by Susan Sontag
1. reportorial
2. ironic—pop art [—] Andy Warhol’s 129 Die; front page of [Hearst-owned New York tabloid that folded in 1963] Daily Mirror
3. Patronizing reality: New Yorker fiction; some passages in The Group
Problem as a writer:
Never think of model
Don’t think of units of art as facts
“factless”
Erwin Straus, “The Upright Posture,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1942
…
Resurrections (in literature):
Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human, The Setting Sun
[Jan Potocki,] The Saragossa Manuscript
[Ghislain de Diesbach,] The Toys of Princes
[Machado de Assis,] Epitaph of a Small Winner
[Witold Gombrowicz,] Ferdydurke
[Stendhal,] Armance
[Knut Hamsun,] Pan
“Another merry day”
“Acting up a storm”
…
On [Antonin] Artaud–[Jacques] Rivière correspondance, pp. 45–52 of [Maurice] Blanchot, Le Livre à Venir.
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Read [Thomas] Carlyle, Sartor Resartus on the dandy [—] “the dandiacal body”
“J’ai le cafard” [“I’m blue”]
12/3/64
Interesting new sculpture rejects the pedestal ([the American sculptor George] Sugarman etc.)
Refinement, finesse: Camp, based on an exaggeration of this value, makes this central; it isn’t. Vigor, vitality is at least as important. But it is important. Cf. Jasper Johns
Essay on camp an example of the larger point—the imp[ortance] of—the idea of—sensibility. Talking about Camp a way of making this point.
Modern art related to 20th century revolution in the graphic arts. We are first generation in human history to live surrounded by print artifacts (comics, billboards, newspapers)—a second nature.
[The American art historian Meyer] Schapiro one of the first to be interested in [Jackson] Pollock, [Willem] de Kooning (late 40s)
Find Schapiro essay on modern art in The Listener, 1956
Warhol ideas: single image (monotonized); the impersonal
“What is it?” before “Is it any good?”
André Breton, a connoisseur of freedom
DUCHAMP
Meyer Schapiro
“The Nature of Abstract Art,” Marxist Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 1 (1937) reply by Delmore Schwartz, a reply to that by Schapiro, op. cit., vol. 1, no. 2 (April–June 1937)
“Style” (Kroeber vol.) [Schapiro’s essay in Alfred Louis Kroeber’s Anthropology Today]
On Modern Art, The Listener, 1956
“Metaphysics for the Movies,” Marxist Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Oct.–Dec. 1937)—attack on Mortimer Adler
• “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art,” in [K. Bharatha Iyer,] Art & Thought …
Priest and Worker: The Autobiography of Henri Perrin Translated and with an introduction by Bernard Wall
…
[There is a box drawn around this:] Style
Style as mode of change in art.
Consciousness of style the same as consciousness of historicity of the art work
Velocity of styles in contemporary painting
Contra “style,” aestheticism—cf. [a friend of SS’s beginning in the 1960s, the French critic Roland] Barthes, “Les Maladies du Costume de Théâtre”—Essais Critiques
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Work of Art
An experiment, a research (solving a “problem”) vs form of play
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[Michelangelo Antonioni’s film] L’Avventura
Hard to believe [it was made] only four years ago …
Only learn at the end that Claudia is poor
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A’s scenes always have the same duration on screen as they w[oul]d in life—no manipulation of time in the cutting—
“Abandon the supernatural casuistry of positives + negatives”—A’s refusal to make a villain of Sandro
Makes films about emotions, but refuses to let his actors “emote” (à la [the Italian film director Federico] Fellini + Visconti)—that w[oul]d be “rhetoric”
New style: “Against Rhetoric”
…
A’s films are “literary” in that they are full of complex references
Self-conscious film-making—Fitzgerald[’s Tender Is the Night] in L’A[vventura]
…
(They have literate scripts) but not like traditional stories
> A’s films: a kind of writing (“caméra-stylo” [literally “camera-pen” of the French film critic and director Alexandre ] Astruc) done by the director who “uses” the actors
• Why does one “write”?
