Susan Sontag Rdr V569

A literary and social critic must stand somewhere between being a sycophant for established rules and practice and a unbridled individualist who fancies herself on a quixotic mission to set things right and one who occupies a privileged position of apodictic certainty. Fortunately Susan Sontag occupies a comfortable Aristotelian place between these two extremes. Rebels tend to be too self-conscious and maybe to a large degree narcissistic, but Sontag manages to be convincing without being in a constant gaze before a mirror. This puts the readers of her stories and literary commentaries much more at ease, at least those readers who don't mind some frequent strong perturbations of their cognitive equilibrium. This collection of essays can be considered representative of the late Susan Sontag, and the one that was of main interest to this reviewer was the one entitled "The Pornographic Imagination." In this essay, Sontag asks whether pornography, at least in the way she views it, could ever be considered to be part of "real" literature, and can, or should it be, appreciated by individuals that are not "sexually deficient" or "deformed"? Can pornography thought of as an `interesting' modality within the arts? Sontag does not want to make commentary on the psychological portraits of those who produce and view pornography, so she confines her analysis to the last question, and, as expected, she places particular emphasis on works of literature that are frequently classified as "pornographic". These include works such as "The Story of O" and "The Image", which Sontag asserts are excluded from classification as real literature "by definition" and not because of the conclusion of genuine debate. Sontag also discusses the claim that pornography should be classified as such since it has only one "intent", namely to excite the reader sexually. Real fiction in other words has many intentions and invokes many more reactions in the reader. She seems somewhat sympathetic with this claim, but reminds the reader that many works of literature can excite in this very fashion even though this was not purely the intention of the author. In addition, there are many works of political fiction for example whose sole intent is to incite the reader to anger or disgust, for example the story "Animal Farm" or "The Jungle". One would probably not want to classify these as pornography. Sontag looks for the day when literary critics develop a more "sophisticated" view of literature. Only then she asserts will the debate on the literary value of pornography be meaningful and literature not simply classified as pornography "by definition". In this regard, and even though not stated this way by Sontag, critics need to be injected with a healthy dose of humility. When gets the impression that some literature is classified as pornographic in order to allow certain individuals or critics the opportunity to distance themselves from "common" or "inhuman" literature so as to imp