[Reader-list] Susan Sontag dies

[Vivek Narayanan]

New York Times
December 28, 2004

Susan Sontag, Writer and Social Critic, Dies at 71
By Margalit Fox

Susan Sontag, the internationally renowned
novelist, essayist and critic whose impassioned
advocacy of the avant-garde and equally
impassioned political pronouncements made her one
of the most lionized presences - and one of the
most polarizing - in 20th-century letters, died
today in New York. She was 71 and lived in
Manhattan.

The cause was complications of acute myelogenous
leukemia, her son, David Rieff, said. Ms. Sontag,
who died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Center, had been ill with cancer intermittently
for 30 years, a struggle that informed one of her
most famous books, the critical study "Illness as
Metaphor" (1978).

A highly visible public figure since the
mid-1960's, Ms. Sontag was the author of four
novels, dozens of essays and a volume of short
stories, and was also an occasional filmmaker,
playwright and theater director. For four
decades, her work occupied a place of prominence
in the contemporary canon, discussed in such
diverse forums as graduate seminars, the pages of
popular magazines and the Hollywood movie "Bull
Durham."

Ms. Sontag's best-known books, all published by
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, include the novels
"Death Kit" (1967), "The Volcano Lover" (1992)
and "In America" (2000); the essay collections
"Against Interpretation" (1966), "Styles of
Radical Will" (1969) and "Under the Sign of
Saturn" (1982); the critical studies "On
Photography" (1977) and "AIDS and Its Metaphors"
(1989); and the short-story collection "I,
Etcetera" (1978).

Her most recent book, published last year, was
"Regarding the Pain of Others," a long essay on
the imagery of war and disaster. One of her last
published essays, "Regarding the Torture of
Others," written in response to the torture of
Iraqi prisoners by Americans at Abu Ghraib
prison, appeared in The New York Times Magazine
of May 23, 2004.

Ms. Sontag's writing marked a radical break with
traditional postwar criticism. She advocated a
sensualist approach to the study of art,
championed aesthetic form over content and - most
subversive - gleefully blurred the boundaries
between high and low culture. Learned,
thoughtful, deeply cerebral, often provocative,
her work repeatedly explored the transcendent
experience of making, and looking at,
contemporary art, with its jagged edges and
attendant themes of alienation and despair. She
was concerned throughout her career with
sensation, in both meanings of the word.

"What Susan did was, she dealt as a literary and
philosophical intellectual with the deep problems
of human life in our times," Arthur Danto, the
Johnsonian professor emeritus of philosophy at
Columbia University and an art critic for The
Nation, said in a telephone interview today. "She
was never a dispassionate or disinterested
writer. She always used her own experience as a
way of giving meaning to issues that had meaning
for everybody."

Unlike most serious intellectuals, Ms. Sontag was
also a popular celebrity, partly because of her
striking, telegenic appearance, partly because of
her outspoken, at times inflammatory, public
statements. She was undoubtedly the only writer
of her generation to win major literary prizes
(among them a National Book Critics' Circle
Award, a National Book Award and a MacArthur
"genius" grant) and to appear in films by Woody
Allen and Andy Warhol; be the subject of
rapturous profiles in Rolling Stone and People
magazine; and pose for an Absolut Vodka ad. Over
the decades, her image - strong features, wide
mouth, intense gaze and dark mane crowned in
later years by a sweeping streak of white -
became an instantly recognizable artifact of
20th-century popular culture.

Trained in literature and philosophy, Ms. Sontag
was a master synthesist who tackled broad,
difficult and elusive subjects: the nature of
art, the nature of consciousness and, above all,
the nature of the modern condition. Where many
American critics before her had mined the past,
Ms. Sontag became an evangelist of the new,
training her eye on the culture unfolding around
her, a radical stance at the time.

For Ms. Sontag, "culture" encompassed a vast,
potentially limitless, landscape. She wrote
serious studies of popular art forms, like cinema
and science fiction, that earlier critics
disdained. She produced impassioned essays on the
(mostly French) writers and filmmakers she
admired, like Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes
and Jean-Luc Godard. She wrote experimental
novels on dreams and the nature of consciousness.
She published painstaking critical dissections of
photography and dance; illness, politics and
pornography; and, most famously, the covert
subculture of camp. Her work, with its emphasis
on the outré, the jagged-edged and the
here-and-now, helped make the study of popular
culture a respectable academic pursuit.

What united Ms. Sontag's output was a propulsive
desire to define the forces - aesthetic, moral,
political - that shape the modernist sensibility.
And in so doing, she hoped to understand what it
meant to be human in the waning years of the 20th
century.

To many observers, Ms. Sontag's work was bold and
thrilling. Interviewed in The New York Times
Magazine in 1992, the eminent Mexican writer
Carlos Fuentes compared Ms. Sontag to the
Renaissance humanist Erasmus. "This is one of the
worst-informed eras in history, just like the
beginning of the 15th century," he said.
"Countries are ignorant about each other. And,
like Erasmus, exactly when it is needed, Susan
Sontag is a communicator in this broken-down
world. Erasmus traveled with 32 volumes, which
contained all the knowledge worth knowing. Susan
Sontag carries it in her brain! I know of no
other intellectual who is so clear-minded, with a
capacity to link, to connect, to relate."

