Susan Sontag's "archaeology of longings".

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-MAR-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)

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)

While the two stories seem to follow the Barthian model, they nonetheless allow the gaps in the text to inform the reader about subtexts of repressed longing and a quest for origins. The "flight" (Sontag, "Writing," xxxi) is not at all complete. Where language stops, the reader is invited to walk in and fill in the spaces. The result, however, is more often a void than a plentitude. Instead of replenishing the vacant text with numerous interpretations, the reader is often yanked back to surface level, reminded time and again that no depth is allowed; that what confronts her is a frustrating shallowness, barren and ungiving.

Paradoxically, it is precisely this tension between suggestive gaps and the inability of the reader to actually explore their depth that grants the reader the experience, the "subtext" of thwarted longing. In a sense, such gaps recall Robert Con Davis's important remark "that the act of reading is never an either/or process; that while the text may present gaps and absences, the reader is constantly driven by the complementary illusion of plenitude and wholeness. Carrying such a fantasy of plenitude into the text, the reader is not merely a naive "victim" of textual strategies, but rather a partner in the production of some meaning which evolves through the gaps ("Lacan and Narration," 855).

The notion of a subtext, or of latent contents, is problematic when we deal with a writer like Sontag who is known for her warning "against Interpretation," (4) against hermeneutics and the attempt to dig "under" a text; "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art" ("Against Interpretation," 14). (5) Sontag calls for acts of interpretation which move beyond "content" and which do not look for a particular didactic cause. My reading of a "subtext," however, is not directed toward excavating a "truth" lying peacefully beneath the surface. Rather, it seeks to follow Sontag's own conception of a "work of art" as "an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question" ("On Style," 21). I would argue, though, that in Sontag's stories the experience of reading accords with the stories' "subtext." The term "subtext," therefore, is used in this context not as hidden or unseen content--all details of "content" can be easily quoted from the surface text, but rather as the emotional experience recreated by the reading of the text. In doing so I hope to follow Sontag's recommendation to the critic "to make works of art--and, by analogy, our own experience--more, rather than less, real to us" and "to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means" ("Against Interpretation," 14).

"Project for a Trip to China"

The story reads more like an outline for writing about such a trip. The "raw" text is filled with lists of variables and permutations which suggest but rarely offer a possible textual development. Nothing seems to mature into what we traditionally recognize as a short story; even the most suggestive psychological hints, and there are quite a few of those, appear to be fragmented, refusing to cohere into a whole, processed text. As an outline for a story, the text seems to hold some promise (6)--a potential corpus of information packaged in the form of outline entries, titles rather than fully articulated passages; indeed, one may speak here of name tags glued to sealed suitcases. There seems to be a suggestion...

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