Susan Sontag: Against the Ideological Grain

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

By LEON S. ROUDIEZ Those who share common concern also tend to be interested in one another especially if the object of that concern is either unusual or controversial in the slightest way. The tone, both professional and personal, of Susan Sontag's recent essays on Roland Barthes confirmed the attraction I had felt toward her work. At present, of course, especially since his death, Barthes is no longer controversial; but he was so at time, nearly twenty years ago, when she listed him among those who were producing, far, the most interesting literary criticism today. Although Barthes is generally known as critic, I prefer to call him writer. I have referred to Sontag as critic, but she too is much more than that. Barthes, toward the end of his life, dreamed of writing novel; the first book published by Sontag, The Benefactor (1963; like all others it was initially published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux), was novel. In 1967 she brought out second one, Death Kit, and collection of short stories, 7, etcetera, followed in 1978. She has written and directed several films: Duet for Cannibals in 1969, Brother Karl in 1971 and Promised Lands in 1974; more fiction is supposed to be on the way. The criticism and essays are what I was most concerned with at first; I return to them more often, for obvious professional reasons. Nevertheless, the fiction is, in my opinion, fundamental. Consciously or not, we are all creators of fictions, what is known as reality being but one of them; some of us have the ability to translate those vague creations into an architecture of words and in so doing strike responsive chord among those less gifted than they and Susan Sontag is surely one of them. When The Benefactor first appeared, there was tendency to detect foreign influences at work. Stanley Kauffmann called it a skillful amalgam of number of continental sources in fiction and thought.' Sontag's own acknowledged interest in the so-called New Novel in France may well have sparked those comments. Actually it was different kind of (as Doris Grumbach put it, It is not, in any sense, novel the kind of statement that never ceases to puzzle me), and as often happens when something new turns up, it was considered alien and hence influenced by alien practice. There is, however, much originality in that novel, even though it conveys European, perhaps mostly French, resonances. Those familiar with the twentieth-century French could perhaps feel more at home reading The Benefactor than they did when confronted with, say, Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America. Nevertheless, Sontag is definitely an American writer at home within corpus that extends from Walt Whitman to Laura Riding. There is much here that is phatic; in other words it allows for communication by establishing familiar ground. The unspecified setting for the is easily identifiable as Paris (although I am not sure that it is useful to do so). As in fictions by Gide or Cocteau, money is of no real concern to the protagonists; either they have an income, or some exterior event provides them with the necessary means for the specific purposes of the fiction. In Sontag's book, as in those by Gide, this means something like the exploration of an individual consciousness. From thematic standpoint, one notices concepts explored by Sartre or Camus in their novels and plays cropping up in number of instances. All that is trivial but makes it possible for the literate reader to recognize familiar territory: it now enables the text to function; it makes its otherness more tolerable.