At The Same Time: Essays And Speeches
By Susan Sontag. Douglas & McIntyre. 256 pp., $25.50
After Susan Sontag’s death in 2004, New York Times writer Margalit Fox pointed out that Sontag had been called “explosive, anticlimactic, original, derivative, naïve, sophisticated, approachable, aloof, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing, profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, ambivalent, lucid, inscrutable, visceral, reasoned, chilly, effusive, relevant, passé, ambivalent, tenacious, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, cantankerous and clever. [But] no one ever called her dull.”
Sontag never was dull, nor was she easy to read. But the body of work she left behind—which includes novels, essays, screenplays, and long nonfiction pieces—is a record of the growth of a political and aesthetic sensibility uniquely attuned to North American culture during the second half of the last century.
Part of the astonishing quality of Sontag’s work is its versatility. Never content to simply be a literary, film, or political critic, Sontag did it all, and she continues that tradition of generalism in her latest and last book, the posthumous At the Same Time. Roughly grouped into three sections, this new collection covers literary themes, arguments about beauty, her reactions to the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the political rhetoric that followed, as well as ruminations on translation, the Middle East, and heroism.
The speech from which the collection takes its name covers several of these themes and could be regarded as another of her various manifestos—as Sontag says in the speech (published here for the first time in English), “In storytelling as practiced by the novelist, there is always—as I have argued—an ethical component. This ethical component is not the truth, as opposed to the falsity of the chronicle. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution.” In other words, “ethics” lie in the experiential quality of the work, that part which trains us as readers and citizens in an ethical relationship to ourselves and the world.
And through her wide variety of interests, Sontag opens the act of reading to include art, politics, film, culture, disaster, and bravery. By doing so, Sontag points out the ways in which a cultural education can “train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours?”
For example, Sontag tackled the subject of 9/11 in the pages of The New Yorker only a week and a half after the event. (This collection marks the first print appearance of the full version of that piece.) Although tragic in tone and full of real sympathy for the loss her country has just undergone, Sontag’s article is a virulent denunciation of the way in which American politicians and public figures have handled the crisis, turning an opportunity for real decision making into a “unanimity of... sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric” in which “politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy.” Her stance on the war on terror (which would, by her definition, be “an endless war” and therefore not a war at all) and her concern over the way people understood 9/11 shocked many, but her refusal to bow to pressure or to silence herself (“there will be no words”) speaks to her intellectual engagement and critical honesty, a quality desperately needed in a solitary superpower.
Her earlier collections (particularly Against Interpretation) had a much heavier focus on art and literature. Here, Sontag’s approach to such topics as resistance to totalitarian rule and the American response to the torture photos of Abu Ghraib, often makes reference to art and literature, although her essays on specific authors are few. I missed that style of writing, wanting to hear Sontag’s impressions of the latest filmmakers and painters, although her essays on the revolutionary novelist/essayist Victor Serge and Hallor Laxness’s novel Under the Glacier are particularly readable and exciting.
Reading Sontag is a challenge—her descriptive statements turn out, upon closer inspection, to also be prescriptive, her opinions are extreme, her style idiosyncratic and difficult. But the rewards of her essays, even if one violently disagrees with her ideas, are plentiful. Sontag is a writer concerned with ideas, with how we think, what we value and why, with the connections between the aesthetic and the ethical, with what it is in our culture that makes us distinctly, irrevocably who we are.
These are questions that we should be grateful she asked. And they are questions we should begin to ask ourselves.
