Essayists From The United States

"Looking back on her own earlier writings, Susan Sontag has remarked: "Now the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, 'unrealistic,' to most people.""

"Sontag's cool 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 of Kate Millett or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, whose middlebrow mediocrity crippled women's studies from the start. No patriarchal villains held Sontag back; her failures are her own."

"Harold Bloom scribbled in the margin of a draft of my dissertation in 1971, "Mere Sontagisme!" It saddened me, but I knew Bloom was right. Sontag, who should have been Jane Harrison's successor as a supreme woman scholar, had become synonymous with a shallow kind of hip posturing."

"She moved readily from references to philosophers, poets, literary theoreticians and film auteurs. Reviewers were, rightly, dazzled. Though she changed her mind repeatedly, it was always done with style and conviction. If you wanted to argue with Sontag, you had to enter into her work in terms of the way a stance, a position, made sense as an intervention."

"Unlike many politically engaged writers, Sontag never hankered after the security of a finished system of thought. If she acquired a reputation for contrarian thinking it was because she responded directly to historical events, which rarely conform to ideological stereotypes."

"Through four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained irreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as explosive, anticlimactic, original, derivative, naïve, sophisticated, approachable, aloof, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing, profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, ambivalent, lucid, inscrutable, visceral, reasoned, chilly, effusive, relevant, passé, ambivalent, tenacious, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, cantankerous and clever. No one ever called her dull. … Ms. Sontag was a master synthesist who tackled broad, difficult and elusive subjects: the nature of art, the nature of consciousness and, above all, the nature of the modern condition. Where many American critics before her had mined the past, Ms. Sontag became an evangelist of the new, training her eye on the culture unfolding around her."

"Some might think Sontag's renunciation of communism an exception to this record of nearly perfect political foolishness. In a 1982 speech at New York's Town Hall, she announced that communism was no more than "fascism with a human face." The remark drove bien-pensants up the (still standing Berlin) wall. Others who had fallen for the dream of communism had got off the train as long as 50 years earlier. And whatever can Sontag have meant by "a human face" to describe a monstrous system of government that in Russia, Eastern Europe, China and Cambodia slaughtered scores of millions of people?"

"During the Vietnam War, Sontag went off to Hanoi as one of those people Lenin called "useful idiots"—that is, people who could be expected to defend Communism without any interest in investigating the brutality behind it. There she found the North Vietnamese people noble and gentle, if a touch boring and puritanical for her tastes. Doubtless that trip led to her most famous foolish remark, when she said that "the white race is the cancer of human history," later revising this judgment by noting that it was a slander on cancer."

"[Sontag] belongs less to the history of literature than to that of publicity. Anyone with the least intellectual pretension seemed to have heard of, if not actually read, her."

"At its best, our relationship was rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge—or possibly Stalin and Malenkov. Sontag was the Supremo and I the obsequious gofer. … Most important, I became adept at clucking sympathetically at her constant kvetching: about the stupidity and philistinism of whatever local sap was paying for her lecture trip, how no one had yet appreciated the true worth of her novel The Volcano Lover, how you couldn't find a decent dry cleaner in downtown San Francisco, etc., etc."

"Susan Sontag's perceptive, often controversial, thoughts continually challenged all those who read them, and made a hugely important contribution to recent American thought. … Susan Sontag will be remembered as a fearless thinker whose pronouncements on everything from sex to photography to language had a formative impact on not one, but four, generations."

"chief priestess of both high modernism and high postmodernism"

"Styles change, style doesn't."

"The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent — the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of "suspects" — the principal justification for holding them is "interrogation." Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and torture become inevitable. Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases, the "ticking time bomb" situation, which is sometimes used as a limiting case that justifies torture of prisoners who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by American military and civilian administrators to learn more of a shadowy empire of evildoers about whom Americans know virtually nothing, in countries about which they are singularly ignorant: in principle, any information at all might be useful. An interrogation that produced no information (whatever information might consist of) would count as a failure."

"The Bush administration has committed the country to a new, pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war — for "the war on terror" is nothing less than that."

"Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies and family. What is revealed by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality. Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal."

"People do these things to other people. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, do them when they have permission. When they are told or made to feel that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be mistreated, humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior, despicable race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show."

"The expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture one is inflicting on helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part of the story. There is the primal satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn't take a picture of them."

"An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured on digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component."

"Space reserved for being serious is hard to come by in a modern society, whose chief model of a public space is the mega-store."

"Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time."

"Too much remembering embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited."

"Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking."

"Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood."

"To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism."

"But if we consider what emotions would be desirable [in response to the suffering of others], it seems too simple to elect sympathy."

"And it is not necessarily better to be moved. Sentimentality, notoriously, is entirely compatible with a taste for brutality and worse."

"Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated."

"Wherever people feel safe...they will be indifferent."

"The question is, Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, Whom do we believe we have the right to blame?"

"But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. (They look like everybody else)."

"Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand."

"The problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs."

"Nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously."

"Often their [media] decisions are cast as judgments about “good taste”—always a repressive standard when invoked by institutions."

"Most people will not question the rationalizations offered by their government for starting or continuing a war."

"War is the largest crime."

"Ever since [the Vietnam War], battles and massacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment."

"What is called in news parlance “the world”…is (unlike the world) a very small place, both geographically and thematically, and what is thought worth knowing about it is expected to be transmitted tersely and emphatically."

"Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience."

"In contrast, images offering evidence that contradicts cherished pieties are invariably dismissed as having been staged for the camera."

"To the militant, identity is everything."

"No “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain."

"They [photographs of war victims] create the illusion of consensus."

"War is a man’s game—the killing machine has a gender, and it is male."

"To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom."

"A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted — made cynical, superficial — by this understanding."

"Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another. Writers can do something to combat these clichés of our separateness, our difference — for writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences — experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed."

"The writer in me distrusts the good citizen, the "intellectual ambassador," the human rights activist — those roles which are mentioned in the citation for this prize, much as I am committed to them. The writer is more skeptical, more self-doubting, than the person who tries to do (and to support) the right thing."

"We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new? It seems to me that one should always be seeking to talk oneself out of these stark oppositions."