In Praise of the Canon and Conscience
Monday 14 May 2007
I wrote the following letter to my dear friend in Louisville, Pat Geier, who is one of the mainstays of the activist community there. She and I traveled to Palestine in October 2003.
An Appreciation of Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)
Dear Pat
I was so delighted and also humbled by your enthusiasm for our venture in New Harmony recently. It is rare to have that kind of exchange, and, like you, I hunger for more of the same.
What we experienced that one Sunday, for five or six exhilarating hours, was a way of life for Susan Sontag who, you may recall, died in December 2005. I recently read her posthumous collection of speeches and essays, several of which I will surely reread in the years ahead and which I enthusiastically recommend to you (Loving Dostoevsky, Unextinguished: The Case for Victor Serge, Regarding the Torture of Others, The Conscience of Words, The World as India: The St. Jerome Lecture on Literary Translation, On Courage and Resistance: The Oscar Romero Award Keynote Address, Literature is Freedom: The Friedenspreis Acceptance Speech, At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning: The Nadine Gordamer Lecture). These writings reveal Sontag to be a militant reader and a critical conscience, and it seems that her reading and resistance, writing and politics, ethics and aesthetics were skillfully interpenetrated.
For decades, Sontag unabashedly pursued what she called the Wisdom Project, which meant an intimate relationship with writers and books. She made the claim, “And the wisdom that becomes available over a profound, lifelong engagement with the aesthetic cannot, I venture to say, be duplicated by any other kind of seriousness.” (I suspect Kathy Kelly, with years of travels to Iraqi hospitals standing before dying children might beg to challenge this unique literary source of wisdom.) Perhaps you have grown weary over the years with my appreciation for Marcel Proust, but I could reread those seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time every couple of years, and I can’t imagine getting bored with it, even if I lived to be 90. Sontag writes, “And one of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives, and make choices, and propose and accept standards for ourselves, is our experience of singular authoritative voices, not our own, which make up that great body of work that educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us to be in the world, that embodies and defends the glories of language (that is, expands the basic instrument of consciousness): namely, literature.” [221] And so, it is late May, and I am about to begin my annual end-of-the-semester ritual, which is to reread The Brothers Karamazov, which, for me continues to educate my heart. I am sure that J. M. Coetzee has a similar place in your pantheon of writers.
As a precocious teen in California, Sontag revealed how it was literature, typically in translation, that liberated her: “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.” [209] She also speaks highly of one particular book, which I invite you to read with me sometime this summer: “when I was a high school student in Los Angeles, I found all of Europe in a German novel. No book has been more important in my life than The Magic Mountain — whose subject is, precisely, the clash of ideals at the heart of European civilization.” [206] She also admitted, “Opera excepted, I never asked myself, in those early years of reading literature in translation, what I was missing. It was as if I felt it were my job, as a passionate reader, to see through the faults or limitations of a translation -as one sees through (or looks past) the scratches on a bad print of a beloved old film one is seeing once again. Translations were a gift, for which I would always be grateful. What—rather, who—would I be without Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov?”{1} [179] Reading Sontag makes me realize what a slacker reader I am, how far there is to go, how much further I could go with greater discipline and a few companions.{2}
I suppose Sontag spent almost as much time writing as reading, and she embodied the Zen adage, “Don’t waste your life.”{3} With great brevity, she has advice for those who spend hours each week with their notebooks or laptops: “I’m often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: ‘Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.’” Included in At the Same Time are several of her powerful essays and speeches that reveal her engagement with some of the injustices of our time.
During a speech in Israel where she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, she sounds like any of us who have worked with ISM and seen for ourselves the brutality of Israeli power: “I believe that the doctrine of collective responsibility, as a rationale for collective punishment, is never justified, militarily or ethically. I mean the use of disproportionate firepower against civilians, the demolition of their homes and destruction of their orchards and groves, the deprivation of their livelihood and their right to employment, schooling, medical services, untrammeled access to neighboring towns and communities … all as a punishment for hostile military activity which may or may not even be in the vicinity of these civilians.” [152]
In another speech honoring Israeli refuseniks, she speaks with a rare clarity in U.S. intellectual circles: “The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community. Thus: It is not in the best interests of Israel to be an oppressor. Thus: it is not in the best interests of the United States to be a hyperpower, capable of imposing its will on any country in the world, as it chooses. What is in the true interests of a modern community is justice. It cannot be right to systematically oppress and confine a neighboring people. It is surely false to think that murder, expulsion, annexations, the building of walls — all that has contributed to the reducing of a whole people to dependence, penury, and despair — will bring security and peace to the oppressors.” [190]
About the Abu Ghraib torture scandal and the photographs that revealed the ugly face of the American “liberators,” she cuts through the long-standing, self-serving American myth of exceptionalism: “Looking at these photographs, you ask yourself, how can someone grin at the sufferings and humiliation of another human being? Set guard dogs at the genitals and legs of cowering naked prisoners? Force shackled, hooded prisoners to masturbate or simulate oral sex with one another? And you feel naive for asking, since the answer is, self-evidently, People do these things to other people. Rape and pain inflicted on the genitals are among the most common forms of torture. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, have done and do them when they are told, or made to feel, that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show.” [135]
If you know a young person soon to graduate from high school or university and who has intellectual propensities, I think this book would make an inspired gift. The young are reputed to be more open, idealistic, and even daring than we oldsters. Perhaps such a young person would be energized by the spirit of Sontag, whose son David Rieff described her thusly: “She was interested in everything. Indeed, if I had only one word with which to evoke her, it would be avidity. She wanted to experience everything, taste everything, go everywhere, do everything.” [xiii]
But even we middle-aged Baby Boomers can be encouraged by her example. You remember the old Hawley-Cooke Bookstore T-shirt with the saying, “So many books, so little time.” A very Sontagian shirt. But another T-shirt would read “So many injustices, so little resistance.” As Bill Gorman would remind us, it’s ambos—both.
Notes
{1} Edward Said: “Who can forget the rush of enrichment on reading Tolstoy or hearing Wagner or Armstrong and how can one ever forget the sense of change in oneself as a result?” Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 67.
{2} George Steiner: “But reading involves a real semiotics, a real linguistics, a real philology: philology in the old sense, love of the Logos, respect for the text. Most of us no longer know how to read. Sometimes I think universities, which have become enemies of reading, ought to be closed down. Instead there should be Houses of Reading where reading means exploring language and ideas. We should use dictionaries: the prime tool for the understanding of language. And we should know grammar, for grammar is the music of language. And we believe we can read philosophy and literature without a knowledge of grammar, but we can’t.” “An Informal Conversation with George Steiner,” Tel Aviv Review 3 (1991): 29.
{3} In his introduction, David Rieff notes, “Among other projects—including a third, more autobiographical book on illness, a novel set in Japan, and a collection of stories…” This was Sontag at 70, like I.F. Stone who took it upon himself to learn Greek late in life so as to be able to read Plato. Sontag wrote the following in a story, and I have to wonder if it wasn’t straight from her own journals: “Three Things I’ve been promising myself for twenty years that I would do before I die: (1) Climb the Matterhorn, (2) Learn to play the harpsichord, (3) Study Chinese.” [xiii]