Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  What was at stake in Sarajevo was not only the fate of a people and a country. Sarajevo was a European city—and European, David wrote, “had become a moral category as well as a geographical one.”13 This category was the liberal idea of the free society: of civilization itself. The Bosnians knew this, and were bewildered that their appeals were met with such indifference.

  We are part of Europe. We are the people in the former Yugoslavia who stand for European values—secularism, religious tolerance, and multi-ethnicity. How can the rest of Europe let this happen to us? When I replied that Europe is and always has been as much a place of barbarism as a place of civilization, they didn’t want to hear. Now no one would dispute such a statement.14

  This idea of Europe emerged from the Holocaust, after which the basic measure of civilization became the willingness to resist the kinds of horrors unfolding in Bosnia. After Auschwitz, the civilized government was one defined by its resistance to these crimes; but governments were not the only ones called: the free citizen, too, had an obligation to resist. But how could a single person stand in the path of a genocidal army? The question of how to oppose injustice had occupied Susan since childhood: since she read Les Misérables, since she saw the first pictures of the Holocaust in the bookstore in Santa Monica.

  “I’m very attached to the idea of noble conduct,” she said in 1979. “Words like nobility sound very strange to us now, and they sound snobbish, to say the least.”15 But nobility was the heart of what she described, even earlier, as “seriousness.” “Being serious,” she wrote in notes for “The Aesthetics of Silence,”

  means being “there.” Feeling the “weight” of things. Of one’s own statements or acts. . . . When [Kierkegaard] said there are no Christians today, he meant there are no serious Christians, no Christians who take Christianity seriously.

  don’t mean it “seriously”—

  i.e. aren’t prepared to act on it

  put your body on the line, put your money where your mouth is16

  Sarajevo offered a chance to put her body on the line for the ideas that had given dignity to her life. This was what she had not been able to do with AIDS—but she did now, and Pašović saw how far she was willing to go.

  Susan did understand, very, very deeply, that this was a defining moment in European and perhaps world history. She knew that. And she was ready to die for it. Because she was saying . . . I’m trying not to cry. I didn’t talk about Susan this way for a long time. It was that she didn’t say that, but I dare to say that she didn’t want to live in the world where those things are possible.17

  * * *

  Susan Sontag was an individual, but her career had made her something more. She was a symbol of the cosmopolitan, “European” culture under attack. And she took her obligation to that culture seriously enough to place both these existences—Susan the person, Sontag the metaphor—in the line of fire.

  She had often pondered the public duty of the writer. She admired those of her predecessors who, in similarly perilous situations, risked their own lives. And she was shocked that more people in her position were not risking their own. “The striking thing about Susan, before you got to know her, was that she was there at all,” said John Burns, Balkan correspondent for the New York Times. “Sarajevo was famous for the people who didn’t show up. Faced with evident cases of genocide, where was the intelligentsia of the time?”18

  Upon returning, after her first visit, to an unruffled Germany, she was “dismayed to find that every German intellectual and writer I spoke to—Günter Grass, [Hans] Magnus [Enzensberger], etc.—seemed completely indifferent to the genocide, or worse. For the first time I heard Magnus talking as a German, not as a European.” In Sarajevo, she was asked about the absence of many noted American writers:

  There is an enormous depoliticization of the Western intelligentsia, the Western writers, the writers of Western Europe and North America. You mention Kurt Vonnegut. . . . All of these people are just sitting in their huge, rich apartments and going out to the country on the weekends and living their private lives.19

  The contrast with another conflict was often mentioned, as in an interview Sontag gave Burns in August:

  Sarajevo is the Spanish Civil War of our time, but the difference in response is amazing. In 1937, people like Ernest Hemingway and André Malraux and George Orwell and Simone Weil rushed to Spain, although it was incredibly dangerous. Simone Weil got terrible burns and George Orwell got shot, but they didn’t see the danger as a reason not to go. They went as an act of solidarity, and from that act grew some of the finest literature of their time.20

  But what did this courting of death accomplish? To stimulate the literary impulse once back in London or Paris? In Against Interpretation, Sontag had written about Michel Leiris’s Manhood, a memoir whose unforgettable preface, “On Literature Considered as a Bullfight,” suggested that modern literature was bloodless, safe, harmless. “To be a writer, a man of letters, is not enough. It is boring, pallid. It lacks danger.” The bourgeois resident of a pacified nation had to seek his thrills in some duskier abroad, whether artistic or geographic.

  Leiris must feel, as he writes, the equivalent of the bullfighter’s knowledge that he risks being gored. Only then is writing worthwhile. But how can the writer achieve this invigorating sense of mortal danger? Leiris’ answer is: through self-exposure, through not defending himself; not through fabricating works of art, objectifications of himself, but through laying himself—his own person—on the line of fire. But we, the readers, the spectators of this bloody act, know that when it is performed well (think of how the bullfight is discussed as a preeminently aesthetic, ceremonial act) it becomes, whatever the disavowals of literature—literature.21

  Leiris’s demand was the same as Adrienne Rich’s, the same as the gay activists’: to lay oneself on the line of fire. This imperative could be interpreted, as Sontag had, as an aesthetic or as a political requirement; but it could also be interpreted in the other sense Leiris suggested: a simple demand to risk one’s life. This demand was frighteningly easy to achieve by setting foot in Sarajevo. During the siege, an average of ten people were killed every day, 11,541 in all.

