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Susan Sontag (1933-2004) |
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American essayist, short story writer, and novelist, a leading commentator on modern culture, whose innovative essays on such diverse subjects as camp, pornographic literature, fascist aesthetics, photography, AIDS, and revolution gained a wide attention. Susan Sontag also wrote screenplays and directed films. She had a great impact on experimental art in the 1960s and 1970s, and she introduced many new stimulating ideas to American culture. "Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive. However, despite the extravagances of ordinary language and advertising, they are not lethal. In the hyperbole that markets cars like guns, there is at least this much truth: except in wartime, cars kill more people than guns do. The camera/gun does not kill, so the ominous metaphor seems to be all bluff – like a man's fantasy of having a gun, knife, or tool between his legs." (from On Photography, 1977) Susan Sontag was born in New York, N.Y. Sontag's father, Jack Rosenblatt, had a fur trading business in China – he died in China of pulmonary tuberculosis when she was five. Sontag inherited his photographic memory. Her mother, Mildred, was an alcoholic. She married army captain Nathan Sontag in 1945. Due to Sontag's asthma, the family left New York City. Sontag
grew up in
Tucson, Arizona, and Los Angeles, California. Later in life she
suffered from migraines. Because of anemia, Sontag's mother gave her
blood to drink. "What saved me as
schoolchild in Arizona," she wrote, "waiting to grow up, waiting
to escape into a larger reality, was reading books . . . " (At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches by Susan Sontag, 2007, p. xvi) At the age of fifteen Sontag entered the University of California at Berkeley, but most of her undergraduate work she did at the College of the University of Chicago, graduating in 1951. In her sophomore year she married the 28-year-old Philip Rieff, a sociology instructor; they divorced in the late 1950s. "I was lucky enough to have a child and be married when I was very young," Sontag later said. "I did it and now I don't have to do it anymore." (Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, 2016, p. 49) With Rieff Sontag moved to Boston and continued her studies at Harvard, where she was a Ph.D. candidate from 1955-1957. In 1957-58 Sontag studied at the University of Paris. She collaborated with Rieff on a study of Freud's cultural influence, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959).
Rieff never published anything as brilliant as this work. When speaking
of the authorship of the book, Sontag always insisted that she wrote
every word of it. For four years, Sontag was an instructor in the religion department of Columbia University. In 1964, for a semester, she was Writer in Residenc at Rutgers University. Since then, Sontag supported herself by writing. Her connection with the Partisan Review brought Sontag in contact with the New York intellectual scene. She contributed to various other periodicals, including New York Review of Books, Atlantic Monthly, Nation, and Harper's. Her first films made in Sweden, Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), received poor reviews. As a novelist Sontag started her career at the age of 30 with The Benefactor. She wrote the first draft in a couple of months. This heavily symbolic work was partly a pastiche of the 19th-century Bildungsroman, a novel about the formation of character. In the story the protagonist, Hippolyte, a wealthy man, attempts to make his daily life conform to his bizarre dreams and to have them to serve as solutions to his normal life. Hippolyte finally achieves complete freedom by rejecting outside interpretations of his real/dream life, and finds peace at living in silence. The novel prepared way for Sontag's essays about art – she stated that people should not attempt to find the 'meaning' in a work of art but experience it as a thing in itself.
