Writing: Susan Sontag; Morality; Female Writers

 I have read one book of Susan Sontag's essays. This I mention to make clear that I do not claim any ability to judge the comments on her contained in Blake Smith's Susan Sontag’s Funny! Sexy! Sad! Magnum Opus Threatens to Upend Our Democracy - for all, I find myself sympathetic to them.

I want to also mention this thought: I associate Susan Sontag with New York, as I associate Joan Didion with California. Along with the geography comes certain intellectual attitudes that are different from my Midwestern upbringing. They have their appeals, and they have difficulties, but they are nevertheless challenges that need to be faced.

But what grabbed me hard as I read the essay was this passage, with its emphasis on Sontag's writing:

Fortunately, Sontag’s own talent and sensitivity got the better of her—part of her genius was to outthink her own plans and opinions, to be carried ecstatically past their limits, to achieve something—with brilliant success—she would never have set out deliberately to do. She found herself, as she put it, “falling in love with her characters,” whose story became the center of a text that became not only a real novel, but as she subtitled it, quite unironically, “A Romance.”

The Volcano Lover represented a real ethical education for Sontag, who, as she told her interviewer Michael Silverblatt, had learned not to approach her material (or, it might be said, her readers—or her own passions) with “condescension.” The desire for intellectual mastery, the modernist conceit of insistently showing that fictionality, linearity, representation, etc., are after all only writerly devices, was, she came to recognize, a defense from the truly experimental, transgressive, and wild possibilities inherent in apparently more conventional or traditional forms of fiction: that we might, in letting our imaginations pursue the energies of some invented personage, find ourselves revealing in them our own multiple, contradictory, unreconciled possibilities.

Unpromisingly, The Volcano Lover begins with a series of stubby, chopped sentences, spoken by an unidentified narrator in an uncertain time—characteristic, as Howard observed, of Sontag’s previous attempts at fiction:

It is the entrance to a flea market. No charge. Admittance free. Sloppy crowds. Vulpine, larking. Why enter? What do you expect to see? I’m seeing. I’m checking on what’s in the world. What’s left. What’s discarded. What’s no longer cherished. What had to be sacrificed. What someone thought might interest someone else. But it’s rubbish.

It sure is! The awful ding-dong rhythm, the irritating address to a second person (you), the baroque, tasteless word choice (the crowd is sloppy, vulpine and larking). If it weren’t Sontag writing, no one would keep reading.

First things first, the overtaking of an intellectual exercise by artistic empathy. Even as formidable an intellectual as Sontag cannot resist the lure of creation.

Secondly, I would not have put the act of creating fictional characters as an ethical act. Yet when the writer drops ethics into the discussion, I have my perspective shifted and cannot understand why I did not think in these explicit terms before. I put it to myself like this: if in interacting with other people it is unethical to treat them like a means instead of an end (Kantian ethics as I understand them), or to misrepresent the character of real people is an unethical act, then is it not unethical to do the same to fictional characters? I find the creationist idea of the world and God as limiting God-as-creator; I find nothing incompatible with God-as-Creator. Creators will let their creations run. I find my own created characters go off in their own ways, for all their being limited by my poor store of talents. Evolution seems to me as God's way of doing the same. Of course, that means allowing for free will.

Then comes the shock of the author taking down Sontag's writing, the actual stuff and not the metaphors or themes. My age-raddled brain said it is all that is being criticized. Vulpine just sits there. KH does not like it when I use a staccato rhythm; he would hate this. That is the kind of rhythm that is in my head - was this how Sontag's mind worked? That last sentence is a brick wall of caution for me - do not play cute in a way that bores your readers.

What good did I find here? Confirmation of my opinion that getting at the heart of the matter (thank you, Graham Greene) is the thing to shoot for, and the means employed must be for that goal - regardless of the fashionability of those techniques.

I pass over the article's inquest on Sontag's politics. They strike me as very New York intellectual, but I do not know enough to adjudge the argument's accuracy. Let me say I have a distrust (I hear my conscience and the ghosts of friends saying my cynicism) of the righteous. The truly righteous draw no attention to their superior moral status.

