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A few of Susan Sontag’s pictures: Corpses of tortured Chinese language rebels (“5 white males standing behind them,” she writes, “posing for the digicam”). A girl whose proper foot has been transplanted onto her left leg (“This isn’t a surgical miracle”). Her father in a Tianjin rickshaw, 1931 (“He seems happy, boyish, shy, absent”). Her father posing together with his enterprise companions, his spouse, his mistress (“It’s oppressive to have an invisible father”).
These pictures are the narrative ligaments of “Venture for a Journey to China,” a fragmentary and diaristic quick story that appeared in The Atlantic in 1973. Though it was taxonomized as fiction, it seems to be one of the crucial plainly autobiographical items of writing that Sontag revealed. That is partly why it has typically been thought of not solely in relation to her different quick tales, but in addition to an earlier essay: “Journey to Hanoi,” a roughly 25,000-word recounting of her go to to North Vietnam, printed in Esquire just some weeks after Richard Nixon was elected president and some months earlier than he ordered the bombing of Cambodia. In “Hanoi,” Sontag recounts a go to east; in “Venture,” she anticipates one. Every work is worried with the reliability of the pictures she carries in her head: a international nation, a far-off conflict, a individuals seen to her solely in pictures and newsreels.
Already an mental celeb for her collections Towards Interpretation and Kinds of Radical Will (which included “Hanoi”), Sontag had not begun to publish the essays that might kind her third anthology, On Pictures, during which she dramatized the query of what an individual may take away from the pictures consumed every day in newspapers, tv, artwork galleries, and ads. Sontag composed “Venture” across the identical time that she made a sequence of visits to a retrospective of the photographer Diane Arbus. Arbus’s portraits of unconventional topics—in Sontag’s time period, “freaks,” or victims who don’t fairly know they’re struggling—struck her for his or her lack of ability to arouse “any compassionate emotions”; the pictures turned the topic of a central critique in On Pictures. “Venture,” in the meantime, illustrated Sontag’s rising preoccupation with the medium and might be learn as an elegiac prologue to these essays.
In “Hanoi,” she’d described “napalmed corpses, dwell residents on bicycles, the hamlets of thatched huts, the razed cities like Nam Dinh and Phu Ly,” depicted in newsreels and The New York Occasions. Earlier than she arrived in North Vietnam, the media’s pictures had been her solely technique of “seeing” the battle; already she’d sensed that the identical pictures may also be alienating her from it. In “Venture,” she adjusted her focus. “A China e book? Not Journey to Hanoi—I can’t do the ‘West meets East’ sensibility journey once more … I’m not a journalist,” she recorded in a 1972 journal entry. As an alternative, she turned to her personal assortment of pictures, on the middle of which was her father, a Manhattan-born Jewish fur dealer who operated an workplace in Tianjin, China, and died of tuberculosis there shortly earlier than her sixth birthday. The loss was the onset of an enveloping obsession, and the story evinces the way in which during which she lengthy fantasized about China from the tinted vantage of the West as a mecca of salvation and annihilation, metaphorically and (she believed) actually “the place the place I used to be conceived.”
The shock of “Venture” is that pictures are much less a drive of alienation and ethical quandary than they’re a method of writing by means of the peculiar ache of absence. Sontag went on to argue that photographs aestheticize human struggling by nature; on the identical time, our situation of image-inundation dulls our reactions, limiting any capability to meaningfully reply to them. “To endure is one factor,” she wrote within the opening essay of On Pictures. “One other factor resides with the photographed pictures of struggling, which doesn’t essentially strengthen conscience and the power to be compassionate. It could possibly additionally corrupt them.”
Sontag didn’t truly go to China till January 1973, when the Chinese language Communist Get together advised a handful of members of the American press to tour the nation’s colleges, hospitals, and factories. She composed “Venture” in a couple of weeks, when she’d been informed the journey was canceled. “I wrote a narrative that began ‘I’m going to China,’” she recalled the summer season after her go to, “exactly as a result of I then thought I wasn’t.”
Not a lot is extant in Sontag’s journals from her journey. Reflecting on it years later, in an essay that turned On Pictures’s ultimate chapter, she described observing a ugly operation unfold in a Shanghai hospital with out flinching. A much less gory surgical procedure in Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie about Maoist China, against this, made her wince. “Like a pair of binoculars with no proper or fallacious finish,” she concluded, “the digicam makes unique issues close to, intimate; and acquainted issues small, summary, unusual, a lot farther away.”
“Venture” is about struggling; it’s also about how one can dwell with pictures of struggling. Within the story, Sontag casts off crucial distance and finds aid in lingering over the photographs. “Journey as decipherment,” goes considered one of her fragments. “Journey as disburdenment.” The pivotal metaphor will not be journey however excavation. Sontag introduces her assortment of fragments as an “archaeology of longings”; by unearthing them, she prepares the bottom for a poetic interment. “By visiting my father’s demise, I make him heavier,” she wrote. “I’ll bury him myself.”
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