Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  It opens with a citation from Virginia Woolf’s “brave, unwelcomed reflections” on war, published shortly before the outbreak of World War II. In the age of the “War on Terrorism,” which in practice meant permanent war, the vision of a world without war seemed quaint. But that had not been the case following World War I. Sontag recalled that the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 bound fifteen leading nations, including the United States, France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, to renounce “war as an instrument of national policy.”2 That renunciation was quickly forgotten. The death of the idea of a world without war meant that it was all the more urgent to know how to read violent images. Citizens were duty-bound to know how they were being manipulated—by whom, and to what end.

  Many journalists, occasionally through gullibility but often by design, helped sell the Iraq War. If individuals did not seek to understand the images they diffused, politicians and their flacks would provide the captions, she wrote: “All Photograph wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. During the fighting between Serbs and Croats at the beginning of the recent Balkan wars, the same Photograph of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings.”3

  The merger of war with the marketing mechanisms of late-stage capitalism made it harder than ever to know how to interpret images. And images of war had gradually taken over war itself, which was now, as Bush’s chief of staff said, a consumer product. The Vietnam War, “the first to be witnessed day after day by television cameras,” had “introduced the home front to a new tele-intimacy with death and destruction.” Now, in the era of twenty-four-hour cable news, the televised war was arranged for maximum entertainment. It provided an incentive to start wars, and to keep them going; the image had so conquered reality that people could increasingly see only in terms of the metaphor: the representation of actual events. That is why “the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was described as ‘unreal,’ ‘surreal,’ ‘like a movie,’ in many of the first accounts of those who escaped from the towers or watched from nearby.”4

  Felice Beato, in the nineteenth century, “was the first photographer to attend a number of wars.”5 Larry Burrows, in Vietnam, was “the first important photographer to do a whole war in color.”6 The verbs are borrowed from the realm of spectacle, of entertainment; and Sontag assembles a fascinating list of faked war pictures. The photograph of the marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima was a “reconstruction” created “by an Associated Press photographer.” The picture of Russian soldiers hoisting the Soviet flag atop the smoldering Reichstag “was staged for the camera.”7 The knowledge that these Photograph are faked obliterated their authority. “Only starting with the Vietnam War is it virtually certain that none of the best-known Photograph were set-ups. And this is essential to the moral authority of these images.”8

  In this historical evolution, the photograph had moved closer to the thing it showed; artists had nudged their metaphors closer to the things and events those representations symbolize, and reasserted the moral authority of the image. Sontag traces this genealogy from Goya’s Desastres de la guerra through Dostoevsky to the journalists and photographers who, in her own time, wielded truthful images against fake ones, risking their lives to convey images that might translate into action.

  This increasing fidelity to reality makes Regarding the Pain of Others more optimistic than On Photography. In Bosnia, she had seen the lengths to which witnesses went to bring back images. “Most of the many experienced journalists who reported from Sarajevo were not neutral,” she wrote.9 The making of images was not only voyeuristic or propagandistic. This discovery led her to quarrel with two ideas that, she admitted, she herself had popularized.

  The first is that public attention is steered by the attentions of the media, which means, most decisively, images. . . . The second—it might be described as the converse of what’s just been described—is that in a world saturated, no, hyper-saturated with images, those that should matter have a diminishing effect: we become callous. . . . In the first of the six essays in On Photography (1977), I argued that while an event known through Photograph certainly becomes more real than it would have been had one never seen the Photograph, after repeated exposure it also becomes less real. As much as they create sympathy, I wrote, Photograph shrivel sympathy. Is this true? I thought it was when I wrote it. I’m not so sure now.10

  And she quarreled with her previous idea that the proliferation of images could undermine their moral authority.

  Since On Photography, many critics have suggested that the excruciations of war—thanks to television—have devolved into a nightly banality. . . . But what is really being asked for here? That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More generally, that we work toward what I called for in On Photography: an “ecology of images”? There isn’t going to be an ecology of images. No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.11

  Bosnia and Iraq proved that the need to see was a matter of life and death. But how? Could metaphor—the image, the photograph, the thing-once-removed—help “recover our senses”? Could it teach us “to see more, to hear more, to feel more”?

  * * *

  More than any others, these were the questions that had occupied Sontag throughout her life. Perhaps only a person to whom empathy did not come naturally could have addressed them as well; a person who hears normally rarely thinks about hearing as a deaf person must. Her handicap, and her desire to overcome it, led her to reflect upon phenomena others took for granted, and her arguments with herself enrich her reflections.

  An ironic consequence of this handicap, however, was that she could not see that others could see. That inability made the conclusion of Regarding the Pain of Others akin to a deaf person’s refusing to admit the existence of the music he cannot hear himself.

