The Sensational Susan Sontag

IN THE land of Vogue, People Are Talking About Susan Sontag. Through no compromises of her own, she has become a synonym for the haute culture of New York City: hopefully, sophisticated dress and cuisine may be refined by some acquaintance, through her, with sophisticated thought. Various accidents and inessentials contribute to this notion, for which Miss Sontag is not to blame, of intellectual chic. Even her nursery-rhyme name, like Lucy Locket or Marshall McLuhan, seems designed for dropping. And she is a young critic, just thirty-three when her first collection of essays, Against Interpretation, came out this year. (That vigorous Against is, in itself, a credit to her metabolism.) And Miss Sontag is handsome. When she published her novel, The Benefactor, in 1963 and received a Merit Award from Mademoiselle, her somber posture in the magazine was splendid. Barbra Streisand appeared no more exemplary as Singing Comedienne, or Valentina Tereshkova as Cosmonaut, than Susan Sontag as Writer.

Her subjects too have had a last-wordness and a European cut which inevitably suggest a new Chanel of the arts. Her critical tone often slips into that of the fashion importer: she repeats an unimpeachable rumor that Marat/Sade will “soon be seen in New York,” and she likes (frowning) to say of a person that “Needless to say, knowledge of him here is long overdue.” Writing in American English, Miss Sontag seldom writes about American or English writers. The cast of one section of Against Interpretation: Cesare Pavese, Simone Weil, Camus, Michel Leiris, Claude LéviStrauss, Georg Lukács, Sartre (on Genêt), Nathalie Sarraute. Her American subjects—Jack Smith’s movie Flaming Creatures, science fiction movies, the Happenings—seem often a deliberate rejection of American writing. Miss Sontag expresses impatience with the old categories of “art” and “non-art,” of “good” and “bad” taste: her ideal is a roving, recent sensibility, equally receptive to mobiles and math problems, to Sartre and the Supremes. In fact, her interests are no more egalitarian than they are hostile toward what she considers philistine taste, particularly the taste gratified by novels or plays of psychological realism. These constitute the “literary culture,” the “Matthew Arnold apparatus,” the banality of the past. Miss Sontag prefers what transcends this taste, the theoretic ascents of European novelists like Robbe-Grillet; or what burrows under it, the mostly American explorations of “bad” taste, those varieties of sexuality, of violence, of practical joking, which, like chickens, didn’t used to be let into the salon.

In purveying these subjects, Miss Sontag mistakes her readers as they mistake her. The severe purpose with which she is attracted to subjects cannot prevent their exciting people far less severe than she is. Fixed in her devotion to the brandnew, Miss Sontag feels alone in it as well. Again, America is devoted to novelty! And when she is bored, she urges others to appreciate boredom. But people have always appreciated boredom: you can tell by looking at them. To overwhelm ignorance, Miss Sontag feels she must be bellicose. And her return for this strenuous ill temper? Against Interpretation is reviewed in a magazine called Life, where the reviewer asks Miss Sontag, please, to tell subscribers all about herself. Implacable and opinionated, she falls into the large, soft lap the public extends for the rigid opinions of others.

These ironic misapprehensions occasionally come to small disasters, as in the April, 1965, Mademoiselle, where Miss Sontag shared a page with a “Jiffy Jump Suit” ad and launched her answer to the C. P. Snow “two cultures” question. A gray essay, the February of her collection now, it must have spread a uniform dismay under the hair dryers of the nation. In something of the same way, Miss Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” rocked unlikely boats. By nature, Camp is (or was) a private game: the amused fondness of a few for the most naïve, the most detailed, the most passionate, the most exhausting errors in art. Dining room chairs shaped like epileptic worms, white linen plus fours, stuffed stoats. But when the essence of a game is condescension, the game is not meant for mass distribution, since nothing is then left to be condescended to. If no one was a heterosexual, whom would the homosexual parody? Or if no one was wrong, no one would be particularly right. With unexceptionable discretion, Miss Sontag published her Camp article in the Partisan Review, that happy union of daring and sobriety, the Martin Luther of little magazines, and in that context the potential salacity of the “Notes” suggested no more than Luther’s getting some of his brightest ideas sitting on the toilet. But unhappily, even Time sensed high jinks in that Partisan issue and hastily repeated provocative bits of Miss Sontag’s work. Her identification with Camp has since been so inflexible that she seems to regret her Notes: at Princeton, at peace again in a panel discussion of a dear old subject, The Role of the Artist in Society, Miss Sontag refused to instruct the undergraduates in the facts of Camp. And quite understandably. It is disheartening, when one’s opinions involve Kierkegaard as much as King Kong, to be summed up, in the New Republic, as “Miss Camp Herself.”

