Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  I, etcetera is a story collection, but it is not really a collection of fictions, as the word is often understood: “Project for a Trip to China,” for example, might be described as a poetic memoir. The next story, “Debriefing,” is also a memoir, slightly more fictionalized, of Susan Taubes, who is called Julia.

  It’s a pleasure to share one’s memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe—though we didn’t know it at the time. We know it now. Because it’s in the past, because we have survived.

  Julia—who, we know, has not survived—has “actress hair” and “a weary, dainty body with wide wrists, shy chest, broad-bladed shoulders, pelvic bones like gulls’ wings; an absent body one might be reluctant to imagine undressed.” Julia “doesn’t bathe enough. Suffering smells.” She and the narrator “know more than they can use.” At the same time, they “don’t know nearly enough.”2

  The story is stuffed with the material of sixties New York, which is not nearly enough to guide Julia safely through the world. “What People Are Trying to Do,” a section of the story, includes observations of others: “All around us, as far as I can see, people are striving to be ordinary. This takes a great deal of effort.”3 “What Relieves, Soothes, Helps” offers some suggestions: “A sense of humor helps. . . . Sometimes it helps to be paranoid. . . . Flight is said to help. . . . It helps to feel guiltless about your sexual options, though it’s not clear that many people actually manage this.”

  Sometimes it helps to change your feelings altogether, like getting your blood pumped out and replaced. To become another person. But without magic. There’s no moral equivalent to the operation that makes transsexuals happy.4

  Nothing really helps Julia: unable to change her feelings, she drowns herself. In the rest of the book, the desire to escape the self recurs. In “The Dummy,” a man creates a doppelgänger—an alternative self, a persona—to carry out all the tasks he no longer wishes to perform: “I want to keep for myself only what gives me pleasure.”5 This would also mean a return to childhood, in which even the most exotic possibilities had not yet been foreclosed by the steady accumulation of self:

  I had grandiose plans for living the lives of others. I wanted to be an Arctic explorer, a concert pianist, a great courtesan, a world statesman. I tried being Alexander the Great, then Mozart, then Bismarck, then Greta Garbo, then Elvis Presley.6

  None of these plans work out. Before long, the dummy himself spins off his more wearisome parts to yet another dummy: not even a doll can escape the burden of self.

  In “Old Complaints Revisited” and “Doctor Jekyll,” Sontag examines another failure. Like Duet for Cannibals and The Benefactor, both stories feature oppressive gurus who recall Jacob Taubes but who might stand for any of the masculine superegos, from Thomas Mann to Brodsky, that exercised imperium over her. Characters aspire to freedom without hoping to attain it. “The slave of seriousness” in “Old Complaints Revisited” is entangled with an organization whose members can never get away. In “Doctor Jekyll,” disciples are bonded to their leader, literally, by mystic ropes. The metaphor is blunt, the message clear: “You can’t become other than what you are,” someone tells the character in “Old Complaints Revisited.”7 “Don’t speak to me about freedom,” “Doctor Jekyll” concludes.8

  * * *

  One knows nothing, and cannot escape: if the diagnosis is at least partly accurate, it is hardly encouraging; and into the early eighties Susan’s mood darkened further. She developed an obsession with Wagner, writing in 1981 that “my passion—and that’s not too strong a word—for Wagner these last three years is also a sign of my psychological collapse. I revel, I float: it’s just as Nietzsche described.”9

  She wanted to begin again, trying, and failing, to cast off her ongoing entanglement with Nicole, trying to find a new way to write, to find some moral equivalent to the operation that makes transsexuals happy. She was still depressed, still feeling she was doing less than she ought, still in a more or less permanent state of panic:

  It must be possible to feel less anxious than I do. I feel—I don’t know how exactly to put it—superfluous, unhinged, and (as I have for five years) posthumous. I’m playing at being alive, at being a writer. I don’t know where to put myself. I have neither energy nor hope. It must be possible to do better than this!10

  This was more than the usual writerly whinge. The uncertainty in her stories and journals was real. The glorious productivity that marked the sixties and seventies would dry up in the eighties, after she was fully recovered from her cancer. Her time was increasingly taken up with ribbon-cutting duties.

