by Susan Sontag
How to transform this?
Journal of C.
or
Letters between C. and S[agan].
In journal, could have the reflections he makes on his novel—his brother—his own life. But is he capable of commenting from the outside—e.g. to understand how this project of the third novel is a violent act of revenge against his mother and his brother?
in writing this novel, he becomes his brother—but he is more intelligent than his brother (that why he denies his character is his brother, or that it matters whether the mentality he will impersonate, render is in fact typical Mongolian mentality)
—in writing this novel, he becomes his mother—but more intelligent than his mother. He understands Philippe better than she does.
Becoming his mother and his brother, he becomes, finally, stronger than either of them.
He impersonates Philippe (but better than Philippe) thereby advancing his claim to his mother’s love. He becomes, magically, the preferred son.
He replaces his mother in Philippe’s love.
He becomes what he always wanted to be—in his sad, pathetic, “bohemian” style—the perfect contestataire.
(C. hates to eat or to sleep. Is very thin. Goes to bed usually between 5 and 7 a.m. Drinks, though. ????, all this, alongside the ideal contestation incarnated by Philippe.)
Letter form: could have a voice—a woman, former wife or lover of Claude, a successful novelist who lives in Paris, genre Sagan—say all this. She is lucid, cynical.
But the letter form makes the story too long. I want it to move fast—as condensed as possible.
Chute (“fall”)? Mother dies, and it is Claude who dies right after—not Philippe.
…
Three themes I have been following all my life:
China
Women
Freaks
And there is a fourth: the organization, the guru.
Three (or four) colonies which I administer—and can exploit. Three (or four) rooms that I can furnish.
[In the margin:] Could write my autobiography in this way. In four sections.
…
11/7/72
Dedicate China book to D:
For David
Beloved son, friend, comrade
…
11/16/72
Science fiction revisited. The misogyny of Jules Verne (+ Nietzsche)
…
1973
1/6/73
When I was an infant, I think, I already knew I only had two choices: intelligence or autism. Being intelligent isn’t, for me, like doing something “better.” It’s the only way I exist. If I’m not [being] intelligent, I hover near being catatonic.
Film to be based on Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa (1910). He died in 1933. A funny, poetic, oneiric film (Story hinges on the fete of a theatrical character given on the occasion of a coronation).
Film on Gilles de Rais.
1/7/73
Perhaps I have begun to think again. It’s too soon to tell. I had begun to believe I had lost my mind.—Or gave it away, because it was too heavy.
Can I love someone (N[icole]] and still think / fly?
Love is flying sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.
I have to think about what I think. And I’m afraid.
The terrible, numbing loss of self-confidence I’ve experienced in the last three years: the attacks on Death Kit, feeling myself a fraud politically, the disastrous reception of Brother Carl—and, of course, the maelstrom of C[arlotta]
Films (tentative hypotheses):
The only kind of films I want to do are S[cience] F[iction]: dreams, miracles, futurology. SF = liberty.
Any “period” film is reactionary in itself. Example: Proust, The Go-Between, Death in Venice Counter-example: Bresson’s Jeanne d’Arc—Why? Because there are no professional actors … Hence [SS’s project to adapt de Beauvoir’s novel] L’Invitée would have been a reactionary film … Another counter-example: Rossellini’s La Prise du Pouvoir …
What about stars? Conscious manipulation of [Brigitte] Bardot-image in [Godard’s] Le Mépris
Essay on violence in cinema:
Compare: 1) eye of woman in Odessa steps sequence ([of Eisenstein’s] Potemkin); 2) eye being cut in [Buñuel’s] Un Chien Andalou
(1) arouses compassion, doesn’t brutalize; (2) brutalizes. Ken Russell’s The Devils comes from (2). A steady progression since Psycho in habituating audiences to endure sadistic assaults without flinching (Psycho, Repulsion, The Music Lovers, The Devils, [Sam] Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Hitchcock’s Frenzy). Where is [Franju’s] Le Sang des bêtes in all this?
My position leads to censorship, if it leads to any public action at all. But I can’t face up to that. I can’t be for censorship.
[SS made a month-long trip to China and North Vietnam in mid-January 1973. I have not found a great many notes from the trip, but much of what was among her papers is reproduced here. Not all of it concerns China directly.]
