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.
Having written two novels -- The Benefactor (1963) and Death
Kit (1967) -- in the 1960s, in the
1990s Sontag turned from essays back to her
first love. Her novel The Volcano Lover was published in 1992, and In America came out last month.
Sontag's novels and essays cover many of
the same themes, including theater, collecting, illness, memory, and social injustice, but the novels
give her more room to roam than did
the essays, with less need to exclude. In the novels she moves through love affairs, lava storms,
revolutions and restorations, the Shakespearean
stage, and transatlantic steerage. The Volcano Lover is set in eighteenth-century Naples, under the shadow of Vesuvius and
the French Revolution. The venues of
In America range from a nineteenth-century
California commune composed of Polish ÈmigrÈs,
to the mind of famed actor Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes. Snatches of Sontag's voice as essayist resurface in the narrative voices of these novels,
teasing apart the meaning of events.
Whether writing as an essayist or a novelist, Susan Sontag is the best of literary company.
Harvey Blume had a chance to talk with Susan Sontag on her
recent visit to Boston.
HB: Over the
years, you have given the word "intellectual" a good name. You have
shown that it's possible to be an intellectual in this culture without being an
academic.
SS: And I'm very proud
of that. But I'm always being introduced with "You are so bookish, you are
what most people think an intellectual is." I could live until I'm 200
years old and I'd still be introduced that way. It drives me nuts that I have
to constantly deal with what I represent as opposed to what I actually have
written. I mean, I've lived my whole life convulsed with various admirations,
but I would admire people for their work.
Let's take a really outlandish but perfectly true example. I
worshipped T. S. Eliot when I was a teenager at the University of Chicago. I'm
of that generation for which Eliot was God. But I worshipped the work, I
worshipped the ideas. If anything, that person, if I ever thought about him,
was slightly embarrassing. And I didn't think, what does this work
"represent"? That's another barrier, another kind of mediation. I was
just convinced by some of the ideas, one of them being (it's probably no
accident I bring up Eliot) that essentially the work isn't about you; it's
impersonal.
I spend a good part of my public conversation dealing with
people's ideas about what I represent, as opposed to what I espouse or what the
work is worth. In the end, we come back to "intellectual" and
"smart." If I were a man, would people always be talking about me
being an intellectual or being so smart? I don't think they would.
HB: There's not
always an obvious split between the work and the writer, is there? Sometimes
the personality of the writer emerges from the work and becomes a force in its
own right. I'm thinking of the way Walter Benjamin emerges as a personality in
"Under the Sign of Saturn," your essay about him.
SS: Yes, and
that's when I realized I should stop writing essays. I thought, I better quit,
this isn't an essay anymore, this is a portrait. I'm writing about a certain
temperament, the melancholic, and since I'm not really dealing with ideas, I
should go back to fiction.
HB: In your essay
"One Culture and the New Sensibility" you say, "Literary men,
feeling that the status of humanity itself was being challenged by the new
science and the new technology, abhorred and deplored the change. But the
literary men ... are inevitably on the defensive. They know that the scientific
culture, the coming of the machine, cannot be stopped." That was written
more than thirty years ago, but it applies pretty well to current debates about
the Internet.
SS: What strikes
me now is not that technology can't be stopped, but that capitalism can't be
stopped. I'm stunned by what I call the total takeover of capitalism.
Mercantilist values and motives now seem absolutely self-evident to people. I
don't mean to say people weren't previously interested in their own prosperity
or material advances, but they did understand that there were some zones of
activity where materialist criteria didn't apply. Or that you could have a
conflict: you're going to be very well paid for something you think is shoddy
or unworthy, and you might actually not do it! I think more and more people
don't even understand why in the world you wouldn't do anything to make a buck,
and why everything isn't about property.
HB: Technology
extends capitalism. With eBay, the market reaches into your closets.
SS: I don't have
a problem with technological culture. I have a problem with capitalism. I use a
word processor. It's the greatest typewriter ever invented. I don't use the
Net. So far, the information I get through books and magazines suffices, but
anytime I feel that some online magazine -- which may very well be this one --
is something I want, I'll stay with it. And listen, the digital world produces
art on a very high level. For me by far the most interesting work in
photography could not be done without digital manipulation. And there's some
video I like, too, though I think some of it is very thin. You want more
density.
HB: I think depth
is not so easy to obtain in digital media.
SS: It's as if
the work isn't expecting to get your full attention. I know lots of people who
have two television sets in the room; they'll have two pictures on and keep
switching the sound. So one thing that's happening with the new technology is
the stretching and layering of attention.
But I see the empowering aspect. I can see it empowering
patients who can now access medical information for themselves. I have twice been
a cancer patient, once in the late seventies and now again. The difference
between how much patients know about their cancers is night and day.
Personally, I'm a different case -- I'm a frustrated doctor. My earliest idea
of how I wanted to spend my life was to be a physician, so I'm good at
assimilating medical information. In the late seventies, when I had cancer for
the first time, I was very curious and read medical books and asked a lot of
questions, to the great annoyance of some of my physicians.
