As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

by Susan Sontag

  And now I feel profoundly guilty. As, in some way, I always have. I feel I’m a vampire, a cannibal. I feed on people’s wisdom, erudition, talents, graces. I have a genius for spotting them + for apprenticing myself to them + for making them mine.

  Does that make me a thief? Not exactly. I don’t feel—ever—that I’m taking them away from these people. I don’t leave them any poorer after I’m gone. How could I? These aren’t things you can take away. They still have them, but now I have them, too. (These things can only be given up—Irene? … by their possessors, never stolen.)

  Then what’s the matter? Who am I harming? Answer: them. And me. For, even if there is no possible question of theft or depletion or diminution of the Other, I am operating under false pretenses. They don’t know what I want from them? At least, they don’t know—can’t know—how lustfully, how single-mindedly I want it from them. And I can’t tell them. For if they did know, they wouldn’t give it to me.

  Don’t I give in return? Sure. Lots. Maybe, in some cases, more than I get in exchange. It’s a compulsive giving (benefaction, generosity) to ward off my own oppressive sense of guilt (over feeling like a predator).

  And—this is the key point—I always leave them when I’ve “learned” all I can, when I’ve had my fill. I “use them up” for myself and then want to pass on to new sources.

  I rush about the world raiding other people’s wells (?) to bring back my buckets + pour all these contributions into my super-well. No one is to see the full extent, all the riches stored there. My deepest secret! They are to see only my skills and products—piecemeal—which are made possible by this laboriously accumulated resource.

  9/18/67 New York

  Aesthetic book: The Benefactor

  Ethical book: Death Kit

  And now? The third stage?

  S[øren] K[ierkegaard] was right. Aesthetic isn’t enough. Neither is the ethical.

  New “form” out of speaking the truth (truth in existential sense, not as “correctness”).

  I have difficulty with describing physical movement of people—detail (?)

  …

  Less consistency or unity of tone in Death Kit than Benefactor?

  Benefactor is a reductio ad absurdum of aesthetic approach to life—i.e. solipsistic consciousness (one that doesn’t fundamentally acknowledge the existence of what’s outside the self). I was thinking of the description of the dandy in [Baudelaire’s] Mon coeur mis à nu.)

  [Undated, October]

  [Gertrude] Stein—exploring what happens when you drop the idea that one thing follows another (that “this” follows from “that”)

  Cage + Thoreau on silence and reduction—

  …

  Questioning the idea of the “logical development” of something, something having an “internal logic.” I’ve always taken this for granted.

  11/17/67

  My neurotic problem isn’t primarily with myself (as with Sandy [Friedman]) but with other people. Therefore, writing always works for me, even lifts me out of depressions. Because it’s in writing that I (most) experience my autonomy, my strength, my not needing other people. (Sandy has, in writing, the keenest experience of his weakness.)

  Au fond, I do like myself. I always have. (My strongest purchase on health?) It’s just that I don’t think other people will like me. And I “understand” their point of view. But—if I were other people—I’d like me a lot.

  Fear of contact. I “see” other people. But not in relation to me. That’s opaque, a mystery—or simply flat (he “likes” me, he doesn’t like me). I’m embarrassed to speak of it. It seems presumptuous.

  I, in my corner, with my monstrous needs. And all of them over there! I vow not to make a fool of myself.

  …

  Constructivism [—Kazimir] Malevich, [Vladimir] Tatlin (cf. tower) [—] feeble imitation in Bauhaus, [Walter] Gropius a dope, didn’t understand Russians—just wanted to make beautiful things—quickly crushed

  Greatest period of modern art in Russia in early 20s, but they were too advanced + too isolated

  theatre on streets—thousands in the Storming of the Winter Palace [SS is referring to the later re-creation of the event in Eisenstein’s October]

  Mayakovsky paper atelier (Rosta [Russian State Telegraph Authority for whom Mayakovsky worked])—turned out new ones every day

  1968

  [In the spring of 1968, SS went to North Vietnam for two weeks (May 3–17) at the invitation of the North Vietnamese government as part of a delegation of American antiwar activists—a trip that excited a great deal of controversy and also provided the basis for her book Trip to Hanoi, published that same year. For the most part, her notes are either transcriptions of what her hosts were telling her (I have found no notations, affirming or questioning, of what SS was hearing; these notebooks are more like a reporter’s than a critic’s), schedules and, as she almost always did, SS made factual and historical notations about the places she was seeing and lists of Vietnamese words and their English meanings. As a result, I have chosen to reproduce only a few representative samples of such entries, while quoting in its entirety the one more introspective, skeptical, and analytical entry that I have been able to find. Indeed, it is self-conscious in a way that neither the other notes nor, in my view at least, Trip to Hanoi succeed in being.]

