Where the Stress Falls 0374289174, 9780374289171

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SUSAN SONTAG what

earliest idea of

one who

a writer

interested

is

years after her classic Against

first

JO

.

has sa.d that her

should be was "some-

everything." Thirty-five

in

now

collection of essays, the

our most important

Interpretation,

chosen more than forty longer and

essayist has

shorter pieces from the trate a deeply

felt,

last

two decades

that

illus-

kaleidoscopic array of interests,

passions, observations, and ideas.

"Reading" offers ardent, freewheeling consid-

own

private

canon, such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Randall

Jarrell,

erations of talismanic writers from her

Roland Barthes, Machado de Assis, W. G. Sebald,

Borges.and Elizabeth Hardwick. "Seeing"

is

a series

of luminous and incisive encounters with film, dance,

photography, painting, opera, and theatre. the

final

some

section,

of her

And

in

"There and Here," Sontag explores

own commitments:

to the

work

(and

activism) of conscience, to the concreteness of historical understanding,

and to the vocation of the

writer.

Where

the Stress Falls records a great

ican writer's urgent

most late

engagement with some of the

significant aesthetic

and moral issues of the

twentieth century, and provides a

clear-eyed appraisal of century,

in

Amer-

what

is

brilliant

at stake, in this

the survival of that inheritance.

and

new

Civic Center New Books 814. 54 Sontag Sontag, Susan, 1933Where the stress falls

essays 31111021750284

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Digitized by the Internet Archive in

2011

http://www.archive.org/details/wherestressfallsOOsont

SONTAG

BY SUSAN

FICTION The Benefactor Death Kit I,

The Way

etcetera

We Live Now

The Volcano Lover In America

ESSAYS Against Interpretation Styles of Radical Will

On

Photography

Illness

As Metaphor

Under the Sign of Saturn

AIDS and Its Metaphors FILM

SCRIPTS

Duet for Cannibals Brother Carl

PLAY Alice in

A

Bed

Susan Sontag Reader

WHERE THE STRESS FALLS

Susan Sontag

WHE RE THE STRESS FALLS essays

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

NEW YORK

Farrar, Straus 19

Union Square West, Copyright

©

and Giroux

New York

10003

2001 by Susan Sontag All rights reserved

Distributed in Canada by Douglas

& Mclntyre Ltd.

Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sontag, Susan,

Where

93 3— falls

:

essays / Susan Sontag.

—

1st

ed.

cm.

p.

ISBN I.

1

the stress

0-374-28917-4 (hardcover

:

alk.

paper)

Title.

PS3569.O6547 814'. 54

W48

2001

—dc2i 2001033704

Designed by Cassandra

J.

Pappas

for Elizabeth Hardwick

Continent, the choice

And

city, is

country, society:

never wide and never

here, or there

.

.

.

free.

No. Should we have stayed

at

home,

wherever that may be?

—Elizabeth Bishop "Questions of Travel"

CONTENTS

READING A Poet's Prose Where

3

the Stress Falls

Afterlives:

The Case of Machado de

Assis

1

o

3

o

A Mind in Mourning

4

The Wisdom

49

Writing

Project

Itself:

On

Roland Barthes

6

3

Walser's Voice

8

Danilo Kis

92

Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke

97

9

Pedro Paramo

1

DQ

109

A Letter to Borges

1 1

o6

SEEING

A Century of Cinema

1

1

Novel into Film: Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz

1

2

3

A Note on Bunraku A Place for Fantasy

1

3

2

1

3

6

The Pleasure of the Image

1

42

1

Contents

About Hodgkin

A Lexicon

Jl

for Available Light

i

6

of Their Feelings

1

78

Dancer and the Dance

1

8

Lincoln Kirstein

1

94

Wagner's Fluids

1

97

An

2

1

o

2

1

6

In

Memory

Ecstasy of

One Hundred

On

Lament Years of Italian Photography

Bellocq

223

Borland's Babies

227

Certain Mapplethorpes

A Photograph

7

Is

233

Not an Opinion. Or

Is It?

238

THERE AND HERE Homage

to Halliburton

2

5

5

Singleness

2

5

9

Writing As Reading

263

Thirty Years Later ...

268

Questions of Travel

274

The Idea of Europe (One More

Elegy)

28

5

The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe (An Interlude)

Answers

to a Questionnaire

290

294

Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo

299

"There" and "Here"

3*3

Joseph Brodsky

330

On

334

Being Translated

Acknowledgments

349

B.EAD N G I

A

"I I

WHO WOULD century

Pasternak

.

.

—one

.

,"

BE

Camus

Poet's Prose

nothing without the Russian nineteenth declared, in 1958, in a letter of

homage

to

whose

of the constellation of magnificent writers

work, along with the annals of their tragic destinies, preserved, recovered, discovered in translation over the past twenty-five years, has

made

the Russian twentieth century an event that

be) equally formative and,

it

is

(or will

prove to

being our century as well, far more impor-

tunate, impinging.

The Russian nineteenth century achievement of prose writers.

Its

that

changed our souls was an

twentieth century has been, mostly, an

achievement of poets

—but not only an achievement

their prose the poets

espoused the most passionate opinions: any ideal

in poetry.

About

of seriousness inevitably seethes with dispraise. Pasternak in the

decades of his

life

last

dismissed as horribly modernist and self-conscious

the splendid, subtle memoiristic prose of his youth (like Safe Conduct),

while proclaiming the novel he was then working on, Doctor Zhivago, to

be the most authentic and complete of

his poetry

committed

was nothing

in

comparison.

all

his writings, beside

More

typically, the

which

poets were

to a definition of poetry as an enterprise of such inherent

superiority (the highest aim of literature, the highest condition of lan-

became an

guage) that any

work

were always

communication,

a

in prose

inferior venture

a service activity.

—

as

if

"Instruction

prose is

the

SUSAN SONTAG

4

nerve of prose/' Mandelstam wrote in an early essay, so that "what

be meaningful to the prose writer or

essayist, the

may

poet finds absolutely

meaningless." While prose writers are obliged to address themselves to the concrete audience of their contemporaries, poetry as a whole has a

more or

less distant,

unknown

addressee, says Mandelstam: "Exchang-

Mars ...

ing signals with the planet

is

a task

worthy of

a lyric poet."

Tsvetaeva shares this sense of poetry as the apex of literary en-

deavor

—which means

"Pushkin was

etry.

Pugachev"

(1937),

identifying

all

great writing, even

if

prose, as po-

she concludes her essay "Pushkin and

a poet,"

and "nowhere was he the poet with such force

the 'classical' prose of

as in

The Captain's Daughter"

The same would-be paradox with which Tsvetaeva sums up her love for Pushkin's novella

elaborated by Joseph Brodsky in his essay

is

prefacing the collected edition great prose,

it

(in

must be described

Russian) of Tsvetaeva's prose: being as "the continuation of poetry

with

other means." Like earlier great Russian poets, Brodsky requires for his definition of poetry a caricatural Other: the slack mental condition

he

equates with prose. Assuming a privative standard of prose, and of the poet's motives for turning to prose ("something usually dictated

economic considerations,

cessity"), in contrast to the

(whose "true subject"

etry

—poetry be

Such

be regarded

as the aristocrat of letters, the

poetry

identical with the "prosaic."

idea.

dull,

(The

is

actually a tautology

And

OED

's

im-

gives 18

13

as

its

literatures of

earliest

as if

prose were

is

precisely a

Romantic

use in this figurative sense.)

one of the signature themes of the

is

Western Europe, poetry

language and being: an ideal of

—

"prosaic" as a term of denigration,

commonplace, ordinary, tame,

In the "defense of poetry" that

Romantic

— another of Brodsky

aviation, prose the infantry.

a definition of

meaning

by

by polemical ne-

"absolute objects and absolute feelings"),

prose writer the bourgeois or plebeian; that ages

rarely

most exalted, prescriptive standard of po-

is

inevitable that the poet

it is

more

'dry spells,' or

is

a

form of both

intensity, absolute candor, nobility,

heroism.

The

republic of letters

always been a bility

titre

is,

in reality,

de noblesse.

But

an aristocracy.

in the

Romantic

And

"poet" has

era, the poet's no-

ceased to be synonymous with superiority as such and acquired

A an adversary

5

poet as the avatar of freedom. The Romantics

role: the

vented the writer

Poet's Prose

as hero, a figure central to

Russian literature (which

does not get under way until the early nineteenth century); and,

happened, history made of rhetoric are heroes

—they have no choice

if

The

a reality

in-

as

it

great Russian writers

they are to be great writers

—and

Russian literature has continued to breed Romantic notions of the poet.

To the modern Russian

poets, poetry defends nonconformity,

freedom, individuality against the

communal

the

drone.

(It is

State.)

No wonder

and

radical difference

its

PROSE

as if

its

wretched vulgar present,

true state were,

finally,

the

they go on insisting on the absoluteness of poetry

from prose.

TO POETRY,

IS

social, the

prose in

said Valery, as walking

is

to dancing

—Ro-

mantic assumptions about poetry's inherent superiority hardly being confined to the great Russian poets. For the poet to turn to prose, says Brodsky,

The

is

always a falling

contrast

is

off, "like

the shift from

full

gallop to a trot."

not just one of velocity, of course, but one of mass:

lyric

poetry's compactness versus the sheer extendedness of prose. (That

virtuoso of extended prose, of the art of anti-laconicism, Gertrude Stein, said that poetry

nouns, prose

is

tinctive genius of poetry

process, time

major poet

—

who

and

—

is

The

future.)

has written major prose far bulkier

something equivalent

is

verbs. In other words, the dis-

naming, that of prose, to show movement,

past, present,

delstam, Tsvetaeva

There

is

is

—

collected prose of any

Valery, Rilke, Brecht,

Man-

than his or her collected poems.

in literature to the prestige the

Roman-

conferred on thinness.

tics

That poets regularly produce prose, while prose writers rarely write poetry,

not, as

is

Brodsky argues, evidence of poetry's

cording to Brodsky, "The poet, in principle, writer

.

whereas

.

.

because

a

hard-up poet can

in similar straits a

is

than writing prose but that

it is

its

superiority.

Ac-

'higher' than the prose

down and compose

an

article,

prose writer would hardly give thought to a

poem." But\he point surely

and

sit

is

not that writing poetry special

is

less well

—the marginalizing of poetry

audience; that what was once considered a normal

playing a musical instrument,

paid

now seems

skill, like

the province of the difficult

SUSAN SONTAG

6

and the intimidating. Not only prose writers but cultivated people gen-

no longer write

erally

poetry. (As poetry

course, something to memorize.)

no

is

longer, as a matter of

Modern performance

in literature

shaped by the widespread discrediting of the idea of

partly

tuosity;

by

now seems

a very real loss of virtuosity. It

is

literary vir-

utterly extraordi-

nary that anyone can write brilliant prose in more than one language;

we marvel

at a

Nabokov,

a Beckett, a

centuries ago such virtuosity until recently,

was the

would have been taken

ability to write

In the twentieth century, writing

prose writer's youth (Joyce, Beckett, ticed with the left to

Cabrera Infante

—but

until

two

for granted. So,

poetry as well as prose.

poems tends

Nabokov

hand (Borges, Updike

.

.

.).

.

.)

.

be

to

a dalliance of a

or an activity prac-

Being

a

poet

is

assumed

be more than writing poetry, even great poetry: Lawrence and

Brecht,

who wrote

poets. Being a poet

great poems, are not generally considered great is

to define oneself as, to persist (against odds) in

being, only a poet. Thus, the one generally acknowledged instance in

twentieth-century literature of a great prose writer poet,

Thomas Hardy,

who was

someone who renounced writing novels

is

order to write poetry. (Hardy ceased to be a prose writer. poet.) In that sense the

also a great

Romantic notion of the poet,

as

He became

An

a

someone who

has a maximal relation to poetry, has prevailed; and not only

modern Russian

in

among

the

writers.

exception

is

made

for criticism, however.

master practitioner of the

critical essay loses

no

The poet who

is

status as a poet;

also a

from

Blok to Brodsky, most of the major Russian poets have written splendid

critical prose.

fluential critics

Indeed, since the Romantic era, most of the truly

have been poets: Coleridge, Baudelaire, Valery,

That other forms of prose are more rarely attempted marks a great ference from the Romantic era.

in-

Eliot. dif-

A Goethe or Pushkin or Leopardi, who

wrote both great poetry and great (non-critical) prose, did not seem

odd or presumptuous. But

the bifurcation of standards for prose in

succeeding literary generations

—the emergence of

of "art" prose, the ascendancy of

made

that kind of

illiterate

accomplishment

Actually, the frontier

and more permeable

far

and

a minority tradition

para-literate prose

—has

more anomalous.

between prose and poetry has become more

—unified by the ethos of maximalism

characteris-

A tic

modern

of the

artist:

to create

work

that goes as far as

standard that seems eminently appropriate to

which poems may be regarded further can be done,

Poet's Prose

lyric poetry,

as linguistic artifacts to

now influences much

it

of what

is

7

can go. The

according to

which nothing

distinctively

mod-

some of

ern in prose. Precisely as prose, since Flaubert, has aspired to

the intensity, velocity, and lexical inevitability of poetry, there seems a

need to shore up the two-party system

greater

in literature, to distin-

guish prose from poetry, and to oppose them.

Why

prose, not poetry, that

it is

always on the defensive

is

the party of prose seems at best an ad hoc coalition.

be suspicious of

a label that

now encompasses

the novel or short story, the play? Prose state of

language defined negatively, by

qui nest point prose est

vers, et tout ce

is

forms

literary

tion,

prose.)

that, in their

Now

it

modern

tively recent notion.

that couldn't

When

essays

called essays,

and long and short

called novels

and

stories,

we

call

qui nest point vers est prose" as

is

a

liptical,

usually in the

forms, that

is

his life

he has been

catchall for a

panoply of

a

term used to describe

be called poetry, "prose"

no longer seem

fictions

like

no longer

like

to

be

what used

to

be

of twentieth -century literature has

kind of prose: impatient, ardent,

more reasonable)

voice.

activity, to

The

if

not,

by writers with the

The

criticism

to prac-

and

cultural journalism of Eliot

as they are, are

not written in poet's

and occasional pieces of Mandelstam and Tsve-

taeva are. In contrast to a poetics

is

have a different (more persuasive,

criticism

and Auden and Paz, excellent prose.

el-

person, often using discontinuous or broken

mainly written by poets (or

genuinely different

a rela-

what used

standard of poetry in mind). For some poets, to write prose tice a

is

them prose.

a particular first

all

evolution and high-speed dissolu-

ONE OF THE GREAT EVENTS been the evolution of

the essay, the memoir,

opposite: poetry. ("Tout ce

one no longer knows how to name. As

what Tsvetaeva wrote

one not

not just a ghostly category, a

its

claims, so that the bourgeois can discover that

—speaking

that

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme pro-

the philosophy teacher in Moliere's

surprise!

How can

is

Mandelstam

—who wrote

criticism, journalism,

("Conversation about Dante"), a novella (The Egyptian

SUSAN SONTAG

8

memoir (The Noise of Time)

Stamp), a

—Tsvetaeva

in

her prose offers a

narrower range of genres, a purer example of poet's prose. Poet's prose not only has a particular fervor, density, velocity, fiber. It

has a distinctive subject: the growth of the poet's vocation. Typically,

takes the

it

The

autobiographical.

form of two kinds of narrative. One

other, also in the shape of a

directly

is

memoir,

is

the

portrait of another person, either a fellow writer (often of the older

generation, and a mentor) or a beloved relative (usually a parent or

Homage

grandparent). self:

the poet

his or

to others

is

complement

the

saved from vulgar egoism by the strength and purity of

is

homage

her admirations. In paying

evoking the decisive encounters, both in writer

to accounts of one-

to the important real life

and

enunciating the standards by which the self

is

Poet's prose

is

mostly about being a poet.

And

the poet

is

ruthlessly sacrificed.

which the

to

self,

The poet

self is the real self, the

and when the poet

selves

the definition of a pathetic fate.)

is

self dies, the

umphant emergence of

form

the poet

—

self.

is

daily self,

the two.

The

to

be judged.

self.

The

person

Much

self deis

other one

dies.

often is

the

(To have two

of the prose of poets

devoted to chronicling the

tri-

(In the journal or diary, the other

major genre of poet's prose, the focus

and the

is

daily self (and others)

carrier;

particularly in the memoiristic

in literature, the

to write such auto-

biography, as to be a poet, requires a mythology of the scribed

models and

is

on the gap between the poet

and the often untriumphant transactions between

diaries

—

for example, Baudelaire's or Blok's

with rules for protecting the poet

self;

desperate

—abound

maxims of encourage-

ment; accounts of dangers, discouragements, and defeats.)

Many

of Tsvetaeva

poet. In the

Man"

writings in prose are portraits of the self as

s

memoir of Max Voloshin, "A Living Word about

evokes the bespectacled, defiant schoolgirl

(1933), Tsvetaeva

with a shaved head

who

has just published her

Voloshin, an established poet and rived

unannounced

eighteen. Like

cious

s

to call

on

her.

of her

gifts.)

herself.

first

The more

book of poems;

having praised her book,

(The year

is

genuine"

writers, she

is,

ar-

1910 and Tsvetaeva

The fond evocation

"insatiability for the

avowal about

critic,

most poets, unlike most prose

command

Voloshin

a Living

was

is

in preco-

of what she calls

of course, Tsvetaeva 's

directly memoiristic texts are also ac-

A

Poet's Prose

9

counts of the growth of the poet's vocation. "Mother and Music" (1935) describes the birth of the poet's lyricism

immersion

in music; Tsvetaeva's

mother was

through the household's a pianist.

"My Pushkin"

(1937) recounts the birth of the poet's capacity for passion (and culiar

by

— bent

"all

the passion in

me

for

its

unhappy non- reciprocal

pe-

love")

recalling the relation Tsvetaeva had, in the very earliest years of her

childhood, with the image and legend of Pushkin.

The prose of poets

is

subject evoked belongs,

may be

sion

But

it is

typically elegiac, retrospective. It

by

a literal death

The

occaBely.

definition, to the vanished past.

exile,

and suffering endured by Tsvetaeva

not even the atrocious privation

in exile

turned to the Soviet Union in 1939 (where,

ter.

in

In prose the poet

August is

as if the

—the memoirs of both Voloshin and

not the tragedy of the

committed suicide

is

and up

now

to the time she re-

an internal

exile,

she

1941), that accounts for this elegiac regis-

always mourning a lost Eden; asking

memory

to speak, or sob.

A work

poet's prose is

is

the autobiography of ardor. All of Tsvetaeva's

an argument for rapture; and for genius, that

a poetics of the

Promethean. "Our whole relation to

in favor of genius," as Tsvetaeva

the Light of Conscience."

wrote

To be

in her

a poet

is

art is

an exception in

a state of being, elevated

There

is

the

quality of emotional soaring in her prose as in her poetry:

no

modern

is

highest."

writer takes one as close to an experience of sublimity.

Tsvetaeva points out, river.

for hierarchy:

stupendous essay "Art

being: Tsvetaeva speaks of her love for "what

same

is,

"No one

As

has ever stepped twice into the same

But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?" [1983]

Where

the Stress

Falls

for P.D.

T I

BEGINS,

this great

American novel

(let's

American short novel"), with the voice of

not

call

it

"this great

recollection; that

the voice of uncertainty:

The Cullens were

Irish;

but

it

was

in

France that

I

met them and was

able to form an impression of their love and their trouble.

on

their

way

to a property they

noon they came That was

in

and she met

Needless to

and now the

to Chancellet to see

May

my

had rented

my

in

Hungary; and one

great friend Alexandra Henry.

of 1928 or 1929, before

we

all

returned to America,

say,

forties in

the twenties were very different from the thirties,

have begun. In the twenties

some country

as foreign to

it

was not unusual

them

as to you,

peregrination just crossing theirs; and you did your best to

an afternoon or

so;

and perhaps you

knowledge, friendship. There was a kind of riosity in the air.

And

peace that goes on even importance.

10

after-

brother and married him.

meet foreigners

in

They were

called that idealistic

know them

little

lightning

or optimistic cu-

vagaries of character, and the various

in the

to

your

war and

psyche, seemed of the greatest interest and

is,

Where To

cite the

had barely it

the Stress

—the novel was published begun — puts an additional on decade

Falls

I

I

in 1940, so the forties

glaze

the story, investing

with the allure of the untimely; supervening World Events,

it's

suggested, have wilted the importance of the "war and peace that

goes on in the psyche." This digested in

lives,

is

be merely some

to

about private

stuff

record time: "an afternoon or so"

exactly the

is

duration of the story, for the Cullens arrive after lunch, around twothirty,

and bolt

just as

these few hours

an elaborate dinner

— good deal — storm of a

of Mrs. Dalloway

a

less

about to be served. In

is

than the entire day and evening

feelings will batter the constraints of

and the ferocious indissoluble union of the Cullens,

gentility,

"their

love and their trouble," will have been subjected to a cunningly

thorough examination. "Lightning knowledge" edge

—what kind of knowl-

that?

is

The

novel,

neglected, ever astonishing,

still

by Glenway Wescott.

It

belongs, in

my

view,

is

The Pilgrim

among

the treasures of

twentieth-century American literature, however untypical are subtle vocabulary, the density of

its

attention to character,

pessimism, and the clipped worldliness of

thought to be typically American

is

Hawk

its

its

sleek,

fastidious

point of view. What's

its

brash, broad,

and

a little simple,

even simpleminded, particularly about such venerable subjects of Eu-

ropean discernment

as marriage,

and The Pilgrim

Hawk

is

anything

but simple about marriage.

Of

course,

American

literature has always

provided complex per-

formances of the moral imagination, some of which are dramas of tricate psychic violence as

consciousness.

watch, to

what

is

The

who

narrates

Who are this bluff, fleshy,

exquisitely dressed

a witnessing

The Pilgrim

Hawk

is

to

understand (which also means to be puzzled by)

reflect, to

going on.

observed and mulled over by

job of the "I"

in-

woman

self-conscious

with a full-grown hooded

man and

this

falcon, or pilgrim

hawk, clinging to the rough gauntlet on her wrist? The narrator finds their presence, their

derangements, stimulating.

He

is

quick with elo-

quent summary assessments of their character. These evolve as their turmoil unfolds.

The opening of

the novel suggests the uncanny speed at which an

SUSAN SONTAG

12

omnivorous observer might form "an impression" of two hitherto-

unknown

people: "you did your best to

masterly vagueness about in

May

when

know them."

It

also

proposes a

impression was formed: "That was

this

we all returned to America ..." Why make the narrator unsure of the year? It

of 1928 or 1929, before

would Wescott choose

to

could be to mute the import of 1929, the year of the Crash, for such as his

two

idle-rich

but seriously

Europe.

American expats

rich, as in a

Or maybe

one assigned the

manners may

this

all

— not Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald

rich

Henry James novel about Americans "doing"

vagueness

is

simply the good manners of some-

name

too Jamesian

dictate the narrator's

fits

of

Alwyn Tower. And good

of doubt about his

own

acuity:

an Alwyn Tower would not wish to appear to be merely trying to be clever.

Name

follows function. Detached,

virtually pastless

being loved;

we

novel,

is

and

that, disabused,

(we don't learn what has exiled him from loving and

name

don't even learn his last

through the book, and to divine his

Alwyn Tower

more than

until nearly halfway

name we have

first

to

know

that

the central figure in Wescott 's early autobiographical

The Grandmothers), the narrator

ous as he might seem. In

fact,

is

nevertheless not as mysteri-

The Pilgrim Hawk's

"I"

is

a familiar

personage, the shadowy bachelor friend of one or more of the principal characters

who,

in

kindred versions, narrates Hawthorne's The

Blithedale Romance, James's

The Sacred Fount, and

gree by the

more

The

Fitzgerald's

Great Gatsby. All these recessive narrators are abashed to

some

de-

reckless or vital or self-destructive people they

observe.

The narrator

as spectator

posed to

at a

at least

hotel

a treetop

room window where he can

house opposite. The Sacred Fount peephole novel. The key revelation tred of his wife's creature,

window and

something of

seeing

a voyeur.

more than one

is

sup-

Coverdale, the creepy narrator of The Blithedale Ro-

see.

mance, observes his friends from post

necessarily,

is,

Gazing can become snooping, or

is

the

in

mirador and also from see into the

consummate

his

windows of

a

narrator-at-the-

The Pilgrim Hawk, Cullen's ha-

comes when Tower happens

sees Cullen, stealthily approaching

to look out a

the falcon,

who

has

Where been removed to the garden

unhooding

her,

Marriage

is

and then

after a

slicing

the normative

the Stress

Falls

13

bloody meal, pulling out

through her leash to

tie in this

set

her

a knife,

free.

world of couples that includes

not only the Cullens and a stormily mated pair of servants but the

pseudo-couple formed by Alex Henry and her opaquely sexed, rumi-

and houseguest. Maybe Tower's unease with the working

native friend

of his

own understanding proceeds from

side the

awareness of being out-

his

deep experiences of coupledom, and alone. "Life

perch. There

is

no

and no one

nest;

is

is

almost

with you, on exactly the same

rock or out on the same limb. The circumstances of passion are petty to be companionable." His

is

wisdom

the arid

unmarried consciousness. "Whether or not understanding of people,

I finally

often begin in the

I

all

arrive at a

way of

all

too

of a profoundly

proper

a vexed, intense

superficiality.

Tower falls

is

and exercises

Hawthorne's "frosty bachelor,"

in writers' self-mortification. Coverdale, is

a poet. Wescott's

bachelor narrator

embittered by his failure to become a "literary

warned me stop

as the pit-

of understanding. All these valetudinarian narrators are also writ-

ers' self-portraits

still

much

describing the vagaries of novel writing as

him from thinking

like a novelist,

to others'

which may There

observing like a novelist, flaunt-

temper or temperament; and

turn, almost

is

("no one

which does not

that I really did not have talent enough"),

ing a novelist's volatility of judgment. "Sometimes

woman

artist"

I

it is

am a

as sensitive as a

kind of

sensitivity

by chance, for them or against them."

no smugness

in

Tower's acknowledgment of a novelist's

ambivalence toward his subject, in contrast to Coverdale 's chilling flection:

The thought impressed

itself

upon me,

that

I

had

left

duties unper-

formed. With the power, perhaps, to act in the place of destiny, and avert misfortune

from

my

friends,

That cold tendency, between

I

instinct

had resigned them and

intellect,

to their fate.

which made

me

pry

with a speculative interest into people's passions and impulses, ap-

peared to have gone far towards unhumanizing

But

a

man

is

my

heart.

cannot always decide for himself whether his

own

heart

re-

SUSAN SONTAG

14

cold or warm.

is

It

now

impresses

Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and pathy, rather than too

Tower

more

serving

Priscilla,

mixed

his

He

explicit.

that, if I erred at all in it

was through too much sym-

feelings about the couple

He

feels repelled.

with the wife, sometimes with the husband

and re-form several times

them

alters.

body

type,

seems

—

(The neurasthenic,

becoming robust,

way

risks

as the

more

Wescott does not go that

—

even appears to change

Sometimes Tower

interesting natures,

sometimes he

He is

far.

is

manner of

late

Henry James. But

content to stay wdth the benefits, for

the advancement of the story, of so self-conscious a narrator.

who

ters

tell

will

plausible,

about him, his tortuous and

a story

in the

to

balance of power between

fragile wife

becoming

of seeing

with a painful story to

ob-

sympathizes, sometimes

seems to be imposing more complexity on their story than

and the narration

is

she so driven and sexually

coarse, indomitable.)

in arrears of their ever

self- torturing

he

and dejected. The Cullens themselves seem

vibrant, he so desperate

dissolve

regard to

little.

make

able to

is

me

want

to furnish

reveal themselves only gradually.

it

What more

nomical method than to make the complexity of

A novelist

with complex characingenious, eco-

a character the result

of the instability of a first-person narrator's perceptions? For this pur-

pose Tower could hardly be better suited. His appetite for discovering

and repudiating There

is

significances

only one

way

another recoil from his

is

insatiable.

for such a narrator to conclude: with yet

own knowingness.

After the drunken con-

fidences and weeping and shouting and dangerous flirting, after a large revolver has been brandished (and flung into a pond), after nervous farewells have

papered over the abyss and the Cullens and the hawk

have spun off into the night

long dark Daimler, after Tower and

in the

Alex have wandered into the garden to muse on

Tower

ior,

recalls to himself the visions of rapacity

has mustered throughout the Cullens'

we have been

.

.

.

and

all this

I

visit

—

unruly behav-

and inhumanity he

recalls, that

is,

the

book

reading:

blushed. Half the time,

just guessing; cartooning.

I

am

afraid,

Again and again

I

my

give

opinion of people

way

is

to a kind of inex-

Where act

and vengeful

and

I

cannot

lyricism; I

am ashamed

of

Sometimes

it.

moral matters; and so long as

I

what

tell I

the Stress

right

15

have to be avenged,

my judgment

doubt

entirely

propose to be

I

Falls

a story-teller, that

is

in

the

whisper of the devil for me.

Is this frenetic reflectiveness

without being able to prove

something of these tones anguish

—

one

is

it.

American?

distinctively

The only English novel

—the tormented

that plainly served

diffidence

Wescott

think so,

I

know

I

and the muffled

as a partial inspiration for

The Pilgrim Hawk: Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier Ford's novel

is

also

routines of idleness

drama

can couple.

It is

is

(191

5).

both a story of marital agony breaking through the

and

undertaken by an

a project of recollection

American expatriate whiling away ter of the

with

his life

on the Continent. At the cen-

an English couple abroad, friends of a rich Ameri-

the American husband,

now

died since the time of the "sad affair" he

is

a

— wife has the —who

widower

recalling

his

tells

story.

Both

in fiction

and

needs a pretext

ally

—

in autobiography, first-person narrating gener-

known

also

as a justification

—

about oneself used to be considered unseemly: the

to begin.

To

talk

classic autobiogra-

phies and the classic novels that pretend to be somebody's

memoir

all

begin by offering extenuating reasons for doing something so egotisti-

Even now, when self-centeredness hardly

cal.

book of

self-examination, a novel cast as a personal recollection, con-

tinues to invite a self-justifying explanation. I

requires an apology, a

know how

to do.

It's all that's left

don't understand, and

I

want

for

me

It's

useful to others.

to do.

There

is

It's all

something

I

to understand. I'm not really talking

about myself but about them.

The Good Soldier that

he

sits

down

did not understand tain

and

when

it

and Mrs. Ashburnham another sense,

yet, in

know then happen fret

starts

—

—by the

is

to

with

its

deracinated narrator explaining

"today" in order "to puzzle out" what he lamentably

was happening. "My wife and as well as

it

was possible

we knew nothing

rules of fiction,

know now. The

from time to time over

at all

where (unlike

narrator

may

to

I

knew Cap-

know

anybody,

about them." Not to life)

something has to

restate his bewilderment,

his inability to describe properly,

worry that

SUSAN SONTAG

16

he has not got some

fact quite right.

There

no way

is

for readers to take

these avowals of deficient understanding other than as evidence that he sees all

—

or, rather,

allows us to see

—the doomed Captain Ashburnham

too well.

MARRIAGES ARE CENTRAL M A T E R

I

A

in

L

most great novels and

are likely to activate the generalizing impulse. In novels recounted in

the third person, a ization

is

good place

The

acknowledged, that

good fortune must be

author, sarcastically.

Austen

of a general-

call

right at the beginning.

"It is a truth universally

sion of a

sound the trumpet

to

And

want of

in

man

Who

a wife."

in posses-

saying this?

is

the denizens of the small world in which

her story actually think

sets

a single

it

—which makes

this

maxim some-

thing less than "a truth universally acknowledged."

And who ily is

saying "All

is

unhappy

happy

own way"?

in its

families are alike; each

Again, the author. Or,

unhappy fam-

if

you

will,

the

book. There's only a touch of irony in the opening line of Tolstoy's synoptic marriage novel. But does anyone, inside or outside the novel, actually think this?

The

No.

authority of the

renowned

and Anna Karenina depends on

first

sentences of Pride and Prejudice

their floating free

from any particular

were the nature of wisdom

to

be impersonal, oracular,

anonymous, overbearing. Neither assertion

is

actually true.

speaker, as

if it

Both seem

unchallengeably mature and pertinent as impatient observations about the cruelties of the marriage market and the despair of a naive wife

upon discovering her husband's which

to

open

a novel,

families are

.

.")

.

This

is

hand with

a strong

some axiom about human behavior

emptively or ironically as an

happy

infidelity.

offered pre-

eternal verity. ("It is a truth

Knowingness about human nature,

.

.

."

"All

old-style,

is

always in the present tense.

Wisdom spective,

in the

contemporary novel

intimate-sounding.

more appealing and seems the display tivity

is

The to

—the intrusion —of

suspect;

it's

is

more

likely to

be

retro-

vulnerable, self-doubting voice

is

be more trustworthy. Readers crave

personality; that

is,

of weakness. Objec-

thought to be bogus or cold. Generalizations

Where can be proposed, but wryly.

welcome

Good

I

have ever heard"

Sad

Soldier.

Falls

is

exude

stories

17

and self-doubt are always

Certitude seems like arrogance. "This

flavors.)

dest story

(Pathos

the Stress

is

the sad-

the famous opening sentence of The signs, like sweat,

many

narrator voice will undertake, with

which

hesitations

a

squeamish

and doubts, to de-

cipher.

While

a narration

conducted

in the third

person can create the

illu-

sion of a story happening now, freshly told, a first-person narrator's story

there ity

one from the

inevitably

is

past. Telling

is

—no, the likelihood—of

mourn on

mind

its

error.

be

will

of the

human

is

a feast of reflection fallibility

And where

always the possibil-

A first-person novel with

backward look so error-prone: the bility

retelling.

is

self-conscious retelling, witnessing, there

anything to

on what makes

that

of memory, the impenetra-

heart, the obscuring distance

between past and

present.

Evoking that distance person

is

a strong

a blur of a year,

the start of a novel narrated in the

at

first

new opening move. Thus The Pilgrim Hawk gives us "May of 1928 or 1929," since which so much has

changed, and follows that with a bit of decade-mongering: the twenties,

the

which were, "needless

"now" of the

from the

thirties

and

opens with another tease of a time-marker:

(1979)

It is

do

to say," very different

Elizabeth Hardwick's novel Sleepless Nights

forties.

June. This

this

life,

is

what

I

have decided to do with

work of transformed and even

the one

I

am

How

nice

it is

squalid nursing home. apathetic battle

—

that

—

its

this

The is

pink and blue and gray squares and diaproduction of a broken old

I see.

a decision

You can

knew what

More

beautiful

it

down

to

like a

be marked Rand Avenue

in a

is

the table with the

in the street.

remember or pretend

and what you want from the

take

woman

magazines, the Times at the door, the bird-

song of rough, grinding trucks only one

lead this

niceness and the squalor and sorrow in an

what

telephone, the books and

If

memory and

I will

leading today. Every morning the blue clock and the

crocheted bedspread with

monds.

distorted

my life just now.

in

can from a

Kentucky

.

remember. Make

lost things will present itself.

shelf. .

to

.

Perhaps.

One

can would

SUSAN SONTAG

18

The weird

specificity of a

month, June, minus the

year; the statement of

the project ("transformed and even distorted memory"); the inventory

of homely comforting objects (clock and bedspread) followed by the

plunge into the world of the disfavored (the broken old nursing home), a foretaste of

more

from the

("this

knowing what

is

past; and,

what

I

finally,

is

a

to attempt to retrieve, in

of Hardwick's

have decided to do with

method

my

human

is

by

told

is

a

book of judgments

a

somewhat

veiled first-person narrator

who

make narrator— —both the protagonist of the book and the voice of deis

to

that

a ver-

tached, brilliant spectatorship. In Sleepless Nights there narrative but many,

most of the

in-

with special attention to marriage, and, like

(what else?) a writer. Hardwick's feat

sion of herself

—such

as a writer.

relations,

Wescott's novel,

now")

life just

tale are a signature aspect

Like The Pilgrim Hawk, Sleepless Nights

about

mem-

the wistful stipulativeness of the venture

comparably rapid modulations of tone and

is

by the narrator with

sophisticated inventory (books, magazines, the Times at the

door); the worry about ory,

of the book's raw feeling and un-

see"); the return to the comforts enjoyed

I

in the

assumption of possibly erroneous subjectivity ("that

ease; the brave

what

much

woman

and the

"I"

is

chooses to

stories she

not

at

retell

is

not one

the center but to the side of

—conjuring up,

talking to, re-

proving, grieving over ghosts.

"Back to the 'long

makes

down

it

streaming and

There

member

Trawling through the past,

is

like a

fitful

damming up

remembering

is

to voice

—

of associations, makes a montage of

for remembering's sake.

to cast

form of address. There

description,

is

Many

I

will

memories

remember

and none of the usual appetite

many

—

are those borne

self.

re-

this for you.")

To

— and

is,

always,

others than

self-

in autobiographical fiction

The

injuries described

—and

by others.

of the memories are discomfiting;

ness. In contrast to

You can even

into language

more invocation of

for the describing of injury to the

there are

Hawk,

memory

can from a shelf"), then, guided by the steady

for others. ("Dear old Alex:

remember a

"

narrow, arbitrary- seeming selection of what to relate ("You

a

can take

that.

ago.'

some reek of spent

what understanding accomplishes

the awareness garnered in Sleepless Nights

is

in

painful-

The Pilgrim

cathartic. It

is felt

Where and

composed, written down, wrung

it is

the Stress

out,

—he doesn't

luctant to

seem

to

really like (or at

19

speeded up. In The

Pil-

—one has the

grim Hawk, the narrator has only himself to talk impression

Falls

to, a self

any rate upon

whom

he

is re-

be bestowing any kind of approval). In Sleepless

Nights, the narrator has the gallery of

bered, fondly or ruefully, to talk

all

the people

who

remem-

are

and the wry magnanimity she ex-

to,

tends to most of those she describes she extends to herself as well.

Some memories

are brought to

and

are allowed to dilate

and quickly dismissed, while others

life

many

fill

pages. Everything

questioned; everything, in retrospect, a breath of complaint (and there

was,

it's

gone now, part of the

is

("Can

self.

it

much

be that

the commenting,

to complain of): whatever

it

past, the nothing-to-be-done, the was-it-

am

I

is

both absorbed by and

the subject?")

pungent astuteness complement each

When

there to be

drenched with poignancy. Not

is

really-like-that, all retold in a voice that

ferent to

is

indif-

The doubts and

the

other.

summing-up observer

is

impervious to

doubts, the register inevitably shifts to the comic. Take that most assured

T

of fictional people-watchers, the witty Pictures

from an

although, as cultural conventions

—

tively superior

that of a

New

reflective, learned,

Benton College,

York

City,

cheeky is

where the famous

even a while before

someone with

by being unidentified,

it,

a voice that

—would be

that

he (and

and

we

that

novelist

he

is

is

so attrac-

assumed

it is

a "progressive" college for

arrived to teach for a semester, It's

would have

man. All we do come to know

faculty of

from

voice of Randall Jarrell's awesomely

Institution (1954). It starts

a he)

is

women

to

on the

not far

Gertrude Johnson has

married.

realize there

is

a first-person narrator,

Recounting matters that only an

a small role in the story.

omniscient narrator could know, the novel's

first

seven pages point

refutably in the other direction. Then, speeding through a hilarious

on the vanity and presumption of little

Gertrude thought Europe overrated,

too; she

voyaged

there,

voyaged

back, and told her friends; they listened, awed, uneasy somehow. She a

icans,

wonderful theory that Europeans are mere children to us Amer-

who

are the oldest of

men

ir-

riff

his writer-monster, Jarrell delivers a

surprise:

had

be

—why

I

once knew: because our

polit-

SUSAN SONTAG

20

ical institutions are older,

their

Who

is

some

—

stage of forget.

I

who once knew, who forgets? Not someone memory lapses. Though the first-perso"n voice of

worried

this "I"

about his

from an

or because Europeans skipped

development, or because Gertrude was an American

Institution pipes

up

avowal of incertitude. But

and self-possessed mind.

belatedly, this

We

a

is

it is

Pictures

in canonical fashion,

mock

with an

avowal, surely, by a nimble

wouldn't expect the narrator to

every one of Gertrudes glib pronouncements; to have forgotten is

recall

some

rather to his credit. In the world of Jarrell's novel, genuinely doubt-

ridden narrators need not apply.

Only the incertitude.

and what

foolish is,

tragic

—or the bleak— can accommodate, even promote,

Comedy depends on is

not,

types. In Pictures

too,

is

a

certitude, the certitude about

and on characters who are "characters," that

from an

come

Institution they

school of fools and apt targets,

mockery. To poke fun

mix

a

in pairs (for this,

the college's professionally boyish president, and their

amusingly discontented or complacent spouses

He

is

marriage novel): Gertrude and her husband; the composer, the

sociologist,

ish.

what

at

all,

—

all

in residence at this

for the narrator's genial, inspired

everyone might have

made Jarrell seem

churl-

obviously preferred to risk being sentimental, and added to the

No

paragon of sincerity and niceness by the name of Constance.

bashfulness about showing himself to be feverishly erudite, proteanly intelligent, terminally droll,

and

a

wizard phrase-maker.

trary {autre temps, autres mceurs), these

perhaps there was be, too mordant.

a

An

glimpsed working

were

On

the con-

clearly glorious assets.

But

shade of anxiety about being, or being thought to adorable, tenderhearted young

in the office of the president,

ously what the narrator sees fiercely.

woman who

is first

Constance sees gener-

Her indulgence

allows

him

to

go

on.

The

true plot of Jarrell's novel, such as

coruscating descriptions of characters

it is,

—above

fascinating, appalling Gertrude. Characters

and

over, not

consists of the flow of all,

the inexhaustibly

need to be described over

because they ever act "out of character" and so surprise

us,

or because the narrator, like

his

mind about them. (The

Tower

in

The Pilgrim Hawk, changes

characters in Wescott's novel can't be types:

Where it's

the Stress

them

precisely the function of the narrator's attention to

them ever more complicated.) In

Pictures

from an

Falls

21

to

make

Institution, the "I"

keeps on describing his characters because he continues to devise new, ingenious, giddy, ever

more hyperbolic phrases

keep on being

and he

foolish,

ventive. His restlessness ethical. Is there yet

is

—the

to

narrative voice

lexical, or rhetorical,

one more way to pin these

sum them

up.

They

—keeps on being

in-

not psychological or

follies

down

verbally?

Forward!

HOW

TO CIRCUMSCRIBE and

story are

To

two

sides of the

same

refine a story

and how

to

open up

a

task.

explain, to inform, to amplify, to connect, to color in

the essayistic digressions in Lost Illusions and

A

—think of

Harlot High and Low,

Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, The Egoist, War and Peace, In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain. Such pursuit of completeness plumps out a novel. Is there a verb "to encyclopedize"?

To condense, nounce, to

distill,

There has to be.

speed up,

to pare away, to

pile up, to

to leap ahead, to conclude (even

conclude again and again)

—think of the

be ready

if

to re-

one intends

aphoristic glitter of

The

to

Pil-

grim Hawk, Pictures from an Institution, Sleepless Nights. Such pursuit of celerity brings a novel's weight and length

down

drastically.

Novels

driven by the need to summarize, to intensify inexorably, tend to be single-voiced, short,

and often not novels

sense. Occasionally, they will

go

after the

at all in

of an allegory or fable, as does Donald Barthelme's there a verb "to angularize"?

Compressed

Or

"to ellipsify"? There ought to be.

first-person narrations don't

tend to project a few distinctive moods. bring worldly

mated.

It's

wisdom

A

tell

any kind of

surfeit of experiences that

(and, usually, disenchantment)

moods

which can darken but does

is

often

inti-

color the whole span of the narration,

not, strictly speaking, develop. In fictions

narrated by a resident observer the end

lies

much

closer to the begin-

ning than in fictions enhanced by digressions. Not is

story; they

hard to imagine a naive narrator with a penchant for tren-

chant summary. Such

novel

the conventional

mock smoothness The Dead Father. Is

deadpan,

shorter but because the look

is

just

because the

retrospective and the tale one

SUSAN SONTAG

22

whose end

is

known from

narration tries to be,

the beginning.

However

few tremors of

can't help registering a

it

straightforward the antici-

pated pathos: the pathos of the already known, and the not prevented.

The beginning what

will

be an early variant on the end, the end

deflating variant

ellipsis

and refined judgments rather than

tened by essayistic expansiveness not.

Even with sentences

der.

Every exquisite

of

stasis, a

some-

on the beginning.

by

Stories kept lean

a late,

may look

like a

that are fired like bullets, attention can

linguistic

moment

fat-

quicker read. They're

(or incisive insight)

a

is

potential ending. Aphoristic finalities sap forward

wan-

moment momen-

tum, which thrives on more loosely woven sentences. Sleepless Nights

—

a novel of

mental weather

of the narrative voice,

matic dash.

It

—enchants by the scrupulousness and

its lithe,

has no shape in the usual novelistic sense.

It

has no

arrives

and de-

shape as the weather has no shape. Like the weather,

it

parts, rather than, in the usual structured way, begins

and ends.

A first-person voice drawn

to reporting

its

devoted to looking and reflecting

displacements, as

tary consciousness does with

its

time.

if

that

These

is

likely to

were mainly what

fictions

or frankly superior narrators are often travelers'

among

the peripatetic rich.

picted in Pictures from an Institution

coming from or on

their

way

to

The

tales, stories

is full

somewhere

staid

be

a soli-

with melancholy of a wan-

dering of some sort, or a halt in that wandering. The Pilgrim takes place

zip

semi-staccato descriptions and epigram-

academic

Hawk

village de-

of successful professionals else.

Such well-oiled

travels

are about as dramatic as the story gets. Perhaps the fictions that con-

dense have to be

accommodated

Many

relatively plotless, large

in fat

brawling events being better

books.

displacements are recorded in Sleepless Nights, none uncon-

nected with a lifetime of incessant reading,

From Kentucky

to

New

fat

books and

thin:

York, to Boston to Maine, to Europe, carried

along on a river of paragraphs and chapters, of blank verse, of

little

books translated from the Polish, large books from the Russian

—

consumed that

it is

in a

sedentary sleeplessness.

the truth.

Is

that sufficient

all

—never mind

Where The voyaging of pleasures, to

doesn't

by

a

many keen had

life

failed

career of mental traveling,

and

il-

relative comfort,

drama

of:

white-bearded frigate master on the dock and signed up

But

for the journey.

am

one's

for a very exciting plot. "It certainly hasn't the

old,

unknown

A

a fair bit of real traveling in safety

make

saw the

interest.

if

23

Falls

the bookish, undoubtedly a source of

nevertheless an occasion for irony, as

meet an agreed standard of

lustrated

I

is

the Stress

after all"

—best

to

name

the formidable constraint

to other representatively brilliant first-person narrators

—

"

T

woman."

COMPARED WITH BEGINNINGS, to resound, to

endings of novels are

What

have an aphoristic snap.

they convey

less likely

is

the per-

mission for tensions to subside. They are more like an effect than a statement.

Hawk

The Pilgrim

and stop very soon

until they leave

tution also

To the

New

draws to

joy of

with the Cullens' arrival and must go on

starts

all,

a close

after they do. Pictures from

an

Insti-

with a departure, actually two departures.

Gertrude and her husband are on the

train

York City the moment the spring term ends. Then we

back

to

learn that

the narrator himself, having accepted the offer of a better job at an-

other college, will be leaving Benton soon, with

than a

some

regret

and more

little relief.

The Pilgrim marriage.

Hawk

ambiguous

signs off with an

Tower claims

to

be worrying about the

reflection

effect

about

on Alex of the

spectacle of the Cullens' torment:

"You'll never marry, dear," after this fantastic

"What bad

my mockery was "Fantastic

bad

luck,

if

self

did not quite

.

.

.

"You'll be afraid to,

you please?" she inquired, smiling

to

show

that

welcome.

bad object

And

Alex

luck."

lessons."

"You're no novelist," she

you know?"

said, to tease

I

I

said, to tease

me.

"I

envy the Cullens, didn't

concluded from the look on her face that she her-

know whether

she meant

it.

SUSAN SONTAG

24

For

last lines,

Wescott's novel confects a flurry of doubts about what

meant and what

is felt,

marry." "You're

no

novelist."

To readers who have retained

information dropped into the very

and marry the

first

paragraph (Alex

and

narrator's brother)

to those

perhaps too

light;

Or

light.

It's

revved up of observers,

who

all

to himself.

Summer

the

soon meet

joyless narrator, the

too neatly da capo.

do the great comedies, with

Pictures from an Institution finishes as

celebration of marriage.

will

a piece of

gripped by the

still

by the

histrionic misery of the Cullens as parsed

ending may seem

is

an exchange of teasing untruths: "You'll never

no-name

narrator, until

has the becalmed

last

a

the most

scene of the novel

campus

vacation has started; the

now

deserted; he

is

has been in his office going through books and papers ("I worked hard for the rest of the afternoon:

away

.

.").

.

When steps

Then he

I

threw away and threw away and threw

leaves:

went downstairs everything was hollow and

at last I

echoed along the corridor,

as I

sunlight in the trees outside. There

body,

I felt,

in all the buildings of

booth on the hello

first floor,

was small and

dialed the

walked down

was nobody Benton.

number

that

all

we know

virtually

his entirely notional wife,

shelter

Of

course,

and Tightness of

And

here are the

gle story to

Pictures

tell,

can.

house, and

my

"Can you come I'll

be

—no-

nothing of the narrator,

tragic) marriages

wife's

get

me

right over."

still

this

ends

as

less

about

novel about it

does, with

which evokes, with exquisite economy, the

a true marriage.

last lines

of Sleepless Nights, which, having no sin-

has no obvious place to end. The Pilgrim

from an

my the

stood in the telephone-

seems appropriate that

it

comic and pathetic (but never that italicized

I

at

in the building

my

far-off in the silence; I said,

now, darling?" She answered, "Of course

For

I

of

silent;

looking

it

Institution

move forward

in

Hawk

and

an announced, framed

length of time: an afternoon and early evening; a spring semester. Sleepless

Nights stretches over decades, darting backward and forward in

time,

its

gallantly de-married narrator accumulating solitudes. Best to

affirm solitude

—

writing, the

—while

work of memory

edging the longing to reach out, to write

letters, to

also acknowl-

telephone.

Where Sometimes

my

about

such fact

I

resent the glossary, the concordance of truth,

have

real life,

is

the Stress

me

to

Otherwise

I

a

an extra pair of spectacles.

like

I

many have mean

known by

love to be I

am

those

I

care

for.

Public assistance,

always on the phone, always writing

always waking up to address myself to B. and D. and C.

whom

that

hindrance to memory.

beautiful phrase. Thus, ters,

25

Falls

let-

—those

dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to through-

I

out the night.

So Sleepless Nights ends with delicately excluding

is,

care for"),

who

is

—the reader

presumed

dance of truth about

have

all

I

a "real life."

(Pasternak's Safe Conduct), Stories)

that

to read intrusively, looking for the concor-

in the guise of a journal

Notebooks of Malt e Laurids Brigge),

(Rilke's

—

be known by those

("I love to

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION

AN

ends by leaving

a departure, too. It

and

a

a

memoir

in poet's prose

volume of stories (Isherwood's Berlin

been mentioned by Hardwick

as

books she found em-

boldening when she came to write the genre-buster that

Sleepless

is

Nights.

To be

sure, fiction of

detail in a

work of

wish, or

a sincere

is

all

fiction

kinds has always fed on writers'

was once an observation or

homage

a

lives.

Every

memory

to a reality independent of the

self.

or a

That

both the pretentious novelist and the pretentious women's college Pictures from an Institution have

well-known models

practices of fiction. (In a satire this if

Jarrell did

is

the norm:

it

in

illustrates familiar

would be

surprising

not have a real novelist, a real college, in mind.)

And

au-

thors of first-person narratives will often be discovered to have lent to that voice a

few

The Pilgrim

stray bio-facts.

Hawk

to recall

For instance,

it

helps explain the end of

having been told that Alex Henry will

marry. But that she will marry the narrator's brother, of is

ever said in the novel, seems like noodling.

who

It's

not.

whom

The

nothing

great friend

inspired the character Alex, a rich i92os-era American expatriate

with a house near Paris in fashionable Rambouillet (the village

named

Chancellet), did, after returning

re-

home, marry Wescott's brother.

SUSAN SONTAG

26

Many make

endowed with enough

first-person narrators are

resemblance to their authors. Others

a pleasantly self-regarding

are there-but-tor-the-grace-of-God creations, (or hopes)

Tower and

—

odd

it is

grim

that

often reproached himself

someone capable oi

Hawk would

only once in a long

Hawthorne was always Peabody

ing to Sophia

operative

what the author believes

he or she has escaped being. Wescott, though not

a tailed writer,

a

book

life

as

—

like

being a lazy one,

fo"r

marvelous as The

Pil-

write at the top of his form.

wrestling with the Coverdale in himself. Writin

from Brook Farm, the model

841

1

community depicted

ing "a feeling of coldness

for the co-

The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne

in

blesses his future wife for imparting a sense of

heart;

to

traits

life's

"reality"

and keep-

and strangeness" from creeping into

his

other words, tor rescuing him trom being someone like

in

Coverdale.

But what about when the "I" and the author bear the same name or have identical

life

circumstances, as in Sleepless Sights, or in Y.

Naipauls The Enigma of Arrival and W. G. Sebald's Vertigo?

much

fact

from the author's

coming reluctant

to call the

most daringly with

plays

life

S.

How

can be sponged up without our be-

book

novel? Sebald

a

this project

is

who

the writer

now. His narratives of mental

haunting, which he wants to be regarded as fiction, are related by an

emotionally distressed alter ego ality to

photographs that annotate

from Sebald

s

his

fiction

in

Of course,

the

many

almost everything that

an autobiographical work

is

absent

withholding

—

is

—which might be

essential to

called reticence, or discre-

keeping these anomalous works of

trom tipping over into autobiography or memoir. You can use

life,

but only

a little,

tor oi Sleepless Sights ot the writer

named

soon after coming to

Holland in

books.

among

books.

Actually, secretiveness

your

presses the claim of solemn factu-

the point of including photographs of himself

would normally be disclosed

tion, or

who

in

and

at

draws on

an oblique angle. a real life.

Elizabeth Hardwick. live in

Manhattan

the early 1950s, did have

a

in

We know

Kentucky

who

is

the narra-

the birthplace

did meet Billie Holiday

the 1940s, did spend a year in

great friend

named

Boston, has had a house in Maine, has lived for

many

M—

,

did

live

years on the

Where West Side of Manhattan, and so on. glimpses

—the

designed as

telling

the Stress

27

Falls

All this figures in her novel, as

much

to conceal, to

put readers off

the track, as to reveal.

To fied

your

edit

with your

to see

life is

life

to save

it,

as others see

for fiction, for yourself. Being identi-

it

may mean

you come eventually

that

that way, too. This can only be a hindrance to

it

memory

(and,

presumably, to invention).

There

more freedom

is

memories are not

set

be

to

down

late

tell

there

only a single story

at all, especially

much about

is

where one

too

is

husband

in a

Husband-wife: not a

pendence

new move

The ensuing

tradition."

be

that has to

to

fifth

in

fifty

pages

is

story.

And

simply too

sometimes, to

re-

be discovered

silence about the

friends of the narra-

Holland. Her

page: "I was then a 'we'

"we"

own .

.

.

in that strong classical

—

a declaration of inde-

intrinsic to the fashioning of the authoritative,

questing "I" capable of writing Sleepless Nights

some

fast,

Dutch couple,

announced thus on the

is

The memories

expected. For instance,

and her then husband when they lived

marriage

the

marriage, notably a long-running soap opera star-

ring the philandering tor

at a time;

when

as chains of luxuriant

of acute compression and decentering

art

any story

—emerge

wind around, and conceal, the kernel of

notations that

Hardwick's

to abridge

in chronological order.

fragments of memories, transformed

fast-paced to

and

elliptical

later: "I

am

alone here in

Years, decades even, have passed."

—

New

lasts until a

sentence

York, no longer a we.

Maybe books devoted

to exalted

standards of prose will always be reproached for not telling readers

enough.

But

made

it's

not an autobiography, not even of this "Elizabeth,"

is

out of materials harvested from, but not identical with, Elizabeth

Hardwick. others. Its

It's

about what "Elizabeth" saw, what she thought about

power

sympathies.

is

and

linked with

Her assessments

are pitiless, but she ers

who

is

class traitors

its

refusals,

and

its

distinctive palette of

of long-term sufferers in lousy marriages

kind to Main Street, touched by inept wrongdo-

and self-important

failures.

Memory

conjures up a

procession of injured souls: foolish, deceiving, needy men, some briefly lovers,

who have been much

indulged (by themselves and by

women)

SUSAN SONTAG

28

and come

no good end, and humble, courteous, simple women

to

who

archaic roles

have

known

in

only hard times and been indulged

by nobody. There are desperately loving evocations of the narrator's mother, and several meanderingly sustained, Melanctha-like portraits of

women who When

are invoked like muses:

women

think of cleaning

I

with unfair diseases

I

think of you,

When I must iron or use a heavy pot for cooking, I think of Ida. When I think of deafness, heart disease and languages I can-

Josette.

you,

not speak,

me

of

I

think of you, Angela. Great washtubs

more than

The work of memory,

women,

think about

those

whom

full

of sheets remind

one.

this

memory,

especially

exquisitely written

quires that they be

choosing, most emphatically, to

is

women

serving out lives of hard labor,

books customarily ignore. Justice

remembered. Pictured. Summoned

re-

to the feast of

the imagination and of language.

Of ers

course, you

summon

ghosts

can bleed into your soul.

ventive.

Memory Hence

turn away.

remembering

what make vited

it

is

a

peril.

The

sufferings of oth-

Memory

invites itself,

hard for you to

sleep.

Memories

procreate.

to the point. (As in fiction:

The boldness and

and

book

intimately connected with insomnia.

is

Memory

try to protect yourself.

performance.

connected.)

is

your

the ravishing insight that gives the

memories always seem

cluded

You

at

virtuosity

is

is

hard to

its title:

that

Memories

And

in-

are

the unin-

whatever

is

in-

of Hardwick's

associativeness intoxicate.

On

the last page, in the peroration with which Sleepless Nights con-

cludes, the narrator observes, in a final

summative delirium:

Mother, the reading glasses and the assignation near the clammy so gray, of the intense church ladies.

mound

of

men

climbing on and

The torment of personal disguise,

and

in the

pierced by daggers

at

And

faces,

then a lifetime with

its

off.

relations.

Nothing new there except

in the

escape on the wings of adjectives. Sweet to be the end of paragraphs.

Where

the Stress

Falls

29

Nothing new except language, the ever found. Cauterizing the torment of personal relations with hot lexical choices, curial sentence rhythms. Devising

more

knowing, of sympathizing, of keeping It's

where the

jumpy punctuation, mer-

subtle,

more engorged ways of

at bay. It's a

matter of adjectives.

stress falls.

[2001!

Afterlives:

The Case of Machado de

IMAGINE long

life

A

WRITER WHO,

be

right:

where he was born, created

a nineteenth-century writer,

you

president of his country's

Academy

and you

will

stories, plays, essays,

political chronicles, as well as reporter,

government bureaucrat, candidate

huge body of

a

will interrupt;

author of a profusion of novels, novellas,

poems, reviews, tor,

course of a moderately

which he never traveled farther than seventy-five

in

miles from the capital city

work ...

in the

Assis

for public

magazine

office,

edi-

founding

of Letters; a prodigy of accom-

plishment, of the transcending of social and physical infirmity (he was a

mulatto and the son of a slave in a country where slavery was not

abolished until he was almost

fifty;

he was

epileptic);

managed

vividly prolific, exuberantly national career,

number

this

to write a sizable

of novels and stories deserving of a permanent place in world

literature,

and whose masterpieces, outside

honors him

as its greatest writer, are little

Imagine such a

which continue Normally, the

to

writer,

who

existed,

his native country,

known, and

his

rarely

most

be discovered more than eighty years

filter

of time

is just,

successful, rescuing the forgotten,

the afterlife of a great writer

30

who, during

—

this

which

mentioned.

original books, after his death.

discarding the merely celebrated or

promoting the underestimated. In is

when

the mysterious questions of

The Case of Machado de

Afterlives:

Assis

value and permanence are resolved. Perhaps

it is

whose

the recognition

afterlife

work

has not brought his

3

1

fitting that this writer, it

merits,

should have had himself so acute, so ironic, so endearing a sense of the

posthumous.

WHAT

IS

Since

is

it

meaning

TRUE

of a reputation

only a completed

a life can have, a

—should be true—of

that reveals

a

life.

shape and whatever

its

biography that means to be definitive must

wait until after the death of can't

life

true

is

subject. Unfortunately, autobiographies

its

be composed under these

And

ideal circumstances.

virtually all

the notable fictional autobiographies have respected the limitation of

while conjuring up a next-best equivalent of the illumina-

real ones,

more

tions of death. Fictional autobiographies, even

ones, tend to be autumnal undertakings: an elderly

seasoned) narrator, having retired from old age

may bring

he or she a

know

now

(or, at least, loss-

writes. But, close as

the fictive autobiographer to the ideal vantage point,

wrong

writing on the

makes

a life story, finally

life,

I

is still

life,

often than real

side of the frontier

beyond which

sense.

only one example of that enthralling genre, the imaginary

autobiography, which grants the project of autobiography it

turns out, comical

—

fulfillment,

and

Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas under the first

paragraph of Chapter

1,

now

the masterpiece called

Small Winner. In the

am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died

is

Here

writing."

considering that the

is

the novel's

book

in

hand

is

in its entirety.

life is

not a

To slow down,

at length, to

framing joke, and

invited to play the

it

is

game of

an unprecedented literary

feat.

much less a life, can ever be replot. And quite different ideas of

to a narrative constructed in the

in the third person.

comment

A

is

first,

in the first person.

course, not even a single day,

decorum apply

to

as

"The Death of the Author," Bras Cubas

Posthumous reminiscences written

counted

—

(1880), introduced into English

about the writer's freedom. The reader

Of

ideal

gaily: "I

has written and is

is

pointless, interfering title Epitaph of a

announces

and

that

its

first

person and to one

to race ahead, to skip

withhold comment

whole

—these done

as

stretches;

an "I" have

SUSAN SONTAG

32

another weight, another

Much

of what

feel,

when

than

one

else.

first

person would seem the opposite

affecting or

is

said about or

pardonable or insufferable

if

book

Assis's

"L" (To sample the

in the

uttered in the third person, and

by reading aloud any page

vice versa: an observation easily confirmed

from Machado de

on behalf of some-

first as it is,

a

second time with "he" for

fierce difference within the

codes governing the third

person, then try substituting "she" for "he.") There are registers of

feel-

can accommodate.

And

ing,

such

as anxiety, that only a first-person voice

aspects of narrative performance as well: digressiveness, for instance,

seems natural

but amateurish in an

in a text written in the first person,

impersonal, third-person voice. Thus, any piece of writing that features

an awareness of the

first

own means and methods

its

person, whether or not the main pronoun

To write about oneself be

felt

should be understood as in

to

—the

true, that

be presumptuous, and to need

is,

is

"I."

the private story

justifying.

—used

Rousseau's Confessions, Thoreau's Walden, and most of the other tually ambitious classics of

to

Montaigne's Essays, spiri-

autobiography have a prologue in which the

author directly addresses the reader, acknowledging the temerity of the enterprise, evoking scruples or inhibitions (modesty, anxiety) that to

be overcome, laying claim to an exemplary

leging the usefulness of

had

artlessness or candor, al-

all this self- absorption

to others.

And,

like real

autobiographies, most fictional autobiographies of any stylishness or

depth also

start

sion to write the

of

with an explanation, defensive or defiant, of the deci-

book

self- deprecation,

egotism. This

is

the reader has just

begun

—

or, at least, a flourish

suggesting an attractive sensitivity to the charge of

no mere

throat-clearing,

the reader time to be seated.

It is

some

polite sentences to give

the opening shot in a campaign of se-

duction in which the autobiographer

tacitly agrees that there

is

some-

thing unseemly, brazen, in volunteering to write at length about oneself

—exposing oneself

to

unknown

others without any evident interest (a

great career, a great crime) or without

some documentary

ruse, such as

pretending that the book merely transcribes existing private papers, like a journal or letters, indiscretions originally destined for the smallest, friendliest first

readership.

person, to as

many

minimal prudence

With

a life story offered straight-out, in the

readers as possible

(a

"public"),

it

seems only

as well as courtesy for the autobiographer to seek

Afterlives:

The Case of Machado de

Assis

33

permission to begin. The splendid conceit of the novel, that these are

memoirs written by someone who on

this regulatory caring

dead, just puts an additional spin

is

about what the reader thinks. The autobiog-

rapher can also profess not to care. writing from

Still,

beyond the grave has not

relieved this narrator

from showing an ostentatious amount of concern about the reception

mock

of his work. His

tinctive velocity of the

mounted,

anxiety

book.

is

embodied

It is in

the

in the very form, the dis-

way

the narrative

is

cut

and

stop-and-start rhythms: 160 chapters, several as brief as

its

two sentences, few longer than two pages. usually at the beginning or

("This chapter

is

to

It is in

end of chapters,

be inserted between the

chapter 129." "Please note that this chapter

found." "But

let

us not

become involved

the playful directions,

for the best use of the text. first

two sentences of

not intended to be pro-

is

in psychology," et cetera.) It

in the pulse of ironic attention to the book's

is

means and methods, the

repeated disavowal of large claims on the reader's emotions ("I like jolly chapters").

Asking the reader to indulge the narrator's penchant

much a seducer's ploy as promising the reader strong emotions and new knowledge. The autobiographer's suave fussing over

for frivolity

is

as

the accuracy of his narrative procedures parodies the intensity of his self- absorption.

Digression of the book. self

adept

at

of realism

He

is

The

the main technique for controlling the emotional flow narrator,

whose head

expert descriptions

—of how poignant

is full

of literature, shows him-

—of the kind

flattered with the

shows himself understandably beyond

also

name

feelings persist, change, evolve, devolve. all

that

by the dimen-

sions of the telling: the cutting into short episodes, the ironic, didactic

overviews. This oddly fierce, avowedly disenchanted voice (but then

what

else

should

we

expect a narrator

who

is

dead to be?) never

an event without drawing some lesson from

"The episode that ..."

serves to illustrate

it.

Chapter

relates

133 opens:

and perhaps amend Helvetius' theory

Begging the reader's indulgence, worrying about the reader's

attentiveness (does the reader get

it?

is

the reader amused?

is

the

reader becoming bored?), the autobiographer continually breaks out of his story to invoke a theory

about

it

—

as if

it

illustrates, to

formulate an opinion

such moves were needed to make the story more

inter-

SUSAN SONTAG

34

esting. Bras

such

Cubas's socially privileged, self-important existence

lives often are, starkly uneventful; the

is,

main events are those which

did not happen or were judged disappointing.

The

rich production of

witty opinions exposes the emotional poverty of the

by having the

life,

narrator seem to sidestep the conclusions he ought to be drawing. digressive

method

also generates

much

with the very disparity between the

life

of the book's humor, starting

(modest

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

in events, subtly artic-

of course the principal

is

The method of

for these savory procedures of reader awareness.

the tiny chapters and ter 55

The

and the theories (portentous, blunt) he invokes.

ulated)

model

as

some of the typographical

("The Venerable Dialogue of

("How

I

Did Not Become

narrative rhythms

Adam and

stunts, as in

Chap-

Eve") and Chapter 139

a Minister of State"), recall the

whimsical

and pictographic witticisms of Tristram Shandy. That

Bras Cubas begins his story after his death, as Tristram Shandy

mously begins the story of

his consciousness before

he

is

born

fa-

the

(at

—

moment of his conception) that, too, seems an homage to Sterne by Machado de Assis. The authority of Tristram Shandy, published in installments between 1759 an

I

on

a writer

born

in Brazil in the

nineteenth century should not surprise us. While Sterne's books, so celebrated in his lifetime and shortly afterward, were being reassessed in

England

as

too peculiar, occasionally indecent, and finally boring,

they continued to be enormously admired on the Continent. In the

English-speaking world, where in this century he has again been

thought very highly

Sterne

of,

ginal genius (like Blake)

who

prematurely, "modern."

When

literature,

however, he

still

is

most notable

looked

may be

mar-

figures as an ultra-eccentric,

at

for being uncannily,

and

from the perspective of world

the English-language writer who, after

Shakespeare and Dickens, has had the greatest influence; for Nietzsche to have said that his favorite novel original a

judgment

as

it

may

was Tristram Shandy

is

not quite as

seem. Sterne has been an especially po-

tent presence in the literatures of the Slavic languages, as

is

reflected in

the centrality of the example of Tristram Shandy in the theories of Viktor Shklovsky

and other Russian formalists from the 1920s forward.

Perhaps the reason so much commanding prose suing for

literature has

decades from Central and Eastern Europe

been

as well as

is-

from

Afterlives:

Latin America

is

strous tyrannies jects,

The Case of Machado de

Assis

35

not that writers there have been suffering under mon-

and therefore have had importance, seriousness, subbestowed on them

relevant irony

Europe and the United

(as

many

writers in Western

States have half enviously concluded) but that

these are the parts of the world

where

for over a century the author of

Tristram Shandy has been the most admired.

Machado de foonery

Assis's novel

belongs in that tradition of narrative buf-

—the —which runs from

talkative first-person voice attempting to ingratiate itself

with readers

Natsume

Am

Soseki's I

Solitude,

much

century,

a Cat, the short fiction of Robert Walser,

Svevo's Confessions of Zeno and

Loud a

own

Sterne through, in our

As

a

Man Grows

of Beckett. Again and again

Older, Hrabal's Too

we meet

in different

guises the chatty, meandering, compulsively speculative, eccentric narrator: reclusive (by

and

choice or by vocation); prone to futile obsessions

fanciful theories

and comically designed

efforts of the will; often

an autodidact; not quite a crank; though sometimes driven by at least

male.

one time by

(No woman

and

unable to mate; usually elderly; invariably

love,

likely to get

is

lust,

even the conditional sympathy these

ragingly self-absorbed narrators claim

from

us,

because of expectations

women be more sympathetic, and sympathizing, than men; a woman with the same degree of mental acuity and emotional separatethat

ness

would be regarded

as

Cubas

is

tudinarian Bras

madcap,

simply a monster.)

Machado de

considerably less exuberant than Sterne's

effusively garrulous Tristram Shandy. It

from the incisiveness of Machado's to the story of his

own

Assis's vale-

life,

only a few steps

is

narrator, with his rueful superiority

to the plot malaise that characterizes

recent fiction in the form of autobiography. But storylessness intrinsic to the

genre

—the novel

as autobiographical

most

may be

monologue

—

as

is

the isolation of the narrating voice. In this respect the post-Sternean anti-hero like Bras

Cubas parodies the protagonists of the

tual autobiographies,

who

stances, unmarried. It

is

are always profoundly, not just

without a spouse, even

peopled

at

by circum-

almost a measure of an autobiographical

narrative's ambition: the narrator tainly

great spiri-

must

when

be, or

there

is

be recast

one; the

as, alone, cer-

life

must be un-

the center. (Thus, such recent achievements of spiritual

autobiography in the guise of a novel as Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless

SUSAN SONTAG

36

Nights and V.

who were

Naipaul's The

S.

Enigma of Arrival leave out

the spouses

actually there.) Just as Bras Cubas's solitariness

a

is

parody

of a chosen or an emblematic solitude, his release through

understanding

for

is,

self-

self-confidence and wit, a parody of that

all its

sort of triumph.

The seductions fesses to

The

of such a narrative are complex.

be worrying about the reader

—whether the

narrator pro-

reader gets

Meanwhile, the reader can be wondering about the narrator the narrator understands display of mental agility

all

the implications of what

and inventiveness which

is

is

—whether

being told.

Ostensibly, this social

how

is

and psychological

of a

life.

portraiture,

remains a tour of the inside of

it

French expatriate

by Xavier de Maistre,

a

his long life in Russia)

who

dueling,

My Room,

funny story

aristocrat (he lived

when he was

written in 1794, his diagonal

verting sites as the armchair, the desk, is

marvelous book

a

most of

invented the literary micro- journey with his

and which recounts

mental or physical, that

is.

Yet, despite the narrator's gift for

someone's head. Another of Machado's models was

journey around

mind

emotionally isolated and forlorn the narrator

book

the

A

designed to amuse

the reader and purportedly reflects the liveliness of the narrator's

mostly measures

it.

and zigzag

in prison for

such

visits to

and the bed.

A

not acknowledged as such can

di-

confinement,

make

a very

one charged with pathos.

as well as

At the beginning,

in a flourish of authorial

graciously includes the reader,

Machado de

pher name the eighteenth-century

literary

self-knowingness that

Assis has the autobiogra-

models of

his narrative with

the following somber warning:

It is,

in truth, a diffuse

adopted the sibly

added

The work

free

work,

form of

man

which

I,

a Sterne or of a

a certain peevish

of a

in

Bras Cubas,

I

wrote

it

my

own. Quite

I

have

possibly.

with the pen of Mirth and

the ink of Melancholy, and one can readily foresee what

such

indeed

Xavier de Maistre, have pos-

pessimism of

already dead.

if

may come

of

a union.

However modulated by whimsy, through the book.

If

Bras Cubas

is

a

vein of true misanthropy runs

not just another of those repressed,

The Case of Machado de

Afterlives:

desiccated, pointlessly self-aware bachelor narrators

be seen through by the full-blooded

which

by the end of the book

is

The Sternean

playfulness

reader,

it is

Assis

who

37

exist only to

because of his anger

full-out, painful, bitter, upsetting.

lighthearted.

is

It is

a comic, albeit ex-

tremely nervous, form of friendliness with the reader. In the nineteenth century this digressiveness, this chattiness, this love of the this pirouetting

hues.

It

from one narrative mode

little

theory,

on darker

to another, takes

becomes identified with hypochondria, with erotic disillusion-

ment, with the discontents of the

(Dostoyevsky's pathologically

self

voluble Underground Man), with acute mental distress (the hysterical narrator,

on

deranged by

injustice, of Multatuli's

obsessively, repetitively,

Max Havelaar). To

(Think of Shakespeare's plebeian grumblers, beth',

natter

used to be invariably a resource of comedy.

think of Mr. Pickwick,

among

Mac-

like the porter in

other inventions of Dickens.) That

comic use of garrulousness does not disappear. Joyce used garrulousness in a Rabelaisian

Gertrude

Stein,

as

spirit,

a vehicle of

champion of verbose

comic hyperbole, and

writing, turned the tics of ego-

tism and sententiousness into a good-natured comic voice of great orig-

But most of the verbose first-person narrators

inality.

literature of this century

ness

have been radically misanthropic. Garrulous-

identified with the baleful, aggrieved repetitiveness of senility

is

(Beckett's prose

monologues

and with

that call themselves novels)

paranoia and unslakable rage (the novels and plays of hard).

ambitious

in the

Thomas Bern-

Who does not sense the despair behind the loquacious,

sprightly

musings of Robert Walser and the quirkily erudite, bantering voices the stories of

in

Donald Barthelme?

Beckett's narrators are usually trying, not altogether successfully, to

imagine themselves as dead. Bras Cubas has no such problem. But then

Machado de

Assis

was trying

to be,

morbid about the consciousness of contrary, the perspective of wittily, a tive.

and

consciousness

posthumous narrator can claim

Where

Bras Cubas

is

writing from

funny. There

posthumous

his

maximum

is,

—

is

is

nothing

on the

narrator;

—which

in itself a

not a true

is

is

what,

comic perspec-

afterlife

(it

has no

the idea of authorial detachment.

The

neo-Sternean narrative hijinks of these memoirs of a disappointed

man

geography), only another go

do not

issue

at

from Sternean exuberance or even Sternean nervousness.

a

SUSAN SONTAG

38

They

are a kind of antidote, a counterforce to the narrator's despon-

dency: a

way of mastering

dejection considerably

more

specialized than

the "great cure, an anti-melancholy plaster, designed to relieve the de-

spondency of mankind" that the narrator Life administers

form of

its

fantasizes about inventing.

hard lessons. But one can write

as

one pleases

—

liberty.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was only forty-one when he published these reminiscences of a

opening of the book

makes

his creation

—

man who

(Machado was born

at sixty-four.

anticipating of old age

is

temperament continue

to

my

first

The novel

nounces

at

life.

— above

was writing

all

all

first

I

and of

a religiously

whom

I

as I think

fantasist,

man

a

who

an-

my head were

to

me

my new

thought

I

me)

certain cherished (by

it

now,

Farrar Straus,

it,

as

I

mostly

nourished inwardness. (What

about

my

1952, in his previous incarnation as the

by

and

I

another

is

story.)

The Benefactor accepted by the

to have

submitted

good luck of having assigned

cently acquired

when

that he has reached a harbor

on optimism and on

life

melancholy

a

late twenties

be the reminiscences of

literary references in

had the good fortune

publisher to

ne

in 1839;

experience finished, he can look back on his

was going on unconsciously,

When

my

in

Candide and Descartes 's Meditations;

a satire

ideas of the inner

to

book

the beginning of the

The few conscious

French

was

I

sixties, a rentier, dilettante,

of serenity where,

the

at

an exercise in the

as

which writers of

a venture to

be drawn.

which purports

novel,

then in his early

—we learn

Bras Cubas, the posthumous autobiographer, more

than a generation older, born in 1805.)

wrote

has died

publisher),

I

had the further

who

editor Cecil Hemley,

head of Noonday Press

had brought out the

in

(re-

translation

of Machado's novel that really launched the book's career in English.

(Under that

title!)

At our

first

meeting Hemley said to me:

"I

can see

you have been influenced by Epitaph of a Small Winner." Epitaph of what? "By, you know, Machado de Assis."

and several days Although

I

later I declared

me

a

a

copy

myself retroactively influenced.

have since read a good deal of Machado in translation,

Memorias postumas de Bras Cubas twenty-eight years after writing

genius

Who? He

lent

— remains my

favorite. I

—the

it)

am

first

of five late novels (he lived

generally thought the told

it is

summit of

his

the one that non-Brazilians

The Case of Machado de

Afterlives:

Dom

often prefer, although critics usually pick

Assis

Casmurro

39

am

(1899). I

astonished that a writer of such greatness does not yet occupy the place

Up

he deserves. Brazil

to a point, the relative neglect of

may be no more

whom

writer of genius

if

—

if

he were,

But the impediment writer.

Latin America

—

est novelist that

as if

it

were

still

his

hard to digest the

fact that the great-

Latin America has produced wrote in the Portuguese,

ways been the outsider country

may be

in racist terms.

A writer from

literature of Brazil,

produced on

great writer

Machado de

some

was translated

With enough

al-

South Amer-

is

far likelier to

Borges, the other supremely

Machado

And

time,

seems never to have read

is

even

who

less

read him

it

enough

afterlife, a great

book does

is

a

decade

find

its

right-

probably one of those

books that

will always

hardly seems

compliment

more than

to say that this novel, written .

Spanish

perhaps some books need to be rediscovered again and

It

.

to

The

(twice) into English.

readers with the force of a private discovery.

and

known

in English.

was written and

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

seems, well

well

finally translated into

eighty years after

thrillingly original, radically skeptical

inality

has

whereas Brazilian writers are acutely

that continent,

Indeed,

Assis.

only in the 1960s,

again.

it

good deal of condescension

a

literature.

Spanish-language readers than to those

ful place.

rest of

these countries

Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas was

it

largest city), but

of the European literatures or literature in English than to

aware of Spanish-American

after

its

the continent's biggest

—regarded by the

Hispanophone South America, with

know any know the

European

read in the rest of

country (and Rio in the nineteenth century

and often

a

absence from the stage of world

little

rather than the Spanish, language. Brazil

ica,

life in

known and

he has been very

that

is

better

whole

Machado was not

not simply that

is

his

or Russian, or even Portuguese.

say, Italian

Even more remarkable than

literature

Machado would be

Surely

Soseki.

he hadn't been Brazilian and hadn't spent

Rio de Janeiro

outside

Eurocentric notions of world literature have

Natsume

marginalized:

known

Machado

mysterious than the neglect of another prolific

.

modern.

Isn't every

work

lucidity we're capable of

conscript into what

we understand

impress

much

of a

a century ago,

that speaks to us with an orig-

acknowledging one we want to

as

modernity?

Our

standards of

SUSAN SONTAG

40

modernity are

a

system of flattering

tively to colonize the past, as are

permit some

illusions,

our ideas of what

provincial. Surely

a point of

to

provincial,

all

the

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

become

rest.

selec-

which Being

view that cannot be accused of being

most entertainingly unprovincial books ever is

is

parts of the world to condescend to

dead may stand for

book

which permit us

a little less provincial

written.

about

And

literature,

is

one of the

to love this

about

litera-

ture's possibilities, oneself.

[1990]

A

IS

LITERARY GREATNESS

still

Mind

in

Mournin

possible? Given the implacable

devolution of literary ambition, and the concurrent ascendancy

of the tepid, the glib, and the senselessly cruel as normative fictional subjects,

what would

a

noble

literary enterprise

look like now?

the few answers available to English-language readers

W. G.

of

work of

Sebald.

Vertigo, the third of Sebald's

how he

began.

appeared

It

forty-six; three years later that,

the

is

One

The Rings of Saturn.

