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Labeled a radical, an intellectual, and a postmodernist, Susan Sontag spanned across writing genres both to compose and to question art. Known primarily for her essays and reviews, Sontag also authored three novels, wrote and directed four feature-length films, composed numerous short stories, and penned several plays. With an existential view she often questioned the position of art and the role of the artist in a world she perceived as declining and deranged. Her continual analysis expounded both a political and philosophical voice that influenced society for more than four decades.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

The Young Academic

Born in New York City in 1933, Sontag (whose birth name remains a mystery, although it may have been Jacobson) was raised by relatives while her parents worked in the fur trade in Tianjin, China. Upon the death of Sontag’s father in China from tuberculosis, Sontag’s mother returned from abroad and took Sontag and her younger sister to live in Arizona. In 1945, Sontag’s mother married a Captain Sontag whose surname Sontag adopted. The family then moved to Los Angeles suburb Canoga Park where Sontag described her years as ones of intellectual exile. A precocious student, Sontag graduated from North Hollywood High School at the age of fifteen and attended the University of California at Berkeley for one year before transferring to the University of Chicago.

At seventeen, following a ten-day courtship, Sontag married the sociologist Philip Rieff in 1950. After obtaining her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1951, Sontag moved to Boston with Rieff where she earned masters degrees in both English and philosophy at Harvard University and completed all but her dissertation for a doctoral degree. While she was a graduate student at Harvard, Sontag taught philosophy there and English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. During this time, Sontag also studied abroad at Cambridge University and the University of Paris. Following her return from Europe, Sontag divorced her husband and moved with her son, David, who was born in 1952, to New York City to begin her career as a freelance writer and novelist. Between 1959 and 1960 she taught philosophy courses at the City College of New York and Sarah Lawrence College, and from 1960 to 1964 she was an instructor in the religion department at Columbia University. She has also been a writer in residence at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (1964-1965).

Exploring the Intellect

Sontag’s first novel, The Benefactor, was published with acclaim in 1963. Set in Paris, it follows two protagonists, Hippolyte, a sixty-one-year-old dreamer, and Jean-Jacques, a professional boxer, novelist, and prostitute, and is said to be modeled after the French writers Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet. Ambitious and experimental, The Benefactor is reminiscent of the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett, a writer whose work Son-tag characterized as ”delicate dramas of the withdrawn consciousness—pared down to essentials.”

While The Benefactor was well received critically, Son-tag first attracted national attention with her essay ”Notes on ‘Camp,”’ written in 1964 for the Partisan Review. Here Sontag delineates the phenomenon of ”camp” sensibility, a sensibility that celebrates the artifice of art with irony and whimsy. ”Notes on ‘Camp”’ marked Sontag as an intellectual who understood the bizarre and the forbidden in modern culture. This essay was republished in 1966 in Sontag’s first collection of essays Against Interpretation. The groundbreaking title essay and its companion piece, ”On Style,” set up the intellectual perimeters for the essays in Against Interpretation, which includes writings on philosophers Albert Camus, Michel Leiris, Georg Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Nathalie Sarraute, and Norman O. Brown among others. These essays read as manifestos for change as Sontag critiqued the way Americans reviewed literature and art in the early and mid-1960s. It was in this time that Sontag wrote, ”What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”

As the 1960s advanced, so did the counterculture of the predominantly young, white middle-class men and women who rebelled against capitalism and conformity. As part of this rebellion, Sontag demonstrated in anti-war protests and challenged the traditional way of looking at culture. Sontag’s challenges to societal conventions appear in her collections of essays, Styles of Radical Will (1969), On Photography (1977), and Under the Sign of Saturn (1980). She criticizes racism in America, United States foreign policy, and especially the war in Vietnam. In her essay ”What’s Happening in America?” Sontag asserts that nothing can ”redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world.” Although her political positions shifted over the years, from enthusiastic support for the Communist cultural revolution in China led by Mao Zedong in the 1960s to a controversial repudiation of all forms of Communist governments in 1982 during a rally at the Town Hall in New York City, Sontag consistently critiqued the status quo and argued in defense of the disenfranchised and the politically oppressed.

Life Imitating Art

When Sontag was diagnosed with breast cancer, her experience with the disease led her to write the acclaimed Illness as Metaphor (1978). As she discusses the metaphors used to describe illness, particularly tuberculosis, cancer, and insanity, she argues that such metaphors distort the event of the illness and involve the patient in a system of symbolic meaning that goes beyond the disease itself. At this time, breast cancer was often a taboo topic, and it had yet to receive adequate funding for research. Sontag’s exploration of the illness and perceptions of it prove her position as a revolutionary writer. A decade later, Sontag revised and expanded this work into AIDS and Its Metaphors. When Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was first identified and began to spread in the 1980s, victims were often shunned. Though the blood-borne disease can afflict anyone, homosexuals and intravenous drug users were more likely to contract it, and for a time mainstream society associated the disease with what they considered morally reprehensible behavior. In AIDS and Its Metaphors Son-tag extended her reflection on the persistent, and often harmful, metaphors used by Western culture to think about disease. In particular, she condemned the view that those who suffered from AIDS were being punished for their sexuality or addiction.

