Evans Chan

evanschan@aol.com

 

This interview took place in late July, 2000 at Susan Sontag’s  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).

 

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.”

 

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 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:

 

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).

 

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.

 

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 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.

 

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.

 

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….

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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 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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

C: Haven’t you said that you don’t like your early novels very much?

 

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.

 

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 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.

 

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….

 

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).

 

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.

 

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

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

C: Did you ever call Baudrillard a “cunning nihilist”?

 

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.

 

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 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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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 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.

 

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).]

 

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.

 

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?

 

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.

 

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?

 

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.

 

C: You supposedly abandoned two novels.

 

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

 

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

 

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 wasn’t confident it would be good enough.

 

C: Have you said goodbye to filmmaking?

 

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.

 

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).

 

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.”

 

C: And “Model Destinations” was part of a larger work that you gave up?

 

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 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.”

 

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?”

 

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

 

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.

 

C: Would you retract your 1982 Town Hall statement that “Communism is fascism with a human face”?⁴

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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).

 

S: I identify entirely with those words.

 

* * *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.

 

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.

 

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.
• —. “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.