Trip to Hanoi by Susan Sontag (May 2019)
Susan Sontag’s describes her 1968 visit to Vietnam in this ninety-one page account. The timing of the work hints at the possibility of political commentary shaping the bulk of the writing but I didn’t find as much discussion this as I expected. I suppose her comment rings true – there is a difference between actors and spectators and the sense of solidarity often spoken of between the two groups is no more than a moral abstraction.
I found Sontag's comparison of Vietnamese and American cultures far more interesting and, in some sense, influential in how she wrote Trip to Hanoi. She notes that there is an inevitable clash whenever a guilt culture meets a shame culture, particularly due to the way the latter grants more importance to collective action and public standards. A guilt culture like America is more likely to produce intellectual doubt and moral convolutions, both of which I thought underscored how Sontag interprets and articulates her experiences into the work. One example of this was the way she describes memberships in public organizations – though she concedes how these are valuable in promoting the values of a shame culture, she sees the loss of private autonomy depersonalizing in a way that wouldn’t concern her hosts. These insights, though illuminating for me as a reader, also seemed to keep a barrier in place between her and her hosts that may have limited the potential of the work.
Of course, such a barrier was always likely to remain in place no matter what the approach taken by any visitor. America’s history in Vietnam was dreadful long before what the locals would soon call ‘The American War’ – in the 1950s, the USA paid for nearly 80% of the French war budget for Vietnam. It’s telling that Sontag notes how Western culture values variety in the process of devaluing what has been done (and repeated) from the past – though her comment came in the context of how an average Vietnamese took to menial daily tasks, I thought it explained much about how an American could conceive of visiting a country her government was actively bombing. It’s another manifestation of the feeling I noted above – in a guilt culture, patriotism can mean opposition to foreign policy.
