Sontag, Susan - Sontag in the New York Times

8/9/2019 Sontag, Susan - Sontag in the New York Times

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SUSAN SONTAG (1933-2004)

SUSAN SONTAG IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Feature Aut!"r

American 'new intellectual' and writer, a leading commentator on

modern culture, whose innovative essays on such diverse subjectsas camp, pornographic literature, fascist aesthetics, photography,AIDS, and revolution have gained a wide attention. Sontag haspublished novels and short stories, and written and directed lms.She had a great impact on eperimental art in the !"#$s and!"%$s and she introduced many new ideas to American culture. &i(e guns and cars, cameras are fantasy)machines whose use is

addictive. *owever, despite the etravagances of ordinary

language and advertising, they are not lethal. In the hyperbole thatmar(ets cars li(e guns, there is at least this much truth+ ecept inwartime, cars (ill more people than guns do. he camera-gun doesnot (ill, so the ominous metaphor seems to be all blu )li(e a man'sfantasy of having a gun, (nife, or tool between his legs./ 0from OnPhotography , !"%%1


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Susan Sontag was born in 2ew 3or(, 2.3. She grew up in ucson,Ari4ona, and os Angeles 5alifornia, and entered at the age of fteen 0!"671 the 8niversity of 5alifornia at 9er(eley. After a yearshe transferred to the 8niversity of 5higaco, and graduated in

!":!. Sontag continued her studies at *arvard, where she was a;h.D. candidate from !"::)!":%. In !":%):7 Sontag studied at the 8niversity of ;aris. She wor(edas a lecturer in philosophy at the 5ity 5ollege of 2ew 3or( andSarah awrence.


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art lies in the eperiencing both style and content together withoutanalysis. &Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art./Sontag's other inCuental wor(s include *? S3? @< =ADI5AI 0!"#"1, which continued her eplorations of contemporary

culture and such phenomena as drugs, pornography, cinema andmodern art and music. On Photography 0!"%#1 was a study of theforce of photographic images which are continually insertedbetween eperience and reality. Sontag developed further theconcept of 'transparency'. hen anythig can be photographed andphotography has destroyed the boundaries and denitions of art, aviewer can approach a photograp freely with no epectations of discovering what it means. I2?S A2D E?A;*@= 0!"%71 waswritten after her cancer treatment. Sontag's point was thatalthough illness is used often punitatively as a gure or metaphor,

the most truthful way is to resist such metaphoric thin(ing. heboo( was later revised and epanded as Aids and its Metaphors0!"771. Sontag's second novel, eath !it 0!"#%1, a was a nightmarishmeditation on life, death and the relationship between the two. i(ein "he Benefactor , the fragmented protagonist cannot alwaysdistinguish between dream and reality. Sontag's short stories, #, $tcetera, appeared in !"%%. In !""FSontag published her third novel, "he %olcano &over , which became

a bestseller. It has been translated among others into


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hrough four decades, public response to Es. Sontag remainedirreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as eplosive,anticlimactic, original, derivative, naNve, sophisticated,approachable, aloof, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic,

sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right)wing, left)wing,profound, supercial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, ambivalent,lucid, inscrutable, visceral, reasoned, chilly, eusive, relevant,passO, ambivalent, tenacious, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous,humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, cantan(erous and clever. 2o oneever called her dull. Es. Sontag's best)(nown boo(s, all published by , F$$6, issue of he 2ew 3or( imes Eaga4ine. An Intellectual ith Style

8nli(e most serious intellectuals, Es. Sontag was also a celebrity,partly because of her telegenic appearance, partly because of heroutspo(en statements. She was undoubtedly the only writer of hergeneration to win major literary pri4es 0among them a 2ational9oo( 5ritics 5ircle Award, a 2ational 9oo( Award and a EacArthur


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in her middle years by a sweeping strea( of white ) became aninstantly recogni4able artifact of F$th)century popular culture. Es. Sontag was a master synthesist who tac(led broad, diQcultand elusive subjects+ the nature of art, the nature of consciousness

and, above all, the nature of the modern condition. here manyAmerican critics before her had mined the past, Es. Sontagbecame an evangelist of the new, training her eye on the cultureunfolding around her.


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her earlier, often controversial positions as ambivalent. Some sawher scholarly approach to popular art forms as pretentious. 0Es.Sontag once remar(ed that she could appreciate ;atti Smithbecause she had read 2iet4sche.1

In person Es. Sontag could be astringent, particularly if she feltshe had been misunderstood. She grew irritated when reportersas(ed how many boo(s she had in her apartment in the 5helseaneighborhood of Eanhattan 0!:,$$$ no television set1. 9ut shecould also be warm and girlish, spea(ing condingly in her rich, lowvoice, her feet propped casually on the nearest coee table. Shelaughed readily, and when she discussed something that engagedher passionately 0and there were many things1, her dar( eyes oftenlled with tears. Es. Sontag had a (nac( ) or perhaps a penchant ) for getting into

trouble. She could be provocative to the point of beinginCammatory, as when she championed the 2a4i lmma(er eni=iefenstahl in a !"#: essay she would revise her position someyears later. She celebrated the communist societies of 5uba and2orth Jietnam just as provocatively, she later denouncedcommunism as a form of fascism. After the attac(s of Sept. !!,F$$!, she wrote in he 2ew 3or(er, Mhatever may be said of theperpetrators of uesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.M And inF$$$, the publication of Es. Sontag's nal novel, MIn America,M

raised accusations of plagiarism, charges she vehemently denied. Es. Sontag was born Susan =osenblatt in Eanhattan on Kan. !#,!">>, the daughter of Kac( and Eildred =osenblatt. *er father wasa fur trader in 5hina, and her mother joined him there for longperiods, leaving Susan and her younger sister in the care of relatives. hen Susan was :, her father died in 5hina of tuberculosis. See(ing relief for Susan's asthma, her mother movedthe family to ucson, spending the net several years there. InAri4ona, Susan's mother met 5apt. 2athan Sontag, a orld ar IIveteran sent there to recuperate. he couple were married ) Susantoo( her stepfather's name ) and the family moved to os Angeles.


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She would get her wish ) Es. Sontag burst onto the scene withM2otes on 5amp,M which was published in ;artisan =eview ) but notbefore she earned a bachelor's and two master's degrees fromprestigious American universities studied at @ford on a

fellowship and married, became a mother and divorced eight yearslater, all by the time she turned F#. After graduating from high school, Es. Sontag spent a semester atthe 8niversity of 5alifornia, 9er(eley, before transferring to the8niversity of 5hicago, from which she received a bachelor's degreein !":!. At 5hicago she wandered into a class taught by thesociologist ;hilip =ie, then a F7)year)old instructor, who wouldwrite the celebrated study M


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ionel and Diana rilling, Alfred Ha4in and Irving *owe. Interlacedwith epigrams from @scar ilde, that essay illuminated a particularmodern sensibility ) one that had been largely the province of gayculture ) which centered deliciously on artice, eaggeration and

the veneration of style.Mhe eperiences of 5amp are based on the great discovery thatthe sensibility of high culture has no monopoly on renement,M Es.Sontag wrote. Mhe man who insists on high and serious pleasuresis depriving himself of pleasure he continually restricts what hecan enjoy in the constant eercise of his good taste he willeventually price himself out of the mar(et, so to spea(. *ere 5amptaste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism.It ma(es the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran theris( of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.M

If that essay has today lost its capacity to shoc(, it is a reCection of how thoroughly Es. Sontag did her job, serving as a guide to anunderground aesthetic that was not then widely (nown. MShe found in camp an aesthetic that was very dierent from whatthe straight world had ac(nowledged up to that point, and shemanaged to ma(e camp 'straight' in a way,M Arthur 5. Danto, the

Kohnsonian professor emeritus of philosophy at 5olumbia and theart critic for he 2ation, said yesterday in a telephone interview. MIthin( she prepared the ground for the pop revolution, which was in

many ways essentially a gay revolution, through arhol andothers. She didn't ma(e that art, but she brought it toconsciousness. She gave people a vocabulary for tal(ing about itand thin(ing about it.M he article made Es. Sontag an international celebrity, showeredwith lavish, if unintentionally ridiculous, titles 0Ma literary pinup,MMthe dar( lady of American letters,M Mthe 2atalie ood of the 8.S.avant)gardeM1.

5hampioning Style @ver 5ontent

In !"## Es. Sontag published her rst essay collection, MAgainstInterpretation.M hat boo('s title essay, in which she argued that artshould be eperienced viscerally rather than cerebrally, helpedcement her reputation as a champion of style over content.


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It was a position she could ta(e to etremes. In the essay M@nStyle,M published in the same volume, Es. Sontag oended manyreaders by upholding the lms of eni =iefenstahl as masterwor(sof aesthetic form, with little regard for their content. Es. Sontag

would eventually reconsider her position in the !"%6 essayM


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Eodjes(a, including Eodjes(a's memoirs. ?cept for a brief prefaceepressing a general debt to Mboo(s and articles by and onEodjes(a,M Es. Sontag did not specically ac(nowledge hersources.

