The Tolles Lecture series was established in 1991 by the class of 1951 in memory of Winton Tolles, class of 1928 and dean of the college from 1947 to 1972. The Tolles Lecture Series brings distinguished writers in the fields of literature, journalism and theater to speak at Hamilton. As Dean of Faculty David Paris pointed out, Susan Sontag represents all three of these fields in one person, making her an outstanding addition to the series.
Introducing Sontag, Hamilton President Joan Hinde Stewart called her a "woman of letters in all senses," and the closest thing we have in this society to a "public philosopher." After giving a short biography of Sontag, Stewart said that there was no point in trying to list all of her accomplishments, other than to say that Sontag has "forced us to think and think better."
Sontag began her lecture by saying that the title "Politics and the Arts" is one she uses to encompass a wide variety of topics and give herself an opportunity to talk about what she's been thinking about recently. In the past, she has focused on the meaning of "art" and "the arts," exploring how art is always contrasted with another idea, such as nature, science, or life in general. Sontag described much of her work over the years as attempting to understand the relationship between the aesthetic and the moral. Her book, On Photography, contained essays looking at the ethical and aesthetic implications of the omnipresence of photography in modern culture. Photography is a medium unique to modernity which allows us both proximity and distance to the subject, giving people visual knowledge of things they have never experienced.
More recently, Sontag said, she has been thinking about the relationship between literature, particularly the novel, and the moral responsibility of the author. In great literature, the author cannot help but evoke the standards in which they believe, making them a moral agent. Sontag said that this role as moral agent does not necessarily entail moralizing or practical recommendations. Instead, she said, literature has the capacity to stimulate our imagination and educate our capacity for thinking about experiences we have not had.
The novel is an ideal medium to create an imaginary world, in that the author's simulation of time and space can confer and withdraw meaning on the various storylines of the novel. Early modern writers often challenged these time and space conventions. More recently, most notions of literature have become reactive, said Sontag, with backlash against modernist challenges to convention. This reaction and regression, she said, are echoed in our current political and social thought, which dismisses ideals and strengthens cynical realism.
Sontag also discussed how the space and time structures of television and the novel differ, and what these models tell us about moral thought. While television has the illusion of immediacy and satisfies our appetite for anecdote, Sontag said, the storytelling model of novels necessarily has an ethical component. In favor of television, however, Sontag pointed out that television programs have the capacity to portray many situations happening simulataneously, something that novels have more difficultly displaying and which humans have difficultly comprehending. Sontag called it the "perennial fate" of humans to be surprised by the simultaneity of events and the extension of the world.
Awareness of this simultaneity allows us to stretch our world and gain sympathy for others, and in this way, authors perform the task of moral agent. While Sontag admitted that transglobal society tries to make the author's role irrelevant by passing borders and showing us other experiences, she ended her lecture by saying, "long live the novelist's task."
-- by Caroline O'Shea '07
