by Susan Sontag
So-called fellow travelers, whether informed or ignorant, are not the best participants in a delegation trip. Indeed, travel officials in communist countries have learned to distrust Western leftists and—this is clearest in Richard Nixon’s favorite foreign vacation spot, Ronald Reagan’s “so-called communist China”—prefer to entertain travelers untouched by radical sentiments: better a chairman of the board than a leftist assistant professor of history. Such travelers tend to depart with a much more favorable impression of the country than they had before their trip, partly on the basis of their discovery that it contains many friendly, attractive people, that the exotic streets swarm with human beings “just like us.”
What had they imagined before they came?
[1984]
The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy)
EUROPE? What Europe means to me?
What it doesn’t mean: the Europe of Euro-business, Eurodollars—the so-called, would-be European “community” that is supposed to help the individual countries of capitalist Western Europe “to stand up to the bracing economic challenges of the late 20th century” (I quote from today’s Herald Tribune, America’s world newspaper); the Euro-kitsch acclaimed as art and literature in these countries; Euro-festivals and Euro-exhibitions and Euro-journalism and Euro-television. But that Europe is inexorably reshaping the Europe I love, the polyphonic culture within whose traditions, some of them, I create and feel and think and grow restless, and to whose best, humbling standards I align my own.
America is not, of course, totally disjunct from Europe, though it is far more unlike Europe (more “barbaric”) than many Europeans like to think. And although, like the majority of my compatriots, if a smaller majority than before, I am of European descent—specifically of European-Jewish descent (my great-grandparents immigrated to the northeastern part of the United States a century ago from what are now Poland and Lithuania)—I don’t often think of what Europe means to me as an American. I think of what it means to me as a writer, as a citizen of literature—which is an international citizenship.
If I must describe what Europe means to me as an American, I would start with liberation. Liberation from what passes in America for a culture. The diversity, seriousness, fastidiousness, density of European culture constitute an Archimedean point from which I can, mentally, move the world. I cannot do that from America, from what American culture gives me, as a collection of standards, as a legacy. Hence Europe is essential to me, more essential than America, although all my sojourns in Europe do not make me an expatriate.
To be sure, Europe means a good deal more than that ideal diversity, that stupendous nourishment … those pleasures, those standards. Both an old reality, since at least the Latin Middle Ages, and a perennial, often hypocritical, aspiration, “Europe” as a modern rallying cry for political unification has invariably promoted the suppression and erasure of cultural differences, and the concentration and augmentation of state power. It is chastening to recall that not only Napoleon but also Hitler proclaimed a pan-European ideal. Much of Nazi propaganda in France during the Occupation was devoted to portraying Hitler as Europe’s savior from Bolshevism, from the Russian or “Asiatic” hordes. The idea of Europe has often been associated with the defense of “civilization” against alien populations. Usually, to defend civilization meant to extend the military power and business interests of a single European country which was competing for power and wealth with other European countries. Besides meaning something that could indeed be called civilization (for this must not be denied, either), “Europe” meant an idea of the moral rightness of the hegemony of certain European countries over large parts of what is not Europe. Seeking to convince non-Jews of the desirability of a Jewish state in Palestine, Theodor Herzl declared that “we shall form part of Europe’s fortified wall against Asia, and fulfill the role of cultural vanguard facing the barbarians.” I cite this sentence from Herzl’s Judenstaat not to inveigh (along with everyone else these days) against Israel in particular but to underline the fact that virtually every act of colonization in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries by a European people was justified as an extension of the moral boundaries of “civilization”—considered identical with European civilisation—and a rolling back of the tides of barbarism.
For a long time the very idea of “universal” values, of world institutions, was itself Eurocentric. There is a sense in which the world was, once, Eurocentric. That Europe is “the world of yesterday,” which is the title that Stefan Zweig gave to his lament for Europe in the form of a memoir, his last book, written almost half a century ago after this preeminent good European was forced to flee Europe, to flee a triumphant barbarism that was (need it be said?) entirely generated from within, in the heart of Europe. One might think that the notion of Europe would have been thoroughly discredited, first by imperialism and racism, and then by the imperatives of multi-national capitalism. In fact, it has not. (Nor is the idea of civilization unusable—no matter how many colonialist atrocities are committed in its name.)
The place where the idea of Europe has the greatest cultural vivacity is in the central and eastern parts of the continent, where citizens of countries in the other empire struggle for some autonomy. I refer, of course, to the debate over Central Europe opened by Milan Kundera’s influential essay of some years ago, and continued with essays and manifestos by Adam Zagajewski, Václav Havel, Georgy Konrád, and Danilo Kiš. For a Pole, a Czech, a Hungarian, a Yugoslav (even, for other reasons, for an Austrian or a German), the idea of Europe has an obvious, subversive authority. The ultimate value of the cultural, and eventually political, counter-hypothesis of the existence of Central Europe—and, by extension, of Europe—is to urge a European peace settlement, a settlement that would erode the rivalry of the superpowers that holds all our lives hostage. To have the edges of the two empires, as they meet in Europe, be porous would be in everyone’s interest. And I mean everyone, which I shall define arbitrarily as all those who think that their great-grandchildren should be allowed to have great-grandchildren. “As long as it is impossible to go over to Vienna from Budapest for an evening at the opera without special permission,” Konrád has observed, “we cannot be said to live in a state of peace.”
