The Voice Over

She also liked to think of herself as a diva (and in her late novel In America she tries on the role of an opera singer conquering the New World)—until the simplification that accompanies immortality started to bother her. Any attempt to define her, any reading that linked her to a sole, definite identity provoked annoyance or anger. “Beware of ghettoization,” she warned her son’s girlfriend Sigrid Nunez, then a fledgling writer. “Resist the pressure to think of yourself as a woman writer.”¹⁶ The evolution of Sontag follows the imperative of rejection, of an unwillingness to think of herself in ready-made (and not her very own) terms. Academia, feminism, the gay rights movement—things she felt the need to align with for a while (“I write—and talk—in order to find out what I think”¹⁷), inevitably fell short, and she, like a chess queen, moved on to the next square. In one entry from the late seventies, she finds herself, to her own amazement, a libertarian: “I can be no more. I should not want to be more. I am not interested in ‘constructing’ any new form of society, or joining any party. There is no reason for me to try to locate myself on either the left or the right—or to feel I should. That shouldn’t be my language.”¹⁸ Perhaps, this was not only because she had turned her life into a novel about becoming a writer (inspired by Martin Iden, a book she loved as a child), and still thought of it as a work in progress in her late years, and the rules of plotting required a change. The point of a text, according to Sontag, is to resist interpretation, and her life was not to be an exception. That seemed important to her: “To deprive one’s plight of some of its particularity.”¹⁹ So Brodsky, her peer and comrade, said with annoyance about his prison experience: “I refuse to dramatize all this!”²⁰

4.

Throughout her life, the rejection of I-statements was both a choice and a torment. In all her literary and personal fearlessness, with all the sharp determination of her judgments, it seems that this was the only thing Sontag refused herself. In order to tell her own story, she chose others—the fates of those she admired, in whom she saw a different, better self. To a certain extent this was a sign of respect and trust in the reader: he was offered the chance to reconstruct the author, to round her out, to put her together like a puzzle from what she said in passing in articles, interviews, novels (the best of which, as if embarrassed to be works of fiction, were built on real stories).

The journals crumple this logic like a napkin. The most common and most interesting thing that happens there has nothing to do with the plot, or, more precisely, is the plot itself. These entries can be used as a great example, an experimental (and incessantly active) model, of the workings of the human mind. This is what the intellect looks like, almost autonomous in its freedom, always taking over new surfaces, clearing and honing formulas, endlessly redefining its own position. Thoughts gather and thicken like clouds, and coalesce into unexpected twin kernels; ideas fill up forms that lie fallow; consciousness does drills and tutors itself.

But in both volumes, love and loving take up a great deal of space—and oh how loudly, how hastily and plaintively they speak. The constant discontent with oneself, and the yearning for something other, and the faint dotted line of guilt, shame and failure. Here Sontag’s journals join the long ranks of journals kept by women, and her voice is supplanted by the impersonal voice of pain, which cannot be confused with anything else—everyone knows it, and not just by hearsay. This register struck and confused the first reviewers of Reborn: it seemed to not match their ideas of Sontag the Amazon who wielded her pen like a bayonet; they were embarrassed for her—she turned out or seemed to be as small as the rest of us.

And this as us is a very comforting conclusion: it seems that, at their core, all people are like this—even those whose greatness is unequivocal and obvious. They are awkward, ridiculous, recoiling from their own vulnerability, from their inability to be immortal, from their intentional and involuntary, seen or unseen guilt. That’s what it sounds like, the inner monologue of a person in her basic configuration. Susan Sontag devoted her life to its reworking, its second birth, fiercely ignoring anything that would hinder or distract her—including her own mortality and the metaphysical lifesavers she had denied herself as a child. And the notebooks containing her journals became the by-product, the detritus of this process: a work of fiction and nonfiction, a novel of ideas, a bildungsroman, a love story, a computer quest, a search for the Holy Grail.

2012

Translated by Maria Vassileva

From That Side

Notes on Sebald