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Against Postmodernism, etcetera--A Conversation
with Susan Sontag

Evans Chan
[e-mail]

© 2001 Evans Chan.
All rights reserved.
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1. This interview took place in late July, 2000 at Susan Sontag's
[Susan Sontag]penthouse apartment in Chelsea on a sunny,
tolerably hot day. Just as I entered the
building, Sontag's assistant was returning from some errands and
we went up the elevator together. As we opened the apartment
door, Sontag was emptying some trash into a bin. Later she
mentioned that since her illness--she has been recovering from a
second cancer that was diagnosed in 1998--her apartment had
become a mess. "These days I'm mostly trying to make space for
all the books I've acquired in the last two years and sorting
papers and manuscripts," she said. What makes the apartment at
once austere and elegant are the dozens of Piranesi prints on
the walls. I was reminded of lines in the Alice James monologue
from Sontag's play, Alice in Bed: "With my mind I can see, I can
hold all that in my mind. Everyone says [Rome]'s so beautiful.
I've looked at the pictures, the engravings. Yes, Piranesi"
(81).

2. I had brought with me a copy of a Chinese periodical review of
my recent book The Last of the Chinese (also in Chinese) to show
her. The editor had used the cover of her latest novel In
America to illustrate the review--a delightful surprise for me,
since Sontag has been an important influence on my own writing
and filmmaking endeavors. An admirer of The Benefactor, Sontag's
first novel, before reading her critical writings, I translated
into Chinese her essay "Fascinating Fascism" and her short story
"Project for a Trip to China" back in the mid-'80s in Hong Kong,
without thinking much about copyright issues. Over the years, I
saw Chinese translations of her work appear here and there in
Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, invariably without her knowledge.
Several friends urged me to interview her for Chinese
publications, and perhaps to edit an anthology of Sontag's
writings in Chinese. As the Sontag anthology project became more
realistic, I finally introduced myself to her at a Trisha Brown
concert at the Joyce Theater and she agreed to my interview
request right away. When I described the chaotic Chinese
publishing scene, she shrugged it off. "People think that I'll
be angry because it's pirated. But I'm not a very good citizen
of capitalist society. Of course, I'd like to be paid, and I'm
hardly difficult to get in touch with. I have a publisher and an
agent, whose addresses are listed in the entry on me in Who's
Who, which I assume anybody can access online. But no, I'm not
angry. Most of all I'd like to be read."

3. Then we settled into a table in the kitchen. Behind me was a
door that opened onto a wrap-around balcony, which overlooked
the shimmering Hudson and the Manhattan skyline in late
afternoon. Sontag put her leg on the table, tilted her chair
back, and sipped her coffee. Two years ago she quit smoking. She
started talking about Shower, the most recent Chinese film she
had seen. She found it "mildly interesting" because of its
setting in a Beijing in transition. Among Hong Kong filmmakers,
Wong Kar-wai is naturally the one she is familiar with. She

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quite liked Fallen Angels, but was disappointed by Happy
Together. (Serving on the jury of Hawaii Film Festival in 1986,
Sontag apparently helped A Time to Live, A Time to Die, the
breakthrough film by Taiwan's preeminent auteur, Hou
Hsiao-hsien, win top prize. She also named YiYi, by Edward
Young, another major Taiwan filmmaker, the best film of 2000
[Sontag, "Best" 26]). I brought her up-to-date on the activities
of our mutual friend Simone Swan, a founding director of the de
Menil Foundation and an old acquaintance of hers, who has been
trying to preserve the legacy of the Egyptian architect Hassan
Fathy by building low-cost adobe housing along the Texas
border.[1] Sontag responded positively, but suspected that "poor
people might want concrete" rather than mud bricks for their
houses. After such preliminary small talk, the interview--C:
Chan; S: Sontag--formally began:

4. C: In the '60s, you were among the first to try to bridge the
gap between high and low cultures. Now, after three decades,
we've seen high culture, or the so-called canon, besieged by
popular culture and multiculturalism. We have today a new
sensibility that, depending on one's perspective, either
surpasses or parodies the kind of sensibility that you heralded
in the last essay of Against Interpretation (1966). We now live
in an age of total eclecticism and global interpenetration,
which many people, including myself, call the postmodern. So
far, your reaction to postmodernism seems largely inimical. And
you refused to allow the Camp sensibility that you helped make
famous to be co-opted by the postmodernists because "Camp
taste... still presupposes the older, high standards of
discrimination" ("Writing Itself" 439).

