Sontag on Sontag

Reborn: Journals and
Notebooks, 1947-1964
By Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
304 pages, $24

Whither the Dear Diaries, the PRIVATE—KEEP OUTs, the flimsy locks and matching steel keys?

Some day, when historians settle on what exactly was wrought by this decade’s personal technologies, atop the list might be the transubstantiation of the adolescent journal, evaporated as it has into the server cloud of Tumblrs and Twitters and non-Euclidean MySpaces. No self-respecting teenager these days bothers with anything as quaint as the bounded discretion of ink (or quainter still, graphite) on paper; in exchange for the psychic risk of a permanent Google trace, she gains a trillion-dollar infrastructure predicated on her inalienable, inexhaustible right to public self-definition—and the deal must seem more than fair. With a potential blog readership of 6.6 billion and counting, every American Madison and McKenzie can today write her childhood diary the way, say, Montaigne wrote his adult letters—for posterity, as archived entries from the self she hopes to fashion.

But if the advent of a universal (markup) language promises an infinite audience for every stray scrap of pubescent confession, where can today’s young exercise the prerogative that’s defined youth since the first Neolithic caveboy splashed his hunting fantasies onto a secret wall 32,000 years ago—the impulse, that is, to scrawl down unmediated transcripts of an inner life so earnestly self-involved and formlessly unripe that exposure of any kind would be humiliating?

This is the messy precinct of self-self-definition, and I suspect its annexation by the public version, with its standardized Facebook profiles and ready-to-hand argot of therapy and memoir, is less a symptom of epidemic exhibitionism (as prurient adult observers tend to claim) than an adaptive defense against incipient ego loss. The need for truly private writing remains, of course; with journals now live to the world, the operations of the private self move to the margins. Quite literally so, at least for those of us not exactly youthful but still gawkily young at thought: How mortifying it would be if someone discovered the banal marginalia scrawled in my books!

And so, in the spirit of self-criticism, and growing up, here’s a peek at how I defiled the back pages of a once-pristine reviewer’s copy of Susan Sontag’s journals:

[Page] 25—Badly done —> student production always already edited —>this H part is a d[illegible] First drag queen —> CAMP?

IT GOES ON AND ON horrifyingly on like that, every page covered with remedial glosses and dilettante observations—even the odd emoticon!—all indicative of shockingly unfocused reading and thinking. I’d never want to be associated with it in print, let alone on a friend’s RSS feed. But let’s not be too tough on me; surely, even the greats achieved greatness only after crudely filling in untold yellowed notebooks and dog-eared margins. Surely, writing to oneself in real time always entails an authorial incoherence unthinkable in a manuscript, say, or a Xanga blog. Surely, the ideas will be, in every sense, immature.

Or maybe not. Beneath my splotched-ink additions, the aforementioned Page 25 contains this text: “… I killed the afternoon at a badly-done student production of three one-acts at Cal Hall, and then came by the bookstore at 5:30. We walked over to her room, and while she changed into levis, I read the first pages of her copy of [Herman Hesse’s] Steppenwolf.” By 4 a.m., “My concept of sexuality is so altered—Thank god!—bisexuality as the expression of fullness of an individual—and an honest rejection of the—yes—perversion which limits sexual experience, attempts to de-physicalize it, in such concepts as the idealization of chastity until the ‘right person’ comes along—the whole ban on pure physical sensation without love, on promiscuity. …

“I don’t intend to let my intellect dominate me, and the last thing I want to do is worship knowledge. … I intend to do everything … to have one way of evaluating experience—does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful—I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it, too, for it is everywhere. I shall involve myself wholly … everything matters! The only thing I resign is the power to resign, to retreat: the acceptance of sameness and the intellect. I am alive … I am beautiful … what else is there?”

An omnibus mission statement, more or less, for her 50 years of critical praxis, Susan Sontag wrote that in May of 1949. She was 16.

Reborn, Journals & Notebooks 1947–1963, the first of three planned volumes, contains the earliest expository efforts yet published from the late essayist laureate of the American cosmopolis. The lasting impression on the reader (especially on the reader attempting, pen in hand, to record the sensation of reading these journals) is of Sontag’s prodigious self-awareness. The rest of us, in comparison, barely know who we are. Whether it’s the teenage provincial attempting Rilke and Gide for the first time (“Look back on the 16 years. … Could be better: more erudition, perhaps, but it’s unreasonable to expect much more emotional maturity than I have at this point”) or the semi-prominent 29-year-old divorcée aphorizing personal failures (“Premature pliability, agreeableness, so that the underlying stubbornness is never touched, accounts for 80% of my notorious flirtatiousness, seductiveness”), Sontag’s ability to blueprint the analytic and affective machinery turning in her own mind is brilliant in the strict gemological sense—all bottomless clarity and refracting facets.