I want to go back to the original article, to where it touches on the moral purposes of fiction.

Then retreating from his demand for readerly empathy, Greenwell concludes by revising his point, saying that art should address the monstrous, that much of the moral office of art might lie in making us identify with the monstrous—identification not as consolation but as indictment, presumably of ourselves. We should learn to identify with bad characters—this should be the point of fiction—it turns out, in order to improve our powers of condemning the badness they represent, of purifying ourselves more thoroughly for having confessed the darkness inside us. The unwoke novel Greenwell promotes will be in the end more thoroughly moral and political than the woke literature he rejects, showing us complex, morally ambiguous characters on whom to practice the skills of first empathy and then indictment.

The Volcano Lover might sound like a novel Greenwell would promote, full of manic energy, a sense of life, textures, terrors, and abysses. It never lets us forget for long our imperative to indict others and ourselves (to live, as a human being, is to judge, even if we are only judging our own seriousness, trying, wrenchingly, to suspend for a moment its unbearable cruelty as it tells us to revile our husband for mishandling an egg). But our identifications with its characters and our reelings from its indictments never settle into Greenwellian lessons in liberal tolerance for imperfect people. Sontag warms us into sympathy with a varied humanity, while demanding a moral and intellectual excellence chilled with inhumanity. Rather than loving the debased person as “monstrous” and leading him, at least in the readerly imagination, back into society (enriched and enlarged by its newly extended power of tolerance), she argues that genius is monstrous—and threatens, in the novel’s peaks of intensity, to upend society on its behalf.

I think there must be a morality in my writing - not to reclaim for myself some inane respectability - but because of the contract with a reader, and to justify my own existence. However, I do not think that means promoting my own morality (which, at least, the federal government would find dubious) - no, I think it's necessary to engage the reader's morality. Those dear souls of the cancel culture I find to be the regurgitation of Victorian morality - Pollyannas needing reassurance of their bigoted respectability. If I can do anything, it is to present people as neither good nor evil, but with the faults born from the messiness and the confusion and contingencies of existence. According to the Orthodox Church, we are all ikons of Christ. For me, that means respecting every human being. The Church believes we all have free will, that we can use for good or ill. For me, that means, we can go wrong as easily as we can go right. The Church emphasizes we do not judge the moral status of any person. For me, that means showing all that we can of all sides of a character, to not reach for a " liberal tolerance for imperfect people" but the recognition by the reader of their own imperfections and the need to work on their own sins. I do not trust the self-righteous - sooner or later they start bonfires for books and for people. 

But what do I know? Before I left college, certainly before I left for law school, I gave up my serious attempts at becoming a writer. I would not be doing this if I had not gone crazy and wound up in prison. Wrecking one's life should not be taken as advice for a career move. However, wandering in the desert and becoming a crazy person did do me one good thing. I found myself an ignorant fool with a goal. I read and explored with a semi-educated omnivorousness. This brought me into contact with Sontag - filling in the holes of my education by experiencing rather than just knowing about. Coming from the Midwest, living in a prison, having ignored literature for decades, I found more comfort with the marginalized - women, ethnic Americans, foreigners. I wanted to see from their perspective in order to see what I had missed, or was still missing. That is why I read essays like the one that prompted this post. Charting my education is why I write this blog.

It is also why I read articles such as The Guardian's The male glance: how we fail to take women’s stories seriously. This quotes Sontag, but that is not why I think it goes along with the original essay's evaluation of Sontag's work. This does:

This is how we approach “male” versus “female” work. Let’s call it the “male glance”– a narrative corollary to the “male gaze”. We all do it, and it is ruining our ability to see good art. The effects are poisonous and cumulative, and have resulted in a huge talent drain. We have been hemorrhaging great work for decades, partly because we are so bad at seeing it.

 I cannot say that it applies directly to Blake Smith; I do think it may apply to some of Sontag's critics cited in Smith's essay. Smith takes Sontag seriously as an artist - I cannot see why the essay would be as critical as it is. I do, also. I suggest you follow suit. If you have doubts, go to The Guardian.

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