{"id":133581,"date":"2021-04-23T08:59:19","date_gmt":"2021-04-23T08:59:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=189897"},"modified":"2021-04-23T08:59:19","modified_gmt":"2021-04-23T08:59:19","slug":"susan-sontag-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/04\/23\/susan-sontag-seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"Susan Sontag, Seriously"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Susan Sontag, speaking at the San Francisco Public Library<\/a>, 2001.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Susan Sontag. She was a brand long before most writers knew they needed one. Even if you\u2019ve never read a Sontag book, you can still engage with her seriousness by studying her darkly handsome, scathingly sensible face, as photographed by Richard Avedon or Diane Arbus or Annie Leibovitz. A major 20th-century cultural critic, as well as novelist and filmmaker, Sontag was all about interrogating Western art and literature to discover their embedded morality (or lack thereof): \u201cThe wisdom that becomes available over deep, lifelong engagement with the aesthetic,\u201d she wrote, \u201ccannot be duplicated by any other kind of seriousness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Decades ago, Susan Sontag meant the world to me. My pals and I were, to use the 1970s label, \u201clesbian feminists.\u201d We were also insecure, angry, unformed, and uninformed. Then, like a Genius-IQ Wonder Woman, Sontag landed, wielding game-changing books like Notes on Camp,<\/em><\/a> Against Interpretation<\/em><\/a>, Trip to Hanoi<\/em>, AIDS and Its Metaphors<\/a>,<\/em> The Volcano Lover<\/a>\u2026<\/em> Some were great; some not; all demanded rethinking lots of your life. The fact that this drop-dead brilliant woman was also beautiful and famous seemed to us 20-somethings like simple moral Justice; we couldn\u2019t have asked for more. Looking back, though, we probably should have.<\/p>\n

Recently, Benjamin Moser published Sontag: Her Life and Work<\/em><\/a>, his 800-page biography of Sontag, which is brilliantly comprehensive and, in terms of Sontag\u2019s personal life, possibly the most engaging outlay of Too-Much-Information I\u2019ve ever read. Moser frames Sontag\u2019s conflicted, sexually ambivalent life by studying it through her preoccupation with metaphor: a thing itself in play with its image. \u201cSontag\u2019s real importance increasingly lay in what she represented<\/em>,\u201d summarizes Moser. \u201cThe metaphor of \u2018Susan Sontag\u2019 was a great original creation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moser\u2019s biography is the story of a woman who craved, even as a child, becoming part of the liberal wing of Western culture\u2019s literary establishment. By her early thirties she was securely ensconced in what pundit Norman Podhoretz called \u201cthe Family,\u201d a predominantly New York Jewish intellectual lineage, shaped in the 1940s around Partisan Review<\/em> and extending through The New York Review of Books<\/em>. Though she grew up, a ferociously intelligent female in the mid-twentieth century and had to fight for every ounce of intellectual independence, Sontag didn\u2019t denounce the Patriarchy; she deeply knew and appreciated its aesthetic power.<\/p>\n

Sontag began life in 1933, as Susan Rosenblatt. After her father died when she was five, Susan and her sister were raised in the more culturally stultifying parts of Tucson and Los <\/a>Angeles by an alcoholic mother who, when Susan was 12, married WWII pilot Nathan Sontag. Other than giving her a more euphonious surname, Nat wasn\u2019t too useful, warning his book-addicted stepdaughter that men don\u2019t marry girls who read all the time. But at the age of 17, Susan, precocious in all things, married her university professor, Philip Rieff, and at 19, gave birth to a son, David. Finding the relationship increasingly suffocating, Sontag spent most of her marriage breaking away and gaining child custody, while her work garnered critical attention.<\/p>\n

Nat Sontag, however, may have been on to something. Susan, who kept a diary from childhood, wrote as a teenager, \u201cMy desire to write is connected to my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon to match the weapon society has against me.\u201d Sontag\u2019s tortured lesbian identity is in fact the central nervous system of Moser\u2019s book. Though her affairs with men were relatively short and less complicated, Sontag pursued, throughout her life, a series of passionate, unhappy, sometimes abusive relationships with women \u2013Irene Fornes, Lucinda Childs, Annie Leibovitz, among others \u2013 which were open secrets in the art world.<\/p>\n

Reading Sontag\u2019s biography, you\u2019re sadly aware of the paralyzed horror this woman would feel at seeing this rendition of her life. Moser devotes a chapter to the likelihood that Sontag\u2019s closetedness \u2013 long after it was remotely necessary \u2013 was largely responsible for her signature lack of self-awareness and empathy, her occasional homophobia, her reliance for selfhood on the opinions of others.<\/p>\n

