Susan Sontag Writing Style

Susan Sontag wrote essays that argue. Her subject is usually a word that has attached itself to an experience without anybody voting on it, illness or camp or photography or taste, and her method is to define that word in one flat sentence and then spend the rest of the piece breaking the definition against real objects. Her paragraphs are short. The pressure comes from their order rather than from their heat.

Her most imitated piece is a list. Notes on Camp appeared in Partisan Review in 1964 and was collected in Against Interpretation two years later, and it is 58 numbered notes. Sontag explains the choice inside the piece: to snare a sensibility in words a writer has to be tentative and nimble, so "the form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility". The notes are unequal in length. Some run a paragraph, some a single line.

The second thing she is copied for is a refusal. Against Interpretation, the title essay of that 1966 collection, argues that reading a work for its hidden content is a way of tidying the work away, and that a critic's job is to describe how a piece behaves. On Style, from the same book, opens by saying it would be hard to find a reputable literary critic who would care to be caught defending the old antithesis of style versus content.

Both essays are short enough to read tonight and quarrel with tomorrow, which is the practical reason to start there. What a writer takes from Sontag is a shape. She is easy to imitate badly, because the surface she is known for, the certainty and the Latinate nouns and the absence of apology, sits on top of an order of claims that cost her the work.

Serial definition

Sontag defines camp in note 1, again in note 3, again in note 41, and the definitions do not agree with each other in any tidy way. The numbering is what makes that legal. A continuous essay that redefined its subject on page two and again on page nine would read as muddle. Notes are read as separate attempts, so a disagreement between two of them counts as a finding and not as a slip. There is a floor under the method. The definitions have to be incompatible in a way a reader could act on, or the series is one definition typed out three times. The cost, when it works, is that a lazy reader can quote any single note and call it her position.

The frame before the first note

Before note 1 there is a dedication, "These notes are for Oscar Wilde", and an epigram of his out of Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young: one should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art. Those two lines do the job a thesis paragraph would have done. They do it faster. The dedication tells you whose side the essay is on. The epigram supplies the attitude that 58 notes will be describing, in Wilde's words rather than hers, so the argument starts already inside its subject. A borrowed line at the top costs a writer nothing and saves a paragraph of throat-clearing.

Titles that take a position

Look at the shelf: Against Interpretation, On Style, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others. Each title has a preposition doing argumentative work, and each commits before the first sentence. Against names an opponent. On claims jurisdiction over a subject rather than promising a survey of it. As Metaphor states the thesis in two words, which is why that book can begin at full speed, and a title of that kind is a promise the writer then has to keep, so drafting one early tends to expose an essay with no position yet.

One word held down

Sensibility is the word the camp essay keeps returning to. Sontag holds it in a single sense instead of rotating through taste and style and fashion the way a looser writer would in order to avoid the repetition. Kundera calls this a theme-word, and says a novel stands on a few of them the way a house stands on its pillars. An essay works the same way. Pick the two or three words your piece cannot be written without, then repeat them on purpose, in the same sense, each time they are needed. That repetition is what lets a reader see the moment the meaning shifts.

The sequel that corrects the first book

Twenty-six years after On Photography, Sontag published Regarding the Pain of Others and used it to argue with herself, backing away from the idea that a steady supply of atrocity images numbs the people who see them. AIDS and Its Metaphors had done the same thing to Illness as Metaphor eleven years on. The tool here is a licence. State the position cleanly now, at the length it deserves, and write the correction later as its own piece, because hedging the first book to protect yourself from the second gives you two weak books. The first versions are the ones people still quote.

The lightest item last

Note 58, the end of the essay, is the shortest thing in it: the ultimate camp statement, she writes, is that a thing is good because it is awful. After 57 notes of definition and distinction the piece signs off on a joke. The joke is also the tightest formulation of the argument. Sequence is doing the work. The same sentence dropped in at note 12 would read as a shrug, while at 58 it reads as a conclusion the writer has earned the right to make lightly. Go through your own notes for the funniest one, then check where you put it.