Interviewed for he imes article, Es. Sontag defended hermethod. MAll of us who deal with real characters in historytranscribe and adopt original sources in the original domain,M shesaid. MI've used these sources and I've completely transformedthem. I have these boo(s. I've loo(ed at these boo(s. here's alarger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions.M Es. Sontag's other wor( includes the play MAlice in 9edM 0!"">1 MASusan Sontag =eaderM 0!"7F1, with an introduction by ?li4abeth*ardwic( and four lms, including MDuet for 5annibalsM 0!"#"1 and

M9rother 5arlM 0!"%!1. She also edited wor(s by 9arthes, AntoninArtaud, Danilo His and other writers. Es. Sontag was the subject of an unauthori4ed biography by 5arl=ollyson and isa ;addoc(, MSusan Sontag+ he Ea(ing of an IconM02orton, F$$$1, and of several critical studies, including MSontag PHael+ @pposites Attract Ee,M by 5raig Seligman05ounterpoint-;erseus, F$$61. She was the president of the ;?2American 5enter from !"7% to !"7". In a !""F interview with he imes Eaga4ine, Es. Sontag

described the creative force that animated Mhe Jolcano over,Mputting her nger on the sensibility that would inform all her wor(+MI don't want to epress alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interestedin various (inds of passionate engagement. All my wor( says, beserious, be passionate, wa(e up.M

AN ARE+IATION SUSAN SONTAGA R&"r"u$ I%te**etua* .re$$e % G*a7"ur


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+hester Higgins r-."he New York "ies

Navigating the world of ideas/ the writer )(san )ontag in 0111- +HARES MGRATH

u5*$!e6 .ee75er 29' 2004 A RETROSE+TI,E

Susan Sontag A loo( at the career of Susan Sontag, including reviews of MAgainst

Interpretation,M M@n ;hotographyM and MIn America,M and articlesabout and by the author.

Photoreporters A social critic and poleicist/ )(san )ontag in 2341-


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Susan Sontag, who died yesterday at %!, was one of the few

intellectuals with whom Americans have ever been on a rst)namebasis. It wasn't intimacy that gave her this status it was that li(e

Earilyn and li(e Kudy, she was so much a star that she didn't needa surname. In certain circles, at least, she was just Susan, even topeople who had never met her but who would nevertheless tal((nowledgeably and intimately about her latest piece in he 2ew

3or( =eview of 9oo(s, her position on Sarajevo, her verdict on thenew . B. Sebald boo(. She brought to the world of ideas not justan @lympian rigor but a glamour and seiness it had seldom seenbefore. ;art of the appeal was her own glamour ) the blac( outts, thesultry voice, the trademar( white stripe parting her long dar( hair.

he other part was the da44le of her intelligence and the range of her (nowledge she had read everyone, especially all thoseforbidding ?uropeans ) Artaud, 9enjamin, 5anetti, 9arthes,9audrillard, Bombrowic4, alser and the rest ) who loomed o onwhat was for many of us the far and unapproachable hori4on.2or was she shy about letting you (now how much she had read

0and, by implication, how much you hadn't1, or about decreeing thecorrect opinion to be held on each of the many subjects she turnedher mind to. hat was part of the appeal, too+ her seriousness and

her conviction, even if it was sometimes a little cra4y)ma(ing.5onsistency was not something Es. Sontag worried about overlymuch because she believed that the proper life of the mind wasone of re)eamination and re)invention. Es. Sontag could be a divisive gure, and she was far frominfallible, as when she embraced revolutionary communism aftertraveling to *anoi in !"#7 and later declared the 8nited States tobe a Mdoomed country... founded on a genocide.M 9ut what heropponents sometimes failed to credit was her willingness to changeher mind by the 7$'s she was denouncing communism for itshuman)rights abuses, and by the "$'s she had etended hercritiue to include the left in general, for its failure to encourageintervention in 9osnia and =wanda. She had found herself Mmovedto support things which I did not thin( would be necessary tosupport at all in the past,M she said in a rueful interview, adding,Mi(e seriousness, for instance.M


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2ot that she was ever unserious for very long. here was aboutmost of her wor( a ?uropean sobriety and high)mindedness and anemphasis on the moral, rather than sensual, pleasures of art andthe imagination. *er reputation rests on her nonction ) especially

the essays in MAgainst InterpretationM and MStyles of =adical illMand the critical studies M@n ;hotographyM and MIllness as EetaphorM) while the !"#% novel MDeath Hit,M written to a highbrow formula of dissociation, now seems all but unreadable.


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THE ENEFA+TOR Su$a% S"%ta& $)year)old 2ew 3or(er, has

chosen to write a carefully &modern/ wor(, a picaresue anti)novel. he tone is detached, the action almost noneistent, and thecharacters do not lead lives, they assume postures. e are not toldthe hero's surname or the name of his city, though this last isclearly ;aris during the past 6$ or :$ years. &"he Benefactor / is the supposed memoir of an aging man named*ippolyte, who has dreamed his way through an ambiguous life. Asa young man without any of the usual human ambitions, heabandons his university education and is supported by his wealthy,indulgent father. *is primary purpose is solitary speculation, and to

further this he lives only on the periphery of other lives. In line withthis he freuents the salon of a foreign couple, the Anderses, asalon peopled by &virtuoso tal(ers./ At about this time *ippolytehas the rst of a series of disuieting dreams. Shortly afterward hema(es his great decision+ instead of using his dreams to interprethis life, he will use his life to interpret his dreams. 5ued by a dream,he begins an aair with his hostess,


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Er. Stern is the author of &ho Shall ive, ho Shall Die/ andother boo(s.

#

Ot"5er 2;' 19:4

au&!ter % t!e .ar$$ women. *e is from agood family and was a model husband and rising young man onthe Stoc( ?change now he is hiding out in a disreputableboarding house in 9roo(lyn *eights. he other innocent is 9ernie Bladhart, also young but already aprofessional schlemiel, most recently a used car salesman from5hicago, who has been dispatched by his middle)aged wife to9roo(lyn *eights to nd 5abot right and write the Breat American2ovel about him.


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In the earlier novel, the young Ealcolm dies, literally ehausted todeath by his eperience of the world, but in &5abot right 9egins/both of the innocents survive and even achieve a (ind of wrytriumph. 9ernie returns to 5hicago and selling cars, disabused of

both man)eating wife and dreams of literary glory. And 5abotright, after running the gantlet of a number of wac(y mentors,soul)healers and prophets, nally purges himself in a paroysm of laughter. &5abot right 9egins/ is, in many ways, the most ambitious of ;urdy's novels. It might be loosely described as a bravura wor( of satire )a satire on pornographic fantasy, a satire on 2ew 3or(literary life, a satire on aTuent eccentric mid)century America.?cept that satire is perhaps too narrow a term to convey the (indof comedy that ;urdy writes, comedy in the tradition that included

both &5andide/ and he Boon Show. ;urdy shares comedy'straditional preoccupation with states of emotional anesthesia 0the&dead pan/1 and with emotional deformity his characters are&humors,/ parodies and the particularities of social satire are notso particular as they may seem, but rather the vehicle for auniversal comic vision. It is a bitter comic vision, in which the Ceshis a source of endless grotesueness, in which happiness anddisaster are eually arbitrary, and eually unfelt. 2ot all of ;urdy's ction is li(e &5abot right 9egins./ ithin the

substantial body of wor( which he has published in the last decade) three novels, a novella, two boo(s of stories and two short playsone can discern at least three ;urdys. here is ;urdy the satirist anfantasist ;urdy the gentle naturalist of American, particularlysmall)town American, life and ;urdy the writer of vignettes ors(etches, which give us a horrifying snapshot image of helplesspeople destroying each other. In other words+ a ;urdy that can becompared, respectively, with 2athanael est, with right Eorris,with 5arson Ec5ullers. 0I'm spea(ing of possible companions, notinCuences.1 I must admit that I prefer the ;urdy represented in&5abot right 9egins/ and &Ealcolm/ )the side of ;urdy that canbe compared with 2athanael est )to the others. ;urdy's mostimpressive gift seems to me to be for dar( comedy, that is, for therhetoric of eaggeration. his is not to slight his other gifts. *e has a marvelous ear,especially for a certain (ind of cran(ish earnest American speech,


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Eidwestern or Eiddle Southern, that is beautifully used in hisstories. 9ut it doesn't seem to me that ;urdy has the gift for great realisticwriting his wor( lac(s the body, the vigor, the unselfconsciousness

that realistic writing reuires. =ealistic ction would also demandthat he transcend his rather limited vocabulary of character, inwhich such types as innocent young men, predatory middle)agedwomen, and saintly half)crac(ed old people recur with insistentregularity. &5abot right 9egins/ is not, then, a realistic novel,though it is, surely, a powerful vision of a very real America. And itis a very American boo(, too at least since *awthorne, the&romance/ or &tale/ has often prospered in our ction at theepense of the novel. Anything ;urdy writes is a literary event of importance. *e is, to

my mind, indisputably one of the half do4en or so living Americanwriters worth ta(ing seriously. Any reservations about his wor( Ihave suggested should be understood to assume the deservedlyhigh place he now holds in contemporary letters. 3et the uestionremains as to whether ;urdy, a brilliant writer, will becomesomething even more. &5abot right 9egins/ does nothing toindicate that this will happen. ;urdy's new novel is a looser, freer, gayer boo( than &Ealcolm./9ut it lac(s &Ealcolm/'s formal perfection and hardness. Its targets

seem more gross, its argument more diuse, its constructionuneven. here are moments in &5abot right 9egins/ when the jo(e 0of a man toujours pret, of the central compliance of allwomen, of a literary scene of unending corruption and fatuity1seems to go on too long. 9ut there are also admirable passages)especially, in the later part of the boo( the ecerpts from Er.arburton's &sermons/ )where ;urdy pulls out all the stops andwrites at the top of his form. ;urdy's dangerous tendencies tosentimentality and to Catness, ehibited most of all in &he2ephew,/ seem wholly conuered when he gives vent to theinspiration of fantasy, and to his marvelously inventive gift forparody. &5abot right 9egins/ may not be ;urdy's best boo(, but it is oneof his best. It is a Cuent, immensely readable, personal and strongwor( by a writer from whom everyone who cares about literaturehas epected, and will continue to epect, a great deal.


