printable versionVantage Point: A valentine for Susan Sontag
BY KENNELL JACKSON
When, on Dec. 28, I saw the first Associated Press announcement that Susan Sontag had died, I became worried. My worry took the form of a question. Would American newspapers make as much of her intellectual career as the world press, led by partisans of French postmodernism, had made of the death of French philosopher-critic Jacques Derrida, who died on Oct. 8? I have nothing against the French. I am not a "Freedom Fries" person. But curiously, it mattered to me that we equal his homage.
My hope was that Susan Sontag would get the best in commentary, plus some delicious gossip to cut through the excessive sentimentality that would be poured on her. My hope had a sharper point as well. Undoubtedly, Derrida was important. Deconstruction, his method of close reading texts, often subverting them, has been a boon to many scholars. Still, having read several of his essays, I thought of him as an obfuscator. Maybe this was not Derrida's intention but was caused by the narrow intellectual crawl spaces he was trying to negotiate.
By contrast, Sontag was a great clarifier of ideas and deepened our understanding of how ideas work and why they matter. Not only this, the best of her writing got to the heart of a matter and was stylish. Although she once called herself a "zealot of seriousness," her writing was often entertaining.
My affection for Sontag is actually based on one singular gift she gave to the world in 1966, a collection of essays entitled Against Interpretation. I bought it at a bookstore devoted to intellectual books in Los Angeles' Westwood Village, run by "Vic," a New Yorker who claimed he was making his "last stand for thought" near the portal to the University of California-Los Angeles, where I was a graduate student in African history. He had made a big display of the Sontag book, and on the day I arrived he was raving about her.
It was the cover that caused me to buy her book. On the front, a big swirl in deep purple and red carried boldly her name and the title. The back had portraitist Peter Hujar's photograph of Sontag, highlighting her youth and her beauty. It was a modest portrait. Hujar captured her face from above, avoiding the common author photo, in which the reader is directly stared at. Under a soft jacket, she wore a turtleneck. The photo seemed to say: My authority arises from working with ideas rather than from a formal body or fashion pose.
Against Interpretation was a book produced by immense work. However, you had to pay close attention to catch Sontag toiling—to see her "breaking a sweat"—because the way she wrote made everything move smoothly. Twenty-six essays comprised the book. The range of her subjects was startling—Simone Weil to Claude Levi-Strauss to Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade to Alain Resnais' films to Nathalie Sarraute to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I read each of the essays, some several times, though I barely knew some of her intellectuals.
Today, we talk about extreme sports, where so-called new athletes perform feats beyond the extraordinary. Sontag in these essays practiced a form of extreme erudition. While at first I marveled at her vast learning, I concluded her greatest achievement was two fascinating themes.
The first theme sprang from the title of the book: Over-interpreting art and literature was undermining our ability to enjoy them. She urged, in the first essay, "Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art … [but] to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all." She ended, "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." I understood her exasperation, but at the time I was searching for a hermeneutic strategy to examine African oral traditions.
Her second idea was more alluring and useful to me. She announced the advent of "a new sensibility," in which "the distinction between 'high' and 'low' [culture] seems less and less meaningful." She explained, "From the vantage point of this new sensibility, the beauty of a machine or of the solution to a mathematical problem, of a painting by Jasper Johns or a film by Jean-Luc Godard, and of the personalities and music of the Beatles is equally accessible." "The new sensibility is defiantly pluralistic." These insights helped me see cultural products as often interchangeable. They also stimulated my interest in mass culture.
Of course, the most impressive application of her "new sensibility" idea was the famous essay "Notes on Camp," published earlier in Partisan Review in 1964. It was an elaborate map of what constituted camp, whose "whole point … is to dethrone the serious … is playful, anti-serious" and involves "a new, more complex relation to 'the serious.'" Even today, I am impressed by her bravery in writing on camp, since one of camp's great sources was urban gay culture, and because the essay's popular subject matter could have jeopardized her authority as an intellectual.
I was not to be disappointed by the American response to her death. By late afternoon, online newspapers and television had begun to run careful stories on her, especially her advocacy for artists and human rights. Gossip had not appeared. The same day, Jerry Orbach of Law and Order died. Momentarily, their photos shared online front pages—an example of the "new sensibility."
After Against Interpretation, I read only one other book by Sontag, On Photography (2000). No matter. The 1966 book was enough to sustain my affection for her across the years. Hence, this valentine of sorts. Add this to the American homage.
Kennell Jackson, the author of America Is Me, is an associate professor of history.