February 12, 2004
Susan Sontag: in case you missed it...
On October 12 last year, during the Frankfurt Book Fair, Susan Sontag was awarded the annual Friedenspreis (peace prize) from the German Booksellers Association. The event was little reported in American media, so you may have missed her acceptance speech. Here is a copy.
An excerpt:
De Tocqueville and Lawrence observed something fiercer: not just a declaration of independence from Europe, and European values, but a steady undermining, an assassination of European values and European power. "You can never have a new thing without breaking an old," Lawrence wrote. "Europe happened to be the old thing. America should be the new thing. The new thing is the death of the old." America, Lawrence divined, was on a Europe-destroying mission, using democracy – particularly cultural democracy, democracy of manners – as an instrument. And when that task is accomplished, he wrote, America might well turn from democracy to something else. (What that might be is, perhaps, emerging now.)One function of literature – of important literature, of necessary literature – is to be prophetic. What we have here, writ large, is the perennial literary – or cultural – quarrel: between the ancients and the moderns.
The past is (or was) Europe, and America was founded on the idea of breaking with the past, which is viewed as encumbering, stultifying, and – in its forms of deference and precedence, its standards of what is superior and what is best – fundamentally undemocratic; or "elitist", the reigning current synonym. Those who speak for a triumphal America continue to intimate that American democracy implies repudiating Europe, and, yes, embracing a certain liberating, salutary barbarism.
And later in the speech:
A good deal of my life has been spent trying to demystify ways of thinking that polarise and oppose. Translated into politics, this means supporting whatever is pluralistic and secular. Like some Americans and many Europeans, I would far prefer to live in a multilateral world – a world not dominated by any one country (including my own). I could express my support, in a century that already promises to be another century of extremes, of horrors, for a whole panoply of meliorist attitudes - in particular, for what Virginia Woolf calls "the melancholy virtue of tolerance".The writer in me distrusts the good citizen, the "intellectual ambassador", the human-rights activist – those roles that are mentioned in the citation for the Friedenspreis, much as I am committed to them. The writer is more sceptical, more self-doubting, than the person who tries to do (and to support) the right thing.
I didn't want to take excerpts from too deep into it; click here to read the whole thing. Also, click here for a ninety second video news story filmed at the ceremony. (The video link is at the bottom of the page.)