5. S: I never thought I was bridging the gap between high and low
cultures. I am unquestioningly, without any ambiguity or irony,
loyal to the canon of high culture in literature, music, and the
visual and performing arts. But I've also enjoyed a lot of
popular music, for example. It seemed we were trying to
understand why that was perfectly possible and why that wasn't
paradoxical... and what diversity or plurality of standards
might be. However, it didn't mean abolishing hierarchy, it
didn't mean equating everything. In some sense I was as much a
partisan or supporter of traditional cultural hierarchy as any
cultural conservative, but I didn't draw the hierarchy in the
same way.... Take an example: just because I loved Dostoevsky
didn't mean that I couldn't love Bruce Springsteen. Now, if
somebody says you have to choose between Russian literature or
rock 'n roll, of course I'd choose Russian literature. But I
don't have to choose. That being said, I would never argue that
they're equally valuable. But I was very struck by how rich and
diverse one's experiences are. Consequently, it seems to me a
lot of cultural commentators were lying about the diversity of
their experiences. On the other hand, there are a lot of things
in mass culture that didn't appeal to me, notably what's on
television. It seems very non-nourishing, conventional, bland,
trivial. So it wasn't a question of bridging the gap. It's
simply that I saw a lot of simultaneity in my experiences of
pleasure, and felt that most discourse about culture was either
philistine or shallowly snobbish. So it wasn't this is "here,"
and that's "there," and I can make a bridge. It was that I
understood myself to have many kinds of experiences and
pleasures, and I was trying to understand why that was possible,
and how you could still maintain a hierarchical sense of values.

6. This is not the sensibility that's called the postmodern--by the
way, that's not the word I use or find useful to use. I
associate postmodernism with leveling and with recycling. The

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word modernism arose in architecture. It has a very specific
meaning. It meant the Bauhaus School, Corbusier, the box
skyscraper, the rejection of ornament. Form is function. There
are all sorts of modernist dogmas in architecture, which came to
prevail not only because of their aesthetic values. There was a
material support for these ideas: it's cheaper to build
buildings this way. Anyway, when the term postmodernism began to
be used across the field for all the arts it became inflated.
Indeed, many writers who used to be called modern or modernist
are now called postmodern because they recycle, use
quotations--I'm thinking of Donald Barthelme, for instance--or
practice what's called intertextuality.

7. C: Yes, the way writers are being relabelled as postmodern is at
times baffling. For example, I was startled when Fredric
Jameson, whose work I greatly admire, cited Beckett--who for me
is a terminal product of high modernism--as a postmodern author.

8. S: Jameson is the leading scholar who has tried to make more
sense of the category of postmodernism. One of the reasons I
remain unconvinced by his use of the term is that I don't think
he's interested in the arts. Not really. Not even in literature.
He's interested in ideas. If he cared about literature he
wouldn't have quoted--at great length--Norman Mailer. While you
illustrate your ideas with quotations from novels, you're also
implicitly suggesting to people that they read these books. I
think that either Jameson doesn't know that Mailer isn't a very
good writer, or that he doesn't care. Another example is when
Van Gogh and Warhol are treated as equivalent by Jameson for the
sake of theory-building, for fitting examples into his theory.
That's when I get off the bus. In my view, what's called
postmodernism--that is, the making everything equivalent--is the
perfect ideology for consumerist capitalism. It is an idea of
accumulation, of preparing people for their shopping
expeditions. These are not critical ideas....

9. C: However, in your long essay AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989),
you characterized the current moment as "a... grateful return to
what is perceived as 'conventions,' like the return to figure
and landscape... plot and character, and other much vaunted
repudiations of difficult modernism in the arts... the new
sexual realism goes with the rediscovery of the joys of tonal
music, Bouguereau, a career in investment banking, and church
weddings" (166-67). I, for one, almost felt you were singing the
praises of postmodernism.

10. S: Did you? That was certainly not my point. I thought I was
being sarcastic.

11. C: And you seem to have tapped new sources of energy in
transforming yourself into a historical novelist by writing The
Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (2000), which I guess would
come under the rubric of postmodern novels.

