The Voice Over

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.

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