1996, the acclaim

autumnal even, as exotic as

it

books to be translated into English,

German

in

in 1990,

was

its

author was

came The Emigrants; and two

When

The Emigrants appeared

bordered on awe. Here was

in his

when

persona and themes,

irrefutable.

is

years after

in English in

a masterly writer, mature,

who had

The language was

a

book

delivered a

—

wonder

delicate,

dense, steeped in thinghood; but there were ample precedents for that in English.

What seemed

foreign as well as

the preternatural authority of Sebald's voice: its

precision,

its

its

most persuasive was gravity, its sinuosity,

freedom from all-undermining or undignified

self-

consciousness or irony. In

W

G. Sebald's books, a narrator who, we are reminded oc-

casionally, bears the

name

W

G. Sebald,

travels

about registering

evidence of the mortality of nature, recoiling from the ravages of

41

— SUSAN SONTAG

42

modernity, musing over the secrets of obscure

memory

of investigation, triggered by a

lives.

On some

mission

or news from a world irretriev-

ably lost, he remembers, evokes, hallucinates, grieves. Is

the narrator Sebald?

Or

a fictional character to

whom

the author

has lent his name, and selected elements of his "biography? Born in

Germany he

1944, in a village in

and

German

"W."

in his

Wertach im Allgau),

jacket identifies for us as his early twenties,

calls

a career

books (and the dust England

settled in

in

academic currently teaching modern

literature at the University of East Anglia, the author in-

cludes a scattering of allusions to these bare facts and a few others, as well

among

as,

other

self- referring

documents reproduced

in

his

books, a grainy picture of himself posed in front of a massive Lebanese

new

cedar in The Rings of Saturn and the photo on his

passport in

Vertigo.

And

yet these

books

ask, rightly, to

they are, not least because there

invented or altered, just

happen

—names,

glish

is

that

the story

is

it

is

One

—

may

it

to believe that

some of what he

and

all.

fiction. Fiction

much

is

relates really did

Fiction and factuality are, of

of the founding claims for the novel in En-

a true history.

untrue

good reason

as, surely,

places, dates,

course, not opposed.

is

be considered

What makes

a

work

fiction

not that

is

well be true, in part or in whole

—but

its

use, or extension, of a variety of devices (including false or forged doc-

uments) which produce what real." Sebald's fictions

— and

literary theorists call "the effect of the

their

accompanying

visual illustration

carry the effect of the real to a plangent extreme.

This "real" narrator

promeneur tary,

even

solitaire of

when

a

an exemplary fictional construction: the

is

many

generations of romantic literature.

companion

is

mentioned

paragraph of The Emigrants), the narrator neys

at

ended

whim, (as, in

to follow

some

The Emigrants,

(the Clara of the

is

to America).

soli-

ready to undertake jour-

flare-up of curiosity about a in the story of Paul, a

life

that has

beloved primary-

school teacher, which brings the narrator back for the

new Germany," and

A

opening

first

time to "the

of his Uncle Adelwarth, which brings the narrator

Another motive for traveling

The Rings of Saturn, where

it is

is

proposed

clearer that the narrator

in Vertigo is

and

also a writer,

A Mind

Mourning

in

43

with a writer's restlessness and a writer's taste for isolation. Often the narrator begins to travel in the

journey

is

even

a quest,

if

wake of some

And

crisis.

the nature of that quest

usually the

not immediately

is

apparent.

Here

is

the beginning of the second of the four narratives in Vertigo:

In October 1980

I

traveled from England,

where

had then been

I

me

grey skies, to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would help

my

over a particularly difficult period in

life.

up by my customary routine of writing and gardening not

know where

to turn.

Every morning

walk without aim or purpose through the

get

In Vienna, however,

now they were

found that the days proved inordinately long,

erally did

living

which was almost always under

for nearly twenty-five years in a county

I

tasks,

would

I

not taken

and

set

I lit-

out and

streets of the inner city.

This long section, entitled "All' estero" (Abroad), which takes the narrator

from Vienna

to various places in northern Italy, follows the open-

ing chapter, a brilliant exercise in Brief-Life writing which recounts the

biography of the much-traveled Stendhal, and

followed by a brief

is

third chapter relating the Italian journey of another writer, "Dr. K," to

some of ter, as

the sites of Sebald's travels in

fourth,

long as the second and complementary to

torno in patria" (The Return Home).

adumbrate

all

The four

it,

haunted and being

visions of destruction. In the

covering from an

illness,

ends with Sebald

London destroyed by

last,

chap-

entitled "II

is

narratives of Vertigo

And

of the great

fire

of

Moscow; and

the last nar-

over his Pepys and dreaming of

this

same four-part musical

structure, in

all

which

Sebald's narratives: the narrator's

lives, all in

some way

own

displaced, that the narra-

tor evokes. first

always, there are

longest and most powerful. Journeys of one kind

and the

the

who

narrative, Stendhal dreams, while re-

falling asleep

or another are at the heart of peregrinations,

first

light.

ri-

the Great Fire.

The Emigrants uses the fourth narrative

Compare

is

and

Sebald's major themes: journeys; the lives of writers,

are also travelers; being

rative

The

Italy.

sentence of The Rings of Saturn:

"

SUSAN SONTAG

44

In August 1992,

when

the dog days were drawing to an end,

walk the county of Suffolk, takes hold of

me whenever

in the I

off to

hope of dispelling the emptiness

have completed

The whole of The Rings of Saturn

I set

is

a

long

the account

stint

that

of work.

ofthis walking

trip

un-

dertaken to dispel emptiness. For whereas the traditional tour brought

one close

to nature, here

opening of the book

traces of destruction"

it

measures degrees of devastation, and the

us that the narrator was so overcome by "the

tells

he encountered

day

that, a year to the

after be-

ginning his tour, he was taken to a hospital in Norwich "in a state of

most

al-

total immobility.

Travels under the sign of Saturn, subject of struction

all

three books Sebald wrote in the

his

is

stroyed by

disease

The Emigrants

life.

of melancholy, are the

first

half of the 1990s.

De-

master theme: of nature (the lament for the trees de-

Dutch elm

and those destroyed

1987 in the next-to-last section of

ways of

emblem

tells

in the hurricane of

The Rings of Saturn); of

of a trip to Deauville in

1

cities;

of

991, in search

perhaps of "some remnant of the past," which confirms that "the once legendary resort, like everywhere else that one the country or continent, was hopelessly run fic,

visits

now, regardless of

down and

ruined by

traf-

shops and boutiques, and the insatiable urge for destruction."

And

the return home, in the fourth narrative of Vertigo, to W., which the

narrator says he had not revisited since his childhood,

is

an extended

recherche du temps perdu.

The climax left their

memoir

of The Emigrants, four stories about people

native lands,

in

manuscript

is

the heartrending evocation

—of an

idyllic

cause

this life it

had been

cause the subject of the

Max

Ferber,

safety in ther,

lived, to see

was The Emigrants

is

a

England

—

his

last narrative, a

mother,

by most of the reviewers

the town, Kissingen,

traces of

it

remained. Be-

who

(especially,

literature.

and be-

famous painter given the name

sent out of Nazi

perished in

being the author of the memoir

ample of Holocaust

what

visit

that launched Sebald in English,

German Jew

have

German-Jewish childhood. The

narrator goes on to describe his decision to

where

—

who

purportedly a

Germany

as a child to

the camps with

his fa-

—the book was routinely labeled

but not only, in America) as an ex-

Ending

a

book of lament with

the

ulti-

A Mind

mate subject of lament, The Emigrants may have

translation,

The Rings of Saturn. This book

is

that followed

Thomas Browne,

one story leads

Holland, was present

visiting

anatomy lesson depicted by Rembrandt; remembers lude, during his English

Roger Casement's noble rule in the

in

The Rings of Saturn, the well-stocked mind speculates

to another. In Sir

Se-

it

not divided into distinct

narratives but consists of a chain or progress of stories:

whether

45

up some of

set

work

bald's admirers for a disappointment with the

Mourning

in

Congo; and

tures at sea of Joseph

exile,

in the life of

at

an

a romantic inter-

Chateaubriand;

recalls

efforts to publicize the infamies of Leopold's

retells

Conrad

the childhood in exile and early adven-

—these

stories,

and many

cavalcade of erudite and curious anecdotes, and

its

others.

With

its

tender encounters

with bookish people (two lecturers on French literature, one of them a Flaubert scholar; the translator and poet Michael Hamburger), The

Rings of Saturn could seem grants It

"literary."

would be

a pity if the expectations

makes

still

about Sebald's work created

also influenced the reception of Vertigo,

Travel frees the

their

in

mind

obsessions; fictional in their reach.

for the play of associations; for the afflictions

(and erosions) of memory; for the savoring of solitude. of the solitary narrator it is

which

clearer the nature of his morally accelerated travel narra-

—history-minded

when

The Emi-

after the high excruciation of

—merely

by The Emigrants

tives

—

The awareness

the true protagonist of Sebald's books, even

is

doing one of the things

it

does best: recounting, summing

up, the lives of others. Vertigo

idence.

is

the

book

in

which the

narrator's English

life is least in

And, even more than the two succeeding books,

this

portrait of a mind: a restless, chronically dissatisfied mind; a

mind;

a

mind prone

to hallucinations.

Walking

in Vienna,

recognizes the poet Dante, banished from his

being burned

at

Venice, he sees

a self-

harrowed

he thinks he

hometown on pain

of

the stake. Sitting on the rear bench of a vaporetto in

Ludwig

II

of Bavaria; riding on a bus along the shore of

Lake Garda toward Riva, he like

is

ev-

sees an adolescent

who defines himself some German tourists in

Kafka. This narrator,

hearing the babble of

did not understand them; "that

is,

that

boy who looks exactly as a foreigner

—over-

a hotel, he wishes he

he were the

citizen of a better

SUSAN SONTAG

46

country, or of

no country

moment, the narrator

at all"

—

is

also a

he does not

says

A

posthumous. for

is

both: both alive and,

journey

some unfinished

The Emigrants acts of

—

if

his imagination

business, to retrace a

plete) an experience; to offer oneself

to the final,

up

—

It is

Vertigo

tigo," the

word used

that

is

it

more on

to repeat (or

com-

as in the fourth narrative of

most devastating

dwells

the guide,

is

the return to a place

memory,

revelations.

remembering and retracing bring with them

power of

in the

is still

else.

often a revisiting.

is

mourning. At one

in

know whether he

land of the living or already somewhere In fact, he

mind

These heroic

a price. Part of the

the cost of this effort. "Ver-

to translate the playful

German

Schwindel.

title,

Gefiihle (roughly: Giddiness. Feeling), hardly suggests

all

the kinds of

panic and torpor and disorientation described in the book. In Vertigo,

he

how,

relates

after arriving in Vienna,

he walked so

far that,

he

dis-

covered returning to the hotel, his shoes had fallen apart. In The Rings of Saturn and, above itself;

the narrator

about the narrator's

evoked mental awareness

What

is

all,

The Emigrants, the mind

in

more

is

own

elusive.

is

less

focused on

the later books, Vertigo

afflicted consciousness.

distress that

never

More than

is

But the laconically

edges the narrator's calm, knowledgeable

solipsistic, as in the literature

of lesser concerns.

anchors the unstable consciousness of the narrator

ciousness and acuity of the details.

As

travel

is

the spa-

is

the generative principle

of mental activity in Sebald's books, moving through space gives a

ki-

netic rush to his marvelous descriptions, especially of landscapes. This is

a propelled narrator.

Where

has one heard in English a voice of such confidence and

precision, so direct in

its

expression of feeling, yet so respectfully de-

voted to recording "the real"? D. H. Lawrence the Naipaul of The

may come

Enigma of Arrival. But they have

sionate bleakness of Sebald's voice. For this one

man

little

Bernhard are

a

few of the

"The Lord Chandos

affiliations

to a

Stifter,

Letter,"

Ger-

Robert

Thomas

of this contemporary master

of the literature of lament and of mental restlessness. sus about English literature for

of the pas-

must look

genealogy. Jean Paul, Franz Grillparzer, Adalbert

Walser, the Hofmannsthal of

mind, and

to

The consen-

most of the past century has decreed

A Mind

Mourning

in

47

the relentlessly elegiac and lyrical to be inappropriate for fiction,

overblown, pretentious. (Even so great a novel, and exception, as Vir-

The Waves has not escaped these

ginia Woolf's

German and

literature,

mindful of how congenial the grandiosity of past of

literature, particularly that

work of

Postwar

strictures.)

German Romanticism, proved

to the

mythmaking, has been suspicious of anything

totalitarian

art

like

the romantic or nostalgic relation to the past. But then perhaps only a

German

writer permanently domiciled abroad, in the precincts of a

erature with a in so

modern

lit-

predilection for the anti-sublime, could indulge

convincing a noble tone.

Besides the narrator's moral fervency and

gifts

he parts company with Bernhard), what keeps never merely rhetorical,

words;

is

the saturated

of compassion (here

this writing

naming and

and the ever-surprising device of pictorial

that,

tures of train tickets or a torn-out leaf calling card,

newspaper

from

pocket

a

from

clippings, a detail

always fresh,

visualizing in

illustration. Pic-

diary,

drawings, a

a painting, and, of

Thus, in Vertigo,

at

many instances, the imone moment the narrator loses

his passport; or rather, his hotel loses

it

for him.

charm and,

course, photographs have the

perfections of

relics.

ment made out by the in

W. G. Sebald inked

issued by the

eigner travels

police in Riva, with out.

And

the

in

—

a

And

all

German consulate in Milan. (Yes, this professional foron a German passport at least he did in 1987.) In The

—

is

merely

a

funerary

Swinburne

cemetery

monument

scribes in detail,

If the narrator

illustrative.

a small portrait of

relating a visit to a

by

to a

In Vertigo the true,

fiction

what

in the

sides,

It

seems

likely that

been

telling

speaks of Swinburne,

middle of the page;

his attention

if

captured

died in 1799, which he de-

to the holes

we

is

bored

are given a blurry

in the stone little

photo-

middle of the page.

documents have

I've

where

woman who

from fulsome epitaph

graph of the tomb, again

set in the

in Suffolk,

on the upper edges of the four

It's

—the G

with the photograph

of them are genuine. In The Rings of Saturn they seem, less in-

terestingly,

there

the docu-

is

touch of mystery

new passport,

Emigrants these visual documents seem talismanic. not

here

a

you

more poignant message. They

—which

normally demands. To offer evidence

is

say,

hardly what a reader of

at all is to

endow what

has

48

SUSAN SONTAG

been described by words with photographs and other

relics

a

mysterious surplus of pathos. The

reproduced on the page become an ex-

quisite index of the pastness of the past.

Sometimes they seem thor

is

Shandy: the au-

like the squiggles in Tristram

being intimate with

us.

At other moments,

-these insistently prof-

fered visual relics seem an insolent challenge to the sufficiency of the verbal.

And

yet. as

Sebald writes in The Rings of Saturn, describing a

favorite haunt, the Sailors'

pored over

entries

Reading

from the log of

Room

a patrol ship

during the autumn oi 19 14, "Every time I

am astounded

in

I

Southwold. where he

anchored off the pier

decipher one of these entries

that a trail that has long since vanished

the water remains visible here on the paper." ing the marbled cover of the logbook, he

from the

And, he continues,

pondered

u

air

or

clos-

the mysterious

survival of the written word."

[2000]

The Wisdom

Another Adam

beauty,

a wise, iridescent

book by

Zagajewski, dips in and out of

many

Project

the Polish writer

genres: coming-of-

age memoir, commonplace book, aphoristic musings, vignettes, and

defense of poetry It is,

be

to

—

that

a defense of the idea of literary greatness.

something of a misnomer to

sure,

who

writer: a poet

is,

call

Zagajewski a

also writes indispensable prose does not thereby

forfeit the better title.

Prose being the wordy

good many more pages than

his

affair

poems. But

it is,

Zagajewski's

in literature's canon-

fills

a

ical

two-party system, poetry always trumps prose. Poetry stands for

literature at its

eted. it,

most

serious,

most improving, most

"The author and reader always dream of

reading

ened; for a

From

it,

living

moment,

it."

a great

we

nuance may require a

little

would hold

a

As

has even less credibility

among younger

live,

deep-

application.) Literature as soul

And

it

last

all

century and a

half.

the calm and delicacy

view of poetry more akin to that of

Shelley than of Ashbery.

writing in English.

it;

expect Slavic intensities. (The partic-

seems hardly surprising that Zagajewski, for

of his poet-voice,

poem, of writing

saved.

nourishment has been a Slavic specialty for the It

most cov-

Living the poem: being elevated by

a great Polish writer

ular Polish

intense,

happens, the

reality of self-transcendence

Polish poets than

among

those

Zagajewski's transposed religious longings

through poetry, on a "higher plane"

—

—

to

are never voiced without a

49

SUSAN SONTAG

50

grace note of mild self-deprecation.

their readers access

is

one that defective human nature bars us from

Poems

habiting except fleetingly. "

because

is

it

moment

"a

The

first

memoiristic, with

that prevail today." All they

two are made up of

The new book

titles.

high-velocity variance of

volume of poems

—

pieces, a

is

so short takes. Its

What kind

mood and

lyric

discontinuous intensities,

some

poems, anyway

at different

is

is,

got that.)

And

but that

is

some

mix of

we

narratives, obser-

Another Beauty

more with

associate

—which

a succession of

is

prone to wonder. Then and with con-

oscillates, vibrates,

like that.

Or:

we expected

this,

The meteorological depressions them

of Paris have an oceanic

it's

feel;

At times the heavens' face appears,

The

the At-

The winds

in the direction of the continent.

blow, dark clouds scurry across the city like racecars. spiteful slant.

rain falls at a

a scrap of blue.

Then

dark again, the Seine becomes a black pavement. The lowlands of

Paris seethe with oceanic energy, thunderbolts corks.

Wnereas

a

typical

Central

somewhere above the Carpathians

pop

champagne

like

European depression

—behaves completely

—centered

differently:

it's

subdued and melancholy, one might say philosophical. The clouds barely move. They're shaped differently; they're like an

blimp drooping over Krakow's Central Market. The ally;

the violet glow fades, giving

skulks

but

everything reeks of dissimilarity, savor, message,

metaphor. Even the weather:

lantic dispatches

a

what kind of prose?) Thought-

—the whole book

like this,

essayistic,

in

pitches of concern.

precise; rhapsodic; rueful; courteous;

(This

appear

to

flow of untitled (and un-

attack that

of intensities? (That

now, here and there

we

sturdier, if only

is

book of prose

Zagajewski's third

is

vations, portraits, reflections, reminiscences gives

trasts.

in-

Zagajewski observes

last,"

of intense experience." Prose

numbered) short and not

ful,

is

takes longer to get through.

Another Beauty English.

"don't

poems

particularly the short lyric

can offer

a

poems

recent collection of

inwardness) to which poetry gives poets and

lyrical feeling, of ecstatic

wryly,

A

with charming sobriety. Mysticism for Beginners. The world (of

called,

somewhere behind

way

enormous

light shifts

to yellow spotlights.

silken clouds, illuminating the

gradu-

The sun

most varied

The Wisdom Project strata of earth

and

Some

sky.

51

of the clouds resemble deep-sea fishes that

have ascended to the surface and swim with mouths wide open, startled

the a

by the

meek

taste of

air.

thunderstorm does

strike,

a sharp, decisive shot,

pa

—

This kind of weather can

climate of Central Europe. it

And

behaves as

as if

last for several days,

after lengthy deliberations,

if,

if it

were

stuttering. Instead of

emits a series of drawn-out sounds, pa pa pa

it

an echo instead of a

Thunder on the

blast.

installment plan.

In Zagajewski's rendering, nature turns out to be wittily steeped in the

bathos of national histories, with the crisp, bullying weather of Paris

good fortune and Krakow's

flaunting France's indefatigable

tired,

melancholy weather summing up Poland's innumerable defeats and other woes.

The poet

can't escape history, only transmute

magic geography.

for purposes of bravura descriptiveness, into

MAY YOU

BORN

BE

era,

it

in interesting times, runs the ancient (or at

Chinese curse. Updated for our

least proverbial)

might run:

May you be born

What Czeslaw

Milosz

calls,

from strange lands where Poland, Ireland,

Israel,

it

is

Bosnia

hausts a writer like Zagajewski ture.

History means

strife.

in

difficult to

—from the

—

escape history"

whose standards

I),

are set

—think of

by world

History means tragic impasse

litera-

—and your

means perennial challenges

to the

had two centuries of his-

First Partition in 1772,

brought about the end of an autonomous

World War

hyperinteresting

prods and pinches, exalts and ex-

nation's very right to exist. Poland, of course,

chokehold

own

an interesting place.

mordantly, "the privilege of coming

friends being jailed or killed. History

tory's

sometimes,

it

which

in a

few years

state (not restored until after

to the collapse of the Soviet-style regime in 1989.

Such countries

—such

histories

—make

it

hard for their writers ever

completely to secede from the collective anguish. Here of another great writer living in a newer nation

is

the testimony

condemned

to

nonstop

dread, A. B. Vehoshua:

You

are insistently

summoned

to solidarity,

summoned from

within

yourself rather than by an external compulsion, because you live from

SUSAN SONTAG

52

one newscast

to the next,

and

it

becomes

automatic from the standpoint of

now you

to any piece of

plane shot down, are predetermined.

inability to

be alone

is

technical,

emotional reaction, because by

its

way and

are completely built to react that

Your emotional reactions a

a solidarity that

live in tension.

news about an

Hence

in the spiritual sense

and

Israeli casualty,

the Jack of solitude, the

to arrive at a life of intel-

lectual creativity.

Yehoshua's terms are identical with those of Zagajewski, whose prose book in English

is

a collection of six pieces

first

published in the early

1980s called Solidarity, Solitude. Solitude erodes solidarity; solidarity

corrupts solitude.

The

solitude of a Polish writer

community formed by the

is

always inflected by a sense of the

literature itself. Milosz, in his

own

great de-

fense of poetry, the address that he delivered at the Jagiellonian University in 1989 entitled

homage

"With Polish Poetry Against the World," pays

to Polish poetry for having protected

him "from

in emigration," recalling that "in solitude too difficult

recommend

to

never escape being responsible to others. By

counterexample of Witold Gombrowicz darily egocentric,

Poetry"

—

despair

and painful

anyone" there was always "the sense of duty toward

predecessors and successors." For Milosz, born in 191

may

sterile

offers

—

1,

to

my

a Polish writer

this rule, the stellar

in his fiction, in his legen-

truculent Diary, in his brazen polemic "Against

evidence, convulsive evidence, of the authority of

idealism in Polish literature. History

is

present even by

Milosz observes in a late book of prose, Milosz

s

its

absence,

ABC's\ and the cult of

altruism and high-mindedness flourishes,

if

wicz's denial of responsibility to anything

beyond the

perversely, in self's

Gombroanarchic

clamor, his ingenious harangues on behalf of the menial, the immature, the low-minded.

Squeezed

right,

every

life

can be construed as embodying exem-

plary experiences and historical momentousness.

could not help but see his tic

—

a

rebuke to

life as

his origins

Even Gombrowicz

exemplary, making something didac-

—out of

his gentry childhood, his preco-

And a writer much piety to-

cious literary notoriety, his fateful, irrevocable emigration.

whose love of

literature

still

entailed, unresentfully, so

The Wisdom Project ward old masters, such eagerness

to feed

on the magnificent

on offer from the past, could hardly help seeing his early circumstances

Soon

—

some kind of

as

Lwow,

ish city of

his family

—

traditions

at least his

representative destiny.

October 1945

after Zagajewski's birth in

life

53

was uprooted

in the

medieval Pol-

in the great displacements

(and redrawings of maps) that followed the Yalta agreements of the

Three Old Men, which put

and the poet grew up

Lwow

in the

in the formerly

German, now

Gliwice, thirty miles from Auschwitz. In

book

Two

when

I

my

childhood in an ugly industrial

was barely four months

old,

town of

second prose

was brought there

city; I

and then

was told about the extraordinarily beautiful

I

Polish,

Cities, his

translated into English, Zagajewski writes:

spent

I

hands of the Soviet Union;

for

many

city that

years afterward

my family had to

leave.

The

family mythology of an expulsion from paradise

him

feel,

he

says, forever

writing, to have

homeless.

made him an

witching Krakow" above to attend university,

all,

It

for

on the evidence of his

also seems,

expert lover of

which he

left

and where he remained

may have made

cities

—

"beautiful, be-

unredeemable Gliwice he was thirty-seven.

until

Dates are sparse in Another Beauty, and the arrangement of from-a-life

unchronological. But there

is

is,

implicitly,

stories-

always a where,

with which the poet's heart and senses are in dialogue. Not the traveler,

—most of the great Polish poets have gone westward, and Zagajewski not one of the exceptions — but the continually not even the emigre

is

stimulated city dweller

no bedrooms and

libraries

in

and

is

Another Beauty, but more than trains.

"we" disappears; there

where he each year

is

cities:

Once is

at

few public squares

he's past his student years, the occasional

now lives

in Paris

and teaches one term

the University of Houston. "I'm strolling through Paris,"

Symphony

Lwow

a

only an "I." Occasionally he will mention

writing: Zagajewski

one entry begins. "And enth

featured here. There are few living rooms and

in

at this

very

moment I'm

listening to the Sev-

Houston," notes another. There are always two

and Gliwice, Gliwice and Krakow, Paris and Houston.

More poignant

oppositions infuse this book: self and others, youth

SUSAN SONTAG

54

and

age.

There are plangent evocations of

cranky professors: for

tenderness toward the old.

its

and

dors, literary

odds with the

political,

difficult elderly relatives

of the poet as a young

this portrait

And

man

is

and

striking

the account of the decorous ar-

of his student years sets his

book

quite at

and pointedly indiscreet contents,

narcissistic purposes,

of most autobiographical writing today. For Zagajewski, autobiography is

an occasion to purge oneself of vanity, while advancing the project of

self-understanding pleted,

—

call

To describe oneself

And

it

however long the

a pithy

the

young

as

acknowledgment

death in their

train,

past.

glimpses, secures several

good

And

it

project

—which

is

one

to face that

is

epiphany. There

how

to talk

results. It

keeps the prose dense, quick.

is

the stories reminds us that in a riousness, change

—

way of

some

insight, or

telling, a lesson in

about oneself without complacency.

not a school for heartlessness,

a

Telling the stories discontinuously, as

a larger lesson in the very

is

no longer young.

that the debilities of age approach, with

invites telling only those stories that lead to

moral tone:

never com-

is

one of the many observations that cut short

is

from Zagajewskis

story

wisdom

life.

an education life

in

Life,

sympathy. The

when

sum

of

of a certain length and spiritual se-

sometimes not for the worse

—

is

as real as

just

death.

ALL

writing

a species of

IS

remembering.

triumphalist about Another Beauty ing the

book contains seem

the past to mental

life

definition a success.

—

is

it

is

so frictionless. Imagining

there as needed;

it

—

never

seems

less

that

is,

falters;

of course,

obligation: the obligation to persist in the effort to truth. This

remember-

that the acts of

The recovery of memory,

anything

If there is

is

bringing it

is

by

an ethical

apprehend the

apparent in America, where the work of

mem-

ory has been exuberantly identified with the creation of useful or therapeutic

fictions,

than in Zagajewskis lacerated corner of the

world.

To recover

a

memory

—

to secure a truth

—

is

a

supreme touchstone

of value in Another Beauty. "I didn't witness the extermination of the

Jews," Zagajewski writes:

The Wisdom Project I

was born too

late. I

bore witness, though, to the gradual process by

which Europe recovered lowland

like a lazy,

evil if

river

condemned

biguously

55

memory. This memory moved

its

than a mountain stream, but

it

slowly,

finally,

more

unam-

the evil of the Holocaust and the Nazis, and the

of Soviet civilization as well (though in this

reluctant to admit that

was

it

less successful, as

two such monstrosities might simultaneously

coexist).

That memories are recovered reemerge

—

modicum Once

is

—

that

that the suppressed truths

hope one can have

the basis of whatever

of sanity in the ongoing

is,

life

for justice

do

and

a

of communities.

recovered, though, even truth

may become complacent and

Thus, rather than provide yet one more denunciation

self -flattering.

of the iniquities and oppressiveness of the regime that was shut

down

in 1989,

Zagajewski chooses to stress the benefits of the struggle

against evil that flowed to the idealistic

young

in his portrayal of the

flawed beginnings of his vocation, as a "political poet," and his ties in

dissident student

and

literary circles in the

Krakow

activi-

of the late

1960s and 1970s. (In 1968, Zagajewski was twenty-three years old.) In

those heady days, poetry and activism rhymed. Both elevated, height-

ened; engagement in a just cause, like service to poetry,

made you

feel

larger.

That every generation its

successor

memory

—

this, too, is a

(history being

Each generation has which brings with

memories young,

a

who

it

its

what

misunderstands, and condescends to

function of the equivalence of history and it is

agreed on,

distinctive

a steady

remember).

collectively, to

memories, and the elapsing of time,

accumulation of

loss,

confers on those

normativeness which cannot possibly be honored by the are busy compiling their memories, their benchmarks.

of Zagajewski illustrious

fears,

s

most moving

member

portraits of elders

Bruno Schulz) and now

the university living in isolation and penury. realization, thinking back, that like fools

he and

Its

by new schools, new papers, new

radio,

known

a retired professor at

point

is

Zagajewski's

his literary friends

and savages, "shaped by

One

of Stefan Szuman, an

of the interwar Polish intelligentsia (he had

Stanislaw Witkiewicz and

have seemed

is

a

could only

postwar education,

new TV,"

to the defeated,

SUSAN SONTAG

56

homely, embittered

Szuman and

upon

generation looks

his wife.

The

successor generation as barbarians.

its

Zagajewski, himself no longer young and

can students,

committed

is

now

Nor

despair and incomprehension.

—the true

is

believers

his friends

were

As

angels.

and those who

kind of

his generation's

artists,

just sold

out

—

for turpi-

any more than he and

devils,

"who began by

for those

Ameri-

he content to write off an entire

tude and cowardice: they weren't simply

ilization"

a teacher of

to not replicating, in his turn, that

older Polish generation of intellectuals and

"enemy"

seems to be: each

rule

serving Stalin's civ-

but then changed, Zagajewski writes: "I don't condemn them

for their early, youthful intoxication. I'm

generosity of

human

nature,

which

more

inclined to marvel at the

young people

offers gifted

a

second

chance, the opportunity for a moral comeback."

At the heart of

assessment

this

the

is

wisdom

of the novelist, a pro-

fessional of empathy, rather than that of a lyric poet. (Zagajewski has

written four novels,

none

monologue "Betrayal"

Why

did

who was

I

do

I? I

am

this interview.

moment

that?

in

Why

moment

The one you were too

I

The dramatic

Cities begins:

did

do what?

I

Why

was

already beginning to regret that

For years

or in a

as yet translated into English.)

Two

refused;

of anxiety

I

who

I

.

.

What

And

me

weak

at a

did that world look like?

know. The same

late to get to

was?

agreed to grant you

you must have asked .

I

as this one.

Com-

pletely different.

That everything Actually,

Of

is

wisdom

always different

.

.

.

and the same:

a poet's

wisdom.

tout court.

course, history should never be thought of with a capital H.

governing sense of Zagajewski's memory-work

is

his

The

awareness of hav-

ing lived through several historical periods, in the course of which things eventually got better. Modestly, imperfectly

The young Zagajewski and

better.

sumed years,

that

when,

communism would in fact,

not immutable.

The

it

had

reality

less is,

his

last

comrades

—not

utopianly

in dissidence

had

as-

another hundred, two hundred

than two decades to go. Lesson:

everyone outlives an old

than one, in the course of a reasonably long

life.

self,

often

evil is

more

The Wisdom Project Another Beauty

tory: liberating the self

from "the grimaces and caprices" of

That should not be so hard has

come

into being in

easily liquidated is,

on easing the clamp of

in part, a meditation

is,

1989.

But

institutions

may be more

is

rooted in an era

an option, and ethical rigor

at least

to negotiate a soft landing onto the

moral expectations and shabby the Central European writers

artistic

whose

new lowland

standards

tenacities

is

when

something ad-

still

mired and consecrated by the genius of several national

How

history.

than a temperament. Zagajewski's temperament (that

the dialogue he conducts with himself)

heroism was

his-

public world that

in the less flagrantly evil

Poland since

57

literatures.

of diminished

the problem of

were forged

in the

all

bad

old days.

The maturing

be described

that Zagajewski chronicles can

as the

relaxing of this temperament: the rinding of the right openness, the right calmness, the right inwardness.

he

(He

says he can only write

— and who can gainsay member of the generation of — viewed with

happy, peaceful.) Exaltation

feels

ment from tical eye.

religious

a

this judg-

'68?

Hyperemphatic

when

intensity holds

no

is

a skep-

His end of the

allure.

spectrum does not include any notion of the sacred, which

figures centrally in the

work of the

late Jerzy

Grotowski and the theatre

center in Gardzienice led by Wlodzimierz Staniewski. While the sacralecstatic tradition cially this

is still

alive in Polish theatre

kind of theatre,

contemporary Polish

is

—but then espe— has no place theatre,

compulsorily collective

literature.

Another Beauty

is

suffused with the hu-

and envisages no

mility of a spiritual longing that precludes frenzy,

large gestures of sacrifice.

As Zagajewski

notes:

in

it

"The week

isn't

made

up only of Sundays."

Some

of his keenest pages are descriptions of happiness, the every-

day happiness of a connoisseur of

Beethoven or Schumann. The "I" of Another Beauty

listening to

scrupulous, vulnerable, earnest

And

—without

neither Zagajewski nor this reader

would come meet

solitary delights: strolling, reading,

in the

ally for

at

the cost of so

world of

art,"

much

is

a jot of self-protective irony.

would wish

otherwise. Irony

it

pleasure. "Ecstasy

Zagajewski observes.

"When

and irony they do

rarely

it's

usu-

the purposes of mutual sabotage; they struggle to diminish each

other's power."

And he

is

unabashedly on the side of

ecstasy.

SUSAN SONTAG

58

These descriptions are tributes to what produces happiness, not celebrations of the receptive

he

loves, or

tions

simply describe something

quote a favorite poem: the book

Adam

(who while

others, in a is

He may

is

a

sampling of apprecia-

and sympathies. There are penetrating sketches of admired

friends such as

ship

self.

in

Michnik, a beacon of resistance to the dictator-

jail

book he

wrote about the poet Zbigniew Herbert, among

titled

From

the History of Honor in Poland); there

doyen of Polish emigres

a reverential salute to the ancient

the painter, writer,

Czapski. Lenfer,

and heroic alumnus of Soviet prison camps Jozef

No,

c'est les autres.

ski declares in the

in Paris,

poem

it is

that gives the

others

book

who

save us, Zagajew-

its title

and serves

as

its

epigraph.

Here tor,

is

"Another Beauty"

in the

new

version by the book's transla-

Clare Cavanagh:

We find

comfort only

in

another beauty, in others' music, in the poetry of others. Salvation

with others,

lies

though solitude may

taste like

opium. Other people aren't if

you glimpse them

their

brows are

This

is

to use,

betrays

why

at

clean, rinsed

pause: which

I

you or

he.

in others'

here

it is

as

it

where

it is

word

Each he

its

time

poems.

appeared

jewski's first collection of

czynski,

by dreams.

some you, but

calm conversation bides

And

hell

dawn, when

in 1985 in Tremor: Selected

poems

in English, translated

entitled "In the Beauty Created

Only

in the

by others

is

beauty created there consolation,

Poems, Zaga-

by Renata Gor-

by Others":

The Wisdom Project in the

music of others and

Only others save

in others'

tastes like

opium. The others are not

you see them

poems.

us,

even though solitude

if

59

early,

hell,

with their

foreheads pure, cleansed by dreams.

That

is

why I wonder what

word should be is

used, "he" or "you." Every "he"

a betrayal of a certain

in return

someone

else's

"you" but

poem

offers the fidelity of a sober dialogue.

A

defense of poetry and a defense of goodness,

or,

more

exactly, of

good-naturedness.

Nothing could take the reader

in a

more contrary

direction to

today's cult of the excitements of self than to follow Zagajewski as

he

unspools his seductive praise of serenity, sympathy, forbearance; of "the calm and courage of an ordinary truth!" and, in another passage,

mation points!) seems,

if

life."

To declare

"Goodness does

"I believe in

exist!" (those excla-

—one American reviewer dethe book— then

not Panglossian

tected a touch of Panglossian uplift in

at least quixotic.

This culture offers few current models of masculine sweetness, and those

we

already possess, from past literature, are associated with

naivete, childlikeness, social innocence: tions,

Joe Gargery

in

Great Expecta-

Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. Zagajewski's persona in An-

other Beauty gift for

is

anything but innocent in that sense. But he has a special

conjuring up states of complex innocence, the innocence of ge-

"Franz Schubert:

A

Press

Beauty makes clear

at

every

nius, as in his heartrending portrait-poem

Conference."

THE TITLE MAY MISLEAD. Another

turn that, worshipper of greatness in poetry and other arts that he

Zagajewski higher:

is

"Woe

not an aesthete. Poetry to the writer

who

is

to

be judged by standards

is,

still

values beauty over truth." Poetry must

SUSAN SONTAG

60

be protected from the temptations to arrogance inherent

in

its

own

left

over

states of elation.

Of course, both from

a

beauty and truth seem like

more innocent

frail

guideposts

past. In the delicate negotiation

with the present

which Zagajewski conducts on behalf of the endangered

would count

talgia

as a deficit of

and license

certainties

to perorate,

argument.

he

is

Still,

pledged to defending the idea

of "sublime" or "noble" achievement in literature does, that

we

still

need the

virtually unsayable

fense

is

Dutch

still

he

by such now

which posed the pseudo-nai've question:

at a

Is

lit-

possible?

belief in literary greatness implies that the capacity for adis

still

intact.

When

admiration

is

corrupted, that

cynical, the question as to whether greatness ishes.

as

words. Zagajewski 's most eloquent, summative de-

university in 1998

miration

— assuming,

qualities in art that are praised

"The Shabby and the Sublime," an address he delivered

erary greatness

The

verities, nos-

even absent the old

is

is,

made

possible simply van-

Nihilism and admiration compete with each other, sabotage

each other, struggle to diminish each other's power. (Like irony and ecstasy.)

Disheartened though he

pean

literature,"

is

by "the mutation downward of Euro-

Zagajewski declines to speculate about what has given

the advantage to subjectivism and the revolt against "greatness." Per-

haps those brought up on the fierceness of state-administered mediocrity find

it

hard to be

as indignant as they

might be about the extent to

which mercantilist values (often sporting the mask of "democratic" or populist values) have sapped the foundations of the sublime. "Soviet civilization," a.k.a.

cultural policies of

communism, was

a great conservative force.

communist regimes embalmed the

The

old, hierarchical

notions of achievement, seeking to confer a noble pedigree on propagandistic banalities. In contrast, capitalism has a truly radical relation to culture, dismantling the very notion of greatness in the arts,

now most

successfully dismissed

cultural progressives

which

is

by the ecumenical philistinism of both

and cultural reactionaries

as

an

"elitist"

presump-

tion.

Zagajewski's protest against the collapse of standards has nothing

The Wisdom Project about

analytical

it.

Yet surely he understands the

Orphaned

of simply denouncing the collapse.

some-

pieties overheat

passages assert a familiar dismay, especially

rhetorically,

would "the

in

our flawed and tawdry world"? Don't

demon had know about

and Apollinaire

(d. 191 8) in-

Giotto or van Eyck; but Proust nocent?

I

to

What, he inquires

great, innocent artists of the past, Giotto or

van Eyck, Proust or Apollinaire, have done

them down

And

when he succumbs

the temptation to see our era as uniquely degraded.

set

(and indignity)

"Without poetry, we'd hardly be better than the mammals."

times:

many

futility

61

1922)

(d.

if

should have thought the Europe

senseless slaughter called

World War

I

some

in

spiteful

which

took place was,

that colossal,

anything, a

if

good deal worse than "flawed and tawdry."

The

idea of art as the beleaguered vehicle of spiritual value in a sec-

ular age should not have ski's utter

his

been

left

unexamined. Nevertheless, Zagajew-

absence of rancor and vindictiveness, his generosity of

spirit,

awareness of the vulgarity of unremitting complaint and of the

own

righteous assumption of one's

cultural superiority,

mark

self-

off his

stance from that of the usual professional mourners of the Death of

High Culture, such while he

slips into facile assertions

the present, but even then he call

it

portentous George Steiner. (Once in a

as the ever

is

human

Steinerism with a

of the superiority of the past over

never grandiose or self-aggrandizing:

face.)

Inveterately prescriptive, occasionally sententious, Zagajewski

common

too shrewd, too respectful of

or ordinary wisdom, not to see

the limits of each of the positions that surround and

One

his abiding passions.

works of

art.

one of

own enemies

its

be dissolved

make

it

loses sight of the solid

world that cannot

is

notational, juxtapositional,

it is

gajewski to entertain quite contradictory assessments.

how

tions

divided Zagajewski

and the

stories in

mind divided between solidarity

become

in art."

Because the book

is

sense out of

can be elevated, deepened, improved by

But, Zagajewski cautions, the imagination can "if

is

and

solitude;

is,

as

possible for Za-

What

is

valuable

he himself acknowledges. The

Another Beauty show us

the public world and the claims of

between the

original

"two

reflec-

a subtle, important

cities":

art,

the

between

Human

62

SUSAN SONTAG

City and the City of

God. Divided, but not overthrown. There There

guish, but then serenity keeps breaking through.

and, as well, so ers. is,

many

There was scorn,

fortifying pleasures supplied until caritas

just as inexorably, consolation.

chimed

in.

is

is

an-

desolation

by the genius of oth-

There

is

despair, but there

Writing

On The

best poetry will be rhetorical criticism

— Wallace Stevens

(in a

.

Itself:

Roland Barthes

.

journal of 1899)

lose sight of myself.

I rarely

— Paul Valery, Monsieur TEACHER, MAN

Teste

OF

LETTERS,

moralist, philosopher of

culture, connoisseur of strong ideas, protean autobiographer

... of

War

all

II in

the intellectual notables

France, Roland Barthes

tain will endure. Barthes

had been

was

is

who

have emerged since World

the one

whose work

I

am most

cer-

in full flow, incessantly productive, as

for over three decades,

when he was

started across a street in Paris in early 1980

—

he

struck by a van as he

a death felt

by friends and

admirers to be excruciatingly untimely. But along with the backward

look of grief comes the awareness that confers upon his large, chronically

mutating body of writing, as on

completeness.

more than subject

—

The development

that, exhaustive. It

that

celebrates the

As

it

major work,

of Barthes's

happens, the

its

retroactive

work now seems

even begins and

exemplary instrument

writer's journal.

all

falls silent

logical;

on the same

in the career of consciousness, the first

essay Barthes ever published

model consciousness he found

in the Journal of

Andre

63

SUSAN SONTAG

64

Gide. and what turned out to be the died offers Barthes 's musings on his

however adventitious,

try,

writing, with

its

subject: writing

essay published before he

last

own

The symme-

journal-keeping.

an utterly appropriate one, for Barthes's

is

prodigious variety of subjects, has finally one great

itself.

His early themes were those of the freelance partisan of

letters,

on

the occasions afforded by cultural journalism, literary debate, theatre

and book reviews. To these were added topics

that originated

and were

recycled in seminars and from the lecture platform, for Barthes ary career

and

was run concurrently with

academic one,

a (very successful)

an academic one. But the voice was always singular, and

in part as

the achievement

self- referring:

had even by

s liter-

of another, larger order than can be

is

most

practicing, with thrilling virtuosity, the

many-tracked of academic

disciplines.

would-be science of

and

signs

For

all

and

his contributions to the

structures. Barthes

s

endeavor was the

under

a series of

own mind. And when

the current

quintessentially literary one: the writer organizing,

doctrinal auspices, the theory of his

lively

enclosure of his reputation by the labels of semiology and structuralism

crumbles, as

promeneur mirers

H

E

it

must, Barthes will appear,

solitaire,

now

and

Barthes

s

full out.

is

vehement

like

in 1953,

brilliance at the is

was always concentrated, keen, inde-

extraordinary powers as a mind, as a writer.

be. "Literature

erature

think, as a rather traditional

This dazzling inventiveness seems not just a function of

almost the status of a position

came out

I

than even his more fervent ad-

claim.

always wrote

fatigable.

a greater writer

as if this

Writing Degree Zero:

brilliance that

Its brilliance aside,

what

is

"it

affair.

be having,

sociated with the style of a late

discourse must

in his first

shines with

His work affirms

indeed one ideal of

Barthes's

seems to have

It

critical

book, which

maximum

its

attempts to die." In Barthes's view,

it

posthumous

itself to

is

phosphorous." he says

moment when

already a

which believes

—

moment itself,

in culture

that

lit-

standard of

cultural

in several senses, the last

work has some of

an endless discourse anterior to

a

a

moment

word.

the specific traits as-

—one

presumes

that

presumes

intellectual so-

Writing phistication:

it is

work

compact

ous, favors

Itself:

On

Roland Barthes

65

be boring or obvi-

that, strenuously unwilling to

assertion, writing that rapidly covers a great deal

of ground. Barthes was an inspired, ingenious practitioner of the essay

and the

anti-essay

—he had

densely

worded entailments of

of a supple prose.

terials

It

ideas deployed as is

French, whose parent tradition cratic essays

long forms. Typically, his

a resistance to

comma-ridden and colon-prone, packed with

sentences are complex,

style

a is

these were the ma-

of exposition, recognizably

be found

to

if

in the tense, idiosyn-

published between the two world wars in the Nouvelle

Revue Frangaise

—

a perfected version of the

NRFs

house

style

can deliver more ideas per page while retaining the brio of that acuteness of timbre. His vocabulary darin.

Even

Barthes's less

them from the

1

960s

—

fleet,

is

which

style, its

man-

large, fastidious, fearlessly

more jargon-haunted

are full of flavor; he

writings

manages

—most of

make an exu-

to

berant use of neologisms. While exuding straight-ahead energy, his

prose constantly reaches for the summative formulation; ibly aphoristic. (Indeed,

ing superb bits

it is

irrepress-

one could go through Barthes's work

—epigrams,

maxims

—

to

make

book,

a small

been done with Wilde and Proust.) Barthes's strengths

extract-

as

as has

an aphorist

suggest a sensibility gifted, before any intervention of theory, for the

perception of structure.

A method of condensed

assertion

by means of

symmetrically counterposed terms, the aphorism displays the symmetries

and complementarities of

situations or ideas

—

their design, their

shape. Like a markedly greater feeling for drawings than for paintings, a talent for

aphorism

is

one of the signs of what could be called the

for-

malist temperament.

The

formalist

temperament

by many who speculate

and

its

just

one variant of

a sensibility shared

in an era of hypersaturated awareness.

characterizes such a sensibility terion of taste,

is

proud

more

generally

refusal to

is its

reliance

sists

that

its

assertions are taste.)

on the

cri-

propose anything that does not

bear the stamp of subjectivity. Confidently assertive,

would be ba3

What

no more than

it

nevertheless in-

provisional. (To

do otherwise

Indeed, adepts of this sensibility usually

make

point of claiming and reclaiming amateur status. "In linguistics

I

a

have

never been anything but an amateur," Barthes told an interviewer in 1975.

Throughout

his late writings Barthes repeatedly

disavows the, as

SUSAN SONTAG

66

it

were, vulgar roles of system-builder, authority, mentor, expert, in

order to reserve for himself the privileges and freedoms of delectation: the exercise of taste for Barthes means, usually, to praise.

the role a choice one

new and

is

is

commitment

something

to finding

unfamiliar to praise (which requires having the right disso-

nance with established

An

his unstated

What makes

early

example

is

taste);

his

or to praising a familiar

second book

—

it

work

appeared

differently.

in 1954

—which

on Michelet. Through an inventory of the recurrent metaphors and

themes

in

the great nineteenth-century historian's epic narratives,

Barthes discloses a more intimate narration: Michelet 's history of his

own body and after

the "lyric resurrection of past bodies." Barthes

another meaning, a more eccentric

What

pleased him was to

show

insipid

—often

Utopian

—

always

is

discourse.

and reactionary works

to

be

quirky and implicitly subversive; to display in the most extravagant projects of the imagination an opposite extreme a sexual ideal that

essay

on Fourier,

was

really

on

in his essay

on Sade,

an exercise in delirious rationality; in his

a rationalist ideal that

delirium. Barthes did take

—

was

really

an exercise in sensual

central figures of the literary

he had something polemical to

offer: in i960

he wrote

canon when

a short

book on

Racine, which scandalized academic critics (the ensuing controversy

ended with Barthes's complete triumph over

his detractors);

wrote on Proust and Flaubert. But more often, armed with tially

his essen-

adversary notion of the "text," he applied his ingenuity to the

marginal literary subject: an unimportant "work" sine,

he also

Chateaubriand's Life of Ranee

— could

be

—

say, Balzac's Sarra-

a

marvelous "text."

Considering something as a "text" means for Barthes precisely to sus-

pend conventional evaluations minor

(the

difference between major

and

literature), to subvert established classifications (the separation

of genres, the distinctions

Though work

among

the

arts).

of every form and worth qualifies for citizenship in

the great democracy of "texts," the critic will tend to avoid those that

everyone has handled, the meaning that everyone knows. The formalist turn in

modern

—from onward —

criticism

idea of defamiliarizing,

its

pristine phase, as in Shklovsky's

dictates just this. It charges the critic

with the task of discarding worn-out meanings for fresh ones.

mandate

to scout for

new meanings. Ltonne-moi.

It is

a

Writing

The same mandate These

"textuality."

On

Itself:

Roland Barthes

supplied by Barthes 's notions of "text" and

is

translate into criticism the modernist ideal of an

open-ended, polysemous

and thereby make the

literature;

like the creators of that literature, the inventor of

Barthes asserts,

literature,

"a meaning.")

is, finally,

a

is

exertions

criticism

meaning. (The aim of

is

subtracting, multiplying

to alter

it

—

is

and

to re-

in effect to

on an enterprise of avoidance, and thereby

had ever

(if it

critic, just

to put "meaning" into the world but not

that the point of criticism

—adding,

critic's

recommit

iar;

To decide

meaning

locate

base the

67

to the

left)

dominion of

taste.

to

For

it

the exercise of taste which identifies meanings that are famil-

judgment of

which discriminates against such meanings

taste

as

too familiar; an ideology of taste which makes of the familiar something vulgar and

facile.

that the critic

but only

its

Barthes 's formalism

called

is

"system"

on

—

at its

most

decisive, his ruling

work

to reconstitute not the "message" of a

its

form,

structure

its

—

is

perhaps best under-

stood thus, as the liberating avoidance of the obvious, as an immense gesture of

good

taste.

For the modernist

—

that

is,

formalist

The "message"

is

OF A VARIETY thing to say

power

critic,

Now, what

ceived valuations already exists.

canon of great books has been

—

fixed.

What

already understood, or

is

the

else

can

work with

can be said? The

we add

or restore to

obsolete. Let's ignore

or into two versions of

his aphorist's ability to conjure

itself;

he remarks,

is

theatricality

from the theatre"; the

The point

a

oppo-

of Voltairean travel,

"to manifest an immobility"; Baudelaire

—Barthes's writing

Eiffel is

"had to protect

Tower "makes the

city into a

seeded with such ostensibly par-

adoxical, epigrammatic formulas as these, It is

its

up

and one term then fielded against the

other to yield an unexpected relation.

thing up.

it.

an exceptionally fluent, ingenious generalizing

—the most elementary was

kind of Nature"

it?

of means Barthes possessed for giving himself some-

—he had

vivacious duality: anything could be split either into itself and site

its re-

whose point

is

to

sum some-

the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of

concluding; a bid to have the final

phrase-making.

word

is

inherent in

all

powerful

SUSAN SONTAG

68

Less elegant, indeed making a point of dogged explicitness, and far

more powerful

as

an instrument for giving himself something to

say,

are the classifications that Barthes lays out in order to topple himself into a piece of

argument

— dividing

into two, three, even four parts the

matter to be considered. Arguments are launched" by announcing that there are

ways

two main

which myth lends

in

two musics, two ways two forms of

his

and two subclasses of narrative

classes

own

two

itself to history,

to read

facets of

units,

Racinean eros,

La Rochefoucauld, two kinds of

interest in photographs.

two

writers,

That there are three

types of corrections a writer makes, three Mediterraneans and three tragic sites in Racine, three levels

on which

cyclopedia, three areas of spectacle

to read the plates of the En-

and three types of gesture

in Japa-

nese puppet theatre, three attitudes toward speech and writing, equivalent to three vocations: writer, intellectual, and teacher. That there are four kinds of readers, four reasons for keeping a journal

And

so on. This

is

accurately,

.

.

the codifying, frontal style of French intellectual

discourse, a branch of the rhetorical tactics that the French

quite

.

Cartesian.

Although

a

few of the

call,

not

classifications

Barthes employs are standard, such as semiology's canonical triad of signified, signifier,

and

many

sign,

are inventions devised

by Barthes

in

order to make an argument, such as his assertion in a late book, The Pleasure of the Text, that the

map

static.

do

seeks to destroy

categorizing

is

precisely for

one category

the two forms, which he calls

—

not

to subvert the his

keep matters

to reserve a place for the uncodified, the enchanted, the in-

tractable, the histrionic. sificatory

excess

He

of the quiver,

a sensual thrill,

classifications, of clas-

example), and his boldly physical

life stress

not topography but transformation.

to hyperbole, as

drama, often

was fond of bizarre for

(Fourier's,

metaphors for mental

Drawn

is

punctum and studium, of

interest in photographs. Barthes offers classifications to

open

art, "this ef-

the intellectual territory: Barthes 's taxonomies are never

Often the point

other, as

artist

The aim of this implacable

fort taking three forms." just to

modern

all

aphorists are, Barthes enlists ideas in a

melodrama or

a faintly

Gothic one.

He

speaks

or shudder of meaning, of meanings that them-

selves vibrate, gather, loosen, disperse, quicken, shine, fold, mutate, delay, slide, separate, that exert pressure, crack, rupture, fissure, are

Writing

On

Itself:

Roland Barthes

69

which

pulverized. Barthes offers something like a poetics of thinking,

meaning of subjects with the very mobility of meaning,

identifies the

with the kinetics of consciousness

The

artist.

liberates the critic as

uses that binary and triadic thinking had for Barthes

were always provisional, available

ination

and

itself;

s

imag-

to correction, destabilization,

condensation.

As

he preferred short forms, and had been planning to

a writer,

give a seminar

on them; he was

particularly

haiku and the quotation; and, like

like the

thralled

by "the

Even

an

as

detail" (his

essayist,

word)

drawn

to miniature ones,

true writers, he

all

—experience's

was en-

model short form.

Barthes mostly wrote short, and the books he did

write tend to be multiples of short forms rather than "real" books, eraries of topics rather than unified arguments. ple,

keys

its

His Michelet, for exam-

number

inventory of the historian's themes to a large

brief excerpts

from Michelet 's

ample of the argument

prolific writings.

The most

of

rigorous ex-

an itinerary by means of quotation

as

itin-

is

S/Z,

From

stag-

ing the texts of others, he passed inevitably to the staging of his

own

published in 1970, his model exegesis of Balzac's Sarrasine.

And,

ideas.

in the

same

on great writers ("Ecrivains de tou-

series

which he contributed the Michelet volume, he eventually

jours") to

did one on himself in 1975: that dazzling oddity in the

land Barthes by Roland Barthes.

The

series,

Ro-

high-velocity arrangements of

Barthes 's late books dramatize both his fecundity (insatiability and lightness)

and

An animus intellectual

his desire to subvert all tendencies to

against the systematizers has

good

taste for

sche, Wittgenstein are

perior

if

virtually

systems. In

its

more than

among

the

lodged

who

in the

many voices

modern form, scorn

the protest against Law, against

Power

a recurrent feature of

a century; Kierkegaard, Nietz-

unbearable burden of

strong

been

system-making.

that proclaim,

from a

su-

singularity, the absurdity of

for systems

itself.

An

is

one aspect of

older, milder refusal

is

French skeptic tradition from Montaigne to Gide: writers

are epicures of their

own

consciousness can be counted on to

decry "the sclerosis of systems," a phrase Barthes used in his

on Gide. And along with these

refusals a distinctive

first essay,

modern

stylistics

has evolved, the prototypes of which go back at least to Sterne and the

German Romantics

—the invention of

anti-linear

forms of narration: in

SUSAN SONTAG

70

fiction, the destruction

of linear argument.

ducing

of the "story"; in nonfiction, the

The presumed

impossibility (or irrelevance) of pro-

continuous systematic argument has led to a remodeling of

a

—the

the standard long forms

treatise,

the long

book

— and Of

of the genres of fiction, autobiography, and essay.

Barthes

abandonment

a recasting

this stylistics

a particularly inventive practitioner.

is

The Romantic and post-Romantic performance: to write

a first-person

One

matic elaboration.

strategy

sensibility discerns in every is

a dramatic act, subject to dra-

to use multiple

is

book

pseudonyms,

as

Kierkegaard did, concealing and multiplying the figure of the author.

When

autobiographical, the

tance to speak in the Barthes

is

himself,

of the conventions of Roland

sometimes

announces on the

"must be considered

first

spoken by

as if

fiction as well.

fiction

Barthes. Writing registers

kind: writing

self- referring

is

"Let the essay avow

as "I,"

page of

this

a character in

Under the meta-category of performance, not only

between autobiography and

Roland

One

person.

as "he." All this, Barthes

book about

and

invariably includes avowals of reluc-

for the autobiographer to refer to himself

sometimes

a novel."

first

work

the line

muted, but that between essay itself

almost a novel," he says in

new forms

of dramatic stress, of a

becomes the record of compulsions and of

resistances to write. (In the further extension of this view, writing itself

becomes the

writer's subject.)

For the purpose of achieving an intensity,

two

some or

all

strategies

ideal digressiveness

have been widely adopted.

One

and an is

ideal

to abolish

of the conventional demarcations or separations of dis-

course, such as chapters, paragraphing, even punctuation, whatever

is

regarded as impeding formally the continuous production of (the writer's) voice

fictions

egy

is

—the run-on method favored by

such as

Hermann

the opposite one: to multiply the ways in which discourse

mented, to invent further ways of breaking this

writers of philosophical

Broch, Joyce, Stein, Beckett. The other

method,

too; Viktor

Shklovsky

writes in one-sentence paragraphs.

it

polyphonous,

is

seg-

up. Joyce and Stein used

in his best

books, from the 1920s,

The multiple openings and

produced by the start-and-stop method permit discourse differentiated, as

strat-

as possible. Its

most

to

closures

become

common

shape

as in

Writing expository discourse

is

sometimes

Roland Barthes

..."

the usual literary

is

on Gide, and returns

Barthes uses in the essay

Much

On

71

that of short, one- or two-paragraph units sepa-

rated by spaces. "Notes on

work.

Itself:

title

—

form

a

to often in his later

of his writing proceeds by techniques of interruption,

in the

form of an excerpt alternating with

mentary, as in Michelet and S/Z.

To write

in

com-

a disjunctive

fragments or sequences or

"notes" entails new, serial (rather than linear) forms of arrangement.

These sequences may be staged they

in

some

arbitrary way.

For example,

—

may be numbered a method practiced with great refinement by Or they may be given headings, sometimes ironic or

Wittgenstein.

overemphatic

—Barthes

strategy in

s

Roland

Barthes.

Headings allow

an additional possibility: for the elements to be arranged alphabetically, to

emphasize further the arbitrary character of their sequence

method of

A

Lover's Discourse (1977),

tion of the fragment;

real title

—the

evokes the no-

Fragments d'un discours amoureux.

it is

Barthes 's late writing

ganized in a

whose

is

serial rather

his boldest formally: all

major work was

or-

than linear form. Straight essay writing was

reserved for the literary good deed (prefaces, for example, of which

Barthes wrote many) or journalistic whim. However, these strong

forms of the his

work

late writing

—Barthes

only bring forward a desire implicit in

relation that art has, of pleasure.

Such

a

conception of writing excludes

the fear of contradiction. (In Wilde's phrase: is

"A

truth in art

also true.") Barthes repeatedly

compared

ing to play, reading to eros, writing to seduction. His voice

more and more tual art

personal,

more openly

systematizers.

ister.

more

full

of grain, as he called

it;

is

that

teach-

became

his intellec-

a performance, like that of the other great anti-

But whereas Nietzsche addresses the reader

— complicity— Barthes

tones, mostly aggressive ing, inviting

of

wish to have a superior relation to assertion: the

's

whose contradiction

all

in

many

exulting, berating, coaxing, prodding, taunt-

invariably performs in an affable reg-

There are no rude or prophetic claims, no pleadings with the

reader,

and no

efforts not to

be understood. This

never violation. All of Barthes or ludic; in

many

s

work

is

is

seduction as play,

an exploration of the histrionic

ingenious modes, a plea for savor, for a festive (rather

than dogmatic or credulous) relation to ideas. For Barthes, as for

SUSAN SONTAG

72

Nietzsche, the point

point

to

is

make

The

not to teach us something in particular.

is

And

us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached.

to

give pleasure.

WRITING

IS

BARTHES's

one since Flaubert

perennial subject

(in his letters)

has thought as

about what writing

ately as Barthes has

—indeed,

is.

Much

of his

work early

is

the writer as fraud, such as

is,

by others,

"The Writer on Holiday,"

ambitious essays on writers writing, that tyr,

is,

devoted

debunking

studies included in Mythologies (1957) of the writer as seen that

passion-

brilliantly, as

from the

to portraits of the vocation of the writer:

perhaps no

to

more

the writer as hero and mar-

such as "Flaubert and the Sentence," about the writer's "agony of

style." Barthes's

wonderful essays on writers must be considered

as dif-

For

ferent versions of his great apologia for the vocation of the writer. all

his admiration for the self-punishing standards of integrity set

by

Flaubert, he dares to conceive of writing as a kind of happiness: the

point of his essay on Voltaire ("The Last

Happy

unvexed by the sense of

portrait of Fourier,

speaks directly of his

own

evil.

Writer"), and of his

In his late

work he

practice, scruples, bliss.

Barthes construes writing as an ideally complex form of consciousness: a

way

and absent

of being both passive and active, social and asocial, present in one's

own

life.

His idea of the

writer's vocation excludes

the sequestration that Flaubert thought inevitable,

deny any

between the

conflict

pleasures of worldliness.

by Gide:

a

more

It is,

writer's necessary

would appear

inwardness and the

so to speak, Flaubert strongly

of the self as writer

virtually

journal.

who

is

complete

—

—the por-

that Barthes sketched throughout his

in the first essay,

work

on Gide's "work of egoism,"

Gide supplied Barthes with the

patrician

model

is

his

for the writer

supple, multiple; never strident or vulgarly indignant; generous

but also properly notes

amended

well bred, casual rigor, an avid, guileful relation to

ideas that excludes fanaticism. Indeed, the ideal self-portrait trait

to

how

little

recognitions"),

egotistical;

Gide was

how

incapable of being deeply influenced.

altered by his vast reading ("so

his "discoveries"

many

were never "denials."

He

self-

And he

praises the profusion of Gide's scruples, observing that Gide's "situa-

Writing

Itself:

On

Roland Barthes

73

tion at the intersection of great contradictory currents has nothing

about

facile

that

is

it

.

.

."

Barthes subscribes as well to Gide's idea of writing

elusive, willing to

be minor. His

relation to politics also recalls

Gide's: a willingness in times of ideological mobilization to take the right stands, to

be

political

—

but, finally, not:

the truth that hardly anybody else

tell

and thereby, perhaps,

is telling.

Barthes wrote after a trip to China in 1974.) Barthes had

with Gide, and self.

much

many

affinities

of what he says of Gide applies unaltered to him-

How remarkable

"perpetual

to

(See the short essay

to find

self- correction"

it all

laid out

—including the program of

—well before he embarked on

his career.

(Barthes was twenty-seven, a patient in a sanatorium for tubercular students,

when he wrote

this essay in 1942 for the

he did not enter the Paris

When

Barthes,

literary

sanatorium's magazine;

arena for another five years.)

who began under

the aegis of Gide's doctrine of

psychic and moral availability, started writing regularly, Gide's important

work was long

1951);

over, his influence already negligible (he died in

and Barthes put on the armor of postwar debate about the

sponsibility of literature, the terms of

demand

that the writer

be

which were

set

up by

in a militant relation to virtue,

Sartre

re-

—the

which Sartre

described by the tautological notion of "commitment." Gide and Sartre were, of course, the

century in France, and the culture suggests quite just this

two most

influential writer-moralists of this

work of these two sons of French Protestant

opposed moral and

aesthetic choices.

it

is

kind of polarization that Barthes, another Protestant in revolt

against Protestant moralism, seeks to avoid. Supple

Barthes

But

is

quarrel with Sartre's view of literature

Writing Degree Zero (Sartre

ment with

Gidean

that he

is,

eager to acknowledge the model of Sartre as well. While a

Sartre's

is

lies at

the heart of his

book,

never mentioned by name), an agree-

view of the imagination, and

surfaces in Barthes 's last book,

first

Camera Lucida

the early Sartre, the author of LImaginaire).

its

obsessional energies,

(written "in

Even

homage"

in the first

to

book,

Barthes concedes a good deal to Sartre's view of literature and lan-

guage

—

for example, putting poetry with the other "arts"

and

identify-

ing literature with prose, with argument. Barthes's view of literature in his

subsequent writing was more complex. Though he never wrote on

poetry, his standards for literature

approached those of the poet:

Ian-

— SUSAN SONTAG

74

guage that has undergone an upheaval, has been displaced, liberated

from ungrateful contexts;

on

that, so to speak, lives

its

own. Although

Barthes agrees with Sartre that the writers vocation has an ethical im-

he

perative,

on

insists

its

complexity and ambiguity. Sartre appeals to

the morality of ends. Barthes invokes "the morality of forrrT

makes

literature a

problem rather than

a solution;

—what

what makes

litera-

ture.

To conceive of

literature

position-taking, however,

conformist.

a

"communication"

successful

as

sentiment that must inevitably

The instrumental view expounded makes of

erature? (1948)

vain

is

—and misplaced—

erary purists, that

is,

literature

struggle

in Sartre's

and

become

What

Is Lit-

something perpetually obsolete,

between

ethical

good

soldiers

and

a

lit-

modernists. (Contrast the latent philistinism of

view of literature with the subtlety and acuity of what Sartre had to

this

say about visual images.) Riven

counted

tempt for

his love of literature (the love re-

one of the century's great

literature,

years of his

by

one perfect book, The Words) and an evangelical con-

in his

insulting literature

life

litterateurs spent the last

and himself with

that indigent idea,

"the neurosis of literature." His defense of the writer's project of com-

mitment

no more convincing. Accused of thereby reducing

is

protested that

(to politics), Sartre

him of overestimating single

it.

it

would be more

what

I

mean by 'commitment.'

ture to "everything"

correct to accuse

"If literature isn't everything,

hour of someone's trouble," he declared

"That's

"

But

in

literature

it's

not worth a

an interview in i960.

Sartre's inflation of litera-

another brand of depreciation.

is

Barthes, too, might be charged with overestimating literature treating literature as "everything" for doing so. is

of

first

Which

is

all,

—but

For Barthes understood last

of

to say that

all,

all

language.

of reality

is

at least

(as Sartre

It is

not)

(as Sartre,

what he

calls

a

is

everything.

presented in the form of language

And

Barthes takes for

with his notion of writing as communication, did the "radical exploration of writing" undertaken by

Mallarme, Joyce, Proust, and their successors. That no venture able unless

it

—with

good case

did not) that literature

language that

the poet's wisdom, and also the structuralist's.

granted

he made

is

valu-

can be conceived as a species of radicalism, radicalism

thereby unhinged from any distinctive content,

is

perhaps the essence

— Writing of what

we

call

modernism

Itself:

On

Roland Barthes

modernism. Barthes's work belongs to the

in the extent to

which

it

75

sensibility of

assumes the necessity of the ad-

versary stance: literature conceived by modernist standards but not necessarily a modernist literature. Rather, tion are available to

all

varieties of counterposi-

it.

Perhaps the most striking difference between Sartre and Barthes

is

the deep one, of temperament. Sartre has an intellectually brutal, bon

enfant view of the world, a view that wills simplicity, resolution, trans-

parence; Barthes's view irresolute. Sartre

was

irrevocably complex, self-conscious, refined,

is

tragedy of this great career, of the use he

was

lect,

made

of his stupendous intel-

Barthes preferred to

just his willingness to simplify himself.

avoid confrontation, to evade polarization. "the watcher

who

and the

eager, too eager, to seek confrontation,

He

stands at the crossroads of

defines the writer as

all

other discourses"

the opposite of an activist or a purveyor of doctrine. Barthes's Utopia of literature has an ethical character almost the op-

posite of Sartre's.

It

emerges

in the connections

and reading, desire and writing

sire

writing

is,

more than

—

his

ist

—Puritan

or

insistence that his

anything, the product of appetite.

"pleasure," "bliss," "happiness" recur in his

niscent of Gide, that

he makes between de-

is

work with

own

The words

a weight, remi-

both voluptuous and subversive. As a moral-

anti-Puritan

—might

solemnly

sex

distinguish

for

procreation from sex for pleasure, Barthes divides writers into those

who ers,

write something (what Sartre

who do

meant by

a writer)

and the

real writ-

not write something but, rather, write. This intransitive

sense of the verb "to write" Barthes endorses as not only the source of the writer's felicity but the

commitment cial

that writing

model of freedom. For Barthes,

makes

to

something outside of

it is

not the

itself (to a so-

or moral goal) that makes literature an instrument of opposition

and subversion but

a certain practice of writing itself: excessive, play-

ful, intricate, subtle,

sensuous

—language which can never be

that of

power. Barthes's praise of writing as a gratuitous, free activity sense, a political view.

He

Still,

in

one

conceives of literature as a perpetual renewal

of the right of individual assertion; and ones.

is,

all

rights are, finally, political

Barthes has an evasive relation to politics, and he

is

one of

— SUSAN SONTAG

76

the great

modern

and

refusers of history. Barthes started publishing

War

mattering in the aftermath of World

never mentions; indeed, in

all

his writings

which, astonishingly, he

II,

he never,

as far as

I recall,

mentions the word "war." Barthes's friendly way of understanding subjects

He

work of barbarism. The

ethical

burden

Benjamin was

for

martyrdom; he could not help connecting

it

with

gards politics as a kind of constriction of the subject

he

lacks anything like Wal-

Benjamin's tragic awareness that every work of civilization

ter

a

domesticates them, in the best sense.

which has

be outwitted;

to

in

ernists: to try to

is

central for Benjamin, as for

all

true

olutionary illusions, had a post-tragic sensibility.

who

writer

He

of gentle apocalypse."

— "the great adventure of sure Brillat-Savarin's Physiology

Barthes called the

is

wisdom

desire," as

he

calls

it

life

of the

mind

desire,

felicity

ample,

this

the

and was concerned

to

never monogamous. His

condition in which one does not have to

The

texts

and enterprises

which he could read is

from

itself to

or gay science offers the ideal of a free yet capacious,

choose between good and bad, true and sary to justify.

is

on

in the essay

of Taste. Collecting a model of

satisfied consciousness; of a

in

the

devoted to the repertoire of plea-

defend "the plurality of desire." Meaning

be those

rev-

Happy indeed

each thing he examines, he assimilates intellectual practice

joyful

its

refers to the pres-

can utter such a phrase.

MUCH OF BARTHES'S WORK

erotic.

mod-

who was

not tormented by the catastrophes of modernity or tempted by

moment

that

Hence, perhaps, he was never

fathom the nature of "the modern." Barthes,

ent literary era as "a

re-

(and intellectual)

Roland Barthes he declares

likes political positions "lightly held."

gripped by the project that

a kind of

Barthes

politics.

human

also

is

how

false, in

that

which

it is

not neces-

engaged Barthes tend to

a defiance of these antitheses.

For ex-

Barthes construes fashion: as a domain, like eros,

where contraries do not

exist ("Fashion seeks equivalences, validities

not verities"); where one can allow oneself to be gratified; where meaning

— and pleasure— To construe

is

profuse.

in this way, Barthes requires a

master category through

which everything can be refracted, which makes possible the

maximum

Writing

number

Itself:

On

Roland Barthes

of intellectual moves. That most inclusive category

the widest sense of language

Systeme de

la

mode

(1967)

—meaning form

is

itself.

is

he said

course on

it."

not fashion but the language of fashion.

less a

become

(myth

for the critic as artist. is

is

a language, fashion

disis

a

a leading, often reductive convention of con-

reductive one than

By

this sort

intellectual endeavor. In Barthes's

side of language

fashion;

is

an interview, "fashion exists only through the

Assumptions of

language) have

temporary

in

language,

Thus, the subject of

Barthes assumes, of course, that the language of fashion that, as

77

To

proliferative

it is

is

the assumption

—embarrassment of

stipulate that there

to assert that there

work

is

is

riches

no understanding

out-

meaning everywhere.

so extending the reach of meaning, Barthes takes the notion

over the top, to arrive

at

such triumphant paradoxes as the empty sub-

ject that contains everything, the

be attributed. With

empty

sign to

euphoric sense of

this

which

meaning can

all

how meaning

proliferates,

Barthes reads that "zero degree of the monument," the Eiffel Tower,

pure

as "this

—

virtually

to vindicate subjects

sign" that (his italics)

Tower

that

untrammeled by

makes

every-

a

utility: it is

is

what makes

in Japan; Japan,

signs. In place of moralistic antitheses

—Barthes

present,

is

the uselessness of the

it

morally useful.) Barthes

world of such liberating absences of meaning, both modernist

and simply non-Western,

bad

"means

infinitely useful as a sign, just as the useless-

it

ness of genuine literature

found

—

(The characteristic point of Barthes's arguments-by-paradox

thing.'"

Eiffel

empty

its

offers

full,"

is

really presence,

"Its

full

false,

form

of empty

good versus is

he writes about myth

Arguments about many

max: that absence

—true versus

complementary extremes.

meaning absent but

in the 1950s.

he noted, was

empty but in

an essay

subjects have this identical

cli-

emptiness repletion, impersonality

the highest achievement of the personal.

Like that euphoric register of religious understanding which

dis-

cerns treasures of meaning in the most banal and meaningless, which designates as the richest carrier of meaning one vacant of meaning, the brilliant descriptions in Barthes's

of understanding; and ecstasy ual

work bespeak an

—whether

ecstatic experience

religious, aesthetic, or sex-

—has perennially been described by the metaphors of being empty

and being

full,

the zero state and the state of maximal plenitude: their

SUSAN SONTAG

78

alternation, their equivalence.

discourse about them to

fill

them up

ecstasy, fosters

is

again. It

is

The very transposing of subjects

into the

same kind of move: emptying subjects out

the

method of understanding

a

detachment.

And

that,

presuming

language also sup-

his very idea of

ports both aspects of Barthes's sensibility: while endorsing a profusion

of meaning, the Saussurean theory

substance)

—

is

—

that language

is

form (rather than

wonderfully congruent with a taste for elegant, that

reticent, discourse. Creating

meaning through the

is,

intellectual equiva-

lent of negative space, Barthes's

method has one never

subjects in themselves: fashion

the language of fashion, a country

"the empire of signs" signs

conforms to

a

is

—the ultimate accolade.

maximum

For

idea of decorum:

talking about is

reality to exist as

meaning

all

is

de-

ferred, indirect, elegant.

Barthes's ideals of impersonality, of reticence, of elegance, are set

forth

most beautifully

book

called

in his appreciation of

Empire of Signs (1970) and

Japanese culture

in his essay

in the

on the Bunraku

puppets. This essay, "Lesson in Writing," recalls Kleist's

"On

the Pup-

pet Theatre," which similarly celebrates the tranquillity, lightness, and

grace of beings free of thinking, of meaning

—

free of "the disorders of

consciousness." Like the puppets in Kleist's essay, the Bunraku puppets are seen as incarnating an ideal "impassivity,

To be both impassive and

tlety."

inane and profound,

fantastic,

unselfconscious and supremely sensuous

sub-

clarity, agility,

—these

qualities that Barthes

discerned in various facets of Japanese civilization project an ideal of taste

and deportment, the

that has

been

ideal of the aesthete in

its

larger

meaning

in general circulation since the dandies of the late eigh-

teenth century. Barthes was hardly the

first

Western observer for

whom

Japan has been an aesthete's Utopia, the place where one finds aesthete views everywhere and exercises one's aesthete goals are central

—

own

at liberty.

The

culture

not, as in the West, eccentric

to elicit a strong response. (Japan

is

mentioned

in the

where

—was bound

Gide essay

writ-

ten in 1942.)

Of

the available models of the aesthetic

way of looking

at

the

world, perhaps the most eloquent are French and Japanese. In France it

has largely been a literary tradition, though with annexes in two pop-

ular arts,

gastronomy and fashion. Barthes did take up the subject of

Writing

food

and

On

Itself:

as ideology, as classification, as taste it

—he

79

talks often of savoring;

seems inevitable that he would find the subject of fashion con-

genial. Writers ously,

Roland Barthes

from Baudelaire

and one of the founding

to

Cocteau have taken fashion

figures of literary

seri-

modernism, Mallarme,

edited a fashion magazine. French culture, where aesthete ideals have

been more

explicit

and

influential than in

any other European culture,

ideas of vanguard art

allows a link between

and of fashion. (The

French have never shared the Anglo-American conviction that makes the fashionable the opposite of the serious.) In Japan, aesthete stan-

dards appear to imbue the whole culture, and long predate the modern ironies; they

were formulated

as early as the late tenth century, in Sei

Shonagon's Pillow Book, that breviary of consummate dandy attitudes, written in what appears to us an astonishingly modern, disjunctive

form

—

and

notes, anecdotes,

lists.

Barthes's interest in Japan expresses

more innocent, and

the attraction to a less defensive,

far

more

elabo-

rated version of the aesthete sensibility: emptier and prettier than the

French, more straightforward (no beauty in ugliness, as in Baudelaire); pre-apocalyptic, refined, serene.

In Western culture, where

it

remains marginal, the dandy attitude

has the character of an exaggeration. In one form, the older one, the aesthete it

is

a willful exclusionist of taste,

holding attitudes that

make

possible to like, to be comfortable with, to give one's assent to

the smallest

number

sion of them.

of things; reducing things to the smallest expres-

(When

taste

distributes

favors diminutive adjectives, such as

—

its

ing," "charming," "agreeable," "suitable.")

amount of

refusal.

As language,

plusses and minuses,

for praise

— "happy,"

it

"amus-

Elegance equals the largest

this attitude finds its

consummate

ex-

pression in the rueful quip, the disdainful one-liner. In the other form, the aesthete sustains standards that the largest

number

the

phony

list

The

possible to be pleased with

that juxtaposes things

facts, aesthetic objects.

illicit

literary device that best projects this attitude

(Roland Barthes has many)

—the whimsical

and experiences of

often incongruous nature, turning

The

it

of things; annexing new, unconventional, even

sources of pleasure. is

make

them

all,

by

a starkly different,

this technique, into arti-

Here elegance equals the

aesthete's posture alternates

aesthete poly-

wittiest acceptances.

between never being

satisfied

and

—

SUSAN SONTAG

80

always finding

way of being

a

being pleased with virtually

satisfied,

everything.*

Although both directions of dandy the exclusivist version tic,

is

The

cooler.

presuppose detachment,

taste

inclusivist version

can be enthusias-

even effusive; the adjectives used for praise tend to be over- rather

who had much

than understatements. Barthes, taste of the dandy,

was more inclined

form: aesthete leveling

—hence

that,

he

says,

many

make up

swarming with these

is

sures; they

committed

seem

Of

the

"little details"

the "whole of Fourier," Barthes writes: "I

carried away, dazzled, convinced by a sort of

Fourier

charm, amuse-

His account of Fourier,

things.

an aesthete's appraisal.

finally

is

modern, democratizing

its

his willingness to find

ment, happiness, pleasure in so for example,

to

of the high exclusivist

'true' to

...

felicities

I

charm of expressions cannot

pressive overcrowdedness of streets in

might experience

Tokyo

transformation of quality by quantity," a

new

.

.

resist these plea-

me." Similarly: what another flaneur,

to finding pleasure everywhere,

am .

signifies for

as the

less

op-

Barthes "the

relation that

is

"a source

of endless jubilation."

Many

of Barthes 's judgments and interests are implicitly affirma-

His early essays championing the

tions of the aesthete's standards.

tion of Robbe-Grillet,

fic-

which gave Barthes the misleading reputation

as

an advocate of literary modernism, were in effect aesthete polemics.

The

"objective," the "literal"

—these

austere, minimalist ideas of litera-

ture are in fact Barthes 's ingenious recycling of one of the aesthete's

principal theses: that surface

as telling as depth.

is

What

Barthes dis-

cerned in Robbe-Grillet in the 1950s was a new, high-tech version of the dandy writer; what he hailed in Robbe-Grillet was the desire "to establish the novel

back on

on the surface," thereby

a psychology."

gogic, that

The

frustrating our desire to "fall

idea that depths are obfuscating, dema-

no human essence

"'The version of the aesthete sensibility

I

stirs at

once

the

bottom of

tried to include

things,

titudes.

Camp

in contrast to

taste,

really

however,

still

the taste incarnated

the dandyism of leveling.

wants to

like)

and

as

pan

that

under the name "camp" can be

regarded as a technique of taste for making the aesthete appreciations

way of liking more than one

and

less

exclusionary

of the democratizing of dandy

(a at-

presupposes the older, high standards of discrimination

by

say.

