Passionate to the end: Susan Sontag's last writings

"At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches"

by Susan Sontag

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 235 pp., $23

"The photographs are us," the late Susan Sontag wrote in 2004, in her last major essay, about the obscene images from Abu Ghraib. Those words, which have already become famous, appear in "Regarding the Torture of Others," one of 16 essays in "At the Same Time," a posthumous collection of criticism that, it's gratifying to report, numbers among her finest books.

Sontag died in 2004, the embodiment of the public intellectual. She had taken defiant stands against the wars in Vietnam, Bosnia (traveling to Sarajevo when the city was under siege) and Iraq; she had written enduring essays on camp, pornography and photography; she had published four novels and eight epochal books of criticism.

Her incendiary first collection, "Against Interpretation" (1966), buzzed with the excitement of a brilliant young critic firing off idea after idea, profligately, almost wildly, and often (as was her wont) shooting from the hip.

"At the Same Time" has the stateliness of age. The ideas in it have been measured over a lifetime; they're substantial, articulated with precision and — to call on a word Sontag once shunned and later embraced — profoundly humanist. The adjective that comes to mind, throughout, is "magisterial."

The book opens with a brief investigation into the significance of beauty ("a gladness to the senses"), followed by five superb prefaces to literature in translation, a lifelong passion.

Then comes the short, much-attacked Sept. 11 essay from the New Yorker. Sontag might have written less belligerently if she'd been in New York for the attack and more privy to the national emotion of shock and horror.

Televised "drivel"

Instead she was in Berlin, glued to the TV — a novel experience for her, since (as she enjoyed pointing out) she didn't own one. Like many people who don't watch TV and then tune in even on an ordinary day, she was appalled by the "self-righteous drivel" of the talking heads (in the original version that appears here she singles out two exceptions, Rudolph Giuliani and Peter Jennings), and that revulsion is what shaped her tone.

Two more level-headed pieces follow. Sontag wasn't a pacifist, and in "A Few Weeks After ... " she wrote, "An armed response ... is necessary. And justified" — not that she expected anything from the Bush administration other than the debacle it has provided.

In "One Year After," on the anniversary of the attack, she took up the theme of her original essay ("Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together") and wrote: "It is a day of mourning. It is an affirmation of national solidarity. But of one thing we can be sure. It is not a day of national reflection."

Words distort

Burrowing deeper, she returned to the theme that had obsessed her in "Illness as Metaphor" (1978): the power of language to distort experience. Taking her stand against "the dangerous, lobotomizing notion of endless war," she decried "the pseudo-declaration of pseudo-war. These necessary" — note the adjective — "actions should not be called" — note the verb — "a 'war.' There are no endless wars. But there are declarations of the extension of power by a state that believes it cannot be challenged."

Then come a short piece on photography and the Abu Ghraib essay, which is about that and much more. The collection ends with five speeches from her final years, all of them political, most of them also literary, in import.

Sontag always said that what she cared most about was art and that she wrote about politics solely out of a moral obligation. And in this belief she was, of course, deluded and wrong. As with all great writers, she was led by an invisible hand away from what she thought was her calling and toward her true vocation. Sontag wrote as a partisan — there's no other way for a real critic to write — and her partisanship led her deeper and deeper into her genius.

Politics and art

She was a culture critic, which meant that she wrote at the intersection of politics and art. When she was younger, and modernist art was in its last great throes, she wrote more persuasively about art. Her political writing of those years wasn't on the same level; it was hotheaded and nearly unhinged by rage.

By the end of her life, the cultural wasteland that T.S. Eliot had once envisioned had become a depressing reality. In this country, at least, the high culture from which Sontag drew her deepest nourishment lay in ruins, and the real struggle, the real battle — where the action was, and thus where a critic had to be — was in the arena of politics.

The rage in these last speeches is controlled rage, frosty and sublime — a snow-capped peak of rage that towers over the landscape that is the political and critical discourse of today.

Craig Seligman is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.