Interpreting Sontag
Jonathan Cott, Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview
Yale University Press, 176pp, £15.99, ISBN 9780300189797
reviewed by Marika Lysandrou
Against being ‘ghettoized’ as a female writer; against demagogic interpretations; against ‘digging’ behind works of art to find their true meaning; against viewing the act of taking a photograph as innocent of its didactic purpose – Susan Sontag certainly expressed formidable ideas in her various critical works. The Complete Rolling Stone Interview, which is a transcription of over three hours’ of conversation between Jonathan Cott, editor of Rolling Stone magazine, and Susan Sontag, gives us insight into the thinking behind some of these ideas.
The interview as a form occupies a peculiar hybrid space. It does not occupy the same space as writing, which writers such as JM Coetzee (whose view Jonathan Cott alludes to in the introduction) associate with truth, silence and reflection; nor does it offer the provisionality of speech or conversation. Cott refers to Sontag as saying that she likes the interview because she ‘likes conversation [and] dialogue’, but as Cott’s thorough research, developed understanding and often premeditated questions demonstrate, the interaction between Cott and Sontag does not have the spontaneity we associate with conversation or other dialogic forms. And yet Cott’s interview of Sontag is sophisticated; it negotiates a space between Coetzee’s silence and Sontag’s dialogue. For if we take a dialogue to mean an engagement between people with overlapping frames of reference and understanding, we can assume that new fusions of ideas will take place in the interaction between them. We have that here to an extent. But we also have the gaps, spaces and silences which dialogue affords. These gaps are evident throughout Cott’s interview in the form of non sequiturs and incongruences.
When discussing On Photography (1977), Cott references a particular passage that exemplifies his use of non sequitur. Sontag finished her previous remark with a claim that if she took pictures as well as observed them, she could never have written the book, to which Cott responds:
If, as Cott’s citation suggests, Sontag claims that photographs have the power to illuminate in a flash and forever fix significant details, she also claims in this interview that ‘there are flashes that I don’t think are fragments [like] an epiphany [or] an orgasm’. Nudged again by Cott to consider the relationship between the photograph and the fragment, Sontag acknowledges that ‘photography comes in the form of fragments… Of course, it’s a thing complete in itself. But in relation to the passage of time, it becomes that telling fragment of what is left to us of the past.’ So in Sontag’s view the photograph appears paradoxically to be both flash, complete in and of itself, and fragment, a vestige of time past; the photograph takes on a different significance in space and in time. Indeed, the fluidity of Sontag’s ideas is something which is brought out well by the dynamicisim of Cott’s interview technique, and the at times incongruous nature of his questions is something to be lauded: it enables Sontag’s arguments to come to the fore as she envisions, namely more ‘like the spokes of a wheel than the links of a chain’.
In this interview Sontag conveys her position on the concept of gendered writing with clarity and precision, yet her wider ideas on gender and feminism are conceived of in more negative terms. So while Sontag does not wish to disalign herself with women’s art movements, she also regards the fact that she is a woman as just one of the many determinants shaping her work as an artist. Cott puts forward some noteworthy examples of espousers of gendered creativity: he cites Charles Baudelaire’s depiction of ‘ineffable, male, voluptuous joy’ and Helene Cixous’s association of ‘continuity’ in writing with femininity. Cixous justifies her view of writing in terms of gender difference by suggesting that it equates to viewing writing as more than a ‘manufactured object’. But Sontag is clear that she doesn’t see that ‘there is such a thing as feminine or masculine writing’, and that writing is, in its crudest sense, the making of objects.
Sontag’s own take on gender difference and her view of feminism are conceived, however, in more nebulous terms. When prompted by Cott to articulate her views on truth, she states that she cannot ‘understand the truth except as the negation of falsehood… the world is basically full of falsehood, and the truth is something carved out by the rejection of the falsehood’ (Sontag’s italics). Sontag dichotomises truth and falsehood while at the same time positing truth as a negative monovalent and falsehood as a multivalent, ubiquitous absolute. This seems unsubstantiated; she does not justify her conception of truth nor why she does not take truth and falsehood to be of equally indeterminate values. The extension of Sontag’s conception of truth and falsehood, her discussion of women, seems equally specious:
The aporia at the heart of this statement is that it lands us in an endlessly relative relation where falsehood and truth and, in this context, women and patriarchal values, are in an interdependent relationship marked by indeterminacy and irresolution. Although there is something to be said for Sontag’s brand of feminism which advocates participating in patriarchal structures that already exist in order to gain equal power (as well as equal rights), and having to work with the status quo to effect corrections and transformations, nonetheless it comes as no surprise, and something of a cop out, when she states that ‘my idea is just to desegregate everything. The kind of feminist I am is to be antisegregationist’. Just as Sontag posited arbitrary values to truth and falsehood and takes as a priori the notion that the latter is a free-floating absolute out of which we can carve the former, so here she posits the patriarchal structures that already exist as absolutes against or within which women can carve out equal power. Sontag seems both to advocate this act of negative participation as well as espouse her idea of ‘desegrat[ing] everything’; the first is insufficient, and the second doesn’t acknowledge a method or practice of desegregation.