Andy Warhol,

the franchiser and mass marketer of

Writing

freedom

lies in

circulates

—

on the

staying

this is the central

tion, in the various

is

it

Duchamp.

latent,

is

Roland Barthes

has taken over the

he declares

against depth, against the

submerged. Bunraku

"Myth Today"

in

hundred

last

Cage.)

the antinomy of matter and soul, inner and outer. ing''

81

on which desire

surface, the large glass

making an argument

constantly

idea that the most real

On

argument of the modern aesthete posi-

exemplary forms

years. (Baudelaire. Wilde.

Barthes

Itself:

(1956).

The

is

seen as refusing

"Myth hides noth-

aesthete position not

only regards the notion of depths, of hiddenness, as a mystification, a lie,

Of

but opposes the very idea of antitheses.

depths and surfaces

world

—

denies.

is

already to misrepresent the aesthetic view of the

to reiterate a duality, like that of

The

course, to speak of

form and content,

largest statement of this position

precisely

it

was made by Nietzsche,

whose work

constitutes a criticism of fixed antitheses (good versus evil,

right versus

wrong, true versus

false).

But while Nietzsche scorned "depths," he exalted "heights." In the post-Nietzschean tradition, there are neither depths nor heights; there are only various kinds of surface, of spectacle. Nietzsche said that every

profound nature needs intellectual ruse;

said that the

a

mask, and spoke

—profoundly—

in praise of

when he

but he was making the gloomiest prediction

coming

century, ours,

would be the age of the

ideal of seriousness, of sincerity, underlies

which makes the overlap of

his ideas

all

actor.

An

of Nietzsche's work,

and those of

a true aesthete (like

Wilde, like Barthes) so problematic. Nietzsche was a histrionic thinker

but not a lover of the histrionic. His ambivalence toward spectacle (after

all,

his criticism of

duction), his insistence teria

Wagner's music was

on the authenticity of

finally that

spectacle,

it

was

mean

a se-

that cri-

other than the histrionic are at work. In the aesthete's position,

the notions of reality and spectacle precisely reinforce and infuse each other,

and seduction

is

always something positive. In this respect,

Barthes's ideas have an exemplary coherence. Notions of the theatre in-

form, directly or indirectly, declares in

Roland Barthes

all

his

work. (Divulging the

that there

was no

did not treat of a certain theatre, and the spectacle

egory through whose forms the world

is

secret, late,

single text of his is

he

"which

the universal cat-

seen.") Barthes explains

Robbe-Grillet's empty, "anthological" description as a technique of

SUSAN SONTAG

82

theatrical distancing (presenting an object "as

Fashion

tacle").

is,

were

if it

in itself a spec-

of course, another casebook of the theatrical. So

which he

Barthes's interest in photography,

treats as a

haunted spectatorship. In the account of photography given Lucida there are hardly any photographers

—the subject

is

realm of pure

is

in

Camera

photographs

found objects) and those who are fascinated by

(treated virtually as

them: as objects of erotic reverie, as memento mori.

What he wrote about the Berliner

Ensemble

Courage) and helped atrical

his frequent use of

who

finally

many

in 1954

(when

production of Mother

in France, says less

about the the-

subjects as forms of the theatrical. In

Brecht in seminars of the 1970s, he cited the prose

which he took

maker of

the

he discovered

visited Paris with their

make known

than his treatment of

writings,

whom

Brecht,

as a

model of

critical acuity;

was not Brecht

it

didactic spectacles but Brecht the didactic intellectual

mattered to Barthes. In contrast, with Bunraku what

Barthes valued was the element of theatricality as such. In Barthes's early work, the theatrical tities

are only roles

itself

may be

tion

is

the

domain of liberty, the place where

and one can change

refused. (Barthes speaks of

from meaning.") Barthes's

gelism of pleasure,

is

a

theatrical, like his evan-

proselytizing for the attenuating,

lightening, baffling of the Logos, of

To

zone where meaning

Bunraku 's privileged "exemp-

about the

talk

way of

roles, a

iden-

meaning

affirm the notion of the spectacle

is

itself.

the triumph of the aesthete's

position: the promulgation of the ludic, the refusal of the tragic. All of

Barthes's intellectual tent," the tragic of

moves have the

its finality.

That

genuinely subversive, liberating great aesthete tradition,

—

effect of voiding is

work of its "con-

the sense in which his

playful. It

is

outlaw discourse

which often assumes the

theories

known

as

it

is

in the

liberty of rejecting the

"substance" of discourse in order better to appreciate

law discourse turned respectable,

work

its

"form": out-

were, with the help of various

as varieties of formalism. In

numerous accounts of

his

intellectual evolution, Barthes describes himself as the perpetual disci-

ple

—but the point

nally,

untouched.

that

He

he

really

spoke of

wants to make

his

is

that

fi-

having worked under the aegis of a

succession of theories and masters. In fact, Barthes's

gether

he remains,

more coherence, and ambivalence. For

all

his

work has

alto-

connection with

Writing

Itself:

On

Roland Barthes

tutelary doctrines, Barthes's submission to doctrine

the end, last is

it

was necessary

books are

the

power.

And

intellectual gadgetry

all

superficial. In

be discarded. His

kind of unraveling of his ideas. Roland Barthes, he

says,

his resistance to his ideas, the dismantling of his

own

a

book of

that

was

83

in the inaugural lecture that

sition of the highest

eminence

College de France in 1977

marked

acceding to a po-

his

—the Chair of Literary Semiology

—Barthes chooses,

to argue for a soft intellectual authority. missive, not a coercive, space

He

at the

enough,

characteristically

praises teaching as a per-

where one can be relaxed, disarmed,

floating.

Language

itself,

which Barthes

in the

euphoric

now comes under

attack, as

called a

formulation that ends Writing Degree Zero,

" Utopia"

another form of "power," and his very effort to convey his sensitivity to the ways in which language

is

"power" gives

rise to that instantly

rious hyperbole in his College de France lecture: the is

"quite simply fascist."

ideologies

To assume

that society

and repressive mystifications

is

is

noto-

power of language

ruled by monolithic

necessary to Barthes's advo-

cacy of egoism, post-revolutionary but nevertheless antinomian: his notion that the affirmation of the unremittingly personal act.

This

comes

is

is

a classic extension of the aesthete attitude, in

a subversive

which

a politics: a politics of radical individuality. Pleasure

identified with unauthorized pleasure,

tion with the sanctity of the asocial

of protest against

power

and the

self.

is

it

be-

largely

right of individual asser-

In the late writings, the theme

takes the form of an increasingly private defi-

nition of experience (as fetishized involvement)

and

a ludic definition

of thought. "The great problem," Barthes says in a late interview,

"is to

outplay the signified, to outplay law, to outplay the father, to outplay the repressed

—

thete's ideal of

do not say

I

to explode

it,

but to outplay

it."

The

aes-

detachment, of the selfishness of detachment, allows for

avowals of passionate, obsessed involvement: the selfishness of ardor, of fascination. (Wilde speaks of his "curious mixture of ardour and of indifference ... tic

I

would go

to the stake for a sensation

to the last.*) Barthes has to

ment, and undermining Like

all

it

—with

keep affirming the

and be

a scep-

aesthete's detach-

passions.

great aesthetes, Barthes

was an expert

at

having

it

both

ways. Thus, he identifies writing both with a generous relation to the

— SUSAN SONTAG

84

world (writing

production") and with

as "perpetual

a defiant relation

(writing as "a perpetual revolution of language," outside the

power).

He

and one

the world

ism a

is

wants

a politics

free of

and an

bounds of

anti-politics, a critical relation to

moral considerations. The aesthete's

radical-

the radicalism of a privileged, even a replete, consciousness

—but

genuine radicalism nonetheless. All genuine moral views are founded

and the

on

a notion of refusal,

ist,

does provide certain potentially powerful, not

aesthete's view,

which can be conformjust elegant,

grounds

be multiple, to make multiple

identifi-

for a great refusal.

The

aesthete's radicalism: to

cations; to

assume

fully the privilege of the personal. Barthes's

he avows that he writes by obsessions

—

work

consists of continuities

detours; the accumulation of points of view;

and

disburden-

finally, their

ment: a mixture of progress and caprice. For Barthes, liberty

is

a state

that consists in remaining plural, fluid, vibrating with doctrine;

whose

price

is

being indecisive, apprehensive, fearful of being taken for an

impostor.

The

The

writer

doctrine.

freedom

the deputy of his

is

before what

writer's

is

that Barthes describes

own ego

fixed by writing, as the

"Who

speaks

is" Barthes wants to

is

not

who

move on

—

—of

that

is

in part, flight.

that self in perpetual flight

mind

writes,

is,

is

from

in perpetual flight

and who writes

is

not

who

one of the imperatives of the

aesthete's sensibility.

THROUGHOUT subject. itics,

He

is

HIS

Fourier:

WORK

Barthes projects himself into his

unvexed by the sense of

"that necessary purge"; he "vomits

puppet: impersonal, subtle.

He

is

up."

it

aloof from pol-

evil,

He

is

(always young, always mature); the writer as egoist species of "simultaneous being" or plural desire.

the subjects that he praises. (That he must,

may be connected

He is

the Bunraku

who

Gide: the writer

—

a

is

ageless

triumphant

the subject of

all

characteristically, praise

with his project of defining, creating standards for

himself.) In this sense,

much

of what Barthes wrote

now

appears auto-

biographical. Eventually,

it

became autobiographical

meditation on the personal, on the

in the literal sense.

self, is at

A

brave

the center of his late writ-

Writing

and seminars.

ings

books with

Much

Itself:

their poignant

The books

is

Roland Barthes

of Barthes's work, especially the

themes of

loss, constitutes a

of his sensuality (as well as his sexuality) the world.

On

—

85

last

three

candid defense

way of tasting

his flavor, his

Camera Lucida

are also artfully anti-confessional.

meta-book: a meditation on the even more personal autobiograph-

a

book

ical

who

he planned to write about photographs of

that

his mother,

died in 1978, and then put aside. Barthes starts from the modernist

model of writing

that

pressiveness; a mask.

person

it

is

superior to any idea of intention or mere ex-

"The work," Valery

"should not give the

can be reduced to an idea of the author's

affects anything that

person and thinking."" But

insists,

commitment

this

not preclude the avowal of the

self; it is

to impersonality does

only another variation on the

project of self-examination: the noblest project of French literature.

Valery offers one ideal of self-absorption

Rousseau

another

offers

Many themes

of Barthes's

erary culture:

its

mal

ideal

work

—impersonal,

—passionate,

avowing

vulnerability.

in the classic discourse of

lie

French

lit-

taste for elegant abstraction, in particular for the for-

analysis of the sentiments;

its

disdain for

mere psychology; and

coquetry about the impersonal (Flaubert declaring c'est

disinterested.

"Madame

its

Bovary,

mot," but also insisting in letters on his novel's "impersonality,"

its

lack of connection with himself).

Barthes

is

the latest major participant in the great national literary

project, inaugurated

The

ing of the

self.

sibilities,

avid,

everything

by Montaigne: the

enterprise construes the self as the locus of

unafraid

may be

free.

The

gained),

distinctive

(nothing

of contradiction

becoming

conscious

fully

French Utopian tradition

is

all

need be

and the exercise of consciousness

highest aim, because only through

be

self as vocation, life as a read-

poslost,

as a life's

may one

this vision of reality

redeemed, recovered, transcended by consciousness; a vision of the of the

mind

as a life of desire, of full intelligence

"This modernist dictum that writing Barthes's

move

is,

ideally, a

to eliminate the "author"

when

and pleasure

critic is to

larity.

—

for

text.)

method of

One

his S/Z:

of the things

formulate the mandate for one kind of writer's modernism

(Flaubert, Valery, Eliot) as a general

date in practice

dif-

form of impersonality or absence underlies

considering a book. (The

an exemplary reading of a Balzac novella as virtually an authorless Barthes does as a

— so

life

program

for readers.

most of Barthes's writing

is

Another

precisely

is

to contravene that

man-

devoted to personal singu-

— SUSAN SONTAG

86

German

ferent from, say, the traditions of high moral seriousness of

and of Russian

literature.

work had

Barthes's

Inevitably,

must choose between being observed rorism

is

in a seminar.

in

Intellectual ter-

intellectual practice in

humored, rewarded: the "Jacobin"

he once

egoist,"

The options seem very French. form of

"One

autobiography.

and being an

a terrorist

a central, respectable

tolerated,

assertion

end

to

France

of ruthless

tradition

and shameless ideological about-faces; the mandate of

inces-

sant judgment, opinion, anathematizing, overpraising; the taste for ex-

treme positions, then casually reversed, and for deliberate provocation. Alongside

this,

how modest egoism

Barthes's voice

An

ward.

cipher")

body,

became

steadily

affirmation of his is

the main

own

is!

more

intimate, his subjects

more

theme of Roland

Barthes.

He

writes about the

taste, love; solitude; erotic desolation; finally, death,

or rather de-

and death: the twin subjects of the book on photography. As

sire

in-

idiosyncrasy (which he does not "de-

in the

Platonic dialogues, the thinker (writer, reader, teacher) and the lover

—are

the two main figures of the Barthesian self course, can. fairly

means

(The text

his erotics of literature enters,

Platonic after

all.

fills,

it

more

joined. Barthes, of

The monologue of A

Lover's Discourse, which

obviously draws on a story of disappointment in love, ends in a tual vision in the classic Platonic way, in

muted to

more

into higher,

unmask, no longer

which lower loves are

inclusive ones. Barthes

to interpret, but to

make

clarity, to

of consciousness

theories,

ernist standard of the intricate.

He

he gave

(of his mother), part meditation

on

The

the great

is

weight to the mod-

The

last

says, to place

book

eros, part treatise

graphic image, part invocation of death desire; a certain brilliance

less

does not want, he

obstacles between himself and the reader.

tion,

reality, to

itself a

prophetic love."

As he divested himself of

the simplest.

spiri-

trans-

avows that he "wants

drug, and thus accede to a vision of irreducible

drama of

he

literally, as literally as

grants euphoria.) But finally he seems

—

a

book of

is

part

any

memoir

on the photo-

piety, resignation,

being renounced, and the view

itself is

of

subject of photography provided the great exemp-

perhaps release, from the exactions of formalist

taste.

In choosing

to write about photography, Barthes takes the occasion to adopt the

Writing

warmest kind of

And

are about.

of the

realism:

wanted

Lucida, "I

sweetness and charm is

at certain

be

to

On

Roland Barthes

is

plaintive,

more

a sense of disaggregation of his ideas,

friendly

details,

would be

my

— repre-

a

few

"the detail." In

calls

"Were

a writer,

I

through the

life,

and detached biographer, were

few preferences,

a

if

desperate: writing

and of himself

the preface to Sade/Fourier/Loyola, Barthes writes: I

Socratic

an idea reaching out.

is

sented by his increasing fascination with what he

some

The

a primitive, without culture.")

become more

and dead, how pleased

divestment

a desire for a further

photographs," he writes in Camera

an embrace, a being embraced; every idea

There

87

photographs fascinate because of what they

may awaken

they

("Looking

self.

Itself:

efforts of

to reduce itself to a

inflections,

let

few

us say: to 'biog-

raphemes' whose distinction and mobility might travel beyond the limits

of any

and come

fate,

to touch, like Epicurean atoms,

body, destined to the same dispersion." perspective of his Barthes's late

of something

own

work

The need

future

to touch, even in the

mortality. is filled

with signals that he had

—the enterprise of the

critic as artist

become another kind of writer. (He announced novel.)

some

There were exalted avowals of

come

to the

end

— and was seeking

to

his intention to write a

vulnerability, of

being forlorn.

Barthes more and more entertained an idea of writing which resembles the mystical idea of kenosis, emptying out.

only systems to

—

his ideas

were

He

in a state of melt

—but the

"I" as well

had

be dismantled. (True knowledge, says Barthes, depends on the "un-

masking of the

empty

'L' ")

subject, the

The

aesthetics of absence

exemption from meaning

gesture of

good

taste.

Toward the

took on another inflection.

A

—the empty

—were

the great project of depersonalization which

is

acknowledged that not

is

all

sign, the

intimations of

the aesthete's highest

close of Barthes's work, this ideal

spiritual ideal of depersonalization

—

that

perhaps the characteristic terminus of every serious aesthete's posi-

tion.

(Think of Wilde, of Valery.)

view

self-destructs:

what follows

It is is

the point at which the aesthete's

either silence

—or transformation.

Barthes harbored spiritual strivings that could not be supported by his aesthete's position. It

did in his very

last

was inevitable

work and

the aesthetics of absence, and

teaching.

that

he pass beyond

it,

as

he

At the end, he had done with

now spoke

of literature as the embrace

— 88

SUSAN SONTAG

of subject and object. There was an emergence of a vision of "wisdom" of the Platonic sort

—tempered,

to

be

sure,

by wisdom of

a

worldly

kind: skeptical of dogmatisms, conscientious about gratification, wistfully attached to ity,

had run

Utopian ideals. Barthes's temperament,

their course.

And from

this

style, sensibil-

vantage point his work

now

appears to unfold, with more grace and poignancy and with far greater intellectual

power than

that of any of his contemporaries, the consider-

able truths vouchsafed to the aesthete's sensibility, to a intellectual adventure, to the talent for contradiction

commitment

to

and inversion

those "late" ways of experiencing, evaluating, reading the world; and surviving in

it,

drawing energy, finding consolation (but

finally not),

taking pleasure, expressing love. [1982]

Walser's Voice

walser

Robert

IS

one of the important German-language

writers of the twentieth century

—

four novels that have survived (my favorite

Jakob von

Gun ten) and

a is

for his short prose,

free fall of his writing are less

impeded by

major

writer,

both for

the third, written in 1908,

where the musicality and plot.

Anyone seeking

bring Walser to a public that has yet to discover him has

whole arsenal of glorious comparisons. cate, as sly, as

haunted.

A

cross

its

between

Kleist

was more

past, so

we

A Paul

hand

—

as deli-

Klee in prose

a

cannot help but see Walser as the missing link greatly. (At the time,

it

be Kafka who was seen through the prism of Walser.

Robert Musil, another admirer among Walser's contemporaries, first

a

as literature's present inevitably

and Kafka, who admired him

likely to

to

at

between Stevie Smith and Beckett:

good-humored, sweet Beckett. And, remakes

his

after

reading Kafka pronounced him "a peculiar case of the Walser

type.") I get a similar rush of pleasure

short prose as

I

from Walser's single-voiced

do from Leopardi's dialogues and

writer's

triumphant short prose form.

weather

in Walser's stories

and sketches,

And

me

abound

literature: pillow

says in idleness."

Japanese

the variety of mental

their elegance

predictable lengths remind in classical

playlets, that great

and

their un-

of the free, first-person forms that

book, poetic

But any true lover of Walser

will

want

diary, "es-

to disregard

the net of comparisons that one can throw over his work.

89

SUSAN SONTAG

90

In long as in short prose Walser

is

promulgating the

a miniaturist,

claims of the anti-heroic, the limited, the humble, the small

sponse to his acute feeling for the interminable. Walser's

—

as if in re-

life illustrates

the restlessness of one kind of depressive temperament; he had the de-

and with the way time distends,

pressive's fascination with stasis,

consumed, and spent much of space: his walks. His

of endlessness:

The important

on.

dom

kind of

as a

The moral

is

plays with the depressive 's appalled vision

voice

—musing, conversing, rambling, running

redeemed

who

—

that

is,

one "drowning

life.

to

felt

is

1),

unimportant, wis-

for success

the refusal of power, of domina-

—declares the

characteristic

don't want to do anything.

One knows

it is

man who wanted

In "Kienast" (1917), Walser describes "a

astonishing micro-script,

observes:

"We

was

a

his

nothing

proud, stupen-

much of it written in his What Walser says about

secreted work,

without pause.

inaction, renunciation of effort, effortlessness,

romantic one, of the

recurrent

that of some-

failure that

do with anything." This non-doer was, of course,

who

The

about the repugnance

—the prodigious spread of

dously productive writer

Walser

Walser evokes the race of "odd peo-

the opposite of the egotist's:

obedience."

in

is

nobody

who

lack character,"

"I" of Walser's prose

Walser

as a species of the

shy, valiant loquacity.

persona. In "Flower Days" (191 ple,

time into

his life obsessively turning

core of Walser's art

I'm ordinary

tion.

work

all

it is

is

artist's activity.

In

"A

is

Little

a

program, an

Ramble"

anti-

(1914),

he

We

al-

don't need to see anything out of the ordinary.

ready see so much."

Walser often writes, from the point of view of romantic visionary imagination. "Kleist portrait

in

Thun"

a casualty, of the (1913),

both

and authoritative tour of the mental landscape of

self-

suicide-

destined romantic genius, depicts the precipice on the edge of which

Walser

lived.

The

last

paragraph, with

its

excruciating modulations,

seals

an account of mental ruin as grand as anything

ture.

But most of

from the brink.

his stories

He

Walser can assure

is

just

us, in

I

know

in litera-

and sketches bring consciousness back

having his "gentle and courteous

"Nervous"

bit of fun,"

(1916), speaking in the first person.

"Grouches, grouches, one must have them, and one must have the courage to

live

with them. That's the nicest way to

live.

Nobody should

Walser's Voice little bit

of weirdness."

The

(1917), identifies

walking with a

lyrical

be afraid of his

Walk"

91

longest of the stories,

"The

mobility and detachment

of temperament, with the "raptures of freedom"; darkness arrives only the end. Walser's art assumes depression and terror, in order

at

(mostly) to accept

it

—ironize over

it,

lighten

These are

it.

gleeful as

well as somber soliloquies about the relation to gravity, in both senses, physical and characterological: anti-gravity writing, in praise of

ment and sloughing

off,

move-

weightlessness; portraits of consciousness

walking about in the world, enjoying

its

"morsel of

life,"

radiant with

despair.

In Walser's fictions one

is (as

side a head, but this universe sistic. It is

of?" Walser's voice asks in

of

— and

our theatrical

all

much

of

this despair

modern

—

is

art)

always

anything but solip-

little

"A

"What kind

am

of people

Sort of Speech" (1925).

I

thinking

"Of me, of you,

dominations, of the freedoms that are none, of

the un-freedoms that are not taken seriously, of these destroyers

never pass up a chance for a joke, of the people

That question mark tesy.

He

at

the end of the answer

is

who

who

are desolate?"

a typical

Walser cour-

Walser's virtues are those of the most mature, most civilized

is

in-

charged with compassion: awareness of the creatureliness of

of the fellowship of sadness.

life,

in so

a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer.

[1982]

art.

Danilo

THE

DEATH OF

Danilo Kis on October

1 5

,

Kis

1989, at the age

of fifty-four, wrenchingly cut short one of the most important

journeys in literature

made by any

writer during the second half of the

twentieth century. Born on the rim of the Yugoslav cauldron tica,

near the frontier with Hungary) a few years before World

to a

Hungarian Jewish father (Kis

in

Auschwitz and

raised mostly in

a

is

a

II

Serb Orthodox mother from rural Montenegro,

Hungary and

in

Montenegro,

eventually a part-time expatriate, doing

a life

War

Hungarian name) who perished

made

of the university in Belgrade, where he

finally a full-time

Subo-

(in

a

graduate in literature his

debut

some teaching

as a writer,

in France,

and

one, in Paris, where he lived his last ten years, Kis had

span that matched, from

start to finish,

what might have been

thought the worst the century had to offer his part of Europe: Nazi

conquest and the genocide of the Jews, followed by Soviet takeover.

Nineteen eighty-nine, the year Kis died of cancer, was, of course, the annus mirabilis in which Soviet-style totalitarian rule ended in Central

Europe. By mid-October, the collapse of what had seemed im-

mutable was torn down.

clearly It is

under way; three weeks

the Berlin Wall was

comforting to think that he died knowing only the

good news. Happily

—

it is

the only thing about his premature death

which gives some consolation

—he didn't

multi-confessional, multi-ethnic state of

92

later,

live to see the collapse

which he was

of the

a citizen (his

Danilo Kis

"mixed" origin made Kis very much

European cide.

An

on

return,

camps and geno-

country, of concentration

ardent foe of nationalist vanities, he would have loathed Serb

ethnic fascism even

more than he loathed

Second Yugoslavia

culture of the

he were

that, if

own

soil, in his

and the

a Yugoslav),

93

still

it

the neo-Bolshevik official

has replaced.

It is

hard to imagine

he could have borne the destruction of

alive,

Bosnia.

The amount not

make him

there was

no

of history, or horror, a writer

retreating

most

legislators.

is

from an exalted sense of the

a small country

portant, with the litical,

obliged to endure does

or her a great writer. But geography

of the writer's responsibility that,

was from

is

literally,

where writers are

gifted

writer's place

came with the for better

For Kis

destiny.

and

territory.

for

and Kis

worse im-

becoming moral, and sometimes even po-

Perhaps more often for worse:

who provided genocidal project known

was eminent

it

Belgrade writers

the ideological underpinning of the

Serbian

as ethnic cleansing.

most Serb writers and

artists

The complicity

of

not in exile in the current triumph of

Greater Serbian imperialism suggests that the anti-nationalist voices, of which Kis was the bravest and most eloquent, have always been in the minority.

Much

as

by temperament and exquisitely cosmopolitan

literary culture

he would have preferred a

which

was kept separate from

attack

literature

and therefore,

necessarily,

less

embattled course, in

politics,

Kis was always under

on the

attack.

The

first

fight

was

was the provincialism not so much of

against provincialism. This

small literature (for the former Yugoslavia produced at least

a

two

world-class prose writers, Ivo Andric and Miroslav Krleza) as of a state-supported, state-rewarded literature. his

being the utterly independent,

It

could be fought simply by

artistically

ambitious writer he was,

almost from the beginning. But worse attacks were to come.

One

who

of those writers

are

first

of

all

who

readers,

prefer

dawdling and grazing and blissing out in the Great Library and surrender to their vocation only Kis was not what

when

would be

the urge to write

becomes unbearable,

called prolific. In his lifetime

he published

nine books, seven of them in the fourteen years between 1962,

was twenty-seven, and

1976,

when he was

forty-one. First

when he

came

a pair

of short novels, The Attic and Psalm 44 (published in 1962; not yet

SUSAN SONTAG

94

The second book, Garden, Ashes

translated into English).

The

novel.

Sorrows (1968), was a book of

third, Early

was

fourth, Hourglass (1972),

a novel.

lections of essays, Po-etika (1972)

A Tomb for

The

and Po-etika

sixth

was

a

stories.

The

were two

col-

The

II (1974).

seventh,

Boris Davidovich (1976), was a collection of thematically

linked stories that his publishers chose to

while an instructor in Serbo-Croatian

he'd written Garden, Ashes

By

and

fifth

(1965),

this time, Kis

when he

He

wrote

it

the University of Bordeaux, as

at

taught

at

Strasbourg.

was spending more and more time abroad, though

he did not consider himself to be

in exile,

have said he was a "dissident writer": ing worthy of the

call a novel.

name

any more than he would

was too

it

him

clear to

that writ-

of literature had to be unofficial. With this sev-

enth book, a suite of fictional case histories of the Stalinist Terror, Kiss

work

finally attracted the international attention

for Boris Davidovich

also

of negative attention back

attracted

home

a

it

web

The campaign, which

—

that the

Anatomy Lesson

The

to respond.

(1978).

result

A Tomb

Defending

against these scurrilous charges, Kis his literary genealogy (that

was

mounted

—

book was

to

which Kis

his eighth

book, The

of plagiarisms from an arcane bibliography

had no choice but

A Tomb

seven-month-long campaign

in Belgrade.

reeked of anti-Semitism, centered on an accusation a

deserved.

for Boris Davidovich

a full-scale exposition of

his literary tastes), a post- or proto-

is,

modernist poetics of the novel, and a portrait of what

a writer's

honor

could be. During the next ten years, he published only one more book,

The Encyclopedia of the Dead

unlinked

(1984), a collection of

stories.

The Western European, and eventually North American, acclaim for

A

Tomb for Boris Davidovich

—

typically confining

ature of dissidence from "the other translations of the earlier

Europe"

it

within the

—had

liter-

brought about

books into the major foreign languages, and

Kis started to be invited to first-rank literary conferences, to win prizes,

and

to

seem

a plausible

Nobel candidate. Becoming an

famous writer meant becoming

pronounce on

a

much

internationally

interviewed writer. Asked to

literary matters and, invariably, to

comment on

the in-

famies back home, he did so with grave, always incisive combative ness

—he gave splendidly substantive

interviews.

He

was

contribute short pieces to newspapers and magazines

—

also asked to

treating

no

lit-

Danilo

95

Kis

erary solicitation as ever less than an occasion for intensity. Recalling that Kis published only

one book of fiction

poet in prose as well as a prince of

in-

he gave

says

and prefaces,

did.

he

No

as

interviews, wrote as

was not best employed

great writer of fiction

Bernhard,

A

who were

And

is.

in these discursive forms.

also lost to literature in the late 1980s, Kis

the novels and stories he did write

somewhat

to say that Kis

is

Thomas

unlike Italo Calvino and

probably not yet done the best of what he was capable in

these two

more

older, far

life,

es-

can't but regret that

dignation, Kis surely

decade of his

many

one

as

many

in the last

assure

still

prolific

him

fiction.

had But

a place alongside

contemporaries

—which

is

one of the handful of incontestably major writers of

the second half of the century.

Kis had a complicated literary genealogy, which he was undoubtedly simplifying

when he

declared himself, as he often did, a child of

Borges and of Bruno Schulz. But to marry the cosmopolitan Argentine to the

immured small-town

viously,

Polish

he was claiming foreign

Jew sounds

relatives

the right note.

Most ob-

over his descendance from his

by yoking together

native Serbo-Croatian literary family. Specifically,

the serenely, speculatively erudite Borges and the inward-looking, hy-

perdescriptive Schulz, he was pointing to the principal double strand in his

own work. Odd

"mixed" fiction)

literary

and

mixtures were very

methods

—most

much

fully realized in

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

to Kis's taste.

(fictional history)

—gave him

exactly the right freedoms to advance the cause of both truth Finally:

one can,

choose one's

in literature,

own

and

parents. But

obliges a writer to declare his or her parentage. Kis, however,

proclaim

his.

Like every writer

ate enthusiast

is

a great reader,

art.

nobody had

to

he was an inveter-

about the work of others. His talent for admiration also

made him an extremely numerous

who

His

Hourglass (historical

collegial writer,

translations of

which he expressed best

in his

contemporary writers he undertook from

French, Hungarian, Russian, and English into Serbo-Croatian. In expatriation he

work

—

was

still

really

back home,

despite'his lived estrangement

tive country.

He had

in his

from the

head and

literary

in all his

world of his na-

never forsaken them, though they had betrayed

him.

When

Kis died in Paris in 1989, the Belgrade press went into

SUSAN SONTAG

96

The renegade

national mourning.

star of

Yugoslav literature had been

extinguished. Safely dead, he could be eulogized by the mediocrities

who had

always envied him and had engineered his literary

nication,

and who would then proceed

become

official writers

order. Kis

about

is,

American 1993,

as

Yugoslavia

who

Belgrade as elsewhere. The place

where he was and

jevo. Literary

—

is

when

I

apart

went

—

to

genuinely cares

in the

former Yu-

perhaps most ardently admired

people there did not exactly ply

literature

fell

post- communist, national chauvinist

of course, admired by everyone

literature, in

goslavia

new

of the

excommu-

me with

is

Sara-

questions about

to Sarajevo for the first time in April

but they were extremely impressed that I'd had the privilege of

being a friend of Danilo Kis. In besieged Sarajevo people think a

about

Kis.

His fervent screed against nationalism, incorporated into

The Anatomy Lesson,

is

one of the two prophetic

As

multi-ethnic Bosnia

secular,

crushed under the

more present than struggle to survive

texts

— —Yugoslavia's

story by Andric, "A Letter from 1920" cited.

lot

that

—the other

is

a

one hears most often Yugoslavia

new

imperative of one ethnicity /one

ever.

He

state,

deserves to be a hero in Sarajevo,

—

Kis

is is

whose

embodies the honor of Europe.

Unfortunately, the honor of Europe has been lost at Sarajevo. Kis

and like-minded writers who spoke up against nationalism and fomented-from-the-top ethnic hatreds could not save Europe's honor, Europe's better idea. But great writer does not

which

is

the end of

it

is

not true that, to paraphrase Auden, a

make anything happen. At

many

things, literature, too,

of Danilo Kis preserves the honor

the end of the century, is

besieged.

The work

of literature. [i994]

Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke

START WITH

the

Which means

title.

.

.

nothing. There

.

character in the novel called Ferdydurke. foretaste of insolence to

Published in is

And

this is

is

no

only a

come.

when

late 1937,

author was thirty-three, Ferdydurke

its

The

the great Polish writer's second book.

title

of his

first,

Memoirs

of a Time of Immaturity (1933), would have served beautifully for the novel. Perhaps this

That ers as if

was

first

is

why Gombrowicz opted

book, whose

title

was pounced on by the Warsaw review-

Gombrowicz had made

a collection of stories (he'd

since 1926); over the next pair ("The Child Filibert") that

voke.

seemed

—

He would

his

in

magazines

stories appeared, including a

and "The Child Runs Deep

agreeable worcl!

word

—

Had

the

his

life:

it

is

as inter-

of his volume of fanciful

Now

—what

"Immaturity

—became my war

in

Princess Ivona; then, in early

title

"ill-chosen"?

"Immaturity" (not "youth")

on because

first play,

he would

write an epic in defense of immaturity.

toward the end of

sists

been publishing them

he would use, with chapter-long mock prefaces,

he embarked on a novel.

1935,

shaming confession inadvertently,

in Filidor"

ludes in Ferdydurke, as well as a

stories

a

two years more

Runs Deep

for jabberwocky.

a

really pro-

As he declared

compromising,

dis-

cry."

the

word Gombrowicz

insists on, in-

represents something unattractive, something, to use

97

SUSAN SONTAG

98

another of his key words, endorses,

inferior.

thirty-year-old

who, waking up one morning

the conviction of the futility of his a teacher

iation, a

his novel describes,

not, Faust-like, to relive the glory days of youth.

is

happens to the

by

The longing

and returned

to the

and

life

his projects,

all

is

world of callow-schoolboys

and

What

roiled in

abducted

is

a humil-

fall.

From

the

start,

Gombrowicz was

To

Gombrowicz might have

irritate,

think, therefore

I

he had chosen to adopt

and bizarre tone" bordering on "mania,

"fantastic, eccentric,

absurdity."

to write,

A young

contradict.

said,

is

madcap grimaces and

folly,

to conquer.

poses.

On

in the writers'

the page, he sought an

equally vehement relation to the reader. Grandiose and goofy, this

work of unrelenting Still, it

going

seems

I

aspirant to glory in 1930s literary

Warsaw, Gombrowicz had already become legendary cafes for his

a

is

a

address.

likely that

when he began

Gombrowicz did not know where he was

the novel. "I can well remember,"

Gombrowicz

declared in 1968, a year before he died (did he remember? or was he

massaging

that,

his legend?),

when

I

started Ferdydurke,

ing satire that

my words were

But bit

would put me

between

it

I

wanted

soon whirled away

their teeth

such speed that give

I

had

to write

my

in a violent dance, they

and galloped towards

a

a bit-

enemies.

took the

grotesque lunacy with

to rewrite the first part of the

book

in

order to

the same grotesque intensity.

But the problem was

less (I suspect) that the first

further infusion of lunatic energies than that ticipate the freight of

argument

Ferdydurke

starts

chapters needed a

Gombrowicz did not

— about the nature of — about

ture (particularly Polish culture),

in

no more than

in a superior position over

ideals

eros,

his tale

about

would

ancul-

carry.

with a dream-like abduction to an absurd world

which the big become small and the small monstrously

big: those

great buttocks in the sky. In contrast to the landscape Lewis Carroll

conjured up for a prepubescent shape-shiftings

and

girl,

Gombrowicz's wonderland of

resizings seethes with lust:

Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke

99

Everything was expanding in blackness. Inflating and widening, yet

at

the same time shrinking and straining, evading something, and some

kind of winnowing, general and particular,

and

a coagulating tension

a

tensing coagulation, a dangling by a fine thread, as well as transforma-

and furthermore

tion into something, transmutation,

some cumulative, towering system, and

on

as if

a

—

a falling into

narrow

raised six stories up, together with the excitement of

all

little

plank

organs.

And

tickling.

In Alice's story, a child

into an asexual

falls

new, fantastic but implacable

owning up

grownup who

a is

of-

to disreputable desire.

Starts with an abduction;

fessor

Ferdydurke, the

schoolboy discovers new, puerile freedoms for giving

turned into a fense and

logic. In

underworld governed by

ends with an abduction. The

Pimko) returns the protagonist

first

(by Pro-

to the scene of true, that

is,

un-

manageable, feeling and desire. The second abduction shows the protagonist making a provisional flight back into so-called maturity:

If I

someone were

to spot

explain this escapade?

me

in the hallway, in the darkness,

How

do we

and abnormal roads? Normality of abnormality.

How much

everyday order of things

is

find ourselves

a tightrope-walker

potential

madness

is

how would

on these tortuous above the abyss

contained in the

—you never know when and how the course

of events will lead you to kidnap a farmhand and take to the

Zosia that

I

should be kidnapping.

napping Zosia from thing to do,

hand

.

.

if

a country

anyone

it

If

anyone,

manor would be

was Zosia, and not

it

fields. It's

should be Zosia, kid-

the normal and correct

this stupid, idiotic

farm-

.

Ferdydurke

is

one of the most bracing, direct books ever written

about sexual desire

—

this

without a single scene of sexual union. To be

sure, the cards are stacked

from the

start in favor

of eros.

Who

would

not concur in the silencing of this social babble by the clamor of

rumps, thighs, calves? The head commands, or wishes reign.

to.

The buttocks

SUSAN SONTAG

100

Gombrowicz

Later,

called

it

a

parody of

Gombrowicz contradict,

is

manner of

He

even on

matters," he declared, "is the

little

— and Ferdydurke

"To

supreme neces-

a dazzling novel of ideas.

These

and wings.

ideas give the novel both weight

Gombrowicz

is

also

Voltaire.

one of the super-arguers of the twentieth century

of art today"

sity

referred to his novel as a pamphlet.

a philosophical tale in the

capers and thunders, hectors and mocks, but he

also entirely serious

is

about his project of transvaluation, his critique of

high "ideals." Ferdydurke

is

one of the few novels

called Nietzschean; certainly

it is

I

know

that could be

the only comic novel that could be so

described. (The affecting fantasia of Hesse's Steppenwolf seems, in

comparison,

riddled

with

Nietzsche deplored the

sentimentality.)

ascendancy of slave values sponsored by Christianity, and called for the overthrowing of corrupt ideals and for ness.

new forms

Gombrowicz, affirming the "human" need

completeness,

youth,

for imperfection, in-

proclaims himself a specialist in

may seem a drastic what Gombrowicz has

Swinish adolescence

antidote to

but

in

this

came my

is

exactly

of masterful-

ideal forever. I

worshipped the

inferiority.

smug

maturity,

mind. "Degradation be-

slave." It

is still

a Nietzschean

project of unmasking, of exposing, with a merry satyr-dance of dualisms:

mature versus immature, wholes versus

parts, clothed versus

naked, heterosexuality versus homosexuality, complete versus incomplete.

Gombrowicz modernism, tional

gaily deploys

lately relabeled

decorums of novel

narrator awash in his

ing,

he

is

of the devices of high literary

"post-modern," which tweak the

tradi-

writing: notably, that of a garrulous, intrusive

own

When

slides into pathos.

many

contradictory emotional states. Burlesque

not preening, he

is

abject;

when not clown-

vulnerable and self-pitying.

An immature who flaunts what tor, sincerity

narrator is

is

some

sort of candid narrator; even

being one of those

of candor and provocation. "In literature sincerity leads nowhere the

more

artificial

we

are, the closer

we come

Gombrowicz

says:

.

.

.

to frankness. Artificiality

allows the artist to approach shameful truths." Diary,

one

What he is not is a "sincere" narraideals that make no sense in the world

usually hidden.

As

for his celebrated

Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke Have you

ever read a "sincere" diary?

mendacious diary is

.

.

And,

.

The

"sincere" diary

in the long run,

what

is

101

the most

bore sincerity

a

is! It

ineffectual.

My diary had to be sincere, but

Then what?

How

could

solve the

I

problem? The word, the

has this consoling particularity: confesses but in what

So

I

had

my

a certain way, in

Still,

is

how

I

my

is

my

could not be sincere. loose,

spoken word,

close to sincerity, not in

what

it

pursues.

it

diary into a confession.

intention of imposing myself

had

I

to

show

on the reader

in

desire to create myself with everyone looking on.

would

however

it

claims to be and in what

to avoid turning

myself "in action," in

"This

it

it

like to

be for you," and not "This

fanciful the plot of Ferdydurke,

is

how

no reader

I

am."

will regard

the protagonist and his longings as anything other than a transposition

of the author's

own personality and pathology. By making Joey Kowalname of the protagonist-narrator is rendered in Enand the author of an unsuccessful, much derided book

ski (as the Polish glish) a writer

—

of stories entitled, yes, Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity dares the reader not to think about the

A

WRITER

and

WHO

REVELS

A

privileges.

its

writer

man who wrote

in the fantasy of

who

imagines a

—Gombrowicz the novel.

renouncing his identity

flight into

youth, repre-

sented as a kidnapping; a discarding of the destiny expected of an adult, represented as a subtraction

from the world

in

which one

is

known.

And

then the fantasy came true. (Few writers'

lives

have so clearly

taken the shape of a destiny.) At the age of thirty-five, a few days short of the fateful date of September into

unexpected

World.

It

was

far

exile,

as brutal a

of a thirty-year-old

man

i,

1939,

Gombrowicz was dropped

from Europe,

change

in

in his real life as the

known about him, he was

means

him because nothing was

offered the divine opportunity to lose him-

In Poland, he was well-born Witold

"vanguard" writer

New

imagined turning

into a schoolboy. Stranded, without any

of support, wnere nothing was expected of

self.

the "immature"

who had

written a

Gombrowicz,

book many

a

prominent

(including his friend,

— SUSAN SONTAG

102

the other great Polish writer of the same period,

Bruno Schulz) consid-

ered a masterpiece. In Argentina, he writes, "I was nothing, so

I

could

do anything." impossible to imagine

It is

Gombrowicz without

(much of which was spent

years in Argentina

own

he made to

suit his

a relatively

young man; he returned

when he was

nearing

in

his twenty-four

penury), an Argentina

He

fantasies, his daring, his pride.

Europe (but never

to

and died

sixty,

man who

south of

Gombrowicz

published Ferdydurke two years earlier was

ready fully formed as a literary tial

Poland

to Poland)

six years later in the

France. Separation from Europe was not the making of as a writer: the

left

artist. It

al-

was, rather, the most providen-

confirmation of everything his novel knows, and gave direction and

bite to the

The

marvelous writings

ordeal of emigration

sharpened

still

— and

to

come.

for

Gombrowicz

in

in

as a

lettre; that

is,

animated by

program of

the Diary.

The

anything but a "personal"

post-modern avant

fiction,

a

was an ordeal

we know from

his cultural combativeness, as

— three volumes English, and kind of free-form diary— can be read

Diary

it

violating

decorum

that of Ferdydurke. Claims for the staggering genius

and

la

similar to

intellectual

acuity of the author vie with a running account of his insecurities, imperfections,

and embarrassments, and

a defiant

avowal of barbaric,

yokel prejudices. Considering himself slighted by, and therefore eager to reject, the lively literary milieu of late-i93os that

it

harbored one indisputably great

writer,

himself "at opposite poles" from Borges. ature, I in

As

if

life.

To

tell

the truth

I

am

Buenos

"He

Aires,

Gombrowicz declared

is

deeply rooted in

liter-

anti-literature."

in agreement, shallow agreement, with Gombrowicz's entirely

self-serving quarrel with the idea of literature,

many now

Diary instead of Ferdydurke as his greatest work.

No

and aware

one can forget the notorious opening of the Diary:

Monday Me. Tuesday

Me.

regard the

Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke

103

Wednesday Me. Thursday

Me.

Having got

that straight,

Gombrowicz devoted

Friday's entry to a sub-

on some material he had been reading

tle reflection

Gombrowicz expected must continually defend

in the Polish press.

to offend with his egocentricity: a writer

his borders.

But

a writer

is

also

someone who

must abandon borders, and egotism, so Gombrowicz argued, precondition of spiritual and intellectual freedom. In the .

.

me

.

...

we

.

.

...

.

me" one

we

culture, with ticism)

.. its

.

the

is

.

.

.

me

hears the solitary emigre thumbing his nose at "we

we."

Gombrowicz never stopped arguing with

the national identity.

The

cultural

its

writers with the national martyrdom,

relentless intelligence

and

Polish

roman-

intractable collectivism of spirit (usually called

and the obsession of

servations on

"me

artistic matters,

and energy of

his ob-

the pertinence of his chal-

lenge to Polish pieties, his bravura contentiousness, ended by making

him the most

influential prose writer of the past half century in his na-

tive country.

The

Polish sense of being marginal to

European

culture,

and to

Western European concern while enduring generations of foreign occupation, had prepared the hapless emigre better than he might have

wished to endure being sentenced to many years of near-total isolation as a writer.

Courageously, he embarked on the enterprise of making

deep, liberating sense out of the unprotectedness of his situation in Argentina. Exile tested his vocation disaffection

him

a

from

consummate

citizen of

MORE THAN SIXTY mains of the

and expanded

nationalist pieties

Y

E

A

world

R

S

it.

Strengthening his

self- congratulation, it

made

literature.

after

Ferdydurke was written,

specifically Polish targets of

have vanished along with the Poland of age

and

in

little re-

Gombrowicz's scorn. These

which he was reared and came

—destroyed by the multiple blows of war, Nazi occupation, So-

SUSAN SONTAG

104

dominance (which prevented him from ever

viet

post- 989 ethos of consumerism. 1

that adults always claim to

Almost

we

we want

to

be

Goodness, Truth

reality,

we

feel

assumption

his

is

.

.

.

cultivated, superior,

we

use the language of maturity and

stance, Beauty,

intimate

dated

as

and the

be mature:

In our relations with other people

mature, so

returning),

talk about, for in-

But, within our

own

confidential,

nothing but inadequacy, immaturity

The

declaration seems from another world.

now

for

How

.

.

unlikely

whatever embarrassing inadequacies people

.

it

feel to

would be

be covered

over with hifalutin absolutes such as Beauty, Goodness, Truth. The

European-style ideals of maturity, cultivation, wisdom have given way steadily to American-style celebrations of the Forever

crediting of literature

or anti-life

and other expressions of "high" culture

a staple of the

is

Young. The

new

now who would all;

claim to love "the inferior"

that actually

opinions against which

it is

superior.

now

a rou-

would argue

still

offend?

Still

that

it is

are

still

cherished.

seem outrageous? Exception

for the novel's acidic misogyny, probably not.

extravagant, brilliant, disturbing, brave, funny

.

.

.

Does

it still

own legend, Gombrowicz was both when he claimed to have successfully

and not

telling the truth

forms of greatness. But whatever he thought, or wanted us

avoided

all

to think

he thought, there are certain unavoidable consequences

has produced a masterpiece, and

edged

as

such. In the late

it

eventually

1950s Ferdydurke

comes was

(under auspicious sponsorship) into French, and "discovered."

triumph over writer

who

He had wanted

his adversaries

above

real

all,

all

their beliefs,

and

if

one

be acknowl-

finally translated

nothing more than

and detractors,

to

Gombrowicz

was,

at

this success; this

and imagined. But the

counseled his readers to try to avoid

themselves, to guard against ings,

seem

wonderful? Yes.

zealous administrator of his

telling

last,

not

Hardly any of the cherished

Gombrowicz contended

Then can Ferdydurke

A

is

not mandatory, contribution to public entertainment. Anyone

inferior at

made

as elitist

culture ruled by entertainment values.

Indiscretion about one's unconventional sexual feelings tine, if

dis-

all

expressions of

to mistrust their feel-

to stop identifying themselves with

what defines them,

Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke could hardly

fail

to insist that he,

deed, he has to be inferior to

hovered

in the sky, while I

that hovers high ity at

ary

it.

Gombrowicz, was not

normalize desire

.

.

.

into culture,

remained below." Like the great backside

the end of the novel, Ferdydurke has floated live

that book. In-

"The work, transformed

above the protagonist's halfhearted

empyrean. Long

105

its

flight into

upward

sublime mockery of

and the reach of great

all

normal-

to the liter-

attempts to

literature.

[2000]

Pedro Paramo

"

I I

told

CAME TO COMALA because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Paramo, lived there. It was my mother who me. And I had promised her that after she died I would go see

him.

and

I

I

squeezed her hands as a sign I would do it. She was near death, would have promised her anything ..." With the opening sen-

tences of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, as with the beginnings of Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas and Joseph Roth's novel

March,

we know we

are in the

hands of

tences, of a bewitching concision

a

master

The Radetzky

storyteller.

and directness

These sen-

that pull the reader

into the book, have a burnished, already-told quality, like the begin-

ning of a fairy

tale.

But the limpid opening of the book Pedro Paramo gests.

The

is

a far

more complex

novel's premise

—

a

hell.

The

only

its first

—mutates

narrative takes place in

move. In

fact,

beginning sug-

into a multi-voiced so-

two worlds: the Comala of

the present, to which Juan Preciado, the "I" of the journeying; and the

its

dead mother sending her son out into

the world, a son's quest for his father

journ in

is

narrative than

Comala of the

first

sentences,

is

past, the village of his mother's

memories and of Pedro Paramo's youth. The narrative switches back and forth between

first

person and third person, present and past. (The

great stories are not only told in the past tense, they are about the past.)

The Comala

106

of the past

is

a village of the living.

The Comala

of the

Pedro Paramo present

ado in

107

inhabited by the dead, and the encounters that Juan Preci-

is

have when he reaches Comala are with ghosts. Paramo means

will

Spanish barren plain, wasteland. Not only

dead, but so

everyone else in the

is

is

the father he seeks

Being dead, they have noth-

village.

ing to express except their essence.

my

"In

life

many

there are

silences," Rulfo

once

said. "In

my

writ-

ing, too."

many

Rulfo has said that he carried Pedro Paramo inside him for

knew how

years before he

to write

of pages, then discarding them

"and made

said,

me

freedom to

acters the

see the

made

me,"

my

char-

is

a legendary

too, in his lifetime. Rulfo

ries

to

book by

was born

in

magazines

in 1953. It

translated into English

it is

a

a

was

called

under the

a legend,

studied law

at

the

in the late 1930s.

His

and

a collection of sto-

El llano en llamas, which has been

The Burning Plain and Other Sto-

title

Pedro Paramo appeared two years

him

as a voice of

unprecedented

a no-time."

who became

fifteen,

in the 1940s,

ries.

terly

would seem,

in 191 8 in a village in the state of

Mexico City when he was

appeared

came out

literature.

is

a writer

and began writing, but not publishing,

university, first stories

it

of silences, of hanging threads, of cut scenes, where

Pedro Paramo

went

to leave

Pedro Paramo, but

everything occurs in a simultaneous time which

Jalisco,

and

to disappear

a structure in

is

stories disciplined

which provoked,

talk at will,

lack of structure. Yes, there structure

need

was writing hundreds

called the novel an exercise in

"The practice of writing the short

elimination.

he

Rather, he

it.

—he once

later.

The two books

originality

and authority

established in

Mexican

Quiet (or taciturn), courteous, fastidious, learned, and

without pretensions, Rulfo was a kind of invisible

ut-

man who

earned his living in ways entirely unconnected with literature (for years

he was a

tire

salesman),

most nights of music.

He

also

edged

his life reading ("I travel in

writer to publish his

even rarer for

as masterpieces.

another book.

married and had children, and

A

And

first

rarer

first

books

still

spent

his fellow writ-

books when he

to

who

books") and listening to

was extremely famous, and revered by

ers. It is rare for a

his mid-forties,

who

is

already in

be immediately acknowl-

for such a writer never to publish

novel called La Cordillera was announced as forth-

coming by Rulfo 's publisher

for

many

years, starting in the late 1960s

SUSAN SONTAG

108

and announced by the author

as destroyed, a

few years before

his

death

in 1986.

Everyone asked Rulfo why he did not publish another book, the point of a writer's

life

the point of a writer's

which once

will last

if it is

that after

— and

were

life is

this is

to

to

go on writing and publishing. In

produce

what Rulfo

not worth reading

as

many

book

a great

—

No book

did.

times. Garcia

is

that

is,

a

if

fact,

book

worth reading

Marquez has

said

he discovered Pedro Paramo (with Kafka's Metamorphosis,

the most important reading of his early writing years), he could recite

from memory long passages and eventually knew the whole book by heart, so

much

did he admire

Rulfo 's novel

is

it

and want

to

be saturated by

it.

not only one of the masterpieces of twentieth-

century world literature but one of the most influential of the century's

books; indeed, in

sense. is

it

Spanish in the

a

It is a

book

would be hard

to overestimate

last forty years.

book

Pedro Paramo

that seems, in retrospect, as

that has profoundly affected the

continues to resonate in other books.

The

made

its is

if it

translation

Buenos Aires

shortly before his death that Pedro

in

to

an accurate and uncut English version,

is

to

be written.

literature

by Margaret

It

and Jill

Juan Rulfo when we met

fulfills

I

had

making of

Costa, which

the promise

impact on literature

a classic in the truest

in

Paramo would appear

an important literary event. [

J

994]

DQ

HE

"SO BURIED HIMSELF

books

in his

nights reading from twilight to daybreak

dawn

dark; and so from

till

up and he

dried

Don

lost his

Quixote, like

But Flaubert's novel

and much reading,

Bovary,

is

much

a piece of realism:

With Don Quixote,

that the

a

books are bad;

Emma's imagination

thinks the world

everything

is

Don Quixote

Not only

his imagination;

The

first

has kidnapped

it.

thought, saw, or imagined followed the pat-

makes him,

The

narrator of

It

in contrast to

Emma

makes him mad;

Don Quixote

even torn papers lying in the

Don^Quixote's excessive reading is

not so

it

Bo-

makes

heroic, genuinely noble.

taste for reading

narrator's

it

the hero of the novel but also the narrator

sotted by reading.

result of

satis-

the sheer quantity of his reading.

beyond compromise or corruption.

him profound,

of romantic is

cor-

is

the inside of a book. (According to Cervantes,

tern of his reading.) Bookishness vary,

tales

hero of excess, the problem it is

Reading has not merely deformed

He

his brain

about the tragedy of reading.

rupted by the kind of books she reads, vulgar faction.

he spent the

mind."

Madame is

sleep

little

that

and the days from

is

is

someone be-

reports that he has a

streets.

But whereas the

madness, the result of the

authorship.

and

greatest epic about addiction,

Don Quixote

is

denunciation of the establishment of literature and a rhapsodic

both a call to

109

I

SUSAN SONTAG

10

literature.

Don Quixote

an inexhaustible book, whose subject

is

is

everything (the whole world) and nothing (the inside of someone's

head

—

that

is,

madness). Relentless, verbose, self-cannibalizing, reflex-

ive, playful, irresponsible, accretive, self- replicating is

— Cervantes

the very image of that glorious mise-en-abime which

of that fragile delirium which

A

writer

is

first

oi

all

when

authorship,

reader

a

reader; an impertinent reader justly,

is

who

—

its

a reader

is

book

literature,

and

manic expansiveness.

gone berserk;

claims to be able to do

the greatest living author

s

composed

it

a

rogue

better. Yet.

his definitive fable

about the writer's vocation, he invented an early-twentieth-century

who had chosen as Don Quixote. Once again.

writer

his

most ambitious work

Exactly as

than any book ever written,

is

is

(was).

to write (parts oi)

For Don Quixote, more

literature.

[1985]

A

Letter to Borges

June

13,

1996

New York Dear Borges, Since your literature was always placed under the sign of eternity, doesn't seem too years!) If ever a it

odd

to

be addressing

a letter to you. (Borges,

contemporary seemed destined for

you knew how to transcend your time, your

yet

that

seem quite magical. This had something

and generosity of your

attention.

most transparent of writers,

You were

as well as the

thing to do with a natural purity of for a rather long time,

spirit.

to

ten

literary immortality,

was you. You were very much the product of your time, your

and

it's

culture,

culture, in

ways

do with the openness

the least egocentric, the

most

artful. It also

Though you

lived

had some-

among

You had

The ordinary

a sense of

ideas of past, present,

future, quoting (as

something

as

time that was different from other people's.

your gaze. You liked to say that every

and the

us

you perfected practices of fastidiousness and of

detachment that made you an expert mental traveler to other eras well.

it

I

like "the present

and future seemed banal under

moment

of time contains the past

remember) the poet Browning, who wrote is

into the past." That, of course,

the instant in which the future crumbles

was part of your modesty: your

finding your ideas in the ideas of other writers.

taste for

SUSAN SONTAG

12

I

Your modesty was part of the sureness of your presence. You were a discoverer of

new

joys.

A

pessimism

did not need to be indignant. were, above

all,

to

me

terrible everything

you added:

cately

him or her

is

all

ple

would

who

said that a writer

that whatever

is

—

deli-

happens

a great resource, for other writers. In 1982

—

I

more

matters

say he

self

not neces-

it is

and undeluded about

clear-eyed

—must think

that

to

(You were speaking of your blindness.)

four years before you died

today

is

— and you

and the transcendence of

You showed

Somewhere you

is.

persons

a resource.

You have been

living

serenity

exemplary.

yours

as serene, as

had, rather, to be inventive

be unhappy, even while one

sary to

how

The

inventive.

you found are

that

It

profound,

as

"There

said in an interview,

is

.

.

.

that

is,

no writer

Many

to other writers than Borges.

the greatest living writer

—

peo-

Very few writers of

today have not learned from him or imitated him." That

is still

true.

We are still learning from you. We are still imitating you. You gave people

new ways

of imagining, while proclaiming over and over our in-

debtedness to the past, above

all,

we

literature almost everything

to literature.

are

am

Books

sure you are right.

human

we owe

said that

and what we have been.

disappear, history will disappear, and I

You

If

books

beings will also disappear.

are not only the arbitrary

sum

of our

dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of transcendence.

Some people

self-

think of reading only as a kind of escape:

an escape from the "real" everyday world to an imaginary world, the

world of books. Books are much more. They are

a

way

of being fully

human. I'm sorry to have to

tell

you that books are now considered an en-

dangered species. By books,

I

make

its

call

possible literature and

up on "bookscreens" any

change

its

also

mean

the conditions of reading that

soul effects. Soon, "text"

we

are told,

on demand, and

appearance, ask questions of

it,

will

utility,

the written

word

will

and promised

course,

book.

it

means nothing

to us, as less

it.

When

to criteria of

have become simply another aspect of our

advertising- driven televisual reality. This

created,

will

be able to

"interact" with

books become "texts" that we "interact" with according

we

is

the glorious future being

something more "democratic."

than the death of inwardness

Of

— and of the

A

Letter to Borges

I

13

This time around, there will be no need for a great conflagration.

The barbarians

don't have to burn the books.

Dear Borges, please understand plain.

But

reading

make

whom

itself

years!) All

to

to

I

—be

mean

it

gives

tiger

me no

is

in the library.

satisfaction to

com-

could such complaints about the fate of books better addressed than to you?

to say

a difference.

is

that

The

era

century, will test the soul in

are not going to

that

The

we we

(Borges,

miss you. / miss you.

it's

—of ten

You continue

are entering now, this twenty-first

new ways.

abandon the Great

But, you can be sure,

Library.

And you

some of us

will continue to

be our patron and our hero.

Susan

SFFING

A

Century of Cinema

inema's hundred years appear life cycle:

ries,

and the onset

cline.

This doesn't

to have the shape of a

an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of gloin the last

mean

decade of an ignominious, irreversible de-

that there won't

be any more new

can admire. But such films will not simply be exceptions; great achievement in any

the

norms and

practices

in the capitalist

And

where. is,

art.

They

will

that's true

have to be heroic violations of

capitalist

ordinary films, films

made

world

—which

is

to say, every-

purely for entertainment (that

commercial) purposes, will continue to be astonishingly witless; fail

resoundingly to appeal to their cynically

geted audiences. While the point of a great film

be

a one-of-a-kind achievement, the

is

now, more than

commercial cinema has

for a policy of bloated, derivative filmmaking, a brazen

re-combinatory film that

art, in

the

hope of reproducing past

some kind of remake. Cinema, once heralded

al-

tar-

ever,

settled

combinatory or

successes. Every

hopes to reach the largest possible audience

is

designed as

as the art of the twentieth

century, seems now, as the century closes numerically, to art.

of

which now govern moviemaking everywhere

and would-be

ready the vast majority

to

one

films

be

a

decadent

,

Perhaps

name

it is

not cinema which has ended but only cinephilia

—the

of the distinctive kind of love that cinema inspired. Each art

breeds

its

fanatics.

The

love movies aroused was

more

imperial.

It

I

was

17

SUSAN SONTAG

18

I

born of the conviction that cinema was an

art unlike

any other: quin-

tessential modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and

and moral

erotic

—

Cinema was

like religion).

Cinema had

the same time.

all at

a crusade.

Cinema was

of poetry or opera or dance don't think there

is

a

apostles

(it

was

world view. Lovers

only poetry or opera or

dance. But lovers of cinema could think there was only cinema. That the movies encapsulated everything

book of

and the book of

art

As many have noted, the was, conveniently, a double

they did.

was both the

It

life.

of moviemaking a hundred years ago

start start.

In that

first year,

1895,

two kinds of

were made, proposing two modes of what cinema could

films

ema

— and

as the transcription of real,

and cinema

unstaged

(the

life

as invention, artifice, illusion, fantasy (Melies).

never a true opposition. For those

first

be: cin-

Lumiere brothers) But

this

was

audiences watching the Lu-

miere brothers' The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, the camera's transmission of a banal sight was a fantastic experience.

wonder, the wonder that

in

cal

reality

immediacy. All of cinema

Cinema began

can be transcribed with such magi-

an attempt to perpetuate and to rein-

is

vent that sense of wonder.

Everything begins with that moment, one hundred years ago,

when

the train pulled into the station. People took movies into themselves, just as the

public cried out with excitement, actually ducked, as the

seemed

train

tied the

movie

you learned to grieve. it

to

move toward them. theatres,

it

was from

(or tried to learn)

Movies gave you

Until the advent of television

tips

how

a

home from

visit to

to strut, to

about

looks good to wear a raincoat even

ever you took

weekly

how

the cinema that

smoke, to

be

to

when

kiss, to fight,

attractive,

such as

isn't raining.

it

the

The by,

more

inclusive

.

.

the movies was only a part of the larger ex-

form of desire embodied

strongest experience

.

But what-

perience of losing yourself in faces, in lives that were not yours is

emp-

was simply

movie experience.

to surrender to, to

what was on the screen. You wanted

to

The

was

prerequisite of being kidnapped

physical presence of the image.

in the

And

—which

be transported

be kidnapped by the movie. to

be overwhelmed by the

the conditions of "going to the

movies" secured that experience. To see a great film only on television isn't to

have

really seen that film. (This

is

equally true of those

made

for

A Century TV,

Reitz.)

home. The conditions of paying attention

at

home

you are

screens can be as big as living in a living

still

among anonymous

be

to

—of the

saultive images,

and

room

darkened

in a

movie

revive the vanished rituals

The reduction

theatre.

—

dark

erotic, ru-

of cinema to as-

now

(faster

be more attention-grabbing, have produced

appear

a screen in a theatre,

hand or

But

walls.

theatre, seated in the

incarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn't

Images

a standard

bedroom

and the unprincipled manipulation of images

faster cutting) to

tention.

or

strangers.

No amount of mourning will minative

domestic space

in a

or a bedroom, alone or with familiars. To

room

be kidnapped, you have

image on the

little

no longer has

are radically disrespectful of film. Since film size,

19

not only the difference of dimensions: the superiority

It's

of the larger-than-you image in the theatre to the

box

I

Alexanderplatz and the two Heimat films of

like Fassbinder's Berlin

Edgar

Cinema

of

in

any

size

and on

on home screens

as big as a wall,

demand

anyone's

a dis-

full at-

a variety of surfaces:

on

palm of your

as small as the

on disco walls and mega-screens hanging

above sports arenas and the outsides of tall public buildings. The sheer ubiquity of moving images has steadily undermined the standards people once as

had both

for

cinema

as art at its

most serious and

for

cinema

popular entertainment. In the

ema era

first

as art

no difference between

years there was, essentially,

and cinema

And

as entertainment.

all films

—from the masterpieces of Feuillade, D. W.

Pabst,

Murnau, King Vidor

and comedies

—

to the

movies

Dziga Vertov,

most formula-ridden melodramas

look, are, better than

most of what was

the coming of sound, the image-making lost poetry,

Griffith,

cin-

of the silent

much

of

to follow.

its

With

brilliance

and

and commercial standards tightened. This way of making

—the

Hollywood system

— dominated

twenty-five years (roughly from 1930 to 1955). tors, like

filmmaking for about

The most

original direc-

Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles, were defeated by the

system and eventually went into

artistic exile in

Europe

—where more

or less the same quality- defeating system was in place with lower budgets; only in

throughout

France were

this period.

a large

Then,

number

of superb films produced

in the mid-1950s,

hold again, rooted in the idea of cinema

vanguard ideas took

as a craft

pioneered by the

— SUSAN SONTAG

120

postwar

Italian films of the early

era.

A

dazzling

tiny crews,

went

movie

festival prizes, into

around the world. This golden age actually lasted

atres

actors

which there were more and

to film festivals (of

more), and from there, garlanded with

of original,

made with new

passionate films of the highest seriousness got

and

number

the-

long as

as

twenty years.

was

It

ema

moment

at this specific

in the

hundred-year history of

cin-

that going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies

became

a passion

You

fell in

had

first

among

and other young people.

university students

love not just with actors but with cinema

become

visible in the 1950s in France:

its

itself.

Cinephilia

forum was the

leg-

endary film magazine Cahiers du Cinema (followed by similarly fervent

magazines in Germany, Canada). cas,

temples, as

Its

Great

Italy, it

Sweden, the United

Britain,

States,

spread throughout Europe and the Ameri-

were the cinematheques and

from

film clubs specializing in films

the past and directors' retrospectives.

The

1960s and early 1970s were

the age of feverish moviegoing, with the full-time cinephile always hoping to find a seat as close as possible to the big screen, ideally the third

row

"One

center.

can't live without Rossellini," declares a character in

Bertolucci's Before the Revolution (1964)

Cinephilia faut

and the

—

source of exultation in the films of

Nanni Moretti

it.

Godard and

morose lament

and Syberberg;

a

—was mostly

Western European

early Bertolucci

cent films of

The

a

—and means

great directors of "the other

a

Europe" (Zanussi

Truf-

in the reaffair.

in Poland,

An-

gelopoulos in Greece, Tarkovsky and Sokurov in Russia, Jancso and Tarr in Hungary) and the great Japanese directors (Ozu, Mizoguchi,

Kurosawa,

Naruse,

saw or Athens there wasn't

The

distinctive thing

"art" films

Douglas

up.

It

seemed

tended

films.

or

not

to

be

Tokyo or War-

chance to get a cinematheque education.

Thus, European

Godard

it

embraced both

cinephilia

Hollywood

had at

a

roman-

the apogee

Howard Hawks, Fassbinder for moment when cinephilia emerged for

—

Of course, this moment when the Hollywood

Sirk.

also the

have

Moscow

the films of certain directors in

of the studio system:

was

a

Budapest or

about cinephile taste was that

and popular

tic relation to

Imamura)

Oshima,

cinephiles, perhaps because in

that

studio system was breaking

moviemaking had re-won the

right to experiment;

A Century cinephiles could afford to

Hollywood genre

be passionate

A

films.

of

Cinema

(or sentimental)

new people came

host of

cluding a generation of young film

121

about the old

into cinema, in-

from Cahiers du Cinema; the

critics

towering figure of that generation, indeed of several decades of film-

A

making anywhere, was Jean-Luc Godard.

few writers turned out to

be wildly talented filmmakers: Alexander Kluge Paolo Pasolini in

making

actually

and Cocteau seemed,

Italy.

emerged

in the

at least in

For some

(The model for the writer

was not

it

fifteen years there

was always

was

a conflict

cinema

cinema

as

conflict

was not such

an

art,

until the

1960s that this

Europe, normal.) Cinema appeared to be reborn.

one allowed oneself to imagine that sure, there

turns to film-

France, with Pagnol in the 1930s

earlier, in

1940s; but

Germany, Pier

in

who

this

would go on

between cinema

as routine

as to

a profusion of masterpieces,

and cinema

make impossible

as

as

forever.

and

To be

an industry and

experiment. But the

the making of wonderful

films,

sometimes within and sometimes outside of mainstream cinema.

Now

the balance has tipped decisively in favor of cinema as an indus-

try.

The

great cinema of the 1960s

and 1970s has been thoroughly repu-

diated. Already in the 1970s

Hollywood was

the innovations in narrative

method and

plagiarizing

and banalizing

editing of successful

ropean and ever-marginal independent American

films.

new Eu-

Then came

the

catastrophic rise in production costs in the 1980s, which secured the

worldwide reimposition of industry standards of making and ing films on a far

more

coercive, this time truly global, scale.

distribut-

The

result

can be seen in the melancholy fate of some of the greatest directors of

What place is there today for a maverick like Hans Jurgen Syberberg, who has stopped making films altogether, or for the great Godard, who now makes films about the history of film on video? the last decades.

Consider some other therefore of casts

was

cases.

The

internationalizing of financing

a disaster for

Andrei Tarkovsky

films of his stupendous, tragically abbreviated career.

tions for

making

films

have proved to be

two of the most valuable directors

still

(The Structure of Crystals, Illumination, gelopoulos (Reconstruction, Days of

what

will

happen now

as

much

an

And

two

these condi-

artistic disaster for

working: Krzysztof Zanussi

Spiral, Contract)

'36,

in the last

and

The

and Theo An-

And And how

Travelling Players).

to Bela Tarr (Damnation, Satantango)?

SUSAN SONTAG

122

will

Aleksandr Sokurov (Save and Protect, Days of Eclipse, The Second

Circle, Stone,

sublime

his

Whispering Pages) find the money to go on making

under the rude conditions of Russian capitalism?

films,

Predictably, the love of cinema has waned. People

some people

the movies, and

films,

special, necessary

from

still

a film.

still

like

going to

care about and expect something

And wonderful

films are

made: Mike Leigh's Saked, Gianni Amelio's Lamerica,

being

still

Hou

Hsiao-

hsiens Goodbye South, Goodbye, and Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up and

Koker

trilogy.

But one hardly finds anymore,

at least

the distinctive cinephilic love of movies, which a certain taste in films

seeing as

has

much

come under

(grounded

is

among

the young,

not simply love of but

in a vast appetite for seeing

and

re-

as possible of cinema's glorious past). Cinephilia itself

attack, as

something quaint, outmoded, snobbish. For

cinephilia implies that films are unique, unrepeatable,

ences. Cinephilia

tells

Breathless cannot be as

us that the

good

magic experi-

Hollywood remake of Godard's

as the original. Cinephilia has

no

role in

the era oi hyperindustrial films. For by the very range and eclecticism

of

its

passions, cinephilia cannot help but sponsor the idea of the film

as, first

of

all,

a poetic object;

and cannot help but

incite those outside

the movie industry, like painters and writers, to want to too. It

is

precisely this that

If cinephilia is

it

will only

films,

must be defeated. That has been defeated.

dead, then movies are dead ... no matter

movies, even very good ones, go on being made. urrected,

make

be through the birth of

a

If

how many

cinema can be

new kind

res-

of cine-love. [!995]

—

Novel

into Film:

Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz

WE

TAKE

IT for granted that film directors are,

wish, in the

game

if

of recycling. Adapting novels

the most respectable of movie projects, while a book that

is

they so

one of

calls itself

the

novelization of a film seems, rightly, barbarous. Being a hybrid art as well as a late one, film has always been in a dialogue with other narrative genres.

Movies were

first

seen as an exceptionally potent kind of

illusionist theatre, the rectangle of the screen

proscenium of

a stage,

silent period, plays

—

on which appear

As

a

actors. Starting in the early

were regularly "turned into"

plays did not encourage the evolution of

about

corresponding to the

what

movie: the intervention of the camera

a source of plot, character,

truly

—

its

suitable.

Many

But filming

was

distinctive

mobility of vision.

and dialogue, the novel, being

narrative art that (like movies) ranges freely in time

more

films.

early successes of

The

form of

and space, seemed

cinema (The Birth of a Nation,

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Ramona, adaptations of popular novels.

a

1930s

and

Stella Dallas, It)

1940s,

were

when movies

tained their largest audience and had an unprecedented

at-

monopoly on

entertainment, were probably the heyday of novel-into-film projects the sleek

Hollywood classic-comics of the novels by the Bronte

ters or Tolstoy

being no more or

less

sis-

ambitious, as films, than those

123

SUSAN SONTAG

124

adapted from such bestsellers Rebecca, The

was

that

Good

was the destiny of

it

Since the film that

is

on the reputation and

And now Oblomov

the Wind, Lost Horizon,

The presumption

novel to "become" a film.

a

a transcription of a

novel

Who

risen.

monopoly of

if

entertain-

made from

can see the films

or The Trial without asking

riding piggyback

is

comparisons are inevitable.

interest of the novel,

that movies have ceased to have a

ment, standards have

novel

Gone With

as

Earth, Gentleman's Agreement.

the film

is

Lolita or

adequate to the

—the making of invariably invidious comparisons depending on

whether or not the novel belongs to

Klaus Mann's Mephisto, turns out to be

seems almost

in the nature of film

abridge, dilute, and simplify any

Even

literature.

good novel

that

novels

— despite the view

like

film. It

film's quality

—

to

adapts. In fact, far

it

plays than

that such films tend to is

minor novel, than the

far richer

— regardless of the

more good movies have been made from good go against the grain of what

a

be

static

from good

and thereby

distinctly cinematic.

Directors of the 1930s and 1940s like Wyler, Stevens, Lean, and

Autant-Lara were particularly drawn to good-novel-into-movie projects

—

as

But the

have been, more

failure rate has

recently, Visconti, Losey,

been so spectacular that since the 1960s the ven-

ture has been considered suspect in certain quarters.

and Truffaut declared

a

fiction. Classics

A

minor novel could serve

of themes with which the director is

is

the problem of being "faithful" to

— adapted from James M. Cain's nobler achievement than Twice— is

Stranger. Cain's

There

is

not just by

a

The Leopard or

stiff,

With

Visconti's

a

good novel

first film,

handsome, respectful

Os-

tran-

rather absent version of Camus's to

be "followed."

quality as literature. Until this past winter

film,

fiction

posed by the length of the work of fiction,

film adaptation of a literary

Russian

be-

as a pretext, a repertoire

it.

melodrama did not have

also the obstacle

its

his

it

The Postman Always Rings

his

a far

scription of

one

seemed cursed:

free to play.

sessione

The

— crime

dictum that cinema was better nourished by pulp

than by literature.

there

Godard, Resnais,

their preference for subliterary genres

and adventure novels, science

came

and Schlondorff.

work

I

had seen only

thought entirely admirable:

The Lady with the Dog, made from

Chekhov. The standard, and

I

a short story

arbitrary, length of feature films

is

by ap-

Novel into

Alexonderplatz

Film: Fassbinder's Berlin

125

proximately the time in which one can render a short story or a

But not

a novel

—whose nature

novel requires a film that

—one

expansiveness.

is

To do

that breaks with the conventions of length set

his legendary,

Stroheim,

who wanted

film of ten hours,

two hours and

justice to a

not just somewhat longer but radically long

is

by theatregoing.

This was surely the conviction of Erich von Stroheim

tempted

when he

to film

all

The

minutes (ten

films.

But movie lovers

Greed

for the loss of the ten-hour

all

will

faithful to, a great novel is

— although a

list

made

lowed to make

mourning

(i

—he has and

a great film of,

in

some Platonic heaven, or ten greatest novels of the title

on

878-1957). Stroheim

it

is

Berlin

was not

al-

a film of ten hours. Fassbinder, thanks to the possibility

of showing a film in parts, on television, was allowed to fifteen

one of the

say,

if

of the,

twentieth century, probably the least familiar

Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin

is

in

Stroheim was thwarted

of a novel. More: he has

haven, of judgments there

be forever

was de-

that Stroheim edited.

FASSBINDER SUCCEEDS WHERE one

a

out of Stroheim 's forty-

reels

version of Greed that survived this butchery

filmed virtually

made

of Frank Norris's novel, had

which the studio reedited and eventually reduced to

two); the negative of the thirty-two reels of discarded footage stroyed.

at-

aborted adaptation of McTeague, called Greed.

forty-five

most admired of

play.

make

a film of

hours and twenty-one minutes. Inordinate length could hardly

assure the successful transposition of a great novel into a great film.

But though not

a sufficient condition,

Berlin Alexanderplatz that Fassbinder

is

succeeded

it

is

probably a necessary one.

Fassbinder's Greed not only in the sense

in

novel, but also because of the

making the long

many

film, the great film

striking parallels

of Berlin Alexanderplatz and the plot of Greed. For, indeed, the ican novel, published in 1899, lated in the

much

German

tells a

of a

between the plot

Amer-

primitive version of the story re-

novel, published thirty years later,

which has

a

thicker texture and greater range. Writing in San Francisco at

the end of the last century, the youthful Frank Norris had Zola as a

model of

a dispassionate "naturalism."

The

Doblin, already in midcareer (he was fifty-one

far

more

when

sophisticated

Berlin Alexander-

SUSAN SONTAG

126

was published) and writing

platz

decade

in the arts,

in the century's single

had the inspiration

(it is

said) of Joyce's Ulysses, as

German

well as the expressive hypernaturalist tendencies in film, painting,

same year

the

most creative

and photography with which he was that Berlin Alexanderplatz appeared,

Doblin wrote an

work by

egant essay on photography as the preface to a volume of

A

the

man, both innocent and brute,

burly, sentimental, naive, violent

the protagonist of both novels. Franz Biberkopf

when

derer

Berlin Alexanderplatz starts

—he has

is

The protagonist

of McTeague eventually

Both novels are anatomies of

Trina.

shoddy Polk

Street in Norris's novel

already a mur-

just finished serving a

sentence of four years for killing the prostitute with Ida.

el-

August Sander.)

great

is

theatre,

familiar. (In 1929,

woman,

kills a

a city, or part of

and the Berlin

whom

it:

he

lived,

his wife,

San Francisco's of workers,

district

whores, and petty criminals in Doblin 's novel are far more than mere

background

to the hero's misfortunes.

tion of the

unmated hero

a depic-

—McTeague

afoot and alone in the city

Sunday routine of

following his

Both novels open with

solitary

walk,

and beer;

dinner,

Biberkopf, just discharged from prison, wandering in a daze about the Alexanderplatz. set

he

A former car boy in

a mine,

McTeague has managed

to

himself up in San Francisco as a dentist; by the middle of the novel

forbidden to practice. The ex-pimp Biberkopf

is

ing honestly in a series of menial jobs, but (he loses his right arm), the

woman

tries to

when he can no

he loves goes on the

earn his

longer

liv-

work

street to sup-

port them. In both novels, the downfall of the protagonist

or circumstantial, but in

is

McTeague, Reinhold

—

a

in Berlin Alexanderplatz.

budding

McTeague

political boss,

tionary populism. Biberkopf, to

go

and

straight,

is

is

not

just

engineered by his former best friend

friends are studies in contrasts.

hyperverbal

is

who

is

And

just as

Marcus

is

spouting the cliches of reac-

has vowed, on coming out of prison,

not inarticulate; Reinhold belongs to a gang of thieves

a stutterer.

permission

—Marcus

both pairs of

inarticulate;

The

gullible

hero

is

obtusely devoted to the secretly

malevolent friend. In Norris's novel, McTeague inherits cus's

bad luck

— the

girl

she wins a large

—with

Mar-

Marcus has been courting and marries her

sum

of

money

in a lottery;

Marcus vows

re-

Novel into

Film: Fassbinder's Berlin

Alexanderplatz

venge. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, Biberkopf inherits

urging

—

a

number

of Reinhold's

women, and

discard one ex-girl of Reinhold's as the next

him

that Reinhold turns treacherous. It

is

it is

—on

127

Reinhold's

when he

refuses to

ready to be passed on to

Marcus who has McTeague

is

deprived of his livelihood and fragile respectability: he reports him to the city authorities for practicing dentistry without having a diploma,

and the

result

is

not only destitution but the ruin of his relationship

with his already deranged, pathetic wife.

It is

Reinhold

atrocious end to Biberkopf's valiant efforts to stay honest,

him ing

into taking part in a burglary

him out of the van

amputation of

him

murders Mieze. Marcus

a

woman, Mieze, with whom he

is

When

toward Reinhold

a

kind of "pure," that

McTeague the

fatal

bond

calls

Biberkopf's forbearance

McTeague and Marcus

is

the

city's

accidentally handcuffed to

self-defense),

in

is

opposite.

The

last

in the

paragraph has

Marcus (whom he has

the middle of Death Valley,

just killed,

"stupidly looking

around him," doomed to await death beside the corpse of enemy/friend. The ending of McTeague wonderfully

so. Berlin

pain, death,

and

he die himself.

