by Susan Sontag
It will be seen that stylistic decisions, by focusing our attention on some things, are also a narrowing of our attention, a refusal to allow us to see others. But the greater interestingness of one work of art over another does not rest on the greater number of things the stylistic decisions in that work allow us to attend to, but rather on the intensity and authority and wisdom of that attention, however narrow its focus.
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In the strictest sense, all the contents of consciousness are ineffable. Even the simplest sensation is, in its totality, indescribable. Every work of art, therefore, needs to be understood not only as something rendered, but also as a certain handling of the ineffable. In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said (rules of “decorum”), of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.
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What I have said about style has been directed mainly to clearing up certain misconceptions about works of art and how to talk about them. But it remains to be said that style is a notion that applies to any experience (whenever we talk about its form or qualities). And just as many works of art which have a potent claim on our interest are impure or mixed with respect to the standard I have been proposing, so many items in our experience which could not be classed as works of art possess some of the qualities of art objects. Whenever speech or movement or behavior or objects exhibit a certain deviation from the most direct, useful, insensible mode of expression or being in the world, we may look at them as having a “style,” and being both autonomous and exemplary.
[1965]
II
The richest style is the synthetic voice of the leading character.
PAVESE
The artist as exemplary sufferer
CESARE PAVESE began writing around 1930, and the novels which have been translated and published here—The House on the Hill, The Moon and the Bonfires, Among Women Only, and The Devil in the Hills—were all written in the years 1947-49, so that a reader confined to English translations can’t generalize about his work as a whole. From these four novels alone, however, it appears that his main virtues as a novelist are delicacy, economy, and control. The style is flat, dry, unemotional. One remarks the coolness of Pavese’s fiction, though the subject-matter is often violent. This is because the real subject is never the violent happening (e.g. the suicide in Among Women Only; the war in The Devil in the Hills) but, rather, the cautious subjectivity of the narrator. The typical effort of a Pavese hero is lucidity; the typical problem is that of lapsed communication. The novels are about crises of conscience, and the refusal to allow crises of conscience. A certain atrophy of the emotions, an enervation of sentiment and bodily vitality, is presupposed. The anguish of prematurely disillusioned, highly civilized people alternating between irony and melancholic experiments with their own emotions is indeed familiar. But unlike other explorations of this vein of modern sensibility—for example, much of French fiction and poetry of the last eighty years—Pavese’s novels are unsensational and chaste. The main action always takes place off-stage, or in the past; and erotic scenes are curiously avoided.
As if to compensate for the detached relations which his characters have with each other, Pavese typically attributes to them a deep involvement with a place—usually either the cityscape of Turin, where Pavese went to the university and lived most of his adult life, or the surrounding Piedmont countryside, where he was born and spent his childhood. This sense of place, and the desire to find and recover the meaning of a place, does not, however, give Pavese’s work any of the characteristics of regional fiction, and this may in part account for the failure of his novels to arouse much enthusiasm among an English-speaking audience, nothing like that aroused by the work of Silone or Moravia, though he is a much more gifted and original writer than either of these. Pavese’s sense of place and of people is not what one expects of an Italian writer. But then Pavese was a Northern Italian; Northern Italy is not the Italy of the foreign dream, and Turin is a large industrial city lacking in the historical resonance and incarnate sensuality which attracts foreigners to Italy. One finds no monuments, no local color, no ethnic charm in Pavese’s Turin and Piedmont. The place is there, but as the unattainable, the anonymous, the inhuman.
Pavese’s sense of the relation of people to place (the way in which people are transfixed by the impersonal force of a place) will be familiar to anyone who has seen the films of Alain Resnais and especially of Michelangelo Antonioni—Le Amiche (which was adapted from Pavese’s best novel, Among Women Only), L’Avventura, and La Notte. But the virtues of Pavese’s fiction are not popular virtues, any more than are the virtues of, say, Antonioni’s films. (Those who don’t take to Antonioni’s films call them “literary” and “too subjective.”) Like Antonioni’s films, Pavese’s novels are refined, elliptical (though never obscure), quiet, anti-dramatic, self-contained. Pavese is not a major writer, as Antonioni is a major film-maker. But he does deserve a good deal more attention in England and America than he has gotten thus far.3
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Recently Pavese’s diaries from the years 1935 to 1950, when he committed suicide at the age of forty-two, have been issued in English.4 They can be read without any acquaintance with Pavese’s novels, as an example of a peculiarly modern literary genre—the writer’s “diary” or “notebooks” or “journal.”
Why do we read a writer’s journal? Because it illuminates his books? Often it does not. More likely, simply because of the rawness of the journal form, even when it is written with an eye to future publication. Here we read the writer in the first person; we encounter the ego behind the masks of ego in an author’s works. No degree of intimacy in a novel can supply this, even when the author writes in the first person or uses a third person which transparently points to himself. Most of Pavese’s novels, including the four translated into English, are narrated in the first person. Yet we know that the “I” in Pavese’s novels is not identical with Pavese himself, no more than is the “Marcel” who tells Remembrance of Things Past identical with Proust, nor the “K.” of The Trial and The Castle identical with Kafka. We are not satisfied. It is the author naked which the modern audience demands, as ages of religious faith demanded a human sacrifice.
