ABSTRACT
In 1963 Susan Sontag had just published a novel in which she examines that inheritance of the “perverse and morbid” in literature, especially as it might have been reinterpreted by the younger writers in France in the 1950s from the generation that had preceded them. Sontag’s writing is epigrammatical, though this is no special observation about her unless one keeps in mind that the epigram, unlike its close cousins the aphorism and the apothegm, embraces a sense of inversion. The epigrammatical mode can be recognized by the penchant of the writer to make the quizzical statements as little or as large as his or her subject warrants and then confound them. Sontag is more prone to wandering in the halls of old cathedrals via their paintings, musing on the melancholy of the body as it is transformed by paint and camera.