12. S: Although I have written two novels that take place in the
past, I don't call them historical novels. That is, I don't
consider myself working in a specific genre like crime novels,
sci-fi novels, or the Gothic novels. I want to enlarge my
resources as a writer of narrative fiction and I found it
liberating to set them in the past. These novels can't be
written in any other time but the late 20th century, written in
a combination of first and third person narrations, and with a
commingling of voices. I don't think there's anything like a
return to convention, or return to figuration. Maybe these
novels should be viewed as books about travel, about people in

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foreign places: The Volcano Lover is about the British in Italy;
In America is about the Poles emigrating to the US; the novel
I'm about to start is about some Japanese people in France in
the 1920s. However, I'm not trying to fulfill a program--I'm
trying to stretch myself.

13. C: Do you feel that in your current novels you can treat more
effectively entities like "characters?" Are characters
conventional items?

14. S: I'm not sure "characters" are conventional items. But I
always start with people, even with The Benefactor (1963) and
Death Kit (1967). The Benefactor explores a certain reclusive
nature, which is in fact very nihilistic--a gentle nihilism.
(Laughs.) Death Kit is about a man committing suicide. During
the time I wrote these two novels I began to become more
interested in history--not exactly related to current events or
particular topics--but just history and what it meant to
understand something historically--just what is behind the way
anything is at any given moment. I used to think that I was
interested in politics, but after I read a lot of history, I
came to think that the notion of politics is very superficial.
Actually, if you care about history, you couldn't care that much
about politics.

15. After writing the first two novels, I did more travels. I had
already set foot outside of the wealthy countries of North
America and Western Europe. For example, I had been to North
Africa and Mexico. But Vietnam was the first country I visited
where I saw real suffering. And I looked at such experiences not
just in aesthetic terms, but also with moral seriousness. So
it's not that I'm disenchanted with modernism. I want for myself
to take in more reality, and still with the tools of modernism,
to address real suffering, the larger world, and to break out of
the confines of narcissism and solipsism.

16. C: Isn't the portrayal of the Cavaliere in The Volcano Lover a
study of the saturnine, melancholic temperament that harks back
to your early, "solipsistic" novels? At the same time, we see
that consciousness is being dramatized by your placing it within
a wider world, within the currents of history.

17. S: I suppose all my work is placed under the sign of melancholy.
Saturn. At least so far. I expect that won't always be so.

18. C: Haven't you said that you don't like your early novels very
much?

19. S: I've said all sorts of stupid things. (Laughs.) Luis Bunuel
once expressed an interest in filming Death Kit. That could have
been very nice.

20. C: Recently, I reread your first novel The Benefactor after
almost twenty years. That was the first book of yours that I
read and it remains one of the most eccentric and brilliant
novels I've ever come across. When I first stumbled upon it I
was living in Hong Kong, completely unaware of contemporary
literary scene, and by chance I started reading Hannah Arendt. I
saw her endorsement of The Benefactor somewhere. She praised
your originality and expressed admiration for your ability to
"make a story out of dreams and thoughts." I guess what Arendt
found fascinating in it might be what she called
"thought-experiments." Now, I was also struck by how much The
Benefactor has encapsulated so many of the themes and concerns
in your writing career. It is, first of all, Against

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Interpretation written as fiction. Hippolyte is someone who
doesn't want to interpret his life through dreams, but to act
through, and along with, his dreams.

21. S: You're right on the mark about The Benefactor having all the
themes of my work. That's very startling to me, as if you
started with the cards in your hand, but you're blindfolded. And
then maybe only halfway through your life do you actually get to
look at the cards you're holding. Every once in a while, I catch
a glimpse of the way my work fits together. For instance, the
essays I wrote about illness--Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and
Its Metaphors--was also kind of "against interpretation": Don't
interpret being ill. Being ill is just being ill. Don't invest
it with all these myths and fantasies....

22. C: In The Benefactor, you wrote: "No part of the modern
sensibility is more tiresome than its eagerness to excuse and to
have one thing always mean something else" (109).

23. S: I'd forgotten that. How did I know what I knew, all too
unconsciously at the time? When I began The Benefactor, I hadn't
the faintest idea of what I was doing; unlike later writing,
when I really did think through the basic ideas before I would
start. I just went sentence by sentence, I had no idea where it
was going to go. But at the same time it was very easy to write,
as if it was already there and I just had to take it down. A few
of the dreams have elements of the dreams of mine, but they are
mostly invented.

