CityReads│Sontag: What Makes Me Feel Strong?
Jonathan Cott, an editor of Rolling Stone magazine, interviewed Sontag first in Paris and laterin New York in 1978.The munificence and fluency of herconversation manifests what the French refer to as an ivresse du discours—an inebriation with the spoken word.
Jonathan Cott, 2013.Susan Sontag: the complete Rolling Stone interview, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Nancy Kates, 2014. Regarding Susan Sontag, HBO documentary.
Source: http://book.douban.com/subject/25933324/
Susan Sontag was essayist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, and political activist. She was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City on January 16, 1933, the daughter of Mildred and Jack Rosenblatt, both Jews of Lithuanian and Polish descent. Her father managed a fur trading business in China, where he died of tuberculosis in 1939, when Susan was five years old. Seven years later, her mother married U.S. Army Captain Nathan Sontag. Susan and her sister, Judith, were given their stepfather's surname.
Sontag grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne’s College, Oxford.
Sontag went to college at 15, married at 17, gave birth to a son at 19, divorced at 25. She never married again. But she had romantic relationships with both men and women.
Sontag had three bouts of cancer. She beat cancer in the 1970s, and again in the 1990s. Her experiences as a cancer patient had been the catalyst for her writing the book, Illness as Metaphor. In 2004, Sontag learned she had leukemia, her third bout of cancer, and died on Dec. 28. She was buried in Paris
Her books include four novels, several plays, and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time.
Sontag also wrote and directed four feature-length films and several plays.
Sontag’s parents, Mildred and Jack Rosenblatt
Sontag in Chinese clothing, probably brought back by her parents
Sontag with her grandparents
Sontag with her mother and sister
Sontag with her mother
Sontag’s mother and stepfather
Sontag’s ex-husband,Philip Rieff
Sontag and her son,David Rieff
Texts below are mainly from Jonathan Cott's interview with Susan Sontag. In 1978 Jonathan Cott, a founding contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine, interviewed Sontag first in Paris and later in New York. Only a third of their twelve hours of discussion ever made it to print. More than three decades later, Yale University Press published the entire transcript of Sontag’s remarkable conversation, accompanied by Cott’s preface and recollections.
Cott remarked in the preface that the munificence and fluency of her conversation manifesting what the French refer to as an ivresse du discours—an inebriation with the spoken word.
Pictures are from a HBO documentary directed by Nancy Kates, which was released in 2014. Nancy Kates explained why she made such a documentary in an interview: ”She was such an important voice. She just had this fierceness about making pronouncements in public.…Writing a book about Susan Sontag doesn’t really do justice to Susan Sontag because she was so photogenic. The camera just loved her. That was one of the interesting things about making a film about her”.
Sontag’s life was an exemplary witness to the fact that living a thinking life and thinking about the life one was living could be complementary and life-enhancing activities. I know I’m afraid of passivity (and dependence). Using my mind, something makes me feel active (autonomous). That’s good.”
“What makes me feel strong?” Sontag asked herself in one of her journal entries, giving as her answer: “Being in love and work,” and affirming her fealty to “the hot exaltations of the mind.” For Sontag, loving, desiring, and thinking were, at their root, essentially coterminous activities. To quote from Anne Carson, whom Sontag loved, “falling in love and coming to know make me feel genuinely alive.”
In all of her endeavors, Sontag attempted to challenge and upend stereotypical categories such as male/female and young/old that induced people to live constrained and risk-averse lives; and she continually examined and tested out her notion that supposed polarities such as thinking and feeling, form and content, ethics and aesthetics, and consciousness and sensuousness could in fact simply be looked at as aspects of each other—much like the pile on the velvet that, upon reversing one’s touch, provides two textures and two ways of feeling, two shades and two ways of perceiving.
"People said I must have been detached to write Illness as Metaphor, but I wasn’t detached at all."
I was told it was likely that I’d be dead very soon, so I was facing not only an illness and painful operations, but also what I thought might be death in the next year or two. And besides feeling the dread and the terror, as well as the physical pain, I was terribly frightened. I was experiencing the most acute kind of animal panic. But I also experienced moments of elation, of tremendous intensity.…it is something extraordinary to become willing to die. I don’t want to say it was a positive experience, because that sounds cheap, but of course it did have a positive side.
The first thing I thought was: what did I do to deserve this? I’ve led the wrong life, I’ve been too repressed. Yes, I suffered a great grief five years ago and this must be the result of that intense depression.
Then I asked one of my doctors:” what do you think about the psychological side of cancer in terms of what causes it?”and he said to me, “well, people have said a lot of funny things about diseases throughout the ages, and of course they never turned out to be true.” He just dismissed it absolutely. I decided that I was not going to be culpabilized. I have the same tendencies to feel guilty that everybody has, probably more than average, but I don’t like it. Nietzsche was right about guilt, it’s awful. I’d rather feel ashamed.
