Considerations of this kind also provide building blocks for the development of a critical apparatus for engaging with forms of experimental art-making and writing – particularly those associated with the online world: the blog and vlog – that were only beginning to emerge when Sontag was most active as an essayist. The essay as a form has become more permeable; when posted online, it may attract an almost immediate series of critical comments, making periods of critical latency much more ephemeral, since the rapid rhythms of these fused narratives create a particular set of artistic and social imperatives. Indeed, modes of dissemination for research in-and-through the arts are beginning to capitalise upon this situation through making internet-based interactivity an essential component of the critical discourse, as in, for example, the online and multidisciplinary Journal for Artistic Research. Given this immediacy, the contemplative spaces for art, the sites of silence, are being impinged upon and challenged.

This intrusion is perhaps most vividly illustrated, however, through the emergence of online communities around illness that evolved in the decades after the appearance of Sontag’s essays on illness (though not necessarily as a direct consequence, despite frequent citation of Sontag in the blogosphere). Springing up at first as a response to a need for supportive contexts, the illness-focused communities have also become sites for various kinds of experimentation that may be seen to have an artistic dimension. Held together by shared experience, they facilitate the generation of critical discourses that challenge silencing, not just through advocacy and information-sharing but also through the construction of new metaphorical readings developed as coping mechanisms. However, in doing so, they also place the critical writer in a hazardous double-role, often caught in the crux between the imperatives of a distanced world-view and the immediacy and contingency of physical frailty. Sontag’s own dilemmas during her final illness similarly bring these matters poignantly to light.

Sontag’s distrust of metaphor is well-documented in Illness as Metaphor. But there is a sharp irony here that has emerged more recently with respect to her life and work. Although, through her writings on metaphor, she was an early advocate for cancer (and, later, AIDS) patients, she wrote about this while maintaining the essayist’s critical distance, minimizing the first-person account-writing that has become so characteristic of advocacy in cyberspace. What she traced was the move away from cancer being simply ‘unspeakable’ to its being encountered through metaphors that returned a sense (however false) of agency to the patient. Silence gave way to a contradictory conflation of military metaphors and spiritual rhetoric, both of which, ironically, returned to silence, either through proposing cures of abolition (the militarily resonant idea of the ‘scorched earth’ of chemo-radiotherapy) or through offering the solace and potential psychological restoration of silence through therapies such as meditation and other practices involving inward reflection and retreat: mentally and spiritually valuable, but of debatable and even dubious value in curative terms, despite the wealth of testimonial assertions to the contrary.

Above all, Sontag maintained a rigorous ‘etiquette of silence’ around her own illnesses, first an advanced and aggressive breast cancer (1975) and, later, a uterine sarcoma (1998), suppressing the personal in favour of the particular ‘aesthetics’ of the stylized essay form at which she excelled. The irony, however, is that her professionally detached silence would appear to have masked a paradoxical terror and non-acceptance of her own mortality, revealed in harrowing detail in her son, David Rieff’s account, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (2008). Rieff’s book presents his vigil with her as she died of a yet more severe malignant disorder, myelodysplastic syndrome or MDS (which she contracted in 2004, and which was brought on by treatment for the earlier cancers) and from complications of the bone marrow transplantation procedure - offered to her as a glimmer of hope in light of the grim diagnosis and in spite of initial evaluations of her case as hopeless. By contrast with his mother’s aesthetics, Rieff’s memoir presents his case through the contemporary critical approach: using a first-person, revelatory, silence-abjuring mode of discourse. Arguably, Rieff also gives voice to a still relatively silent group around illness: the ‘support people’. This literature, for and about the supporters and carers of the ill, has precedents in C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed (1961) and Ken and Treya Killam Wilbur’s Grace and Grit (1991) but uncovers, in a more contemporary and problematised way, the phenomenon of bystander-silencing that occurs when support people are brought into complicity with professionals in the withholding of information from the patient. Rieff rightly presents this as both a personal and a critical dilemma that has no easy resolution; his account thus reads, in part, as a work in progress. Bystander observation of the dying brings forward a new set of critical and ethical problems: the contrasting of the desire for ‘a good death’ with the sometimes harrowing nature of its reality. In a sense, it is the witness who becomes the voice of the illness at the most critical point: the moment of death.

Why is the silence around personal experience in Sontag’s writing worth discussing? Because understanding how this very public intellectual navigated the contradictions of her own condition helps us to penetrate the nature of her work, and to reflect upon it as part of the world here-and-now. For the world of ideas and their manner of communication has changed since Sontag’s most active time as a critic and, even more so, since her death in 2004. The emphasis, even in critical writing, is increasingly upon first-hand experience and the subjective eye. There are obvious reasons for this, but having the legitimacy of the questioning of ‘boundary experiences’ (Sontag 1967/2002, 11) placed before us in Sontag’s writing, it behoves us to go deeper.

As noted above, the rise of fields exploring research into arts practices, carried out through the perspectives of practitioners of that art, rather than through detached criticism, is remaking processes of critical writing, since those same artists are the individuals engaging in that writing. One of the more difficult problems with this approach is the most obvious one: a purely subjective mode of discourse is generally insufficient, collapsing its critical expression into constellations of solipsistic descriptive writing. Subjectivity can only work in this kind of frame when it is set up to reverse itself; that is, the artist-researcher devises critical approaches and theoretical frameworks whereby that which is most personal, most subjective, is flipped into its opposite, the universal and impersonal. This requires the surrender of aspects of the myth of art, and the understanding that human experience, while infinite in its diversity, has a few, common, shared, meta-level topics, and that these provide the field and ground for a writing that can be both personal and rigorous in its applicability outside the subject.

For this reason, the calculated absence of Sontag as the subject of her own reflection on illness both gives a historical sense of where her writings on this topic are situated and also raises questions about the nature of her critical work when read today. But there is a critical rupture when Sontag does use her own voice to tell of her struggle; significantly, this occurs not in the writings focussing upon cancer, but in the follow-up: AIDS and its Metaphors, where it takes the form of a compassionate, intellectual and critical response to an emergency that was not first-hand. In the introductory words to that text, Sontag permits herself to reflect back on its antecedent, Illness as Metaphor, and her rationale for its composition. In doing so, she does write in the first person, yet she writes of herself historically: the crisis being past (by that time), she now turns to others with a different kind of illness, and comments upon her own situation as if safely distanced from it by the passing of time.