[In the following review of A Susan Sontag Reader, Goodman studies the vehemence and political leanings of Sontag's essays throughout her career. Goodman asserts that Sontag is becoming less radical and extremist as she matures, detecting a more moderate stance in her views and writings.]

UNDER THE SIGN OF SONTAG

Her position has been certified everywhere from Vogue to Rolling Stone. Readers of People magazine know her as “America's prima intellectual assoluta,” and she also holds the ambiguous title of “the Natalie Wood of the U.S. avant garde.” Yet the crowning of Susan Sontag as this country's exemplary intellectual remains a puzzlement. As A Susan Sontag Reader, her new collection of “the work I'm proudest of,” confirms, she is more akin to a species of European intelligentsia than to any homegrown strain, and has no great affection for American society.

Sontag became the talk of the literati in the mid-'60s, with several now-famous essays that were as striking for their combative tone as for their substance. In “Against Interpretation” and “On Style,” she took on critics who, in her view, were so intent on “explaining” what a work of art “meant” that they missed the essence of the work itself. She condemned the seekers after interpretation as “reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.” Her attention-grabbing “Notes on ‘Camp’,” written around the same time, was all about a way of seeing the world that exaggerated style to the point of parody and laughed away content.

For conservative critics like Hilton Kramer, who devoted considerable space to his distaste for Sontag in the premier issue of his magazine, The New Criterion, Sontag was guilty of promoting a doctrine that would “release high culture from its obligations to be entirely serious.” Her essay's catchiest line, “Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers,” was an uncharacteristic flash of humor from a writer whose prose is not usually much fun. The Sontag camp has had to grapple with sentences like this one from her essay, “The Aesthetics of Silence”: “Toward such an ideal plenitude to which the audience can add nothing, analogous to the aesthetic relation to nature, a great deal of contemporary art aspires—through various strategies of blandness, of reduction, of deindividuation, of alogicality.”

Would these early essays have brought fame to a homely middle-aged man? An invidious question—but Sontag grants that her gender has contributed to her celebrity. America likes its intellectual glamour girls. If she lacked the wit of Mary McCarthy or the weight of Hannah Arendt, it cannot have hurt to be a good-looking woman in her early 30s, as well as a highly intelligent, formidably read, fiercely assertive one.

During the '70s, Sontag made a mark as the foremost publicist for European bearers of the Modernist sensibility, whose writings even devotees of cultural criticism and philosophy may find hard going. These “master obscurantists,” as John Simon calls them, include Walter Benjamin, the melancholic German-Jewish essayist who was driven to suicide in 1940; the anguished Antonin Artaud, who tried to transmogrify delirium into drama; the misogynistic Nobel Prize-winner Elias Canetti, author of “Crowds and Power”; and the influential French man of letters Roland Barthes, propounder of “semiotics” or the study of signs, who was killed in a traffic accident in 1980.

Sontag is powerfully drawn to outsiders, writers removed from bourgeois society and most of its works. Among the few Americans to engage her enthusiasm are Paul Goodman, unrecognized for most of his writing life, who found attention in the 1960s when raging against America was all the rage, and Norman O. Brown, who won an audience for his assaults on the West's sexual hangups during the same giddy period. The spirit that draws Sontag to such alien minds also impels her, as David Bromwich put it, to champion a kind of art that “stands outside the mainstream of culture and sometimes at the very periphery of human experience.” Extremity, in art and criticism, is a key to the enthusiasm of this self-described “besotted esthete” and “obsessed moralist.”

IMAGE OF AMERICA

It is difficult not to detect a certain trendiness in Sontag's political as well as her esthetic tastes. Her vision of America in the '60s was drenched in New Leftism. In 1966, she contributed to Partisan Review a response to a set of questions on “What's Happening in America” that condemned every aspect of the country except its alienated “kids,” who were extolled for “the way they dance, dress, wear their hair, riot, make love,” and for their homage to Oriental thought and ritual and their interest in drugs. For the rest, America was “a violent, ugly, unhappy country, passionately racist,” run by “genuine yahoos.” She called the white race “the cancer of history.”