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Eiss Sontag, a well)(nown critic, is a writer)in)residence at=utgers. She is the author of a novel, &"he Benefactor ,/ published last year.

# =a%uar 23' 19:: a "% t!e Se%e EN=AMIN .EMOTT Against Interpretation Su$a% S"%ta& he lady swings. She digs the Supremes and is savvy about 5amp.She catches the major *appenings and the best of the (in(y Cic(s.She li(es her hair wild and her sentences intense 0&I couldn't bear

what I had written,/ etc. &I could not stand the omnipotentauthor,/ etc.1. She moc(s ?stablishment biggies 05harles Snow,Arthur Eiller1 and worships little mag (ings 0Benet, =esnais, Artaud,that whole unruddy gang1. And time and time over she Cauntsintellectual pieties, as with her hint that critical problems are li(eHleene and the mind is a runny nose. 0&I have the impression not so much of having, for myself, solved... problems as of having used them up./1 3et despite all this, despitecoterie ties, clever girlisms, a not completely touching softness

toward the cant of the ?die P Andy world the author of thecollection of essays and reviews at hand stands forth as a genuinediscovery. *er boo(, which includes F# pieces published between!"#! and !"#: in periodicals ranging from Partisan Review to


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new)wave lms, pop art and the li(e, than from overeposure tocertain fringe movements of literary criticism. And, as has to be added, that argument isn't especially fresh orwell)informed. Eiss Sontag's announced cause is that of design, the

surface art in the Kamesian sense in ne, the cause of style. Sheinvo(es a 0predictable1 string of sages from @rtega y Basset toEarshall Ecuhan in support of the claim that &interpreters/)people who &translate the elements of the poem or play or novelor story into something else/ )are philistines. And, impatient withtheorists who continue to treat novels and movies as means of &depicting and commenting on secular reality,/ she insists that artnow is &a new (ind of instrument, an instrument for modifyingconsciousness and organi4ing new modes of sensibility./ @newea(ness of the case, in the present version, is it rather beamish

dependence on crude distinctions between form and content.Another is that it lac(s urgency. he author believes her sort of thin(ing is out of favor and that lit)crit generally in the last fewdecades has avoided matters of structure and style. She is wrongby a country mile on this point, and the embattled sections of herboo( seem, in conseuence, more li(e tomboy fantasies thanreactions to critical things as they are. 5ompetent chatterers about critical things as they are, though,aren't in short supply these days. hat is rare is the writer who has

moved beyond the Bee hi4 or See *ere response to the new artthe observer who breathes naturally in encounters with a Bodardlm or a nouveau roman and ta(es as his critical purpose there)creation of these encounters as (nown an eperienced by thefeelings and the imagination. Eiss Sontag at her best is such awriter. She doesn't simply view a *appening, for instance sheinhabits the moment of its &performance/ and gives it bac( to herreader as an inward disturbance as well as a set of odd outwardevents. e, the audience, feel &teased/ and &abused,/ shereports. 2obody caters to our desire to see everything, events occur insemidar(ness or simultaneously in dierent rooms, we are&deliberately frustrated,/ &enveloped,/ moc(ed, turned into scapegoats+ &I, and otherpeople in the audience, often laugh during *appenings. I don'tthin( this is simply because we are embarrassed or made nervous


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by violent and absurd actions. I thin( we laugh because what goeson in the *appenings is, in the deepest sense, funny. his does notma(e it any less terrifying. here is something that moves one tolaughter... in the most terrible of modern catastrophes and

atrocities. here is something comic in modern eperience as such,a demonic, not a divine comedy./ As every schoolboy (nows, nocritic can recover and re)create an esthetic eperience in itswholeness.


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piuant than any of this, there is at every moment the achievedcharacter of the observer herself. *e &I/ of & Against #nterpretation/isn't a mere pallid, neutral register it is a self clear enough inoutline to provide answers to many of the cultural historian's bald

uestions )as, for eample, the uestion who needs the new artand whyV Spi(y, jealous of her preferences, seemingly eacerbateby the very notion that others may share them, Eiss Sontagobliuely conrms that enthusiasts of the new art tend to bepeople who need badge of dierence from the herd. Impatient,restless, her nerve ends visible in sentence after sentence 0can'tbear it, can't stand it1, she further testies that one pleasureoered by the new art is a release from that prison of patience andploddingness into which traditional art loc(s its audience.


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Er. DeEott, the author of &*ells and 9enets,/ is professor of ?nglish at Amherst. Some art aims directly at arousing the feelings some art appealsto the feeling through the route of the intelligence. here is art that

involves, that creates empathy. here is art that detaches, thatprovo(es reCection. Breat reCective art is not frigid. It can ealt the spectator, it canpresent images that appall, it can ma(e him weep. but itsemotional power is mediated. he pull toward emotionalinvolvement is counterbalanced by elements in the wor( thatpromote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. ?motionalinvolvement is always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed. )


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sensation. If her critical writing has not always been entirely lucid,it has been fresh and fascinating, and idiomatically true to itself. *er novels are a dierent matter. In &"he Benefactor / 0!"#>1, sheeplored, at tedious and wandering length, the dream) and

wa(ing)life of a fellow who wants to fashion actuality from hisdreams )a seemingly easy chore because his dreams are soundreamli(e, and a chore because so dull. he novel was infusedwith ideas that had little dramatic relation to the narrative voiceswhere confused 0the novel's and Eiss Sontag's1 or at any rateconfusing, and the pacing was erratic. @n the positive side, thenovel was an attempt at innovation and )one is grateful forsurprises )the tone throughout was not >)year)old, epensively educated,;ennsylvania businessman who is moderately thoughtful, entirelydependable in everyday matters, and nic(named Diddy )&the sortof man it's hard to disli(e, and whom disaster avoids./ 9ut+ &Diddy,not really alive, had a life. *ardly the same. Some people are theirlives. @thers, li(e Diddy, merely inhabit their lives./ In fact, the lifethat Diddy inhabits is also unreal, as Eiss Sontag evolves it. 9utthis is as nothing compared with Diddy's immediate problem, which

is+ Did he bludgeon to death a railroad wor(er while his train washalted in a dar(ened tunnel )as he himself believes )or was hesitting all the time uietly in his seat, as *ester, the sensuous blindgirl who hears all, testies. he answer, or nonanswer, is suspected all along, though EissSontag seems not to care overmuch, and &all along/ is a long, longway. During the lulls )Diddy's dreams, who)(nows)who'sphilosophical ruminations, Eiss Sontag's epistemological riddles,the reader's daydreams, art vs. life, Bide, 5amus,


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development, pacing, authenticity of tone and other antiuarianmatters of craft. ea


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brainy and dar(ly beautiful, smart enough to tell America o, andglamorous enough to ma(e America li(e it. Susan Sontag isdenitely &in./ o meet her, to write about her, to rent her a car isto edge a little &in/ oneself.

9ut I decided to begin as though I didn't &(now/ who she was. , and received a Eerit Award fromEademoiselle, her somber posture in the maga4ine was splendid.9arbra Streisand appeared no more eemplary as Singing5omedienne, of Jalentina eresh(ova as 5osmonaut, than SusanSontag as riter./1 hey ma(e jo(es about her alliterative name asthough, li(e Earilyn Eonroe's, it had been publicity, notmother)invented. he great American sport+ have it and eat it too.


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about to prostitute myself.'/1, reaping the establishment's rewardswith the right hand, damning the establishment with the left. heydescribe her Breenwich Jillage apartment &whose walls arecovered with do4ens of movie stills./ hey describe her son's room+

&David's room, while cluttered with the usual boy jun(, alsoincludes such unli(ely pre)teen reading matter as he 2ewStatesman, he 2ew 3or( =eview of 9oo(s, and I.


