The Benefactor (novel)

The Benefacor
First edition
AuthorSusan Sontag
PublisherFarrar, Straus & Company
Publication date
1963
Media typePrint (hardback)
Pages274

The Benefactor is a novel by Susan Sontag published in 1963 by Farrar, Straus & Company.

Sontag's first novel, it was inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Hippolytus of Athens and his step-mother Phaedra[1][2]

Plot

Reception

“Miss Sontag is an intelligent writer who has, on her first flight, jettisoned the historical baggage of the novel. However, she has not replaced it with material or insights that carry equal, or superior, weight. Instead she has chosen the fashionable imports of neoexistentialist philosophy and tricky contemporary techniques. She has made an unfortunate exchange.”—Literary critic Daniel Stern.[3]

In an interview with critic John J. Enck, metafiction writer John Barth dismissed both the novel and its author:

I didn't especially care for The Benefactor. Sontag writes like a middle-aged French roue. She writes like Carl Jung dreaming he is Candide (1759). That makes it sound exciting, doesn't it? There's a picture of a good-looking chick on the back of the jacket, and a note that she teaches philosophy and theology at Columbia. Don't believe it. Susan Sontag does not exist.[4][5]

New York Times reviewer Daniel Stern characterizes The Benefactor as a “picaresque anti-novel” and faults Sontag for failing to develop her protagonist, the aging Hippolyte, who existence as a literary figure emerges as little more than an “ambiguous dream.”[6]

Reviewer Robert W. Flint at Commentary offers high praise for the novel: “Susan Sontag…has written a Marius the Epicurean for the 1960’s [and] it must be said that she has done so with a rapt and thorough awareness of what she was about.” [7]

Retrospective appraisal

New York Times literary critic Cynthia Ozick honors The Benefactor less for its “sly audacity” and more for its author's aesthetic legacy.[8]

The Benefactor has no beneficiaries, no literary heirs, either in Sontag's own work or in that of her admirers. But society at large is heir to the cultural rupture, the linked discordances, that she championed.”[9]

Footnotes

  1. ^ Stern, 1963: “the novel as a vehicle for the retelling of an ancient myth.”
  2. ^ Flint, 1963: “...her first novel…”
  3. ^ Stern, 1963
  4. ^ Enck and Barth, 1965 p. 4: See here for quoted material And: p. 5: “Sontag is kind of French. The Artificial Frenchman. Or would be, if she existed.”
  5. ^ Ozick, 2006: “[H]ere she is on the back cover of my browning paperback copy of The Benefactor, a first novel published in 1963, when she was thirty: dark-haired, dark-browed, sublimely perfected in her youth.”
  6. ^ Stern, 1963: “...a picaresque anti-novel…” And: “None of these activities, however, has any dimensional life. Obviously meant to be emblematic, they are thin as experiences, undeveloped as ideas.”
  7. ^ Flint, 1963
  8. ^ Ozick, 2006: “The novel, which reads like an audacious, sly, somewhat stilted translation from the French of a nineteenth-century philosophical memoir…”
  9. ^ Ozick, 2006

Sources


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.