PARTISAN REVIEW
395
explanations of very uneven, complicated and unpredictable develop–
ments. More pertinent and immediate
is
the force of talent. For
new styles are set by strong subversive talents that overcome the
inertia of taste and change the rules of
art.
1bis
would seem to
leave open the problem of how to recognize such talent, but, fortu–
nately, there always seem to be a certain number of writers whose
eye for new talent is not blinded by theoretical or generational
prejudices.
The collection
also
includes Susan Sontag's long essay on her
trip to Hanoi and a short reply to a political questionnaire in
PR.
So far as I can recall they are her first excursions into politics, and
though both are spirited and sophisticated they lack the depth and
the daring of the best of her criticism, not the daring to oppose the
system, but to question
all
assumptions. It must be said, however,
that politics
is
now more resistant than art to new ideas, and the
level of these pieces is much higher than most political writing
today. The earlier statement is mainly a testament of belief: as such
it is quite moving, and even the famous extravaganza about the
white race being the cancer of history should be understood as an
expression of anger and disgust. The Hanoi story
is
partIy an intel–
lectual diary but mostly an account of the conflict between her
political feelings and her intellectual reservations - between, that is,
her sympathies with the North Vietnamese and all the ironies and
subtleties of thinking that make her an overconscious child of the
West. Predictably, her feelings won.
The tortured honesty and clarity of Susan Sontag's analysis
is
quite impressive, and I am scarcely doing justice in this quick sum–
mary to the awareness that makes her self-examination an important
document of radical thought. But I am more concerned at the
moment with what I think
is
its exemplification of the dilemma of
the Left. What I mean
is
that Susan Sontag's discussion of the aims
of the North Vietnamese and the role of the United States has great
moral and emotional force but fails to put them in any new or large
political perspective.
It
reduces, the combat to the good guys vs. the
bad guys. And this is one of the reasons why Miss Sontag has trouble
squaring
all
the complexities of thought and soci.al vision that have
come out of the West, including its radical ideas, with the villainy