At times, Sontag’s articulation of what she perceives to be problematic can be so nebulous that it is difficult to either entirely agree or disagree. So, for instance, after a short, inconspicuous prompt from Cott that ‘the patriarchal ethos has for centuries posited that women were the negation of men’, Sontag stakes her claim that the conventional polarities of ‘the heart and the head, thinking and feeling’ aren’t true, rather ‘we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world’. Sontag seems to pioneer the use of ‘instruments provided by our culture’ and sees such instruments as integral to thought (as well as ‘intuition’ which she also cites as integral). Yet Sontag does not make entirely clear what she means by ‘instruments provided by our culture’. In the wider context of her arguments, particularly towards the end of this interview, we can ascertain that Sontag is against demagogical modes of thought and systems of interpretation; she advocates the ‘making [of] things more complicated’ – isn’t this making of things more complicated, essentially, the work of the critic? Does it not come under the auspices of critical activity?
In Against Interpretation Sontag famously pits herself against the hermeneutic activity of interpreting texts. She suggests that such an activity ascribes a hidden ‘meaning’ to a work of art which is to be discovered; it elevates the content as something to be decoded:
From this essay written in 1966 to her interview with Cott in 1979, Sontag is consistently against fixed systems of interpretation, but the critical activity of evaluation and of ‘making things more complicated’ is something she appears to advocate. Freud and Marx critically evaluated as well as interpreted; it is their elevation to paradigmatic status and the co-opting of their theories to support other interpretive systems which is problematic and ossifying for new and actively critical modes of thought. To continuously reinterpret is, perhaps, the task at hand – and this is what we are urged to consider by Sontag’s final words of the interview: ‘the most awful thing would be to feel that I’d agree with the things I’ve already said and written – that is what would make me most uncomfortable because that would mean I had stopped thinking.’
The interview as a form occupies a peculiar hybrid space. It does not occupy the same space as writing, which writers such as JM Coetzee (whose view Jonathan Cott alludes to in the introduction) associate with truth, silence and reflection; nor does it offer the provisionality of speech or conversation. Cott refers to Sontag as saying that she likes the interview because she ‘likes conversation [and] dialogue’, but as Cott’s thorough research, developed understanding and often premeditated questions demonstrate, the interaction between Cott and Sontag does not have the spontaneity we associate with conversation or other dialogic forms. And yet Cott’s interview of Sontag is sophisticated; it negotiates a space between Coetzee’s silence and Sontag’s dialogue. For if we take a dialogue to mean an engagement between people with overlapping frames of reference and understanding, we can assume that new fusions of ideas will take place in the interaction between them. We have that here to an extent. But we also have the gaps, spaces and silences which dialogue affords. These gaps are evident throughout Cott’s interview in the form of non sequiturs and incongruences.
When discussing On Photography (1977), Cott references a particular passage that exemplifies his use of non sequitur. Sontag finished her previous remark with a claim that if she took pictures as well as observed them, she could never have written the book, to which Cott responds:
In [On Photography] you state that ‘the photographic world stands in the same essentially inaccurate relation to the real world as stills do to movies. Life is not about significant details, illuminated in a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.’… The critic George Steiner once wrote about the flash of insight conveyed by the literary fragment… and referred to both ‘its lightning of certitude of immediacy and necessary incompletion of such immediacy,’ and highlighted its importance to the process of critical insight.
If, as Cott’s citation suggests, Sontag claims that photographs have the power to illuminate in a flash and forever fix significant details, she also claims in this interview that ‘there are flashes that I don’t think are fragments [like] an epiphany [or] an orgasm’. Nudged again by Cott to consider the relationship between the photograph and the fragment, Sontag acknowledges that ‘photography comes in the form of fragments… Of course, it’s a thing complete in itself. But in relation to the passage of time, it becomes that telling fragment of what is left to us of the past.’ So in Sontag’s view the photograph appears paradoxically to be both flash, complete in and of itself, and fragment, a vestige of time past; the photograph takes on a different significance in space and in time. Indeed, the fluidity of Sontag’s ideas is something which is brought out well by the dynamicisim of Cott’s interview technique, and the at times incongruous nature of his questions is something to be lauded: it enables Sontag’s arguments to come to the fore as she envisions, namely more ‘like the spokes of a wheel than the links of a chain’.
