by Susan Sontag
READING USUALLY PRECEDES writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. And, long after you’ve become a writer, reading books others write—and rereading the beloved books of the past—constitutes an irresistible distraction from writing. Distraction. Consolation. Torment. And, yes, inspiration.
Not all writers will admit to this. I remember once saying something to V. S. Naipaul about a nineteenth-century English novel I loved, a very well known novel, which I assumed that he, like everyone I knew who cared for literature, admired as I did. But no, he’d not read it, he said, and, seeing the shadow of surprise on my face, added sternly, “Susan, I’m a writer, not a reader.”
Many writers who are no longer young claim, for various reasons, to read very little, indeed, to find reading and writing in some sense incompatible. Perhaps, for some writers, they are. If the reason is anxiety about being influenced, then this seems to me a vain, shallow worry. If the reason is lack of time—there are only so many hours in the day, and those spent reading are evidently subtracted from those in which one could be writing—then this is an asceticism to which I don’t aspire.
Losing yourself in a book, the old phrase, is not an idle fantasy but an addictive, model reality. Virginia Woolf famously said, in a letter, “Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.” Surely the heavenly part is that—again, Woolf’s words—“the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego.” Unfortunately, we never do lose the ego, any more than we can step over our own feet. But that disembodied rapture, reading, is trance-like enough to make us feel egoless.
Like reading, rapturous reading, writing fiction—inhabiting other selves—feels like losing yourself, too.
Most people seem to think now that writing is just a form of self-regard. Also called: self-expression. As we are no longer supposed to be capable of authentically altruistic feelings, we are not supposed to be capable of writing about anyone but ourselves.
But that’s not true. William Trevor speaks of the boldness of the non-autobiographical imagination. Why wouldn’t you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It’s far more interesting to write about others.
Needless to say, I lend bits of myself to all my characters. When, in In America, my immigrants from Poland reach southern California—they’re just outside the village of Anaheim—in 1876, stroll out into the desert, and succumb to a terrifying, transforming vision of emptiness, I was drawing on my own memory of childhood walks into the desert of southern Arizona—outside what was then a small town, Tucson—in the 1940s. In the first draft of that chapter, there were saguaros in the southern California desert. By the third draft I had taken the saguaros out, reluctantly. (Alas, in 1876, there weren’t any saguaros west of the Colorado River.)
What I write about is other than me. As what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it. My books know what I once knew—fit—fully, intermittently. And getting the best words on the page does not seem any easier, even after so many years of writing. On the contrary.
Here is the great difference between reading and writing. Reading is a vocation, a skill at which, with practice, you are bound to become more expert. What you accumulate as a writer is mostly uncertainties and anxieties.
All these feelings of inadequacy on the part of the writer—this writer, anyway—are predicated on the conviction that literature matters. “Matters” is surely too pale a word. That there are books which are necessary, that is, books which, while reading them, you know you’ll reread. Maybe more than once. Is there a greater privilege than to have a consciousness expanded by, filled with, pointed to literature?
Book of wisdom, exemplar of mental playfulness, dilator of sympathies, faithful recorder of a real world (not just the commotion inside one head), servant of history, advocate of contrary and defiant emotions—a novel that feels necessary can be, should be, most of these things.
As for whether there will continue to be readers who share this high notion of fiction, well, “There’s no future to that question,” as Duke Ellington replied when asked why he was to be found playing morning programs at the Apollo. Best just to keep rowing along.
[2000]
Thirty Years Later …
TO LOOK BACK on writings of thirty or more years ago is not a wholesome exercise. My energy as a writer impels me to look forward, to feel still that I am beginning, really beginning, now, which makes it hard to curb my impatience with that beginning writer I once was in the literal sense.
Against Interpretation, my second book, was published in 1966, but some essays in it date from 1961, when I was still writing The Benefactor. I had come to New York at the start of the 1960s—eager to put to work the writer I had, since adolescence, pledged myself to become. My idea of a writer: someone interested in “everything.” I’d always had interests of many kinds, so it was natural for me to conceive of the vocation of a writer in this way. And reasonable to suppose that such fervency would find more scope in a great metropolis than in any variant of provincial life, including the excellent universities I had attended. The only surprise was that there weren’t more people like me.
I’m aware that Against Interpretation is regarded as a quintessential text of that now mythic era known as the Sixties. I evoke the label with reluctance, since I’m not keen on the omnipresent convention of packaging one’s life, the life of one’s time, in decades. And it wasn’t the Sixties
“Thirty Years Later …” was written in the summer of 1995 as the preface to the republication the following year in Madrid of the Spanish translation of Against Interpretation.
then. For me it was chiefly the time when I wrote my first and second novels, and began to discharge some of the cargo of ideas about art and culture and the proper business of consciousness which had distracted me from writing fiction. I was filled with evangelical zeal.