Do we have anything comparable to the Central Europeans’ romantic project of a Europe of small nations, able to communicate freely with one another and pool their experience, their immense civic maturity and cultural depth, which have been acquired at the cost of so much suffering and privation? For us, who can hop from continent to continent without securing permission from anyone for a night at the opera, could Europe mean anything of that value? Or is the ideal Europe rendered obsolete by our prosperity, our liberty, our selfishness? And the idea itself, for us, spoiled beyond repair?
In one respect, our two experiences seem comparable, perhaps due to the very real loss of European power on both sides of the divide of empire. The new idea of Europe is not of extension but of retrenchment: the Europeanization not of the rest of the world but of Europe. Among Poles and Hungarians and Czechs, “Europe” is a not-so-subtle slogan for limiting the power and cultural hegemony of the cloddish, stifling Russian occupiers. Make Europe … European. In rich Europe, where we cannot complain of being cut off from one another, there is another anguish. Not about making Europe European but about keeping it European. Clearly, a losing battle. While the highly educated populations of central Europe are suffering from preposterous isolation and rationing of cultural contacts, those of western Europe are afflicted with incessant and isolating admixtures of cultural practice. There are Sikh taxi drivers in Frankfurt and mosques in Marseille. Italian doctors in hospitals in Naples, Rome, and Turin are performing clitoridectomies on the pubescent daughters of African immigrants, at the request of their parents. The only relatively homogeneous countries in Europe are going to be the poor ones, like Portugal and Greece, plus the Central European countries that have been impoverished by forty years of Moscow-directe
d economic planning. The unremitting influxes of foreigners into the rich European countries have the possibility of turning the slogan “Europe” nasty once more.
Europe, an exercise in nostalgia? Loyalty to Europe like continuing to write by hand when everyone is using a typewriter? (More aptly: like continuing to write on a typewriter when everyone is using a word processor?) It seems worth noting that the countries where an idea of Europe one can take seriously does flourish are those whose inflexible, fearful, militarized systems of governance and dismal economies make them considerably less modern, less prosperous, and more ethnically homogeneous than the western part of the continent. A modern Europe—often mistakenly called an “Americanized” Europe—is certainly a good deal less European. Some experience of Japan over the last decade has shown me that the “modern” is not equivalent to American. (Equating modernization with Americanization and vice versa may be the ultimate Eurocentric prejudice.) The modern has its own logic, liberating and immensely destructive, by which the United States, no less than Japan and the rich European countries, is being transformed. Meanwhile, the center has shifted. (But the center is always being destroyed or modified by the periphery.) Los Angeles has become the eastern capital of Asia, and a Japanese industrialist, when recently describing his plans to put up a factory in the United States in the “northeast,” meant not Massachusetts but Oregon. There is a new cultural and political geography, and it will be syncretistic, and increasingly destructive of the past. The future of mainstream Europe is Euroland, nation-sized theme parks, Europe as instant playback, which natives will consume as avidly as tourists (in Europe the distinction has long been obsolete—everyone is a tourist). What remains of the Europe of high art and ethical seriousness, of the values of privacy and inwardness and an unamplified, non-machine-made discourse: the Europe that makes possible the films of Krzysztof Zanussi and the prose of Thomas Bernhard and the poetry of Seamus Heaney and the music of Arvo Part? That Europe still exists, will continue to exist for some time. But it will occupy less territory. And increasing numbers of its citizens and adherents will understand themselves as émigrés, exiles, and foreigners.
What then will happen to one’s European roots, the real ones and the spiritual ones? I can think of no more consoling response to that question than one given by an American expatriate writer who was once asked if, having spent forty years living in France, she was not worried about losing her American roots. Said Gertrude Stein, her answer perhaps even more Jewish than American: “But what good are roots if you can’t take them with you?”
[1988]
The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe
(AN INTERLUDE)
WALL: Thus have I, Wall, my part discharged so;
And being done, thus Wall away doth go.
—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene 1
THlSBE: It’s not here anymore.
PYRAMUS: It separated us. We yearned for each other. We grew apart.
THISBE: I was always thinking about it.
PYRAMUS: I thought you were thinking about me.
THISBE: Ninny! (Gives him a kiss.) How often have I reassured you.
But I’m talking about what I didn’t say. With every sentence I uttered, there was another, unspoken half sentence, “And the wall …” Example: I’m going to the Paris Bar.
PYRAMUS: “And the wall …”
THISBE: Example: What’s playing at the Arsenal tonight?
PYRAMUS: “And the wall …”
THISBE: Example: It’s terrible for the Turks in Kreuzberg.
