Monkey business

Dang in Berkeley, January 2026

1.

There is no known photograph of Susan Sontag in Hanoi. Not in her published work, not in the Vietnamese archive, not in the historical record that so eagerly consumed her American counterparts. This absence is not logistical—it is strategic. In a war built on visibility, Sontag chose to vanish. She offered no spectacle of witness, only a gesture of refusal: authorship built on turning away, a refusal that was also a theory of consciousness—what could be borne, what could be known, what must remain outside the frame.

Susan Sontag went to Hanoi in the Year of the Earth Monkey^[1]. But this is neither a travelogue nor a dispatch from war. It is a story about vanishing—about the limits of representation, the ethics of refusal, and what happens when a writer steps out of the frame.

Where Mary McCarthy sketched luminous images of crowded markets and rain-soaked bicycles, Sontag stripped away photographs, anchoring descriptions, even the possibility of intimacy. She gave us no easy entry point for the Western gaze. To show up without needing to be seen—that was her wager.

1968 was a Monkey year, tilted toward rupture: sudden turns, clever improvisations, the reign of tricksters. But the Earth element tempered volatility with ballast, tethering mischief to responsibility. This was not chaos for its own sake, but disruption disciplined into architecture. It’s a year for improvisers who build as they go, for provocateurs who also plan. When Sontag arrived in Hanoi, she stepped into this field of calculated instability—not just as witness but as someone recalibrating her own stance within it. What looked like mischief, from afar, was in fact a deliberate attempt to think structure through rupture.

Her companions came to Hanoi with clear instruments: Andrew Kopkind to report, Robert Greenblatt to teach. Sontag cast herself otherwise. “Neither a journalist nor a political activist (though a veteran signer of petitions and anti-war demonstrator) nor an Asian specialist,” she wrote, but “a stubbornly unspecialised writer…unable to incorporate into either novels or essays my evolving radical political convictions and sense of moral dilemma at being a citizen of the American empire.” Her presence was not instrumental. She wasn’t there to extract meaning but to inhabit contradiction—to witness without claiming authority, to show up without needing to be seen.

The year’s trickster energy manifested everywhere as breaches in the given order. In Vietnam, the Tết Offensive stunned both sides of the war and pierced the illusion of American dominance. In France, May ’68 brought Paris to its knees. In the U.S., the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy shattered public trust. Across the globe, archetypal Monkey agents—youth and intellectuals—rose in anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle. The Monkey doesn’t destroy for fun; it destabilises to reveal.

Sontag stepped into this choreography not as a neutral observer but as an American intellectual drawn toward the epicentre of destabilisation. She believed herself engaged in a moral journey: reckoning with American imperialism through proximity to its victims. Her presence was meant to signal seriousness—not only opposition to the war but an attempt to inhabit the position of the other. For her, the trip was part ethical performance, part intellectual pilgrimage. What she sought, above all, was to be taken seriously. Jane Fonda would come later, with more theatre and consequence. But Sontag rehearsed the role—mapping the terrain that made such a gesture thinkable.

Before Sontag, there was McCarthy. Visiting Hanoi in March 1968, just a month after the Tết Offensive, she published two essays in The New York Review and later a book titled Hanoi. Her gaze was restrained but precise: markets, children evacuated, faces glimpsed but unnamed. “And I felt that it would be somehow impolite to express my curiosity in the form of a point-blank question,” she wrote. McCarthy gave us images without intimacy: luminous, fleeting, but untroubled by contradiction.

Hanoi was not just a city under siege; it was a stage. Every Western gesture was read, recorded, reframed. American intellectuals did not arrive as private individuals but as emissaries, whether they liked it or not. Sontag’s seriousness, her desire to witness with integrity, could not escape the logic of performance. In Hanoi, she became part of the script—proof that even within the American empire, there were figures of conscience. The North Vietnamese were not passive recipients of solidarity; they positioned her with care. She was hosted, honoured, staged. In the midst of bombardment, Hanoi offered her a role, and she took it.

Her Esquire essay—later expanded into a book titled Trip to Hanoi—offers a tightly controlled glimpse into that theatre. It is not reportage but a document of presence under pressure: restrained, self-conscious, caught between proximity and detachment. She does not dramatise; she catalogues, parses, resists collapse. And yet the self surfaces—in syntax, in moral clarity, in the quiet pride of having been there. What she brings back is not a record of Hanoi but a portrait of the self-in-solidarity: serious, lucid, unshaken.

Beneath the poise was a pulsing heartbreak—a quiet crisis of intimacy. Sontag understood the other, or at least tried to. But she couldn’t reach them. She asked questions—about medicine, education, ideology. “Is your medicine entirely Western in orientation, or mixed with Chinese methods such as herbal remedies and acupuncture? How is your education system different from the French lycée curriculum used until 1954?” The answers came, but not as she hoped. Not apathy, but something harder to penetrate: politeness. A softness that sealed her out. Her questions, however precise, were received as evasions—refusals to fully enter the affective logic of the struggle. She had come to witness, but it became painfully clear that her role was already written: the American friend, caught in a register that was “either self-effacing or passive or sentimental or patronising—just as there’s no way for Americans, myself included, not to measure a good six inches taller than the average Vietnamese.”

Here was an intellectually formidable, emotionally astute woman—reaching, then recoiling from the limits of her own reach. What was denied her was not only intimacy, but consciousness in common—any shared rhythm of perception or recognition. Politeness was sovereignty; containment was a way of saying: your consciousness cannot fold into ours.

