Susan Sontag: To Outrage and Back

Susan Sontag’s name has been synonymous with sharp-eyed trendiness in the arts since the appearance, a dozen years ago, of her first volume of essays, Against Interpretation. Her critical manner, impatient and intense, had at its core from the start a fierce conviction that the lives led by the majority of us — people of middle means, middle ambition, middle years—are nothing short of appalling. Her themes and preoccupations were unrelentingly modernist—alienation, deracination, powerlessness, blockage of perception and communication, death of relationship, rage for transformation, search for new consciousness, and (no skipping this) the bourgeois West as disease and moral collapse. Low culture and high, film, music, letters, painting belonged to Miss Sontag’s beat. But her heroes, campy or otherwise, inventors of Theaters of Cruelty such as Artaud’s, or banishers of the human voice from books, such as Roland Barthes (the “writing degree zero” man), were invariably image breakers. Not a household word among them.

The attitudes and assumptions shaping Against Interpretation are fully visible in much of Susan Sontag’s other writing—reportage, travel narrative, filmscripts, fiction. A novel called Death Kit (1967), for example, blended Dostoevskian and Kafkaesque accents in a tale of ambiguous homicide involving a character named Diddy (Did he? Didn’t he?). An account of a wartime visit to North Vietnam — Trip to Hanoi, published in 1968 and included in Styles of Radical Will (1969)—focused on the reporter as tormented isolato, hyperconscious in Asia of differences between luxuriantly complicated egos like her own and the simpler sensibilities of her Vietnamese hosts, and hyperconscious on the way home of differences between herself and people less guiltridden about the war than she. Miss Sontag has spared her readers bravura autobiography, but the accumulating evidence about her tastes, together with glimpses afforded by passages in the Hanoi journal and by her answers to magazine questionnaires, has kept her from becoming an enigma. Only to nonreaders has she been a legend, obscure in the mists of People fame; others have had a clear and distinct sense of her as a person.

A person of value and distinction. Roland Barthes may turn out to be rather more of a literary con man than Miss Sontag predicted, but in writing about him in the early sixties she was serving as a warning system, usefully alerting audiences to an oncoming juggernaut of literary theory. In writing coolly about pornography (Styles of Radical Will), she established that rational discrimination was as feasible in this quarter of discourse as elsewhere, thereby helping to sweep away coyness. And in simply being herself—woman on the scene, curious, restless, unaccepting, an explorer of consciousness “taking certain drugs (in a serious spirit), ” viewer of a million films, celebrator of “daring hybridizations” (Gertrude Stein and David Riesman conjoined in Jean-Luc Godard) —Miss Sontag functioned as an effective reminder that participating vibrantly in the culture of one’s age isn’t the same thing as soaking up PBS Trollope repeats or batches of Harvey Wallbangers.

A useful critic, a valuable person— but also, I’m afraid, somebody about whom reservations have seemed inevitable almost from the beginning. The trendiness was partly to blame, naturally. Writers are mistrusted when their choice of subjects and their assessments of worth appear to reflect fashion alone. Whipped in Miss Sontag’s pages from the Marquis de Sade to John Cage, from Bresson to Bergman to Bataille et al., a reader commences to hope for a wild surprise: say, a piece about Booth Tarkington’s Penrod books. The reason is neither need for comic relief (Miss Sontag is seldom funny), nor preference for Penrod over Bergman (defensible). The reason is worry about the paucity of proof of full independence, proof that not all the critic’s interests bear fashion’s seal.

But there is a deeper problem than trendiness; call it thinness of experience, lack of conversance with common life. In the works mentioned, Miss Sontag appears obsessed with the idea that every neighbor is a monster and that daily life is rape. “Most people in this society who aren’t utterly mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics” (“The Pornographic Imagination”). To a man we’re locked in “the isolation of a private self” (Trip to Hanoi). Nothing can “redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. . . .” (“What’s Happening in America?”). One corollary of this conviction of the universal hatefulness of next door is that, on earth, the only sounds intelligence makes are violently denunciatory and outraged. We know John Cage is brainy, because his irony is “devastating.” We know Sade is brainy, because he’s an “express train of outrages.” We know Jasper Johns is brainy, because he has “disdain for the ‘meanings’ established by bourgeoisrationalist culture.” We know the Futurists and the Dadaists and William Burroughs are brainy, because they share “a harsh despair and perverse vision of apocalypse.”

Intelligence is always angry: corollary one. Corollary two is that worthwhile folks (worthwhile works of art, too) must, in the nature of things, tear themselves to bits. Self-destructionpersonal agony—is their sole imperative. The correct posture is Godard’s, “each of [whose] films is a totality that undermines itself; a de-totalized totality.” The correct voice is ironic, “continually undermining one’s assumptions.” The great achievement is the creation of works such as Bergman’s, that are rich in “an almost defiling charge of personal agony.”