Having conducted a phenomenal amount of interviews and research, Moser connects as many psychosexual, interpersonal, and historical dots as he can to present Susan Sontag as an epically accomplished and complicated woman. It\u2019s an authoritative book and, as such, can presume too much, judge too easily, and evade the mystery that lies at the heart of any human being. It can also focus on the personal at the expense of the political.<\/p>\n

Politically, the book offers a sort of cooked, National-Public-Radio certitude about history, as if \u201cwe of the liberal intelligentsia\u201d already know and agree on what\u2019s happened: the fall of the USSR and the Berlin Wall were good; the Oslo Accords were promising; Cuba\u2019s revolutionary \u201cNew Man\u201d evoked Nazi purity. While Moser would never dismiss Sontag\u2019s lesbianism as a phase, he easily does so with her politics.<\/p>\n

Sontag\u2019s \u201cradical\u201d phase began in the 1960s, when she developed an interest in revolutionary societies. She spent some time in North Vietnam during the war and, in Partisan Review<\/em>, famously wrote of the white race as \u201cthe cancer of human history.\u201d In \u201cthe American Bloomsbury,\u201d Moser observes, where it was cool to debate revolution, Susan Sontag became \u201cthat most radical of radicals.\u201d But this phase came to a definitive halt at a 1982 Town Hall smack-down with the New Left, when Sontag \u2013 supported by her friend, Joseph Brodsky, a poet expelled from the USSR \u2013 decried Communism as fascism, \u201cSuccessful Fascism, if you will.\u201d This was the moment, according to a friend, that Sontag finally \u201cceased being \u201cradical\u201d and reverted to being \u201cintelligent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moser includes a dust-up between Sontag and the poet Adrienne Rich \u2013 openly feminist and<\/em> lesbian. Sontag\u2019s essay, \u201cFascinating Fascism,\u201d had attributed the newfound popularity of the Nazi-friendly work of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to feminists. Rich wrote to correct Sontag: it was not feminists; it was the cinephile establishment that promoted Riefenstahl. Deeply affronted, Sontag called Rich an \u201cinfantile leftist\u201d whose demagoguery was yet another example of fascism. Rich, herself a distant relative of the Family \u2013 and writer, according to Moser (and many others, including me), \u201cof essays in no way inferior to Sontag\u2019s\u201d \u2013 was effectively banned from The New York Review of Books<\/em>, which never published her again.<\/p>\n

Adrienne Rich probably didn\u2019t miss the Family for long; she was already heading off to society\u2019s \u201cinfantile\u201d margins to write some of her best work examining white women\u2019s role in the history of enslavement and colonialism, exposing compulsory heterosexuality in building Empire. Here, on these \u201cfanatical\u201d margins, Susan Sontag would have ceased to think or exist.<\/p>\n

But these margins have also encompassed centuries of art, scholarship, and literature by intellectuals and artists \u2013 largely Black, Brown, Indigenous \u2013 who knew, usually first-hand, the colonialism, enslavement, and genocide on which the esteemed New York Review <\/em>aesthetic has been built. While James Fennimore Cooper was writing The Last of the Mohicans<\/em>, David Walker, son of an enslaved father, wrote his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World<\/em>; while J.D. Salinger was writing Catcher in the Rye<\/em>, Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire wrote Discourse on Colonialism<\/em>; while Joseph Brodsky was writing poetry, so were Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, Essex Hemphill\u2026<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t that radicals don\u2019t deserve criticism. Sometimes, as Sontag alleged, the left does <\/em>know less about human rights abuses under \u201cCommunism\u201d than Reader\u2019s Digest <\/em>subscribers. But communism was meant to answer centuries of imperial European atrocities: where was<\/em> Sontag, intellectually, when she wrote about the cancerous white race? Why did she leave that place? She was never without her white, middle-class privilege; she could come and go as she pleased. Her journey leaves many questions\u2026<\/p>\n

Why, after the 9\/11 attacks, did Sontag seem to return, at least for a moment, to that empire-questioning place? She was one of very few public voices to criticize U.S. policy \u2013 and was thoroughly excoriated for it. Not even her son liked: \u201cLet\u2019s by all means grieve together. But let\u2019s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened and what may continue to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Susan Sontag\u2019s mysteries and metaphor are one reason you\u2019d want to read her biography. I just wish Moser \u2013 and Sontag herself, for all her seriousness \u2013 could have taken radicalism more seriously.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Susan Sontag, speaking at the San Francisco Public Library, 2001. Susan Sontag. She was a brand long before most writers knew they needed one. Even if you\u2019ve never\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":403,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,266,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133581"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133582,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133581\/revisions\/133582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}