More than any other writer today, Susan Sontag has suffered from bad criticism and good publicity. If she could be rescued from all her culture-hungry interpreters, it might be possible to find the writer who has been made into a symbol. This is no longer easy because a popular conception of her has been rigged before a natural one could develop—like a premature legend…. The standard picture now in circulation is that of the up-to-date radical, a stand-in for everything advanced, extreme and outrageous, for artistic revolt, political disaffection, perversity and that peculiar combination of moral responsibility and moral irresponsibility associated with revolutionary movements—a fusion of Che and Genet. Middle-aged liberals are shocked by her politics and her aesthetics, and loudmouthed moral conservationsists have been accusing her of trying to undermine the good old sexual establishment. On the other hand, a recent adulatory review endowed her with the kind of subversive wisdom only a great revolutionary prophet could have. And then there is the tintype of the smart rebel promoted a few years ago by the fashionable magazines and the commercial media with their cultural thermometers looking for the hottest things going in intellectual life. Naturally, they have struck gold in the Camp and the Hanoi pieces, and have ignored the rest of her writing. (p. 388)

[Since] she is taken as a spokesman for The New, she is thought of as someone to take a stand for or against. Hence, as with so many of the younger writers, the reactions to her have fallen into the stereotypes of polarization. But because she is so articulate and takes all questions as her theoretical province, because her writing has political as well as literary implications, the polarization is both sharper and more distorting. (p. 389)

Susan Sontag is both an exponent and a victim of the new polarization: an exponent in that she doesn't go in for modulation and adjustment, a victim because her concern with speculative and literary problems often falls outside the prevailing left-right fashions. Hence she is not radical enough for the footloose generation and the new crop of militants who think with their feet, and she is too wild for those who get scared when they discover that the new movements do not look like the old ones. She is particularly frightening to those who do not like either their art or their politics to be open, fluid, uncertain, unbridled and youthful. She is too much a child of her time and too intelligent to accommodate to the placid thinking of an earlier period, yet she is too much addicted to theorizing and too much aware of complexities to be satisfied with a purely activist politics and aesthetics. All Susan Sontag's writing has these two sides: a skeptical mind steeped in the unsolved problems that make up the history of thought and a strong, almost willed, feeling for change and discovery, and for new ideas that are attractive because they cannot be insured by history. (p. 390)

The three best and most typical pieces [in Styles of Radical Will], on Pornography, on Silence and on Vietnam, are essentially reexaminations of accepted ideas about art and politics. In all three—as in the other essays too—the point of view from which the accepted rules and definitions are revised is the malleable sense of literature and society that shapes writing and thinking today. But the language is the accepted language of criticism; and the assumption throughout is that the way to understand the current rejections of the past is through the continuities of criticism, and history. This has been the traditional role of criticism. And if at times her tone is apocalyptic and oracular, there are precedents in the essays of Ortega y Gasset, and the manifestos of the Futurists and the Surrealists.

Yet it is this self-assured and condensed style that offends most academic critics, this mode of assertion and speculation that disdains an orderly argument, that repeats old ideas with the same verve with which it explores new ones, that bypasses contemporary American criticism as though it didn't exist. Hence some of her criticism is thought to be homemade and half-baked by academicians brought up to be orderly. My own feeling, however, is that while rigorous analysis will reveal many such failings, it doesn't do justice to one of the few bold and original minds to be found among the younger critics. And anyway, the so-called order of most academic criticism comes from playing it safe. The usual run of criticism is devoted to the application and refinement of some accepted views of literature and society…. Susan Sontag's shortcomings, on the contrary, are usually of her own making. Thus it can be said that the essay on Silence never really overcomes the ambiguities of the term, and it confuses the deflation of the human claims of art talked about by Ortega and exemplified in earlier abstract and experimental painting and writing with the deflation of art itself, in pop, rock, ephemeral theater and movies that write off the medium. Nevertheless, it is an unusually sophisticated exploration of the theoretical implications of contemporary styles. Similarly, her discussion of pornography, though it doesn't sufficiently explain the difference between potboilers and literature, takes us out of the cozy limits that have kept literature safe for academic criticism. Her idea of a "pornographic imagination" goes beyond the liberal tolerance of a subject; it legitimizes a repressed faculty.

Actually, some of the implications of Susan Sontag's argument are more far-reaching than the flamboyant views with which she is associated. Despite the fact that she is an elitist, she suggests a way out of the predicament of elitism. For in pressing for the liberation of the arts from their history, Susan Sontag opens them up to popular exploitation, thus breaking with the elitist tradition which assumed serious art to be alienated from middle-class society and hence from the political and commercial manipulations of the mass mind. But it is also a break with the kind of adaptation to popular taste in the last few decades that made literature so conventional in form and in subject. The effect is to rescue the experimental tradition from its loss of power and the exhaustion of its subject, from its unbearable isolation as it struggled to remain both pure and advanced. In a sense, this is a formal solution to a social problem, the problem of the social role of art and its relation to an audience, for the loosening of style has made it possible to be at the same time popular and unconventional…. [One] of the striking things in Susan Sontag's essays is her recognition that the last few decades have been a kind of interlude during which avant-garde writing lost its elan, while most academic criticism went into the business of educating readers or talking vaguely about the relation of literature to society. This is why most of Miss Sontag's critical references are to an earlier period and to the French who are often saved from banality by their aloofness from reality.