The journal gives us the workshop of the writer’s soul. And why are we interested in the soul of the writer? Not because we are so interested in writers as such. But because of the insatiable modern preoccuption with psychology, the latest and most powerful legacy of the Christian tradition of introspection, opened up by Paul and Augustine, which equates the discovery of the self with the discovery of the suffering self. For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering.
The writer is the exemplary sufferer because he has found both the deepest level of suffering and also a professional means to sublimate (in the literal, not the Freudian, sense of sublimate) his suffering. As a man, he suffers; as a writer, he transforms his suffering into art. The writer is the man who discovers the use of suffering in the economy of art—as the saints discovered the utility and necessity of suffering in the economy of salvation.
The unity of Pavese’s diaries is to be found in his reflections on, how to use, how to act on, his suffering. Literature is one use. Isolation is another, both as a technique for the inciting and perfecting of his art, and as a value in itself. And suicide is the third, ultimate use of suffering—conceived of not as an end to suffering, but as the ultimate way of acting on suffering.
Thus we have the following remarkable sequence of thought, in a diary entry of 1938. Pavese writes: “Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: ‘You can’t deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching your reactions, and steal your secrets by
involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.’… The other defense against things in general is silence as we muster strength for a fresh leap forward. But we must impose that silence on ourselves, not have it imposed on us, not even by death. To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship … Those who by their very nature can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. This is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.”
The modern form of the writer’s journal shows a curious evolution if we examine some of its principal exemplars: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Gide, Kafka, and now Pavese. The uninhibited display of egotism devolves into the heroic quest for the cancellation of the self. Pavese has none of Gide’s Protestant sense of his life as a work of art, his respect for his own ambition, his confidence in his own feelings, his love for himself. Nor does he have Kafka’s exquisite commitment without mockery to his own anguish. Pavese, who used the “I” so freely in his novels, usually speaks of himself as “you” in his diaries. He does not describe himself, but addresses himself. He is the ironic, exhortatory, reproachful spectator of himself. The ultimate consequence of such a bracketed view of the self would seem to have been, inevitably, suicide.
The diaries are in effect a long series of self-assessments and self-interrogations. They record nothing of daily life or observed incidents; nor is there any description of family, friends, lovers, colleagues or reaction to public events (as in Gide’s Journals). All that satisfies the more conventional expectation of the contents of a writer’s journal (as in Coleridge’s Notebooks, and again in Gide’s Journals) are the numerous reflections on the general problems of style and literary composition, and the copious notes on the writer’s reading. Pavese was very much a “good European,” though he never travelled outside Italy; the diaries attest that he was at home in all of European literature and thought, and in American writing (in which he was especially interested) as well. Pavese was not simply a novelist but a uomo di cultura: poet, novelist, short story writer, literary critic, translator, and editor with one of Italy’s leading publishers (Einaudi). Much space in the diaries is taken up by this writer-as-man-of-letters. There are sensitive and subtle comments on a lifetime of immensely varied reading that ranged from the Rig-Veda, Euripides, and Defoe to Corneille, Vico, Kierkegaard, and Hemingway. But it is not this aspect of the diaries which I am considering here, for it is not this which constitutes the specific interest that writers’ journals hold for a modern audience. It should however be noted that when Pavese discusses his own writing, it is not as the writer of it but rather as a reader or critic. There is no discussion of work-in-progress, or plans and sketches for stories, novels, and poems to be written. The only work discussed is what has been finished. Another notable omission in the diaries is any reflection of Pavese’s involvement in politics—neither his anti-fascist activities, for which he was imprisoned for ten months in 1935, nor his long, ambivalent, and finally disillusioned association with the Communist Party.
It might be said that there are two personae in the diary. Pavese the man, and Pavese the critic and reader. Or: Pavese thinking prospectively, and Pavese thinking retrospectively. There is the self-reproachful and self-exhortatory analysis of his feelings and projects; the focus of reflection is on his talents—as a writer, as a lover of women, and as a prospective suicide. Then there is all the retrospective comment: analyses of some of his completed books, and their place in his work; the notes on his reading. Insofar as the “present” of Pavese’s life enters the diaries at all, it is mainly in the form of a consideration of his capabilities and prospects.
