Sontag was active in writing and speaking about, or traveling to, areas of conflict, including during theVietnam War and theSiege of Sarajevo. She wrote extensively about literature, cinema, photography and media, illness, war,human rights, andleft-wing politics. Her essays and speeches drew backlash and controversy,[2] and she has been called "one of the most influential critics of her generation".[3]
Early life and education
Sontag was bornSusan Rosenblatt inNew York City, the daughter of Mildred (née Jacobson) and Jack Rosenblatt, bothJews ofLithuanian[4] andPolish descent. Her father managed a fur trading business in Tientsin, China, where he died oftuberculosis in 1939, when Susan was five years old.[1] Seven years later, Sontag's mother married US Army Captain Nathan Sontag. Susan and her sister, Judith, took their stepfather's surname, although he did not adopt them formally.[1] Sontag did not have a religious upbringing and said she had not entered asynagogue until her mid-20s.[5]
At 17, Sontag married writerPhilip Rieff, a sociology instructor at the University of Chicago, after a 10-day courtship; their marriage lasted eight years.[9] While studying at Chicago, Sontag attended a summer school taught by the sociologistHans Heinrich Gerth [de] who became a friend and subsequently influenced her study of German thinkers.[10][11] Upon completing her Chicago degree, Sontag taught freshman English at theUniversity of Connecticut for the 1952–53 academic year. She attendedHarvard University for graduate school, initially studying literature withPerry Miller andHarry Levin before moving into philosophy andtheology underPaul Tillich,Jacob Taubes,Raphael Demos, andMorton White.[12]
After completing herMaster of Arts in philosophy, Sontag began doctoral research in metaphysics, ethics, Greek philosophy, Continental philosophy, and theology at Harvard.[13] The philosopherHerbert Marcuse lived with Sontag and Rieff for a year while working on his 1955 bookEros and Civilization.[14]: 38 Sontag researched for Rieff's 1959 studyFreud: The Mind of the Moralist before their divorce in 1958, and contributed to the book to such an extent that she has been considered an unofficial co-author.[15] The couple had a son,David Rieff, who went on to be his mother's editor atFarrar, Straus and Giroux, as well as a writer in his own right. According to Sontag'sbiographerBenjamin Moser, Sontag was the true author of the text on Freud, which she wrote after David's birth, and in the separation the latter was the subject of an exchange: she handed over the authorship of the book to Rieff, he gave her their son.[16]
At age 30, Sontag published anexperimental novel calledThe Benefactor (1963), following it four years later withDeath Kit (1967). Despite a relatively small output, Sontag thought of herself principally as anovelist and writer of fiction.[citation needed] Her short story "The Way We Live Now" was published to great acclaim on November 24, 1986, inThe New Yorker. Written in an experimental narrative style, it remains a significant text on theAIDS epidemic. She achieved late popular success as a best-selling novelist withThe Volcano Lover (1992). At age 67, Sontag published her final novel,In America (2000). The last two novels were set in the past, which Sontag said gave her greater freedom to write in thepolyphonic voice:
In a print shop near theBritish Museum, in London, I discovered the volcano prints from the book thatSir William Hamilton did. My very first thought—I don't think I have ever said this publicly—was that I would propose toFMR (a wonderful art magazine published in Italy which has beautiful art reproductions) that they reproduce the volcano prints and I write some text to accompany them. But then I started to adhere to the real story of Lord Hamilton and his wife, and I realized that if I would locate stories in the past, all sorts of inhibitions would drop away, and I could do epic, polyphonic things. I wouldn't just be inside somebody's head. So there was that novel,The Volcano Lover.
It was through her essays that Sontag gained early fame and notoriety. She frequently wrote about the intersection ofhigh andlow art and expanded the dichotomy concept of form and art in every medium. She elevatedcamp to the status of recognition with her widely read 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp' ", which accepted art as including common, absurd, andburlesque themes.