The temperament of Camp has very little to do, as a matter of fact, with Miss Sontag’s critical temperament. Instead, the article conveys a purpose one would have thought sufficiently republican for the New Republic, a daylight desire to document Camp, a sober intention of defining a new type of intoxication. The distance between the impudent subject and the careful student is measured by Oscar Wilde, whose quips drop into the Notes from time to time like actresses visiting an engineering school. And this superficial incongruity echoes a general incongruity of Miss Sontag’s American topics: the repeated attraction of a no-nonsense mind to aspects of frivolity. Camp, for example, takes lightly what others have taken seriously, while Miss Sontag urges that things be taken seriously which before have been taken lightly. Her services to the science fiction movies, the lists of titles and dates alone, prove a persistence amounting to self-immolation. Readers are abashed: they sense her months in the dark, breathing the dead air, smacking at the fleas, losing gloves. To bring back that darkcircled message: “Ours is indeed an age of extremity.”

HER defense of those little evanescent dramas, the Happenings, has the same sturdy purpose of edification. The effect of, say, the Happening of the Table, is primarily childlike:

A table is set. The entire cast, a mute and industrious group of young people, pitches in to set it. When they have loaded the table, they lift it at one end. With a fine crash, all the things on the table reassemble themselves on the floor as a single objet-trouvé, a cone of debris.

The action is autistic, the silent and compulsive handling and arrangement of objects. Its climax is the breaking out of autism into racket and mess. Both complication and solution are, really, quite homely and cheerful, and yet Miss Sontag’s first impulse is to make an honest genre of the Happenings, by geography: they are performed not only in New York, but also in cathedral towns like Cologne, Milan, Paris, Stockholm, and Osaka. Furthermore, in New York, “the most striking feature of the Happening” is its effort to “tease and abuse the audience”: instances of this abuse include such Harpo Marx turns as chasing the audience with a power mower. We are informed that when Happenings lack the element of abuse, they seem (in Siamese adjectives) “less dense and compelling.” But then, at the end of the essay, Miss Sontag insists, with the same air of knocking sense into us yet, that the Happenings are often funny.

She is devoted to the just apportionment of that inhibitive emotion, respect, to art forms which set out to defy inhibition. Her enthusiasms are also polemical: by belaboring the respect she considers due to the “new,” she wishes to imply her disrespect for the “old.” But the sense of incongruity in her book is more intricate than either of these. On the literary scene, at any rate, Miss Sontag now symbolizes an outburst of energetic and quite contrary intentions. She seems determined to spread throughout the provinces a point of view whose urban and elite qualities she relishes. She is a novelist who cares, among all art forms, the least for the novel. She is a literary intellectual who is sick of “literary intellectuals.” She recommends a dedication to Style and returns again and again, like an Old Girl, to Content. In her analysis of the work of the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, she conveys an unforced pleasure in scientific and philosophic achievement, in the Increase of Knowledge. The same pleasure recurs in her discussion of Sartre’s “stunning and profound ideas,” and on a simpler level, in her not wholly ironic choice of a McCarthy documentary as the best comedy of a movie season. The enthusiasm for information is at once spontaneous and meticulous; the enthusiasm for art is comparatively forced and vague — chiefly propelled, it seems, by an evangelistic urgency, a fervor of conversion to the new.

