Writing About Nonfiction, or Recapping The Thoughts of (Smarter) Others
And I've Returned to Films!
This one was longer coming due to the fact that almost all of my reading this month has been nonfiction—and approaching writing about nonfiction for me often feels like recapping the thoughts of others. Others who are far smarter than I am. Mostly it’s that in general I don’t read a lot of nonfiction in comparison to the many, many novels I read. When I sit down to write about a novel, while in no way an easy affair, I at least have many hundreds of previous novels I’ve read to think about and draw connections, contrasts, tidbits of trivia, etc. from. Also can’t overstate how much easier it is to write about books, especially classics, when you have a general picture of the author’s life and body of work (even if you haven’t read much of their work, just knowing the subjects, themes, and formal techniques they are known for is extremely useful when trying to form thoughts on one of their individual works). The simple fact is that, on top of reading vastly more novels than nonfiction, I spend a lot of time reading about novelists—a commitment of time and mental energy that I have not consistently given to writers of memoirs, criticism, biographies, etc.
Planning my reading for this year I decided to try and fix that. I have written about some nonfiction titles on here, most notably Against Interpretation & Other Essays by Susan Sontag and The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert. But I have not evened out the ratio as much as I want. This was further sabotaged by my shameless decision to read almost entirely fiction last month (the exception being Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero, which I did write about). So in response to last month’s uneven balance I decided to dedicate this month to nonfiction, with one huge exception: my fiction mental energies are wholly committed to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions which I am reading as part of a Twitter group read.
In terms of reading nonfiction this month, I’m killing it. I’ve read five nonfiction titles and have more lined up than this month (or even next month) could handle. The issue has been that when I’ve finished the books I’ve read and thought about writing about them on here… I just haven’t felt like I had enough to say—or at least not enough interesting thoughts. I think my struggle in many ways comes down to the fact that I just haven’t read enough criticism of nonfiction books. I like to think I’m a smart reader who can read a book, have some thoughts, and write those thoughts in a smart way, but, in reality, for me to write about any type of literature I need to read writing by other more intelligent critics to figure out any idea of how to approach writing about it myself. And it terms of this work, I have been slacking. I subscribe to so many damn magazines and literary journals full of great criticism, and yet if I don’t consciously work towards exploring their archives and keeping up with their new articles then I end up not doing it at all.
With all that said, I am going to write a bit on the books I’ve read this month and just embrace my struggles. Will write through my messy, unfocused thoughts and treat it as it is—practice. For someone who isn’t a professional critic, has no intention of being one, and simply wants to be a moderately intelligent hobbyist with my writings on what I read, I sure do agonize over all this a lot. Anyway.
I opened the month with Styles of Radical Will by Susan Sontag (Picador). Sontag has been one of my great discoveries this year and at the same time the writer who most inspires all of my above agonies. She is an encyclopedia of cultural knowledge, and reading her essays feels like reading a scholar of any of the subjects she chooses. The entire collection is fascinating, although the opening essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” was a bit too abstract and theoretical for my taste.
It was an exciting experience to read the second essay, “The Pornographic Imagination,” as I’ve been slowly making my way through her journals where she has entries where she begins formulating the ideas and discussing the reading she did in prep. In the essay Sontag discusses three pornographic novels—Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille (published as Lord Auch—I’ve read this one, and it is amazingly deranged), Story of O by Pauline Réage and The Image by Jean de Berg—which she considers to be examples of morally complex and aesthetically impressive literature. Interestingly, the writers behind the pseudonyms of the second two titles were not known at the time Sontag wrote this essay. It have since been revealed that the author of The Image is none other than Catherine Robbe-Grillet, professional dominatrix, photographer, writer and wife of Nouveau Roman novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. (Pauline Réage was discovered to be the pen name for journalist Anne Desclos.)
Sontag writes against the common, generalized tendency to write-off pornographic novels as artistically juvenile and/or morally insidious and/or aesthetically debased. She accepts that much of their purpose is sexual gratification and that the depiction of sex acts pushes stylistic invention to the side, but she doesn’t believe that the former means the work can’t still be impressive and the latter she sees as the habit of any specific genre. She compares pornographic literature to science fiction, and an aspect of the essay that has aged poorly is her extremely reductive perspective of science fiction. But this essay furthers what feels like Sontag’s grand argument over her first two collections which, in my overly simplified view, is that politics and moral judgments should not be our priorities when reading or writing, but that literature’s real power comes from aesthetic and stylistic complexity.