24. C: One critic suggested that Hippolyte and Jean-Jacques are
modeled after Artaud and Genet.

25. S: Jean-Jacques is, in part, inspired by Genet--well, by the
idea of Genet. Hippolyte? No, that's no one in particular.

26. C: I was spellbound by The Benefactor's opening epigram: Je reve
donc je suis! Maybe because I'm Chinese and every Chinese is
familiar with Chuang Tzu's tale about the man and the butterfly:
The man dreams a dream in which he becomes a butterfly. Upon
waking up, he wonders whether he's actually a butterfly that
dreams of becoming a man. I can see how The Benefactor was
influenced by Kleist's essay "On the Puppet Theater," as it
makes Hippolyte's journey a quest for the equilibrium and
tranquility of the self.

27. S: You're right about Kleist. I read the Kleist essay when I was
very young and was completely overwhelmed. However, the point is
you have to write out of a deep place, and these things, like
the Kleist essay, sink down to a deep place and then you find
you can write. Many people have asked me why I haven't written
something in the form of fiction or play about the siege of
Sarajevo. The answer is that I feel that experience hasn't yet
gone to the deepest place it can go.

28. C: In response to your political intervention in Sarajevo by
staging Waiting for Godot, Jean Baudrillard said, "Even if there
are any intellectuals left... I do not share in that complicity
of intellectuals who perceive themselves as responsible for
'something,' as privileged with a sort of conscience-radicalness
that used to be the privilege of intellectuals.... Subjects such
as Susan Sontag cannot intervene anymore, even symbolically, but
once again this is not a prognosis or diagnosis" (qtd. in
Bayard). What's your reaction to his idea about "the privilege
of the intellectuals," as well as his so-called diagnostic
statement about our time?

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29. S: Baudrillard is a political idiot. Maybe a moral idiot, too.
If I ever had any thought about functioning in a typical way as
a public intellectual, my experiences in Sarajevo would have
cured me forever. Look, I did not go to Sarajevo in order to
stage Waiting for Godot. I would have had to have been insane to
do such a thing. I went to Sarajevo because my son, a journalist
who had begun covering the war, suggested that I make such a
trip. While there for the first time in April 1993, I told
people I would like to come back and work in the besieged city.
When asked what I could do, I said: I can type, I can do
elementary hospital tasks, I can teach English, I know how to
make films and direct plays. "Oh," they said, "do a play. There
are so many actors here with nothing to do." And the choice of
doing Godot was made in consultation with the theater community
in Sarajevo. The point is, that doing a play in Sarajevo was
something I did at the invitation of some people in Sarajevo,
while I was already in Sarajevo, and trying to learn from
Sarajevans how I might be, in some small way, useful.

30. It had nothing to do with "the privilege of the intellectuals!"
My visit wasn't intended to be a political intervention. If
anything my impulse was moral, rather than political. I'd have
been happy simply to help some patients get into a wheelchair. I
made a commitment at the risk of my life, under a situation of
extreme discomfort and mortal danger. Bombs went off, bullets
flew past my head.... There was no food, no electricity, no
running water, no mail, no telephone day after day, week after
week, month after month. This is not "symbolic." This is real.
And people think I dropped in for a while to do a play. Look, I
went to Sarajevo for the first time in April 1993 and I was
mostly in Sarajevo till the end of 1995. That is two and a half
years. The play took two months. I doubt if Baudrillard knows
how long I was in Sarajevo. I'm not a Bernard-Henri Levy making
his documentary Bosna. In France they call him BHL; in Sarajevo
they called him DHS--deux heures a Sarajevo--two hours in
Sarajevo. He came in the morning on a French mlitary plane, left
his film crew, and was out of there in the afternoon. They
brought the footage back to Paris, he added an interview with
Mitterand, put on the voice-over, and edited the film there.
When Joan Baez came for twenty-four hours, her feet never hit
the sidewalk. She was going around in a French tank and
surrounded by soldiers the entire time. That's what some people
did in Sarajevo.

