Monday, January 03, 2005
The last Sontag obit
And then there were Sontag's own political activities. Cuba and North
Vietnam in 1968, China in 1973, Sarajevo in 1993 (where she went to direct a
production of Waiting for Godot--surely one of the consummate radical chic
gestures of all time). Few people have managed to combine naïve idealization of
foreign tyranny with violent hatred of their own country to such deplorable
effect. She has always talked like a political radical but lived like an
aesthete. At the annual PEN writers' conference in 1986, Sontag declared that
"the task of the writer is to promote dissidence." But it it turns out that, for
her, only dissidence conducted against American interests counts. Consider the
notorious essay she wrote about "the right way" for Americans to "love the Cuban
revolution." Sontag begins with some ritualistic denunciations of American
culture as "inorganic, dead, coercive, authoritarian." Item: "America is a
cancerous society with a runaway rate of productivity that inundates the country
with increasingly unnecessary commodities, services, gadgets, images,
information." One of the few spots of light, she tells us, is Eldridge Cleaver's
Soul on Ice, which teaches that "America's psychic survival entails her
transformation through a political revolution." (It also teaches that, for
blacks, rape can be a noble "insurrectionary act," a "defying and trampling on
the white man's laws," but Sontag doesn't bother with that detail.)
According to her, "the power structure derives its credibility, its
legitimacy, its energies from the dehumanization of the individuals who operate
it. The people staffing IBM and General Motors, and the Pentagon, and United
Fruit are the living dead." Since the counterculture is not strong enough to
overthrow IBM, the Pentagon, etc., it must opt for subversion. "Rock, grass,
better orgasms, freaky clothes, grooving on nature--really grooving on
anything--unfits, maladapts a person for the American way of life." And here is
where the Cubans come in: they enjoy this desirable "new sensibility" naturally,
possessing as they do a "southern spontaneity which we feel our own too white,
death-ridden culture denies us. . . . The Cubans know a lot about spontaneity,
gaiety, sensuality and freaking out. They are not linear, desiccated creatures
of print culture."Indeed not: supine, desiccated creatures of a Communist tyranny would be more like it, though patronizing honky talk about "southern spontaneity" doubtless made things seem much better when this was written.
0 Comments:
