Waiting for the Barbarians (53 page)

The Sontag that the author of the later fiction seems to think we want is not even Sontag the great critic: it’s just “Sontag,” the celebrated public figure. Already in
The Volcano Lover
, but particularly in the unbearably labored and self-conscious
In America
, the authorial interventions feel not only self-referential but also self-congratulatory. Even the true believers who felt that
In America
deserved the acclaim it received must have stumbled over passages such as the following one, in which, as the novel opens, the hovering Sontag-narrator explains how she manages to understand the conversation of the Polish characters she mysteriously finds herself observing at the beginning of her tale:

The command “only” of Romance languages; the pompous advertisement for what we understand to be her sophisticated appreciation of sushi and sashimi—stuff like this, and there is a lot of it, makes you wish that Sontag had hoped more fervently for herself what, as the narrator of
In America
, she “hoped” for her protagonist: that “she hadn’t been made less of an artist by high-mindedness. Or by self-regard.”

The great irony of her career is that her apparent conviction, derived from her early immersion in nineteenth-century European literature, that to be a significant literary figure you had to be a novelist, paradoxically blinded her to what already made her a significant literary figure. There’s a passage in
Regarding the Pain of Others
, a
slender critical work published in 2003, in which, making a case about the special rhetorical quality of photography, she observes that “photographs [are] both objective record and personal testimony, both a faithful copy or transcription of an actual moment of reality and an interpretation of that reality—a feat literature has long aspired to, but could never attain in this literal sense.” But of course literature does possess a genre that strives to be both objective and personal, an accurate record and a subjective testimony, a representation and an interpretation at the same time, and it’s the genre at which Sontag really excelled: criticism. That she could write such a passage—that it never occurred to her to think of her own métier when thinking about what literature could do—is more wrenching than anything she ever wrote in her fiction.

The contrast between the pointed effectiveness and verbal élan of Sontag’s critical writing and the bloated grandiosities of her fiction makes it that much more regrettable that, as time passed, the criticism itself seemed to metamorphose, to change direction and tone.

Like Wilde, whose arguments and aphoristic dazzle she appropriated, Sontag achieved considerable fame and authority early on by rebelling against staid, academic, old-fashioned intellectual culture. And like Wilde, she paradoxically used the tools provided by a formidable traditional education (he as a classicist, she as a student of philosophy and a precocious autodidact) to reject the academy, carving out a career for herself instead as a popular literary figure—a move that surely accounts for the cult-like status that she, like Wilde, enjoyed. Both were intellectuals who made good, who achieved glamour in the great world. And yet, once she had made her name with those extraordinarily cunning and excitingly fresh validations
of popular American culture, Sontag went on to spend the rest of her career as a tireless cheerleader for the canon, for what she referred to, with telling frequency, as “greatness”—a quality that, strikingly, she seemed increasingly to find only in the works of middle-aged, white, European men.

This is most apparent in the later essays, such as those collected in
Where the Stress Falls
(2001). These pieces were written in the years after she published the last of her significant works of cultural criticism,
Illness as Metaphor
and
AIDS and Its Metaphors
—texts in which she brilliantly brings a calm philological eye to reveal the cultural anxieties and prejudices that lie beneath the overwrought diction of pop epidemiology and professional medicine. The problem with
Where the Stress Falls
is, in fact, that there is not a whole lot of stress in evidence. There is a played-out feel about the book, whose serious critical reflections are increasingly rambling and diffuse, and whose many incidental pieces seem, more than anything, like advertisements for Sontag’s status as a cultural icon: answers to French questionnaires about the role of intellectuals, for example, and self-flattering ruminations on being translated. (“You might say I’m obsessed with translations. I think I’m just obsessed with language.” What writer isn’t?)

This exhaustion is even more marked in the collection that was published after Sontag died, in 2004, called
At the Same Time
, which includes the now-notorious speech in which she seems to have plagiarized her observations about hypertext: the ultimate mark of creative exhaustion. But a critical tendency does emerge. The vast majority of these late and ostensibly critical pieces are encomia to, and sometimes eulogies for, a long list of European (preferably
Mittel-
) men: Victor Serge, W.G. Sebald, Robert Walser, Danilo Kiš, Joseph Brodsky, Witold Gombrowicz, Adam Zagajewski. The essays are curiously shorter and more desultory than the early pieces; there is a
restless quality even to the project of praise, which Sontag very early on saw as her specialty. (“I don’t, ultimately, care for handing out grades to works of art,” she wrote in a later preface to
Against Interpretation
. “I wrote as an enthusiast and a partisan.”) Walser, for whom she professes to want to perform her signal service and thereby “bring [him] to the attention of a public that has not yet discovered him,” gets a scant two pages, which end with the kind of banal encomium, a blurb really, that you expect from the harried reviewers in the dailies: “a truly wonderful writer.”

Compare all this to the forty-two densely packed pages of her thrillingly brilliant 1968 dissection of Godard, for whose reputation she set out to perform a similar service. In that instance Sontag was providing a rigorous and wholly original way of thinking about the complex work of a major young contemporary artist; it was an essay that felt like part of something vital that was happening in the arts. In the Walser piece, by contrast, you get a whiff of Lemon Pledge: she’s dusting off a forgotten tchotchke and putting it back on the very high shelf from which it had fallen. The style, too, is diminished, wearied. The surgical gleam and “aphoristic glitter”—Sontag’s admiring description of Glenway Wescott’s style in
The Pilgrim Hawk
—of the strong youthful pieces come more and more to be replaced here by expressions of anxious concern for the safety of High Culture. “Is literary greatness still possible?” she frets in the slim essay on Sebald.

