Or an author who’d step out of time, breaking a dramatic moment in which an 18th-century diplomat stands on the lip of a volcano for an aside on public suicide in the streets of 20th-century Manhattan. I’d never before read contemporary historical fiction where the author begins her book with a “Chapter Zero,” in which she eavesdrops on a 19th-century dinner party in Poland and, in essence, walks us through the process of how a novelist transforms history into fiction. Where others complained about Sontag inserting her own thoughts, wedge-like, into the prose, I relished a writer daring enough to poke her head out from behind the curtain of history. Where others saw limp narratives, I saw historical novels in which time and place were the reason to keep reading. I didn’t understand what the problem was. (Her earlier fiction being hard to find in bookstores, I had little choice to but to read backwards.) What saved me from giving up at the start, I imagine, was starting in reverse, with her 2000 National Book Award-winning novel, In America, and, after it, 1992’s The Volcano Lover. It’s a personal judgment I’ve struggled with ever since I first decided to plow my way, like an icebreaker, through novels I’d been warned were cold and impenetrable fiction too frozen in ideas to allow characters to live and breathe. So to say I love Susan Sontag’s writing means I must come to terms with the fact that much of her fiction just isn’t that good. We love the best of them and the worst of them. When we say we love someone, what’s implicit in that statement (if we mean it genuinely) is that we love the person with all their faults. Then there’s another canon of work I’d never know of were it not for Sontag’s essays and her intellectual mystique (the furor of her cultural passions, the near-impenetrability of her writing, that skunk-white stripe in that black mane): her fiction. I am forever indebted to her for introducing me to an entire canon of work I’d likely never have encountered without her guidance (or, admittedly, her name-dropping). Sebald and Victor Serge Jean-Luc Godard’s tragic Vivre Sa Vie and Ingmar Bergman’s hallucinogenic Persona Virginia Woolf’s “Three Guineas” Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Andre Gide’s The Immoralist. It was through her essays and think pieces that I learned not so much about her aesthetic arguments as about the works supporting them: the novels of W.G. Then again, this is one of the defining characteristics of a great thinker, a great polemicist: You wish she or he were still around to illuminate our present moment, to help us make sense of the whole damn mess.įor me, Sontag is, first and foremost, a cultural gatekeeper. One marvels to imagine, were Sontag alive today, what she would think (and write!) about our hyper-connected, Instagram-and-Twitter, President- Trump, ISIS-threatened world. One cannot read a Susan Sontag essay and come away unscathed about the modern world: how we see it, how we capture it, how we live and die in it. More than a decade after her untimely death in December 2004, it’s difficult to deny the resonance of her essays, whether it’s “Against Interpretation,” the 1964 ur-text that would solidify her reputation as a public intellectual On Photography and Illness and Its Metaphors, with their trenchant takedowns of how we take photographs and live with cancer or her last major work, 2003’s Regarding the Pain of Others, in which she lays bare our own culpability in viewing images of suffering. Most serious consumers of culture are, in one way or another, indebted to Susan Sontag.
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