Everything about Susan Sontag totally explained
Susan Sontag (
January 16,
1933 –
December 28,
2004) was an
American literary theorist,
novelist,
filmmaker, and
political activist.
Life
Sontag, originally named
Susan Rosenblatt, was born in
New York City to Jack Rosenblatt and Mildred Jacobsen, both
Jewish Americans. Her father ran a fur trading business in China, where he died of tuberculosis when Susan was five years old. Seven years later, her mother married Nathan Sontag. Susan and her sister Judith were given their stepfather's surname although he never formally adopted them.
Sontag grew up in
Tucson,
Arizona and, later, in
Los Angeles, where she graduated from
North Hollywood High School at the age of 15. She began her undergraduate studies at
Berkeley but transferred to the
University of Chicago, where she undertook studies in philosophy, romanism and literature (
Leo Strauss and
Kenneth Burke among her lecturers) and graduated with a B.A. She did graduate work in
philosophy,
literature, and
theology at
Harvard,
St Anne's College, Oxford and the
Sorbonne.
At 17, while at Chicago, Sontag married
Philip Rieff after a ten-day courtship. Sontag and Rieff were married for eight years and divorced in
1958. The couple had a son
David Rieff, who later became his mother's editor at
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He has also become a
writer.
The publication of
Against Interpretation (1966), accompanied by a striking dust-jacket photo taken by the photographer Harry Hess, helped establish Sontag's reputation as "the Dark Lady of American Letters." No account of her hold on her generation can omit the power of her physical presence in a room. Movie stars like
Woody Allen, philosophers like
Arthur Danto, and politicians like Mayor
John Lindsay vied to know her. In the movie
Bull Durham, her work was used as a touchstone of sexual
savoir-faire. (See below.)
In her prime, Sontag avoided all pigeon holes. Like
Jane Fonda, she went to
Hanoi, and wrote of the
North Vietnamese society with much sympathy and appreciation (see
Trip to Hanoi in
Styles of Radical Will). She maintained a clear distinction, however, between
North Vietnam and
Maoist China, as well as East European communism, which she later famously rebuked as "fascism with a human face."
Sontag died in New York City on
December 28,
2004, aged 71, from complications of
myelodysplastic syndrome. It had evolved into
acute myelogenous leukemia. The MDS was likely a result of the
chemotherapy and
radiation treatment she received three decades earlier for advanced
breast cancer and, later, a rare form of
uterine cancer. Sontag is buried in
Montparnasse cemetery, in
Paris, France. Her final illness has been chronicled by her son,
David Rieff.
Work
Sontag's literary career began and ended with works of
fiction. After teaching philosophy at
Columbia University, Sontag devoted herself to full-time writing. At age 30, she published an
experimental novel called
The Benefactor (1963), following it four years later with
Death Kit (1967).
Despite a relatively small output in the genre, Sontag thought of herself principally as a
novelist and writer of fiction. Her short story "
The Way We Live Now" was published to great acclaim on
November 26,
1986 in
The New Yorker. Written in an experimental narrative
style, it remains a key text on the
AIDS epidemic. She achieved late popular success as a best selling novelist with
The Volcano Lover (1992). At age 67, Sontag published her final novel
In America (2000). The last two novels were set in the past, which Sontag said gave her greater freedom to write in the polyphonic voice.
It was as an essayist, however, that Sontag gained early and enduring fame and notoriety. Sontag wrote frequently about the intersection of
high and
low art. Her celebrated and widely read 1964 essay "
Notes on 'Camp'" was epoch defining, examining an alternative sensibility to seriousness and comedy. It gestured to the "so bad it's good" concept in popular culture for the first time. Sontag also contributed the essay,
On Photography in 1977. This gave media students and scholars an entirely different perspective of the camera in the modern world. The essay is an exploration of photographs as a collection of the world, primarily by travelers or tourists, and the way we therefore experience it. She outlines the concept of her theory of taking pictures as you travel:
The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic – Germans, Japanese and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work driven feel about not working when they're on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that's like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
Sontag suggested we use this photographic ‘evidence’ as a presumption that ‘something exists, or did exist’, regardless of distortion. Sontag saw the art of photography, ‘as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are’, as cameras are produced rapidly as a ‘mass art form’ and are available to all of those with the means to attain them. Focusing also on the effect of the camera and photograph on the wedding and modern family life, Sontag reflects that these are a ‘rite of family life’ in industrialized areas such as Europe and America.