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her brilliance, which lights compleity, but her cleverness, whichcan be made to simplify and dar(en. 2ow what I thin( is this+ hat she (nows what novels are, now,always now 0though literary historians will try to (ill them o and

ma(e them then1. hat she (nows the price she has been made topay 0she did not read the ne print1 and that it will not ruin her. hat she (nows &eath !it / will be treated more as news thannovel, and drubbed the harder because it is news, and that it maysurvive even that. hat she (nows how easily a label stic(s to awoman, let alone to one capable of glamour, let alone to a &careerwoman./ Een do not have &careers./ he central characters inboth her novels are men, because to be a woman in a novel todayis to be a set of circumstances. 0o be a man was that for Kames,awrence, Shaw, Ibsen and other, who therefore wrote about

women, once upon a time.1 If she critici4es, some reviewer saysshe is using a riding crop. Eale critics are not accused of assumingseual roles. hat I learned in my interview is this+ that I must not uote her,for those words, too, crystalli4ed, wrenched from the conversationwhich evo(ed them, become simplied, false. hat she is not li(eher photographs+ academy portraits never lied more. hat she feelsbound to act when she thin(s the issues are important )foreample, by publicly opposing our involvement in Jietnam. hat

she may be able, unli(e the hero of &eath !it ,/ not to assume amas(+ to live her life, not inhabit it. hat she has a mind which notonly has learned and retained numberless boo(s and velanguages, but which can see meaning, and then release thatmeaning, and see again. hat her plans, after &eath !it ,/ are to go to the lm festival inJenice, then, soon, to write her doctoral dissertation, probably onmodern


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2evertheless, the blac(birds in the pie do ta(e wing when singledout+ Daniel ?llsberg, a Defense Department consultant onpacication+ &he lesson which can be drawn here is one that therest of the world, I am sure, has drawn more uic(ly than

Americans have )that, to paraphrase *. =ap 9rown, bombing is asAmerican as cherry pie. If you invite us in to do your hard ghtingfor you, they you get bombing along with our troops./ Stanley*omann, professor of government at *arvard+ &he ethics of foreign policy must be an ethics of self)restraint. he saddestaspect of the Jietnam tragedy is that it combines moral aberrationand intellectual scandal./ Sir =obert hompson, former Secretaryfor Defense in Ealaya+ &he prospect of going in as a politicalreformer frightens me more than anything else. I would not touchpolitical reform in these territories with a barge pole )and I certainly

would not touch it with an American political scientist./ ?dwin=eischauer, former Ambassador to Kapan+ &Jietnam has shown thelimited ability of the 8nited States to control at a reasonable costthe course of events in a nationally aroused, less developednation.... I believe we are moving away from the application to Asiaof the 'balance of power' and 'power vacuum' concepts of the coldwar./ It is unfortunate, though hardly to be anticipated, that thisboo('s round table too( place several months before EcBeorge9undy's speech at De;auw 8niversity last @ctober calling for an

end to bombing of 2orth Jietnam. Since Er. 9undy was moreresponsible than any ;residential adviser for the bombing andescalation of the war in Jietnam, his speech could have helped tofocus the lessons set forth in &2o Eore JietnamsV/


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an easy use of traditional philosophical and literary analysis,ruthless self)criticism, a shifting focus of investigation. 9ut sinceshe uses such techniues better than almost any other writertoday, Susan Sontag cannot be called fashionable, any more than a

statue can be called statuesue. She's simply there, thoroughlyherself. here she is can best be seen in her own words. @n esthetics+ &Asthe activity of the mystic must end in a via negativa, a theology of Bod's absence, a craving for the cloud of un(nowing beyond(nowledge and for the silence beyond speech, so art must tendtoward anti)art, the elimination of the 'subject' 0'the object,' the'image'1, the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence.... Art is unmas(ed as gratuitous, and the everyconcreteness of the artist's tools... appears as a trap. ;racticed in a

world furnished with secondhand perceptions, and specicallyconfounded by the treachery of words, the artist's activity iscursed.... Art becomes the enemy of the artist, for it denies him thereali4ation )the transcendence )he desires. herefore, art comes tobe considered something to be overthrown./ 0And the &esthetics of silence/ come to be written.1 @r, on politics+ &hat the Eongolhordes threaten is far less frightening than the damage thatestern, '


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&enigmatic,/ &comple,/ &useful./ 9ut one major adjective must be added+ &moral/)because the eight essays in &)tyles of Radical *ill/ are mainly

eercises in moral denition, as far as moral denition can beaccomplished today on the two supremely and terrifyingly insecureareas of modern art and modern political brutality. i(e all moralists, Eiss Sontag hopes to inspire readers with thedesire to act upon her principles. 9ut there are insurmountablediQculties in acting upon them, and this is the nal, mostmaddening element in the world she so brilliantly describes.


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as foils for her own personal psychological developmentV *ow dareshe claim to be a radical and still spend time agoni4ing overagoni4ing at the typewriterV Aren't we getting gassed, clubbed,taed, drafted, jailed while she is trying to decide what to sayV

=eading &rip to *anoi/ now as a part of a collection, one sees howEiss Sontag's sensibility allowed her to ris( these painfulaccusations. &hat I'd been creating and enduring for the last few years was aJietnam inside my head, under my s(in, in the pit of my stomach,/she writes, adding that she is &a stubbornly unspeciali4ed writerwho has so far been largely unable to incorporate into either novelsor essays my evolving radical political convictions and sense of moral dilemma at being a citi4en of the American empire./ *anoichanged that )and &rip to *anoi/ enables us to see how her

attitude toward Jietnam does follow logically from the moralphilosophy which she applies so successfully to esthetic uestions.In art, she glories in the discovery of &tact/ and &poise/ amidst theroaring babble. @n her trip, she delighted in the painful recognitionof the virtues of the Jietnamese who were &fastidious/ and&whole/ in the unspea(able holocaust. o understand the nature of this achievement )the clear)eyedtranslation of a vocabulary of art and philosophy into politics )onemust note again that Eiss Sontag has been deeply inCuenced by

the contemporary radical


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&2otes on 5amp,/ &he Aesthetics of Silence,/ and &rip to *anoi./ In the world inwhich she's chosen to live, she continues to be the best there is. Er. 9ens(y, a critic and former managing editor of =amparts, lives

in San te75er 2;' 19:9 Su$a% S"%ta&C$ C.uet ?"r +a%%5a*$C at Fe$ta* ROGER GREENSUN he special providence that protects movie critics decrees thatwhen they do ta(e up honest wor( they often ma(e surprisingly

good movies. Bodard and ruaut come to mind at once, but also awhole line of &5ahiers du 5inema/ critics including 5habrol,=ivette, and ?ric =ohmer. #n Aerica, we have ;eter 9ogdanovich 0&argets/1 and now SusanSontag with &Duet for 5annibals,/ which played last night at the2ew 3or(


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he one she chose to ma(e rst was a grotesue &chamber lm/about two couples, one older and perverse 0the cannibals1, oneyounger and vulnerable. In three wee(s in her hotel room she wrote a !$$)page shooting

script, then chose locations and actors and began lming it eactlyas she had written it. &?verything was so relaed andunhysterical./ here wasn't even a language problem. &?nglish wasthe language of the set. &I had never made a lm,/ she continued, &but I've been aroundthe lm world. I've been on sets of many lms. I've been an etra. Iused to act )until I was F!. I've read a lot of boo(s. I (new enoughabout the camera and lights and actors and editing. I don't (nowhow I (new but I (new I (new./ She has spent a large part of herlife in theaters seeing movies. She has watched many directors

wor(, including her friend Ei(e 2ichols. &I admire the way he getspeople to do what he wants them to do without ma(ing them feeloppressed. hat's my way./ hile she was shooting, she thoughther lm morbid. &I didn't li(e that aspect,/ she said, &but that'swhat it was. I was ma(ing a dar(, depressing Swedish movie. In therushes people started laughing,/ and she reali4ed that she wasma(ing a blac( comedy. &In a way it didn't surprise me. I don't thin( the author is the best

judge,/ she conceded, and so when people began analy4ing the

lm, she listened. &=ichard =oud said, '@bviously, Dr. 9auer is a descendent of Dr. Eabuse.' 2ot that there was a conscious inCuence,/ Eiss Sontagsaid, &but there is a relationship. Someone else said somethingabout *itchcoc(, and I thought, '3es.' @r, 'I love the theme of thepornography of eating in your lm.' 3es. *ow marvelousR/ *er ownfeeling on seeing it, she said, was one of &surprise, pleasure,ama4ement that it eists independent of me./ At the 5annesfestival, she sat through it twice &listening to the people in theseats./ She has seen it about !$$ times. @n the other, she said,&I've never reread anything I've published./ She thin(s there is asimilarity between novels and screenplays. &I'm so inside Wa lmX.

he story is really happening. I'm reporting it. Ey novels are alsoconceived very uic(ly. In a few hours I see the whole story. It's justgetting it down./ 9ut the techniues are stri(ingly dierent. &Adirector has to be an amateur psychiatrist. *e has to have certain


