Susan Sontag: the name is a resonance of qualities, of quality itself. The drama of the idea, the composition, a recognition from the past that tells us what the present may bestow when we see her name. The term "essay" itself is somewhat flat as a definition of the liberality of her floating, restless expositions. A Susan Sontag Reader, a choice from her criticism and fiction, is in no way scant, but it interested me to note that one could regret the omission of almost any piece of her writing, any square of the mosaic that is in the end an extraordinarily beautiful, expansive, and unique talent.

Her writings are hers, intimately and obsessively one might say. They bear, each one, the mark of a large and coherent sensibility, the mark of her interests, her sense of the aesthetic and moral world around us. Almost none of her work comes out of the mere occasion, the book published, the film released, or the fad acknowledged. I suppose her theme is the wide, elusive, variegated sensibility of modernism—a reach of attitude and feeling that will include great works of art, the modern disturbance of the sense of self seen in "camp" and in pornography, and account for the social, historical disturbance represented by the contemporary glut of photographic images. Modernism is style and the large figures of culture she likes to reflect upon leave in their styles the signature of wishes, attractions, morals, and, always, ideas.

Susan Sontag is not drawn to her themes as a specialty, as one might choose the eighteenth century, but rather as expressions of her own taste, her own being, her own style perhaps. Her imagination is obstinate, stubborn in its insistence upon the heroic efforts of certain moving, complex modern princes of temperament such as Walter Benjamin, Artaud, Roland Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Canetti, and the tragic moral philosopher Simone Weil. The modern sensibility in her view is democratic; it embraces the aristocratic spirit of the films made by Godard, Bresson, Bergman, and Syberberg. The listing of her "interests" shows an almost spendthrift openness to example and precept and vivacious practice. But her thoughts surprise. Films, writers, philosophers are, as it were, excavated, brought up to the topsoil to be viewed in the round. This is a particular vision, the defining glance of cultural history in which each thing is itself, unique and to some degree "against interpretation"—and yet reflecting a disjunctive modern consciousness that is historical. On this theme and its fascinations each of her essays has a profound authority, a rather anxious and tender authority—the reward of passion. (pp. ix-x)

The writers she has chosen to reflect upon are somewhat daunting and I do not think she would place herself among the undaunted. The tone of her writing is speculative, studious and yet undogmatic; even in the end it is still inquiring. There remains what Henry James called the "soreness of confusion," the reminder of the unaccountable and inexhaustible in great talents. This remnant of wonder is her way of honoring the exceptional, the finally inimitable. (p. xi)

She, like Barthes and Benjamin, chose philosophy as a student…. Her metaphysical vocabulary retains this habit of mind and she has Nietzsche and Plato as readily at hand as bits of memorized poetry…. Conceptualization from instances gathered from afar is her method. There is seldom anything whimsical or indulgent in this far-flung patterning. The structure is genuine, convincing, and the gathering-in is an illumination.

She practices delicately and lightheartedly the aphoristic summation, rather than the aphoristic interruption…. Her style, her prose language, is clear, fresh, not meant to tease or to confound. However, the extremity of her subjects will often demand that the expositor be a gymnast. Waywardness attracts her and in waywardness there is humor, outrageousness, the unpredictable, along with extremity. In that sense her work is sensual and many of her essays are about heroic insatiability, as in the instance of the brilliant "Syberberg's Hitler."

"Notes on Camp" is an early, exhilarating work about "style" at an ineffable outpost of sensibility. "Camp" is parochial in that it can only be fulfilled in the city with its infinite byways. "Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture." If the word is beyond definition, it is not beyond reflection, example, listing. The essay is amused, a sophisticated precondition for a pose that elevates the amusing to a criterion. The camp sensibility is not a text to be held in the hand. The only text is finally this essay, with its incorporation of the exemplar of the camp mode—the epigrams of Oscar Wilde. The essay is intuition, observation, tolerance for the inverted, the willful. (pp. xii-xiii)

In 1966 a number of essays by Miss Sontag which had appeared in magazines were collected into a published book, Against Interpretation. "Appeared" is to the point in this case since it leads to the personal, the noticeable, the theatrical element in taste and in "point of view" when the observer is a foraging pluralist. This first book of essays was provoking, meaning to unsettle by an insistent avant-gardism, by aesthetic irregularities such as "camp," science fiction, and the film Flaming Creatures, "the poetry of transvestism," closed on the ground of obscenity by the police. These diversions are bright, poisonous poppies, flaming about Simone Weil, Lévi-Strauss, Camus, and others. There is an anarchic, intrepid stretch to the book. In it we are invited to a "new sensibility," in which the "beauty of a machine or of the solution to a mathematical problem, of a painting by Jasper Johns, or a film by Jean-Luc Godard, and of the personalities and music of the Beatles is equally accessible." Youthful, brilliant, and so ardently interesting and unmistakably hers. And a mood that would at last disappoint, or if not disappoint, fall into familiarity and thereby ask of her intelligence some steadier and more difficult refinement.

Her essays gradually became longer, and perhaps more serene, and certainly less imploring. The labyrinthine perfectionism, the pathos of a "dissatisfied" spirit like Walter Benjamin came to her, I think, as a model, and certainly as an object of love, the word in no way out of bounds. It is love that makes her start her essay on Benjamin by looking at a few scattered photographs. Benjamin is not an image to us; his is one of those faces that dissolve. It would seem that his body and soul are not friends. And so we can never be surrounded, illuminated as we are by the face of Kafka, a face of absolute rightness. The wish to find Benjamin as a face is touching, subjective, venerating. And this is the mood of much of her recent work, particularly the majestic honoring of Barthes and the homage to Canetti, himself a great and complicated "admirer" of his own chosen instances of genius.

Thinking about Susan Sontag in the middle of her career is to feel the happiness of more, more, nothing ended. An exquisite responsiveness of this kind is unpredictable, although one of the intentions of her work is to find the central, to tell us what we are thinking, what is happening to our minds and to culture. There are politics, fashions, art itself, and of course the storehouse of learning to be looked at again and again in her own way. I notice that in her late work she stresses the notion of pleasure in the arts, pleasure in thinking. Only the serious can offer us that rare, warm, bright-hearted felicity. (pp. xiv-xv)