SUSAN SONTAG: Stand Aside, Sisyphus

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In August, Sontag spent a long week at a hospital bedside watching helplessly as the epidemic claimed another friend. "It's like a nightmare," she says. The new book, however, is intended to go beyond sympathy and outrage. "What interested me was what AIDS means for the way people think about illness," she explains. "One way for people to defend themselves against what is painful and frustrating in modern life is to have fantasies of disaster. AIDS is the latest script of that disaster."

It's typical of Sontag that she would turn a personal preoccupation into an occasion for larger reflections. Her collected work is a map of her consuming passions: the French writer Roland Barthes, the German critic Walter Benjamin, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. (In her spare time, she has directed four films abroad.) All her work aims at defining a vaporous but crucial notion, the modern sensibility. She combines a metropolitan taste, omnivorous and hard to satisfy, with a transatlantic mind, drawn to European writers and filmmakers. Often she discusses them in the European form of fragments and epigrams. "I get impatient with linear forms in which you go from a to b to c." she explains. "It takes too long. I love to go faster."

It was while briskly patrolling the outer edges of modernity in the early 1960s that Sontag became suddenly, improbably famous, for her essay "Notes on 'Camp,' " a meticulous exertion of reason applied to an apparently weightless topic: the enthusiasm for silly extravagance, for the likes of Busby Berkeley and Mae West. "Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style," she wrote. But more than that, "It incarnates a victory of 'style' over 'content,' 'aesthetics' over 'morality,' of irony over tragedy."

By taking seriously a taste that valued aesthetics over morality, Sontag offended American critics trained to sort through works of art for their moral messages. So be it -- they were the ones she had in mind when, in another famous essay, she declared herself "against interpretation." In her view, interpretation had become a means to reduce unruly art and literature to its manageable "content," a way of rendering art's raw power more digestible. She wanted more attention paid to art's sensual capabilities, to the way it works upon consciousness through the imprint of its form and surfaces. It was all summed up in her famous phrase: "Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art."

Sontag's first two collections of essays, Against Interpretation and Styles ) of Radical Will, also made her a crucial guide to the intentions of the avant- garde. She attacked Anglo-American fiction for being "deeply, if not irrevocably, compromised by philistinism," for clinging to realism instead of pursuing experimental technique, as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein had done. In all, the effect of her complaints was electric, a bracing shot at some of the more complacent positions in American thought. But her critics accused her of trendiness, of bowing to Europe, of hostility to art's moral purposes. They charged that she equated art with style and made thought subordinate to sensuality.