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Susan Sontag In Memoriam (1933-2004)
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 14:14:47 -0500
From: Chung Nguyen <Chung.Nguyen@umb.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Susan Sontag In Memoriam (1933-2004)
Susan Sontag died at 7:10 AM Tuesday Dec 28, 2004, of complications of acute myelogenous leukemia at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, NY.
Below are some excerpts from the obituaries.
-- On growing up and the power of literature:
The first novel that affected her was Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables."
"I sobbed and wailed and thought [books] were the greatest things," she recalled. "I discovered a lot of writers in the Modern Library editions, which were sold in a Hallmark card store, and I used up my allowance and would buy them all."
She remembered as a girl of 8 or 9 lying in bed looking at her bookcase against the wall. "It was like looking at my 50 friends. A book was like stepping through a mirror. I could go somewhere else. Each one was a door to a whole kingdom."
Edgar Allan Poe's stories enthralled her with their "mixture of
speculativeness, fantasy and gloominess." Upon reading Jack London's
"Martin Eden," she determined she would become a writer. "I got through my childhood," she told the Paris Review, "in a delirium of literary exaltations."
At 14, Sontag read Thomas Mann's masterpiece, "The Magic Mountain." "I read it through almost at a run. After finishing the last page, I was so reluctant to be separated from the book that I started back at the
Beginning and, to hold myself to the pace the book merited, reread it aloud, a chapter each night." [LAT]
-- Sucess as a writer
.National Book Critics' Circle Award (for On Photography)
.National Book Award (for In America)
.MacArthur "genius" grant
.Israel's Jerusalem Prize
.Spain's Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts
.Germany's Friedenspreis (Peace Prize).
[Chronicle News Services]
Susan Sontag's best-known books, all published by Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, include:
. Novels
Death Kit (1967) The Volcano Lover (1992) In America (2000)
. Essay collections
Against Interpretation (1966) Styles of Radical Will (1969) Under the
Sign of Saturn (1982)
. Critical studies
On Photography (1977) AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989)
. Short-story collection
I, Etcetera (1978)
[New
York Times]
-- On The Vietnam War and 9/11:
Writing in the 1960s about the Vietnam War, Sontag declared "the white
Race is the cancer of human history." Days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she criticized U.S. foreign policy and offered backhanded praise for the hijackers.
"Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a `cowardly' attack on `civilization' or `liberty' or `humanity' or `the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" she wrote in The New Yorker.
[AP]
An early and passionate opponent of the Vietnam War, Sontag was both
Admired and reviled for her political convictions. In a 1967 Partisan Review symposium, she wrote that "America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent."
In her rage and gloom and growing despair, she concluded that "the
truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone - its ideologies and inventions - which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." [LAT]
She was pilloried by bloggers and pundits, who accused her of anti-Americanism. [LAT]
-- On the dark side of communism:
Ever the iconoclast, Sontag had a knack for annoying both the right and the left. In 1982, in a meeting in Town Hall in New York to protest the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, she declared that communism was fascism with a human face. She was unsparing in her criticism of much of the left's refusal to take seriously the exiles and dissidents and murdered victims of Stalin's terror and the tyranny communism imposed wherever it had triumphed.
[LAT]
She was pilloried by bloggers and pundits, who accused her of anti-Americanism. [LAT]
-- On Contemporary Culture:
Sontag was a fervent believer in the capacity of art to delight, to inform, to transform.
"We live in a culture," she said, "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."
[LAT]