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)ong shot+ he eye trac(s forward as the lm company's bus pulls

into the suare and stops. he driver chec(s his watch 0%+!: A.E.1and ma(es an impatient gesture in the direction of two gures

hurrying hand)in)hand toward the bus. Eedium shot+ It is S8SA2 S@2AB and her !%)year)old son, DAJID,they get into the bus and drive o. Sounds+ bus door slamming andmotor starting. 5redits+ S8SA2 S@2AB, >%, American writer, lapsed philosopher,abdicated critic, radical intellectual, daughter of a travelingsalesman, mother but no longer wife, eistential voyager andlmma(er. So far. Eedium shot+ e are in the bus speeding toward a location

outside Stoc(holm where S@2AB is ma(ing )writing, directing,editing )her second lm, an elliptical tale called &9rother 5arl./Seated behind the driver, S@2AB and DAJID are leaning closetogether, spea(ing in low, intimate tones. hey loo( very tired. S@2AB 0tenderly1+ David arrived unepectedly from Africa lastevening. *e is on his way to college at Amherst. e tal(ed all night. 5loser shot of the two+ 9oth S@2AB and DAJID are dar( and veryhandsome. he eye pans on her. She is thinner and taller than in

her photographs )though just as mysterious loo(ing. She has long,straight, blac( hair and she moves as warily as a young Indianbrave. She is dressed in jeans and white snea(ers. ong shot+


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S@2AB+ &3es, I loved her... etravagantly... 9ut I've always beenbetter at loving people when they don't as( for it, when they don'tneed my love to survive./ *K?E imitates her somewhat Catly. 5ut to S@2AB standing beside the camera. *er directorial

manner is rm, self)condent, cool. S@2AB+ =eady for a ta(eR ASSISA2+ ystnadR S@2AB+ 5ameraR S@82D EA2+ BorR 5AE?=A EA2+ =ollingR S@2AB+ ActionR... hree minutes later. S@2AB+ 5utR ac(. Eerci. ;rint that. ASSISA2+ ac(R

Eedium shot of S@2AB, who suddenly loo(s apprehensive. S@2AB 0aside1+ I'm the director, so I decide everything. hetrouble is that I can't eecute everything. DAJID touches S@2AB lightly on the arm and proers a cigarette.She ta(es it and smiles. Dissolve. It is past midnight, three days later. e are in S@2AB'Sapartment in the @ld own, where she is being interviewed by the=?;@=?=. S@2AB is stretches out on a couch, smo(ing, left armcroo(ed under her head, eyelids half closed. he =?;@=?= is

seated in a straight chair drawn up near the couch. S@2AB is asdressed up as she's ever willing to be+ a yellow wool dress, stonebeads, and high boots. Sounds+ the hum of a refrigeratorS@2AB'S voice, low and epressive. S@2AB+ It's terrible to give an interview, to have the illusion thatyou have some connection with the interviewer )and then to be sodisappointed. @nly once have I read an article about myself whichseemed to me to have any connection with me. It's a littledepressing, but it's the nature of being reported that a couple of things you do get singled out as captions, as handles, as labels)and they stand, in a way, for your whole wor(.


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I'm sure that 2orman Eailer didn't li(e being (nown for F$ years asthe author of &he 2a(ed and the Dead/ when he had done a lot of other things. It's li(e referring to


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Antonioni can ta(e his art abroad, but, judging by &


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deserves suerance ) not uncivili4ed harshness )on the part of hisaudience. I thin( Bodard's conversion should be respected. I can'timagine not being interested in what he does. And I suppose I'msecretly pleased that he has had the courage to stop doing what

everyone nally learned to li(e so much )although I'm one of thefans he's left behind. And I wish he'd do those marvelous moviessome more. =?;@=?=+ Is the uestion of the woman as director worthdiscussingV S@2AB+ It's a pleasure to be wor(ing in a country where theuestion is never raised. And, on the whole, I thin( it's not aproblem. @f course, there's still discrimination, but there's nolonger a taboo. It's not, in this respect, li(e becoming an orchestraconductor. here one is really brea(ing ground. 9ut there have

been women as directors since silent lms. And now there's 5avani,5hytilova, 5lar(e, Jarda, Getterling.... =?;@=?=+ And Sontag.

# Au&u$t 12' 19/2 Sree%6 Cr"t!er +ar*C ROGER GREENSUN

9other 5arl/ is Susan Sontag's second movie. 9ut it is the rstmovie in which she seems to see lm as a means to life rather thanas a repository for ideas. &Duet for 5annibals/ 0!"#"1 really dealtwith a (ind of rareed mental cannibalism. In a very open way,&9rother 5arl/ really deals with human relationships. wo women, Haren and ena, visit an island, a Swedish resort,where ena's e)husband, Eartin, lives in comparative seclusionwith a mentally disturbed ballet dancer named 5arl. 5arl is brotherby guild rather than blood, for Eartin is somehow responsible forhis brea(down, and 5arl, who totally depends upon him, regardshim as an enemy. ena is young and full of life, and to some etent &9rother 5arl/ isthe story of how she oers her life, rst to Haren, then to Eartin,and nally to 5arl )before committing it in total and apparentlywasteful sacrice. Haren is older and very tired, and to some etent


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the lm is the story of how her life is saved by the enigmatic 5arl,who forms a bond with her own desperately withdrawn youngdaughter, Anna, and eectively brings the girl out of her privatedistances and bac( into the world.

I have greatly simplied the story, which is very comple and fullof symbolic event and confrontation, and which is also a littlefoolish. In a sense, &9rother 5arl/ is all about learning to give, andits climactic &miracle/ 0Eiss Sontag's word1 is essentially to evo(elaughter from a little girl. hese suggest sentiments worthy of *ollywood in the !">$'s and !"6$'s, but that Eiss Sontag is willingto treat them openly and seriously is, paradoically, perhaps hergreatest source of strength. here are a directness and an aw(wardness of gesture and of larger movement in &9rother 5arl/ that count among its most

attractive ualities, and that go a long way to compensate for itsoccasionally strained pretensions. It is a very imperfect lm, withone bad performance 0Benevieve ;age as Haren1 and severalperformances that seem to have been directed toward anecessive inepressiveness. 9ut I thin( that it indicates the ta(ing of considerable imaginativeand emotional ris(s, as &Duet for 5annibals/ did not, and the resultis a real movie. &9rother 5arl/ was lmed in Sweden with an ?nglish)language

sound trac(. It opened yesterday at the 2ew 3or(er heater. #

=u* 12' 19/4 Sree%6 S"%ta&C$ Cr"7$e a%$C NORA SAYRE Susan Sontag's lm about Israel, &;romised ands,/ which was

made in @ctober and 2ovember of !"%>, isn't intended to be adocumentary. *owever, that country's situation is just too factually comple tobe treated as a tone poem. In an eort to eschew tal(ing heads,there's a lot of voice)over narration, as people wal( through thestreets, but sometimes we don't (now who's tal(ing. here's somehandsome photography )especially of gures in landscapes


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)although what's seen and what is said often don't go together, andmany shots seem irrelevant. he movie opened yesterday at the


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# Fe5ruar 9' 19/; T!e E"*ut"% "? Su$a% S"%ta&

HITON KRAMER In place of hermeneutics,/ Susan Sontag wrote at the close of her

famous essay & Against #nterpretation,/ in !"#6, &we need anerotics of art./ It was this essay, with its stunning declaration of independence from the traditional obligations of criticism, thatgave the title to Eiss Sontag's rst volume of essays, published in!"##, and it was this sentiment )for it was clearly a sentiment morethan an idea )that helped to ma(e & Against #nterpretation/ one of the most widely read and widely inCuential wor(s of criticism in the

!"#$'s. *ermeneutics, the attempt to analy4e or interpret wor(s of art for their hidden meanings, was resoundingly rejected in favor of &an erotics/ that, though never dened, invo(ed a promise of untroubled esthetic delight+ untroubled precisely because it wouldno longer be burdened by intrusions of moral discrimination. In the cultural climate of the late !"#$'s, this was a position of immense conseuence. It conferred on the eperience of art thesame (ind of radical freedom that was already at wor( in the realmof politics and personal moral, in modes of dress and seuality and

social manners )in everything, indeed, that came to be lumpedunder the rubric of &life)style./ hat was upheld as the highestvalue was &the sensuous surface of art,/ and anything in ourresponse that complicated or modied or abridged our surrender tothe &sensory eperience of the wor( of art/ was dismissed as aform of life)denying philistinism. he ercest opprobrium wasreserved for criticism that concerned itself with the so)called&content/ of a wor( of art, for it was this &content/ that wasalleged to prompt these despised eorts of &interpretation./ It is noeaggeration to say that Eiss Sontag's views on this uestion)abetted, as they were, by so many other voices joined in thecelebration of &style/ at the epense of moral analysis )had afar)reaching eect on the way an entire generation conceived thevery nature of esthetic eperience. ?actly how this &erotics of art/might dier from that powerful current of estheticism that hadbeen a signicant factor in both art and criticism, at least since the


