Susan Sontag

An Annotated Bibliography 1948-1992

Leland Poague, Kathy A. Parsons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135575342
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Susan Sontag: An Annotated Bibliographycatalogues the works of one of America's most prolific and important 20th century authors. Known for her philosophical writings on American culture, topics left untouched by Sontag's writings are few and far between. This volume is an exhaustive collection that includes her novels, essays, reviews, films and interviews. Each entry is accompanied by an annotated bibliography.

PART ONE

Primary Works

SECTION A
Books, Collections, Etc.

A1 The Benefactor. New York: Farrar, Straus & Co.; Toronto: Ambassador, 1963. ix+273 pp.

Begins with an expository, first-person table of contents. Epigraphs on sleeping or dreaming follow. Chapter 1 begins “Je rêve donc je suis”; Chapter 17 begins “Voila que j'ai touché l'automne des idées.” The paradoxical relations between thinking and being—figured in displacements from province to capital, from male to female, from Sontag's America to Hippolyte's France—frame (and shadow) the entire narrative.

“One” (G74). Emphasizes the difference between “those days” and “Now,” especially the “change” in his “preoccupation.” Recalls childhood and adolescence by reference to “traits which distinguished” him from his peers while asserting that his (family, class) origins were “unremarkable.” Such paradoxes abound, and are further complicated by the uncanny sense, in biographical retrospect, that Sontag has as much predicted as transposed her life story, as in Hippolyte's first philosophical article (“important ideas on a topic of no great importance”), which, like “Notes on ‘Camp,’” “excited some discussion in the general literary world” and gained Hippolyte entrance into the salon of Frau Anders. Sontag's aphoristic “voice” is here, surely, but is kept in (pleasurable, irritating) suspension by the narrator's as-if unconscious habit of self-contradiction, as in his narratorial claim that “truth is always something that is told,” that is “convincing,” followed immediately by the claim that writing, versus speaking, banishes “the thought of another person,” should not “try to convince.”

“Two.” Professes not to remember (exactly) when “the dream of the two rooms” began, though the dream (of being ordered from one prisonlike room to another by a limping flutetoting sadist in a black wool bathing suit who is replaced by, or has become, a woman dressed in white, etc.) is recounted in detail to the reader and to Jean-Jacques, ex-boxer cum homosexual prostitute and habitué of Frau Anders's salon. Rather than dream, Jean-Jacques writes, expressing his “dream-substance” in words, then replenishing it “in the show of the café.” He advises Hippolyte—who suspects that the dream had “interpreted itself or was itself” an interpretation—to “outbid” his dream by living it. Hippolyte “labors” with his dream—as if pregnant (“Interpretation was my Caesarean”).

“Three.” Versions of the “two rooms” dream proliferate. Hippolyte attempts to “master” the dream by enacting it, externalizing it, which provides Hippolyte the “first taste of an inner life.” Visits the elderly conductor. Sleep is “rewarded with a new dream”; it begins with the flute player and includes curiously (a)sexual party games. The conductor and Hippolyte discuss solitude and art. Hippolyte professes himself a student of “the various styles of silence,” a matter of “crawling through” or “disembowelling” himself. Returns to the city and undertakes a “new project, the seduction of Frau Anders,” despite the latter's (conventional) conviction that nothing has changed between them. Confirms the “parallel” of the seduction “campaign” and “the dream of the unconventional party” by imposing “a rigid discipline” of distance and discretion on the love affair. Herr Anders takes his wife on a business trip; Hippolyte eventually has a new dream.

“Four.” Reports the dream: of two half-naked men locked in struggle, of a young girl with a stick, of a secret shared with the bather, of a drum stuffed with flesh, of a “fault swelled to the size of a sin,” of a chapel full of odors, of a corpse wearing a crown, of an electric chair out of a gangster movie, of a birthlike ascension through a cathedral roof. Hippolyte reads the “widening thematic range” of his dreams as cueing a religious interpretation, if only to avoid a sense of defilement. Ponders the relation between silence and thought. Hippolyte and Father Trissotin discuss the legibility of dreams; where the priest wonders whether the dreams are devil-sent, to be countered and exorcised via priestly “form letters,” Hippolyte takes them as “messages from one part of myself to another,” and expresses a counter wish, not to rid himself of dreams but “to rid my dreams of me.” Hippolyte meets a young girl in a park. Hippolyte “eats” her ball and gives her his rosary.

