This propensity for seeing both sides got Sontag in trouble after her first, short 9/11 essay in The New Yorker 13 days after. This was the piece which stated that the attacks were “undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.” But in later pieces Sontag acknowledged that such grievances were merely excuses, and that to blame the United States is “morally obscene.”
The best pieces in “At the Same Time” are on topics closer to Sontag’s own experience and expertise: writers and their work, language and rhetoric, esthetic insights and controversies. “An Argument About Beauty”—not, significantly, “A Conclusion About Beauty”—takes off from Pope John Paul II’s comment on the church’s child-molestation scandals: “A great work of art may be blemished, but its beauty remains.” The comparison, she writes, is “inane”—sexual abuse isn’t like scratches on an old photo. But it’s her door into a discussion of “the beautiful”—and how the modernist sensibility has devalued it in favor of “the interesting.” Though Sontag is one of modernism’s great champions, she sees that the interesting is losing its “transgressive bite.” Beauty, she concludes, is “a judgment needed to make sense of a large portion of one’s energies, affinities and admirations.”
The several critical essays on novels in translation—they were originally book introductions—show that political righteousness was never enough for Sontag. She defends “the saving indifference, the saving larger view, that is the novelist’s or the poet’s—which does not obviate the truth of political understanding, but tells us that there is something more than politics, more, even, than history.” And the title essay picks up this theme: “Let the dedicated activist never overshadow the dedicated servant of literature—the matchless storyteller.” She distinguishes story from information: stories seek “completeness, closure,” while information is “always, by definition, partial, incomplete, fragmentary … Literature tells stories. Television gives information.”
But wait. Doesn’t Sontag’s beloved modernism prefer the fragmentary—e.g., “The Waste Land”—over the conventional form of beginning, middle and end? When you work to extend boundaries, as modernists do, doesn’t that imply a “limitless number of unstopped stories”? If only Sontag were here to write an essay showing why this little “gotcha” point is poorly argued and profoundly uninformed.
