Susan Sontag

American essayist, novelist, and cultural critic

• Born: January 16, 1933
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: December 28, 2004
• Place of death: New York, New York

Sontag was one of the first American women to achieve eminence as a critical essayist. She was a controversial cultural critic who took seriously popular culture, celebrated the aesthetic, and advocated for human rights. She wrote about not only literature, art, and the life of the mind but also global politics, illness, warfare, feminism, and photography.

Early Life

Susan Sontag (SON-tag) was born Susan Lee Rosenblatt in were chosen to parents who were fur traders working mainly out of Tianjin, China. During their formative years, she and her younger sister were cared for by relatives. Her lonely, loveless childhood likely shaped her bookish, introspective character. She always exhibited a high degree of intelligence and found solace in reading matter that was often far beyond her years.

Sontag’s father died when she was only five years old. Her mother returned to the United States and took the children to live in Arizona and later to the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. Her mother, an alcoholic, gave the children little more than room and board. Sontag felt abandoned by both parents, and she later told an interviewer, “I still weep in any movie with a scene in which a father returns home after a long, desperate absence, at the moment when he hugs his child.”

Sontag was reading difficult authors such as literary and social critic Lionel Trilling while still in high school. She entered the University of California, Berkeley, when she was only fifteen years old. By the age of eighteen, she was attending the University of Chicago, where she met and married Phillip Rieff, who was to become a prominent cultural historian and social psychologist. The couple were divorced in the late 1950’s. They had one child, David Rieff, who was raised by Sontag and became a writer-journalist as well.

Sontag’s early life, like her later life, was devoted to intellectual pursuits. She enrolled at Harvard University, earning master’s degrees in both English literature and philosophy by 1954. She was a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard but did not complete her dissertation. In 1959, after studying briefly at Oxford University and the University of Paris, she moved to New York City and obtained a job on the staff of Commentary. Shortly thereafter, she began teaching at City College of New York and Sarah Lawrence College, and from 1960 to 1964 she taught at Columbia University.

In 1963, Sontag published her first novel, The Benefactor , which was followed by her second novel, Death Kit , in 1967. Although her fiction was well received, her first book of nonfiction, Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (1966), made her famous. She stated that she preferred to think of herself as a fiction writer, but she continues to attract the most attention for the complex, modernistic ideas expressed in her nonfiction books and essays.

Life’s Work

Sontag is invariably described as a modernist, who contrary to traditionalists concerned with the styles and values of the past embraces modern life with its highs and lows, its moralities and immoralities, and its celebrations of the popular and new at the expense of the old. There have been modernists and traditionalists in every age; in Sontag’s age, modernism included such interests as alienation, powerlessness, the search for new spiritual values, the decline of the West, and the conflict between capitalism and socialism. Sontag was fascinated with uniquely modern forms of expression such as cinema, while in literature she championed unorthodox authors such as Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Nathalie Sarraute. She was one of the first public intellectuals to take seriously the popular, but she did not disregard tradition entirely.

Sontag’s most talked about works are the essay “Notes on Camp” (1964), published in the journal Partisan Review, and the highly controversial and much-analyzed book On Photography (1977), which considers the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding photographed images. In “Notes on Camp” she goes to great lengths to explain the concept of “camp,” which was new to most readers at the time and is still a mysterious subject to many. The term was adopted from gay subculture (before the gay and lesbian rights movement of the late 1960’s) and originally referred to exaggerated effeminate behavior. The essence of camp, according to Sontag, is its “love of the unnatural” and the artificial, and its love of affectation and over-the-top styles. She offers many examples of camp in art, giving special attention to Aubrey Beardsley, the Victorian English painter, and Oscar Wilde, the infamous English dramatist and poet of the same era, whose life was ruined by a famous trial in which he was exposed to public disgrace as gay (or, more specifically for the time, homosexual).

The concept of camp, since the publication of Sontag’s essay, has become essential to evaluating modern art because so much of modern art is not meant to be taken at face value. One modern camp hero is Busby Berkeley, who designed the outrageous choreography for many Hollywood musicals during the 1930’s; his trademark was using groups of scantily dressed chorus girls to form kaleidoscopic patterns on stage. Another camp figure is Andy Warhol, whose pop art likely would have been misunderstood entirely or faded as soon as it was made were it not for Sontag’s “notes” on the camp aesthetic.

