by Susan Sontag
Dazzling bed linen; the cafes + confectioners’
Shops with their chocolate + almond cakes—
High-bosomed beauties at the opera—marble—
Steel skates
The essence of things
Good signs are arbitrary > Barthes in Mythologies Bad as “natural”
The willingness to be, to open …
I will tell you in whatever voice is left to me of the voices now inhabiting. They cry. Each sentence, each breath, is a sundering.
This fabric, this bolt of language belongs to whom?
Speech < > a person speaking
Always?
Story of Queen Christina …
Story of a collective hallucination …
Dialogue between Orpheus + Eurydice …
Entire novel is a voice of narrator questioning
who he is
where he is
where he is
who he is talking to
what is going to happen next
Explores in 3) problem of science fiction In 5) theme of apocalypse
W[ittgenstein]:
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world”
“To imagine a language means to imagine a way of life.”
[The twentieth-century Austrian writer Hermann Broch’s The D]eath of Virgil: the nocturnal anguish that impels a creator, on his deathbed, to destroy his work
Person who has an extraordinary, incommunicable experience
Cf. William Gerhardi, Resurrection (1935)—novelist, Gerhardi, is writing a book called Resurrection—talks with his friend, Bonzo
Sylvia Plath:
Poet—
Husband, father
Two children—
Suicide—
July
Movies seen (July) + = Cinémathèque
(In Paris)
+ Julien Duvivier, Poil-de-Carotte (1932)—Harry Baur
+ Yasujiro Ozu, Histoire d’un Acteur Ambulant [A Story of Floating Weeds] (1934—silent!)
+ Mikhail Romm, Le Fascisme Tel Qu’il Est (1965–66)
Victor Fleming, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1941)—[Spencer] Tracy and [Ingrid] Bergman
+ Tony Richardson, Mademoiselle (1966)
Karlovy-Vary
(*Czech film)
Hermína Týrlová, The Snowman (short)
Jan Schmidt + Pavel Juráek, Joseph Kilian (short)
Ivan Passer, Intimní Osvtlení (Éclairage Intime) (1965)
Iulian Mihu, Prosecul Alb (White Trial) (1965)—Roumanian feature
[Rubén] Gámez, The Secret Formula (moyen)—Mexican (1965)
Zbynek Brynych, The Fifth Horseman Is Fear (1965)
Miloš Forman, Peter and Pavla (Cerný Petr [literally] Black Peter)
Godard, Masculin, Feminin (1966)
Evald Schorm, Everyday Courage
[Jacques Godbout,] Yul 871
Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Faraon (1966)
Karel Kachya, Wagon to Vienna,
[Werner Herzog,] Fata Morgana
Jean-Paul Rappeneau, La Vie de Château
[Jaromil Jireš,] The First Cry
[Jean-Gabriel Albicocco,] The Wanderer
Vra Chytilová, O Nem Jinm (Another Way of Life)
Karel Kachya, (Long Live the Republic)
[Václav Vorlícek,] (Who Wants to Kill Jessie?)
Alain Resnais, La Guerre est Finie
7/5/66
Materials:
Organization
early draft
Laura Riding myth
Sci-fi ideas cf. telepathy in [the novels of the British writer William Olaf ] Stapledon
Conspiracy
A collective hallucination
artist—madness—breakdown exp[erience]
T[homas] Faulk
“Sylvia Plath”
Foucault ideas about incommunicability
Wax figures; skin grafts
The inhuman presence of objects
erotic obsession
dialogue between Orpheus + Eurydice
pornograph
a “fantasy”
ecstatic experience
Tangier
a woman narrator
Art Nouveau—flowing hair, serpentine body
[Guillaume] Apollinaire deleted all punctuation from his first collection of poetry.
Dziga Vertov (c[irc]a 1922) called his films “Cinéma-Vérité”—then, “Cinéma-Oeil” (Antedates newsreels?)
The landscape of words (Joyce, Stein) obliterates elements of the “story”—traditional distinctions, which are non-linguistic, of character, act, attitude.
Relation between ideas of Valéry (a work of art must be necessary, or it’s nothing) and of Duchamp. Large Glass is “the most complex art-work, technically + intellectually, of our time … [its] baffling intricacy of reference + implication … its compendious ramifications into mathematics, literature, + the laws of chance … Duchamp set about elevating intellectual awareness into a creative principle in itself.”
*A way of continuing with “The Organization”—
There is a question as to how the members communicate with each other. By letters? (an underground postal system?) By telepathy?
Learns that chief of organization is receiving messages from the Future.
