Notes on Sontag and Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
Against Interpretation & Other Essays by Susan Sontag (Picador)
I feel inadequate to the task of writing about this book. I have not read enough or explored enough art forms and see my thoughts as half-formed things. However, maybe that’s precisely why I should write about this book in which Susan Sontag argues again and again against over-interpretation and for focusing primarily on an artwork’s aesthetics.
Sontag writes in “On Style”:
A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.
So what is this book like as an “experience”? For me it was like finding a friend as excited about literature as I am and then equally as opinionated about mediums that I’ve only had a peripheral interest in thus far. Sontag is polemical with her opinions but, not always yet often, open-minded and forthright about her biases. Her essays have a refreshing messiness in that you often watch her experiment with her own ideas in real-time. She expects a lot from art and makes bold judgements that sometimes don’t feel like they align with her central arguments but that nonetheless fit with her intensive analysis of the artworks in question.
Sontag is drawn to artworks that you could obsessively interpret and analyze, but to her the key to appreciating them is by embracing their chaotic quality. She passionately rejects the simplification of art to summed-up theories of what their content means. She strives to look beyond meaning and find the future of where art will go through a more open-minded and polyamorous relationship with form.
In her review of Michel Leiris’ Manhood, she is fascinated by the contrast between Leiris’ brilliance as an anthropologist and ethnographer and the deeply alienated and nihilistic quality of his autobiographical projects. Manhood is a catalogue of his failures, inadequacies and humiliations told with fetishistic detail that manages to lull its reader into boredom. Sontag sees uses of boredom which explore an opaque and hermetic view of life such as Leiris’ as “the most creative stylistic features of modern literature.”
On the other hand, Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade is a play that is a relentless assault of imagery provoking every possible interpretation. On the play’s depiction of insanity, she says:
But the setting of Marat/Sade does not amount to a statement that the world is insane. Nor is it an instance of a fashionable interest in the psychology of psychopathic behavior. On the contrary, the concern with insanity in art today usually reflects the desire to go beyond psychology.
Sontag is only vaguely interested in psychoanalyzing Weiss’ text or Peter Brook’s production. Beyond over-simplistic looks at its moral value and its portrayal of “humanism,” she is excited by it as a sensory experience. A chaotic work of art that has a lot to say about morality and psychology but with an experimental form that refuses to be summed up by any theory.
The opening to Sontag’s essay on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet opens as such: “Saint Genet is a cancer of a book, grotesquely verbose, its cargo of brilliant ideas borne aloft by a tone of viscous solemnity and by ghastly repetitiveness.” And for the rest of the essay she argues that the brilliance of Sartre’s ideas is worth enduring the cancer of its pretentious tone and exhausting design. Perhaps it’s too simplistic to read her thoughts on Sartre’s book—which originated as a 50-page introduction to Jean Genet’s collected works then turned into 650-page treatise—as a mix between the creative boredom she values in Leiris’ Manhood and the sensory assault of Marat/Sade, but it feels right to me.
As a former film student who has had a complicated relationship with Jean-Luc Godard—I’ve experienced his work in passionate phases separated by large gaps in time, never able to watch and appreciate his work if not in a very specific frame of mind—I am horrified that I hadn’t read Sontag’s essay on Vivre Sa Vie. I feel like this essay should be required reading for film students (and film lovers) wanting to understand Godard. Godard is arguably the perfect representation of Sontag’s thesis of Form over Content. You have to understand his form to understand the content. Some of his films can be appreciated on a more primal level (Breathless and Weekend come to mind), but most require a firmer understanding of his aesthetic style, and all benefit from this.
Her essay on Bresson is a great companion to this with Bresson’s work being a more subtle and spiritual expression of form over ideas.
“Against Interpretation,” “On Style,” and “Notes on ‘Camp’” are the definitive essays of this collection. The first two are arrogant and evangelical in how Sontag voices her rejection of the monopoly of interpretation—psychology, morality, sociology, etc.—as critical focus over the beauty and complexity of form. “Notes on ‘Camp’” is an ode to messy, ecstatic, contradictory artifice. The essay itself reflects this.
“One Culture and the New Sensibility” is supposed to be a companion to the previous three essays, but it is far weaker. It reads too much like a manifesto with no real concrete solutions to the problems it presents. Also, it rehashes many of the ideas already voiced in “Against Interpretation” and “On Style” which are far more focused.
We need more critics like Sontag that have the courage to be skeptics of mass culture. In my opinion we’ve become far too complacent with the content being churned out by huge corporations. Sure, there is a steady stream of tweets and op-eds decrying the monopoly of the Big 5 in publishing and the sterilized content coming from Hollywood, but as soon as these corporations throw money around in support of diversity (usually in a very pandering way) we sing their praises like this represents real change. I think a better way to work towards change is for us to greatly raise the standards we have for the art we consume. Emily in Paris was nominated for Golden Globes because millions of people, many who claimed to dislike it, made it an incessantly central topic for weeks.