We’re still free hereabouts, happily, to relish anguish ceaselessly and to decree absolutely (to ourselves) that goodness is gone for good. I’m for that freedom, as who isn’t? But I’m also convinced that people who ceaselessly promote anguish as. “our” norm tend to rouse skepticism. Miss Sontag, in the works in question, sees a mark of superiority in an artist who insists undeviatingly on the wretchedness of our condition and the pervasiveness of our unconcern with each other. But other observers see other things: preciousness, unreality, remoteness from life as lived.

And it must be said that the latter defects are at least as vexingly present in two of this author’s most recent books as they have been before in her career. On Photography (1977), an often provocative study of the impact of photographic images upon modern life, repeatedly mocks belief in empathy as a human resource, as well as belief in the possibility of human solidarity amidst diversity. “Bombastic” and “pushy” Walt Whitman is a man on “a giddy trip,” as is Edward Steichen with that naive notion of his about a “Family of Man”; “this message of identification with other Americans is foreign to our temperament now.” What we like, Miss Sontag observes, are photographs that “suppress, or at least reduce, moral and sensory queasiness” and “make a compassionate response feel irrelevant.” Walker Evans is “barely credible.” Diane Arbus’s pictures of freaks are our meat—work that is “reactive against gentility, against what is approved,” work that crusades “against boredom.”

The anti-boredom crusade jangles the nerves not only of the critic but of many key characters in her fiction; witness I, Etcetera (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $8.95), a collection of eight stories written over the last decade or so. The tales focus upon an urban suicide, a couple sharing “parenting problems”— bizarre problems—with an analyst, an American woman slogging about Europe with a male companion in the futile hope of revitalizing herself and her “relationships,” others. The literary influences are Nathanael West and Franz Kafka. Decline and entropy are omnipresent: “ ‘At the beginning of the world, everything was America.’ How far from the beginning are we? When did we first start to feel the wound?” And the familiar, knowing, but still weird enthusiasm for the defilements of personal agony darkens page after page.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? The notion that a real turn could occur in a career like Miss Sontag’s lacks plausibility on its face. At moments in Trip to Hanoi, as she praised the North Vietnamese for their patriotism, neighborliness, openness, joy in life, and faith in human goodness, the thought came that when the reporter returned she might just discover America. She might begin to grasp, that is, that the attractive qualities of her Hanoi hosts, if absent from enclaves of Manhattan intellectuals, are everywhere visible in the middle America of PTA meetings and truck stops and volunteer associations.

But nothing of the sort happened. Back home Miss Sontag quickly resumed her old self, settling into the familiar, comfortably murky modernist blackishness, and proving thereby (seemingly) that in this career no turn could come. Yet the case is that, with the publication of Illness as Metaphor (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $8.95), a turn seems to have come. The psychological landscape of Miss Sontag’s work has abruptly—in truth, almost astonishingly-altered; she steps forward in this most recent piece of writing as critic of the assumptions and values hitherto controlling her work, prepared for the first time to acknowledge the dignity of other attitudes and faiths besides those of modernist coteries. (The book was published before I, Etcetera but written after even the latest of the stories.)

Admittedly Illness as Metaphor isn’t conceived as an act of conversion. It presents itself as an attack on some corrupt uses of language. In a series of ten meditations on the human failure to grasp that sickness is not a metaphor, not a sign standing in for something else, not a symbol of a moral or cultural condition, Miss Sontag develops the thesis that it is therefore wrong to use sickness as a means of interpreting the character of either individuals or nations.

On every side, the author notes, people waffle on figuratively about disease, as though there were no limits to the likenesses between it and war—or politics, slavery, vice, you name it. One example of this punitive and improper use of “illness” is Miss Sontag’s own assertion in the sixties that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” (Minus italics and other vehemence, this zinger is quoted and condemned in Illness as Metaphor.) Another example is Norman Mailer’s explanation that “had he not stabbed his wife (and acted out ‘a murderous nest of feeling’) he would have gotten cancer and ‘been dead in a few years himself.’ ” Still another is the declaration by Karl Menninger that “illness is in part what the world has done to a victim, but in a larger part it is what the victim has done with his world, and with himself.” Metaphoric thinking along these lines, like the claim that a “specific cancer personality” exists, isn’t just cruel, says Miss Sontag; it probably impedes scientific progress toward cures. For that reason it is essential to know where such thinking comes from —the processes by which disease becomes mythicized—and how best to combat it.