31. C: Did you ever call Baudrillard a "cunning nihilist"?

32. S: I doubt it. I don't think I would call him nihilistic. I
think he's ignorant and cynical. And he definitely has opinions
about intellectuals. There are intellectuals and intellectuals.
The majority of them are conformists. But some are brave, very
brave. And what are intellectuals doing with postmodernism? How
people move these terms around instead of looking at the
concrete reality! I'm for complexity and the respect for
reality. I don't want to think anything theoretically in that
sense. My interest is to understand the genealogy of ideas. If
I'm against interpretation, I'm not against interpretation as
such, because all thinking is interpretation. I'm actually
against reductive interpretation, and I'm against facile
transposition and the making of cheap equivalences.

33. C: Yet, in retrospect, your book On Photography (1977) can be
considered a pioneering work on postmodernity. For example, you
said that the photographic taste is inherently democratizing and
leveling--capable of abolishing the difference between good and

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bad taste. Photography, or the culture of images, has
aestheticized tragedies and disasters, fragmented our world,
replaced (virtualized?) reality, and instilled a sense of
fatalism: "In the real world, something is happening and no one
knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has
happened, and it will forever happen in that way" (168). (That
comment presaged Virilio's observation that our Past, Present
and Future has been replaced by Fast Forward, Play and
Rewind--the image of modern/postmodern man being that of a
sitter with a remote.) For you, photography is the culmination
of modernism and its undoing.

34. S: Yes, I suppose so. But again I don't think I need to use that
term "postmodern." But I do think seeing the world
photographically is the great leveler. And yet I'm puzzling a
lot over the consequences of viewing disasters and the horrors
of the world through photographic images. Does it anaesthetize
us? Does it make us used to things? Does the shock value wear
off? I don't know. Then there's a big difference between the
still and the moving images. The moving image is very powerful
because you don't know where it's going to go. In the last essay
in On Photography, I talked about the experience I had in China
watching an operation under acupuncture anaesthesia. I saw
someone have most of his stomach removed because of a
catastrophic ulcer. Clearly it worked. His eyes were open and he
was talking and sipping some liquid through a straw. There was
no way of faking that; it did work. The doctor said it tends to
work well for the torso but not so well for the limbs, and
doesn't work for some patients at all. But it worked for this
one. I watched the operation without flinching, the cutting open
of the abdomen, the huge ulcerous part of the patient's stomach,
which looked gray as a tire. This was the first operation I had
seen, I thought maybe I'd find it hard to watch, but I didn't.
Then, six months later, I was in a movie theater in Paris
watching Chung Kuo, Antonioni's China film, which has a scene
showing a Caesarian delivery with acupuncture anaesthesia. The
moment the abdomen of the pregnant woman was cut, I couldn't
watch it. How strange! I couldn't watch the image, but I could
watch the real thing. That is very interesting. There are all
sorts of puzzles about what the culture of image is.

35. C: Some of the most ominous statements in On Photography have
come true. For example, photography--in its latest incarnation
through digital technology--has definitely triumphed over art.
TV, Hollywood, and the infotainment industry have taken over,
resulting in, among other things, what you called "the decay of
cinema"[2]--the most important modern art form. Jean-Luc Godard
recently said the cinema as we knew it is over (see Rosenbaum
165).[3]

36. S: The cinema as he knew it is over. That's for sure--for a
number of reasons, including the breakdown of the distribution
system. I had to wait eight years to see Alan Resnais's
Smoking/No Smoking, which I just saw at the Lincoln Center.
Resnais made those films in the early '90s, but then none of his
films were distributed here in the past 10 years. We're getting
a much smaller selection here in New York, which is supposed to
be a good place to see films. On the other hand, if you can
tolerate the small formats--I happen to have a problem with
miniaturized images--you can get the whole history of cinema and
watch it over and over again. You don't have to be dependent on
the distribution system. The problems with cinema seem to me,
more than anything, a cultural failure. Tastes have been
corrupted, and it's so rare to see filmmakers who have the
aspiration to take on profound thoughts and feelings. There is a

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reason that more and more films that I like are coming from the
less prosperous parts of the world, where commercial value has
not completely taken over. For example, I think people have
reacted so positively to Kiarostami is that he shows people who
are quite innocent and not cynical, in this increasingly cynical
world. In that sense, I don't think cinema is over yet.

37. C: It's been suggested that you redirected your fiction-writing
urge toward filmmaking during the long hiatus between your two
groups of novels. [Sontag's filmography includes Duet for
Cannibals (1969), Brother Carl (1971), Promised Lands (1974),
and Unguided Tour (1983).]

