Susan Sontag: The Rolling Stone Interview

The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind,” wrote the late political scientist Hannah Arendt, ”is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.”

Susan Sontag is an exemplary witness to the fact that living a thinking life and thinking about the life one is living can be complementary and energizing activities. Since the 1966 publication of Against Interpretation — her first collection of essay, which included the brilliant ”Notes on ‘Camp”’ and ”On Style” and which ranged joyously and unpatronizingly from the Supremes to Simone Weil, from films like The Incredible Shrinking Man to Muriel —  Sontag has continued to be drawn to both ”popular” and ”high” cultures and to write about subjects as diverse as pornography and photography, the aesthetics of silence and the aesthetics of fascism. In doing so, moreover, she has been continually examining and testing out her notion that supposed oppositions like thinking and feeling, consciousness and sensuousness, morality and aesthetics can in fact simply be looked at as aspects of each other —  much like the pile on the velvet that, upon reversing one’s touch, provides two textures and two ways of feeling, two shades and two ways of perceiving.

In ”On Style,” for example, Sontag wrote: ”To call Leni Riefenstabl’s ‘Triumph of the Will’ and ‘Olympiad’ masterpieces is not to gloss over Nazi propaganda with aesthetic lenience. The Nazi propaganda is there. But something else is there, too … the complex movements of intelligence and grace and sensuousness.”

Exactly 10 years later, in the New York Review of Books, she reversed the pile, commenting that Triumph of the Will was ”the most purely propagandistic film ever made, whose very conception negates the possibility of the filmmaker’s having an aesthetic or visual conception independent of propaganda.” Where she once focused on the ”formal implications of content,” Sontag has explained, she later wished to investigate ”the content implicit in certain ideas of form.”

A ”besotted aesthete” and ”obsessed moralist” (as the recently described herself), Sontag has —  in her essays (“Styles of Radical Will”), novels (“The Benefactor” and “Death Kit”), and films (“Duet for Cannibals,” “Brother Carl” and “Promised Lands,” a documentary about Israel) —  persistently rejected and worked against ”comfortable” and ”received” positions, attitudes and opinions. As she stated in an interview: ”We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.”

And her three most recent publications — “On Photography” (a long, dialectical essay, surprisingly a best seller), Illness as Metaphor (a book that elucidates and exorcises tuberculosis and cancer as metaphors, written as a result of having been operated on for cancer several years ago) and I, etcetera (eight adventurous works of fiction that explore and extend her concerns in a variety of voices) —  have confirmed Sontag’s position as one of our most unpredictable and enlightening writers, whose modes of thinking and feeling have been a model and inspiration for many people.

Born in Arizona and raised in California, Sontag was educated at the University of Chicago, which she entered when she was 15, and at Harvard. I met her in 1963 when she was teaching, and I was studying, at Columbia University, I saw her again in 1966 in Berkeley, where she had been invited to lecture; I invited Sontag and filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who had just released his dazzling Scorpio Rising, onto an informal, late-night radio program that I was producing for KPFA. A couple of years later, I saw her in London during a press screening of her first film, Duct for Cannibals. Having run into each other for 15  years, we decided, early in 1978, to do a ”formal” interview.

Since her bout with cancer, she has been in good spirits, good health, and has been busier than ever. The following interview began in June 1978 in Paris, where Susan lives half of the year, and continued in November of last year in New York City, where she lives the other half, surrounded by a library of 8,000 books (”my own retrieval system,” as she calls it).

When you found out you had cancer a few years ago, you immediately started thinking about your illness. I’m reminded of something Nietzsche once wrote: ”For a psychologist there are few questions that are as attractive as that concerning the relation of health and philosophy, and if he should himself become ill, he will bring all of his scientific curiosity into his illness.” Is this the way you began to think about Illness as Metaphor? 
Well, it’s certainly true that the fact that I got sick made me think about sickness. Everything that happens to me is something I think about. I’m sure that this experience will turn up in my fiction — very transposed. But as far as that side of me that writes essays, what occurred to me to ask was not, What am I experiencing? but rather, What really goes on in the world of the sick? What are the ideas that people have? I was examining my own ideas because I had a lot of the fantasies about illness, and about cancer in particular. I’d never given the question of illness any serious consideration. So if you don’t think about things, you’re likely to be the vehicle of the going clichés, even of the more enlightened ones.

The fact of being ill, however, and thinking about it in the way you’ve done would seem to demand a sense of distance.
On the contrary, it would have been an enormous effort for me to not think about it. The really enormous effort was to get out of that period when I was so ill that I couldn’t work at all. The greatest effort is to be really where you are, contemporary with yourself, in your life, giving full attention to the world. That’s what a writer does. I’m against the solipsistic idea that you find it all in your head. You don’t.

For about a year and a half I was going to a hospital three times a week, I was hearing this language, I was seeing the people who are victims of these stupid ideas. Illness as Metaphor and the essay I wrote about the Vietnam War are perhaps the only two instances in my life when I knew that what I was writing was not only true but actually helpful to people in a very immediate, practical way. I know people who have sought proper medical treatment because of reading it — people who weren’t getting anything other than some kind of psychiatric treatment and are now getting chemotherapy.

Following Nietzsche’s idea that ”in some it is their deprivations that philosophize; in others, their riches and strengths,” it seems interesting that while suffering from your illness you produced something very rich and strong.
I thought that when this started. . .well, of course, I was told it was likely that I’d be dead very soon, so I was facing not only an illness and painful operations, but also what I thought might be death in the next year or two. And besides feeling the physical pain, I was terribly frightened. I was experiencing the most acute kind of animal panic. But I also experienced moments of elation. A tremendous intensity. I felt as if I had embarked on a great adventure. It was the adventure of being ill and probably dying. And, I don’t want to say it was a positive experience, because that sounds cheap, but of course it did have a positive side.

So it wasn’t out of a sense of deprivation that you thought about these things? 
No, because it was two weeks after I was told I had cancer that I cleaned out those ideas. The first thing I thought was: What did I do to deserve this? I’ve led the wrong life. I’ve been too repressed. Yes, I suffered a great grief five years ago and this must be the result of that intense depression.

Then I asked one of my doctors: ”What do you think about the psychological side of cancer in terms of what causes it?” And he said to me, ”Well, people say a lot of funny things about diseases.” I mean, he just dismissed it absolutely. So I began to think about TB; the argument of the thing fell into place. I have the same propensities to feel guilty that everybody has, probably more than average. But I don’t like it. Nietzsche was right about guilt. It’s awful; I’d rather feel ashamed. That seems more objective and has to do with one’s personal sense of honor, but people do feel guilty about being ill.

I like to feel responsible, you understand. Whenever I find myself in a mess in my personal life, I’d rather say, ”Well, I chose to fall in love with this person, who turned out to be a bastard.” I don’t like blaming other people, because it’s so much easier to change oneself than other people.

I don’t think it makes much sense to worry about what made you ill. What does make sense is to be as rational as you can in seeking the right kind of treatment.