Literature Of Reflection: On Susan Sontag’s Art Of Fiction

Although Susan Sontag is best known as a critic, she has more thanonce expressed regret for having devoted so much time to having written theessays that made her well-known, instead of spending time on her beloved novelwriting. Compared with her essays, her novels have received less attention andmore controversial reviews. She had more than once expressed the desire that shewanted to “leave her past work behind” and pay more attention to writings in thefuture. This “leaving her past work behind” can be seen from the tension betweenher writings in the1960’s and the writings after the late1970’s. This tension isplayed out in Sontag’s canon as she moves from viewing art as autonomous in the1960’s—divorced from the historical forces that produced it—to a belief in thelate1970’s and afterwards that art can never be severed from its politics. In herlatter work, she moves toward a lyrical, elegiac “intellectualself-expression”—one that focuses on the life spent, the life lived, as she writesabout Walter Benjamin, Antonin Artaud, and Roland Barthes in Under the Sign ofSaturn, and as she writes about the historical persons in her later novels. Thefocus of this research will be placed mainly on this tension between her worksproduced in the60’s, early70’s and the works produced in the latter half of herwriting career. Shown directly from the essays that Sontag wrote as time goes, italso leaves mark in her4novels, which she mentions with more endearing tones.Aiming to integrate Sontag’s essay writing into her novel writing, thisresearch tries to position Sontag in a background which is itself turmoil, tosystemize Sontag’s theory of fiction, and to find a continuous clue in all of herwork. In an essay in memory of Roland Barthes, Sontag describes Barthes’s writing career as a progression, declaring “writing is Barthes’s perennial subject.”Similar to Barthes, Sontag’s wonderful essays on writers and creative portrait offictional figures must be considered as different versions of her great apologia forthe vocation of the writer.The Introduction makes the case for the importance of such an investigationand defends the centrality of novel writing in Sontag’s writing career.Recognizing the need to clarify Sontag’s position as a novelist, I suggest that hernovels can tell us more both about herself and about the way writing should be.This focus on her novels at once limits the range of the dissertation andcontextualizes her ideas among those of her contemporaries, without, I hope,reducing Sontag to a mere representative of her times.Each chapter after the Introduction explores Sontag’s attitudes toward aspecific aspect of novel writing, and looks at what her views imply for a broaderunderstanding of what it means to be a writer at different times. Specific works,then, illuminate larger themes, just as her writings illuminate the works of hercontemporaries. Chapter1explores Sontag’s attitudes toward the relationshipbetween art and reality, and tries to treat with it in two succeeding periods. Thehistorical rupture between the60’s and the previous time, between the60’s andthe time after that set the terms for most subsequent characterizations in Sontag’sworks. As a leader of her contemporaries, Sontag first forwards that art does notreflect reality, in answer to the then popular criticism that art serves reality. Bythe end of70’s, all forms of art have successfully jumped out of the bounds ofreality, Sontag thus reevaluates the importance of reality in art’s form. This turncan be seen from her novels produced in these different times.Chapter2and3consider Sontag’s narration as a whole process, and tries toanalyze Sontag’s attitudes toward the structure of narrative transmission througha close reading of her4novels. In Story and Discourse (1978), SeymourChatman points out that narrative is a discourse that follows conventions, andgives a narrative transmission format. Sontag’s view towards different elementsof this format in various times, such as author and narrator, is illuminated in thenovels that she wrote, reflecting the cultural change in a broader sense. Chapter4and5go into more specific aspects of Sontag’s novel writing,trying to examine two major elements of a novel——plot and character. In the60’s, Sontag has been criticized by many critics for lacking a coherent plot and areasonable character, which, in my opinion, is a strategy Sontag uses deliberatelyto show her rebel to the “dead” conventions. But this rebellious action has beenmodeled to an extreme extent by some of her contemporaries, so she goes back topick up these conventional tools, using them in her own way. Only the mostperceptive and least doctrinaire readers and critics could account for Sontag’ssudden change, and in so doing made possible many of the insights of the modernand postmodern age which Sontag lives in.Chapter6explores a more sophisticated variety of the idea of art. It looks atthe importance of form and style in Sontag’s novels and relates the growth anddevelopment of the concept of form to Sontag’s own criticism. In the binary termof “content and form,” content has been given the priority since Plato’s time. Thestructure, the organization of time and space in Sontag’s novels, together withmany of her criticism in different times all explain her attitudes toward theimportant role form and style play in all forms of art.In Conclusion, Sontag’s art of fiction is concluded in two ways: as a writer,Sontag has been influenced by various intellectual schools and different academicthoughts, her writing has also exerted a powerful influence upon hercontemporaries and followers alike, her position in contemporary western literaryfield, in this research, is carefully posed; as a theorist, although Sontag herself didnot confess her role as a theorist, she expands and develops the theory of fiction,combining the formalist and structuralist’s ideas of fiction with postmodernstrategies.