“Five.” Hippolyte's journal entries praise Jean-Jacques's cheerfulness, reticence, the latter equated with (un)dismembered wholeness. Hippolyte confirms Jean-Jacques's assertion that Hippolyte is not a writer, recounts the “pleasures of spectatorship” enjoyed by following Jean-Jacques, watching him dress, observing his surroundings (his campy flat, the “gossiping sisterhood of men” at the cafés). Describes the wordlessly “faultless encounters” of love in public lavatories. Describes Jean-Jacques's efforts to disallow silence—by defending the theatricality of “being-what-one-is-not” against Hippolyte's “unspoken objections”; by defending “obsession” against theatricality as a basis for trust; by defending his similarity to Hippolyte by emphasizing their differences, which leads to an “impromptu sexual encounter” between them. Hippolyte undertakes to distinguish himself from Jean-Jacques, by paring away possessions, by abandoning an exercise program. Returns to his dreams, but in the hope of making them “altogether silent,” like silent movies. Jean-Jacques advises Hippolyte to disavow principles and explanations (“To explain one thing is to make another thing—which only litters the world the more”) by reference to the second of two pacifists, who had just killed his wife.

“Six.” Hippolyte asserts authority over Frau Anders by spiriting her out of the capital. Bored with island life, Frau Anders writes (philosophical) letters to her daughter, Lucrezia, about money, bodies, religion, instinct, about “the intuition of women and the sensuous power and cruelty of black men.” Hippolyte and Frau Anders arrive in an Arab city; drugged, Frau Anders is seduced by the wife of an Arab barman while Hippolyte listens to poetry. Less passionate toward Frau Anders if more fond, Hippolyte shares his dreams with her, then sells her to a local merchant and returns to the capital.

“Seven.” Anxieties of irony (of acting/being, altruism/guilt) are cut short by “the dream of an elderly patron.” Though ordered by a “wizened old man,” dream-associated with infancy and inaudibility, to take a trip “around the world,” Hippolyte's dream-self wanders the tobacco king's estate in a bath towel after being told to wait in the garden by his son. He is told to dig; he throws a cat into the muddy hole, though the cat is still with him when he encounters Jean-Jacques, who reminds him of an impending operation. Hippolyte claims to be sleeping. Jean-Jacques becomes a malevolent giant; Hippolyte discovers his “entire left side was open and wet.” Daring not to report his failure, he wanders lost, leaning to the right to keep his balance. Death or darkness comes. Hippolyte awakes cursing the “captivity” of his dreams. Yet Professor Bulgaraux's “Autogenist” interpretation overcomes Hippolyte's despair by linking the unself-conscious “being” of Autogenes to the sleep-inducing martyrdom of his hermaphrodite child by the serpentine Sophia, Dianus, who needed “periodic martyrdom” for his own sake, not for the salvation of men. Other interpretive “clues” focus on the association between the serpentine form of Sophia and “the shape of the human viscera.” Though created out of “dark matter,” humans are saved by becoming “light,” as in being disemboweled, dehumanized, purified of personality, of being-for-others. Sexuality, like criminality, “is an imperishable resource” of impersonalization—and so too is dreaming, a state of airy transparency. “Dreams are the onanism of the spirit.”

“Eight.” Hippolyte gives up (passive) reading for writing, others' dreams for his own. Thoughts about the relations of acting to being, of theater to cinema, of waking and dreaming are prologue to recounting the story (echoing Artaud's experience as an actor in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc) of Hippolyte's “last work as an actor,” playing the role of father-confessor to a serial child-murderer who had once played Joan of Arc's comrade in a film by a renowned Scandinavian director. Against the latter's view that the murderous nobleman was “passionate,” Hippolyte urges the (Autogenist) view that he was insatiable to the point of indifference (“Don't exonerate him, I urged Larsen…. Let nothing be interpreted”). Back in the capital, Frau Anders's daughter receives a letter from her mother, which “hints at ransom.” When Hippolyte produces the money to pay the ransom, Lucrezia, lately his lover, becomes jealous; they discuss beauty, boredom, preoccupation. Hippolyte ruminates on the “perpetual presentness” of dreams by contrast with the rhetorical and revocable reality of events.

“Nine.” Distraught at the thought of his wife's “insincerity,” Herr Anders informs Hippolyte of a letter from her, hinting she had entered a nunnery and appointing Hippolyte her “trustee in the world”; Herr Anders wishes to remarry and seeks help in obtaining a divorce. Hippolyte discusses his relationship to the somewhat naive, celebrity-fond Monique (“a functionary in good causes”) by reference to the happiness he imagined he'd provided for Frau Anders, liberating her from one life by (re)confining her to another. Ponders his “vocation of self-investigation” and “several hitherto unremarked inconsistencies.” Discusses revolution with Tububu and (later, on the street) with a temporarily pregnant Monique. An angry Monique delivers a (loc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Publisher Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART ONE: PRIMARY WORKS
• PART TWO: SECONDARY WORKS
• Index of Authors
• Index of Titles