Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  “Bergman withholds the kind of clear signals for sorting out fantasies from reality,” she wrote. “The insufficiency of the clues Bergman has planted must be taken to indicate that he intends the film to remain partly encoded.” The parallels with her novels, particularly Death Kit, speak for themselves. The film is likewise filled with metaphors of blindness, as when Elisabet’s blind husband makes love to Alma instead of to his own wife. But Bergman constantly frustrates the most basic “interpretation”: we can be no more sure whether he is really blind than we are that Elisabet is really mute.

  But one thing is sure, Sontag writes, and that is that Elisabet has refused life as a metaphor. Alma

  has grasped that Elizabeth wants to be sincere, not to play a role, not to lie; to make the inner and the outer come together. And that, having rejected suicide as a solution, she has decided to be mute.28

  Persona is the Latin for a theatrical mask. Etymologically, the mask is the condition of personhood, and to strip the mask is to depersonalize, literally. Removing the mask of language and speech is a “solution” almost spookier than suicide; an elected silence forces all expression into the eyes and reveals their oddity and creepiness. Eyes make Persona potent: Alma’s and Elisabet’s, but especially the eyes of Bergman, which force the viewer’s eyes, bereft of other clues, to probe his characters’ faces so invasively.

  “In the aesthetic of traditional films,” Sontag wrote, “the camera tried to remain unperceived.” No longer: the camera is everywhere, an uncomfortable, obstinate presence. But it comes no closer to “reality” than equally imperfect speech. “Persona,” Sontag wrote, “demonstrates the lack of an appropriate language, a language that is genuinely full. All that remains is a language of lacunae.”29

  * * *

  Another form of surpassing consciousness appears in Styles of Radical Will, and that is pornography. Rather, “pornography”: though her essay on the subject fortified Susan’s reputation for what would soon become known as radical chic, few would recognize the works she describes in the essay as pornographic.

  At the outset, she acknowledged this confusion with terms similar to those she employed at the Jonas Mekas trial: “Pornography is a malady to be diagnosed and an occasion for judgment,” she wrote. “It’s something one is for or against.”30 She was not talking about its more vernacular forms, she emphasized, but “a body of work belonging to literature considered as an art.”31 The careful framing is now dated, as if she were embarrassed to be wading into these waters. Indeed, this carefulness reflected a change typical of the sixties. A serious intellectual could not write about anything she wanted to, and a subject like pornography had to put on its Sunday best: made as respectably bloodless as possible.

  Susan had long been interested in pornography as most people understand the term. When she was fifteen, she recognized the appeal of smutty passages of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers.

  I detect in myself a tendency toward the pornographic, a kind of muted pleasure when I read about sexual relations. It is practically negligible when concerned with heterosexual love, but I experience a very sharp feeling when I come across passages such as the part describing Winifred and Ursula. Nothing will ever equal the intensity of my shock when I read the “Well of Loneliness” and I have since re-read parts of the book simply for the guilty and yet shameless stimulation I receive from such thoughts.

  This is not very pretty—in fact, it’s rather disgusting—but I feel obliged to record it.32

  This was not exactly a “tendency toward the pornographic.” It was a teenager turned on by writing for grown-ups. In any event, no heavy breathing would ruffle the pages of “The Pornographic Imagination”; the pornography she discussed was no more about sex than science fiction was about astronomy.

  The ahistorical dream landscape where action is situated, the peculiarly congealed time in which acts are performed—these occur almost as often in science fiction as they do in pornography. There is nothing conclusive in the well-known fact that most men and women fall short of the sexual prowess that people in pornography are represented as enjoying; that the size of organs, number and duration of orgasms, variety and feasibility of sexual powers, and amount of sexual energy all seem grossly exaggerated. Yes, and the spaceships and the teeming planets depicted in science fiction don’t exist either.33

  This was pornography as a literary discourse. As such—like so much of the art that interested her—it was an aestheticization of “real life”: an attempt to speak the ineffable, to express the radical will. Her case studies were French novels such as Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye and Anne Desclos’s Story of O, whose roots were in the eighteenth-century writings of Sade but whose interest was fundamentally modern: Sade was “one of the patron saints of the Surrealist movement.”34

  Neither book was about sex. They were about domination and submission, about purification through degradation and libertinage. And they were about the representation of sex, metaphors of sex. Because there were as many representations of sex as there were of everything else, the ones Susan chose were instructive, stories of a surrender of will so abject that it became a species of religious discipline or monasticism. This placed these works in a different context: “The use of sexual obsessions as a literary subject whose validity far fewer people would contest: religious obsessions.”35

  Not my will but thine be done: “Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds,” Susan noted. “Yet among the multitudes of the pious, the number who have ventured very far into that state of consciousness must be fairly small, too.”36 Bataille and Desclos did, and as such become paradigmatic modern figures: “One of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what’s there.”37 Bataille’s and Desclos’s characters do not return, nor do they want to: “O does not simply become identical with her sexual availability, but wants to reach the perfection of becoming an object.”38

  This desire connects the sexual pilgrim to a strain in modern art. If some artists strove “to keep one’s life from being turned into an object, a thing,” many others shared Warhol’s goal of becoming a machine: both motivations, however apparently opposed, essentially mystical. The desire to escape self, and even its “personas,” through some extreme negation can lead to physical annihilation, making many of the characters described in these works akin to Simone Weils or Antonin Artauds of sexuality. As in Sade, they go very far indeed: Bataille’s book climaxes, if that is the word, with a gouged-out eyeball being shoved into a vagina.

