of the world and a believer in theatricality and role playing. He is a participant, Hippolyte is an observer. Hippolyte treasures the sheer sensuousness of images in silent film; Jean-Jacques is a man of the word.

In Chapters Six and Seven, the logic of Hippolyte's dreams drives him to kidnap Frau Anders, to drug her, to share his dreams with her, and then to sell her to an Arab barman in an Arab city. Returning to the capital in Chapter Seven, he has dreams of an old man who becomes his patron, who makes him dig a hole and throw a cat in it. Like other similar dreams, Hippolyte abases himself to an authority who degrades him. Although he awakes cursing the “captivity of his dreams,” a conversation with Professor Bulgaraux convinces him that the dreams are a form of psychic cleansing. Rather than feeling ashamed or humiliated, he appears liberated—evidently because he has divested himself of his worldly personality and submitted himself to the power of his dreams.

To submit to the dream is to relinquish the craving for interpretation, Hippolyte implies in Chapter Eight. He recounts his last role as an actor. Playing the part of a father confessor to a child-murderer, Hippolyte argues with the director who wants to explain the psychology of the criminal. Hippolyte objects to the director's belief that the criminal is passionate. Just the opposite is true, Hippolyte argues: the murderer is supremely indifferent to his crime. Psychology is only a form of exoneration, Hippolyte implies.

When Frau Anders's daughter, Lucrezia, receives a ransom note, Hippolyte agrees to pay the sum for Frau Anders's return. He discusses with Lucrezia, his lover, his theory that dreams are perpetually present—unlike real events which vanish after they occur and are, in a sense, revocable.

In Chapter Nine, Herr Anders, anticipating his wife's return, seeks Hippolyte's help in obtaining a divorce, since he wishes to remarry. Hippolyte's friend, Monique, delivers a letter from Frau Anders, who then appears. She has been maimed by the Arab and demands that Hippolyte tell her what to do. Hippolyte dreams of a piano lesson in which he crawls into a piano played by a Mother Superior in the garden of an ice palace. Inside the piano he meets “a young man with a tiny mustache” and advises him to crawl into a hole in the floor while students attack the piano. Hippolyte then shoots the Mother Superior and everyone in the room. Then he is pulled out of a tree by the man in the black bathing suit. Noticing that the Mother Superior resembles Frau Anders, Hippolyte sets fire to her apartment.

Suspecting that he has murdered Frau Anders, Hippolyte visits Monique in Chapter Ten. She is jealous about his relationship with Frau Anders. He tells her that he is guilty of “real murder.” With Jean-Jacques he explores the concept of individualism, which can be creative or destructive. Hippolyte then leaves the capital to visit his sick father, with whom he discusses marriage and murder. When he returns to the capital, Monique has married, and Frau Anders tells him: “My dear, you're no better as a murderer than as a white-slaver.” When he inherits his father's estate, Hippolyte decides to surprise Frau Anders by refurbishing a town house for her, thus becoming her benefactor.

In Chapter Eleven, Hippolyte takes Frau Anders on a tour of the house and is relieved and delighted to see that she accepts his gift. When he obeys her command to make love to her, he discovers, as in a dream, that in his “erotic fury” he has healed her. The “dream of the mirror” follows in Chapter Twelve. Hippolyte is standing in a ballroom trying to remember a name. When he strips naked and encounters a footman, he announces that he is a “potential amputee” and rips off his own left leg. He then struggles into an operating theatre where he is among volunteers waiting to have their eyes put out with knitting needles. He proposes to donate his body and worldly goods to the man in the black bathing suit if his leg and his sight are restored to him. When he is told to run, he finds himself in the street watching his own house burn. Rescuing his journal, a book of ancient history, and a tray with cups, he confronts his father. What will Hippolyte call his wife? his father asks. This long sequence of dreams involving dismemberment, destruction, and reunification, and the fact that Hippolyte seems to be waking up to see his dream in the mirror, suggests that perhaps the world of waking and dreaming are coming together. He goes back to his country home, marries an officer's daughter, and returns to the capital.

In Chapter Thirteen, Hippolyte seems content with his happy wife, even though Jean-Jacques suggests that Hippolyte expresses his guilt by being a benefactor to Frau Anders. Hippolyte tells his wife the story of a nearly blind princess who marries a talking bear that decides not to talk. They live happily ever after, perhaps because she cannot see whom she has married. Hippolyte's wife makes friends with a Jewess who is being pursued by the authorities. The Jewess turns out to be Frau Anders. Meanwhile Hippolyte thinks about how self-love so perfectly contains the lover.