All this suggests, in the end, a certain melancholy fulfillment of a prophecy that Sontag made in her journals when she was in her early twenties. Not long before her twenty-fourth birthday, she wondered to herself which of two roads she might take, and the question she posed suggests that she understood more, then, about the divided nature of both her gifts and her ambitions—the struggle, not least, between genuine innovation and intelligent adulation—than some of her later pronouncements, and projects, might indicate. The answer,
too, was prescient. “To philosophize, or to be a culture-conserver?” she wondered in October 1956. “I had never thought of being anything other than the latter.”

Anyway, what had “greatness” come to mean for Sontag? It was, for a start, almost exclusively identified with Europe. In his preface Rieff acknowledges that for his mother “American literature was a suburb of the great literatures of Europe,” and he is right: Sontag devoted none of her remarkable interpretative energies to significant American writers, either of an earlier time or of her own. The most effusive of her literary encomia, indeed, often come at the expense of the Anglo-American tradition. “When has one heard in English a voice of such confidence and precision, so direct in its expression of feeling, yet so respectfully devoted to recording ‘the real’?” she asks in her piece on Sebald, the last in the string of German novelists whom she exalted—an adulation that started with her life-altering reading of
The Magic Mountain
as a teenager. (In
Reborn
Sontag records her meeting with Mann when she was fourteen and he seventy-two, and both were living in Los Angeles; rather typically, she expresses disappointment that the flesh-and-blood person failed to live up to the books.) And as the list of writers whom Sontag does choose to exalt in collections such as
Where the Stress Falls
also suggests, “greatness” seems to be largely the property of men, and is most likely to be achieved through the writing of novels. And so, in the end, Sontag became a genuine traditionalist—not only a conserver but also, at least in matters of culture, a conservative.

This desire to be associated with greatness of a kind that is, when all is said and done, exceedingly old-fashioned brings you back to the Sontag of the early journals—to the “ambition,” to the starry-eyed lover of books who reminds Rieff of Lucien de Rubempré. Lucien’s real name is the comically plebeian Chardon, or “thistle”: he has to
shake the family tree a bit before the surname that he eventually adopts, with its glamorous aristocratic “de,” falls out. The desire not merely for self-transformation but for a kind of validation that only an association with the highest echelons of culture can bring is one to which
Reborn
bears ample witness. As his name change indicates, Lucien’s aspirations were social as well as artistic; Sontag, to her great credit, was purely intellectual and cultural in her ambitions. Her desire, twice articulated in these pages, to be “reborn” itself testifies to the fervor of her belief that it was necessary to abandon where she came from in order to get where she wanted to be—an impetus that may well never have found an end point, and that itself may have seemed to her a mark of “greatness.”

But the obsession with greatness has other implications. There is, you realize, another odd thing about the list of qualities that Sontag associated with literary greatness: it is a list of things that she herself was not. The sense you get here of a profoundly divided identity is, for Rieff, entirely consonant with his mother’s taste for transformation, the lifelong effort to “remake herself.” Anticipating the questions about self-knowledge and identity that such efforts inevitably raise about people, he hints that what in other people could be seen as embarrassment, a kind of covering up, was in Sontag’s case exemplary. Casting her strenuous “jettisoning” of her middle-class, American, Jewish roots (“her social and ethnic context,” as he puts it) as a heroic, nineteenth-century, and even somewhat Nietzschean affair—the achievement of a titanic “will”—he cites Fitzgerald on second acts in American lives, a nice way of suggesting that Sontag’s increasing dissociation from things American was the most American thing about her.

But this pervasive irresolution and desperate desire for transformation can also be ascribed to another factor, to the other of the two strands that unspool in
Reborn
—not to ambition but to sexuality. In
this case, the instability had a marked effect on Sontag’s engagement with politics. I am referring to the issue of the writer’s homosexuality, which she discussed forthrightly enough in her private musings, but about which she remained curiously reticent even when such reticence was no longer expected of important left-wing intellectuals—indeed, when to come out of the closet would have been an affirmation of a certain kind of cultural bona fides.

It is a measure of the intimidating power of Sontag’s mystique that comparatively little has been made over the years of the refusal by this most public of public intellectuals to engage, in her speeches and her essays, with the pressing issues raised particularly by the AIDS crisis and the political and cultural controversies that it generated throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It says something that when Sontag did write about homosexuality, it was in a work of fiction: the now-famous short story “The Way We Live Now,” first published in
The New Yorker
in November 1986. (It’s a story about men, about male homosexuals and their experience: a suggestive displacement.) Any notion that she might have connected the dots between her sexual nature and her public utterances on power and justice tended to be cast as a vulgar parochialization, a crass infringement upon her citizenship in the wider republic of letters. Rieff, as we know, acknowledged that his mother “avoided to the extent that she could, without denying it, any discussion of her own homosexuality.” Much depends on that lawyerly “without denying it.” Sontag’s passivity in this regard may have been the only feeble thing about her; she was, after all, no stranger to controversy. She herself was almost touchingly forthright about her ambiguity, in remarks she made late in life to the editor of
Out
magazine: