A Susan Sontag Reader
Sontag, Susan
A SUSAN SONTAG READER Susan Sontag/Farrar, Straus & Giroux/$17.95 Mitchell S. Ross Last year Susan Sontag, aesthetic lioness, discombobulated the leftist culturati with a statement of the...
...She isolates the "saturnine" temperament in her essay on Walter Benjamin and seems drawn to the same melancholic mode in the writings of Roland Barthes—to her, the most significant French writer of recent decades...
...She writes "Against Interpretation": "Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling...
...Too true, O on tag herself remains an individual with enough angst inside her to touch a roomful of spirits...
...The Benefactor is an essayist's novel...
...But the truth of my life is for someone else...
...She would rather submit to the avant-garde forces in her midst, and yet the critic in her pauses...
...She is confused, but she has a right to be...
...I only wish she carried her baggage a bit more lightly, as hers is, all in all, an honest voice...
...My objections are stylistic, not ideological: Sontag writes like a French intellectual who got drunk on German philosophy at an early age and has done all subsequent writing on a hangover...
...Sometimes I cannot help pursuing various ideas I have of the character and preoccupations of my readers," he writes...
...Some pornographic books are interesting and important works of art...
...She called her book about this "On Photography" and pinned down the truth about contemporary man's thralldom to the camera's image-making...
...This is about as trenchant as Sontag ever gets...
...There was booing...
...What all this said about the leftist culturati—that they are more to be honored, for their contributions to culture than for their excursions into politics—wasn't newsy or exciting...
...Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul our urban atmosphere, the effusions of interpretations of art today poison our sensibilities...
...The he first piece here is a long extract from Sontag's first published book, a novel called The Benefactor...
...She discerns romantic decadence in Nazism, and sees in sadomasochism the detachment of a culture from its roots...
...Sontag had broken ranks...
...This is from the famous "Notes on Camp," in which she confesses, "I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it...
...She is ambivalent, caught between the Kultur of Kant and the culture of Greenwich Village...
...In the Reader Sohtag's basically romantic sensibility, overcoated by that damnable style, unveils itself...
...In all candor she isn't really mine...
...For myself I plead the goal of self-edification, and the goad of a sharp conflict in my sensibility...
...This is the voice of the naughty Susan of the late sixties—the one who took her "Trip to Hanoi" (none of which is reprinted here) and declared the white race to be the "cancer of human history" (a view subsequently recanted after a personal battle with cancer led Sontag to decry the use of "illness as metaphor...
...But it did serve as a reminder that Susan Sontag has oyer the years maintained a feline independence from the pack, to which the appearance of this Reader bears witness...
...In the seventies Sontag's search for romance in these hard-nosed times led her to the camera...
...What honest witness of these days wouldn't be?ys wouldn't be...
...This weakness I hope to conquer...
...Is she your kind of cat...
...Having a photo-graph^f Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross...
...Its narrator is an old man carved out of existentialist cloth...
...There remains within her a commitment to the seriousness of art, expressed in labored aphorisms such as this one: "Art is seduction, not rape...
...much disapproval...
...It is true that the lessons of my life are lessons only for me, suited only to me, to be followed only by me...
...The question is not whether pornography," she quotes Paul Goodman approvingly, "but the quality of the pornography...
...A work of art produces a type of experience designed to manifest the quality of imperiousness...
...Camp never is precisely defined—nor could it be— but the impression left is that Sontag would be happy to throw in her lot with the bad boys and girls if only she could be sure that the ghost of Immanuel Kant would not excoriate her for doing so...
...Most of the time her consciousness wavers...
...The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death...
...Mitchell S. Ross is author of The Literary Politicians and An Invitation to pur Times...
...This quality can at times manifest itself oddly, as in pornography...
...The writing is so clotted that it's difficult to love...
...The setting is vaguely middle European, The atmosphere is heavy...
...Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph...
...A SUSAN SONTAG READER Susan Sontag/Farrar, Straus & Giroux/$17.95 Mitchell S. Ross Last year Susan Sontag, aesthetic lioness, discombobulated the leftist culturati with a statement of the obvious—to wit, that someone who had read only Reader's Digest between the years 1950 and 1970 would have absorbed more truth about the nature of Communism than someone who had read only the Nation during the same period...
...There are various divagations...
Vol. 16 • March 1983 • No. 3
