Susan Sontag, _Illness as Metaphor_

I WONDER WHAT Sontag's standing will be ten, twenty, thirty years from now. A natural question to ask when a famous writer dies, I suppose. Updike, for instance -- how will he fare with posterity? I don't care that much for him, though. Sontag has always represented the life of the mind for me, or one peculiarly compelling version of the life of the mind.

_Illness as Metaphor_ was actually the first Sontag I read, back when it ran in the NYRB in 1978. I was in my first year of grad school, and a fellow grad student mentioned that it was running serially in the New York Review of Books -- which I likewise had never read at that point -- and was amazingly interesting. So I drifted over to Current Periodicals in the library and settled down with it -- what I mainly remember is what a stretch it was. Who was this woman who knew so much and wrote about it all so commandingly?

Reading it again, thirty one years on, a lot of it seems plain common sense; I guess after Foucault and the innumerable Foucauldian analyses of knowledge, authority, and figural language, nothing in Illness as Metaphor seems particularly startling. Highly readable, though, with great range (the diaries of John Adams!) and a knack for lucid and memorable phrasing one rarely meets among the Foucauldians -- my college-age daughter tells me she read Sontag for one of her courses, "The Sociology of Health and Wellness," and that Sontag's line about the two kingdoms, that of the well and that of the sick, is constantly quoted in the other reading she did for the course.

As a working intellectual with no base in academe, was Sontag the last of her breed, the end of the line of the kind of writer/thinkers who made Partisan Review, Dissent, and (God help us) Commentary must-reads in the 1950s and 1960s? It's certainly hard to think of anyone else like her, although academe now has its fair share of writer/thinkers who range all over the place -- Martha Nussbaum, Elaine Scarry, Nancy Fraser, Anthony Appiah, Paul Gilroy. Being in a tenured professor in some elite institution's Program of Incredibly Cool Interdisciplinary Stuff leaches a little urgency out of their stuff, though, I think, and Sontag was always, always urgent.

I miss her. Granted, had I personally met the Sontag of those just-published early diaries, I would have run for the hills.