People do feel guilty about being ill. I personally like to feel responsible. Whenever I find myself in a mess in my personal life, like being involved with the wrong person, or with my back to the wall in some way—the kind of things that happen to everybody—I always prefer to take responsibility myself rather than to say it’s the other person’s fault. I hate seeing myself as a victim. I’d rather say, well, I chose to fall in love with this person who turned out to be a bastard. It was my choice, and I don’t like blaming other people because it’s so much easier to change oneself than to change other people. So it isn’t that I don't like to take responsibility, but in my view, when you do get sick and have a drastic illness, it’s like being hit by a car, and I don’t think it makes much sense to worry about what made you ill. What does make sense is to be as rational as you can in seeking the right kind of treatment and to really want to live. There’s no doubt that if you don’t want to live you can be in complicity with the illness.
You can’t feel angry at nature. You can’t feel angry at biology. We’re all going to die—that’s a very difficult thing to take in—and we all experience this process. It feels as if there’s this person—in your head, mainly—trapped in this physiological stock that can only survive seventy- or eighty-plus years normally, in any kind of decent condition. It starts deteriorating at a certain point, and then for half of your life, if not more, you watch this material began to fray. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re trapped inside it, and when it goes, you go.
Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by willpower are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
One of the things I discovered hanging around in the world of the ill is that most people don’t have any understanding or respect for science. …But I think that as awful as the medical profession is, a person who is seriously ill has a much better chance of being properly treated in a major medical center in a large capital city than by going to a medicine man. It’s not that people can’t be cured by the power of suggestion, but most of us have more and more complicated kinds of consciousness, and we don’t seem to respond to that as well as people do in simpler societies where traditional folk medicine does provide real remedies. …But I do think that scientific knowledge really exists and really is progressive, and the body is an organism that can be studied and deciphered.
There is a physical basis for disease. Tuberculosis is particularly interesting because its cause was discovered in 1882, but the cure only in 1944. All that stuff of sending people to sanatoriums didn’t do them any good at all. So the myths and fantasies about TB—The Magic Mountain’s it’s-just-love-deferred, or Kafka’s it’s-really-mymental-illness-connecting-itself-into-a-physical-thing—started to vanish when almost no one died of TB anymore. And if people discover what causes cancer but don’t find the cure for it, then the myths about cancer will go on.
Cancer is a very big metaphor, and it’s true that cancer doesn’t have those contradictory applications. It truly is a metaphor for evil, and it’s not also a metaphor for something positive, but it’s one that has an enormous allure. So often when people talk about what they really hate or fear or want to condemn—as if they don’t know how to express a sense of evil—a metaphor is the most available and attractive way of expressing a sense of disaster, of what is to be repudiated.
Don’t interpret illness. Don’t make one thing into something else. I never meant that you shouldn’t try to explain or understand something, but just don’t say that the real meaning of x is y. Don’t abandon the thing in itself, because the thing in itself really exists. Illness is illness.
In the modern period, the things attributed to TB have been split off—the positive, romantic things being assigned to mental illness and all the negative things to cancer. But there is an intermediate metaphor, one that had a career as interesting as that of TB, and that is syphilis, because syphilis did have a positive side. Syphilis was not only something laden with a sense of guilt because of its association with illicit sexual activity and because it was so feared and so highly moralized, but it was also attached to mental illness. It is, in a way, the missing link between TB and what happened in the split: mental illness on one side and cancer on the other.
“Being 70, sounded very awesome, despite my two bouts of cancer, I feel fine, I feel as if a lot of things are still ahead”.
A lot of our ideas about what we can do at different ages and what age means are so arbitrary—as arbitrary as sexual stereotypes. I think that the young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people. The values associated with youth and with masculinity are considered to be the human norms, and anything else is taken to be at least less worthwhile or inferior. Old people have a terrific sense of inferiority. They’re embarrassed to be old.
What you can do when you’re young and what you can do when you’re old is as arbitrary and without much basis as what you can do if you’re women or what you can do it you’re man. If life you want to keep as many options open as possible, but of course you want to be able to be free to make real choices. I don’t think you can have everything, and you need to make choices. Americans tend to think that anything is possible, and that’s something I like about Americans, but there does come a point when you have to acknowledge that you’re no longer postponing something and that you really have make a choice.
Susan Sontag was never a second class citizen to any man. She was the exception that proved the rule.
The whole system of patriarchal values posits that women are better than children and less than men. They’re grown-up children with the charm and attractiveness of children.
In our culture they’ve been assigned to the world of feeling, because the world of men is defined as being one of action, strength, executive ability, and a capacity for detachment, and therefore women become the repositories of feeling and sensitivity.