And I remember sitting day after day, month after month,
getting chemotherapy. There were five, ten, fifteen people in the room and day
after day I was with them. I'm talkative, curious, and I would ask what drugs
they were taking -- this was before I even knew I was going to write Illness as
Metaphor. Nobody knew the names of their drugs. I knew the names of my drugs.
They were polysyllabic words, but it's not rocket science.
"Chemotherapy," they'd say. But what particular chemotherapy? It's
always a cocktail; it's always more than two drugs.
Cut to twenty-two years later, I have a new cancer, I'm back
in the hospital in the chemo room, and every single person knows the names of
their drugs. Not only that, but they are chatting away about having read a protocol
from the University of Indiana, or research from somewhere else, and they give
you the Web site. And that's wonderful.
HB: As you
observed thirty years ago, it's often literary intellectuals who are the least
enthusiastic about the prospects for technology.
SS: The great
leap is the Gutenberg leap. Someone was marveling that I moved with so much
pleasure to the word processor. And I said, "The leap is from writing by
hand to the typewriter. From writing with a typewriter to using a computer is
no leap at all." In the same way, the real leap is when books are set in
type and they become uniform, reproducible objects. They can then be uniform
reproducible objects in some non-paper-based form, and I don't feel in any way
threatened by that. I don't need the OED in book form. I'm delighted it's a CD
and I can stick it in my computer.
But if you're going to read the poems of Jorie Graham, which
are really hard, you can't read them hyperkinetically. Either you don't read
Jorie Graham at all, or you read her real slow, and over and over. It's an
effort of immersion and decipherment. You can't read The Brothers Karamazov
hyperkinetically. Either you're going to get the good of it, or you're not.
I know people who find it hard to watch a movie. They want
shorter attention units. And I know other people who listen to Morton Feldman
-- hours of music just above the threshold of audibility.
HB: So maybe
we're getting more varieties of attention.
SS: I think
that's exactly what that essay, "One Culture and the New
Sensibility," as I dimly recall it, was about. It was about not having to
exclude, which seemed very heretical then. Now, of course, the question is,
Does anyone want to listen to Morton Feldman? Are people being rewired so they
are kind of jumpy? It's the neurological and the anthropological issues that
concern me.
But, in the end, isn't this all a function of prosperity?
Will there be eternal prosperity in a small part of the world? Maybe there
will, maybe Keynes is obsolete. But suppose there are hard times ahead, and
people have real material problems. Don't you think they'll slow down a little?
It's almost a function of luxury, this hyperkinetic thing.
HB: You have also
been seen as the European connection, showing that an American could be an intellectual
the way Europeans were.
SS: And I wanted
to do that. I thought that was a useful thing to do, a thing nobody was doing,
and I knew how to do it.
HB: In your
essays you often presented European writers -- Benjamin, Canetti, Barthes,
Artaud -- to Americans. And in the new novel the main character is a Polish
actress who comes to America. You maintain the European connection.
SS: It's a
question of affinities. When I left this place -- and it actually was this
place, Cambridge, Harvard -- I ended up for the better part of a year in Paris.
Everything until then was mediated through painting and music and especially
books; everything was canonical. It was precisely in Europe that I had more of
a confrontation with the modern and the contemporary. It was through films. It
was probably Godard. I felt my life was divided into before Godard and after
Godard.
Before, I hadn't understood the force of the modern. I just
felt the past is bigger than the present and European culture is obviously
bigger than American culture. And America has been so much about disburdenment,
getting rid of the past. I thought, Why can't one have it all? -- a very
American thought, I hasten to add. And wouldn't it be nice to look at these
things in a fresh way, and not make the sorts of distinctions that have to do
with notions of the canon? Though I was totally a product of the canonical way
of thinking, and still am. But we can open up a lot of annexes and branches,
can't we? Why choose? Very American.
When I started trying to do fiction, though, I didn't know
how to open up. The fiction was mostly taking place in somebody's head. So I
thought, I don't want to just be talking about the commotion in someone's head.
Why don't I make movies? Then, a story idea came my way, and it started with
something visual. In a print shop near the British Museum, in London, I
discovered the volcano prints from the book that Sir William Hamilton did. My
very first thought -- I don't think I have ever said this publicly -- was that
I would propose to FMR (a wonderful art magazine published in Italy which has
beautiful art reproductions) that they reproduce the volcano prints and I write
some text to accompany them. But then I started to adhere to the real story of
Lord Hamilton and his wife, and I realized that if I would locate stories in
the past, all sorts of inhibitions would drop away, and I could do epic,
polyphonic things. I wouldn't just be inside somebody's head. So there was that
novel, The Volcano Lover.
And there was the notion of the foreigner. I have done a
novel about English people in southern Italy, a novel about Poles in America,
and the next one is going to be about French people in Japan. I say it's a
privilege to be a foreigner, it's such an intensifier of experience.
HB: The narrator
of In America is a foreigner in the sense that she is foreign to the past; she
time travels.
SS: The book
begins with her time traveling. I like foreigners. I feel like a foreigner in
New York. I like not being too comfortable.
Harvey Blume is a contributing writer for Atlantic Unbound
and The Boston Book Review.
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