He goes mad

after the

grief

I

kill

Reinhold, nor does

in literature),

mental hospital, and when released, a burnt-out case,

respectable job, as night

watchman

eventually brought to

for Mieze's murder,

tify

trial

grief,

murder of his beloved Mieze

know

his

merely dramatic, though

Biberkopf does not

most lacerating description of a

is

Alexanderplatz ends as a series of arias on

survival.

de-

the end of the novel Norris removes

from San Francisco: the two men find each other

desert, the landscape that

ulti-

motiveless, love.)

is,

that unites

more summarily. Toward

his characters

falls in

motivated by envy; Reinhold by an

mately motiveless malignity. (Fassbinder

in

after the

unable to endure Biberkopf's happiness, seduces and

love, Reinhold,

McTeague

—but Biberkopf,

strangely without desire for revenge.

is

of his despair by finding

In

tricking

and former lover Eva brings the crippled Biberkopf out

his protector

picted

puts an

first

and then, during the getaway, push-

into the path of a car

his arm,

who

in a factory.

finally

When

(the

confined to

is

lands his

Reinhold

Biberkopf refuses to

is

tes-

against him.

Both McTeague and Biberkopf go on savage, character-altering alcoholic binges

—McTeague

because he

feels

too

little,

Biberkopf

— SUSAN SONTAG

128

because he

feels

much

too

(remorse, grief, dread).

Biberkopf, not stupid but oddly docile, generosity toward, as well as real love

McTeague can

a soul;

he

naive, virile

capable of tenderness and

for,

Mieze; in contrast to what

feel for Trina: abject fascination,

por of habit. Norris denies hulking,

The

is

succeeded by the

repeatedly described as animal-like or primitive. Doblin

is

does not condescend to his hero

Biberkopf has

—who

is

part Woyzeck, part Job.

a rich, convulsive inner life; indeed, in the course of the

novel he acquires more and more understanding, although

adequate to events, to the depth or the gruesome

Doblin

ing.

stu-

McTeague

pitiable, semi-retarded

novel

s

is

this

never

is

specificity of suffer-

an educational novel, and a modern Inferno.

In McTeague there

one point of view, one dispassionate voice

is

selective,

summarizing, compressive, photographic. Filming Greed,

Stroheim

is

graph

said to have followed Norris's novel paragraph

—one can

see how. Berlin Alexanderplatz

for the ear as for the eye.

It

has a complex

many

form, encyclopedic, with

is

as

much

method of

by para(or

more)

narration: free-

layers of narrative, anecdote,

and com-

mentary. Doblin cuts from one kind of material to another, often

within the same paragraph: documentary evidence, myths, moral literary allusions

—

same way

in the

The

stylized lyrical language.

author,

is

The

he

shifts

style

of Greed

is

an ti- artificial. Stroheim refused to shoot any-

making

a half century later,

all

of Greed in "natural" loca-

Fassbinder has no need to make a

point about realism or about veracity.

And

it

would hardly have been

possible to film in the Alexanderplatz, which

bombing of Berlin during World War if it

were shot

in a studio.

II.

was annihilated

neon

in mirrors.

sign

on the

The extreme

street;

of

in the

Most of Berlin Alexanderplatz

Fassbinder chooses a broad, familiar

stylization: illuminating the principal location, Biberkopf's

flashing

a

exalted, urgent, anything but dispassionate.

More than

looks as

tales,

between slang and

principal voice, that of the all-knowing

thing in the studio, insisting on tions.

that

room, by

a

shooting often through windows and

artificiality,

or theatricality,

is

reached in the

sequences in the circus-like street of whores, and in most of the two-

hour epilogue. Berlin Alexanderplatz has the distension of a novel, but

it

is

also

very theatrical, as are most of Fassbinder's best films. Fassbinder's ge-

Novel into

Alexonderplatz

Film: Fassbinder's Berlin

nius was in his eclecticism, his extraordinary freedom as an

was not looking from

theatre.

He

for the specifically cinematic,

began

he directed almost

many

as

and some of

plays as movies,

own The

group

Bitter Tears of Petra

Bremen Freedom, or take place mostly

in

one

in

he

artist:

and borrowed

as the director of a theatre

are filmed plays, like his

129

freely

Munich;

his best films

von Kant and

such as Chinese

interior,

Roulette and Satan's Brew. In a 1974 interview Fassbinder described his first

years of activity thus: "I

rected film as

if it

were

produced theatre and did

theatre,

abridge a scene because they might fear)

static,

were

it

film,

this quite stubbornly. "

other directors, adapting a novel to a film, it

as if

and

di-

Where

would have thought

to

went on too long, and thereby became

Fassbinder would

and

persist,

(as

The

insist.

him

stay close to

—an

all-forgiving

theatrical-looking style that Fassbinder devised helps

Doblin's book.

Apart from the invention of one new character

mother

landlady Frau Bast

figure, Biberkopf's

Fassbinder has

made

in the story simply

—most of the changes

render the action more com-

pact visually. In the novel Biberkopf does not always live in the same

one-room apartment,

as

he does

and Fassbinder

in the film,

sets events

there that in the novel take place elsewhere. For example, in the novel

Franz ing

kills

Ida

—which we

at

her

the film, the gruesome batter-

sister's place; in

see in repeated, hallucinatory flashback

—takes place

in

Biberkopf's room, witnessed by Frau Bast. In the novel, Biberkopf doesn't live with

all

the

women

with

whom

he takes up;

in the film

each of them, one by one, moves into his place, reinforcing the visual unity, but also

making the

union with Mieze perhaps

a bit too cozy.

The women seem more

whores-with-hearts-of-gold than they do in the book. tion:

it

is

a gift

is

just

mentioned, once,

which we see Biberkopf doting on, and that take place in Biberkopf's is

last

inven-

room,

is

is

in Doblin's novel),

often in the shot in scenes

a reincarnation of the canary

McTeague's most cherished possession, the only thing he

vages from his wrecked domestic tle gilt

One

hard not to suspect that the canary in a cage Mieze gives

Biberkopf (such

that

film's

relationships that precede Biberkopf's

prison"

when

his

Fassbinder's cinema

doom is

full

is

felicity,

and

still

by

his side "in its

sallit-

sealed in the desert.

of Biberkopfs

—victims

of false con-

SUSAN SONTAG

130

sciousness.

And

throughout his

the material of Berlin Alexanderplatz films,

marginal existences

—

whose recurrent

subject

prefigured

is

damaged

is

and

lives

petty criminals, prostitutes, transvestites, immi-

grant workers, depressed housewives, and overweight workers at the

end of

More

their tether.

specifically, the

harrowing slaughterhouse

scenes in Berlin Alexanderplatz are anticipated by the slaughterhouse

sequence

in Jail Bait

and In a Year of

compendium

platz

is

more than

ment

—

and the origin.

a

In an article he wrote in

months he had

it

13

Moons. But Berlin Alexander-

of his main themes.

March

1980,

It

was the

fulfill-

toward the end of the ten

took to film Berlin Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder declared that

first

read Doblin 's novel

had dreamed of making

it

when he was

into a film

fourteen or fifteen, and

from the beginning of

his career.

—he described how own had protagonist was Fassbinder's been impregnated by the novel — and It

was the novel of

his life

fantasies

his

its

elected alter ego. Several heroes of his films were called Franz;

name Franz Biberkopf

gave the

Friends, a role he played himself.

to the protagonist of It is

and he

Fox and His

said that Fassbinder

would have

He did not; but he did something equally apHe became Doblin: his is the voice of the narrator. Doblin is

liked to play Biberkopf.

propriate.

omnipresent

in his

book, commenting and lamenting.

a recurrent voiceover, the voice of the novel, so to

binder's.

Thus we hear many of the

parallel stories,

And

speak

the film has

— and

such as the

Fass-

sacrifice

of Isaac, related in the novel. Fassbinder preserves the novel's extrava-

gant ruminating energy without breaking the narrative stride.

ruminating voice

Godard's

make

films,

is

used not

as

an

anti-narrative

device,

The

as

in

but to intensify the narrative; not to distance us but to

us feel more.

The

story continues to evolve, in the

most

direct, af-

fecting way.

Berlin Alexanderplatz

is

not a meta-film, like

Hans Jurgen

Syber-

berg's Hitler, Fassbinder has nothing of Syberberg's aesthetic of the

grandiose, for

all

for high culture.

the length of Berlin Alexanderplatz, or his reverence It is a

narrative film, but

one

that

is

that long: a film

that tells a story, in decors of the period (the late 1920s), with

more

than a hundred actors (many roles are taken by actors from Fassbinder's regular troupe)

and thousands of

extras.

A

fifty-three-year-old

— Novel into theatre actor

who

Film: Fassbinder's Berlin

Alexanderplatz

13

has had minor roles in a few of Fassbinder's films,

Giinter Lamprecht, plays Franz Biberkopf. Splendid as are

Barbara Sukowa

actors, particularly

Lamprecht

as Eva,

1

the

Mieze and Hanna Schygulla

as

Biberkopf overshadows the others

s

moving, expressive,

all

—an

intensely

performance, as good as anything

brilliantly varied

done by Emil Jannings or by Raimu.

Though made

man and series

is

interval

it is

—one week being the convention,

not a

TV

serials

like the old

Ger-

A TV

series.

Saturday

at

an

after-

parts of Berlin Alexanderplatz are not really episodes, strictly

over fourteen weeks

is

(as I

diminished

saw

sentation in a movie theatre

hours each, over it.

Seeing

it

five

it

—

when

for the five

long novel with

seen in this way, spaced out

first

time,

on

Italian

TV). Pre-

segments of approximately three

consecutive weeks

—

is

certainly a better

way

to

over three or four days would be far better. The more

one can watch over the shortest time works

platz,

a co-production of

is

(Fantomas, The Perils of Pauline, Flash Gordon).

speaking, since the film

see

—

Berlin Alexanderplatz

constructed in "episodes," which are designed to be seen

noon movie

The

possible by television

TV

Italian

maximum

cinema, that hybrid

best, exactly as

one reads

a

pleasure and intensity. In Berlin Alexander-

art,

has at

last

achieved some of the dilatory,

open form and accumulative power of the novel by being longer than any film has dared to be

—and by being

theatrical.

[1983]

A Note Art

is

something which

between the yet

real

the slender margin

lies in

and the unreal

not unreal;

it is

it is

real,

on Bunraku

...

and

unreal,

it is

yet

it is

not

and

real.

— Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725)

BUNRAKU THE

IN

object: a text.

And

P L

AY

the text

identified, first of

is is

sacred

—

that

as a physical

all,

generative.

is,

Hence,

the grave ceremony that opens each performance: the chief reader

holds out the text and

actor,

bows

to

before setting is

it

down on

the low

a theatre that transcends the

by multiplying and displacing the sources of dramatic pathos.

The

play

is

acted; that

is

to say, recited; that

claimed, sung, chanted, wailed)

produced by

is

is,

punctuated or

a string instrument, the shamisen. It

read.

The

italicized is

text (de-

by music

also, simultane-

enacted by piercingly expressive large puppets, half or two-

ously,

thirds life-size.

The enacting of the drama occupies

front of the audience: the

the music

dialogue

is

reciters

—the

a

and musicians who

sit

to the right

constitutes a parallel performance.

not "off," as in a certain kind of narrative film, but

— displaced, given

132

figures

—move. But the source of the words and

—the one or more on rostrum —

of the stage

the stage proper, in

wide rectangular space where

puppets and their handlers

center

it,

and beginning to read. Bunraku

lectern

its

own

The off-

expressive and corporeal autonomy.

A Note on Bunraku The drama has

a

double displacement of emotion, a double

double physical and emotional principle onists

is

a

On

gait.

kind of anti-hysteria. There

—

who, instead of being

who

is

Most of the

the stage proper the leading is

which

texts,

given the task of maximal expres-

is

acts, as

it

transcends, intensifies

The puppet The

is,

and the narration may mod-

and gasps. The

figure of the re-

were, by proxy, on behalf of the puppets,

one of the devices whereby Bunraku

son.

and commentary

consist of narrative

ulate into a lengthy crescendo of sobs

who

the

is

humans who make them move. To

as well as dialogue, are floridly emotional,

citer,

the muteness of the protag-

not only off-center (from the audience's point

of view) but physically immobile, siveness.

scale, a

living actors, are puppets; there

impassivity and omnipresence of the

the Jorurz reciter,

133

—what acting

in prototype, a

isolates

— decomposes,

is

just

illustrates,

is.

supple doll operated by a single per-

invention, in 1734, of a puppet to be operated by three per-

sons brought the puppet's emotional and gestural potency to a point

never equaled before or since. The Japanese puppet can raise its

eyebrows, smile, clench

run, convincingly take

its

own

its fists; it

life.

No

roll its eyes,

can languish, dress

string

itself,

puppet or hand puppet

can perform such complex and detailed actions; and the Bunraku puppets have an ability to in

move

audiences,

move them

to tears,

unmatched

any other puppet tradition.

But apart from widening the emotional range and expressiveness of the puppet (a gain

we may

or

may

not choose to identify with "real-

ism"), the fact of multiplying the operators

them onstage with the puppets

—

—and, of

decisively shapes

emotional register of puppet drama. The puppet bered, beleaguered, surrounded. dlers

The presence of

endows the puppet's movements and

pathos.

The puppets seem

seem sovereign, imperious,

necessity, putting

and transforms the is literally

outnum-

three outsized han-

efforts

with a sheen of

helpless, childlike, vulnerable. Yet they also in their very smallness

and precision and

el-

egance.

Bunraku works on two elaborate decor

is

scales of relatedness in space.

The

constructed to the puppets' measurements.

erators are giants, interlopers. Alongside each delicate

the three large heads of the operators.

often

The op-

puppet head are

The operators look

at

the pup-

SUSAN SONTAG

134

pet as they manipulate

it.

The audience watches

drama they animate. The three

ing the puppet, primal spectators to the

sum up

operators

the essence of what

impassive: one has his face bared.

wear black hoods. The puppet as

it is

And

gestures.

one giant body, animating the

a perfected division of labor.

the operators observ-

to

to

be

The operators move

What

veiled

fate.

seen,

the audience sees

That one operator's face

is

together,

is

that to act

enacted

is

is

is

in

to

the

exposed and two are

another device making Bunraku's characteristic double

is

and

puppet body,

different parts of the

be moved. (And, simultaneously, observed.) What submission to a

To be

a god.

be hidden: the other two

state-

ment: hyperbole and discretion, presence and absence of the dramatic substance.

This relation between the operators and the puppet efficient relation;

it is

the cruel mystery which

Bunraku drama. Handing the puppet

doom at

a

moments

its

captors.

at

not simply an

the center of the

comb, rushing the puppet

— some moments the operators seem

other

is

is

to

its

like the puppet's servants,

Sometimes the puppet seems

to

be repos-

ing solidly on the operators or to be borne placidly aloft by them; other

times to be in perpetual, hapless scale, to delight the senses

flight.

There are constant

Then

the operators

of

and wring the emotions. Sometimes the

shadowy manipulators shrink and the puppets scale.

shifts

normal

swell into a

loom once more and the puppets re-become

persecuted Lilliputians.

fragile,

The

situation

we

call art characteristically

requires us both to look

very attentively and to look "beyond" (or "through") what

is

under-

stood as an impediment, distraction, irrelevance. At an opera perfor-

mance, we look past or over the orchestra to concentrate on the But

in

Bunraku we

are not

supposed to look past the shadowy, black-

garbed puppeteers. The presence of the operators raku

its

elevated,

is

what

gives

mythic impersonality and heightened,

emotionality. In order to

stage.

make

Bun-

purified

the art of the puppets competitive with

the art of living actors, says Chikamatsu, the text must be "charged

with feeling." But, he adds, "I take pathos to be entirely a matter of straint."

Compare

Balanchine,

cal ballet tradition to its

who brought

re-

the naively emotive classi-

apex by developing the sense

in

which dancers

are co-sharers, with ideal puppets, in the sublimity of the impersonal:

"

A Note on "Silence, placidity, forces.

They

Bunraku

135

and immobility are perhaps the most powerful

are as impressive, even

more

so,

than rage, delirium, or

ecstasy.

In the most profound Western meditation on puppet theatre (and,

by extension, on the dance),

Kleist

wrote that the very inanimateness of

the puppet was the precondition for expressing an ideal state of the spirit. Kleist's

puppets

—

is

speculative fantasy

—he was writing

in 1810,

about string

incarnated and fulfilled in Bunraku. [1983]

A

GARDEN

HISTORY

Place for Fantasy

an enthralling branch of

IS

art history,

opening onto the history of outdoor spectacles (the masque, fireworks, pageants), of architecture, of urban planning

ary history as well.

Once mainly

French, English, German), center of activity ton, D.C.,

The

is

the

which possesses superb materials on garden

principal tradition of Western garden art

brick, tufa, stucco,

wood

—among the

and

none

is

more

fascinating or

ations than the grotto.

human-made

It

is

complex

a space that

is,

in

Washing-

history.

—of

marble,

And

plants.

its

usually, a space already

same kind of space grotto in the garden

tamed. Other,

are "cave," is

history

literally,

recess or subterranean space that

is

vault,"

names

echo them. This curiosity

136

is

I

is,

for the

"crypt."

even repulsive, and yet exercises on some people, of

my way

follies,

associ-

called a grotto

the domesticated version of a space that

one, a very strong attraction.

and have gone out of

and

of the

profound. The

less reassuring

"underground

One

inclusive rather

constructions

trees

in

constructions that recur in gardens (statuary, fountains,

bridges),

scary,

human-made

is

liter-

scholars were

(its

flourishes in this country, too.

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library

than exclusionary, putting

many

European subject

a

now

it

—and of

is

The often

whom I am

have always been fascinated by grottoes

to look at

them and

at

constructions that

perhaps no more than dread mastered

— A but then the grotto seems no more, or

morbid

Place for Fantasy

than a playfulness with

less,

feelings.

For grottoes

to enter the garden, a place conceived as a

miniaturized. Grottoes, mostly real grottoes, were places.

we

The

sibyl's

or oracle's

lair,

a

are never

far,

grave.

men and

our imaginations, from being reminded of the

in

And

grottoes that

were

the garden

program

of the

century

Roman

in the late

patricians.

common

From

and rooms

in

the latter part

out to

fitted

and

their mysteries,

re-

and entertainments conducted

backdrop of

for example, as the

were partly

satyr plays

and

for ban-

quets.

Perhaps the most famous and grandiose, though hardly

of the

villas

villa in Tivoli

built as

These caverns, ornamented spaces that alluded

practical constructions for pleasures

whose

se-

features of the gardens of the villas

gracefully to the old sacred spaces

—

Romans

appear as an element

Republic.

B.C., artificial grottoes,

semble grottoes, became

outdoors

first

cell

had, to begin with,

artificial

part of hydraulic projects. Artificial caves

Roman

sacred

all

revered ancestors

verely practical purposes: like the marvelous vaults the

first

of

first

the hermit's retreat, the sect's sanctu-

the resting place of the bones of holy

and the

of

haven and

of recreation, their original functions had to be secularized or

site

ary,

137

ruins survive

from the ancient world was Hadrian's

near Rome, which had a

Christianity gave the grotto

nopolizing grotto imagery for

typical,

new

number

of grottoes.

associations

more than

and succeeded

thousand

a

years.

in

mo-

Supposedly

natural but in fact thoroughly stylized grottoes figure in paintings of

the Christian narratives

Entombment

— and

—the cave of the

Nativity, the sepulchre of the

in the lives of saints like

Jerome and Anthony, who

are often depicted as praying or being assailed at the

hermit's grotto.

The

revival of the

garden grotto

necting of the grotto with the garden

when tions

—had

the grotto could be divested of

and infused with new,

eclectic

its

that

is,

of their

the recon-

to wait for the Renaissance,

principally Christian associa-

symbolism (Neo-Platonist, human-

Although the gardens and grottoes of the

ist).

—

mouth

classical villas

had long

— example, by Ovid and —had been preserved, and were admired. The elaboration of the

since

been

them

for

a principal feature of the

new

leveled, descriptions of

Livy

garden grotto,

heights attained by the

SUSAN SONTAG

138

the Renaissance, produced such triumphs as the Grotta

garden

in

Grande

in the Medici's

many

Boboli Gardens in Florence and the

grot-

and hydraulic marvels of Pratolino, so admired by Montaigne and

toes

The use of

other foreign visitors. sites

their

employment

The

the grottoes of ancient villas as ban-

protected from the sun was replaced" in the Renaissance by

quet

backdrops for

as

theatrical spectacles.

complex idea of the garden

distinctive,

has been most prevalent in Western culture

work of

as a

—the garden

as

which

art,

an "ideal"

landscape, including an anthology of architectural elements, and featuring waterworks of various spectacular contrivance

Though only one element

the Renaissance.

which

in the

an intensification,

is

it

garden-world.

It is

den

outdoors, open,

that

is

it is

The

defined in

of the garden program,

grotto

is

light,

The essence

of the gar-

spacious, natural, while the grotto

indoors, hidden, dim,

is

a

whole

in miniature, of the

also the garden's inversion.

the quintessence of what

rated.

is

West has mostly been heterogeneous, the grotto has

privileged place:

is

—

characteristically a space that

is

deco-

artificial,

adorned

—with

frescoes, painted stuccos, mosaics, or (the association with water re-

maining paramount)

shells.

In the garden history that starts in the Renaissance, the grotto reflected

all

the turns of taste,

artificial ruin.

ern,

The

all

the ideas of the theatre.

The

grotto as

this survives in the fairground's

Tunnel of Love.) The grotto

showcase. The grotto

as

is,

papier-mache as

it

were, the

innately decadent element of the garden ensemble, the one that

impure, and most ambiguous. mulative, dimly

lit,

It is a

bad

the most intensively "rustic" space

Pope

villas.

Eventually

The roof and

space.

at

space that

thickly ornamented.

likely site for the elaboration of

Roman

mod-

grotto as a place for foolery and escapades. (A

degraded form of

Twickenham

it

taste.)

became an

of mirror interspersed with

At

first it

to fantasy,

and

was thought

to

a cave, as in

some

built

be

by Alexander

and 1730s were studded with shards

shells.

(The grotto

many

as

camera obscura,

in

grottoes were built by

shell collectors principally as a setting to display their treasures. last private grottoes,

a

elaborately theatrical, encrusted

famous grotto

Pope's phrase.) In the eighteenth century,

of the

most

complex and accu-

(An appeal

—the imitation of

walls of the in the 1720s

is

is

the Venus Grotto built by

Ludwig

One II

of

A Bavaria

at

Linderhof

in

ting of several scenes

876—1 877, was

1

Place for Fantasy

itself a theatrical

139

space, the set-

from Wagner's Tannhauser. Le Palais Ideal du

Facteur Cheval, in a small village in central France, could be regarded

garden grotto of the beginning of

as the great

haps the

last

of the breed.

The

this

ground

crypt-like

century

— and per-

level of this astonish-

ing building has the characteristic encrustedness of the grotto interior,

the didacticism, and the reach for the sublime.

Its builder's

aim

is

noth-

ing less than to miniaturize, and thereby to possess, the sublime. There are inscriptions, labels, declarations, adages incised throughout

walls

—the whole structure being designed, with something

by the inspired autodidactic handedly between 1879

an

as

postman who

on the

like genius,

built

single-

it

an anthology of world spiritual

and

materials

Ferdinand

sensibility,

same family

Cheval's grotto-labyrinth belongs to the

as the grotto of

Pope. Grottoes are places of fantasy, but the greatest grotto buildings

and always have been, functional: from the villas

are,

Roman

cryptoportici of the

(underground passageways one could take from one building to

another to avoid the heat of the day), or that stupendous achievement of

Roman

one of

engineering, the emissarium of

Piranesi's

Lake Albano

most haunting books of engravings),

fantasy lands as the limestone caves, over six

(the subject of

hundred

feet long, that

house the operations of the Brunson Instrument Company City, Missouri; or the miles of

underground shopping

in

Kansas

streets in

Osaka;

or the vast caverns dug in the mountain behind the National in Taipei that store the

made

off with

Louvre Metro

way

when he

made

in 1949; or the

Stockholm sub-

war

—

all

fled

all,

the justly celebrated

Mayakovsky and Dynamo possible to build

it

art,

Chiang Kai-shek

from China to Taiwan

feasible: the great

Grottoes of

art treasures that

Museum

station in Paris, several stations of the

system, and, above

pecially the

has

innumerable

modern

to such

stations.

below ground on

subterranean installations are

Moscow Modern

subway,

es-

technology

a scale never before

bound

to multiply.

grottoes of industry, grottoes of shopkeeping, grottoes of

these are functional and yet

space. In grottoes the functional

compatible. Perhaps that

is

why

seem the epitome of the poetry of

and the the

fantastic are anything

museum

but

in-

for his art collection that

SUSAN SONTAG

140

Johnson put underground next

Philip

Canaan, Connecticut, seems

that

is

House

New

in

— house sunk beneath the ground — but

like the

demands one

with glass walls

to his Glass

famous house's twin

a

is

not convincing as an example of the grotto in the garden:

too

is

it

purely functional, stripped down.

Many

tourist-worn

Carlsbad Caverns

sites

can supply the grotto experience. The

New Mexico,

in

the Postojna Caves in Slovenia (near

Ljubljana), the Grotte d'Arcy near Vezelay, south of Paris, the Grotte di ral

Nettuno near Alghero on the western coast of Sardinia

— such natu-

caves admired by grotto-buffs like myself serve as well the function

For there

no natural cave open

of

artificial grottoes.

(if

only because of the requirements of safety) has not been turned into

a stage set, or

is

museum, with guides pointing out zoomorphic forms

and organ pipes

in stalagmites

the visitors lined

up on the

erses part of the caves

with

—generally grilles

inaccessible

railroad.)

grottoes.

do

(In Postojna,

The cemetery

is

one a

trav-

garden

mausoleums and aboveground

crypts

instead of doors, into which one can peer. Visits to the at

near

Cerveteri,

visits to

bones instead of

The garden

And

— such

— resemble

as

the

visits to grot-

mummies

or artful piles of

shells.

grotto it

Rome

the catacombs of Palermo and of Guanajuato,

walls are decorated with upright

anymore.

with their flashlights to

But some cemeteries, particu-

Bella, with its relief-encrusted walls

toes, as

whose

—

stalactites

and walkways.

by miniature

Etruscan tombs excavated

Tomba

and

stairs

Latin countries, have

larly in

with

to tourists that

is

is

not extinct, but

it is

not to be found in gardens

above ground more than below. While the domi-

nant architectural tradition for half a century was the machine phase of the Bauhaus

style,

much

of the building that contradicted, dissented

from, or simply ignored the hyperrational Bauhaus aesthetic precisely

tended to have face,

a "grotto" look: the

the underground

mood,

in

curving

line,

the encrusted wall sur-

buildings as different as Antoni

Gaudi's Casa Mila and Parque Giiell (indeed most of Gaudf's work),

Kurt Schwitters's Merzbau (with

its

Nibelungen and Goethe grottoes),

Frederick Kiesler's "Endless House" (he designed a "Grotto for Meditation"), the

Saarinen's

Rudolf Steiner Goetheanum

TWA

terminal at

Kennedy

in

Airport.

Switzerland, and Eero

One

of the

more

flam-

— A boyant recent versions

is

Place for Fantasy

the design developed by John

the Hyatt Hotels. In the

first

141

Portman

for

of the hotels, in Atlanta, one goes

through an oddly small, unprepossessing entrance to receive the shock of unexpected height

in

an enclosed space. The Portman atrium

overdecorated, cluttered, and centered on water, usually a waterfall a deliberately coarse transposition of

some garden-grotto

Grottoes affirm the element of fantasy, of tecture

and

feeling.

Garden

full

grottoes

may

—

motifs.

of excess in archi-

frivolity,

be, in the sense projected in

garden history writing, obsolete. But one can predict an interminable ture for this kind of space, for

A

grotto

is

both

it is

a hiding place

der between the scary and the also a

a

permanent part of our

reality.

a

kind of ruin;

it is

on the bor-

the sublime and the decrepit.

And added

apprehensions embodied in the grotto

is

a specific

in their gardens.

It is

to the archaic fears

In the 1950s there was considerable pressure on

owners to build grottoes

fu-

permanent part of our imagination.

and

safe,

is

modern

all

and

scariness.

American house

They were

called

bomb

shelters.

[1983]

The Pleasure of the Image

AS

ELATED asl become roaming among

SATISFYING LY

the transfiguring masterpieces in the Mauritshuis collection,

still

need

minor

succumb

to

paintings: those that depict the interiors of churches.

sociate particularly with

enced

by some indisputably

to the spell exercised

pleasures these images offer, there

is first

of

Dutch painting

all

(I

Among the

a generic pleasure I as-

first

consciously experi-

before a skating scene by Brueghel) of falling forward into

it

a world.

And

I

.

.

.

that flicker of an out-of-body, into-the-picture sensation

I'm granted in the course of scrutinizing the renderings of these

large,

impersonal spaces populated with very small figures has proved, over

decades of museum-going, to be addictive. So, demagnetizing myself with difficulty

the Vermeers, in the

might

Nieuwe Kerk

petit maitre

for

I

some

drift off to, say,

in Delft,

who was

Silent

painted in 1651 by Gerard Houckgeest, a

an almost exact contemporary of Rembrandt's,

less individualizing pleasures.

The public space chosen two notions of elevated tional feeling

(it

is

one consecrated by

(it is

a

church) and na-

houses the tomb of the martyred founder of the House

The Tomb of William the which only part

for depiction here

feeling: religious feeling

of Orange). But the painting's

142

from the Rembrandts and

The Tomb of William the

is

title

Silent

visible,

is

supplies the pretext, not the subject.

dominated not by the monument, of

but by the strong verticals of the columns

The Pleasure of the Image and by the happy

monument

has

its

The

light.

subject

is

an architecture

place) and, to our incorrigibly

which the

(in

modern

143

eyes, a

way

of

presenting space. All renderings of the large, populated

by the

small,

the meticulously precise, invite this imagined entry.

which disclose

Of course,

savoring

the miniaturizing of a public space both deep and wide in a painting a far

more complex pleasure

ums over

than, say, daydreaming in historical muse-

tabletop models of the scenography of the past. Transcription

through miniaturization

in three

dimensions gives us

that of an inventory, completeness,

is

unexpected

plete with

house

as of a

detail

The

diorama.

—

as perspective),

as true of a

model

To a

start with, the

of the interior of the

same

earlier

painting

site,

now

is

point

of The

—there

is

site,

is

by

as

Tomh of William

the

are. (like

portraits

a wider- angle picture of

Kunsthalle, and

than the Mauritshuis picture. But this

records the

much

Houckgeest made other

Hamburg least

excludes as

it

Nieuwe Kerk, including

is

presumed

surely his

because of the features

photographic way of seeing. For it

which

visually appropriate (such

not just the view of something but

as viewed.

in the

account of the space, not

that

by what

And much of the pleasure comes from how bold its exclusions

photograph) something

the

delights

re-

railroad or a doll's

painting's surface gives us a view,

selects.

it

Silent

and which

whose aim

a thing

and which enchants by being

shaped by preexisting formal notions of the

what

is

it

most

to

be

original

shares with a

in addition to its illusionist

method

with considerable accuracy, from a real view-

the unconventionally tight framing, which brings the

base of the column looming in the center almost to the picture's bot-

tom

edge.

And

while the

main sources of light a dull bit of

in the

ally

version shows three windows, the

Mauritshuis painting are "off."

which

strikes the

columns comes from

picture's right edge. In contrast to the

a

window

panoramic view usu-

sought by painters documenting an architecture (or a landscape),

which takes

norm

is

in fnore

than could be seen by a single viewer, and whose

a space that appears comprehensive,

unabridged

self-contained, wall-to-wall), the space depicted here lit

We see only

high window, just below the arched top border of the

panel; the potent light

beyond the

Hamburg

so as to refuse visual closure.

The

is

(if

indoors,

one framed and

very nearness of Houckgeest 's

— SUSAN SONTAG

144

viewpoint

much

is

a

way of

larger space that continues

borders of the picture. This

photography (both ible,

what

logically

lies just

making the viewer aware

referring to,

still

is

beyond the space depicted within the

the

method

photography and

outside the visual

—of what we

the

of,

central to the aesthetics of

film): to

field, a

make what

constituent

—

is

not

vis-

dramatically,

see.

THE CLOSE POINT OF

V

I

E

w, which

is

the most immediately en-

gaging feature of Houckgeest's painting, produces an allied impression: of an unusual fullness of the space. Traditionally, church interiors are

rendered vastness,

empty, the better to achieve the impression of

as relatively

which was thought

pect. Architecture

to

be the church's most eloquent visual

was depicted

as framing, rather

than

filling,

as-

this

deep space, and the lighting ensured that structures looked plausibly three-dimensional; without dramatic lighting, the architectural details

tended to view

flatten

—not the

out.

light,

In Houckgeest's painting, the foreshortened

which

is

benign rather than dramatic

the three-dimensionality of the architecture.

By being

making the architecture so palpable, Houckgeest has that

seems redolent of inwardness, aura, emotion,

found

in paintings

admired of

all

the

—brings out

so close, and

forfeited the look

spirituality, as

it is

his

contemporary Pieter Jansz Saenredam, most

Dutch

painters of church interiors, or by an almost

by

equally admired architectural painter of the succeeding generation,

Emanuel de

Witte.

By the standard

ness of such paintings as

Rhenen

(165 5)

associated with the "poetic" empti-

Saenredam 's

and de Witte's

Interior of the Cunerakerk,

Interior of an Imaginary Catholic

Church

may seem

under-

(1668), also in the Mauritshuis, Houckgeest's painting

evocative, perversely

literal.

Saenredam 's achievement was

to

combine

the atmospherics of remoteness with accuracy of depiction, depiction

of a real church from a real viewpoint, though never from a near one the eccentric choice Houckgeest has

made

in

The Tomb of William the

Silent.

Masking

a portion of the real or

nominal subject by architectural

bulk, or interposing a screen or lattice or other grid-like barrier be-

tween viewer and subject,

is

a perennial strategy of

photographic fram-

The Pleasure of the Image ing,

and

it is

145

worth noting that Houckgeest, who has chosen an angle

good part of the sepulchre behind the column

for his view that leaves a

made

could have

in the center foreground,

his

framing even more

proto-photographic. For the next column to the right, the column that

looms

largest in the

Hamburg

version, should

be partly

still

the cropped composition of the Mauritshuis picture

from the same angle

— and would,

if it

were

—both

visible in

are painted

there, further block

our

view of the monument. Houckgeest has preferred to be inaccurate, and leave the right side of the picture's space

To

this space,

more

fully

more open.

than usual inhabited by

its

architectural

elements, are added a few inhabitants in the normal sense: eight

chunky, bundled-up people with covered heads, two of

whom

are chil-

dren; one animal; and an allegorical statue on a pedestal, the farthest

forward element of the partially obscured monument.

We

contemplate

the space Houckgeest has rendered, which includes, inside the space, these diminutive figures, ing. In

coming

an architecture, looking

to see or already in position for see-

at

an architecture. Giving the measure

of an architecture.

Although the people closer)

in

Houckgeest's painting are larger (we are

and more detailed than the

tiny staffage figures that classical

landscape painters added to their panoramic views, they function in a

comparable way, establishing the architecture's heroic scale,

human

figures also, almost inadvertently, create

dwarfed by the spaces they inhabit and to three-dimensional tions

seem most

are, usually,

scale.

By

setting

mood: they look

but few. In contrast

model worlds, whose miniaturized representa-

satisfying

when

a large

number

of tiny figures are de-

ployed on the landscape, architectural space as a subject of painting characteristically, if unrealistically,

space thronged with people painter, it

who, by putting

is

now

underpopulated. Indeed, a public a signature subject of the "naive"

in lots of tiny figures, appears to

were, a genre mistake.

is

What seems

be making,

as

professional in the depiction of

the interior of grandiose buildings or of outdoor space enclosed by buildings

is

thafcthe space,

sparsely populated. This

is

which always looks somewhat the involuntary pathos of

architecture that are not laden with obvious affect, like

William the

Silent. All

church

interiors,

even

stage-like,

many

this one,

be

portraits of

The Tomb of

become "meta-

146

SUSAN SONTAG

physical" interiors in de Chirico's sense; that sary absence of the this sense of

is,

they speak of a neces-

human. They cannot help but suggest

this pathos,

enigma.

THE PRESENCE OF PEOPLE, if just one person, makes this not only a space but a moment of stopped time. Of course, tableaux in which people are depicted being busy project

in the throes of

a different feeling

ing or gazing or explaining.

As

some ceremony or way of

from those

which they're

in

befits a church, the

mood

is

calm

rest-

—but

perhaps more than calm: becalmed, indolent, though not suggestive of introspection.

We

from the visions of alienation relished by the

are far

mid-eighteenth century,

when

sublimity was identified with the decay

of the grandiose architecture of the past, and staffage was turned into a

among

population of spindly dejected figures stationed in reverie. tus,

The

not just a

the ruins, lost

full-bodied figures in Houckgeest's painting have a stasize:

Where

they are citizens, townspeople.

they are

is

where they belong. Public space, whether rendered in two dimensions or three, ally

shown being used

in a variety of representative or stereotypically

contrasting ways. In the

Dutch paintings of church

the church

it

is

often, as

Nieuwe Kerk we

are

is

shown

backs to

here, wholly secular.

us, the viewers,

but their

two men on the

seems to be

The people

the

left,

clear.

hand

they have

The

father in

head

raised, his

in a posture of explaining.

to speak to his

companion,

the child with the dog seem to be just loitering.

is

seen

full face)

The and

This most un-Hebraic

of Christianity does not require the continual re-performing of

the separateness of the sacred; space designed for devoutness

open

in the

far side of the barrier enclosing the sepulchre (one of

whom, having turned

mode

at

mood seems

the family group in the foreground with one partly turned to his wife,

interiors, the use of

are spectators, visitors, not worshippers.

Except for the pair of men entering the picture their

usu-

is

to the irreverent accents

Sacred space that mesticated,

made

is

tender

and mixtures of

daily

fully

life.

mildly profaned, grandiose space that

— children and dogs

is

is

do-

(often a child paired with

The Pleasure of the Image a dog) are characteristic presences in the teriors:

emblems of

Compare

the modest

Dutch paintings of church

in-

amid the marmoreal splendors.

creatureliness

number

147

emblems Houckgeest

of such

(one dog, two children), having chosen to treat the

settles for

close range,

site at

with the variety offered in a conventional wide-angle view, such as de Witte's Interior of the

dogs, one of children,

them urinating

one an infant

less regular

presence

of small children.

—

at

at its

As

if

he, too,

and two

left,

mother's breast. Graffiti are a related

would

invariably

on the warm, whitish column

human

which has four

the base of the pillar on the

worn by

all six

be read

were an

is

if

as the trace

Houck-

in the center

a stick

is

males in the painting), the

drawn by

figure as

scrawled in the same red chalk or ink, the date.

(1659),

legible of the drawings in red that

with a hat (the same hat

stereotype of the

Amsterdam

Kerk,

they, too,

The most

geest has recorded

man

Oude

a child.

the painter's

And

below,

monogram and

artless vandal.

Devising ingenious locations for the signature or

monogram

strong Northern tradition, of which Diirer was a master, and the

is

a

Dutch

painters of church interiors play a witty variant of the game.

In

Saenredam's Interior of the Cunerakerk, Rhenen, the painter's name, the

name

of the church, and the date of the painting are to be deci-

phered, foreground center, as the inscription incised on the tombstone set in the floor.

this

A

And

in several other

church interiors Saenredam inserts

information on a column on which there are some crude drawings.

brilliant

example

is

the Interior of the Mariakerk, Utrecht (1641), in

the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where Saenredam's inscription (name

of church, date of painting, painter's name) appears on a pillar right in three colors, as

if

these were graffiti

hands, along with several drawings of

human

made by

at far

three different

figures in the

same three

inks or chalks. Saenredam's Interior of the Buurkerk, Utrecht (1644), in

the National Gallery in London, ing before the pillar

on the

is

notable because he shows us, stand-

far right

which has an amusing drawing

in

red of four figures astride a horse (below which, in another color,

is

who

is

Saenredam's

artfully printed signature), a child,

starting another drawing. (Beside

dog.)

One

him

is

arm

raised,

a seated child playing

with a

imagines him, far from being engaged in a surreptitious de-

— SUSAN SONTAG

148

embarking on

facing,

mood

a

happy exercise of immature prowess,

in the

of the grinning child displaying his stick-figure drawing in a

painting done around

1

520, Portrait

Francesco Caroto, in the the other rare,

Museo

of a Boy with Drawing by Giovanni

geest's graffiti-plus-signature in

then, original. But

it is

unusual because of

It is just a

—one of Houck-

The Tomb of William the

the picture, not on a pillar to the side fo rmativeness.

Verona

children's art.

del Castelvecchio in

premodern representations of

—

its

and

placement

its

Silent

not,

— the center of

simplicity,

its

monogram, barely

self-effacing

is

lack of in-

distinguish-

able from the child's drawings.

THE GRAFFITI HOUCKGEEST

has put on the central column

nify childishness but are pieces of visual wit.

Two

scribed.

notions of presence.

the column; the painter has

be depicted

that can only

A

Two spaces are being demade an inscription on

child has

drawn on the panel

as

one space,

—two

physically.

spaces, logically,

And two

temporal

relations of painter to church: as a vandalizing presence in the

anterior to the painting;

church who,

and

as

sig-

church

the faithful documentarist of the

after recording the architecture as

is,

signs the

document.

Hindsight instructs us that the ironic paralleling of the signature of a painter

with the scribbling of a child on a public surface

a very rich conceit,

which was

to

have

a

and has perhaps never been so generative could not begin to happen as long as tively

—

as

graffiti

word

this

were defined only priva-

1

reality.

Not

as

until the

discovered to be "interesting"

taste as Grandville

modern

taste

and Baudelaire.

—by such A

pio-

self-portrait

844 showing himself drawing alongside a small child

a graffiti-covered wall

paralleling of

graffiti

that signals the advent of

modern

Grandville did in

on

But

immature, embryonic, unskilled. Graffiti have to be seen

mid-nineteenth century were the key

potentially

as in recent decades.

an assertion of something, a criticism of public

neers of

is

long career in the visual arts

two kinds of

makes

a far bigger point than Houckgeest's

inscription,

which are here only

traces (their

perpetrators are absent).

Houckgeest's painting describes

a

world

in

which the abstract

The Pleasure of the Image order of the State, of collective

assumed, so successful, that

(represented by gigantic space)

life

creaturely.

so

ele-

Pub-

order can be relaxed, can even be mildly defaced. The sacred and

solemn can tolerate

Nieuwe Kerk

any more than the

less centrally

ruined by the dog's peeing on

are an element of

The imposing main column

a bit of profaning.

his portrait of the

is

is

can be played with, by miniature

it

ments that represent the incursion of the personal, the lic

149

charm

not really damaged by the

is

in

graffiti,

located column in de Witte's painting Reality

it.

sturdy, not fragile. Graffiti

is

environment, with not

in the majestic visual

even the slightest foretaste of the menace carried by the tide of indecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents which has washed over

and bitten into the facades of monuments and the surfaces of public vehicles in the city yes,

but most of

too.

The

graffiti

all

where

I live

—

graffiti as

an assertion of disrespect,

simply an assertion: the powerless saying, I'm here,

recorded in the Dutch paintings of church interiors are

mute; they do not express anything, other than their endearing lack of

umn

skill

speak, intransitive.

Even

not directed

is

that red

"GH"

naivete, the

The drawing on

of their perpetrators.

Houckgeest's painting

in

own

at

anyone;

it

the colis,

seems barely directed

so to

at any-

one.

What

this painting

shows

cord, without aggression.

is

Church

church interior church was

a

interiors are the opposite of ruins,

says,

This

is

The

is

be most eloquently

ruin says, This

our present.

(It is

Now—whether

is

our

past.

lo-

The

because the beauty of the

the churches have survived in-

has the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, or not

This

to

matter of local pride that these paintings were commis-

sioned, bought, hung.)

says,

before, innocent of, the inven-

where the sublimity of space was

cated in the following century.

tact, as

a friendly space, a space without dis-

The grandiose

tion of melancholy space.

which

is

our

past.

Still,

choly that are the great

—the church

interior also

even installed in those temples of melan-

museums

of

Old Master

paintings like the

Mauritshuis, they do not lend themselves to elegiac reverie. Attached as I

am

to the melancholy registers of space, as

tural portraits

Roman

ruins,

done and

in

found

in the architec-

in Italy in the eighteenth century, particularly of

images of great natural ruins (volcanoes) and of

150

SUSAN SONTAG

space as labyrinth (grottoes),

I

also crave the relief offered

by these

ro-

bust, unsoulful renderings in miniature of grandiose public space that

were painted

a century earlier in

Holland.

Who

sure in the thought of a world in which trespass tion

is

not an ideal, and nostalgia

is

could is

fail

to take plea-

not a threat, perfec-

not a compulsion? [1987]

About Hodgkin

DEVOLVING NOW, up

a

when pressed have

much

"program."

And,

to talk about their art. It appears unseemly, or naive, to

to say about the pictures or to attach to

No more

artists

theories

as statements wither

anything in the

a

the modernist tasks and liberties have stirred

canny diffidence among painters of the largest accomplishment

expounding an

ideal

them any

way

explicit

of painting.

and with them counterstatements, hardly

way of provocation,

either.

Decorum

sound somewhat trapped when being drawn

out,

suggests that

and venturing

few cagey glimpses of intention. Complementing that venerable

fortress of

modernist

taste,

doubt of modernism under the thoughtful

—

as distinct

son to be wary, anxious,

the white wall of the gallery, siege, the

from the

EARLIER IN THE CENTURY,

who might

to

words by paying

And

—may have good

rea-

words).

it

was the most responsive writers

begin their setting of the encounter with a

body of pictures

a final re-

white mind of the painter.

inarticulate

at a loss (for

is

much admired

tribute to painting as a

form of the

unsayable.

151

SUSAN SONTAG

152

As Paul Valery wrote

"One must

Corot"):

From enact,

1932

(it's

the

sentence of "About

first

always apologize for talking about painting."

summoning

the

in

of each art to what

means only could

its

follows that nothing can be paraphrased or transposed into

it

another medium. Painting, like music and dance, does not signify in the verbal sense; what you see

not leave us mute,

is

of

little

is

what you

"A work

get.

value" (Valery again).

of

art, if it

Of course, we

does don't

stay mute.

But there

is

be said now,

comes

a further incentive to

as the

aim and

be self-conscious about what can

justification of art after

precisely to generate talk

— about what

is

not

modernism

art.

A

be-

mighty

re-

pudiation of the idea of art pursued out of reverence for art has

overwhelmed art-making and

critical

discourse in the

last

decade.

It

has centered on the equating of aesthetic purposes, and their unforgivingly "high" standards, with illegitimate or indefensible forms of social privilege.

For those whose principal

interest

is

neither to

come

clean

about adventures in selfhood nor to speak on behalf of fervent communities but rather to perpetuate the old, semi-opaque continuities of admiring, emulating, and surpassing, prudence

may

suggest saying less

rather than more.

THE ATTACK ON ART

—

for being, just, art

abetted by modernism's peculiar, reductive

omy

of

erarchy

art,

discriminating

was inexorably

among

of

art.

been

affirming the auton-

Shorn of the support of received ways of

subjects

subjectivized;

and destinations, the nature of pictures

and archly plebeianized.

There are two leading assertions

plained."

to have

which derived much of its energy by denying the idea of hi-

among kinds

the painter.

way of

—has

The

The

in this

reduced

field

of saying for

painter asserts that the pictures don't need to be "ex-

painter explains that the pictures should, properly, be

regarded as "things."

About Hodgkin

there's one just ahead ...or nearby

And

perhaps not in the obvious place, such

room;

lector's living

it

may be on

153

... or over there

museum

as a

.

.

.

or the col-

the wall of a restaurant or a hotel

lobby.

But wherever we see which one. But

it,

we know what

we know, even from

it

is.

far across the

In contrast to the painting of earlier eras, this ing aspects of the experience

Each

style,

a pictorial

of which each

language of

that artist's language,

work

maximum is

—of

room, who did

one of the

A

regulat-

art in this century.

else's.

—

a sig-

style is equivalent to

what declares

distinctiveness:

it.

itself as

To use again and again the

it

might be

in a writer. Repetitiveness

Like purity. Like strength.

OBSERVATION

A FIRST

an example.

know

not deemed a failure of imagination in a

painter (or choreographer), as like intensity.

is

and nobody

same gestures and forms

seems

making

is

not

responsible for creating his or her unique "vision"

artist is

nature

—and

We may

about

Howard Hodgkin work: 's

the ex-

which everything by Hodgkin looks so unmistakably by him.

tent to

That the pictures are done on gularity

—and

dards, they

wood seems

their "thingness." Usually

to heighten their rectan-

modest

in size

by current

stan-

seem boxy, blunt, even heavy sometimes because of the

proportions of frame to interior of the picture, with something like the form,

which

if

not the scale, of a window, displaying a ballet of

either are enclosed within thickly

plump shapes

emphatic brush strokes that

frame (or shield) or are painted out to the edge of the raised frame.

The

pictures are

packed with cunning design and

(Hodgkin 's green blue.)

is

as excruciating as

Having renounced

Hodgkin has

fielded the

thick, luscious color.

de Kooning's pink and Tiepolo's

painting's other primary resource, drawing,

most inventive, sensuously

repertory of any contemporary painter

—

as

if,

in taking

affecting color

up the ancient

SUSAN SONTAG

154

quarrel between disegno and colore, he had wanted to give colore

most sumptuous exclusive

victory.

"my PICTURES TEND to hung too picture

make

ideally, a

its

case

to exclude

at

if,

maximum

seduction.

the distance from which

some adjacent

to solve the problem,

the picture's charms

sheer color-bliss

destroy each other

when

they are

Hodgkin has remarked. No wonder. Each

closely together,"

is,

its

solicitations.

Harder it is

for the picture to

best seen, one

is

unable

But the viewer may be tempted

abandoning the proper distance from which

may be

all

appreciated to zero in for immersion in

—what Hodgkin

's

on

pictures can always be counted

to provide.

TOO CLOSE

A

VIEW

of the picture will not only yield a

round of voluptuous sensation

(say,

the streaks of salmon-pink

beneath what reads ten feet away

ible

mind

the viewer of what

is

new

now vis-

as cobalt blue). It will also re-

written beside or below:

its title.

Leaves, Interior with Figures, After Dinner, The Terrace, Delhi,

Venice/Shadows, Clean Sheets,

man, After Corot

.

.

.

familiar subjects: the

Red Bermudas,

Mr. and Mrs. James Kirk-

titles like

these indicate a pleasingly large range of

still life,

the plein-air scene, the intimate interior,

the portrait, the art history homage.

Sometimes the

title

corresponds to something that can be

dis-

cerned.

More traits

—

often,

that

two names,

is,

it

doesn't. This

whose

most obviously true of the porare someone's

name; usually

(The names, those of friends and

collectors, will

the pictures

a couple.

is

titles

be unfamiliar to viewers.)

Some

We

titles

that are phrases, such as Like an

Open Book, Haven't

Met?, Counting the Days, seem to be drawn from the history of a

love titles

life.

In Central Park, Egypt,

evoke

a very specific

On

the Riviera, Venice Evening

world, the world

known through

—many

tours of

— About Hodgkin

(We hear about

seeing and savoring.

submerged

hint at a

—

hear

body on

a bed.

Hodgkin 's

But

signals,

much

there's as

some of the

has the

from

an impulse to play

pictures. Thus,

title

to

form of

down

one of the

a

as to re-

largest of

Snapshot. While offering a shrewd spread of

Coming Up from

the diaristically offhand, like

and Cafeteria

Grand Palais,

at the

and Love

Jealousy,

titles

recent pictures, and one of the most glorious and emotion-

ally affecting,

the Beach

to the bluntly plaintive, like Passion,

Letter, the majority of the titles are casually

nomina-

or slightly ironic, which makes them nicely at variance with the

proud exuberance of

pictures'

Of course, is

Some

quite a lot of meals.)

which we can be sure we're not going

like the glimpses, in several of the pictures, of the

veal the charge of

tive

story,

155

buoyant, ecstatic palette.

feeling, their

the fact that a person or place

is

named does not mean

it

depicted.

In the Bay of Naples, Still Life in a Restaurant, In a

Hot Country

—

the "in" in a fair

number of

that the artist has

been "in" these places, on these fortunate holidays.

(We

don't expect a

And

that,

itself is a

which

is

Hodgkin

titles carries a

title

that tells us

whether the space named kind of

interior.

One

is

titles

are "in" a dungeon.)

outdoors or indoors, the picture

looks into the picture, to something

near Venice

— confirm the suggestiveness of — Egyptian Night and House

Lovers, for instance

certain enlacing shapes.

—succeed

in

A

few

titles

like

making the pictures seem representational

the conventional sense. But, exception as Venetian Glass,

Hodgkin

world, an impression. (An emotion of

we

It signifies

both disclosed and hidden.

Some

mances

dual meaning.

Hodgkin 's

is

made

is

for such bravura perfor-

not offering the look of the

not an impression.) Hardly any

paintings harbor mimetically distinct shapes, and only a

few have shapes which would seem even clue supplied posite of the

in

by the

title.

The

allusively distinct

one associated with Impressionism:

freshness of the

first

fleeting

without the

subjectivism of these pictures

moment

that

it

the op-

to preserve the visual

something

aims to reinvent the sight of something after

is

is

seen.

Hodgkin

has been seen,

has acquired the heavy trappings of inner necessity.

when

it

SUSAN SONTAG

156

8

OPERATING ON

BORDER

A

much

very

own

of his

between figuration and abstraction, Hodgkin has made for regarding his

choreography of spots,

wavy bands

lozenges, arrows, and

devising

a sturdy case

stripes, discs, arcs, swaths,

as always representational.

am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances" how he puts it. "I paint representational pictures of emotional situa"I

is

Note

tions/'

tions";

he

is

that

Hodgkin

"emotional situations," not "emo-

says

not licensing the attempt to read a specific emotion from a

given picture, as

if

that

Hodgkin 's formula

were what the picture was "about." is

as elegantly

withholding as

it

is

incisive

and

alert.

Whose

emotional situations? The

Obviously,

titles

David Hockney or Dinner

like After Visiting

Palazzo Alhrizzi or Indian Sky

would seem

has to assume that, in this sense,

graphical, though only

them

be deceptions

to

had never met David Hockney, had never

painter

One

artist's?

some of the

are self- referential in the

the emotional state of the earnest,

titles

narrow

artist.

all

the

visited Italy or India.

the pictures are autobio-

make

sense.

And

if

in

this explicit. Still,

What's on display

few of is

not

the pictures offer the most

emphatic tribute to the world outside,

its

treasurable objects

and beauties and opportunities. Indeed, the sublimity of the color

Hodgkin 's itude

—

Two

tents.

pictures can be thought of

for the

passions which

collecting, are is

world that

resists

we

as, first

of

all,

in

expressive of grat-

and survives the ego and

its

discon-

associate with this painter, traveling

and

both expressions of ardent, deferential feeling for what

not oneself.

SO called.

past,

MANY OF To

sites

the pictures refer to "abroad," as

it

used to be

of dalliance already consecrated by great painters of the

which one never

tires

of revisiting: India,

Egypt. Seasons in their foreign plumage:

fruit,

Italy,

palm

France, Morocco, trees, a searingly

About Hodgkm colored

And home

sky.

Bed in

Venice, not in

There

is

consumed on

pleasures

bed

in

London; the painter

lovemaking and dining and looking

gazing out over water.

The

sites

foreign premises. (In is

not traveling alone.)

and shopping and

at art

bespeak an avid

157

eye,

and

a taste for the

domesticated; gardens and terraces, not forests and mountains. evocation of sensuous, congenial tourism

promenades, cherished

art,

memorable

—dinner —boldly

The

parties, nocturnal

visits

affirms the idea

of pleasure.

But the

intimate another relation to pleasure, with their

titles also

naming of weather and seasons and times of weather cited,

is

it's

season

rain; the

usually sunset

is

—which,

story in the daily existence of

day.

invariably autumn;

The most common if

day

a time of

is

apart from being the biggest color

most people, has

a large place in the the-

saurus of melancholy. All those titles with

"goodbye

on

all

to

.

.

.

pleasures

,"

"sunset,"

"autumn," "rain," "after

"the last time ..." suggest the pensive

when

.

.

shadow

.

,"

cast

they are framed, theatricalized even, as acts of

memory.

Hodgkin may

often be en voyage, but not as a beholder (the Im-

pressionist project). In place of a beholder, there pursuits, that of the traveler

and

is

a

rememberer. Both

that of the collector, are steeped in

elegiac feeling.

10

AFTER THE SHOP HAD CLOSED, The

When Did We Go titles

to

Last Time I

Morocco?, Goodbye to the Bay of Naples

focus on time ("after"), on the awareness of

Art

made

Saw .

.

.

Paris,

many

finalities.

out of a sense of difference, a sense of triumph, a sense of

regret. If there are so

and sensations

many

pictures

which

that Venice inspires,

it is

offer

homage

because that

to the feelings

city is

now,

as

it

could never ha\fe been for Turner, a quintessential evoker of the senti-

ment of loss.

SUSAN SONTAG

158

11

NOT THAT

it's

the exotic, or the southern,

required to

is

re-

lease the impulse of this "northern" sensibility to paint.

But

A

it

may be

trip

is

You need home,

that this painter needs to travel.

an intensifies license to the avid eye (and other senses).

And

the separation from home.

to consider

then you need the return

what you have stored up.

In principle, the painter could

make

pictures out of everything he

has lived through and done and seen. This creates an unbearably acute pressure to paint, and an equally acute feeling of anxiety. Travel, the impression that

used

as a filter

and goad.

It

one has ventured outside

oneself, can

organizes the desire to paint.

It

gives

be

it

a

rhythm, and the right kind of delay. It is

important not to see too much. (And there

duce.) Hence,

doesn't

doesn't sketch, doesn't take photographs,

do anything obvious

terior or a

sight of

Hodgkin

view or

a face

nothing to repro-

is

to

commit

—instead

something has burrowed

memory

to

what

trusting

itself

the scene or an in-

happen when the

will

deep down

memory, when

in

it

has accumulated emotional and pictorial gravity.

A way of feeling is What

is

a

way of

worth painting

is

seeing.

what remains

memory. And what survives the

test

in,

and

is

transformed by,

of long-term deliberation and

countless acts of re-vision. Pictures result from the accretion of decisions (or layers, or brush strokes);

some

are

worked on

many

for years, to

find the exact thickness of a feeling.

12

LOOKING CLOSELY

at

what the swipes and plunges of Hodg-

kin 's brush have deposited on a surface

is

to feel, sometimes, that

has divined the brush's itinerary, starting from the

first,

one

generative

Hodgkin 's

pictures read like

a vocabulary of signals for the circulation, collision,

and rerouting of

surge of feelings.

desire.

The

distinctive shapes in

About Hodgkin Sometimes

it

feels as if the flooding or

onto the frame. Sometimes thickened, doubled, as

if

is

it

the frame that has

to contain

Love Letter

spilled over

moved

inward,

what cannot be contained. (The

verticals of Snapshot, like the sides of a

thick oval frame of

brimming has

159

proscenium stage or

fat

a gate; the

crowds the heart of what

that squeezes,

pulsing in the center.)

lies

Framing hems

And

keeps one from

in,

falling off the

edge of the world.

framing gives permission to emote.

makes possible the ambitiousness of Hodgkin 's work, and

It

its

cunningly judged compactness of statement. Hodgkin has under-

tight,

stood that

the pictures are dense enough, they can go in two direc-

if

doing justice to intimate textures as well

tions,

as to

emotions of

a large

expressiveness. (Vuillard an d opera, so to speak.)

13

VENICE: want

ONCE, AGAIN.

to see Venice again,

Imagining the imagined.

and you have seen

it

many times,

When

rising out of

the sea, in winter perhaps, semi-deserted, what you appreciate will

not have changed

Or you

is

that

it

all.

stand at the railing of the boat going up the Nile, a

day's journey

are

at

you

from Luxor, and

no words you

sunset. You're just looking.

are impelled to write

or take a photograph.

and you look

it's

again,

You

look,

and you

down; you don't make

and sometimes your eyes

feel saturated,

There

a sketch

feel tired,

and happy, and

terribly

anxious.

There

is

a price to

be paid for stubbornly continuing to make love

with one's eyes to these famous tourist- weary old places. For not letting go: of ruined grandeur, of the imperative of bliss.

work on behalf that this

is

of, in

praise of, beauty.

It's

For continuing to

not that one hasn't noticed

an activity which people rather condescend to now.

Indeed, one might spend a lifetime apologizing for having found so

many ways

of Seceding to ecstasy.

SUSAN SONTAG

160

M THE IDEA each picture. so

much

IS

It's

feeling.

to put as

much

as if the pictures

As

if

need

their

broad border to contain

they need to be painted on something hard,

wood, since they embody such

The

as possible, of color, of feeling, in

a large sense of vulnerability.

sense of vulnerability has not diminished.

Nor

has the sense of

gratitude: for the privilege of feeling, the privilege of voluptuousness,

the privilege of

knowing more

rather than

less.

vehemence and the lack of irony of Hodgkin's

them

as if painting

could

still

be

There

is

pictures.

heroism

He

in the

labors over

a vehicle of self-transcendence.

In such matters, with such purposes, the race

is

to the slow. x [

995]

A

AVAILABLE dancers

Lexicon for Available Light

1983. Fifty-five-minute work for eleven

LIGHT.

(five

women and

seum of Contemporary

Art,

large-scale productions.

six

men) commissioned by the Mu-

Los Angeles: the third of Lucinda Childs's

Music by John Adams,

set

by Frank Gehry,

costumes by Ronaldus Shamask, lighting by Beverly Emmons.

beauty. The its

visionary authority of Childs's

lack of rhetoric.

Her

strict

work

resides, in part, in

avoidance of cliche, and of anything that

The

would make the work

disjunctive, fragmented.

self-mockery, flirtation

with the audience, cult of personality. The

taste for the exhibitionistic:

able "effects." Beauty

choreography.

movement

as, first

of

all,

an

refusal of

humor, dis-

calling attention to itself, isolat-

of refusal.

art

Childs started by defining herself as a "modern"

choreographer; therefore, alienated from "tradition." (Two decades ago,

it

tithesis

could

still

seem plausible

and subversion of

graphing dances, in 1968,

movement vocabulary where

—

to regard

classical dance.) it

modern dance

When

she did start choreo-

was with the predilection

relatively

simple,

in the intricate design of spatial

as the an-

seeking

for keeping the

complexity

else-

forms and of timing. But in

the music-based works choreographed since 1979, which propose a

much more complex movement

vocabulary, Childs has broken radi-

16

SUSAN SONTAG

162

cally

with the anti-ballet aesthetic of the other ex- or neo-Duchampian

choreographers with

whom

Of

she has been grouped.

all

the adepts of

modern among contemporary choreographers, she has

the rigorously

the subtlest and most fastidious relation to classical dance. If her use of

portions of the ballet idiom

less easily

is

ningham's and Twyla Tharp's, letic

movements and

because Childs does not feed bal-

is

it

positions

recognizable than Merce Cun-

an

into

transforms and reinterprets them. In

mix but wholly

eclectic

this, as in

other matters, she

is

adamantly anti-collage. Thus the choreography of Available Light was not conceived

costumes but to these

—

first

and then

solicited,

illustrated

by the music, the

presupposed, and worked out in

to the two-level stage devised

and the

set,

strict relation

by Gehry, the multi-layered

music of Adams, the three-color constructivist scheme (black, red, white) of Shamask's costumes.

complexity. Cunningham dancing

what

is

it is.

delicate

in 1952:

"For me,

a spiritual exercise in physical form,

And

I

do not believe

rhythms and

it is

and

that

what

seen

is

is

is

The

"

possible to be 'too simple.'

intricate configurations

ham's work, the way attention

seems enough that

it

and tempi of Cunning-

commanded through

simple,

a

unadorned, unexplained, often decentered presence, offered

a

new

standard of the complex.

Cunningham, merce. tween 1959 and

1963,

Childs,

who

studied with

Cunningham

be-

assumes Cunningham's notion that dance should

not express something else (an emotion, a

story,

an interior landscape)

but not Cunningham's method, which

make

the elements of dance

self-contained,

autonomous, even

in their look). "I didn't like it,"

ment meant

is

to

aleatoric in their

mix (and sometimes

Cunningham once

said, "that a

something." This liberating stance has

move-

been associated

with a large element of parody in Cunningham's idiom: post-Graham

movements

Graham

(the

Cunningham curved back

is

an ironic

comment on

contraction) and laterally tilted ballet positions.

eclectic aesthetic,

much

irony.

Out

(Cunningham's choreography

is

the

of this

an

art

of

disjunction and therefore ultimately comic.) Childs by temperament unifies;

her aesthetic refuses the eclectic, the disjunctive

—

it

never

A

Lexicon for Available Light

quotes.

Though

work

virtually free of irony. Its tone

is

playfulness

Cunningham

bracing the

163

one of her chief standards of grace, her

is

austere but never cool.

is

Em-

position (the refusal of plot, of "meaning"),

Childs has drawn other consequences from

she has dropped the

it;

jokes, the kidding around, the wistful lyricism,

and reached for the

sublime.

dance.

1979.

The

of the large-scale productions, a hundred-

first

minute work, for the company of nine. Music by Philip Glass, lighting

by Beverly Emmons, and

a film

by Sol LeWitt of portions of three of

"Dance

the five sections ("Dance #1,"

#3,"

and "Dance

#4").

Choreog-

Cunningham and Pina Bausch have made works

raphers as different as

TV

with an accompanying, simultaneous image-record, displayed on a

monitor placed on the use, the projection of

of the stage,

stage; in contrast to this additive,

LeWitt 's

a true setting

is

The synchronized ongoing flat

(the scrim /screen)

vides a double jection),

reality,

a transparent scrim at the front

literal

transfiguration of the dance.

and three-dimensional

both dance and

its

(the stage)

split-screen

and

same

in close-up, LeWitt's film tracks the level,

and multiple images. Or

series of

still

shots)

it

which the

sometimes from above

solo,

when

live

dancer passes through.

"Dance

seem disembodied,

spectacle

becomes

Or

#4," Childs's

Childs appears both in large mask-like close-up on

a friendly, intermittent ghost that

scrim,

—using

immobilizes them, in a freeze-

the scrim and as a small immobile figure in white on the stage. is

pro-

shadow (documentation, pro-

waits with the dancer, as in the beginning of

second

— and

both intimacy and distance. Recording the dancers from

dancers, sometimes on the

it

and

on

of film and dance creates a double space

different angles, in long shot

frame (or

film,

fragmenting

too:

The

film

makes the dancers, seen behind the

each seems the ghost of the other. The

authentically polyvalent, though the film

subordinate to the dance. "Dance #2," Childs's

first solo,

is

finally

and the con-

cluding "Dance #5" proceed without the film ghost.

diagonal. A

signature element in Childs's choreography: a principle

of avidity, about space. Dancers often go into low plie arabesque, with the

arm continuing the diagonal

—the longest

line that the

body can

SUSAN SONTAG

164

make.

And

they often

move on

the diagonal

—the longest distance one

can traverse on a stage without changing direction. Childs's adventures with the diagonal have their apotheosis in Relative Calm, two of four sections being choreographed entirely on the diagonal. In the section, the

whole company dances back and forth on

from upstage

right

to

downstage

in phrases of different lengths,

opposite diagonal

.

.

.

And moving

tensification, as in the finale of

parallel paths

Childs dances for seventeen

punctuated by turns, on the

to the diagonal often

Or

in Available Light: Childs's arrival

slow progress downstage dancers, four

on each

doubling. A

left

means an

in-

"Dance #i" of Dance, when suddenly

four pairs of dancers dash again and again from upstage stage right.

first

for twenty-three increasingly

left

blissful minutes; in the third, solo section,

minutes

its

left

to

down-

upstage right and

through a corridor formed by eight

side.

recurrent structure in Childs

former into two versions, the action into two

s

work: splitting the per-

levels,

which proceed

si-

multaneously. For example, in an early piece, Street Dance (1964), Childs's voice, taped, loft,

while she was

tions that she

was with the audience assembled

down on

in a sixth-floor

the street, being seen performing the ac-

was heard describing. Doubling

in the sense of several

dancers performing the same movements on different paths became, starting with Untitled Trio (1968), the

extended subject of the works

she created for small ensembles in the 1970s. Transverse Exchanges and

Radial Courses (both 1976) elaborate, delicately and strenuously, on the counterpoint of dancers who, using the same steps or families of movements, go in and out of sync with each other through changes of direction,

and

Having

relation to the floor.

same rhythmic thing above the other

—

side

by

side,

one

gait,

several people doing the

in front of another, or

one

—has always been part of choreographing ensembles,

military, ceremonial,

principle of artifice

and

balletic.

—of form

Indeed, doubling

itself.

Childs's

is

the most basic

work concentrates on

the

implications of doubling as a formal principle and as the basis of

choreographic syntax: the geometrical, or diagrammatic, idealization of

movement. Her recent

large works, created since 1979, allow for a

A more complex decor ities

is

165

theme of doubling. The adding of

orchestration of the

never merely decorative but functions to create richer possibil-

made

of doubling. Thus, the film that LeWitt

Dance

creates a perfectly synchronized

ample, the film,

Lexicon for Available Light

split

never

less

double

set

decor for

as the

of dancers. For ex-

screen allows the audience to see the dancers in the

than

on

life-size,

top; the live dancers (behind the

scrim) on the bottom. What LeWitt supplied

for

Dance with

a film,

Frank Gehry supplies for Available Light with an architecture. In Available Light, the stage variations

itself

become

has

two-level, allowing other

on the theme of doubling. Instead of traveling ghosts, there

are live trackers:

one

to three dancers are upstairs echoing, playing off,

providing counterpoint to what the dancers are unfolding below.

einstein on the beach. 1976. The "opera," conceived and directed

by Robert Wilson, with music by Philip Glass; Childs was performer and collaborated on the

and touring

that

Her

opens Act

work and

a

former and to

music

The

year she spent preparing

on the Beach (Avignon, Venice, Belgrade, Brus-

New

Hamburg, Rotterdam, Amsterdam,

sels, Paris,

ing point.

in Einstein

text.

thirty-five-minute solo, constructed I,

Scene

a principal

I

was

a culmination of the

bridge to the third. as choreographer),

Her

it

longest

was the

work

first

York) was a turn-

on three diagonals, second phase of her so far (both as per-

time she choreographed

—and the experience encouraged her

to undertake the long

work, for which Glass agreed to furnish the score, eventually called Dance.

emotion. The

leading notion of the great

from Duncan

Graham and Horton, was

Though

to

dance-as-ritual looked

more

modern dance to return

pioneers,

dance to

abstract than ballet, actually such

dances were heavy with descriptive intentions based, above ideas about the primitive, the authentic, both in ing.

ritual.

movement and

all,

on

in feel-

Wigman created her "absolute" dances, performed in and with a minimum of theatrical support, the better to render

Thus, Mary

silence

extremely emotional "inner states." Childs's turn

(in

1968) to dance

without props or music or words was an absolute conception of dance,

SUSAN SONTAG

166

for

it

did not claim to express anything interior. For Childs, as for Cun-

ningham,

all

notions of dance as ritual are alien; she was drawn to

using game-like forms of ensemble movement, in which the idea of

wardness

is

The view

irrelevant.

that

in-

dance should not express emotion

does not, of course, mean to be against emotion. Valery defined the

poem

as a

machine made of words whose function

tinctively poetic feeling:

of creating

tions

—

to create a dis-

does not "express" emotion,

method

a

it is

it.

formations. metrically,

it

is

Childs tends to organize choreographic patterns sym-

movement

in twos,

and

contrapuntally.

more than

their multiples,

Though Childs most

The dancers move in trios

often deploys dancers in pairs, this

and is

forma-

in

quintets.

the smallest

formation and has nothing to do with partnering in the traditional sense: neither dancer

is

the consort of the other, one does not assist or

accompany or accommodate fore equal.

The two dancers

another.

They

are doing the

tence of a pair doubles the

and there-

are duplicates,

same movements: the

movement image. There

exis-

are "delicate

invasions" (Childs's phrase) of one group by another, each keeping

group contour,

as in the traveling

section of Relative Calm.

its

diamond formations of the fourth

Men and women

perform the same move-

ments (thus shaving off the gender-specific extremes of movement vocabulary, such as very high jumps),

wear the same or

virtually identical

costumes. All plugged into the same sound, the dancers

They

paths, inexorably, to a steady underlying pulse.

perilous off-balance positions, such as

vors asymmetrical formations.)

ningham dance has isolation

its

The

Cunningham

company every dancer

Childs's work, as each element of the spectacle

corps de ballet

is

(He

also fa-

Cun-

also applies to the

is,

is

can be, a

strictly

star.

In

coordinated

each dancer: she choreographs for the glorified

—they become the

in polyattentiveness;

favors.

up

can be apprehended in

from the other elements of the spectacle

with every other, so

rarely take

rule that each element in a

own autonomy and

dancers. In Cunningham's

move on

more

star.

Childs's dances are not exercises

generally, they are not

ceived as a tool for perception.

examples of

Her choreography demands

art

con-

a concen-

A trated all-over attention;

is

it

Lexicon for Available Light

cumulative;

it

aims

167

not

at transporting,

educating the audience.

geometrical.

Available Light

the second act of Giselle as revised

is

and corrected by Mondrian.

head. The look

—

positioning of the dancer's head in ballet always implies a

to a partner, or a central (noble) figure, or to the audience. In

Childs's choreography, the

such looking elsewhere. technique

expression. a support

humor

is

a simple,

is

head

One

is

not posed in

his dancers usually

milked from

this

no

of the basic conventions of Cunningham's

unmannered use of

Even while taking part

—

this sense; there is

the head and detached, cool

in cooperative tasks

—

seem unaware of each

incongruity.)

a

lift,

other.

a pull,

(Much

In Childs's choreography

dancers never engage in cooperative tasks, indeed never touch each

Hence,

other.

blank performance masks signify another,

their intensely

non-atomized detachment. The rather,

it

effect

is

never incongruous, or comic;

underscores the feeling of purity, the striving for an elevated

state of things that

ideal. Where space, here

is

the register of her work.

are these dancers dancing?

Not

and now, of Duchampian performance

anti-dramatic, democratized space of

in

the vernacular

pieces;

Cunningham's dances

nor

in the

—dance

as

pure, noncumulative activity with detachable parts and movable borders.

(Hence one of Cunningham's

characteristic notions:

dance

as a

sequence of open-ended "events.") Instead, Childs's choreography suggests

some

ideal space,

where

tions take place. (In this, she

Dance

is

ideal transactions

and transforma-

close to the ethos of traditional ballet.)

as the art of ideal precision; ideal spatial relationships; ideal,

undiluted intensity.

illustrating.

A

didactic) work, in

which she sometimes used words

procedure typical of Childs's early (conceptual or

structions or descriptions

could be

live

—

as in Street

in the

form of

in-

Dance. This linguistic decor

monologues or words on tape

that

were

illustrated

by her

SUSAN SONTAG

168

movements. Some of the the Surrealist

early pieces treat

movement

in the

manner of "found"

citing already existing positions,

obje't trouve:

through words. In Model (1964), Childs gives

awkward

ern dance and illustrates a few

a

mock

positions. In

lecture

on mod-

Geranium

(1965),

she provides a taped sportscast: as the announcer describes a football player falling, tumbling, Childs illustrates the actions in slow motion.

Museum

Piece (1965) has nineteen dots in three colors cut out of heavy

paper, each about ten inches in diameter, which are an enlargement of a tiny portion of Seurat's

Le

Cirque.

While delivering

pointillism, Childs sets out the dots like plates in a

the floor. Then, gazing into a a slow, circuitous

speaking of

why

hand

1966. Childs

in 1962

was invited

—her

in the

first

to join in 1963,

work presented

and did publicly

to present

a ten-

—

at

the

most of the

next three years, as well as to perform in pieces by

on the puppet theatre.

ideal state of the spirit; written in

the dance. Kleist exalts as the

1

810,

it is

Its

subject

summit of grace and profundity

modern oppositions

is

also the first great essay

of being without inwardness or psychology. Writing

characteristic

dis-

James Waring, and Robert Morris.

kleist's essay

way

by Yvonne Rainer

Cunningham's) and Steve Paxton;

minute piece called Pastime

Rainer, Paxton,

making

mirror, she walks backward,

Judson Memorial Church, where she went on

work she did

complex pattern on

she wants "to enter this body of material."

(then, like Childs, a student of in

mock lecture on

journey through the dots, without stepping on them,

judson dance theatre. Co-founded banded

a

an

on

in art a

when

the

of the heart versus the head, the or-

ganic versus the mechanical, were invented, Kleist ignores the obloquy already attached to the metaphor of the mechanical, and identifies the

mechanical movements of puppets with the sublimity of the impersonal.

The Romantic

ideal of the absence of affectation

with the free expression of personality but with

its

is

equated not

transcendence.

These Romantic oppositions (and evaluations) continued to dominate sensibility for

another century, mutating into what

we know

as

mod-

ernism, into "romantic" modernism, which was challenged by "neoclassical"

modernism

—various

ideals of the impersonal as different as

A Duchamp and

those of

Lexicon for Available Light

of Balanchine (who thought ballet should be

unconcerned with inner experience). The

ideals of the personally ex-

and the impersonal or impassive constitute

pressive

a central contrast

contemporary dance. Cunningham

in the evolution of

169

the most im-

is

portant champion of the anti-expressive and anti-subjective, and most of the choreographers phasis

on

who

studied with

him have extended

and impersonality. Yvonne Rainer's work

objectivity

period of the Judson Dance Theatre aimed

one

closer to the virtues extolled

assumes that dancing perturbable sivity is It is a if

in the

"submerging the person-

one

ideally,

is

a neutral doer." In Childs's choreography,

is

em-

not even

one

is

not

but a transpersonal doer. Her emphasis on impersonality

a neutral is

at

movements: "So,

ality" in impersonal, task-like

oneself,

his

—

is

a

by Balanchine than by Rainer,

noble

art.

The dancers move on

for she

paths, im-

comings and goings seem implacable. Their impas-

their

not detachment, the cool ironic tone of Cunningham dancers.

positive impassivity that recalls the

argument made by

Kleist

—

as

grace and inwardness were opposed.

lightness, art dance should be

of. Childs's conception of dance

lively, playful,

decorum, unaffected

intensity.

is

Apollonian:

joyous. Beauty equals power, delicacy,

What

ugly

is

is

timidity, anxiety,

goguery, heaviness. (Other exemplars of the Apollonian

demaSeurat,

style:

Mallarme, Morandi, Ozu, Wallace Stevens.)

measurable. of

some

Museum same

Seurat calculated exactly the place and the disposition

forty tiny figures in

—

Le Cirque

cited

by Childs

Piece. Childs prepares placing of dancers

spirit.

The

early pieces

Untitled Trio,

num-

started in 1968, with

Childs began choreographing in the normative

It

is

through counting that space

whether or not time

"silent"

in

choreograph means to give movement a rhythmic, countable

time structure. time,

when

work

were timed to the second, but not counted. The

method of working out choreography by counts

sense: to

in the

Seurat believed that the beautiful had an objective, mea-

surable basis; Childs needs to specify the structure of her bers.

in her early

and timing

is

is

connected with

further articulated by music. All the

works of the 1970s are precisely counted. (An example:

a

SUSAN SONTAG

170

dance from 1976, Transverse Exchanges, has 1,449 counts.) In works created since 1979, counts are coordinated to

For instance,

—supplied by—music.

Calm, Childs requested

in Relative

numerical phrase base, from the composer Jon Gibson

—

that the

first

and have eleven

section be constructed out of fifteen-count phrases

subsections; that the second section be

and

a specific pattern,

composed of seventeen-count

phrases and have nine subsections, each two to two and a half minutes long; et cetera.

stage space)

The

whole

intricate patterning (designed to activate the

and subtle variations

may seem

in timing

simple to dance

audiences habituated to recognizing only the complexities apparent in

movement

itself.

minimalist. Unlike some arts

dumb

other

marketing campaigns (Pop Art,

piece of linguistic chewing gum,

labels that

Op Art)

emerged

in the last

some

in visual

two decades,

this

painters

and sculp-

tors (Sol LeWitt,

Robert Morris, Carl Andre), has spread to

architects,

choreographers,

composers, even to couturiers

first

applied to

label-mongering invariably does, a specious unity

Muybridge, Mondrian,

artists.

Stein,

—imposing,

as

among widely

such

different

and Ozu had the good fortune

to

pursue careers as virtuosi of obsessive repetition and strong patterning without incurring

this label. Inevitably

succeeded by POST-MINIMALIST.

movements. Childs's movement ideal: clear, clean, deliberate, intense. And directional. The dancers are moving or are absolutely still. When moving, they move continuously, with relatively muted accents and

a softer

dynamic than

in classical

prescriptive idea of dance as

choreography, recalling Rainer's

"movement

series"

tween phrases and no observable accent fixed,

still

stantly

relationship

engaged

.

.

.

.

.

.