  * * *

  Was there not something grotesque about using other people’s suffering to “achieve this invigorating sense of mortal danger”? Did the duty—social, political, moral, aesthetic—mean nothing more than risking terrible burns, or getting shot in the neck, or being gored? And would it be enough to volunteer for the risk—or was dying the only way of proving one’s commitment?

  Even those who did brave the journey to Sarajevo discovered how difficult it was to answer these questions. Some, whose intentions were beyond reproach, offended the Sarajevans. Amid widespread starvation, Joan Baez warned Atka Kafedzić that she was “too skinny”; Bernard-Henri Lévy, known in France as BHL, became known in Bosnia as DHS: “Deux Heures à Sarajevo,” Two Hours in Sarajevo.

  The locals had ample opportunities to size up their visitors. “We were very cynical about the whole circus element of these war safaris,” said Una Sekerez, who issued passes on behalf of the United Nations, and issued one to Susan:

  There were other people like that, like: What are they doing here? I just assumed she was in for a quick look at how these people on the reservation lived—and she would go. Then she stayed. That was very, very unusual.22

  On that first visit, the poet Ferida Duraković translated questions from a journalist.

  His first question was: How do you feel coming to Sarajevo for safari? I translated it and Susan said: I understood the question. Please be careful when you translate this. She looked at me and then said, “Young man, don’t put stupid questions. I am a serious person.”23

  * * *

  “Witnessing requires the creation of star witnesses,” Sontag wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others, the last book published in her lifetime.24 Like so many of her works, the book was a meditation on ways of seeing and representing; but if her re
ference to stars sounded sardonic, it was not—or not only. Like all forms of seeing and representing, witnessing was often pathetically ineffective. How was watching something happen, even risking one’s life to write about it or take pictures of it, going to change the world of armies and politics?

  Yet John Burns saw the importance of witnesses. Shortly after the siege began, three journalists were killed; and the remaining reporters, led by the BBC, decided that they should all leave: “It was an intense, shameful debate.” They evacuated to the suburb of Ilidža, safely beyond the airport, to the same hotel where Archduke Franz Ferdinand slept before his own apocalyptic visit. There, Burns made up his mind to go back to Sarajevo. “As soon as we left, the Serbs started letting loose on the city,” he explained. “Ten thousand shells that day. They felt free because the journalists were gone.”

  Eyes made a difference, even if only a limited one. In On Photography, Susan discussed the limits of representing calamity. “A photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude.”25 This allowed a witness—a writer, a journalist, a photographer—to create that context; but that process could be agonizingly slow, and it was not easy to know if one was making any difference. “No longer can a writer consider that the imperative task is to bring the news to the outside world,” she wrote. “The news is out.”26

  This was what David discovered. Everyone everywhere knew what was happening in Bosnia, yet few went beyond rhetorical expressions of solidarity. The politicians relied on compassion fatigue, exactly as Susan had warned in On Photography—Photograph of war would become nothing more than “the unbearable replay of a now familiar atrocity exhibition.”27 And the victims, enraged by the world’s apparent indifference, mocked the powerless newsbringers, whether celebrities or journalists.

  In Sarajevo in the years of the siege, it was not uncommon to hear, in the middle of a bombardment or a burst of sniper fire, a Sarajevan yelling at the photojournalists, who were easily recognizable by the equipment hanging round their necks, “Are you waiting for a shell to go off so you can photograph some corpses?”28

  The reporters who were risking their lives for the sake of Sarajevo were judged. And they, likewise, judged those they suspected of tourism. But both Sarajevans and journalists respected Susan Sontag. One, the American Janine di Giovanni, was amazed by her sheer stamina.

  It was unbelievably tough for me, a twenty-something-year-old girl. And she was a woman in her sixties. It really struck me. For a New York intellectual it was an odd place to be. Lots of celebrities came, and the reporters were cynical. I remember hearing she was coming and not being that impressed. But she didn’t complain. She sat with everyone else, she ate the crap food, she lived in the bombed-out rooms we lived in.29

  The actor Izudin Bajrović said:

  She represented for us the part of the world that understood what was going on and was ready to do something about it. Not the world. But it meant more to us that she came than some prime minister. We didn’t really believe in any prime ministers. We never doubted her goodwill. We doubted everyone else’s.30

  * * *

  If praise and prosperity brought out the worst in her, oppression and destitution brought out the best. If she could be haughty in New York, she was kind in Sarajevo. There, she put her body on the line, and bore witness, and earned universal respect; but none of that answered the difficult question she posed: of what she, either as an individual or as a symbol, could actually do to help. “I didn’t want to be a tourist here,” she said, “to watch while everybody suffered. . . . I wanted to give something, to contribute.”31 Perhaps, she later wrote, the most appropriate response would have been silence:

  The best thing is not to speak at all, which was my original intention. To speak at all of what one is doing seems—perhaps, whatever one’s intentions—a form of self-promotion.32

  This was the response—silence—offered by many modern artists. It was the response that Elisabet, in Bergman’s Persona, elected when confronted with other exemplary horrors: a Vietnamese monk burning himself alive; a terrified child in the Warsaw Ghetto. Elisabet, Susan wrote nearly thirty years before, “wants to be sincere, not to play a role, not to lie; to make the inner and the outer come together, [and] having rejected suicide as a solution, [has] decided to be mute.” But this was a spiritual response, not a political one. The Bosnians had real needs, and Susan hoped to be of some real assistance.

