The intimate link

In the last section of Chapter 3 I suggested that Sontag and modernism are two interconnected intellectual objects. From the perspective of her visual persona, melancholia transfigures Sontag into a beautiful modernist ruin. This chapter explores the connection from the vantage point of the archive. We shall see how, in the archive, Sontag's fidelity to modernism becomes, in fact, her relation to theory, and she re-emerges as a mind among the theorists. The chapter illuminates the understudied role and place of Sontag in the critical movement called ‘theory’.

In her early essays Sontag had raised the question of a more ample criticism beyond the isolated exegesis of individual texts and authors. Against this kind of interpretation, she had pointed to the task of ‘critical theory’ (‘On Style’ 20) to examine the unexamined formal function of subject matter, and to the ‘theory’ of thinkers like Lévi-Strauss, who had dissolved established meanings to create a map of functions and relations. Her sympathy for the critical theory of Adorno naturally led her to explore the untapped potential of material reality, to hold the previously unseen and neglected as worthy objects of inquiry. In this earlier work, theory means rearranging the cultural landscape so that she might feel at ease in it. ‘I create the world,’ she writes in her notebooks from that time.

In the previous chapter we saw that becoming a public intellectual by no means meant the absence of contradictions and conflicting forces. Sontag's public image appeased the conflicts and struggles by projecting a ‘silent statue’, freezing her in time. But the struggles are there, and, depending on how one approaches Sontag, in her archive it is possible to find sadness or bliss. So far, most accounts that have drawn on her papers have incorporated that sense of struggle in her personal narrative to offer an intimate account of her life. The aim of this study, of this chapter in particular, is different. It wishes to include that sense of struggle in a broader context.

Sontag's mentor Kenneth Burke called her a ‘reporter’ of modernity. By modernity she meant exactly what other illustrious reporters before her had meant: the waning of perception.