On the bohemian New York scene of the early sixties, Sontag swiftly
acquired a reputation as the radical-liberal American woman, who had not
only deep knowledge ancient and modern European culture, but could
also reinterpret it from the American point of view. A selection of her
writings appeared in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1968),
where she stated that the understanding of art starts from intuitive
response and not from analysis or intellectual considerations. "A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or
commentary on the world." (Ibid., p. 21) Thus she could defend the fascist aesthetics of Leni Riefenstahl, whose Triump of the Will (1935)
is the most famous example of Nazi propaganda. Later Sontag
reconsidered her views and coined the slogan of 'fascinating fascism'
in her essay from 1974. It was an assault on the rehabilitation
Riefenstahl. "Incidentally, her ideas were not new," answered
Riefenstahl in her autobiography, "she was merely rehashing an
opinion that Siegfried Kracauer had voiced in his film catechism From Caligari to Hitler, which is respected by a number of cinema enthusiasts and film students." (A Memoir by Leni Riefenstahl, 1993, p. 622) Rejecting interpretation as the main task of the critic, Sontag
advocated what she called 'transparency', which means "experiencing the
luminousness of thing in itself, of things being what they are." (Against Interpretation: And Other Essays by Susan Sontag, 2001, p. 13)
The 'meaning' of art lies in the experiencing both style and content
together without analysis. "In a culture whose already classical
dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy
and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect
upon art." (Ibid., p. 7) Sontag's other influential works include The Style of Radical Will (1969), which continued her explorations of contemporary culture and such phenomena as drugs, pornography, cinema, and modern art and music. The essays in On Photography (1976) were first published in The New York Review of Books. This book, which took five years to finish, was a study of the force of photographic images which are continually inserted between experience and reality. Sontag developed further the concept of 'transparency.' When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. Sontag's views deeply influenced the famous celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, a close friend of hers. "When I first met her, she said, 'You could be good,' and I've always been trying to rise to that place." (The Powells.com Interviews: 22 Authors and Artists Talk about Their Books by Dave Weich, 2000, p. 186) On Photography was not illustrated with photograps, and the same policy Sontag followed in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), dealing with the imagery of war. Again Sontag rests solely on the power of words in the world, where "our culture of spectatorship neutralizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities." (Ibid., p. 105) When Sontag's mother first heard that her daughter had cancer, she sent Susan an electric blanket. Illness as Metaphor (1978) was written after Sontag's cancer treatment, but she tells nothing of her own struggle with cancer.. Her point was that although illness is used often punitatively as a figure or metaphor for all sorts of political, military, and other processes, the most truthful way is to resist such metaphoric thinking. Sontag compared TB with cancer, noting that "in the hierarchy of the body's organ, lung carcer is felt to be less shameful than rectal cancer." Newsweek described Illness as Metaphor as "one of the most liberating books of our time." The book was later revised and expanded as Aids and Its Metaphors (1988), in which Sontag saw AIDS as one of the most "mean-laden" of diseases, and criticized the aspect of punishment that was connected to it. "If consistency is truly the hobgoblin of little minds, Sontag's mind must be very large, for she has never been stopped by her own last pronouncement. In the past decade, for instance, while continuing to champion the kind of elliptical European fiction that meets her much elaborated and stringent critical standards, she began writing best-selling, plot-heavy novels. But whatever the position or wherever the situation, Sontag has managed to hold the limelight as few of her kind have done." (Daphne Merkin in 'The Dark Lady of the Intellectuals', The New York Times on the Web, October 29, 2000) Death Kit (1967), Sontag's second novel, a was a nightmarish meditation on life, death and the relationship between the two. Like in The Benefactor, the fragmented protagonist cannot always distinguish between dream and reality. A collection of Sontag's short stories, I, Etcetera, came out in 1977. Her third novel, The Volcano Lover (1992), was a bestseller. Set in the 18th century, it depicted a drama between the 56-year- old ambassador sir William Hamilton, his 20-year-old wife Lady Emma Hamilton, and the hero of the age, Lord Nelson, who won Napoleon but lost his victory for a woman. It is also a story of revolution and the position of women, written in a manner that approaches the formality of late 18th-century English. After the appearance of the book Sontag declared that further on she will concentrate on writing fiction rather than essays. "The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. Can we really say there is no response to this? Is it acceptable that such slaughters be dismissed as civil wars, also known as ''age-old ethnic hatreds.'' (After all, anti-Semitism was an old tradition in Europe; indeed, a good deal older than ancient Balkan hatreds. Would this have justified letting Hitler kill all the Jews on German territory?) Is it true that war never solved anything? (Ask a black American if he or she thinks our Civil War didn't solve anything.)" (from 'Why Are We in Kosovo?' 1999) Sontag's novel In America (1999) was based on a real story.
