Susan Sontag: The Mind of a Writer

Susan Sontag: The Mind of a Writer

“A writer is first of all a reader.”
~Susan Sontag

This is a brief/sincere attempt at trying to give a view to the brilliant array of the works of the major writer, activist, philosopher, human being: Susan Sontag (1933-2004). I will use some of her journals, essays, novels short stories, even her play Alice in Bed; which is based on the life of Alice James, sister of William and Henry James. In honor of Women’s Month I find her and her work to be an appropriate subject to tackle. The legacy she left the world is immense. Through her fiction she showed that there are no limits to curiosity or imagination. And via her political writings, she demonstrated that it’s an obligation to speak out against brutality and oppression. All her life Sontag was very involved in the world around her. Her political activism is clearly shown in many of her books, including At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches and A Susan Sontag Reader.

The theme of reading and writing comes up throughout her work. She always felt they are innately connected. This was how she measured her writings as well as why she returned again and again to her life as a reader. The art of reading opened her imagination and helped her escape and later on would be her gateway to writing. As a lover of literature, she wrote fiction, short stories, and plays. And this she did due to her inspiration to stimulate the mind of others as previous writers had inspired hers. As she wrote in one of her journal entries, “What saved me as a schoolchild in Arizona, waiting to grow up, waiting to escape into a larger reality, was reading books.”

Sontag, a lover of words, began keeping a journal since age 13. Her diaries and notebooks from 1947-1963 are included in Reborn. This book is a good beginning if one is not familiar with her work. The wisdom in her writings and reflections absorb the reader from beginning to end to the point where it’s hard to deduce her age from entry to entry. For example at age sixteen she wrote of her love of Gide, Mann, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Dante, Rimbaud, Calderón and the list goes on (for five pages) as well as her thoughts on their work. One that stayed in my mind was what she wrote about Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. She loved her prose, the heavy sonorous rhythms of this enchanting novel as well as the intricacies of the characters within the plot. 

She also sought refuge in music from Mozart’s Don Giovanni’s Arias which brought a feeling of solace when she listened to them. She was a big fan of Vivaldi and others. She wrote of music that it’s the most alive of all the arts, the most abstract, the most pure, the most sensual. Her musical descriptions reach a crescendo that can be linked to her own awakening sexuality as she was only fifteen when she wrote this. Her love of knowledge is abundant in Reborn as is the way she agonizes over the dichotomy between the body and the mind, her bisexuality and the discovery that it was possible to accept and live being oneself. To her, “intellectual wanting is like sexual wanting.” 

In reading her journals one feels like one is reliving the thoughts and experiences of one person. Sontag offers this awareness. She presents us her inner life. From her youth to the occurrences she was subjected to when she was a teacher, a mother, a lover, a wife, she writes her dreams and fears. In reading her one arrives at the conclusion that she was a real human being, and in her work one will find this wisdom. 

Her involvement in fighting injustice is clearly shown in her books of essays and in her speeches. As a major intellectual figure she was never shy to speak her mind. The article Regarding the Torture of Others deals with how conflicts are judged and remembered. This essay is about the photographs shown in The Western Memory Museum, particularly with the photos of the tortured Iraqi prisoners by Americans in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay. The Bush Administration never called it torture. It was their way of denying the obvious and violating international human rights laws. What is not missing in Sontag’s analysis is our blindness to these crimes, our denial to the evident. She uses history to remind us of previous foreign occupations: the Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, the Spanish in the Americas, etc. We may not have as many or any pictures of the occupied in these areas, but we have words in history books that one can always read to enlarge our awareness of what seems to be a repetitious cycle on earth.

In her Reader book, she mostly concentrates on essays about intellectuals, from Simone Weil to Roland Barthes, Robert Bresson and Jean Luc Godard. However, there are other articles such a Project for a Trip to China, Fascinating Fascism, The Image World, Unguided Tour, Under the Sign of Saturn among others. Each is unique like its title implies and each takes us into a deeper understanding of film, photography, fascism and its history or simply Sontag’s planning for her trip to China. Whether she writes about abstraction, form, aesthetic or content, each article will touch and wake up parts of our unconscious.

How does one end an article about a writer one admires? 

In conclusion, perhaps, but when writing about Susan Sontag I don’t see an end to ever reading her books. I always find something new in each word, sentence, and paragraph. One play I had not read was Alice in Bed. She wrote this magnificent piece of art in two weeks. I read it in less than an hour. One of the protagonists was Alice from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The action takes place during a tea party where Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller are also present. Without giving all details away, I will add that the anguish, mental and time travel that the imagination can create are all there thanks to Sontag. So if we agree with her that, “the only real escape from ignorance is knowledge,” then we agree that language is not only an instrument, but and end in itself. At sixteen she knew she wanted to write, “to live in an intellectual atmosphere.” She felt that reading a book gave her the experience of “creating it myself.” In the end she left readers the gift of her writings and a challenge for us to create literature ourselves.

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Leticia Cortez. Born in México and grew up in Chicago. She worked as a teacher at Truman College. She is a writer, educator and activist who currently lives and teaches in Santa Fe, Nuevo Mexico.

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