I certainly think that there’s some difference, not a lot, between masculine and feminine sensuality—obviously, a difference that everything in our culture conspires to make even bigger. There’s probably some root difference just having to do with different physiologies and different sexual organs. But I don’t believe there is such a thing as feminine or masculine writing. … I don’t see any reason why a woman can’t write anything that a man writes, and vice versa.
Somebody like Hannah Arendt would be considered a male-identified intellectual. She happens to be a woman, but she’s playing the man’s game that starts with Plato and Aristotle and continues with Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes and John Stuart Mill. She’s the first woman political philosopher, but her game—its rules, discourse, references—is that of the tradition established with Plato’s Republic. She never asked herself: “Since I’m a woman, shouldn’t I be approaching these questions differently?” Indeed she didn’t, and I don’t think she should have.
The attempt to set up a separate culture is a way of not seeking power, and I think women have to seek power. As I’ve said in the past, I don’t think the emancipation of women is just a question of having equal rights. It’s a question of having equal power, and how are they going to have that unless they participate in the structures that already exist?
I feel an intense loyalty to women, but it doesn’t extend to giving my work only to feminist magazines because I also feel an intense loyalty to Western culture. In spite of the fact that it’s so deeply compromised and corrupted by sexism, it’s still what we have, and I feel that we have to work with this compromised thing, even if we are women, and make the necessary corrections and transformations.
I think that women should be proud of and identify with women who do things at a very high level of excellence, and not criticize them for not expressing a feminine sensibility or a feminine sense of sensuality. My idea is to just desegregate everything. The kind of feminist I am is to be an antisegregationist. …I think it’s fine if there are women’s collectives doing things, but I don’t believe that the goal is a creation or a vindication of feminine values. I think the goal is half the pie. I wouldn’t establish or disestablish a principle of feminine culture or feminine sensibility or feminine sensuality. I think it would be nice if men would be more feminine and women more masculine. To me, that would be a more attractive world.
“Don’t allow yourself to be patronized, condescended to, which, if you are a woman, happens and will continue to happen all the time all your lives. Don't take shit. Tell the bastards off”.
"Sue, if you read so much, you will never get married." Mr. Sontag, Susan Sontag’s step-father, once said to her. Sontag: “I burst out laughing. It was preposterous. It's never occurred to me that I would want to marry someone who didn't like someone who read a lot of books”.
I read an enormous amount and, in large part, quite mindlessly. I love to read the way people love to watch television, and I kind of nod out over it. If I’m depressed I pick up a book and I feel better. As Emily Dickinson wrote: “Blossoms and books, those solaces of sorrow.”
Yes. Reading is my entertainment, my distraction, my consolation, my little suicide. If I can’t stand the world I just curl up with a book, and it’s like a little spaceship that takes me away from everything. But my reading is not in any way systematic. I’m very lucky in that I read rapidly, and I suppose that compared to most people I’m a speed reader, which has its great advantages in that I can read a lot, but it also has its disadvantages because I don’t dwell over anything, I just take it all in and let it cook somewhere. I’m much more ignorant than most people think.
I have very few beliefs, but this is certainly a real belief: that most everything we think of as natural is historical and has roots—specifically in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the so-called Romantic revolutionary period—and we’re essentially still dealing with expectations and feelings that were formulated at that time, like ideas about happiness, individuality, radical social change, and pleasure. We were given a vocabulary that came into existence at a particular historical moment.
Sontag wrote in 1966 entitled “ A Letter to Borges”:
“If books disappear, history will disappear, and human beings will also disappear.…books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human”.
“The writer often takes some kind of adversary position. I like that adversary position, being able to express dissident opinions.”
Sontag wrote in her paper when she was in high school: “The battle for peace will never be won by calling anyone whom we don't like a Communist”.
I find writing very desexualizing. I don’t eat, or I eat very irregularly and badly and skip meals, and I try to sleep as little as possible. My back hurts, my fingers hurt, I get headaches. And it even cuts sexual desire. I find that if I’m very interested in someone sexually and then embark on a writing project, there’s pretty much a period of abstinence or chastity because I want all my energy to go into the writing. But that’s the kind of writer I am. I’m totally undisciplined, and I just do it in periods of very long, intense, obsessional stretches.
The task of the writer is to pay attention to the world, but obviously I think that the task of the writer, as I conceive of it for myself, is also to be in an aggressive and adversarial relationship to falsehoods of all kinds … and, once again, knowing perfectly well that this is an endless task, since you’re never going to end falsehood or false consciousness or systems of interpretation. But there should always be some people in any generation who are attacking these things…But for me, the most awful thing would be to feel that I’d agree with the things I’ve already said and written—that is what would make me most uncomfortable because that would mean that I had stopped thinking.