Hippolyte discovers in Chapter Fourteen that his wife is dying of leukemia. He attends her and they play with tarot cards. Jean-Jacques appears, masquerading as an officer who dies in a fight with Hippolyte, who then delivers (with the assistance of a delivery boy) an unconscious Jean-Jacques to his flat. Hippolyte's wife dies after three days in a coma. Professor Bulgaraux performs a private service, delivering a sermon entitled “On the Death of a Virgin Soul.” Like the criminal, the virgin discovers innocence in the act of defiance, Bulgaraux declares. A tense Hippolyte feels the need of another dream.

Although increasingly estranged from Jean-Jacques, Hippolyte renews their friendship in Chapter Fifteen after learning that Jean-Jacques has been accused of collaboration (the novel is vaguely set during the years of the Spanish Civil War and World War II). The two men argue, with Jean-Jacques accusing Hippolyte of being a “character without a story.” Hippolyte dreams again, and this time he is dismembered several times by three acrobats. He then retires to his town house to live with Frau Anders.

In Chapter Sixteen, Hippolyte reaches the end of his story and suddenly doubts its veracity. What has he been dreaming? What has been “real”? Have the two rooms of his dreams been an expression of his two modes of existence? Apparently evicted from his house, Hippolyte considers that perhaps he has been confined to a mental institution. Has his story been only the outline of a novel he finds in his notebooks? How can he separate his waking from his dreaming?

SONTAG READING SONTAG

The Benefactor, as Sontag admitted in 1974 to interviewer Joe David Bellamy, contains “systematically obscure elements … because I want to leave several possible readings open.” On the one hand, the novel is the “dreams of Hippolyte,” and like all dreams his contain unresolvable elements and events that cannot be reduced to a definitive interpretation. Sontag seems to have set out to construct a novel that defies or is “against interpretation.” Even Hippolyte cannot say for sure what his dreams mean and how much he has dreamed. As Sontag told Jonathan Cott in 1979, Hippolyte is a “kind of Candide who, instead of looking for the best of all possible worlds, searches for some clear state of consciousness, for a way in which he could be properly disburdened.” The idea that he can jettison reality, Sontag suggests, is ludicrous, and she means for some of his apparently solemn statements to be taken comically and ironically. He cannot abolish the waking world any more than he can stifle his dreams. The novel's ending, then, is ironic. By attempting to live entirely in his dreams, Hippolyte has no basis for comparison; he cannot know how much he has been dreaming because he has not kept careful track of his waking moments. His problem is not psychological; it is ontological. Like a Poe narrator, his problem is not that he is insane; it is that he has lost a standard or objective by which to measure himself. This is perhaps why Sontag told Edward Hirsch in 1995 that she “thought I was telling a pleasurably sinister story that illustrated the fortune of certain heretical religious ideas that go by the name of Gnosticism.” She seems to have in mind the notion that Hippolyte's Gnostic search for esoteric or privileged knowledge is ironic because in his desire to be unique he destroys any way of grounding his uniqueness.

Sontag also told Hirsch that in retrospect she realized that the model for her first novel was Kenneth Burke's Towards a Better Life. He had given her a copy of the novel when she was at the University of Chicago. Years later he would say that she was his best student, and not surprisingly he wrote to her later to tell her how much he enjoyed The Benefactor. Burke, more renowned for his literary criticism than his fiction, had published a work, Sontag explained to Hirsch, full of “arias and fictive moralizing. The coquetry of a protagonist—Burke dared to call the novel's hero [John Neal]—so ingeniously self-absorbed that no reader could be tempted to identify with him.” Similarly, Sontag had picked a narrator who was a Frenchman in his sixties to forestall any identification between herself and Hippolyte. (Burke's novel and its relationship to The Benefactor is discussed in the next section.)

