Sontag's Critical Blandness

Is Susan Sontag the only critic left who still cares about high culture?

It’s been almost 40 years since “Against Interpretation’’ became an iconic text in faddish counteracademic lit-crit, and the big question is how, or why, Sontag has managed to keep a straight face while her peers break loose into genre criticism, hip-hop studies and other stereotypically un-Sontagian fields. Sontag herself has stayed the course, a true cultural diehard, and barely offers a nod of recognition to anything but the beaux-est of beaux-arts. To see the films she mentions you have to go an art house; to read the books you have to visit Schoenhof’s.

In her newest essay collection, Where the Stress Falls, Sontag sounds awfully unfazed by this steady depletion of the ranks of “serious’’ critics—a depletion she has observed from a high and uncompromised vantage point. Since the early sixties she has been a major figure among the New York intelligentsia (“the Dark Lady of American letters,’’ said Norman Podhoretz), and she has with remarkable energy written novels, screenplays, drama and essays, the last two decades of which are collected here. In none of these endeavors has her tone faltered from the serious, committed voice of her early essays. In an era when other critics see fit to cut loose and scribble nutty books about man-dog love affairs and ambiguously ribald real estate ads, such an oddly conservative sense of taste and purpose demands a closer examination. Sontag may be a guardian of culture’s good name, or she may be just a relic.

The essays in her new collection display a wide interest in literature, film, dance, photography, criticism and sometimes politics (though her 1999 essay on Kosovo is noticeably absent). The literary essays tend to deal with established but mildly obscure European litterateurs (Danilo Kis, Witold Gombrowicz, W.G. Sebald, Andrzej Zagajewski). The rest of the pieces stick to art films, opera and dance. Her inimitably terse prose is recognizable from her previous criticism, particularly her tendency to issue elliptical, almost aphoristic judgments at an essay’s end. In addition, a few creative pieces—one an accompaniment for a Jasper Johns exhibit, the other a short parodic sketch of Pyramus and Thisbe—provide unsatisfying, indulgent interludes.

For Sontag, art matters, sometimes more than life itself. Two fascinating pieces recount her rather daring directorial debut in Sarajevo in 1993, a time when rifle rounds were still zinging lethally across Sniper’s Alley. The play, Waiting for Godot, could have been exploited facilely—both in performance and in these essays—for its uncomfortable relevance in a place of such imminent mortality. But it is typical of Sontag that she embraces nuances whenever possible and measures out her observations carefully, with the political message demurely concealed beneath the aesthetic one.

I cannot quarrel with most of Sontag’s aesthetic judgments—they are, with no obvious exceptions, level-headed essays of appreciation for roundly-lauded artists—but her unremitting earnestness ultimately make her essays a chore to read. One wonders not just at Sontag’s artistic voracity, but at her boneheaded inability to crack wise now and then, or to liven her discussion with even the slightest dip into the troughs of low culture. Sontag has long been mocked and feared for her imposing figure, and nowhere do we see the intensity of her sternness than in an essay collection like this. It’s not her excessively dour prose style, but rather the cumulative effect of dozens of articles with precious few pauses to point out why these artists manage to be special in some way that hits the author, Susan Sontag, personally.

And ironically enough, it is the dispassionate, wintry, methodical approach that Sontag herself had warned against. In “Against Interpretation’’ (collected in a book of the same name), Sontag railed against the type of writing about literature, film and painting that dissects artwork and leaves it dead on the examination table. She ended the essay with a stand alone line, unrivaled by other criticism of the era for its pith and spirit: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.’’

Why, if Sontag really aspires to an “erotics of art,’’ can she not pen more than a couple passionate sentences in a whole volume of criticism? The few attempts at humor don’t really work; some jokes repeat themselves in different essays. And it all manages to be astonishingly devoid of gusto, even in its highest praise. In her “Letter to Borges’’ (1996)—a wise, charitable and admirable short work—she makes clear her affection for the man’s writing, but with no locutions less stiff than “I miss you’’ and “you were our greatest living writer.’’ One wonders whether literary celebritydom and the inherent respectability of her subject matter have made her forget her responsibility to spice her writing stylistically to match its substance. And it’s too bad that she, who so steadfastly has stuck to writing about things a discerning reader will care about, seems to feel restrained in other regards as well.

I fear that what we’re really discovering is that all our least charitable hunches and peeves about Sontag may have been right from the start—she is pretentious, not to say stupid, and her prose is dull, not to say wholly unadmirable. Sontag simply isn’t much fun to read. The mind I detect in the pieces about literature, about Borges and about travel, is sensitive and intelligent. She has forged a deserved reputation for herself as the preeminent woman of fine art in the New York intelligentsia.

But at her worst she sounds like a more confident Annie Hall. Sontag’s blandness makes us ask whether critical appreciation of serious art requires the critic to drain the blood from her prose style. The great fear of this reviewer is that if he continues to want to read criticism of serious art, he will have to get used to writing without a shine to it, the substance-heavy but styleless prose of a Susan Sontag.

Where the Stress Falls

by Susan Sontag

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

350 pp., $27