It may be that this is a genuine solution or at least a direction one can take: if you cannot live your life without the color scheme of daily horror, you can still tell it the way it was conceived. This strange kind of everyday heroism (entirely divorced from pathos, devoid of any pathetic element) leaves very little room to maneuver. The answer to “how are you?” can only be “fine, thank you”; it seems unthinkable to just squander your pain in public—and almost the entirety of your life is left beyond the borders of what can be said. You end up having to rеinvent it, to lay it out in all its splendor, turn on all the lights, remember all the plots that can fit the story line of this great adventure. Make it so that only the front-facing part of the story remains. Live in a way that leaves no room for shame.
In a movie that’s currently playing in theaters, the hero survives a shipwreck and finds himself on a boat with a giant tiger—and together they drift for a long time until they reach a safe shore. There, of course, it turns out that he imagined the tiger in order to forget the unthinkable and unbearable events that actually occurred. The story of Alisa Poret, who spent years not wanting to notice the tiger in her own boat and wrote a picture book about it, is one of the few happy endings of the previous century. And one of its models.
4.
A large fish, which had lived for quite a long time in an aquarium at the zoo, was released into the sea. They watched it from the pier. All day long it swam in circles no bigger than the walls of its former cell. The next day, the circles grew a little larger, on the third day even more so, and only on the fourth day did it swim away.
This entry in Alisa Poret’s notebook is called “FREEDOM.”
2013
Translated by Maria Vassileva
The Last Hero
(Susan Sontag)
1.
Susan Sontag’s detractors, of whom she had many, often accused her of exploiting her looks—and it’s true that she gave us plenty to look at. In the posthumous corpus of what remains, which includes books, movies, texts, interviews, and journals, the photographs of the author—young, ageless, aging, dead—are like the temporary exhibit displayed on the honorary first floor of the museum. Some visitors never venture past it, and there’s a reason for that: the images of Sontag don’t tell or comment on her story—they supplant it, providing the viewer with the main thing, an emblem, an identity card: X was here. In the case of Sontag, the sum of her features, repeated in dozens of photographs with the precision of a series of freeze-frames, tells us the following. In this body, in this face, with its high cheekbones and large mouth, with its limited range of poses—hands behind the head or on the hips, hands holding a cigarette, feet up on a table, on the back of the couch, eyes fixed on the viewer (summoning, courageous), but more often looking off to the side (detached, unapproachable), her hands embracing her son—there is drama. This face, this body (in black, white, gray) are perceived simultaneously as the hero and the arena onto which that hero steps out; they tell you: something will happen here, the scene of action has been charged or colored by fate. When we look at an actor’s picture, we are offered an empty house, an empty theater that we have seen fill up with a fictitious life. In the case of Sontag, the house is inhabited, and you can trust that. You have to take her message at face value; her features insist on their own importance—they are part of that larger reality where a private history becomes shared, instructive, exemplary (the last being one of Sontag’s favorite words). The way this woman looks asserts the weight of everything she’s said or done. It is a trademark that you can’t help but trust, the italics that make the text stand out, the packaging that compels you to read its lettering.
Sontag herself would eagerly read photographs as a form of divination, as if they were the entrails of sacrificed animals. Here is the beginning of an essay in Under the Sign of Saturn: “In most of the portrait photographs he is looking down, his right hand to his face. The earliest one I know shows him in 1927—he is thirty-five—with dark curly hair over a high forehead, mustache above a full lower lip: youthful, almost handsome.”1 The text follows his story (the mid-thirties, their end) noting photographic details: the shape of a hand, the direction of a gaze. Initially the book was going to be named after Thomas Carlyle—“On Heroes and Hero-Worship”—but there could be no story about herself among the texts dedicated to Benjamin, Canetti, Barthes, all inhabitants of an intellectual Valhalla about which she’d dreamed her entire life. In one of her journals she expresses this regret: she wishes she could read—but, it seems, not write herself—“an essay describing me as I have described them. The pathos of intellectual avidity, the collector (mind as every-thing), melancholy & history, arbitrating the moral claim versus aestheticism, and so forth. The intellectual as an impossible project.”2
For Sontag it was impossible or undesirable to describe herself publicly, to talk about herself in the first person. Throughout her life she had turned away from herself with shame and grief, like an artist repeatedly disappointed by the poor material at hand. And she could always find other things (people, topics) that were more important—which underwent an immediate appraisal, and transformed into ideological models for reflection and imitation. Her passion for admiration (“Ah, Susan. Toujours fidèle,” Barthes once said to her3) prevented her, as it seemed at the time, from writing her own magnum opus: her energy was expended on others. But playing this role—the interpreter working at the very front edge of the new, ready to bring words and meanings into a language everyone could understand—is how Sontag found herself in demand in the sixties, to the point where she became a grand idol of success, a Pythia, a queen of clubs—a Mrs. America of new writing. The many photographs that accompany this ascent give it a kind of cinematic quality: these are close-up shots, stills from an unfinished (but ongoing) biopic. The reader-voyeur encounters a rewarding subject in them: these pictures promise a continuation—and they will keep their promise at any cost. David Rieff, Sontag’s only son, never forgave her longtime partner Annie Leibowitz for taking a series of photographs that were final in every sense of the word: Sontag is shown in the weeks of her final battle with cancer, in a bed in the oncology center, amid tubes and monitors, heavy, her legs twisted in effort, her nightgown torn. It’s hard to imagine what the heroine, a theorist of photography and collector of film stills, would have to say about them. Photography (and the constant presence of a lens) seemed to play the role of a supporting narrative in her life, clarifying and commenting on the main events—and as such could have been considered helpful.
The Sontag effect was of course also determined by where it took place: a vacancy for the position of public intellectual, a master of intelligence creating texts about texts, can emerge and be filled where there are not just books but also readers, and universities producing these readers, and newspapers-journals-publishers that allow texts to flourish and multiply. In order for a conversation about the quality of literary criticism to be worthwhile, there has to be sufficient quantity—of printed space, hands eager to fill it, and other hands ready to turn those pages. In 1967, when Sontag’s first book of essays was published in New York (she started out with prose, whose lukewarm reception determined her authorial strategy for years to come), she had people to read and discuss. Still, Sontag’s fame went way beyond what could be expected—especially given that, with few exceptions, the things that interested her, which she was always ready to explain to the city and to the world, lacked mass appeal and were patently closed off to a broader readership. Once again, we hear the voice of the annoyed observer: it turns out that clever Sontag was not possible without beautiful Sontag, that the media persona was the opening act for the author of complex texts about unpopular things.