The other two essays that I’ve been thinking about the most and know I will return to often in the future are her essays on Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) and a retrospective on Jean-Luc Godard. In typical Sontagian fashion, in the Bergman essay she scoffs at the overly simplistic views of her peers. She views the widespread tendency to interpret the film as the two women (played by Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann) switching personalities as reductive. She finds this perspective too clean and simple, as well as smoothing over the film’s purposeful contradictions. It has been years since I’ve seen Persona and now plan to rewatch it and then revisit this essay. The Godard essay is a lengthy overview of all of his work up till that point (written in 1967, meaning he was thirteen films into his career). This essay, in my opinion, is one of the definitive analyses of Godard’s ‘60s period. It is far too long and detailed for me to try and sum it up here, but I will say that it has inspired me to embark on my own Godard revisit (more on that later).
Next I read Grieving: Dispatches From A Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza (Feminist Press, translated by Sarah Booker). What possibly could I add to a haunting, mournfully optimistic book on the horrors the Mexican people have suffered due to the the “misnamed ‘War on Drugs’” from the last leg of the 20th century till now? I will keep it simple and say that this is an important book that couldn’t have come at a more necessary time. In it Garza reveals the pain and tragedy of the Mexican people that has gotten tragically obscured by all violence perpetuated by the government and the cartels as well as the soulless racism infecting America’s handling of the border crisis. Alongside her short and powerful essays highlighting the dignity and humanity of the Mexican people she also writes a number of odes to writing during crisis. In 2021 we like to bemoan the state of literature and the lessened influence writers have, but in this book Garza provides rallying cries that argue that writing and literature have never been more important than now. That is all I will say about this book, and if you haven’t read it you really should.
It’s a strange and exhilarating experience to read a book and find yourself witnessing the writer uncovering the purpose of an important literary project. And that is what it is like to read The Rules of the Game Vol. 1: Scratches by Michel Leiris (Yale University Press, translated by Lydia Davis) in a nutshell. The opening chapter is a microscopically observed rumination on a moment from Leiris’s childhood where language took center stage. Maybe it was because I read Lydia Davis talking about her experiences translating Leiris and Proust and the similarities she found in their languages that influenced this feeling, but the opening feels remarkably… Proustian. Similar to Proust, Leiris has a flowing, eloquent, obsessive relationship with language and memory. While these similarities are apparent, Leiris is a writer completely his own. The Rules of the Game is his four-volume autobiographical project that he worked on for nearly forty years. This first volume begins with Leiris diving deep into his fascination with words and linguistics. Frankly, the chapter “Persephone” is quite overwhelming. In it he falls down a lengthy rabbit hole where he is caught in a cycle of connections between words and sensory experiences. There is only sporadic autobiographical detail to connect you to his linguistic tangents—although they are often interesting as language experiments. However, following this chapter, in what was already present but now fully becomes the signature of the volume, Leiris addresses precisely the issues that the reader likely has already noticed. Over the rest of the book he finds a better balance between the linguistic arcana that he explores and the connections to his personal life. He analyzes his compulsive return to experiences from his childhood. He agonizes over the unfocused, “anecdotal” quality of the work, and relentlessly dissects his neuroses as a child, man and writer—seeing in them a fatal flaw that will doom him to lifelong mediocrity. Also very nteresting are his contemplations on his middle-class privilege, always having been financially secure and able to use his social class to remain in relative security through World War II. The book ends with a chapter where Leiris picks apart a few selections of criticisms of the work we are reading (including one from a friend who saw the manuscript and a stranger who read the “Persephone” chapter in a literary journal), at first defending himself but then accepting them as correct, he then decides that the project is a failure and needs to abandon it, only to finish by saying he will continue on nonetheless. This summary doesn’t capture how thrilling it is to see a writer discussing the limitations of their work. It is this brutal introspection which is a key to Leiris’s brilliance. In the end he claims his obsessive self-criticism as his own, recognizes it as perhaps the defining quality of his work, and embraces it as the driving force of this ambitious project.
