Literature is freedom. — Susan Sontag Susan Sontag was an essayist, fiction writer, occasional filmmaker, screenwriter and, above all, a philosopher of culture. She was that rarity in the US — a public intellectual, and one who managed to defy the stereotype of both the Left and the Right. An outspoken critic of injustice everywhere, she was once consigned by former New York mayor Ed Koch “to the ninth circle of hell” for her support of Palestine and exorcised by The Financial Times as “the wringing handmaiden of elitist liberalism” for her vitriolic essay on Abu Ghraib. Sontag skipped three grades and left school at 15. She studied philosophy, literature and theology at Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne. What set her apart from her American contemporaries in the ’60s was her fascination with the ethics and aesthetics of modernism in its European forms. This was the source for her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp”, launch pad for her prolific and controversial career, written as a series of numbered aphorisms. The aim was to break down the artificial barrier between “popular” and “high” culture. Between 1966 and 2004, she published some 20 books, including Against Interpretation, Death Kit, Trip to Hanoi, Styles of Radical Will, In America, The Volcano Lover, Under The Sign of Saturn. In On Photography (1977) she discussed how photography moulded the way we see the world. She returned to this theme in her last essay “Regarding the pain of others”, where she explored the manner in which photographs of war were influenced by the politics of photographers and how, in turn, they could influence politics. Sontag’s first brush with cancer resulted in Illness as Metaphor (1978) in which she analysed the treatment of cancer as a metaphor for moral fault. Covering the disease in mystery and theorising on “cancer personalities” was more than cruel, she asserted; it hindered recovery. Her solution, here as elsewhere, was demystification. Sontag’s politics defied labelling; she wrote, she once said, out of grief. This impulse, she said in a talk with Nadine Gordimer, was both radical, in wanting to right fundamental wrongs, and conservative, “because we know that so much is being destroyed”. In the 1960s, she supported Vietnam; in 1982 in Poland she spoke of communism being “fascism with a human face”. In 1993, she lived in war-torn Sarajevo, calling for international intervention. In 2001, she was savaged for her views on 9/11; in 2003, she launched a trenchant attack on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy while receiving a literary prize in Germany, leading to a walkout by the US ambassador. Sontag was an engaged intellectual, living fully in the world. For her was not the arid intellectualism which separated life and literature. Christopher Hitchens has rightly placed her in the same category as Alexander Solezhnitsyn, Albert Camus and George Orwell. Sontag’s writings are equally suffused by the same moral outrage against all that dehumanises. As she once wrote: “A good deal of my life has been devoted to trying to demystify ways of thinking that polarise and oppose. Translated into politics, this means favouring what is pluralistic and secular.” Or again: “Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.”