These two responses, a pleasure in ideas and a displeasure in all that she considers artistic convention, lead to Miss Sontag’s aesthetic division between thought and sensation. What she rejects in the “nineteenth-century” convention is its encroachment upon ideas, its involvement with those social, psychological, and moral judgments which she considers the property of the intellectual life. The property of art is sensation: this is a principle propounded in her two most recent essays, “Against Interpretation” and “On Style.” Both of these have ruffled reviewers; perhaps more various than consistent objections have been raised. It has been pointed out, rather testily, that critics like I. A. Richards described the assumption of content into artistic form or “style” some little while before Miss Sontag, as Walter Pater had previously worried, in his outmoded way, about the sensations of art. But then it is also argued that Miss Sontag’s attempt to put down content and to elevate sensation is dangerous, an attempt, as Charles Samuels said in The Nation, to lobotomize art. At the same time, through her (again, largely polemical) association with such experimental phenomena as the movie Flaming Creatures, some readers have regretted that Miss Sontag’s “sensations” are so markedly sensational! in the billboard sense.

As for the last, it must be remembered that these debatable sensations, though they are described as voluptuous and seductive, are irreprehensibly grim as well. The sensations which the new novel will provide may at first have to be “shoved down the throats of readers,” and still others resemble “shock therapy.” Neither image suggests a voluptuous extravagance. And in another place, there occurs a thoroughly wholesome comparison of the new artistic substance to a kind of sublime lawn food, revitalizing the “humus” of the total human sensibility. At the same time, neither the hope nor the desire that many will ever experience this renewal is expressed. On the contrary, the “abstruseness” of the sensations in question obliges that same small audience to which Milton (with whom Miss Sontag has a good deal in common) addressed Paradise Lost.

IT MUST also be granted that if Miss Sontag lobotomizes art, she performs the operation with the best of intentions. There is, first of all, her instinct, more philosophical than critical, for absolute distinctions. And the sense of being in an argument, which is her sense of criticism, exaggerates the rigidity of these distinctions. So she has to be impatient for the establishment of demarcations, norths and souths of experience, separate but equal facilities for thought and sensation. She is driven toward the limpid and yet impossible equation,

Rightly disturbed by those disturbing people Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan, Miss Sontag in a sense disparages her own pleasure in abstraction, by emphasizing their thesis that the sensory base of life is anesthetized by the complex technology of the twentieth century. Abstraction, like rationality, must then be felt as an exacerbation of the problem, drug on top of drug; the sensuous and concrete in art as its solution or antidote. If modern technology has darted past all sensuous comprehension, modern art will retaliate by darting past thought to sensation. At one time, the sight of a plate might legitimately rouse speculations about lamb chops or detergents or tipping waiters or sitting next to bores at dinner parties. Ideally, for the new sensibility, the plate is a thing in itself, so that one is capable of saying, like the heroine of the Godard movie Vivre Sa Vie, “A plate is a plate.” Art, then, is to restore our ability to “see (hear, taste, smell, feel),” and we make room for these exercises by pushing the “furniture of ideas” up against the wall.

The sensations which may then rush in have, in Miss Sontag’s references to them, at least six abiding characteristics:

Coolness. The term is so popular as to seem either indefinable or self-explanatory. Miss Sontag sometimes contrasts coolness with sentimentality, but since sentimentality has always been a defect and coolness has not always been a virtue, something more is involved. Coolness seems particularly an assertion of the right to control feeling, to feel exactly as much as one wishes. Coolness refuses to be forced into either agony or ecstasy: Michelangelo is out.

Catholicity. That range of affective objects which sweeps in the Beatles as handily as Baudelaire. Mainly, there must be no sense of slumming, no condescension: all media are declared equal. As McLuhan puts catholicity, a book is a personal confession, and a newspaper is a social mosaic: they are just different. Of course, in opposing “literary” condescension, McLuhan, and Miss Sontag, are still intensely aware of levels of taste. Their refusal to condescend puts them “above” the Beatles in much the way that the condescending critic is above them. Similarly, linguists argue in impeccable grammar the justice and inevitability of “bad” grammar. All are prophetic figures, in a way, anticipating a future in which people, like beaches, will welcome every wave.

Rapidity. Here, it is as though real speed, made possible by science, provoked an imitative or retaliatory speed in art. In this way, Miss Sontag’s favorite is naturally the one (and most rapid) art form born out of technology, the movies. Photographs, however, need not apply, since they lack continuous rapidity. The Benefactor: “Life is a movie. Death is a photograph.”

