Understanding Susan Sontag

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931–2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.

As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers—explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives—and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.

In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli’s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.

Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was born in New York City and grew up in Tucson and Los Angeles, the daughter of Jack Rosenblatt, who owned a trading company in China. She thought of him as a departed merchant prince who died in China when she was only five years old. Mildred Jacobson Rosenblatt, Sontag’s mother, then married a highly decorated Air Force officer, Nathan Sontag. Susan took her stepfather’s name, as did her younger sister, Judith. With family connections to both Asia and Europe, even as she acclimated to the wide-open spaces of the West, Sontag, a precocious child, spent time in her Tucson backyard digging a hole to China.¹ While her father was still alive, the family based itself in a New York hotel—just one of many temporary abodes that seemed to forecast the fate of a peripatetic writer who saw herself as belonging less to any country than to the world itself, where she would go questing just like Richard Halliburton, her favorite author-adventurer.² That such a life and career would bring much unhappiness as well as fulfillment occurred to Sontag while she was quite young and already noting her joys and disaffections in her diaries.

Sontag grew up reading the biography of Marie Curie, a Pole who sought her life’s work and acquired fame in France—exactly where Sontag arrived in her formative years as a writer after earning an undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago and a master’s degree at Harvard University. Like Curie, who bound herself to a mate, her fellow scientist Pierre Curie, Sontag at the age of seventeen married the sociologist Philip Rieff, with whom she collaborated on a book about Freud’s contribution to western civilization. But both the traditional boundaries of academic life, and the conventional obligations of marriage, chafed an ambitious woman who was also aware, at quite a young age, that a so-called normal, heterosexual, and university-driven existence was not for her—even though into her thirties she still contemplated completing her Ph.D.

At nineteen, Sontag gave birth to a son, David Rieff, over whom she would lavish not a maternal care so much as the attachment of a sibling, like that of a sister for her younger brother. This unorthodox parenting was of a piece with her ambition to create a body of work that would challenge the pieties of American culture, the canons of literary study, and the traditional role of the public intellectual. Although she immersed herself in the bohemianism of Greenwich Village, she very quickly sought public platforms that overturned the alienated artist’s scorn for mainstream fame. Even as Sontag professed to abjure the very notion of careerism and popularity, she cultivated an appearance and personal style accentuated in photographs with a dramatic Holly­wood gloss calculated to invite mass media attention, which began when Time magazine featured an account of her groundbreaking essay Notes on ‘Camp,’ published in the Partisan Review (whose circulation was no more than ten thousand). Her appeal to both the literary elite and to a much broader literate audience in the 1960s broke new ground in the way so-called high and low culture were beginning to converge.

Sontag embodied the contradictions of her time—at once a serious and sometimes abstruse thinker and yet a highly quotable writer whose words made good newspaper copy. She distilled her insights into epigrams and epithets that popular publications could build stories around. The titles of her first books, such as Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will, were provocative and prescriptive. What Sontag described in essays—such as the spontaneous events called Happenings—she also made into required reading for anyone wanting to keep abreast of what was current and urgent in American culture. At the same time, she evaded the label of critic and functioned as a kind of impresario of the avant-garde and a practitioner, producing two experimental novels, The Benefactor and Death Kit, which established her credentials as a modernist akin to the European authors such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, whom she wrote about in essays that extolled their efforts to subvert traditional narratives and novelistic conventions. Her early films Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl, which she wrote and directed in Sweden, were inspired by the work of Ingmar Bergman, especially Persona, the topic of one of Sontag’s signature essays touting the superior European probing of modern identity. Her later play Alice in Bed completed her highly self-conscious effort to conflate feminism and modernism in scenes that explored the lives of Alice James and Emily Dickinson.

In the economy of publishing, Sontag was the total package—essayist, novelist, playwright and filmmaker—kept in print and aggressively marketed abroad by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She, in turn, amplified her authority by appearing on panel discussions, delivering public lectures, and joining protests against the Vietnam War and against social injustice. In this respect, she was like her European models, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, who defined the public intellectual as one who stood apart from governmental authority, even though, like other writers of her generation, Sontag enjoyed her share of State Department junkets to Europe when she was not managing her own dissenter’s trips to Hanoi and later to Sarajevo, where, in her view, the fate of Western Civilization was being worked out.

Sontag benefited as well from the women’s movement of the 1970s, even though she declared her independence from movement politics in her attack on Leni Riefenstahl, who had become, in Sontag’s view, a feminist icon notwithstanding her fascist aesthetics. Sontag also angered a generation of leftists in her controversial Town Hall speech in 1982 when she described Communism as Fascism with a human face. In effect, she was repudiating many of her own political causes, including her championing of Communist Cuba and North Vietnam. She stood out from groups and organizations, and yet she also solidified her public persona in her role as president of the American PEN Center. Her assumption of such an office signaled the later phase of her career, in which she eschewed her earlier concerns with popular culture and accelerated her missionary fervor for guiding elite tastes in literature as featured by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, highly regarded for its publication of European authors, many of them Nobel Prize winners.

Sontag’s position as a kind of intellectual arbiter reached an apogee with the publication of On Photography (1977) and Illness as Metaphor (1978), the former poised exquisitely between the claims of photography as a craft or art, and the latter repudiating the mythology of disease as a manifestation of the human psyche, a mythology she replaced with a bracing reliance on the science of human biology and the rational explanation of disease as cells gone wrong. These two books increased her stature as a touchstone figure in discussions of medical ethics and aesthetic standards. Her work also made her a target for those with contrary views, who termed her arguments rebarbative because she refused to consider either the possible psychic roots of sickness or the psychology of the artist.

Under the Sign of Saturn signaled her narrowing focus on creative nonfiction writers like Walter Benjamin and Elias Canetti, whom she extolled in the old eighteenth/nineteenth-century man-of-letters mode. These essays produced a quasi-biographical/critical approach rendered in cerebral narratives that foreshadowed her discursive novel The Volcano Lover, an account of the famous Admiral Nelson–Sir William Hamilton–Emma Hamilton triangle. History, never a very important category in Sontag’s earlier taxonomic essays, became paramount as she began to rewrite her literary past, returning to the subject of photography in Regarding the Pain of Others, for example, but also subsuming her own autobiography in another novel, In America, the story of a nineteenth-century Polish actress and her encounter with a new land, especially the California of Sontag’s youth.

Sontag spent her last years writing novels and attempting to avoid the kind of essay work that many critics still believe is her greatest achievement. But she nevertheless worked on a final book of nonfiction prose that would sum up and amplify her aesthetic, moral, and political positions. The books published about her after her death reckon with her as a public intellectual and as a powerful personality who made herself a cynosure of contemporary culture. Indeed, her most lasting achievement may well be this conception of her as a sensibility attuned to the widest possible vision of the modern writer, a vision she explored with singular tenacity and provocation, if not always with the kind of rigor expected of professional philosopher, critic, or aesthetician. Her aphoristic way of defining issues and bringing them to a point of acute consciousness seems, in the final analysis, her most impressive accomplishment.

CHAPTER 2

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