Sontag: Her Life and Work

by Benjamin Moser

This living exemplar of Warholian celebrity was a former middling actor whose sensibilities derived from Hollywood, and in whom a sense of irony was never detected: unable to distinguish between an atrocity and a photograph of an atrocity. His presidency was defined by this notion of politics as role-playing, as camp: “the farthest extension, in its sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” For Reagan, Joan Didion wrote, “rhetoric was soon understood to be interchangeable with action.”

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

She did not become a neoconservative, Norman Podhoretz with a human face. Instead, she became a liberal, that scourge of radicals, right and left. For the rest of her life, she championed causes that were not revolutionary but were nonetheless urgent.

These included freedom of speech and opposition to racial, sexual, and religious bigotry—causes that needed the advocacy she could bring. In a world shifting sharply rightward, abandoning radicalism would not mean abandoning controversy.

her liberal activism formed one of her enduring legacies: an argument for culture as a bulwark against barbarism, for the connection between art and the political values that guaranteed individual dignity.

This is why Sontag is important

A woman who only said 10 percent of what she meant was confronted by one who said ten times more than she meant.

“No good writer speaks as well as he can write. (To write means to revise.)” Sartre chitchatted his way through thousands of interviews, accepting “an invitation to self-vulgarization, to the adulteration of one’s ideas, and the leveling of ideas into opinions,” she insisted. The interview form was a leveling one, “an ideal arm of the triumphant anti-elitist notion of literature.”

Cluster B sufferers tend toward drama and—to compensate their sense of low self-worth—are prone toward attention-seeking and grandiosity. Their desperate need to be admired leads them to issue cruel judgments of others.

To read the literature from the gay movement in the eighties is to discover phrases that sound far more dated than the language of the civil rights movement or feminism from twenty years earlier. Even the most radical African American and feminist activists stood in a venerable tradition. In the age of AIDS, gay activists had to invent a grammar to allow them to speak about their lives. AIDS sparked a revolution, and so would the language discovered by the activism it unleashed.

His piece, for which he interviewed Susan, focused on the devastation in the art world. This was controversial: “a political risk,” he said, “because it was based on the premise that people in the arts were dying disproportionately, and was it somehow politically incorrect to suggest that there were more gay people in the art world, and that gay people were getting AIDS far more than straight people.”

“I realize all Mother left me was you,” Judith told her.

The most enduring legacy of the late eighties in AIDS activism proved to be its critique of silence, which is to say: of the closet. That critique departed from the proposition that homosexuality was a natural orientation, exactly like heterosexuality. The simplicity of this statement gave it sweeping implications that were only beginning to emerge under the pressure of the crisis. The gay activists stated that sexuality—in sharp contrast to sex—was no more “private” than being black or female or Catholic.

Gay people had gained a sympathetic space in the media in the seventies, but they had been caught by the broader cultural backlash of the Reagan era. This was racial: Reagan and Bush exploited resistance to the civil rights movement. It was economic: Reagan and Bush rolled back the social-democratic vision of the Great Society. And it was sexual.

bitchiness and vindictiveness with the closet, even when the closet was the only option. Self-loathing translated into contempt and cruelty; lying about who one was bled into lying tout court. It made people mean.

The passive voice—the voice of bureaucracy, of wall-to-wall carpeting—was not appropriate at a time when so many were screaming.

As Sarajevo was situated at the intersection between Islam and Christianity, and between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, it was the place where the interests that Sontag had pursued throughout her life coincided. The political role, and the social duty, of the artist; the attempt to unite the aesthetic with the political, and her understanding that the aesthetic was political;

Was there not something grotesque about using other people’s suffering to “achieve this invigorating sense of mortal danger”? Did the duty—social, political, moral, aesthetic—mean nothing more than risking terrible burns, or getting shot in the neck, or being gored? And would it be enough to volunteer for the risk—or was dying the only way of proving one’s commitment? Even those who did brave the journey to Sarajevo discovered how difficult it was to answer these questions.

Eyes made a difference, even if only a limited one. In On Photography, Susan discussed the limits of representing calamity. “A photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude.”25 This allowed a witness—a writer, a journalist, a photographer—to create that context; but that process could be agonizingly slow, and it was not easy to know if one was making any difference. “No longer can a writer consider that the imperative task is to bring the news to the outside world,” she wrote. “The news is out.”

If praise and prosperity brought out the worst in her, oppression and destitution brought out the best.

“Everything she said about Bosnia was admirable,” said Stephen Koch. “Her behavior about it was insufferable. Because if you had not gone to Sarajevo yourself, you were obviously just a morally inferior being. And she let that be known very clearly, with almost sneering condescension.”12 The need for moral invulnerability that had led to dalliances with questionable political causes in the past now unleashed behavior that offended people who were otherwise sympathetic and admiring.

Once it acquired a name, the phenomenon now known as “the closet” could be studied and understood. If homosexuals in the age of the black and women’s liberation movements were beginning to see that they, too, were an oppressed minority, they also understood that there were significant differences between the ways girls or members of minority communities grow up and the way gay children grow up. Girls—most of them—learn about being a woman from a mother. A black child can learn how to cope with racism from parents and community. But most gay children are born into heterosexual families, and into

communities that often hold strongly antihomosexual attitudes. The incentive this creates to lie about who they are is so strong that those behaviors—reprehensible in other contexts—are a matter of survival.

“It is not your job to reject yourself. It is their job. You put your name in the hat. If they reject you, that is their job. It has nothing to do with you! Why are you making it all about yourself? You are so egotistical!”

The idea of the woman who went to every opening and saw every opera and read every book and resisted the siege of Sarajevo through dramaturgy alone was essential. For Susan, the person, it meant a degree of pressure that was beginning to madden her.

“Our country is strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.2 These paragraphs were more incendiary than anything she had ever published. The words may have been just—even, as time would show, prophetic.

Could metaphor—the image, the photograph, the thing-once-removed—help “recover our senses”? Could it teach us “to see more, to hear more, to feel more”?

If nothing can be understood or imagined without firsthand experience, why represent experience at all? Do those who strive to bear witness torture themselves in vain?

One need not become another person, or to have had exactly the same experiences, in order to imagine that person’s life—which is why the foundation of metaphor is empathy. Art and metaphor do not make other people’s experiences identical. They make other people’s experiences imaginable.

Metaphor meant so many things; and among its sinister powers was its ability to disguise evil by dressing it in other names. Thousands of years ago, Confucius wrote that the abuse of metaphor led to the destruction of society, because tyranny began with language. The warning could never be repeated enough. In every generation, it needed to be relearned, often at hideous cost.

She showed how to remain anchored in the achievements of the past while embracing her own century. She demonstrated endless admiration for art and beauty—and endless contempt for intellectual and spiritual vulgarity. She impressed generations of women as a thinker unafraid of men, and unaware she ought to be. She stood for self-improvement—for making oneself into something greater than what one was expected to be. She symbolized the writer who ranged widely without falling into either overspecialization or dilettantism.