A Bit More Detail

I was so caught up in reading the 1980 book by Susan Sontag (Wikipedia, official site), essay collection Under the Sign of Saturn, that I missed my subway transfer to a northbound route and overshot to Sherbourne station, and would certainly have come in late to work if not for the kind lady who said that the escalators provided a much quicker route to the westbound platform than the stairs. I returned the book that day to the friend who'd lent it to me and cherished it, pasting a poicture of Sontag in Sarajevo on the back cover.

What is it about this book that inspires such devotion? It was Sontag's beautiful prose style, at once langourous and critical, conversational and disciplined. It was also Sontag's beautiful critical mind that did it for me, that marvellous instrument that was profoundly informed and profoundly honest. It's that mind that inspired Andrew Sullivan to create the "Susan Sontag Award" as a club with which to beat people whose opinions he didn't like, one reason among several, incidentally, why I think he deserves to be hit, repeatedly. It's this mind that wrote the six wonderful essays contained in Under the Sign of Saturn, five of which were biographies of intellectuals one sort or another--Roland Barthes, Elias Canetti, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin and Paul Goodman. These biographical essays were written about all kinds of intellectuals--people she knew and people she could never have known, people she liked as people and people she didn't, avant-garde playwrites and Marxist social theorists alike--and were, again, rigourous and honest. The centrepiece of the book is her famous 1975 essay "Fascinating Fascism", the essay that begins with a withering takedown of Leni Riefenstahl's claims to be an honest person and a critical director and an innovative one, passing from there to examine the cult of the perfect body and the transformation of Nazi ideology into sexual fetishes.

I haven't read much of Sontag's work, but I still miss her. We all need wonderful public intellectuals like her plying their crafts, saving us from ourselves and letting us make sense of the past. Everywhere.