by Susan Sontag
All thoughts are upgrades—get more clarity, definition, authority, by being in print—that is, detached from the person who thinks them.
A potential fraud—at least potential—in all writing.
How revealing to meet [Richard] Eberhart, [Paul] Tillich, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy!
Jonathan [Miller]: “I take Trilling’s ideas less seriously since I know him.”
Sensibility is humus for the intellect.
There’s no syntax for sensibility—hence, it’s ignored.
Reading criticism clogs conduits through which one gets new ideas: cultural cholesterol.
One’s ignorance is a treasure, not to be casually spent ([Paul] Valéry)
Body type [SS is describing herself]:
• Tall
• Low blood pressure
• Need lots of sleep
• Sudden craving for pure sugar (but dislike desserts—not a high enough concentration)
• Intolerance for liquor
• Heavy smoking
• Tendency to anemia
• Heavy protein craving
• Asthma
• Migraines
• Very good stomach—no heartburn, constipation, etc.
• Negligible menstrual cramps
• Easily tired by standing
• Like heights
• Enjoy seeing deformed people (voyeuristic)
• Nailbiting
• Teeth grinding
• Nearsighted, astigmatism
• Frileuse (very sensitive to cold, like hot summers)
• Not very sensitive to noise (high degree of selective auditory focus)
Pills one takes for reducing hypertension are depressants Alcohol is a depressant
8/22/64 Paris
The incredible pain returns again and again and again.
8/23/64
Finished the story. “An American Destiny,” for the moment. I see now that it’s mined from the vein that produced [SS’s first novel] The Benefactor—it’s a sort of miniaturized Frau Anders story, more drastically comic.
[In the margin:] My pop art story
Gains
• Third person rather than first
• Fantasy America, rather than fantasy France (because I’m in Paris?!)
• Use of slang,—active verbs
8/24/64
Great art has a beautiful monotony—Stendhal, Bach. (But not Shakespeare.)
A sense of the inevitability of a style—the sense that the artist had no alternatives, so wholly centered is he in his style.
Compare [Gustave] Flaubert and [James] Joyce (“voulu,” constructed, intricate) with [Choderlos de] Laclos and [Raymond] Radiguet.
The greatest art seems secreted, not constructed.
Camp: irony, distance; ambivalence (?)
Pop art: only possible in an affluent society, where one can be free to enjoy ironic consumption. Thus there is Pop art in England—but not in Spain, where consumption is still too serious. (In Spain, painting is either abstract or social protest realism.)
Armature—in sculpture
[Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 Hollywood film starring Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper] Morocco:
Dietrich: clean, solid—movements never weak or floating or petty—sparse
Von S: profuse
[In the margin:] They highlight each other by their differences
“Fagotage” (m.)—botch; ridiculous way of dressing >
“Fagoter” (verb)—to dress (a person) ridiculously > Is this where “faggot” comes from?
Movies seen since Aug. 11:
The Crowd (King Vidor)—Cinemathèque
Bande à Part ([Jean-Luc] Godard)—Gaumont Rive Gauche
Une Femme est une Femme (Godard)—Cinemathèque
La Grande Muraille (Jap[anese]?)—Normandie
Maciste Contre Le Cyclope (It[alian]?)—Ciné Gobelins
[The French director Georges] Franju’s first feature, The Keepers [La Tête contre les murs], about insane asylum—horrible, stupid, vicious director
([parallel] to Les Yeux sans visage [Franju’s next film]
Gothic horror in films
The institution—cf. [Robert Wiene’s 1920 Weimar film The Cabinet of Dr.] Caligari, etc.
8/28/64
“The Primary and most beautiful of Nature’s qualities is motion, which agitates her at all times, but this motion is simply the perpetual consequence of crimes, it is conserved by means of crimes alone.”
—[Marquis] de Sade
Humanism = moralizing the world, thereby refusing to acknowledge the “crimes” of which de Sade speaks.
What one is is the idea one has of oneself. If one thinks one is loveable, one is; beautiful, talented, etc.
8/29/64
[The American sociologist Philip Rieff, to whom SS was married between 1950 and 1959] P. [hilip Rieff]—
Everyone else not real—very distant, small figures. I would have to swim a thousand miles to reach the margin of the relationship, on the other side of which might lie other people, and it was too far, I was too tired.