  Sontag’s readings go to extremes of their own, toward general statements about sexuality that are much more convincing as statements about her sexuality. What she sees in sexuality is the master-slave dynamic, and in this kind of pornography a reflection of her “Project: to destroy the will.”

  Human sexuality is, quite apart from Christian repressions, a highly questionable phenomenon and belongs, at least potentially, among the extreme rather than the ordinary experiences of humanity. Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness . . . making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much, if not more, than it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.39

  One can agree without finding The Story of O representative of sexuality as it occurs in most lives, even in those in which it is unambiguously demonic. What Sontag admires in Desclos—who wrote under the pseudonym of Pauline Réage, and would not reveal her authorship until 1994—is that she “entirely presumes this dark and complex vision of sexuality so far removed from the hopeful view sponsored by American Freudianism and liberal culture.”40

  Sontag’s own vision emerges from her skepticism toward metaphor and images. “What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death,” she writes. This seems questionable: pornography, at least f
or most people, really is about sex. But etymology relates pornography to the broader themes in Sontag’s work. In Greek, pornografia means a “depiction of prostitutes.” And it is not prostitutes but the depiction of them that relates pornography to death. Depictions—images—show lives bound toward their undoing. “Photograph,” Susan wrote, “state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction.”41 This is the pathos of the image. There may be escapes from consciousness. But there is no escape from time.

  Chapter 19

  Xu-Dan Xôn-Tăc

  In 1968, a new phrase entered the American lexicon: “credibility gap.” It referred to the distance Plato had described between language and reality, and showed that that distance, rather than a mere intellectual abstraction, was a matter of life and death.

  In practical terms, “the credibility gap” meant the gap between the Johnson administration’s rosy rhetoric and a bloody quagmire. “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” Johnson had said in the 1964 campaign.1 The gap grew once fifty thousand troops became 549,000, especially because Photograph revealed something no amount of propaganda could prettify: monks setting themselves on fire; a naked girl running in terror from her napalmed village; a civilian shot in the head in the middle of the street; American soldiers with their limbs blown off.

  The extent of the deception reached such proportions that it came very close to upending the nation’s social contract. Great though Johnson’s initial achievements were, they almost immediately ran aground on the distrust of a corrupt authority that he came to symbolize. He signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965. On August 11, as a reaction to police brutality, riots broke out in the Watts district of Los Angeles. Those six days of mayhem were followed, in coming years, by mass rioting in one city after the next—Newark, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Baltimore. In Washington, in 1968, for the first time in memory, troops bristling with machine guns perched on the steps of the Capitol.

  They had been called out on April 5. Six days before, President Johnson stunned the nation with his announcement that he would not seek reelection. On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and more than a hundred cities burned. On June 5, the day after he won the California primary, Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles.

  * * *

  The early 1960s, with their hopes of generational renewal, personal reinvention, and escape from outmoded social conventions, were over, and darkness was pouring in. In “Trip to Hanoi,” the record of Susan’s journey to North Vietnam, those hopes are not quite dead, and the essay illustrates an attempt, common enough at the time, to salvage some of the idealism that was propelling revolts all over the world, from Mexico to Prague to the Paris barricades. Susan visited in May 1968, halfway between the assassinations of King and Kennedy. The chaos of those weeks haunts every page of the essay, and makes it a sinister mirror of the times.

  Her activism had earned her an invitation from the North Vietnamese government. She traveled to Laos, then entered a country that had suffered years of bombardment, where life had been reduced to the barest necessities. She was immediately confronted with the problem of how to see a place that she had only known through words and images. “Like anyone who cared about Vietnam in the last years, I already knew a great deal,” she wrote. But she soon realized that she knew nothing, and the first days were “profoundly discouraging.”2

