Chekhov's Mistress

Literature is Freedom, by Susan Sontag

by Bud Parr

One of Susan Sontag’s last publications was the transcript of her acceptance speech on the occasion of being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She delivered Literature is Freedom in Frankfurt, Germany on October 12, 2003. She died December 28, 2004.


I read the speech some time ago and even though I found it moving, I never mentioned it here. Last weekend, I was writing a friend about some of the best essays I’d read in the last few years and this one immediately came to mind. Here’s my favorite quote:


A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted – made cynical, superficial – by this understanding.


Literature can tell us what the world is like.


Literature can give us standards and pass on deep knowledge, incarnated in language, in narrative.


Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.


By virtue of a mutual acquaintance I got to attend a concert in her honor last March. For attending, I received a book produced by Annie Leibovitz and Sharon DeLano. The book contains photographs taken of Ms. Sontag by some of the world’s great photographers: Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others. One is a set of stills from an Andy Warhol screen test. There’s a photograph of Sontag being led away by a policeman at an anti-draft demonstration in 1967. There were several taken at movie sets, and two photos, one of the book Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett illuminated by nothing more than candlelight, and another of Sontag at a rehearsal of that play, taken in Sarejevo in 1993. What a life – you know. For all the controversy over her beliefs or the things she wrote that made some bristle, you can’t deny that she lived like few do.


That’s why those words have meaning. She meant them because she lived them and that is where their force comes from.





Literature is Freedom is available in paperback or in special edition, bound in Japanese cloth, from the publisher, Winterhouse Editions.

posted February 06, 2006

comments

Thank you so much for posting this. That quote just brought tears to my eyes.

    – Susan (02/07  at  12:49 AM)


That quote gave me the shivers. What a glorious writer she was.

I am enjoying the new banner as well - very pretty!

    – Ella (02/07  at  11:48 AM)


Yes, thanks for posting this. Sontag was, as you note, one of kind, not only for what she wrote and the manner in which she wrote it, but also for the principles by which she lived. And few critics in American life have thought with such intellectual force.

    – Michael (02/07  at  12:22 PM)


I remember my outrage that 2 only American venues mentioned this grand oration by Sontag — The Lit Saloon and belatedly, the LA Times.

Also, the US Ambassador to Germany, who protocol dictates would be in attendance at an award ceremony for a US citizen, was conspicuously absent.

    – birnbaum (02/09  at  10:53 AM)


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