Sontag resisted any autobiographical reading of The Benefactor, insisting to James Toback in 1968 that “I'm nothing like Hippolyte: at least I certainly hope I'm not. He fascinates me, but I dislike him intensely. He's purposeless and wasteful and evil.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

Reviews of The Benefactor were respectful but mixed. In the New York Times Book Review, Daniel Stern commented, “It has been said of the French that they develop an idea and then assume it is the world. Hippolyte has decided that he is the world, and has proceeded to explore it.” He compared Sontag's work to the nouveau roman. In Against Interpretation, she would secure her status as the foremost interpreter of the French new novel, selecting the work of Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet for her admiration. What her novel had in common with her French colleagues was a style that “concentrates … on itself,” noted reviewer John Wain in the New Republic. She repudiated the American tradition of psychological realism. James Frakes in the New York Herald Tribune was perhaps the novel's greatest advocate, calling it “a very special book, written with care, polish, daring, and certainty. Very sure. Very tough.” Yet he took note of The Benefactor's “frustrating precise design.” Though it reminded him of Kafka, to other readers Sontag's absolute exclusion of psychological insight squeezed life out of the novel. What she gained in purity of form, she lost in chapters that became monotonous. In the New York Review of Books, Robert Adams appreciated Sontag's original depiction of a “mind lost in its own intricate dialectic.” He thought of Candide but complained that Sontag did not have Voltaire's wit or gift for comedy.

Later critics, drawing on Sontag's essays, perceived that Hippolyte resembled her culture heroes such as E. M. Cioran (an alienated Romanian exile who lived and wrote in Paris) and Antonin Artaud (a great writer about the modern theatre's need to explore extreme states of mind, who himself went mad). Sohnya Sayres pointed to Sontag's comment that these writers' “uninhibited display of egotism devolves into the heroic quest for the cancellation of the self.” Although Sontag told interviewer James Toback that she was nothing like Hippolyte and that she found him wasteful and evil, Sayres suspected that Sontag was “hiding from a complex set of feelings.” She was ambivalent about the aesthetic view of the world—the one in which Hippolyte's dreams have first claim on him—because it seems to lead to a solipsism that negates the idea of the individual's ethical obligation to others. Ultimately Hippolyte's devotion to his own vision results in his self-disintegration. Yet the Sontag of the early essays she was soon to include in Against Interpretation extols precisely those artists who favor the beauty of form over the urgency of the message, the content. The Benefactor seems to subvert as much as it supports Sontag's essays. Sontag's first novel has buried in it the seeds of doubt about her aesthetic position that would begin to surface in interviews she gave to coincide with the publication of her most recent novel, In America.

No critic spotted the resemblance between Kenneth Burke's Towards a Better Life and The Benefactor. Burke's protagonist, John Neal, laments, rejoices, beseeches, admonishes, moralizes, and rages against the world, the status quo. He is a Hippolyte, a narcissist concerned with perfecting himself. As critic Merle Brown points out, Neal's language is “pure artifice”; that is, it does not arise out of character development or plot. Instead, he is his arias as much as Hippolyte is his dreams. Both Neal and Hippolyte are fashioning narratives that represent themselves, not the world. In his preface to Towards a Better Life, Burke favors the essayistic over the narrative, admitting that in the books “I had especially admired, I had found many desirable qualities which threatened them as novels.” This is, no doubt, why he taught Joseph Conrad's novel Victory during one of Sontag's semesters with him. In Conrad's narrator, Marlow, Burke seized on the intruding figure—the writer who reminds the reader that stories are artifice.

Burke argues in his preface that the verisimilitude of the nineteenth-century novel that has come to dominate fiction is but a blip in the history of literature, which has traditionally prized form over lifelike content. Here he is foreshadowing Sontag's soon-to-be-published essays fulminating against content, psychologizing, and so-called realism in literature. Her key term will be “artifice” as she argues for an art that is enclosed in its own language—as Neal and Hippolyte are enveloped in theirs. Rejecting the value of pure story, Burke concludes that his hero's bewilderment “charts a process, and in the charting of this process there is ‘understanding.’” Of what? Apparently of how the self construes an identity through words—or, in Hippolyte's case, through dreams.

Sontag seems to acknowledge Burke in Hippolyte's assertion: “I am interested in my dreams as acts, and as models for action and motives for action.” That key phrase, “motives for action,” alludes to Burke titles such as A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives, both of which reveal a sensibility interested in why people or characters in literature act as they do, but which also treats the idea of motives dispassionately—as separate from the notion of a unique personality that must be understood in biographical terms. In his novel, as in his criticism, Burke is simply not taken with the project of analyzing—really psychoanalyzing—the self. Like Sontag's Hippolyte, he explores the range of action open to the individual, which Hippolyte says constitutes his freedom. Otherwise, to inspect his dreams in order to understand himself would be “considering my dreams from the point of view of bondage.” To Sontag, as to Burke, the idea that one is bound to a psychological matrix established in childhood is deeply offensive; it is a provocation to the sui generis.

