Susan Sontag's "archaeology of longings".

 
  I am part of all that I have met; 
  yet all experience is an arch wherethro' 
  Gleams that untravell'd world, whose 
    margin fades 
    For ever and for ever when I move. 
  Alfred Lord Tennyson ("Ulysses") 

Susan Sontag has often been read as "the avatar of an emergent postmodernist culture" (Kennedy, Mind as Passion, 44), (1) informed by a postmodernist ethos of dissemination, fluidity, and dispersion of subjectivity. Indeed, Sontag's reading of Roland Barthes's conception of textuality seems to serve as a good point of departure for an engagement with her own work. However, I believe that this appropriation does not do full justice either to Sontag's work or to the complex issue of subjectivity itself. In the following discussion I focus on Sontag's two short travel stories, "Project for a Trip to China" and "Unguided Tour," and offer a reading which addresses some of the more relevant aspects of this issue.

The "trip" in the first story is not necessarily a trip to another country, but to the most personal and historical biography. China is the place where the narrator was probably conceived. China is where her father died, his place of burial not known. (2) The insistence on spotting the geography of conception indicates an insistence on origins, a return to sources. (3) While Barthes's texts point at dissemination and dispersion, as some of Sontag's texts ostensibly do, "Project for a Trip to China" seems to be motivated by the very opposite of such dynamics--the search for origins and the quest for some point of beginning. This tension between textual processes and subtext must alert us to conflicting sets of motivation in the story. Whereas the story seems to make China an impossible locus, a multiplicity refusing to cohere around any known core--"China is certainly too big for a foreigner to understand. But so are most places" (11)--the search for the absent, dead father summons a counter energy; one that mounts towards a point of conception, a place of origin, a lost plenitude that one has not yet given up hope of attaining.

Similarly, "Unguided Tour" offers a subtext of longing and "unrequited love" that translates into the textual dynamics of unfulfillment or impossible relationships. While the text is fragmented and incoherent, frustrating the reader's dream of interpretation, of finding meaningful depths lying beneath a suggestive surface, the story is fraught with a "great longing for another place" (246), with a persistent, submerged craving for a "change of heart" (233). The insistence on aphorism, fragmentation, gaps, and nonlinearity in both stories does not only serve to exemplify purely ideological positions, such as the "fending off [of] any easy appropriation" of the writer's thoughts (Kennedy, "Precocious," 37), or what Sontag defines as Barthes's "defiant" politics of radical individuality; a "liberty" which is a state "that consists in remaining plural, fluid" ("Writing," xxx-xxxii). This poetic strategy is also, primarily perhaps, a means of reenacting emotional states.

Indeed, a flat surface, a text resisting any in-depth reading, does not eliminate the presence of emotions, and this is perhaps one of the interesting things happening in so many postmodernist stories. What seems to evade the character somehow escapes into the text. The locus holding such emotions is decentered. We can no longer geographically place fear, for example, as an emotion "belonging" to a character in a story; this would be futile, since so many of those "characters" seem so flat, so incapable of having any feelings. But the feelings are preserved elsewhere--displaced, exiled, decentered, and expropriated--they nonetheless persist, holding on to some of the texts like a plague.

Sontag's "project" is neither the utterly "unguided tour"--a fantastic illusion of self-creation where one is free to reinvent subjectivity autonomously, nor is it a total dissolution into language and cultural constructs. As such, Sontag's stance of "betraying contradictory claims" ("Project," 29) recalls Ihab Hassan's conception of postmodernism which includes Sontag herself as a representative:

 
  We can not simply rest ... on the assumption that postmodernism is 
  antiformal, anarchic, or decreative; for though it is indeed all 
  these, and despite its fanatic will to unmaking, it also contains the 
  need to discover a "unitary sensibility" (Sontag), to "cross the 
  border and cross the gap" (Fielder), and to attain,... an immanence 
  of discourse, an expanded noetic intervention, a "neo-gnostic 
  immediacy of mind." (150)