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essay, entitled &


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hird orld camp)following and belief in gurus and the occult./0Italics added.1 2oting that one of =iefenstahl's main projects haslately been to photograph Eic( Kagger, Eiss Sontag comments+&=iefenstahl's current de)2a4ication and vindication as

indomitable priestess of the beautiful )as a lmma(er and, now, asa photographer )do not augur well for the (eenness of currentabilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst. he force of herwor( is precisely in the continuity of its political and aestheticideas. hat is interesting is that this was once seen so much moreclearly than it seems to be now./ Again, one admires the insight,but can only marvel at the lac( of self)awareness it suggests. Eiss Sontag understands very well the (ind of esthetic and evenseual appeal that 2a4i iconography has lately acuired amongartistic and seual adventurers. 0Along with &he ast of the 2uba,/

she also discusses a paperbac( volume on &SS =egalia./1 She isinteresting on what she calls the &erotici4ation of fascism,/ but sheremains curiously aloof )not eactly approving, but remar(ablygentle about drawing the obvious implications )about some recenteamples of the estheti4ation of fascist iconography. hus shewrites about last year's notorious =obert Eorris poster+ &he poster=obert Eorris made for his recent show at the 5astelli Ballery inApril, !"%6, is a photograph of the artist, na(ed to the waist,wearing dar( glasses, what appears to be a 2a4i helmet, and a

spi(ed steel collar, attached to which is a large chain which heholds in his manacled, uplifted hand. Eorris is said to haveconsidered this the the only image that still has any power toshoc(+ a singular virtue to those who ta(e for granted that art is aseuence of ever)fresh gestures of provocation. 9ut the point of theposter is its own negation. Shoc(ing people in this contet alsomeans inuring them, as 2a4i material enters the vast repertory orpopular iconography usable for the ironic commentaries of ;opart./ 9ut is the point of such a poster really its own negationV Iwonder, especially when Eiss Sontag herself, in the very netsentence, adds that &the material is intransigent./ he Eorrisposter was no surprise to anyone who visited the !"%F Documentaehibition in Hassel, est Bermany, for in that gigantic assembly of artists, wor(s of art and ideological framewor(s, fascisticonography )both in its (itsch and its more solemn &high art/


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varieties )was clearly to be seen ma(ing a successful comebac(among &advanced/ artists and intellectuals. Er. Eorris drew the obvious conclusions+ that there was a&scandalous/ taste now waiting to be satised. he discussion of

the Eorris poster is one of the few disappointing passages in EissSontag's essay. his essay is one of a series Eiss Sontag has written during thelast year or so on the subject of photography. 0hese essays are, Iunderstand, now being revised for publication in a boo(, to becalled &On Photography ,/ later this year.1 I thin( it is interestingthat photography, even more than the movies, has prompted herto move beyond the boundaries of a purely esthetic criticism. Itlead one to wonder if the current ecitement over photography asart is going to accomplish something more than a belated

appreciation of an art form long neglected by &serious/ criticism.ill it, perhaps, lead to a general reopening of the uestion of content in art )a uestion long considered impermissible in thehigher criticismV Eiss Sontag's essay )important in its own right)suggests that this might indeed be the case.

# Fe5ruar 8' 19/:

N"te$ "% Art' SeB a% "*t$ SUSAN SONTAG he following ecerpts are ta(en from an interview which

appeared in the


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Stravins(y, Apollinaire, Koyce and ?liot showed how &high culture/could assimilate shards of &low culture./ 0&he aste and,/ &8lysses,/ etc., etc.1 9y the !"#$'s the popular arts, notably lm and roc( music, had

ta(en up the abrasive themes and some of the &diQcult/techniues 0li(e collage1 that had hitherto been the fare of theuniversity)educated, museum)going, cosmopolitan audience for theavant)garde or eperimental arts. hat the modernist sensibilityhad created new boundaries for popular culture, and waseventually incorporated into it )this is a fact that nobody who hascared for culture can ignore or should fail to treat with highseriousness. It seems rather late to stop identifying culture with someEasterpiece heater of orld *istory and to respond )on the basis

of contemporary eperience, and moved by pleasure rather thanresentment )to how comple the destiny of &high culture/ hasbecome since Eatthew Arnold whistled in the dar( on Dover 9each.

he notion of culture implied by the distinction seems to me awfullymiddlebrow, and plausible only to someone who has never beenreally immersed in or gotten intense pleasure from contemporarypoetry and music and painting. oryish labels li(e &cultural elite/and &instinctual mass/ do not tell us anything useful about how toprotect that endangered species, &high/ standards.

Diagnoses of cultural sic(ness made in such general andself)congratulatory terms become a symptom of the problem, notpart of the answer. I've been as(ed whether there is something about wor(s of art thatma(e them &objectively/ conservative or reactionary. I doubt thatthere is anything more &conservative/ or &reactionary/ aboutartists than there is about people. And why shouldn't people benaturally conservativeV hat the past necessarily weighs more on the ais of humanconsciousness is perhaps a greater liability to the individual than tosociety, but how could it be otherwiseV here is the scandalV o bescandali4ed by the normal is always demagogic. And it is onlynormal that we are aware of ourselves as persons in a historicalcontinuum, with indenite thic(nesses of past behind us, thepresent a ra4or's edge, and the future )well, problematic is onedamp word for it.


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Dividing the time into ;ast, ;resent P


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intellectuals who are also feminists doing their bit in the waragainst misogyny in their own way, letting the feminist implicationsbe residual or implicit in their wor(, without ris(ing being chargedby their sisters with desertion.

Some feminist critics, for eample, have labeled Ingmar 9ergmanas a &reactionary artist./ hat's the weapon of repressive andignorant oQcialdom in you)(now)which countries, where&reactionary/ is also associated with a (ind of pessimistic contentor with not providing &positive images./ 9eing very attached to thebenets of pluralism in the arts and of factionalism in politics, I'vegrown allergic to the words &reactionary/ and &progressive./ Such

judgments always support ideological conformity, encourageintolerance )even if they aren't originally formulated to do that. Asfor 9ergman, I'd say that anyone who reduces his wor( to its

neo)Strindbergian views of women has jettisoned the idea of artand of comple standards of judgment. he harsh indictment of 9ergman simply inverts the slac( standards that prevail in much of feminist criticism. o those critics who rate lms according towhether they ma(e moral reparations, it must seem snobbish tocavil about the low uality of most recent movies made by womenwhich do convey positive images. It's not the appropriateness of feminist criticism which need to berethought, but its level )its demands for intellectual simplicity,

advanced in the name of ethical solidarity. hese demands haveconvinced many women that it is undemocratic to raise uestionsabout the uality of feminist discourse, if it is suQciently militant,and the uality of wor(s of art, if these are suQcientlywarm)hearted and self)revealing. *atred of the intellect is one of the recurrent themes of modernist protest in art and in morals.

hough it is actually uite inimical to eective political action, itseems li(e a political statement. 9oth avant)garde art and feminism have made large use of, andsometimes seem to be parodies of, the languages of failed politicalmovements. @ne common denominator of 2ew eft polemics wasits 4eal for pitting hierarchy against euality, theory againstpractice, intellect 0cold1 against feeling 0warm1.


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surrender to callow notions of art and of thought and theencouragement of a genuinely repressive moralism. hat distinguishes the wor( of &the pornographic imagination/from other accounts of the erotic life is that it treats seuality as an

etreme situation. hat means that what pornography depicts is, inone obvious sense, uite unrealistic. Seual energy is not endlesslyrenewable seual acts cannot be tirelessly repeated. 9ut inanother sense pornography is rudely accurate about importantrealities of desire. hat voluptuousness does mean surrender, andthat seual surrender pursued imaginatively enough, eperiencedimmoderately enough, does erode pride of individuality and moc(sthe notion that the will could ever be free )these are truths aboutseuality itself, and what it may, naturally, become. 9ecause it is such an ascesis to live completely for

voluptuousness, only a few women and men ever do pursuepleasure to this terminal etreme. he fantasy of seual apocalypseis common enough, however ) indisputably, a means forintensifying seual pleasure. And what that tells us about theinhuman, as it were, character of intense pleasure is still beingslighted by the humanist &revisionist/


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standards of credibility 0thereby attaching a whole new sort of aniety to seual performance1. In particular, the uest for theeperience of complete psychic surrender now no longer enclosedwithin traditional religious forms has become increasingly, and

restlessly, attached to the mind)blowing character of the orgasm. Ey interest in the pornographic novel, &Story of @,/ is in its candorabout the demonic side of seual fantasy. he violence of theimagination that it consecrates )and does not at all deplore )cannotbe conned within the optimistic and rationalist perceptions of mainstream feminism. ;ornography's form of utopistic thin(ing is,li(e most of science ction, a negative utopia. Since the writerswho have insisted on how erce, disruptive and antinomian anenergy seuality 0potentially, ideally1 is, are mostly men, it'scommonly supposed that this form of the imagination must

discriminate against women. I don't thin( it does, necessarily. ?vidence about the feelings and seual tastes in our culture beforeit was wholly seculari4ed, and in other cultures past and present,suggests that voluptuousness was rarely pursued in this way, asthe organon to transcend individual consciousness. ;erhaps onlywhen seuality is invested with that ideological burden, as it is now,does it also become a real, and not just a potential, danger to aperson)hood and to individuation. e live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance

altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as aninstrument of authority and repression. In my view, the onlyintelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, s(eptical,disimplifying. An intelligence which aims at the denitive resolution0that is, suppression1 of conCict, which justies manipulation ) always, of course, for other people's good, as in the argumentbrilliantly made by Dostoyevs(y's Brand Inuisitor, which hauntsthe main tradition of science ction )is not my normative idea of intelligence. 2ot surprisingly, contempt for intelligence goes with the contemptof history. And history is, yes, tragic. 9ut I'm not able to support anyidea of intelligence which aims at bringing history to an end ) substituting for the tragedy that ma(es civili4ation at least possiblethe nightmare or the Bood Dream of eternal barbarism. I am assuming that the defense of civili4ation implies the defenseof an intelligence that is not authoritarian. 9ut all contemporary


