SOURCE: Simon, John. “From Sensibility toward Sense.” New Leader 63, no. 23 (15 December 1980): 22-4.

[In the following review, Simon judges that many of the phrases in Sontag's collection Under the Sign of Saturn are nonsensical and overly verbose, creating confusion for the reader.]

According to an adage that often performs also as an analogy, if we watched ourselves walking, we could not walk at all. In the process of speculating about just how we propel ourselves forward by putting one foot in front of the other, we would end up paralyzed or falling on our faces. Whether or not this is the truth about ambulation, it unfortunately is not true of criticism: Entire schools of contemporary criticism watch themselves—anxiously, self-importantly, gloatingly—perform in essays that, far from freezing, flow unremittingly on. If anyone becomes numb, it is the reader, unlucky fellow, who finds himself in the position of an innocent traveler pressed into archaeological spade work without being given the necessary equipment or training. Structuralist and semiological criticism, and their various offshoots, have not only buried the texts they belabor under impermeable rubble, they are also hell-bent on burying us.

Susan Sontag is not uninfluenced by the prevailing French or French-derived criticism, witness the tribute to Roland Barthes in her new collection, Under the Sign of Saturn. Although she is basically a comprehensible, generally even lucid, critic, she has a tendency to sprinkle complication into her writing, as for instance in the opening section of her essay on Antonin Artaud, the longest and most interesting in the book. One is reminded of the story about Mallarmé dawdling at a café table over a funerary poem for Verlaine and explaining his holding up the obsequies with: “I am just adding a little obscurity.” Aside from the short mortuary tribute to Barthes, a similar one to Paul Goodman—the latter really a lament over his snubbing her, as well as a portrait of herself as an isolated artist in a Paris garret—and the piece on Artaud that served as the introduction to his Selected Writings, Sontag's book includes essays on Walter Benjamin (himself no mean shedder of obscurity), on Elias Canetti, on Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's seven-hour film about Hitler, and on “Fascinating Fascism,” which deals with both Leni Riefenstahl and a coffee-table book of photographs called SS Regalia.

What is the sign of Saturn, and why are these writers and filmmakers under it? Miss Sontag quotes Walter Benjamin, the complicated German philosopher-critic who alone can compete with the French master obfuscators in current popularity among the literary élite: “I came into the world under the sign of Saturn—the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays. …” The umbrella of Saturn does not really cover every one of the other artists discussed, but they are all, in one sense or another, extreme cases—cas limites, as the French would say: artists who are at the limits of the possible or the permissable. Sontag refers to them admiringly as “the great, daring mapmakers of consciousness in extremis.

Actually, some do not enjoy her full favor: she is against Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favorite filmmaker, at least ideologically. It is characteristic of Miss Sontag's new critical stance that moral considerations matter. Thus she shows us Riefenstahl's career as a triptych: the early mountaineering films where Leni was both star and director, and physical effort triumphed; the Nazi period's panegyrics to bodily beauty, strength and achievement—Triumph of the Will and Olympia; and the more recent book of photographs about a handsome but vanishing African tribe, The Last of the Nuba. In her Sturm und Drang phase, Miss Sontag would have hailed Riefenstahl's esthetic achievements and disregarded the political and moral aspects; now, at last, she gives us a carefully researched and documented moral-political case against Riefenstahl and her alleged reformation, though Sontag rightly concedes a certain philosophy to the Nazis and admires the unquestionable cinematic values of the Nazi filmmaker's two great documentaries.

Here Sontag reintroduces the concept of “camp” that she championed without ever fully admitting it, essentially to renounce it, albeit not without some reservations and regrets. She speaks of “formalist appreciations” backed up by “the sensibility of camp, which is unfettered by the scruples of high seriousness: and the modern sensibility relies on continuing trade-offs between the formalist approach and camp taste.” This is an irresponsible statement: Neither in her celebrated “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964) nor in “Fascinating Fascism” (1974) does Sontag show how “high seriousness” or “the formalist approach” trades off with camp taste; indeed, not even the meaning of “modern sensibility” is made entirely clear.

But, then, Sontag has a trying habit of issuing wonderfully challenging statements throughout this collection (and elsewhere) without elaborating and elucidating them. She will tell us, “I admire Norman Mailer as a writer, but I don't really believe in his voice,” a voice that she finds “too baroque, somehow fabricated.” Since her statement occurs in the tribute to Paul Goodman, whose voice, apparently, “is the real thing,” we must, perhaps, settle for this foreshortened explanation of what is wrong with Mailer; yet, whatever the context, we must be told how someone with an inauthentic voice can still be admired as a writer.