—with "no pauses be-

the limbs are never in a

creating the impression that the

in transitions." Childs has

Judson performers, designed

(in Rainer's

body

is

con-

brought the aesthetic of the words) to impart to dance

"factual quality," a deliberately matter-of-fact,

more "banal

a

quality of

physical being in performance," into confrontation with the high energies

and

lyrical

movements

solemnity of the classical dance ideal.

that she recasts are ballet

movements. In

Many

of the

ballet, positions

are reached, then held, allowed to shine. In Childs's choreography, the

A

Lexicon for Available Light

tendu plie) are taken, cleanly,

classical positions (arabesque, attitude,

but only for a

171

second. Childs doesn't use in-place movements

split

(like

penche, passe developpe, grands battements) that exhibit positions, that

modern-dance

display technique. Reacting against the fied

by Graham, of dance

and, in

of

more

as a succession of climaxes,

that has

From

exempli-

Cunningham

Judson choreographers proposed

radical form, the

movement

framed.

ideal,

no climaxes,

which nothing

in

is

a style

dramatically

that aesthetic Childs has retained the prohibition against

devising positions that can be framed; but the taboo on climactic passages

is

maxes.

weakening. Available Light has several clearly identifiable It

also has a looser

work

Relative Calm, the

score

is

a

is

weave

—

not divided into separate sections. Adams's

departure from the music Childs has previously used. Instead

of the sharp boundaries of earlier scores, sitions;

it

cli-

perhaps because, unlike Dance and

it

more obvious emotional

has a

evolves with soft-edge trantexture and consists, most

starkly in the last fifteen minutes, of a succession of climaxes.

neo-classical. in

dance or

It is

the hallmark of a neo-classical style, whether

in architecture, to

be accused of being merely mathemati-

cal. If

mathematical means quantifiably precise, insistently formal, ma-

jestic,

stripped

forms

—there

openings.

down

—

as in

some Platonic or Palladian kingdom of

truth in the accusation.

is

In Dance: an empty stage, and the propulsive joyousness

of the music

.

.

and then the dancers springing

.

in pairs

from the

wings, spinning, prancing, skimming across the stage. In Relative

Calm: the drone nal formation)

sound

.

on

.

.

and the dancers already

in place, sitting (in diago-

their carpets of light. In Available Light, the blast of

that fades into a drone-like

hum

.

.

.

and the dancers coming on

slowly to take their positions.

order. Beauty bility.

identified with order, liveliness, serenity, inevita-

is

*

politeness. The Ballet gestures are

classical tradition of

based on

a

dance

is

related to courtesy.

system of deference, of hierarchy, and

SUSAN SONTAG

172

descend from the gestures of themselves as egalitarian

members

courtesy.

real courts. Childs's

dancers comport

of an imaginary, cosmic court, behaving with

There are no angry or

erotic

emotions.

The

dancers are grave, imperturbable. They always leave each other enough space.

post-modern. The servers

aging of modernism was remarked by astute ob-

when modernism was

still

in

its

changed meaning," Cocteau observed safely

modern age

will

be

favorite vantage point)

a period

of modernism's perennial ventures,

first

applied to architects,

its

now

between

191 2

and pre-

and 1930."

demise, has recently been

new

celebrated with the most successful of

modern,"

word 'modern' has

in 1932, already situating himself

beyond the modern (everyone's

dicting that "the

One

prime. "The

labels

—the word

as well to visual artists

choreographers after Cunningham. Frequently a synonym for

"post-

and

to

eclectic.

But sometimes conflated with MINIMALIST.

presence /absence. used by Childs

was gap

first

—

acknowledged

as in the

Dance, most present, incarnate of

in the service of in a

Dadaist way, in the notion of the blank, the

unpainted painting that

absence, or the drawing that section of Geranium, a

it

is

is

illustrated

monologue

supposed to be the third

in

conjured up by discussing

by

might be best to refer to the third section

(It

dancer

is

as a

which

is

no

gap"

is

is

third section, so

—and goes on

to

a glass enclosure that

was constructed, and could skim about

the stage, in the last piece of Childs's in 1966 in the series

erasure. Thus, the third

its

section, but there really

a performer.

its

which Childs announces: "This

discuss ideas for the third section, one of

would contain

arts, is

an aesthetic of absence. This principle

first

period, Vehicle

—presented

"Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering": the

inside a mobile Plexiglas box.)

ercises in absence. Street

Many

of the early solos are ex-

Dance begins with Childs disappearing

into

the elevator after pushing the button of the tape recorder. (She reap-

pears below on the street.) In Carnation (1964), Childs does a vanishing act

under

a white sheet. In her very first piece, Pastime, Childs

various poses inside a stretchable blue jersey bag.

Dadaist performance

is

What

assumes

starts as a

eventually raised to a positive principle: a mys-

A The dancers

ticism of space.

Lexicon for Available Light

173

are disembodied, dematerialized.

Duchampian whimsicality of non- or anti-appearance

is

The

replaced by

the Mallarmean idea of beauty as a tribute to the ineffable, to absence.

quartets.

Favorite formation in Childs's choreography, the

multiple of two.

Among

the short works choreographed for four

dancers are Calico Mingling (1973), for four Courses, for section

is

women, and Radial

two women and two men. In Relative Calm, the second

for a quartet formation restocked several times

eight dancers. Its sequel

is

from among

the fourth section, which consists of two

one of women and one of men.

quartets,

relative calm. tions.

first

The second

1981.

of Childs's evening-length produc-

Music by Jon Gibson, decor and

by Robert Wilson.

lighting

Ninety-five minutes, a prologue and four sections, for nine dancers.

Though not

so labeled, the sections

four-part sequences,

The Times

version of the subject

make up one

of Day. This

is

of the traditional

the Symbolic-Romantic

—Runge rather than Hogarth. Prologue:

backdrop and the moon swinging pendulum-like dancers sitting in diagonal formation in carpets of tion, "Rise," suits; at

is

dawn

early

—the dancers

light.

a star

front of the

The

first sec-

are in identical white

jump-

the end, the stage brightens and the stars blanch out. "Race"

day; the dancers are in beige;

the form of

it

contains an

homage

is

to the quotidian, in

some inane sentences projected on the cyclorama and the

brief appearance of a live dog. "Reach," the solo, start to

in

come out

— and both

stage

is

twilight

and cyclorama are cut

—the

stars

diagonally,

with half of the stage and half of the cyclorama in shadow, and Childs, in black,

dancing in a diagonal wedge of

dancers in royal blue,

is starry,

light.

"Return," with the

The

conceit of the times

electric night.

of day evolved in conversations between Childs and Wilson; Childs in-

vented the

titles

of the four sections,

vey and to obscure

whose function was both

a little the literalness

to con-

of the scenic underpinning

supplied by Wilson's set and lighting.

repetition. "silent"

Childs's early notion of repetition, in the sprightly

dances of the 1970s: dancers using the same steps or fami-

SUSAN SONTAG

174

lies

of movements, going in and out of sync with each other.

becomes more complex

tion

in

Childs's

solo

in

The noon the

Einstein

Beach: repetition as an accumulation of effects, as layering. (Versus the repetition-as-reinterpretation of Patio.) Strictly speaking, there

course no repetition in Childs's work, but rather a certain thematic materials, which are

first

stated

strict

of

is

use of

and then gradually modified

of change (more evenly, not expressionistically) than

at a different rate

audiences are accustomed

In contrast to Wilson's Judson- derived

to.

dynamics of slow movement, thin difference, low-contrast change, Childs's fast

work

since the late 1970s has a greater density of

movement,

rhythms and few tableaux. (Whereas Wilson's work tends naturally

work

to take long forms, Childs's

Though

usually presented as cool choice, repetition always suggests

perfectionist zeal. Rainer in 1966

movement appear "more

ciple

a

is

enhances

also a

makes

matter-of-fact, neutral,

method

for inducing bliss. Re-

legibility or intelligibility. (Rainer: "literally

idea of the minimal,

it

A way of ordering material

making the

associated with the

could more accurately be called the modern

maximalism: repetition possibilities.

is

it

—more

technique that seems to suggest simplicity, that in prin-

material easier to see.")

nous

defended repetition because

objectlike"

unemphatic. But repetition petition

only gradually assuming them.)

is

as exhaustive patterning;

the exhausting of

Far from making material neutral, repetition has

effect, as in

much

of Childs's recent

work

a vertigi-

— duplications, mirror-

ings, that are the kinetic equivalent of the static mise-en-ahime.

See

DOUBLING.

romantic. The classical

idiom

in

"classical" tradition in

dance

Romantic. (But even

above

all,

pelganger in Dance.

is

Romantic, so

a neo-

will inevitably be, in a restrained key, neo-

this

self-conscious

dance

restraint

and

is

critical.)

appropriate. Romantic art

The

The Pythagorean beauty

allegorical underpinning: the

son's allegorizing sensibility

is,

play of ghost, shadow, dop-

of Relative Calm, with

its

Times of Day. (The contact with Wiland

its

innate affinities with a certain

German Romanticism helped Childs move away from a dead-end puritanism in her own sensibility.) There are Romantic echoes in all the

— A work

Lexicon for Available Light

since 1979. In Dance, having

("Dance #2") and one

two solo

Queen

presented

—

in black

white ("Dance #4"), like Swan Lakes

in

Odile/ Odette. In Available Light, the like the

one

sections,

175

of the Wilis in Giselle.

arrival of Childs in the corridor,

When

Available Light was

first

Chateauvallon Dance Festival in an

in July 1983, at the

open-air version, with no set and with the dancers in the company's

purpose touring costumes, the white jumpsuits of the Relative

Calm

—one saw the choreography

white tutus but very

much

As

a soloist she gives herself a

dynamic changes, more evolution

functions is

more

separate

—

in

is

in the material (rather

in

wider range of than in space).

member of the ensemble, less as a soloist. Still, she white, when most of the dancers are in red or black. Alas a

the only dancer

company remains onstage

From

without

Dance, one in Relative Calm. In

as

such where she appears alone on-

who comes and

goes.

The

rest of the

for the entire fifty-five minutes (except for

one brief pause when the music downshifts and turn).

state:

not divided into separate sections, Childs

is

though she has no solo section stage, she

naked

for herself differently than she does for

There are two lengthy solos Available Light, which

its

all-

section of

a ballet blanc.

solos. Childs choreographs the rest of the company.

in

first

all

ten go off, then re-

her early solos, with their theme of the absent or disap-

pearing performer, to her privileged comings and goings in Available Light, Childs's solo presence

—grave,

hieratic,

not wholly expressive

invokes both presence and absence.

space. Dancers

up

are travelers, "space eaters" (Childs's words), using

a given space in a patterned,

which Childs covers the stage

solo, Particular Reel, 1973, in

from

right to left

and then

point where she started, using up space.) line;

and

comprehensive way. (An early didactic

in ten

is

a

left to right,

ending

model demonstration of the

The more space

their* relations are

rows from

in ten

rows

at

the

project of

the better. Dancers are pulled along a

conceived as parallel or perpendicular.

Dancers are always, indefatigably, going somewhere. In non-imploring urgency, they never stop; though they

a

state of

may go

into

SUSAN SONTAG

176

movement-absence, they do so dancers "drop out," others

in order to repopulate the space.

come

in.

titles. After the capers of the mid-1960s, ally

two words, adjective and noun; often

with a ing is

movement word,

as in

Checkered

titles

have been sober: usu-

a structure or pattern

an oxymoron

—one

word

Drift, Calico Mingling, Reclin-

Rondo, Transverse Exchanges, Radial Courses.

a contradiction,

When

A

favorite title

that, in recent

works, suggests

the paradoxes of self-control: Relative Calm, Formal Abandon. stylish appreciation

form

Or

a

of the possible: Available Light.

unavailable. Dance

is

about the absent or unavailable object of

desire.

volition. The more formal dance

is

shown

possible attributions of volition. Dancers in formations roring, duplicating,

weaker the

to be, the

—

all

this mir-

and inverting of movement removes the impression

of subjectivity. So does the neutral performance

mask

—the

fact that

the dancers don't look at each other, or at the audience. (The effect

comparable to the anti-acting

style

is

favored by Bresson.) Dancers stop

because they are being rearranged or repatterned, not because of any

emotion or

them

as

To

volition.

mechanisms

—

substitute rules or patterns

for subjectivity in

—

Kleist

imagined

demeanor and movement

is

the prerequisite of grace. But the dancers are anything but automata.

world.

Dance, since the Romantics, has been about

a

phantom

world. Childs's counts, like the tiny dots of color in the paintings of Seurat, are the building blocks of an art of

which both are and are absence; pleasure

—

not: the

as in

moment

phantom

is

an evocation of

shown

as rigidity, re-

of plenitude

—

La Grande

Jatte

is

presences. Things

straint.

yearning. The body longing

—

for space

in diagonal

itself.

However

is

a

pose of outreach,

large,

the stage

enough. Childs's choreography projects onto the nitely large space or territory.

Her

is

hailing; of

never large

finite stage

love of space produces

an

infi-

movements

A and structures

Lexicon for Available Light

—among them, the modalities of

repetition

—

177

that

seem

choreographic equivalents of Zeno's arguments (called paradoxes) on the subject of motion, according to which, since any line visible,

and

will

be made up of an

which has some magnitude, every great; and, despite appearances,

distance at

infinite

finite line

number or space

is

infinitely di-

of units, each of is

in fact infinitely

no moving object ever

traverses any

all.

zeno's territory. Childs's now known as Available Light.

early,

provisional

title

for the

work

[1983]

In

of Their Feelings

DANCERS ON A PLANE

1.

I

Memory

don't see them.

There.

The dancers

are there, invisible

— an

analogue to racing

thoughts.

Framed by

A meal

to

the utensils of eating.

be eaten?

An invisible meal. Two meals: one light, one

dark.

One

sprightly,

one stained with

sexual dread.

Dancers on

a plate?

No. They need more space than

EATING AND DANCING

2.

Recombinant

A

domain of

Rule-bound.

"In

Memory

arts.

pleasure.

Who

A

domain of

sets the rules?

a

Anthony d'Offay

on Jasper Johns's Dancers on a Plane sequence of applied knives, forks, and spoons.

tion centered

178

courtesy.

Behavior with standards.

of Their Feelings" was written for the exhibition catalogue of Dancers on a

Plane: Cage, Cunningham, Johns at the

is

that.

series.

Gallery,

London,

Framing the

1989.

The

exhibi-

sides of the paintings

Memory

In

An Then terval:

of Their Feelings

Then one

idea of order. First one thing, then another. finished

it is

—the

179

is full.

belly sated, the limbs heavy. After a decent in-

then again. All over again. All over, again.

They remind us we

body-house.

live in the

Living "in" the body. But where else could

Dancing

as the

realm of freedom,

we

that's less

live?

than half the

story.

What about

Eating as the realm of necessity. Not necessarily.

eating

idyllically (as in Paris)?

Everyone I

everyone can dance. Not everyone dances

eats,

watch dance, with pleasure.

one eating when hungry, hungry person full, I

may

is

wish

it

don't watch eating. If

were

always savory. If

You

for

me. (You do the dancing

can't eat for

You can dance

meal watched by

a

place,

much pleasure there. Salome. You can eat to please

to please:

mother or

said to have said that she

danced for

except to doting parents eating gusting unless you're doing

it

is

I'll

just

God

a

Suzanne

a nurse. (As

too: as a

Farrell

is

and for Mr. Balanchine.) But

poor spectator

sport. Mildly dis-

as well.

mouth.

to put metal in one's

is

my

in

me. Not

its

eat

A

eating.

(alas).

watch some-

watch someone eating when I'm

I

child might eat to please

To

I

I

turn away.

You can dance watch.)

I

I

Delicately.

It's

not supposed

to hurt.

The

eater

fills

A dancer eats Space

eat silence.

THE KNIFE

It cuts.

you

space.

eats time.

Sounds

3.

the hole.

Don't be

eat. See.

afraid.

Passing

it

to

This

you

is

—

not a weapon.

you asked for

handle, keeping the blade pointed at myself.

It's

it

—

just a tool to

I

proffer

The blade

is

it

help

by the

pointing at

me.

One

should not

move

the point of the knife toward

an attack.

You can

lay

it

down two

ways. Blade

in,

blade out.

someone

as in

SUSAN SONTAG

180

Don't be timorous.

It isn't

sharp.

It's

ordinary

just a plain,

.

.

.

knife.

Straight. Two-sided.

mermaid who has

In the fairy tale, a

human form

begs to be allowed to assume

and make her way

fallen in love

She

to the court. Yes.

But with each step she takes

it

with a prince

so she can leave the water

will

have

legs,

she will walk.

were walking on

will feel as if she

knives.

You can dance with der blades?)

The ers

Hard

(Between the teeth? Between the shoul-

a knife.

to imagine

dancing with a fork.

Or

with a spoon.

knife seems like the master utensil, the one from

Army

depend. (Swiss

You could

Knife.)

which

oth-

all

spear food with your knife,

eliminating the fork. (As everyone knows, you can eat the peas with

your knife. You're could do without

just

not supposed

that, too. Just

Only the knife

is

manners

grasp

is

a

—

well,

we

And

it is

the knife,

it.

more than any

most circumscribed. The evolution of

unobtrusively, elegantly.

against your

it

"There

spoon

mainly about what to do with knives. Use the knife

is

more and more

is

for the

up the bowl dish cup, and drink

really necessary.

other eating utensil, whose use table

lift

As

to.)

palm

With your

finger ends.

Don't

like a stick.

tendency that slowly permeates

civilized society,

from

the top to the bottom, to restrict the use of the knife (within the frame-

work of

the instrument at

all"

(Norbert

Elias).

least limit the contact of the knife

Not

restrictions are successful.

all

and wherever possible not to use

existing eating techniques)

For instance,

to eliminate or at

with round or egg-shaped objects.

The

prohibition on eating fish with a

knife was circumvented by the introduction of a special fish knife.

That oxymoron: the butter

To

eat

sight of

is

knife.

to put metal in one's

someone putting her

mouth. But not knives. The mere

knife in her

mouth produces an uneasy

feeling.

4.

THE SPOON

The spoon seems

The spoon It

is

to

belong

in the

mouth.

not quite grownup in the way the knife and fork

doesn't menace.

It isn't

a

tamed weapon.

are.

In

The spoon The spoon

is

accepts.

Yum-yum. Scoop me

hand cupped. Doesn't

a cradle, a shovel, a It

Round, curved. Can't

a knife or a fork,

of Their Feelings

181

the utensil of childhood, the friendliest utensil.

childlike.

is

Memory

how

but

up, pour

Don't

stick you.

me

in.

Like

cut or pierce or impale.

your child with

trust

can a spoon harm? The spoon

is itself

a

child.

The world

of pleasures.

is full

One

has only to be where one

is.

Here. Now.

me my

Give

spoon

my

spoon,

big spoon, and

an afterthought. While a

is

wooden spoon

of a spoon.

isn't less

I'll

wooden It's

eat the world.

knife

is

A

metal

of a knife, a

less

just fine.

"Spooning": embracing, kissing, petting. Lovers in bed

fit

together

in sleep like spoons.

To bring about ronment,

will take

a

music "that

them

be part of the noises of the envi-

will

into consideration.

I

think of

it

as

melodious,

softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not

imposing

itself,"

wrote John Cage, quoting Erik

What happened

to the

Satie.

spoons? Don't spoons make noises, too?

Softer noises.

And two

music. Music

is

made with two spoons

(not with

two

forks,

knives).

Spoon music.

5.

THE FORK

There's a hesitation about the fork. the fork in your right.

put

Then

down

—

if

left

cut

it

with the knife held in your

the knife, then transfer the fork to your right

up

Grownups throw would throw

as one. It

may be

wouldn't

The weight

is

The

emblem

—you

hand and send

mouth.

to your

knives. Children

a fork. It

fork as

the food with

you're not only right-handed but also American

the speared morsel

be thrown

hand while you

You hold down

throw spoons. Nobody

(I

four- thirds of a toy trident, but

think)

it

can't

arrive, spear-like, tines first.

in the handle.

—emblem of the

real.

something about "my general development so

Jasper Johns, explaining far," said:

"That

is

to say,

SUSAN SONTAG

182

I

find

it

more

interesting to use a real fork as a painting than

it is

to use

a painting as a real fork."

What would The

fork

Supper was

wedding It

in the early seventeenth century: I

a set of

it

arrived

gold "Italian

by the Venetian ambassador were put

Westminster; she never used them.

at

The introduction effete,

forks either at the

thought a foppish pretension when

Italy,

forkes" presented to Elizabeth

as

No

appearance when the knife and spoon were well estab-

its

Invented in

on display

The Last

Cana.

feast in

England

look like?

with knives and spoons only.

set

made

lished.

in

a fork that isn't real

the youngest of the three great eating utensils.

is

of that vital implement, for a long time despised

enabled people to distance themselves from the eating

process by avoiding manual contact with the food.

The

principle of fastidiousness.

New

forms of distance, new forms

of delicacy.

New

rules of finicky behavior at table proliferated.

People were ex-

pected to manipulate an increasingly complicated battery of It

seemed hard,

Now we

6.

A

setting

up and keeping

utensils.

this distance.

take forks for granted.

KNIFE,

SPOON, FORK

—

secular trinity

knife, spoon, fork.

No hierarchy. The list

can only be varied, systematically. As in knife,

As

spoon, fork. As in fork, knife, spoon. As in

fork, spoon.

in knife,

fork, spoon, knife.

As

in spoon, fork, knife.

Seemingly immutable

They

lie

edge of the

A A

there,

flat.

As

in

spoon, knife, fork.

(after all that history).

On

a plain (plane) surface.

Perpendicular to the

table.

trialogue. stately relationship.

divides into

Not

all

on the same

two and one. Fork on the

left side.

side of the plate.

Three

Knife and spoon on the

right.

The

knife

is

scary by

itself.

But

as part of a setting,

something

else.

Memory

In

of Their Feelings

183

Lying beside the spoon, the knife becomes quite domestic. Knife and spoon: the odd couple. They don't go together, you don't use them to-

But they are together.

gether.

The

fork

is solitary.

could have next to That's

from

in

an ampler

setting, all

you

arranged

at

the start of the meal, one step

down

Escorting the plate on either side.

the plate.

No

Even

is.

another (smaller, larger) fork.

it is

how they're

Always

now

excuse

to eat with your hands. Civil eating (versus glut-

tony).

After finishing eating you arrange

Not

Not

alphabetically.

them

neatly

on the

order of importance,

in

plate.

there were

if

one.

A trinity but They seem

We

quite contingent.

to

complement each

have learned to use

all

other.

three.

But they can be used

separately,

of course.

7.

DANCERS ON A PLAIN

On On

An

a plane?

Low,

is

(borderless) as feasible.

Don't

try for

any of those old heights. Depths.

essential

about

a surface that

How

do we

register

level.

What

airplane?

As open

a plain.

other surface?

makes

smoothness

it

different

from an-

in a surface, a

move-

ment, a sound, an experience?

Smoothness? Yes. Something continues, plausibly. Pleasurably.

What does

With

it

parts.

mean

to

be one part of something

(a surface, a

move-

ment, a sound, an experience)?

The old

heights. Mirroring.

Look down. These

Be more modest;

elegant.

Sometimes

sometimes heavy

4ight,

—

it's all

times.

Makes

it

new. Yes.

And make

it

plain.

are

right to

my

genitals.

be heavy some-

SUSAN SONTAG

184

8.

SYMMETRIES

Dancers on

No

a plane.

Always

center.

off-side.

Any

place

is

the

center.

We ovaries

seem symmetrical. Two

—or

two hairy

eyes,

two

ears,

two arms, two

But we're not. Something

testicles.

legs; is

two

always

dominating.

A mirror image: left,

a fantasy of

symmetry. The right the reverse of the

or vice versa.

We seem They

symmetrical. But

cross-refer

(knife,

handedness means the

left

handedness means the brain's

How

to find out

we

are not.

spoon, fork). As in the brain. Rightside

of the brain

which side of your brain

is

answer to the ques-

while you're doing this you turn your head slightly to the right,

tion. If

means the

left

side dominates.

And

vice versa.

The

question-master.

An

dominant. Left-

dominant. Close your

eyes, think of a question, then slowly think of an

that

is

right side dominates.

art that asks questions.

How

do we understand how one part of

a surface, a

movement,

a

sound, an experience relates to another? Note: you have a choice of questions. But

if that's

the question you choose to ask, you can be sure

the answer will include a bias toward asymmetry.

"The non-relationship of the movement," Cunningham has clared, "is

extended into

a relationship

with music.

It is

de-

essentially a

non-relationship."

The dancer must be

You

eat with

place

A real

is

Food makes you

your hands, dance on your

handed or left-handed.

Any

light.

Is

heavy.

legs.

Eating can be right-

dancing left-legged or right-legged?

the center.

symmetry: chopsticks.

Memory

In

Lots of prattle. That, too, lence.)

The deaf hear

warm

there a

The

kind of

a

is

their deafness.

Controlling through silence.

The

silence. (Since there

Make

si-

blind see their blindness.

Whoever speaks

less is the stronger.

silence?

Cut up the words

to babble.

it

meals out of words.

What would

gether on a plane (plain).

know.

"Who

Mushrooms,

raw vegeta-

in strips, like

A culinary relation

to

Suppose Knife, Spoon, and Fork are three people.

As

no

to language.

it

No, take

I

is

noise of ideas.

Take

bles.

185

SILENCES

9.

Is

of Their Feelings

words

And

.

.

.

they get to-

they have to say to each other?

brought the marshmallows?"

surely

you mean mushrooms.

marshmallows.

I said,

That's not

Then they

what

I

had

in

mind. Then what?

get very particular about

how

the marshmallows are to

be cooked. All three of

them know

a lot

by gathering, preparing, cooking But these are

You can be

just

about food. (About eating. Preceded .

.

.)

marshmallows. American junk.

fastidious about anything.

botched, too; can disappoint. lation of inside to outside.

It's

The

not letting the outside catch

And marshmallows

a question of (yes,

inside has to

fire.

Stick?

it

off with your fingers

What happened

once again) the

be cooked very

re-

well, while

Ideally the outside will get crusty but

not burnt, while the inside melts. Then, right before

you pluck

can be

and pop

to the fork?

it

it

falls

off the stick,

whole into your mouth.

Don't you toast marshmallows

with a fork? All right, the fork.

But

this is better as a

gooey experience than

as a

refined one.

"Everywhere and

at all times,"

Levi-Strauss has observed, "the Eu-

ropean code of politeness rules out the possibility of eating

And you

don't always have to be polite.

noisily."

SUSAN SONTAG

186

MEMORY OF THEIR FEELINGS

10. IN In the that has

first

—buoyant,

allegro vivace

—painting,

this

is

been painted white. In the second painting, the

real flatware

artist

has cast

the utensils in bronze.

Repeating as a means of varying. Accepting as a way of discriminating. Indifference as a

Use

me

as

you

form of emotional

vitality.

will.

Savoring non-relatedness. Put the emphasis on savoring. "I

more

interested in the facts of

moving rather than

in

my

am

feelings about

them" (Merce Cunningham).

Would you

We

like to play chess?

were younger then.

were younger; then

We

—

that

it

meet. This could be

Who

Chess

would be at a

seriously.

would have thought then

—when we

like this?

dinner party (forks, knives, spoons,

et

cetera).

We so. I

say things like,

How

lovely to see you. I've

been busy.

I

think

don't know. That must have been very interesting. (Everything

interesting.

But some things are more interesting than others.) Proba-

bly not. I've heard. In Frankfurt, in Illinois, in London.

What

is

a pity.

Next

year.

He's gone away. He'll be back soon. They're organizing

something. You'll get an invitation.

We smile. We nod. We are indefatigable. I think We say we wish we saw more of each other. We eat, we savor.

I'm free next

week.

Meanwhile, each harbors

We

a secret idea of ascending, of descending.

go on. The plane's edge beckons. [1989]

Dancer and the Dance

LINCOLN its

tury

KlRSTElN,the

finest historian of

dance and one of

master ideologues, has observed that in the nineteenth cen-

what the prestige of

amounted

ballet really

of the dancer; and that even

when

to

there were great choreographers

(notably Petipa) and great dance scores (from

Tchaikovsky), dance was

still

in

dance

dance audiences which occurred to the authoritative intensity

Adam,

Delibes, and

almost entirely identified for the large

and

theatrical public with the personality

That triumphant mutation

was the reputation

just

taste

virtuosity of great dancers.

and

in the

before World

and exoticism of the

not challenge the old imbalance of attention

composition of

War

I,

in response

Ballets Russes, did

—not even with the subse-

quent invention by Diaghilev of dance as an ambitious collaboration, in

which major innovative

in to

enhance

artists

this theatre

Stravinsky, the decor

outside the dance world were brought

of astonishment.

The

score might be by

by Picasso, the costumes by Chanel, the

by Cocteau. But the blow of the sublime was delivered by a Karsavina

—by the dancer. According

to Kirstein,

advent of a choreographer so complete in his forever,

George Balanchine,

that the

before Balanchine

is,

more

was only with the

gifts as to

change dance

primacy of the choreographer

over the performer, of dance over the dancer, was Kirstein 's account of the

it

libretto

a Nijinsky or

finally

understood.

limited perspectives of dance publics

of course, not incorrect. But

I

would point out

187

SUSAN SONTAG

188

that the exaltation of the performer over

dance

need

that

—

pervaded not onlv

else

all

the arts

be performed. Recalling the effusive identification oi

to

dance with the dancer Elssler

all

nineteenth (and early twentieth) century but

in the

one should

—

say,

with Marie Taglioni and with Fanny

recall as well

other audiences, other raptures.

The

concert audiences ravished by Liszt and Paganini were also identifying

music with the virtuoso performer: the music was, sion.

Those who swooned over La Malibran

as

it

in the

were, the occa-

new

Rossini or

Donizetti thought of opera as the vehicle oi the singer. (As for the look

of opera, whether

it

was the

ous physique of the singer

And

—

staging, the decor, or the often incongruthis

hardly seemed worthy of discussion.)

the focus oi attention has been modified in these

Even

arts, too.

the most diva-besotted portion of the opera public of recent decades

is

prepared to segregate the work from the performance and, within the performance, vocal prowess and expressiveness from acting tions fused

by the

inflatedly partisan rhetoric of

(either ecstasy or the rudest

performance of a

in the

—

distinc-

extreme reactions

condemnation) that surrounded opera

nineteenth century, particularly early performances

new work. That

the

work

is

now

routinely seen as transcending the

come

performer, rather than the performer transcending the work, has to

be

felt

not just in dance, because of the advent of a supremely great

choreographer, but in

And

all

being

yet, this

the performing

said, there

arts.

seems to be something

dance that warrants the kind of reverential attention paid eration to a very few dancers different

Dance cannot is

whom we

arts to

in

each gen-

— something about what they do

from the achievements of surpassingly

formers in other

intrinsic to

gifted,

that

is

magnetic per-

pay homage.

without dance design: choreography. But dance

exist

the dancer.

The

relation oi

dancer to choreographer

—which,

tant to auteur

former,

is still

creative,

a subservient relation.

too. the

dancer

that has

no analogue

A

however

is

also

great dancer

Someone can be

is

more. There

in the other

is

not just that of execu-

however inspired the

Though a

is

a

performer

in this sense,

mystery oi incarnation

performing

not just performing

per-

in

dance

arts.

(a role)

but being

(a

dancer).

the greatest Odette/Odile, the greatest Albrecht one

— Dancer and the Dance has ever seen or Boris or the finest

—

as a singer

Carmen

can be the best

or Sieglinde or

Don

memory) Tosca

anyone's

(in

189

Giovanni, or an actor can be

Nora or Hamlet or Faust or Phaedra or Winnie. But beyond

the already grandiose aim of giving the definitive performance of a

work, a

role, a score, there is a further,

plies to dancers.

One

can be not

even higher standard which ap-

performer of certain roles

just the best

but the most complete exhibit of what

be

to

it is

a dancer.

Example:

Mikhail Baryshnikov. In any performing art which

largely repertory, interest naturally

is

The work

flows to the contribution of the executant.

What to

it

is

new, each time,

in the

How

they

way of new

make

to performer

is

it

is

what

this

energies, changes in emphasis, or interpretation.

different, or better.

some

is

worse.

The

theme and

the theme:

all

relation of

variations.

readings of

although the dancer does what

as well,

do, dance differs

from the other performing

all

that of the highest excellence

In

The standard

my

is

—

as

For the is

who

is

with actors and singers and musi-

artist is as self-critical

my

praise

received without

is

demurral, with evident pleasure (my purpose, of course,

and sometimes with

a friend or acquaintance I

a friend

an actor or a pianist or a singer on his or her su-

perlative performance; invariably

pleasure),

not simply

have gone backstage many times to congratulate

or acquaintance

stan-

perfection.

experience, no species of performing

as a dancer. I

and

will be,

executants of a

arts.

dard against which dancers measure their performances

cians.

it

work

A given

extent, variations.

But here

work

Or

a musical-structural one:

play or opera or sonata or ballet to

already exists.

performer, these performers, bring

who

include Baryshnikov

—

relief. is

a

I've

But each time

dancer on

heard

first

a

is

much

to give

I've congratulated

superb performance

a disconsolate litany of

mistakes that were made: a beat was missed, a foot not pointed in the right way, there

neuver. Never

was

mind

a near slippage in

some

observe these mistakes. They were made. the performance was not really good.

In

no other

world thinks of

art

intricate partnering

ma-

that perhaps not only I but everyone else failed to

The dancer knew. Therefore

Not good enough.

can one find a comparable gap between what the

a star

and what the

star thinks

about himself or

herself,

— SUSAN SONTAG

190

between the adulation that pours dissatisfaction that

It

is,

all

is

not simply a case of performers' raw

great performing artists are worriers, skilled at

of artistic conscience

self-criticism),

—

rather, integral to the dancer's

of being

a

dancer

shortcomings,

one's

observer, one

relentless

goads one from within. The degree and severity

of dancers' self-criticism

nerves (virtually

from outside and the

in

this

is

cruelly

a

deformation professionnelle.

formation professionnelle. Part

self-punishing objectivity about

viewed from the perspective of an ideal

as

more exacting than any

real spectator

could ever be: the

god Dance. Every serious dancer

is

driven by notions of perfection

pressiveness, perfect technique.

anyone

is

What

this

means

—perfect

in practice

is

ex-

not that

perfect but that performance standards are always being

raised.

The notion of progress

in the arts has

chine was the greatest choreographer

proposition firmly held by is

cause he was the

seem

to

many

came

surely not because he

last (or

be something

few defenders now.

who

ever lived (an

balletomanes, myself

after

If

Balan-

un verifiable

among

them),

it

Noverre and Petipa and Fokine, be-

the most recent) of the breed. But there does

like linear progress in

dance performance

unlike the other performing arts largely devoted to repertory, such as opera. (Was Callas greater than Rosa Ponselle or Claudia

question does not

make

sense.)

There

is

no doubt

Muzio? The

that the general level

of dancing in unison in companies like the Kirov and the

New

York

City Ballet (which have probably the two best corps de ballet in the

world) and the prowess and power and expressiveness of the leading dancers in today's great ballet companies (the two just mentioned, the Paris atre

Opera

— among

Ballet, the

All

past.

soloists apart, the

and the American

dancing

Ballet

The-

most admired few immortal

dance writers agree

that,

in Diaghilev's Ballets

Russes was technically

a

by today's standards.

Raising the level

number

Ballet,

others) are far higher than the level of the

dancing of the

quite limited

Royal

is

the function of the champion: a considerable

of people found they could run the four-minute mile once

Roger Bannister had done

it.

As

in sport or athletics, the

achievement

Dancer and the Dance by

dancer

a virtuoso

And

this

is

has done

raises the achievable

191

standard for everybody

else.

what Baryshnikov, more than any other dancer of our time,

—not only by what he can do with

other feats, jumped higher than anyone

but by what he can show,

his

else,

body

(he has,

and has landed lower),

and range of

in the maturity

among

his expressive-

ness.

Dance demands ing

degree of service greater than any other perform-

a

or sport. While the daily

art,

life

of every dancer

(which are inevitable), dance

injuries

ergy which must seem, in

moment

fully

mastered.

respects,

all

The

—

for there

is

reer).

is

effort visible

moved

herself nis

is

have

effortless, at

what he or she

is

is

not so

every

much

actually experienc-

often pain, in every major stint

an important difference between the dancer and

much

in

common

(ordeal, contest, brevity of ca-

In sport, the signs of effort are not concealed: on the contrary,

making and

who

the enactment of an en-

untrammeled,

some discomfort, and

of performing. This the athlete,

and those due to

dancer's performance smile

a smile as a categorical denial of

ing

itself is

a full-time strug-

is

gle against fatigue, strain, natural physical limitations

is

part of the display.

The public expects

by, the spectacle of the athlete visibly

beyond the

limits of

to see,

pushing himself or

endurance. The films of championship ten-

matches or of the Tour de France or any comprehensive documen-

tary about athletic competition (a splendid example: Ichikawa's

Olympiad) always reveal the tent to

athlete's strain

which Leni Riefenstahl,

is

really

about

politics

dered mass spectacle and about sport

as such.)

ter of general

public, while

—the

in

That

stress.

this light is

one of the signs that her

aestheticizing of politics in totally or-

imperturbable solo performance

is

why news

— and not

of an athlete's injuries

knowledge and legitimate

news of dancers'

Tokyo

(Indeed, the ex-

her film on the 1936 Olympic Games,

in

chose not to show the athletes in film

and

injuries

curiosity is

not,

is

a mat-

on the part of the

and tends

to

be sup-

pressed. It is

often said that dance

is

the creation of illusion: for example,

the illusion of a weightless body. (This might be thought of as the furthest extension of the

phantasm of

would be more accurate

to call

it

a

body without

fatigue.)

But

it

the staging of a transfiguration.

SUSAN SONTAG

192

Dance body.

enacts both being completely in the It

seems to be

a higher

body and transcending the

order of attention, where physical and

mental attention become the same.

Dancers of unrivaled

talents

dancers, Suzanne Farrell comes

which

focus, total concentration,

singer or a musician

performance.

like

first is

mind) project

not simply

—

an actor or a

—the necessary prerequisite of producing

Merce Cunningham and Lincoln

it.

No

art lends

dance does to metaphors borrowed from the r

a great

Kirstein have both offered as a

definition of dance: a spiritual activity in physical form. self so aptly as

a state of total

as for

the performance, the very center of

It is

woman

Baryshnikov (among

to

it-

spiritual

means, too, that

all

discussions of the

dance, and of great dancers, including this one,

fit

dance into some

(Grace, elevation

life.

larger rhetoric about

One

practice

ideal alternatives. tury.

is

.

.

.)

\X hich

human

possibility.

to pair off the greatest dancers as representing

The most

Theophile Gautier, so contrasted the reigning dancers of

Elssler

and

Taglioni. Elssler

transcendent.

And

critics a

was pagan,

was

earthy; Taglioni

decade ago, when absorbing the

second male Kirov refugee of genius

Nureyev and Baryshnikov

two

astute dance writer of the nineteenth cen-

in the

in

his era,

spiritual,

arrival of a

our midst, tended to compare

same way. Nureyev was Dionysian,

Baryshnikov was Apollonian. Such symmetries are inevitably misleading,

and

this particular

one does an

injustice to Nureyev,

supremely gifted and expressive dancer and

who was

in the early years

a

an ideal

partner (with Fonteyn), as well as to Baryshnikov. For although Barysh-

nikov has perhaps never in his career been an ideal partner, said

—without any disrespect the grandeur of Nureyev heroic — the younger dancer proved to

tenacities

to his

's

that

it

has to be

dancing and

to

be

a

genius

of another magnitude.

Of

a

magnitude without

tellectual curiosity,

and

his

parallel.

Guided by

his generosity, his in-

unprecedented malleability

as a dancer,

Baryshnikov has given himself to more different kinds of dancing than any other great dancer

in

history.

He

has danced Russian ballet,

Bournonville, the British recensions (Ashton, Tudor, MacMillan), Balanchine, Roland Petit, and a range of Americana from jazz dancing (a

Dancer and the Dance

duo with Judith Jamison, choreographed by Alvin Tharp, and Karole Armitage.

He

is

always

dancer.

more than

Which

is

the role.

what dance

Ailey) to Robbins,

may, on occasion, have been abused

or misused by his choreographers. But even

he

193

He

is,

strives to

when

almost

make

the role

literally, a

is

not

right,

transcendent

actual. [i

9 86]

Lincoln Kirstein

BORN as

1907, the "107th year of the nineteenth century," he once dubbed it, Lincoln Kirstein devoted his life to proIN

moting and exemplifying standards that were both confidently oldfashioned and recklessly visionary. His widest claim to fame

through his the cultural

initiative life

classical ballet

and unflagging

attentions,

both a great

art

of a great city were transformed. Lincoln Kirstein

an American

by giving America

art

and giving an American home twentieth century.

And

to

that artist,

its first

one of the supreme

that,

is

and

made

ballet school artists

George Balanchine, made

of the

New York

made anywhere,

the dance capital of the world: the best dances being

performed by consummately trained great dancers, created the most knowledgeable audience anywhere, one better prepared than audiences in any other metropolis to welcome and evaluate dance in

"modern"

varieties,

Kirstein 's actual Ballet

is

as well as ballet. titles

were: general director of the

and president of the School of American

tion with

often

dance was only one aspect of

(if

all

off as

194

when

New But

York City

his associa-

Like Diaghilev,

who

assessing Kirstein 's role

someone with

interesting, fiercely

the arts and literature, a connoisseur and prosely-

tizer of indefatigable appetite,

his focus to dance.

Ballet.

his genius.

not too accurately) invoked

and importance, he started partisan tastes in

all its

charm, social energies

Great tastemakers need

a

—who narrowed

capacious institution to

Lincoln Kirstein

bend

to their will, a vehicle. Diaghilev started, precociously,

ing a magazine (The World

thought

still

write for and to discover other talents,

at

Hound & Horn,

to

used museums and an

art gallery to celebrate

museum

magazine or

a

is

He

might

such as A. Everett ("Chick") Austin and Julien Levy,

disparate enthusiasms: a tion, as

forgotten.

not unlike other exceptionally prescient aesthetes of

a career

his generation,

who

new and

was

an undergraduate

Harvard, founded a magazine, a splendid magazine,

have had

by found-

of Art), well before the Ballets Russes

Kirstein in the late 1920s, while

of;

195

or a gallery

their

institu-

But Kirstein had the

a publishing house.

means, the daring, and the tenacity to put

and sponsor

an anthology

is

his avidity, all his piety,

all

a gallery or a

One genius only. And unlike museum or a magazine, institutions

that are invaluable in the soliciting

and disseminating of work but are

into an

institution exhibiting

house or

a publishing

not indispensable to

creation, a

was Kirstein 's

It

into being

dance company

and makes possible the work which

that inspires

public.

its

one genius.

and guaranteed the

who

a living

organism

vision, his stamina, his fidelity, that

survival of the greatest

of our time, without which most of the dances

imported,

is

then exhibits to the

it

brought

dance company

made by

the genius he

turned out to be the greatest choreographer of

all

time,

would not have been made. These

roles, of

magnificent cles)

to the idea of service.

The

Movement

&

Metaphor and many other books (and

arti-

about the history and ideology of dance

What made him something

author. writer,

ume

tastemaker and supreme enabler of another's genius,

and Kirstein was devoted

are service roles,

was the quality of

of

poems

—

how he happened

aghilev 's funeral in 1929;

War

made him an important an important, thrilling

exclude the early novel and vol-

interesting mainly because

Flesh Is Heir, relates

during World

his prose. (I

larger,

to

he wrote them. The novel, be present

Rhymes of a PFC, about

II, tells

how he

in

Venice

at

Di-

his military service

loved being in the army.) What's

more, when his work with the great institution he founded and kept alive for

decadts was virtually over ("Apres moi,

le

Board"

as

he quotes

Balanchine as saying), his work with English sentences was not. There is

more than

he got better

fifty all

years of writing, going back to

the time,

more

subtle,

Hound

& Horn,

more sonorous, more

and

intense. I

196

am

SUSAN SONTAG

thinking of the articles that appeared in the 1980s in The

Review of Books and, biographical writing static sensibility

in particular, of four

—triumphs of

—published

New

York

stupendous pieces of auto-

elliptical

prose and anguished, ec-

in the literary quarterly Raritan. In 1991 a

generous sampling of Kirstein's writing on

all

subjects (including pho-

tography, painting, film, and literature as well as dance) was published

under the

title

& From: A

By With To

Lincoln Kirstein Reader, and in

1994 Mosaic: Memoirs appeared, which incorporated some but not

And

of the material in Raritan.

there

much, much more,

is

all

be

to

still

collected or brought back into print.

A

votary of systems of ideal order, Kirstein

more than once

ex-

pressed his love of ballet as a commitment to certain spiritual values to an exalted abnegation of is

sometimes the good

self.

But

attraction to ideally regimented

life

does

discipline, service, devotion.

examined

impersonal

taste of a truly strong personality, so the militant

communities

of a truly eccentric temperament. Kirstein devoted his

as the attraction to the

closely, yields a

The

is,

illustrate the ideals

His

own

hallmark

usually, the

collective enterprise to

life,

like

he said

it

did: perfect

any individual

double meaning. Kirstein's

life

which

life

when

and accom-

plishments supply model lessons about the necessity of eccentricity

about being eccentric (including being spiritual value

We among

and

"difficult"

personally)

as

a

a precondition of real seriousness.

were fortunate to have had

this

noble and complicated

man

us. x [

997]

Wagner's

WATER,

BLOOD, HEALING

B

ALM

,

Fluids

magic potions

—

flu-

ids play a decisive role in this mythology.

Wagner's

launched from

stories are often

by water and

a

a water-world.

below the Rhine's surface

tan

und

fire).

(to

end, four operas

literally in

later,

Isolde, begins

who

fluidity, Tris-

and ends with journeys over water. Act

is

commanded by

Tristan that

is

affianced to Tristan's uncle,

wounded, had

set off

alone in a

I

takes

taking the Irish

King Marke, to

Cornwall. Preceding this journey was an earlier sea voyage, tan, grievously

the water,

with a cosmic duet

Wagner's most delirious exploration of

place on a noble vessel princess Isolde,

arrival

departure by water frame the plots of The Flying

Dutchman and Lohengrin. The Ring saga begins of water and

An

frail skiff

when

Tris-

for Ireland, in

hopes of being ministered to by Isolde, renowned for her healing

arts.

who wounded him and whom he killed was Isolde's fiance, he could not say who he was. (Solitary people with mysterious or disguised identities Lohengrin, the Dutchman, the wounded Tristan Since the foe

at

the Irish

— court — usually

rampart overlooking the the end of

Acf

II,

sea,

by

where

water.) Tristan,

Act

III takes

place on a

re-wounded mortally

waits for a boat to arrive bearing Isolde,

been summoned not as she

arrive

as his lover

who

at

has

but as his once successful healer. But

appears Tristan dies, and she follows him in death. Journeys over

water are associated in Wagner's mythology with a redemption that

197

SUSAN SONTAG

198

does not happen, as

in

Lohengrin, or happens in terms other than those

originally sought, as in Tristan

und

Isolde,

which has almost everybody

die, either senselessly or beatifically.

Parsifal, like Tristan

ever, in this last of

und Isolde,

very

is

—finding someone who king Amfortas — does take and demption

will heal, in the

place,

this

much

a story of fluids.

Wagner's thirteen operas, what

is

How-

defined as

re-

and succeed, the wounded hoped-for terms.

A

virgin,

time male, a holy fool, appears as foretold. Perhaps this fulfillment

of expectations makes

it

cluded from the opera.

A majestic outdoors,

inevitable that the water-world

indoors, the Grail Hall,

tified

are

its

is

largely ex-

the forest, and a vast sanc-

two

positive locations

(the

negative ones, Klingsor's domain, being a castle tower and a garden of

dangerous flowers). To be sure, Act

which the wounded king

is

has water just offstage: a lake to

brought for

where Kundry procures water announcing to him

I

his hydrotherapy,

and

a spring

to revive the fainting Parsifal after bru-

his mother's death;

and

Act

there

is

water for a consecration, for a baptism. But the main story of fluids

is

tally

about blood: the unstanchable hemorrhaging of the

blood that should stream

side, Christ's

in the chalice

charistic meal, has is

by

this

wound,

Jesus' side while

summarized

on

He hung

is

(Elsa,

to

is

for

him

to

perform

make

Christ's

—weakened

on the Cross. The plot of

as

he

Parsifal could

be

replacement for

having trouble making a fluid appear.

enter the

only one form does fluid leave

Women

Amfortas 's

by Klingsor with the very spear that pierced

SEVERAL KINDS OF FLUID in

which

as the search, eventually successful, for a

someone who

in

a regular basis, for the knights' eu-

become agony

inflicted

wound

III,

in the Grail chalice. Amfortas's

essential duty as king of the Grail knights,

blood appear

in

it,

body

in

Wagner's

stories,

but

blood, and this in male bodies only.

have bloodless deaths: usually they simply expire abruptly

Elisabeth, Isolde, Kundry), or they immolate themselves, in

water (Senta) or (Therefore,

it

in fire (Brunnhilde).

Only men bleed

doesn't seem too fanciful to regard

metaphorically, under blood.)

—bleed

semen

Though Wagner makes

as

to death.

subsumed,

the prostrate,

punctured, hemorrhaging male body the result of some epic combat,

Wagner's there

usually an erotic

is

wound behind

Fluids

199

the one inflicted by spear and

sword. Love as experienced by men, in both Tristan und Isolde and is

tantamount to

had

fallen in love

Parsifal,

Tristan

emotional necessity of a

a

wound. Isolde had healed

Tristan, but

way of

signaling the

with Isolde; Wagner's

new

virtually self-inflicted. (Tristan

and

wound

physical

is

make

to

drops his sword

at

it,

shockingly,

the end of Act II

the treacherous Melot run him through.) Amfortas had already

lets

been seduced by Kundry; Klingsor's spear

just

made

wound

that

literal.

woman, who

In Wagner's misogynistic logic, a

doubles as healer and seducer,

whom

Isolde

negativity flies in,

is

and the eroticism made Act

early in

stricken king

—

appears in Parsifal with both the

a positive version,

is

it

I,

characteristically

often the true slayer. This figure, of

more

far

explicit.

The person who

bearing a vial of precious medicinal balm for the

can relieve but not cure him

—

is

the same person

who

caused the King's wound. Wagner makes Kundry systematically dual: in her service role, a bringer of fluids; in her seducer's alter ego, a taker

of them.

Seduction

eloquence;

is

service

mute.

is

Kundry 's maximal eloquence, her attempt she

represented as having nothing

is

To

serve!

serve!) are the only

who

contrast, Isolde,

who

characterized

successfully administered

story), It is

is

and then

balm

as a focus of desire,

is

failure

of II,

"Dienen! Dienen!" (To

allowed in

first as

(the

the

to seduce Parsifal in Act

left to say.

words she

After

all

a healing

of Act

III.

In

woman, one

background of the opera's

becomes more and more eloquent.

with Isolde's rush of ecstatic words that

Wagner concludes

the

opera.

THE FLUID ADMINISTERED by past. In the story is

Wagner has chosen

what they both believe

inhibitor,

A

to

which makes them

be

—

to

tell,

in the

the fluid she offers Tristan

a lethal poison. Instead,

just as the

is

boat

is

is

a dis-

about to land

—con-

it

each other.

fess their love for

fluid-that-changes-everything

Tristan

Isolde in her role as healer

and Isolde

that has

is

essential to the Celtic legend of

been circulating through the veins of Euro-

SUSAN SONTAG

200

pean culture for more than seven centuries. In the

account, from

fullest

the thirteenth century, Gottfried von Strassburg's novel-length verse epic Tristan,

named

is

it

a love-philter

woman

and the healing

Isolde,

concocted by Isolde's mother

(also

in the original tale) for her

daughter and King Marke to drink on their wedding night which, during the voyage, an ignorant servant offers to Marke's

nephew and

the

bride-to-be as wine. Wagner's version turns accidental calamity into necessity.

"Der Liebestrank" the draught of love that Brangane,

make

servant, has deliberately substituted for the poison, does not

and Isolde

tan

being martyred by them.

on not acknowledging

The

own

feel their

love-potion

is

It

feelings

—they

simply makes

Isolde's Tris-

already feel them, are

impossible for them to go

it

their love.

treated in a comic register in another opera,

Donizetti's Lelisir d' amove (1832),

which opens with the well-to-do

heroine reading to a group of peasants a reduction of the Celtic legend to a tale of conventionally unrequited love with a

some

Tristan procures

from

a "saggio incantatore" (a

"certo elisir d'amor" (a certain elixir of love); ful

wise sorcerer) a

no sooner has the

but indifferent Isolde taken a sip than a matching love

instantly.

amante

I

'

"Cambiata visse

in

un

drink that makes someone tions, spells,

and charms

maids into princesses:

Mere

(Changed

fall

/

in love

by an

itinerant

is

and

is

belongs to the same family of po-

is

just

wine

and mer-

the instant metamorphosis of fairy

quack

no place

to the opera's hero to

—the

The

lived faithful to him.)

is

tales.

for magic: the

woo

the

woman

actually Bordeaux. Instead of

given as wine being really a magic potion, what

magic potion

created

an instant / that unkind

that transforms princes into frogs

it

he thinks (wrongly) doesn't love him

what

in

fairy tales. Donizetti's buffa realism has

fluid sold

is

beauti-

istante I quella belta crudele I fu di Tristano

Tristan fedel"

beauty / became Tristan's true love

a

happy ending. Hand-

inevitable,

is

fobbed off

comic deflation of the

as

fan-

tasy. Its tragic

dissolution

is

Wagner's, a quarter of a century

tion that, rather than

making something

loosening the

The

ity,

tie to life.

later: a

po-

possible, heightens impossibil-

fluid that

Brangane gives the hapless

pair does not just reveal (and therefore unleash) a feeling.

It

undoes

a

Wagner's world. Love subtracts them instantly,

normal

ties

from

totally,

and obligations, casting them into

Fluids

201

from

civil society,

a vertiginous solitariness

(rather than a romantic solitude a deux) that brings

Where are we? asks Where am I? she asks Tristan

on an inexorable

darkening of consciousness.

Isolde at the begin-

ning of the opera.

at

after they

king

is

have drunk the potion,

here,

someone

know where he

not

castle?

that

says.

what peasants? he

on the rampart of

in

Act

III.

asks, as his loyal retainer

home to own

his

Brittany, his castle.

I,

boat lands in Cornwall. The

And What

Tristan does

king? asks Tristan.

when he awakens

is

he has been brought

lying

What

as the

the end of Act

Love

herds? what

Kurwenal explains

own kingdom, is

that he

is

an anti-gnosis, a de-

knowing. Each act begins with a tormented, paralyzing, anguished waiting by one for the other, followed by the longed-for arrival

concluding with other, unanticipated

arrivals,

—and

which are not only

ruptive but, to the lovers, barely comprehensible.

What

duty?

dis-

What

shame? Passion means an exalted passivity. Act

I

opens with Isolde on

a

couch, her face buried in the cushions (Wagner's stage direction), and

Act

As

III

has Tristan in a

in Parsifal, there

coma

at

the beginning and supine throughout.

a great deal of lying

is

down and many

peals for the surcease of oblivion. If the opera acts,

one could regard

ended

fervent ap-

after its first

this pull of the horizontal in Tristan

und

two

Isolde,

the paeans to night, the dark, the equating of pleasure with oblivion

and of death with pleasure,

as a

most extravagant way of describing the

voluptuous loss of consciousness in orgasm. Whatever

is

being said

or being done on the stage, the music of the Act II encounter thrillingly

unequivocal rendering of an ideal copulation.

Mann was

not wrong

when he spoke

for bed.")

But Act

makes

III

it

is

a

(Thomas

of the opera's "lascivious desire

clear that the eroticism

is

more means

than end, a platform for the propaganda against lucidity; that the deepest subject

is

the surrender of consciousness as such.

Already the emotional logic of the words of the Act

quence of annihilating

do not simply

— and

nihilistic

II

duet

—mental operations. The

is

a se-

lovers

unite, generically, as in the unsurpassably elegant for-

mula of Gottfried von Strassburg's medieval German

Tristan:

SUSAN SONTAG

202

A

man,

a

woman;

a

woman,

man;

a

Tristan, Isolde; Isolde, Tristan.

Imbued with

the elaborate understanding of solitude and the explo-

seem the most

ration of extremes of feeling that

of the Romantic movements in the arts of the

much

able to go

Wagner

last century,

is

further:

tristan: Tristan du, ich isolde:

Du

isolde:

the world

is

You

I

mehr

Isolde, nicht

Isolde, Tristan ich, nicht

(tristan: Tristan you,

When

original achievements

Isolde,

Isolde, Tristan

I,

mehr

no more

no more

Tristan!

Isolde!

Tristan!

Isolde!

thought to be so easily negated by the pressure of

extreme feeling (the

still

regnant mythology of the

self

we owe

to the

nineteenth-century writers and composers), the feeling self expands to fill

the

empty

a

space:

dann bin

Selbst

ich die

Welt"

myself

(I

The

world), Tristan and Isolde had already sung in unison.

next

move

the elimination of the

is

self,

am

gender, individuality.

"Ohne

Nennen, ohne Trennen" (no names, no parting), they sing together "endlos, ewig,

one

self to

einhewussf

(ever,

the

inevitable

.

.

.

unendingly, one consciousness). For

seek to fuse with another

is,

in the

absence of the world, to

seek the annihilation of both.

When

lovers unite in opera,

what they do, mainly,

is

utter the

same

words; they speak together, as one. Their words unite, rhyme, to the

same music. Wagner's formal principle more

libretto for Tristan literally

and

lovers return to echo each other's

change, in the garden of Act

words back

to each other,

unite, to die,

and

exchange

— and

plex awareness.

And

bound yearning

in

any other opera: the

words throughout. Their

in their expressions of desire to

neither, for

two

all

and

day.

II,

Of

course their

their desire to merge, even

lovers. Tristan

is

having sung with Isolde of the

Act

fullest ex-

has them voluptuously repeating their

competing

identities, are the

Isolde carries out this

insistently than

their denunciations of light

texts are not identical

to

II,

und

given a bliss

more com-

of their death-

Tristan expresses another relation to death in

Wagner's

203

Fluids

the last act, in the form of a soliloquy in which he separates himself

from

Isolde, cursing love. It

had been Tristan alone

in

Act

who

II

dwelled ecstatically on the potion that flowed through him, that he

drank with endless bitter:

delight.

emotion

that

he invokes are

all

in his delirious unraveling of the story's deepest layer of

he himself brewed.

THE CHARACTERISTIC, is

III the fluids

"Liebestranen" (lovers' tears) and the accursed potion, which he

now proclaims

eras

Now in Act

plot-generating situation in Wagner's op-

one that has gone on too long, and

infused with the anguished

is

longing to terminate. ("Unending melody" distinctive musical line

—

is

—Wagner's phrase

one formal equivalent of

for his

this essential sub-

of prolongation, of excruciation.) Blood flows unceasingly from

ject

Amfortas's wound, but he can't die. Meanwhile, his father, Titurel, the

who already lies in his tomb, is And ageless Kundry, painfully

former Grail king,

the Grail ceremony.

wants nothing more than to go back to

sleep.

being kept alive by revived in each act,

Wagner

turns the legend

of Tristan and Isolde into an earlier, secular version of the longings ex-

—with Tristan taking the

pressed in Parsifal is

a proto-Amfortas: a suffering

finally,

Men

he can.

are given a

women. (Kundry, whose longing than Amfortas's,

when, with

is

lead.

man who wants

The

Tristan of Act III

to die but can't until,

more developed death wish than for extinction

seems even stronger

the exception.) Isolde tries to die only in Act

Tristan, she drinks the potion she believes to

while Tristan actively provokes his death in

all

I,

be poison,

three acts, succeeding at

wound when he is told that moment in Act II of doubt (or

the end by tearing the bandages from his Isolde

is

common little

approaching. Isolde even has a sense),

when

word: and),

them? she

asks.

she evokes "dies susse Wortlein: und"

and

as in Tristan

Isolde.

(this

sweet

But won't dying separate

No, he answers.

Viewed from the narrowing and even more excruciating perspective of the last act, the

Viewed more

opera

is

(or

becomes) mostly

inclusively, as the story of both,

old Celtic legend has an arbitrariness in

its

Tristan's story.

Wagner's version of the

denouement

that

closer in feeling to the traditional Japanese tragedy of the

makes

double

it

sui-

SUSAN SONTAG

204

—the voluntary hopeless — than cide

death of lovers whose situation

to, say,

is

not entirely

Romeo and Juliet. (And Wagner's

depiction of

love as tormentingly painful, consciousness-dissolving yearning recalls

sentiments in the love poetry of Heian Japan.) His Tristan and Isolde

von Strassburg's poem, star-crossed lovers

are not, as in Gottfried

thwarted by the standard obstacles: that the tive of the

woman's; that the

tive of the

man's to

whom

woman

loyalty

is

man

has slain a close

rela-

betrothed to an older male

rela-

owed. Wagner requires something

is

beyond these objective impediments, whose importance the lovers are

obstacle

of

its

is,

members

then, the very nature of love

object; insatiable.

The

signifies that

The world-transcending

of a society, a world.

— an emotion always

eroticism that

Wagner

exalts

in excess

one that

is

has to self-destruct.

When Marke

arrives at the end,

the claims of this passion and ulets

and Montagues do,

that

not to grasp for the

it is

now

to wish,

when

it's

too

first

time

Cap-

late, as

he had been more understanding. Hav-

ing learned from Brangane that the lovers were compelled by a love-philter to betray him,

and

in

some

Marke (who

early versions of the story

from her vow and

lease Isolde

let

functions as Tristan's father, his father) has

is

decided to

the lovers marry. But union

is

re-

not

what Tristan and Isolde want, what they ever wanted. They want the lights

turned

words

off. Isolde's last

—the

last

words of the opera

—

are

a description of losing consciousness: "ertrinken, versinken / unbewusst bliss!).

The

about being overcome, destroyed by

feel-

hochste Lust!" (drowning, sinking /unconscious supreme

music overflows. Consciousness drowns.

TRISTAN UND ISOLDE ing

is

— and not only about extreme experience but intended

That Wagner equates being

whelmed

is

a typically

satisfied

to be one.

or inspired with being over-

Romantic idea of

art, art

that not only

is

about

excess (Tristan and Isolde overwhelmed by their passion) but employs,

extravagant and outsized means, such

in

an almost homeopathic

as

unusual bulk or duration. The element of ordeal for the audience in

all this,

even of

risk,

spirit,

seemed only appropriate.

A

good performance of

Wagner's

und

Tristan

Isolde,

Wagner had predicted

while composing the

last act, is

"bound

Wagner's favorite notions about could immerse themselves in the tenor

nich in

1

865,

had been ties;

Ludwig Schnorr,

it

fell

laid

low by the

role's

Wagner was hardly

felt

the

would be

a

few weeks

had

that perhaps the opera first

Tristan,

first

in

composer

Mu-

said that

unprecedented exertions and

and when Schnorr unexpectedly died

(and not only Wagner)

the

performances

it

later,

had focused on the

singer.

To the

Wagner

killed him.

to associate the lethal, at least

librettist

A

musical drama must

lyri-

whom he was work-

with

ing on / Puritani, Bellini wrote, "Grave on your letters:

he

intensi-

metaphorically, with the lyrical. But previous notions of the lethal cal

of

that only the strong

When

after the first

both he and Wagner worried that

One

mad."

to drive people

with impunity. ill

Wesendonk

to Mathilde

work was

his

205

Fluids

mind

adamantine

in

make people weep, shudder, and

through the singing." The great singers were those

who

die

could provoke

audiences to an ecstasy bordering on delirium, a standard that was set

by

Farinelli, Pacchierotti,

and other celebrated

teenth and early nineteenth centuries, the sense,

whose

voices

first

castrati of the eigh-

divas in the

made people swoon and weep and

were being driven out of

their senses,

manner were

Napoleon declared,

in praise of his favorite singer, that

mad when he

one's

normal consciousness ravished by the

phenomenon

they

both sexes.

erotically captivating to

going

served in an irrepressible

feel that

and whose appearance and ex-

travagantly artificial

heard Crescentini

modern

sing. It is this

he

felt

he was

longing to have

singer's art that

is

pre-

usually dismissed as an oddity

or aberration of the opera world: diva worship.

The

distinctively high-

pitched adulation surrounding several sopranos (and a tenor or two) in every generation affirms this

much-prized experience

as

granted by

the voice, not merely the charms of celebrity and glamour.

Wagner opens beauty that

is

a

new

erotically troubling, soul-piercing

that the intensity has

fused.

chapter in this operatic tradition of creating

—the difference being

been heightened by becoming,

Though borne by

as

it

were,

dif-

the singer's voice, lyricism does not climax in

the experience of the voice. Rather than being specifically, corporeally, identified with the singer's voice as

it

floats

above the music,

it

has be-

SUSAN SONTAG

206

come

a

property of the music as a whole, in which the voice

ded. (This

is

what

is

embed-

is

sometimes called the symphonism of Wagner's op-

eras.)

Audiences have relished being excited, disturbed, troubled by the beauty of voices

music

—

as such.

What

the voice did seemed

play of virtuosity was, in castrati

But there was,

their sweetness, their velocity.

at least

considerable resistance to a dereglement du sens produced by

initially,

itself,

superhuman and

as a dis-

The sound produced by

admirable.

suggested something disembodied

the

—the words "seraphic" and

"heavenly" were often used to describe these voices, though the singers

themselves were clearly objects of erotic fantasy as well. Wagner's mad-

dening lyricism had nothing seraphic about

whatever the

it,

spiritual

messages and "higher" feelings being urged on us by the words; thing,

it

seemed

to

come from "below,"

if

any-

and, like the potion in the

opera, to invite repressed feelings to flow forth. Berlioz described the

Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, where no voices yet "groaning and moaning." Renouncing locity,

Wagner had chosen

to slow

all

sing, as

one long

the effects (and relief) of ve-

down sequences

of deep feeling that

then either became enthralling or seemed unbearably oppressive. The

Viennese music

and leader of the anti-Wagnerians, Eduard

critic

Hanslick, said that the Prelude to Tristan the Italian painting of a martyr

from are

his

body on

no longer any

whose

a reel." Parsifal,

real

he

und

Isolde "reminds

said,

made him

process of modulation so that the listener loses tonality.

We

feel as

ground under our

all

though we were on the high

feet." Yes.

The new emotional,

We

"There

seasick.

a perpetually

of

unwound

intestines are slowly

modulations but rather

me

undulating

sense of a definite seas,

with no firm

are.

as distinct

from

lyrical, intensity that

Wagner

brought into opera owes most to the way he both amplifies and makes excruciatingly intimate (despite the epic settings) the distinctive

of feelings depicted: weariness.

Wagner

lust,

tenderness, grief,

pity,

mix

euphoria, world-

utterly transforms feelings that are staples in opera's

long tradition of representing exalted sentiments, such as the association of love

and death. Hearts wounded by

love, death that

able to separation from the beloved or the loss of love

common

coin of lovers' plaints, of lovers' ecstasies

—

is

this

preferis

the

—long before Wag-

Wagner's ner,

we call Romanticism. Wagner, in Tristan und made these old hyperboles of opera, understood

long before what

Isolde to

207

Fluids

and elsewhere,

literal.

To speak nakedly

feeling, to

be overwhelmingly

be expressive exaggerations, shatteringly

and with unprecedented insistence about

—Wagner's sensualism, —was new

intimate with audiences

experienced as invasive

and

century,

it

his emotionalism,

were

territory for art in the mid-nineteenth

seems inevitable that such shamelessness

(as

was then

it

judged by many) be attached to the permissions given by opera's

unabashed commitment to heightened opera

I

treatment of time

is

ing of duration as a

he meant

"But for the

states of feeling.

Whitman

could never have written Leaves of Grass"

ciple late in life (though

told a dis-

not Wagner). The

Italian opera,

one of Wagner's principal innovations: the extend-

means of

But the depth and

intensifying emotion.

grandeur of feeling of which Wagner

is

capable are combined, in his

greatest work, with an extraordinary delicacy in the depiction of tion. It is this delicacy that

in the

rich,

may

finally

convince us that

presence of that rarest of achievements in

art,

we

emo-

are indeed

the reinvention of

sublimity.

Bruno Walter once

home

after

"That

isn't

said to

as they

were walking

Walter had conducted a performance of Tristan und Isolde, even music any longer." Meaning,

Wagner thought he was

offering

or idea that transcended mere

much more idea of

Thomas Mann,

it

is

more than music.

some kind of transforming experience

art.

(Of course, he considered

his

than mere operas.) But such claims seem mainly like an

art, a

peculiarly

modern

idea of

deal of expressed impatience with

art.

art, in

When

which there

a great

is

artists aren't trying to

subvert the art-status of what they do (saying, for instance, that ally life),

they often claim to be doing something

gion? Therapy?)

Wagner

is

an important part of

more than this

the inflation and coarsening of expectations about

duced so many great works of

IT

WAS OBSERVED

had an

works

effect similar to

art,

among them

Tristan

from the beginning that

consuming

modern

art,

re-

story of

which has pro-

und Isolde.

listening to

a psychotropic drug:

Baudelaire; alcohol, said Nietzsche. And, as with

it is

art. (Reli-

all

Wagner

opium, said disinhibiting

SUSAN SONTAG

208

drugs, sometimes there were violent side effects. In the early years of

und

Tristan

Isolde occasionally

someone had

be evacuated from the

to

theatre, fainting or vomiting, in the course of the performance.

perhaps

as

hard

now

to imagine the impact

ner, particularly of this opera,

that impact

tears

was immense,

as

it is

produced by the voice of

No

be more

artist

the

first

but positive. In the era of rock

and John Adams, be

it

to,

just

there have been others

'n' roll

now

rarely

viewed

and of Philip Glass

seems normal and desirable for music to aspire to

We live in

a narcotic.

— and

of the nineteenth cen-

the enchantments of addiction in art are

as anything

But the scandal

composer people boasted of not

admiring passionately but being addicted

And

Farinelli.

influential.

Though Wagner was

since.

issue

to imagine the fainting

was the passion with which he was defended

the incalculable influence of his work. to

It is

Wag-

mean, of course, aesthetic scandal, leaving aside the

(I

and spasms of

was

early audiences of

and the scandal which became part of

of Wagner's repugnant political views), as

tury

on

the time of the triumph of the "theatrocracy"

which we can find many descendants of

that Nietzsche deplored, in

Wagner's favorite dramatic form, the pseudo-spiritual pageant of

And

demption.

Wagner's characteristic means (the garrulous,

re-

soft-

focus libretto; the exacerbated length; the organized repetitiveness)

and themes

(the praise of mindlessness, the featuring of the pathos of

heroes and rulers) are those of some of the most enchanting spectacles of our

own

day.

Wagner's adaptations of the myths of the European and the

Germanic past (both Christian and pagan) do not involve

But they do involve a literary

way; he

Beach made

it

ideas.

knew

Wagner was

his sources.

clear that they

thought they didn't have

to.

mythologies of the past that only express an even for effect.

It is

The

creators of Einstein on the

knew nothing about

The emblems and

litter

the

more generic

edge,

is

—the

belief.

highly literate, and reflective in

work of

Einstein,

the

modern Wagnerians

pathos, and a generalized striving

firmly thought that neither the creator nor the audience historical

knowl-

considered to have a baleful effect on creativity and on last

and

bric-a-brac of heroic

need have any information (knowledge, particularly

ing

specifically

feel-

and most tenacious of the cliches of Romanticism). The

Wagner's

Gesamtkunstwerk becomes placidity

—

that have floated free

and for non-knowing literary,

as

from

such.

emotionally remote

confirmed

moods

—such

as paranoia,

specific emotional situations,

And

the

aptness

of these

anti-

modern redemption-pageants may have

troubled way of reacting to Wagner's highly

a less

fervent ones.

ary,

a vehicle for

209

Fluids

The smarmy, redeeming higher

values that

liter-

Wag-

ner thought his work expressed have been definitively discredited

much we owe the historic Nazism). Few puzzle anymore, (that

and Wagner is

just

fearers,

a

there anyone

taste." Nietzsche's acerbic

hundred years

left

after

it

then indeed

much

the optimal Tristan

remark about

was made, truer than

that Nietzsche and, to a lesser extent,

work

lovers

Now Wagner

ever.

But

even to be ambivalent about Wagner now, in the

has been

lost. I

mood

und Isolde

—you have

for experiencing really

is,

Thomas Mann were?

If not,

should think that feeling ambiva-

lence (the opposite of being indifferent still

Wagner

enjoyed ... as a drug.

Wagner seems, way

as did generations of

about what Wagner's operas mean.

"His pathos topples every

is

connection of Wagnerian ideology to

how

to

be seduced)

is

authentically sublime a

and how strange and troubling. [1987]

An

ALLAndART, all

opera

—

it

has been said, aspires to the condition of music.

arts

made with music

—but,

more than any

other,

aspire to the experience of ecstasy.

were provided by the

Originally, opera's ecstasies

well-known intrigues from naissance epic

classical

—were dignified

singers. Stories

mythology, ancient history, and Re-

pretexts.

The music,

often glorious, was

Whatever the pleasures afforded by the other elements

a platform.

(music, dance, poetry, scenography), opera was above

unique reach of the

human

voice. This

What was

musical occasion of opera was

a

trans-human

(in

all

a vehicle for a

was something much more po-

tent than "beautiful singing."

tually

Lament

Ecstasy of

released by the dramatic and

substance experienced as sublime,

part because

it

vir-

was often transgendered), and so

erotically affecting as to constitute a species of ravishment.

(Think of

the swoons and delirium that Farinelli and the other legendary castrati

among men

of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provoked

and

women

both

—echoed,

in

diminuendo, by the adulation offered

the great bel canto singers of our

own

soaring, feminine; the gender line parts),

century.)

was

The model

arbitrary

register

was

(men sang women's

and opera aroused emotions, excesses of reaction

identified as

feminine.

A more

civically responsible idea of the ecstasies delivered

emerged when the devoted audience expanded from

210

its

by opera

aristocratic

An core to a

much

a ritual of

larger public,

urban bourgeois

Ecstasy of

and attendance

life.

at

Opera experienced

form of drama. Singing was

enterprise,

21

I

"opera houses" became preeminently a

as

vehicle for the voice declined in favor of opera as the resistible

Lament

most

inspiring,

a heroic rather than

ir-

an uncanny

which furthered the "progressive" idea that the work of the

work of music were

voice and the

opera began

teenth century.

about

at parity. It is

to reflect the nationalist projects

The enthusiasm produced

in

this

time that

of the European nine-

opera houses fed on some-

thing the audience brought to the occasion: tribal

self- congratulation.

Being construed as an achievement of a national culture resulted evitably in a certain normalization of opera ecstasies: sexual roles

in-

were

locked into place; stories chosen (historical or folkloric) were constructed around the contrasts of feminine

and masculine

traits,

vocal

and characterological. The model responses of audiences became

less

outrageously feminine: invigoration, inspiration, exaltation. It

was precisely the composer with the

largest ambition for opera,

Richard Wagner, who, in addition to bringing opera can be

—the

most solemn conclusion,

what opera can

also

be: an isolating, ecstatic

music.

second idea of what

The

—

to

human

greatest,

commotion of

feeling aroused

voice but by exhausting, relent-

voice rides the music; the music, rather than

an independent ideal of vocal virtuosity, makes ever more tially felt to

its

ushered in the third, or modern, idea of

not by the sublime feats of a lessly ecstatic

this

apotheosis of a collective spirit

difficult (ini-

be impossible) demands on the voice. Music, Wagner's

music, depicts the very condition of being flooded by feeling that the

uncanny voice once provoked

in audiences.

The consequence was

to

weaken the authority of sharply contrasting feminine and masculine styles of

emotional reaction

culinist pretensions of

opera public. But

how

—both on the opera

stage (for

Wagnerian ideology) and

in the

all

the mas-

minds of the

could reinstating the goal of providing an im-

moderate, ravishing experience not entail a re-feminizing

(in

terms of

the cultural stereotypes) of the most acute pleasure taken in opera?

FOR WAGNER, who perience

created the idea of opera as overwhelming ex-

—and whose supreme dramatic subject

is

the progression of

SUSAN SONTAG

212

consciousness through ecstasy into oblivion the story

drama

still

left

held.

—

certain strictures about

Wagner could not have accepted

Since Wagner, however, the stories that operas

end with

any

are

tell

more

likely to

collective dismay, with the defeat of understanding.

To be

sure,

some of the

greatest operas {Lincoronazione di Poppea,

Don

Cost fan tutte, Fidelio,

Moses und Aron) carry

Carlo,

ments, real debate. But more

which

as satisfying

unresolved by an epiphany oi acceptance, of understanding.

commonly favored

are, in effect, tragedies of cognition.

what we could properly

made by Wagner's

last

call

modern

This

real argu-

opera are stories

in

particularly true of

is

opera, the transition to which

opera, Parsifal,

whose protagonist

is

enters the

story as a child, a holy innocent, a fool. Subsequently, Parsifal does at-

enlightenment

tain

mains

someone

often

—

offstage. In later versions of this story the naif re-

unknowing. The central figure of modern opera

in a state of

is

in a state of deficient consciousness, of pathological in-

nocence. Pelleas et Melisande

Onto one she

is

in this evolution.

of the most traditional opera stories, that of a young

whose love

Isolde\

one of the masterpieces

is

for a

woman

his

own

age or younger

promised or already married

Don

Eugene Onegin,

Carlo,

is

thwarted because

to an older relative [Tristan

inter alia),

is

grafted the

story about not understanding, not knowing, being balked tery;

man und

modern

by

a

mys-

or creating a mystery, by being afflicted by an unexplained injury

or suffering.

Debussy's opera (following the Maeterlinck play used almost in entirety as the libretto) has

its

special inflections.

We

are in the

its

world

without clear borders and fixed dimensions of Symbolist enigma:

where appearances debility

are

known by

and inexplicable

their

affliction are

and the emblematic object of desire

Xouveau long

Art

In this nile,

ill

tale of

well,

a

reflections,

where

equated with voluptuousness,

woman

with

— ancient and

juve-

languid childlike

hair.

kingdom oi

and

is

shadows or

stretched, fairy-tale dualities

dark and

light,

wet and dry

—

is

set a

neo-Wagnerian

yearning and thwarting, of incurable vulnerability. Maeterlinck's

drama can be read

as

an idealization oi depression.

It

can also be seen

An as a representation, a literalizing, of

physical illness

Lament

Ecstasy of

213

once widely accepted ideas about

—which attributed many

illnesses, tautologically, to

The

illness-producing atmosphere ("miasma").

story

an

set in precisely

is

such a damp, sun-deprived environment, replete with water sources

and subterranean spaces. Debussy began with Melisande I'eau." (It

at a forest spring:

was surely not

"Une petite fille qui pleure au bord de

for lack of thematic aptness that

he cut the

scene of Maeterlinck's play: a chorus of castle servants calling for

first

water.)

The omnipresence

emotional

volatility

wounded

ther, Arkel)

(in

are

signifies a generalized unhealthiness.

(Pelleas's father, Pelleas's friend Marcellus)

ill

or physically

— and

—or

the course of the story, Golaud) or infirm (the grandfa-

of his inability to fragility

of water, which generally signifies purity

—here

Most characters or

the play's second scene,

at

lift

weak (Golaud's

little

son, Yniold,

a stone). Melisande, of course,

wound

dies of a

that, the

who

sings

the epitome of

is

doctor says, would not

kill a

bird. (In Maeterlinck's play, the doctor adds, "Elle est nee sans raison .

.

.

pour mourir;

et

meurt sans

elle

Every reference to

raison.")

u

Melisande emphasizes her smallness (her hands are always her petites mains"), her untouchability (her

me

touchez pas!").

like a giant

—

a rapist

woman

own

adult sexuality is

would

appears to her

vulnerability ("Je suis perdu

woman, he becomes,

is

who

—wins Melisande by promising not

his

his family

and begins to

despite himself, a brute.

consummated not

is

too

fragile, sexually

tiously chaste,

and

when he wishes

to

immature.

constitute an aggression against the heroine.

the story's one normally mature male character

to the ancient grandfather,

be-

married to an older relative of the young

man's, the usual story, but because she

Golaud

"Ne me touchezpas! Ne

love of Pelleas and Melisande cannot be

cause the young

Any

are

But when he brings Melisande back to

treat his child-bride as a

The

words

discoverer, Golaud,

and by avowing

to touch her, aussi").

Her benign

and possibly

first

whose request

to Golaud's

to kiss

—

Melisande

young half brother,

still

in contrast is

ostenta-

a boy,

who,

embrace and be embraced by Melisande, wraps

himself in the«part of her body that

not

not

her

hair.

Melisande seems endowed with a body only for others to marvel

at its

delicacy. It

is

startling to realize (I

is

solid,

have never seen

it

flesh:

depicted in any

SUSAN SONTAG

214

production of the opera) that Melisande would be nine months pregnant

when

she and Pelleas finally do confess their love to each other,

only immediately to be torn apart by the jealous Golaud. But her

body

tered, swollen

is

unmentionable, perhaps unstageable, and,

certain sense, unthinkable.

she

is

Melisande herself cannot

It is as if

pregnant (and therefore a woman), for the same reason

now

the story's close, she cannot take in that she

about to

al-

in a

realize that, at

has a daughter and

is

die.