The radical change I’d made in my own life, a change embedded in my moving to New York, was that I was not going to settle for being an academic: I would pitch my tent outside the seductive, stony safety of the university world. No doubt, there were new permissions in the air, and old hierarchies had become ripe for toppling, but not that I was aware, at least not until after the time (1961 to 1965) these essays were written. The freedoms I espoused, the ardors I was advocating, seemed to me—still seem to me—quite traditional. I saw myself as a newly minted warrior in a very old battle: against philistinism, against ethical and aesthetic shallowness and indifference. And I could never have imagined that both New York, where I had come to live after my long academic apprenticeship (Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard), and Paris, where I had started spending the summers, in daily attendance at the Cinémathèque, were in the early throes of a period that would be judged as exceptionally creative. They were, New York and Paris, exactly as I’d imagined them to be—full of discoveries, inspirations, the sense of possibility. The dedication and daring and absence of venality of the artists whose work mattered to me seemed, well, the way it was supposed to be. I thought it normal that there be new masterpieces every month—above all in the form of movies and dance events, but also in the fringe theatre world, in galleries and improvised art spaces, in the writings of certain poets and other, less easily classifiable writers of prose. Maybe I was riding a wave. I thought I was flying, getting an overview, sometimes swooping down to get close.
I had so many admirations: there was so much to admire. I looked around and saw importance to which no one was giving its due. Perhaps I was particularly well fitted to see what I saw, to understand what I understood, by virtue of my bookishness, my Europhilia, and the energy I had at my disposal in the search for aesthetic bliss. Still, it surprised me at first that people found what I said “new” (it wasn’t so new to me), that I was thought to be in the vanguard of sensibility and, from the appearance of my very first essays, regarded as a tastemaker. Of cou
rse, I was elated to be apparently the first to pay attention to some of the matters I wrote about; sometimes I couldn’t believe my good fortune that they had waited for me to describe them. (How odd, I thought, that Auden hadn’t written something like my “Notes on Camp.”) As I saw it, I was merely extending to some new material the aesthete’s point of view I had embraced, as a young student of philosophy and literature, in the writings of Nietzsche, Pater, Wilde, Ortega (the Ortega of “The Dehumanization of Art”), and James Joyce.
I was a pugnacious aesthete and a barely closeted moralist. I didn’t set out to write so many manifestos, but my irrepressible taste for aphoristic statement conspired with my staunchly adversarial purposes in ways that sometimes surprised me. In the writings collected in Against Interpretation this is what I like best: the tenacity, the succinctness (I suppose I should say here that I still agree with most of the positions I took), and certain psychological and moral judgments in the essays on Simone Weil, Camus, Pavese, and Michel Leiris. What I don’t like are those passages in which my pedagogic impulse got in the way of my prose. Those lists, those recommendations! I suppose they are useful, but they annoy me now.
The hierarchies (high/low) and polarities (form/content, intellect /feeling) I was challenging were those that inhibited the proper understanding of the new work I admired. Although I had no programmatic commitment to the “modern,” taking up the cause of new work, especially work that had been slighted or ignored or misjudged, seemed more useful than defending old favorites. In writing about what I was discovering, I assumed the preeminence of the canonical treasures of the past. The transgressions I was applauding seemed altogether salutary, given what I took to be the unimpaired strength of the old taboos. The contemporary work I praised (and used as a platform to relaunch my ideas about art-making and consciousness) didn’t detract from the glories of what I admired far more. Enjoying the impertinent energy and wit of a species of performance called Happenings did not make me care less about Aristotle and Shakespeare. I was—I am—for a pluralistic, polymorphous culture. No hierarchy, then? Certainly there’s hierarchy. If I had to choose between the Doors and Dostoyevsky, then—of course—I’d choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?
The great revelation for me had been the cinema: I felt particularly marked by the films of Godard and Bresson. I wrote more about cinema than about literature, not because I loved movies more than novels but because I loved more new movies than new novels. It was clear to me that no other art was being so widely practiced at such a high level. One of my happiest achievements in the years when I was doing the writing collected in Against Interpretation is that no day passed without my seeing one, sometimes two or three movies. Most of them were “old.” My absorption in cinema history only reinforced my gratitude for certain new films, which (along with my favorites from the silent era and the 1930s) I saw again and again, so exalting were their freedom and inventiveness of narrative method, their sensuality and gravity and beauty.
Cinema was the exemplary art activity during the time these essays were written, but there were astonishments in the other arts as well. Artists were insolent again, as they’d been after World War I until the rise of fascism. The modern was still a vibrant idea. (This was before the capitulations embodied in the idea of the “post-modern.”) And I have said nothing here about the political struggles which took shape around the time the last of these essays were being written: I mean the nascent movement against the American war on Vietnam, which was to consume a large part of my life from 1965 through the early 1970s (those years were still the Sixties, too, I suppose). How marvelous it all does seem, in retrospect. How one wishes some of its boldness, its optimism, its disdain for commerce had survived. The two poles of distinctively modern sentiment are nostalgia and utopia. Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the time now labeled the Sixties was that there was so little nostalgia. In that sense, it was indeed a utopian moment.