Similarly, we learn next that although Goodman “was not often graceful as a writer, his writing and his mind were touched with grace.” This means one of three things. Either grace as a writer can coexist with gracelessness in the writing, or being touched with grace is in some mysterious way different from having it, or Miss Sontag tosses off hasty, high-sounding paradoxes without thinking through what, if anything, they mean.

The last hypothesis gains credibility when considered in conjunction with other assertions in the book. We are told that the major works of Baudelaire and Lautréamont “are equally dependent … upon the idea of the author as a tormented self raping its own unique subjectivity.” Quite aside from the clumsiness of that image, the extremely disciplined verse and controlled audacity of Les Fleurs du mal are in no way comparable to the torrential flow of poetic prose and surreal vision of Les Chants de Maldoror; as for the artist's driving himself to the limit and beyond, this applies equally to a good many 19th-and 20th-century poets. But what really confuses the issue is Miss Sontag's wording: What is this “idea of the author”? Is it in the author's or in the reading public's mind? Is it a legitimate concept or a self-deluding notion? Or is it merely verbiage?

Again, when Sontag casually asserts that “Walt Disney's Fantasia, Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here, and Kubrick's 2001 … strikingly exemplify certain formal structures and themes of fascist art,” we cannot accept her parenthetic aside without any further discussion; at the very least we want to know which structures and themes. And if it is true, it requires an examination of what that says about contemporary American society. In fact, if Sontag could prove her glibly dropped point, an essay on it would be much more interesting than the virtually self-evident demonstration of Riefenstahl's fascism.

But to return to camp. Sontag tries to exonerate it, first, on the basis of “continuing trade-offs” between it and high seriousness—which conjures up the image of a close collaboration between Matthew Arnold and Ronald Firbank; soon, contradictorily, she attempts a defense on the grounds of something quite ephemeral: fashion. “Art that seemed eminently worth defending 10 years ago [i.e., in '64 as against '74], as a minority or adversary taste, no longer seems defensible today, because the ethical and cultural issues it raises have become serious, even dangerous, in a way they were not then.” This is, to put it mildly, bizarre.

To begin with, can something that ceases to be defensible as art in a mere decade still be considered art at all? Whatever outlives its artistic usefulness in 10 short years is precisely a fleeting fashion and the exemplar of nonart. Second, is critical evaluation meant to be a kind of politics of contrariness? That would automatically foster the enshrinement of what the majority resents or ignores—the very procedure that, for a while, raised camp to the level of art.

The giveaway follows apace: “The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in élite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocuous ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.” Yet how did camp become a majority taste? It achieved its eminence precisely because the brilliant, young, glamorous Susan Sontag published “Notes on ‘Camp’”—to be sure, in Partisan Review, not exactly the stomping grounds of hoi polloi, but where are the temples of the unco-optable nowadays? Soon enough the media latched on to that essay and its topic, and especially to its eloquent, charming, highly saleable author. Nothing succeeds better than highbrow endorsement of lowbrow tastes: Who would not, at no extra cost, prefer to be a justified sinner? Miss Sontag's “hard truth” strikes me as very soft indeed.

Next, by what right, human or divine, is what is good for the élite taboo for the masses? This kind of intellectual droit du seigneur may well be the epitome of fascist criticism. If, as responsible critics, we preconize, say, Proust, Mallarmé, Joyce, and Beckett, it is not because we want to keep them to ourselves; it is, on the contrary, in the hope, often forlorn, that we may bring more people to the pleasure and insight to be gathered from them. If, on the other hand, our taste is deleterious and culpable—or foolish and irresponsible—we have no business promulgating it either in Partisan Review or in Time magazine. Taste is precisely not context, but that which transcends context; everything else is addiction, fashionable or unfashionable, and, even if pleasing for the moment, headed for the waste basket. But, of course, this is presuming that taste refers to esthetics and not to erotics, and that we do not, as Miss Sontag did in another famous 1964 essay, “Against Interpretation,” celebrate and demand a mere “erotics of art.”

Miss Sontag no longer militantly espouses this outlook, but she continues to hover in its vicinity. Scattered throughout Under the Sign of Saturn are such bits of questionable praise as that for Artaud's “aesthetics of thought … theology of culture … phenomenology of suffering.” Now, I can see how one might worship culture, though I am not sure how this applies to a craving for Artaud; I can likewise see how a phenomenology of suffering might make for a riveting case history for psychiatrists and even some lay readers. But “aesthetics of thought”—surely this is just the “erotics of art” turned inside out and being sneaked, in sheep's clothing, through the back door.

