Sontag and Vidal.
First published in 1967, Death Kit –Susan Sontag’s second novel– is an example of modern fiction. Blending realism and dream, it offers a passionate exploration of the recesses of the American conscience. — Goodreads.
“The recesses of the American conscience.” Now that tells me a lot! I will not reveal the plot so as not to spoil one’s disappointment in reading it. Truth be told, I just picked it up today. Shameful. But the mischievous and brilliant Gore Vidal posthumously alerted me to it from the other shore and, as is usually the case whether his reviews are praising an author or damning it (sic), he likely says much that any reader should know up front. I have many of his books and reviews dating to long ago.
The following are some money quotes or rather excerpts that compelled me to hobble over to our library to read (maybe) for myself. SH.
“… Miss Sontag’s intelligence is still greater than her talent. What she would do, she cannot do—or at least she has not done in Death Kit, a work not totally structured, not even kind of. Worse, the literary borrowings entirely obscure her own natural talent while the attitudes she strikes confuse and annoy, reminding one of Gide’s weary complaint that there is nothing more unbearable than those writers who assume a tone and manner not their own. In the early part of Death Kit, Miss Sontag recklessly uses other writers in much the same way that certain tribes eat parts of their enemies in the hope that, magically, they may thus acquire the virtues and powers of the noble dead.
No doubt the tribesmen do gain great psychological strength through their cannibalizing, but in literature only writers of the rank of Goethe and Eliot can feed promiscuously and brazenly upon the works of other men and gain strength. Yet the coda of Miss Sontag’s novel suggests that once she has freed herself of literature, she will have the power to make it, and there are not many American writers one can say that of.” —Book World September 10, 1967
An excerpt from Vidal’s review written so long ago:
“In the early pages of Death Kit, Susan Sontag betrays great ambition. Her principal literary sources are Nathalie Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, Sartre, and Kafka, and she uses these writers in such a way that they must be regarded not so much as influences upon her prose as collaborators in the act of creation.
Contemplating Nathalie Sarraute’s Portrait of a Man Unknown, Sartre made much of Sarraute’s “protoplasmic vision” of our interior universe: roll away the stone of the commonplace and we will find running discharges, slobberings, mucus; hesitant, amoeba-like movements.
The Sarraute vocabulary is incomparably rich in suggesting the slow centrifugal creeping of these viscous, live solutions. “Like a sort of gluey slaver, their thought filtered into him, sticking to him, lining his insides.” This is a fair description of Sarraute’s manner, which Miss Sontag has entirely appropriated. The first few pages of Death Kit are rich with Sarrautesque phrases: “inert, fragile, sticky fabric of things,” “the soft inter-connected tissuelike days,” “surfaces of people deformed and bloated and leaden and crammed with vile juices” (but Miss Sarraute would not have written “leaden” because a bloated person does not suggest metal; more to the point, “leaden” is not a soft, visceral word), “his jellied porous boss” (but isn’t the particular horror of the true jelly its consistency of texture? a porous jelly is an anomaly).
Fortunately, once past the book’s opening, Miss Sontag abandons the viscous vision except for a brief reprise in mid-passage when we encounter, in quick succession, “affable gelatinous Jim Allen,” “chicken looks like boiled mucus,” “oozing prattling woman,” “sticky strip of words.” But later we are reminded of Miss Sarraute’s addiction to words taken from the physical sciences.
In “The Age of Suspicion” (an essay admired by Miss Sontag in her own collection of essays Against Interpretation), Miss Sarraute wrote that the reader “is immersed and held under the surface until the end, in a substance as anonymous as blood, a magma without name or contours.” Enchanted by the word “magma,” Miss Sontag describes her characters as being “All part of the same magma of sensation, in which pleasure and pain are one.” But Miss Sarraute used the word precisely, while Miss Sontag seems not to have looked it up in the dictionary, trusting to her ear to get the meaning right, and failing…
In any case, hallucination has begun, and we are embarked upon another of those novels whose contemporary source is Kafka. [In other words] Do I wake or sleep?”
— United States, Gore Vidal, Collected Essays, 1952 – 1992
Susan Lee Sontag (/ˈsɒntæɡ/; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer and critic. She primarily wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay “Notes on ‘Camp’ ”, in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), the short story “The Way We Live Now” (1986) and the novels The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (1999). — Wikipedia
