The facts in the archive

Sontag became aware of Benjamin's work in the early 1960s. The first mention of his name occurs in a thin spiral notebook dated on the cover September 1963. Inside, however, the entries show abrupt chronological leaps from 1963 to March 1965; the entries continue to April 1965, then jump back to 1964. Tucked between a cluster of pages dated 1964 and an entry for April 1965 is the first reference to Benjamin. We find his name written next to ideas from The Antiquiertheit des Menschen (1957) by philosopher Günther Anders. The fragment expands on ‘the technique of reproduction’, on ‘a spectral and mortuary cosmos’ superimposed on the world by mass culture and by the vanishing of ‘the aura surrounding things’, which has caused men to shift to blindness and passive reception. The chronological leaps suggest that Sontag, who often used her journals as notebooks to try out ideas or interests she would develop in her published essays, might have gone back in 1964 and 1965 to the notebook begun in September 1963 to fill the remaining blank pages with new entries. Similarly, she might have gone back to the ideas of Anders and added the name of Benjamin and marked the passage as meaningful, with an asterisk, at a later stage, as she gained a firsthand knowledge of his oeuvre and began to engage with him more systematically.

In a notebook dated 1964, Sontag takes notes on Benjamin, cinema and the abolition of tradition. The notebook, however, also contains notes from 1962. In this notebook we encounter a Benjamin page in which she lists a bibliography of his work taken from the French edition of his selected writings, Oeuvres Choisies, translated from the German by Maurice De Gandillac (1959). At the top of the page, she reminds herself to read the two works that Benjamin had published in 1928, ‘One-Way Street’ and the book on ‘Baroque Drama’.