On Photography, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 1978, has been praised as well as condemned by photographers, art critics, cultural critics, and general-interest readers alike. In the book, a collection of essays originally published in slightly different form in The New York Review of Books, Sontag argues that because of “the omnipresence of photographed images,” modern societies cannot be understood without considering the interplay between reality and image. The photographed image, she argues, has gained an unchallenged authority not as a reflection of the world but as a piece of it and has thus profoundly shaped how modern life is experienced and understood. She writes, in the opening chapter “In Plato’s Cave,” that photography has redefined the visual code and developed “an ethics of seeing” that outlines “what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.”

Against Interpretation, and Other Essays, is a selection of critical pieces described by Sontag as “case studies for an aesthetic” that focus on literature, theater, and film from the viewpoint of “the new sensibility” she championed. Sontag challenged the traditional idea that the function of art should be moral and intellectual edification. She asserted that art should be appreciated for its sensory qualities (art for art’s sake) rather than for its meaning. The book brought her worldwide attention as a brilliant iconoclast and is generally considered her most important publication. She was attacked by traditionalist scholars and critics, who had a strong vested interest in the matter because they had built their careers on explaining the “meaning” of works of art. These same critics were proponents of what Sontag, and others, disapprovingly called the “Matthew Arnold idea of culture,” which the English critic and poet Arnold had defined as “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.” The late twentieth century field of cultural studies, without much credit to Sontag, was founded as a counter to the Arnoldian idea of culture as comprising only the best of what “has been thought and said.”

Sontag’s essays appealed to the rebellious younger generation of the 1960’s, who had been questioning the values they had been taught by their elders. Her notion of art as pure enjoyment seemed exactly suited to the spirit of the times. Later, Sontag felt compelled to modify her views, having realized that too much freedom can be almost as harmful as too much control; in the meantime, however, she had succeeded in forcing a reexamination and reevaluation of traditional ways of thinking. She typified the uncompromising spirit of the 1960’s. As conservative critic Hilton Kramer wrote, “Hers was but one case among many in the sixties a particularly distinguished one, of course of intellectuals engaging in strenuous flights of cerebration on behalf of ideas that promised deliverance from the tyranny of celebration.”

Sontag tried her hand at many artistic forms, including short stories, novels, biographies, and films. She wrote and directed four feature-length films, but they did not enjoy enough success to encourage her to continue working in that medium. Pauline Kael, a brilliant motion picture critic for The New Yorker, criticized Sontag’s films for lacking “dramatic sense” and noted the same fault in Sontag’s novels. Many critics have stated that Sontag’s expressionistic style of fiction is more suited to the short story form than to the novel.

In 1976, Sontag was diagnosed with breast cancer and told that she had two years to live. She tried to find effective treatment and eventually contacted a French doctor who brought the disease under control. Characteristically, she used the traumatic experience as a mental and physical challenge and wrote Illness as Metaphor (1978). Her intention was to expose the ways in which physicians and patients regard disease and the ways in which it is exacerbated by the workings of the imagination. The book, which brought its courageous author back into the limelight, received a National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 1988, Sontag published AIDS and Its Metaphors , which carries forward the ideas about illness expressed in Illness as Metaphor. In the work she deplores the unjust stigma attached to those with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) because of false ideas about illness in general. Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), which explores the visual culture of warfare, including discussion of the atrocities in Bosnia and Serbia and how images of the devastation were instrumental in global intervention. In May, 2004, she published one of her last essays, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” about the photographs of the torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. Army soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (2007) is a meditation on literature, especially, but also on world politics, 9/11 and its consequences, Israel, and the war in Iraq.

Sontag was a leading, often highly controversial figure in the cultural and intellectual life of New York City. She had long-term relationships with women, most famously with photographerAnnie Leibovitz. Sontag was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the New York Institute for the Humanities. She led an exceedingly quiet life and seldom granted interviews. She died from cancer on December 28, 2004, in a New York City hospital. Controversy erupted even after her death when major newspapers failed to mention her bisexuality, or her partnership with Leibovitz, in their obituaries.

