Not Either/Or But Both/And

In 1968, Esquire published an article called “Whatever You’d Like Susan Sontag to Think, She Doesn’t.” It’s a succinct early description of how she unnerves both enemies and friends. During her four decades as thinker and cultural commentator, as novelist, director and playwright, compliance has not been part of her brief. As an intellectual--”I answer if so called,” she says--she’s a free lance, not a mercenary. The spirit of contradiction is built into everything she does, and the people she most panics are those whose own efforts are paralyzed by their terror of being wrong. Sontag creates arguments in progress, not holy writ. If she has written herself into a dead-end--and every committed thinker will do that sometimes--she finds the energy to write herself back out. As each year that passes throws up fresh banalities and adds to the stock of received ideas, the skeptical thinker must be always on the move.

The commentator on her work must be equally nimble. Sontag may be reevaluating even as we speak. In conversation with Amy Lippman in 1983, she said, “I write essays only when I am beyond the point of view proposed in them.” Consistency, in her view, is not just the hobgoblin of little minds but also an intellectual vice. Books must be reread, as there is always a new self to read them. She quotes the poet Marina Tsvetaeva: “No one has ever stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?” Opinions must be revised too; circumstances change, the past itself is not static. There are new wars, new works of art. Maps are redrawn. New borders create the chance to cross them. Early in her career, she described her idea of a writer: “someone interested in everything.” She has not accepted limitations on her interests, even when specialists would have been keen to impose them. As she explained to Kenny Fries in 1989, “I have the kind of mind that, whenever I think of something, it makes me think of something else.”

It’s not a habit of mind that makes for an easeful life, and her readers have been the gainers. The essays in the new collection “Where the Stress Falls”--40 pieces from the last two decades--give a good indication of the range of her sympathies and enthusiasms. The section called “Seeing” includes a piece on cinephilia and its demise, and essays on garden history, on pictures of church interiors seen at the Mauritshuis at The Hague; on bunraku, the strange Japanese puppet theater. It includes the text to Annie Leibovitz’s 1999 book of photographs, “Women,” the essay called “A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?” It is, of course; she instances “Platteland,” Roger Ballen’s pictures of poor whites in South Africa, where the ugliness of his chosen subjects and the places they live in suggest degeneracy and moral impoverishment. She writes on Mapplethorpe and on Polly Borland’s pictures of adults dressed as babies, taking a shot at analyzing the peculiar shame they produce in the viewer.

Elsewhere what she captures is simply the pleasure of looking; looking, for example, at a city like Venice, used up by other people’s eyes. And whatever picture she considers, moving or still, she sees herself as part of it, a figure in the landscape. She never ceases to question the role of the taste-maker, aware that the instant of collision between observer and observed produces meanings that are ephemeral, subjective and valuable for that reason. She has been accused, sometimes, of lacking a sense of history, but what she really lacks (her readers are the gainers again) is the impulse to smooth the past and present into one homogenous blandness and argue consolingly that they were just like us. In “Wagner’s Fluids,” she tells how members of the audience for “Tristan und Isolde” were sometimes taken from the theater fainting and vomiting, overcome by the music; and we can no more imagine their physiological distress than we can imagine why the singing of Farinelli and the great castrati made men and women faint and burst into storms of tears.

The first section of the book, “Reading,” includes two remarkable essays (including the title piece) that show Sontag at her most lucid. Both explore the role and capacities of the first person narrator in fiction, and both are plain and useful--useful to the practitioner trying to find out what “I” can do. In the third section, “Here and There” is an essay called “Writing as Reading,” which says without affectation everything that needs to be said about how to direct the impulse to write. These are generous pieces of work, and characteristic. On each of these essays, one could write an essay. The peril of her polished, aphoristic style is that it can intimidate and close off debate; it suggests that the truth is always elegant and what is elegant must be the truth. But the cumulative effect of her writing is to stimulate the flow of argument. Her facility in quotation enhances her work; read her, and you read her friends. Her friends, of course, are cosmopolitan, sometimes difficult, sometimes obscure. An admirer of the “diversity, seriousness, fastidiousness, density of European culture,” she was born in the country with “the most developed anti-intellectual tradition on the planet”; she set herself to smarten up its manners. Some suggest she softens the edges of challenging thought, domesticates it; Roland Barthes, for instance, sounds quite cozy when she explains him. More fairly, you might say that she has diverted the mainstream; her private islands of thought now look like the territory on which we’ve always lived. Her very success has moved her from the margin to the center. What happens to the cultivated emigre sensibility when the rest of the world catches up with it? Then it is time to put the record straight, to redress imbalances in the way one has been perceived; it is time, in other words, to be reread.

Sontag has endured four decades of being trivialized. Has she nice manners? Does she dye her hair? Why won’t she kiss and tell? “Sometimes,” she says, “I feel I’m in flight from the books and the twaddle they generate.” She has been a political animal and made enemies accordingly. A 1997 essay strikes a note of caution: “A good rule before one goes marching or signing anything: ... you have no right to a public opinion unless you’ve been there, experienced firsthand and on the ground and for some considerable time the country, war, injustice, whatever, you are talking about.”

“In the absence of such firsthand knowledge and experience: silence.” This is not a call for disengagement but the opposite. Always conscious of the trickiness of metaphors, she is no doubt mindful that being “under fire” from neoconservatives in a lecture hall is not the same as risking--as she has--a sniper’s bullet in Sarajevo.

What ultimately matters about Sontag is not who has tried to shoot her down or their success in wounding her. What matters is what she has defended: the life of the mind, and the necessity for reading and writing as “a way of being fully human.” She has been a great explainer, but her explanations are not reductive. Prizing logic, she admits a sense of awe. She regroups the familiar and makes the eye fresh. She is not a confessional writer, but she is often candid and intimate, and her passions are personal ones. In these essays, her tone is invariably warm. “Life,” she says, “when not a school for heartlessness, is an education in sympathy.” She persuades us in “Illness as Metaphor” and here in her “Letter to Borges” that suffering must be analyzed, not indulged, and that the most personal of misfortunes can be put to work in making sense of the human condition.

She stands for what is articulate, independent, exploratory: for self as a work in progress. “You have something in mind,” she says. “You imagine it. You prepare for it. You voyage toward it. Then you see it. And there is no disappointment .... “