To Sontag ‘picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights - to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on’. She considers the camera a phallus, comparable to a ray gun or a car which are ‘fantasy-machines whose use is addictive’. For Sontag the camera can be linked to murder and a promotion of nostalgia whilst evoking ‘the sense of the unattainable’ in the industrialized world. The photograph familiarizes the wealthy with ‘the oppressed, the exploited, the starving, and the massacred’ but removes the shock of these images because they're available widely and have ceased to be novel. Sontag saw the photograph as valued because it gives information but acknowledges that it's incapable of giving a moral stand point although it can reinforce an existing one. This point of view is relatively lost in the western world consumed by pictures.
Sontag championed European writers such as
Walter Benjamin,
Roland Barthes,
Antonin Artaud, and
W. G. Sebald, along with some Americans such as
María Irene Fornés. Over several decades she'd turn her attention to
novels,
film and
photography. In more than one book, Sontag wrote about cultural attitudes toward
illness. Her final nonfiction work,
Regarding the Pain of Others, re-examined art and photography from a moral standpoint. It spoke of how the media affects culture's views of conflict.
A New Visual Code
In her Essay “
On Photography” Sontag says that the evolution of modern technology has changed the viewer in three key ways. She calls this the emergence of a new visual code.
Firstly, Sontag suggests that modern photography, with its convenience and ease, has created an over abundance of visual material. As photographing is now a practice of the masses, due to a drastic decrease in camera size and increase of ease in developing photographs, we're left in a position where “just about everything has been photographed”(
Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London pp 3). We now have so many images available to us of: things, places, events and people from all over the world, and of not immediate relevance to our own existence, that our expectations of what we've the right to view, want to view or should view has been drastically affected. Arguably, gone are the days that we felt entitled of view only those things in our immediate presence or that affected our micro world; we now seem to feel entitled to gain access to any existing images. “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notion of what is worth looking at and what we've the right to observe” (Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London pp 3) This is what Sontag calls a change in “viewing ethics” (Susan Sontag(1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 3'').
Secondly, Sontag comments on the effect of modern photography on our education, claiming that photographs “now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present”(
Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 4). Without photography only those few people who had been there would know what the Egyptian pyramids or the Parthenon look like, yet most of us have a good idea of the appearance of these places. Photography teaches us about those parts of the world that are beyond our touch in ways that literature can not.
Sontag also talks about the way in which photography desensitizes its audience. Sontag introduces this discussion by telling her own story of the first time she saw images of horrific human experience. At twelve years old, Sontag stumbled upon images of holocaust camps and was so distressed by them she says “When I looked at those photographs something broke… something went dead something is still crying” (
Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 20).
Sontag argues that there was no good to come from her seeing these images as a young girl, before she fully understood what the holocaust was. For Sontag the viewing of these images has left her a degree more numb to any following horrific image she viewed, as she'd been desensitized. According to this argument, “Images anesthetize” and the open accessibility to them is a negative result of photography (
Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography, Penguin, London p 20).
Activism
In 1989 Sontag was the President of
PEN American Center, the main U.S. branch of the
International PEN writers' organization. This was the year when Iranian leader
Ayatollah Khomeini issued a
fatwa (in this instance a death sentence) against writer
Salman Rushdie after the publication of his novel
The Satanic Verses. Khomeini and some other
Islamic fundamentalists claimed the novel was blasphemous. Sontag's uncompromising support of Rushdie was critical in rallying American writers to his cause.
A few years later, Sontag gained attention for directing
Samuel Beckett's
Waiting for Godot during the nearly four-year
Siege of Sarajevo. Early in that conflict, Sontag referred to the
Serbian invasion and
massacre in Bosnia as the "
Spanish Civil War of our time". She sparked controversy among
U.S. leftists for advocating U.S. and European military intervention. Sontag lived in
Sarajevo for many months of the Sarajevo siege.