The usual tools did not work. They smiled, nodded, made her feel young. Like a child. She could not get through. And worse: they did not seem to want her to. But this too was not indifference. Their politeness was a form of sovereignty, a mode of strategic containment. They had seen too many Americans arrive bearing seriousness. They had mastered the art of hosting without yielding. And perhaps—more quietly—they too no longer knew how to dance. There was no shared rhythm. No improvisation. Just roles. That’s where the heartbreak lived. They gave her a role, when what she wanted was resonance. That was the crisis: a rhyme with no tune, a gesture with no reply.

Ever the strategist of form, Sontag folded entries from her Hanoi journal into both the essay and the book. The entries are exacting, affectively raw. She documents her visits, her encounters with people who seemed to draw her in just far enough to withdraw the possibility of intimacy. And yet she felt strangely safe: “I’m no longer even surprised, as I first was, at how comfortable I am walking alone, even when I get lost in obscure neighbourhoods far from the hotel. Though I’m aware of the possibility of an unpleasant incident occurring when I’m in another part of the city, unable to explain who I am or even read signs, I still feel entirely safe.”

Still, safety was not intimacy. She wrestled with the “miserable feeling” that her being in Hanoi was a waste of her hosts’ time—that if connection was impossible, what exactly was she there to do? She noticed, with discomfort, how Vietnam “gives of being an almost sexless culture”—a line that exposed her desire not just to understand the revolution, but to offer herself to it, and be transformed in return. But the transformation didn’t come. Not because she wasn’t open to it, but because the encounter itself was misaligned—two precisely calibrated forces meeting at an angle that could not hold. “But it seems to me that while my consciousness does include theirs, or could, theirs could never include mine. They may be nobler, more heroic, more generous than I am, but I have more on my mind than they do—probably just what precludes my ever being that virtuous.”

This is where the second heartbreak intrudes: a woman making herself bigger to cloak the vulnerability she hadn’t expected to feel. She wasn’t dishonest—with herself or with the Vietnamese—but she built a narrative, a form, to contain what threatened to overwhelm her. Sontag constructed a paradox: you see the artifice, and still the ache gets through. The tropics haunted her, so she haunted them back. The tone is real, even when the staging is unmistakable. What we witness is not raw experience, but performance in its most refined register: authorship as armour. Her prose resists collapse. It calibrates, arranges, preserves the image of someone who tried to touch history and survived the near miss. The second heartbreak is formal: this is what it looks like when a writer tries to metabolise failed intimacy through structure, when the form becomes the only place where she can be held.

If intimacy exists through austerity, then perhaps this was the closest she could come. In withholding, a kind of fidelity emerges—not to the people she met in Hanoi, and perhaps not even to the revolution, but to the difficulty of the encounter itself. She wrote of the embarrassment she felt at witnessing “the modest (if proud) self-affirmation of citizens of a small, weak nation,” and of the unsettling comfort she experienced because the Vietnamese failed to register to her as fully “real.” 

To be real, she suggested, is to be dangerous, volatile, abrasive—to possess a range that exceeds the “muted, deep, sweet silence” she wandered through. “Even more than the Jews, the Vietnamese seem to suffer from an appalling lack of variety in their collective existence. History is one long martyrdom: in the case of Vietnam, the chain of episodes of victimisation at the hands of great powers.” 

There goes the abrasiveness, the danger, the volatility: an act of devotion easily mistaken for condescension, or worse—for boredom. Her seriousness could not find friction. The revolution was luminous but tonally flat, emotionally illegible to her repertoire of intimacy. The revolution would not fight with her, so she staged her own defiance—ancestral, reflexive, the kind a child hurls when no one will speak their language.

And then came the third heartbreak: no one wanted it. Not the Americans, who were unmoved by her attempts at moral seriousness, nor the Vietnamese, for whom her longing remained foreign, and perhaps—as she feared—irrelevant. The essay was received coolly, both in its original publication and in its later form as a book. Sontag had risked vulnerability, and when that failed, she risked art. But there was no echo. What she had written was neither polemic nor reportage, neither memoir nor critique. It slipped between categories, refusing the catharsis that readers expect from witnessing.

The work bore the mark of someone who had felt deeply but refused to confess, who had constructed a form for what could not be resolved. It was, in its way, a structure of consciousness: austere, withholding, asking the reader to dwell in contradiction. And in a cultural moment hungry for clarity, for sides, for usable emotion, that kind of consciousness was illegible. She built a structure that asked to be inhabited—but no one had time to move in.

This was an act of vanishing. Not invisibility, but refusal: stepping into history while stepping out of its frame—and in doing so, staging a different mode of consciousness: one that resists being captured as image, intimacy, or proof.

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2.

Sontag invited us into her tempo, and every beat we misread would cost us later. That was the long game—the Monkey’s game. Quick to move, slow to reveal. The two books that followed, On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others, carried the same austerity many had already refused to metabolise. People choked on it. The tone was distant, deliberate, almost cold. But by then she had learned what the Vietnamese had shown her without saying it: there is a before, and there is an after. And you cannot beg intimacy from a war. Consciousness, she realised, would have to be built otherwise—through form, not through closeness.

On Photography, whose essays began appearing just a few years later, reads like a continuation in another key. The moral seriousness remains, but now it’s stripped of immediacy: abstracted, sharpened, fortified. Gone is the yearning to be let in. What remains is the machinery of seeing, the politics of distance. No longer pleading for intimacy, Sontag dissects its mechanics. The camera becomes the mediating force she once tried to override with presence. Where Hanoi had offered silence, photography offers spectacle. In both cases, she shows us what it means to witness without touching, and how consciousness is shaped not by access but by distance.