  But her renown would grow at the expense of her private and artistic lives. Between 1980, when she published Under the Sign of Saturn, and 1992, when she published The Volcano Lover, she would produce only a single short book, AIDS and Its Metaphors. She wrote short pieces, some outstanding; but the decade would become more notable for what she did not write than what she did. She started and abandoned book after book, distracted by unsatisfying projects, struggling, constantly, to begin again. For a woman famed for “reinvention,” the eighties would show just how agonizing the struggle to move beyond outdated ideas and passé selves could be, how little it had to do with fashion: how intimately it related to an attempt to escape the bad parts of herself, the sad parts of herself. In I, etcetera, she observed, time and again, that flight was not an option. And as she realized its impossibility, she grew so depressed that she considered the ultimate escape: suicide.

  But an uncertain mind is an open mind. And as Susan was better at admiring than attacking, she was better at doubt than assertion. It was just as well, since her attempts to think her way into a new self were occurring in a wildly fluctuating cultural context. A person who had so recently been “the tone of the times” and “the muse of the age” found herself stranded. Certain questions, urgent in the sixties and seventies, quickly became as outlandish as the quarrels among the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Taken together, these sudden shifts—artistic, political, sexual—left her old world shattered.

  * * *

  The election of John Kennedy in 1960 symbolized a break between generations. Twenty years later, the election of Ronald Reagan became a watershed, too. Kennedy was the youngest president, following the oldest, Eisenhower. At sixty-nine, Reagan was seven years older than Eisenhower had been when he was inaugurated. He did not represent a new generation, but he did represent a new coalition. He married old Republican issues—antiunionism, anticommunism, low taxes on the rich—with reaction to the progressive victories of the sixties. Appeals to “states’ rights” won over southern racists, many of whom had been Democrats until Johnson’s civil rights laws. He brought together those offended by the liberal Supreme Court decisions of the post-Kennedy era—banning prayer in schools, allowing abortion and contraception—and rallied antifeminist sentiment in the wake of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment.

  His election, and then his resounding reelection, was a rebuff to the political world that Susan had inhabited for more than twenty years, the world that seemed victorious during the feminist meeting with Norman Mailer. In that world, said Norman Podhoretz, “the right wing did not exist. It wasn’t even on the radar.”11 In those days, the enemy of radicalism was not conservatism but liberalism, and “the fights were all sectarian.” The event of Reagan proved how much those battles had blinded the Left to a resurgent Right, and rendered them unprepared for people just as opposed to liberalism as they were, but from the opposite side. People like Sontag had not only failed to engage conservative ideas, Podhoretz said; they had not even acknowledged that such ideas existed. In 1950, Lionel Trilling, Podhoretz’s teacher, wrote that “in the United States at this time Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” There were no conservative ideas, he said: only “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”12

  Even then, this was false. Reagan was a reinvigorated
conservatism’s rebuff to the sixties, but he was also a product of the sixties. In some ways, he represented the triumph of Andy Warhol: famously unable to distinguish between image and reality, metaphor and object, experience filmed and experience lived. He told, with apparent conviction, a story about his father “lying on the doorstep in a drunken stupor” that turned out to be lifted from a novel;13 he claimed that during World War II he had filmed Nazi death camps for the Signal Corps, whereas he spent the entire war in Culver City, making training films at the Hal Roach studio.14

  This living exemplar of Warholian celebrity was a former middling actor whose sensibilities derived from Hollywood, and in whom a sense of irony was never detected: unable to distinguish between an atrocity and a photograph of an atrocity. His presidency was defined by this notion of politics as role-playing, as camp: “the farthest extension, in its sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” For Reagan, Joan Didion wrote, “rhetoric was soon understood to be interchangeable with action.”15

  * * *

  The notion that rhetoric was equivalent to action was also—as it happened—a precept of that group of writings vaguely classified as postmodernist. The movement, which partly overlapped with French Theory, or just Theory, bore certain superficial similarities to some of Sontag’s own earlier work, and set the tone for academic criticism for a generation.

