(Lisandro Otero is one of
Cuba's best-known writers. He lived and worked here on the island for many
years, then in Mexico as a columnist for a principal daily paper. Now he's back
in Cuba where he is president of the Academy of Linguistics. This is his
commentary on Susan Sontag, published a few days ago on LA JIRIBILLA.
Translation for CubaNews by Ana Portala. Mil gracias!)
==========================================================
Susan
Sontag, the thinking machine
By Lisandro Otero
Havana
http://www.lajiribilla.cu/2005/n194_01/194_33.html
Susan Sontag died a few days ago: a person who, in the second half of last century, acquired an intellectual prominence based on her unusual thought that created new categories of analysis. Her first important essay, on certain qualities of esthetic appreciation, coined a neologism called "camp". The word encompassed the artificial, the anti-natural and the exaggerated, but it soon became popular to typify the vulgar, the pretentious and affected frivolity
She died of leukemia but before had suffered breast cancer which she overcame after a long battle that stimulated her to write "Illness and its metaphors". However, her great international reputation rose from her deep studies on media culture, the universe of the recreational industry called "pop". She embraced the definition by Ortega y Gasset that culture is all a person conserves after forgetting what he or she read. In other words, she based her concept of culture on the instruments that take in the environment, the immediate and practical use, of knowledge and classification rather than an erudite accumulation. Many consider that the mass reproduction of art objects is the death of art but Sontag countered with her idea that we are going through a transformation about the function of art.
Her essay on photography is a classic. Her studies of Roland Barthes and Antonin Arthaud contributed to clarifying the respective work of both. Her first collaborations for the well known left-wing journal, Partisan Review, sparked her notoriety. She was always a liberal political militant. She attacked Bush and Berlusconi, she opposed US intervention in Sarajevo and traveled to Vietnam; she wrote extensively against the savage colonial war the US was waging in that country. She condemned the torture by US soldiers in the jail of Abu Ghraib and the expansionist policy of Israel, in spite of being Jewish and of having accepted the highest award of that country, the Jerusalem Prize for literature.
As President of the US PEN Club she mobilized that group in defense of the writer, Salman Rushdie when he received the "fatwa" condemning him to death for his irreverent anti-Islamic texts. She was genuinely - that is how she was considered by many - a "thinking machine". She considered that the job of an intellectual was to privately reflect, to analyze with discretion, but the 20th century forced them out into the arena and become public figures, setting aside their inherent function of retreat. In the style of the French writers Bourdieu, Foucault or Derrida she was always newsworthy. She was outrageous, provocative, impetuous and a rebel.
She tried her hand in to the art of narrative although with less success. Her novels based on important feminine personalities such as Lady Hamilton, the lover of Lord Nelson, Isadora Duncan, the extravagant dancer or the Polish actress, Helen Modjenska, did not leave the same penetrating mark of her essays. These were truly original, incisive and she uncovered unknown facets in each analysis she undertook.
She was a militant anti-Stalinist and wrote against the so-called "real socialism" of the Eastern European countries, a true caricature of true socialism. However, that view prevented her from finding the differences of the reach of social battles, of the movements of national liberation, of anti-imperialism so necessary in certain Third World countries. She did not grasp the truth of the Cuban Revolution and the deep historical and national roots on which the social transformation begun in 1959 were based.
For her, a work of art was not a vehicle of ideas but an object that modifies our conscience and sensibility. "A work of art is nothing but a moment in the conscience of humanity," she wrote, "while moral conscience is understood as one of the functions of the conscience". That idea, as a moral end, that could have come from the pen of Tolstoy is, perhaps, the best epitaph of her contradictory and dynamic existence.