The image already surfaced in the very first pages of Trip to Hanoi: Sontag recalled Godard’s Far from Vietnam and his instruction for revolutionaries to “each make a Vietnam inside ourselves, especially if we cannot actually go there”—and to carry the duty to create “two, three, many Vietnams.” She recognised the demand instinctively—it was already in her. Before her trip to Hanoi, she had already carried many Vietnams inside her body: “inside my head, under my skin, in the pit of my stomach.” The body, saturated with meaning, needed relief—so she turned, as ever, to structure. On Photography is the reckoning that comes after: when crossing fails, and all that’s left is the afterimage. The photograph becomes both substitute and shield, an object that permits attention without the danger of intimacy.

Sontag began to metabolise the Vietnamese way of knowing—in her own assessment, chronological rather than geographical—for the first time in the same book, when she reflected on the photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau that had haunted her since childhood. She had come across them by chance, at twelve years old, in a bookstore. “Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about… When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying.” For Sontag, consciousness was not revelation but rupture: an incision that wounds, deadens, and persists.

Vietnam appears here again, in the same breath. “An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs—think of the Vietnam War. (For a counter-example, think of the Gulag Archipelago, of which we have no photographs.) But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real.” The paradox is blunt: photographs sharpen, then dull. Consciousness, under this regime, is recursive: intensified by contact, then numbed by repetition.

There is a straight line from this reflection to what she had already reckoned with in Trip to Hanoi: “In my own case, several years of reading and of viewing newsreels had furnished a large portfolio of miscellaneous images of Vietnam: napalmed corpses, live citizens on bicycles, the hamlets of thatched huts, the razed cities like Nam Dinh and Phu Ly, the cylindrica, one-person bomb shelters spaced along the sidewalks of Hanoi, the thick yellow straw hats worn by schoolchildren as protection against fragmentation bombs… But the confrontation with the originals of these images didn’t prove to be a simple experience; actually to see and touch them produced an effect both exhilarating and numbing.”

The lesson of Hanoi resurfaces here with clarity in photography. Having been burned by proximity—by the failure of intimacy—Sontag no longer sought closeness. She had learned the cost of immediacy. “Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening. To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are…to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing—including, when that is the interest, another person’s pain or misfortune.” The photograph stabilises the scene at the very moment it makes consciousness complicit.

And yet this, too, was only a stage in her thinking. In Hanoi she had discovered the impossibility of shared consciousness, of mutual resonance. In On Photography, she confronted the opposite: that consciousness could be too easily manufactured, simulated, distributed—flattened into spectacle. If the war had denied her intimacy, the photograph threatened her with its excess: too much seeing, too little thought. Consciousness, she insisted, could not live in either place.

But we already know where this is going. In distance, intimacy is suspended. No resonance, no resolution. Just the dull ache of almost. And that was never going to be enough. “In fact, using a camera is not a very good way of getting at someone sexually. Between photographer and subject, there has to be distance. The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate—all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.”

A prophet of her own reckoning, Sontag was also a prophet of history.

There is no known photograph of Sontag in Hanoi. That absence now reads as prophecy. Unlike Jane Fonda, whose image was weaponised into moral theatre, Sontag offered no such spectacle. She refused the frame, or perhaps understood too well what the frame would demand. In a war built on visibility, she chose to disappear. The result is not invisibility but enigma: a consciousness confirmed only through afterimage and trace.

What does it mean to be present in history and yet refuse its image? To inhabit an event only through the structures that contain it? In the long arc of her writing, this refusal becomes the groundwork of her thought: that consciousness is not born from contact, but from form—form severe enough to withstand both heartbreak and spectacle.

Fifty years after the war ended, the image continues to haunt. But now it is not only the image of war—it is the image of the image, and who is permitted to author it. In 2025, the most iconic photograph of the Vietnam War—The Terror of War, better known as Napalm Girl—was placed under forensic scrutiny. A new documentary, The Stringer, alleged that the image had been misattributed: that it was not Nick Út, the AP photographer long credited with the photo, who captured the moment, but a little-known Vietnamese stringer named Nguyễn Thành Nghệ. The scandal was not simply about the frame; it was about authorship, recognition, and the machinery of historical proof. Just as Sontag’s disappearance offered a lesson in the limits of legibility, another image—the one that was never allowed to disappear—was unravelling.

Fracture, not clarity, ensued. The AP commissioned its own investigation—a meticulous, nearly forensic review of footage, negatives, testimonies, and visual geometry. Their conclusion was careful: it is possible that Nick Út took the photo, and it is possible he did not. But no definitive evidence exists to overturn the historical record. And so, the credit stands. But the very fact of the doubt—and the institutional chaos that followed—reveals something deeper: that even the most iconic image of moral clarity can become a site of moral suspicion. That authorship, in times of war and spectacle, is never merely about who was there. It’s about who is believed, who is remembered, and who is framed.

Sontag, by contrast, left no such frame. She refused the visibility the war demanded. If Jane Fonda was theatre, and Nick Út became the canonical eye, Sontag enacted a third position: the vanishing author. Her presence is confirmed only through prose—controlled and exacting. In contrast to the forensic spectacle now encircling Napalm Girl, her Hanoi is not open to the camera’s claim. No one else gets to narrate it.