And touting Artaud, that “hero of self-exacerbation,” as “the greatest prose poet in the French language since the Rimbaud of Illuminations and A Season in Hell,” rashly ignores the Mallarmé of Divagations and does scant justice to Valéry, Claudel, Gide, and Jules Renard, among others. Of course, if your criterion is self-exacerbation—“the greatest quantity of suffering in the history of literature”—your candidate may be the greatest prose poet before Rimbaud as well, although even then one might wonder about what kinds of scales, or calipers are needed for the quantitative assessment of suffering. Or does one judge simply by the loudness of the screams?

Yet how silly of me to raise such questions in these post-R. D. Laing and post-Michel Foucault days. Obviously, Miss Sontag is influenced by both these “minority or adversary” thinkers, as witness her condemnation of Jacques Rivière's moving attempts to bring Artaud back to relative sanity (a lost cause, if ever there was one), followed by her Foucaultian definition of sanity as what makes sense to a particular culture, a particular society; whereas “what is called insane denotes that which in the determination of a particular society must not be thought.” Aside from the fact that this statement overlooks the not insignificant distinction in most societies between thought and action, it implies that to a shallow society profundity will appear insane, i.e., madness is context, and the context changes. Yet even if there is something arbitrary about most prevailing definitions of madness, there is nothing specious about regarding acts of violence against others as dangerous, illicit and mad.

But do not consider the foregoing strictures a complete rejection of Miss Sontag's book. Whenever she takes the trouble to be a historian, as in her pointing out the ahistoricity of Riefenstahl's view of the Nuba, or a theological historian, as when she traces Artaud's indebtedness to Gnosticism, she performs with noteworthy acumen and ability. So, too, when she analyzes the quiddity of a work and its background, as with Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany, a seven-hour endurance test she had the stamina (or eccentricity) to see five or six times, to discuss at length with its author, and (apparently) to read up on in great detail. Although my own regard for this film is qualified, I have nothing but respect for a critic who goes to such lengths to understand and interpret (yes, interpret; no “against interpretation” here!) a difficult work.

Regrettably, in the case of this film, too, Miss Sontag indulges in what strikes me as an exaggeration. Just as she asserted that “the course of all recent serious theater in Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods—before Artaud and after Artaud” (which, assuming that it is meant as more than a chronological division, sounds like a whopping overstatement), she now tells us that Hitler is “probably the most ambitious Symbolist work of this century,” a masterpiece having “in the era of cinema's unprecedented mediocrity … something of the character of a posthumous event.” It is “like an unwanted baby in the era of zero population growth.” The trouble with Hitler, as I see it, is precisely that it is the equivalent of too many babies in any era, an act of overpopulation on screen—and of decimation in the auditorium.

That, however, is one of the hallmarks of Miss Sontag's criticism; a boundless enthusiasm for certain favorites that ignores or minimizes their shortcomings. In Elias Canetti she loves “his staunchless capacity for admiration and enthusiasm, and his civilized contempt for complaining.” This may be splendid in a novelist and essayist; in a critic, complaining is often necessary where it hurts most, and enthusiasm frequently in need of a little staunching. Thank goodness, Miss Sontag no longer comes out in enthusiastic defense of such stuff as Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, yet not even Canetti, whose work I do not know, should (in my opinion) be praised unqualifiedly for his tribute to “a brown bundle emitting a single sound (e-e-e-e-e-e) which is brought every day to a square in Marrakesh.” Canetti's “I was proud of the bundle because it was alive” strikes me not as a moving tribute, but as endorsement of a horrible misery for the sake of displaying one's enlightened affirmation of life.

Susan Sontag can write well: “One is always in arrears to oneself” is exquisite and compelling; “Surrealism's great gift … was to make melancholy cheerful,” though debatable, is equally stimulating and exquisite. There is much to be said, too, for this maxim: “One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But one can use the work to interpret the life.” Other boldly hurled maxims boomerang. I find it hard to accept, in a context of her high praise for Walter Benjamin, that “his major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct.”

Rash and unhelpful, again, is the assertion that, though one can be inspired, scorched and changed by Artaud, “there is no way of applying him.” Can any poet-seer be applied? Sontag's argument is not helped by careless use of words: How can Artaud be “profoundly indigestible”? On some deeper level than that of the stomach? And I should be happier if Miss Sontag stopped hinting, especially about the dead, and instead of referring to Barthes as “consciously interested in the perverse” and as “a man of his sexual tastes,” allowed her observations to come out of the closet.

She might also, profitably, stop reaching for grand but nebulous criteria. To praise, as she does, identification “with something beyond achievement” is very much like arguing “against interpretation.” A critic as capable of subtle and illuminating interpretations as Susan Sontag should come down all the way from the cloudy heights of metacriticism.