Cultural imperialism is the key issue. No wonder the US is not xenophobic. It exports its culture—confident it will contaminate (seduce) anyone who touches it.
Current Chinese slogan: “China must make greater contributions to the world.” The Chinese modesty about what it can export. China doesn’t think it can be a model, not even to the Third World.
China wants to be left alone. To make a New Zion, need to be isolated. America had that chance. China doesn’t, won’t.
Calvinist base of American ideology: human nature is fundamentally dark, evil, sinful, selfish, will respond only to egotistical or material or competitive motives
Faces with China: either (1) it isn’t real (it’s a show, it’s coerced); or (2) it can’t last (wait until materialism gets you (!)) Belief that consumer society is the irrefutable seducer (corruptor). Have nostalgia for pristine past of US, but …
How not to use words like:
regimentation
catechism
brain-washing
conformity vs. individualism
drab
[The American sinologist John King] Fairbank has pointed out (in 1971, testifying before [the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman , Arkansas senator William] Fulbright, p. 38) that American “individualism” translates as “ho-jen-chui,” each man for himself, selfishness; “freedom” in Chinese is “tzu yu,” means being out of control, doing as you wish, not following your responsible duties, licentiousness
Self-determination of small groups makes no sense—[the Chinese] believe people are one unit, must be unified.
Rituals of mutual aid
Eating: never help yourself, serve the person to the right + left of you. (Each course in big plate or bowl in the center of a round table.)
Chinese don’t understand (deal with) a group that doesn’t have a “Chairman.”
“Culture” in the West, the bastion of the bourgeoisie
culture, a temple
an elite, its guardians
cf. Nizan book
In China, for the time being, only one culture—accessible to everyone
One iconography:
Mao
The “[Gang of] 4”
The rev[olutionary] ballets
Art mirrors daily life.
Same repertory—are likely to hear / see it everywhere: a.m. visiting a nursery, p.m. visiting a factory, eve[ning] professional Song + Dance ensemble in Sian, Shanghai, or Hangchow
Women’s liberation
Women // blacks
important difference not degree or quantity of oppression (women through most of history have been slaves, chattel—from bound feet, clitoridectomy, immolation on husband’s funeral pyre > no legal status, right to own property, vote, have own name > abortion laws, job discrimination, etc.) but the fact that they are integrated with their oppressors though in some societies—e.g. Arab, Chinese—women are almost ghettoized
Crucial question: integration or separatism
Separatism implies at least bisexuality (exclusive homosexuality a result of sexual polarizing—would decline with more integration, abolition of sex stereotyping).
N.B. Current tendency in movement toward separatism—Redstockings, Gay Liberation Front, Weatherwoman. Aphra, a feminist lit. magazine praised for “not trying to copy male literary standards.”
My own view: pure integrationist.
Aim of women’s lib should be the abolition of sex-specific standards for all activities—except child-bearing and, perhaps, a few jobs requiring great physical strength (like coal-mining—but these jobs are rapidly disappearing)
There may be a “black literature” with its own standards, but there is no “women’s literature.” Isn’t this precisely the old male chauvinist slander. (Cf. treatment of Virginia Woolf) Women do not have—and should not seek to create—a separate “culture.” The separate culture they do have is privative. It’s just that they should be seeking to abolish.
Only function of caucusing—formation of separatist groups—is transition: to raise consciousness; to lobby.
Schools
Why not eliminate schooling between age 12–16? It’s biologically + psychologically too turbulent a time to be cooped up inside, made to sit all the time. During these years, kids would live communally—doing some work, anyway being physically active, in the countryside; learning about sex—free of their parents. Those four “missing” years of school could be added on, at a much later age. At, say, age 50–54 everyone would have to go back to school. (One could get a deferment for a few years, in special cases, if one was in a special work or creative project that couldn’t be broken off.) In this 50–54 schooling, have strong pressure to learn a new job or profession—plus liberal arts stuff, general science (ecology, biology), and language skills.
This simple change in the age specificity of schooling would a) reduce adolescent discontent, anomie, boredom, neurosis; b) radically modify the almost inevitable process by which people at 50 are psychologically and intellectually ossified—have become increasingly conservative, politically—and retrograde in their tastes (Neil Simon plays, etc.)
