Susan Sontag: More Than a Writer, a Thinker and a Symbol
On the one hand, Susan Sontag does not seem to need to be presented, on the other hand, the board books of its authorship were only recently translated into Russian. The fact that the second half of the 20th century was printed in the leading journals fell into every book and was studied in Western universities, and finally comes to us with great delay. In Russia, Susan Sontag falls into the status of a monument (the exception is the HBO documentary, which will be shown on October 10 at the Side-by-Side LGBT Film Festival), but Western culture remembered her as a living, changing person and a strong thinker who tried to embrace the entire culture without texts exceptions and divisions into high and low.
In the first place, Sontag was a frequently cited author and one who is usually called a public intellectual - a writer, an active speaker with a clearly articulated position, broad interests and an open view of the world in which there is nothing secondary. Confident, attentive and loud, she from her youth was a supporter of open discussions and direct experience instead of interpretations. It was Sontag who wrote about the experimental art of the 60s, one of the first American critics was fascinated by the directors of the new wave and refuted all gender stereotypes with her own example.
Not directly associating herself with the history of feminism, Sontag nevertheless embodied feminist ideals long before they embraced Europe and the States: she simply did not allow herself to be on the sidelines and live in the shadow of another person. Unlike many authors, Sontag was not afraid of media attention and did not avoid television: she willingly gave interviews, wrote columns for gloss and loved public discussions. Sontag will enter the theater when he puts Ibsen in Italy and adapts it to the stage of Wagner's Parsifal. She is a regular author of The New Yorker and a literary critic, author of four novels and four experimental films, she personally knew half of the key heroes of modern culture - from Andy Warhol to Joseph Brodsky.
Sontag began to write as a teenager and in the first public texts she touched on topics that would always excite her. In a school essay, she will look at the differences in the effects of the Second World War — for the United States, which has never experienced the destruction of its cities, and Europe, where the bombing did not spare anyone. Later, she will not only become an active anti-war speaker, but will also write, among other things, in the essay "On Photography" and "We Look at Another's Suffering" about the documents of war, which allow us to observe history, remaining detached and closed.
During the Vietnam War, Sontag was one of the few who was ready to go to an Asian country to see other people's suffering with their own eyes, and not from documentary photo reports and editorials of American newspapers. She will return to the topic of death, casualties and anxiety in her essays “Disease as a metaphor” and “AIDS and its metaphors” - they reflect Sontag’s pain from a long struggle with cancer and grief over her closest friends who died during the AIDS epidemic. During the war in Yugoslavia, Sontag will decide to come to Sarajevo to put Beckett in the theater that was destroyed by the bombardments - minefields remain in the city and there are still fights.
Confident and loud, she has been a supporter of open discussion since her youth.
↑ In the documentary “Looking at Susan Sontag” of 2014, the off-screen text is read by actress Patrish Clarkson - the star of another HBO hit “Client is always dead”
Sontag lived a long and hectic life - one marriage, one child, four art books, hundreds of articles on art, film and society, several cities, three deadly diseases, nine long novels. Not speaking openly about her sexuality and romantic relationships, she accepted her bisexuality without hurling and learned to take on her own body all her life. She fell in love often, strongly and always only in those who opened her new world and another environment to which Sontag turned her writer's ambitions. Husband Philip, older teacher, actress Harriet, playwright Irene, aristocratic Carlotta, scientist Eva, artist Jasper, then artist Paul, poet Joseph, actress Nicole, ballerina Lucinda, photographer Annie - Sontag sprouted into each of these people, Sontag sprouted, plunging into action their lives.
Of the new relationships, Susan carried out reflections on talent, the nature of art, freedom, and obsession — and turned them into an essay. Sontag never stopped sharing her life with countless people: it was natural for her to communicate and correspond, maintain a large network of acquaintances, friends and friends, and follow their discoveries and interests. Including under the influence of friends, lovers and joint discoveries, her texts about camp and happening, Sartre, Camus, Godar and the modern theater appeared. Annie Leibovitz’s book, A Photographer's Life, documented the last 15 years of Susan Sontag’s life and the relationship between two mature, accomplished and very different women, who for a long time after Sontag's death hesitated to call love.
