Susan Sontag was an America essayist, a literary critic and a political activist. She has also written several novels. A spirited woman who had many interests including photography and films, met ageing with the words, “Age has been kind to me, I have not crumbled… I have gone through many deepening experiences and am now able to see the larger picture….” There lies a dream in that statement as she is able to see her life with a sense of detachment and yet is attached enough to want to use the experiences constructively. The two interviews on YouTube bring out both the zest in her and her sensitive conscience. In seemingly light hearted interviews, Sontag makes several points of great relevance to today’s society. The first one which has been mentioned above is to see life as teaching rather than crippling. The second is her compulsive commitment to give back to the world and the third is her conviction that the writer is actually the society’s watch dog.
In one interview she is rather strong on the interviewer desperately resisting being labelled as so and so or making controversial assertions. But when heard along with the second, a lot of why she is so piqued comes out quite clearly. She is not just interested in many arts and social issues; she has strong views on them.
Talking about her writing Sontag says, “When I write, if I am thinking about anything else other than my characters, my language, punctuation etc., it is about the literary standards that all that I have read set for me so that I can be sufficiently critical and tough with myself.”
But after the writing is over, Sontag says, “I write chapter by chapter and give the chapter to ten of my friends to see how it goes. In fact one of my favourite things to do is to sit in front of my friend who is reading my chapter and watch the play of emotions on her face and if there is even a little smile at the corner of her lips, I want to know if she found it funny and what she thinks of it...”
Sontag worked and felt for the people of Bosnia and about that she says, “My involvement with the Sarajevo is normal or should I say normative. It is what people should do. I think you should be ashamed to die if you have not done something for other people. This commitment to Bosnia came...it could have been something else for this isn’t the only injustice in the world...but I was moved by the genocide and the suffering in this way...I think people of conscience, each in his or her own way, want to do something....”
One question both the interviewers pose is: has she changed her stance vis-à-vis pop culture? She had pioneered their acceptance, now is she backtracking? As a prelude to her answer, Sontag says that she has not gone back on any of her opinions, but with age has only found better understanding.” It is in this context that she says age has made her wiser and so she may have evolved in some of her views, but her views on pop culture remain the same. “It seemed a good thing to tell people thirty years ago that a lot of stuff in popular culture was utterly fascinating and really interesting and they could be enjoyed in a non-condescending way. But the cultural shift has been so enormous that now I don’t think these things need my support at all. In the sixties you had to help people lighten up a little, now you have to encourage people to be a little more serious.
An interesting role of the writer is somewhat adversarial…things are going too much in one direction, you call out say and say hey...you want to keep shifting what the centre is and that means supporting that are less central.”
Web Links
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GRx3KgKauY&feature=related
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mmi03G5oV0&feature=endscreen&NR=1