The beholder and the ready-made

Susan Sontag's critical production shows a preference for unfinished form, for notes and fragments (‘Notes on Camp’, ‘Fragments of an Aesthetic of Melancholy’) or for the cumulative sequence of meditations on or regarding a topic (On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others). What has become known as her ‘epigrammatical mode’ (Sayres, ‘Susan Sontag’ 595) combines with a tendency to protect the object of inquiry rather than explicate. The combination of unfinished form and opacity has fascinated her readers.

For her most perceptive readers, silence is a key term in Sontag's critical canon. Cary Nelson first noticed the ‘deep, sweet silence’ with which Sontag surrounds the artefacts she examines, as if to signal the encounter with an otherness that she consistently tries to preserve (‘Soliciting’ 720). Sohnya Sayres followed up: ‘the work itself is bracketed off in a language of untouchability’ (Elegiac Modernist 82). Like Nelson, like Sayres, anyone approaching Sontag must reckon with her paradoxical silence as a critic and a writer: ‘Meaning glints off its surface. The silence of a work that Sontag repeatedly asks be respected, resounds’ (Sayres, Elegiac Modernist 82–3). Nelson also usefully describes her style as ‘written reverie’ (‘Soliciting’ 720), a phrase that alludes to the image of the writer lost in thought at the same time that it evokes the attempt to capture a stream of thoughts that remains somehow in excess of the written and, in any case, does not settle into finished concepts. Sontag was a philosopher by formation who liked to call herself a writer. Approaching her means finding words for this fact. Nelson's phrase conveys something uneasy about the fusion of the two identities of thinker and writer. A ‘written reverie’ suggests a certain turbulence in the passage from thinking to writing. It poses the problem whether thought might be written into finished concepts, whether, in fact, thought can be transferred into writing or whether it lingers before the concept's threshold – exactly like a reverie.