But here lies the deeper tension. Even the image most violently insistent on being seen—the scorched body of Kim Phúc, captured mid-scream—could be stripped of its author. The girl remains; the photographer vanishes. Or is made to vanish: not by disappearance, but by bureaucratic doubt, forensic re-staging, institutional cowardice. This is not forgetting. This is the crisis of consciousness under spectacle, when the capacity to register pain depends not on encounter but on verification—and when proof fails, belief collapses. What remains is a refusal to sit with the grain of film, the blur of trauma, the impossibility of certainty. What cannot be confirmed is treated as if it never was.

This is the crisis of consciousness under spectacle: when the capacity to register pain becomes contingent on evidentiary certainty, and authorship cannot rest solely as a forensic claim, its legitimacy endures only as an ethical stance. The image of Kim Phúc was supposed to awaken global conscience, but its current afterlife tells a different story—one of reputational theatre, where legacy photojournalists and diasporic documentarians stage their claims to moral authority through counter-investigations and cinematic insinuation. Consciousness, in this schema, is no longer something inhabited or shared. It is something proven. And when proof fails, so does belief. Consciousness becomes metadata rather than memory. The epistemic regime that governs the image now renders moral clarity suspect. We are no longer asked to remember, only to verify—and even that, without conclusion.

Sontag would have seen it coming. She knew what it meant to need the photograph and distrust it. She had already written the script: “To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed image of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate.” In Hanoi, she refused to photograph. She understood that what would be demanded of her was not just the image, but the gesture of possession. In refusing the frame, she retained control. Her disappearance became its own kind of authorship—a defiance of the very spectacle that, today, devours itself.

And perhaps this is the final Monkey trick: not to seize power, but to vanish from its circuitry. To step out of the frame while everyone else scrambles to reconstruct it, dispute it, litigate it. In the Year of the Earth Monkey, Sontag entered Hanoi and left no image behind—not out of modesty, but foresight. She understood what the frame would one day demand. And now, decades later, the image that stayed is the one the archive no longer knows how to hold—too sacred to discard, too unstable to trust, suspended between icon and allegation. In her refusal, she offered a different lesson: that consciousness, to survive spectacle, must sometimes step out of sight.

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3.

But refusal, for Sontag, was never the end of thought; it was its beginning. Years later, she would return to the photograph—not to disown the frame, but to anatomise its seductions. If Hanoi was the scene of her disappearance, Regarding the Pain of Others was the blueprint of her re-emergence: austere yet luminous, stripped of illusion yet alive with clarity.

In this book, she conjures Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas to reflect on her “brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war.” Woolf’s revulsion against war was genuine, but her rhetoric trembled with repeated phrases and moral fragility. Sontag admired the refusal to accommodate the masculine logic of war, but she had little patience for the performance of ethical delicacy. Where Woolf asked how to resist war without becoming monstrous, Sontag asked how to resist sentimentality without becoming irrelevant. Consciousness, she insisted, cannot rest on fragility; it requires form severe enough to bear what it sees.

Noting Woolf’s stance on the “difficulty of communication” between men of war and women of peace—privileged, well-off, educated women—Sontag wrote, with icy lucidity, that Woolf’s revulsion against war was “conventional in its rhetoric, in its summations, rich in repeated phrases.” Sontag waged her own kind of womanly war: “And photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus.” This war with a fellow feminist writer was not personal, but positional. Regarding the Pain of Others inherits Woolf’s clarity but jettisons her trembling. It does not plead; it dissects. Where Woolf opened space for moral hesitation, Sontag built a form that could absorb suffering without sentimental collapse.

“Photographs of mutilated bodies certainly can be used the way Woolf does, to vivify the condemnation of war, and may bring home, for a spell, a portion of its reality to those who have no experience of war at all. However, someone who accepts that in the world as currently divided war can become inevitable, and even just, might reply that the photographs supply no evidence, none at all, for renouncing war…” For Sontag, the photograph fails not because it lacks power, but because its power too easily becomes a moral shortcut. Shock substitutes for thought, sentiment for solidarity. Consciousness collapses into consumption. The image becomes a moral prosthesis—allowing the viewer to bypass thought, action, responsibility—while preserving the illusion of seriousness.

A scathing indictment on the impulse to consume war as generic images rather than situated acts, Sontag’s target is not the photograph itself, but the moral shortcuts it enables. To feel appalled by an image is not the same as thinking through what permits its existence. Nor is it equivalent to changing one's stance on the legitimacy of war. Here, Sontag resists the idea that shock can be equated with consciousness. It challenges the liberal fantasy that feeling bad—momentarily, aesthetically, from a safe distance—is itself a form of solidarity. For Sontag, the photograph does not fail because it lacks power; it fails because that power is too easily metabolised into sentiment. The image becomes a moral prosthesis—allowing the viewer to bypass thought, action, responsibility—while preserving the illusion of seriousness.

Few did seriousness as seriously as Sontag. Never one to flinch from the personal—as she showed in Trip to Hanoi—she remained adamant that war photography could not escape the structure of identification. “To an Israeli Jew,” she wrote, “a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide-bomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance.” These are not failures of perception but the inevitabilities of history.

Consciousness, in this register, is never neutral; it arrives already politicised, waiting for the caption to fire.

“To the militant,” she continues, “identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions.” What Sontag insists on here is not a flattening of sympathy, but the impossibility of neutral witness. The image never arrives alone. It brings its politics with it, waiting only for the caption to fire.

