On Susan Sontag's The Benefactor

Dear Readers,

Here I sit, listening to the last couple of movements of Mozart's Symphony #35, the Haffner symphony, on a rainy day with the pounding of the jackhammer as construction workers spend their second day outside of my home.  I have been reading Susan Sontag's first novel, The Benefactor (published in 1963), and find it quite good, even though most critics and many of her friends thought it wasn't her best.  I am definitely more interested in her essays than her fiction, but this novel has captured my imagination because its main character, Hippolyte, is a disenchanted intellectual who has left the academic world in pursuit of something else which he cannot define.  (For those of you who know me, don't worry--I am not planning on leaving academics.).

The novel is told in flashback so far, working through that wonderful charting of memory that the best Modernist novels do so well.  It is written from the vantage of Hippolyte as a sixty-one-year old, looking back on his twenties and the choices he made then.  He is very much someone I find sympathetic.  Listen to how he explains his disenchantment with academics even though he is an intellectual and one who quests after knowledge: "Inspired [at university] by the project of becoming learned, I enrolled in the most varied courses of lectures.  But this very thirst for inquiry, that led to investigations which subsequently preoccupied me, did not find a proper satisfaction in the divisions and faculties of the university.  Do not misunderstand me, it was not that I objected to specialization...Neither did I object to pedantry.  What I objected to was that my professors raised problems only to solve them, and brought their lectures to a conclusion with maddening punctuality." I just love that description and find it fascinating that we have changed only somewhat in our ways of teaching since then, and perhaps not quite enough.  Further, I think this description is in part autobiographical and could be applied to Sontag, who herself left academics around this date having not finished her dissertation on Simone Weill, and living much of her time after leaving in Paris.  (If Hippolyte now moves to Paris or even Europe in his twenties, I will know even more certainly that he is based on her.)

One brief note here about the use of memory--I know that in this novel, Hippolyte is going to start blurring his real life and his dream life.  I love the interplay between memory, remembrance and the present, and how faulted memory can shape present life.  Sontag has a compelling vision of the memoryscape of her central character here, as she is very well-read in Freudianism and Surrealism.  This lack of playing with memory, remembrance, and its relationship with the present is the key reason I find Stephen King's Lisey's Story an important but ultimately unsatisfactory novel; memory in that novel is just too darn clear!

The book cover of The Benefactor lists as its models Kafka, and this influence is certainly apparent.  I also see a strong influence of Vladimir Nabokov, especially his later books like Look at the Harlequins! (one of my favorites), which may date after Sontag's early novel.  Where I am in the novel Hippolyte is becoming more and more obsessed with his own mind, and particularly his developing habit of vivid and rather verbal dreaming.  (Sontag will explore the dreamworld again quite strongly in her second novel Death Kit (1967), which is also more profoundly Surrealist and, at least to me, not as successful as The Benefactor appears to be).  Yes, as critics have noted, The Benefactor has all of the hallmarks of Surrealist fiction, but even more because of Sontag's essays and background, I think we can conclude that Freud in general and his Interpretation of Dreams in particular has a lot to do with the structure of this novel's explorations.  (Of course the influence of Freud on Surrealism and the impact of Surrealism on Freud is a long and interesting history that I know too little about at present to write with any precision.)  Thus I see the early '60s in Sontag's work--both essays and fiction--as a long, drawn-out conversation with her ex-husband Philip Rieff and his apologetic approach to Freud (more about that in my book on Sontag when it comes out!).

Good fiction has a way of drawing us in, often through empathy.  (This is one of the reasons why I find most postmodern fiction unsatisfactory, as I find nothing to hold on to in relation to the characters.  Please fault me here if you choose, but my model for the best novels ever written are still Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, and George Eliot's Middlemarch.)  So far in my reading of The Benefactor, I would list it as one of Sontag's better novels, alongside The Volcano Lover.  I will let you know what I think as I continue reading this fascinating early text.