Sontag's life spanned 70 years of American history since 1933, but her image did not disappear from the culture after her death, but received a new dimension. Reviewing Sontag’s notes, notebooks, and countless notebooks, her son David Riff decides to publish a small part of what his mother wrote in diaries only for himself: margin notes, a list of books to read, random phrases from friends, and many pages of self-analysis, critics and most personal revelations. Thus, the public figure of one of the main women of the 20th century acquired the transparency, defenselessness and multidimensionality that she hinted at, but did not fully express her creativity. The incredible Sontag from the encyclopedia became after the publication of diaries tangible, restless, humane and so familiar to every thinking person in their aspirations, fears and anxiety.
“The greatest works seem to have been extirpated, not erected,” writes Susan Sontag in her diary in 1964. She is 31 years old, a year before her first novel came out, and now - a collection of her essay about cinema "Camp Notes", she teaches philosophy at Columbia University and has been divorced for six years. From the first days of her intellectual life, she takes for identity the work of art and the torment with which it comes into the world. Evasion, difficult birth of words and relationships from a transitional age does not leave her: in parallel with essays and speeches, new novels and old affections, friendship and painful loneliness, Susan has kept detailed diaries all her life, containing present doubts and plans for the future. In doubt, a constantly updated list of your own shortcomings, notes about feelings every minute of time and a statement of constantly changing feelings. The plans - waterfalls names of writers and directors, which must be comprehended, before it is too late. There is no time, to waste your time on bad authors and mediocre acquaintances does not make sense, fearlessness - to “write with a full voice” and articulate changes in yourself swiftly, without looking around.
Son David Riff writes in the preface to the published diaries: "Before us is a diary in which art is perceived as a matter of life and death, where irony is considered a vice, not a virtue, and seriousness is the greatest of benefits. My views were developed early in my mother." From 15 to 71, Sontag ruthlessly dissected reality, whether it was the hypocrisy of acquaintances or airplanes, flying through twin towers, but remained a tough critic and editor for herself. Some college discoveries will remain with her for life, but the question of her own solvency will torment her at seventy just as she would at twenty. And if at twenty she wants to teach at the university to attentive eyes of an audience, then at fifty she will think about how to stand in the story on a par with Proust and Benjamin.
Anxiety and anxiety to live life in vain and to catch a small part of the planned will push her back - to move, new novels and unusual activities. "Reborn", - for the life she will tell herself several times, noting the tremendous changes, growth and change of priorities, but with each new obstacle as if nullified. In parallel with books, relationships, friendships and motherhood, unassuming lists of “like / dislike”, categorical attacks on antipodes and partners and constant reminders will be written that the only nerve and freedom to be true to oneself is valuable for a writer. And a sense of her own uniqueness: paraphrasing Dostoevsky, Sontag admits that she fears only one thing - that her sufferings will be unworthy of her.
Strict bangs, an open smile and a keen look brown eyes: with dreams of the Nobel Prize, Sontag enters college at the age of 15. Her childhood in the company of her younger sister and forever absent mother tired of her feeling of loneliness: a white crow with a typically Jewish surname Rosenblatt, at the age of 11 she read diaries of French writers and composed plays, could not fit into the circle of her classmates from Tulsa and California and missed her life a big city and mentors that you want to follow.
"I want to write, I want to live in an intellectual atmosphere, I want to live in a cultural center, where I will have the opportunity to often listen to music - all this and many more," - in the diaries of Sontag is full of evidence of what is called “inquisitive mind ": if she feels relaxed for a second, the future writer beats her hands and collects new lists of unreached writers and unread novels. The brightest sensation of adolescence is a large bookstore with your favorite authors and books about everything. The writer - the one who is interested in everything - decides Sontag once and for all and discourages fellow students with his stubborn enthusiasm, simply and bravely written columns and absolute confidence in recognizing her merit over time. One of her acquaintances travels with Susan to the gay neighborhoods of San Francisco to show her a life without stiffness and guilt for her sexual experience.
In the story of her marriage as a teacher and a person much older, it’s not the age difference or early marriage that is surprising, or even the fact that the decision about the wedding was made a week after the meeting, but how Sontag talks about this relationship: seven years in a row. " The conversation was interrupted when Susan and Philip Rif already had a small child, and Susan managed to discover bisexuality in herself, exhaled with relief and started the first affair with a girl. "I know what I want in life, because everything is so simple - and at the same time it was so difficult for me to understand it. I want to sleep with many - I want to live and hate the thoughts of death ... I wanted to spit on anyone who collects facts, if only this is not a reflection of the underlying sensuality that the choir self ... I do not intend to retreat and only by action limit the evaluation of my experience - no matter whether it brings me pleasure or pain. " During her life, Susan Sontag survived romance with men and women, succumbed to their influence and struggled with their power over themselves, continued to talk and write. Pleasure and pain were almost always reciprocal - elderly people who were once in love with Sontag talk about colossal charisma and cruelty to voice ugly thoughts when the soul asked for storms. Sontag's anxiety was mental and physical: she changed Paris to New York several times in her life and vice versa, she turned out to be in Vietnam and Sarajevo, and at the same time she wrote artistic prose while she was stubbornly called a cultural scientist and a publicist.