  [Undated, May, but most likely May 5 or 6 in Hanoi.]

  The cultural difference is the hardest thing to understand, to overcome. A difference of “moeurs” [“mores”], style. (And how much of that is Asian, how much specifically Vietnamese I certainly can’t find out on my first trip to Asia.) Different way of treating the guest, the stranger, the foreigner, the enemy. Different relation to language—compounded, of course, by the fact that my words, already slowed down and simplified, are mediated by a translator or if I’m speaking English to them we’re talking baby-talk.

  Added to that the difficulty of being reduced to the status of children: scheduled, led about, explained to, fussed over, pampered, kept under surveillance. We are children individually—even more exasperating, a group of children. They are our nurses, our teachers. I try to discover the differences between each of them (Oanh, Hien, Pham, Toan) and I worry that they don’t see what’s different or special about me. I feel myself continually trying to please them, to make a good impression—to get the best mark of the class. I present myself as an intelligent, well-mannered, cooperative, legible person.

  The first impression is that everyone talks in the same style, and has the same things to say. And this is reinforced by the exact repetition of the ritual of hospitality. A bare room, a low table, chairs. We all shake hands, then sit down. On the table: two plates of half-rotten green bananas, cigarettes, soggy cookies, a dish of paper-wrapped candies from China, tea-cups. We are introduced. The leader of their group looks at us. “Cac ban [Chào ón] …” [“Welcome” in Vietnamese] Someone comes through a curtain and begins serving tea.

  The first few days it seemed quite hopeless. There was a barrier that seemed impossible to cross. The sense of how exotic they were—impossible for us to relate to them, clearly impossible for them to understand us. An undeniable feeling of superiority to them; I could understand them (if not relate to them, except on their terms). I felt my consciousness included theirs, or could—but theirs could never include mine. And I thought with despair that I was lost to what I most admired. My consciousness is too complex, it has known too great a variety of pleasures. I thought of the motto of [the 1964 Bernardo] Bertolucci film [Before the Revolution]—“He who has not lived before the revolution has never tasted the sweetness of life”—and mentioned it to Andy [the American writer and activist Andrew Kopkind]. He agreed.

  More than hopeless. An ordeal. Of course, I was not sorry I had come. It was a duty—a political act, a piece of political theatre. They were playing their role. We (I) must play ours (mine). The heaviness of it all was due to the fact that the script was entirely written by them; and they were
directing the play, too. There was no question in my mind that this was as it should be. But my acts appeared as nothing other than dutiful. And inwardly I was very sad. Because this meant I could learn nothing from them—that an American revolutionary could learn nothing from the Vietnamese revolution, as I think one can learn (for instance) from the Cuban revolution, because—from this perspective, at least—the Cubans are pretty much like us.

  We had a role: we were American friends of the Vietnamese struggle. A corporate identity. The trip to Hanoi was a kind of reward, a form of patronage. We were being given a treat—being thanked for our efforts—and then we were to be sent home again, with reinforced loyalty, to continue our separate endeavors as we saw fit.

  There is of course an exquisite politeness in this corporate identity. We are not asked—separately or collectively—to justify why we merit this trip. Our being invited and our willingness to come seems to put all our efforts on the same level. We each do what we can—that’s what appears to be assumed. Nobody asks questions about what we specifically or concretely do for the struggle. Nobody asks us to explain, much less to justify, the level and quality and tactics of our efforts. We are “cac ban” all.

  Everyone says, “We know the American people are our friends. Only the American government is our enemy.” And from the beginning I want to yell with exasperation. I honor the nobility of their attitude, but I pity their naïveté. Do they really believe what they are saying? Don’t they understand anything about America? Part of me is always thinking of them as children—beautiful, naïve, stubborn children. And I know that I’m not a child—though this theatre requires that I play the role of one.

  I long for the three-dimensional textured adult world in which I live—even as I go about my (their) business in this two-dimensional world of the ethical fairy-tale to which I am paying a visit.

  It’s monochromatic here. Everything is on the same level. All the words belong to the same vocabulary: struggle, bombing, friend, aggressor, imperialist, victory, comrade, the French colonialists, the puppet troops. I resist the flattening of our language, but soon I realize that I must use it (with moderation) if I’m to say anything that’s useful to them. That even includes the more loaded local phrases like “the puppet troops” (instead of the ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the South Vietnamese army] and the movement—they mean us!—and “the socialist camp” (when I’m aching to say “communist”). Some I’m already comfortable with: like “The Front” instead of “Viet Cong” and “imperialism” and “black people” and “the liberated zones.” (I notice that when I say “Marxism” it’s usually translated as “Marxism-Leninism.”)