PYRAMUS: “And the wall …”
THISBE: Exactly.
PYRAMUS: It was a tragedy. Will it be a comedy now?
THISBE: We won’t become normal, will we?
PYRAMUS: Does this mean we can do whatever we want?
THISBE: I’m starting to feel a little nostalgic. Oh, the human heart is a fickle thing.
PYRAMUS: Thisbe!
THISBE: Not about you, beloved! You know I’ll always be yours. I mean; you’ll be mine. But of course that’s the same, isn’t it? No, I’m thinking about … you know. I miss it a little.
PYRAMUS: Thisbe!
THISBE: Just a little. (Sees PYRAMUS frowning.) Smile, darling. Oh, you people are so serious!
PYRAMUS: I’ve suffered.
THISBE: So have I, in my way. Not like you, of course. But it wasn’t always easy here, either.
PYRAMUS: Let’s not quarrel.
THISBE: We quarrel? Never! (Sound of wall-peckers) Listen! What an amazing sound!
PYRAMUS: I wish I’d brought my tape recorder. It’s a Sony.
THISBE: I’m glad you can buy whatever you want now. I didn’t realize you were so poor.
PYRAMUS: It was awful. But, you know, it was good for my character.
THISBE: You see? Even you can feel regret. An American artist warned me last year, You’ll miss this wall. (She spies some wall-peckers spraying their hoard of pieces of the wall with paint.) They’re improving it.
PYRAMUS: Let’s not be nostalgic.
THISBE: But you agree there’s something to be said for it. It made us different.
PYRAMUS: We’ll still be different.
THISBE: I don’t know. So many cars. So much trash. The beggars. Pedestrians don’t wait at corners for the green light. Cars parked on the sidewalk. Enter the SPIRIT OF NEW YORK.
SPIRIT: O city, I recognize you. Your leather bars, your festivals of independent films, your teeming dark-skinned foreigners, your real-estate predators, your Art Deco shops, your racism, your Mediterranean restaurants, your littered streets, your rude mechanicals—
THISBE: No! Begone! This is the Berkeley of Central Europe.
SPIRIT: Central Europe: a dream. Your Berkeley: an interlude. This will be the New York of Europe—it was ever meant to be so. Only postponed for a mere sixty years. SPIRIT OF NEW YORK vanishes.
THISBE: Well, I suppose it won’t be too bad. Since New York isn’t America, this city still won’t be—
PYRAMUS: Sure, sure, provided it stays shabby as well as full of unwelcome foreigners. (Sighs.) Let’s not be too hopeful.
THISBE: Oh, let’s be hopeful. We’ll be rich. It’s only money. PYRAMUS: And power. I’m going to like that.
THISBE: We’re not getting anything we don’t deserve. We’re together. We’re free.
PYRAMUS: Everything is going too fast. And costing too much.
THISBE: No one can make us do what we don’t want as long as we’re together.
PYRAMUS: I’m having a hard time thinking of those less fortunate than we are. But sometimes we’ll remember, won’t we.
THISBE: I want to forget these old stories.
PYRAMUS: History is homesickness.
THISBE: Cheer up, darling. The world is divided into Old and New. And we’ll always be on the good side. From now on.
PYRAMUS: Goethe said—
THISBE: Oh, not Goethe.
PYRAMUS: You’re right.
THISBE: In Walter Benjamin’s last—
PYRAMUS: Not Benjamin, either!
THISBE: Right. (They fall silent for a while.) Let’s stroll.
They see a procession of vendors, including some Russian soldiers, coming across an empty field.
PYRAMUS: And to think that was no-man’s-land.
THISBE: What are they selling?
PYRAMUS: Everything. Everything is for sale.
THISBE: Do say it’s better. Please!
PYRAMUS: Of course it’s better. We don’t have to die.
THISBE: Then let’s go on celebrating. Have some champagne. Have a River Cola.
They drink.
PYRAMUS: Freedom at last.
THISBE: But don’t toss your can on the ground.
PYRAMUS: What do you take me for?
THISBE: Sorry. It’s just that—I’m sorry. Yes, freedom.
Curtain.
[1991]
Answers to a Questionnaire
IN MAY 1997 the French literary mag
azine La Règle du Jeu, edited by Philippe Sollers, conducted “an international survey about intellectuals and their role.” I was the sole American on the list of respondents to whom they sent the following six questions:
1. What does the word intellectual mean to you today? Do you see yourself as an intellectual or do you reject this term?
2. Who are the intellectual figures who have inspired you in a profound way and still have influence over your thoughts?
3. What is the role of intellectuals at the end of the XXth century? Is their mission completed or do you think that they still have an important task in the world?
4. Much has been said about the mistakes of intellectuals, their blindness and their irresponsibility. What do you think about these accusations? Do you agree or would you challenge the criticism?
5. What, in your view, are the major obstacles for intellectuals in your country—the indifference of the media, the chaos of opinions, political repression, or what?