Eventually the lovers do embrace, body to body, but this of shared immolation-in-feeling

is

moment

cut short, to be followed by amnesia

(Melisande) and excruciating mental confusion (Golaud). Melisande

remember

doesn't

that Pelleas has

been

by Golaud,

slain

que je

that she has just given birth ("Je ne sais pas ce

pas ce que je

sais

.

.

.

Je ne

capable of giving the frantically bereaved Golaud the that,

however much he

regrets

dis

que je veux"), and

dis plus ce

is

isn't .

.

.

aware

Je ne sais

genuinely

relief

in-

of knowing

what he has done, he was not wrong

in

suspecting that Melisande and Pelleas were in love.

The

Golaud has turned

well-intentioned

morseful, inadvertent murderers

he truly

For

loves.

everyone

Golaud

feels

is

who

one of opera's

re-

woman whom

an innocent

which not

in this story in

just a protagonist

inadequate, helpless, baffled by what she or he

is

but

feeling,

the only character physically capable of violence. Mental de-

ficiency or frustrated understanding lessness)

kills

into

indeed

is

(combined with

a recipe for violence.

Bluebeard's Castle, Pelleas et Melisande

is

feelings of help-

Like Wozzeck and Lulu, like with

a story of blind cruelty,

the difference that the cruelties perpetrated are not transactions be-

tween adult

men and women

Melisande

a lost child

is

but acts of adults against children.

whom Golaud

rescues and pledges to protect

but cannot help destroying; in the anguish of jealousy he also manhandles his a

victim

guilty

—

little

like

son. But

Wozzeck,

— and therefore

Pity

for

the

Melisande has

garded

like

this

does not make the ogre any

Peter Grimes, Golaud

proper object of the audience's

innocent lovers;

left;

pletes the process

a

all

and

pity for

pity

Golaud

for

No work

that

is

innocently

pity.

Yniold and the infant

Pelleas et Melisande

begun long ago whereby opera

as feminine.

is

now

less

com-

exalts the feelings re-

part of opera's standard

An repertory

is

such pleasure.

chamber music), opera has broadly legible is

Lament

—

emotions.

A

robust art (compared with,

specialized in

broad

—broadly contrasting,

on

a

more harrowing, more

But the great modern tragedies of deficient

consciousness propose their

own voluptuous

standards as they

an ecstasy of lament. Debussy's portrayal of lacrimae rerum

any other in opera.

It

only rival of Pelleas et Melisande in this respect

toute que

I'

is

rise to

unlike

must be the saddest opera ever composed. (The is

Wozzeck, which also

ends on the excruciating presence of a just-orphaned heartbroken Arkel

say,

The emotional stream of Debussy's master-

deliberately narrower: he wagers

finely calibrated intensity.

215

which opera,

so devoid of the triumphalist accents by

traditionally, gives

piece

Ecstasy of

sings:

"Mais

la tristesse,

child.)

Golaud, mais

As the

la tristesse

on voti!" I>997]

de

One Hundred Years of

/taly: one hundred double narrative:

a

Photography

Italian

years of photography announces

a

century of Italy as well as a century of pho-

tography.

The

photograph

earliest

in the

book, taken

in 1884, of the large

conservatory of the Italian Horticultural Society, shows us a place

quented by well-off people of

owned cameras and hobby; a picture

some of

a century ago,

like this

could have been taken by one of the Society's

an Italian

interior,

a picture

not so

much

in 1984,

shows us not

not even something in

portion of the world (Europe) of which Italy it's

probably

practiced photography at a very expert level as a

members. The most recent photograph, taken real place (not

whom

fre-

is

Italy)

a

but a

a part; an aerial view,

taken as arranged, by professionals, aided by

computers.

There

is

nothing distinctively Italian about either photograph,

though both photographs bespeak a lush halls,

one we see

new

exhibition

example of the glass-and-iron shape given

markets, and railway stations

nineteenth century. ject that

The

aerial

all

to

over Europe in the mid- and late

photograph

is

also an

example of

a sub-

could have been photographed elsewhere in the same way;

what dates

216

their period. In the first

it,

though,

is

not what

we

see but that

we

can see

it.

It is

an

One Hundred

Years of

Italian

example of something that can be seen only

Photography

in the

form of

217 a photo-

graph, and could only be photographed (thanks to the existence of

now.

other, allied technologies)

The

subjects of both photographs have an obtrusive geometry; nei-

ther includes people. But the conservatory

a site that

appears to be

temporarily vacated of people, to get this picture of the overbear-

just

ing architecture

and the

place, milling about in

of things beyond the absent.

human

—time—

is

very

much

human,

a

of the aerial photograph

a

is

world

from which people are necessarily

scale

no

place.

the unifying topic of this seemingly

random

striking, then, that the anthologist,

selected as the

histor-

imagines people reinserted in this

historical fact has

is

How

collection of subjects.

Colombo, has

easily

The world

it.

Here the human,

But history

tory

valiant plants. It

One

world.

ically specific

are

is

most recent photograph one

in

Cesare

which

his-

annihilated in favor of geography; in which the accents of time

is

made

irrelevant

by the

scale of this uniformly

marked

distribution

of space.

Are we

to read this as a history-minded

anthologist: an

comment on

greeds created by multi-national capitalism?

Or

device: the anthologist's perhaps overemphatic

sure for the collection? If only the

For

latter,

is it

demise

way

of photographs, which

is

simply a formal

of decreeing a clo-

the device

is,

defies the very nature of photography,

it

its

and absorption into the homogenizing system of

as a distinctive culture

bitrary.

the part of the

acknowledgment of the Euro-destiny of Italy,

of necessity,

and of

ar-

collections

that they are open-ended; that they cannot

conclude. There can be no definitive or summative or terminal photograph, or collection of photographs. Only collections

A

.

.

.

COLLECTION OF IMAGES

Alinari

—though most — reminds us

archives

more photographs. More

of the Italian past published by

of the photographs aren't from the Alinari

that a

photograph

is

rarely a

work of

individual

seeing but almost inevitably a (potential) unit in an archive.

The

archive can be that of the Alinari enterprise, which appears less as the

very successful business

it

was than

as a cultural operation, a vast col-

SUSAN SONTAG

218

endeavor for documenting

lective

many

Italian society that

extended over

decades, in which the names of individual photographers have

been suppressed,

More

cathedrals.

like those of the artisans

often, the archive

prolific professionals

is

who worked on

the Gothic

that of single photographers

with studios from the nineteenth and the

first

half

of the twentieth century, and also contemporary photographers whose

manipulations of their subjects, in the service of fashion and other kinds of advertising, produce results that are most unlike the innocently scrupulous documentation practiced

mercial photography.

Avowed proponents

of bad taste such as Carlo

Mollino and celebrants of celebrity such

museum -worthy, no and beautiful Bresson.

in

less

Luxardo

as Elio

are

now

than such illustrious proponents of the serious

photography

The most

by older forms of com-

Paul Strand and Henri Cartier-

as

eccentric, partial view could constitute an archive of

invaluable images of (from, about) the past.

Even the

soft-focus super-

impositions of the self-styled Futurist Anton Bragaglia which are located nowhere and the staged al fresco fantasies of the erotomane

Baron von Gloeden located

in turn-of-the-twentieth-century

Taormina

have their period charm, their status as documents.

(Though the destiny of in a

museum

—the extramural time effects

too,

1952 Jean

photographs

museum, they can

housed

here,

all

Cocteau

life

of a

droll

its

still

document being mutations.

all

a

in

In

a

crown of

roses. Surely

shops in town catering to

it

an archive

that of a souvenir;

journal entry of

fisherman in

relates the story of a forty-year-old

von Gloeden's photographs

naked with

end up

to

lead, singly, a life outside the

Taormina, furious because one of the shops hibiting

is

in the

main

street

was ex-

of his grandfather completely

was

tourists,

just a

few years

von Gloeden's

later that, in

daintily erotic

photographs of naked local youths of yesteryear were to be found

as

postcards.) Italian

photography

which have

a

is

exceptionally rich in superb photographs

primary status

as

documents.

One

thinks,

the best images from the Alinari holdings and of the

first

of

all,

of

work of Giuseppe

Primoli, the most fascinating figure in the history of Italian photography,

who was

himself something of a one-person Alinari enterprise. (A

photograph by Primoli

—of someone taking

a

photograph

—begins

this

One Hundred

Years of

Italian

Photography

219

book.) If the collective activities of the Alinari firm and the ultraindividual enterprise practiced by the dilettante aristocrat Primoli were

both supremely archive-creating ventures,

word

"archive," with

ceals

much

its

it

should be noted that the

implicit claim of disinterested curiosity, con-

of the complex ideological agenda behind this glorious

burst of picture-taking.

Consider the Alinari collection, more than a hundred thousand pic-

seems

tures. It

like a nineteenth-century

updating of the eighteenth-

century Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, which was less an

instrument of learning than an expression of collecting mania, the ap-

accumulation and

petite for

classification;

wonder, a favorite sentiment

of that era, and one unburdened by historical understanding, depends

on ignorance

as

much

as

on knowledge. But

it

also

seems an example

of a distinctively nineteenth-century ideological project, shared by

some of

the century's greatest novelists, which was to provide an ency-

clopedic understanding of social

decisively,

it

seems

art

of their native

travelers

on

their

Grand

city,

city.

mode

by specializing

in

the great

Florence. For a small, wealthy class of

and the

art in

Florence more than in any

Collectible photographic documentation played an

essential role in the democratizing of this construction of Italy

happy

few,

desired,

of

Tour, Italy had long been the country where

to look at the art,

other Italian

to the lowest

and perhaps most

and boosting consumption.

Alinari photographers started

works of

one came

from the highest

historically. Last,

like a proto-twentieth-century project: a

advertising, of creating needs

The

reality,

something that unfolds

levels, as

which has made the country into the world's

most prestigious

by the

single

most

target for the instant appreciations of

mass

tourism.

The dissemination of sion of

art in the

form of photographs

what Andre Malraux, who

jamin, described as the

museum

lifted the idea

without walls

—

a first ver-

from Walter Ben-

—was soon extended

to

the whole physical environment, which could be collected as pictures.

Exhaustive documentation meant, in contrasting: feats of

urban renewal

fact, a

(as that

century) juxtaposed with ancient sites and

preference for the strongly

was understood

monuments, the

in the last vitality

of

the swarthy poor as well as the glamour and remoteness of the rich and

SUSAN SONTAG

220

powerful. Photographs disseminated not just art (the art of the past)

but

all

of the past

the past (that as such:

we

is,

look

— and the present, inexorably on

art).

at

The notion

PHOTOGRAPHS ARE NOT view of the world evidence

of art

as

it is,

or

windows which supply

more

and existing

to

becoming

aesthetically.

it,

exactly, as

social arrangements.

a transparent

was. Photographs give

it

—often spurious, always incomplete—

ideologies

way

extended to include the past

is

the past, any part of

its

in

support of dominant

They

fabricate

and con-

firm these myths and arrangements.

How? By making should look

Photographs

at.

their subjects

statements about what

make

the run.

itself

we

what

on the

sites

construction of what

markers of

early twentieth centuries

We

status.

associate this with

took time: one couldn't take photographs on

With posing, whether

ple taken

world, what

things ought to look,

and

in the nineteenth

visible the

The process

posing.

how

in the

should reveal about themselves.

Photographs taken rarely fail to

us

tell

is

in a studio portrait or in pictures of peo-

of

work and

is

seemly, appropriate, attractive.

recreation, there can

be

a conscious

The way most

old photographs look expounds the value of uprightness, explicitness, informativeness, orderly spacing; but from the 1930s on, and this can-

not only be due to the evolution of camera technology, the look of

photographs confirms the value of movement, animation, asymmetry, enigma, informal social relations. in the old

to

be

photographs of building

kind of

a

Modern

cal exertion.

lie

We

—concealing,

sites

(if

and

factories

way workers

were

stiffly

posed

for instance, the reality of their physi-

prefer to see the sweat, in informal, unposed-looking

shots in which people are caught in a truthful

taste judges the

not always beautiful) to

us.

movement

We

feel

—

that

by

others), of

what looks

more comfortable with

what features exertion, awkwardness, and conceals the trol (self-control, control

is

power

—

realities

revelations

of con-

we now

judge, oddly enough, to be "artificial."

Two

On ily

contrasts, a century apart.

the front endpaper, a celebrated image.

signifying

It is

the ordered, heav-

decor and spaciousness of the bourgeois photography

One Hundred

Years of

studio (in fact, the Alinari salon).

Someone

remotely, discreetly

ure,

Deep

space: everyone

(seated, weighty)

tographed. People seem becalmed. Everyone

On

shoving, taking their images by force.

word

that the international their celebrity targets

decor

is

is

is

crowded

being pho-

A

—

this

is

a placeless space.

THE FUNCTION OF

together, straining,

Shallow space: everyone

And

room

the

everyone

an anthology

pack of

there any justice in the fact

(Is

Not enough of

close up, indiscreetly.

full fig-

taking his or her time.

is

for predatory photographers

Italian?)

221

seen

the endpaper at the back, a familiar kind of image.

journalists, paparazzi, standing, densely

tially,

Photography

Italian

is

who jump is

seen par-

to identify

it,

no

in a big hurry.

to represent a world. This an-

is

thology, this token chronicle of a century, represents a world as

sub-

it

mits to the imperatives of time.

Most of the is

pictures are records of a highly distinctive society that

profoundly used

by Pasolini

senses of the word), the Italy

(in several

in Uccellacci e uccellini, the Italy that

no longer

dying, in the throes of being replaced, since the 1950s,

consumer

Italian Italy of the Italys

is

enormous,

The

The

was

is

trans-

two

which the photographer's

was an incursion: the photographer could be only an observer.

new

Italy the

photograph and photographic

photography has participated

that

mercialization of reality but in

founded

in the early 1850s,

activities,

which

first

seems

unification.

its

Italy, as

had only Florence cities

a

The

could be regarded as

clude the countryside and other

new

activities

(TV,

version of the

com-

Alinari enterprise,

itself

an instrument of

the scope of the firm's

as its subject,

broadened

—the whole —photographic

country.

to in-

Now,

for

photography

endeavors by

—has participated mightily

in the project of unifying Italy

decades,

many hands

It

in the past not only in the

the subsequent political unification of

several

by the

difference between the

a society in

video, monitoring, playback) are central.

way

or

visceral, shocking.

distinctive Italy

practice

In the

society.

mourned

exists,

Italian

culturally (which also

means

politically)

with Europe, with the Atlantic

world. Photographic images play a large role in making Italy (be? or only look?)

more and more

like

.

.

.

everywhere

else.

SUSAN SONTAG

222

All of

Europe

is

in

mourning

for

its

Bookstores are stocked

past.

with albums of photographs offering up the vanished past for our delectation

and

reflex nostalgia.

But the past has deeper roots

than anywhere else in Europe, which makes

And

ing.

was the note of rancor

Italy, as

the past: the calls to burn the

make

a highway,

it

of, say,

its

destruction

the elegiac note was sounded earlier and

more

defin-

more plangently

museums,

fill

in the

Grand Canal and

and so on. Comparable anthologies of photographs

The depth possessed by past. It

is

in quite this way.

these images of an older Italy

is

not just the

the depth of a whole culture, a culture of in-

comparable dignity and flavor and bulk, that has been thinned out, faced, confiscated.

depth

is

air

.

.

To be replaced by

meaningless. That

becomes an

in

—think of the Futurist tantrums about

premodern France or Germany do not move

depth of the

in Italy

abstraction.

is

a culture in

ef-

which the notion of

not meant to be sauntered through. That

To be seen

as

an image. To be seen from the

.

[1987]

On

OF ALL,

FIRST

the pictures are unforgettable

ultimate standard of value.

And

New

Orleans in the early years of

most admired recoveries

why

the

this

century became one of the

in photography's widening, ever

incomplete

Eighty-nine glass plates in varying states of corrosion, shatter,

history.

Lee Friedlander came across

in

and eventually purchased. When,

in

and defacement were the treasure

New

—photography's

not hard to see

unknown photographer working

trove of glass negatives by a hitherto in

it's

Bellocq

Orleans in the

late 1950s

that

1970, a selection of the ingeniously

lander had

made was published by

book became,

deservedly, an instant

developed, superb prints Fried-

Museum of Modern Art, the classic. So much about these pic-

the

tures affirms current taste: the low-life material; the near-mythic prove-

nance virtual

(Storyville); the informal, anti-art look,

anonymity of the photographer and the

sitters; their status as objets trouves,

this

which accords with the

what

is

and

a gift

real

anonymity of

from the

past.

Add

his

to

decidedly unfashionable about the pictures: the plausibility

and friendliness of their version of the photographer's troubling, highly conventional subject.

And

photographer's* relaxed tive.

If there

and one day

a

because the subject

way of looking seems

is

that

so conventional, the

much more

had once been more than eighty-nine few others turned up, no one would

fail

distinc-

glass negatives

to recognize a

Bellocq.

223

SUSAN SONTAG

224

The

year

is

191

but

2,

we would not be surprised to be told that the when Theodore Dreiser began writing Jenwhen Kate Chopin published The Awakening,

pictures were taken in 1901, nie Gerhardt, or in 1899,

or in

1

889, the year Dreiser set the start of his first novel, Sister Carrie

the ballooning clothes and

from 1880

lenting that ticipating

Chopin

World War

it

second novel and Dreiser's

"fallen"

first

were so unre-

and Dreiser

faltered. (An-

attacks, Dreiser, after beginning his great

second

aside for a decade.) Bellocq's photographs belong

same world of anti-formulaic,

this

The charges of indecency

I.

retreated from literature

more such

novel in 1901, put to

plump bodies could be dated anywhere

to the beginning of

that greeted Chopin's

women, though

in his case

anti-salacious

sympathy for

we can only speculate about we knew nothing about the

the

origin of that sympathy. Until recently

thor of these pictures except what Friedlander: that he had

no other

"he always behaved polite"

he spoke with

was an (his

(this

some old

interests except

from one of

—hydrocephalic and

New

entirely normal-looking scion of the

who

It

New

—shades of

turns out that he

Orleans middle

also

—

for example, the

The Chinatown

Orleans's Chinatown.

class

photographed quite

conventional subjects as well as other low-life ones

opium dens of

photography; that

his Storyville sitters); that

dwarf-like.

grandparents were born in France),

au-

cronies of Bellocq's told

French accent; and that he was

a "terrific"

Toulouse-Lautrec

—

series, alas,

has never been recovered.

The

Storyville series includes

terest for Bellocq

and

a rolltop

surrounding

must have been

a central painting,

erotically naked.

portraits.

of two is

in

That

is,

all

The

there

above

one picture

a fireplace in

is

photographs with the same contrasts

are of

women, some dressed

rest of Bellocq's

as

to the nines,

photographs are individual

a single subject per picture, except for a shot

champagne drinkers on

a similar off-duty

trait

that,

in-

desk in the other, the walls are covered with photographs

the ones he was taking:

some

two pictures of parlor decor. The

moment

the floor absorbed in a card

in Bunuel's

game

(there

unconvincing, notional por-

of a brothel in Belle de Jour) and another of a

demure

girl

posing

her Sunday best, long white dress and jacket and hat, beside an iron

bed ture,

in

which someone

is

sleeping. Typically

— an exception

which shows only the sleeping woman's head and

right

is

this pic-

arm

—

Bel-

On locq photographs his subjects in figure will

reclining

be cut off

chosen to come

pictures

same

make on

setting

us

and

is

a seated

— naked woman —does one have the impression

the knees; in only one picture

at

225

though sometimes

full figure,

on some embroidered pillows

that Bellocq has

Bellocq

a

in close. Central to the

that there are a large

cast in a variety of poses,

number

impression the

of them, with the

from the most natural to

the most self-conscious, and degrees of dress /undress. That they are part of a series

what

is

gives the photographs their integrity, their

depth, their meaning. Each individual picture

is

informed by the mean-

ing that attaches to the whole group.

Most

obviously,

pictures that the

it

could not be detected from

women are inmates of a woman in a large

one picture

clothed: in

a brothel.

Some

something

like

one poses on

it:

Others are

a chair, her

tious bodies.

hands clasped behind

—with unpretentious candor about,

Some

just

stand there, as

they didn't

if

underwear or

in their

her head, wearing a comical-looking body stocking.

tographed naked

skirt sits in

beyond which frayed

the yard in front of a low black backdrop, just line.

are fully

feathered hat, long-sleeved

white blouse adorned with brooch and locket, and black

towels are drying on a laundry

of the

at least a third

Many

are pho-

mostly, unpreten-

know what Only

to

once they had taken off

their clothes for the camera.

voluptuous pose,

the long-tressed adolescent odalisque on

like

wicker divan

—

graphs show

women

probably Bellocq's best-known picture.

exceptionally pretty

wearing masks.

woman

One

The other

bellied, entirely

face as she

mask

(it

is

for her face.

mask she

woman whose mask

The

is

sits as

awkwardly posed on the edge of

appears to be a first

full

Two

offer a a

photo-

a come-hither picture: an

wearing only black

picture, the opposite of a pin-up,

naked

few

with a dazzling smile reclines on a chaise

longue; apart from her trim Zorro-style stockings.

is

a

do

mask minus

woman

its

a

is

of a large-

awkwardly on her

wooden

chair; the

lower half) seems too big

seems happy to pose

(as,

given her

charms, well she might); the second seems diminished, even foiled, by her nudity.

Income

sive look, the

pictures, in

emotion

doubt that posing

is

a

is

which the

sitters

adopt

a genteelly

harder to read. But in others there

game, and fun: the

woman

in the

pen-

is little

shawl and vivid

striped stockings sitting beside her bottle of "Raleigh Rye," apprecia-

SUSAN SONTAG

226

tively eyeing

her raised

glass; the

woman

in

ample undergarments and

black stockings stretched out on her stomach over an ironing board set

up

in the

backyard, beaming

at a tiny

dog. Clearly, no one was being

spied on, everyone was a willing subject. dictated to

them how they should pose might for

selves as they

a

customer

We

are

far, in

hijinks of the

Bellocq's company,

bound women

—whether

of them undoubtedly were.

offering themselves

stylish,

up

to the

male gaze

photographs of Nobuyoshi

unvaryingly intelligent lewdness of

Helmut Newton. The only

the images devised by

to exhibit them-

from the staged sadomasochistic

(or worse) in the disturbingly acclaimed

Araki or the cooler, more

Bellocq couldn't have

absent the customers, as the

or,

women most

wholesome-looking country

And

pictures that

do seem

—or convey something of the meanness and abjection of — those on which the have been scratched one, the vandal — could have been Bellocq himself? — missed the

salacious

a

are

prostitute's life

(In

face.)

faces

out.

it

These pictures are actually painful to look

viewer.

But then

I

am

a

woman

at,

at least for this

many men who look

and, unlike

at

these photographs, find nothing romantic about prostitution. That part

of the subject

ence of

many

that affirm

I

do take pleasure

of the

in

is

the beauty and forthright pres-

women, photographed

both sensuality and domestic

their vanished world.

How

in

ease,

homely circumstances

and the tangibleness of

touching and good-natured the pictures

are.

[1996]

Borland's Babies

The

title

ship, terie.

it

The

is

appears.

Babies.

More than

More than one such

one.

A group. A fellow-

fellowship or

band or

co-

A world.

A

cunningly sequenced album of pictures inducts us into this

world. It

three.

would convey To show

a

to have only

little

world

calls for

one photograph. Or two. Or

an abundance of photographs, and

the photographs have to be arranged. First things

first.

The

last for

the

last.

The sequence First

we

will

be

a tour of this world.

see bits of decor.

A

A journey. An initiation. A teddy bear. A

small pink satin dress.

colorful crib sheet printed with cuddly animals. Then, gradually, the

A

presence of the human.

pair of shoes.

Bunny

slippers.

A

foot.

A

knee. It will

be

a while before

Something doesn't

fit.

But the human presence

We expect babies. real babies,

is

we

see faces.

The accoutrements

is

too large, ugly

are those of the nursery.

—Brobdingnagian.

These seem to be adult men. The skin of babies,

perfect. This skin

is

rough, blotchy, hairy (with here and

there a tattoo), the bodies mostly flabby or scrawny land's

camera scrutinizes them very

—and Polly Bor-

closely.

227

228

SUSAN SONTAG

Close

is

And

ugly.

adult

is

ugly,

when compared with

the perfection

of the recently born.

As Gulliver observes over eighty feet

He

tions.

was

tall:

after reaching a

to see enlarged

recalls that in the

a giant, the

me from

on

him up first

in

a very

much

the ground, than

my hand and shocking

and

my

He my

as fair as

my

travels.

and smoother when he looked

did upon a nearer view

ies

where

complexion made up of several colors I

must beg leave

in exactly the

same way

A

—

good

that the Brobdingnagians are

any other people

at

my

alto-

to say for myself, that little

II

he's the tiny person, Gulliver finds these

perfections, Gulliver reminds himself

—

in

beard were ten times stronger than the

that

to the people of Lilliput. But, even while recoiling

become

took

I

which he confessed was

close,

most of my sex and country, and very

and faces repulsive

when

he could discover great holes

Stranded among the people of Brobdingnag, Part els,

friends

of them

fairer

said

gether disagreeable: although

am

One

brought him

sight.

stumps of

bristles of a boar,

it

new

world," while his tiny

fairest in the

face appeared

skin; that the

be taken aback by imperfec-

country from which he's come, where he

found him ugly beyond imagining.

my

to

complexion of the diminutive Lilliputians had ap-

peared to him "the

said that

is

country whose inhabitants are

sunburnt by

I

all

of Gulliver's Trav-

mountainous bod-

he was,

from

in close-up,

their gross im-

cultural relativist that he's

no doubt

just as

handsome

as

in the world.

world, according to Jonathan Swift, and as depicted by Polly

Borland, replete with disconcerting oddities.

By

the standard of the baby, any adult

is

ugly, coarse.

No

beauty of

skin can withstand the too intimate scrutiny of the camera.

Beauty, adorableness

— and

repulsiveness

favoring or disfavoring scale, and proximity. ity

—

is

what photographers deal with

all

—

are mainly a matter of

And

the time.

that

—

scale,

proxim-

Borland's Babies

OF COURSE, BEING

CLOSE "is

"

229

impact and

essential to the

the meaning of these photographs. Virtually

indoors.

all

some

of them were taken in

We may suppose Borland's subjects to be hiding in these drab,

wallpapered rooms which

we

never see most

They may only be

lying about. (Babies

coming and going.

We

also

seem

to

but which

a lot of rest.)

intimate, private space

a space

whose banal

a secret identity

activities

—here

character of weird rituals, because they're done by adult

and carrying on has to

It

come

well as

sleepover.

where

drooling, eating, sleeping, bathing, masturbating

as,

feel small.

As

be offered glimpses of the conven-

The photographer has penetrated

An

of,

need

A party of tots. A children's

ing of a boisterous clan.

unfolds.

meanly furnished

generic,

—yowling,

acquire the

men

dressed

like, babies.

when,

as a surprise

tograph of three of the babies in

late in the

full regalia

on

a

book, there

suburban

is

a

street.

pho(Aus-

England?) Surprise that some of Borland's subjects are willing

tralia?

to offer themselves to the gaze of casual passersby.

PROGRESS OF PHOTOGRAPHS. We

A

are introduced to this

oddly framed and cropped. The

world

in the guise of parts of bodies,

initial

withholding of faces, and the number of pictures taken from a

high angle, bolster the relation of superiority that we, the consumers of Borland's images, seem invited to have

(at first) to

these clandestine

shenanigans.

We

look

at

babies seeing;

them. They don't look

when we

are,

or a look of concentrated Properly, bies,

tfTe

it's

at us.

We

a baby-style gaze,

are rarely

wobbly focus and

back. At

last.

all,

self- absorption.

book ends with

a straight-on portrait of

looking adult, even handsome, gazing intently

us. Staring

shown the

at

one of the ba-

the camera, at

SUSAN SONTAG

230

FOR A LONG TIME zanies ity

and pariahs,

this

and

their quirks.

Making voyeurs out of

of the non-normal.

But

the camera has been bringing us

their miseries

common

or mere curiosity. There

of a Diane Arbus picture.

by these

vited

all.

particularly gifted, authoritative work. Borland's pictures

is

seem very knowing, compassionate; and too gest

us

news about

Showing the banal-

(I

is

close, loo familiar, to sug-

nothing of the ingenuous stare

don't doubt that Arbus

subjects, but surely she

would have

felt in-

would have photographed them

very differently.)

Zeal in colonizing new, especially transgressive, subject matter

one of the main traditions of photographic

Here

—

mate claim on our about

book

says this

human

—

interest

is

a

and

practice.

specimen of behavior that has attention.

is

The

a legiti-

pictures register a truth

nature which seems almost too obvious to spell out

temptation of regression? the pleasures of regression?

—the

—but which has

never received so keen, so direct a depiction. They invite our identification ("nothing

human

is

alien to

can imagine such feelings, even actually

me") if

—daring us

we

to admit that we, too,

are astonished that

some people

go to the trouble, and assume the shame, of acting them

out.

ARE THESE PICTURES shocking? Some people apparently find them so. Probably not the same people made indignant by the sex-pictures of Robert Mapplethorpe. Here the shock is produced by scenes from the intimate life of adult men

who I,

appear to have

Shock a

but completely renounced their sexuality.

for one, don't find these pictures shocking or even upsetting.

(What shocks me

me

all

is

cruelty,

—which then

somewhat

embraced the

not sadness.)

dilates into aggressive disapproval

pointless reaction to adults

role of being helpless.

who have

—seems

to

so dramatically

Borland's Babies

23

I

In most of the pictures, the subjects are sitting, lying down, crawl-

They

ing.

on beds or close

are often

to the floor.

They

are rarely

vertical.

They want

But of course they're not. So, instead, they

to look small.

look mortified.

There logical or

is

picture-taking assumes an anthropo-

ethnographic function, that the subjects

look the way they do

What

when

a presumption,

—don't

—

is

to

really see themselves.

these pictures suggest

about them

—who happen

that not only

—what

some may

do Borland's

subjects

find

is

want

disturbing

to look like

but they relish being seen.

this

MOST OF THE atre. It requires

sexual acting-out understood as deviant

dressing up.

It relies

by these adults must be counted

them being "baby

What

is

the-

on props. And the world created

as a sexual fantasy,

purists," they don't

even

if,

most of

have sex.

goes on in these depressing rooms

is

a kind of theatre. Play-

time.

But entirely unfeigned.

And

without manipulation by the camera. Nothing

Borland's project depends on the photographs being trace or imprint of the real.

who

ple

show

There

is

is

—

digitalized.

as of old

—

an implicit contract: these are peo-

really are (part of the time) like this; they aren't putting

for the photographer. Indeed, she

time with them, win their confidence,

had

to

become

on

a

spend long periods of

friends, in order to take

these pictures.

Imagine what we would

and

that the pictures

house rather than

The

(as

feel if

were taken

we

learned that the

in the course of

on our

pher that nothing was devised for the camera. is

are actors,

an afternoon

in

one

they were) over years and in several countries.

force of these pictures depends

That something

men

being revealed.

trusting the photogra-

232

SUSAN SONTAG

ARE THE BABIES

really unattractive

—

like, say,

the folk in Roger

Ballen's Platteland (1994)?

In Ballen's marvelous

album of

portraits of degenerate-looking

whites in rural South Africa, the unattractiveness of his subjects and the

rooms they inhabit

Here

delivers a moral, ultimately political, message.

ugliness seems to attest to an appalling impoverishment of spirit

album, the message

as well as of material circumstances. In Borland's

of her subjects' unattractiveness

mainly one of

scale: that

tasy of smallness

we might

is,

is

harder to read.

We might decide

it is

of the mismatch between the enacted fan-

and feebleness and these hefty grownup bodies. But

also suppose,

perhaps wrongly, that only adults

who

look as

they do would want to do "this" to themselves.

What

are the frontiers of attractiveness

— and of unattractiveness?

Images produced by cameras have more to question, than any other resource.

tell us, in

Maybe we

are

unpacking

this

no longer capable of

thinking about the attractiveness of bodies and faces except in the ways

we've learned through the camera's presumptuous seeing. Enlarging, miniaturizing

—the camera judges, the camera

world to which Borland has given us we're in Lilliput or in Brobdingnag. us realize that,

when we

entry,

Her

reveals.

we

don't

brilliant

Looking

at

the

know whether

achievement makes

see photographically, we're living in both.

r2ooil

Certain Mapplethorpes

ALTHOUGH

REASON TELLS M E gun barrel at my head, each

like a

graphic portrait exhibited in

I feel

many

apprehensive. This

I

do not imagine

way

the

register that

I

is

not aimed

pose for a photo-

not the well-known

fear,

a layer

that the photographer, in order

to bring the image-replica into the world, robs

do

I

robbed of one's soul or

cultures, of being

of one's personality.

is

the camera

time

me

of anything. But

ordinarily experience myself

is

I

turned

around. Ordinarily

command frontality)

I feel

coextensive with

station of the head,

— and

articulation

whose

—

is

my

my

body, in particular with the

orientation to the world (that face, in

which are

is,

set eyes that

it is my fantasy, and my privilege, permy professional bias, to feel that the world awaits my seeing. When I am photographed, this normally outgoing, fervent relation of

look out on, into, the world; and

haps

consciousness to the world station of consciousness, ate with the is

one

jammed.

I

yield to another

which "faces" me,

if I

photographer (and, customarily,

which

heel, is

my

threatened. But

I

do

photographic portrait

Stowed away, berthed,

consciousness has abdicated

to provide amplitude, to give feel

disarmed,

my

command

have agreed to cooper-

a

that requires the subject's cooperation).

brought to tion,

is

me

its

normal func-

mobility.

I

don't feel

consciousness reduced to an

233

SUSAN SONTAG

234

embarrassed knot of self-consciousness striving for composure. Immobilized for the camera's scrutiny, jut

and

my lips,

fleshiness of

my hair.

I

windows

I

the spread of

experience myself as behind of

my

weight of

feel the

my

my nostrils,

my face,

eyes, like the prisoner in the

facial

mask, the

the unruliness of

looking out through the

kon mask

Dumas's

in

novel.

Being photographed, by which

I

mean posing

a session usually lasting several hours, in

taken),

I

feel transfixed,

for a

photograph

(at

which many photographs are

trapped. In response to a look of desire

can

I

look back, with desire. The looking can, ideally should, be reciprocal.

But to the photographer's look lent, unless I

my own looking

were

camera.

me,

at

it

to decide to

I

cannot respond with anything equiva-

be photographed with

The photographer's look desires

what

I

am

not

many

in fact desire the subject. It

may seem worth photographing because

feels lust, or

romantic attachment, or admiration

of a myriad of positive feelings. But at the the look trained

upon

cerns form. At that I

become

behind state; in

is

of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs record ob-

jects of his desire. Subjects

photographer

my head

looking in a pure

—my image.

(Of course, the photographer may obvious that

is

the subject

moment,

it

is

moment

the picture

sightless, generic: a

is

the

—any

taken,

look that

dis-

cannot be responded to in kind.)

the looked-at. Docilely, eagerly,

I

follow the photogra-

is willing to give any, as to how I may much as I am a professional see-er, I am a hopelessly amateurish see-ee. An eternal photographic virgin, I feel the same perplexity each time I'm photographed. I forget the makeup

pher's instructions,

if

she or he

"look" more attractive. For as

tricks I've

of

my

been taught, what color blouse photographs

face

know what

My

is

the "good" side.

to

do with my hands.

Considering that

I

chin

is

too low.

well,

Too

which side

high.

I

don't

have been browsing through the history of pho-

tography for decades, have been photographed professionally countless times,

and spent

five years writing six essays

and moral implications of photographic images,

which

I

about the aesthetic this

blankness with

face the camera can hardly be ascribed to inexperience or to

lack of reflectiveness.

Some deeper stubbornness on my own

part

is at

Certain Mapplethorpes fully to take in the fact that I

work: the refusal

good

look, look

As

I've never

been photographed without feeling apprehensive, so

it

that I'm too powerfully an observer myself to

be comfortable being observed? Is

my

it

Is

moral narcissism, which has erected a taboo

prone? All of these, perhaps. But what

I

mainly

some ninety percent of my consciousness thinks

am me, about

I

ten percent thinks

ways appalled whenever photograph

in

which

I

about pretend-

a puritan anxiety

it

which

against whatever narcissism of the usual kind to

that

I

the result of a photographic session without feel-

at

ing embarrassment. Is

posing?

not only look but have a

(or bad), look "like" that.

have never looked

ing,

235

look

The photograph comes

I

am

that

I

dismay. While

is

am

invisible.

in the world,

That part

is al-

photograph of myself. (Especially

see a

I

feel

might be

I

a

attractive.)

as a

kind of reproof to the grandiosity of

consciousness. Oh. So there "I" am.

my own

see

I

photograph differently from the others

plethorpes Certain People. longing,

can't

I

I

my own

can't look at

I feel is

photograph with

and

the difference between

me and

surface,

look.

It is a

suspended.

is

To me, the

the image.

pression in the photograph Mapplethorpe has taken of

"my"

me

admire (who

is

and

also a friend)

hinged to

is

my

trying to preserve

(When

anxiety.

I

look

bornness, balked vanity, panic, vulnerability.)

at

my

look exactly

this

way

At the same time that

how

I feel

ferent to

not really

is

I

the next time he takes I

I

intensely

my own

picture

doubt that

looked exactly the way Mapplethorpe has photographed will

read stub-

I I

me

dignity,

have ever

—or

that I

my picture.

recognize in this portrait another record of

being photographed, Mapplethorpe's photograph looks

me from

ated as best

I

ex-

look fabricated for the camera: an unstable compro-

mise between trying to be cooperative with a photographer

which

Map-

have a fantasy about the person in that photograph. The

eros of photography, which identifies subject

What

in

any other that has ever been taken of me.

could, and he

saw something

that

I

dif-

cooper-

no one had ever

seen.

Being photographed by Mapplethorpe was different from being pho-

tographed by anyone ently, is

else.

He

permissive differently

reassures differently, encourages differ.

.

.

— SUSAN SONTAG

236

Taking pictures

book

offers

is

an anthologizing impulse, and Mapplethorpe's

no exception. This mix of

non-famous and

subjects, the

the celebrated, the solemn and the lascivious, illustrates a characteristic

spread of photographic interests. Nothing

photographer is

is

saying.

By including

be

upon

me, the

alien to

is

rejecting the typical photographer's stance, in which,

distance, the photographer confers reality to

human

a sexy self-portrait,

Mapplethorpe from

a godlike

the world but declines

a subject himself.

Most photography comes with photograph conveys

be known were graphing

a

is

it

about the subject,

a truth

form of knowledge. Thus, some photographers have said

whom

they don't know, others that

photographs are of subjects they

know

best. All

however contradictory, are claims of power over the Mapplethorpe's claims are more modest. decisive

moment. His photographs do not

not trying to catch anyone off guard.

must be

Mapplethorpe plays lit.

it,

The

He

is

aspire to

He

not in a predatory relation to his subjects.

raphy, as

is

such claims,

subject.

not looking for the

be

revelatory.

not voyeuristic.

rules of the

are that the subject

game

He is He is

of photog-

must cooperate

In the eloquence and subtlety of cropping, rendering of

textures of clothing

and

skin,

and variations on the color black,

photographs clearly proclaim their relation to an

prefer to say they are a record of his

Mapplethorpe wants be made

artistic,

his

rather than

The photographer himself would probably

documentarist, impulse.

that can

would not

a truth that

not captured in a photograph. In short, that photo-

they photograph best someone their best

a built-in cognitive claim: that the

to

to pose.

own

avidity.

photograph everything, that

(However broad

is,

everything

his subject matter,

he could

never become a war photographer or a photographer of accidents in the street.)

What he

looks

for,

dity or wness of something.

strongest version of I

which could be

Not

called

Form,

is

the quid-

the truth about something, but the

it.

once asked Mapplethorpe what he does with himself when he

poses for the camera, and he replied that he himself that

is

tries to find that

part of

self-confident.

His answer suggests a double meaning

in the title

he has chosen for

Certain M.applethorpes his

book: there

is

certain in the sense of some,

and not

237

others,

and

cer-

tain in the sense of self-confident, sure, clear. Certain People depicts,

mostly, people found, coaxed, or arranged into a certainty about themselves.

That

is

what seduces,

that

is

what

is

disclosed in these bulletins

of a great photographer's observations and encounters. [1985]

A

Photograph

Is

Not

an Opinion.

Or

Is

It?

UNDERTAKE nothing

TO DO a book of photographs of people with more in common than that they are women (and liv-

ing in America at the all

—

end of the twentieth century),

.

.

—

well, almost

not the other kind of all-women picture

fully clothed, therefore

book

all

.

Start with

no more than

a

commanding notion

of the sheer interest-

ingness of the subject, especially in view of the unprecedented changes

consciousness of

in the

open

solve to stay

whim and

to

Sample, explore,

brought to the page

Even

so, a large

many women

revisit,

tinies

and

.

.

number

disabilities

women

.

.

of pictures of what

felt to

.

.

is,

be representative

and new

we

possibilities; a

book

nominally, a single

in

some

sense.

How

(Random House,

that invites the sym-

bring to the depiction of a minority (for that

is

are, by every criterion except the numerical), featuring

This essay was written to accompany a book of photographs.

238

a re-

so with this subject, with this book, an anthology of des-

pathetic responses

what

opportunity

and

choose, arrange, without claiming to have

a representative miscellany

subject will inevitably be

much more

in these last decades,

1999).

Women, by Annie

Leibovitz

A Photograph many

portraits of those

to feel instructive,

even

who

Is

Not

Or

an Opinion.

Such

are a credit to their sex.

if it tells

us what

we

think

Is

we

239

It?

a

book has

know

already

about the overcoming of perennial impediments and prejudices and cultural handicaps, the conquest of

course, such a

news

new zones

book would be misleading

continuing violence (domestic assault to

American women). Any

the ongoing story of

A

vited to think of themselves.

whether

it

demeaning stereotypes, the

the leading cause of injuries

is

large-scale picturing of

how women

are presented,

women

belongs to

and how they are

in-

book of photographs of women must,

intends to or not, raise the question of

women

Men, unlike women,

equivalent "question of men."

Of

did not touch on the bad

if it

as well: the continuing authority of

of achievement.

—there

is

work

are not a

no in

progress.

Each of these pictures must stand on says,

So

this is

what

women

are

women known in this

book

are like

will fail to

—

own. But the ensemble

as different, as varied, as heroic,

unconventional as

as forlorn, as conventional, as

nizing the

now

its

this.

Nobody

note the confirmation of stereotypes of what

and the challenge to those stereotypes. Whether well

or obscure, each of the nearly one hundred and seventy

album

scruti-

will

be looked

at (especially

by other women)

as

women models:

models of beauty, models of self-esteem, models of strength, models of transgressiveness, ness,

models of victimhood, models of

false conscious-

models of successful aging.

No book

of photographs of

men would be

interrogated in the same

way.

But then in the

man

same

a

book of photographs of men would not be undertaken

spirit.

How

could there be any interest in asserting that a

can be a stockbroker or a farmer or an astronaut or a miner?

book of photographs of men with sundry occupations, men only

A

(with-

out any additional label), would probably be a book about the beauty of men,

men

as objects of lustful imaginings to

women and

to other

men. But when identity.

ators

The

men

are viewed as sex objects, that

traditions of regarding

and curators of

their

emotions and fantasies

own

(lust,

men

destinies

is

not their primary

as, at least potentially,

and

tenderness,

women

fear,

the cre-

as objects of

male

condescension, scorn,

SUSAN SONTAG

240

dependence), of regarding an individual

mankind and an

individual

woman

man

an instance of hu-

as

an instance of

as

largely intact, deeply rooted in language, narrative,

women,

are

still

group arrange-

ments, and family customs. In no language does the pronoun "she"

human

stand for

beings of both sexes.

Women

and men are

differently

weighted, physically and culturally, with different contours of selfhood, all

presumptively favoring those born male. I

that,

do

this, I

endure

endure

that. I

want

this. I

want

that

.

.

.

this

.

.

.

because

even though I'm

women,

the

mandated

ity,

there continues to be a debate about what

inferiority of

should want to be. Freud

what do

women want?"

inquire. "Lord,

is

I

am

a

woman.

I

do

woman. Because

a

minor-

their condition as a cultural

women

of

can be,

are,

famously supposed to have asked, "Lord,

Imagine

a

world

which

in

seems normal to

it

what do men want?" But who can imagine such

a

world?

Xo

one thinks the Great Duality

is

symmetrical

—even

noted since the nineteenth century by foreign travelers

women. Feminine and masculine

uppity

America,

in

as a paradise for

are a tilted polarity.

Equal

men has never inspired a march or a hunger strike. In no men legal minors, as women were until well into the twentieth century in many European countries, and are still in many Muslim countries, from Morocco to Afghanistan. Xo country gave women the right to vote before giving it to men. Xobody ever thought of men as rights for

country are

the second sex.

AND

YET,

AND

YET: there

is

something new

in the world, starting

with the revoking of age-old legal shackles regarding suffrage, divorce,

property

rights. It

chisement of

women vote.

in

seems almost inconceivable

women happened

France and

Italy

had

as recently as

from women's

life

in

that the enfran-

—

that, for instance,

did

to wait until 194 s

There have been tremendous changes

transforming the inner

it

now

and 1946

to

be able to

women's consciousness,

of everyone: the sallying forth of

worlds into the world at large, the arrival of

ambitions. Ambition

is

what

women

have been schooled to

women

women's stifle in

A Photograph themselves, and what

Such also

a

celebrated in a

is

women's

phasizes the variety of

Not

Is

Or

Is

241

It?

book of photographs

em-

that

lives today.

much

book, however

an Opinion.

it

attends to

women's

activeness,

is

about women's attractiveness.

Nobody

looks through a

ing whether the

women

To be feminine, or to

do

one's best to

not possible for any

weakness fault in a

pearance

notic-

are attractive or not.

one commonly

in

being strong.) While

book of pictures of women without

be

it is

felt definition, is

be

to

attractive,

being masculine

attractive, to attract. (As

perfectly possible to defy this imperative,

woman

to

be unaware of

it.

As

is

it

is

it is

thought a

man to care a great deal about how he looks, it is a moral woman not to care enough. Women are judged by their apas men are not, and women punished more by the changes in a

brought about by aging. Ideals of appearance such

now

slimness are in large part

and

as youthfulness

created and enforced by photographic

images. And, of course, a primary interest in having photographs of

well-known beauties to look

at

over the years

is

seeing just

how well

or

badly they negotiate the shame of aging. In advanced consumer societies,

ues are

more and more

the concern of

never loosens the male lock on one's appearance

is

it is

said, these "narcissistic" val-

men

as well.

But male primping Indeed, glorying in

initiative taking.

an ancient warrior's pleasure, an expression of

power, an instrument of dominance. Anxiety about personal attractiveness could never be thought defining of a man: a

Women are looked at. We assume a world with

man

is, first

of

all,

seen.

people, era.

women and men,

But

it

is

worth

a

boundless appetite for images, in which

are eager to surrender themselves to the cam-

many

parts of the world

women.

In a few countries,

recalling that there are

where being photographed

is

off-limits to

where men have been mobilized

for a veritable

women

scarcely appear at

gaze

to record, to exhibit anyone, anything

at,

ture of modern*

granting of

life,

as

is

all.

The

rights

against

women,

imperial rights of the camera

the emancipation of

more and more

war

and choices

—

—

to

are an exemplary fea-

women. And to

women

is

just as the

a

measure

of a society's embrace of modernity, so the revolt against modernity

ini-

— SUSAN SONTAG

242

dates a rush to rescind the meager gains toward equal participation in

won by women, mostly urban, educated women, in previous decades. In many countries struggling with failed or discredited at-

society

tempts to modernize, there are more and more covered women.

THE TRADITIONAL UNITY is

some

of a

ideal of female essence:

women

charms,

book of photographs of women

women

gaily displaying their sexual

behind

veiling themselves

a

look of soulfulness or

primness. Portraits of

women

featured their beauty; portraits of

"character." Beauty (the province of (the province of

Women,

men) was rugged. Feminine was

Julia

didn't look wistful.

a vocation, she invariably

poets, sages,

and

photographed men

who

—somebody's

served mostly as models for

were used

as

differently than she pho-

included some of the most eminent

were posed

scientists of the Victorian era,

The women

middle-aged

Margaret Cameron took up the camera

tographed women. The men,

Women

yielding, placid, or

in the early 1860s a well-connected, exuberant,

Englishwoman named

their

character

look forceful.

ideally, didn't

When

portraits.

Men

masculine was forceful, piercing.

plaintive;

men

women) was smooth;

wife,

daughter,

sister,

(Cameron's

"fancy subjects"

to personify ideals of

for their

niece label).

womanliness drawn from

lit-

erature or mythology: the vulnerability and pathos of Ophelia; the ten-

derness of the relatives

carnated

Madonna

and friends several

with her Child. Almost

—or her parlor maid, who,

exalted icons

all

the sitters were

suitably reclothed, in-

of femininity.

Only

Julia Jackson,

Cameron's niece (and the future mother of the future Virginia Woolf ), was, in

homage

to her exceptional beauty, never

posed

anyone but

as

herself.

What

qualified the

fame and achievement

them

women

as sitters

qualified the

ideal subjects. (Notably, there

otic beauty, so that after

their beauty, as

men. The beauty of

was no

women made

role for picturesque or ex-

Cameron and her husband moved

she took very few pictures.) Indeed, a quest for the beautiful.

was precisely

And

quest

to Ceylon,

Cameron defined photography it

was:

"Why

as

does not Mrs. Smith

A Photograph come don

to

a friend

she had never met. "I hear she

shall

Or

an Opinion.

be photographed?" she wrote to

whom

and she

Not

Is

about

243

It?

Is

a lady in

Beautiful. Bid her

is

Lon-

come,

be made Immortal."

IMAGINE A BOOK of pictures of women in which none of the women could be identified as beautiful. Wouldn't we feel that the photographer had made some kind of mistake? Was being mean-spirited? Misogynistic? Was depriving us of something that we had a right to see?

No

one would say the equivalent thing of

a

book of

portraits of

men.

THERE WERE ALWAYS

several kinds of beauty: imperious beauty,

voluptuous beauty, beauty signifying the character

—

woman

for the confines of genteel domesticity

Beauty was not

ity.

thetic ideal. It also in

just loveliness

traits that fitted a

docility, pliancy, seren-

of feature and expression, an aes-

spoke to the eye about the virtues deemed essential

women. For

a

woman

to

larly appropriate. It

be

was not

intelligent

was

inscribed in her appearance. Such

The

Woman

novel,

Here

the voice of

I

its

not even particu-

is

and

likely to

how

is

in i860, just before this

woman

Cameron

started

making her

introduced, early in the book, in

is

young hero:

looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady

standing rested

at

on

it,

with her back turned towards me.

her, I

was struck by the

unaffected grace of her attitude.

comely and well- developed,

The

instant

rare beauty of her form,

Her

figure

yet not fat; her

was head

tall,

set

my

eyes

and by the

yet not too

tall;

on her shoulders

with an easy'pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for

it

ibly

occupied

and

be

the fate of a principal character in

White, Wilkie Collins's robustly, enthrallingly clever

in

which appeared

portraits.

essential,

in fact considered disabling,

its

natural place,

delightfully

it

rilled

undeformed by

trance into the room; and

I

out

stays.

its

natural circle,

it

She had not heard

was

vis-

my

en-

allowed myself the luxury of admiring her

SUSAN SONTAG

244

moved one

for a

few moments, before

least

embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned

wards

me

I

The

immediately.

of the chairs near me. as the

easy elegance of even-

movement

to-

oi her

limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of

room

the

me

set

in a flutter

— and forward few — and proached nearer— and the

left

window

I

steps

a

I

words

me

fail

oi expectation to see her face

said to myself. I

The

lady

The

said to myself.

is

lady

moved

young. She ap-

is

said to myself (with a sense of surprise

to express).

The

lady

is

She

clearly.

dark. She

which

ugly!

Reveling in the effrontery and delights of the appraising male gaze, the narrator has noted that, seen from behind and in long shot, the lady the criteria of female desirability.

satisfies all

when

she turns and comes toward him,

lowed

to

be

just plain

at

Hence

his acute surprise,

her "ugly" face

or homely), which, he explains,

is

a

(it is

not

al-

kind of par-

adox:

Never was the old conventional maxim, flatly

contradicted

strangely

The

and

mouth and

promise of

a moustache.

She had

jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute

coal-black hair, growing unusually low

expression silent, to

—

bright, frank,

and

and

woman

alive

pliability, is

more it.

in Collins s novel,

Moved is,

in those

brown

eyes;

masculine

and

thick,

her forehead.

—appeared,

Her

while she was

feminine attractions oi gen-

without which the beauty of the handsomest

beauty incomplete.

Marian Halcombe

angelic, that

a lovely figure

a large, firm,

down on

intelligent

be altogether wanting

tleness

desire.

more

by the face and head that crowned

startlingly belied

was almost

lip

fair

err,

Nature cannot

complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her

lady's

upper

—never was the

that

will turn

out to be the most admirable character

awarded even-

virtue except the capacity to inspire

only by generous, noble sentiments, she has a neararchetypally feminine, temperament

troubling matter of her

uncommon

—except

for the

intelligence, her frankness, her

oi "pliability" Marian Halcombe's body, so ideally feminine that

judged ripe for appropriation by

a

presumptively male

artist,

want it

is

conveys

A Photograph

Is

Not

"modest graces of action." Her head, her concentrated, exacting face another.

And

face, signifies

—unfeminine. The body body—

face trumps

on shoulders

see such a face as this set

—

longed to model

to

gives

Is

It?

The

245

something more

one message, the

as intelligence, to the

of female sexual attractiveness, trumps beauty.

To

Or

an Opinion.

detriment

narrator concludes:

that a sculptor

would have

be charmed by the modest graces of action

through which the symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when they

moved, and then

be almost repelled by the masculine form and

to

masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped figure

ended

—was

to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort

familiar to us

all

in sleep,

when we

recognise yet cannot reconcile the

anomalies and contradictions of a dream.

Collins's

male narrator

and

cally arouses anxieties

touching a gender fault

is

feelings of discomfort.

the order of sexual stereotypes

may seem

line,

The

which

typi-

contradiction in

dream-like to a well-adjusted

inhabitant of an era in which action, enterprise, artistic creativity, and

understood to be masculine, fraternal or-

intellectual innovation are

ders.

For

a long time the

beauty of a

greater novelist,

Henry James,

speaks of the challenge of

no

incompatible, or

oddly matched, with intelligence and assertiveness. (A

at least

nist

woman seemed

with

all

in the preface to

filling

The

Portrait of a Lady,

the "frail vessel" of a female protago-

the richness of an independent consciousness.)

novelist today

would

find

it

far

To be

sure,

implausible to award good looks to a

woman who is both cerebral and self-assertive. But common to begrudge a woman who has beauty as

in real

life, it's still

well as intellectual

—one would never say there was something odd or ing or "unfair" about man who was so fortunate — beauty, the

intimidat-

brilliance

a

as if

ul-

timate enabler of feminine charm, should by rights have barred other

kinds of excellence.

IN

A

WOMAN

woman,

BEAUTY

for character.

is

something

It is also,

willed, designed, obtained.

total. It is

what

stands, in a

of course, a performance; something

Looking through an old family photograph

SUSAN SONTAG

246

album, the Russian-born French writer Andrei' Makine

used to get the particular glow of beauty he saw

women's

recalls a trick

some of the

in

faces:

These

women knew

be beautiful, what they must do

that in order to

several seconds before the flash blinded

lowing mysterious syllables

extended

round

a gracious

oval of the cheeks

by magic, the mouth, instead of being

.

.

.

The eyebrows arched

.

.

was elongated. You

a distant

your features

A woman

if

counterfeit bliss, or contracting into an anxious grin,

in

would form

shadow of

to articulate the fol-

French, of which few understood the

in

meaning: "pe-tite-pomme." As

them was

said "petite

slightly,

pomme"

and dreamy sweetness veiled your

the

and the

gaze, refined

.

being photographed aspired to a standardized look that

nified an ideal refinement of "feminine" traits, as

sig-

conveyed through

beauty; and beauty was understood to be a distancing from the ordinary.

As photographed,

what make

a

photographic portrait interesting.

And

are

refinement

is

and seems pretentious or sham.

Beauty

—

as

photographed

vailed until recently

in the

mainstream tradition that pre-

—blurred women's

graphs that were frankly

erotic, the

the face another: a naked tion,

projected something enigmatic, dreamy, in-

Today idiosyncrasy and forthrightness of expression

accessible.

passe,

it

woman

sexuality.

body might be

And

even in photo-

telling

one story and

lying in a strenuously indecent posi-

spread-eagled or presenting her rump, with the face turned to-

ward the viewer wearing the vapidly amiable expression of respectable photographic portraiture. Newer ways of photographing less

women

are

concealing of women's sexuality, though the display of once for-

bidden female

flesh or carnal posturing

fraught as a subject, so

is still

inveterate are responses that reassert male condescensions to

the guise of lecherous appreciation.

Women's

women

libidinousness

is

in

always

being repressed or held against them.

The

identification of

women. While

women

with beauty was a way of immobilizing

character evolves, reveals, beauty

is static,

net for projection. In the legendary final shot of

Queen

a

mask, a magChristina, the

A Photograph queen

Not

Is

an Opinion.

Or

—Greta Garbo—having abdicated the Swedish throne, renounc-

ing the masculinizing prerogatives of a

monarch

woman's happiness, and boarded the ship

for the

vengeful rejected suitor from her court, stands

wind

the shot lian,

monument

in her face, a

was being prepared, Garbo asked the

Don't think of anything.

Go

in

and holds on

and

wounded by

the ship's

a

prow with

director,

take.

Rouben Mamou-

Nothing, he famously

blank. His instruction produced

one of the most emotion -charged images

moves

at

a

of heartbreak. While the lighting for

what she should be thinking during the

replied.

modesty of

to join her foreign lover

depart with him into exile only to find him mortally

the

247

It?

Is

in

movie

camera

history: as the

a long close-up, the spectator has

no choice but

to

read mounting despair on that incomparably beautiful, dry-eyed, vacant face.

sired

The

face that

the

is

The

a

is

mask on which one can

project whatever

de-

consummate perfection of the looked-at-ness of women.

identification of beauty as the ideal condition of a

anything,

is

more powerful than

woman

is, if

although today's hugely complex

ever,

fashion-and-photography system sponsors norms of beauty that are far less provincial,

more

diverse,

and favor brazen rather than demure

ways of facing the camera. The downcast gaze, tion of

women

to the camera, should

a staple of the presenta-

have a touch of sullenness

if it is

not to seem insipid. Ideas of beauty are less immobilizing now. But

beauty

ment

itself is

an ideal of a stable, unchanging appearance, a commit-

to staving off or disguising the

ual attractiveness for

ages into his powers.

marks of time. The norms of

women are an index of their vulnerability. A man A woman ages into being no longer desired.

Forever young, forever good-looking, forever sexy construction, a transformation, a masquerade.

prised

—though of course we

decked out

are

—

We

that in real

life,

—beauty

is still

a

shouldn't be sur-

when

she

is

not

as a cliche of desirability, the flamboyant,

bespangled, semi-

woman

of unremarkable

nude Las Vegas showgirl can be features

sex-

a

mature

and sober presence. The eternal feminine project of

self-

embellishment has always been able to pull off such triumphs.

SINCE TO BE FEMININE site,

is

to have qualities

which are the oppo-

or negation, of ideal masculine qualities, for a long time

it

was

SUSAN SONTAG

248

woman in other than woman was an allegorical fan-

hard to elaborate the attractiveness of the strong mythic or allegorical guise. The heroic

and sculpture: Liberty leading the

tasy in nineteenth-century painting

People.

The

large-gestured, imperiously draped, convulsively powerful

woman danced by Martha Graham in the works she created for her allwomen troupe in the 1930s a turning point in the history of how

—

women's

women's anger have been represented

strength,

mythic archetype ing over a

—was

mourning daimon, quester)

(priestess, rebel,

community of women, not

a real

a

presid-

woman compromising and

cohabiting with and working alongside men. Dentist, orchestra conductor, commercial pilot, rabbi, lawyer, astro-

naut, film director, professional boxer, law-school dean, three-star gen-

... no doubt about

eral

well, ior,

And what women mind has

have changed.

from the caddish

still

is

protest indignantly

if

to

women

much

occupations are

women

work outside

and three-fourths of what still

themselves and

a

is

man

their

that a

the

It is

front of

most job

assumption

and

frivolity

reali-

women

with

homes. The measure of

how

(including most

woman

earns between one-half

earns in the same job.

And

nearly

all

gender-labeled: with the exception of a few occu-

if

titles

will always

Any woman

To be

new economic

pations (prostitute, nurse, secretary) where the reverse

needs to be specified

ac-

who would

as feminists.

change the stereotypes of

oblige most American

things have not changed

was

many women

are not the labors of the various femi-

nisms, indispensable as these have been.

small children) to

it

someone described them

what has done most

fecklessness afflicting

ties that

changed. Male behav-

seen today as outrageous by

not so long ago were putting up with

sure,

can do, and do

to the outright violent, that until recently

cepted without demurral

who

women

what

ideas about

it,

man, one has

the person

is

when

woman

it's

a

be that one

a

is

is

to put

true

and

"woman"

it

in

holding them; otherwise the

referring to a

of accomplishment becomes

man.

more acceptable

if

she

can be seen as pursuing her ambitions, exercising her competence, in a feminine

(wily,

nonconfrontational) way.

"No

harsh feminist, Ms.

woman in a equals of men

attained ..." begins the reassuring accolade to a

executive responsibilities. That

women

are the

X has

job with

—the new

A Photograph idea

— continues

Not an Opinion. Or

Is

to collide with the age-old

feriority

and

sentially

dependent or

serviceability: that

presumption of female

normal for

it is

249

It?

Is

a

woman

be

to

in-

in an es-

self-sacrificingly supportive relation to at least

one man. So ingrained richer,

more

is

the expectation that the

successful than the

exceptions, of which there are

worthy.

eminence.

feels

No

if

he

—

feels

"threatened" by his

threatened by her husband's eminence.

if

the non-

woman

is

And

is

still

to efface her

own

it

a loving wife in a two-career marriage having every cause

("Hello, everybody. This

women, except

Norman

Mrs.

is

and surpass her husband's. Maine.") Accomplished

for those in the performing professions, continue to

regarded as an anomaly.

have anthologies of it

seem note-

to

industrialist, surgeon, writer, politician,

for anguish should her success overtake

phers;

taller, older,

mates that the

one would dream of wondering

thought that the ultimate act of love for a identity

be

woman with whom he now many, never fail

than himself

famous wife of an important actor,

will

seems normal for a journalist to ask the husband of a

It

woman more famous wife's

man

It

appears to

women

be

many

reasons, to

women

photogra-

sense, for

writers or exhibits of

would seem very odd

exhibit of photographers

make

to propose an anthology of writers or an

who had

nothing in

common

except that they

were men.

WE WANT PHOTOGRAPHY to be unmythic, full of concrete information. We are more comfortable with photographs that are ironic, unidealizing. Decorum is now understood as concealment. We expect the photographer to be bold, even insolent. We hope that subjects will be candid, or naively

Of

revealing.

course, subjects

achievement,

women

who

are accustomed to posing

of notoriety

—

will offer

—women

of

something more guarded,

or defiant.

And appear)

the is

way women and men

not identical with

the camera.

What

how

really

it is

look (or allow themselves to

thought appropriate to appear to

looks right, or attractive, in a photograph

is

often

no

— SUSAN SONTAG

250

more than what

illustrates the felt "naturalness" of the

bution of powers conventionally accorded

done so much

Just as photography has it

unequal

distri-

women and men. to confirm these stereotypes,

can engage in complicating and undermining them. In Annie Lei-

bovitz's

Women, we

at-ness.

We

see

women

see

women

catering to the imperatives of looked-

whom, because

for

of age or because they're

preoccupied with the duties and pleasures of raising children, the rules

many

of ostentatiously feminine performance are irrelevant. There are portraits of

women

defined by the

new

now open

kinds of work

to

them. There are strong women, some of them doing "men's jobs,"

some of them dancers and

athletes with the

only recently began to be visible

powerful musculature that

when such champion female bodies

were photographed.

ONE OF THE TASKS

of photography

sense of, the variety of the world.

It is

is

to disclose,

and shape our

not to present ideals. There

is

no

agenda except diversity and interestingness. There are no judgments,

which of course

And

every this there

a

is itself

that variety

a that.

is

Photography

is

judgment.

is itself

an

ideal.

We

We want to have

in the service of the

want now

to

know

that for

a plurality of models.

post-judgmental ethos gaining

ascendancy in societies whose norms are drawn from the practices of

consumerism. The camera shows us many worlds, and the point all

the images are valid.

celebrated in today's America. There

modern life,

after

faith in the possibility of all, is

that

A woman may be a cop or a beauty queen or an

architect or a housewife or a physicist. Diversity

much

is

commonly

is

is

an end in

itself

the very American, very

continuous self-transformation.

referred to as a

lifestyle. Styles

A

change. This

celebration of variety, of individuality, of individuality as style, saps the

authority of gender stereotypes, and has terforce to the bigotry that to

many occupations and That women,

in the

their individuality

is,

still

denies

become an inexorable coun-

women more

than token access

experiences.

same measure

as

men, should be able

of course, a radical idea.

It is in this

to

fulfill

form, for

A Photograph better

and for worse,

women

A

has

come

to

Is

Not

an Opinion.

Or

plausible.

a

book about women;

ican project: generous, ardent, inventive, open-ended.

opinion.

Or

make

251

It?

that the traditional feminist call for justice for

seem most

BOOK OF PHOTOGRAPHS;

cide what to

Is

of these pictures. After

all,

a

It's

a very

Amer-

for us to de-

photograph

is

not an

is it? J [

999l

THFRF AND HFRF

Homage

THERE WAS

BEFORE

Books

travel books.

travel

—

in

my

to Halliburton

least

life, at

—there were

you the world was very large but

that told

quite encompassable. Full of destinations.

The

first

books of

travel

my

life,

year was 1940,

books

I

read,

and surely among the most important

were by Richard Halliburton.

when

I

I

was seven, and the

read his Book of Marvels. Halliburton, the hand-

some, genteel American youth, born in Brownsville, Tennessee,

had devised

was

my

first

lives, that

less

for himself a

vision of

what

of a writer: a

enthusiasms.

life

life

To be

I

who

of being forever young and on the move,

thought had to be the most privileged of

of endless curiosity and energy and count-

be

a traveler, to

a writer

—

in

my

child

mind

they started off as the same thing.

To be

me

sure, there

a

good deal

in that child

mind

to fall in love with the idea of insatiable travel.

lived

abroad most of my

northern China in the States. a

was

first six

—while my

As

far

back

sister

as I

years

and

—my father had

I

remained

can remember,

I

that the

parents had

a fur business in

in the care of relatives

my

parents' unimag-

on the opposite side of the globe had inspired

precise, hopeless set of travel longings. Halliburton's

me

My

was already conducting

potent dream-life of travel to exotic places. But

inable existence

that prepared

a too

books informed

world contained many wonderful things. Not

just the

Great Wall of China.

255

— SUSAN SONTAG

256

Yes, he

had walked on the Great Wall, and he'd

also

climbed the

Matterhorn and Etna and Popocatepetl and Fujiyama and Olympus;

Grand Canyon and

he'd visited the

when

the

book was published,

Panama

length of the

Golden Gate Bridge

(in 1938,

the bridge counted as the newest of the

rowed

world's marvels); he'd

the

and swum the

into the Blue Grotto

Canal; he'd

made

it

to

Carcassonne and Baalbek

and Petra and Lhasa and Chartres and Delphi and the Alhambra and

Timbuktu and the

Taj

Mahal and Pompeii and

Bay of Rio and Chichen

wasn't this

my

and the Blue Mosque

Itza

Angkor Wat and, and, and

.

.

.

too,

my own The

full

of amazing

that

I realize

sites

and

stories attached to

Book of Marvels was

a

and

edifices,

them. Look-

prime awakener of

ardor and appetite. year before

under

trip

The

introduction to the notion of "the masterpiece"?

might one day see and learn the

ing back now,

and

in Isfahan

Halliburton called them "marvels," and

point was: the faraway world was I,

and the

Victoria Falls

Hong Kong

I

read Book of Marvels, Halliburton had ventured a

in that quintessentially

sail

to

I

He

was

was reading

his

which

I

a sad

book? Probably

end couldn't

first,

tually read

them

taint the lessons of

— described

of successful volition.

You prepare

for

it.

know he

But then,

I'd not

thirty-three-year-old father in

pluck and avidity

my

for

me

no disappointment; indeed,

it

last; I

to

it.

in

Ro-

even-

an idea of pure happiness.

You have something

You voyage toward

drew

I

—from The Royal Road

published in 1925, to Book of Marvels, his all

I

for good.

from reading Halliburton. Those books mance, his

not.

Did

learned about in 1939, several months after

mother returned from China

And

thirty-nine years old.

my own

entirely taken in the death of

Tientsin,

from

vessel, a junk,

San Francisco, and had vanished somewhere mid-

Pacific without a trace.

had died when

Chinese

And

mind. You imagine

Then you

may be even more

see

it.

And

there

it.

is

captivating than you

imagined. Halliburton's books convey in the most candid and ingenuous

which

asm

is

to say, unfashionable

for travel

may

—way the "romance" of

travel.

Enthusi-

not be expressed so giddily today, but I'm sure that

the seeking out of what

is

strange or beautiful, or both, remains just as

Homage pleasurable and addictive.

to Halliburton

257

And bemy more

has certainly proved so for me.

It

cause of the impact of those books read

grownup

enviable sightings throughout

when life,

I

was so young,

mostly by-products of op-

portunity or obligation rather than pilgrimages undertaken, continue

When

to bear Halliburton's imprint.

Wall, and

was rowed

did walk on the Great

I finally

into the Blue Grotto,

and was shat on by mon-

Angkor Wat, and

keys in the Taj Mahal, and wandered in the ruins of

wangled permission to spend

bag on the rosy

a night in a sleeping

rocks of Petra, and surreptitiously climbed the Great Pyramid at Giza

before daybreak,

thought: I've done

I

although San Francisco I

is

it.

They were on

his

Truth

list.

is,

anything but an unusual destination for me,

never drive across the Golden Gate Bridge without recalling where

Even

figures in Halliburton's book.

teresting

and haven't

visited,

Fujiyama comes to mind, cult of

I

my

isn't

interior

very in-

map

be-

Picchu or Palmyra or Lhasa or

think, I haven't

done

that. Yet.

youth that animates Halliburton's books could hardly

have meant something to a seven-year-old. But travel

assumed

Andorra, remains on

And when Machu

cause he went there.

The

a place I've

it

it is

the association of

with youth, beautiful youth, that seems most dated now. As an

undergraduate

at

Princeton just after World

War

I,

he succumbed to

the spell of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and throughout his brief life his

beau ideal remained Rupert Brooke, whose biography he hoped one

day to write. Even more remote than these references assumption that he

and seduce are

his

is

is

Halliburton's

bringing news to his readers, that what will entice

words

—not the photographs

in the books,

most no

better than snapshots: the author standing in front of the Taj Mahal,

and so

forth. Today,

images,

still

miliar, to

when

lust for travel

and moving, we expect the

is

awakened primarily through

sights,

many

of them

all

too

fa-

speak for themselves. Indeed, we've seen the famous sights

unrolling in color long before

we

actually travel to see them.

Halliburton's travel narratives are stocked with people: guides, facilitators,

scam

artists,

and other

locals.

The busy world

that

he en-

t

counters

fills

traveling, to

The Body

his

mind. Today

vacancy

Artist logs

itself.

on

The

to her

it

is

possible to travel solo, without

distraught heroine of

computer

at

odd hours

Don

to

DeLillo's

watch

a live-

SUSAN SONTAG

258

streaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane road outside Kotka, Finland, where a

webcam

mind and made her To me.

beyond the write

when

travel

I

am

feel the

is filling

self, it

always trained on asphalt.

is

emptied her

deep silence of other places."

the mind. But that means, by launching

also empties

traveling.

"It

my

mind:

To write

petes with mental traveling.

(What

I

I

find

it

me

"almost impossible to

have to stay put. Real travel com-

is

a writer

but

a

mental traveler?)

WTien I recall now how much Halliburton's books meant to me at the beginning of my reading life, I see how the notion oi "traveler" infiltrated, perfumed, abetted my nascent dream of becoming a writer.

When am

I

I

acknowledge to myself

saying but that

I

want

that

Fm

interested in everything,

what

to travel everywhere. Fike Richard Hal-

liburton.

[2001]

Singleness

Who's

your favorite writer?

me many easy.

—Oh,

—For heaven's

say Shakespeare!

—Just

years ago.

Shakespeare, of course.

one?

an interviewer asked

—Uh-huh. —Then

it's

would never have thought you'd

I

sake,

—Well, you've never

why?

writ-

ten anything about Shakespeare.

Oh. So I'm supposed to be what writer I

knows

write?

No more? No

less?

But every

this isn't so.

write what

writing,

I

by me.

I

can: that

is,

what's given to

care passionately about

I

me and what

many

seems worth

things that don't get

my fiction and essays. They don't because what's in my head seems me to lack originality (I never thought I had anything compelling to

into to

say about Shakespeare), or because

inner freedom to write about them.

And

in

ligent, is

some ways

more

trivial

am

and

—

sense to say

I

am; anyway,

a specializing

loyalties

—of the

literature;

The me through whom ings too, other duties.

books

aren't

me

—

different.

The

"I"

all

who

and upgrading, according

who What

"I"

make my books.

made, through me, by

My

of me.

than them. The better ones are more

less

talented, than I

a transformation

literary goals

I

haven't yet found the necessary

I

and I'm

the books

For instance:

lives. It feels I really feel is

writes

to certain

true only in a that they are

their (literature's) servant.

make as

intel-

me,

their I

way has other

yearn-

believe in right action.

259

SUSAN SONTAG

260

But, for the writer,

it's

doing the right thing a

far

more complicated.

—though

it is

Literature

not about

is

about expressiveness (language)

at

noble level and wisdom (inclusiveness, empathy, truthfulness, moral

And my books

seriousness).

ing

who

am,

I

either; I've

means of discovering or express-

are not a

never fancied the ideology of writing as ther-

apy or self-expression.

There

a

is

deeper reason

ways

felt like a

They

liberate

learner. I've

why

becoming, and

me

My

the books are not me.

on.

Sometimes

I'm in

I feel

flight

— I'm

I

enjoy beginning again.

the beginner's

It's

mind

I

The

mind

beginner's

a fierce

from the books,

and the twaddle they generate. Sometimes the momentum pleasurable.

al-

does. But the books are finished.

still

to do, be, feel, aspire to something else

moved

has

life

more

is

best.

is

embrace and permit myself now, when

I'm very far from being a beginning writer.

When

I

began publishing

thirty years ago, I entertained a simpler version of the figment that

there were two people around here:

Admiration

—no, veneration—

my vocation,

on

my

knees. So, naturally,

How

ented enough, worthy enough.

my

launch

frail

and

I

vessel into literature's

my own

In fact,

I

then did

I,

was

my

her going, though

Going on long time; isfied.)

In

it

I

didn't think

who

work but

all

that

much

I"

I

tal-

a sense of

in

my

"the" work.

made

think

work.

By

ex-

a writer.

sacrifices to

keep

of what she wrote.

as a writer didn't allay this dissatisfaction,

"Sontag and

wasn't

to

awareness of the gap be-

happily

only upped the ante. (And

my

I

one who had dared to become

the one with the standards,

me

find the courage to

wished to honor

I

did "my"

I

that one, the

I

that

wide waters? Through

and the standards

never called what

tension, there

And

gifts

same name.

books had brought

was scared

I

two-ness that expressed, and enforced,

tween

a writer of the

for a host of

I

was

not for a very

right to

be

game, the disavowals were for

dissat-

real.

Op-

pressed by as well as reluctantly proud of this lengthening mini-shelf of

work signed by Susan Sontag, pained seeker)

from her (she had merely found),

ten about her, the praise as

of

self-flattery: I

body

is

to distinguish myself

know

as severe a

Every writer

—

much

I

better than anyone

after a certain point,

I

was

a

flinched at everything writ-

as the pans.

judge of her work as

(I

My

one perennial form

what she

am

when

is

about, and no-

myself.

one's labors have resulted

Singleness in a

body of work

enstein

—experiences himself or

herself as both Dr. Frank-

and the monster. For while harboring

a secret sharer

bly not often the fantasy of a beginning writer, the conceit

appeal to a writer

and

who

has gone on.

And

is

A persona now:

on.

trying to ignore, the nibblings of alienation

from the

which time, and more work, are bound to worsen. firms the dismaying disparity

261

between the inside

proba-

is

bound

to

enduring,

earlier

work

also playfully af-

It

(the ecstasy

and ardu-

ousness of writing) and the outside (that congeries of misunderstandings

and stereotypes image

(in

make up

that

the minds of other people),

poignancy: don't punish

onerous charge,

this

the same

one's reputation or fame). I'm not that

name

it

me for being what you

this

as I do.

And, with more

declares.

call successful. I've

work-obsessed, ambitious writer

I'm

just

who

got

bears

me, accompanying, administering,

tending to that one, so she can get some work done.

Then, more

specifically, this

sheen on the abandonment of

doubling of the

self

required to

self

make

invariably incurs the stigma of selfishness in "real"

Kafka

said,

You have

appease them

—

solitary, to

to fend off the others to get your

that issue

Don't be mad, or

is

keen

especially

jealous. I can't help

You

it.

Yeats said one must choose between the

One

yes.

result of lavishing a

your books I

life.

To

which

write, as

you can never be alone enough. But the people you love

tend not to appreciate your need to be them.

winsome

puts a

literature,

is

that

if

work done. And

the writer

see,

life

turn your back on

is

a

woman.

she writes.

and the work. No. And

good part of your one and only

you come to

feel that, as a person,

remember my merriment when, many

to

years ago,

life

you are faking

I first

came

on it.

across

Borges's elegy to himself, the most delicate account ever given of a writer's

unease about the reconciling of

Writers' humility.

Rereading that

balm

it

(I

life

and work. Writers' pathos.

envied him the slyness of his humility.)

now,

I still

grin.

But I'm not so prone to make use of

to writers' self-consciousness

which Borges's fable so charm-

ingly evokes. «

Far from needing the consolation of a certain ironic distance from myself (the earlier distance wasn't ironic the opposite direction and at last

my

come

at all), I've

slowly evolved in

to feel that the writer

double, or familiar, or shadow playmate, or creation.

(It's

is

me: not

because

I

262

SUSAN SONTAG

got to that point write a

book

I

—

it

took almost thirty years

really like:

—

The Volcano Lover.)

that

I

Now

was I

finally able to

think there's no

escaping the burden of singleness. There's a difference between

and

my

lier.

Liberating.

books. But there's only one person here. That

is

scarier.

me

Lone-

h995]

Writing As Readin

READING

NOVELS SEEMS

while writing them think until

mored

I

remind myself

because to write

is

how

and see

it

—once,

twice, as

can bear to reread. write

is

one of But

to

sit

in

many You

firmly the

two are

—

Hard

You

times as

are your

it

takes to get

own

first,

it it

maybe

never

is

Surely, sure.

much

all right.

in general read

that

is

ment of

to rewrite

severest, reader.

"To

flyleaf

of

And

that only suggests, to this

still.

as

—

that

is,

an-

I'm not saying that the novelist

"What

is

written

without pleasure," said Dr. Johnson,

remote from contemporary

taste as its author.

written without effort gives a great deal of plea-

No, the question

prefer a writer's

is,

straight off never all right? Yes, sure:

might be better

and the maxim seems

and

to be something you

has to fret and sweat to produce something good.

without effort

ar-

write in order to read what you've

writer at any rate, that with a closer look, or voicing aloud it

(No

related.

I

to imagine writing without rereading.

sometimes even better than

—

so

few remarks.)

and, since of course

what you've written

other reading

activity,

at least

judgment on oneself," Ibsen inscribed on the

his books. is

OK

if it's

such a normal

to practice, with particular intensity

attentiveness, the art of reading.

written,

me

such an odd thing to do

is

generalities here. Just a

First,

to

is

—who may well elaborated work —but

not the judgment of readers

more spontaneous,

less

writers, those professionals of dissatisfaction.

a senti-

You

think, If

263

I

SUSAN SONTAG

264

can get

to this point the

it

couldn't

it

be better

And though fort,

it is

first

go-around, without too

the rewriting

this,

— and the rereading—sounds

most pleasurable part of

only pleasurable part. Setting out to write, erature" in your head,

warm

Then comes

work

with, upgrade, edit.

be

clearer.

try to

be true

to

authoritative. to

the

deeper.

part,

when you

But you have

a mess.

Or

if

writing.

Or more

to a world.

You want

You want

to

A

plunge

chance to

a

book

fix

try to get this

wretched

your book should be

You

be.

is

eccentric.

spacious,

to

on the page

—what you know,

in

read the sentences over and over.

more

in

try to liberate

it.

is

what you think

your spasms of the

You

entombed

closer to

Is this

try

You want

yourself.

You

inside your head.

stuff

You

it.

be more

winch yourself up from

the block of marble, the novel

"lit-

an icy

in

Or more

winch the book out of your balky mind. As the statue

You

Sometimes the

already have something to

eloquent. the

like ef-

you- have the idea of

formidable, intimidating.

is

lake.

it's

struggle,

still?

actually the

Let's say

much

elation,

book I'm

it

can

writing?