This is the lesson she draws: consciousness is not the flash of recognition but the slow labour of form. A photograph may disturb, but disturbance alone neither clarifies nor instructs; it does not tell us how to live with what we see, or what obligations the seeing imposes. To live with what one sees requires more than sentiment—it requires a structure capable of holding contradiction without collapsing into spectacle. Consciousness, for her, was not revelation, nor empathy, nor proof. It was endurance: a form that could carry the weight without dissolving under it.

Indignant at the idea that imagery of relentless slaughter is evidence enough, Sontag pressed instead on the need for sustained interpretation. What Sontag demands is not reaction, but cognition—a reckoning with how we know what we know, and at what cost. Consciousness, then, is not the flash of moral recognition. It is the slower, lonelier labour of staying with the discomfort, resisting the flattening, and building a form capable of bearing it. Where others chased affect, Sontag once again turned to architecture—not to shield herself from pain, but to make it thinkable.

And yet her severity was never indiscriminate. She refined her feminist inheritance rather than abandoning it. If she was impatient with Woolf’s trembling, she was reverent toward Simone Weil. In The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, Weil insisted that violence turns the human into a thing. “No,” she wrote, “retort those who in a given situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt someone subjected to it into a martyr or a hero.” For Sontag, this was not rhetoric but incision—an ethical claim that endured. Weil’s ascetic clarity, her metaphysical gravity, her refusal of consolation: here was a form of consciousness honed by suffering, intolerant of illusion. Unlike Woolf’s fragility, Weil’s severity held. Always alert to the cost of clarity, Sontag recognised in Weil a kindred structure of seriousness—unadorned, unyielding, incandescent. Consciousness, stripped to form: that was the kind of thinking Sontag could trust.

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4.

When McCarthy was leaving Hanoi, she was met with a proposal—her comrades tried to put a ring on her. “At the museum, in a parting ceremony, they presented us with rings made from downed US aircraft. Like a wedding-ring, mine is dated August 1, 1966—the day the plane was shot down. They also gave me a woman’s comb of the same material. Such souvenirs seem to be popular in Hanoi, but though, as they watched, I murmured ‘Merci beaucoup’ and hurriedly, like one rapidly swallowing medicine, tried the blunt ring on my finger, I instantly slid it off and dropped it into my handbag; luckily, I had the excuse that it was a man’s ring: too big. Back in the hotel, I shut it up in a drawer out of sight, but it kept troubling my mind, making me toss at night, like an unsettled score. For some reason, the comb, scalloped in the Vietnamese style, did not bother me.”

McCarthy wrestled with these two objects long after. “Perhaps, if I had had the courage, I might have declined to take the ring… Yet equally repugnant to my nature, to my identity, whatever that is, to the souls of my ancestors, would be to be wedded for life… to a piece of aluminum wreckage from a shot-down US warplane. Or was it just the fact that it did not ‘go’ with my other jewellery?”The moral choreography here is absurd, elegant, and oddly moving. McCarthy, so composed in public, is undone in private by a gift too symbolic to accept and too fraught to refuse. The ring, forged from imperial wreckage, offered friendship while echoing complicity. Its weight was psychic as much as political: wearing it would mean marrying the contradiction, entering the script. In the end she deferred—sliding it into a drawer, neither accepted nor rejected. Her discomfort was not with the Vietnamese, but with herself. If Sontag refused the frame, McCarthy recoiled from the object. Each gesture marks a different limit of consciousness: one vanished into form, the other flinched at matter.

The comb unsettled her more quietly. “Yet I now slowly realise that I never passed it through my hair. Mysterious. I cannot explain the physical aversion, evidently subliminal, to being touched by this metal.” Unlike the ring, the comb was not a public emblem but an intimate tool: meant to touch the body, enter the self. Here, consciousness confronted contamination. The liberal reflex to be polite, to accept, faltered when the object crossed from symbol to proximity. What disturbed McCarthy was not its political charge but its proximity: the possibility of absorption, of being altered by contact. What she feared, in the end, was contamination—not from the Vietnamese, but from the war’s debris, repurposed as care. Refusing it felt impolite. Accepting it felt irreversible. It was not the object she feared, but what it might make legible—about her, to herself.

McCarthy’s time in Hanoi was saturated with object encounters. But unlike the charged symbolism of the ring and the comb, most were defined by absence, austerity, and the strange economy of wartime durability. “There is almost nothing to buy,” she wrote, “except, literally, hardware: e.g., flashlights, thermoses, canteens, second-hand bicycles and bicycle-parts. Many shops are closed down. The principal private businesses seem to be barber shops and bicycle-repair shops. The very name, Silk Street, sends a pang through the luxury-loving passerby.” In this landscape, the material world was stripped to essentials—function over beauty, repair over replacement. Objects had afterlives, not price tags. Even luxury existed only as echo, a ghost conjured by a street name.

Then there were books. “As in all Communist countries, books are cheap,” McCarthy observed, “but the shelves and counters of the Hanoi bookstores display almost exclusively textbooks, of one sort or another: technical, scientific, political. Little fiction or poetry and that mostly of an edifying or patriotic character; few translations of foreign classics, except Marx and Engels. The translation of modern European and American authors, a thriving industry in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, is here still largely a dream for the future: ‘We have started to translate your progressive writers: Jack London and Mark Twain.’” What remains in circulation, then, is not literature, but instruction. Books function not as containers of inner life but as conduits of ideology—tools for building, training, correcting. In a city stripped of adornment, narrative too becomes utilitarian. Translation exists, but only for the already-aligned. A future of reading is promised, but deferred. Even pleasure must be politically vetted. For McCarthy, steeped in the world of liberal letters, the absence of imaginative literature signals not just deprivation, but disorientation: a silence where interiority might have been.