  Again and again, she confessed to her bafflement. She realized how inadequate words and Photograph were, understood how hard it was to see Vietnam independent from the ideology that had grown up around it. She tried to reconcile the country in her mind with the one in front of her eyes: “The problem was that Vietnam had become so much of my consciousness as an American that I was having enormous difficulty getting it out of my head.”3 It was, she later said, “the first time I ever wrote about myself at all.” This was not a natural voice; she had always written about herself when hidden behind a persona. “I can’t hope to have the kind of influence that Norman Mailer and Paul Goodman have because I can’t imagine writing personally the way they do. I’m just not temperamentally capable of using the kind of direct, immediate, first-person experience that Mailer uses in his essays, but that’s precisely what makes him so effective,” she said the year she went to Vietnam.4 She had to step out from behind the mask. “I don’t want to write about myself,” she thought. “I just want to write about them. But when I realized that the best way that I could write about them was to include myself, then it was like a sacrifice.”5

  Hippolyte had confessed his interest in revolutions, his conviction that revolutions were “changes not of government or of the personnel of public institutions, but revolutions of feelings and seeing.” Vietnam was both. It was, first of all, the bloody revolt Che Guevara envisioned when exhorting radicals to create “two, three, many Vietnams.” And it was an individual commitment to radical consciousness. “It would be good if we each made a Vietnam inside ourselves,” Jean-Luc Godard said. Susan cited the phrase approvingly.6 But in Hanoi, she found that reconciling these different Vietnams—the real country and the image that trickled through language and Photograph—was harder than she expected.

  Over and over, in her first days, she emphasized how much she could not see, how much she could not understand. “I try to discover the differences between each of them, but can’t,” she said of her hosts, “and I worry that they don’t see what’s different or special about me.” She did her best to go along with being “reduced to the status of a child: scheduled, led about, explained to, fussed over, pampered, kept under benign surveillance.” This was a form of surrender of consciousness, like those she had discussed in her essays on pornography, Persona, and the aesthetics of silence, but it was not easy to accept: “The heaviness of it all comes from the fact that the script is written entirely by them; and they’re directing the play, too. Though this is how it has to be.”7

  As usual, language was no help. “What makes it especially hard to see people as individuals is that everybody here seems to talk in the same style and to have the same things to say,” she wrote.8 The Vietnamese spoke in language that she felt reduced her to the status of a child: indeed, to being Sue Rosenblatt, cub reporter at Tucson’s Cactus Press. “The executed Fascist leaders were our enemies,” she wrote when she was twelve. “But the Italian people are not.” In Vietnam, she heard clichés she had long outgrown: “We know that the American people are our friends,” she was told. “Only the present American government is our enemy.”9

  One could smile at that childish language. Sontag did, uncomfortably: “The root of my bad faith: that I long for the three-dimensional, textured, ‘adult’ world in which I live in America . . . [even] in this two-dimensional world of the ethical fairy tale where I am paying a visit.”10 But a writer who loved complexity found that some things were quite simple: “For once, I think, the political and moral reality is as simple as the Communist rhetoric would have it. The French were ‘the French colonialists’; the Americans are ‘imperialist aggressors’; the Thieu-Ky regime is a ‘puppet government.’”11 Here, at last, the credibility gap was bridged.

  The simple language consoled her. But she also knew that the surrender of intelligence and personality it required was not a way out of her own consciousness. Adopting the Vietnamese view would mean losing “what’s different or special about me.” It meant the loss of self she had always feared. (“I won’t let ‘them’ take it away from me. I won’t be annihilated.”) Still, she tried to imagine a positive side to such a loss.

  Of course, I could live in Vietnam, or an ethical society like this one—but not without the loss of a big part of myself. Though I believe incorporation into such a society will greatly improve the lives of most people in the world (and therefore support the advent of such societies), I imagine it will in many ways impoverish mine.12

  This was why Cioran rejec
ted musings about a return to a less complex consciousness as neither desirable nor possible. There was no going back, no rewriting history; and Susan’s desire to square this circle, to remain herself while also embracing some alternative she thought might be simpler, gave her an experience of being trapped in history—the social, economic, and political structures that produced her—and trapped in herself.

  “It is a very complex self that an American brings to Hanoi.”13 No matter how much she admired the Vietnamese peasant revolutionaries, Susan Sontag could never become a Vietnamese peasant revolutionary. Did this make her a phony? “My impulse is to follow the old, severe rule: if you can’t put your life where your head (heart) is, then what you think (feel) is a fraud.”14 This paradoxical desire—to be authentic by being something other than she was—would lead her to greater fraudulence: in terms of Vietnamese culture, in terms of her own.

  * * *

  The first part of “Trip to Hanoi” is filled with admissions, candid and concise, of blindness: “I want their victory. But I don’t understand their revolution.”15 The language, the starkness, the tight control (“which leaves me unable to believe I’m seeing a genuine sample of what this country is about”16), turned Vietnam into the kind of “ahistorical dream landscape” in which she had situated pornography. Vietnam was “the target of what’s most ugly in America: the principle of ‘will,’ the self-righteous taste for violence.”17 But the same principle of will—the desire to be different—led her, suddenly, to submit to her American fantasy of Vietnamese ethics and heroism.