  The word “academic” is important. Theory, from the start, was an academic endeavor. Many of its American devotees specialized in—and boasted of—writing that was designed to be unreadable; and among its many effects was to sever the connections, fraught but essential, between specialized criticism and the educated public. The maintenance of this link had been a strength of Family writers such as Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and Hannah Arendt, as well as their third-generation successors, including Sontag and Robert Silvers. Theory isolated the academic humanities from the general reader, producing “texts” that reflected a retreat from the social debates in which scholars had once occupied a central role. The cleavage between the opaque writing of many postmodern academics and the increasingly lowbrow tone of magazines threatened to leave writers like Sontag stranded, with no place to publish.

  The leading exponents of postmodernism—Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze—were French, members of a culture whose postwar productions Sontag had embraced and promoted at a time when those productions were mainly ignored in the United States. Like her, they were interested in film, photography, surrealism, and other forms of popular culture hitherto considered to lack the bon ton of high art. They were interested in sexuality and feminism; they were interested in and drew from writers that interested her, including Barthes, Benjamin, and Sartre.

  But Sontag did not like these postmodern writers, and almost never referred to them by name. Instead, she expressed disapprobation of “what’s called postmodernism,” which she defined as “making everything equivalent.”16 She thereby addressed, obliquely, her own critics, particularly the neoconservatives who had always accused her of leveling. This was the accusation that Hilton Kramer, her long-ago Commentary colleague, brought when he said that “Notes on ‘Camp’” created “the spiritual bankruptcy of the post-modern era” by severing “the link between high culture and high seriousness that had been a fundamental tenet of the modernist ethos.”17 This was Podhoretz’s opinion, too: “Not only ‘Camp’ but ‘Against Interpretation,’ which is basically a relativistic—I don’t know what you’d call it. It was certainly not on the side of what we, in those days, thought of as the right standards.”18

  It was one thing to expand standards to incorporate art excluded by historical injustice, as the feminist and black movements tried to do. It was something else to suggest that all works were equivalent. This was an implication of Sontag’s sixties provocations: “It’s very tiny—very tiny, content,” she quoted De Kooning’s saying in “Against Interpretation.” These could seem designed to convince herself to experience art sensually, like Irene or Paul. She never actually believed that content did not exist: like many modernists, including Wittgenstein, she was interested in the philosophical shift from examining what things mean—the classical task of criticism—to examining how they come to mean it. But this idea, popularized, risked suggesting that meaning was a mere construction, and that language, literature, and art were no more than the sum of the biases of a dominant group. Far more than Marxism or Freudianism, postmodernism was the “revenge of the intellect upon art” of which she had warned in “Against Interpretation.”

  In later years, she would often explain why democratizing “the right standards” was not the same thing as doing away with them.

  I am unquestioningly, without any ambiguity or irony, loyal to the canon of high culture in literature, music, and the visual and performing arts. But I’ve also enjoyed a lot of popular music, for example. It seemed we were trying to understand why that was perfectly possible and why that wasn’t . . . and what diversity or plurality of standards might be. However, it didn’t mean abolishing hierarchy, it didn’t mean equating everything. In some sense I was as much a partisan or supporter of traditional cultural hierarchy as any cultural conservative, but I didn’t draw the hierarchy in the same way. . . . Take an example: just because I love Dostoevsky didn’t mean that I couldn’t love Bruce Springsteen. Now, if somebody says you have to choose between Russian literature or rock ’n roll, of course I’d choose Russian literature. But I don’t have to choose.19

  In 2002, she made the connection between postmodernism and political vacuity: the cheesy, made-for-TV speechifying that had become standard in the wake of Reagan:

  When the great Lincoln speeches are cited at the commemorative ceremonies of September 11th, they have—in true postmodernist fashion—become completely emptied of meaning. They are now gestures of nobility, of greatness of spirit. What they were being great about is irrelevant.20