Numbered sections

Numbering an essay is not something only Sontag did. The comparison that shows what hers are for is Joan Didion. The White Album, which opens with the line about the stories we tell ourselves in order to live, runs in numbered sections because Didion's material will not cohere, and the numbers hold a self together across a decade that has come apart. Sontag's numbers do the opposite job. The unit under the number is different too. Didion numbers scenes, a recording session or a psychiatric report, and what sits under a Sontag number is a proposition, so the white space between two of hers has to be crossed by the reader's own argument.

The split term

Her standard opening move is to take a word most people use as one thing and show that it is two. Style against content in On Style. The image against the reality it claims to record in On Photography, the disease against the metaphors clamped onto it in Illness as Metaphor. Once the word has been split, the rest of the piece has somewhere to go, because she can grant one half and refuse the other, and a reader gets a place to stand while disagreeing. The move fails when the split makes no difference to what anyone may then say. Test your own splits by asking what a reader is now allowed to claim that they were not allowed to claim before.

The metaphor under arrest

Illness as Metaphor takes the figurative language wrapped around tuberculosis and cancer and treats it as the problem itself, on the ground that a patient told to fight off an invader has been handed a story that was written for somebody else's benefit. Orwell had put the dying metaphor at the head of his list in the 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, and his objection was that a figure worn that smooth has stopped saying anything. Sontag's objection runs the other way. The metaphors clamped onto cancer say a great deal, they work on the patient exactly as intended, and the working is the damage. Her own prose stays light on figures of speech as a result. That surprises readers who turn up expecting a stylist.

Looking at the looking

On Photography begins with the claim that people are still sitting in Plato's cave, where images of the truth pass for the truth, and from there Sontag spends the book on what the taking and keeping of photographs does to the person holding the camera rather than on what the pictures show. A photograph of a famine is treated as an event in the viewer's life. This is the device that makes her essays feel unlike reviews. A critic tells you about the work. Sontag tells you what the work has already done to you. That shift, from the work to the audience, carries over to any subject that has an audience.

Writing the aphorism first and building backwards to it

Sontag's quotable lines arrive at the end of a stretch of sorting. They are short because the qualifying has already happened above them. Lift the shape without the sorting and you produce a sentence that sounds settled about something nobody has established. Readers register this fast. The line is balanced, the vocabulary is confident, nothing underneath is holding it up, and the practical symptom is a draft whose memorable sentences could be reordered at random with nothing lost. If that is your draft, the aphorisms are the first thing to cut, and the argument they were standing in for is the thing to write.

Numbering paragraphs that were already a continuous argument

Numbering makes a claim about the material, and the claim is checkable. Numbering an argument that does run in a line gives you something else: a listicle, where each item is a subheading with a paragraph under it and the numbers are furniture. The numbers also excuse you from the sentence that would have joined two items, which is usually the sentence with the thinking in it. A real sequence of notes has at least one place where note nine only makes sense because note eight arrived first, and at least one place where two notes contradict each other on purpose. With neither, take the numbers off and write the transitions.

Importing the vocabulary and skipping the definitions

Her abstract nouns are load-bearing. Each is fixed to a case within a sentence or two of its first appearance. Copied without that habit, the same words behave like packing material. Steven Pinker's name for them, in The Sense of Style, is metaconcepts: the level and the approach and the framework and the perspective, words that occupy a sentence while the reader waits for something to picture. Beside them he sets the zombie nouns that bury a live verb inside an ending. A draft with this problem reads as intelligent on the first pass and empty on the second. Read your paragraph aloud and mark the nouns you could photograph.

Taking the adversarial posture without naming the adversary

Against Interpretation is against a practice she describes in detail before objecting to it. She quotes the kind of reading she means. Imitators keep the posture and drop the target, so the piece ends up arguing with a vague they who are said to believe something, and no reader can check whether anybody believes it. The fix is unglamorous. Find one published sentence by one named person saying the thing you want to argue with, quote it whole, and let your case be measured against a real opponent instead of a convenient one.