Dark Lady of the Tuned-in

STYLES OF RADICAL WILL by Susan Sontag. 274 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95.

If Susan Sontag did not exist, the New York Review of Books might have had to invent her. One moment, in fact, not very long ago she did not exist. The next moment she was everywhere--the new darling of the literary set. Norman Podhoretz, author of Making It, Commentary editor and close student of cultural chic, explained the Sontag phenomenon this way: When Mary McCarthy arrived at "the more dignified status of Grande Dame," she left a vacancy as "Dark Lady of American Letters." With a timing she herself would be the first to appreciate, Miss Sontag appeared in the early 1960s to fill it, her belle-dame-sans-merci credentials already well in hand.

Apart from a dogmatic, astringent manner, Miss Sontag does not specifically resemble Miss McCarthy. She is, for one thing, far more "serious." By comparison, the younger McCarthy seems a kind of Vassar gun moll, playing Bonnie to the Clyde of Dwight Macdonald and other Partisan Reviewers of the 1930s and 1940s. Styles have changed. The vices (and virtues) of cleverness have now been replaced by the virtues (and vices) of relentlessly with-it seriousness. Susan Sontag--complete with academic sojourns at Oxford and the Sorbonne, and stints as a philosophy teacher--has proved to be just the girl to play tuned-in scholar to the age of McLuhan. In this, her second collection of essays, she continues to develop the main lines established by an earlier book, Against Interpretation.

As that title is meant to imply, her chief cultural presupposition is that readers, viewers and critics should approach art with no cultural presuppositions. Beginning with her opening essay, "The Aesthetics of Silence," she argues that the public must explore new standards of judgment to match new concepts of art.

European Concept. She is probably the first serious, practicing literary critic not to assume the primacy of print. In pieces like "Theatre and Film," she constantly works to break down old critical boundaries like the one between "fine arts" and "popular arts." She has not only declared that culture is a single kingdom--Bach to the Beatles, Henry James to Bergman--but perceived and firmly insisted (in the chapter "What's Happening in America--1966") that politics cannot be discussed outside the cultural context in which they occur. This last is essentially a European concept, and her interest in European culture has lent substance to her views in other ways. She has helped sponsor on this side of the Atlantic such distinguished but previously little-known European contemporaries as Rumanian Philosopher E. M. Cioran and French Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

So much for matter. When it comes to manner, alas, Miss Sontag can be as exasperatingly pretentious as anyone in the not overly humble world of cultural punditry. Her work abounds in self-contradictions. She is a girl almost without a sense of humor; yet she made her reputation with an article on the high frivolity of "camp." She is a part-time novelist (Death Kit) who officially reveres style while writing herself like a grim translation from the German: "By literary genre," she observes, "I mean a body of work belonging to literature considered as an art and to which inherent standards of artistic excellence pertain." She is the kind of girl who takes 33 talky pages to tell you that art "must tend toward the pursuit of silence." Few can rival her, moreover, for looking the reading public straight in the eye and delivering flat, positive statements whose potential meaning evaporates instantly upon reflection: "Never has 'less' so ostentatiously advanced itself as 'more' "; "Whatever is wholly mysterious is at once both psychically relieving and anxiety-provoking."

On the theme of "The Pornographic Imagination," she is abetted by what her fellow novelist-critic Gore Vidal judges to be "a perfect absence of humor." Solemnly reviewing the Story of O and other preposterous scandals, she owlishly concludes that pornography is sure evidence of "the traumatic failure of modern capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness." Self-transcending sentences like this have one tactical virtue. They preclude serious reply. Readers are reduced to stunned silence or rudely irrelevant expostulations like "And that ain't hay, baby!"

Nicer or Smarter. Elsewhere Miss Sontag's tone of authority, though impeccably ex cathedra, is curiously aggressive. The films of Jean-Luc Godard, the philosophy of E. M. Cioran, the literary criticism of the German poet Rilke --whatever the subject, Miss Sontag approaches it with uncompromising sweep. Her favorite weapon is the judicious-sounding exaggeration. A Susan-says sampling reveals the following:

> "This is a doomed country, it seems to me; I only pray that, when America founders, it doesn't drag the rest of the planet down, too."

> "The depolarizing of the sexes . . . is the natural, and desirable, next stage of the sexual revolution ..."

> "It seems unlikely that the possibilities of continually undermining one's assumptions can go on unfolding indefinitely into the future, without being eventually checked by despair or by a laugh that leaves one without any breath at all."

The book's longest piece, an evaluation of her trip to Hanoi last summer, never gets beyond self-conscious ploys with double mirrors--Me-West, They-East. Miss Sontag's tentative conclusion --the Vietnamese may be nicer, but she is smarter: "While my consciousness does include theirs, or could, theirs could never include mine. They may be nobler, more heroic, more generous than I am, but I have more on my mind . . ."

Yet for all her limitations, Susan Sontag has undeniable impact. She is one of those critics who must be judged by their presence as well as their performance. However badly she writes, she will probably continue to shake up the academic complacencies of those New Critics who are still following approaches 50 years old. Her serious posture, too, will go on being a rebuke to slovenly new pop critics, who are often condescending to their material.

In short, Susan Sontag's gut instinct for the significant "new thing" can ill be spared at a time when the daily perils of novelty have driven many critics to ostrich-like retreat or to playing games of me-tooism. One might well shudder at the notion of two Susan Sontags. One would regret the prospect of none.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.