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Some of Susan Sontag’s photographs: Corpses of tortured Chinese rebels (“Five white men standing behind them,” she writes, “posing for the camera”). A woman whose right foot has been transplanted onto her left leg (“This is not a surgical miracle”). Her father in a Tianjin rickshaw, 1931 (“He looks pleased, boyish, shy, absent”). Her father posing with his business partners, his wife, his mistress (“It is oppressive to have an invisible father”).
These images are the narrative ligaments of “Project for a Trip to China,” a fragmentary and diaristic short story that appeared in The Atlantic in 1973. Although it was taxonomized as fiction, it turns out to be one of the most plainly autobiographical pieces of writing that Sontag published. This is partly why it has often been considered not only in relation to her other short stories, but also to an earlier essay: “Trip to Hanoi,” a roughly 25,000-word recounting of her visit to North Vietnam, printed in Esquire just a few weeks after Richard Nixon was elected president and a few months before he ordered the bombing of Cambodia. In “Hanoi,” Sontag recounts a visit east; in “Project,” she anticipates one. Each work is concerned with the reliability of the images she carries in her head: a foreign country, a far-off war, a people visible to her only in photographs and newsreels.
Already an intellectual celebrity for her collections Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will (which included “Hanoi”), Sontag had not begun to publish the essays that would form her third anthology, On Photography, in which she dramatized the question of what a person could take away from the images consumed daily in newspapers, television, art galleries, and advertisements. Sontag composed “Project” around the same time that she made a series of visits to a retrospective of the photographer Diane Arbus. Arbus’s portraits of unconventional subjects—in Sontag’s term, “freaks,” or sufferers who do not quite know they are suffering—struck her for their inability to arouse “any compassionate feelings”; the images became the subject of a central critique in On Photography. “Project,” meanwhile, illustrated Sontag’s growing preoccupation with the medium and can be read as an elegiac prologue to those essays.
In “Hanoi,” she’d described “napalmed corpses, live citizens on bicycles, the hamlets of thatched huts, the razed cities like Nam Dinh and Phu Ly,” depicted in newsreels and The New York Times. Before she arrived in North Vietnam, the media’s images had been her only means of “seeing” the conflict; already she’d sensed that the same images might also be alienating her from it. In “Project,” she adjusted her focus. “A China book? Not Trip to Hanoi—I can’t do the ‘West meets East’ sensibility trip again … I’m not a journalist,” she recorded in a 1972 journal entry. Instead, she turned to her own collection of photographs, at the center of which was her father, a Manhattan-born Jewish fur trader who operated an office in Tianjin, China, and died of tuberculosis there shortly before her sixth birthday. The loss was the onset of an enveloping obsession, and the story evinces the way in which she long fantasized about China from the tinted vantage of the West as a mecca of salvation and annihilation, metaphorically and (she believed) literally “the place where I was conceived.”
The surprise of “Project” is that photographs are less a force of alienation and moral quandary than they are a means of writing through the peculiar pain of absence. Sontag went on to argue that photos aestheticize human suffering by nature; at the same time, our condition of image-inundation dulls our reactions, limiting any capacity to meaningfully respond to them. “To suffer is one thing,” she wrote in the opening essay of On Photography. “Another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them.”
Sontag did not actually visit China until January 1973, when the Chinese Communist Party entreated a handful of members of the American press to tour the country’s schools, hospitals, and factories. She composed “Project” in a few weeks, when she’d been told the trip was canceled. “I wrote a story that started ‘I am going to China,’” she recalled the summer after her visit, “precisely because I then thought I wasn’t.”
Not much is extant in Sontag’s journals from her trip. Reflecting on it years later, in an essay that became On Photography’s final chapter, she described observing a gruesome operation unfold in a Shanghai hospital without flinching. A less gory surgery in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film about Maoist China, by contrast, made her wince. “Like a pair of binoculars with no right or wrong end,” she concluded, “the camera makes exotic things near, intimate; and familiar things small, abstract, strange, much farther away.”
“Project” is about suffering; it is also about how to live with images of suffering. In the story, Sontag casts off critical distance and finds relief in lingering over the photos. “Travel as decipherment,” goes one of her fragments. “Travel as disburdenment.” The pivotal metaphor is not travel but excavation. Sontag introduces her collection of fragments as an “archaeology of longings”; by unearthing them, she prepares the ground for a poetic interment. “By visiting my father’s death, I make him heavier,” she wrote. “I will bury him myself.”
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