The demands that Sontag placed on herself all those years, her worship of her idols and her pursuit of new heights to conquer, the high-brow dramaticism of her existence, seemed to imply some kind of hidden wound, a sting of the flesh or the mind—that which, in fact, distinguishes heroes from gods. But to many onlookers, Sontag was also a goddess, impetuous, merciless, almost impossible to comprehend.
That’s how they saw her (noting her height and figure, the flowing scarves, the tall boots), and that’s how they wrote about her: “Susan is … beyond being a lesbian. I know I’m probably saying something very politically incorrect, but, except for the fact that she has affairs with women, she doesn’t really fit into that category. […] I look upon her as, I don’t know, as Venus with Hera, some great goddess that is on Mount Olympus and beyond sexuality, beyond category.”15 Once you take this approach, the height, the seriousness, the assertive tone, the legendary humorlessness no longer count as merits or flaws—they are a mere footnote to the main text. Sontag comes from a place where they never heard the news about the death of irony, because irony never made an appearance there in the first place. Hence her fierce sensitivity to the appeals of the fascist aesthetic, hence the draw of camp, hence the attraction and resentment toward the avant-garde.
She also liked to think of herself as a diva (and in her late novel In America she tries on the role of an opera singer conquering the New World)—until the simplification that accompanies immortality started to bother her. Any attempt to define her, any reading that linked her to a sole, definite identity provoked annoyance or anger. “Beware of ghettoization,” she warned her son’s girlfriend Sigrid Nunez, then a fledgling writer. “Resist the pressure to think of yourself as a woman writer.”16 The evolution of Sontag follows the imperative of rejection, of an unwillingness to think of herself in ready-made (and not her very own) terms. Academia, feminism, the gay rights movement—things she felt the need to align with for a while (“I write—and talk—in order to find out what I think”17), inevitably fell short, and she, like a chess queen, moved on to the next square. In one entry from the late seventies, she finds herself, to her own amazement, a libertarian: “I can be no more. I should not want to be more. I am not interested in ‘constructing’ any new form of society, or joining any party. There is no reason for me to try to locate myself on either the left or the right—or to feel I should. That shouldn’t be my language.”18 Perhaps, this was not only because she had turned her life into a novel about becoming a writer (inspired by Martin Iden, a book she loved as a child), and still thought of it as a work in progress in her late years, and the rules of plotting required a change. The point of a text, according to Sontag, is to resist interpretation, and her life was not to be an exception. That seemed important to her: “To deprive one’s plight of some of its particularity.”19 So Brodsky, her peer and comrade, said with annoyance about his prison experience: “I refuse to dramatize all this!”20
4.
Throughout her life, the rejection of I-statements was both a choice and a torment. In all her literary and personal fearlessness, with all the sharp determination of her judgments, it seems that this was the only thing Sontag refused herself. In order to tell her own story, she chose others—the fates of those she admired, in whom she saw a different, better self. To a certain extent this was a sign of respect and trust in the reader: he was offered the chance to reconstruct the author, to round her out, to put her together like a puzzle from what she said in passing in articles, interviews, novels (the best of which, as if embarrassed to be works of fiction, were built on real stories).
The journals crumple this logic like a napkin. The most common and most interesting thing that happens there has nothing to do with the plot, or, more precisely, is the plot itself. These entries can be used as a great example, an experimental (and incessantly active) model, of the workings of the human mind. This is what the intellect looks like, almost autonomous in its freedom, always taking over new surfaces, clearing and honing formulas, endlessly redefining its own position. Thoughts gather and thicken like clouds, and coalesce into unexpected twin kernels; ideas fill up forms that lie fallow; consciousness does drills and tutors itself.
But in both volumes, love and loving take up a great deal of space—and oh how loudly, how hastily and plaintively they speak. The constant discontent with oneself, and the yearning for something other, and the faint dotted line of guilt, shame and failure. Here Sontag’s journals join the long ranks of journals kept by women, and her voice is supplanted by the impersonal voice of pain, which cannot be confused with anything else—everyone knows it, and not just by hearsay. This register struck and confused the first reviewers of Reborn: it seemed to not match their ideas of Sontag the Amazon who wielded her pen like a bayonet; they were embarrassed for her—she turned out or seemed to be as small as the rest of us.
And this as us is a very comforting conclusion: it seems that, at their core, all people are like this—even those whose greatness is unequivocal and obvious. They are awkward, ridiculous, recoiling from their own vulnerability, from their inability to be immortal, from their intentional and involuntary, seen or unseen guilt. That’s what it sounds like, the inner monologue of a person in her basic configuration. Susan Sontag devoted her life to its reworking, its second birth, fiercely ignoring anything that would hinder or distract her—including her own mortality and the metaphysical lifesavers she had denied herself as a child. And the notebooks containing her journals became the by-product, the detritus of this process: a work of fiction and nonfiction, a novel of ideas, a bildungsroman, a love story, a computer quest, a search for the Holy Grail.
2012
Translated by Maria Vassileva
From That Side
Notes on Sebald
W. G. Sebald’s book of essays A Place in the Country has come out in English for the first time. It’s hard to say why it wasn’t published sooner—given his present importance, one might assume that every page preserved would already be published (“every tiny curl!”—as Tsvetaeva said of her own posthumous legacy, knowing very well how it goes). But no. This may be because the book’s “German” frame (six essays about German writers you can’t exactly say have entered worldwide circulation) makes it something like a private album: a family conversation—closed to strangers—with his own language and cultural tradition. To me, though, it seems that in books and articles of this kind (written as if sideward, past oneself) the occasion allows one to express the main thing—and that an essay about Robert Walser, for example, may well be the central text among everything by Sebald, the one where he speaks about himself, his work, and his spiritual organization with tormenting, unbearable clarity and directness: the one where he says everything.
Sebald occupies a peculiar position in Russia: here he’s an underground classic, because he literally doesn’t exist on the surface; people refer to him as if he’s a buried treasure. It’s the grotesque flip side of his world fame, which quickly turned him into something like an institution, if not an industry. The words of Susan Sontag, who raised the issue of literary greatness in connection with Sebald’s name,1 have come true with terrifying completeness: his work and fate, not at all suited to this, now become something of a new standard of calibration. It’s strange to look at his posthumous fate with a stranger’s eyes: how he’s hastily being turned into an object of general love (a common-place)—into an answering machine for ethical questions, a ready source of citations in dissertations and epigraphs in novels. But Sebald is untranslated in Russia, unfamiliar and undigested (of all his books only one has come out in Russian, and that was back in 2006).2 He exists as secret knowledge: people don’t write about him, but they talk; they don’t discuss him—rather, they allude to him. This is even more bizarre because it’s precisely here that his manner of existing in literature ought to be as essential as it could possibly be.