Susan Sontag, my prose’s prime mover, ate the world. In 1963, on the subject of Sartre’s Saint Genet (her finest ideas occasionally hinged on gay men), she wrote, “Corresponding to the primitive rite of anthropophagy, the eating of human beings, is the philosophical rite of cosmophagy, the eating of the world.” Cosmophagic, Sontag gobbled up sensations, genres, concepts. She swallowed political and aesthetic movements. She devoured roles: diplomat, filmmaker, scourge, novelist, gadfly, essayist, night owl, bibliophile, cineaste . . . She tried to prove how much a human life—a writer’s life—could include. Like Walter Benjamin, she was entranced by multiplicity; and, like him, she was an aphorist at heart, honing pluralities down to terse sentences not without Jamesian evasions and excesses. Again, Sontag on Sartre’s Genet: “Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again.” Thus in her Yeatsian tower she wrote, wrote, wrote; reiterating, she made writing’s asocial motion pornographic—a subject on which she dilated in her essay “The Pornographic Imagination.” Remember, she was no stranger to Mapplethorpe’s milieu.
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Transference: In the early 1990s, the night before I gave a lecture on Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, I dreamed that she reclined, wearing a pink miniskirt, on her living-room couch. I’ve had dozens of Sontag dreams, in which she represents intellectuality’s phantasmagoria, prose’s succulence, quality’s fearsomeness, and aphorism’s bite.
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The first time I saw Sontag in person, she was speaking at a Samuel Beckett homage in the 1980s. Listening to her eloquent presentation, I whispered to my boyfriend, “Susan Sontag’s got a crush on me.” I meant the reverse: “I have a crush on Susan Sontag.” Instinctive, preposterous substitution: For an instant, Sontag besotted, I ate the world.
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My essays would not be mine without the influence of her prose’s Mercurochrome aesthetic, her stern, self-conscious, tense sentences.
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The ends of her novels are the best parts. Closure sharpened Sontag's scalpel. The last three sentences of The Volcano Lover: “They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.” The last two sentences of Death Kit: “Diddy has made his final chart; drawn up his last map. Diddy has perceived the inventory of the world.” The last sentence of The Benefactor: “You may imagine me in a bare room, my feet near the stove, bundled up in many sweaters, my black hair turned grey, enjoying the waning tribulations of subjectivity and the repose of a privacy that is genuine.” And here are the concluding lines of her 2001 essay “Where the Stress Falls”: “Nothing new except language, the ever found. Cauterizing the torment of personal relations with hot lexical choices, jumpy punctuation, mercurial sentence rhythms. Devising more subtle, more engorged ways of knowing, of sympathizing, of keeping at bay. It’s a matter of adjectives. It’s where the stress falls.” Dig the word engorged. Like Jean Rhys, Sontag kept rules and torments at bay by generating stressed prose—magnifying, through emphasis and engorgement, the opportunities for attentiveness.
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In her first novel, The Benefactor published in 1963, a year before "Notes on ‘Camp,’” she wrote the following sentence: “I am a homosexual and a writer, both of whom are professionally self-regarding and self-esteeming creatures.” Admittedly, this line occurs in the voice of her character, Jean-Jacques. But Susan wrote the sentence, not Jean-Jacques. I am a homosexual and a writer. Each of her books and essays contains a similar coded declaration. Sontag “came out” in her own way, forcibly, repeatedly. Her seeming refusal of queer identity may have enraged others (e.g., Adrienne Rich’s 1975 quarrel with Sontag—supposedly on the subject of Leni Riefenstahl but covertly on the subject of feminist and lesbian identification—on the letters page of the New York Review of Books), but in retrospect Sontag’s reticence seems picturesque, contrarian, and human. And it did not preclude admiration for Gay Lib, even if her theory of sexuality emphasized the saturnine, not the cheerful. Listen to her admiration (in a 1972 essay) of poet and social critic Paul Goodman’s erotic forthrightness: “I admired his courage, which showed itself in so many ways—one of the most admirable being his honesty about his homosexuality in Five Years, for which he was much criticized by his straight friends in the New York intellectual world; that was six years ago, before the advent of Gay Liberation made coming out of the closet chic. I liked it when he talked about himself and when he mingled his own sad sexual desires with his desire for the polity.” Sad sexual desires? Allow Sontag that adjective’s aptness.