My long-planned introduction to Sigmund Freud finally happened. I read Civilization and its Discontents (W.W. Norton, translated by James Strachey), and what a strange book it is. One of Freud’s final works, in it he essentially argues that civilization is caught in a cycle dominated by mankind’s aggression. In his eyes, not even revolutions such as what Communism strives for would solve the issue because the root of the aggression originates from before private property or capitalism even existed, but from our primitive stage involving deeply natural issues, most notably sex. This is highly simplified, and I am going to hold off on trying to dig deeper into writing about Freud until I’ve read more by and on him. I will say that, in spite of all the scientific debunking his claims have suffered, his theories on religion, sex, and the cycle of violence are deeply fascinating. The book closing with him questioning if mankind will ever be able to calm our violent instincts which was written during the rise of Hitler is chilling.
Last but not least, the masses broke me down and got me to read The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (Vintage). And, kids, it is very good. In it Malcolm uses the Joe McGinniss vs. Jeff MacDonald libel case as a way to explore the inherent issues with the journalist/subject relationship. McGinniss was a nonfiction writer who was given an amazing degree of access o MacDonald, first when he was on trial and then continuing into him being a convicted murderer. They were friends up until the day McGinniss’s scathing book about MacDonald, Fatal Visions, was published. Won’t spend anymore time discussing the situation as it’s widely known. The book is a meta exercise as Malcolm herself interviews everyone involved, thus making them all her subjects and her relationship with them plagued by the same issues. But Malcolm is deeply self-aware about the intrinsic issues with her book, and sees the only way to adequately address the moral and ethical issues as to embark on a sort of graceful kamikaze mission.
A Return To Film
In closing, I’d just like to announce that I’m watching movies again! It has been such an obscenely long time since I watched any movies and, like all the previous times this has happened, I truly don’t understand why I ever abandoned them. Movies have taken a backseat to books for years now (movies were my first passion, I originally entered college as a film student). What would usually happen is I wouldn’t watch any movies for a few months, spending all my time reading, and then the passion would return and books and movies would live in happy harmony for a while. But then strange things have happened this year in quarantine. It began with me diving deep into movies, lasted maybe a month, and then I stopped watching them almost altogether. Ever since reading has been my all-consuming obsession with no time left for movies (only the occasional TV show—culminating in me watching all of Gossip Girl over the last few months).
But now books and movies are back together, and I’m loving it. Maybe it took a year of submitting entirely to literature for me to finally have some real self-control and make time for other interests. We’ll see, so far it is going remarkably well.
Now here is a quick summary of the movies I’ve watched:
Animal Crackers (1930) — directed by Victor Heerman and starring the Marx Brothers. Very entertaining.
Monkey Business (1931) — directed by Norman Z. McLeod and starring the Marx Brothers. Very entertaining.
A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937) — directed by Sam Wood and starring the Marx Brothers. Very and entertaining.
Vivre Sa Vie (1962) — directed by Jean-Luc Godard and starring Anna Karina. Formally exciting and joyfully stylish.
Bande à Part (1964) — directed by Jean-Luc Godard and starring Anna Karina. Less formally inventive, but a meandering, intelligently self-aware homage to gangster films with those satisfying signature Godard digressions.
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) — directed by Jean-Luc Godard and starring Marina Vlady. At turns very interesting and agonizingly dull. Truly is, like Godard says, a film as essay of contemporary life. Feel like it is one that will grow more interesting with revisits—catching ideas and connections missed while focusing on other aspects.
Le Petit Soldat (1963) — directed by Jean Luc-Godard and starring Michel Subor and Anna Karina (her first film with Godard). Political crisis as detached violence and disaffected self-survival.
The 400 Blows (1959) — directed by François Truffaut and starring Jean-Pierre Léaud. Post-war France where children are raised and surveilled by selfish, petty, disloyal bullies (their parents and all other authorities).
Antoine and Colette (1962) — directed by François Truffaut and starring Jean-Pierre Léaud. 30-minute follow-up to The 400 Blows. Following Antoine Doinel as he pines after a young woman not interested in him. Subtle agony.
Night and Fog (1956) — directed by Alain Resnais. A haunting cinematic essay on a real life nightmare. The nauseatingly horrifying imagery of the final five minutes can’t be overemphasized.
Masculin Féminin (1965) — directed by Jean-Luc Godard and starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and Chantal Goya. Interesting to watch as an Antoine Doinel film where Doinel is assuming a different identity. Not too much of a stretch as Léaud as Paul is a young man of performative values and an artificial personality. Goya radiates a vapid, complicit sort of innocence.