The concept of photography image
In 1977, Sontag published the series of essaysOn Photography. These essays are an exploration of photographs as a collection of the world, mainly by travelers or tourists, and the way we experience it. In the essays, she outlined her theory of taking pictures as you travel:
The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic—Germans, Japanese and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures. (p. 10)
Sontag writes that the convenience of modern photography has created an overabundance of visual material, and "just about everything has been photographed".[23]: 3 This has altered our expectations of what we have the right to view, want to view, or should view.
Ethic and the problem of norms
Ethical intentions are key points for Sontag. In her bookOn Photography[23] she writes of the connection of the photography with the idea of norm.[24] Discussing photographs ofDiane Arbus, Sontag writes on borders and landmarks of the photo program of beauty. Beauty is the ground of the photography program and at the same time one of the biggest conceptual questions of photography.[25] The problem of identification ofbeauty andugliness forms one more question—the idea of norm.[26]
"In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notion of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe" and has changed our "viewing ethics".[23]: 3
Photography: reality and truth
According to Sontag, photographs have increased our access to knowledge and experiences of history and faraway places, but the images may replace direct experience and limit reality;[23]: 10–24 photography desensitizes its audience to horrific human experiences, and children are exposed to experiences before they are ready for them.[23]: 20
Sontag continued to theorize about the role of photography in life in her essay "Looking at War: Photography's View of Devastation and Death", which appeared in the December 9, 2002, issue ofThe New Yorker. There she concludes that the problem of our reliance on images and especially photographic images is not that "people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs ... that the photographic image eclipses other forms of understanding—and remembering. ... To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture" (p. 94).
She became a role model for many feminists and aspiring female writers during the 1960s and 1970s.[14]
Criticism
White civilization as a cancer
Sontag drew acclaim and criticism for writing in 1967 inPartisan Review:
If Americais the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far.... The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, Baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets,et al, don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white raceis the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.[27]
According to journalistMark M. Goldblatt, Sontag later made a "sarcastic retraction, saying the line slanders cancer patients".[28]Patrick J. Buchanan said: "Rewrite that sentence with 'Jewish race' in place of 'white race' and the passage would fit nicely intoMein Kampf".[29] According toEliot Weinberger, "She came to regret that last phrase, and wrote a whole book against the use of illness as metaphor". But, he wrote, this did not lead to any "public curiosity about those who are not cancerously white", and "She may well have been the last unashamed Eurocentrist".[30]
Allegations of plagiarism
Ellen Lee accused Sontag of plagiarism after discovering at least 12 passages inIn America that were similar to or copied from passages in four other books aboutHelena Modjeska without attribution.[31][32] Sontag said of the passages, "All of us who deal with real characters in history transcribe and adopt original sources in the original domain. I've used these sources and I've completely transformed them. There's a larger argument to be made that all of literature is a series of references and allusions."[33]
In a 2007 letter to the editor of theTimes Literary Supplement, John Lavagnino identified an unattributed citation fromRoland Barthes's 1970 essay "S/Z" in Sontag's 2004 speech "At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning", delivered as theNadine Gordimer Lecture in March 2004.[34] Further research led Lavagnino to identify several passages that appeared to have been taken without attribution from an essay on hypertext fiction byLaura Miller published in theNew York Times Book Review six years earlier.[35] Writing for theObserver, Michael Calderone interviewed Sontag's publisher, who said, "This was a speech, not a formal essay", and that "Susan herself never prepared it for publication".[36]
On Communism