Illness as Metaphor is designed as a contribution toward this end. Miss Sontag attempts to prove that the chief sources of the offensive habits of mind are literary, none more pivotal than the nineteenth-century Romantic movement with its mythicization of consumption. The material adduced in support of the argument—snippets from Shelley, Keats, and Byron, and from dozens of others, writers as various as Oliver Goldsmith, Georg Groddeck, Wilhelm Reich, and Thomas Mann—is absorbing. But no less so is the explication of the complex interchanges of rhetorical role among tuberculosis, cancer, and mental illness over the past two centuries. And when the author probes contemporary politics, recalling her reader to John Dean on Watergate (“a cancer within—close to the Presidency”), or Arab polemics on Israel as “the cancer of the Middle East,” her conviction that such metaphors are vehicles of dangerous evasion achieves striking force.

I don’t finally believe, however, that the prime value of this book lies in the analysis of the sickness-of-our-time metaphor, or in the discovery of its sources. What is most revelatory is Miss Sontag’s encounter with the assumptions and superstitions underlying the language of agony she has attempted to demystify. To speak of a murderous deed as self-curative isn’t merely to make a metaphor; it is to bring forward implicitly a broad-ranging set of ideas. And to lay bare the content of such a metaphor is, accordingly, to lay bare a whole system of thought about strength, weakness, energy, sensitivity, creativity, superiority.

As it happens, the system of thought pertinent to illness metaphor is among the most important intellectual underpinnings of modernism. And this in turn means that Miss Sontag is surveying, in Illness as Metaphor, precisely the dogmas about the human condition that have shaped the work of the artists she has most admired and imitated.

What are these dogmas? One holds that heightened melancholy and certainty about one’s total separateness from others necessarily establish one as superb. (“The melancholy character—or the tubercular—was a superior one,” writes Miss Sontag wryly: “sensitive, creative, a being apart.”) Another holds that sensitivity, powerlessness, and disease are, if not interchangeable, near allies. (“Tuberculosis provided a metaphoric equivalent for delicacy, sensitivity, sadness, powerlessness. . . .”) Another holds that only sickness is interesting. (“This idea—of how interesting the sick are—was given its boldest and most ambivalent formulation by Nietzsche . . . and [his] famous judgments about individual weakness and cultural exhaustion incorporate and extend many of the clichés about TB.”) Still another holds that insanity equals enlightenment: “The romanticizing of madness reflects in the most vehement way the contemporary prestige of irrational or rude (spontaneous) behavior, (acting-out) of that very passionateness whose repression was once imagined to cause TB, and is now thought to cause cancer.”

As the writer comes to grips with these and related fatuities, her scorn of the stuff increases. The voice that once swelled in admiration of Sade as a kind of moral exemplar now carries an edge of protest at the tyranny of the extreme. The reasonableness of a conserving optimism—trust in decency, in competence, in the possibility of success in the struggle against the worst of our ailments —flickers into sight. It is hinted that modesty and moderacy deserve regard as civilizing values. Before the end, in a few likably acerb sentences about modernist heroes and heroines (the “hectic, reckless creatures of passionate extremes, someone too sensitive to bear the horrors of the vulgar, everyday world”), Miss Sontag seems capable of genuine affection for middle ways, for what Randall Jarrell described as “the dailiness of life.” Once before in her career, Miss Sontag spoke of optimism-impersonal good cheer—without disgust, but that was in another country (North Vietnam). In this book she manages to see it as a resource for our kind.

Caution: The authorial self recreated in Illness as Metaphor retains profound reservations about the culture and its politics, and despite the new tone continues to occupy a position a fair distance from the “vulgar, everyday world.” Further caution: This book is not inspirational or complacent in message. Miss Sontag’s plea is for the restoration of the sense of fact to human discourse, for some released time from the cage of subjectivity, for fuller alertness to both the complication and the comprehensibility of the real world, and for more skepticism of “our” standard “language of despair, of discontent about and obsessive preoccupation with the isolated self and its never altogether satisfactory ‘relationships.’ ” Time to come off it, she’s telling us. Time to uncover the superstition and fantasy hidden in our solemnly regarded perspectives on ourselves. Time to kick—for good—the ego-inflating habit of self-laceration.

Can a single short, pithy book reverse an entire career? Impossible to say. Literary careers are often mysteriously patternless; today a door opens, briefly, offering surprising views, and tomorrow it is inexplicably slammed shut. I do know, however, that I’d like to read more by Susan Sontag that’s written in the spirit of Illness as Metaphor. Her happiest and least conventional book, it’s also immeasurably her shrewdest.