And yet there were flashes of pageantry. At a generator factory, McCarthy saw young women workers in dazzling áo dài, faces painted with exaggerated red lips and disks of rouge. “They looked like bridesmaids emerging from a church,” she wrote—costumed, ceremonial, out of sync with the worksite. This was not sincerity but staging: fashion as signal, hospitality as theatre. Even beauty, like politics, was choreographed.

“Ordinarily the women wear no make-up, and the only notes of colour on the flying bicycles are supplied by girls’ plastic raincapes, robin’s egg blue or pink. Despite the rainy winters, the umbrella, I was told, was discarded when the air war began. Mine attracted attention, and I began to be embarrassed by it, as though it had been a parasol. When not in work clothes, the men of Hanoi dressed neatly in Western suits, clean white shirt, and tie.” Even beauty, here, was rationed—reduced to flashes of plastic in motion, or quiet gestures of propriety. This vision was not fashion as expression, but fashion as signal: a temporary rupture in the logic of uniformity, femininity staged for foreign eyes, or perhaps for the theatre of state hospitality. The rouge held, but so did the distance. McCarthy’s embarrassment at her umbrella—at its frivolity, its femininity—reveals the depth of her self-consciousness, her awareness that visibility in Hanoi was never without meaning.

McCarthy’s descriptions have the precision of a photograph, but her prose lingers longer, accumulating unease. In one sense, it surpasses the photograph. The ring in the drawer, the comb never used, the umbrella abandoned, the raincapes flashing blue and pink—all these details reveal the limits of what she could absorb. Her gaze is exact but unsettled, clarity always undercut by recoil. What she leaves behind is not intimacy but residue: vivid, unresolved, strangely visceral. In this sense, McCarthy anticipated the problem Sontag would later name: the impossibility of consciousness without implication, the instability of witness when objects, images, and gestures all threaten to implicate the self.

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5.

1968 was the Year of the Earth Monkey—Mậu Thân. Not just a calendrical coincidence, but an astrological inscription written into the year’s pulse. In Vietnamese cosmology, the Monkey is the trickster—clever, fast, disruptive—but in the Earth Monkey’s iteration, this mischief is not senseless. It is strategic, cunning, deliberate. Earth steadies the Monkey’s leap, turning volatility into recalibration. Disruption becomes architecture.

In Vietnam, Mậu Thân names not just a year but a rupture: the Tết Offensive, a moment so destabilising that it altered the trajectory of the war regardless of its military outcome. Elsewhere—Paris, Prague, Oakland, Mexico City—1968 followed suit. Systems cracked. Illusions collapsed. The world, for a moment, flared into possibility. But this wasn’t chaos for chaos’s sake. It was, as the Earth Monkey foretells, a structural unmaking with an eye toward something else. Not revolution as crescendo, but as sleight of hand. Not collapse as failure, but as the condition for reconstitution.

To invoke Mậu Thân, then, is to reckon with a transformation engineered from within—one that moves through misdirection, that exposes by disorienting, that works from within until what once seemed permanent gives way. The Earth Monkey does not scream; it rearranges the scene. It teaches us that spectacle is not surface, that rupture can be engineered, and that the trickster is not unserious—they are already drafting the next blueprint.

After Mậu Thân, the war dragged on—but its structure had already collapsed. It was no longer a war to win, only one to survive or abandon. What remained was not just wreckage, but a new configuration of consciousness: one forged in rupture, tempered by refusal, sharpened against spectacle. Sontag’s vanishing, McCarthy’s recoil, the afterlives of Napalm Girl—all these moments are not digressions but indices of what Mậu Thân made possible. They show how consciousness in an age of war and image could no longer rely on immediacy, intimacy, or proof. It had to be reconstituted—through form, through severity, through the endurance of thinking.

The Earth Monkey’s final trick is not destruction but reconfiguration: to unseat what seemed stable so that another architecture can be built. In 1968, that architecture was consciousness itself.

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6.

On the American stage, 1968 gathered a different cast of monkeys. Not insurgents improvising under bombardment, but executives and technologists in boardrooms and laboratories, sketching circuits and futures under the glow of venture capital. If in Hanoi the Monkey appeared as insurgent energy—destabilising empire, living in precarity—in California it wore another mask: charisma, inevitability, the cowboy technologist. The business class rehearsed its own theatre of disruption, and it too had its tricksters. Here consciousness did not emerge through rupture or heartbreak, but through the performance of certainty itself.

Robert Noyce, co-founder of Intel, embodied what Tom Wolfe called the “halo effect”—that effortless charisma which makes admiration feel like a natural law. Wolfe painted him in the Gary Cooper mould: tall, athletic, serene, the cowboy who carried certainty as if born to it. Noyce’s presence was read as substance, his improvisations as visionary daring. That was the privilege of the halo: when Noyce bent rules or charmed rivals, it was sanctified as leadership, not scheming. The gestures were not so different from the monkeys of Hanoi—the hustles, shortcuts, improvisations—but their meaning depended on who was allowed to define them.

Noyce’s halo was contextual as much as personal. America in 1968 wanted its technologists to look like cowboys: masculine, assured, frontier figures to redeem a country bloodied by war and protest. Admiration descended on Noyce not because he transcended monkey business, but because he never had to wear the name. His tricks were laundered into destiny. In this sense, he was both the quintessential monkey and the anti-monkey: the trickster whose antics were canonised as genius because of where he stood. Consciousness here was structural—it resided less in the man himself than in the interpretive frame that crowned his charisma as natural fact.