The denouement of Burke's novel reads like a stencil for The Benefactor, for as critic Merle Brown concludes, “Toward the end … Neal talks to others who are only projections of himself and who reply to him in his own voice. He has lost all sense of an outer world.” Hippolyte, who has been, he thinks, moving toward a better life, suddenly discovers journals and a novel-like narrative similar to the one he has been relating that call into question whether his present account is fiction or fact, a history of what has actually happened to him or simply a delusion. Friends treat him as though he has been in a mental institution. And Hippolyte concedes there are six years of his life about which he is doubtful—his memory wavers. The consequences of choosing himself—as Hippolyte puts it—include not merely narcissism but solipsism.

This impasse of the self-involved is precisely what modern novels have tended toward, Sontag observes in “Demons and Dreams,” her review of an Isaac Singer novel. Why not, then, as in Burke, make that solipsism not just denouement of the novel but its subject? Why not suggest that Hippolyte's desire to become his dreams is the equivalent of the modern novel's desire to free itself from the world, from mimesis, and to become what Poe said a poem is: “a poem and nothing more—this poem written solely for the poem's sake.”

What can be attractive as well as off-putting about this kind of self-contained fiction is that it is so ouvre. Critic Malcolm Cowley admired the virtuosity of Burke's style, its finished quality, but that very rondeur also robs the novel of vitality. Burke tried in Towards a Better Life to return to more “formalized modes of writing,” to what he called the “structural” sentence, the “Johnsonese” manner as opposed to the modern, informal, conversational style. Sontag affects a Johnsonese grandeur in her passive constructions, which she tries to offset by quaint, teasing chapter headings reminiscent of eighteenth-century novels. But, like Burke, she turns away from what he calls the “impromptu toward the studied.” At best such fiction has the alternation of excitement and depression that characterized, in Poe's view, the poetic principle. So much of Poe seems to take place in a dream—or rather, the nightmare that Sontag evokes in her Singer review. Poe's stories, like Hippolyte's dreams, have a redundancy that is both compelling and alienating. Poe wisely measured out his aesthetic in small doses; to string his short story structure into a novel is enervating. If Hippolyte is going mad at the end of the novel—as many critics have supposed—just as Neal appears headed for insanity, both Burke and Sontag confound their readers by insisting on narrators who write, as Merle Brown puts it, in the “same well-rounded, periodic sentences.” Brown is applying this judgment only to Burke, but it holds for his pupil as well; she, like him, remains a “verbalizer and analyst.”

Although Sontag would publish another novel, Death Kit, closely related to The Benefactor's exploration of a disintegrating self, she was already writing herself into a dead end. It would take her twenty-five years to reverse her theories of fiction and to recoup her confidence as a writer of fiction. Roger Straus, an astute observer of her developing talent, suggested that her next book be a collection of essays. He recognized that Sontag's nonfiction was bold and provocative. Compared to the attentive but not exactly enthusiastic reviews of her first novel, the reception of Against Interpretation, Straus seemed to foresee, would be intense and wide ranging, so that the name of Susan Sontag would become a cynosure for controversy.

Works Cited in the Text

Note: For the biographical details of this study I draw on Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon. Where I have used traditional print (hard-copy) sources, I have cited page numbers. For articles retrieved from websites, I have supplied the website address.

Adams, Robert M. “Nacht und Tag.” New York Review of Books, October 17, 1963, 19.

Bellamy, Joe David. “Susan Sontag.” The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Reprinted in Poague, 35-48.

Brown, Merle E. Kenneth Burke. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969.

Burke, Kenneth. Towards a Better Life: Being a Series of Epistles, or Declamations. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932.

Cott, Jonathan. “Susan Sontag: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, October 4, 1979, 46-53. Reprinted in Poague, 106-136.

Frakes, James R. “Where Dreaming Is Believing.” New York Herald Tribune Book Week, September 22, 1963, 10.

Hirsch, Edward. “The Art of Fiction: Susan Sontag.” Paris Review 137 (Winter 1995): 175-208.

Sayres, Sohnya. Susan Sontag: Elegiac Modernist. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Stern, Daniel. “Life Becomes a Dream.” New York Times Book Review, September 8, 1963, 5.

Toback, James. “Whatever You'd Like Susan Sontag to Think, She Doesn't.” Esquire, July 1968, 59-61, 114.

Wain, John. “Song of Myself.” New Republic, September 21, 1963, 26-27, 30.