• Answer—idea of a film as recording, incarnating
Material must necessarily be diffuse, non-dramatic (hence, failure of [Antonioni’s 1957 film] Il Grido)
…
[The next three entries have a box drawn around them.]
A number is the set of all sets which are equivalent to each other
A cardinal number is the class of all similar classes
To every finite set can be assigned a cardinal number
12/6/64
My friendships (Paul—[SS’s friend the American artist Paul Thek] etc.) are weightless. Now, since———, I experience them as maintenance problems. I’m juggling my schedule, paying dues …
“Every life is a defense of a particular form.” [—the Austrian composer Anton] von Webern
(Kitaj painting)
Read:
Buy: OUP editions of [the Welsh alchemist and Rosicrucian Thomas] Vaughan, [Andrew] Marvell, + [the metaphysical poet Richard] Crashaw.
Vaughan sermon on dying
[The French writer Alfred de Musset’s 1834 play) Loren-zaccio …
Walter Benjamin’s book on the baroque.
Frederic Farrar, History of Interpretation (1886)
Poe—stories
Iris Murdoch, “How I Write a Novel,” Yale Review, spring ’64
Franz Borkenau, book on 17th century (1934)—Pascal, Racine, Descartes, Hobbes [The Transition from the Feudal to the Bourgeois World View]
• John Cage, Silence
[The Russian filmmaker Vsevolod] Pudovkin on film [Film Technique and Film Acting]
…
12/19/64
Novel: discovering the life of the body (posture, gesture Carolee’s [the American performance artist Carolee Schneemann] “I had to deal with the fire,” [the Swedish sculptor] Claes Oldenburg’s “very involved these days with hallways”) … two characters—one who makes it, one who doesn’t.
1965
[Undated loose sheets:]
Language becoming a series of dead “white” tones
A person who (as a human being) has (?) perfect pitch
I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces “intelligence”
Writers think words mean the same thing—
[SS’s journals in the 1960s were copious but increasingly dated haphazardly or not at all. The following notes are from a notebook marked “1965—, Novel, collated notes,” but which are otherwise unspecified as to date or sequence. I have reproduced here those entries that seemed to me to tell something about SS that had a wider resonance than that usually found in book outlines.]
[Crossed out but legible:]
Note how Burroughs in Naked Lunch shifts from 1st to 3rd person, and back without any formal announcement.
Note, too, the use of erudition in parentheses
[Crossed out but legible:]
What sex is the “I”? Does one have to believe that God is a Woman to say “I” as a woman and be writing about the human condition.
Who has the right to say “I”? Is that a right that has to be earned?
The oneiric element.
[Crossed out but legible:]
drug ecstasy[—]cf. [Francis] Picabia�
�s painting Universal Prostitution universal fornication
The rendering of the erotic fantasy: “neither beautiful nor ugly” no affective weight, nothing other than it is—just “exciting”
This as subject for novel—the fantasies being interlaced like dreams in The Benefactor
…
I’m not looking for a plot—I’m looking for a “tone,” a “color,” and the rest will follow
What if everything were the same, but no one talked.
…
Novel as a game (Burt) [SS’s friend the American novelist Burt Blechman]—set up “rules,” which then determine character + situation
A problem: the thinness of my writing. It is meager, sentence by sentence. Too architectural, too discursive.
Jasper [Johns’s] [with whom SS had a relationship in the mid-1960s ] formidable reticence—it’s awe-inspiring—plus his argumentativeness
“In modern America. In modern America”
Whiper Baroney Gospel Church (in So[uth] Carolina) Blob’s Park—Max E. Blob Park—near Baltimore Tibetan Museum on Staten Island
…
What makes someone move?