Significance

Sontag’s polemical style and approach was legendary and can be summed up best with the following words by Margolit Fox, from Sontag’s New York Times obituary:

Through four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained irreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as 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. No one ever called her dull.

Sontag made her greatest impact as a critic. Her short stories and novels might be said to illustrate the stylistic and intellectual ideas she articulated in her nonfiction, but as an essayist she aroused great alarm and controversy in the intellectual world, especially with Against Interpretation and On Photography. She did nothing less than challenge the basic assumptions of criticism that had been a guiding light of literature for centuries. She asserted that art did not need a moralistic or edifying purpose but should be appreciated for the pleasure it provides, and she questioned the power and significance of photography and photographs.

As a modernist and a feminist, Sontag brought a whole new perspective to a field that had been almost exclusively a male domain since the time of Aristotle. She naturally aroused hostility among conservative members of the entrenched establishment, most of whom were men. Their life work had been dedicated to interpretation to finding and revealing the “meaning” of works of art to others and Sontag challenged the notion that meaning was essential. Her views rapidly spread to Europe and the Soviet Union, and they continue to influence artists, critics, and intellectuals all over the world.

Sontag made her appearance at exactly the right moment in history, during the romantic revolution of the 1960’s, when people were looking for new ways of doing things. She helped to draw attention to avant-garde artists such as French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who were creating some of the most important works of the century. She is regarded as one of the intellectual leaders of the 1960’s revolution, which changed Americans and Europeans in every conceivable way. She vehemently opposed the repressive war that the United States was waging in Vietnam and was influential in changing public opinion so that the government was forced to find an honorable way of withdrawing from that exploited country. Her antiwar arguments continued into the twenty-first century, starting with 9/11 and expanding into criticism of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Bibliography

Acocella, Joan. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays. New York: Pantheon Books, 2007. A unique blending of biography and literary-cultural criticism that explores the lives and works of creative geniuses, including Sontag, revealing the profound influence such figures have had on American and British cultural and intellectual history.

Grenier, Richard. “The Conversion of Susan Sontag.” New Republic, April 14, 1982. This essay discusses Sontag’s confession in a famous speech in Town Hall in New York City that she had failed to understand “the nature of the Communist tyranny.” Grenier looks back over Sontag’s career and points out other ways in which she modified her radical opinions.

Kramer, Hilton. “The Pasionaria of Style.” The Atlantic, September, 1982. Discusses Sontag’s use of A Susan Sontag Reader as a springboard. Kramer calls Sontag “the critical spokesman [sic] of the sixties” because she gave intellectual support to the hedonism and loose morals that characterized that turbulent era.

Lacayo, Richard. “Stand Aside, Sisyphus.” Time, October 24, 1988. An excellent short profile of Sontag that covers her career as a fiction and nonfiction writer over two decades and assesses her importance to American literature. Illustrated.

Rieff, David. Swimming In a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Sontag’s son explores his mother’s life with cancer and his relationship with her during her final months of life. A moving memoir about death and dying in American culture as well as an intimate account of how Rieff helped his mother die with dignity.

Rollyson, Carl. Reading Susan Sontag: A Critical Introduction to Her Work. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001. A good introductory companion to Sontag’s broad range of work, written for general readers. Includes a helpful glossary.

Sayres, Sohnya. Susan Sontag: The Elegaic Modernist. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1990. An excellent critical study of Sontag’s works. Contains extensive biographical notes as well as a fairly comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Sontag. The bibliography itemizes reviews of Sontag’s essays, books, and films.

Sontag, Susan. A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982. This single volume offers a generous overview of Sontag’s fiction and nonfiction written over a period of approximately a decade. It contains excerpts from some of her most famous essays, including an essay on camp that displays her modernism, her acute intelligence, and her enormous breadth of reading.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. Edited by Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2007. A posthumously published collection of Sontag’s latest writings. Includes a foreword by her son, David Rieff.