The almost infinitely extending network of that relationship; its dense weave That’s what held me—
Not (at least nowhere as strongly as I. [Irene Fornés])
The sense of P.’s uniqueness, value, preciousness—
H. [Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, who was SS’s lover when she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and then the lover of both Irene Fornés and SS in Paris in 1956 and 1957]—very sloppy, loosely woven relationship—hence possibility of friendship, much later.
If one knew one would live 200 years, would one be as tired at 35?
Is the being tired a spontaneous complicity with death—a beginning to let go at what one judges to be about the right time, half way?
Or is it objectively so, that one would anyway be tired at 35 and spend the next 165 years “se traînant?” [“moping around”]
If one could amputate part of one’s consciousness …
What appeared to Annette [the American film scholar Annette Michelson, whom SS met in Paris in 1957] as narcissism six years ago: I was still so unawakened, so out of focus. So dead, or, rather, unborn.
I will never just outlast this pain. (Healing passage of time, etc.) I am frozen, paralyzed, the gears are jammed. It will only recede, diminish if I can somehow transpose the emotion—as from grief to anger, from despair to assent. I must become active. As long as I continue to experience myself as done to (not doing) this unbearable pain will not desert me—
Persistent motive in my writing:
X speaks, asks, demands—but if doesn’t answer, turns away. X tries to make the best of it.
[A note, undated, is inserted:] I will be alright by 7:00 am this morning
M. [Mother] didn’t answer when I was a child. The worst punishment—and the ultimate frustration. She was always “off”—even when she wasn’t angry. (The drinking a symptom of this.) But I kept trying.
Now, the same with I[rene]. Even more agonizing because for four years she did answer. So I know she can.
Those four years! That huge length of time—its weight, its almost palpable thickness—obsesses me. “How can she …” etc.
I’m so stuck on the “was” of people—
…
8/30/64
Yves—
Fragile
Hypochondriac, thin, needs 10 hours of sleep a night—lives on pills
From provinces—Nantes, Poitiers
Petit bourgeois
Father—had a small clothing factory, makes uniforms for the army
Mother—an antique dealer
Red hair, white skin, regular features
Works for army on rockets—big center in banlieue
“Je sais que je vais vieillir trop tôt et …” [“I know that I will grow old too early, and …”]
Paranoid—
Stole money from bank (father’s friend) + from queer art gallery dealer (Annet
te’s friend)
“Denise”—calls her Régine—she’s 20, works this summer in Paris for an airline.
First time he was with Annette: “If only someone could see me now.” For the last three years.—Annette: “Elle n’est pas ma reine à moi” [“She’s not my very own queen”]
From parataxis (loose association of clauses) to hypotaxis (more precise indications of logical relationships + subordination)
…
Play:
Doctor
World is a body
Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.
In ancient religion all significant behavior was acc[ording] to a divine prototype.
Man > arena of forces, battleground
Gods = names of important things
a. Homer on volition (cf. Snell [the German classicist Bruno Snell, author of The Discovery of Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature]
b. Tragedy A causal analysis
A god wills > humans act
No conception of roles
Modern idea of individuality < > role-playing (i.e. self-consciousness)
Compare Hamlet and Oedipus
9/3/64
How beautiful [von Sternberg’s 1935 film] The Devil Is a Woman is! It’s one of the most extreme films I’ve ever seen. Dietrich is completely object—almost lacquered, embalmed. Research into the absoluteness of décor: style obliterating personality … Dietrich is “mounted” inside her costumes, her huge hats—behind the confetti, the streamers, the doves, the grilles, the rain … Décor is “surcharge,” both beautiful and parodic—
Compare with [the Italian director Luchino] Visconti (Senso, The Leopard) +, of course, Flaming Creatures [made in 1963 by the American experimental filmmaker Jack Smith. SS had written an essay on the film, which would appear in her first collection of essays, Against Interpretation (1966).]
[John] Donne’s “Sermon Preached at White-Hall”—Feb. 29, 1627
My faults:
• To censor others for my own vices*
• To make my friendships into love affairs
• To ask that love include (and exclude) all
*but, perhaps this becomes most hectic and obvious—reaches a climax, when the thing in myself is deteriorating, giving way, collapsing—like: my indignation at Susan [Taubes’s] [SS’s close friend from Cambridge, Massachusetts, days] and Eva [Berliner Kollisch’s] [a friend of SS’s and Taubes’s] physical squeamishness.