Chief relates myth of the founding of the Organization.
A scapegoat is awaited (part of myth).
Turns out to be the narrator.
7/6/66
A novel in the form of:
letters; a letter
a diary
a poem plus commentary
an encyclopedia
a confession
a list
a manual
a collection of “documents”
“Organization” is a novel or a novella?
N.B. Nothing about making a work-of-art in this. Save all that material …
An ordeal, a martyrdom
A strange and sovereign language.
What is “we”? The different kinds of “we”—
Characters in “The Organization”:
narrator
the chief
friend, Walter
Keeper of Archives
A talking computer
Narrator’s mother
A singer, Lolly Po
Throughout book, there is a war going on. Reading in newspapers of bombings—dull ache …
“There is another world, but it is in this one.” ([Yeats] motto to Patrick White book, Solid Mandala)
In the end, narrator is assassinated. But then, who is telling the story?
Gangs of surfers; roving highway motorcyclists
The physical-ness of people, taken for granted as flesh (that smells, that itches) in Ozu’s movies. Japanese culture as a whole? People continually scratching themselves, even in moments of remorse, grief, love in Histoire d’un Acteur Ambulant (1934).
The long love-scene between Paul and “the lady” (Balkan Queen) which is most of Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks is art nouveau—N.B. erotic use of long hair, flowers, woman’s body curling like a serpent; eroticism as languidness, swooning, losing consciousness.
I bought the English Duden today. A treasure! Instant Raymond Roussel (lists …) Instant world— … All there is, the whole world, an inventory.
7/8/66 Karlovy Vary
The canal with its rushing water—the huge ochre hotels—the bust of Karl Marx in the little plaza near the spring—the tacky clothes—the absence of cars (the streets are virtually malls; no one notices the sidewalks)—the politeness + friendliness of people—the inefficiency—the smell of urine + hot asphalt. It’s just funny old Europe again—
Czech movies:
Intimate Lighting (Ivan Passer)
Long Live the Republic (Karel Kachya)
Pearls from the Bottom (Schorm, Chytilová)
Everyday Courage (Evald Schorm)
Appassionata (Jií Weiss)
A Blonde in Love (Miloš Forman)
&n
bsp; The Accused ([Ján] Kadár & [Elmar] Klos)
The Fifth Horseman Is Fear
The Ceiling (Chytilová)
Joseph Kilian (short)
The Hand (short) (Jií Trnka)
Peter and Pavla (Miloš Forman)
The new generation of [Czech] directors: Passer, Forman, Chytilová, Schorm
[The] older generation: Jií Weiss, Karel Zeman, Kadár & Klos
7/17/66
Methods of narration:
Intercut two independent stories—Chytilová, Something Else Move “out” of
7/23/66 Prague
To become famous in order to have access to people, not be alone.
I am too “close” to David in the sense that I identify with him. When I spend a great deal of time with him, I lose the sense of my age; I accept the limits of his world (no sexuality, shyness, etc.).
I smile too much. How many years have I been saying that? Fifteen at least. It’s the Mother-and-Judith in me—
I must learn to be alone—and what I’ve discovered is that being with David isn’t being alone (despite my acute loneliness). It’s a whole universe of its own, to which I adjust. With David, I become a different person than I am alone.
What I liked about being with [SS’s friend] Barbara [Lawrence] is that I felt more adult with her than with most people. (The company of Elliott, of Paul [Thek], for instance, makes me childish.)
When I’m alone—after a while—I do begin to look at people. I don’t, with David (he inhibits me? I’m distracted by him?); I don’t with Elliott (his interests, their specificity, confuse + distract me).
These minutes, writing this in the lobby of the Ambassador [Hotel]—at a table spread with a white cloth, by the open doors on a fine Saturday morning, having just finished a big breakfast (two boiled eggs, Prague ham, roll with honey, coffee) and alone, alone (David upstairs, still sleeping)—watching the other people in the lobby, on the terrace, passing on the street—have been the first moments since the beginning of the summer in which I’ve had some sense of well-being.
I am alone—I ache—the novel is bogged down—and so on. Yet for the first time, despite all the anguish + the “reality problems,” I’m here. I feel tranquil, whole, ADULT.
7/28/66 Paris
America founded on genocide
(> the uniqueness of Am[erican] slavery, the only slavery w[ith]o[ut] limits) > the genocide in Vietnam
Merely an application to the “world” of the American idea of nation-building, clearing the wilderness of natives, dark people.
