In Under the Sign of Saturn Sontag is at work again reshaping the canon of modern European literature. Her particular polemic—a strong element in the general thrust of postwar New York literary criticism—is to celebrate the leopards in the temple of literature, not those cool and calm consciousnesses (like the Sophocles and Shakespeare of Matthew Arnold) who abided all questions and saw life whole, but those whose own derangement allowed them to explode the lies of order so that better forms might be discovered. In her criticism she labors to turn even the most self-isolating, uncompromising, and personally outrageous of such figures (I think here especially of Artaud) into humane teachers, whose flame, all the brighter for being trimmed, she will pass on to future generations.

In the 1960s such a critical project was both exuberant and expansive. But as Sontag wrote further and became part of the critical establishment herself, her tone became more sober and somber, until in Saturn she finds a moral and emotional benchmark in the melancholic temperament (specifically Benjamin's), with its "self-conscious and unforgivable relation to the self, which can never be taken for granted," born under "the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays." Sontag's heroes are, therefore, those writers whose acute sense of the difficulties of using language properly allows them, paradoxically, to pierce its veil and see into the heart of things. Without being system-builders, they search for the core of a newly whole reality that gives due respect to the fragmentations of 20th-century knowledge and perception. (pp. 43-4)

Reality is a crucial term for Sontag, not least because, for all her appreciation of movies, she is specifically hostile to what she calls nominalism, the view that there are no absolute concepts or ideas, only words that are socially accepted ways of communicating. Of course, the philosophical realist need not live entirely in a world of Platonic ideas and the nominalist is hardly happy only when he contemplates fragments and ruins. But Sontag's sympathies are clear. Her goal is an understanding of what is essential and what is real, and those she most admires retain a Platonic sensitivity to the disorder of the world and a Platonic faith in the ability of mind to penetrate that disorder and find truth. (p. 44)

To pursue the life of the mind and maintain its vitality in the face of both the dehumanizing horrors of 20th-century war and the more subtle dehumanizations of technological advance and aesthetic democratization, implies Sontag, requires the self-questioning detachment of the melancholic critic/artist, whose essentially passive objectivity her own style seems to imitate. Ever since the Renaissance, melancholy has been the mark of the artist whose work or aspiration made claims on the philosophic and eternal. Sometimes the melancholic artist, separated from ordinary men by his link to what is permanent, could be a satirist as easily as a high-stalking dreamer of the divine…. Sontag's essays are in fact filled with traditional satiric themes—the incoherence of public sources of information, the corrupt emptiness of theatrical versions of reality, the pressure that time and bodily decay put on human aspirations—even though she never writes satire as such…. Instead, she is fascinated with the effort, through writing and sometimes film, of creative individuals to be Romantic eccentrics in a time of mass societies. The strategies of such an assertion obviously have changed since the days of Wordsworth, Byron, and Napoleon. But Sontag adds her own emphasis on the importance of the melancholic's corrosive self-awareness. In the view that she derives primarily from Benjamin, 20th-century history has forced the critic/artist to take up a custodial relation to the world—collecting, deciphering, rearranging what is discovered into patterns that in their turn must be criticized. Enter, then, the interpreter of such writers, who deciphers their references and fragments not by the piecemeal process of ascertaining the meaning of each but by enlightening us about the cultural significance of such fragmented referentiality.

Such a role suited Sontag well in her earlier incarnation as a questioner of critical and cultural clichés, when her special status as an émigré by adoption allowed her to champion many artists and thinkers whose moral purpose was often less clear than her own. But in our climate of confusion over what political, aesthetic, or spiritual leadership might be, Under the Sign of Saturn raises more questions than its ideals can satisfy. Where Sontag once strode the marches in search of outlandish but crucial sensibilities to bring back struggling and vital to the general reader, her trophies now have the slightly greenish tinge of the coterie or the salon. The fault lies more in her net than in her quarry.

In essence, I think it is difficult for Sontag to maintain an argument that attacks one side of Romantic individualism (that leads to political megalomania) in order to accept another (that leads to artistic self-aggrandizement). I hardly want to equate the two myself: strutting artists do much less harm than strutting dictators. But the paradox of the grandly assertive work of art that attacks the grandly assertive gesture in the public world of politics is a delicate one indeed, and Sontag is unconvincing about the terms of the competition, perhaps because she is so caught up in it herself. Syberberg's Our Hitler is Sontag's set piece here—"probably the most ambitious Symbolist work of this century"—and Saturn's structure very carefully poises it against Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. In this implicit contrast Syberberg is the modernist virtuoso of fragments, playing in the spray of 20th-century images, constantly aware of the lie and deceit of all visual insignia, while Riefenstahl is the monolithic God's-eye director, soaring over the world like her subject, reducing all to pattern, sentimentally invoking the coercive abstractions of leader, nation, and body, and leaving her film unetched by any nuance of individual life and doubt.

In this contest the palm is clearly to Syberberg (or to Sontag's account of him). But from the competition seeps a corruption of means and terminology. Sontag devotes some telling comments to Syberberg's ambivalent relation to Wagner (who plays second fiddle to Hitler in the film), but scants the extent to which Syberberg, with his seven-hour film, administers an aesthetic dictatorship to his audience in order to purge the political dictatorship whose paraphernalia he portrays. Movies especially raise the question of how to draw the line between aesthetic and political control…. Must the artist counter the sins of political absolutism by an absolute gesture of his own?

Sontag no doubt thinks that melancholic self-questioning can keep the true artist and critic from such indulgences. But the coolness of her own style belies her prescriptions for self-awareness…. Sontag remarks on the fact that many of the exemplary thinkers she treats—from the modernist monk Artaud to the goliard intellectual Goodman—were riven by the worry that they hadn't been appreciated, hadn't become famous enough. (pp. 44-5)

For the secular writer and artist, musing on the face of death and the failure of the body and mind, the question of fame is crucial…. Under the Sign of Saturn is [Sontag's] effort to reassess the public aspect of her pursuit of a career that has been defined historically by its distaste for public life and display. Searching for the shape of other careers, she implicitly meditates on her own: what am I to make of this pile of books that in some way is me? The question is all too modern. At the end of the Middle Ages Chaucer's House of Fame described statues of the great writers of antiquity, each holding up his greatest work. By the 18th century, in Pope's rewriting of Chaucer, The Temple of Fame, they are standing on top of their books. Sontag similarly first dons the costumes of her various heroes and villains and then packs each neatly away in the cultural closet. As always, her intelligence makes her essays refreshing, even though we may often learn less about her subjects than about what she thinks of them and how their ideas affected her. In pursuit of new connections she has fashioned a rhetoric of subordination that puts her forward as the humble lightning rod of culture. This is my tradition, she seems to say, these are my boys, and thus the Romantic project of finding the heart of a culture in its eccentrics winds up recommending instead the eccentricity of its own quest. (pp. 45-6)