Her treatments of Cuba, China and North Vietnam were notably kinder, in the fashion on the Left of the time. In the Third World, she discovered “moral beauty.” Even Sontag's fans do not claim much for her assays into political philosophy. The fuss over her recent Town Hall attack on Communism, which Leon Wieseltier dismissed in Partisan Review as “the political apology of an unpolitical person,” owed less to its novelty than to the fact that it was delivered to an audience that would rather not have heard it.

The omission of the 1966 anti-American diatribe from her new collection may be evidence of a softening of Sontag's attitude toward her country as her hopes for the evolution of Communist regimes toward more openness has faded. As she put it in an interview, “I wrote, ‘What's Happening in America’ at a time of great anguish over Vietnam. I still think this is a crazy, violent, dangerous, horrifying country and that there are other, better possibilities for a prosperous democratic capitalist society than we have here. But between our empire and the Communist empire, I prefer ours.”

Despite or because of her role as adversary of American culture and society, Sontag has gotten her share of praise, grants and awards from the Establishment. Her most popular book, On Photography, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1978. These ruminations exhibited her mind at its most venturesome, as it speculated upon the blurring in this age of photography of the line between images and things, between copies and the original.

Even here, however, she could not resist a dig at capitalism so tendentious that it distracted one from the main picture, like the antics of a crackpot in a gallery. She wrote: “A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.” Sontag has always had a sharper eye for the image than for the reality. Numerous magazines have used images of her, sometimes in dramatic poses, the better to stimulate sales of boots perhaps. She has confessed that she finds it “hard to resist the invitation to manifest oneself. …”

As for pictures that move, the filmmakers whom she admires and has borrowed from in her own tries at movie-making are mainly European moderns like Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson and Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, whose Hitler, a Film from Germany she hailed, typically, for “the extremity of its achievement.” She has soured on Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favorite filmmaker. The Susan Sontag Reader contains a vigorous assault on Riefenstahl, written in 1974, that is startling when set against Sontag's previous, thoroughly admiring approach to her work. In 1965, Sontag wrote that the content of Triumph of the Will and Olympia had “come to play a purely formal role,” owing to Riefenstahl's genius; a triumph of the Style. But by 1974, Sontag was exceedingly harsh with those who would blink away the filmmaker's connection with Nazism. The aggressive tone of both these contradictory pieces supports the observation of Denis Donoghue that Sontag's mind is “powerful but not subtle.”

REALITY OF CANCER

A few years ago, after her recovery from cancer, Sontag vowed to devote more time to fiction, but finds herself now completing a long essay on the travels of intellectuals to Communist countries; it promises to display yet another change of her heart and mind. Her fiction so far has received mixed notices—kinder probably, and more of them certainly, than would have been garnered by a lesser name.

None of her stories, which abjure conventional plot and characterization, carries the passion of her 1978 polemic, Illness as Metaphor. Moved by her personal experience, she inveighed against the literary penchant for using disease, particularly cancer, as a metaphor for all manner of evil, thereby making the victim to a degree responsible for his sufferings, and diverting attention from the cruel reality of the illness. “I just wanted to say that cancer is real and ought to be diagnosed and treated.” (She now regrets having called the white race a cancer.) It is an indication of Sontag's bookish approach to life that even in this deeply personal work there is no mention of her own mastectomy. Her emotions are channelled into an attack on words and their power to do damage.

Benjamin DeMott, who has noted a “thinness of experience, lack of conversance with common life” in Sontag's work, suggests that Illness as Metaphor can be read as a questioning of the “murky Modernist blackishness … the dogmas about the human condition that [have] shaped the work of the artists she has most admired and imitated.” DeMott catches flickerings here of a “genuine affection for middle ways” and advances the possibility that Sontag may have arrived at a belated recognition that “modesty and moderation deserve respect as civilizing values.”

Do the essay on illness, the public split with her former political allies, the turnabout on Riefenstahl represent a shift in the Sontag sensibility, a movement from the extreme toward the middle, some reconciliation with the country that she seems to have written off on the day that she began to write? The question is open. After nearly two decades of “manifesting oneself,” Sontag remains the beneficiary of a society that enjoys conferring celebrity on its most disdainful critics.