Around him gathered a small pantheon. Gordon Moore, quiet and methodical, the scientist-anchor who steadied Noyce’s glow. Andy Grove, Hungarian refugee turned disciplinarian, his own fears institutionalised in his mantra that “only the paranoid survive.” William Shockley, the fallen patriarch, whose descent into racist crankery revealed how charisma could collapse into grotesque. Halo, anchor, survivor, ruin: the four fates of monkey energy when transposed into the theatre of American business. Taken together, they sketch a spectrum of consciousness in the corporate field: inevitability, vigilance, collapse.

It mattered that this theatre unfolded in 1968. While the streets of Chicago burned and campuses convulsed, while Vietnamese villages were flattened under American ordnance, the men of Intel sketched another future: semiconductors, microchips, information economies. Their chips would eventually feed into military contracts—guidance systems, surveillance technologies, Cold War computation—but the mood among their founders was not resistance or conscience. It was inevitability. If Hanoi forced Sontag into the heartbreak of failed intimacy, California staged the charisma of technological certainty. The business class did not tremble—it glowed. Their consciousness was not forged in crisis, but insulated by the assumption that history was on their side.

This too was consciousness, but of another register. Where Sontag wrestled with the impossibility of intimacy and the collapse of proof, Noyce projected a charisma that demanded no proof at all. His was a consciousness haloed by privilege: effortlessness mistaken for substance, charm mistaken for vision. It was not that Noyce lacked monkey energy—he schemed around bureaucracy, cut corners, cultivated his cowboy poise—but his antics were never read as antics. They were canonised. This was the American trick: to turn monkey business into destiny, and to call it genius.

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7.

Madison Avenue staged this consciousness with its own tragicomic flare. Don Draper was not a man of 1968, but a man imagined decades later, when the early 2000s tried to remember what such a figure might have looked like. A simulacrum of charisma, Draper condenses an entire archetype: the veteran who survives by reinvention, the adman who makes masks his métier, the trickster whose monkey energy is both ruin and allure. In Mad Men’s retelling, he begins on a Korean battlefield, swapping names with a dead soldier. In one sleight—ducking death, stealing identity—he embodies the monkey’s gift for vanishing from one life and conjuring another. Draper is fiction, but he is also diagnosis: a dramatization of how we later imagined the men who turned war’s precarity into advertising’s spectacle.

By the late 1960s, the Vietnam War loomed over Madison Avenue—but in Mad Men, that presence arrives through the filter of hindsight. The series stages young copywriters grumbling about the draft, strategizing deferments, joking about bone spurs and grad school. Conscription appears not as conscience but as chatter, a background noise to campaigns. What we see here is not a record of how advertising actually met the war, but a simulacrum of how a later era imagined that encounter: war metabolised as demographics, body counts as market data, napalm as a question of which age cohort was vanishing from the consumer base. The fiction sharpens the truth: that for Madison Avenue, war registered less as catastrophe than as segmentation, less as horror than as market calculus.

By 1968, Draper’s charisma was fraying. Alcoholism, erratic spirals, a forced leave of absence after losing a major client. The trickster’s charm, once read as brilliance, began to look like chaos. Consciousness falters here too: he drifted out of the role, then back in, struggling to sustain the fiction. In 1970 he abandoned it altogether—walking out of McCann’s conference room, trading the halo of the agency for a mechanic’s anonymity. It was another monkey turn: charisma disappearing into grease-stained overalls, identity shed again like a skin.

But the world Draper abandoned was already morphing. By the early 1970s, advertising and technology were converging. Market research feeding computation, consumer demographics feeding the circuits Intel was wiring in California. Madison Avenue’s tools of persuasion—segmentation, profiling, the art of shaping desire—were being grafted onto silicon. Even the war supplied material: Vietnam’s body counts, surveys, and television images became data streams, rehearsal grounds for the fusion of spectacle with calculation.

What Draper performed in the conference room, Noyce and his peers were scripting into hardware: systems built to measure, predict, and sell. The same logics of persuasion that kept Draper’s campaigns alive were being transposed into code, chips, networks. Where Noyce’s halo turned semiconductors into inevitability, Draper’s ad world sutured spectacle to desire. Consciousness itself was becoming infrastructural. The halo of charisma and the glow of the circuit were never separate; they were twin stages of the same American performance.

And then came Draper’s final act. At Esalen, he sits cross-legged, eyes closed, a smile breaking across his face. What follows is either retreat or reincorporation: the halo transfigured into commerce. The Coca-Cola ad—“I’d like to buy the world a Coke”—stands as his possible afterimage, the trickster reborn not as dissident but as myth-maker for capital. But this, too, is hindsight: a story written in 2007 about what 1971 must have meant, how charisma dissolves into advertising. Unlike Sontag, who vanished from the frame, Draper returns as the frame itself. He is not a historical presence but a retroactive construction, proof that consciousness is scaffolded not just by archives and images, but by fictions that circulate as if they were real.

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8.

If Madison Avenue was theatre and Silicon Valley charisma, Hillsboro was the stage stripped bare. Intel called it the Silicon Forest, but the name was already an erasure. The forest had been cleared long before the fabs arrived, the land levelled so the metaphor could masquerade as nature. Tektronix—America’s test instrument manufacturer—had already planted the first trunk of this so-called forest in the 1950s, but what grew from it was not woodland. It was circuitry—spin-offs branching into hundreds of firms, inevitability rooted in absence.

