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Book REview Digest:  Sontag’s Last Stand

by rg on March 10, 2007

At the Same Time, a posthumous collection of Susan Sontag’s essays and speeches, just came out and is showing up in review columns. Does Craig Seligman live in Seattle? Because it sure seems like he looked to Mount Rainier for metaphorical inspiration in describing the book.

The rage in these last speeches is controlled rage, frosty and sublime — a snow-capped peak of rage that towers over the landscape that is the political and critical discourse of today.

In The Nation, Jeremy Harding is less poetical, but makes up for this deficiency by deferring to Sontag for much of his review. Thus we get a sense of the melancholy that informs this book.

In an essay on Beauty,

we’re brought smoothly forward into Sontag’s present–her own time and place–to reflect on a set of values that have evolved for centuries but that are rapidly degrading, she believes, under the pressure of late capitalism in America.

The deterioration of values, the corruption of essential culture, the loss of beauty and virtue–maybe liberals and conservatives have more in common than is usually thought. Apparently these concerns are common to left and right.

Both traditional society and the modernist critical reaction to it are undermined by postmodern apathy. On one hand we have pseudo-traditions–fundamentalisms which ignore the diversity, intelligence, and complexity of real tradition. (For example Joel Osteen vs. Emerson or William James.) On the other, we have the novel eclipsed by the memoir (reflection by reportage) but neither read very much unless picked up by Oprah.

Thus the vastness of postmodern consumer choice has made ours a myopic society. The thoughtful reader has been replaced by the passive viewer. Understandably, Sontag seems nostalgic for the days when letters carried more weight.

“Literature was mental travel,” she says in the same lecture. “Travel into the past…and to other countries…. And literature was criticism of one’s own reality, in the light of a better standard.”

That “better standard” is common to both tradition (religion) and modernism (analysis) in their best aspects, and sadly absent from the postmodern scene. Without it–without some sense of ideals or principles–can we hope to make a better world?

The kind of writing [Sontag] most admires may be a dying art, stifled by “our debauched culture,” which “invites us to simplify reality, to despise wisdom.” The picture she paints is extraordinarily bleak. … If fiction has a duty to “enlarge and complicate,” she can’t see it surviving for much longer. And a world without literature–”criticism of one’s own reality”–is sure to lose what’s left of its moral bearings.

I wonder, did Sontag utterly despair at our situation or did she perceive some hope, some light in the world before she left it? I guess I must read the book to find out.

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