cqvip:This essay expounds the indiscernible symbiosis that hitches formalist aesthetics to moral consciousness via an analysis of the fictionality of metafiction,the uncertainty of dream narrative,and Sontag’s sarcasm of anti-intellectual behaviors imbedded in her novel The Benefactor.The fictive nature of the novel is well manifested via the pervasive disclosure of self referential narration made by Hippolyte.The glaring discrepancies between the dreamlike life experiences expatiated on by Hippolyte in the main body of the novel and the circumstances laid plain en masse in his journals,letter,and manuscript which come out at the close of the novel are a strikingly acute revelation to remind a reader of the novel of the uncertainty of Hippolyte’s narration.The concluding section of the essay is an analysis of Sontag’s satirical version of anti-intellectualism:She arranges for the two abnormal characters—one is fond of daydreaming,and the other is temperamentally“camp”—to revert to the normal way of life and become intellectually pedestrian.The conclusion of the novel obscurely implies that the realities of the world have rendered it difficult for such a moral disburdenment as is set forth in Sontag’s aesthetic conceptualization to come into being.
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