But despite the cross-eyed intensity of its inward gaze, each page sopping with the intimacy of preternatural self-knowledge, Reborn is resolutely not autobiography, of either the personal or intellectual sort. The most perilous decision of Sontag’s early adulthood—to marry the sociologist Philip Rieff after a 10-day courtship at the age of 17—occasions a yawning narrative lacuna: One moment, the reader is wrapped around tumultuous romances with fiery women; the next, “I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness.” Soon her son is born (David Rieff, editor of these journals), and Sontag begins raging artfully against the confines of a marriage that’s never explained.

THE LATER SECTIONS OF Reborn are studded with professional updates—1/15/57 offers “Ongoing projects: / ‘Notes on Marriage’ / ‘Notes on Interpretation’ / Essay: ‘On Self-Consciousness as an Ethical Ideal’”—but every direct engagement with a specific thinker or text reads like a self-contained prose poem. On Halloween in 1956, Sontag wrote, “The three philosophers I admire most Plato Nietzsche Wittgenstein, were avowedly anti-systemizers. Could it be shown that the arch-systemizer—the philosopher who thrust his own noble spirit hardest down on the Procrustean bed—I mean Spinoza—is best understood if his system is unraveled and interpreted aphoristically?” The question floats portentously, and must surely have animated at least the “Interpretation” piece, ongoing three months later and soon to become an iconic rejection of “elaborate systems of hermeneutics.” But, as violently lucid as individual entries are, the path from here to there—the gradual maturation and piecemeal refinement of a single idea—goes untraced. These journals do not reveal the extended, strenuous working-through of problems. Sontag never leaves notes of the “ —> always already edited” variety.

Is that to say that the material gathered in Reborn was indeed always already edited? Was it from the beginning an aestheticized, non-mimetic fashioning of a personality? David Rieff suggests not: “These diaries were written solely for herself,” he reports. “She had never permitted a line from them to be published.” (Mr. Rieff struggled with the decision to make his mother’s private pages public, especially given the “sexual frankness” of much of the material. But though Sontag never published her journals, she did sell them along with the rest of her papers to UCLA before she died; her son could therefore be certain that every last salacious secret would eventually be exposed by scholars.)

Best to think of Reborn as a multimedia collage—Susan Sontag’s coming-of-age blog, its “straight” entries spliced by quotations and reading lists and, yes, transcribed marginalia, all rendered with bravura tossed-off stylishness: “I note with amusement my entrance into the anarchist-aesthete phase of my youth”; or, “Sophism is the only true philosophy, if philosophy is to mean something different from common sense.” Though this particular lonelygirl (1/14/47: “Am I myself alone?”) may bring to it uncommon skill, the genre’s charge remains: the ideal self summoned within a constructed web of affections and affiliations, reflections and repudiations. Unlike all but the most hermetically sealed of bloggers, however, Sontag radicalizes this construction into the productive basis of identity itself; no audience, imagined or otherwise, is necessary.

“Superficial,” she writes at age 24, “to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself. … Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather—in many cases—offers an alternative to it.”

WHAT OF THE MATURE Sontag, the public Sontag, the Sontag we know? The pressing danger, I think, is taking the precocious, devouring acuity on display in Reborn as sign and proof of Sontag’s greatness as author and thinker. That is, the journals are not necessary and sufficient evidence of critical genius. Not necessary, because surely “Notes on Camp” or “On Photography” could have been written by an author less adept at describing her own intellectual and emotive tumult; not sufficient, because neither the vivid introspection nor the occasional Gatling bursts of scholarly insight in the journals imply a novelist’s or even essayist’s capacity for sustained performance. Great journal writing, absent further evidence, is just that.

Why then, beyond mere voyeurism, are these entries so insistently gripping? Perhaps, in the near-hysterical brightness with which people and books and ideas get sucked up in the orbit of pleasure and pain surrounding a young woman, we see not the virtue but the limits of Sontagism. Pursuer of the grand gesture, her archly generalist-solipsist posture backed by the credit of pure feeling, Susan Sontag left behind no real critical followers, no school. Jean Baudrillard, the sort of European haute theorist she’s credited with importing to this country, called her most vapidly adolescent pose—staging Waiting for Godot in war-torn Sarajevo—“cultural soul-boosting.” It’s hard to disagree.

And then the book next to me flips open again and I notice my handwriting scratched grotesquely across a page in protest or amazement: “We all speak like her now!”

Jonathan Liu, a writer living in Brooklyn, reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at jliu@observer.com.