An Interview With Susan Sontag

[Mark Kohut]

I surely overrespect Ms. Sontag's judgments re books and her characterization of GR as science fiction has always bothered. 
(I read it from an artist friend of hers who believes otherwise--they used to argue about it, it seems---and who has done art works inspired by)

Another variety of 'lacks real characters' ala Woods, I gather. 

--- On Fri, 1/8/10, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> Subject: An Interview With Susan Sontag
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Friday, January 8, 2010, 6:58 AM
> 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
>