Queen Critic
Hardwick, Elizabeth
Queen Critic A SUSAN SONTAG READER Introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick Farrar, Straus, Giroux. 446 pp. $17.95. t's trashing time for Susan Sontag, queen of the critical essay. The publication of A...
...The publication of A Susan Sontag Reader has provided a reveling occasion for critics of rivaling royalty to shoot at the twenty-year writing career of this intellectual whiz kid who, at fifty, is still making precocious and provocative pronouncements...
...Hilton Kramer chastises Son-tag for this contradiction...
...yet earlier, Sontag seemed to separate Riefenstahl's artistry from the politics she represented...
...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a free-lance writer and critic...
...Aronowitz's main bone of contention with Sontag seems to be that she doesn't really understand Roland Barthes, the French writer who died in 1980 and was eulogized by Sontag in an essay in The New York Review of Books...
...Altogether he finds her eminence in American letters "disproportionate to the quality of her thought...
...Don't be intimidated: any cat can look at a queen...
...Aronowitz believes Barthes was really a post-modernist scientific philosopher, whereas Sontag presents Barthes as an aesthete like herself—that is, an obsolete "modernist" who believes in the permanence of art and in unchanging human nature, obsessed with style more than with substance...
...sometimes she can make a whole paragraph hang together...
...Sontag's most contradictory aspect is that while she fulminated "against interpretation," she went on interpreting...
...He cites Sontag's Illness as Metaphor (not included in this collection) as an illustration of her "inability to sustain an extended argument...
...The question remains: what is Sontag's real "self...
...a large and coherent sensibility . . . each of her essays has a profound authority...
...yet, emerging from all the fictionalized realities and fantasies and the erudite observations and critiques of the arts included in this collection, one is hard-put to say what Sontag really stands for other than free intellectual inquiry (which is not, of course, to be sneezed at...
...Yet I admire Sontag's struggles to elucidate our arts, our culture, our sensibilities, our times—for herself, and for all who can stay with her...
...he says that in her essay "Fascinating Fascism," it is as if Son-tag "had only just discovered the Nazi content" of Riefenstahl's films...
...In The Atlantic, art critic Hilton Kramer called her "the Pasionaria of style" and claimed that Sontag is guilty of "overgeneralizing the aesthetic view of the world...
...Kendrick, dubbing Sontag the "unofficial hostess of letters," deems her essays "formless" or else "propped up on the ready-made structure of someone else's film, novel, or oeuvre...
...Sontag's critics appear to agree that by omitting her political writings—especially her "Trip to Hanoi"—she has presented herself in this Reader as somewhat above and beyond the mud of controversial politics (though her Town Hall remarks on the blindness of the Left about communism stirred up a lot of dust, if not mud...
...Since those strange novels, her career has come a long way, helped, as Hilton Kramer points out, by the element of timing...
...While she may be the "Pasionaria of style," her fiction lacks the passion of immediate emotion, and the essays included here, despite their authoritative tone, lack the passion of strong conviction about earthbound issues...
...He credits her mainly for a talent in "fashioning memorable phrases and elegant sentences...
...Either she is not entirely clear herself about what she really thinks and feels, or—what heresy—she often does not know how to express her ideas clearly (which may be the same thing, if style is substance...
...while she advocated direct sensory experience, she obfuscated it with words...
...But I am unwilling to ally myself fully with those who now cry out so boldly that the queen has no clothes on...
...In the early 1960s, he notes, literature was ready "to disembarrass itself of its old constraints and stake out a territory . . . devoid of inhibition, formality, and other impediments to the unfettered expression of the self...
...I read part of Sontag's first novel, The Benefactor, before it was published some twenty years ago and at that time took it no more seriously than the writer herself seemed to...
...I read it this time from a different perspective...
...Oddly, I found it and Death Kit (both excerpted in the Reader) more interesting—particularly as they reveal Sontag's own fears and fantasies— though somewhat more memorable than meaningful...
...This is the final piece in the Sontag Reader as well as the introduction to the recently published Barthes Reader which Sontag edited...
...Professor Stanley Aronowitz wrote in The Village Voice that Sontag is "a major American example of the critic as star" and "an excellent publicist for herself...
...The critics' missiles have been rather different from the kisses blown at Sontag by her friend Elizabeth Hardwick in a rhapsodic introduction to this collection: "an extraordinarily beautiful, expansive, and unique talent...
...While I am reluctant to join the chorus of her current detractors, I think it is in sentences like this that Sontag's problem lies...
...Certainly she puts on an impressive, pyrotechnical show of vocabulary and has apparently mastered the reading repertoire of the highest literati...
...The one political judgment she allows herself in this collection is a fairly safe denunciation of Leni Riefenstahl, the German photographer who glorified the Nazis with her camera...
...Replying to a question about this apparent inconsistency (in "The Salamagundi Interview" reprinted in the Reader), Sontag avows that "both statements illustrate the richness of the form-content distinction, as long as one is careful always to use it against itself...
...I would urge anyone with the intellectual curiosity and stamina to make the effort—beginning with this Reader, if you want to find all in one place Sontag's own view of her most representative writings...
...Walter Kendrick, a professor of literature at Fordham, began the caterwauling in The Nation: "The absence of an American intelligentsia makes Susan Sontag possible...
...Such effusions naturally put up the backs of the aesthetic and academic tomcats policing the literary alleyways...
Vol. 47 • March 1983 • No. 3