The “authority” of a documentary movie is its connection with fact, an image of reality. Theatre is actors, a representation rather than a presentation. What can the theatre offer that is analogous to the authenticity of the photograph? The genuine, unfeigned travail of the actor. Enactment, rather than acting. A theatre based on the martyrdom of the actor ([The Living Theatre’s] The Brig, [Jerzy] Grotowski, etc.)
[In the margin:] It is this that The Brig and [Peter Brook’s production of ] Marat/Sade have in common
Vietnam is the first television war. A continuous happening. You are there. Americans can’t say, as the Germans could—but we didn’t know. It’s as if CBS [had been] at Dachau. With panel debates in 1943 Germany, one out of four saying Dachau is wrong.
Theatre of Cruelty, happenings, Artaud, etc. based on the idea that shock, violence (in theatre, art) is efficacious. It alters one’s sensibility, rouses one from torpor.
Vietnam war—a huge closed-circuit TV production—seems to prove the opposite. As the images multiply, the capacity to respond diminishes.
TV the most brutalizing single factor in modern sensibility. (TV changes the whole rhythm of life, personal relations, social fabric, ethics—all this only just beginning to be apparent. Forces one to think: WHAT IS AN IMAGE?)
The punitive labyrinth—Kafka; [Hugo von Hofmannsthal,] Lord Chandos; Joyce
The initiatory labyrinth—Borges; Robbe-Grillet; Hoffmannsthal, ———[name illegible]
The architecture labyrinth—Roussel
The clarity + exactness Beckett
Comédie
Two women and a man (who has the hiccups)
Discoveries about myself this summer (small beer!)
I wear pants mainly to hide my fat legs—other reasons are secondary
I believe I’m real, valid, sympathetic; my activities are fraudulent. (Joe [Chaikin] says it’s the opposite with him.)
An obsession with a person so great that it can give rise to the disbelief I felt two years ago here in Paris, seeing the young man laughing at La Grande Muraille.
Acting (theatre) vs being a star (movies). Movies have specialized (though not exclusively) in actors whose appeal lies in the continuity of character, manner, appearance from one role to another. Garbo, [Douglas] Fairbanks, Bogart. Fritz Rasp [the German film star who played in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis]. Garbo is Garbo, only secondarily acts a character. Characters, roles are pretexts which both obscure and reveal the star. Theatre has gloried in the absence of the actor. Someone like Olivier or Guinness, or Irene Worth, or Robert Stephens—almost totally changed, unrecognizable from one role to the next. Acting as impersonation, the actor as chameleon.
[In the upper right-hand corner of the page, above this entry, are the French words souches (“tree stumps, [vine] stock, or-gins” ) and envoûtement (“bewitchment”).]
Joe, David, [the American scriptwriter] Marilyn [Goldin] all agree passionately that I’m more critical of people—have higher standards—than anyone they know. Joe says I look to be offended—
———’s response to [the costume designer] Willa Kim’s “They’re improving themselves.” Note!
[The German expressionist director Paul] Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928) [the silent film that adapted a Victor Hugo novel of the same name]
Conrad Veidt [as] “Gwynplaine”
Mary Philbin [as] “Dea”
Why are you laughing? I’m not. I can’t help it. My face is always like this.
Nabokov talks of minor readers. “There must be minor readers because there are minor writers.”
Buy a dictionary the size of an elephant—
Journey, to a writer, may “mean” nothing. It is a form of narration. Choice of journey in Dans le Labyrinthe is of this sort, says R-G; not like Kafka! “The form has made it possible for me to free myself from the philosophical justifications which served as guiding threads through my previous novels.”
{40 years ago Ortega y Gasset wrote essay on the death of the novel
{plus T. S. Eliot (1923) [Eliot’s essay “‘Ulysses,’ Order, and Myth,” appeared in The Dial magazine in the fall of that year]
The organization, the league:
To protest the war
To seek virtue, wisdom
A man seeking to resign—
In fact, carrying a message (secret postal system)
Only when Joe came yesterday did I realize the extent of my despair of the last two months. My heart began to pound—just sitting opposite him at the [Paris café] Deux Magots having coffee. I was talking hysterically about nothing! (Theatre, Peter Brook, NY). And for the first time I thought: But I could go back to NY—give up the charter. Why has that not even occurred to me until this moment? I’ve been paralyzed—
Film magnate lusting hopelessly for lush blonde
Peter Brook describes film made of training at Green Beret camp in Louisiana—a “happening” they stage there: soldiers are divided into two groups, one American prisoners + the other Viet Cong captors. Viet Cong beat up Americans ( … waiting with a bottle of ketchup).
8/4/66 London
