ABSTRACT
Who is Susan Sontag? Feminist and cultural analysis today suggests that we scrutinize the image, examine the photograph on the book jacket, in order that we can make some putative connexion between the woman and the work. Sontag has done this herself, in her well-known essay on Walter Benjamin, ‘Under the sign of Saturn’, where she fondly compares the photographic image of Benjamin as a younger man (‘the downward look through his glasses—the soft daydreamer's gaze of the myopic’) with that of him older, corpulent, weary (The look is opaque, or just more inward: he could be thinking—or listening') (1983). These sentences also indicate the extent to which we look to the image and to the physical appearance of figures from the past with a kind of sensual back projection. It is that degree of desire, or simply of sentiment, which provides the additional momentum to the critical and analytical task. The image of Susan Sontag is, like that of Walter Benjamin, cerebral. It is an image formed in the early sixties, immune to and perhaps beyond, fashion (no earrings, no hair-styles) and sustained twenty, almost thirty years later. The picture is invariably in black and white. It too conveys something of the dreamer. It is an image which combines sinewy female strength with casual elegance. Thick dark hair, same style at varying lengths, dark eyes, olive complexion, square jaw, virtually no makeup. On the cover of the collection of short stories I, etcetera (1978a) she is shown full length, in black trousers, black polo-neck and wearing Chelsea boots. She is stretched out on a window-sill with a pile of books and papers under her arm. The seriousness is lightened by the faint flicker of pleasure: this is an image which pleases the author. At home, with books, wearing black.
