almost a parable about the perils of meeting one’s literary idol. It is also a revealing record of Sontag’s sense of isolation and inability to share her enthusiasms with others, except for a very few friends. In the end, “Pilgrimage” is about Sontag’s quest, her journey to discover literary greatness and to be found worthy of the company of great writers.
Fiction
“Man with a Pain” (Harper’s, April 1964, 72–75) reads almost like an amalgam of The Benefactor and Death Kit. The story is set in Manhattan and centers on a protagonist who cannot make his peace with the city. He feels fragmented, his days full of accidents, anxieties, and a sense of isolation, but the story lacks development and is more the description of a condition than a narrative of events—in keeping with Sontag’s early rejection of conventional fiction with its well-made plots and characters that fit into the conventions of realism.
“Description (of a Description)” (Antaeus, Autumn 1984, 111–14) is another oblique study of a narrative consciousness, given from two perspectives of a man who collapses on a public street. Customary explanations of the man’s conditions are thwarted. He cannot be placed certainly in the context of society, or of psychology. Why the man falls and what the fall means are never explained. The last section of the story suggests that he may have been reacting to a love affair, but even the timing of his fall and whether it is a present or future event cannot be known for sure. Is this a story about disintegration, the disintegration of the character and of the narrative that attempts to tell his story?
Like “Description (of a Description),” “The Letter Scene” (New Yorker, August 18, 1986, 24–32) is more of a meditation than a narrative. A variation on Scene II of Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin, the story of Tatyana writing a love letter to Eugene receives complex treatment in a multiplicity of voices, including Eugene’s as he writes a letter to his father (not included in the opera); thus the nature of the letters themselves and the language that expresses them become the focus of the story, if it can be called that. Allusions to Sontag’s divorce from Philip Rieff also call into question the story’s status as fiction. Letters can be expressions of love but also “a way of keeping someone at a distance.”
“The View from the Ark,” in Violent Legacies: Three Cantos by Richard Misrach (New York: Aperture, 1992), reads as a kind of framework for Misrach’s photographs from a nuclear test site in Nevada. This is yet another experimental fiction unrelated, it seems at first, to the photographs. Sontag’s narrator, “one of the descendants of Noah,” discusses the nature of storytelling. Then a familiar Sontag theme is explored: the differences between seeing and knowing, between pictures and stories. The theme uniting the disparate parts of Sontag’s fiction seems to be the recurrence of “bad news all the time,” the announcement that “it’s a cruel world out there.” Just ignoring this news is what leads to the “pleasure of killing.” Notwithstanding these gloomy thoughts, the possibility is raised that the world can be saved by the possibility of imagining it saved—that is, by literature itself. Sontag’s abstruse exchanges seem to be a more elaborate way of restating her philosophical belief in optimism, which is expressed directly in her “Notes on Optimism.”