The reconciliation of rapidity with abstruse difficulty is only momentarily puzzling. Either the person gets the proper sensation quickly or he doesn’t get it at all. Anyone who spends a half hour looking at a tray of pink-iced plaster cupcakes by Claes Oldenberg confesses that he is either hungry or hopeless.

Impermanence. A natural adjunct of rapidity, as all drivers know. In art, however, impermanence seems in part a reaction against accumulation and scholarship — the arid fixities of the past, the university and the museum. Impermanence is associated with all spectacles, even Fourth of July parades, but again particularly with the movies. There are movie archives somewhere (Ruby Keeler has been exhumed for Camp purposes), but still people say “It’s gone” of a movie, with a finality they don’t apply to other art forms. The enjoyment of intervals of silence in modern music is also relevant here: once a person has “heard” an interval of silence, in contrast to a melody, it is gone.

Miss Sontag makes use of a Kleenex blow-andthrow-away simile in defining this quality, and speaks, in summary of the problems set by her essays, of having “used them up.”

Unity. This criterion may seem to have been around for some time, but the post-Aristotelian aspect of the new unity is perhaps clearest in physical terms. When a person is cut by a knife, his sensation of pain does not depend in the least upon his comprehension of the arrangement of contiguous molecules forming the knife’s blade. In the same way, a concern with beginnings, middles, and ends suggests to Miss Sontag that the cut has healed, that the aesthetic sensation is dissipated. As The Benefactor argues, the immediate experience is a speechless whole, and only its pallid recollection is a wordy sequence of parts.

Words inevitably work against this kind of indivisible and instantaneous unity: they are small islands on oceans of paper, they merge into a single continent only in the mind of the reader. It is probably this awkward fact that explains the absence of detailed literary criticism in Miss Sontag’s essays. Books are almost always referred to as wholes: Madame Bovary, for example, is a “constructed” (less effective) book, whereas Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a “secreted” (more effective) book. And the plodding, broken progress involved in reading a poem seems to prevent Miss Sontag from counting on poetry at all. A Venerean reading only Against Interpretation would report to headquarters that there was no poetic life on earth.

Wordlessness. All words are guilty of association with both rational comment and abstract idea. Hence, wordlessness, or an approximation of wordlessness, is vital to sensation. Sartre, in his highly articulate fashion, has opposed language as one of the curators of bourgeois sentiment. This is not very different from Miss Sontag’s conception of words: they are particularly vulnerable to infection by those “humanist” statements which are obsolete in art.

THESE attributes reflect a legitimate and informative sociology of art, and as sociology, the essays are entitled to their generality. Miss Sontag is like a witness who has no specific interest in the murder but comes to testify that the defendant, through a glandular defect, had not been feeling quite right for some time before the crime. But it is less easy, even in exchange for a sociology, to give up an art, and at the same time difficult not to sense that Miss Sontag is writing to say that she has given up writing. She seems not so much to fear the inadequacy of language as a medium of art as to assume it. And certainly, in terms of the new sensibility, she is logically obliged to do so. Since people stopped reciting Beowulf aloud, writing has had a shockingly low sensory quotient (S.Q.). Words are seen on the page, but except in calligrams, looking at them is only a preliminary, like Miss Sontag’s buying a ticket to the movies. Blind people substitute feeling words without altering their essential effect, which is incorrigibly intellectual. Moreover, writing can hope the least of all the arts for effects of rapidity: it takes time to read. Just as it seems, curiously, too permanent. The duplication of copies means that a single book, lost or burned or eaten by an indiscriminately sensuous goat, is easily replaced. kept again, read again. Writing is therefore the art most available to exegesis, to analysis, to the dread interpretation. It even shares its medium — those words again — with interpretation.

It is therefore understandable that Miss Sontag should show not only distaste for writing within acknowledged traditions, but distrust of writing in general. Why not turn, then, to the natural wordlessness of sculpture, painting, music? But Miss Sontag’s response to those forms is no more enthusiastic than it is flitting, as at the end of a concert relief can contribute to an ovation. Ironically, it is words in which Miss Sontag is entrapped along with many other people, and therefore her constant concern is not with wordless forms, but with all techniques which may lend to words this property of the other arts.