Is this all?

Or didn't,

let's

say

it's

going well, for

it

you'd go crazy). There you

does go well, some of the time are,

and even

of scribes and the worst of touch typists, a

down, and you want

to

trail

if

(if it

you are the slowest

of words

keep going. Then you reread

it.

is

being laid

Perhaps you

don't dare be satisfied, but at the same time you like what you've writ-

You

ten.

find yourself taking pleasure

—

a reader's pleasure

—

in what's

there on the page.

Writing

is, finally,

a series of

pressive in certain ways.

own own

characteristic

way

inner freedom.

To

permissions you give yourself to be ex-

invent.

To

leap.

To

fly.

fall.

of narrating and insisting; that

To be

strict

is,

To

find your

to find

your

without being too self-excoriating. Not

stopping too often to reread. Allowing yourself, it's

To

when you

dare think

going well (or not too badly), simply to keep rowing along.

No

waiting for inspiration's shove.

Of

course, blind writers can never reread

haps

this

their

head before

ear

matters less for poets,

much more

setting

down

who

often

what they

do most of

dictate. Per-

their writing in

anything on paper. (Poets

than prose writers do.)

And

live

by the

being unable to see doesn't

Writing As Reading

mean

one

that

make

can't

Don't

revisions.

we imagine

265

that Milton's

daughters, at the end of each day of the dictation of Paradise Lost, read all

it

back to

their father

prose writers

—who work

their heads.

They need

and then took down

in a

lumberyard of words

to see

what they've

forthcoming, prolific writers must feel

when he went

composing The Golden Bowl aloud

at all,

1900,

this.

blind, that his writing days

venerable Henry James pacing up and

difficulty of

how James's

imagining

his corrections?

—

can't hold

written.

But

it all

in

Even the most

(Hence, Sartre announced,

were

down

over.)

in a

room

Think of in

portly,

Lamb House

Leaving aside the

to a secretary.

prose could have been dictated

late

much less to the racket made by a Remington typewriter circa don't we assume that James reread what had been typed, and was

lavish with his corrections?

When

became, again,

I

a

cancer patient two years ago and had to

break off work on the nearly finished In America, a friend in Los Angeles,

to

my despair and fear that now I'd never finish it, offered New York and stay with me to take down my dictation of

knowing

come

to

the rest of the novel. True, the rewritten ter,

first

eight chapters

and reread many times) and

with the arc of the

last

I'd

two chapters

were done

begun the

(that

is,

next-to-last chap-

clearly in view.

And

to refuse his touching, generous offer. It wasn't just that I

yet I

had

was probably

too befuddled by drastic chemotherapy and morphine to

remember

what

wrote, not

just

I

was planning

hear

I

it.

had

to

had

to write. I

to

READING USUALLY PRECEDES is

I

writing.

And

the impulse to write

almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading,

makes you dream of becoming a writer, reading

of the past

—

Not

all

thing to V.

a writer.

books others write

And, long

after you've

Torment. And,

what

become

from

writing. Dis-

yes, inspiration.

writers will admit to this. S.

is

— and rereading the beloved books

constitutes an irresistible distraction

traction. Consolation.

I

remember once

saying some-

Naipaul about a nineteenth-century English novel

loved, a very well I

be able to see what

be able to reread.

knew who cared

known

novel,

for literature,

which

I

admired

I

assumed

that he, like everyone

as I did.

But no, he'd not read

— SUSAN SONTAG

266

it.

he

sternly,

shadow of

and, seeing the

said,

my

surprise on

added

face,

"Susan, I'm a writer, not a reader."

Many

who

writers

to read very

little,

are

no longer young

indeed, to find reading and writing in

compatible. Perhaps, for

some

about being influenced, then the reason

is

claim, for various reasons,

lack of time

some sense

writers, they are. If the reason

— there

me

seems to

this

are only so

is

in-

anxiety

a vain, shallow worry. If

many hours

in the day,

and

those spent reading are evidently subtracted from those in which one

could be writing

—then

Losing yourself

in a

an addictive, model

"Sometimes

I

this

is

an asceticism to which

book, the old phrase,

reality.

state of reading consists in the

we

fortunately,

our

own

enough

that

is

—

Woolfs words

again,

never do lose the ego, any more than

make

—

— "the

complete elimination of the ego." Un-

we can is

step over

trance-like

us feel egoless.

Like reading, rapturous reading, writing fiction selves

said, in a letter,

But that disembodied rapture, reading,

feet.

to

don't aspire.

think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted read-

Surely the heavenly part

ing/'

Woolf famously

Virginia

I

not an idle fantasy but

is

—inhabiting other

feels like losing yourself, too.

Most people seem

to think

now

regard. Also called: self-expression.

be capable of authentically

that writing

As we

are

altruistic feelings,

is

just a

form of

self-

no longer supposed

we

are not

supposed

to to

be capable of writing about anyone but ourselves. But

that's

not true. William Trevor speaks of the boldness of the

/76>/7-autobiographical imagination.

yourself as

much

as

Why

you might write

wouldn't you write to escape

to express yourself?

It's

far

more

interesting to write about others.

Needless to In America,

my

lend bits of myself to

say, I

and succumb

was drawing on

my

characters.

When,

in

immigrants from Poland reach southern California

they're just outside the village of desert,

all

Anaheim

—

in 18-76, stroll

out into the

to a terrifying, transforming vision of emptiness,

my own memory

I

of childhood walks into the desert of

southern Arizona

—outside what was then

the 1940s. In the

first

a small

draft of that chapter, there

southern California desert. By the third draft

I

town, Tucson

were saguaros

—

in

in the

had taken the saguaros

Writing As Reading

267

out, reluctantly. (Alas, in 1876, there weren't any saguaros west of the

Colorado

What I

River.) I

write about

am. Because

Here is

easier, is

other than me. As what

can rewrite

I

fully, intermittently.

seem any

is

And

it.

many

and

smarter than

—

once knew

I

fit-

On

the contrary.

the great difference between reading and writing. Reading

expert.

What you accumulate

you are bound to become

as a writer

mostly uncertainties

is

anxieties.

All these feelings of inadequacy

anyway

writer, ters.

—

"Matters"

are predicated

is

you'll reread.

on the conviction

is,

Maybe more than

that literature mat-

That there are books which

once.

Is

there a greater privilege than

by, filled with,

pointed to literature?

recorder of a real world (not just the commotion inside

one head), servant of

—

this

of wisdom, exemplar of mental playfulness, dilator of sympa-

thies, faithful

tions

—

books which, while reading them, you know

have a consciousness expanded

Book

on the part of the writer

surely too pale a word.

are necessary, that

to

is

words on the page does not

years of writing.

a vocation, a skill at which, with practice,

more

write

My books know what

getting the best

even after so

I

history,

advocate of contrary and defiant emo-

a novel that feels necessary can be, should be,

most of these

things.

As

for

whether there

high notion of

Duke

will

fiction, well,

Ellington replied

morning programs

at

continue to be readers

"There's

no future

when asked why he was

who

share this

to that question," as to

be found playing

the Apollo. Best just to keep rowing along. [2000]

Thirty Years Later

TO a

LOOK BACK wholesome

forward, to feel

makes was

still

exercise.

that

hard to curb

it

on writings of thirty or more years ago

am

I

is

.

.

not

My energy as a writer impels me to look beginning, really beginning, now, which

my impatience

with that beginning writer

I

once

in the literal sense.

Against Interpretation,

some

essays in

tor. I

had come

work

the writer

My idea

my

second book, was published

date from 1961,

it

New

to I

many

York

at

someone

kinds, so

The only

surprise

And

was

in a great

that there weren't

now mythic the

life,

Thirty Years Later

.

.

."

tion the following year in

268

—eager

for

me

to put to

era

known

life

in

fer-

metropolis than in any variant

more people is

regarded

as the Sixties. I

I

had attended.

like

me.

as a quintessential

evoke the label with

on the omnipresent convention of pack-

of one's time, in decades.

was written

had

to conceive of the vo-

including the excellent universities

reluctance, since I'm not keen

aging one's

but

writing The Benefac-

reasonable to suppose that such

I'm aware that Against Interpretation text of that

still

the start of the 1960s

was natural

it

vency would find more scope life,

was

I

interested in "everything." I'd always

cation of a writer in this way.

of provincial

when

in 1966,

had. since adolescence, pledged myself to become.

of a writer:

interests of

"

.

the

summer

Madrid of the Spanish

And

it

wasn't the Six-

of 199s as the preface to the republica-

translation of Against Interpretation.

Thirty Years Later

For

ties then.

me

it

was

when

chiefly the time

I

wrote

.

269

.

.

my

and

first

second novels, and began to discharge some of the cargo of ideas about

and culture and the proper business of consciousness which

art

had distracted

me from

writing fiction.

I

was

filled

life,

a

with evangelical

zeal.

The

radical

change

I'd

made

my own

in

change embedded

in

my moving to New York, was that I was not going to settle for being an academic: I would pitch my tent outside the seductive, stony safety of the university world. No doubt, there were new permissions in the air, and old hierarchies had become ripe

was

for toppling, but not that I

aware, at least not until after the time (1961 to 1965) these essays were written. to

The freedoms

—

me

seem

still

minted warrior

to

I

espoused, the ardors

me

— quite

was advocating, seemed

I

saw myself

traditional. I

newly

as a

in a very old battle: against philistinism, against ethical

and aesthetic shallowness and indifference. And imagined that both

New

York, where

I

had come

I

could never have

to live after

my

academic apprenticeship (Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard), and

where

had

I

started spending the

Cinematheque, were judged

as exceptionally creative.

actly as I'd

imagined them to be

sense of possibility.

summers,

They were,

—

thought

—above

all

it

in the

was riding

to

seemed, well, the way

and

and improvised

I

down

I

thought

I

was

flying, getting

I

was

ergy

I

prised

had

particularly well fitted to see

me

at

my

to admire.

what

I

my bookishness, my

its

people found what

was thought

to

be

in the

I

said

I

looked

due. Per-

saw, to understand

what

Europhilia, and the en-

disposal in the search for aesthetic bliss.

at first that

to me), that I

an

to get close.

had so many admirations: there was so much

understood, oy virtue of

art spaces,

other, less easily classifiable writers

around and saw importance to which no one was giving haps

was

form of movies and dance events, but

a wave.

overview, sometimes swooping I

Paris, ex-

normal that there be new masterpieces

in the writings of certain poets I

York and

of discoveries, inspirations, the

full

also in the fringe theatre world, in galleries

Maybe

New

it

be.

of prose.

the

at

of venality

supposed to

month

attendance

period that would be

me

whose work mattered

every

Paris,

The dedication and daring and absence

of the artists

I

in daily

in the early throes of a

long

"new"

(it

vanguard of

Still, it

sur-

wasn't so

new

sensibility and,

SUSAN SONTAG

270

my

from the appearance of

Of

course,

was elated

I

some of the matters good fortune I

I

view

aesthete's point of

phy and

I

to

first

pay attention to

couldn't believe

I

to describe them.

my

hadn't written something like

I

had embraced,

some new

to

was

a

(How

many

Art"),

"Notes on

Wilde, Ortega

and James Joyce.

my

manifestos, but

my

odd,

material the

pugnacious aesthete and a barely closeted moralist.

out to write so

my

young student of philoso-

as a

literature, in the writings of Nietzsche, Pater,

aphoristic statement conspired with in

me

Ortega of "The Dehumanization of

(the

set

for

was merely extending

I

it,

regarded as a tastemaker.

essays,

be apparently the

to

had waited

Auden

saw

first

wrote about; sometimes

I

that they

thought, that

Camp.") As

very

I

didn't

irrepressible taste for

staunchly adversarial purposes

ways that sometimes surprised me. In the writings collected

Against Interpretation ness

suppose

(I

positions

what

the tenacity, the succinct-

I like best:

should say here that

I

agree with most of the

I still

and certain psychological and moral judgments

took),

I

this is

the essays on Simone Weil, Camus, Pavese, and Michel Leiris.

don't like are those passages in which

way

my

of

prose.

Those

The

me

new work

understanding of the

programmatic commitment

new work,

especially

judged, seemed

about what

work

more

to the

that

was discovering,

I

seemed altogether

impulse got in the I

suppose they

I

(form /content,

polarities

intel-

that inhibited the proper

admired. Although

I

had no

"modern," taking up the cause of

had been

I

slighted or ignored or mis-

strength of the old taboos.

assumed the preeminence of the

The

salutary, given

transgressions

what

I

my

from the

I

I

praised (and used

ideas about art-making glories of

was applauding

took to be the unimpaired

The contemporary work

platform to relaunch

ness) didn't detract

I

useful than defending old favorites. In writing

canonical treasures of the past.

as a

and

was challenging were those

lect/feeling) I

in

What

now.

(high/low)

hierarchies

my pedagogic

those recommendations!

lists,

annoy

are useful, but they

in

what

I

and conscious-

admired

far

more. En-

joying the impertinent energy and wit of a species of performance called

Happenings did not make me care

Shakespeare.

No

I

was

—

I

am

—

less

for a pluralistic,

about Aristotle and

polymorphous

hierarchy, then? Certainly there's hierarchy. If

I

had

to

culture.

choose be-

Thirty Years Later ...

tween the Doors and Dostoyevsky, then

do

toyevsky. But

The

to

but because

me

level.

One

literature, I

of

my

been the cinema: Bresson.

not because

loved more

no other

that

me had

Godard and

films of

ema than about

without

my

new movies

new

than

silent era

happiest achievements in the years is

new

and the

films,

1930s) I

saw again and

clear

was doing

I

no day passed

Most of them

favorites

my

grati-

from the

were

again, so exalting

their

and

their sensuality

and beauty.

gravity

Cinema was the exemplary

art activity

during the time these essays

were written, but there were astonishments

rise

was

It

such a high

at

when

that

my

which (along with

freedom and inventiveness of narrative method,

Artists

novels.

absorption in cinema history only reinforced

tude for certain

cin-

loved movies more than nov-

I

was being so widely practiced

art

particularly

I felt

seeing one, sometimes two or three movies.

My

choose Dos-

wrote more about

I

the writing collected in Against Interpretation

were "old."

I'd

have to choose?

great revelation for

marked by the

els

I

—of course—

271

were insolent

of fascism.

again, as they'd

The modern was

the capitulations

embodied

nascent

movement

consume

were

against the

still

its

tinctively

my

disdain for

little

the

And

life

from I

commerce had

I

mean

the to

through the early 1970s

1965

suppose).

How marvelous

some of its boldness,

survived.

are nostalgia

I

which took shape

American war on Vietnam, which was

interesting characteristic of the time

there was so

"post-modern.")

political struggles

How one wishes

modern sentiment

I until

was before

a vibrant idea. (This

still

the Sixties, too,

does seem, in retrospect. timism,

World War

of these essays were being written:

last

a large part of

(those years

in the other arts as well.

after

in the idea of the

have said nothing here about the

around the time the

been

The two

it all

its

op-

poles of dis-

and Utopia. Perhaps the most

now

labeled the Sixties was that

nostalgia. In that sense,

it

was indeed

a

Utopian

moment.

The world

in

which these essays were written no longer

Instead oPa Utopian the end

—more

exactly, just past the

fore of culture: there

An

moment, the time we

is

illusion of the end,

no

end

live in is

—of every

possibility of true culture

perhaps

— and not more

exists.

experienced as

ideal.

(And

there-

without altruism.)

illusory than the con-

SUSAN SONTAG

272

on the threshold of

viction of thirty years ago of being

a great positive

transformation of culture and society. No, not an illusion, It is

think.

not simply that the Sixties have been repudiated, and the dis-

and made the object of intense

sident spirit quashed,

more triumphant

ever

I

indeed, impose pleasure that

mendations

—the

of consumer

values

promote

and insolence and defense of

cultural mixes

was advocating

I

The

nostalgia.

capitalism

for quite different reasons.

No

recom-

The recommendations and

exist outside a certain setting.

enthusiasms expressed in the essays collected in Against Interpretation

have become the possession of many people now. Something was operating to

which

I

make by

time

(call

more

cautious.

a sea

change

it

more

these marginal views

had no inkling its

— and, had

decade-name

Something that

whole

in the

it

acceptable, something of

my

understood better

I

time, that

me

you want), would have made

if

would not be an exaggeration

to call

culture, a transvaluation of values

which there are many names. Barbarism

is

one name for what was

we had

ing over. Let's use Nietzsche's term:

—

for

tak-

entered, really entered, the

age of nihilism.

So

I

can't help viewing the writings collected in Against Interpreta-

tion with a certain irony. I

such as "Notes on

still

Camp" and "On

only one thing in the collection cles,

most of the essays

like

I

don't like at

would not be pleased

more than

I

few of them,

two theatre chroni-

all:

had accepted,

magazine with which

literary

a

Style," quite a lot. (Indeed, there's

the brief result of a commission

judgment, from a

—

was

I

my

better

allied.)

Who

against

that a collection of contentious writings

three decades ago continues to matter to

readers in English and in

many

—

reader not to lose sight of

it

new

foreign languages.

may

take

some

from

generations of

Still,

I

urge the

effort of imagination

To

the larger context of admirations in which these essays were written. call for

an "erotics of art" did not

critical intellect.

ture did not

in the

name

I

denounced

and on Lukacs) of a

didn't understand

to then as "popular" cul-

to conspire in the repudiation of high culture

When

ence-fiction films

was

to disparage the role of the

To laud work condescended

mean

complexities.

mean

(I

more

(for instance, in the essays

and

on

its

sci-

certain kinds of facile moralism,

alert, less

was surely not the

complacent seriousness. What right

person to understand

it

I

this)

Thirty Years Later ...

was

that seriousness itself

the culture

at large,

was

273

in the early stages of losing credibility in

and that some of the more transgressive

art I

was

enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years

later,

the undermining of standards of seriousness

most complete, with the ascendancy of ble, persuasive values are

Now the

I

drawn from the entertainment

most people, and when allowed

temperament

suppose

it's

—probably unhealthy,

is

not

how I

to

be read.

of

new

My

—

as

intelligi-

industries.

an arbitrary deci-

too.

not wrong that Against Interpretation

reread, as an influential, pioneering that

whose most

al-

very idea of the serious (and of the honorable) seems quaint,

unrealistic, to

sion of

a culture

is

read

hope

or

it,

is

document from

—lurching from

that

its

a

is

read now, or

bygone

nostalgia to Utopia

age.

—wish

it

republication now, and the acquisition

readers, could contribute to the quixotic task of shoring

values out of which these essays and reviews were written.

ments of taste expressed

But

in these essays

may have

prevailed.

up the

The The

judg-

values

underlying those judgments did not. [1996]

Questions of Travel

ABOUT TRAVEL

BOOKS

posed an "us"

to a

"them"

riety of appraisals. Classical

the "us good,

them bad"

be foreign was

to

—

have always op-

a relation that yields a limited va-

and medieval

travel literature

good, them horrid"

typically, "us

be abnormal, often represented

mostly of

is

—

sort.

as physical

"men whose heads tale),

/

Do grow beneath

their shoulders" (Othello's win-

of anthropophagi, Cyclopes, and the like illustrates to us the

astonishing gullibility of past ages. But even this gullibility had its.

A Christian

culture could

more

its

lim-

easily believe in the existence of the

monstrous than of the perfect or near

doms

To

abnor-

and the persistence of those accounts of monstrous peoples, of

mality;

ning

—

to exotic places

perfect. Thus, while the king-

of freaks appear century after century on maps, exemplary races

figure mostly in

Not

books of

travel to Utopia; that

until the eighteenth century are there

is,

nowhere.

many examples

of a

more

daring geography: literature about model societies which describes

purportedly real places. Documentary literature and fiction were, of course, closely related in the eighteenth century, with nonfiction narratives in the first

day of

And

person an important model for the novel.

travel hoaxes, as well as of fiction in

the form of

It is

the hey-

travel books.

the greatest of the imaginary voyages, Gulliver's Travels, mixes the

two main series of

274

fantasies of the wholly alien. Consisting mostly of visits to a

monstrous

races,

it

ends with

its

burnt-out hero settled

among

Questions of Travel an ideal race: a high

them good"

The

moment

275

in the soon-to-be-flourishing "us bad,

tradition.

travel literature that can

be understood

premodern takes

as

for

granted the contrast between the traveler's society and those societies defined as anomalous, barbaric, backward, odd. To speak in the per-

sona of the

speak for

traveler, a professional (or

civilization;

Modern

the barbarians.

comes

no premodern

travelers thought of themselves as

travel literature starts

a critical as well as a self-evident

longer so clear Travel

is

who

is

civilized

and who

notion

when

—

that

civilization beis,

when

it is

no

not.

is

a didactic fantasy in the discourse of the philosophes (the

first intellectuals in

the

modern

sense),

societies,

tional," in

order to illuminate the

anomaly attested to by voyagers late eighteenth

who

often invoke distant non-

described as either more "natural" or more "ra-

European

ample

even amateur) observer, was to

century

—the

evils

remote lands

to

still

circulate in the

nine-foot- tall giants of Patagonia, for ex-

—but the sense of anomaly

"we" become the moral

of their own. Tales of physical

is

defectives.

increasingly the moral one.

There

is

And

a large literature of jour-

neys to exotic places whose fanciful virtues are recounted to point an instructive contrast with Europe.

the present

—

to

something

The journey was out

better: the past or the future.

America was the beneficiary of many this kind.

of civilization

"In the beginning," said

trips, real

John Locke,

and fabricated, of

"all

the world was

America." Crevecoeur and Chateaubriand found in the

something better than, unspoiled integrity, a refreshing naivete

and

New World

by, civilization: health, vigor,

moral

directness. After such fantasies

came

the inevitable counter-literature, that of acerbic British travelers of the

mid-nineteenth century like Fanny Trollope and Dickens,

who found

us simply not very civilized, in a word, vulgar; Harriet Martineau in the 1

830s, sensing abolitionism

rather better.

modern judgments about

of

exotic places

is

reac-

Turks were one of the model races in the eighteenth century; in

tive.

the

Much

and feminism on the march, had liked us

1

850s the Intrepid

Martineau actually visited two examples of the

"Turkish" harem and described pressed, and corrupted

Although these

human

travel

its

inmates as the most injured, de-

beings she had ever seen.

judgments

—the

idealizing of an exotic soci-

— SUSAN SONTAG

276

ety,

and the report on

its

—seem

barbarity

to alternate in cycles of

hope

and disillusionment, certain countries (following the mysterious laws of stereotyping) have proved

China has been

a fantasy

eighteenth century son, there

spread

it

more

susceptible to idealizing than others.

kingdom

since

Marco

was widely believed

America, too, for

all its

visit;

and

superstition, or wide-

denigrators, keeps recurring as

an object of idealization. In contrast, Russia

is

a

land whose customs

and energies have been perennially deplored. Since Ivan the the

first

in the

that in China, a land of rea-

was no war, debauchery, ignorance,

illness.

Polo's

Terrible,

Muscovite monarch to capture the imagination of Europe,

re-

ports on the infamy of Russian society have constituted a flourishing

branch of reports

travel literature in the West.

—those made by some foreign

The only memorable visitors

from the 1930s

1950s, precisely the period of the Greatest Terror,

dented heights of freedom and have strengthened

One

counterto the

about the unprece-

justice attained in the Soviet

Union

this tradition.

cannot imagine anyone being exactly disillusioned by the Mar-

quis de Custine's account of the barbarism

when he went

to Russia in 1839, as

m ^ny

and despotism he found

people were sharply

disillu-

sioned by Simon Leys's account, in the mid-1970s, of the barbarism of China's Cultural Revolution.

And

this centuries-old

propensity to think

the best of China and the worst of Russian society today,

when, though by many

more

repressive,

more

the Chinese version

criteria

has

Chinese communism

(literally) totalitarian

still

still

is

its

echo

infinitely

than Soviet communism,

enjoys a far better press than the Soviet one.

(Indeed, most self-righteous anti-communists at the highest reaches of the American foreign policy establishment behave as

supposed

if

they are not

to notice the tragically Stalinist character of current

political life.)

Some

countries are perennial objects of fantasy.

THE PHILOSOPHES HAD ATTRIBUTED

—the Hurons old Tahitian —but noble savage

Chinese

ideal virtues not only to a

of Voltaire and Rousseau, Diderot's wise

also to existing

non-European ("Eastern") peoples

such as Turks, Persians, and Chinese. The fantasies of succeeding generations of writers

were not so

easily disconfirmed.

The only

"ideal"

Questions of Travel

277

allowed by the Romantic poets was a thoroughly dead one:

civilization

the Greek.

Once

travel

was

itself

an anomalous

strue the self as essentially a traveler

true citizenship

is

—

The Romantics con-

activity.

a questing,

homeless

of a place that does not exist at

self

whose

or yet, or no

all,

longer exists; one consciously understood as an ideal, opposed to

something

real. It is

understood that the journey

To

destination, therefore, negotiable.

of

modern

consciousness, of a

On

out of longing or dismay.

travel

modern view of

this

is

unending, and the

becomes the very condition the world

view everyone

is,

—the acting

potentially, a trav-

eler.

The

new genre of travel writing: which from now on will rival the lit-

generalizing of travel results in a

the literature of disappointment,

erature of idealization. Europeans visited America, prospecting the possibilities of a

Europe

new, simpler

to appraise the

letters

cultivated

Americans journeyed to

Old World sources of civilizations

profess to be disappointed.

ropean

life;

From

the early nineteenth century on, Eu-

resound with the sentiment of being Europamiide, tired

make

of Europe. Travelers continue, in ever larger numbers, to exotic,

trips to

non- Western lands, which seem to answer to some of the old

where

stereotypes: that simpler society,

discontent (and lost.

—both often

One

its

civilization)

faith

is

of the recurrent themes of

modern

the idyllic

The nineteenth-century

life in,

say,

economy, for travelers generally

still

want the natives

always being

—the report on

is

the

a soci-

travelers are noting the inroads in

the South Seas

who would

is

travel narratives

depredations of the modern, the loss of the past ety's decline.

pure, nature pristine,

unknown. But paradise

made by

the

modern money-

never dream of living like the natives

to stay

wholesome,

rustic, sexy,

and

uncomfortable.

Another

characteristic

modern incitement

country worth seeing, and describing, place in

it.

is

to travel,

what makes

a

that a revolution has taken

That most unromantic and profound of

travel writers,

Alexis de Tocqueville, saw in America the vanguard of a radical

process soon to transform Europe as well, irrevocably destroying the past;

it

was

to

examine

that revolution, democracy, that Tocqueville

traveled about the United States. Trips to countries to see

how

they

SUSAN SONTAG

278

have been transformed by about the enactment of

modern

a revolution, a revolution

ideals,

Much

to

be

travel literature. In the twentieth century these are trips to spe-

homeland, revolution-in-general.

revolutions, seeking that ideal

cific

which claims

have been one of the great subjects of

of the literature of travel from the "West". to communist coun-

reads as a late variant of the old genre, in which visitors from cor-

tries

rupt, oversophisticated

world"

—now

Europe

a self- designated

"new

hail the healthy energies of a

"new man."

In this version of the ideal destination, "revolutionary" has replaced "primitive" but

still

retains

many

of the attributes of what was once un-

derstood as primitive. "I have seen the future and ously declared Lincoln Steffens after his early 1930s

—

visit to

works," notori-

it

the Soviet

Union

in the

perhaps the high point of identifying communism with

modernization. But as the Soviet model was discredited, and revolu-

became the

tion

siege,

it

past and

fate of struggling agrarian societies

seemed it is

.

.

what the

that .

more or

travelers really felt was: I

less

under

have seen the

moving.

Trips to those grievously poor countries are perceived as journeys

backward

in time: leaving affluent, doubt-stricken civilization for the

simplicities, pieties,

and materially spartan

ing of her visit to China in 1973, Barbara

coming from plications

a

it is

life

of an earlier age. Writ-

Wooten avowed: "To anyone

world which threatens to strangle

itself in its

the apparent simplicity of Chinese

irresistible appeal."

This reaction

is

life

own com-

which makes an

not just fantasy. Communist revo-

lutions tend not only to occur in peasant societies but, for

all

the en-

ergy devoted to bringing about a certain modernization, to preserve tenaciously

family least

omy

life

slow

much

that

is

and the central

down

—

in part

premodern

values,

and

its

countries of Central

them, such as old-fashioned

role of a literary culture;

due

and

to abort or at

to the intractable failures of the econ-

—the onset of the consumer

sive"

in

society,

with

its

affluence,

its

"permis-

degraded mass culture. Even the unfortunate

Europe (now paradigmatically relocated

"East"), though hardly

backward

societies

when

they

fell

in the

under Rus-

sian hegemony, are not exceptions to the rule of delayed advance into

the

modern which communism

of Europe before

World War

enforces;

II

and

still

visibly preserve

more

than do the countries of Western Eu-

Questions of Travel rope.

A good

279

deal of the favorable reaction of foreign visitors has been

precisely to this.

In almost

all

accounts of modern reflective

The

ject is alienation itself.

trip

may support

ous, or speculative view of the world.

overcoming alienation ties

—found

in

which

from bourgeois

become common with

One

to

Egypt

in

1

liber-

own. In an-

the enlarging possibilities of

affluent traveler,

on vacation advantage

celebrated nineteenth-century

the trip that Flaubert, in the

Camp, made

—or

restraints, explores the "picturesque," takes

of unlimited sexual opportunities. is

an exercise in

is

travelers celebrate virtues

non-European countries, the

example

a skeptical, acutely sensu-

the trip

in a distant society that are lacking in their

other trip that has travel to

Or

master sub-

travel, the

company of Maxime Du homo-

850-1 851. (In the twentieth century,

sexual writers have been specialists in this kind of libertine travel to colonies

and ex-colonies.) In the

picturesque

is

countries as old-fashioned sexuality

The

is

now

is

what

perceived in communist

is

the sexual decorousness.

itself as a

kingdom of

tors accepted the theft,

Though fying trip

solemn assurances of

virtue,

debauch

made

their

who

visi-

Chinese hosts that there in China.

the opposite of the high-minded, edi-

poor country

to a

latter trip often inspires similar

pathetic visitors

is

visitors

many Western

no homosexuality, and no premarital sex

travel for

and

a revolutionary society re-

has been thus transformed. In the early 1970s

was no

Untrammeled

associated not with the primitive but with decadence.

revolution represents

have been ready to believe that behavior in ally

another kind of

trip to the revolution,

in evidence. Part of

in the throes of a revolution, the

condescensions and detachments. Sym-

cannot even imagine the local hardships often

have a high standard of revolutionary consciousness, and when, for example, the ghastly rigors and lethal zealotry of Chinese the time of the Cultural Revolution were the mid-1970s, first-time visitors were

communism

somewhat abated,

known

in

starting in

to commiserate with each

other that they had missed the really good period,

when

the natives

were pure, pious, uncorrupted by consumerism.

Many as in

of the earlier travelers to the capitals of the revolution were,

an old-fashioned literary journey, going to an exotic land in order

to return

home and

write about

it.

Travelers to these countries were

SUSAN SONTAG

280

conscious of traversing a formidable barrier. (Beyond the Great Wall.

Behind the Iron Curtain.) They came

what they

actually

gram

is

that

laid

to write about an exotic country;

wrote about was their

out for privileged

itinerary, the

visitors.

of these books was the record of the

strenuous pro-

Indeed, the

common form

China Day by Day, the

trip, as in

notably ingenuous account Simone de Beauvoir wrote of her trip to

China

in 195

5.

By the

early 1970s, with an increasing

volume of travel

to

China, travelers were reporting not only similar trips but identical

same tea-growing commune near Hangchow, the same

ones: the

cle factory in

borhood

bicy-

Shanghai, the same "lane committee" in a Peking neigh-

—the sameness of the

trip

having not deterred a large number

of them from coming back and writing virtually the same book. Isolated, secretive, besieged

—

communist countries have elabo-

all

procedures for receiving foreign

rate

putting

pampering them while

visitors,

them through some well-chosen

paces, then dispatching

them

back, laden with trinkets and books, to the outside world. Like the

most modern which the

tourist venture in

any remote land, the experience

traveler to the revolution

nies enigma. Mystery, risk

is

enrolled eliminates

and unpleasantness,

ingredients of travel to remote lands.

all risk,

in

de-

isolation are traditional

Even the most independent lone

observer needs help in deciphering an exotic country. Such an observer

may

take on a native cicerone,

terlocutor for part of the trip

about his travels

ers,

observer friend.

is

in

—

will

be the

traveler's principal in-

as in V. S. Naipaul's

Among

Group

travel to a

communist revolution

These are

trips

the country seem intelligible.

have been

easily

is

designed to produce

organized by travel

And many

visitors to

officials to

persuaded to consider the aspirations and needs

when

they

too similar, and institutions and practices to be comparable to

all

our own, which are

The voyage ardous travel

make

communist coun-

of their inhabitants to be fundamentally different from ours, are

the Believ-

revolution-convulsed Islam. But the lone

unlikely to take at face value the attitudes of this native

a different result.

tries

who

to

in fact radically different.

be made to new worlds used to be arduous, haz-

— so arduous

books were

That eventually

that travelers often skipped

it.

Many

authors of

fireside travelers, plagiarizing earlier travel accounts.

travel to exotic places

became

altogether

common, and

Questions of Travel

more and more organized, has made the old kind of ally obsolete:

people do take the

period there are probably

tend to deceive,

hoax

trips they write about. In the

many fewer

many more

travel

travel

virtu-

modern

books that consciously

which the author

in

281

deceived.

is

in-

The

No

chances of being caught out, of course, have also mounted.

Natchez squaw arrived

in Paris at the

end of the eighteenth century

to

explain what Chateaubriand hadn't seen or had misinterpreted in the

course of his enthusiastic (and, in part, faked) travels to America in 1

79 1. But

someone

years in the

Gulag and was

Siberia that both early 1940s

—her name

a

few years

oners

felt

—who served eleven

a prisoner in that slave labor

Henry Wallace and Owen Lattimore

and pronounced

Hudson Bay Company and up

Eleanor Lipper

is

a

model workplace

(a

visited in the

cross

between the

and wrote about the rage and contempt the

later,

in

the Tennessee Valley Authority) did turn pris-

for their visitors.

THE ACCOUNTS OF TRAVEL

to exotic countries in the nineteenth

century suppressed the servants, often a whole retinue,

nied the venturesome traveler.

The modern

who

accomplished. The sort of person

communist country

And

this usually

(that

is,

is,

more

traveler touring the revo-

writes a

member

a

a trip

book about

often than not, the sort

means being

who accompa-

group with which such

lution tended to suppress the

being

camp

of a tour

was

travel to a

who

gets invited.

— an

educational

propaganda) tour sponsored and often paid for by the country

visited.

As

in all tours,

one may not know some or even any of

whom one is packaged. The group may be my first trip to North Vietnam, in April 1968)

the other people with small as three (as

on

five (as

when

group

joined to go to China in 1979).

I

I

as

or

went to Poland, in April 1980) or eight (the size of the

Groups of forty

students; the eminent rarely travel in groups of

in general

more than

five

mean

or

six;

those considered top-drawer celebrities will be invited to travel with a

spouse or companion. And,

one

will

ad hoc

be surprised to learn that

—

resents

if it is

is

called a "delegation."

nobody back home,

a first trip to a

this

group

communist country,

—however

small,

however

You may protest that your group repmember speaks only for herself

that each

SUSAN SONTAG

282

or himself, but your smiling hosts will keep on referring to "your delegation."

The custom

for

is

hotel mid-journey to

be instructed

those taking part in the trip to rendezvous in a

all

on the way

ground

in the

"chairman" (sometimes duty

it

will

be

to

table at banquets

rules of delegation travel,

a vice

respond to

day before entering the country,

"in," the

chairman

and lead off the

to elect a

as well) for the trip,

speeches and to

official

and

sit

whose

the head

at

(Some delegations choose

toasts.

to

rotate the chairmanship for different segments of the trip, to share the

Wherever you go

—

pompousness and the

fun.)

where they meet your

train; in factories; in schools; at the Writers'

Union

—your delegation

is

at

railway stations,

meeting the representatives of their organi-

zation.

No

invitation without an inviting

without a program. Led from

—host—organization;

museums

to

no

travel

model kindergartens

to the

birthplace of the country's most famous composer or poet,

and given

tea

and phony

statistics

by

dignitaries in factories

welcomed and com-

munes, shepherded from oversized meal to oversized meal, with time off for will

shopping sprees

complete the

in stores reserved for foreigners, the travelers

tightly

scheduled

trip

having talked with hardly any-

one except each other and the only natives they spend time with, upon

whom

they will base

many

guides assigned to the delegation. These

from

a

companions

thrilling job that puts

contact with foreigners), and scared (they

an indiscretion) charges.

One

—hover

is

— apart

and

fuss,

at

know

late at night, they will

and the

tourist's role

the price of a misstep,

is,

visitors' reactions,

characteristically, a

to arrange tickets

The

visitor has only to express a

cursion or entertainment, and

and

be writing reports on the

planning

activities to

come.

greedy one. But a delegation

tour of a communist country tenders an explicit invitation to be greedy.

in

the constant disposal of their

During an after-lunch break, they have

day's activities

them

always busy, accompanied by them. They are even

accommodations; up

The

official

few head hacks, they are often young, warmhearted, eager (they

have worked hard to get the coveted,

busier.

amiable

a generalization: the inveterately

selfish,

wish for some unscheduled ex-

more phone

calls are

made

to the

people

— Questions of Travel

working behind the scenes

on the

to conjure

up the necessary

283

guide

tickets, a

spot, another limousine.

Educational travel

by definition privileged

is

One model

round-trip ticket.

travel

—

travel

on

a

of travel to foreign countries for the sake

of education was the eighteenth-century

Grand

Tour, in which a young

gentleman, accompanied by his often ill-born and usually underpaid tutor,

his

to a variety of customs, places, treasures adjacent to

own. Although these

often

be

was exposed

no more than

a rake's progress, their educational point

The graduate of

altogether nullified.

home contaminated

in

some sense by

experienced that there are

one beginning of true

travel

designed to

is

contaminating.

and

and cultural distance,

traveler will see has for

—which

communist

its

revolution's benefits, as illustrated

is

tours or field trips, the

reinforced by the mandarevolution

theme the country's progress, the

by an array of elementary perforvisitors are

taken in order to

many who

admire. But few visitors from very rich countries, including left,

is

countries,

The Disneyland of

mances, economic and cultural, to which

their first trip to a

had

sure the visitor does not encounter anything

tory luxuriousness of delegation travel.

identify with the

return

civility.

offered to visitors to

make

could not

Grand Tour did

for being civilized

The precondition of such

visitor's intellectual

which the

the

the foreign. At the least he

many models

civilization,

Grand Tour

In the

through the Continent were

leisurely travels

are able to evaluate these performances. If

communist country,

it is

probably the

first

on

time most

of them will have been in a truck factory, on a breeding ranch, in a

paper

mill.

Most

visitors will

know

nothing about communism, about

the country they are visiting (often they have not even taken the time to

study a

map and seem unaware

about peasant

life

and major

of the most salient facts of

its

history),

industrial procedures.

So-called fellow travelers, whether informed or ignorant, are not

the best participants in a delegation

communist countries have learned this

is

clearest

in

trip.

Indeed, travel

to distrust

Western

leftists

and

Richard Nixon's favorite foreign vacation spot,

Ronald Reagan's "so-called communist China" travelers

officials in

untouched by

—prefer

radical sentiments: better a

to entertain

chairman of the

284

SUSAN SONTAG

board than

a leftist assistant professor of history.

depart with a

much more

they had before their contains

many

Such

travelers tend to

favorable impression of the country than

trip, partly

on the

basis of their discovery that

friendly, attractive people, that the exotic streets

human beings "just like us." What had they imagined before

it

swarm

with

they came? [1984]

The

Idea of Europe

(One More

Europe? What dollars

—

it

What Europe means doesn't mean: the

the so-called, would-be

to

Elegy)

me?

Europe of Euro-business, Euro-

European "community"

posed to help the individual countries of

capitalist

that

is

sup-

Western Europe "to

stand up to the bracing economic challenges of the late 20th century" (I

quote from today's Herald Tribune, America's world newspaper);

the Euro-kitsch acclaimed as art and literature in these countries;

and Euro-exhibitions and Euro-journalism and Euro-

Euro-festivals television.

But that Europe

is

the polyphonic culture within

and

whose

and think and grow

feel

standards

I

America far

inexorably reshaping the Europe

align is

my

restless,

and to whose

not, of course, totally disjunct

And

best,

I

I love,

create

humbling

own.

more unlike Europe (more

to think.

some of them,

traditions,

from Europe, though

it is

many Europeans

like

"barbaric") than

although, like the majority of

smaller majority than before,

I

am

my

compatriots,

of European descent

—

if

a

specifically

of European-Jewish descent (my great-grandparents immigrated to the northeastern part of the United States a century ago from what are

now Poland and

Lithuania)

—

I

don't often think of what

Europe

285

— SUSAN SONTAG

286

means

me

to

as

an American.

as a citizen of literature If I

would

I

think of what

—which

is

it

means

to

me

as a writer,

an international citizenship.

must describe what Europe means

to

me

as

an American,

with liberation. Liberation from what passes in America

start

for a culture.

The

move

Euro-

diversity, seriousness, fastidiousness, density of

pean culture constitute an Archimedean point from which mentally,

I

the world.

I

I

can,

cannot do that from America, from what

American culture

gives me, as a collection of standards, as a legacy.

Hence Europe

essential to

though

To be sity,

my

all

that

sure,

me, more essential than America,

Europe means

a

reality,

make me an

good deal more than

stupendous nourishment

Both an old nial,

is

sojourns in Europe do not

.

.

.

al-

expatriate.

that ideal diver-

those pleasures, those standards.

since at least the Latin

Middle Ages, and

often hypocritical, aspiration, "Europe" as a

for political unification has invariably

modern

a peren-

rallying cry

promoted the suppression and

erasure of cultural differences, and the concentration and augmentation of state power.

It is

chastening to recall that not only Napoleon

but also Hitler proclaimed a pan-European

aganda

ideal.

Much

of Nazi prop-

France during the Occupation was devoted to portraying

in

Hitler as Europe's savior from Bolshevism, from the Russian or "Asiatic" hordes.

The

idea of

Europe has often been associated with the

defense of "civilization" against alien populations. Usually, to defend civilization

meant

to

extend the military power and business interests

of a single European country which was competing for

power and

wealth with other European countries. Besides meaning something that could indeed ther),

be called

civilization (for this

must not be denied,

ei-

"Europe" meant an idea of the moral Tightness of the hegemony

of certain European countries over large parts of what

is

not Europe.

Seeking to convince non-Jews of the desirability of a Jewish state in Palestine,

Theodor Herzl declared

fortified wall against Asia,

ing the barbarians."

and

I cite this

that

fulfill

"we

shall

form part of Europe's

the role of cultural vanguard fac-

sentence from Herzl's ]udenstaat not to

inveigh (along with everyone else these days) against Israel in particular

but to underline the fact that virtually every act of colonization in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries by a European people was justified as

an extension of the moral boundaries of "civilization"

The Idea of Europe (One More considered identical with European civilization

—and

Elegy)

a rolling

287

back of

the tides of barbarism.

For tions,

a

long time the very idea of "universal" values, of world institu-

was

itself

Eurocentric. There

once, Eurocentric. That the a

title

Zweig gave

that Stefan

memoir,

his last

Europe

preeminent good European was forced to that

was (need

it

how many The ity is in

this

flee a tri-

entirely generated

from

think that the notion of Eufirst

by imperialism and

and then by the imperatives of multi-national capitalism. In has not. (Nor

it

is

form of

ago after

Europe, to

flee

rope would have been thoroughly discredited,

fact,

in the

a century

be said?)

One might

within, in the heart of Europe.

racism,

Europe

to his lament for

book, written almost half

umphant barbarism

which the world was,

a sense in

is

"the world of yesterday," which

is

is

the idea of civilization unusable

colonialist atrocities are

place where the idea of

committed

in

Europe has the

its

—no matter

name.)

greatest cultural vivac-

the central and eastern parts of the continent, where citizens of

countries in the other empire struggle for

Adam

ifestos

by

Danilo

Kis.

For

some

I refer,

of

Europe opened by Milan Kundera's

course, to the debate over Central influential essay of

some autonomy.

and continued with essays and man-

years ago,

Zagajewski, Vaclav Havel, Georgy Konrad, and

a Pole, a

Czech, a Hungarian, a Yugoslav (even, for

other reasons, for an Austrian or a German), the idea of Europe has an

The

obvious, subversive authority.

ultimate value of the cultural, and

eventually political, counter-hypothesis of the existence of Central Eu-

rope

— and, by extension, of Europe—

tlement, a settlement that that holds as they

And

I

all

meet

mean

our in

is

to urge a

would erode the

lives hostage.

I

set-

superpowers

To have the edges of the two empires,

Europe, be porous would be

everyone, which

European peace

rivalry of the

in everyone's interest.

shall define arbitrarily as all those

who

think that their great-grandchildren should be allowed to have great-

grandchildren. "As long as

Budapest for an evening

it is

impossible to go over to Vienna from

at the

opera without special permission,"

Konrad has observed, "we cannot be

Do we

said to live in a state of peace."

have anything comparable to the Central Europeans'

ro-

mantic project of a Europe of small nations, able to communicate freely

with one another and pool their experience, their immense civic

SUSAN SONTAG

288

maturity and cultural depth, which have been acquired

much

suffering

and privation? For

who

us,

at

the cost of so

can hop from continent to

continent without securing permission from anyone for a night opera, could

Europe mean anything of

that value?

rope rendered obsolete by our prosperity, our

And

the idea

itself,

beyond

for us, spoiled

In one respect, our two experiences to the very real loss of

empire.

The new

Europe

is

stifling

power and

Russian occupiers.

the ideal Eu-

our selfishness?

repair?

seem comparable, perhaps due sides of the divide of

rest of the

world but of Europe.

Poles and Hungarians and Czechs, "Europe"

slogan for limiting the

the

not of extension but of retrench-

ment: the Europeanization not of the

Among

is

liberty,

European power on both

idea of

Or

at

Make Europe

where we cannot complain of being cut

.

.

a not-so-subtle

is

hegemony of

cultural .

off

the cloddish,

European. In rich Europe,

from one another, there

is

another anguish. Not about making Europe European but about keeping

it

European.

Clearly, a losing battle.

While the highly educated

populations of central Europe are suffering from preposterous tion

and rationing of

flicted

Europe

cultural contacts, those of western

isola-

are af-

with incessant and isolating admixtures of cultural practice.

There are Sikh

taxi drivers in Frankfurt

ian doctors in hospitals in Naples,

and mosques

Rome, and Turin

in Marseille. Ital-

are performing

oridectomies on the pubescent daughters of African immigrants, request of their parents.

Europe

are going to

the Central

The only

be the poor ones,

European countries

years of Moscow-directed

like

that have

homogeneous

at

the

countries in

Portugal and Greece, plus

been impoverished by

forty

economic planning. The unremitting

fluxes of foreigners into the rich ity

relatively

clit-

European countries have the

in-

possibil-

of turning the slogan "Europe" nasty once more.

Europe, an exercise to write

in nostalgia? Loyalty to

by hand when everyone

is

It

like

continuing

using a typewriter? (More aptly: like

continuing to write on a typewriter processor?)

Europe

when everyone

is

using a

word

seems worth noting that the countries where an idea of

Europe one can take

seriously does flourish are those

whose

inflexible,

fearful, militarized systems of governance and dismal economies

them considerably

less

modern,

homogeneous than the western

less

make

prosperous, and more ethnically

part of the continent.

A modern

Eu-

The Idea of Europe (One More rope a

—often mistakenly

good deal

less

Europe

—

certainly

is

European. Some experience of Japan over the

decade has shown can.

called an "Americanized"

289

Elegy)

me

"modern"

that the

is

last

not equivalent to Ameri-

(Equating modernization with Americanization and vice versa

may be

liberating

logic,

States,

The modern has

the ultimate Eurocentric prejudice.)

no

and immensely

destructive,

by which the United

than Japan and the rich European countries,

less

own

its

being

is

transformed. Meanwhile, the center has shifted. (But the center

is al-

ways being destroyed or modified by the periphery.) Los Angeles has

become

the eastern capital of Asia, and a Japanese industrialist,

recently describing his plans to put

cultural

and

political

geography, and

ingly destructive of the past.

land, nation-sized

natives will

a factory in the

long been obsolete art

The

it

be

will

United States

—everyone

is

and

Europe

is

a tourist).

Europe the

What

a

in

new

increasis

as instant playback,

as avidly as tourists (in

and

syncretistic,

future of mainstream

theme parks, Europe

consume

rope of high

up

meant not Massachusetts but Oregon. There

the "northeast,"

when

Euro-

which

distinction has

remains of the Eu-

ethical seriousness, of the values of privacy

and

inwardness and an unamplified, non-machine-made discourse: the Eu-

rope that makes possible the films of Krzysztof Zanussi and the prose of

Thomas Bernhard and

the poetry of

of Arvo Part? That Europe time.

But

izens

and adherents

it

will

occupy

still

less territory.

will

Seamus Heaney and the music

exists, will

And

continue to exist for some

increasing

numbers of its

understand themselves as emigres,

exiles,

cit-

and

foreigners.

What

then will happen to one's European roots, the real ones and

the spiritual ones?

I

can think of no more consoling response to that

question than one given by an American expatriate writer

once asked

if,

who was

having spent forty years living in France, she was not

worried about losing her American roots. Said Gertrude Stein, her an-

swer perhaps even more Jewish than American: "But what good are roots

if

you

can't take

them with you?" [1988]

The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus andThisbe

(an interlude)

Wall: Thus have

And

I,

Wall,

my

part discharged so;

being done, thus Wall away doth go.

—A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act

Thisbe:

Thisbe:

I

Pyramus:

It

separated us.

We

We

apart.

it.

there

How

kiss.)

But I'm talking about what

I

often have

didn't say.

I

reassured you.

With every sentence

Pyramus: "And the wall ..." Thisbe: Example: What's playing

Pyramus: "And

It's

the Arsenal tonight?

terrible for the

Pyramus: "And the wall ..." Thisbe: Exactly.

at

the wall ..."

Thisbe: Example:

I

was another, unspoken half sentence, "And the

wall ..." Example: I'm going to the Paris Bar.

290

grew

thought you were thinking about me.

Thisbe: Ninny! (Gives him a

uttered,

i

yearned for each other.

was always thinking about I

Scene

not here anymore.

It's

Pyramus:

V,

Turks

in

Kreuzberg.

The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe Pyramus: Thisbe:

It

was

a tragedy. Will

be

it

a

291

comedy now?

We won't become normal, will we?

mean we can do whatever we want? Thisbe: I'm starting to feel a little nostalgic. Oh, the human Pyramus: Does

this

heart

is

a

always be yours.

I

fickle thing.

Pyramus: Thisbe! Thisbe: Not about you, beloved! You

mean;

you'll

be mine. But of course

thinking about

.

.

you know.

.

I

know

I'll

that's the

miss

it

a

same,

No, I'm

isn't it?

little.

Pyramus: Thisbe! Thisbe: Just a

(Sees

little.

Pyramus frowning.) Smile,

darling.

Oh, you

people are so serious!

Pyramus:

I've suffered.

Thisbe: So have

in

I,

ways easy here,

Pyramus: Thisbe:

my way. Not

like you, of course.

But

it

wasn't

al-

either.

Let's not quarrel.

We

What an

quarrel? Never! [Sound of wall-peckers) Listen!

amazing sound!

Pyramus:

I

wish I'd brought

my

tape recorder.

a Sony.

It's

Thisbe: I'm glad you can buy whatever you want now.

didn't realize

I

you were so poor.

Pyramus:

It

was awful. But, you know,

Thisbe: You see? Even you can

me

it

feel regret.

was good

my

for

An American

last year, You'll miss this wall. (She spies

character.

artist

warned

some wall-peckers

spraying their hoard of pieces of the wall with paint.) They're im-

proving

Pyramus:

it.

Let's not

be

nostalgic.

Thisbe: But you agree there's something to be said for

it.

It

made

us

different.

Pyramus: We'll Thisbe:

I

still

be

different.

don't know. So

Pedestrians don't wait

many at

cars.

So much

trash.

corners for the green

light.

The

beggars.

Cars parked

on the sidewalk. Enter the Spirit of Spirit:

O

city,

independent

I

New York.

recognize you. Your leather bars, your festivals of films,

your teeming dark-skinned foreigners, your

—

—

——

SUSAN SONTAG

292

Deco

predators, your Art

real-estate

Mediterranean restaurants, your

shops, your racism, your

littered streets,

your rude mechan-

icals

Thisbe: No! Begone! This

is

the Berkeley of Central Europe.

Your Berkeley: an

Spirit: Central Europe: a dream.

be the

will

New York

postponed for Spirit of

this city

still

sure,

of Europe

—

it

let's

shabby

stays

it

be

so.

Only

New

York

isn't

as well as full of

unwel-

be too hopeful.

be hopeful. We'll be

rich. It's

only money.

to like that.

Thisbe: We're not getting anything

we

don't deserve. We're together.

free.

Pyramus: Everything Thisbe:

to

won't be

provided

Pyramus: And power. I'm going

We're

was ever meant

won't be too bad. Since

foreigners. (Sighs.) Let's not

Thisbe: Oh,

it

sixty years.

vanishes.

suppose

I

Pyramus: Sure,

come

mere

New York

Thisbe: Well, America,

a

interlude. This

No

is

going too

fast.

And

costing too

one can make us do what we don't want

much.

as long as we're

together.

Pyramus: I'm having

we

are.

Thisbe:

I

a

hard time thinking of those

But sometimes we'll remember, won't we.

want

to forget these old stories.

Pyramus: History

is

homesickness.

Thisbe: Cheer up, darling. The world

And

fortunate than

less

we'll always

Pyramus: Goethe

be on the good

is

side.

divided into

From now

Old and New.

on.

said

Thisbe: Oh, not Goethe.

Pyramus: You're

right.

Thisbe: In Walter Benjamin's

last

Pyramus: Not Benjamin,

either!

Thisbe: Right. (They fall

silent for a while.) Let's stroll.

They see a procession of vendors, including some Russian coming across an empty field.

Pyramus: And Thisbe:

What

to think that

was no-man's-land.

are they selling?

Pyk \mus: Everything. Everything

is

for sale.

soldiers,

The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe Thisbe:

Do

say

it's

better. Please!

Pyramus: Of course Thisbe: Then

293

it's

better.

We

don't have to die.

go on celebrating. Have some champagne. Have

let's

a

River Cola.

They

drink.

Pyramus: Freedom

at last.

Thisbe: But don't toss your can on the ground.

Pyramus: What do you take Thisbe: Sorry.

It's

just that

me

—I'm

for? sorry. Yes,

freedom.

Curtain. [

I

99 I 1

.

Answers to

MAY 1997

IN

a Questionnaire

the French literary magazine La Regie du

edited by Philippe Sollers, conducted

Jeu,

survey about intellectuals and their role."

on the

list

of respondents to

whom

I

"an international

was the

sole

American

they sent the following six ques-

tions:

1

What

does the word intellectual

see yourself as an intellectual or

2.

Who

are the intellectual figures

profound way and 3.

do you

What

is

still

mean

to

you today?

reject this

who have

Do

you

term? inspired you in a

have influence over your thoughts?

the role of intellectuals at the end of the

tury? Is their mission completed or

do you think

XXth

that they

still

cen-

have

an important task in the world? 4.

Much

has been said about the mistakes of intellectuals, their

blindness and their irresponsibility. accusations?

think about these

you agree or would you challenge the criticism?

in

your view, are the major obstacles for intellectuals

your country

—the indifference of the media, the chaos of opin-

j.

in

What,

Do

What do you

ions, political repression, or

294

what?

Answers to

What do you

6.

Questionnaire

a

295

consider the most urgent tasks, the most dan-

gerous prejudices, the most important causes, the biggest

and the greatest

perils,

intellectual joys of today?

This provoked nine answers to some of the questions asked and

(I

thought) implied.

WHAT THE WORD

intellectual

means

to

me

today

is, first

of

all,

conferences and roundtable discussions and symposia in magazines

about the role of intellectuals

in

which well-known

intellectuals

have

agreed to pronounce on the inadequacy, credulity, disgrace, treason, relevance, obsolescence,

ir-

and imminent or already perfected disappear-

ance of the caste to which, as their participation in these events testifies,

they belong.

WHETHER

SEE myself

I

self as possible) is

one

as

beside the point.

BEING A CITIZEN

I

(I

try to

answer

of a country

tuals (reread Tocqueville), the

anti-intellectual tradition

my-

so called.

political

and

and contempt

ethical cul-

for intellec-

country which has the most developed planet, I incline to a less jaded view of

my

colleagues in Europe. No, their "mis-

sion" (as your question has it's

as little seeing of

on the

the role of intellectuals than

Of course,

if

whose

ture promotes and reinforces distrust, fear,

do

speaking

it) is

not completed.

much

too well of intellectuals to expect the

majority to have a taste for protesting against injustice, defending victims, challenging the reigning authoritarian pieties.

are as conformist

wars

—

as

—

as willing, say, to

Most

intellectuals

support the prosecution of unjust

most other people exercising educated professions. The num-

SUSAN SONTAG

296

who have

ber of people

given intellectuals a good name, as trouble-

makers, voices of conscience, has always been small. Intellectuals

re-

sponsibly taking sides, and putting themselves on the line for what they believe in (as

mon

opposed

to signing petitions), are a

good deal

less

com-

than intellectuals taking public positions either in conscious bad

faith or in

shameless ignorance of what they are pronouncing on: for

every Andre Gide or George Orwell or Norberto Bobbio or Andrei

Sakharov or

Adam

Michnik, ten of Romain Rolland or Ilya Ehrenburg

or Jean Baudrillard or Peter Handke, et cetera, et cetera.

But could

it

be otherwise?

4

ALTHOUGH INTELLECTUALS COME ing the nationalist and the religious, secular,

tual"

his or

me

all

flavors, includ-

confess to being partial to the

cosmopolitan, anti-tribal variety.

seems to

By

I

in

The "deracinated

intellec-

an exemplary formula.

mean

intellectual I

the "free" intellectual,

her professional or technical or

someone who, beyond

artistic expertise, is

exercising (and thereby, implicitly, defending) the

life

committed

to

mind

as

of the

such.

A

specialist

just a specialist.

may

One

also is

be an

intellectual.

and

responsibility in discourse.

one indispensable contribution of is

intellectual

is

never

an intellectual because one has (or should have)

certain standards of probity

that

But an

That

is

the

notion of discourse

intellectuals: the

not merely instrumental, conformist.

5

HOW many

TIMES

has one heard in the

lectuals are obsolete, or that so-and-so

is

last

decides that

intel-

"the last intellectual"?

THERE ARE TWO TASKS for intellectuals, today as yesterday. One task, educational, is to promote dialogue, support the right

Answers to

a

Questionnaire

297

of a multiplicity of voices to be heard, strengthen skepticism about re-

ceived opinion. This tion

and culture

means standing up

to those

whose idea of educa-

the imprinting of ideas ("ideals") such as the love of

is

the nation or tribe.

The other

task

moral attitudes Its

hallmark

is

tion

is

to

is

adversarial.

There has been

two decades

the discrediting of

high standards of

Thatcherism

is

in the last

all

all

a

advanced

in

daunting

of

shift

capitalist countries.

idealisms, of altruism

kinds, cultural as well as moral.

itself;

of

The ideology

of

gaining everywhere, and the mass media,

whose func-

promote consumption, disseminate the narratives and ideas

of value and disvalue by which people everywhere understand them-

have the Sisyphean task of continuing to embody

selves. Intellectuals

(and defend) a standard of mental nihilistic

life,

and of discourse, other than the

one promoted by the mass media. By nihilism

the relativism, the privatization of interest, which the educated classes everywhere, but also the pernicious, nihilism

embodied

is

more

I

mean not only

ascendant recent,

among

and more

in the ideology of so-called cultural

democracy; the hatred of excellence, achievement

as "elitist," exclu-

sionary.

THE MORAL DUTY because there

is

of the intellectual will always be complex

more than one

circumstances in which not

honored

—

"highest" value, and there are concrete

all

that

is

unconditionally good can be

two of these values may prove incom-

in which, indeed,

patible.

For instance, understanding the truth does not always struggle for justice.

And

in

order to bring about

justice,

facilitate

the

may seem

it

right to suppress the truth.

One hopes truth

and

not to have to choose. But

justice) is necessary

that an intellectual

This

is

not,

intellectuals,

causes,

it is

—

as, alas, it

sometimes

ought to decide for the

by and

large,

what

when

a choice is

—

it

(between

seems to

me

truth.

intellectuals, the best-intentioned

have done. Invariably, when intellectuals subscribe to

the truth, in

all its

complexity, which gets short

shrift.

298

SUSAN SONTAG

8

A

GOOD

RULE BEFORE one

goes marching or signing anything:

Whatever your tug of sympathy, you have no

right to a public opin-

ion unless you've been there, experienced firsthand and on the ground

and for some considerable time the country, war,

injustice, whatever,

you are talking about. In the absence of such firsthand

ON THE SUBJECT of so

many

intellectuals

tive actions that

nobody

said

it

knowledge and experience:

of the presumption

who

—

it's

silence.

worse than naivete

take public positions and endorse collec-

concern countries they

better than one of the

know

virtually

nothing about,

most compromised

of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht (who surely

intellectuals

knew whereof he

spoke):

\\

nen

it

comes

to

That their enemy

The Is

marching many do not know is

marching

head.

voice which gives them their orders

the enemy's voice and

The man who speaks Is

at their

the

enemy

of the

enemy

himself.

[*99l]

Waiting for Godot Sarajevo

in

Nothing to be done.

/ Nista

— opening

WENT TO I

ne moze da se

line of

uradi.

Waiting for Godot

Sarajevo in mid-July 1993 to stage a production of

Waiting for Godot not so

rect Beckett's play (although

I

much because

in April,

tered city and what

But

friends.

I

tremble with versations,

would be

No

it

it

month

reason to return to Sarajevo and stay for a

two weeks there

I'd always

had) as because

gave

or more.

stands for;

some of

I

its

citizens is,

had become

meet and

lose weight. If I

lies

it

and do something.

the news to the outside world.

reporting the

visit,

went back,

longer can a writer consider that the imperative task

journalists (most of

had spent

brave, feel depressed, have heartbreaking con-

grow ever more indignant,

to pitch in

to di-

a practical

and had come to care intensely about the bat-

couldn't again be just a witness: that fear, feel

wanted

me

them

The news

is

out.

Many

is

to bring

excellent foreign

in favor of intervention, as I

am) have been

and the slaughter since the beginning of the

siege,

while the decision of the western European powers and the United States not to intervene remains firm, thereby giving the victory to Serb

fascism.

I

was not under the

illusion that

going to Sarajevo to direct a

299

SUSAN SONTAG

300

play a

would make me

useful in the

water systems engineer.

would be

It

the only one of the three things the theatre that

—which

way

I

do

met

who had

Pasovic,

left

a

if I

make

write,

war

doctor or

a

But

and

films,

there.

young Sarajevo-born theatre

director, Haris

made

the city after he finished school and

When

went abroad, but

1992, Pasovic

in April

was

it

direct in

exist only in Sarajevo,

considerable reputation working mainly in Serbia. started the

were

a small contribution.

—

something that would

yields

would be made and consumed

In April I'd

could be

I

his

the Serbs in the fall,

while working on a spectacle called Sarajevo in Antwerp, he decided that

he could no longer remain

managed

to crawl

back past

the freezing, besieged

city.

UN

tors;

he'd put

it

me

at

coming back

More than Before

I

Grad

(City), a

drawn from

texts

by Con-

interested,

in a I

One

me

flect:

in

I

let

me

people find

it

of

me

me

was

if I

And bravado

A

S

K

E

D since

actors, I've

I

ss

suggested

taken longer to

re-

and about, Sarajevo.

my

come on

return from Sarajevo to

if I

understand that many

at all in

the besieged

In fact, of the five theatres in Sarajevo before the war, two are

Chamber Theatre

I

to direct. Beckett's play, writ-

surprising that theatre goes

radically, in use:

Drama)

think for a while about what

ten over forty years ago, seems written for,

worked with professional

Academy

might not have seen had

there was one obvious play for

having OFTEN BEEN

far

his

told him.

could add, "But

an instant what

ac-

to direct a play.

might want to do," he went on, "What play?" to

dozen

which one of

day Pasovic asked

few months

a

he was preparing a

Alcestis, after

the still-functioning

directing Sophocles' Ajax.

into

to see his

Now

together in eight days.

students (Pasovic teaches

interested in

the end of the year

Zbigniew Herbert, and Sylvia Plath, using

more ambitious production, Euripides' would be

at

and under Serb gunfire

patrols

Pasovic invited

collage, with music, of declamations, partly

stantine Cavafy,

and

in safe exile,

(Kamerni Teater

55),

still,

city.

spo-

where

in

April I'd seen a charmless production of Hair as well as Pasovics

Grad, and the Youth Theatre (Pozoriste Mladih), where stage Godot. These are both small houses.

The

I

decided to

large house, closed

Waiting for Godot since the beginning of the war,

Sarajevo

in

301

the National Theatre, which pre-

is

sented opera and the Sarajevo Ballet as well as plays. In front of the

handsome ochre building a poster

still

from

announcing

early April 1992

soon

ballet dancers left the city

them

damaged by

shelling), there

new production

a

is

of

which never opened. Most of the singers and musicians and

Rigoletto,

for

(only lightly

to find

after the Serbs attacked,

work abroad, while many of

it

being easier

the actors stayed, and

want nothing more than to work. Another question I'm often asked of Waiting for Godot?

Who

indeed

go to see Waiting for Godot today's shattered city

once an extremely tural life

if

and

who would

it

hard to grasp that Sarajevo was

attractive provincial capital, with a cul-

comparable to that of other middle-sized old European

that includes an audience for theatre.

theatre in Sarajevo

was

As elsewhere

live in Sarajevo, so

difference

maimed by

is

in Central

largely repertory: masterpieces

and the most admired twentieth -century still

goes to see a production

not the same people

there were not a siege on? Images of

must make

lively

who

is:

if

do members of

that actors

the theatre; but then, that can

mortar

happen

Europe,

from the past

plays. Just as talented actors this cultivated

and spectators

a sniper's bullet or a

cities;

The

can be murdered or

alike

shell

audience.

on

their

way

to

and from

to people in Sarajevo in their

ing rooms, while they sleep in their bedrooms,

when

liv-

they fetch some-

thing from their kitchens, as they go out their front doors.

BUT isn't this play ing, wasn't

it

rather pessimistic? I've been asked.

pretentious or insensitive to stage Godot there? tion of despair

were redundant when people

what people want Couple.

those

to see in such a situation

The condescending,

who

ask

it

really care

what everyone wants

from

their

own

reality.

than a few people

who

is

all

what

—

as if the representa-

would

be, say,

makes me

it's

The Odd

realize that

like in Sarajevo

about literature and theatre.

It's

now,

not true

entertainment that offers them an escape

In Sarajevo, as anywhere else, there are feel

it

really are in despair; as if

philistine question

don't understand at

any more than they that

Mean-

depressing for an audience in Sarajevo; meaning, wasn't

more

strengthened and consoled by having their

SUSAN SONTAG

302

sense of reality affirmed and transfigured by

people

in Sarajevo don't

National Theatre, the

first

before

art.

miss being entertained.

This

not to say that

The dramaturge

of the

who began sitting in on the rehearsals of Godot after who had studied at Columbia University, asked me

week, and

I left

few copies of Vogue and Vanity Fair when

to bring a

turn later this month: she longed to be reminded of

had gone out of her

would

is

Certainly there are

life.

all

the things that

more Sarajevans who

Ford movie or attend

rather see a Harrison

I re-

a

Guns

N

Roses

concert than watch Waiting for Godot. That was true before the war, too. It

is, if

And

if

anything, a

true now.

one considers what plays were produced

the siege began

big

little less

—

as

opposed

Hollywood successes

closing just before the

in Sarajevo before

to the

movies shown, almost entirely the

(the small

cinematheque was on the verge of

war

for lack of an audience,

was nothing odd or gloomy

I

was

told)

—there

for the public in the choice of Waiting for

Godot. The other productions currently in rehearsal or performance

and the meaning of

are Alcestis (about the inevitability of death fice),

Ajax (about

a warrior's

madness and

play by the Croatian Miroslav Krleza,

who

suicide),

is,

the century from the former Yugoslavia (the play's self).

Compared with

title

first

half of

speaks for

it-

Godot may have been the

these, Waiting for

"lightest" entertainment of

a

with the Bosnian Ivo An-

one of the two internationally celebrated writers of the

dric,

sacri-

and In Agony,

all.

INDEED, THE QUESTION IS not why there is any cultural activity in Sarajevo now after seventeen months of siege, but why there isn't more. Outside a boarded-up movie theatre next to the Chamber Theatre

is

a sun-bleached poster for

nal strip across

it

The Silence of the Lambs with

that says danas (today),

which was April

day moviegoing stopped. Since the war began, in Sarajevo

aged by

have remained shut, even

shelling.

A

not

all

all

1992, the

of the movie theatres

have been severely dam-

building in which people gather so predictably

would be too tempting electricity to

if

6,

a diago-

a target for the

Serb guns; anyway, there

is

no

run a projector. There are no concerts, except for those

given by a lone string quartet that rehearses every morning and per-

Waiting for Godot

Sarajevo

in

forms occasionally in a small room that also doubles seating forty.

in the

(It's

and photography, the Obala

one

Street that

whose

Gallery, a

exhibits sometimes stay

week.

talked with in Sarajevo disputes the sparseness of cultural

I

where, after

life in this city still live.

art gallery,

only one active space for paint-

is

up only one day and never more than

No

an

same building on Marshal Tito

houses the Chamber Theatre.) There ing

as

303

The

between 300,000 and 400,000 inhabitants

all,

majority of the

city's intellectuals

and creative people,

in-

cluding most of the faculty of the University of Sarajevo, fled at the be-

ginning of the war, before the city was completely encircled. Besides,

many is

Sarajevans are reluctant to leave their apartments except

when

it

absolutely necessary, to collect water and the rations distributed by

the United Nations

High Commissioner

though no one

anywhere, they have more to fear

is

safe

And beyond

in the street.

are very depressed

fear,

there

—which produces

depression

is

(UNHCR); when they are

Refugees

for

—most Sarajevans

lethargy, exhaustion, apathy.

Moreover, Belgrade was the cultural capital of the former Yugoslavia,

and

I

have the impression that in Sarajevo the visual

derivative; that ballet, opera,

and musical

and theatre were distinguished, so tinue under siege.

A

documentary and

fiction

it is

film production films,

life

arts

were

were routine. Only

film

not surprising that these con-

company,

SAGA, makes both

and there are the two functioning

theatres.

IN

FACT,

THE AUDIENCE

Waiting for Godot.

for theatre expects to see a play like

What my production

apart from the fact that an eccentric rector volunteered to

with the

and shame,

their attachment to else,

it

is

by the

local press

nobody but

that they are

members

American popular

the high culture of

their ideal, their passport to a

di-

an expression of solidarity

world "does care," when

that I represented

European play and

American writer and part-time

in the theatre as

city (a fact inflated

that the rest of the

where

work

of Godot signifies to them,

I

and radio

knew, to

myself),

is

my

as

evidence

indignation

that this

is

a great

of European culture. For

all

culture, as intense here as any-

Europe

European

that represents for

identity.

them

People had told

me

SUSAN SONTAG

304

again and again on

my

earlier visit in April:

ues

— secularism,

rest of

Europe

and

religious tolerance,

happen

let this

and always has been lization, they didn't

as

much

want

to us?

We

who

are the people in the former Yugoslavia

How

multi-ethnicity.

W hen rr

I

replied that

can the

Europe

a place of barbarism as a place of

to hear.

Now

We

are part of Europe.

stand for European val-

is

civi-

no one would dispute such

a

statement.

CULTURE, SERIOUS CULTURE, nity

—which

is

what people

in Sarajevo feel they

know themselves to be brave, or stoical, or know themselves to be terminally weak: waiting, they

knowing

to hope,

human dighave lost, even when

an expression of

is

For they also

angry.

hoping, not wanting

be saved. They are humili-

that they aren't going to

ated by their disappointment, by their fear, and by the indignities of daily life

ing to

—

it

for instance,

by having

to

spend

a

that their toilets flush, so that their

cesspools. That

public spaces,

may be even

is

at

how

see-

bathrooms don't become

they use most of the water they queue for in

great risk to their lives. Their sense of humiliation

greater than their fear.

Putting on a play means so

because

in Sarajevo

good part of each day

it

allows

much

them

to the local theatre professionals

to

be normal, that

to

is,

do what

they did before the war; to be not just haulers of water or passive

re-

cipients of humanitarian aid. Indeed, the lucky people in Sarajevo are

who

those

tion of

money, since Sarajevo has only

currency ings,

can carry on with their professional work.

in

professional

—

say, a

surgeon

city's

I,

on

at the city's

main hospital or

earns three deutsche marks a

month, while

marks

just

a skilled

a television

cigarettes, a

a pack.)

of course, were not on salary. Other theatre people

on rehearsals not

their sav-

economy, consider that

local version of Marlboros, cost ten deutsche

and

are living

deutsche marks, or on remittances from

abroad. (To get an idea of the

—

black-market economy, whose

German marks, and many people

is

which were always

journalist

a

not a ques-

It is

The

actors

would

sit

in

because they wanted to watch our work but be-

cause they were glad to have, once again, a theatre to go to every day.

Far from

it

being frivolous to put on

a play

—

this play

or any

Waiting for Godot other

—

it is

a

like fiddling

welcome expression of normality.

while

Rome

Sarajevo

in

"Isn't putting

305

on

a play

burns?" a journalist asked one of the actors.

"Just asking a provocative question," the journalist explained to

me

when

of-

I

fended.

reproached

her,

He was

He

not.

worried that the actor might have been didn't

know what

she was talking about.

STARTED AUDITIONING actors the day after I arrived, one role already cast in my head. At a meeting with theatre people in April, I couldn't have failed to notice a stout older woman wearing a large broad-brimmed black hat who sat silently, imperiously, in a corner of I

A few days later when

the room.

decided to direct Godot

I

Pasovic concluded that

I

I

would

all-woman Godot had been done wasn't

my intention. I wanted

that this

is

in Pasovic's

Grad,

pronoun "he") being told

I

it

even allegorical

whom

I'd

and

me

that an

makes

sense, since the charac-

figures. If

woman

to

—

Everyman

as

women

be played by

a

(like the

are always

man.

can also be a tyrant

I

was

—which

in the role

can play the role of a tyrant. In contrast,

Admir ("Atko") Glamocak, of thirty

(he told

meant by casting Ines Fancovic

woman

theatre,

Belgrade some years ago). But that

in

—then Everyman doesn't have

Pasovic then decided

learned

the casting to be gender-blind, confident

not making the statement that a

but rather that a

women

does stand for everybody

really

I

immediately thought of her as Pozzo. cast only

one of the few plays where

ters are representative,

man

saw her

was the senior actor of the pre-siege Sarajevo

that she

when

I

the actor

admired

as

I

cast as Lucky, a gaunt, lithe

Death

in Alcestis,

fit

perfectly the

traditional conception of Pozzo's slave.

Three other

roles

were

left:

Vladimir and Estragon, the pair of

for-

was troubling

that

lorn tramps, and Godot's messenger, a small boy. there were

much

meant

it

seemed

actors available than parts, since

to the actors

I

I

knew how

auditioned to be in the play. Three

particularly gifted: Velibor Topic,

Alcestis;

Nada

more good

It

Izudin ("Izo") Bajrovic,

who was

who was

playing Death in

Alcestis's Hercules;

who had the lead in the Krleza play. occurred to me I could have three pairs of Vladimir and

and

Djurevska,

Then

it

Es-

SUSAN SONTAG

306

tragon and put them

make

likely to

on the stage

all

once. Velibor and Izo seemed

at

the most powerful, rluent couple: there was no reason

not to use what Beckett envisaged, two men.

would be flanked on the right

by

a

woman and

side oi the stage

left

man

a

—

the center: but they

at

women and on

by two

three variations* on the

the

theme of the

couple.

Since child actors were not available and fessional.

I

glish oi

anyone

English

at

a talented actor

It

all.

Of

in the cast.

was

a great

who happened

THE SECOND DAY

apportion the

text, like

Vladimir and Estragon.

when

I

nonpro-

a I

I

to speak the best

same

the

at

of rehearsal.

knew no

among

to divide

knew some

Italian,

Desire

while

in a foreign lan-

Me at

my

call

"Thank you." and "Not now."

the Teatro Sta-

Serbo-Croatian (or the words "Serbo-

it.

Croatian" being hard to utter nowi was limited

up and

the three pairs of

had once before worked

As You

I

time.

had begun

I

musical score,

"the mother tongue." as people in Sarajevo

"Please." "Hello."

En-

help to have Mirza as interpreter, so

directed Pirandello's

But

bile in Turin.

me

a

the other eight actors, three

could communicate with even-body

guage,

dreaded using

decided to make the messenger an adult: the boyish -looking

Mirza Halilovic,

BY

I

when I

I

arrived to

had brought with

an English-Serbo-Croatian phrase book, paperback copies of the

play in English and French, and an enlarged photocopy oi the text into

which

I

copied in pencil the "Bosnian" translation, line by

as I received

it.

I

also copied the English

the Bosnian script. In about ten days

I

and French

had managed

it.

DID

av E

so.

I

H

was there

one here

in

a multi-ethnic cast?

conflict or tension

New

But of course termarriage

is

so

York put I

did

it

to

by

line into

by heart

line

that

my

actors

were

many people have asked me. And

among

if

the actors, or did they, as some-

me. "get along with each other"?

—the population oi Sarajevo

common,

soon

to learn

the words oi Beckett's play in the language in which

speaking

line, as

it

would be hard

is

so mixed, and in-

to assemble any kind

Waiting for Godot of group in which

Eventually

I

mother and

Sarajevo

in

three ethnic identities were not represented.

all

learned that Velibor Topic (Estragon

Croat father, though he has a Serb

a

307

up

she was born and grew

in the coastal

name, while Ines

first

Fancovic (Pozzo) had to be Croatian, since Ines

is

town of

has a Muslim

I)

name and

Croat

a

and came

Split

to

Sarajevo thirty years ago. Both parents of Milijana Zirojevic (Estragon II)

are Serb, while Irena

Muslim

least a

father. I

Mulamuhic (Estragon

They knew them and took them

tors.

leagues

—they've acted

III)

must have had

never learned the ethnic origins of

many

in

all

at

the ac-

for granted because they are col-

plays together

— and

friends.

Yes, of course they got along.

WHAT SUCH into the

QU

E S

T

l

O N S show

is

that the questioner has

propaganda of the aggressors:

old hatreds; that

it is

a civil

war or

a

that this

war of

war

is

secession, with Milosevic

whom

trying to save the union; that in crushing the Bosnians,

propaganda often

refers to as the Turks, the Serbs are saving

from Muslim fundamentalism. Perhaps prised to be asked

who wear

if I

saw many

women

I

bought

caused by age-

Serb

Europe

should not have been sur-

in Sarajevo

who

are veiled, or

the chador; one can't underestimate the extent to which the

prevailing stereotypes about

Muslims have shaped "Western" reactions

to the Serb aggression in Bosnia.

To invoke these stereotypes tion I'm often asked

is

also to explain

—why other foreign

artists

—

this

is

another ques-

and writers who regard

themselves as politically engaged haven't volunteered to do something for Sarajevo.

The danger

most people say as

is

can't

be the only reason, though

their reason for not considering a visit; surely

dangerous to go to Barcelona I

1993.

that's

in 1937 as

suspect that the ultimate reason

is

it

is

to

what it

was

go to Sarajevo

in

a failure of identification

enforced by the buzzword "Muslim." Even quite well informed people in the

United States and

mention

more to a

Europe seem genuinely surprised when

mosque.

I

make

this

I

began, a middle-class Sarajevan was far

go to Vienna to the opera than to go down the

likely to

religious

in

that, ifhtil the siege

street

point not to suggest that the lives of non-

urban Europeans are

intrinsically

more valuable than

the lives

SUSAN SONTAG

308

oi the devout of Tehran or

has an absolute value that

it

is

ideal that

Baghdad or Damascus

—but because

wish

I

it

—every human

life

were better understood

precisely because Sarajevo represents the secular, anti-tribal it

has been targeted for destruction.

In fact, the proportion of religiously observant people in Sarajevo

about the same

as

it

is

among

the native-born in

Berlin or Venice. In the prewar

city, it

London

was no odder

lim to marry a Serb or a Croat than for

for a secular

New

someone from

is

or Paris or

Mus-

York

to

marry someone from Massachusetts or California. In the year before the Serb attack, sixty percent of the marriages in Sarajevo took place

between people from different

backgrounds

religious

—the

surest

index of secularism.

