Recent Reads by Duras and Brian Dillon, A Home in Sontag's Journals & Reading Projects
I’ve been reading Susan Sontag’s journals, unintentionally starting with the second volume, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: 1964-1980, very slowly for a couple weeks now. Going into it I expected it to be something I would read fairly fast, with journals and diaries being looser and more meandering. While this is true for Sontag’s journals, I find that when I pick it up I usually only read 20 or so pages, and then I won’t read it at all for days. Part of this is that my attention has been on other reading projects. This year I have had a massive book going at all times—first it was Dostoevsky’s Demons, then it Anna Karenina, and now I’m currently reading Vol. 4 of Proust and Vol. 1 of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities at the same time. Proust and Musil at the same time, you ask? Well okay, I don’t take much convincing to go on a digression.
This time a year ago it was a grand occasion if I could get myself to read more than one book at a time, something that I would consider doing every time I started a new book, seeing it as a cheat code to reading more books (especially important for someone like me who can’t remember a time when I wasn’t drowning in books I wanted to read). But I just couldn’t ever get myself to do it. I would start two books on the same day, reading a bit from each, but every time one would win a battle I didn’t even know was being waged and I’d end up committing to the winner. In the back of my mind there’s always been this anxiety that if I read more than one book at a time it will detract from the individual reading experiences of the respective books I read together. This cycle of continually planning to read multiple books and never doing it because I valued these individual reading experiences went on for years, until last year when Proust invaded my life.
Reading Proust has been a very significant moment in my life, but this isn’t the time to try and put together my thoughts on In Search of Lost Time. That will require multiple newsletters, but, more importantly, I’m in the middle of Vol. 4 and I don’t trust my thoughts or impressions and likely won’t until I’ve finished the entire series. Back to the point, Proust has marked an important point for me as a reader. To commit to reading all of In Search of Lost Time I was faced with two options: dedicate myself to reading it all at once with all other reading being put on hold for months, or reading it slowly, on a page per week or day schedule, which would take even longer but allow me to read other books as well. I chose the section option. For the past six or so months I’ve been reading through it gradually, usually with breaks between volumes, at 30 pages a day. When I decided to do this I thought it would be for Proust alone, but it was like discovering a new form of reading. Suddenly I realized that I could read most of the huge, daunting behemoths that have been taunting me from my shelves over the course of a single month while still able to focus on other reading. Up until now I’ve strictly been jumping between two books, a biggun’ I’m reading on a page-per-day schedule and a shorter work I read at whatever pace I feel like. I found paradise, but after a while even paradise loses its luster.
Now I find myself reading Proust, Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero, Sontag’s journals on-and-off, while also being a part of a group read of The Man Without Qualities. It is hosted by a group of literature professors and has me feeling at once that I have found my people and that my people exist in another world that I am outside from, merely looking in through a smudged window. Nonetheless, while they are already able to write 1,000 words on the first ten pages of TMWQ I stand back awed and envious, taking notes and channeling my inner Julien Sorel.
Yikes, there were digressions within digressions in that. Back to Sontag’s journals. What I believe is causing me to read it so slowly isn’t my attention on other reading projects but something else, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Reading her journals, even more than her essays, feels like spending time with a bookish friend who is as ravenous for literature as I am. Seeing her struggling to formulate her responses to the books she reads and trying to use the ideas she gets from them for her own fiction which was always such a painful struggle for her—the beauty of her struggles inspires me. Her lists and and the way she strives to make use of everything that fascinates her, it makes me look at myself and recognize that I am constantly thinking about this as well but doing less to make use of all the ideas and ambitions that come from reading so much great literature. More to the point, I read 20 pages of her journals and it excites me so much to see her grappling with her ideas and I think that if this was her life’s work it would have been a tragedy to her but that to the rest of us they will have a longevity that most of her fiction, and much fiction in general, will not.
Maybe I should give keeping a journal of my own another try. Take all the time I spend with my head in the clouds thinking of what I just finished reading and what possible fiction ideas I could pilfer from them and get that shit down on paper. Anyway, sorry to those of you who signed up for this newsletter just for the hot book recs, your boy craves something more and the consequences are that while I try to find whatever that is you have to scroll through me rambling about whatever pops into my head.
The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras (Pantheon, translated by Richard Seaver): An unreliable narrator with a taste for fictional flourishes becomes obsessed with an unreliable woman who keeps her past in a vaporous cloud of missing information. The pain of the past as an obsession that lies dormant until a place, person, or sensory experience awakens it. If it can’t be escaped perhaps it can be tamed by recreation, a delusion of safety created by calculated and synchronized parallels. Duras’ haunting and cryptic writing inspires equally abstract and theorizing thoughts. I also read L’Amour, a vague sequel to Lol Stein that feels like it was meant to be a play or screenplay, which makes sense as it was written at a time when Duras was growing increasingly drawn to cinema. I had the same problems with L’Amour as I had with Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), in that throughout them I get glimpses of fascinating ideas that are completely obscured by abstract symbolism and indecipherable dialogue. I do feel like maybe I didn’t experience either at the right time. I will read more Duras and return again in the future. Lol Stein is elusive and enigmatic as well, but the characters are full-formed, have pasts (even if clouded in mystery) and private lives that give meaning to their haunted obsessions.
Essayism by Brian Dillon (NYRB Imprints): A book-length ode to essays as an art form. Dillon discusses William H. Gass, Sontag, Virginia Woolf, Barthes, etc. to explore what these writers has contributed to the essayistic tradition and what their work reveals about the form of the genre. But alongside his ruminations on form Dillon also gradually, in essayistic fragments, chronicles his own personal struggles that lead to him discovering his unique voice. This book is many things at once, but most of all it is study of writing as a solace, as something to hold onto to through life’s hardships. It’s a study of the essay form, but is digressive and ruminating rather than polemical. Dillon writes with wonder and excitement at the form’s possibilities, and I see Essayism as a book I will return to at those melancholy moments to which a litany of lists, melodramatic aphorisms, or bits of literary gossip serve as the best respites.
A recent read that I will be mostly saving for future discussion is Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz (Yale University Press, translated by Danuta Borchardt). A vicious, inventive, profane book that gleefully mocks the corruption and hypocrisy of modern life as well as the self-imposed limitations of most fiction. Gombrowicz seems to see modern life and fiction groveling at the feet of similar forms of artificial ideas. His response to the Cult of Dignity, Order and Authority is derision—their self-importance crumbling in the face of disrespectful disdain. Although, this is all half-baked theorizing. I plan to read much more of Gombrowicz, fiction and his Diary, before trying to write more on him.