Review: Ann Kjellberg on Susan Sontag, Part II
Gary Michael Perry, acting head of fiction for Foyles bookshop in London, tweeted last week that he and his colleague James had been wanting to do a “What would Sontag read?” table for years and Benjamin Moser’s new biography gave them an excuse. “Books blurbed by Sontag for your pleasure”: Krasznahorkai, Hardwick, Bolaño. Walzer, more.
As it goes with writers who leave a lasting imprint, individual circumstances in Susan Sontag’s life aligned with the work she came to produce and the society that received it. In her breakthrough book, Against Interpretation, she declared that she “did not set out to devise a ‘position’ about either the arts or modernity”; read these essays, she proposes, as “case studies of my evolving sensibility,” in which “I was not trying to lead anyone into the Promised Land except myself.” And yet with a formidable arsenal of analytic tools she scrutinizes her own responses for signs of the fundamental origins of our emotional and intellectual engagement with art. She sets out to liberate art from service to its “content” or “meaning” or moral implications; its salience for us lies in “the extent to which [it] engages the mind in certain transformations”; the experience of art is “something like an excitation, a phenomenon of commitment, judgment in a state of thralldom or captivation”; works of art are “living, autonomous models of consciousness,” “vibrant, magical, and exemplary object[s] which return us to the world in some way more open and enriched.”
Any great intellectual endeavor, in her telling, combines an adventure on the part of the maker with an experience of discovery on the part of the receiver. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s magnum opus, Tristes Tropiques, for example, is “an intellectual autobiography, an exemplary personal history in which a whole view of the human situation, an entire sensibility, is elaborated.” In wresting the consideration of art and culture from the ivory tower, readying her readers, as she readied herself, for ever-higher orders of aesthetic experience, she embodied a moment in American life that also brought us the modern New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, the trade paperback, and other efforts to capture a moving civilization for an expanding educated audience, even as she hoisted that moment forward.
And the effort was entirely successful. The model of the thinking person that she fashioned like a hipster Pygmalion lives on in our contemporary enthusiasm for the “personal essay” and along the expanse of youngish readers’ bookshelves from Walter Benjamin to W. G. Sebald. American letters are fundamentally different from those of our abutting cultures as a result. Moser and other readers identify Sontag’s Americanness as a field for her self-invention, but there is a deeper connection—the American faith in original experience, the confidence that the culture’s deepest resources are available to anyone who seeks them out. Others, mostly unmentioned by Moser—notably fellow women writers like Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Mary McCarthy—were making confluent contributions to the ways we read now, but Sontag supplied a fundamentally international flavor and a receptiveness to the most challenging developments in the avant-garde. A few years ago I found myself in an attic in St. Petersburg, Russia, with a group of young artists and writers who were cherishing her robust advocacy for cosmopolitan intellectual values just as writers behind other political barriers, like Danilo Kiš, George Konrad, and Nadine Gordimer, had thirty-five years before.
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To me, returning to Sontag’s early essays and her short stories—which, as Moser rightly notes, draw on the gift for aphorism that finds Sontag at her most agile and winning—takes one back to a generative moment in our culture and taps into some of its vital energies. As with fellow erstwhile academics like Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt, Sontag tended to pull her pronouncements, in the spirit of the age, still under the tutelage of Marx and Freud, in the direction of big-picture conclusions about “our time” that can now seem like museum-pieces, but she also turned the lens inward, on the thinking and observing subject. That writers now identified as “the new Sontag” tend to study writing itself rather than the many fields in which she made herself conversant might offer a lesson. Sontag made a perhaps inevitable evolution from an iconoclast to a conservator of culture, but she remained throughout committed expansively to learning. How Sontag’s top-notch education was paid for scarcely comes up. Do our current educational arrangements even contemplate a career buoyed by this level of study? Are the opportunities and aspirations that created a Susan Sontag receding from a culture, beset, as she herself was, by the “social” and losing the thread of slow, quiet work? What are we laying down as a the basis for the thinking life of our future?
It is a central pathos (to this reader) of Sontag’s undertaking that she was, at her core, defining, deepening, elaborating the role of the recipient of art, while never quite fathoming how to position herself as its maker. Her talent for being in the audience made her a cherished friend to artists and writers, but also drew a line around the scope of those friendships and identifications. (This irony had an inverse in the extent to which she was training herself to be a viewer and the culture kept recasting her as the object of view—a beauty, a celebrity.) We could use her reminder now of the muscle that tenacious reading can bring to writing, without surrendering an ounce of its passion and urgency.
[Read Part I of this post here]
Ann Kjellberg is the founder and editor of Book Post. She worked for Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodsky, and Sontag’s publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in the late 1980s, and for Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books for many years following.
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