Remembering Susan Sontag

When Susan Sontag died last week, at age 71, after her third bout with cancer, this country lost the most versatile and passionate intellectual of her generation, a patiently experimental artist and a social conscience of unflinching principle. Of course, to speak of my friend of 45 years as an intellectual would not have been to her taste, for she was eager to devote the energy of her days (which she knew to be cruelly determined by her disease) to her fiction (which she knew by the same token to be joyously determined by her imagination and her will). Yet her final text (written in the hospital at the start of her last illness) was an essay on the Abu Ghraib prison photographs, a characteristic study in the understanding of outrage. She was obsessed by the phenomenon of affective opacity (as in science fiction) -- by the resistance to feeling.

In her first book of essays, “Against Interpretation,” she was at pains to articulate this perception, in every art, as a modern possibility with an aesthetic basis, almost an aesthetic justification, against old ideas of emotional adequacy. But always in her own fiction (as in her later essays), this “modernist” project was countered, was invaded by impassioned responses to -- and continuations of -- the great achievements of canonical art (Dostoevski, Nietzsche, Proust).

How far and wide Sontag ventured in her discoveries of creative possibility (as in her journeys to Vietnam and Sarajevo for possibilities of political truth), and how she reveled in the generous communication of those discoveries! If she often shocked her complacent fellow citizens by the severity of her moral responses to what she knew were betrayals in the realm of national policy, she more often amazed and allured us with the energy of her curiosity and solicitude in setting forth the glorious achievements of writers and artists she knew were the masters of experience unsuspected by an indolent public. I think one of the reasons she protested the label “intellectual” (anything but a compliment in our country) was that she had observed how frequently that label was a shortcut to a dismissal of the new. Her six volumes of fiction, her (wonderful) play “Alice in Bed,” her four films and even her seven volumes of closely reasoned essays (“AIDS and Its Metaphors,” for example) were met so often with grudging incomprehension that I believe much of her “critical” writing was an overall effort to open a wider path to new forms of experiment and mastery, not merely to an intellectual’s defense pro domo.

And then how protean, how resourceful, was that loving curiosity of hers in every genre. Her studies in photography, cinema and popular culture were matched, indeed were sustained, by her searching inspections of medicine and politics, of religion and philosophy. Sontag had begun as a teacher (at age 28, she was teaching a course at Columbia University on “the sociology of religion”) and although the academy remained a road not taken, anyone who heard her lecture or read poetry (or indeed any literature) aloud, could be in no doubt of her loving responsibility to the text.

“We aspire to life in the body,” Sontag wrote in that first book of criticism, and the rest of her work went on to examine a series of exemplary instances that sustained, flouted or just articulated that aspiration. In pursuit of this endeavor, a constant application to Nietzsche had been Sontag’s resource from the beginning. I recall in 1968 getting a glimpse of her notes for a series of lectures, “Beyond Personality,” given at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York. On one 3-by-5 card I was startled to see the scrawl: “Nietzsche -- my hero!” It has been ever thus, and it was precisely the reversals and paradoxes of the Nietzschean resonance that let her get in her own licks, that allowed her to discover or invent her native strain (one extending from L.A. to Tucson from the University of Chicago to Manhattan’s London Terrace).

If she was the swiftest exponent of the “modern” resonance, she also always scrutinized past masters for what would make them “her” masters. She was the most generous of our critics because she discovered early on that the excellence and ingenuity of art were precisely what would empower her to an autonomous range of actions. Admiration was Sontag’s compositional device, the Penelope’s web she would pluck apart by night (in the darkness of critical texts) so she might weave it again by day (in the dazzle of her fiction and discursive fables). There was no more poignant self-explorer (“I am always starting up,” she wrote, “straining to hear a change in the sound”) among her contemporaries than this resolutely errant venturer into the acknowledged mysteries of mastery.

What is remembered and what is forgotten -- Sontag has written to remind us -- are one and the same. That is the faith of her, of our, modernity: We remember what we wish to remember, what we regard as important (Freud); and yet we truly remember only what we do not even know we remember, what our senses involuntarily recover from the abyss of the past, a reconstruction of that lost paradise that is the only paradise we know (Proust). This was Sontag’s lifelong pursuit, what I’d like to call her errantry.

In her two last (and best) fictions, she proceeded by the use of memory (often by direct citation, much fragmented) to deeper incitations, showing a willingness to submit or surrender mere conscious process to engage scription, that writing without purposive prefix that is the secret of her best texts, her finest fabrications. (“[O]ne can forget everything and then it all comes back.”)

How prescient Sontag was when she (necessarily) concluded one of her critical revisions (here of Nietzsche, as elsewhere of Diderot, of Ibsen, in the fashion of her greatest contemporaries in fiction-cum-criticism, William Gass, Donald Barthelme, Guy Davenport). “I have told this story many times,” she wrote, “snatching composure from my insignificant terrors.” Technically, one recognizes that it was the aphorism -- a suspension between poetry, which is always recurrence, and prose, which is always singularity -- that governed the stories she told. It will come as no surprise that in her most celebrated essays, such as “Notes on Camp” and “The Pornographic Imagination,” Sontag achieved this same athleticism of self-recognition: “I discover who I have become” by this device. And ever since her first novel, “The Benefactor,” her means of fictive characterization were the same, epigram or aphorism: Such concision was her saving grace in a medium often damned for its loquacity. Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti are latter-day masters of the elliptical and the oblique, the aphoristic consciousness, and it is they, of course, whom she eagerly saluted in her own criticism, along with E.M. Cioran and Cesare Pavese; not to mention, in its wilder ranges, John Cage and Antonin Artaud. The very international savor of these contemporary virtuosos of broken wisdom was one of Sontag’s strongholds.

Of all the American writers of her generation, she is readiest to haunt the altars of strange gods, aware that they might well be the ones to shore up the holiness that has so continuously leaked out of the home-ground divinities. This is the “one story only” that all of Sontag’s fictions and all her discursive forays tell, always with the same passionate capacity for recognition of the masters, for admiration -- for wonder and awe.

I’d like to end this perhaps too personal notice by reversing a flyleaf dedication to me of her 1969 volume of essays, “Styles of Radical Will,” professing my mourning for my late friend by borrowing her own phrase: For Susan, whom I want to talk to all my life. *