38. S: Maybe. But I don't have an industrial model of productivity.
I don't think it's the most important thing, as soon as I finish
one book, to immediately start another one. I want to write
books that are necessary.

39. C: One more question about The Benefactor and your writing
career, because your first novel seems particularly interesting
in light of your lifetime relationship with interpretation,
Freudian and otherwise. Hannah Arendt is antipathetic to
psychoanalysis because it compromises her conception of human
freedom. Here's a quote from The Benefactor: "But one has to
declare oneself free in order to be, truly, free. I have only to
consider my dreams as free, as autonomous, in order to be free
of them--at least as free as any human being has the right to
be" (246). I heard echoes of these statements in "Writing
Itself," your essay on Barthes, in which you upheld "the
exercise of consciousness as a life's highest aim, because only
through becoming fully conscious may one be free" (444). To what
extent do you feel that the project of consciousness that you
treasure is better served by you as a fiction writer, rather
than as an essayist?

40. S: Yes, I do feel freer, more expressive, and much closer to
what matters to me when I'm writing fiction. The goal is to
become still more expressive. And to take in more and more
reality.

41. C: Do you acknowledge that there is an anti-psychological
tendency in your work? Is that an aesthetic, formal, modernist
approach partly derived from the French new novels? Or is it
your moral and philosophical stance vis-à-vis the human
condition?

42. S: I don't think I'm anti-psychological. I am rather
anti-autobiographical, however. Maybe the confusion lies there.
And I don't think I've learned anything from the so-called
French new novels. I didn't ever really like them. I thought
they were "interesting," which is a shallow, dishonest form of
praise from which I like to think I've freed myself.

43. C: You supposedly abandoned two novels.

44. S: Three, I'm afraid. I stopped at fifty, sixty pages. If I get
to a hundred pages I can go on.

45. C: Weren't you supposed to have made a film based on Simone de
Beauvoir's first novel L'Invitee (She Came to Stay)?

46. S: Yes. I'd written a full shooting script, secured the rights,
for a pittance, from Simone de Beauvoir, and found some modest
financing for the film. But at some point I stopped believing in
the script, or the film, or the subject--I'm not sure which. I

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wasn't confident it would be good enough.

47. C: Have you said goodbye to filmmaking?

48. S: Movies have been the love of my life. There have been many
periods of my life when I've gone to movies every day, and
sometimes I see two films a day. Bresson and Godard, and
Syberberg, and more recently Sokurov, have been extremely
important to me. I love Chantal Ackerman's Jeanne Diehlmann,
Bela Tarr's Satantango, Fassbinder's In a Year of Thirteen
Moons, The American Soldier, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,
and Berlin Alexanderplatz; Angelopoulos's Traveling Players,
Alan Renais's Melo, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Goodbye South, Goodbye,
Claire Denis's Beau Travail.... I've learned so much from these
films. And no, I haven't said goodbye to filmmaking. I'm not
interested in adapting my own books, but in something else. Yes,
I want to make more films.

49. C: In your 1995 essay "On Wei Jingsheng," you lamented "the
general decline of universalist moral and political standards of
Enlightenment values in the past generation," as reflected in
the suspension of human rights standards where China is
concerned. I think this piece, together with your (uncollected)
1984 essay "Model Destinations," goes straight to the heart of
the political dilemma of our post-Cold War and post-ideological
era. Dictatorships all over the world, as you said, "have been
emboldened" by the triumphant, capitalist West's concerns about
"sustaining lucrative economic ties" ("Model Destinations"
699-700).

50. S: For the record, that wasn't something I wrote. These are
impromptu remarks I made at a press conference in New York
organized by Orville Schell when Wei was rearrested, which were
recorded, transcribed, and picked up by The New York Review of
Books. The first I heard that my remarks were to be published
was a few days later when I got a telephone call from The New
York Review of Books, telling me that they were sending down the
galleys of my "China piece" by messenger. (Laughs.) You know,
I'm not a relativist. I grew up hearing that Asian culture is
different from Western culture. Generations of Sinologists,
including John Fairbank, have declared that where Asia is
concerned, the Western standards of civil liberties are
irrelevant, or don't apply, because these came out of European
Protestant culture which stresses the individual while Asian
cultures are fundamentally collectivist. That is pernicious and
colonialist in spirit. Such standards don't apply to traditional
societies or communities anywhere, including in Europe. But if
you live in the modern world, which is by definition not a
traditional world, then you do want these freedoms. Everyone
wants them. And it's important to explain that to privileged
people from rich countries who think they're only for "us."