  [Other people] can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.12

  These are the last sentences in the book, and they seem reasonable enough. But one must read them a few times before their implications sink in. If nothing can be understood or imagined without firsthand experience, why represent experience at all? Do those who strive to bear witness torture themselves in vain? The paragraph echoes the conception of marriage in In America: to “ask someone, legitimately demand of someone, to see what you saw. Exactly what you saw.” It echoes her demands of Annie: “You couldn’t stand a little to the left or a little to the right. You had to stand exactly where she had stood.”

  This is the opposite of the conception of metaphor that emerges from the novels of Dostoevsky or the etchings of Goya. If such artists had departed from Sontag’s precept, their works would never have come to exist. If no representation could bridge the gap between the person in Sarajevo and the person reading about Sarajevo, why write about Sarajevo? The point of artistic representation is not to make the reader’s experience identical to the artist’s. The point of representation is to allow the reader or the viewer to enter another person’s experience. We can, in fact, imagine. We can understand.

  To say otherwise is to say that a black person can never understand a white person, or a man a woman, or a Chinese a Bosnian: to say that no person can ever understand another. One need not become another person, or to have had exactly the same experiences, in order to imagine that person’s life—which is why the foundation of metaphor is empathy. Art and metaphor do not make other people’s experiences identical. They make other people’s experiences imaginable.

  * * *

  Throughout 2003, Susan gathered honors and prizes. In April, she went to the book fair in Bogotá. “A few people told her that it was a really bad idea, including Andrew Wylie,” her agent, sai
d her assistant Oliver Strand. Colombia, after all, was still dangerous. “I think we should go,” she said. Her Spanish editor, Juan Cruz, came along.

  But soon after they arrived, Strand, born in Chile, realized there had been a misunderstanding. Reading “conferencia” as “conference,” Susan had not prepared a speech, which is the meaning of the word in Spanish. She expected, instead, to be interviewed. “I realized that in the middle of the press conference and I told her, and it’s like ten o’clock at night.” Knowing how she agonized over her writing, he expected her to be upset, but she rose to the occasion. In the morning, she told Strand: “I’m going to go and denounce García Márquez for supporting Castro in the execution of the intellectuals.”13

  This was no small provocation. A Colombian icon and winner of the Nobel Prize, Gabriel García Márquez was one of the most famous writers in the world—and a notorious apologist for Fidel Castro. If, in the sixties, many Latin American writers had been hopeful about the Cuban Revolution, half a century of political repression and enforced poverty had left Castro few friends among intellectuals. This exception, however, was an essential one, and allowed the dictator to present a cultivated face.

  In March, just before Susan went to Bogotá, the Cuban regime put on one of its periodic show trials, in which seventy-eight dissidents were sentenced to prison terms from twelve to twenty-seven years, including for crimes such as “possessing a Sony tape recorder.” Soon after, Castro had three men executed for trying to flee to the United States in a small boat.14 These actions were denounced all over the world. At her speech, attended by a thousand people (three hundred more waited outside), Sontag said:

  I know that Gabriel García Márquez is very respected, and his books widely read. He is the great writer of this country and I have great admiration for him, but it is unforgivable that he has not spoken out against the latest measures of the Cuban regime.15

  Rather than taking offense, the Colombian audience, embarrassed by the great man’s prevarications, greeted this attack with a standing ovation. The reactions forced García Márquez to respond. “I myself cannot calculate the number of prisoners, dissidents, and conspirators that I have helped, in absolute silence, get out of jail or emigrate from Cuba over no less than twenty years,” he told the Colombian paper El Tiempo. “That’s a regime that deserves to be defended?” Susan riposted. “A regime you have to help people escape?”16

  Following the book fair, Susan, Strand, and Cruz headed to Cartagena de Indias. Invigorated by the controversy, she maintained her punishing schedule even in that laid-back beachside city. In the hotel pool, she “swam, swam, swam to oblivion,” wrote Cruz. And despite the oppressive Caribbean heat, she went looking for culture, music, art, unable to sit still, “sweating her human marathon.”

  * * *

  In the less than two years since Sarah’s birth, Annie Leibovitz had pressed ahead with her determination to have more children. Despite her age—she turned fifty-four in 2003—she had managed to get pregnant twice following Sarah’s birth. Both pregnancies ended in miscarriages. Forced to accept that she would not be able to have another child, she turned to surrogacy, and with Susan’s help wrote a letter to women she hoped would help her. In it, she explained her decision to delay childbearing: “I’ve had a big fantastic wonderful career, and consider now that I’ve been incredibly lucky to make a good living doing something I love doing,” Susan wrote, in her voice.

  People say—well, here goes the part that seems like praising myself—that I’m the kind of person who would give the shirt off my back to someone in need. I guess I can say, without too much embarrassment, that generosity is one of my outstanding characteristics. I love helping people.

  What else? I’m sentimental, I suppose. I love people, especially children. I cry pretty easily. But I’m strong, too. I’m a good person in an emergency.