Long before the second wave of feminism, Sontag retorted when she was called "ladywriter", and, remaining very simple in her tastes and always spectacular, said that in modern girls she was worried about the thought of what should be worn, and not about how to think. Being the youngest for a long time in almost any adult company, she clearly monitored the power relations between people and the attempts of protection. Past partners in an interview talk about Sontag's pathological phobia of co-dependencies and attachments that equalized feeling and total possession. The diaries and memories of loved ones register the Sontag constant conflict between the desire to love and be loved at the limit and the need for personal space, in the air around you and the right to free relationships.
"My neurotic problem is initially not connected with myself, but with other people. Therefore, writing work always helps me, sometimes it even takes me out of depression. It is when I write that I feel my independence, my strength, my lack of need to other people, ”writes Sontag at 34, lamenting about the vanishing style, now that her work resembles the rage of a typewriter that produces goods, not thoughts. Sontag's greed for people and events is confirmed by hundreds of intonation-like autobiographical records in which she dissects a search for truth and constant borrowing from loved ones: "I understood more and put it into a large system to which they had no access." Self-love in character turned into self-love, self-confidence into self-confidence, and, being able to register and notice these transformations, Sontag could not stop them. “The experience does not teach a person - because the essence of things is constantly changing,” and Sontag continued to suffer from the same feelings with new people, to feel nauseous from her new texts and to hate the once estranged and cold mother many years later, as she died.
Sontag experienced the same feeling of oppression and horror over and over again in the fight against cancer, which left and returned again, grabbing her by the throat. Not a single critical article she wrote, not a single book could compare with the pain of her own body from repeated illness. “The body is now speaking louder than I have ever said,” Sontag will write when he gets his first diagnosis: breast cancer. Later there will be uterine sarcoma and at the very end of life - blood cancer. “Death is the opposite of everything that exists,” she will draw a line under her life and career as a writer who is obliged to love, understand and absorb everything that exists in order to pass it on to others. After several years of burial of her closest friends and dealing with her own illnesses, she writes an essay on stigmatization of the sick and a mass attitude towards diagnosis as a punishment for the sins of a lifestyle. There is nothing to be ashamed of, but it’s really equally scary to die - be you a happy housewife, an eternally unsatisfied writer or a university teacher. Speculation and myths about disease as a punishment will not alleviate the fear of meeting with your own doctor.
Would my young copy be pleased with me? Not every elderly person will answer this question calmly and negatively. Sontag without stress says: “No,” despite the record of novels and iconic essays she managed to write. I succeeded because in her diaries there are still hundreds of undeveloped ideas and not continued developments. In the texts about photography and the skill of the directors of the new wave, in the columns about the American way of life and ageism, the Sontag signified the value of free choice and human life, which runs between the stifling banality of others and the horror of certain death. She categorically states that the white race is the cancer of mankind, and talks about how observing the sufferings of others from photographs turns sympathy into mechanics and atrophies human memory and analysis. A picture instead of a thought, a second impression instead of experience - Sontag was one of the first to state the world in which we found ourselves irretrievably in modernity. The immediacy of perception and the ability to feel is what Susan clings to in her texts and reflections most often. In the first collection of essays, Sontag comes up with an argument: "Interpretation makes art tame, comfortable." In the story about Sontag, it is impossible in the first place to make it hand-made and cozy. Anyone - whatever, but not tame and comfortable. The present is unsteady and is not given to anyone. Why do these 70 years of memory, impressions, self-blame, passion and overcoming? We tend to use synecdocs and talk about the giant through a convenient and simple quotient - so as not to be afraid of the world and ourselves in it. Among the quotations written in Sontag’s notebook is the phrase of William Yeats, with whom Sontag fought and repeatedly confirmed by her own example: “A person is able to embody the truth, but not to know it.” Reflection Sontag with sudden insights and years of life by inertia, ambitions and cyclical self-analysis best of all shows how she wrestled, rather than methodically built texts, rushing to truth from all sides and constantly losing it out of sight - like every person.
Photo: HBO