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plays, and notes for many unreali4ed theater projects, among theman opera a historical novel a fourpart dramatic monologue writtenfor radio essays on the peyote cult of the arahumara Indiansradiant appearances in two great lms 0Bance's 2apoleon and

Dreyer's he ;assion of Koan of Arc1 and many minor ones andhundreds of letters, his most accomplished &dramatic/ form )all of which amount to a bro(en, self)mutilated corpus, a vast collectionof fragments. hat he beueathed was not achieved wor(s of artbut a singular presence, a poetics, an aesthetics of thought, atheology of culture, and a phenomenology of suering. Artaud in the nineteen)twenties had just about every taste 0eceptenthusiasms for. comic boo(s, science ction, and Earism 1 thatwas to become prominent in the American counterculture of thenineteensities, and what he was reading in that decade )the

ibetan 9oo( of the Dead, boo(s on mysticism, psychiatry,anthropology, tarot, astrology, 3oga, acupuncture )is li(e aprophetic anthology of the literature that has recently surfaced aspopular reading among the advanced young./ Susan Sontag)whose new novel, #n Aerica, has just been published )doesn'tfeel at home in 2ew 3or(, or anywhere else. And that's the way sheli(es it April !>, F$$$

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.ee75er 18' 19// A .Dere%t K% "? Art WIIAM H@ GASS On Photography Su$a% S"%ta& Eirrors and fatherhood are abominable, the anonymous narrator of

one of 9orges's apocalyptic tales tells us, because they multiplyand disseminate an already illusory universe and if this opinion is,as seems li(ely, surely true, then what of the most promiscuousand sensually primitive of all our gadgets )the camera )whichcopulates with the world merely by widening its eye, and thus sosimply fertili4ed, divided itself as uietly as amoebas do, and with agentle bu44 slides its newborn image into view on a coated tongueV 2o simple summary of the views contained in Susan Sontag's brief but brilliant wor( on photography is possible, rst because there


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anonymous amateurs which are just as interesting, as compleformally, as representative of photography's characteristic powersas Stieglit4 or a al(er ?vans./ echnical nish is not a measure.Intention scarcely maters. he subject alone signs no guarantee. I

once too( a terribly overeposed photograph of a Spanish olivegrove, but if you thought I had intended the result, you couldadmire the interplay of the trees' washed)out form, the heat thatseems to sweep through the grove li(e the wind. he fact is that,although there are many calculations which can be made beforeany photograph is ta(en, and of course tric(s can be played duringthe developing afterward the real wor( is eecuted in a single clic(.A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once. he decisions a photographer must ma(e, compared to those of the Cower)arranger or salad chef, are few and simple indeed. he

eects of his actions are dominated by accident+ the ambiance of an instant in the camera's apprehension of the world. he formalproperties of photographs, even the most formal ones, are toooften ehausted in a glance, and we return to the subject, againand again, with other than esthetic interest. So far, certainly, theartistic importance of the camera has been secondary to its eecton society, on our (nowledge of processes li(e aging, of things andbeings 0li(e the body of the opposite se1, on our standards of illustration an documentation, our ability to inCuence others with its

powerful rhetoric, its untiring surveillance. It has changed thecomposition of our amusements and pastimes beyond return,altered our attitudes toward seeing itself. @ne reali4es, reading Susan Sontag's boo(, that the image hasdone more than smother or mas( or multiply its object. Ey face isonly photography, and people inspect me to see if I resemble it.

he family album demonstrates to me what I don't yet feel+ notthat I was young once, but that I'm old now. ime, so long as itlingers in the loo(, is visible to us in this photographic age in a wayit was never visible before, among familiar things, we fail tomeasure change with any accuracy but the camera records onestep upon the stone, and then another, until the foot has worn ahollow li(e a hand cupped to catch rain. ;rocess has becomeperceptible in the still. And that is strange.


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and the image the camera caught, and was made to cough up, wasan image already stopped, sei4ed, li(e the victims of ;ompeii'slava, in the slow Cow of the subject's will. e can easily see thedierence now, because, out of the continuities of eperience, the

sitter 0that was the word1 selected the slice that was to stand forhis or her life, the prettiest or most imposing self 0although thisitself too( s(ill that few possess1 whereas it is normally the camerathat ma(es the choice these days, and we are encouraged to rela,to guard against being on our guard, as if the pose were merelythat, and the candid camera, more li(ely to serve up a fairer, fullershare of us that our own decision would supply. 9esides,ceremonies are another thing of the past, and a visit to thephotographer is itself something to be photographed before itdisappears li(e the Aborigines. hat was once a blac( bo with a

bac(wards beard, a menacing presence, a merciless eye, hasbecome as discreet as a uic( pee(, friendly as an old chum,ubiuitous as bees at a picnic or Kapanese school children at ashrine. 9ut camera enthusiasts are nor always fans of the photograph.

here are too many benets in the point and clic( itself. hebusiness of ta(ing a picture is, rst of all, a Cattering and righteousone, as Sontag points out, so the shooter is accorded considerablerespect+ If the subject, we are pleased to have been found

&pictorial,/ worthy of homage or memorial if a bystander, we donot wish so come between the lens and its love, so we stop or turnaside or otherwise absent our image. It is bad manners to bloc( theview or be insensitive to the claims of the camera. e have learned to read resemblance as easily as ?nglish. Aphotograph is Cat, reduced, rigidly rectangular li(e the view)nder,cropped out of space li(e a piece of grass, sliced from time li(echeese or salami, ed on a piece of transportable paper, soft orglossy as no perception is, often ta(en at articial speeds,positions, distances, so we can &see/ both shatters and implosions,the pale deni4ens of caves or the deep sea, the insides of minerals,as she says, crystals, s(y, the speed of bees and almost invariably,in the case of the serious camera, the photograph is composedwholly of shadow, its shades going from gray to gray li(e night orour moods in a state of depression yet we breathe in its illusionsli(e a heavy scent.


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Sontag omits none of these matters, touching on them freuently,each time in a more comple and complete way, though hermethod 0eactly appropriate to the vastness of her subject, theuntechnical level of her language, the literary nature of her form1

allows only the brush, the mention, the intriguing suggestion. Bivenmy own philosophical biases, I should have been pleased to see herweigh more heavily the highly conventional character of thesimplest ;olaroid. *owever, the belief in the realism of its image isfundamental to the cultural impact of the camera, and since that isan important part of her theme, she is right to stress it. ?ven if the camera were more li(e the eye than it is, and Sontag isboth put o and beguiled by the parallels, it sits steady as thespider for the Cy, sees only in a blin(, and is sightless "" percent of the time )while we see between blin(s as between Jenetian blinds,

and our sight is thus relatively uninterrupted, in a sense continuingeven through our sleep. hen we see, there is always the &I/ as well as the eye. here isthe frame of the eye soc(et, the fringe of hair, the feel of the face,our hungers, hopes and hates )that full and euberant life in whichobjects seen are seen because they're sought, complained of, orencountered ) though no photograph contains them. And when wecarry away from any eperience a visual memory 0remote,conventional, schematic in its own way, too... no souvenir1, that

recollection is private, not public it cannot be handed round forsniggers, smiles or admiration it cannot lie a lifetime in a bo to bediscovered by distant cousins who will giggle at the uaintness of its clothing. 2o. I thin( that I would want to say that the camera only pretendsto be an eye. It creates another object to be seen, yet one thateists uite dierently than a perception not merely diering aspeople dier who come from dierent climates and geography, butas entities dier which have their homes in dierent realms of 9eing. It is not sight the camera satises so thoroughly, but themind for it creates in a clic( a visual concept of its object, a signwhose substance seems seductively the same as its sense, yetwhose articiality is no less than the S's that line the sentence li(enervous sparrows on a swaying wire. Sontag discusses, it seems to me, a number of separate, thoughnot necessarily eual or even eclusive views of what the serious


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purpose of photography might be, apart from the immediate needsof sentiment and utility it so obviously serves. he camera certainlyconfers an identity on whatever it isolates, however arbitrary theframing. It permits its subject to spea( to the world, in a way it

would otherwise never be able to do, by multiplying its presence,ta(ing it from its natural environment and placing it within thereach of many, as though it could live well anywhere, li(e thestarling. he lens removes reality from reality better than a surgeon, andallows us to witness (illing with impunity, na(edness withoutshame, weddings without weeping, miracles without astonishment,poverty without pain, death without aniety. It discovers a desirabletitillation in overloo(ed, humble, ugly, out)of)the)way or unli(elyobjects, often reCecting the interest of a social class in what the

camera considers eotic. It can create an image that will interpret its object , so that theshot will not be a cartoon balloon ed to something real, but acaption of commentary, li(e an epitaph, beneath. In addition, thecamera nds forms in nature that are the same as those whichestablish beauty in the other arts, an thus proves that photographyis itself an art )an art of structural epiphany, if Bod has had a handin the laws of 2ature. he camera is a leveler. It ma(es everything photogenic. ?very

angle of an object has an interest, as has every object from anyangle, every entrance, every eit, however odd or uic( or small orpreviously proscribed. A scullery maid may ma(e a better picturethan a ueen. And the eye is omnivorous as an army of army ants.

he perfect coo(, the camera can ma(e anything, in a photographas on a platter, loo( good. @f course, the camera may beregistering eactly that relation of eye and apprehension whichgive the machine is particular epistemology. he image is magically superior to the word because, though agray ghost, the photo is believed to possess actual properties of itsobject.