Controversies
Sontag drew fire for writing that "
Mozart,
Pascal,
Boolean algebra,
Shakespeare,
parliamentary government,
baroque churches,
Newton, the emancipation of women,
Kant,
Balanchine ballets,
et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history." (
Partisan Review, Winter 1967, p. 57.) Sontag later offered an ironic apology for the remark, saying it was insensitive to cancer victims.
In a well-circulated essay entitled "
Sontag, Bloody Sontag,"
Camille Paglia describes her initial admiration for Sontag and her subsequent disillusionment with the author. Paglia wrote,
» Sontag's cool exile was a disaster for the American women's movement. Only a woman of her prestige could have performed the necessary critique and debunking of the first instant-canon feminist screeds, such as those of
Kate Millett or
Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar, whose middlebrow mediocrity crippled women's studies from the start. No patriarchal villains held Sontag back; her failures are her own.
Paglia proceeds to detail a series of criticisms of Sontag, including
Harold Bloom's comment on Paglia's doctoral dissertation, of "Mere Sontagisme!". This "had become synonymous with a shallow kind of hip posturing." Paglia also describes Sontag as a "sanctimonious moralist of the old-guard literary world". She told of a visit by Sontag to
Bennington, in which she arrived hours late, ignored the agreed upon topic of the event, and made an incessant series of ridiculous demands.
In 1968 Sontag was criticized for visiting
Hanoi, the capital of
North Vietnam, during the
Vietnam War.
Ellen Lee accused Sontag of
plagiarism when Lee discovered at least twelve passages in
In America that were similar to passages in four other books about
Helena Modjeska. Those books included a novel by
Willa Cather. (Cather wrote: "When Oswald asked her to propose a toast, she put out her long arm, lifted her glass, and looking into the blur of the candlelight with a grave face, said: 'To my coun-n-try!'" Sontag wrote, "When asked to propose a toast, she put out her long arm, lifted her glass, and looking into the blur of the candlelight, crooned, 'To my new country!' " "Country," muttered Miss Collingridge. "Not 'coun-n-try.'") The quotations were presented without credit or attribution.
Sontag said about using the passages, ""All of us who deal with real characters in history transcribe and adopt original sources in the original domain. I've used these sources and I've completely transformed them. I've these books. I've looked at these books. There's a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions."
Sontag sparked controversy for her remarks in
The New Yorker (
September 24,
2001) about the immediate aftermath of the
September 11th, 2001 attacks. Sontag wrote:
» "Where is the acknowledgment that this wasn't a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word 'cowardly' is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."
Similar remarks were made by political commentator/comedian
Bill Maher, and by British journalist and author
Robert Fisk.
Perhaps the most well-known criticism of Sontag was in the film
Bull Durham, written and directed by
Ron Shelton. The character
Crash Davis, played by
Kevin Costner said, "I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap..."
Sontag was criticized for her statement, "Communism is fascism with a human face."
Bisexuality
In the early 1970s, Sontag was romantically involved with
Nicole Stéphane (1923-2007), a Rothschild banking heiress turned movie actress. Sontag later had committed relationships with
photographer Annie Leibovitz, with whom she was close during her last years;
choreographer Lucinda Childs, writer
Maria Irene Fornes, and other women.
In an interview in
The Guardian in 2000, Sontag was quite open about her
bisexuality:
» "Shall I tell you about getting older?", she says, and she's laughing. "When you get older, 45 plus, men stop fancying you. Or put it another way, the men I fancy don't fancy me. I want a young man. I love
beauty. So what's new?" She says she's been in
love seven times in her life, which seems quite a lot. "No, hang on," she says. "Actually, it's nine. Five
women, four
men."
