Susan Sontag Threatens to Upend Our Democracy

In a 1985 essay on Susan Sontag, her friend the translator and poet Richard Howard noted that one of Sontag’s preferred techniques of fiction was the mise en abime—the repetition of forms and elements such that “the story is inlaid within the story.” These doublings and digressions-in-digressions suggest an “infinite regress” that thwarts such conventional pleasure of reading as moving forward step-by-step toward an assured ending—or even knowing exactly what’s going on and who is whom. The technique of mis-en-abiming, Howard argued, was logically accompanied by tactics of hybridization and fragmentation that Sontag, along with writers she admired like Donald Barthelme and Guy Davenport, had learned from the French critic Roland Barthes, who in his last works (translated by Howard) broke open genre conventions in texts partaking of memoir and essay, organized, or disorganized, around arbitrary clusters of themes, by a craft of disorder.