There would no longer be one huge generation gap (war), between the young and the not young—but 5 or 6 generation gaps, each much less severe.
After all, since most people from now on are going to live to be 70, 75, 80, why should all their schooling be bunched together in the first 1/3 or 1/4 of their lives—so that it’s downhill all the way
Early schooling—age 6–12—would be intensive language skills, basic science, civics, the arts.
Back to school at 16: liberal arts for two years
Age 18–21: job training through apprenticeship, not schooling
[Undated political note:]
For [the essay SS wanted to write] “Notes Toward a Definition of Cultural Revolution”
Read, reread:
Sartre interview, New Left Review #58, Nov–Dec 1969
3/15/73
… Where does a writer’s authority come from? Where does my authority come from?
Exemplary people, exemplary acts.
In “life,” I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In “work,” I don’t want to be reduced to my life.
My work is too austere
My life is a brutal anecdote
3/21/73
… Re-reading The Magic Mountain for the first time in 25 years, I discover today that a line from the Artaud essay, “Only the exhausting is truly interesting,” is an unconscious parody of a line in the Foreword to TMM: “Only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.”
[Undated, June]
… “When did the Ego begin to stink?” ([the British critic] Cyril Connolly, 30 years ago)
[There is a question mark in the margin of this entry.] Leni Riefenstahl’s terrifying “Nietzschean” documentary, Triumph of the Will
Late June 1973 Venice
Flying low—approach to Marco Polo Airport—the landscape is “lunar”—poisoned by oil refineries at Mestre, range of wild colors—the bones of the earth lying under the shallow water.
The American novel as an imperialist project: Melville.
…
6/20/73 Haramont
… The only stories I want to write now are those to which I can feed a personal experience. That’s why “China,” “Debriefing,” and “Baby” work. That’s why the Fable I tried to write in Venice didn’t work.
[Malcolm] Lowry story in American Review: one of the most beautiful examples of the writer’s will: persisting, shaping
…
6/27/73 Paris
What matters, what eats me: What is usable from the past—
Philip
Sense of madness
America
Women
Freaks
The will
Cocktails & overdrive
A story is a voice.
Overdrive
[In the margin , dated 2/13/74, is the added notation:] This is the name of the truck drivers’ mag[azine]
The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader’s heart
A beginning: “All my life I have been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.”
The story must strike a nerve—in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.
…
I know I “have” a story when the form (tone) comes, and everything seems relevant to it—so it could be much longer (more detailed) than it is.
…
Story called “Overdrive”
People in a car driving around the world make a tour of all the boring places: Bergen, Norway
Overdrive as title of the collection? I, etcetera too cerebral. [In the end SS opted for I, etcetera.]
7/31/73 Paris
Maybe I should go on writing stories for two years—fifteen, twenty stories—really clear the deck, explore new voices—before tackling the third novel. Can bring out two collections of stories in the next 2–3 years, re-establish myself (establish?!) as a fiction writer, and create interest—anticipation—in the forthcoming novel.
…
I’m now writing out of rage—and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It’s tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I’m safe. I don’t have to face the consequences of “real” aggressivity. I’m sending out colis piégés [“booby-trapped packages”] to the world.
That’s why my voice is getting more American. Because I’m finally handling / touching autobiographical material directly. The Europeanized voice (“tranlatorese”) of the earlier fiction was the just correlative of the fact that I had transposed—displaced—what I was writing about.
It started with the Paul Goodman essay—feeling grief, and having the courage (and interest) to advertize it. The second step was when I thought, in October, that the China trip was cancelled. I was so disappointed—and, above all I didn’t want to waste (not have the opportunity to use) all the personal fantasies [In the margin: (Daddy, M. [SS’s mother], my childhood)] that had been stirred up at the prospect of that trip. I wrote a story that started “I am going to China” precisely because I then thought I wasn’t. I decided to let the four-year-old have her say, since the thirty-nine-year-old wasn’t going to get to find out about Maoism and the Cultural Revolution. (Of course, when, in January, I did get to go—it was the 39-year-old who went; the 4-year-old, to my surprise, didn’t even deign to come along. Was it because she’d gotten the load off her chest? No—probably she would never have come—because the real China has nothing, never had anything, to do with her China.)