I, etcetera (1978) 2

 

I am nearing the end of Sontag's Kafkaesque allegory "The Old Complaints" (1974). Not sure at what point I gave up trying to ascertain which "organization" Sontag's ungendered "I" is trying to quit (The Temple of Non-Fiction?), but it's been a while now. At this point my thoughts recall the organizations I have joined in my life, those I have come to know through service, and in the course of serving learning how they work (and don't work), what they are built on, their histories, how some (like some of my country's state-sponsored Artist-Run Centres), have become entirely about their insistence, how I have become alienated from them, yet stayed on, awaiting a time and a place to leave them, as Sontag's "I" has been waiting since she joined the organization as a teen, when Sontag herself started publishing her writings.

Sontag scholars note her legendary seriousness, her deep focus, yet in her dozen or so short fiction works we see the author reaching out her arms as if to summon the flighty, the ludic, the absurd. It is strange to read Fiction Sontag. I am tempted to say she is trying too hard, but that's not fair; she's remans the serious, truth-seeking intellectual, but tucked in a fiction, airing (confessing?) issues that are relevant today, as she did eight years before "The Old Complaints" was first published when, in 1966, she wrote: "Today's America, with Ronald Reagan the new daddy of California and John Wayne chawing spare ribs in the White House, is pretty much the same Yahooland that Mencken was describing." H. L. Mencken was commenting on America during the first half of the 20th century; Sontag's domain was its second half.

"A summing up. I accuse the organization of depriving me of my innocence. Of complicating my will.

(I don't deny that it has improved my mind, taught me to see the world in a truer, less falsely expectant way. But what use is truth if it makes you despise other people? In despising others, you only despise yourself.)" (130)

I, etcetera (1978)

When Susan Sontag passed away in 2004 after a thirty year argument with acute myelogenus leukaemia, the U.S. lost one of its greatest writers. I want to say public intellectuals, but would prefer to emphasize a writing that, despite influential texts like Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977) and Illness as a Metaphor (1978), is most resonant in fiction -- or let us say an argument with fiction, where the author's discomfort with everything except cigarettes and black turtleneck sweaters achieved its greatest expression. 

A couple years ago, when Jacqueline Zhong-Li Ross submitted to me her list of books to read in advance of our meetings, Sontag's short fiction collection I, etcetera (1978) was among them. I never got around to reading it at the time, but I am now, and sheesh -- does it feel fresh! Certainly the first story, "Project for a Trip to China", with its literary curlicue and dialectical why and wherefore em-dashed notes; a work that carries with it the sound of its own making, but a complete work all the same. "Fresh" not because of its style, which would pass for experimental in the 1970s, but its variegation of fiction and non-.

Here's a passage that reminds me of my own father's beginnings in China (Shanghai):

"A trip into the history of my family. I've been told that the Chinese are pleased when they learn that a visitor from Europe or America has some link with prewar China. Objection: My parents were on the wrong side. Amiable, sophisticated Chinese reply: But all foreigners who lived in China at the time were on the wrong side." (12)