In her introduction to this pocket-sized new collection of journalism by the American writer Susan Sontag, the academic Merve Emre begins with a reassurance to (younger, I assume) readers that there’s nothing to be afraid of here. “A certain anxiety besieges the critic asked to introduce a volume of earlier writings on women, lest she should find the ideas expressed in them interesting only as relics of a distant, less enlightened past,” she declares, eyeing the smelling salts she presumably keeps about her desk for times just like these. But don’t worry. She has checked and there is no ghastly second-wave feminism to be found in these pages: “Far from prompting the gentle rebuke that they are ‘of their time’, the effect of reading them today is to marvel at the untimeliness of their genius.”
To read such a statement in isolation is infuriating enough, and not only because you grow increasingly weary of the conviction that the past must always be measured against our own, supposedly morally superior, times. I can think of lots of “earlier” feminist writing that is as good, if not better, than anything published more recently; if young feminists can’t, or won’t, acknowledge the debt we owe to those who came before us, they may be fighting the wrong cause. But then you read the essays that follow Emre’s, in which Sontag makes some of the most sexist and wrongheaded assertions I’ve read in a long time, and exasperation turns to bewilderment. What’s really going on here? What book did she read? When, you wonder, will the unwarranted allure Sontag holds for a certain kind of intellectual ever begin to fray?