The world in which these essays were written no longer exists.
Instead of a utopian moment, the time we live in is experienced as the end—more exactly, just past the end—of every ideal. (And therefore of culture: there is no possibility of true culture without altruism.) An illusion of the end, perhaps—and not more illusory than the conviction of thirty years ago of being on the threshold of a great positive transformation of culture and society. No, not an illusion, I think.
It is not simply that the Sixties have been repudiated, and the dissident spirit quashed, and made the object of intense nostalgia. The ever more triumphant values of consumer capitalism promote—indeed, impose—the cultural mixes and insolence and defense of pleasure that I was advocating for quite different reasons. No recommendations exist outside a certain setting. The recommendations and enthusiasms expressed in the essays collected in Against Interpretation have become the possession of many people now. Something was operating to make these marginal views more acceptable, something of which I had no inkling—and, had I understood better my time, that time (call it by its decade-name if you want), would have made me more cautious. Something that it would not be an exaggeration to call a sea change in the whole culture, a transvaluation of values—for which there are many names. Barbarism is one name for what was taking over. Let’s use Nietzsche’s term: we had entered, really entered, the age of nihilism.
So I can’t help viewing the writings collected in Against Interpretation with a certain irony. I still like most of the essays—a few of them, such as “Notes on Camp” and “On Style,” quite a lot. (Indeed, there’s only one thing in the collection I don’t like at all: two theatre chronicles, the brief result of a commission I had accepted, against my better judgment, from a literary magazine with which I was allied.) Who would not be pleased that a collection of contentious writings from more than three decades ago continues to matter to new generations of readers in English and in many foreign languages. Still, I urge the reader not to lose sight of—it may take some effort of imagination—the larger context of admirations in which these essays were written. To call for an “erotics of art” did not mean to disparage the role of the critical intellect. To laud work condescended to then as “popular” culture did not mean to conspire in the repudiation of high culture and its complexities. When I denounced (for instance, in the essays on science-fiction films and on Lukács) certain kinds of facile moralism, it was in the name of a more alert, less complacent seriousness. What I didn’t understand (I was surely not the right person to understand this) was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and of the honorable) seems quaint, unrealistic, to most people, and when allowed—as an arbitrary decision of temperament—probably unhealthy, too.
I suppose it’s not wrong that Against Interpretation is read now, or reread, as an influential, pioneering document from a bygone age. But that is not how I read it, or—lurching from nostalgia to utopia—wish it to be read. My hope is that its republication now, and the acquisition of new readers, could contribute to the quixotic task of shoring up the values out of which these essays and reviews were written. The judgments of taste expressed in these essays may have prevailed. The values underlying those judgments did not.
[1996]
Questions of Travel
BOOKS ABOUT TRAVEL to exotic places have always opposed an “us” to a “them”—a relation that yields a limited variety of appraisals. Classical and medieval travel literature is mostly of the “us good, them bad”—typically, “us good, them horrid”—sort. To be foreign was to be abnormal, often represented as physical abnormality; and the persistence of those accounts of monstrous peoples, of “men whose h
eads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (Othello’s winning tale), of anthropophagi, Cyclopes, and the like illustrates to us the astonishing gullibility of past ages. But even this gullibility had its limits. A Christian culture could more easily believe in the existence of the monstrous than of the perfect or near perfect. Thus, while the kingdoms of freaks appear century after century on maps, exemplary races figure mostly in books of travel to utopia; that is, nowhere.
Not until the eighteenth century are there many examples of a more daring geography: literature about model societies which describes purportedly real places. Documentary literature and fiction were, of course, closely related in the eighteenth century, with nonfiction narratives in the first person an important model for the novel. It is the heyday of travel hoaxes, as well as of fiction in the form of travel books. And the greatest of the imaginary voyages, Gulliver’s Travels, mixes the two main fantasies of the wholly alien. Consisting mostly of visits to a series of monstrous races, it ends with its burnt out hero settled among an ideal race: a high moment in the soon-to be-flourishing “us bad, them good” tradition.
The travel literature that can be understood as premodern takes for granted the contrast between the traveler’s society and those societies defined as anomalous, barbaric, backward, odd. To speak in the persona of the traveler, a professional (or even amateur) observer, was to speak for civilization; no premodern travelers thought of themselves as the barbarians. Modern travel literature starts when civilization becomes a critical as well as a self-evident notion—that is, when it is no longer so clear who is civilized and who is not.