  It’s the world of psychology that I miss.

  Each account of something has as its pivot a date: usually either Aug[ust] 1945 (date of the Vietnamese revolution, the founding of the state) or 1954 (expulsion of the French colonialists). Before and after … Their concept is a chronological one. Mine is both chronological and geographical. I am continually making cross-cultural comparisons—at least trying to. This is the context of most of my questions. And they seem mildly puzzled by many of my questions, because we don’t share a common context.

  The first few days I am constantly comparing the Vietnamese with the Cuban revolution. (Both my experience of it in 1960 and my sense of how it has developed that I get from other people’s accounts.) And almost all my comparisons are favorable to the Cubans, unfavorable to the Vietnamese—by the standard of what is useful, instructive, imitable, relevant to America radicalism. I want to stop doing this, but it’s hard.

  I long for someone to be indiscreet here. To talk about his “personal” or “private” feelings. To be carried away by feeling. I remember the Cubans as sloppy, impulsive, manic (marathon) talkers. Everything here seems terribly formal, measured, controlled, planned, and hierarchical. Everyone is exquisitely polite, yet (somehow) bland.

  The strongly hierarchical features of this society strike me immediately, and displease. No one is in the least servile, but many people know their place. I evoke the populist manners of the Cuban revolution. The deference I see given to some people by others is always gracious and graceful. But there is clearly the feeling that some people are more important (valuable) than others, and deserve a bigger share of the few comforts available. Like the store for foreigners (diplomatic personnel, guests) and important government people to which we were taken the third day to buy pants and tire sandals. Our guides told us this was a special store quite proudly, without shame. I thought they should see that the existence of such facilities was uncommunist.

  It exasperates me that we are taken quite short distances by car—two cars, in fact—big, ugly, black Volgas that are waiting with their drivers in front of the hotel whenever we are supposed to go somewhere. Why don’t they let us—ask us—to walk? Better yet, they should insist that we walk. Is it because of politeness? (Only the best for the guests.) But that kind of politeness, it seems to me, could well be abolished in a communist society. Or because they think we’re weak, effete foreigners? (Westerners? Americans?) It horrifies me to think they might regard our walking as beneath our dignity (as important people, official guests, celebrities, or whatever). There’s no budging them on this. We roll through the bicycle-crammed streets in our big black cars—the chauffeur blasting away on his horn to make people on foot and on bicycles watch out, often give way.

  What would be best, of course, is if they would give us bicycles. But it’s clear they can’t possibly take that request seriously. Are they at least amused? Do they think we’re being silly or impolite or dumb or what when we broach it?

  Wherever we go in Hanoi people stare, often gape. I find that very pleasant, I don’t know exactly why. It’s not a particularly friendly stare, but I feel they are “enjoying” us, that it’s a pleasant experience for them to see us. I asked Oanh if he thought many people would see that we are Americans. He said this wouldn’t occur to many people. Then who do they think we are, I asked. Probably Russians, he said. And indeed, a couple of times people said “tovarich” and some other Russian words at us … Mostly, though, people don’t say anything to us at all. They stare calmly, they point, they discuss us with their neighbors. Hien says the thing about us that is most frequently said is how tall we are. With good-natured amazement.

  The monochromatic version of Vietnamese history that is recited to us again and again. Three thousand years of repelling foreign aggressors. The present extended backward in time. The Americans = the French colonialists = the Japanese (briefly) = millennia of “Northern feudalists”—read “Chinese.” There was even a Tet offensive in the [thirteenth century]. The great sea battle on the Bach Dang river in 1288 is related as another version of the victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu.

  Speaking all the time in simple declarative sentences. All discourse either expository or interrogative.

  Whatever we do, we are locked within ourselves. And yet the doing of anything marks the extent to which we make contact with what is not ourselves.

  It is a very complex self that an American brings to Hanoi.

  Vietnam seemed most real when I saw it at [one] remove, in a film, Joris Ivens’s 17th Parallel.

  When Viet[namese] children play “capture the pilot,” the tallest must be the American.

  The first North Vietnamese feature film was made in 1959. There are now four film studios in the country.

  I was lucky to have started the trip in Phnom Penh [in Cambodia]—where I spent four days waiting for the ICC [International Control Commission] plane—and even luckier (though Bob [Robert Greenblatt, a mathematician from Cornell working full-time for the antiwar movement], Andy, + I cursed our bad luck) to have been stranded in Vientiane [in Laos] for four more days. That at least has given me some perspective.

  …

  Hanoi approximately 1 million people before the bombing, now (1968) about 200,000 …