At a New York pro-Solidarity rally in 1982, Sontag said that "people on the left", like herself, "have willingly or unwillingly told a lot of lies".[37] She added that they:
believed in, or at least applied, a double standard to the angelic language of Communism ... Communism is Fascism—successful Fascism, if you will. What we have called Fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown—that has, largely, failed. I repeat: not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies—especially when their populations are moved to revolt—but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face... Imagine, if you will, someone who read only theReader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read onlyThe Nation or [t]heNew Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?[37]
Sontag's speech reportedly "drew boos and shouts from the audience".The Nation published her speech, excluding the passage contrasting the magazine withReader's Digest. Responses to her statement were varied. Some said that Sontag's sentiments had been held by many on the left for years, while others accused her of betraying "radical ideas".[37]
On the September 11 attacks
Sontag was angrily criticized for what she wrote in the September 24, 2001, issue ofThe New Yorker about the immediate aftermath of9/11.[38] She called the attacks a "monstrous dose of reality" and criticized U.S. public officials and media commentators for trying to convince the American public that "everything is O.K." Specifically, she opposed the idea that the perpetrators were "cowards", a commentGeorge W. Bush had made. Rather, she argued the country should see the terrorists' actions not as "a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions."[39]
Criticism from other writers
In a 2000 article forHarper's Magazine's that was later included in his bookHooking Up,Tom Wolfe called Sontag "just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid atPartisan Review."[40]
In "Sontag, Bloody Sontag", an essay in her 1994 bookVamps & Tramps, criticCamille Paglia describes her initial admiration of and subsequent disillusionment with Sontag.[41] She makes several criticisms, includingHarold Bloom's comment "Mere Sontagisme!" on Paglia's doctoral dissertation, and says that Sontag "had become synonymous with a shallow kind of hip posturing".[42] Paglia also recounts a visit by Sontag toBennington College, in which she arrived hours late and ignored the agreed-upon topic of the event.[43]
Sontag's cool self-exile was a disaster for the American women's movement. Only a woman of her prestige could have performed the necessary critique and debunking of the first instant-canon feminist screeds, such as those byKate Millett orSandra Gilbert andSusan Gubar, whose middlebrow mediocrity crippled women's studies from the start ... No patriarchal villains held Sontag back; her failures are her own.
In his bookSkin in the Game,Nassim Nicholas Taleb criticizes Sontag and other people with extravagant lifestyles who nevertheless declare themselves "against the market system". Taleb assesses Sontag's shared New York mansion at $28 million, and writes that "it is immoral to be in opposition to the market system and not live (somewhere in Vermont or Northwestern Afghanistan) in a hut or cave isolated from it" and that it is even worse to "claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences".[44][45]
Activism
Sontag became politically active in the 1960s, opposing theVietnam War.[14]: 128–129 In January 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse to pay a proposed 10% Vietnam War surtax.[46] In May 1968, she visited Hanoi; afterward, she wrote favorably about North Vietnamese society in her essayTrip to Hanoi.[14]: 130–132
The former Sarajevo newspaper building during theSiege of Sarajevo, when Sontag lived in the city
During 1989 Sontag was the President ofPEN American Center, the main U.S. branch of theInternational PEN writers' organization. After Iranian leaderAyatollah Khomeini issued afatwa death sentence against writerSalman Rushdie for blasphemy after the publication of his novelThe Satanic Verses that year, Sontag's uncompromising support of Rushdie was crucial in rallying American writers to his cause.[47]
A few years later, during theSiege of Sarajevo, Sontag gained attention for directing a production ofSamuel Beckett'sWaiting for Godot in a candlelit theater in the Bosnian capital, cut off from its electricity supply for three and a half years. The reaction of Sarajevo's besieged residents was noted:
To the people of Sarajevo, Ms. Sontag has become a symbol, interviewed frequently by the local newspapers and television, invited to speak at gatherings everywhere, asked for autographs on the street. After the opening performance of the play, the city's Mayor,Muhamed Kreševljaković, came onstage to declare her an honorary citizen, the only foreigner other than the recently departed United Nations commander,Lieut. Gen. Phillippe Morillon, to be so named. "It is for your bravery, in coming here, living here, and working with us," he said.[48]
Sontag became aware of herbisexuality during her early teens. At 15, she wrote in her diary, "I feel I have lesbian tendencies (how reluctantly I write this)." At 16, she had a sexual encounter with a woman: "Perhaps I was drunk, after all, because it was so beautiful when H began making love to me... It had been 4:00 before we had gotten to bed... I became fully conscious that I desired her, she knew it, too."[51][52]
Sontag lived with 'H', the writer and modelHarriet Sohmers Zwerling, whom she first met atU. C. Berkeley from 1958 to 1959. Later, Sontag was the partner ofMaría Irene Fornés, a Cuban-Americanavant garde playwright and director. Upon splitting with Fornés, she was involved with an Italian aristocrat, Carlotta Del Pezzo, and the German academicEva Kollisch.[53] Sontag was romantically involved with the American artistsJasper Johns andPaul Thek.[54][55] During the early 1970s, she lived withNicole Stéphane, aRothschild banking heiress turned movie actress,[56] and, later, the choreographerLucinda Childs.[57] Sontag also had a relationship with the writerJoseph Brodsky, who deepened her appreciation of theanti-communism of the writers persecuted by the Soviet regime, whom she had read and in some cases even known, without really understanding them.[58]
With photographerAnnie Leibovitz, Sontag maintained a close romantic relationship stretching from the later 1980s until her final years.[59] Sontag and Leibovitz met in 1989, when both had already established notability in their careers. Leibovitz has suggested that Sontag mentored her and constructively criticized her work. During Sontag's lifetime, neither woman publicly disclosed whether the relationship was a friendship or romantic.Newsweek in 2006 made reference to Leibovitz's decade-plus relationship with Sontag: "The two first met in the late '80s, when Leibovitz photographed her for a book jacket. They never lived together, though they each had an apartment within view of the other's."[60]
When interviewed for her 2006 bookA Photographer's Life: 1990–2005, Leibovitz said the book told a number of stories, and that "with Susan, it was a love story."[61] WhileThe New York Times in 2009 referred to Sontag as Leibovitz's "companion",[62] Leibovitz wrote inA Photographer's Life, "Words like 'companion' and 'partner' were not in our vocabulary. We were two people who helped each other through our lives. The closest word is still 'friend.'"[63] The same year, Leibovitz said the descriptor "lover" was accurate.[64] She later reiterated, "Call us 'lovers.' I like 'lovers.' You know, 'lovers' sounds romantic. I mean, I want to be perfectly clear. I love Susan."[65]
In an interview inThe Guardian in 2000, Sontag was open about bisexuality:
'Shall I tell you about getting older?', she says, and she is laughing. 'When you get older, 45 plus, men stop fancying you. Or put it another way, the men I fancy don't fancy me. I want a young man. I love beauty. So what's new?' She says she has been in love seven times in her life. 'No, hang on,' she says. 'Actually, it's nine. Five women, four men.'[1]
Many of Sontag's obituaries failed to mention her significant same-sex relationships, most notably that with Leibovitz.Daniel Okrent,public editor ofThe New York Times, defended the newspaper's obituary, saying that at the time of Sontag's death, a reporter could make no independent verification of her romantic relationship with Leibovitz (despite attempts to do so).[66] After Sontag's death,Newsweek published an article about Leibovitz that made clear references to her relationship with Sontag.[59]
Sontag was quoted by editor-in-chief Brendan Lemon ofOut magazine as saying "I grew up in a time when the modus operandi was the 'open secret.' I'm used to that, and quite OK with it. Intellectually, I know why I haven't spoken more about my sexuality, but I do wonder if I haven't repressed something there to my detriment. Maybe I could have given comfort to some people if I had dealt with the subject of my private sexuality more, but it's never been my prime mission to give comfort, unless somebody's in drastic need. I'd rather give pleasure, or shake things up."[67]
Legacy
