As Consciousness Is Harnessed To Flesh [Hardcover]

“That tormented Sontag is known to many, but she was not all Dark Lady. It’s impossible to read these journals and not experience the warmer sides of her ambition: her deep admiration for certain artists around her, her animating wish to encourage and promote . . . Rieff designates the second volume as his mother’s ‘political bildungsroman,’ the record, as she put it, of ‘falling out of love with Communism.’ Yet he chose to call this volume As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, a title pointing to her inner life rather than her political one. It is through this startling image, noted in a margin in May, 1965, that we today see the thirty-two-year-old Sontag awaken to her finitude: her life had to reach an end, just as consciousness is harnessed to flesh. But, then again, perhaps it isn’t: language—which can capture and embody consciousness—lives on, and has its own fleshiness. As Sontag’s hero, Roland Barthes, once wrote, ‘Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.’ If anyone else’s language trembles that way, as this volume of her journals attests, it is Susan Sontag’s.” —Emily Greenhouse, The New Yorker

“The Sontag that appears here is, at times, very different from the strident academic who polarises public opinion. She is anxious, self-deprecating and frequently heartbroken . . . As in the earlier volume of diaries, Reborn, in which Sontag wrote reminders to herself to wash, this collection brings a more fragile, neurotic side into view. And yet there is still much of the academic who did not suffer fools—or ‘Modernist-nihilist-wise-guy-bullshit’—gladly. Her lengthy analyses of her relationships are broken up with quotations from Wittgenstein, or counterpoised by reported conversations with Jasper Johns and Joseph Brodsky . . . She writes dozens of obsessive lists . . . each a reminder of her voraciously catholic interests . . . Over the course of the diary, a picture of a complicated, brilliant person emerges. A little like her criticism, her diary entries combine her interests with bright, aphoristic turns of phrase . . . these diaries are a reminder of the value of the work that made her great, and also mysterious—“partly (and forever)” escaping from view.” —The Economist

“Consciousness is ultimately a very serious book, as it would have to be, as the record of the inner life of a renowned and resolutely serious person . . . It is a story of settling and unsettling, of restlessness and of trying to find a place to rest, of examining the parameters of adulthood, of questioning what it means to be a friend, a lover, a writer, an artist, a mother, a person in the world. ‘I have a wider range as a human being than as a writer. (With some writers, it's the opposite.) Only a fraction of me is available to be turned into art,’ Sontag writes. If this is the case, then Consciousness is a presentation of the residue of Sontag, the part that is not art. It’s life . . . At its best, [Consciousness] is Sontag turning her keen intellect onto the world and onto herself, practicing criticism in her architectural, adversarial, serious way . . . we should  . . . be grateful for the dissemination of these notebooks, with their long stretches of self-analysis and their pops of insight.” —Lisa Levy, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Sontag seems addicted to writing lists—of films she has seen, or would like to see, and of her extensive reading, including Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud. But there is plenty of deeper, psychological revelation. While, outwardly, she appeared formidably confident, her entries here show her to be riddled with doubt, anxiety and a fear of showing weakness . . . These often intense accounts of the inner life of a passionate, highly cultured intellectual woman are riveting.” —Rebecca Wallersteiner, The Jewish Chronicle