One thing that Naipaul and Sontag share, besides a certain haughty austerity, is that they both came from humble beginnings to conquer their respective fields.  Perhaps when you must go against the grain and against tradition, you can’t afford the luxury of the slightest sympathy for the also-ran, lest you allow yourself to become one.  Certainly Sontag would believe so, that one must will oneself to greatness and anything that weakens one’s willpower, any acceptance of softness or mediocrity within oneself, dooms one to obscurity as a minor artist.

In criticism, Seligman claims that provocation and exaggeration are more important than truth and honesty, which goes some way to explaining how he misapprehends Sontag, who might sometimes practice the former but only in service to the latter.  He also writes that critics must narrow their vision to the art about which they write, but the magic of criticism is that reading the criticism may be as heady and rewarding an experience as seeing the art it describes.  Perhaps he is right, although he is too unthoughtful (or considers it a waste of his time) to explain how that might happen, how criticism can aspire to that level of greatness.  Instead, he merely asserts that Kael was a superior stylist, whose skill “deepen[ed]” with age but whose early work was even more rewarding and “human” in its “strain[ing],” to Sontag, whose writing is “narrow” and “constrained” if still “masterful.”

Again, we see that Seligman stacks his deck in order to raise up Kael, even for her shortcomings, while he pushes down Sontag, despite her virtures.  His entire conception of criticism and how it might transcend its subject matter serves to elevate Kael from the station of a reviewer of movies through a film critic to a great writer and critic.  He wants her to be great so he defines greatness in a way that flatters her.  He doesn’t dare argue against Sontag’s greatness, instead he spends his time denigrating her fiction, arguing that in her fiction she is not great.  Only in her criticism can she lay claim to greatness.