It depicted a woman's search for self-transformation. The protagonist
is Maryna Zalewska, an actress, who travels in 1876 with her family and
a group of Poles to California to found an utopian commune. When
the endeavour fails, Maryna returns successfully on the stage. The
work received the National Book Award in 2000. Where the Stress Falls (2001), a collection of essays, made William Deresiewicz in The New York Times attack
on Sontag's position as America's leading intellectual: "While ''Where
the Stress Falls'' won't do much to enhance her stature as a thinker,
never before has she made such large claims for her moral pre-eminence,
her exemplary fulfillment of the intellectual's mission as society's
conscience. In effect, she's the first person in a long while to
nominate herself so publicly for sainthood." (The New York Times, November 4, 2001)
The novelist Lisa Appignanesi notes in her review that what sets Sontag
apart from most of her academic contemporaries is that "if they care,
they can't seem to think; and if they can think, they're often too
grand to care" (from Independent, 19 January 2002). After the Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, issued in February 1989 a death sentence against Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses (1988), Sontag supported him and organized a public reading from his work in Manhattan. Besides herself, readers included Aryeh Neier, Claire Bloom, Norman Mailer and Larry McMurtry. At that time, she was the president of PEN American Center. During the war in Bosnia, Sontag spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. "If Europe is having a hard time thinking that it matters what happens in the southeastern corner of Europe," Sontag wrote in her famous essays 'Why Are We In Kosovo', "imagine how hard it is for Americans to think it is in their interest." (The New York Times Magazine, May 2, 1999) In addition to essays and novels, Sontag wrote screenplays
for experimental films and directed for the theatre. She also edited selected writings of such European writers as
Roland Barthes and Antonin Artaud (1976). Homo Poeticus (1995) is a selection of
Danilo Kis' essays and interviews, in which Sontag wrote an introduction. Among
Sontag's several awards are American Academy Ingram Merrill Foundation
Award (1976), National Book Critics Circle Award (1977), Academy of Sciences
and Literature Award (Germany, 1979). She was appointed in 1979 Member
of American Academy. In 1990 Sontag received a five-year fellowship from the MacArthur
Foundation. Her private life Sontag kept carefully guarded. However, in an interview in The New York Times she told that she had loved both men and women. To stay awake and keep up her productivity, she took massive amounts of amphetamines. Occasionally, she forgot to eat. She wrote in her diary in 1977: "Things I dislike: sleeping in an apartment alone, cold weather, couples, football games, swimming, anchovies, mustaches, cats, umbrellas, being photographed, the taste of licorice, washing my hair (or having it washed), wearing a wristwatch, giving a lecture, cigars, writing letters, taking showers, Robert Frost, German food." (As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries 1964-1980 by Susan Sontag, 2012, p. 418) With Joseph Brodsky, whom she dated for a period, she ate often at the Silver Palace, a New York Chinese reataurant. Sontag died of complications of leukemia in Manhattan on December 28, 2004. She had been ill with cancer intermittently from the 1970s. The famous white streak in her hair was the only part that was its true color: chemotherapy thinned her thick, black hair and mostly white or grey grew back. Sontag's last essays included 'Regarding the Torture of Others,' about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq (May 23, 2004, The New York Times Magazine). For further reading: Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist by Sohnya Sayres (1989); Conversations with Susan Sontag by Leland Poague (1995); Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion by Liam Kennedy (1995); Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock (2000); Susan Sontag: An Annotated Bibliography, 1948-1992 by Leland A. Poague, Kathy A. Parsons (2000); Reading Susan Sontag: A Critical Introduction to Her Work by Carl Rollyson (2002); Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, by Craig Seligman (2004); Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag by Sigrid Nunez (2011); Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser (2019); Interpreting Susan Sontag's Essays: Radical Contemplative by Mark K. Ful (2021) Selected works:
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