One providential escape from her quandary exists, of course, in all forms of theater, in which she can virtually see (hear, taste, smell, feel) words as she sees pictures or smells fish. Predictably, not much comes of her attending “old” plays like Hamlet: “And George Rose, in the brief role of the gravedigger, rendered all the delights of Shakespeare’s prose.” But in dealing with Arthur Miller, John Osborne, Peter Weiss, Ionesco, Miss Sontag is at her critical best. It is natural too that she should prefer those plays in which words have given up as much as possible of their rational meanings to what is seen, gone as far as they can go as spectacle. Phis accounts for her immense pleasure in Marat/Sade. Since the characters are mad, and cavorting madly to prove it, the words they utter can never achieve more than the illusion of sense. In movies, Miss Sontag fixes with delight upon an element of preoccupation, what is called the “project” in Bresson’s movies: the particular grace of the “project” lies in its persuading the character to shut his mouth.

But Miss Sontag is a writer herself, and not yet of plays, so that her troubles aren’t entirely solved by the theater. In her most recent essays, however, those on style and interpretation, a certain dramatic effort is discernible. The new essays are broken up, like the earlier “Notes on Camp” (in which the fugitive nature of the subject was said to require fugitive treatment), into sibylline fragments, small sudden separate forays into the wilderness of the subjects. These have been abused as incoherent, but their incoherence is deliberate: now, an application to criticism of the Marshall McLuhan “probe,” an execution of his preference for “aphorism” in contrast to “method” in expression, on the grounds that the reader then participates (as in a play) in the piece of writing — in order to complete it. In McLuhan’s memorable simile, this kind of writing is better as the mesh stocking is better than the ordinary nylon: the mesh stocking is more “sensuous” in that the eye has to fill in its interstices.

But the defect of Miss Sontag’s interstitial structures is that they are not aphoristic enough. An occasional smartness, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art,” jostles with a crudely sententious (“Now hear this”) quality, so that the new essays suggest in the end an ill-conceived marriage of La Rochefoucauld and a WAC sergeant. The approach to dramatic aphorism is also impeded in Miss Sontag’s work by a complacent use of the cliché, which sounds loose and long even when it is short. Miss Sontag is especially indebted to the clichés of curtness: the truth is, long overdue, a waste of time, the overall impression, in the last analysis, the sooner the better. And when, as on the topic of missionaries, curtness mounts to contempt,

. . . an army of stony-eyed spinsters from Yorkshire and raw-boned farmers’ sons from the American Midwest, cliché mounts with it, pitilessly. It is cliché in turn which obscures the concrete meanings of words. Sartre’s Saint Genet

... is a cancer of a book, grotesquely verbose, its cargo of brilliant ideas borne aloft by a tone of viscous solemnity and by ghastly repetitiveness.

That’s the cancer that went by air freight, and it was a ghastly trip. The one small way in which words might approach sensation, by our visualizing the things which they name, is lost. And yet the idea about Sartre’s book is communicated. The essays are like subway rides: what matters is to get there, to get it said, and for that purpose intelligence can make do with brutality.

In her first book, The Benefactor, however, Miss Sontag’s effort to accommodate writing to the new sensibility was more successful. Relieved of her discursive duties, she achieved aphorism more consistently. There were no innovations in language, no departure from its conventional patterns, but the novel was a sustained protest against easy or conspicuous elegance. And its frugality had the incidental virtue of budgeting the cliché as well as the flourish. Moreover, the madness of the hero allowed for Miss Sontag’s reconciliation of her habitual contrarieties. In his stifled and constricted way, he was articulate. He made a style out of his straitjacket. He was as tree as Marat and Sade to have ideas: no matter how cerebral his opinions and judgments seemed, they could all be attributed to the sensation of his madness. But in Against Interpretation, hostilities have been resumed, and they are clearly more welcome to our present taste. For it is Miss Sontag militant in the essay rather than Miss Sontag quiescent in the novel that has now made her sensational!