Waiting for the Barbarians
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or subject himself to the discipline of writing a poem, or discover or invent something useful to humanity, or burn with zeal for anything except his own pleasures and the privileges annexed to his station? He knew enough to appreciate what the picturesque natives had left, in the way of art and ruins, lying about the ground.
And the novel’s last lines make a final overt allusion to Sontag herself, one that suggests that she saw her political engagement as an expression of this “romantic” side:
Sometimes I had to forget that I was a woman to accomplish the best of which I was capable. Or I would lie to myself about how complicated it is to be a woman. Thus do all women, including the author of this book. But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.
Anyone who has considered Sontag’s career will find that “damn them all” profoundly affecting; it expresses, yet again, her desire to forsake who she was in favor of a romantic dream. The Volcano Lover makes it clear that Sontag’s sensibility was the eighteenth-century one that she so successfully evoked in the character of Hamilton, whom she ends by damning. And yet this aesthete and accumulator of experience nonetheless yearned all her life—because she was so taught by the kind of novels that she ingested but could not, in the end, ever write—to inhabit the century to which her son touchingly assigns her: the nineteenth, with its grand passions and its Romantic energies. Emotionally, she thought she was the one; intellectually, she was the other. This confusion helps to account for so much about her life and her work: the strange analytical coldness about normal human passions (that desire to make sex “cognitive”) and the remarkably hot passion for the stimulation of books, theater, films; the initial embrace of the importance of the daringly new, the avant-garde, the louche and outré, followed by the retreat into the conventional (the historical novel!), the canonical, the established, the “great”; the wobbly relationship between the criticism, which was her calling, and the fiction, which was not.
This lifelong struggle to find a place between these various poles—extremities nicely summed up, in The Volcano Lover, during an amusing encounter between Hamilton and Goethe, as “beauty” and “transformation”—gives Sontag a certain novelistic allure of her own. But here again the character whom she calls to mind is a decidedly pre-Romantic figure. In one of the shortest literary essays that she ever wrote, Sontag ruminated on a favorite novel, and her description of its hero suggests a strong affinity between the critic and the character:
With Don Quixote, a hero of excess, the problem is not so much that the books are bad; it is the sheer quantity of his reading. Reading has not merely deformed his imagination; it has kidnapped it. He thinks the world is the inside of a book.… Bookishness makes him, in contrast to Emma Bovary, beyond compromise or corruption. It makes him mad; it makes him profound, heroic, genuinely noble.
Thanks to her son’s nervous but rewarding decision, Sontag herself has finally achieved a kind of resolution. For she has made the translation that, you sometimes feel, she had always yearned for and so long awaited. Now others must do the interpreting; she herself, beyond compromise and corruption, no madder than most and more noble, too, has become the text. Infinitely interpretable, she has at last ended up on the inside of a book.
—The New Republic, April 15, 2009
DANIEL MENDELSOHN’s reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear frequently in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. His books include a memoir, The Elusive Embrace, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; the international best seller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; an acclaimed translation of the works of C. P. Cavafy; and a previous collection of essays, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken. He teaches at Bard College.