The Voice Over

But Sontag was exactly this—an author interested in the complex and the boring (“We should not expect art to entertain or divert any more. At least, not high art”⁴), and had been since birth, with no intention of changing course. In her diaries from her youth, she complains about wasting a Sunday night with her stepfather: a driving lesson, an evening at the movies (which she “pretended to enjoy”). Her morning routine is full of more serious things (“seriousness” is another one of her important words): The Magic Mountain and recordings of Mozart’s Don Giovanni; no more compromises, she promises herself.⁵ Here we see a marvelous blending of a pronounced focus on culture (where “culture” and “Europe” are synonymous) and a less distinct shape, which organizes Sontag’s life goals, one that’s both a close relative of the American dream—a religion of achievement and victory—and quite far from it. “I had the company of the immortal dead—the ‘great people’ (the Nobel Prize winners) of whom I would some day be one. My ambition: not to be the best among them, but only to be one of them, to be in the company of peers and comrades.”⁶

The nostalgia for heroes, for the familiar dead, the dream of a textual immortality, of glory—it touches us because it makes us think of a time that has been recently and hopelessly lost, an old world bound by the borders of a great era. The scale that seems native to Sontag, the yardstick by which she measures herself, are those of the nineteenth century, with its great ideas and even greater expectations. The novelty and advantage of her position is that she is an anachronism; the way she carries herself (and her self) belongs to a different time. Sontag imposes on herself the obligation of nothing other than greatness (one of her later articles, on W. G. Sebald, begins by asking whether literary greatness is still possible in the present day⁷—and in a way her fifty years of authorial practice amount to variously orchestrated attempts to answer this question for herself). The tasks she sets for herself often seem neither literary nor feasible. “To be noble-minded. To be profound. Never to be ‘nice.’” “Remember: this could be my one chance, and the last, to be a first-rate writer” (written when she was past forty). “Well, what’s wrong with projects of self-reformation?” “I smile too much,” “I lack dignity,” “I don’t try hard enough.”⁸

And also:

Proust didn’t know he was writing the greatest novel ever written. (Neither did his contemporaries, even the most admiring, like Rivière.) And it wouldn’t have done him any good if he had. But he did want to write something great.

I want to write something great.⁹

3.

The daily journals from her youth and adulthood are where Susan Sontag’s life project comes to its long-awaited, startling conclusion. We are now presented with texts that are still fresh, that haven’t yet reached a broader readership: the first volume of the diaries, Reborn, was just translated into Russian, and the second, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, was just published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. And it feels like a long-running Spiderman comic book or the crusade to find the Holy Grail has finally ended in victory—now, in real time, before our very eyes, on the TV screen that Sontag loathed so much. This corpus of diaries and notebooks (the third volume has not been published yet) spans decades, and I believe it may be the most significant thing she ever wrote; it truly resembles “something great,” even though Sontag, who considered herself above all a writer of novels and stories, probably had something different in mind. “Every interesting aesthetic tendency now is a species of radicalism. The question each artist must ask is: What is my radicalism, the one dictated by my gifts and temperament?”¹⁰ she writes elsewhere.