forever on
SUSAN SONTAG
by
YAHIA LABABIDI
__________________
Yahia Lababidi, aphorist, essayist and poet, is
the author of Signposts
to Elsewhere, selected for ‘Books
of the Year’ in 2008 by The Independent (UK).
She
lived up to her definition of a writer, someone who was interested
in everything; and showed us how interesting she could be by
writing intelligently on subjects as varied as philosophy and
pornography. She was that rare sort of critic, whose appreciative
faculty was as developed as her critical one. Rather than hectoring
or tearing down, she preferred to communicate her enthusiasms
or discoveries in an infectiously spirited style, always arguing
on the side of sophistication.
At
times her high brow interests could be vertiginous, prompting
conservative critic Roger Kimball to pay her the backhanded
compliment of cultivating a certain “altitude.”
But she was as delighted by the contours and movement of the
mind as she was of the body. Dance or art were just as likely
the subjects of her admiring attentions as were her beloved
European thinkers whom she introduced to an unsuspecting American
audience. In the process she gradually altered prevailing aesthetic
tastes and the shape of the intellectual landscape in favor
of “a pluralistic, polymorphous culture.”
As
a passionate thinker and self-appointed cultural provocateur,
Sontag championed liberty of the mind and body and, indifferent
to controversy, defended them against their hijackers at home
or abroad. In opposition to the Vietnam War, following a trip
to Hanoi, she stridently proclaimed that "the white race
is the cancer of human history." 
(Later
diagnosed with cancer, she reneged somewhat, saying that she
had been unfair -- to cancer). When, in 1989, the Ayatollah
Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against author Salman
Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, Sontag (then president
of PEN American Center, an international organization of writers)
denounced it as “an act of terrorism against the life
of the mind.”
More
recently, and controversially, in an incendiary New Yorker
article addressing the September 11, 2001 attacks, Sontag refused
to refer to the attackers as cowards since courage, she argued,
is a morally neutral term. This "monstrous dose of reality"
was an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower
(read bully) and thus a consequence of specific American alliances
and actions. This did not make her popular in the stunned and
confused post 9/11 USA. Following the article, she received
death threats along with calls for her to relinquish her US
citizenship. Yet as a philosopher, Sontag was a citizen of no
community. Her allegiances were always larger than any nation
state, while her loyalties were to humanity and the truth as
she saw it.
In
her spartan New York City apartment, Sontag owned a small clock
that told time in America on one side and Europe on the other.
Like her clock, Sontag had a foot in America and another in
Europe, straddling cultures. She lived for long periods in France
and Italy and was versed in both tongues. A self-confessed Europhile,
she immersed herself in European criticism and cinema as well
as its history of ideas, seeking to overcome the limitations
of her own culture in herself. She was a ‘public intellectual’
in the French tradition: engaged, political and outspoken. Yet
for all her conscientious involvement on the public stage, she
discreetly guarded her personal life: “I don’t talk
about my erotic life any more than I talk about my spiritual
life,” she once told a journalist, “. . . it always
ends up sounding so banal.”
Sontag
enjoyed what she termed "probably the best university education
in the planet." At sixteen, having outstripped her teachers
(her high-school principal’s words), she was shuttled
off to Berkley. From there the wunderkind transferred
to Chicago University then on to Harvard, where she became engrossed
in philosophy and comparative religions. Later at Oxford, she
came under the influence of her teacher, novelist and philosopher
Iris Murdoch, capping her prestigious international education
with a spell at the Sorbonne.
A
precocious and voracious reader, Susan Sontag turned to books
in her childhood “to ward off the jovial claptrap of classmates
and teachers, the maddening bromides I heard at home.”
As an adult, she would continue to extol the pleasures of the
text and its spiritual edification. Reading, “that disembodied
rapture . . . is trance-like enough to make us ‘feel’
egoless,” she confessed in an essay “Writing as
Reading” (2000). While writing was merely an extension
of this beloved pastime, as she says in that same essay, “to
write is to practice, with particular intensity and attentiveness,
the art of reading.”
In
a 1995 essay, “Singleness,” Sontag articulates her
passion for literature, thus: “Admiration -- no, veneration
-- for a host of books had brought me to my vocation, on my
knees.” Her Borgesian library is a living testament to
her relentless self-education and enduring devotion. Composed
of 15,000 books, catalogued by subject and language (not alphabetically),
she referred to her library-dominated apartment as “the
inside of my head . . . (and) a map of my brain.” Moreover,
her intimate and reverent dialogue with her literary heroes
was undeterred by death. In an open letter to Borges penned
a decade after his passing, she writes affectingly: “It
does not seem odd to be writing you . . . since you always wrote
under the sign of Eternity.”
As
an essayist she stood apart from her contemporaries. Her best
essays bear comparison with that premiere essayist, Montaigne,
for their acuity and wit; as well as successfully using the
format to interrogate and discover herself, while testing the
limits of her indefatigable responsiveness. On account of these
miniature marvels, many first appearing in the New York
Review of Books, she was declared a new star in the cultural
skies of the 1960s. Since then, Sontag came to be regarded as
a thinker of omnivorous appetite, writing in a dazzling aphoristic
style that was still accessible to an educated general audience.
