Posted on 01/05/2005 4:19:09 AM PST by Colosis
I wish I had kicked Susan Sontag
By Kevin Myers
(Filed: 02/01/2005)
If ever a single person was living proof that intelligence is a meaningless quality without modest common sense, it was Susan Sontag who died last week. The reverential tone of the obituaries served to confirm that self-proclaimed intellectuals, no matter how deluded or preposterous, exert a strange, intimidating power over non-intellectuals – especially if they employ that infuriating literary device, the epigram.
Beware the epigramista. Beneath the veneer of apparent profundity of the epigram's internal contradiction, there is usually a deep well of meaninglessness, from which other intellectuals can extract similarly worthless academic baubles. The foremost proponent of the apparently profound but actually worthless epigram was Oscar Wilde – as in "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."
Haw haw haw. Dashed good, that, what? Only it isn't. It's flummery coated with a cheap and not very clever glitter. And such epigrams were what Sontag specialised in. Interpretation, she said, was "the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world".
Can't you hear the well-informed, mannerly discussions between all those New England professors with their bow-ties and tweed suits and rimless spectacles? But would that someone had treated Sontag in life as Dr Johnson had disposed of Bishop Berkeley's contention that objects only exist because we see them: kicking a stone till he bounced off it, he snarled, "I refute it thus."
I ran into her once, and my abject failure to give her the Johnson refutation haunts me still. Indeed, it might well be my greatest single delinquency, in a far from blameless life. It was in Sarajevo, during the siege in 1993, and she had arrived to stage a Bosnian version of Waiting for Godot. If memory serves – and possibly it doesn't, no doubt clouded by guilt that I failed to put the wretched woman over my knee and give her a sound spanking – she had each of Beckett's characters played by a Bosnian Muslim, a Bosnian Serb, and a Bosnian Croat.
By my personal reckoning, the performance lasted as long as the siege itself. It was mesmerisingly precious and hideously self-indulgent. As inexcusable as the pretentious twaddle she had mounted on-stage were her manners off it. I have occasionally seen egregious examples of de haut en bas, but I have never seen anything as degrading and insufferable as her conduct towards the Sarajevans. And as far as I could judge, she never listened to any of them, but only uttered lordly pronouncements as she held court in the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, while outside scores daily died.
Meanwhile she ostentatiously disdained us hacks even as she sedulously courted us. It was a grotesque performance. My real mistake was not radioing her co-ordinates to the Serb artillery, reporting that they marked the location of Bosnian heavy armour. My own life would have been a cheap price to pay.
All right, so she read 10 books a day: but a brilliant intellect can often be the companion to a truly asinine personality – so step forward, Susan Sontag, and take a bow. Admittedly, the vainglorious silliness that was her most salient characteristic did not lead her to embrace the Marxism of so many similarly silly Cambridge intellectuals. But it did cause her to emulate within American public life the role of "intellectuals" in France: insufferably self-important and posturing creatures like Barthes, Foucault, Derrida. They were best characterised in the immortal words of that truly great English philosopher, Terry-Thomas: "What an absolute sharr."
But wretched, credulous, self-hating American academia wanted to fawn on an intellectual whom popular culture could celebrate, and it chose Sontag and her vapid aphorisms. "The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own;" or: "What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death;" or: "Sanity is a cosy lie;" or: "Good health is the passing delusion of the doomed."
Well, actually, the last one is mine. We can all do this kind of poser-cleverness, but we'll never find our way into any dictionaries of quotation because one has to have a certain academic status before one's pseudo-sage declarations come to be exalted as "sayings". Yet Susan Sontag, the ridiculous heroine of US campus culture, couldn't even count to three: "The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony."
What's it to be, Susie babe? Jewish seriousness? Homosexual aestheticism? Or homosexual irony? But hey, what about Jewish irony? Or Jewish aestheticism? Or homosexual seriousness?
Such bilge can only exist in Englitish, the impenetrable campus-dialect in which English literature is analysed, discussed and then buried. Susie's gone now, but no doubt some other tongue will soon be babbling comparable Englitish gibberish in her stead. Meanwhile, I am left with the melancholy reflection, that yes, once I had my chance – and I bloody well blew it.
Pissing on Sontag's grave would be an excellent piece of performance art!
NEA GRANT!!!! NEA GRANT!!!!
Since death is eternal. it's not too late to micturate.
That was my observation. Christopher Hitchens can do it also.
I do too, and this one qualifies in spades. I particularly liked the syntax and content of this one: "...a brilliant intellect can often be the companion to a truly asinine personality."
A good epitaph for Susan, I think.
One source of additional material from Mr. Myers is the Telegraph itself. I used the Telegraph's own search engine with "Kevin Myers" as the keywords, and these are my results (the first ten out of 301):
In five years, no one under the age of 30 will have heard of her and likely never will. That's my obit for the self-obsessed crackpot.
The only bad thing about it is that doing so might kill some decent flowers.
I just sent this to the entire Memphis Mensa newsgroup, with the following message:
"Perhaps my birthplace betrays me, but the sheer Britishness of what follows appeals to me in a manner independent of the subject. But the subject, whether officially Mensan or not, was "intellectual" for a living, and this criticism might be salutary for all of us - whether it applies specifically to any of us or not."
Among her accomplishments listed in her Obit is that she had sex with Annie Leibowitz. Wow. A life well led eh Sue? Didn't EVERYONE in the 60's counter culture have sex with her too?
LOL...I must have called in sick that day!
Actually, I admire the epigrams of Oscar Wilde. There was truth in his wit. But Susan Sontag was a pretentious fool.
Bon mots -- great name! That is exactly what you have written -- bon mots! Double-dog-dittos to what you said!
Susan Sontag was a NAG hag of the first degree!
Kevin Myers is a real find. My Lord this man can write.
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