He’s being chased
He’s looking for something
He’s running away
He’s restless
He’s crazy
He’s jealous
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[The twentieth-century French writer Georges] Bataille died of syphilis (inherited)—in early sixties—
Was a librarian—
could put such a character in a novel …
Bataille: connection betw[een] sex + death, pleasure + pain, cf. Larmes d’Éros
[In the margin:] only goal in life is ecstasy, exaltation, bliss
… fantasy (erotic) is, by definition, an open form … fantasy can be perpetually re-exciting by adding details—décor, clothes, each movement and gesture
Obsessed regard of [the contemporary French novelist Alain] Robbe-Grillet’s novels is (suppressed) erotic consciousness Point is—it has to be made explicit
PLOTS & SITUATIONS
Redemptive friendship (two women)
Novel in letters: the recluse-artist and his dealer and a clairvoyant
A voyage to the underworld (Homer, Vergil [and in Hermann Hesse’s novel] Steppenwolf)
Matricide
An assassination
A collective hallucination (story)
[Crossed out but legible:] A dialogue between Orpheus and Eurydice
[Crossed out but legible:] The construction of a fantasy: accidental stimulus—gradual refinement + elaboration—going over + over it—new inventions—need a détente
A theft
A work of art which is really a machine for dominating human beings
The discovery of a lost mss.
Two incestuous sisters
A space ship has landed
An ageing movie actress
A novel about the future. Machines. Each man has his own machine (memory bank, codified decision maker, etc.) You “play” the machine. Instant everything
Smuggling a huge art-work (painting? Sculpture?) out of the country in pieces—called “The Invention of Liberty”
A project: sanctity (based on SW [Simone Weil]—with honesty of [the poet] Sylvia Plath—only way to solve sex “I” is talk about it
[Crossed out but legible:] Theme of the changeling—a child
Letters between SW (in Mississippi) and Bataille …
Jealousy
Regenerative experiences:
Plunge into the sea
The sun
An old city
Silence
Snow-fall
Animals
Angelic apprehension of the past—neutrality—
All one’s experiences are equally important, singular (ps[choanalysis] teaches one to judge one’s experiences, judge one’s past)
…
Each generation has to reinvent spirituality
Ardent reason
Greatest subject: self seeking to transcend itself (Middlemarch, War and Peace)
Looking for self-transcendence (or metamorphosis)—the cloud of unknowing that allows perfect expressiveness (a secular myth for this)
On the “I”:
Use of WE
The married couple
The royal we
News broadcast
The nurse-patient (child) relation: “Aren’t we cranky today?” “Oh, we have a high temperature, don’t we?”
The parental “we”: “We always want what is best for you”
To found a leper colony
Sci-fi fiction the last storytelling (giving sense of otherness, “dépaysement” [“being out of one’s element”])
…
The necessity of the “récit” form: because the “I” is composite
… The dissociated consciousness (cf. [Sartre’s] Les Mots) that sees itself, is a spectator of itself.
acts > “acts”
agent > “agent”
“I” am playing the part of myself.
In the future, one could be re-wired or re-programmed [—] more euphoria, more repose [—] by drugs [—] destructive associations undone [/] voluntary, selective amnesias.
LSD: very wide-angle lens: flattening but a loss of depth perspective (things far away seem within reach)
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A person of low vitality (20-watt personality)—cf. [Theodore Dreiser’s novel] American Tragedy—deficit of energy (+ wit) coupled with extra refinement > bewilderment, blanking out, euphoria, self-flogging
A rheumatic heart in childhood—has to take care of himself
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Imagination not harmonious
With the body > fantasy becoming absolute destroys the body: s-m (Sade), drugs > decay of flesh (Burroughs)
Religious vocabulary puts a boundary around total fantasy—this is gone now.
Also analogies of body + nature (perceiving person as a body—e.g. a tree) have been lost.
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How hard it is to get people to accept “novel” as object. People who’ll take Larry Poons or Frank Stella are mystified by G[ertrude] Stein saying “One + two + three + four …”
Most interesting poetry today is prose-poem form ([Henri] Michaux, [Francis] Ponge, [Blaise] Cendrars, [Vladimir] Mayakovsky)
…
What would rigorous form be in the novel?
Couldn’t be mathematical, abstract (as in music + painting). There is the “material.” (Same problem in films)
Could you have Infinite Variation in the novel …