With her dense academic knowledge, she trained her eyes and
agile mind on the new: avante garde, modernism and the latest
in French thought (Barthes, Artaud, Baudrillard).
As
an amalgam of scholar and aesthete, she managed to forge a new
style, the essay as performance art; and was credited with introducing
a new sensibility, equally concerned with aesthetics as ethics
-- most famously on display in her reputation-establishing essay
“Notes on Camp.” For the 30 year anniversary of
her seminal book of essays, Against Interpretation,
she would ironically refer to herself in a new preface as a
“pugnacious aesthete . . . and a barely closeted moralist.’
As for the new sensibility she was credited with, she modestly
attributed that to her spiritual ancestors. “I was --
I believed -- merely extending to some new material the aesthete’s
point of view I had embraced as a young student of philosophy
and literature, in the writings of Nietzsche, Pater (and) Wilde.”
Equally
conversant in all the arts, her constellation of interests encompassed
science fiction, music, theatre, and the quandaries of translation.
Photography was a profound and lifelong meditation, especially
the extent to which a photograph could capture and transmit
the truth. The appalling torture images of Abu Ghraib prison
were an opportunity for Sontag, the theorist and activist, to
reflect and speak out on the complex impact of photographs in
her classic 2004 New York Times article entitled "On
Photography." Refusing to settle for being an academic,
Susan Sontag had become the median link between the world of
academe and popular culture.
In
Against Interpretation, perhaps exasperated with her
own hyper-developed intellectual apparatus, she defended the
senses against the intellect. Accordingly, “Interpretation
was the evenge of intellect upon art . . . (and) the world.”
Instead, Sontag exalted altered states of perception --intuition,
ecstasy and dreams -- since sanity was but “a cozy lie”
and art “a new kind of instrument . . . for modifying
consciousness.”
Surprisingly,
the essays that she seemed to fire off effortlessly did not
come easily to her. Edmund White relates how Sontag once told
him, "You know my essays are much more intelligent than
I am . . . I rewrite them so many times, and slowly, slowly,
I nudge them up the hill.” Unprolific, in the sense of
having produced only 6 volumes of essays in over three decades,
she would admit she slaved over an essay of a few thousand words
for up to nine months. Author Mark Simpson appears to intuit
this in his review of her magisterial book of essays: Where
the Stress Falls. “Her impressive, swan-like prose
always inclines me at least to wonder how much furious peddling
is going on beneath the water line.”
In
1976, Sontag was diagnosed with cancer and told she was not
expected to live more than two years. Applying her radical will,
and enduring radically high doses of chemotherapy for the next
two and a half years, she put to practice the prayer of lifelong
invalid and precursor of Existentialism, Pascal: “Teach
us the proper use of sickness.” By stoically becoming
a student of her own condition and exercising her own facility
for metaphor, Sontag produced a book. Although certainly ‘informed’
by her experience, Illness as Metaphor does not discuss
her illness specifically but the stigma of sickness in general.
Much later, reflecting on these harrowing years, Sontag would
say: If you think you are going to die, and you are spared .
. . you always feel a little posthumous.”
Susan
Sontag actually died of leukemia on December 28, 2004 at the
age of 71. In an influential and illustrious career spanning
over four decades she has been called everything from “the
thinking man’s pin-up” to “the high priestess
of the American avant-garde”, and “the Last Intellectual.”
Eminent Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes compared Ms. Sontag to
the Renaissance humanist Erasmus. "Erasmus traveled with
32 volumes, which contained all the knowledge worth knowing.
Susan Sontag carries it in her brain! I know of no other intellectual
who is so clear-minded, with a capacity to link, to connect,
to relate."
Throughout
an honorable life marked by unusual curiosity, commitment and
courage, Sontag succeeded in securing the attention and recognition
of the world (with her books being translated into thirty-two
languages). At 70, she received one of the German-speaking world's
most prestigious literary prizes, 2003 Peace Prize of the German
Book Trade, for acting as ‘intellectual ambassador’
between the United States and Europe. In 2001, she won Israel's
top literary award, the Jerusalem Prize, where she dared to
use the occasion to criticize Israeli policy: “There can
be no peace here until the planting of Israeli communities in
the territories is halted.” Her historical novel,
In America, garnered the National Book Award in 2000 and,
in 1999, she was named a Commandeur
de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by
the French government. The list is long, but it goes on.
Revisiting
her pet subject of photography in a 1985 essay, “Certain
Mapplethorpes,’’ Sontag articulates the inadequacy
of the medium thus: "The photograph comes as a kind of
reproof to the grandiosity of consciousness.” In pursuing
literature, her aim was antithetical, namely to expand consciousness.
Having conceived of literature as a calling and a noble project
she strove to honor all her life, Sontag’s ardently expressed
rallying cry remained: "Be serious, be passionate, wake
up!"
