An Interview With Susan Sontag

[Dave Monroe]

June 1975
An Interview With Susan Sontag
Geoffrey Movius


Geoffrey Movius: In one of your recent essays on photography in The
New York Review of Books, you write that “no work of imaginative
literature can have the same authenticity as a document,” and that
there is “a rancorous suspicion in America of anything that seems
literary.” Do you think that imaginative literature is on the way out?
Is the printed word on the way out?

Susan Sontag: Fiction writers have been made very nervous by a problem
of credibility. Many don’t feel comfortable about doing it straight,
and try to give fiction the character of nonfiction. A recent example
is Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man, a book consisting of three
novellas: the first two are purportedly written by the first-person
narrator of the third one. That a document of the writer’s own
character and experience seems to have more authority than an invented
fiction is perhaps more widespread in this country than elsewhere and
reflects the triumph of psychological ways of looking at everything. I
have friends who tell me that the only books by writers of fiction
that really interest them are their letters and diaries.

Movius: Do you think that is happening because people feel a need to
get in touch with the past—their own or other people’s?

Sontag: I think it has more to do with their lack of connection with
the past than with being interested in the past. Many people don’t
believe that one can give an account of the world, of society, but
only of the self—”how I saw it.” They assume that what writers do is
testify, if not confess, and a work is about how you see the world and
put yourself on the line. Fiction is supposed to be “true.” Like
photographs.

Movius: The Benefactor and Death Kit aren’t autobiographical.

Sontag: In my two novels, invented material was more compelling than
autobiographical material. Some recent stories, such as “Project for a
Trip to China” in the April 1973 Atlantic Monthly, do draw on my own
life. But I haven’t meant to suggest that the taste for personal
testimony and for confessions, real and fictitious, is the principal
one that moves readers and ambitious writers. The taste for
futurology, or prophecy, is of at least equal importance. But this
taste also confirms the prevailing unreality of the real historical
past. Some novels which are situated in the past, like the work of
Thomas Pynchon, are really works of science fiction.

[...]

http://bostonreview.net/BR01.1/sontag.php