Zdravko Grebo, Haris Pasovic, Mirsad Purivatra,

Amela

Izeta Gradevic,

Hasan Gluhic, Ademir Kenovic, Zehra Kreho, Ferida

Simic,

Durakovic, and other friends of mine there of Muslim origin are as

much Muslim would be

as I

am Jewish

—which

correct to say that I'm

is

to say, hardly at

more Jewish than they

all.

are

family has been entirely secular for three generations, but as

I

Indeed,

Muslim. I

am,

it

My

as far

can know, the descendant of an unbroken line of people under the

same

religious discipline for at least

two millennia, and have

plexion and cast of features which identify

me

as the

a

com-

descendant of

a

branch oi European (probably originally Sephardic) Jewry, while the Sarajevans of for at

most

Muslim

origin

five centuries

toman Empire), and

come from

families that have

(when Bosnia became

been Muslim

province of the Ot-

a

are physiologically identical with their southern

Slav neighbors, spouses,

and compatriots, since they are

in fact the de-

scendants of Christian southern Slavs.

What Muslim adherence had

existed throughout this century was

already a diluted version of the moderate, Sunni faith brought by the

Turks, with nothing of what

asked friends

who

now

called fundamentalism.

in their families are or

they invariably said: they usually said:

is

my

my

grandparents.

If

great-grandparents.

the only one with religious leanings

were

I

religiously observant,

they were under thirty-rive,

Of

the nine actors in Godot,

was Nada, who

Indian guru; as her farewell present she gave edition of The Teachings of Shiva.

When

me

a

is

the disciple of an

copy of the Penguin

Waiting for Godot

Pozzo: There (They

is

no denying

it is still

Sarajevo

in

309

day.

look up at the sky.)

all

Good. (They stop looking at the

OF COURSE To was

lit

start with,

usually

flashlights I'd

sky.)

there were obstacles.

we

ethnic ones. Real ones.

The bare proscenium

rehearsed in the dark.

stage

by only three or four candles, supplemented by the four brought with me.

was told there weren't

When

I

I

asked for additional candles,

was told

any. Later I

for our performances. In fact, dles;

Not

that they

never learned

who

when

they were simply in place on the floor

I

I

were being saved

doled out the canarrived each

morn-

ing at the theatre, having walked through alleys and courtyards to

reach the stage door, the only usable entrance, at the rear of the free-

modern

standing

building.

The

theatre's facade, lobby,

cloakroom, and

bar had been wrecked by shelling more than a year earlier and the debris

had not been cleared away.

still

me with comradely re"We have many bad habits

Actors in Sarajevo, Pasovic had explained to gret,

expect to work only four hours a day.

here

left

over from the old socialist days." But that was not

ence. After a

bumpy

start

— during the

first

my

experi-

week everyone seemed

pre-

occupied with other performances and rehearsals, or obligations

home

—

at

could not have asked for actors more zealous, more eager.

I

The main

obstacle, apart

from the siege

lighting,

was the fatigue of the

malnourished actors, many of whom, before they arrived for rehearsal at ten,

had

for several hours

been queuing for water and then lugging

heavy plastic containers up eight or ten

had

to

walk two hours to get to the

to follow the

The only

member

who seemed

to

of

stairs.

Some

theatre, and, of course,

same dangerous route actor

flights

at the

end of the

of them

would have

day.

have normal stamina was the oldest

of the cast, Ines Fancovic,

who

is

sixty-eight. Still large, she

lost more than sixty pounds since the beginning of the siege, which may have accounted for her remarkable energy. The other actors were

had

— SUSAN SONTAG

310

underweight and tired

visibly

tionless

through most of

heavy bag he

Atko,

carries.

me

dred pounds, asked

empty

on the

suitcase

his

who now

Whenever

movement

a

I

lines

than any actors

opening they

the

his

halted the run-through for a

or a line reading, lie

down on

were slower

fatigue: they

to

all

the actors,

the stage.

memorize

their

have ever worked with. Ten days before the

I

needed

still

down

he occasionally rested

if

with the exception of Ines, would instantly

Another symptom of

Lucky must stand mo-

weighs no more than one hun-

him

to excuse

floor.

few minutes to change

Beckett's

easily.

long scene without ever setting

and were not word-

to consult their scripts,

perfect until the day before the dress rehearsal. This might have been

of a problem had

less

not been too dark for them to read the scripts

it

they held in their hands.

who

An

then forgot the next

actor crossing the stage while saying a line,

was obliged

line,

to

make

a

detour to the

nearest candle and peer at his or her script. (A script was loose pages, since binders

The

and paper

clips are virtually

unobtainable

play had been typed in Pasovic's office on a

writer

whose ribbon had been

little

in Sarajevo.

manual

type-

in use since the beginning of the siege.

I

was given the original and the actors carbon copies, most of which

would have been hard

to read in any light.)

Not only could they not read face, they

their scripts; unless standing face-to-

could barely see one another. Lacking the normal peripheral

vision that

anybody has

in daylight or

when

there

is

electric light, they

could not do something as simple as put on or take off their bowler hats in unison.

And

they appeared to

mostly as silhouettes. At the

me for

moment

a

long time, to

early in

Act

I

my despair,

when Vladimir

"smiles suddenly from ear to ear, keeps smiling, ceases as suddenly" in

my

version, three Vladimirs

false smiles

from

lying across

my

OF COURSE, learn their lines forgetful. It

was

my

stool

—

some

was not

and

their

my

just fatigue that

was

and

fear.

my

flashlight

night vision improved.

movements and

distraction,

a shell exploding, there

couldn't see a single one of those

ten feet in front of them,

scripts. Gradually,

it

I

made to

the actors slower to

be often inattentive and

Each time we heard the noise of

relief that the theatre

had not been

hit,

but

Waiting for Godot

had

the actors in

my

to

be wondering where

cast, Velibor,

and the

oldest, Ines, lived alone.

the theatre each day, and several of

near Grbavica, a part of the

them

city

3

1

I

had landed. Only the youngest

it

wives and husbands, parents and children

lines,

Sarajevo

in

The

home when

at

others

they

left

came

to

lived very close to the front

taken by the Serbs

last year,

or in

Alipasino Polje, near the Serb-held airport.

On July at

30, at

two o'clock

in the afternoon,

two weeks of

Nada, who was often

news

that

eleven that morning Zlajko Sparavolo, a well-known older actor

who

during the

late

first

rehearsal, arrived with the

had been

specialized in Shakespearean roles,

neighbors,

when

a shell

landed outside

killed,

his front door.

the stage and went silently to an adjacent room. the

first

me

to speak told

everyone because, up

till

that this

then,

news was

along with two

The

actors left

followed them, and

I

particularly upsetting to

no actor had been

killed. (I

had heard

who had each lost a leg in the shelling; and I knew Nermin Tulic, the actor who lost both legs at the hip in the first months of the siege and was now the administrative director of the earlier

about two actors

When

Youth Theatre.) the rehearsal, hour,

all

I

asked the actors

but one, Izo, said

some of the

actors

ett

S E

T

I

had designed

—

as

himself could have desired

tered, acted on,

But

yes.

they

felt

after

up

to continuing

working for another

found they couldn't continue. That was the

only day that rehearsals stopped

THE

if

early.

minimally furnished,

—had two

and exited from

levels.

I

thought, as Beck-

Pozzo and Lucky en-

a rickety platform eight feet

deep and

four feet high, running the whole length of upstage, with the tree to-

ward the

left;

the front of the platform was covered with the translu-

cent polyurethane sheeting that

the shattered

windows of

UNHCR brought in last winter to seal

Sarajevo.

The

three couples stayed mostly

on

more of the Vladimirs and

Es-

the stage floor, though sometimes one or

tragons went to the upper stage.

It

took several weeks of rehearsal to

arrive at three distinct identities for them.

Estragon (Izo and Velibor) were the false starts, the

classic

The

central Vladimir

buddy

pair.

and

After several

two women (Nada and Milijana) turned into another

kind of couple in which affection and dependence are mixed with ex-

SUSAN SONTAG

312

asperation and resentment: mother in her early forties and

daughter. a

And

Sejo and Irena,

who were

grown

also the oldest couple, played

quarrelsome, cranky husband and wife, modeled on homeless people

downtown Manhattan. But when Lucky and Pozzo were

I'd seen in

onstage, the Vladimirs and Estragons could stand together,

something of a Greek chorus

by the

terrifying

master and

becoming

an audience to the show put on

as well as

slave.

Tripling the parts of Vladimir and Estragon, which entailed

more

stage business,

good deal longer than

play a

would run was

at least

had the

intricate silences, it

usually

ninety minutes. Act

I

is.

soon realized that Act

would be

II

shorter, for

a half

hours long.

And

I

come

deliers could

from

a shell, or

if

down

if

was taking place on as

many

as a

a

planks.

in the

hit.

deep proscenium stage

be squeezed together;

up outside the

stage

(tickets are free).

hot, since

I

knew

lit

only by a few candles. close to the actors, at

a half

How

very choices

was

also

I

was high summer, and they would

many more people would be

could

I

ask the audience, which

sit

in

I

could not do

of Waiting for Godot. But the

all

had made about the staging which made Act

meant

that the staging could represent the

dramatic literature in which Act

place and time of Act II:

"Next

would have no

so uncomfortably, without moving, for

for Godot, while using only the words of Act

work

lining

hours?

concluded that

I

that

made from wood

door for each performance than could be seated

lobby, bathroom, or water, to

two and

it

Further, there

auditorium could see what

hundred people could be seated

They would be

would be two

whose nine small chan-

the front of the stage, on a tier of six rows of seats

Act

idea

the building suffered a direct hit

an adjacent building were

was no way three hundred people

it

my

I

could not envisage asking people to watch

crashing

even

the play

II,

the play from the Youth Theatre's auditorium,

But

new

making the

to use only Izo and Velibor as Vladimir and Estragon. But even

with a stripped-down and speeded-up Act

and

result of

day.

I are:

Same

"A country

time.

Same

I.

For

I is itself

road.

place.")

A

long as

whole of Waiting

this

a

I as

may be

complete

tree.

the only

play.

The

Evening." (For

Although the time

is

"Evening," both acts show a complete day, the day beginning with

Vladimir and Estragon meeting again (though in every sense except the

Waiting for Godot

in

Sarajevo

3 13

sexual one a couple, they separate each evening), and with Vladimir (the

dominant one, the reasoner and information-gatherer, who

ter at

fending off despair) inquiring where Estragon has spent the

They

night.

bet-

is

talk

about waiting for Godot (whoever he may be),

Pozzo and Lucky

ing to pass the time.

strain-

while and

arrive, stay for a

perform their "routines," for which Vladimir and Estragon are the audience, then depart. After this there

Then

they are waiting again.

more

they have waited once

Of Act

I

course, there

which

Act

is

II.

Not

between Act

only has one

Vladimir has given in to despair. Perhaps for the Sarajevo audience,

second time when Godot does not subliminally, that

Act

Godot was so apt an

might be

II

.

/

'

Avaj, avaj

—from Lucky PEOPLE

's

IN

.

.

relief:

them

that

and the replay of

and

by.

Everything

that the despair of

wanted

I

Maybe

is

pathetic and blind,

to spare

wanted

I

Act

them

I

a

to propose,

different. For, precisely as Waiting for

now

an arbitrary, alien power to save

protection

its

ing Waiting for Godot, Act

.

tell

illustration of the feelings of Sarajevans

them or take them under

.

now

is

I felt

arrive.

bereft, hungry, dejected, waiting for

Alas, alas

I

more day gone

worse. Lucky no longer can speak, Pozzo

was enough

and

a time of deflation

in vain.

a difference

is

is

the messenger arrives to

—

it

seemed

apt, too, to

be

stag-

I.

.

monologue

SARAJEVO

live

harrowing

lives; this

was

a

harrowing

Godot. Ines was flamboyantly theatrical as Pozzo, and Atko was the

most heartrending Lucky ing

and was

a

movement

I

have ever seen. Atko,

teacher

at

who had

ballet train-

the Academy, quickly mastered the

postures and gestures of decrepitude, and responded inventively to suggestions for

Lucky s dance of freedom.

Lucky 's monologue, which

in every

It

took longer to work out

production of Godot I'd seen

cluding the one Beckett himself directed in 1975 in Berlin) was, to this

speech into

my

taste,

five parts,

delivered too

it

(in-

the Schiller Theatre

at

fast, as

and we discussed

my

nonsense.

line

by

I

line, as

divided

an argu-

SUSAN SONTAG

314

ment, as

Atko

a series of

images and sounds,

as a lament, as a cry. I

wanted

about divine apathy and indifference,

to deliver Beckett's aria

about a heartless, petrifying world,

as if

made

it

Which

perfect sense.

it

does, especially in Sarajevo. It

me

has always seemed to

realistic play,

though

or vaudeville

style.

it is

Godot

that Waiting for

is

supremely

a

generally acted in something like a minimalist

The Godot

that the Sarajevo actors

were by

inclina-

temperament, previous theatre experience, and present

tion,

cious) circumstances

was

direct,

full

most able

of anguish, of

violence. That the messenger

to perform,

and the one

immense sadness and, toward

was

a strapping adult

meant

(atro-

chose to

I

that

the end,

when he

announces the bad news, Vladimir and Estragon could express not only disappointment but rage: manhandling him as they could never

have done had the role been played by

a small child.

(And there

are

not two, of them, and only one of him.) After he escapes, they sub-

six,

side into a long, terrible silence. It

solute pathos, as at the

butler Firs wakes

up

was

a

Chekhovian moment of ab-

end of The Cherry Orchard, when the ancient

to find that he's

been

behind

left

in the aban-

doned house.

FELT, during the mounting of Godot and

IT

jevo, as if I

were going through the replay of

the severest shelling of the

city's

this

second stay

a familiar cycle:

in Sara-

some of

center since the beginning of the siege

(on one day Sarajevo was hit by nearly four thousand shells); the ing once

Clinton solve)

more of the hopes (if

outwitting

is

of American intervention; the outwitting of

not too strong a term to describe so weak

by the pro-Serb United Nations Protection Force

FOR) command, which

rais-

a re-

(UNPRO-

claimed that intervention would endanger

UN

troops; the steady increase in despair and disbelief of the Sarajevans; a

mock

cease-fire (that

means

more people ventured out and maimed each

The that

cast

and

I

just a little shelling

in the street,

and sniping, but since

almost as

many were murdered

day); et cetera, et cetera. tried to avoid jokes

about "waiting for Clinton," but

was very much what we were doing

in late July,

when

the Serbs

Waiting for Godot took, or ture of

the

seemed

to take,

Mount Igman,

Mount Igman would

city,

and hope rose again

gun

against the Serb

Sarajevo

in

3 15

The

just

above the

airport.

allow them to

fire shells

horizontally into

that there

would be American

cap-

air strikes

arms embargo.

positions, or at least a lifting of the

Although people were afraid to hope, for fear of being disappointed, the same time

no one could believe

that Clinton

intervention and again do nothing.

when

again

a journalist friend

at

would again speak of

myself had succumbed to hope

I

showed me

dim

a

transmis-

satellite fax

sion of Senator Biden's eloquent speech in favor of intervention, twelve

single-spaced pages, which he had delivered

on July

The Holiday

29.

on the western

Inn, the only

still

on the

floor of the Senate

functioning hotel, which

side of the city's center, four blocks

from the nearest

Serb snipers, was crowded with journalists waiting for the jevo or the intervention; one of the hotel

been

this full since the 1984

SOMETIMES ton.

We

Lucky 's

were waiting suitcase

for our props.

hadn't

Godot, or Clin-

There seemed no way to find cigarette holder (to substi-

and whip. As for the carrot that Estragon munches

slowly, rapturously: until

two days before we opened, we had

hearse with three of the dry

Holiday Inn dining room

and

of Sara-

Winter Olympics.

and picnic basket, Pozzo's

tute for the pipe)

actors

fall

staff said the place

THOUGHT we were not waiting for

I

is

assistants

rolls I

(rolls

and the

to re-

scavenged each morning from the

were the breakfast offered) to feed the

all-too-rare stagehand.

any rope for Pozzo until a week

after

we

started

We

on the

could not find stage,

and Ines

got understandably cranky when, after three weeks of rehearsal, she still

did not have the right length of rope, a proper whip, a cigarette

holder, an atomizer.

The bowler

hats

and the boots for the Estragons

materialized only in the last days of rehearsal.

whose designs proved

I

And

the costumes

had suggested and the sketches of which

in the first

week

—did

not

come

until the

I

had ap-

day before

we

opened.

Some Some of

of this was owing to the scarcity of everything in Sarajevo. it,

I

had

to conclude,

was

typically "southern" (or Balkan)

SUSAN SONTAG

316

man an a -ism.

("You'll definitely have the cigarette holder tomorrow/'

was told even- morning were the

between

result of rivalry

Why

the closed National Theatre.

There had to be props

theatres.

were they not available

covered, shortly before the opening, that

was not

I

I

But some of the shortages

for three weeks.)

at

to us?

I dis-

just a visiting

mem-

ber of the Sarajevo "theatre world," but that there were several theatre clans in Sarajevo

and

that,

being

allied

count on the goodwill of the others. around, too.

On

with Haris Pasovic's,

could not

I

would work the other way

(It

one occasion, when precious help was offered

another producer,

who on my

last visit

had become

by Pasovic, who was otherwise reasonable and

me

by

was told

a friend, I

helpful: "I don't

want

you to take anything from that person.

Of in

course this would be normal behavior anywhere

Why

not

besieged Sarajevo? Theatre in prewar Sarajevo must have had the

same feuds, think

my

signer,

and jealousy

pettiness,

assistants, as well as

on

to catch

that

some

Finci, the set

us.

to shield

was

to

I

me from

be trusted.

rr

\\

the knowl-

hen

I

began

my

assistants said to

me

sadly:

"Now

that

you

vou won't want to come back anvmore."

SARAJEVO

IS

NOT

only a city that represents an ideal of pluralism;

was regarded by many of

its

citizens as

an ideal place: though not im-

portant (not big enough, not rich enough), be, even

city.

and costume de-

oi our difficulties reflected a degree of hostility

or even sabotage, one of

know

in Sarajevo

any other European

as in

Ognjenka

and Pasovic himself, were anxious

edge that not everybody

it

else.

if,

it

being ambitious, you had to leave

was it

still

the best place to

make

to

a real career, as

people from San Francisco eventually take the plunge and go to Los Angeles or

New York. "You

Pasovic said to me.

duces

a

know

in Sarajevo

"It

can't imagine

what

was paradise." That

very acute disillusionment, so that

the increasing

number

used to be

like here,"

kind of idealization pro-

now

cannot stop lamenting the

it

almost

city's

all

the people

I

moral deterioration:

of muggings and thefts, the gangsterism, the

predatory black marketeers, the banditry oi some army units, the absence oi civic cooperation.

One would

think that they could forgive

Waiting for Godot themselves, and their

There

gallery.

city.

virtually

is

For seventeen months

Sarajevo

in

3 17

has been a shooting

it

no municipal government; hence, debris from

shelling doesn't get picked up, schooling isn't organized for small chil-

dren, et cetera, et cetera.

come

A

city

under

siege must, sooner or later, be-

a city of rackets.

But most Sarajevans are

and of many "elements,"

tions now,

pained vagueness, in the

condemnation of condi-

pitiless in their

city.

would

as they

call

them with

"Anything good that happens here

is

a

my friends said to me. And another: "This is a city of bad people." When an English photojournalist made us the invaluable gift of nine candles, three were immediately stolen. One day Mirza's miracle," one of

lunch

—

chunk of home-baked bread and

a

knapsack while he was on the other actors. But

it

stage. It

a pear

—was taken from

could have been anyone

else, say,

one of the

hands or any of the students from the Academy of Drama dered in and out of the rehearsals. The discovery of depressing to us

number

to leave,

and

was very

when

they can,

will leave

one of my friends from

Batinic, a local journalist. "I can live this life a

Zehra Kreho

me one

who wan-

this theft

"We can my April visit, Hrvoje

say that their lives are not unbearable.

live this life forever," said

friend,

stage-

all.

Although many people want a surprising

his

could not have been one of the

hundred

years," a

—the dramaturge of the National Theatre—

evening. (Both are in their late thirties.) Sometimes

new

said to

I felt

the

same way.

Of course, months," feels?"

weeks. I

I

I

was

it

different for

me.

"I haven't taken a

middle-aged matron said to me. "Do you

a

don't; I only

was

know what

elated, full of energy,

it's

like

bath in sixteen

know how

because of the challenge of the work

was doing, because of the valor and enthusiasm of everyone

with

—but

them, and

I

could not ever forget

how

fact that I

trated

how hard

it

and the danger

city.

play.

worked

What made my

relatively easy to bear, apart

could leave and they couldn't, was that

on them and on Beckett's

I

has been for each of

hopeless the future looks for their

lesser hardships

that

not to take a bath for six

I

was

from the

totally

concen-

SUSAN SONTAG

318

5

UNTIL A week be very good.

before

opened,

it

feared that the choreography and emotional design

I

had constructed

had not been

I

and the nine actors

for the two-level stage

were too complicated for them that

did not think the play would

I

as

demanding

me

that

But

I

suddenly, in the

and

at

went on, hoping last

that

seemed

it

which did honor was

I

then and, in

not yet learned

all

it

came

all

together,

the production was, after that this

was an

all,

effort

to Beckett's play.

also surprised

tional press that

a corner,

made, and

affecting, continually interesting, well

as-

would be not too bad; then

me

to

now and

who had

it

week, they turned

our dress rehearsal

my

oi

was being too amicable, too

I

tantrum

a

particular, threaten to replace the actors

their lines.

Two

should have been.

as I

should throw

I

in five roles

to master in so short a time; or simply

sistants, as well as Pasovic, told

"maternal," and that

I

by the amount of attention from the interna-

Godot was

getting.

I

had told few people

that

was

I

going back to Saravejo to direct Waiting for Godot, intending perhaps

something about

to write

journalists' dormitory.

it

later. I

The day

forgot that

after I arrived I

room

the Holiday Inn lobby and in the dining

next day; and the next.

I

said there

I

would be

was

living in a

fielding requests in

for interviews;

was nothing

to

tell,

that

I

and the was

still

auditioning; then that the actors were simply reading the play aloud at a table; light,

then that we'd

just

begun on the

was hardly any

stage, there

there was nothing to see.

But when desire to

I

mentioned

to Pasovic the journalists' requests

keep the actors free from such

had scheduled

a press

conference for

distractions,

me and

I

that he

I

wanted me

tional Festival oi Theatre

in that I

was

his Alcestis,

was

my

Godot.

ogized to the actors for the interruptions to come,

wanted the

which

a part: the Sarajevo Interna-

and Film, directed by Haris Pasovic, whose

second production, following

too,

to

maximum

publicity not just for the play but for an enterprise of

had not altogether taken

my

learned that he

admit journalists to rehearsals, give interviews, and get the

amount of

and

journalists to

be

I

When

I

apol-

found that

they,

there. All the friends

I

consulted in

Waiting for Godot the city told

me

Sarajevo

in

3

19

would be "good

that the story of the production

for

Sarajevo."

And

so

access to

I

obediently changed

anybody who wanted

my

it.

policy of

no interviews

to giving

This was easy, not only because

was what the actors and Pasovic wanted, but because

I

it

never saw any-

thing that was printed or televised (even the journalists at the Holiday

Inn never saw their stories until they

left

that the rush of interviews in the

two weeks meant

first

Sarajevo).

I

were done before the actors had learned

stories

regretted, though, that

most of the

my

and

their lines,

conception of the play began to work.

The point

of course, that any cultural activity in Sarajevo

is,

who have come

sideshow for correspondents and journalists war.

To

there

is

The

my

original intention.

—perhaps, whatever

promotion. But

this

is

just

best thing

To speak

is

one's intentions,

not to speak

of what one

at all

becomes

—

a

a

to cover a

protest the sincerity of one's motives reinforces suspicion,

suspicion to begin with.

which was seems

is

if

at all,

doing

is

form of

self-

what the contemporary media culture ex-

My political opinions — I would go on about what I regard as the infamous role now being played by UNPROFOR, railing against "the pects.

Serb-UN

siege of Sarajevo"

about them, and If

it

out.

my work

mentioning. But stories as the

illustrates

it

one

Television, print,

When,

my own

to

in Sarajevo,

none of

this

would be worth

something of the way such long-running to.

and radio-journalism are an important part of

in April, I

be

discomfort about some of the

Bosnia are transmitted and being reacted

in

it

to

in

were only a matter of

foreign coverage of

war.

—were invariably cut You want — media land— be about you.

turns out

it

this

heard the French intellectual Andre Glucks-

mann, on

his twenty-four-hour trip to Sarajevo, explain to the local

journalists

who

event,"

attended his press conference that "war

and "wars are won or

telling that to all the

there

mark.

is

a sense in

It's

lost

people here

on TV,"

I

who have lost

media event, but

object of attention,

comes the main

now

a

media

thought to myself, Try their

arms and

legs.

But

which Glucksmann's indecent statement was on the

not that war has completely changed

principally a

is

nature,

that the media's coverage

and the very

story.

its

fact of

and is

is

only or

a principal

media attention sometimes be-

SUSAN SONTAG

320

An

Inn. the

best friend

BBC's admirable Alan

and was shown from

juries

My

example.

a

if

the journalists at the Holiday

Little, visited

one oi the

semi-conscious five-year-old

mortar

a

she would die

among

had

shell that

girl

with severe head

The doctor

killed her mother.

Moved by

Alan began to

about her

talk

Irma" became the front-page story day

tabloids and virtually the only Bosnia story

said

the child's

and the case of

story,

day

after

in the British

TV

on the

news. John

Major, eager to be seen as doing something, sent a plane to take the to

in-

For days nothing

in his reports.

happened. Then other journalists picked up the "Little

hospitals

she was not airlifted to a hospital where she could be

given a brain scan and sophisticated treatment. plight.

city's

girl

London.

Then came the

become

backlash. Alan, unaware at

so big. then delighted because

would help

to bring the child out.

"media circus" that was exploiting obscene, the

critics said, to

it

that the story

first

meant

had

that the pressure

was dismayed by the attacks on a child's suffering. It

a

was morally

concentrate on one child

when thousands

many amputees and

paraplegics, lan-

oi children and adults, including

guish in the understaffed, undersupplied hospitals of Sarajevo and are

not allowed to be transported out, thanks to the other story

i.

oi one child vious,

and

needed

to

That is

was

it

a

good thing

to

—

do

better than doing nothing at

in fact others

were brought out

UN

(but that

is

an-

that to try to save the

life

all

—should have been ob-

as a result.

But

a story that

be told about the wretched hospitals of Sarajevo degener-

ated into a controversy over what the press did.

THIS

IS

THE

FIRST

European genocide

in

our century to be

tracked by the world press and documented nightly on TV. There were

no reporters

in 191

5

sending daily stories to the world press from Ar-

menia, and no foreign camera crews in Dachau and Auschwitz. Until the Bosnian genocide, one might have thought

conviction oi

many

—

this

oi the best reporters there, like

day and John Burns oi

1

York Times

was indeed the

Roy Guttman

—

that

if

of

the story

could be gotten out. the world would do something. The coverage ot the genocide in Bosnia has

ended

that illusion.

Waiting for Godot

Newspaper and radio reporting and, above shown the war

Bosnia in extraordinary

in

by those few people

a will to intervene

TV

all,

detail,

in the

Sarajevo

in

321

coverage have

but in the absence of

world

who make

and military decisions, the war becomes another remote

political

disaster; the

people suffering and being murdered there become disaster "victims." Suffering

visibly present,

is

many people an absence

more

feel

—the

and can be seen

sympathy for the

victims.

in close-up;

and no doubt

What cannot be recorded

absence of any political

end

will to

this suffering:

Eu-

exactly, the decision not to intervene in Bosnia, primarily

rope's responsibility,

which has

its

Quai d'Orsay and the

slant of the

plemented by the

is

origins in the traditional pro-Serb

British Foreign Office. It

UN occupation of Sarajevo, which

is

is

being im-

largely a

French

operation. I

do not believe the standard argument made by

as

makes them

it

real. It is

the absence of action to stop

it

vision but our politicians have

the continuing coverage of the

that

makes us mere

made

history

We get tired of watching the same show. it's

If

it

come

Not

spectators. to

seem

seems unreal,

war

as in

tele-

like re-runs. it is

because

both so appalling and apparently so unstoppable.

Even people

They

atrocities,

said to

is

hope

("How could

this

happen?

can't

I still

happening"). They are genuinely astonished by the Serb

and by the starkness and sheer unfamiliarity of the

lives

they

obliged to lead. "We're living in the Middle Ages," someone

me. "This

People ask there.

seems to them unreal.

it

which does not diminish, which takes the

a rhetorical incredulity

believe this

now

sometimes say

in Sarajevo

are in a state of shock,

form of

are

of television

on the small screen distances them

that watching terrible events

much

critics

The

truth

to direct

and Velibor

as

is

me is,

science fiction," another friend said. if

Sarajevo ever seemed to

2:00 p.m.

17.

unreal while

since I've started going to Sarajevo

The Cherry Orchard with Nada Lopakhin

—

it

seems the most

WAITING FOR GODOT OPENED, on August

me

at 4:00

this

was

winter

I

Madame Ranevsky

real place in the world.

with twelve candles on the stage,

There were two performances that

and the other

as

—

I

day, a Tuesday,

one

at

p.m. In Sarajevo there are only mati-

322

SUSAN SONTAG

nees; hardly

anybody goes out

away. During the

performances

first

third performance,

I

started to

Many

after dark. I

be able

people were turned

was tense with

to see the play as a spectator. It

was time to stop worrying that Ines would

the rope linking her and

let

Atko sag while she devoured her papier-mache chicken; third Vladimir,

would

forget to keep shifting

fore he suddenly rushes off to pee. tors,

and

I

knew

it

was

in

performance on August

The

play

good hands. And 19,

By the

anxiety.

from foot

that Sejo, the

to foot just be-

now belonged

at

to the ac-

the end of the 2:00 p.m.

during the long tragic silence of the

Vladimirs and Estragons which follows the messenger's announcement that Mr.

Godot

isn't

coming

today, but will surely

eyes began to sting with tears. Velibor

audience

made

a

sound.

side the theatre: a street

was

come tomorrow, my

crying, too.

No

one

in the

The only sounds were those coming from

out-

UN armored personnel carrier thundering down the

and the crack of sniper

fire. I I

993]

"There" and "Here'

went TO

Sarajevo for the

newly independent multi-ethnic Bosnian first

stay, I

flew out as

UNPROFOR cargo planes making a Zagreb.

back

The heart-stopping

trail

over

state.

had come

I

in,

regular run between Sarajevo

eighth stays; and by that time, the winter and

Nothing ever equaled the misery of daily sniper

To

fire.

And

life in

Leaving Sarajevo after

lay far in the future,

dards of peril were higher, and first

was

I

up the

on one of the Russian

shock.

summer

a veteran of

The shock

my

on

and

by the switch-

drive into the besieged city

Mount Igman

one

1993,

year after the start of the Serb-Croat campaign to carve

I

that

time in April

first

seventh and

of 1995,

my stan-

dread and shock.

of Sarajevo

itself,

the

the shattered city under constant mortar and

the aftershock of re-entry into the outside world.

leave Sarajevo

and

be, an

hour

later, in a

"normal"

city (Zagreb).

To

get into a taxi (a taxi!) at the airport ... to ride in traffic regulated

by

traffic signals,

along streets lined with buildings that have intact

roofs, unshelled walls, glass in the

switch in your hotel

room

... to use a toilet

to run the bath (you haven't

water, hot water,

come out

and people walking,

windows ...

had

and

flush

a bath in several

of the tap ... to take a

like you, at a

to flip

normal pace

it

light

afterward

.

.

.

weeks) and have

stroll

... to

on the

and see shops,

buy something

in

a small grocery store with fully stocked shelves ... to enter a restaurant

323

SUSAN SONTAG

324

and be given

menu

a

.

.

.

All this seems so bizarre

for at least forty-eight hours,

you

that,

And

very

quite disoriented.

feel

To speak with people who don't want

angry.

and upsetting

to

know what you know,

don't want you to talk about the sufferings, bewilderment, terror, and

humiliation of the inhabitants of the city you've just

when you

worse,

your friends

return to your

"Oh, you're back;

say,

ize that they don't

want

to

know,

never really explain to them

how bad you

own "normal"

feel

I

And

left.

(New York) and

city

was worried about you"

either.

To understand

—neither how

even

terrible

to real-

you can

"there" nor

is

it

—

that

being back, "here." That the world will be forever

di-

vided into "there" and "here."

People don't want to hear the bad news. Perhaps they never do.

But

in the case of

imagine, was

people you

Or

too.

A from

more acute than

feel

Or who

You

ever anticipated.

slaughter

at least

few weeks ago

my

I

comfortable with are those

some other

to

Chechnya.

Bosnia the indifference, the lack of effort to

—El

know, firsthand, what

—I'm writing

in late

find that the only

who have been

Salvador,

my

to Bosnia,

Cambodia, Rwanda, a

war

November

sole option

is.

1995

ninth stay in Sarajevo. Although once again

only land route, this was no longer

try to

I

—

I

came

(UN

returned in

by the

planes were

again landing on a corner of the destroyed Sarajevo airport) and the rutted dirt

trail

over

route in the world. into a

narrow

Mount Igman was no

It

longer the most dangerous

had been widened and graded by was

dirt road. In the city there

UN

engineers

electricity for the first

time since the beginning of the siege. The shells were not exploding, snipers' bullets

were not whizzing past everyone's heads. There would

be gas for the winter. There was the promise of running water. Since

my

return, an agreement has

to the war.

Bosnia

I

am

Whether peace, an reluctant to say. If

war, wants the in Pale,

been signed

war

to

in

Ohio

that promises an

unjust peace, has actually

Slobodan Milosevic,

end and can impose

end

come

started the

on

his proxies

this decision

then the successful campaign to destroy Bosnia by killing or

locating or driving into exile finished. Finished, too,

is

most of

its

population

is,

in

what the Bosnians had held out

ternationally recognized unitary state.

to

who

most

re-

senses,

for: their in-

"There'' and "Here" utterly transformed Bosnia)

So Bosnia (an

be partitioned. So

to

is

new

might, instead of right, has triumphed. Nothing

Thucydides, Book V, "The Melian Dialogue."

vance of the Wehrmacht had been halted in the League of Nations called a conference at

ties,"

that

in

—see

as if the eastern ad-

It's

late 1939 or early 1940

among

and

"the warring par-

which Germany was awarded half of Poland twenty percent of the

part), the invading Russians got

325

(the western

east,

and while

the thirty percent of their country in the middle that the Poles were

lowed ing

it

to

keep did include

went

to the

was very

this

fair

most of the

their capital,

by "moral"

criteria

rior forces of Hitler's

Germany and

be content with what they

ing

still

it all.

got.

At

that

—quickly adding, Since when have

in international politics?

had no chance of successfully defending

they

territory surround-

Germans. Of course, no one would have claimed

moral standards prevailed

their country against the supe-

Stalin's Russia,

least,

Because the Poles

they would have to

the diplomats

would have

said,

have some of their country; they had been on the verge of

And

would have figured

of course the Poles

as the

most

los-

diffi-

cult at the negotiations, since they didn't see themselves as simply

of three "warring parties."

al-

one

They thought they had been invaded. They

thought they were the victims. The diplomats brokering the settlement

would have found them quite unreasonable. Divided among themselves. Bitter.

Untrustworthy. Ungrateful to the mediators trying to stop

the slaughter.

know

Before, people didn't want to in

Bosnia

is

so complicated,

it

is

—you often heard

hard to

know which

is

that the

war

the "right"

—but now more people do understand what happened. They understand the war— the Serb and Croat aggression side

also

that

that

could have been stopped actly the

NATO

any

moment

in the past three years in ex-

same way and by the same minimum application of force by

(entirely sparing soldiers

finally

took place

didn't

want

the

at

is,

this past

on the ground

as well as civilians) as

August and September. But the Europeans

to stop the conflict (both the British Foreign Office

Quai d'Orsay

are traditionally pro-Serb),

and

and the Americans, the

only major power to acknowledge that justice was on the Bosnian side,

were reluctant to get involved.

Now that

the

war

has, or

seems to

326

SUSAN SONTAG

have been, stopped,

it

suddenly looks

complicated.

less

The mood

is

retrospective.

ONE QUESTION in Sarajevo

is

why

I

'

M OFTEN ASKED

widespread indifference

in

and Germany)

than genocide

from

a stay

other well-known writers besides myself haven't

spent time there. Behind this

tably Italy

after returning

lies

the

more general question

of the

nearby rich European countries (most no-

to an appalling historical crime, nothing less

—the fourth genocide of

European minority

a

to take

place in this century. But unlike the genocide of the Armenians during

World War

and of the Jews and the Gypsies

I

early 1940s, the genocide of the

glare of

Bosniak people has taken place

TV

worldwide press and

in the late 1930s

coverage.

No

and

in the

one can plead igno-

rance of the atrocities that have taken place in Bosnia since the war started in April 1992. Sanski Most, Stupni

Do, Omarska, and other

concentration camps with their killing houses (for hands-on, artisanal butchery, in contrast to the industrialized mass

murder of the Nazi

camps), the martyrdom of East Mostar and Sarajevo and Gorazde, the rape by military order of tens of thousands of

captured Bosnia, the slaughter of after the

surrender of Srebrenica

logue of infamy.

And no one

that of Europe: democracy,

the

members

of a tribe.

at least eight

—

this is

throughout Serb-

thousand

men and

boys

only a portion of the cata-

can be unaware that the Bosnian cause

and

Why

a society

visibility rallied to

composed of

citizens,

is

not of

haven't these atrocities, these values,

aroused a more potent response? stature and

women

Why have hardly

any intellectuals of

denounce the Bosnian genocide and de-

fend the Bosnian cause?

The Bosnian war

is

hardly the only horror

show

that has

been un-

folding in the past four or five years. But there are events

events

—

time.

One

that

do seem

to

sum up

—model

the principal opposing forces of one's

such event was the Spanish Civil War. Like the war in

Bosnia, that struggle was an emblematic one. But intellectuals writers, theatre people, artists, professors, scientists

who have

—the

a record

of speaking up on important public events and issues of conscience

have been

as

conspicuous by their absence from the Bosnian conflict

as

"There" and "Here"

Of course,

they were by their presence in Spain in the 1930s.

327

it's

speak-

ing rather too well of intellectuals to think that they constitute some-

thing like a perennial class, part of best causes

—

as

it's

war somewhere be

a reality.

is

Why

so

bad reputation of the Balkans

another? (This

is

is

historical cliches cer-

There

the traditional

is

as a place of eternal conflict, of implaca-

ble ancient rivalries. Haven't those folks always

been slaughtering one

comparable to having said when confronted with the

of Auschwitz: Well, what can one expect? is

as-

response to what

little

There are probably many reasons. Heartless

Semitism

up the there a

Bosnia?

tainly figure in the paltriness of the response.

reality

is

standard of dissent and activism

pacifists to take sides. Still, the

in

to take

is

world that should inspire even would-

else in the

sociated with intellectuals

happened

whose vocation

unlikely that only every thirty years or so

You know,

anti-

an ancient story in Europe.) Not to be underestimated, too,

the pervasiveness of anti-Muslim prejudice, a reflex reaction to

a people the majority of

whom

are as secular,

contemporary consumer-society culture, neighbors.

To

bolster the fiction that this

gious war, the label their army,

and

Muslim

their

is

at its

southern European

deepest source a

reli-

—though no one would think of de-

Orthodox and the

ular "Western" intellectuals their voices to

as their

imbued with

as

invariably used to describe the victims,

is

government

scribing the invaders as the

and

who might be

Catholics.

Do many

sec-

expected to have raised

defend Bosnia share these prejudices?

Of

course they

we

are already

do.

And

this

is

not the 1930s.

Nor

living in the twenty-first century, in

the 1960s. Actually,

which such twentieth-century

tainties as the identification of fascism, or imperialism, style dictators as the principal

"enemy" no longer

(often a facile one) for thought

and

action.

offer a

What made

cer-

or Bolshevik-

it

framework

obvious that

one should side with the government of the Spanish Republic, whatever

its

flaws,

was the struggle against

fascism.

Opposing the American

aggression in Vietnam (which took over the unsuccessful French effort

made

sense as part of the worldwide struggle

to hold

on

against

Euro-American colonialism.

to Indochina)

If the intellectuals

of the 1930s and the 1960s often

showed them-

SUSAN SONTAG

328

selves too gullible, too

happening

really

may

that they

or

in

prone to appeals

to idealism to take in

what was

newly radicalized

societies

certain beleaguered,

may not have

visited (briefly), the

morosely depoliti-

cized intellectuals of today, with their cynicism always at the ready, their addiction to entertainment, their reluctance to inconvenience

themselves for any cause, their devotion to personal least equally deplorable.

asked, each time

I

(I

a place that's so dangerous.)

who

By and

own

countries.

Among

ble now.

—

can go to

I

handful of intellectuals

against, say, racism or censorship

Only domestic

political

more of

(I

should note that

writers than of doctors, scientists,

teristic

the global bilateralism

(a

plausi-

intellectuals, nationalist

and

this

seems

There has

actors.)

been an implacable decay of the very notion of international

Not only has

now

—within

commitments seem

once internationally minded

at

times I've been

from Sarajevo, how

large, that

complacencies have renewed prestige. true

how many

consider themselves people of conscience can be mobilized

solely for limited actions

their

can't count

New York

return to

seem

safety,

solidarity.

"them" versus "us") charac-

of political thinking throughout our short twentieth century,

—fascism versus democracy; the American empire versus the Soviet empire — What has followed the wake of from

1

9 14 to 1989

collapsed.

in

1989 and the suicide of the Soviet empire ism,

is

the final victory of capital-

and of the ideology of consumerism, which

of "the political" as such. All that makes sense alism,

and the

above are

all,

most

cultivation of the self

the ideal of "health"

likely to subscribe.

place where people

asked It's

too

have to

my

son, the writer

much

left

smoke

—

entails the discrediting

is

private

and private well-being

are the values to

("How can you spend

all

the time?"

David

to expect that the

life.

which so

featuring,

intellectuals

much

someone here

Rieff, of his

—

Individu-

in

time in a

New

frequent trips to Bosnia.)

triumph of consumer capitalism would

the intellectual class unmarked. In the era of shopping,

be harder for

intellectuals,

York

who

are anything but marginal

it

has

and im-

poverished, to identify with less fortunate others. George Orwell and

Simone Weil did not exactly leave comfortable upper-bourgeois ments and weekend country houses when

apart-

they volunteered to go to

Spain and fight for the Republic, and both of them almost got them-

"There" and "Here" selves killed.

"here"

is

Perhaps the stretch for

monplace

it

has been a journalistic and academic com-

to say that intellectuals, as a class, are obsolete

of an analysis willing

Europe has

yet to

above

is

and

(Europe

is its self-

is

be born:

fenseless minorities

to incarnate

itself to

Europe

proclaiming that

"Society

between "there" and

intellectuals

too great now.

For several decades

Bosnia

329

be an imperative.

dead, too. a

Europe

It

Now

may be more

there are voices true to say that

that takes responsibility for

for upholding the values

will

— an example

be multicultural, or

it

it

its

de-

has no choice but

won't be

at all).

And

induced abortion. In the words of Emile Durkheim, all

the idea

it

forms of

itself."

The

idea that the pros-

perous, peaceful society of Europe and North America has formed of

—through the actions and statements of — one of confusion, called

itself

intellectuals

cowardice

.

.

Ours, not

.

is

all

those

who

could be

irresponsibility, selfishness,

and the pursuit of happiness. theirs.

Here, not there. [

J

995]

Joseph Brodsky

FOR

LONG

AS

A S we

are,

we're always somewhere. Feet are

always somewhere, whether planted or running. Minds, notoriously,

can be elsewhere. Minds, whether from lack of

vitality

or from

the deepest strengths, can be in the past and the present, or the present

and the

future.

Or

simply here and there. For reasons not hard to un-

derstand, the making of art at the highest plane of accomplishment

during the

last

century or so has required,

more

often than not, an ex-

ceptional development of the talent for being, mentally, in two places at

once. Elated by the landscapes he has been painting and drawing in

the south of France, van "really" in Japan. fulfilling a

Gogh

The young,

Theo

that

he

—

is

unpublished poet from Leningrad

sentence of compulsory labor on a collective farm in a

lage in the Far North, near the

uary 1965

writes his brother

as yet

White

that T. S. Eliot has died in

Sea, receives the

London,

news

sits at a

—

it is

vil-

Jan-

table in his icy

shack, and within the next twenty-four hours composes a long elegy to Eliot,

which

is

also an

homage

to the very alive

W. H. Auden

(the tone

and swing of whose elegy on the death of Yeats he adopts).

He was

elegant

enough always

to claim that

he had not

really suf-

fered during that year and a half of internal exile; that he rather liked

farmwork, especially shoveling manure, which he regarded the

more honest and rewarding

being mired

330

in shit,

jobs he'd

and had got quite

a

had so

far,

as

one of

everyone in Russia

few poems written

there.

Joseph Brodsky

Then, back

he put

sky, as

it

other losses,

it

I

Leningrad, a few years later Joseph Brod-

succinctly, "switched empires." This

from one day

denly,

who,

in his native

33

and

to the next,

happened sud-

among

entirely against his will:

separated this beloved only son from his elderly parents,

in further

punishment of the renegade poet, were thereafter

re-

peatedly denied exit permits by the Soviet government to meet for a brief reunion in, say, nearby Helsinki,

and died without

bracing them again. Intractable

borne with great indignation,

grief,

his ever

em-

great sobriety.

He

even managed to make of his KGB-enjoined departure some-

thing self-propelled

And

as for

hard

all

where

in

space and time one's toe end touches, well, earth

is

over; try the States

—landing among us

hurled from the other empire, a be-

like a missile

nign missile whose payload was not only his genius but his native ature's exalted, exacting sense of the poet's authority. (To

well

among

its

liter-

be found

as

how Gogol and Dostoyevsky moral and spiritual task.) Many aptitudes

prose writers: think of

conceived of the novelist's

eased his rapid insertion in America: immense industriousness and confidence, ready irony, insouciance, cunning. But for

self-

the dash and

all

ingenuity of his connections with his adopted country, one had only to

watch Joseph Brodsky among other Russian ize

how viscerally,

expressively Russian he

ous his adaptation to

us,

exiles

had

and emigres

stayed.

to real-

And how

gener-

along with the eagerness to impose himself on

us, actually was.

Such

adaptability,

such gallantry,

tanism. But true cosmopolitanism

may go by

is

the

place than to time, specifically to the past (which

bigger than the present). This has nothing in

oneself,

which acknowledges the past

is

common

simply so

much

with that senti-

It is a relation,

as

higher standards than the present affords.

of cosmopoli-

matter of one's relation to

less a

mental relation to the past called nostalgia.

name

unsparing to

the source of standards,

One

should write to please

not one's contemporaries but one's predecessors, Brodsky often declared. Surely

he did please them

—

his compatriots agree that

he was

SUSAN SONTAG

332

his era's

unique successor to Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, and Akhmatova.

Raising the "plane of regard" (as he called

it)

was

relentlessly identified

with the effortfulness and ambitions and appropriate I

think of Joseph Brodsky as a world poet

—

partly because I cannot

read him in Russian; mainly because that's the range he

poems, with

his

commanded

and density of material no-

He

insisted that poetry's "job"

much-used word) was he

farther, faster. Poetry,

to explore the capacity of language to travel

said,

accelerated thinking.

is

It

was

his best ar-

gument, and he made many, on behalf of the superiority of poetry

rhyme

prose, for he considered

mental acceleration in

in

their extraordinary velocity

tation, of cultural reference, of attitude. (a

of poets.

fidelities

essential to this process.

An

the key to his great achievement (and

is

to

ideal of

its limits),

prose as well as in poetry, and to his indelible presence. Conversa-

tion with him, as felicitously recalled

by

his friend

Seamus Heaney,

"at-

tained immediate vertical takeoff and no deceleration was possible."

Much

of his

work could be subsumed under

poems, "Advice to

his

journeying, with

what there was

its

know and

to

mordant avowals of

premium on speedy

of one of

assimilation of

determination never to be duped,

feel,

vulnerability.

title

Real travel nourished the mental

a Traveller."

characteristic

the early

Of

course, there were favorite else-

wheres, four countries (and the poetry produced within their borders)

England, the United States, and

in particular: Russia,

Italy.

Which

is

to

empires never ceased to incite his powers of fast-forward associa-

say,

tion

and generalization; hence,

sites

of ancient

as well as in

his passion for the Latin poets

Rome, inscribed

poems. The

of cosmopolitanism

ment was imperial

is

in

to

first,

be

many

in several essays

in the

end perhaps the

a citizen of

who he and

form

senses.

was

Perhaps no decision he made

as startling (to

many), as emblematic of

was, as his refusal, after the dismantling of the Soviet empire

in the face of countless

for the briefest

And

only, tenable

an empire. Brodsky 's tempera-

Home was Russian. No longer Russia. in the later part of his life

and the

and the play Marbles

worshipful solicitations, to go back even

visit.

so he lived most of his adult

life

elsewhere: here.

And

Russia,

the source of everything that was most subtle and audacious and fertile

and doctrinaire about

his

mind and

gifts,

became the

great elsewhere

Joseph Brodsky to

which he could

not,

would

333

not, out of pride, out of anger, out of

anxiety, ever return.

Now largest,

whose years)

he has rushed away from

most powerful empire of

us, for so all,

it

feels, to reside in

the final elsewhere: a transfer

anticipation (while enduring a serious cardiac ailment for

he explored

The work,

in so

many

the

defiant, poignant

the example, the standards

many

poems.

— and our

grief

—remain. [1998]

On

START WITH a Story. the summer of 1993, and

LL

It's

I

gone there three months

I

earlier), this

Being Translated

was back

time

at

in Sarajevo (I'd first

the invitation of a local

theatre producer to stage a play in one of the besieged city's battered

We'd met

theatres.

interested in

and

my

at the

coming back

end of to

my

work

choice of a play to do

April

stay,

he'd asked

me

—

Beckett's Waiting for

—was

ought to go without saying that the play would be performed it

never occurred to

me

that the actors I chose

should do otherwise. True, most of them

But an

actor's

talent

inextricably

is

rhythms and sounds of the language that talent;

and Serbo-Croatian

on everybody

in the

is

knew some

in

met.

It

in Serbo-

might or

to see our pro-

bound up with

the

which he or she has developed

the only language one could count

audience knowing. To those

smacks of presumption to dare

I

English, as did a

who would come

portion of the educated Sarajevans duction.

was

Godot

agreed to with enthusiasm by him and by other theatre people

Croatian:

if I

as a director, I'd said yes, yes, gladly,

who may

to direct in a language

now operates

think

it

one doesn't

know,

I

much

international circuitry as the opera repertory has always had.

Arthur

can only say that repertory theatre

Miller,

when he accepted an

Death of a Salesman nese than

334

I

knew

in

Shanghai

Serbo-Croatian.

a

with almost as

invitation to direct a production of

few years ago, knew no more Chi-

Anyway

(trust

me),

it's

not as hard to

On do a

as

sounds.

it

good

You

Being Translated

need, besides your theatre

skills,

335

and

a musical ear

interpreter.

In besieged Sarajevo, you also needed a lot of stamina. In July,

flew into Sarajevo on a

I

UN

my backpack

troop plane,

bulging with pocket flashlights and a sack of double-A batteries, and,

pocket of

in a

my

The day

French.

after

my

began auditioning

arrival I

whom

I'd

envisaged the

set,

ented, undernourished actors (most of stay),

making drawings of how

stand

how

things

worked

I

was possible under the privations of

stop

bombardment. Once chosen, the basement

—no

a passel of tal-

met during and trying

generally in the theatre in Sarajevo

that

atre's

and

flak jacket, copies of the Beckett play in English

siege

actors

and the

and

I

my

to under-

—such

first

huddled

week

as

terror of nonin the the-

reason to start working upstairs, on the

vulnerable area of the stage, until after the

first

more

—doing improvi-

and figuring out rehearsal schedules (everyone had complex

sations

family responsibilities, not least of which was several hours' worth of fetching water), and learning to trust each other. side the building

was

more appropriate than I

War

is

didn't have to explain Beckett to Sarajevans.

common. Before

ducer that

I

The

noise from out-

seemed even

noise. Beckett

I'd imagined.

were already familiar with the

tors in

incessant.

play.

And some

of

my

ac-

But we did not yet have a text

leaving Sarajevo in April, I'd checked with the pro-

could count on his having enough copies of a translation

of the Beckett play on hand for the actors and everyone else involved in

working on the production when

said.

my

But when, the day of

distribute at the auditions, he

tance of

my coming

to

work

I

returned in July. Not to worry, he

return,

I

asked for copies of the play to

announced

that, in

honor of the impor-

in Sarajevo, Beckett's play

translated. In fact, the translation

was being worked on

was being

right

re-

now.

Uh-oh.

"The

translation isn't

"Well,

it

Hmmm. So

I

may be

.

.

.

finished?"

finished,"

he

said.

'

had another problem besides the Serbs'

shells,

grenades, and

constant gunfire from snipers on rooftops in the center of the

absence of

electricity

and running water, the shattered

city,

the

theatre, the

SUSAN SONTAG

336

nervousness of the malnourished actors, the

.

.

my own

anxiety and fear,

.

The problem,

my

as

producer explained, was the typewriter: an old

one available

typewriter, but the only

bon was very

faint (having

been

to the translator,

one whose

rib-

was

six-

in use steadily for a year; this

teen months since the beginning of the siege). But, he assured me, this translation patient.

I

said

knew

I

would be I

a real asset to the

would

try to

be

production

only

if

I

would be

patient.

that in the former Yugoslavia there

tions of Beckett's plays

—

had been many produc-

—the most frequently performed being none

other than Waiting for Godot. (Indeed, I'd chosen Godot over the other play I'd thought of doing,

known.) There had to be

more than

one. Perhaps

Ubu Roi,

we

didn't really

"Is the existing translation

who,

"No,

We want "But

"Not

it's

back to the

need

this

not very good?"

had staged

a director himself,

grade a few years

partly because the Beckett play

a translation dating

a

I

new

1950s.

was

Maybe

translation.

asked the producer,

production of the play

in Bel-

earlier.

not bad

at all,"

he

said. "It's just that this

is

Bosnia now.

to translate the play into Bosnian." isn't

what you speak Serbo-Croatian?"

really,"

"Then why,"

he

said.

"did you lend

I said,

dictionary the day

"Well, for you

I

me

your Serbo-Croatian-English

arrived?"

it

"But does that

would be good enough

— mean" — persisted I

to learn Serbo-Croatian."

"that

if

Croatian there are words or phrases in use here that

I

learned Serbo-

I

wouldn't under-

stand?"

"No, you'd understand everything. The way educated people speak in Sarajevo

is

the same as educated speech in Belgrade or Zagreb."

"Then what's the difference?" "I can't explain,"

But

he

said. "It

would be hard

for

you

to understand.

there's a difference."

"A

difference for Beckett?"

"Yes, "If

it's

a

new

translation."

someone did

ferent, too?"

a

new

translation in Belgrade,

would

that

be

dif-

On "Maybe," he

"And from

this

Keep

337

said.

that

new

new

translation?"

"Maybe

Being Translated

would be

translation

different in a different

way

not."

calm,

Bosnian about

"Then what's going

told myself.

I

done here

"Because

it's

"But

some of the words be

will

to

be

specifically

this translation?"

in Sarajevo, while the city

is

under

siege."

different?"

"That depends on the translator."

"You haven't read any of it?" "No, because

I

can't read her handwriting."

"She hasn't started to type

it

yet?"

"She has, but with that typewriter ribbon

"Then how

it's

impossible to read."

and learn

are the actors going to study the play

their

lines?"

"Maybe

we'll

have to find someone with good handwriting to make

the scripts."

Wow,

it

really

the

is

Dark Ages,

I

thought.

AFTER MORE HALLUCINATORY EXCHANGES rising anxiety on my part about when the actors and really to begin,

typed, using

signer,

some

my two

script I

(for the actors, the set designer, the

that

costume de-

and me). Between the

lines of text, so

assistants

and

interpreter,

sound of

it,

by

heart,

and always

the actors were saying. in this story

is

that, as

Beckett wrote his play in

—the English Waiting for Godot of the French — the play has two

two languages

is

not merely a transla-

original languages, in

which

I

am

re-

copied out in ink both the English and the French

(An extra symmetry

tion

would be able

ancient, scarred carbon paper to provide fifteen

that I could learn the Bosnian, the

know what

I

another typewriter was found and the translation

double-spaced scripts

my

of this sort, and

at

home; and now

was completely opaque

What happened working for about

had two

translations, in a language

to me.)

then? After

a

it

both of

week, and

we had gone up on I

had blocked

a

the stage and been

good part of the

first

SUSAN SONTAG

338

act,

my

English

assistant

and two of the actors

— took me

—the two who spoke the most

aside.

Problem? Yes. What they

they had to

felt

tell

and could we

translation really wasn't very good,

translation published in Belgrade in the 1950s. "Is there a difference?"

me was

new

that the

please, please use the *

asked.

I

"Yes, the old translation

better."

is

"Better in what sense?" "It

sounds

"There

more

Or something

translation?

"Not

better. It's

that

natural. Easier to say."

difference? Something Serbian about that

isn't a linguistic

not Bosnian?"

anyone would notice."

"So there aren't any words you would have to change to make the translation

"Not "It's

more Bosnian?"

really.

But we could,

not what

serve. Beckett.

"Well,"

my

I

want,"

you want us

if

my

said, gritting

I

to."

teeth. "I'm just here to

You. Sarajevo. Whatever." Vladimir said thoughtfully, "here's what

we could

Let's

go back to the old translation, and while we're rehearsing,

see a

word we think should be changed

we'll

change

tell

"Nema problema" means.

me,"

said

a

something more Bosnian,

I said.

my

of course means

It's

we

it."

"Don't forget to

Which

to

if

do.

.

Estragon. .

.

but you

know

perfectly well

what

phrase that seems to translate into every language

it

in the

world.

THE END OF THE STORY learn

is

that

—

as

you may not be surprised to

— the actors never changed anything.

Godot opened

in

mid-August, no

member

Further,

when Waiting

for

of the theatre public com-

plained that the translation didn't sound Bosnian, or Bosnian enough.

(Perhaps they had other, more pressing things on their minds

— such

as

waiting for Clinton.)

Much

can be spun from

this story,

including

some consideration of

the potent fantasy that people have about language as a carrier of na-

On tional identity

—which can make on the

concerns newly, lethally

339

a translation, or the refusal to

one, the equivalent of an act of treason. stance taking place

Being Translated

What

territory of the

self- defined

is

make

pathetic about this in-

former Yugoslavia

happen

nations that

same spoken language and are therefore deprived

is

that

it

to share the

may

of, if I

call

it

thus, "the right of translation." It

seems appropriate that the story

place that

—

as I realize

spend so much time

I try

I talk

I've just told

my

you happened

what

to describe

in Sarajevo in the past

two weeks ago, from

just returned,

most people

whenever

two and

ninth stay there)

siege, or the

in a

like to

a half years (I've

with like the other side of the moon.

people can't imagine a war or a

been

it's

It's

—seems

to

not just that

danger or the fear or the

humiliation. More: they simply can't imagine that degree of different-

ness from their

sense

own

and comforts, from

lives

—understandable,

for

it's

based on their

their understandable

own

experience

—

that

the world isn't such a really terrible place.

They

can't imagine that. It

TRANSLATION

ABOUT

IS

and ameliorating, and, lustrates,

it is

also a

Originally

ference of

all:

yes,

way of

(at least in

that

must be translated

differentness.

denying difference

for them.

A

way

—even

of coping with, if,

as

my

story

il-

asserting differentness.

English) translation was about the biggest dif-

between being

alive

and being dead. To

translate

is,

To what end? In

etymologically, to transfer, to remove, to displace.

order to be rescued, from death or extinction. Listen to Wycliffe's Englishing of the

Bi feith

Enok

is

translatid, that

Hebrew Bible's Book of Enoch:

he shulde not see deeth, and

he was not founden, for the Lord translatide him.

come

to

mean

from earth

to

heaven

Eventually "to be translated" did translation

—one

rection,

which

deeth to

lyfe."

is

is

translated

(again in Wycliffe's English) to

"to die."

Death

— and so

is

is

resur-

be "translatid from

In English, the oldest meanings of the verb have nothing to

do with

SON -

N

34C

language

—with

a

mental act and

and

mainly, an intransitive verb,

condition or

site

—usually

each other. The "trans" _

.

is

no

it is

To

translate

so far as these, condition and

a physical "across" or crossing,

graphy of action, action

X was.

transcription.

its

in space.

longer: instead

it is

(or

The formula

is at)

now

Consider the following meanings,

meant

In medicine, to translate once

is.

is,

change of

a physical act. It signifies a

imply

site,

and proposes

roughly:

where

Y.

obsolete:

to transfer a disease

from one

person to another, or from one part of the body to another (something

modern concept oi

like the

property (such as

Contract

metastasis). In law,

a legacy). In the

it

meant

to transfer

words oi Thomas Hobbes:

mutual translation, or change of Right." Perhaps the

is

"All latest

of these meanings which involve an idea oi physical transfer dates from the late nineteenth century. In long-distance telegraphy, to translate to retransmit a

We

message automatically, by means of

is

a relay.

retain only the sense of translation as the transfer or

handing

over or delivery from one language to another. Yet the older meanings

expressed in the as if

tra-

and

trans-

words (welded

an underpinning. The fruitful subliminal, connection.

gap. to

which

To

translate

make something go where is

it

handed "over" or "down"

others, translation

one person,

site,

is

language to is still

something across

not. Like tradition,

(originally,

real,

a

something

something material) to

all

that

its

meaning has

—what being passed or transferred from one another — the sense of physical or geographical is

is

separate-

implicit,

who

to lead

or condition to another. For

and potent. Languages are

tagonistic) communities, each with

the one

is still

was

to -dere* -ducere) remain

of etymology express a

the conveying or transmitting of something from

been "spiritualized"

aess

affinities

its

own

like separate (often an-

customs. The translator

rinds (identifies, formulates) the

comparable customs

is

in

another language.

i'll

mention briefly

three variants of the

modern

idea of trans-

lation. First, translation as explanation.

Motivating the translator's effort

is

the project of replacing ignorance, obscurity ("I don't understand.

On Would you The

Being Translated

341

please translate that for me?") by knowledge, transparency.

translator's mission

is

clarification,

enlightenment.

Second, translation as adaptation. Not simply a freer use of language, which purports to express, in another language, the spirit

if

not

the letter of the original text (a wily distinction), but the conscious creation of another "version" (from vertere, to turn, to change direction): "versionist"

the old English

is

who

lators (usually poets)

word

for translator. Indeed,

"mere" accuracy entirely eschew the word "translation" "adaptation" or "version." Rewriting would be a

and

scription,

new

valuable

if (if

the poet

is,

say,

Allan Poe sial,

deas a

poem

—by him."

The

hubristic extension of the

Of translations which

could be considered im-

original, Baudelaire's translation of

poems of Edgar

one, not too controversial, example. (More controver-

is

to say the least,

Germans

in favor of

more accurate

Third, translation as improvement. translation as adaptation.

trans-

Robert Lowell, the version stands

not wholly original)

provements on the

some

don't want to be held to the criterion of

is

the judgment of several generations of cultivated

—Americans old enough

known German-Jewish

to have

refugees in the academic world or in other professions

—

hearing the fervently held view

Hitler

may remember

that the Shakespeare of the Schlegel-

Tieck translation was better than Shakespeare in English.) Translation as

improvement has sounds better

its

own sub -variant:

in translation"), a dressing

which may or may not

entail actively

THE ACCURACY OF tion. It

is

"There

a

is

translation as obfuscation (as in "It

as well

up or paring down of the

tampering with

a translation

an ideological one.

text,

it.

not merely a technical ques-

is

And

it

has a moral component,

metaphoric use of translation-as-adaptation, which evokes the older, physical

sense of translation: translating (transposing) from one guidelines about

medium

what may be produced by following the

to another.

Here there

are

original more, rather than less,

no lit-

recommended) choosing an inferior work to strut one's stuff. When was "translated to the screen" by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the filmmaker preserved a large part of the spirit of Doblin's masterpiece, and also made a film that is a masterpiece. What might seem a counterexample, with equally exemplary results: Henry erally;

or

(as is

often

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Bernstein's

Melo

is

far

from

a great play, but Alain Resnais's Melo,

melodrama of He only had to add to

the text of Bernstein's boulevard

1928,

improve Bernstein's

it

play.

his

is

which scrupulously follows

a great film. Resnais did not

own

genius.

have to

— SUSAN SONTAG

342

which becomes the notion of

visible

when

for the notion of accuracy

what

In the ethics of translation,

one who would be always willing

Good,

vise again. it

we

substitute

fidelity.

projected

is

to take

better, best, ideal

.

.

.

more

an ideal servant

is

pains, linger longer, re-

however good the

translation

is,

can always be improved, bettered. Can one translation be the best?

Of

course. But the perfect (or ideal) translation

an ever receding

is

chimera. Anyway, ideal by what standard?

(You

will

have already noted that

I

am assuming

when

thing as an "original" text. Perhaps only now,

common

void of

that there

making

I

such a

ideas utterly de-

sense or respect for the practice of writing have great

And

currency in the academy, would this seem to need saying.

am

is

am

that assumption, but I

also

not only

proposing that the notion

of translation not be too broadly extended or metaphorized, which

what allows one be regarded

to claim,

among

other

as itself a translation

—the

is

the original should

follies, that

"original translation," so to

speak, of something in the author's consciousness.)

The notion perennially one.

means

It

of ideal translation

opposed standards of

likely to

is

translation.

be submitted

Minimum

that the translation will feel like one:

it

to

two

adaptation

is

will preserve,

even flaunt, the rhythm, syntax, tone, lexical idiosyncrasies of the text in its original language. this literalist idea

tion

is

the other.

It

means

text wholly "into" the feel all

one

(The most contentious modern proponent of

of translation

new

tified

with the

must bring the

original

language, so that, ideally, one does not ever at all. Inevitably, this

traces of the original lurking

liberties

Vladimir Nabokov.) Full naturaliza-

that the translator

reading a translation

is

is

text: these

work of dispelling

behind the translation requires taking

adjustments or inventions are not only

jus-

but necessary.

Pedestrian trot versus impertinent rewrite extremes, well within which

lies

and behind the difference

responsibility

translator

what end?

A

two notions of

—the image

translator

may

of course,

lies

is

a

translation in circu-

a larger disagreement about what

one has to the "original"

must serve

are,

the actual practice of most dedicated

translators. Nevertheless, there are lation,

—these

text.

Everyone agrees that the

powerful one

—the

text.

But for

feel that the text (or "original") is best

On

Being Translated

343

served by taking certain liberties, perhaps in the interest of making

more

accessible or gaining for

it

new members

it

of the potential audi-

ence. Is

the

it

work

to

which one

to

it

be

self-evident that

the words of the book. But this

Bible,

this illustrious title

theory of translation, for that

Perhaps

Plato.

it's

Jerome couldn't

because he was the

honor belongs,

because Jerome was the

as

we might

on record

first

rail

a

expect, to

to complain

against ignorant, careless

and brazen confectioners of interpolated passages; and to

And

was

for greater exactitude.

his epistle

"The Principles of Good Translation," who

in the case of Scripture, a translator

a

advance

to

first

campaign

duce

that I

work, to

not a simple matter, either histori-

about translations, about their quality: to copyists

mean

I

faithful to the

called the patron saint of translators.

is

have received

is

one be

The

Take Saint Jerome himself, father of the Latin

cally or normatively.

who

writer? Literature?

One might suppose (maybe

language? The audience?

might suppose)

The

faithful?

is

word-by-word rendering;

that

yet

it

this

should not it

was

same Jerome,

in

said that, except

feel

bound

to pro-

sufficient to translate the

sense.

That

from one language

a translation

sonably faithful (whatever that

Standards of

were

to another

may mean)

is

now

fidelity to the original are certainly

a generation, not to

mention

a

rea-

received wisdom.

now

higher

than they

century, ago. For some time now,

translating, at least into English

(though not,

been measured by more

—

literalist

ought to be

I

French), has

say, into

should say more scrupulous

standards, whatever the actual insufficiencies of most translations. This is

partly because translation has itself

reflection,

and translations

come under

(at least

scholarly scrutiny.

become

a subject for

of important books) are likely to

As part of what may seem

opting by academic

standards of the translator's task,

more

literary

likely that

any

academic

work of importance which

like the co-

more and

it

is

is

not contem-

porary will be accompanied by the translator's "notes," either

bottom of the page or the text

presumed

to

at

the end

at

the

of the book, explaining references in

be obscure. Indeed,

less

and

less

do

translations

presuppose that the reader possesses the most elementary information about history or

literature, or

any language

skills.

The

recent,

much

344

SUSAN SONTAG

heralded re-translation of The Magic Mountain puts the delirious conversation in the pivotal "Walpurgis Nacht" chapter between

Hans Cas-

torp and Clavdia Chauchat, which transpires, crucially to the story, in

French (and

is

French

in

in the old

of 1927), into English. English in

(whose ignorance of French

italics,

H.

Lowe-Porter translation

T.

so the Anglo-American reader

taken for granted) might "feel" that

is

it is

in a foreign language.

TRANSLATIONS patina of time

ARE

LIKE

buildings. If they're any good, the

makes them look

Plutarch, Motteux's Rabelais

.

.

.

better: Florio's

(Who was

it

Montaigne, North's

who

said,

"The

greatest

Russian writer of the nineteenth century, Constance Garnett"?) The

most admired, and long-lived, are not the most accurate.

And,

like building (the verb), translating

Few people

creasingly ephemeral now. tion

—

that

produces something

believe in a definitive transla-

And

one that would not need to be redone.

is,

the force of novelty: a "new" translation, like a

new

car.

then there

more

books there

is

rapidly.

With

German

and since the 1950s vary. Translation is

translations of

at least ten

new

Between 1947 and 1972

The Picture of Dorian Gray,

English translations of Madame Bo-

one of the few cultural practices that

ruled by an idea of progress

become

respect to a few (admittedly a very few)

actually a glut of translations.

there were eleven

is

Submitted to

the laws of industrial society, translations seem to wear out,

obsolete

in-

(in

contrast to, say, acoustics).

still

The

seems

latest

is,

in principle, the best.

The new

cultural populism,

which

be available to everyone,

carries with

thing should be translated

—

or, at least,

counter-example, that the old or anti-populist, as you will

insists that

—

New

Yorker

everything should

the implication that every-

it

be

—

translatable. Recall, as a

call

the magazine snobbish

didn't, as a matter of policy, print fiction

in translation.

Consider the force of the locution "language barrier"

which language interposes between one person

(or

—the barrier

community) and

another, the barrier which translation "breaks down." For language

is

the enforcer of separateness from other communities ("You don't

On speak

speak

my language") as well as the my language around here?").

But we tions

live in a society

—which

is

in the

creator of

is

to

world culture

today

is

—

ide-

effortlessly transmissible form.

unitary, transnational capital-

the practice of translation.

is

tradi-

and knowledge of

be recombined, remade

A leading feature of our ideology of a ist

community ("Anyone

to say, the destruction of fealty to

most portable,

345

pledged to the ceaseless invention of

the specific, local past. Everything ally,

Being Translated

one of the communicational

this perspective, translation

lifelines

quote: "Translation

I

of our global village." In

becomes not merely

a useful, desirable

practice but an imperative one: linguistic barriers are obstacles to the

commodities ("communication"

freest circulation of

for trade)

is

One

the ideology of unlimited business.

more people with

plicit claim:

Ulysses,

can't

namely, that anything can be translated,

Gerard Manley Hopkins, whatever.

for saying this

be translated

is

true.

is

always wants

one's product. Besides the universalist

claims implicit in this goal of unlimited translation, there

ment

euphemism

and therefore must be overcome. Underpinning the ideology

of universalism to reach

a

is

And

if

is

another im-

one knew how.

there

is

a

good argu-

(Perhaps the only important book that

Finnegans Wake, for the reason that

it is

not writ-

ten in only one language.)

The

inevitable instrumentation of this idea of the necessity of trans-

lation, the "translation

universal language

is

machine," shows us

alive

and

well. Saint

how the

Jerome took

did most Christians of the early centuries, that

from one Ur-language (Hebrew, the the presumptuous building of the that, via the

We

computer,

do not need an

all

ancient

all

it

dream of

a

for granted, as

languages descend

original speech of

mankind,

until

Tower of Babel). The modern idea

is

languages can be turned into one language.

actually existing universal language as long as

we

have, or can imagine as feasible, a machine which can "automatically" give us the translation into any foreign language.

and fancy prose writers about what

is,

will instantly

weigh

in

Of

course, the poets

with their old lament

inevitably, "lost in translation" (rhyme, flavor, wordplay,

the grit of dialect) even by experienced, individual, "real" translators.

Imagine the dimensions of the a

loss if the translator

is

not a person but

program! The directions on a Tylenol bottle can be translated with-

SUSAN SONTAG

346

out loss into any language. This

which

hardly the case with a

poem by Ma-

by Carlo Emilio Gadda. But the project of

rina Tsvetaeva or a novel a translation

is

machine proposes quite another idea of language, one

identifies

language with the communication of information:

statements. In the

new

Platonic praxis, the poets will not need to be

banished from the Republic.

It will

dered unintelligible, because the

be processed by

have been ren-

suffice that they will

artifacts they

make with words cannot

a machine.

This universalist model exists side by side with the persistence of

language separatism, which asserts the incommensurability of cultures, of identities (political, racial, anatomical). So, in the former Yugoslavia,

one language

is

being turned into many, and there

triotic call for translations.

Both models

interdependently. Language patriotism

is

the farce of a pa-

exist simultaneously,

may

perhaps

continue to grow as a

country pursues economic politics that sap national sovereignty,

just as

the most lethal myths of national distinctiveness can maintain their

hold on a population even as cultural paraphernalia of

(made

national

it

becomes ever more attached

consumer

in Japan,

made

capitalism,

which

blandly supra-

computer

in the U.S.A.), or to

which promote inevitably the growth of

nologies,

is

to the

tech-

world language,

a

English.

I

BEGAN WITH

an anecdote that illustrated some of the ideological

paradoxes embedded in the practice of translation. another fragment of personal experience: mitting of

my own books

I'll

end by evoking

my participation

in the trans-

into other languages. This has

been

The Volcano Lover, with

a par-

mul-

ticularly

wrenching task

tiplicity

of narrative voices and levels of language. Published in 1992,

in the case of

the novel already exists or

and

I

is

about to exist in twenty foreign languages;

have checked, sentence by sentence, the translations

principal

its

Romance languages and made myself

in the four

available to respond to

countless questions from several of the translators in languages

know. You might say I'm obsessed with translations.

I

I

don't

think I'm just

obsessed with language. I

don't have time to

tell

you any

stories

about

my

dialogue with the

On translators.

I'll

end by saying

available to them.

own

I

wish

I

that

I

wish

work.

I

do not

347

could stop wanting to be

could give up trying to see the words,

sentences, English, shine through.

thralling

I

Being Translated

translate. I

It's

am

melancholy

translated

—

my

as well as en-

modern

in the

sense and in the obsolete sense deployed by Wycliffe. In supervising

my translations, of my words.

I

am

supervising the death as well as the transposition

[

x

995]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

"A

Poet's Prose"

was written

tive Spirit: Selected

"Where

as

an introduction to Marina Tsvetaeva, Cap-

Prose (Virago Press, 1983).

The

the Stress Falls" appeared in

"Afterlives:

The Case

Machado de

New

ruary

in

June

18, 2001.

the foreword to a reprint-

Winner (Noonday Press, Mourning" appeared in the Times

Literary Supplement, Feb-

Assis"

ing of Epitaph of a Small

"A Mind

Yorker,

is

of

1990).

25, 2000.

"The Wisdom Project" appeared in The New Republic, March 16, 2001. "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes" is the introduction to A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (Hill and Wang, 1982). "Walser's Voice"

Susan Sontag

is

the preface to Robert Walser, Selected Stories, ed.

(Farrar, Straus

"Danilo Kis"

is

and Giroux,

1982).

the introduction to Danilo Kis,

Homo

Poeticus: Essays

and Interviews, ed. Susan Sontag (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995). "Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke" is the foreword to a new translation of Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke (Yale University Press, 2000). "Pedro Paramo" is the foreword to a new translation of Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo (Grove Press, 1994). "DQ" was published in Spanish translation in a National Tourist Board of Spain catalogue, "Esparia:

appeared

"A

el sol," in 1985;

it

has never before

Letter to Borges," written on the tenth anniversary of Borges's death

and published 13,

Todo bajo

in English.

in

Spanish translation

1996, has never before

"A Century

appeared

in the

of Cinema" was written for and

lation in Frankfurter

Buenos Aires

daily Clarin,

June

in English.

Rundschau, December

first

published in

German

trans-

30, 1995.

349

Acknowledgments

350

"Novel into Film: Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz" appeared

September

ity Fair,

in Van-

1983.

"A Note on Bunraku" was raku Puppet Theatre

at

program note

a

for performances of the

New York City on March

the Japan Society in

Bun-

12-19,

1983.

"A

Place for Fantasy" appeared in House and Garden, February 1983. "The Pleasure of the Image" appeared in Art in America, November 1987.

"About Hodgkin" was written for Howard Hodgkin Paintings, the catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, in 1993, and subsequently seen at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It was first published in Britain by Thames & Hudson in 1995.

"A Lexicon

for Available Light"

appeared

in

Art

in

America, December

1983.

Memory

"In

of Their Feelings" was written for the catalogue Dancers on

Cunningham, Johns, which accompanied an exhibit at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery in London from October 31 to December 2, 1989.

a Plane: Cage,

"Dancer and the Dance"

"On

Lincoln Kirstein"

New York lier,

on

first

French translation and

1986, in

is

appeared

in

French Vogue, December

in English.

a revision,

done

in 1997 for a publication

by the

City Ballet, of a tribute to Lincoln Kirstein written ten years ear-

his eightieth birthday,

which appeared

in Vanity Fair,

May

1987.

"Wagner's Fluids" was the program essay for a production of Tristan und Isolde staged

by Jonathan Miller

at

"An Ecstasy of Lament" was leas et

the Los Angeles

Opera

in

December

1987.

the program essay for a production of Pel-

Melisande staged by Robert Wilson

at the

Salzburg Festival in July

1997.

"One Hundred Years of Italian Photography" is the foreword to Italy: One Hundred Years of Photography (Alinari, 1988). "On Bellocq" is the introduction to a new edition of E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portraits (Jonathan Cape and Random House, 1996). "Borland's Babies"

House Books,

is

the preface to Polly Borland's

The Babies (power-

2001).

"Certain Mapplethorpes"

is

the preface to Robert Mapplethorpe's Cer-

A

Book of Portraits (Twelvetrees Press, 1985). "A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?" was written as an accompanying text to Annie Leibovitz's Women (Random House, 1999). tain People:

"Homage

to Halliburton"

was published

in

Oxford American, March/April

2001.

"Singleness," one of a group of essays inspired by Borges's "Borges y yo,"

was collected

1995).

in

Who's Writing This?,

ed. Daniel

Halpern (Ecco Press,

Acknowledgments

35

1

"Writing As Reading," a contribution to a series called "Writers on Writing" in

The

New

York Times, appeared on December

"Thirty Years Later ..."

the preface to a

is

new

18, 2000.

edition of the Spanish

translation of Against Interpretation (Alfaguara, 1996).

Threepenny Review (Summer

in English in

"Questions of Travel"

appeared

in

was

first

published

Times Literary Supplement,

the

June 22, 1984. "The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy)" started conference on Europe held in Berlin in late

appeared

It

1996).

May

as a talk delivered at a

1988. It has never before

in English.

"The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe (An Interlude)" was written for the catalogue of an art exhibition in Berlin and first published there, in

German

translation, in

Wulf Herzogenrath, Joachim Hentrich, 1990).

"Answers

It

appeared

in

Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit Berlin

Sartorius,

New

English in The

to a Questionnaire"

was written

La Regie du

Que

peuvent

Jeu, n.s. 21 (1998),

"Waiting for Godot

Yorker,

March

It

Review of Books, October 21, 1993. There' and 'Here' " appeared '

"Joseph Brodsky" was written

in in

published in The

first

1991.

The Nation, December

in

repondent,"

and has never before appeared was

4,

was published,

les intellectuels? 36 ecrivains

in Sarajevo"

ed.

response to a

in July 1997, in

questionnaire sent by a French literary quarterly.

French, in "Enquete:

njcjo,

and Christoph Tannert (Edition

in English.

New

York

25, 1995.

1997 as the afterword to Mikhail

Lemkhin, Joseph Brodsky I Leningrad Fragments

(Farrar, Straus

and Giroux,

1998).

"On Being

Translated," a speech given in

Pellizzi,

November

1995 at a confer-

Columbia University and organized by Francesco the editor of Res, was printed in Res 32 (Autumn 1997).

ence on translation held

at

SUSAN SON TAG novel, In America, fiction in

won

s

the National

most recent

Book Award

for

2000. Her other books include the novel

The Volcano Lover, as well as two earlier novels; a collection of stories,

/,

etcetera; a play, Alice

in

Bed;

and nonfiction works, among them On Photography and

Illness as

Metaphor.

In

2001 she was awarded

the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work.

Jacket design by Susan Mitchell Jacket painting: Indian Sky, 1988-89 by

Howard Hodgkin.

Courtesy of Anthony d'Offay Gallery© Howard Hodgkin

Author photograph by Annie Leibovitz

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

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