By the early 1980s, Noyce was spelling out the creed. America, he argued, did not need state planning or industrial policy; it only needed to trust the market. Innovation, in his telling, was a natural resource—self-generating, inevitable. This was the halo transposed into law: charisma reborn as doctrine, inevitability recoded as common sense. Where Sontag wrestled with the impossibility of intimacy, Noyce planted inevitability into the ground itself—charisma sutured to policy, policy to landscape. Consciousness here was infrastructural not only in circuits, but in soil.

And yet even halos cast shadows. Grove was that shadow: refugee, disciplinarian, paranoia made law. Unlike Noyce, he carried history in his body—Holocaust survivor, Hungarian exile, a man for whom vigilance was never metaphor but memory. Where Sontag faltered in the heartbreak of failed intimacy, Grove made fracture into method: no resonance, only survival. If Noyce named absence a forest, Grove kept it sterile, pruning every threat, ensuring no wild growth could breach the fab’s perimeter. His paranoia resonated with the wider Cold War mood—containment, surveillance, vigilance institutionalised. Noyce projected inevitability; Grove enforced it, soldering fear into the circuit. Together they staged the American trick: certainty above, precarity beneath, inevitability masking the fact that the forest was already cleared.

Paranoia, in Grove’s hands, did not stay personal—it scaled. What began as the vigilance of a refugee hardened into corporate method, then into national ethos. Intel’s fabs in Oregon were not only stamping out consumer chips; they were feeding Cold War arsenals—guidance systems, surveillance satellites, the circuitry of containment. The same fear that Grove carried in his body was soldered into America’s infrastructure: paranoia reborn as strategy. The forest was not just cleared of trees but repopulated with a vigilance that could never rest. Inevitability above, precarity beneath—by the early 1980s, that was not just Intel’s trick but America’s.

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9.

Paranoia leaves marks on the ground. In Oregon it materialised as the Silicon Forest, a landscape re-scripted into industrial parklands where vigilance was etched into zoning maps and fab perimeters. The forest was long gone, cleared first for farmland and then again for concrete, but the metaphor lingered as if nature had willingly ceded its place to silicon. What Intel and its peers built was not only circuitry but a geography of containment: sterile campuses buffered by highways, suburbs recalibrated for engineers, towns remade around the rhythms of shift work and clean rooms. Consciousness here was not metaphorical but material—paranoia poured into soil, asphalt, and air, until even the landscape rehearsed the doctrine that survival required vigilance.

The genealogy stretched back decades. Tektronix and Electro Scientific Industries arrived first, in the 1940s and ’50s, hauling their labs out of Portland proper into Washington County. Their campuses were designed as lures—nodes meant to attract others, each new fab promising not just jobs but a future. Spin-offs sprouted: Floating Point Systems in 1970, then hundreds more, until the “Silicon Forest” was less a metaphor than a family tree, nearly nine hundred companies branching from those roots. The myth was inevitability, the reality was succession—firms constantly splitting, failing, recombining. Innovation was not seamless growth but a churn of offshoots, fractures institutionalised as genealogy. What Sontag lived as heartbreak and Grove codified as paranoia became, in Oregon, an economic ecosystem: instability scripted as progress, precarity recast as development.

The churn was the trick. What in Vietnam looked like monkey improvisation—volatile, precarious, constantly recalibrating—was in Oregon recoded as innovation. Startups spun out of Tektronix, collapsed, recombined, and the chaos was sanctified as dynamism. Nearly nine hundred companies traced their lineage through these fractures, a genealogy of volatility renamed as progress. Monkey business, but haloed: flares of improvisation canonised as the inevitability of American ingenuity. The forest was not only cleared of trees; it was cleared of doubt. Every fracture became a branch, every failure a seedling, until precarity itself was naturalised as development.

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10.

1968 was the year of the Monkey everywhere, but each stage read the trick differently.

In Hanoi, monkey business appeared as rupture, a choreography of insurgency that unsettled empire yet left Sontag grasping for intimacy that never came. On Madison Avenue, it surfaced in Draper’s masks—charisma, reinvention, the hustler’s sleight of hand—eventually sutured back into the glow of a Coke ad. In California, it gleamed as inevitability: Noyce’s halo sanctifying tricks as vision, Grove’s paranoia soldering fracture into doctrine. And in Oregon, the churn of spin-offs turned volatility into genealogy, monkey improvisation rebranded as progress.

Everywhere the gestures were the same—improvisation, trickery, survival—but the names they carried shifted with the stage. Monkey in one place, genius in another, spectacle somewhere else. The year made clear that charisma and chaos are never opposed; they are the same energy, refracted through power.

Consciousness, then, is not the halo, nor the spectacle, nor even the intimacy Sontag sought and failed to find. It is the labour of living with fracture: of knowing that monkey business is always present, but never evenly named. In 1968 it surfaced as refusal in Hanoi, as charisma on Madison Avenue, as inevitability in Silicon Valley, as paranoia in Oregon. What the year teaches is that consciousness cannot be trusted to the frame—whether photograph, advertisement, or corporate myth—because the frame is always already tilted.

To be conscious is to see the trick, to feel the fracture, and still to hold it without collapsing into sentiment or inevitability. Monkey business was never marginal; it was the structure itself, hiding in plain sight—the very engine on which order turns.

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[1] Susan Sontag (1968) Trip to Hanoi, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, USA.