In this interview Sontag conveys her position on the concept of gendered writing with clarity and precision, yet her wider ideas on gender and feminism are conceived of in more negative terms. So while Sontag does not wish to disalign herself with women’s art movements, she also regards the fact that she is a woman as just one of the many determinants shaping her work as an artist. Cott puts forward some noteworthy examples of espousers of gendered creativity: he cites Charles Baudelaire’s depiction of ‘ineffable, male, voluptuous joy’ and Helene Cixous’s association of ‘continuity’ in writing with femininity. Cixous justifies her view of writing in terms of gender difference by suggesting that it equates to viewing writing as more than a ‘manufactured object’. But Sontag is clear that she doesn’t see that ‘there is such a thing as feminine or masculine writing’, and that writing is, in its crudest sense, the making of objects.
Sontag’s own take on gender difference and her view of feminism are conceived, however, in more nebulous terms. When prompted by Cott to articulate her views on truth, she states that she cannot ‘understand the truth except as the negation of falsehood… the world is basically full of falsehood, and the truth is something carved out by the rejection of the falsehood’ (Sontag’s italics). Sontag dichotomises truth and falsehood while at the same time positing truth as a negative monovalent and falsehood as a multivalent, ubiquitous absolute. This seems unsubstantiated; she does not justify her conception of truth nor why she does not take truth and falsehood to be of equally indeterminate values. The extension of Sontag’s conception of truth and falsehood, her discussion of women, seems equally specious:
Take the question of women. The truth about women is that the whole system of patriarchal values, or whatever you want to call it, is false and oppressive. The truth is that that is false.
The aporia at the heart of this statement is that it lands us in an endlessly relative relation where falsehood and truth and, in this context, women and patriarchal values, are in an interdependent relationship marked by indeterminacy and irresolution. Although there is something to be said for Sontag’s brand of feminism which advocates participating in patriarchal structures that already exist in order to gain equal power (as well as equal rights), and having to work with the status quo to effect corrections and transformations, nonetheless it comes as no surprise, and something of a cop out, when she states that ‘my idea is just to desegregate everything. The kind of feminist I am is to be antisegregationist’. Just as Sontag posited arbitrary values to truth and falsehood and takes as a priori the notion that the latter is a free-floating absolute out of which we can carve the former, so here she posits the patriarchal structures that already exist as absolutes against or within which women can carve out equal power. Sontag seems both to advocate this act of negative participation as well as espouse her idea of ‘desegrat[ing] everything’; the first is insufficient, and the second doesn’t acknowledge a method or practice of desegregation.
At times, Sontag’s articulation of what she perceives to be problematic can be so nebulous that it is difficult to either entirely agree or disagree. So, for instance, after a short, inconspicuous prompt from Cott that ‘the patriarchal ethos has for centuries posited that women were the negation of men’, Sontag stakes her claim that the conventional polarities of ‘the heart and the head, thinking and feeling’ aren’t true, rather ‘we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world’. Sontag seems to pioneer the use of ‘instruments provided by our culture’ and sees such instruments as integral to thought (as well as ‘intuition’ which she also cites as integral). Yet Sontag does not make entirely clear what she means by ‘instruments provided by our culture’. In the wider context of her arguments, particularly towards the end of this interview, we can ascertain that Sontag is against demagogical modes of thought and systems of interpretation; she advocates the ‘making [of] things more complicated’ – isn’t this making of things more complicated, essentially, the work of the critic? Does it not come under the auspices of critical activity?
In Against Interpretation Sontag famously pits herself against the hermeneutic activity of interpreting texts. She suggests that such an activity ascribes a hidden ‘meaning’ to a work of art which is to be discovered; it elevates the content as something to be decoded:
The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one… [for Marx and Freud] events… as well as texts… are treated as occasions for interpretation… And to interpret is to reinstate the phenomenon, in effect, to find an equivalent for it.
From this essay written in 1966 to her interview with Cott in 1979, Sontag is consistently against fixed systems of interpretation, but the critical activity of evaluation and of ‘making things more complicated’ is something she appears to advocate. Freud and Marx critically evaluated as well as interpreted; it is their elevation to paradigmatic status and the co-opting of their theories to support other interpretive systems which is problematic and ossifying for new and actively critical modes of thought. To continuously reinterpret is, perhaps, the task at hand – and this is what we are urged to consider by Sontag’s final words of the interview: ‘the most awful thing would be to feel that I’d agree with the things I’ve already said and written – that is what would make me most uncomfortable because that would mean I had stopped thinking.’