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IN MEMORIAM
Susan Sontag, 1933–2004
BY MICHAEL BRONSKI

It is tempting, at times almost a cultural mandate, to make ornate, grand pronouncements on the death of a public figure. The death of Renata Tebaldi last week was described by some, for example, as signaling the end of the era of the great opera divas. But such pronouncements are usually inaccurate, often even demeaning to the import and the cultural influence of the very people they eulogize. And so it is tempting, with the death of Susan Sontag this past Tuesday at the age of 71, to remember her with a sweeping statement. The obituaries are just beginning to appear, and already she has been hailed as the singular originator of a new wave of post-war cultural criticism, a literary critic who carelessly and naively stumbled into politics, the last great public intellectual whose social observations were vital moral guideposts.

While all these characterizations are, to varying degrees, true, in the end they do a disservice both to her intellectual and critical expanse, and to her power as a writer. Indeed, as much as she enjoyed promoting her ideas and their value, she would have disliked such generalizations. The reality is that Sontag was a rare, even exotic, being in our culture of disposable ideas and transient fashion: she was a working writer and intellectual who refused to rely on platitudes to express her ideas and who valued seriousness. Many of the first wave of obituaries quote — with various degrees of irony, indulgence, and even sarcasm — Sontag’s famous self-description as a "zealot of seriousness." But this was, in the best possible sense, true, and it explains quite simply the enormous impress she made on the world.

The facts of Sontag’s life and career have been reiterated endlessly, and will continue to be as new obits appear. The brilliant, ambitious student — married at age 17, in 1951, to the noted sociologist Philip Rieff, who was her professor at the University of Chicago — went on to have a child and garner a couple of degrees from Harvard before she divorced Rieff. In 1959 she moved to New York and two years later burst forth on the literary scene with a series of essays that dazzled with their intellectual audacity. (One of her first published pieces, a review of Walter Kaufmann’s anthology Religion from Tolstoy to Camus, blithely dropped references to Sade, George Eliot, Psycho, and the Oresteia.) The publication of "Notes on ‘Camp’ " in 1964 — an explication of how gay-male sensibility and culture was a primary shaper of contemporary culture — made her a media star. Over the next four decades she published four collections of essays, four books of cultural analysis, four novels, and a volume of short stories, and she wrote and directed several films and plays.

Sontag’s books and essays — at least the best of them — plainly and firmly stated truths that, once articulated, were so conspicuously apparent that they immediately became accepted as obvious fact. This was clearly evident in the publication of On Photography, in 1977, and Illness As Metaphor, in 1978. Both of these slim volumes — which first appeared as lengthy articles in the New York Review of Books — radically and forever changed public discourse on representation and disease. In On Photography, she explored how our moral understanding of the world is influenced by the proliferation of "real" images produced by photographs (she would later expand on these ideas in 2003 with the publication of Regarding the Pain of Others.) In Illness As Metaphor, she probed the damage we do to ourselves, and society, by mythologizing illness and refusing to deal with the corporeality of the body. The force of her arguments lay in the a breadth of specificity she was able to offer, while making a nuanced plea for taking a moral position on the topic at hand.

I have been an avid Sontag reader since 1964, when I first read "Notes on ‘Camp,’ " and her writings have been vital to me as a cultural critic and journalist. But it was really five years ago, when I began teaching at Dartmouth, that I acquired a deep understanding of the power of her work. I don’t think I have taught a class for which I have not assigned a Sontag book or essay — in Contemporary Issues in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies, we read "Notes on ‘Camp’ "; in Plagues and Politics: The Impact of AIDS on US Culture, we read Illness As Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors; and in Beatniks, Hot Rods, and the Feminine Mystique, we read "The Imagination of Disaster," her analysis of 1950s science-fiction films. I assigned these works because I love them and they have been so important to my own thinking, as well as to the subjects at hand. But what always amazed me was how quickly and avidly my students took to Sontag’s writings.

For the most part, the students had little idea of who Susan Sontag was — a reminder of how narrow and limited American secondary education really is — but once we got into the material, they would debate it with an uncommon ferocity. Students’ discussions of Illness As Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors became intense as they resisted Sontag’s idea that any attempt to discuss disease metaphorically was not only illogical but downright dangerous. (Although, in the end, most of them agreed with her analysis, particularly when considering how religious conservatives labeled AIDS a moral plague.)

But perhaps the most satisfying reading of Sontag’s work in the classroom for me came this past term, when I taught "Judaism, Sexuality, and Queerness." A complicated mix of theory, movies, and literature, the course was an exploration of how these three "sensibilities" might be interrelated. Sontag’s passage in "Notes on ‘Camp’ " was brilliantly illuminating and prescient: "Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral sensibility and homosexual aestheticism and irony."

For my students, this idea resonated throughout the entire term. Even as they argued with her assertion, they returned to it as a baseline over and over again. This, to me, was both gratifying and illuminating. An essay that 40 years ago had meant so much to me — and to so many others — was still vital and alive.

The death of Susan Sontag means many things, and sweeping statements, even when inflected with irony, don’t quite capture any of them. It should be enough to say that she reshaped how we thought about the world, and will, I trust, continue to do so for future generations.


Issue Date: December 31, 2004 - January 6, 2005
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