BOOKS
SPACE ODYSSEY
DEATH KIT. By
Susan Sontag. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
$5.75.
At one point in
Death Kit
Diddy, who is both the center
and circumference of consciousness of the book, finds himself in an
elevator inside the building which comprises the headquarters of the
firm he works for. The architecture of this building is marked by a
particular eccentricity - a blue and gold dome. In Victorian times this
dome was the top of a chapel, but the chapel has been cleared
away and the space is now used for "research and technological devel–
opment." So "the dome was (now) just a head missing a body, an idle,
spiritually pretentious ornament atop a busy profane building.... The
wrong head for this body." Diddy is drawn to the dome. "Diddy wishes
the elevator could go straight up, into the dome. And nestle there." He
would leave the elevator and then somehow shut all the others out of
the dome. He thinks of possible ways: "any of these situations would
do, as long as he can gain the dome by himself." Later on Diddy again
thinks of that dome. "Diddy appreciated the fantasy the dome em–
bodies." The dome is fairly obviously human consciousness, once reli–
giously wedded to the actions of the body but now something of a
functionless anachronism in this modern mechanical age. For the
detached Diddy, this dome offers the ultimate refuge; and the novel
concerns the fantasies that are possible, and only possible, in this retreat.
This journey into interior space is made clear throughout, a journey
undertaken because exterior space, and all that is contained in it,
seems either alien or hostile to Diddy - "too agitated to entrust
him–
self to the open spacei of the city streets, with their possibilities of
haphazard, impersonal encounters." Even the various small man-made
spaces he finds himself in - a railway carriage, a hotel room, a hospital
ward, an elevator, a TV studio, etc. - are claustrophobic without being
comforting: "however small the space Diddy means to keep free for
himself, it won't remain safe." The outside world is "running down"–
another of those entropic nightmares common in contemporary Amer-