N.B. My ostentatious appetite—real need—to eat exotic and “disgusting” foods = a need to state my denial of squeamishness. A counter-statement.
…
9/8/64
“I got away, but I had to leave my arms and legs behind …”
Not to look back means cordoning off all sorts of things in the present which are too full of memories that can’t be suppressed. To disinfect my life of———, of this nearly mortal grief, I find myself refraining from this, and this, and this. The greatest loss is sex. That, and so many other things, remind me of———.
I can’t afford to allow the present any depth or ballast, because that means (for me) the past, and the past means all that was shared with———.
I feel—when I’m not sorrowing—so dry, like powder, like a helium balloon that’s been let go—
I’ve forbidden myself to think, to feel, because thinking and feeling—
How can I go on this way?
And how can I not?
“Dearest———
“I’m sorry not to have written. Life is tough, and its hard to talk while one is gritting one’s teeth …”
Color in films
[Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1953 film] Gate of Hell
Senso
[Alain Resnais’s 1963 film] Muriel
Two palettes: one based on skin color, one not (city, plastic, neon)
The orgasm—repeated overexposed sequence in [Resnais’s 1961 film Last Year at] Marienbad
Relation of parody + self-parody in camp
[The twentieth-century French artist Jean-Robert] Ipous-téguy’s sculpture—the heroic figure (large head, arms outstretched, pubic hair like a badge—penis rides free), in bronze, but cracked, fissured …
“I don’t want to know about your past. I have a feeling it would weigh too much.”
“But we’re not on a balance.”
“But we are.”
Marxism a position vis-à-vis culture
—[Theodor] Adorno, Philosophy of New Music
[Arnold] Schoenberg = progress
[Igor] Stravinsky = fascism (whom A. identifies with just one period, the neo-classical)
[In the margin:] NB parallels [between] Stravinsky + [Pablo] Picasso—raiding the past [in their] different styles—no commitment to progress
—[Georg] Lukács
[Thomas] Mann = realism = sense of history = Marxism
[Franz] Kafka = allegory = dehistoricization = fascism
—[Walter] Benjamin
Cinema = abolition of tradition = fascism
(Use this as introduction to Lukács essay)
Read the two novels of [the contemporary French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave] Le Clézio
“J’ai besoin de beaucoup de tendresse.” [“I need a great deal of tenderness.”]
“Écrire veut dire aller jusqu’au bout. J’ai renoncé à ça dans ma vie, mais dans ce que j’écris, je dois prendre un risque.” [“To write means to go all the way. I’ve renounced this in life, but in what I write, I must take risks.”]
“C’est trop et c’est juste assez pour moi” (Jean Cocteau) [“It’s too much and it’s just enough for me”] Motto of Cahiers du Cinéma American Cinema issue (Jan. 1963)
…
Lineage of Le Bavard [by Louis-René des Forêts]: Poe
[Jorge Luis] Borges says: [G. K.] Chesterton, [Robert Louis] Stevenson, + early films of von Sternberg
9/10/64
Do essays on:
• The first person narrative, the récit
• Von Sternberg
• [Herman Melville’s novel] Pierre[: or, The Ambiguities]
• Style + silence Gertrude Stein, etc.
All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.
Camp is one of the species of behaviorism in art—it is, so extremely, it has no norm to reflect.
Modern aesthetics is crippled by its dependence upon the concept of “beauty.” As if art were “about” beauty—as science is “about” truth!
[The contemporary American artist R. B.] Kitaj: “found + assisted object”
…
For Sarraute piece, read early essay by [Pierre] Boulez (printed by “Domaine Musicale”) “On Hedonism.”
For [SS’s essay on the contemporary French anthropologist Claude] Lévi-Strauss, read [Paul] Ricoeur essay in Esprit
…
[The contemporary German composer Karlheinz] Stockhausen’s work abolishes the notion of composition—proposes
1. Any rhythmic structure may be organically adapted to any tempo; 2) unlimited cycle of permutations.
Boulez rejects (1) + (2)
…
9/23/64 New York
Inspiratory emphasis
Inhale > lower (flatten diaphragm) > suppress sensation—pelvic, i.e. sexual
Therefore secret of a feeling is learning to breathe out
