BOOKS
saying that Miss Sontag conveys little sense of
process.
She is capable of
making all sorts of arresting clarifications concerning the torments of con–
sciousness when it becomes disablingly aware of its separation from the
general "otherness" of environment; but she cannot, or does not, drama–
tize, the engagement, the interpretation of consciousness and otherness
which customarily provides the richness and energy of the novel. Her
book is a long rumination - but it is a rumination without a view.
But
if
one complains that the novel is airless, viewless, unlocated
and entirely adrift in time, Miss Sontag has one powerful rejoinder.
Because, as one realizes by the last page (if one has not picked up the
hints throughout the novel), the book is simply about the long moment
of dying. There are, in truth, no external events - only the compressed
fantasies of the last moments of Diddy's fading consciousness, a purely
private narrative based on the transformed circumstances of his own
suicide (e.g., the bad smell which occurs once or twice is the smell of
his own vomit. At one point he has a series of bottles of red wine–
blood transfusions?). In view of all this Miss Sontag might fairly say
that such an account is perforce airless, viewless, etc., etc., because
that suits the quality of the strange dreams thrown up by the final
efflorescence of consciousness before it gives up the struggle and enters
into that part of the dark tunnel from which there is no return. The
repetition of the word "(now)" may be justified as serving to an–
nul our habitual sense of chronological time, since in dreams there
is no sense of temporal progression - only "now": "dreams taught me
the secret of perpetual presentness," says the narrator of
The Benefactor,
and I need hardly remind any readers how preoccupied American
writers have been, at least since Emerson, with "the strong present
tense." This fictional device of revealing on the last page that the whole
novel- with its illusory externality - is the projection of a man's dying
seconds has been used before by William Golding in his immensely
powerful novel,
Pincher Martin.
I find that novel more compelling than
Death Kit
because it brings into focus one particular kind of man; it
relates the actual appetites of his life to the fantasied stratagems of
his death, and the last desperate motions and energies of this particular
human consciousness are projected with a seamless force which Miss
Sontag's more meditative and notional novel cannot emulate. To adopt
two of her own chosen terms, her work is palpably "constructed" rather
than "secreted."
In her own often brilliant criticism Miss Sontag says that a proper ex–
perience of art is "an experience of the qualities or forms of human con–
sciousness." Art offers "the nourishment of consciousness": "the overcom–
ing or transcending of the world in art is also a way of encountering the