51. C: And "Model Destinations" was part of a larger work that you
gave up?

52. S: Yes, it was going to be a book, about 100 pages, about
intellectuals and Communism--because I was really impressed by
how gullible those visitors to socialist countries were. Those
people normally traveled in a delegation, stayed at hotels and
were escorted around. I remembered my trip to China in January
1973 during the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. I became
friendly with this woman assigned to be my interpreter. I wasn't
very important, so I got this low-level person from the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs. And obviously she was writing a report on me
every day. She was a sweet but frightened middle-aged woman who

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had lost her husband during the Cultural Revolution. I asked her
where she was staying. She said she was staying with friends. As
it turned out, she was staying in this tiny room, which was more
like a closet, in the basement of the hotel. I saw it because I
insisted on seeing where she stayed--she wasn't supposed to show
it. One day she invited me to go out for a walk, after
indicating that the room was bugged. She spoke very slowly in
her limping English: "Have... you... read... a... book...
called... 19--" When I heard "19" there was a pain in my chest.
I knew what she was going to say next. "-84." "1984," I
repeated, more upset than I wanted to let on. "Yes," she said,
smiling, "China just like that."

53. I think if you troubled yourself to make a few human contacts,
you could find out some truths about these countries. At least
Roland Barthes had the courage of his sexual tastes. He liked
countries in North Africa and Asia where he could sleep with
boys; since he didn't get the chance to do that in China, he was
bored. But not fooled. His sexuality kept him honest about his
unflattering impressions of Maoist moralizing and cultural
uniformity. But others on the same trip to China [in 1974],
Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers, came back saying it's
absolutely wonderful, and repeating all the Maoist clichés. You
can say that their ideological blinders made them see things a
certain way. There are also all the dupes who visited the Soviet
Union in the 1930s. You want to say to such people, "Stop! Do
you know where you are? What you're seeing? Try to start from
what is absolutely concrete. How could you not see?"

54. C: Was there any period in your life when you were seriously
seduced by communism?

55. S: No, not by communism, but by the struggle against American
imperialism. I was obsessed with the American war on Vietnam.
Even to this date, Americans talk about 56,000 American soldiers
who died there. That's a lot of people. But three million
Vietnamese soldiers and countless civilians died. And the
country was ruined ecologically. More bombs were dumped on that
country than all the bombs dropped in WWII, the same in Korea.
The disproportionate nature of American firepower when it went
into these countries was mind-boggling. Take the war in Iraq.
The war was already over, and the Americans were dumping napalm
and firebombing barefoot Iraqi soldiers who were retreating
north. Those things drove me to despair. One must remember that
between 1963 and August 1968, with the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia--that was a period of thought for a lot of us. In
1963 I became involved in the anti-war movement before there was
really an anti-war movement. The Vietnam war was just starting.
I teamed up with an ex-green beret and went on a speaking tour
in California. We stood at street corners and twice were stoned.
During that period of the mid-'60s I met people from the Soviet
Union who did, in fact, say that things were really much better,
and going in the right direction. Then it all came crashing down
in August of '68. So yes, between 1963 and 1968, I was willing
to believe that so-called Third World countries opposing
American imperialism which had adopted single-party Communist
governments--and not just Vietnam or Cuba--could develop a
humane alternative to their previous status of just being
colonies.... That didn't turn out to be true, but in a lifetime
of caring about what goes on in the world, five years doesn't
seem too long to have been mistaken.

56. C: Would you retract your 1982 Town Hall statement that
"Communism is fascism with a human face"?[4]

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57. S: Of course not. Communist governments for a while drew on
immense resources of idealism. In the 1930s in Europe,
extraordinary people were drawn into the communist movement and
they had no idea what was going on. And then the people who
talked about it were constantly told to shut up because the most
important thing was the struggle against Hitler and we must not
let down the right side in the Spanish Civil War.

58. C: Did you not finish the book about intellectuals and communism
because you feared the book would be used by the
neo-conservatives?

