First appeared in Atlantic Unbound, 4/13/2000
Susan Sontag -- whose new novel, In America, has just been
published -- doesn't feel at home in
New York, or anywhere else. And that's the
way she likes it
By the late seventies, books such as Against Interpretation
(1966), Styles of Radical Will (1969), and On Photography (1977) had established Susan Sontag as an
essayist whose concerns stretched from high
culture to low before it was fashionable for writers to have this kind of range. Sontag wrote on
subjects like film, photography, pornography,
and camp with the same zeal she brought to the great European writers whom she helped introduce to American readers.
The title essay of her collection
Under the Sign of Saturn (1980) is about
the German critic Walter Benjamin, and it is no wonder he had special meaning for her. In Benjamin's work
many of the contrasting cultural and
political concerns of his day -- any one of which would have sufficed for a lifetime's
preoccupation by more narrowly focused thinkers
-- flourished side by side. Similarly, in Sontag's essays there is an inclusiveness that may be the closest thing to intellectual unity we should hope for
in our multi-dimensional culture. As
Sontag says in the following interview, she does not like to exclude.
