#Sontag

[thirdity]

The world is, ultimately, an aesthetic phenomenon. That is to say, the world (all there is) cannot, ultimately, be justified. Justification is an operation of the mind which can be performed only when we consider one part of the world in relation to another — not when we consider all there is.

Susan Sontag, "On Style"

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

Dear Mr. Sizzling Sandwich,

Have you ever read Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag? Once when I was very sad I went to the library to cope and found myself on the floor reading that book in one go. I had also been listening to the anthropocene reviewed and it occurred to me that a lot of the things Sontag discussed reminded me of your videos and podcasts about tuberculosis and some of the ideas in TFIOS. It also seems likely that, as an author and person who seems to read a lot of books, especially on the subject of tuberculosis, it would be statistically likely that you had. Anyways, I thought that book was very interesting and wondered what you thought (if you did read it after all).

Sincerely,

A regular sandwich

Yes it was very important to me when writing The Fault in Our Stars, especially. Here is a passage from the opening of Sontag's essay:

"My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill —is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped."

And this is how I wanted to approach TFIOS if I could--to write with a hyperawareness of how people metaphorize, and how the lurid metaphors of cancer especially have shaped (and in many cases harmed) the lives of cancer survivors, but try to find a way not to metaphorize the disease itself, which as Hazel repeatedly says, is just a disease.

But I also relied (and rely!) so much on Illness as Metaphor because of the way it connects historical constructions of tuberculosis to contemporary constructions of cancer. Cancer now is seen in much of the rich world as the most capricious disease, the "robber of youth" (as TB used to be known), as the illness that you may survive through positive thinking or clean living or whatever--which all used to be how we thought of TB.

(This is why the band in The Fault in Our Stars is called "The Hectic Glow," which is something Thoreau said about TB when romanticizing it as a beautiful disease.)

Of course, our current metaphors around TB are very different--TB is now constructed as a disease of dirt and filth and poverty. In time, the same may become true of cancer--already cancer is killing more people in low- and middle-income countries than in rich ones. So the other thing I take from Illness as Metaphor is that the lurid metaphors of disease are not stable or fixed, nor need they be. We can change them together. I tried to contribute to that in whatever small way in TFiOS, but I don't and can't ever know if I succeeded, because that isn't up to me; it's up to the ongoing readers of the story.

[diana-andraste]

“…desires contrasting, contradictory, impacted, immobilizing. The desire to become fully visible, to be seen (at last) as one is, to be honest, to be unmasked. The desire to hide, to be camouflaged. To be elsewhere. Other. The desire to be stripped down, to be naked, to be concealed, to disappear, to be only one's skin, to mortify the skin, to petrify the body, to become fixed, to become dematerialized, a ghost, to become matter only, inorganic matter, to stop, to die.”

— Susan Sontag, from Fragments of an Aesthetic of Melancholy

[papillon-de-mai]

Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Rilke, Lawrence, Gide…one could go on citing author after author; the list is endless of those around whom thick encrustations of interpretation have taken hold. But it should be noted that interpretation is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius. It is, indeed, the modern way of understanding something, and is applied to works of every quality. Thus, in the notes that Elia Kazan published on his production of A Streetcar Named Desire, it becomes clear that, in order to direct the play, Kazan had to discover that Stanley Kowalski represented the sensual and vengeful barbarism that was engulfing our culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilization, poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings and all, though a little the worse for wear to be sure. Tennessee Williams’ forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of Western civilization. Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be manageable.

— Susan Sontag, from "Against Interpretation"

[blackswaneuroparedux]

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

- Susan Sontag

[pagunawa]

Susan Sontag, The artist as exemplary sufferer, quoting the Italian novelist, Cesare Pavese (taken from her book, Against Interpretation and Other Essays)

[sontagspdf]

sontag has the right idea

[dog-uncrushed]

[eclogues]

excerpt from Sontag's "In Memory of Their Feelings"

[moonwaterstories]

Reading is a means of thinking with another person's mind; it forces you to stretch your own.

-Susan Sontag

[shiny1jux]

Wünsche euch allen ein super tolles Wochenende ^^/✨

[thirdity]

What is inevitable in a work of art is the style. To the extent that a work seems right, just, unimaginable otherwise (without loss or damage), what we are responding to is a quality of its style. The most attractive works of art are those which give us the illusion that the artist had no alternatives, so wholly centered is he in his style.

Susan Sontag, "On Style"

[justuju]

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Illness as Metaphor - Susan Sontag

[mechaprimaverablog]

En el tiempo, se es sólo lo que se es: lo que siempre se ha sido. En el espacio se puede ser otra persona.

[Sontag sobre Benjamin]

Bajo del signo de Saturno

[papillon-de-mai]

Interpretation in our own time, however, is even more complex. For the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety toward the troublesome text (which may conceal an aggression), but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances. The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud’s phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning—the latent content beneath. For Marx, social events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of individual lives (like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well as texts (like a dream or a work of art)—all are treated as occasions for interpretation. According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be intelligible. Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it. Thus, interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.

— Susan Sontag, from "Against Interpretation"

[pagunawa]

Susan Sontag, On Style (taken from her book, Against Interpretation and Other Essays)