Susan Sontag by her son

KATIE ROIPHE “Without Metaphor” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/books/review/Roiphe-t.html


スーザン・ソンタグの晩年について、彼女の息子であるDavid RieffによるメモワールSwimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoirが出たという。
以下書評から幾つか抜書き;


What is shocking about the memoir is how ordinary Sontag seems. The reactions of this strong, singular woman to her illness, as Rieff reports them, are oddly generic. In a car returning from receiving the terrible diagnosis, he writes, she looks out the window, and “‘Wow’ she said, ‘Wow.’” It tells us something important, surely, that one of the most articulate women of the last century should say, in the face of her cancer, “Wow.”

In fact, Sontag’s confrontation with her own ordinariness is the most intriguing element of Rieff’s story. For a woman who had always believed in her own exceptionality, who had defined herself by her will to be different, to rise above, the terrifying democracy of illness is one of its most painful aspects. Throughout her final illness, she tells Rieff, “This time, for the first time in my life, I don’t feel special.” In the most profound and affecting passages of the book, Rieff questions whether, on some level, his mother thought that she was too special to die. He investigates the line between hubris and bravery, grandiosity and vitality. Do we ever truly accept that we will die? Is there a part of the mind, especially for someone as ambitious, as avid, as Sontag, that refuses to believe in its own extinction? Rieff enumerates the qualities that enabled her to transcend her unhappy girlhood in Arizona and her early unhappy marriage to become one of the country’s most formidable intellectuals. “Her sense that whatever she could will in life she could probably accomplish ... had served her so well for so long that, empirically, it would have been madness on her part not to have made it her organizing principle, her true north,” he writes. That same belief in the power of her own desire, that spectacular ambition, that intellectual bravado, made it impossible to accept that fatal illness was not another circumstance she could master.


Ultimately, Sontag’s strength is hard to disconnect from her folly. Her way of dying seems impossible, arrogant, heroic. Her conclusions, so hard won, so beautifully wrought, in “Illness as Metaphor” seem a luxury here. In the introduction to that book, Sontag wrote about the kingdom of the ill, but in the real kingdom of the ill, as Rieff reminds us, there is no place to ruminate on metaphors: there is only death. From her bed at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, when she was recovering from breast cancer, Sontag wrote in her journal, “In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.” Rieff, his mother’s son, unwilling to mystify, to romanticize, adds that “this was not the way she died.” But it is, of course, the way she lived.
See also http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20060208/1139400636