Following Sontag's death, Steve Wasserman of theLos Angeles Times called her "one of America's most influential intellectuals, internationally renowned for the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and her ardent activism in the cause of human rights."[68] Eric Homberger ofThe Guardian called Sontag "the 'Dark Lady' of American cultural life for over four decades."[69] He observed that "despite a brimming and tartly phrased political sensibility, she was fundamentally an aesthete [who] offered a reorientation of American cultural horizons."[69]
OfAgainst Interpretation, Brandon Robshaw ofThe Independent later wrote that "Sontag was remarkably prescient; her project of analysing popular culture as well as high culture, the Doors as well as Dostoevsky, is now common practice throughout the educated world."[70] InCritique and Postcritique (2017),Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker argue that the title essay from the aforementioned collection played an important role in the field ofpostcritique, a movement withinliterary criticism andcultural studies that attempts to find new forms of reading and interpretation that go beyond the methods ofcritique,critical theory, andideological criticism.[71]
Reviewing Sontag'sOn Photography in 1998, Michael Starenko wrote that it "has become so deeply absorbed into this discourse that Sontag's claims about photography, as well as her mode of argument, have become part of the rhetorical 'tool kit' that photography theorists and critics carry around in their heads."[72]
2004: Two days after her death, Muhidin Hamamdzic, the mayor ofSarajevo announced the city would name a street after her, calling her an "author and a humanist who actively participated in the creation of the history ofSarajevo andBosnia." Theatre Square outside the National Theatre was promptly proposed to be renamed Susan Sontag Theatre Square.[80] It took five years, however, for that tribute to become official.[81][82] On January 13, 2010, the city of Sarajevo posted a plate with a new street name for Theater Square: Theater Square of Susan Sontag.[81]
2024: Acrater onMercury was named in her honor in November 2024.[83]
Works
Fiction
Sontag, Susan (1991) [1963].The Benefactor. New York, N.Y.: Anchor Books.ISBN978-0-385-26710-6.
A digital archive of 17,198 of Sontag's emails is kept by theUCLA Department of Special Collections at theCharles E. Young Research Library.[88] Her archive—and the efforts to make it publicly available while protecting it frombit rot—are the subject of the articleOn Excess: Susan Sontag's Born-Digital Archive, by Jeremy Schmidt and Jacquelyn Ardam.[89]
Biographical play, documentary, and biopic film
Sontag: Reborn is a play dramatizing Sontag's life as recorded in her early journals (which were later edited and published as the bookReborn). Described as "a spellbinding X-ray of a writer’s psyche",[90]Sontag: Reborn traces Sontag's private life from age 14 to her emergence as a renowned author and activist. The young Sontag wrestles with her emerging sexuality and precocious intelligence. The refuge of her diary became integral to her development as a writer.[91] The play was adapted from Sontag's journals by theatre artistMoe Angelos, who also plays Sontag in the production, directed byMarianne Weems, and produced byThe Builders Association.Sontag: Reborn was first staged at the Under the Radar Festival in 2012,[92] moved to off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop in 2013, and was staged into 2014.
^See Susan Sontag, 'Literature is Freedom' inAt the Same Time, ed. P. Dilonardo and A. Jump, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, p.206 and Morton White,A Philosopher's Story, Pennsylvania University Press, 1999, p. 148. See also Rollyson and Paddock, pp. 39–40 and Daniel Horowitz "Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World", University of Pennsylvania, 2012, p. 314.
^abSante, Luc."Sontag: The Precocious Years", Sunday Book Review,The New York Times, January 29, 2009, accessed December 19, 2012
^See Morton White,A Philosopher's Story, Pennsylvania University Press, 1999, p.148; and Rollyson and Paddock, pp. 43–45
^Field, Edward.The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, Wisconsin, 2005, pp. 158–170; Rollyson and Paddock, pp. 45–50; andReborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963, ed. D. Rieff, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, pp. 188–189.
^"An Emigrant of Thought", interview with Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, in Poague, pp. 143–164
^Wilson, Scott.Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 44249). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
^abcdRollyson, Carl (2016).Understanding Susan Sontag. Understanding Contemporary American Literature. University of South Carolina Press. pp. 110–112.doi:10.2307/j.ctv6sj92n.S2CID185707026.
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