ABSTRACT
The contrivances that keep us suspended outside closed-off novels, their odd, erudite tone and complexities are the ways Susan Sontag contains the argument—more than just ambivalences—she feels towards that side of herself and of art that gets “regularly choked off by seizures of morbidity.” Sontag tells us, in a much later interview, that she wrote The Benefactor to “explore the contours of a sensibility” and that she chose among them one that was exotic, uncontaminated by ethical virtues, “in obvious ways minor, even despised.” In Death Kit Sontag releases her protagonist for that final venturing, already lightened, already sucked up into his death. Sontag loosened herself to explore the sensibility of morbidity literally, phenomenologically, as the life lived in the moribund state. Each can claim, as Sontag has claimed for her modernist writers, that they are “perpetually in training to defeat themselves.”