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or mud that preserves the tire tread of a robber's car but thecausal connection is loose, and can be fa(ed. Suppose, forinstance, we contrived to dimple up an image, by articial means,created the picture of a person who never eisted 0doctored

photographs do that for events1. he photo would still &loo( li(e/ aman, but it would not be the image of anybody, and so 0without itsof1 would not be an image. ould it any longer be a photographV he great euali4er, the camera has brought democracy to thevisual levels of the world. 2ow images accompany us everywhere,even attesting to our uite fragile and always dubious identity 0toparaphrase Bertrude Stein+ I am I because my shrun(en photoshows me1. hough only a hundred years old as an art,photography seems already ageless as a s(ill, its product without

limit, even if its images are not immortal and do decay, and even if some species are endangered. ;erhaps they move us too easily, asthough we stood on s(ates. ;erhaps, at the same time, we havegrown too familiar with the way the camera ma(es our commonclay seem strange. 2ow, not even strangeness is unfamiliar. Instead of tet accompanied by photographs, Susan Sontag hasappended to her boo( a collection of uotes, framed bypunctuational space and the attribution of source. hese areclipped from their contet to create, through collage, another

contet )yet more words. And for a boo( on photography that shallsurely stand near the beginning of all our thoughts upon thesubject, maybe there is a message, a moral, a lesson, in that. illiam *. Bass is the author of &@mensetter's uc(,/ &!"t"@%et@ On Photography 5 Su$a% S"%ta&' 19// A%!"r ""


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laughably incoherent then you've gotten hold of something writtenby a university professor. hese boo(s really ought to be pulped atthe bindery with a few copies reserved for the author's tenurecommittee but for some reason they occasionally ma(e it past the

boo( buyer at a reputable store and hence you end up readingfeminist deconstruction of a diamond jewelry ad. It is a shame that the university types manage to ta(e up shelf space that could be devoted to more copies of these essays from

he 2ew 3or( =eview of 9oo(s and boo(s by real photographers. Sontag rst eplains why it is necessary to step bac( and thin(about photographs+ *uman(ind lingers unregenerately in ;lato'scave, still reveling, its age)old habit, in mere images of the truth.9ut being educated by photographs is not li(e being educated byolder, more artisanal images.


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mental openness and receptivity characteristic of a beginner or achild. his is often what the poetry of the camera spea(s aboutthat through photographing, one can see in a new way and canbegin to brea( down the dichotomies such as beautiful-ugly,

sacred-profane and discover a more wholistic and harmoniousworld. )Kames Hevin *utchens, @ctober F!, !""% I li(e Sontag's wor( a lot.I thin( she could be a little more receptive to postmodernism, assuch. ?specially since she admires 9audrillard and 9arthes. I mean,if you drin( beer, you li(e to drin(V SometimesV 2oV I agree with Sontag vi4. television )the soul destruction of theuniverse. I would li(e to (now what Sontag thin(s of the &horrible/ 0yethorribly attractive to a F# year old straight male1 &Spi4e Burls/V

ADD as a methaphorV )Er.


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.ee75er 18' 19//

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of the mar(et and there was a need for a cheap object that peoplecold collect. And the third idea that you hear sometimes is that there's areaction against diQculty in art. 2ot only is photography an art

more easily practiced by large numbers of people, it's also easier tounderstand, easier to grasp. It ma(es fewer demands.


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Eore and more, audiences want uic( results, they want punchlines from the beginning. Eodernism always assumed that therecalcitrant bourgeois audience that could be shoc(ed was going tohang onto its own standards.

9ut when modernism became the established mode, it alsobecame a contradiction in terms. And that, I thin(, is the situationin which photography has prospered. U. here's a particularly intimate passage in your boo( in whichyou describe seeing in a boo(store in Santa Eonica in !"6:, whenyou were !F, photographs of 9ergen)9elsen and Dachau, and youma(e the etraordinary statement that you divide you life in half )before seeing these photographs and after. And you say thatsomething in you died at that midpoint. Do you (now what thatwas, and do you want to tal( about itV

A. I thin( that that eperience was perhaps only possible at thattime, or a few years after. oday that sort of material impinges onpeople very early )through television, say )so that it would not bepossible for anyone growing up later than the !"6$'s to be a horrorvirgin and to see atrocious, appalling images for the rst time atthe age of !F. hat was before television, and when newspaperswould print only very discreet photographs. As far as what died )right then I understood that there is evil innature. If you haven't heard that news before and it comes to you

is so vivid a form, it's tremendous shoc(. It made me sad in a waythat I still feel sad. It wasn't really the end of childhood, but it wasthe end of a lot of things. It changed my consciousness. I can stillremember where I was standing and where on the shelf I foundthat boo(. U. hile you were writing this boo( did your attitude towardphotography changeV I had a sense that you credited photographymore by the end of the boo( than at the start. A. I don't thin( it changed. hat I did come to appreciate as I waswriting these essays is how big a subject photography really is. Infact, I came to reali4e that I wasn't writing about photography somuch as I was writing about modernity, about the way we are now.

he subject of photography is a form of access to contemporaryways of feeling and thin(ing. And writing about photography is li(ewriting about the world.


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manifest oneself. I'm doing it with you now. If =ichard Avedon as(edto photograph me I would go and be photographed by him. *e maynot as( me, because we're friends, and he tends not to photographpeople he (nows.

U. he one he did of =enata Adler is awfully nice. A. ell, there are two photographs of =enata. here's the beautifulone with the hat, and there's another, which he told me he too( theday they met that was the way he wanted to photograph her. *ehas told me that he prefers to do that sort of photograph. U. hat sortV A. he (ind you call distorted )I say revealing. 3ou could say thatthe way he photographs emphasi4ed s(in blemishes very much,because it's etremely accurate, sharp)focus photography. heimage is unCattering in that way. 9ut I don't agree that Avedon's

photographs distort. I thin(, on the contrary, that we epect to beCattered by photography, we epect in fact that the photographwill show us to be better loo(ing than we really are. U. ;hotogenic. A. hat notion of being &photogenic/ actually means that you loo(better in a photograph than you do in real life. e all want to bephotogenic that is, we all want )since the photograph is this thinslice of time )to be photographed at that moment when we areloo(ing better than usual. hat Avedon has done is to ta(e

photographs which do not contain in any way the idea of thephotogenic. U. hich writers are you reading nowV A. I don't (now where to start. Since his death I've been reading allof 2abo(ov, I'm overwhelmed by how good he is. *e gets betterand better every time I reread him. I'm sad that he didn't get the2obel ;ri4e. So many second)rate writers have gotten it, one wantsrst)rate writers to get it too. And I've been reading and rereadingJi(tor Sh(lovs(y, Sinyavs(y, Koseph 9rods(y. U. hat are you writing nowV A. I'm nishing an essay called &Illness as Eetaphor./ And I'mwriting a story, which will be called either &Act !, Scene F,/ or &heetter./ And then I've been at wor( on a novel for several years, o and on. I'll get bac( to that after the rst of the year. U. Is it a relief to get o one project and onto anotherV


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A. It's always a relief to do ction it's always a trial to do essays. hey're much harder for me. An essay can go through F$ drafts, awor( of ction rarely goes through more than three or four drafts.ith ction, I'm almost there after the rst draft. he second, third

and fourth drafts are mostly cutting and ing up. hesephotography essays too(, each one of them, about si months.Some of the stories are done in a wee(. U. @n the other hand, the photography boo( is very ambitious,perhaps the rst literary boo( on the subject. A. 9y &literary boo(,/ do you mean it's a boo( by a writerV U. I mean you brought a literary sensibility to it. 3ou don't agreewith thatV A. ell, many people seem to thin( that one should be a

photography insider to write about photography as I've done. 9utno insider would do it. @nly an outsider would write this (ind of boo(. *owever, I'm not a literary, as opposed to visual, person. hedistinction is trivial. It's because I do see &photographically/ that Icame to understand what a distinctive and momentous way of seeing that is. Eore generally, people don't li(e trespassers, and topeople on the inside I'm a trespasser ) even though in fact I'm not.Also, I am not and don't want to be a photography critic. his isn'tthat (ind of boo(.

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=a%uar 30' 19/8 Su$a% S"%ta& F"u% +r$$ "? +a%er Ae a Fere I%te%$t t" ?e THE NEW YORK TIMES She didn't even have a doctor )&I'd always been in ecellent

health,/ she shrugs )and Susan Sontag made the appointment forherself as an afterthought while arranging a chec(up for her son.


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has, among other things, has a mastectomy and various follow)upoperations written another boo( 0the provocative &OnPhotography ,/ which was published by

Sontag, Susan - Sontag in the New York Times

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