Many of Sontag's obituaries failed to mention her significant same-sex relationships, most notably that with photographer
Annie Leibovitz. In response to this criticism,
The New York Times' Public Editor,
Daniel Okrent, defended the newspaper's obituary, stating that at the time of Sontag's death, a reporter could make no independent verification of her romantic relationship with Leibovitz (despite attempts to do so). After Sontag's death,
Newsweek published an article about Leibovitz that made clear reference to her decade-plus relationship with Sontag, stating: "The two first met in the late '80s, when Leibovitz photographed her for a book jacket. They never lived together, though they each had an apartment within view of the other's."
Sontag was quoted by Editor-in-Chief Brendan Lemon of
Out magazine as saying "I grew up in a time when the
modus operandi was the '
open secret'. I'm used to that, and quite OK with it. Intellectually, I know why I haven't spoken more about my sexuality, but I do wonder if I haven't
repressed something there to my detriment. Maybe I could have given comfort to some people if I'd dealt with the subject of my private sexuality more, but it's never been my prime mission to give comfort, unless somebody's in drastic need. I'd rather give pleasure, or shake things up."
Annie Leibovitz's recent exhibit of work in
Washington, D.C. at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art included numerous personal photos, in addition to the celebrity portraits for which the artist is best known. These personal photos chronicled Leibovitz's long relationship with Sontag. They featured many pictures of the author, including some showing her battle with cancer, her treatment, and ultimately her death and burial.
Works
Fiction
Plays
(1991) "A Parsifal" [one-actplay, first published in _Antaeus_ 67 (1991): 180-185.]
(1993) Alice in Bed Library of Congress catalog card number 93-71280
(1999) "Lady from the Sea" [adaptationof Henrik Ibsen's play of the same name; first published in _Theater_ 29.1 (1999): 89-91.]
Nonfiction
Collections of essays
(1966) Against Interpretation ISBN 0-385-26708-8 (includes Notes on "Camp")
(1969) Styles of Radical Will ISBN 0-312-42021-8
(1980) Under the Sign of Saturn ISBN 0-374-28076-2
(2001) Where the Stress Falls ISBN 0-374-28917-4
(2007) ISBN 0-374-10072-1 (edited by Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump, with a foreword by David Rieff)
Sontag also published nonfiction essays in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Granta, Partisan Review and the London Review of Books.
Monographs
(1977) On Photography ISBN 0-374-22626-1
(1978) Illness as Metaphor ISBN 0-394-72844-0
(1988) AIDS and Its Metaphors (a continuation of Illness as Metaphor) ISBN 0-374-10257-0
(2003) Regarding the Pain of Others ISBN 0-374-24858-3
Other
(2004) Contribution of phrases to Fischerspooner's third album "Odyssey."
(2002) Liner notes for Patti Smith album Land.
The first volume of Sontag's journals are expected to be published in 2008 or 2009.Books and articles on Susan Sontag
Sontag and Kael by Craig Seligman ISBN 1-58243-311-9.
The Din in the Head. Essays by Cynthia Ozick ISBN-13: 978-0-618-47050-1 See Forward: On Discord and Desire.
Conversations with Susan Sontag. Edited by Leland Poague ISBN 0-87805-833-8 Susan Sontag in her own words.
Susan Sontag. The Elegiac Modernist by Sohnya Sayres ISBN 0-415-90031-X
Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff A memoir about Susan Sontag's death by her son.
Awards and honors
1978: National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography
1990: MacArthur Fellowship
1992: Malaparte Prize, Italy
1996: Recognized for her major contributions to the AIDS field when referenced in a toast during "La Vie Boheme" from the Broadway musical Rent - To Sontag, To Sondheim, To anything taboo...
1999: Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France
2000: National Book Award for In America
2001: Was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded every two years to a writer whose work explores the freedom of the individual in society.
2002: Received her second George Polk Award, for Cultural Criticism for "Looking at War," in The New Yorker
2003: Received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade during the Frankfurt Book Fair .
2003: Won the Prince of Asturias Award on Literature.
2004: Two days after her death, the mayor of Sarajevo announced the city would name a street after her, calling her an "author and a humanist who actively participated in the creation of the history of Sarajevo and Bosnia."Further Information
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