[Mental] Sontag Dies
Susan Sontag died yesterday. I have two memories of her: one, from the late 80s, sitting across the aisle from her at a performance of Robert Wilson's interpretation of Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine; the second, from the early 90s, sitting across the aisle from her at a performance of Ron Vawter's Roy Cohn/Jack Smith My memory may have conflated the two events, or at least Sontag's being there, but you would have expected to see to Sontag at both.
Back when I hung out with people who cared about her, the general consensus seemed to have been that she was less a thinker than a popularizer of other people's ideas. (Barthes, for example.) I think I'm less judgmental now; few people ever rise to the top tier, and fewer still manage to stay there. I liked that she was an anachronism: that she managed to be an intellectual, and make a living at it, without benefit of academia. I think this freed much of her writing from needless blather. No one I know, then or now, read her fiction, that I recall. Personally, I thought her politics were far more interesting than her art — interestingly, the same appreciation I have for Vanessa Redgrave.
NPR just did an appreciation, and mentioned how attractive she was, a comment to which Catherine Stimpson took strong exception. I think this was misunderstood. In my memory, when Sontag entered a room, people turned and looked. She was striking, of course: her face, that shock of hair ..... but she seemed irradiated ..... I recall meeting James Baldwin once, and standing next to Leonard Bernstein in the back of the Imperial Theatre ..... few people, even celebrities, can command that much charisma. You didn't sexualize Sontag, you didn't intellectualize her — had she opened her mouth, I'm not sure I would have even heard the words — but what it was, it was like like getting completely lost in conversation with another person, or lost in their body, only in public, and only more so.
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art.
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
Back when I hung out with people who cared about her, the general consensus seemed to have been that she was less a thinker than a popularizer of other people's ideas. (Barthes, for example.) I think I'm less judgmental now; few people ever rise to the top tier, and fewer still manage to stay there. I liked that she was an anachronism: that she managed to be an intellectual, and make a living at it, without benefit of academia. I think this freed much of her writing from needless blather. No one I know, then or now, read her fiction, that I recall. Personally, I thought her politics were far more interesting than her art — interestingly, the same appreciation I have for Vanessa Redgrave.
NPR just did an appreciation, and mentioned how attractive she was, a comment to which Catherine Stimpson took strong exception. I think this was misunderstood. In my memory, when Sontag entered a room, people turned and looked. She was striking, of course: her face, that shock of hair ..... but she seemed irradiated ..... I recall meeting James Baldwin once, and standing next to Leonard Bernstein in the back of the Imperial Theatre ..... few people, even celebrities, can command that much charisma. You didn't sexualize Sontag, you didn't intellectualize her — had she opened her mouth, I'm not sure I would have even heard the words — but what it was, it was like like getting completely lost in conversation with another person, or lost in their body, only in public, and only more so.
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art.
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
posted by Chris Hodge at 8:55 AM
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