Reviewing Daniel Schreiber’s Susan Sontag: A Biography, Carl Rollyson attributes the late critic and novelist’s decades-long prominence to “the time-tested American trick of self reinvention” – and he doesn’t mean that entirely as a compliment:
When the argument of Against Interpretation that art is a matter of form, not content—that conveying messages is not the purpose of art, but that art in itself is the message—got stale and became a staple of too many critics, Sontag switched sides. In “Fascinating Fascism,” she declared that the content of Leni Riefenstahl’s films and photographs is irretrievably fascist and cannot be countermanded by considerations of form and style. At every stage of her career, Sontag performed a similar volte face, saying, for example, that communism is fascism with a human face—although earlier she had shouted “Viva Fidel!” The capper on this career-long repudiation of her own ideas came when she said she never really believed what she wrote in Against Interpretation.
And, she added, she never really liked the nouveau roman that her some of her own work—The Benefactor, for example—was said to emulate. In fact, when her novel The Volcano Lover became a bestseller, she even claimed that she would not be upset if posterity favored her novels and forgot her essays. Her last works of fiction were essentially conventional historical novels, as Schreiber admits, so all her pretensions about subverting conventional narrative became . . . well, just pretensions.
But Sontag, so expert at marketing herself, always proclaimed her recantations as discoveries, bold revisions by an intellectual who was always ready to reconsider and deepen her understanding of art and politics. And in some cases—as with her best books, On Photography and Illness as Metaphor—she did succeed in exploring the play of ideas that have made these works classics. Similarly, her literary portraits in Under the Sign of Saturn display an inquiring intellect that remains beguiling and provocative. All these works show her arguing with herself, revealing a powerful mind at work. They constitute the core of what will probably remain as her legacy.
The Dish 