Content area
Full Text
This article examines how Susan Sontag used the practice of diary writing for her own self-fashioning, opening with a discussion of Sontag's views about the genre of the writer's diary from two essays in Against Interpretation and from her own early diaries - as published by her son David Rieff in Reborn, the first of three projected volumes. In her diaries, Sontag restlessly honed her literary style, as well as her own behavior, attempting to transform herself into a better person and a better writer. The article analyzes the literary mechanisms with which she did so and the diaries' regimen of self-prescription, self-assessment, rereading and rewriting. The diaries are a device for self-improvement, oriented towards the future more than the past or even the present; their gradual process of transformation evolves as much from Sontag's flight from parts of herself as from her endless need for self-fulfillment. Their ultimate, ongoing goal is the attainment of "self-consciousness."
Keywords: Susan Sontag / autobiography / diaries / life writing
. . . that exemplary instrument in the career of consciousness, the writer's journal.
- Susan Sontag, "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes"
The word "journal" (meaning "daily") was an adjective first.
- Philippe Lejeune, On Diary
When Susan Sontag died in 2004, she had already bequeathed her diaries - almost a hundred notebooks, as her son David Rieff tells us - to the University of California at Los Angeles library. This testamentary act informed Rieff's own decision to edit and publish a selection from the diaries in a projected three volumes, of which the first appeared in 2008. In his preface, in the title he eventually chose for this volume (Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963) and, to some extent, in the selection of the actual diary passages in the finished book, Rieff's editing of this material highlights the way in which the diaries form a prolonged and ongoing narrative of self-creation. The diaries can be read in a multiplicity of ways: as the source material for biography; as a creative notebook; as autobiography; as literary history; as criticism; as a hoard of quotations; even, one might playfully suggest, as a novel - or, accidentally, in the form in which they have finally appeared, as dialogue between mother and son....