A Woman Who Defied Definition

Although Sontag acquired much of her fame from nonfiction prose, she is also admired for her novels, short stories, screenplays, and plays. In one interview Sontag asserted herself primarily a creative writer. Sontag’s three novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit (1967), and The Volcano Lover: A Romance (1992), have been highly lauded, but it is her short stories that have garnered the most critical enthusiasm. Published in various periodicals including The New Yorker and the Partisan Review, Sontag gathered eight of her stories for her collection I, etcetera (1978). For the screen, Sontag’s work includes Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971) while the stage has seen the well-received Alice in Bed: A Play in Eight Scenes (1993).

After the World Trade Center tragedy of September 11, 2001, Sontag made controversial statements criticizing American military intelligence, policies in the Middle East, and the reaction of President George W. Bush, political officials, and the media. She stated that the government was trying to convince a naive public of the country’s strength rather than confront the underlying issues of the attack. One of her last essays, ”Regarding the Torture of Others,” published in The New York Times Magazine in 2004, discussed American soldiers’ torture of Iraqi prisoners. She died of leukemia in 2004.

Works in Literary Context

Existentialism

A literary and philosophical movement of the post-World War II years, existentialism stresses that people are entirely free and thus responsible for the consequences of their own actions. A sense of isolation in an indifferent world characterizes the thought. The idea that life is without objective meaning generalizes the movement. Sontag’s essays discuss proponents of this thinking as well as capture its essence in her own writing. In this vein, Sontag expounds the idea of art for art’s sake. Rather than impose meaning on art, Sontag argues that art is created for the sake of itself. Its value is its transparency. There is a similarity between Sontag’s focus on the artwork itselfrather than on its interpretations and the insistence of New Criticism of the mid-twentieth century that art should ”not mean, but be.”

Continental Influence

One of Sontag’s key functions as an American critic has been to introduce American readers to European literature. Through her essays, editing, and book reviews, Sontag has brought her audience’s attention to, and clarified for them, the works of such authors as Nathalie Sarraute, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Maurice Blanchot—not in the 1980s, when these names have become critical and academic anchors, but in the early 1960s, when the works of most of these writers were yet to be translated and unfamiliar to more than a small segment of her American audience. Many American readers approached these writers through Sontag, borrowing her insights into and her preference for modern European literature. Displaying an adept understanding of the philosophical and critical bases of Continental European thought, Sontag has made available not only these works but keys to understanding them as well.

Works in Critical Context

Regarded as a preeminent social critic of her time, Sontag was both revered and rejected for her views. Although Sontag has been criticized for being too trendy and too inclined to favor modernism at all costs, even at the expense of critical judgment, she has also been heralded as a vital influence of the intellectual elite.

Against Interpretation

Her compilation of critical essays that appeared in literary magazines in the early 1960s, Against Interpretation received much attention. The premise of her writings rejects the tendency to find meaning in art. Instead, Sontag directs observers to experience art sensually. In defense of “lobotomizing” art, Sontag calls her approach ”aesthetic experience.” Critic Elmer Borklund explains how Sontag valued the ”transparency” of art, what Sontag described as ”the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” Borklund further explains that ”Interpretation, which seeks to replace the work with something else—usually historical, ethical or psychological” reduces art. It is in the gaps of interpretation that silence exists, allowing a reader or viewer to experience an art form. As critic Jeffords stated, ”Ordinary language does not acknowledge the wedge silence drives into meaning.” Ironically, Sontag’s silence would have prevented much questioning and understanding, which Robert Hughes captured in Time, when he wrote that ”there are perhaps half a dozen critics in America whose silence would be a loss to writing itself, and Sontag is one of them.”

Illness as Metaphor

As a cancer patient herself, Son-tag was able to experience disease, and her analysis of it brought about Illness as Metaphor. Discussing how disease gets turned into a stigma or symbol, she explains how metaphors allow people to view disease from a safe distance. As critic David Gates explains, ”Sontag believes that how we speak of a given illness often betrays fears and fantasies that have little to do with the disease itself.” The general reaction to this book was favorable. A Newsweek reviewer described it as ”one of the most liberating books of our time.” AIDS as Metaphor, according to Gates, was less successful because ”Sontag’s adversaries [were] less formidable and their ideas less seductive.”

References:

Borklund, Elmer. ”Susan Sontag: Overview. ”Contemporary Novelists. Edited by Susan Windisch Brown. Sixth ed. New York: St. James Press, 1996.
Clark, Judith F. ”Sontag, Susan (1933-).” Encyclopedia of World Biography. Edited by Suzanne M. Bourgoin. Second ed. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998.
Pague, Leland, ed. Conversations with Susan Sontag. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
Sayres, Sohnya. Susan Sontag: The Elegaic Modernist. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Walker, Susan. ”Susan Sontag.” American Novelists Since World War II: First Series. Edited by Jeffrey Helterman and Richard Layman. Detroit: Gale Research, 1978.
Capouya, Emile. ”The Age of Allegiance.” Saturday Review 52 (May 3, 1969): 29.
DeMott, Benjamin. ”Lady on the Scene.” New York Times Book Review (January 23, 1966).
Gates, David. ”Now, Metaphor as Illness.” Newsweek Vol. CXIII, No. 5 (January 30, 1989): 79.
”Women, the Arts and the Politics of Culture: An Interview with Susan Sontag.” Salmagundi 31-32 (1975): 29-38.
”The Talk of the Town.” The New Yorker Online Archive.. Accessed November 11, 2008, from http://www. newyorker.com/archive/2001/09/24/010924ta_ talk_wtc. Originally published September 24, 2001.