Ozick and Sontag

Cubs and White Sox, Sheepmen and Cattlemen, Noodleites and Farfelites, it's a binary world Now, try Ozick and Sontag—Susan Sontag, the ““essayist, novelist, intellectual, filmmaker, and activist (link), as Wiki describes her, and Cynthia Ozick “an American writer” (link).

For her part Sontag—spare, austere, at once engagée and disengaged—would not have been amused. Ozick, tubby and a bit of a dork, was definitely not the coolest kid on the playground and Sontag certainly played for cool, as, indeed, she more or less invented cool. But Ozick, intense and localized, sometimes appears almost to be making an aesthetic out of uncool. If she skips filmmaking and activism, she may be seen to pour herself almost unconsciously into her life as an essayist and novelist. And in the end, no one can argue with her standing as an intellectual.

Ozick was born in 1928; Sontag in 1933. But Sontag died in 2004, and Ozick is still writing. Ozick’s new collection, The Din in the Head (2006), opens with a “Foreword” on Susan Sontag. Here Ozick traces Sontag’s spectacular career as our taste-maker and ironist-in-chief—and back, in the fullness of time to a more settled, a more traditional, a less ironized view of life. Ozick says:

It was the shock of Sontag’s death, of having to speak her name in the past tense—she was the tone of the times, she was the muse of the age, she was one with her century, and look, her century, our century, the terrible twentieth, with all its blood and gas and gulags and crimsonly sordid Riefenstahl aesthetics, has gone into the past tense too—it was her death that pricked these reflections upon long-ago excess. Excesses of critical pride, excesses of writers’ vulnerability and demoralization: all of it vanished into a nullity. My private war with Sontag can hardly count as a war if she had no inkling of the vanquished foot soldier in the yellow room. Yet she was the victory only until irony itself won out—after all, she did not recant! And it may not be mere sophistry to suggest that irony, and its sardonically grim grin, is the outcome of all wars, big and little.

Cynthia Ozick, The Din in the Head 8 (2006)

Who was it that said that the purpose of life is to outlive our enemies?

Fn.: The Ozick Wiki page is some sort of obscure joke; I fail to see the humor. A much more useful intro is at the Jewish Virtual Library (link).