Sontag spoke up on hot-spot issues (Bosnia, 9/11, racism, Vietnam) and was indiscriminately pilloried by Right and Left for her quirky, vatic pronouncements. Like her idol Antonin Artaud, she wanted to be a creature of passion, not reason: Her positions, even when logically worded, subtly dismantled sensibleness. Responsible intellectual statements weren’t her forte; her temperament demanded rash, provisional utterances. In a 1975 interview, published in Salmagundi, she defended the intellectual’s right to be partial: “People who reason in public have—and ought to exercise—options about how many and how complex are the points they want to make. And where, in what form, and to what audience they make them.” After her death, only a few obituaries referred to her as a feminist. In the Salmagundi interview, she defended her sexual politics: “I’d like to see a few platoons of intellectuals who are also feminists doing their bit in the war against misogyny in their own way, letting the feminist implications be residual or implicit in their work, without risking being charged by their sisters with desertion. I don’t like party lines. They make for intellectual monotony and bad prose.” Though Sontag and Rich argued in print, they had much in common; as essayists, they knew how to be intimately magisterial, definitively tentative. And Sontag, like certain other sisters, among them Joan Didion and Avital Ronell, threw away security and pusillanimousness for the sake of daredevil phrases.
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Sontag's Credo: move on. The phrase comes from her grief-ennobled expansive essay on her friend Roland Barthes: “The aesthete’s radicalism: to be multiple, to make multiple identifications; to assume fully the privilege of the personal. . . . The writer’s freedom that Barthes describes is, in part, flight. The writer is the deputy of his own ego—of that self in perpetual flight before what is fixed by writing, as the mind is in perpetual flight from doctrine. ‘Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.’ Barthes wants to move on—that is one of the imperatives of the aesthete’s sensibility.” Move on, Sontag urged. Leave the field untilled. Switch projects. Change hemispheres. Make a film. Direct a play. Write a novel. Fly to Hanoi. Nonspecialist, she refused restriction, scorned the limiting identity of expert. She would rather have been considered a collector, connoisseur, sad pervert—anything but an academic.
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Sontag achieved her customary tone of passionate detachment by refusing academic thoroughness. As a writer she was solely self-commanded, not taking editorial orders, obeying allegiance only to her own momentary or abiding enthusiasms: Fassbinder, Robert Walser, Marina Tsvetaeva, bunraku, Alice James . . . So what if she stopped endorsing a certain strain of countercultural American art and experience ( Jack Smith, Happenings, drugs, science fiction), and turned toward sober European and Asian pleasures? She loved fragments; her finest fictions and essays use the fragment as heuristic device and as musical measurement. In this predilection, she was influenced by Benjamin and Barthes, though I imagine that these writers merely confirmed her native inclinations. And, like Benjamin and Barthes, she respected philosophy and social criticism as forms of writing: Though she never (to my knowledge) referred to Derrida, they shared a genealogy, a set of assumptions—above all, a respect for any text’s unruly, tricky self-contradictions. Sontag is usually cited for her content rather than her form or style, and yet her paragraphs and sentences bear close and admiring scrutiny as exemplars of experimental writing: Avatar of move on, she sought prose forms that would permit maximum drift and detour.
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Fiction was one escape ramp; she used it to flee the punitive confines of the essay. And she used essays to flee the connect-the-dots dreariness of fiction. Her essays behave like fictions (disguised, arch, upholstered with attitudes), while her fictions behave like essays (pontificating, pedagogic, discursive).