Other critics were less enthralled. Some branded
Ms. Sontag an unoriginal thinker, a popularizer
with a gift for aphorism who could boil down
difficult writers for mass consumption. (Irving
Howe called her "a publicist able to make
brilliant quilts from grandmother's patches.")
Some regarded her tendency to revisit her
earlier, often controversial, positions as
ambivalent. Some saw her scholarly approach to
popular art forms as pretentious. (Ms. Sontag
once remarked that she could appreciate Patti
Smith because she had read Nietzsche.)

She had a knack - or perhaps a penchant - for
getting into trouble. She could be provocative to
the point of being inflammatory, as when she
championed the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl in
a 1965 essay (she would revise her position some
years later); celebrated the Communist societies
of Cuba and North Vietnam (just as provocatively,
she later denounced Communism as a form of
fascism); and, in the wake of the terror attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001, wrote in The New Yorker,
"Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of
Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." And
in 2000, the publication of Ms. Sontag's final
novel, "In America," raised accusations of
plagiarism, charges she vehemently denied.

Over four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag
remained irreconcilably divided. She was
described, variously, as explosive,
anticlimactic, original, trendy, iconoclastic,
captivating, hollow, rhapsodic, naïve,
sophisticated, approachable, abrasive, aloof,
attention-seeking, charming, condescending,
populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere,
posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing,
left-wing, mannered, formidable, brilliant,
profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless,
dogmatic, challenging, ambivalent, accessible,
lofty, erudite, lucid, inscrutable, solipsistic,
intellectual, visceral, reasoned, pretentious,
portentous, maddening, lyrical, abstract,
narrative, acerbic, opportunistic, chilly,
effusive, careerist, sober, gimmicky, relevant,
passé, facile, illogical, ambivalent, polemical,
didactic, tenacious, slippery, celebratory,
banal, untenable, doctrinaire, ecstatic,
melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan,
rhapsodic, aloof, glib, cantankerous and clever.
No one ever called her dull.

Ms. Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in Manhattan
on Jan. 16, 1933, the daughter of Jack Rosenblatt
and the former Mildred Jacobson. Her father was a
fur trader in China, and her mother joined him
there for long periods, leaving Susan and her
younger sister, Judith, in the care of relatives.

When Susan was 5, her father died in China, of
tuberculosis. Seeking relief for Susan's asthma,
her mother moved the family to Tucson, Ariz.,
where they spent the next several years. In
Arizona, Susan's mother met Capt. Nathan Sontag,
a World War II veteran sent there to recuperate.
The couple were married - Susan took her
stepfather's name - and the family moved to Los
Angeles.

For Susan, a student so gifted she graduated from
high school before her 16th birthday, the
philistinism of American culture was a torment
she vowed early to escape. "My greatest dream,"
she later wrote, "was to grow up and come to New
York and write for Partisan Review and be read by
5,000 people."

She would get her wish - Ms. Sontag burst onto
the scene with "Notes on Camp," published in
Partisan Review in 1964 - but not before she
earned a bachelor's degree and two master's
degrees from prestigious American universities;
studied at Oxford on a fellowship; and married,
became a mother and divorced eight years later,
all by the time she turned 26.

After high school, Ms. Sontag spent a semester at
the University of California, Berkeley, before
transferring to the University of Chicago, from
which she received a bachelor's degree in
philosophy in 1951. At Chicago, she wandered into
a class taught by the sociologist Philip Rieff, a
28-year-old instructor who would write the
celebrated study "Freud: The Mind of the
Moralist" (Viking, 1959). He was, she would say,
the first person with whom she could really talk;
they were married 10 days later. Ms. Sontag was
17 and looked even younger, clad habitually in
blue jeans, her black hair spilling down her
back. Word swept around campus that Dr. Rieff had
married a 14-year-old American Indian.

Moving with her husband to Boston, Ms. Sontag
went on to earn two master's degrees from
Harvard, the first in English, in 1954, the
second in philosophy the following year. She
began work on a doctorate in philosophy but did
not complete her dissertation.

In 1952, she and Dr. Rieff became the parents of
a son. The couple divorced in 1958. Ms. Sontag is
survived by her son, David Rieff, who lives in
Manhattan and was for many years her editor at
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (A journalist, he is the
author of "Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure
of the West," published by Simon & Schuster in
1995.) Also surviving is her younger sister,
Judith Cohen, of Maui.


A RETROSPECTIVE
Susan Sontag
A look at the career of Susan Sontag, including
reviews of "Against Interpretation," "On
Photography" and "In America," and articles about
and by the author.
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2003/03/23/books/authors/index.html?8dpc