In her afterword written thirty years after the publication of Against Interpretation & Other Essays, Sontag writes:
I suppose it isn’t wrong if Against Interpretation is read now, or re-read, as an influential, pioneering document from a bygone age. But that is not how I read it, or—lurching from nostalgia to utopia—would wish it to be read. My hope is that its republication now, and the acquisition of a new generation of readers, could contribute to the near-hopeless task of shoring up the values out of which these essays and reviews were written. The judgments of taste expressed in these essays may have triumphed. The values that underlay those judgments did not.
Hopefully with the current surge of retrospective interest in Sontag’s work (me included) we will see more critics following in her footsteps because our culture desperately needs voices as passionate and furious for the future of art as hers was.
Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick (NYRB Classics)
Sleepless Nights is a novel that treats life experienced as a work of art. Note that I said experienced instead of lived. The narrator is also named Elizabeth and her own experiences are only fleetingly reflected on. She is recently divorced and through letters to her friend M. (perhaps a nod to Mary McCarthy who Hardwick dedicates the novel to) we see that she is travelling to and from New York City, Boston and Maine and in the process is reminiscing about the places and people she has encountered.
Most of all her thoughts return to her mother, a woman with a guarded and fascinatingly withheld interior life who spent her exterior life raising nine children. The narrator remembers her mother and her adolescence with a mournful nostalgia. She misses her mother and yearns to return to her past to try and understand her more yet has little interest in her own past. In contrast, the rest of her recollections are from her adult life and focus on melancholy transitory figures.
There are many lovelorn people that pass through the halls of her memory. There is a doctor who survived the Holocaust and treats his romantic life as a desperate, all-consuming search for love and desire, which takes on a narcissistic quality as his vaguely-defined open-marriage falters. She remembers what she learned, practical and moral, from the housecleaners of her life. But a man named Alex is one she remembers most. He is a lifelong bachelor who has been content in a lengthy love affair with a woman, but when she abruptly leaves him to marry an older man from her past he suffers the agony of a destroyed marriage. Hardwick captures the pain of his sudden loneliness and solitary melancholy beautifully.
He could look back to the forties, to the anti-Stalinist radicals. How happy he had been then; in the old Partisan Review days, the night when Koestler first met and insulted Sidney Hook; when Sartre and the French discovered Russia long after “we” had felt the misery of the trials, the pacts, the Soviet camps. Alex had lived in history; that is, he had lived through T.S. Eliot, Kafka, John Donne, Henry James,; through Maritain, Gilson, and Alger Hiss.
But he could not give much to this side trip and so, turning back, his eyes rapidly blinking, his mood lowering to a reflection, to a more becoming melancholy, he spoke of the sadness of living alone.
How do you mourn a private life when your life has been spent with art, ideas and political movements? Sleepless Nights deals with this question but not in an attempt at finding answers. Hardwick meanders around her narrator’s memory, using her own life as inspiration and with a distance that allows her to focus on everything but herself.
Like Sontag, Hardwick is best known for her essays. That essayistic spirit which is fascinated by everything encountered drives the design of this novel. Ideas are as much a part of Sleepless Nights as the human figures that past through it.
On the people she sees at a Presbyterian Church as a young girl.
Perhaps here began a prying sympathy for the victims of sloth and recurrent mistakes, a sympathy for the tendency of lives to obey the laws of gravity and to sink downward, falling as gently and slowly as a kite, or violently breaking, smashing.
On the secret lives of spinsters.
Society tries to write these lives before they are lived. It doesn’t always succeed. I have known from home the anarchic sexual secrets of plain, unmarried schoolteachers, some with their thick savings accounts, their accumulation of house lots and rooming houses, their hoarded legacies from parents, aunts, and uncles. Often these women tricked fate by their hidden inclination to men of bad character, younger than themselves: a yard man, a drifter, ex-convict. Gentlemen do not appeal to all women.
On New York City.
New York—this is not a city for poor people. Their presence ruins everything, everything. Dread—that is the noxious air around them. The rich in their pyramids have a nice time. All of the objects of eternity are at hand, lest they down the years need something remembered or forgotten. A broken heart. The pharaohs need not even go outdoors to pace about in their pain, looking in shop windows, buying things. No, they may sit a home in a depression, a square of fur warming their knees, mending all the while. Everyone dreams of a servant when the ego is bruised, the vanity affronted.
Last but not least, this passage from the very end of the book is such a perfect encapsulation of the mournful, searching poeticism of the entire novel.
The torment of personal relations. Nothing new there except in disguise, and in the escape on the wing of adjectives. Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs.
Sometimes I resent the glossary, the concordance of truth, many have about my real life, have like an extra pair of spectacles. I mean that such fact is to me a hindrance on memory.
Otherwise I love to be known by those I care for. Public assistance, a beautiful phrase. Thus, I am always on the phone, always writing letters, always waking up to address myself to B. and D. and C.—those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to throughout the night.