Susan Sontag is a good deal more than a mere explainer. Her strong, idiosyncratic sense of the contours of her own culture makes her sensitive to the cultural difference of the alien sage. She may think veneration an appropriate response to some subjects, but not, usually, at the expense of her own judgment. It is therefore not surprising that in this collection of essays [Under the Sign of Saturn], nearly all of which are about alien sages, there are some that one could confidently propose as models of what such introductory studies ought to be, though there are others in which the cult corrupts the exposition, and we are asked to wonder at the Hercules under discussion rather than to understand his labors.

The long essay on Artaud seems to me the finest in this collection. It was written as an introduction to a selection of Artaud's works, and since it isn't difficult to imagine a perfectly satisfactory, workmanlike piece doing just that job, one has a measure of the much greater achievement of Sontag; fully engaged, urgent, bold, she strives to hand over an image of Artaud as a whole—a whole conceived by her and not assembled from scraps of prevailing wisdom on the subject. Her Gnostic Artaud may not be yours, but he is credible, and belongs to a credible history of ideas….

The characteristic strength of this piece lies in the author's awareness that to explain Artaud (or any other hero) is, in part, to domesticate him, to make him useful, to make it possible for his work to be understood as other literature is understood; while at the same time she knows that this kind of writing … cannot, without betrayal, be subjected to the ordinary forms of exposition. And it is precisely this exasperated sense of the near impossibility of the project that causes some expository defects—overheated language, an occasional uncertainly in the progress of the argument—that are more in evidence in other, less majestically conceived, essays, when there seems less reason, the subject being less extreme, for resort to rhetorical extremes.

Artaud is "modern literature's most didactic and most uncompromising hero of self-exacerbation"—Sontag often sounds like that, even when the occasion is less pressing. It is the style of hero worship, but also of the need to coerce the reader into hero worship. It tries to satisfy the need to account, to one's own intellectual satisfaction, for the greatness of the subject, but it also tries to inflame a possibly ignorant, possibly skeptical readership with the same enthusiasm. By having opinions of her own, and letting them show (on movies, on political anarchism) this writer mostly keeps her balance. But she does have difficulty assessing her audience….

The other heroes expounded in this book are Paul Goodman, Walter Benjamin, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Roland Barthes, and Elias Canetti. (There is only one villain, Leni Riefenstahl.) The Goodman piece is an obituary notice…. Neatly turned, and a little self-regarding, the piece dwells on the shyness that muted the author's personal relations with Goodman; goes on to express devotion; complains that other obituarists had wrongly dismissed Goodman as a maverick, a writer who spread himself too thin. It praises a distinctive voice, a distinctive courage. Perhaps because it was written for an audience that might be expected to know Goodman's work already, it is unspecific; it focuses on a hero (and on hero worship) rather than on the hero's labors.

Much the same might be said of the longer piece on the death of Barthes, though she knew Barthes better, less shyly, and catches the personality in a way that is at once expert and endearing. Yet again, however, the man seems more important to her than his books. It is a familiar modern paradox that the Death of the Author, so powerfully demanded by theory, seems slow to occur in practice; Barthes, who had seemed alarmingly rigorous in his adherence to the new Inhumanism, let it be seen more and more clearly that he was in many respects an old-fashioned littérateur and extremely charming to boot.

Sontag, very much alive to the charm, wants to correct any wrong impressions we might have about this hero. When he first became well known outside France it was as a polemicist and a formidable one…. But Sontag is right to say that his personality is not so much polemical as celebratory—though to call him a "taxonomist of jubilation" may be rather more resonant than accurate. (p. 42)

The peculiar heroism of Walter Benjamin proves more resistant than Barthes's, and there is a special misfortune in the blurb writer's singling out Benjamin as, of all her subjects, the one Sontag herself most closely resembles. She does have some things in common with him—curiosity, an openness to oddly angled pieces of information, a willingness to pursue a notion wherever it goes, to find out if it will eventually pay off. And perhaps, like Benjamin, she has the advantage of loosely adhering to a guiding faith or set of principles. But of the penetration and accuracy of Benjamin's notations on specific texts, his power suddenly to transform with his intelligence a paragraph of Kafka, Proust, Goethe, Baudelaire, she has little (nobody has much). I think she may exaggerate the relative value, among Benjamin's works, of the book on the Baroque Trauerspiel, seduced by its strangeness and its parody of erudition; but I am not sure about this—the thoughtful accuracy of her caption for Benjamin's style ("freeze-frame Baroque") is a warning that one might lose the argument.

Benjamin's version of the saturnine temperament is the origin of the title of this book; he didn't know all that is now known about Renaissance and Baroque theories of melancholia and its creative aspects, but in his eccentric way he devised variants of them, and Sontag reasonably enough thinks of all her heroes as under the same sign: "Melencolia I" broods over every desk, all those strange but very concrete objects held in stillness by the saturnine glare….

Elias Canetti, though a lesser figure than Benjamin, has something of the same appeal to Sontag. Another Middle European Jew, only a little younger than Benjamin, he is also celebrated as an exotic, a polymath who would like to live forever in order to become wise and good, in order also sometimes to pause, to breathe. Canetti is restless and misogynistic, but Sontag will overlook these defects, and, though restless herself, ends her book with an exhortation to "talented admirers" (including, presumably, herself) to "give themselves permission to breathe … to go beyond avidity," and so "identify with something beyond achievement, beyond the gathering of power." But Sontag uses the word "avidity" with noticeable frequency, usually applying it with admiration to her heroes; and the renunciation of avidity, the ceasing to admire it in others whom one desires to emulate, is, given the cultural role she has assumed, all too difficult.

The strength of Sontag's own personality—her own avidity for ideas and detail—is demonstrated in the virtuoso essay on Syberberg's Hitler, a Film. This movie … is enormously long, but her avidity is equal to the absorption of what must be its multitudinous detail. Moreover, she gives a convincing account of its precursors in film, photography, and music, especially Wagner. Syberberg appeals to Sontag's Romantic view of art: "a truly great work must seem to break with an old order" and "extend the reach of art," she claims; and she finds in the film a strong apocalyptic strain…. Being a work of genius, Sontag would argue, Hitler, a Film demands from us fealty.

An interesting expression, which suggests the chivalric quality of the author's dedication to the idea of greatness. A little halting, a little hectic in its exposition, this essay is nevertheless of more importance than the one that deftly puts down Leni Riefenstahl and does a good Barthesian job on the Nazi iconography of sado-masochism. It is under the stress of excitement, the solemnities of affirmed fealty, that occasional clumsinesses occur, almost as signs of homage, indices of an avid deference. But the cooler reader must make what he can of the heat and rush of Sontag's prose; it beckons him on with its offer of an intelligible heroism. Perhaps she will, in due time, follow Canetti's advice: learn to breathe, seek something beyond the gathering of power. (p. 43)