59. S: Certainly not. It was abandoned because I wanted most of all
to return to writing fiction, only fiction. I knew this book
would take me a couple of years. I've abandoned a lot of things.
And I'm not one of these graphomaniacs who write all the time.
There are periods when I find writing the hardest thing in the
world.

60. C: Some critics have suggested that Maryna in In America is sort
of a fictional self-portrait. Would you tell us how much you
identify with this description in the novel, when you offer us
the last glimpse of her in a third person narration? "Maryna sat
down and looked into the mirror. Surely she was weeping because
she was so happy--unless a happy life is impossible, and the
highest a human being can attain is a heroic life. Happiness
comes in many forms; to have lived for art is a privilege, a
blessing" (369).

61. S: I identify entirely with those words.

* * *

62. After the actual interview, I was sidetracked by finishing and
launching my new feature film, "The Map of Sex and Love." Then
Susan Sontag won the 2000 National Book Award for In America,
and, following that, the Jerusalem Prize in May of 2001.[5] She
had also been traveling and putting together Where the Stress
Falls, a new collection of essays.[6] By the time she came
around to reviewing her responses and answering the additional
questions that I put to her through writing, a year had passed.
However, the piece is finally here. It will be translated into
Chinese and serve as an introduction to Susan Sontag: Selected
Writings in Chinese, to be published in Taiwan and Hong Kong in
2002.

63. I'd like to acknowledge the following individuals, whose support
and assistance made this interview possible: Jeff Alexander, May
Fung, Russell Freedman, Canran Huang, Wendy Lidell, Ivan Ng, and
Professor David Der-wei Wang.

[e-mail]

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Notes

1. More information about Simone Swan's housing projects for the
poor can be found at <http://www.adobealliance.org>.

2. See Sontag's "The Decay of Cinema."

3. From "Trailer for Godard's 'Histoire(s) du Cinema'," Jonathan
Rosenbaum's interview with Godard in "Trailer for Godard's
'Histoire(s) du Cinema,'" found in "Jean-Luc Godard: Histoire(s)
du Cinema," Vol. 4, from books accompanying the 5-CD set of the
soundtrack from Godard's video series released by ECM Records in
1999.

4. Sontag participated in a meeting at New York's Town Hall on
February 1, 1982, which was intended as a rally for the banned
Solidarity in Poland. During the meeting, Sontag made a speech
accusing the left of duplicity and declaring that "Communism is
fascism with a human face." Her speech, reprinted in a somewhat
revised form in The Nation (27 Feb. 1982), drew much political
criticism.

5. Sontag's acceptance of the Jerusalem Prize has generated some
controversy. Her speech was published as "The Conscience of
Words" in the Los Angeles Times on June 10, 2001. Available via
<http://www.latimes.com>.

6. Some pieces cited in this interview have been anthologized in
Sontag's latest collection of essays, Where the Stress Falls,
which includes "Writing Itself--On Roland Barthes" (63-88); "A
Century of Cinema" (117-122), cited here as "The Decay of
Cinema"; and "Questions of Travel" (274-284), cited here as
"Model Destinations."

Works Cited

Bayard, Caroline and Graham Knight. "Vivisecting the 90s: An
Interview with Jean Baudrillard." Ctheory 8 Mar. 1995
<http://www.ctheory.com/article/a024.html>.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "Trailer for Godard's 'Histoire(s) du
Cinema.'" Interview with Jean-Luc Godard. Jean-Luc Godard:
Histoire(s) du Cinema. Vol. 4. Books accompanying 5-CD
soundtrack set. ECM Records, 1999.

Sontag, Susan. Alice in Bed. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux,
1993.

---. The Benefactor. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1963.

---. "Best of 2000: Film." Artforum Dec. 2000: 26.

---. Death Kit. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1967.

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---. "The Decay of Cinema." New York Times Magazine 25 Feb.
1996: 6-10.

---. Illness as Metaphor; and, AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York:
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990.

---. In America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000.

---. "Model Destinations." Times Literary Supplement 22 Jun.
1984: 699-700.

---. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977.

---. "On Wei Jingsheng." New York Review of Books 15 Feb. 1996:
41-42.

---. The Volcano Lover. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992.

---. Where the Stress Falls. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux,
2001.

---. "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes." A Susan Sontag Reader.
New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982. 425-46.

---. A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux,
1982.

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