  Sontag denounced a culture in which “Van Gogh and Warhol”—Lincoln and Reagan—“are treated as equivalent.” She described “what’s called postmodernism—that is, the making everything equivalent” as “the perfect ideology for consumerist capitalism. It is an idea of accumulation, of preparing people for their shopping expeditions.”21

  This was a natural outgrowth of the idea that language and metaphor refer only to themselves and not to any external reality. By removing any connection to the real world (of bodies, of politics), postmodernism subverted critical authority, affirming Fernando Pessoa’s saying, half a century before, that “a great painting means a thing which a rich American wants to buy.”22 The measure was money, the critic’s opinion no more than that of one consumer. The Age of Reagan was the Age of Warhol—minus the irony.

  * * *

  During its long, wearisome reign over American academia, Theory’s refusal to engage an audience drove the humanities—already besieged by a culture that found it ever harder to see values other than financial—further to the margins. For the rest of her life, Sontag defended works described, increasingly with a sneer, as “the canon.” This defense was seen as conservative. But it had nothing to do with political conservatism. It was a great-books, University of Chicago conservatism—the opposite of the Sherman Oaks conservatism Reagan symbolized.

  In the sixties, she became known as a symbol of novelty. But political radicalism in the age of Vietnam was not incompatible with respect for the authority of the past. In 1988, she admitted that some of her enthusiasm for certain fashionable art forms had been strained:

  I was not being entirely honest with myself in the 1960’s about the accomplishment of le nouveau roman. What I really liked much more was the idea of it. When I wrote about Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet, I liked their essays and the ideas they had about fiction much better than the fiction that they themselves were writing.23

  In those years, she often expressed disdain for “the novel.” This reflected an insecurity, a suspicion of herself, that helped explain the more
recherché devices in her own fiction. Privately, as the long lists of books in her journals show, she read thousands of novels, many if not most of which reflected the traditional culture found in Joseph Brodsky’s syllabus. This was the culture she had venerated since the days of the Tucson stationery store.

  With a lifetime of study behind her, she was now in a perfect position to defend that culture to a general readership: so well fitted that the very words “Susan Sontag” came to be synonymous with high culture. Admiration brought out the best side of her personality, where she rarely put a foot wrong; and in politics, too, she escaped another unconvincing part of her thought, moving from “the infantile leftism of the 1960s” to become, in Koch’s phrase, an intelligent person again.

  But rather than discreetly allowing her writing to express this evolution, Sontag jettisoned her leftist allegiances with a gesture whose flamboyance became notorious. It was a gesture that requires decipherment, because its language, once central to political debate, is almost lost today. On February 2, 1982, Susan Sontag denounced communism in an event that became known as “Town Hall.”

  * * *

  Shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rights and wrongs of communism were still being debated in certain enclaves in the United States. The days in which Partisan Review congratulated a pregnant woman on producing “a future citizen of Soviet America” were as distant as the days in which “Stalinists, Trotskyites, Leninists, Marxist-Leninists, all debated their positions endlessly in the pages of Partisan Review—or, as Edmund Wilson called it, Partisansky Review.”24

  Over the decades, different Communist models had been in fashion: often, like Vietnam and Cuba, as proxies for American domestic battles. But interest in communism was never quite an interest in real politics, since the constituency for a Communist party in the United States was microscopic at most. For Americans, interest in communism was above all a hope that an alternative might be found to the consumer capitalism that was as devastating—to the poor and the powerless, to culture, to the environment—as it had come to seem invincible. Such interest expressed a hope that the valuable insights in Marxism might be employed democratically, since even most radicals agreed that communism was flawed wherever it really existed, despite vogues for places like North Vietnam and, especially, Cuba. Many of these debates were about aesthetics—about culture—and it was in the cultural world of New York that they played out. This was Susan’s world, “the American Bloomsbury,” in which she earned the reputation of being “that most radical of radicals.”25