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At no other writer's name can I stare entranced for hours on end—only Susan Sontag’s. She lived up to that fabulous appellation. No wonder Joseph Cornell loved her. He made a collage (The Ellipsian, 1966) incorporating a photograph of her, and courted her, in his fashion. Attuned to synchronicity, he believed that Henriette Sontag, nineteenth-century opera diva, led to the modern Susan. The second Sontag must have savored her own iconicity, a notoriety ensured by her severe good looks and by a style of intelligence (intelligence as style) that seemed a mode of locomotion (how to get through Western Thought without stopping for traffic lights) as much as a project—one of her favorite words. Stardom was one project she pursued. See her 1963 essay on Resnais’s Muriel, especially this footnote: “In this film (but not in Marienbad) Seyrig has the nourishing irrelevant panoply of mannerisms of a star, in the peculiarly cinematic sense of that word. That is to say, she doesn’t simply play (or even perfectly fill) a role. She becomes an independent aesthetic object in herself. Each detail of her appearance—her graying hair, her tilted loping walk, her wide-brimmed hats and smartly dowdy suits, her gauche manner in enthusiasm and regret—is unnecessary and indelible.” Here is Sontag’s brief theory of stardom: unnecessary and indelible. Those antithetical adjectives recall the concluding line of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Bight”: “All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful.” Another Bishop poem about placelessness gave placeless Sontag—Hollywood? Hanoi? Sarajevo? Manhattan?—the epigraph for her last collection, Where the Stress Falls. Sontag belongs with Bishop in that constellation of brilliant aesthetes, mostly women, whose public positions on sexual eccentricity were, shall we say, complex.
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Adventurous as Tarzan, Sontag consecrated her life to the task of being exemplary; consciousness, for her, was a grand experiment, a spiritual vocation, like Simone Weil’s. Such lives leave always a sense of the unfinished. Naturally, Benjamin’s incomplete Arcades Project ghosts Sontag’s work, not least her 1973 autobiographical short story, “Project for a Trip to China,” the only thing she wrote about her longing for her dead father.
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“Authority, idiosyncrasy, velvetiness—these are what make a star”: from Sontag’s In America (2001). I wonder what Sontag means by “velvetiness.” Velvety complexion? Velvety aura? Velvety effect on beholders? Is velvet the zone the spectator steps into when watching a film? Is velvet the trance state of the reader who experiences identification? Does velvet—as an emotion—precede initiation into the echo chamber of I, Etcetera, the replication booth of Sontag admiration?
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So far I’ve failed to mention cancer, aids, photography, atrocity—four of her major subjects. She was comfortable staring at apocalypse. She cut her critical teeth on the Six Million and the Atom Bomb. From horrors, she learned what mattered.
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In 1968 she described Jean-Luc Godard’s art as “a cinema that eats cinema.” Cosmophagic, cinematophagic, bibliophagic, Sontag’s literature ate literature—and ate itself. No wonder she enjoyed Bataille, Leiris, Sade, and other savants of the mind consuming itself; and no wonder she had a nose for intertextuality. She alluded to it when defending herself against silly charges of plagiarism: “There’s a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions.”
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Sontag was a shameless apologist for aesthetic pleasure. Accordingly, I revere her essays not only for what they say but for how they say it. The essay, in Sontag’s hands, became perilously interesting, governed by caprice masquerading as commentary. Her capriciousness, like foppish fiction-maverick Ronald Firbank’s, turned on the dime of the sentence, that unit of fidelity to the “now,” to contemporaneous duration. Sentence maven, she enmeshes me still: In her prose’s hands I’m a prisoner of desire, yearning for a literary art that knows no distinction between captive and captor. Such art can be sadomasochistic in its charm, its coldness, and its vulnerability.
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She died on December 28, 2004. A few days later, I began rereading André Breton in private tribute to Sontag, who loved French seriousness, even when it was surreal. On January 1, 2005, imitating Sontag, I saw a new print of Antonioni’s L’Avventura screened at MoMA. Daily, Sontag’s spirit exhorts me: Move on! Eat the world! In 2005, everything I do, say, read, and write will be an oblique elegy to her attainments and postures. My Susan Sontag Commemoration Project begins here.
Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet and critic.