Apart from writing, there are two prospects to which Pavese continually recurs. One is the prospect of suicide, which tempted Pavese at least as early as his university years (when two of his close friends killed themselves) and is a theme to be found on almost every page of the diaries. The other is the prospect of romantic love and erotic failure. Pavese shows himself as tormented by a profound sense of sexual inadequacy, which he bulwarked by all sorts of theories about sexual technique, the hopelessness of love, and the sex war. Remarks on the predatoriness, the exploitativeness of women are interspersed with confessions of his own failure to love, or to provide sexual satisfaction. Pavese, who never married, records in the journal the reactions to a number of long affairs and casual sexual experiences, usually at the point when he is expecting trouble or after they actually have failed. The women themselves are never described; the events of the relationship are not even alluded to.
The two themes are intimately connected, as Pavese himself experienced. In the closing months of his life, in the midst of an unhappy affair with an American film star, he writes: “One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love—any love—reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness … Deep, deep down, did I not clutch at this amazing love affair as it flew … to make myself revert to my old thought—my long-standing temptation, to have an excuse for thinking of it again: love and death. This is the hereditary pattern.” Or again, in an ironic vein, Pavese remarks: “It is possible not to think about women, just as one does not think about death.” Women and death never ceased to fascinate Pavese, and with an equal degree of anxiety and morbidity, since his main problem in both cases was whether he would be equal to the occasion.
What Pavese has to say about love is the familiar other side of romantic idealization. Pavese rediscovers, with Stendhal, that love is an essential fiction; it is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. What one takes to be an attachment to another person is unmasked as one more dance of the solitary ego. It is easy to see how this view of love is peculiarly congruent to the modern vocation of the writer. In the Aristotelian tradition of art as imitation, the writer was the medium or vehicle for describing the truth about something outside himself. In the modern tradition (roughly, Rousseau forward) of art as expression, the artist tells the truth about himself. Therefore it was inevitable that a theory of love as an experience or revelation of oneself, deceptively presented as an experience or revelation of the value of a loved person or object, should suggest itself. Love, like art, becomes a medium of self-expression. But because making a woman is not as solitary an act as making a novel or a poem, it is doomed to failure. A prevailing theme of serious literature and cinema today is the failure of love. (When we encounter the opposite statement, as for instance in Lady Chatterley’s Lover or in Louis Malle’s film The Lovers, we incline to describe it as a “fairy tale.”) Love dies because its birth was an error. However, the error remains a necessary one, so long as one sees the world, in Pavese’s words, as a “jungle of self-interest.” The isolated ego does not cease to suffer. “Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anaesthetic.”
A further consequence of this modern belief in the fictional nature of erotic attachment is a new self-conscious aquiescence in the inevitable attractiveness of unrequited love. As love is an emotion felt by the solitary ego and mistakenly projected outward, the impregnability of the beloved’s ego exercises a hypnotic attraction for the romantic imagination. The lure of unrequited love lies in the identity of what Pavese calls “perfect behavior” and a strong, absolutely isolated, indifferent ego. “Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference,” Pavese writes in his diary in 1940. “Perhaps that is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference; she represents ‘style,’ the fascination of ‘class,’ all that is desirable.”
Many of Pavese’s remarks on love seem like a case history supporting the thesis of Denis de Rougemont and other historians of the Western imagination who have traced the evolution of the Western image of sexual love since Tristan and Isolde as a “romantic agony,” a death-wish. But the striking rhetorical enmeshment of the terms “writing,” “sex,” and “suicide” in Pavese’s diaries indicates that this sensibility in its modern form is more
complex. Rougemont’s thesis may throw light on the Western overvaluation of love, but not on the modern pessimism about it: the view that love, and sensual fulfillment, are hopeless projects. Rougemont might well have used Pavese’s own words: “Love is the cheapest of religions.”
My own view is that the modern cult of love is not part of the story of a Christian heresy (Gnostic, Manichean, Catharist), as Rougemont suggests, but expresses the central and peculiarly modern preoccupation of the loss of feeling. To wish to cultivate “the art of looking at ourselves as though we were characters in one of our novels … as the way to put ourselves in a position to think constructively and reap the benefits” reveals Pavese speaking hopefully about a situation of self-alienation which elsewhere in the diaries is a subject of continual sorrow. For “life begins in the body,” as Pavese observes in another entry; and he continually gives voice to the reproach which the body makes to the mind. If civilization may be defined as that stage of human life at which, objectively, the body becomes a problem, then our moment of civilization may be described as that stage at which we are subjectively aware of, and feel trapped by, this problem. Now we aspire to the life of the body and we reject the ascetic traditions of Judaism and Christianity, but we are still confined in the generalized sensibility which that religious tradition bequeathed us. Hence we complain; we are resigned and detached; we complain. Pavese’s continual prayers for the strength to lead a life of rigorous seclusion and solitude (“The only heroic rule is to be alone, alone, alone”) are entirely of a piece with his repeated complaints about his inability to feel. (See, for example, his remarks on his absence of feeling when his best friend, Leone Ginzburg, eminent professor and Resistance leader, was tortured to death by the fascists in 1940.) Here is where the modern cult of love enters: it is the main way in which we test ourselves for strength of feeling, and find ourselves deficient.