The essay on Silence is a good example of Susan Sontag's method. The idea of silence actually is used as a metaphor for the opposite of talkiness in art, talkiness being too full of subject matter, too directly aimed at an audience, too bustly in its language, too neatly constructed—all suggesting a closed, stale view of existence. Art that babbles thinks of itself as finished, with an audience out there, an inert, voyeuristic mass. Only a silent medium can properly engage an audience, because it is not performing but completing itself…. Throughout all her essays, she attacks the idea of the separation of form and content as the main source of the illegitimate moral and social demands on art, particularly since the dichotomy, she says, leads to the primacy of content. This is not exactly a new idea for academic criticism, though her insistence that despite all disclaimers the separation of theme from form is rooted in our cultural habits goes beyond the usual analysis. Nor is she able to solve the problem, which, I suspect, is not soluble today because the terms in which it is put preclude a solution. But the most suggestive approaches have been taken by younger critics like Susan Sontag and Richard Poirier who argue that style is the shape and meaning of the "content"; and that an examination of the style is an examination of the "subject."… The trouble with this view is that so long as we are locked into the old language and the old categories it leads less gifted critics to exalt any kind of formal innovation and to downgrade thematic innovation. But, then, the critics who ride a new approach always run it into the ground.

Miss Sontag has also been taken down for not displaying in her own work the abandon and playfulness her aesthetic calls for. There is, of course, a quality of intense dedication in her writing, suggesting a generational gap between her intelligence and her sensibility. And sometimes there is an elevation of tone which endows "art" with the very sanctity she is constantly questioning. Nor is she a witty writer. But the play of her mind is to be found in her speculative sensibility, expressed more in the texture of her thinking than in her writing.

Another familiar charge is that Miss Sontag's aesthetic comes down to a celebration of novelty. Usually, this indictment takes the crudest form and is proved by ignoring what she actually has said. Whatever basis there is for the accusation is to be found in her observation that contemporary art is less concerned with the quality of a finished work than with the process and the idea of making it. Nor does she dissociate herself from this attitude; on the contrary, she regards it as basic to the entire modern tradition. She points out, correctly, I think, the sources in such figures as Joyce, Picasso and Beckett of the tendency today to break down the formal structures of art through irony, self-parody and the free play of the medium that calls into question its very existence. This does not mean the end of critical judgment, which is what Susan Sontag is accused of by critics with a large stake in the past. All that can be said is that she has failed to reconcile the new deflation of art with the old merit system. But Miss Sontag can't be held responsible for a dilemma all modern criticism has failed to resolve: the dilemma of how to judge—or relate—new works that defy the old criteria. (pp. 391-94)

The collection also includes Susan Sontag's long essay on her trip to Hanoi and a short reply to a political questionnaire in PR. So far as I can recall they are her first excursions into politics, and though both are spirited and sophisticated they lack the depth and the daring of the best of her criticism, not the daring to oppose the system, but to question all assumptions. (p. 395)

The tortured honesty and clarity of Susan Sontag's analysis is quite impressive, and I am scarcely doing justice in this quick summary to the awareness that makes her self-examination an important document of radical thought. But I am more concerned at the moment with what I think is its exemplification of the dilemma of the Left. What I mean is that Susan Sontag's discussion of the aims of the North Vietnamese and the role of the United States has great moral and emotional force but fails to put them in any new or large political perspective. It reduces the combat to the good guys vs. the bad guys. And this is one of the reasons why Miss Sontag has trouble squaring all the complexities of thought and social vision that have come out of the West, including its radical ideas, with the villainy of the Americans. Obviously, the policies of the United States make no sense morally, politically, militarily, not even in its own terms, in terms, that is, of "anti-communism" or the "national interest." But it should be clear by now that opposition to the war—or to America—is scarcely enough on which to build new socialist policies or theories. Nor is it any reason to romanticize all revolutionary or militant movements, or to fail to distinguish, say, between the advanced consciousness of the revolutionary Czechs and the tragic limitations of the North Vietnamese, who, after all, were forced to support the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. My own feeling is that the brightest revolutionary hopes have been sustained by the Czechs, who brought to socialism a glimpse of its human possibilities. And I suspect it is an awareness of these distinctions, not the intellectual baggage of the West, that kept Susan Sontag from identifying with the Vietnamese, despite all her good will.

But whether or not one agrees with her analysis, her speculations are so wide-ranging that one is led to think about many of the questions occupying the Left. (pp. 395-96)

And if there are no answers to many of [the questions raised by Susan Sontag's new book], it might be because this is a time not for rigor and caution in politics and criticism but for boldness in disgarding stale ideas and trying out untested ones. This, it seems to me, is one of her main achievements. Miss Sontag has given some shape and will to a new sensibility in art and politics, but, appropriately, without systems or programs. Hence she has been able to speculate about many of the contradictions facing those who are both aware of the past and open to new literary and political experience. Isn't this enough?—even if she can't satisfy her conservative critics or keep up with the latest styles in radicalism. (p. 400)