  Family means everything to me. It is a specially wonderful time when we all get together to celebrate the Jewish holidays. I believe in a strong sense of tradition and of religious values. From the beginning, I have trusted in the values of religion to guide me in bringing up Sarah.17

  Despite the description of Annie’s generosity and strength, and despite Susan’s apparent support, revealed in the letter, for Annie’s desire to have more children, the relationship had not improved. Susan was still fretting to Sharon DeLano, who, at the end of September, urged her to cut the cord.

  You are SUSAN SONTAG, for chrissake. . . . Now, I know that you are not without sin in terms of the relationship-with-Annie department. Your impatience and censoriousness have been noted. Nevertheless, would a guy have moved on? Yes, he would. WHAT ARE YOU DOING?18

  * * *

  Five days after Sharon’s e-mail, on October 3, the Nobel Prize was awarded to J. M. Coetzee. The award depressed Susan, according to her French publisher, Dominique Bourgois.19 It made it highly unlikely that another English-language writer would receive it in the coming years, and Susan, at seventy, realized she was unlikely to achieve the goal she had set as a child. But a few days later, she was in Frankfurt to receive another prestigious award, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. There, she was snubbed by the United States ambassador, Dan Coats, an undistinguished former senator from Indiana, who did not attend as a protest against her supposed anti-Americanism. And, in fact, it did seem that she was given the award, at least in part, for her objections to the Iraq War, which the German government had opposed.

  Sontag represented an alternative to the America of “freedom fries,” and she recognized as much in her speech.

  Irate, dismissive statements about Europe, certain European countries, are now the common coin of American political rhetoric; and here, at least in the rich countries on the western side of the continent, anti-American sentiments are more common, more audible, more intemperate than ever.20

  She analyzed this antagonism, particularly the misunderstandings it engendered about America: “a profoundly conservative country in ways that Europeans find difficult to fathom” but also “radical, even revolutionary, in ways that Europeans find equally difficult to fathom.”21 And if continent-as-metaphor engendered dangerous misunderstandings, it also spurred dreams: Europeans dreamed of America; Americans, of Europe.

  One of those Americans was a girl growing up in the “cultural desert” of southern Arizona, who discovered German literature through a teacher named Mr. Starkie. “And a few years later, when I was a high school student in Los Angeles, I found all of Europe in a German novel. No book has been more important in my life than The Magic Mountain. . . .”

  She then told of the man who later became her German editor, Fritz Arnold, who spent the war as a prisoner just up the road from the Sontags, in northern Arizona.

  Fritz told me that what got him through his nearly three years in the prison camp in Arizona was that he was allowed access to books: he had spent those years reading and rereading the English and American classics. And I told him that what saved me as a schoolchild in Arizona, waiting to grow up, waiting to escape into a larger reality, was reading books, books in translation as well as those written in English.

  To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom.

  Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.22

  This was a moving valedictory—though Sontag could not have known it at the time—to the cosmopolitan tradition to which she had pledged herself as a girl.

  * * *

  A few months later, in March 2004, she traveled to South Africa at the invitation of Nadine Gordimer. Their dispute over Israel had healed. And in Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan even used that most radioactive of South African words—one she had not used in Jerusalem—to describe
Israel: “an apartheid state maintaining a brutal dominion over the lands captured in 1967.”23

  When the University of the Witwatersrand inaugurated a yearly lecture in Gordimer’s name, she suggested that Susan be the first honoree. “I’d always wanted Susan to come to South Africa,” she said. “Wherever Susan was, the walls seemed to expand.” Susan ran her escorts ragged with sightseeing, Gordimer said: “She wasn’t very well, but she didn’t spare herself at all, or anybody else!”

  Gordimer wanted to take her to a game reserve, but Susan proclaimed that she was not interested in nature. “I’m interested in people.” But Gordimer insisted: “You’ve met so many people, and I absolutely will not allow you to be in Africa and see only the human animal.” Because Susan loved Nadine, she accepted.

  I took her to a very lovely game reserve, and I was so upset because it was drizzly. It was March and it was raining half the time. She didn’t give a damn. This wild hair was all sprinkled with raindrops, and she—first of all, she fell in love with the countryside, with the thorn trees and the whole look of the space. . . . And then when we came to the animals, especially giraffes, elephants—the smaller animals you couldn’t see, it was drizzling so much—she was tremendously impressed by their majesty, by their poise, by everything about them. . . . And then she said something that I so much wished it could have happened. She said, “Yes, well, I want to come back. I want to come and sit here,” because it was the hotel part of it—you could go—you were fed, you were looked after. And she said, “This is what I need to get away from New York, from Paris, from everywhere, and I want to come and finish my book here.” . . . Wouldn’t it have been wonderful—and it would have been such, to me, such a paradox and irony, I would have teased her with it. I don’t want to see anything but the human animal, and then—she falls in love with this place and the animals.24