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Tuesday, December 28, 2004
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MORE ON SONTAG
It used to seem to UD that Sontag, Susan appeared in the index of every book UD owned. Now that Sontag has died, UD finds remarkably few Sontags, at least in her library at home. When she’s back in her office at GW, she’ll look there, especially for “Against Interpretation,” the Sontag essay UD first encountered in Lionel Trilling’s 1970 anthology, Literary Criticism. That hip little number had much to do with UD’s decision to get serious about literature. Here was a way to be serious without being dry; here was, as Sontag put it in the essay, an erotics of reading. UD read “Against Interpretation” again not long ago, and she saw the less savory aspects of Sontag -- her arrogance, her humorlessness, her rhetorical excess. But the power of the prose was still there; the shimmer the essay had given off in its first reading, of energy and clarity and lofty polemic all at once, had survived. Beyond her enormously attractive analytical style, Sontag’s openness to travel, exoticism, languages, and all sorts of cultural movements, drew UD. Sontag’s politics seemed to UD pretty absurd; but her aesthetic and social curiosity, her wandering into odd corners of European writing, for instance, was inspiring in its generosity and sympathy. Above all, UD loved Sontag’s lack of sentimentality and narcissism. Sontag was an intellectual. She was interested in thick descriptions of human experience, descriptions that would have broad relevance. If her own experience of cancer illuminated the larger metaphors through which illness is filtered, then Sontag would make use of that experience. But it never felt personal. Sontag had the inestimable gift of infusing consciousness with truth. |