[A-List] Lines of beauty

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by John Gray

New Statesman (April 23 2007)

At the Same Time by Susan Sontag
(Hamish Hamilton, 256 pages, GBP 18.99)
ISBN 0241143713

The first of the essays and speeches that are collected in At the Same Time {1}
is a meditation on beauty. Written during the last years of Susan Sontag's life,
when she was ill with cancer, these sixteen pieces brim over with vitality.
Every one of them opening up fresh lines of thought, they are in no sense last
words. 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.

Enraging bien-pensants when she noted that Reader's Digest gave a truer picture
of communism than could be found in the journals of the left, she provoked fury
on the right by observing (in a piece written just after the 9/11 attacks,
included in this volume) that politics had been replaced by a kind of
psychotherapy whose goal was to spare the American public from being burdened by
too much reality - not least the reality of intractable conflict in the Middle
East. In each case, she was speaking a truth that had been silenced by
prevailing opinion.

At the Same Time is a record of Sontag's thinking in progress. Even so, the
book's opening reflections on beauty undoubtedly express her lifelong beliefs -
and may help unravel a persistent paradox in her life as a writer. Against the
puritan tradition that suspects aesthetic values because they threaten the
primacy of morality, she declares that "beauty, even amoral beauty, is never
naked", for "the aesthetic is itself a quasi-moral moral project". Engaging with
beauty enables a type of wisdom, she believed, that "cannot be duplicated by any
other kind of a seriousness". This is a conception of beauty that recalls Plato,
and Sontag is clear that modern democratic relativism - the belief that
aesthetic judgement is a matter of subjective preference rather than a
perception of some kind of reality - undermines the very possibility of wisdom.

Here we have one of Sontag's many departures from current liberal orthodoxy -
her "elitist" insistence on the enduring importance of values that are neglected
in popular culture. It is true that she had no time for the postmodern view that
the cultural consumer is always right. Radical subjectivism of this sort
produces a cult of fashion masquerading as irony, "the promiscuous, empty
affirmations of the interesting" that places human subjectivity at the centre 
of the world. In contrast, she believed, beauty "reminds us of nature as such -
of what lies beyond the human and the made."

Though the fact is commonly resisted, an abiding concern with aesthetic
experience does not coexist easily with strong political engagement. An urgent
interest in reshaping the world is at odds with the attempt to discern the
beauty it contains whatever its flaws. More than any of her critics, Sontag was
aware of this tension. At times she seemed wary of the moral activism that
fuelled her protests against injustice, and may have regretted not giving more
of her energy to writing novels. It is striking how many of the writers she
admired lacked, or even scorned, political commitment. An earnest desire to
improve the human lot does not figure centrally in the work of Fernando Pessoa,
E M Cioran or W G Sebald - writers Sontag fervently praised and publicised. 
When she promoted the work of an indefatigable activist and agitator - as she
does, in a luminous essay collected here, when she praises Victor Serge's
neglected novel The Case of Comrade Tulayev {2} - it was not primarily his
exposure of Soviet oppression that she celebrated. It was the subtlety with
which Serge pursued fictional truth in all its labyrinthine complication.
Whereas an archetypal didactic "political novel" such as Arthur Koestler's
Darkness at Noon {3} sees the Stalinist era through the prism of one person's
experience of oppression, Serge interweaves politics and personalities in a
panoramic view of history. For Sontag, fiction was the most effective way of
rendering the human actuality, and it was Serge's realistic account of the
contingencies that shape human fortunes which made him the better writer.

I knew Sontag only slightly, and all too briefly, towards the end of her life.
At the time she died, she was America's best-known public intellectual. To my
mind, she was also the most exemplary. Intellectually and imaginatively gifted
to an extraordinary degree, she used her fearless intelligence to illuminate
some of the deepest contradictions of contemporary life. Her writings on
interpretation, photography and illness are part of the modern cultural canon.
But Sontag was much more than a critic of culture, however accomplished. 
Who else would note, as she does in her essay "Regarding the Torture of Others",
collected here, the seamless connection between the images of torture coming out
of Abu Ghraib and the cliche's of the American porn industry? Or note that the
photographs the soldiers posed, thumbs up, over their victims and sent to their
friends illustrate a media-driven society in which everything that was once
private is now shamelessly revealed? This is the moral culture that has made
possible the rehabilitation of torture - a process that has taken place in a
matter of a few years, but which is a defining feature of our age.

As Sontag wrote, "What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the 
exercise of extreme sado-masochistic longings - as in Pier Pasolini's last,
near-unwatchable film Salo (1975), depicting orgies of torture in the fascist
redoubt in northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era - is now being
normalised by the apostles of the new, bellicose, imperial America".

That this process should have been led by the world's pre-eminent liberal regime
is also symptomatic of the times in which we live. Images of naked men stacked
in heaps seem to have been sufficiently shocking to be largely withdrawn from
the media. Yet practices of sensory deprivation and denial of sleep, which 
when practised on dissidents in the former Soviet Union were condemned as 
a sign of totalitarianism, are now defended by the American vice-president 
and his neoconservative acolytes as part of a crusade for universal freedom. 
One of the ethical restraints that shape civilised life has been eroded, 
while those responsible for the slide into barbarism rant on about human 
rights and the perils of moral relativism.

Contemporary politics is a surreal spectacle that few writers in any country
have succeeded in capturing. If Sontag did, it was because, for her, cultural
criticism and literature were not separate activities. The paradox in which she
seemed at times entangled was only partly real. While moral activism does not
always go with devotion to beauty or concern with truth, in Sontag's case these
values served a single end. In At the Same Time we hear the voice of a unique
writer, who loved the world and spent her life in an attempt to see it whole.


Notes:

{1} http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780374100728-0

{2} http://www.powells.com/s?kw=The+Case+of+Comrade+Tulayev&x=45&y=13

{3} http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Darkness+at+Noon&x=55&y=11


____

John Gray's next book, Black Mass: apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia,
will be published by Penguin in July.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200704230046


http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
http://www.ashisuto.co.jp