  I’d have been happy simply to help some patients get into a wheelchair. I made a commitment at the risk of my life, under a situation of extreme discomfort and mortal danger. Bombs went off, bullets flew past my head. . . . There was no food, no electricity, no running water, no mail, no telephone day after day, week after week, month after month. This is not “symbolic.” This is real.33

  On her first visit, she asked Ferida Duraković to organize a meeting with intellectuals. Duraković invited some people who brought predictable requests for material assistance—which, in time, Susan would provide. “But what do you want me to do,” she asked, “besides bringing food, or money, or water, or cigarettes? What do you want from me?”

  Eventually, with Pašović, head of the International Theater Festival, she discussed putting on a play. This would by no means liberate the city. But it did have some practical use. It would offer employment to actors, provide cultural activity, and show the world that the supposedly barbarous clans of Yugoslavia were every bit as modern as the people who might read of the production in their newspapers. She considered Ubu Roi, the play by Alfred Jarry that is often considered the grandfather of modernist theater.34 And she mentioned Happy Days, Beckett’s play about a woman chattering with her husband, remembering happier days, while being buried alive. The dirt reaches her neck by the end of the play.

  “She came with Beckett,” Pašović remembered. “And I said: But Susan, here—in Sarajevo—we are waiting.”35

  Chapter 35

  A Cultural Event

  Being! Being is nothing! Being is becoming!” a character exclaimed in Susan’s first theatrical venture.1 This was Pirandello’s Come tu mi vuoi, which she directed in Turin in 1979 at the behest of Adriana Asti, an actress who starred in Duet for Cannibals.2 Pirandello had long been a favorite: already in 1958, she wrote that “Pirandello’s schmaltzy reflections on illusion & reality have always appealed to me.”3 She also came, a friend said, to be closer to Carlotta.4 And the play had a connection to another of Susan’s heroes, who had starred in a film version from 1932, As You Desire Me:

  What fascinates me about this Pirandello play is the theme of psychological cannibalism. So I moved the character played by Greta Garbo in the film version to the center of my production as a sort of queen bee who entraps the other characters; but ultimately she is their victim.5

  During this production, another play was born: Alice in Bed, first performed in Bonn in September 1991.

  One day Adriana Asti, who played the lead, said to me—dare I say it?—playfully, Please write a play for me. And remember, I have to be onstage all the time. And then Alice James, thwarted writer and professional invalid, fell into my head, and I made up the play on the spot and told it to Adriana. But I didn’t write it for another ten years.6

  Alice James was, almost like Susan Taubes, an admonishment, a symbol of female failure, and one in whom Susan Sontag had an old interest. Sontag got cancer at forty-two; Alice James died of the same at forty-three. The talented sister of two great writers, William and Henry, Alice had not mustered “the egocentricity and aggressiveness and the indifference to self that a large creative gift requires in order to flourish,” Sontag wrote—that same egocentricity that she, following Virginia Woolf, believed came more naturally to men.7

  Instead, Alice took to bed. In the play, Sontag shows several renowned women, real and mythological—Kundry and Myrtha, Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller—who must be sedated, calmed, or left
to “sleep it off”; and who, in their different ways, struggle with the question of action, of how to respond. They have, Sontag says, “the bourgeois luxury of psychological invalidism,”8 a subject that was much on her mind while directing Pirandello: “another play about a woman in despair who is, or is pretending to be, helpless.”9

  Were these women really helpless, or just “pretending”? “Alice is shamed by the knowledge that her threats of suicide were mere self-dramatizations,” one critic wrote, “as if they were merely the empty words of an actor.”10 These threats recall Susan’s threats of suicide, as her relationship with Lucinda was ending; and allow her to ponder, again, the question of duty.

  Duty to self—

  ALICE: Life is not just a question of courage.

  MARGARET: But it is.11

  —and duty to others:

  KUNDRY: It is hard to save anyone. But that is all we desire.

  * * *

  In 1985, Frank Rich, theater critic of the New York Times, wrote that

  If ever there was a Cultural Event, it is “Jacques and His Master,” the Milan Kundera play now at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater. Not only is this production the American premiere of the Czechoslovak writer’s sole stage work, but it also marks the American debut of Susan Sontag as a theater director. Leafing through the program, one half expects to discover Irving Howe and Philip Roth in the cast list.12