by Susan Sontag
11/21/78
The Beckett manner has no use for allusiveness. You can’t say “a Gioconda smile” in his idiom. [The Canadian literary critic Hugh] Kenner
Napoleon’s wet, chubby back (Tolstoy)
Beyond compassion? Don’t give advice. I ignore the difference between me + the other person.
A tribe in the Sudan, with a complex theology in which the middle-aged are initiated. Old people laugh continually.
The unity of the eight fictions in I, etcetera. Meaning that circulates. Stories like prisms. They are “about” narration. Unity of the ethical project.
I’m making it impossible for myself to write essays any longer.
I disregard the separation (a dogma) betw[een] the essay + fiction. In fiction I can do what I’ve done in essays, but not vice versa.
12/5/78
Joseph’s operation [for open heart surgery]
…
Italian Futurists were self-styled “primitives of a new sensibility”
…
STOP HECTORING
…
Canetti essay—
Should be on the idea, the project, of the writer (the great writer)
The European model—how it seems dated—its grandeur, its pathos
Start from C[anetti]’s essay on Broch
Broch, Kraus, Kafka—models for C.
C’s idea about death—dread—his desire for immortality
Condescension to women
Essay on Hitler—his crowd is the dead
[Canetti’s] Crowds + Power: History into biology (biological metaphors)
cf. Ring: a biological epic (begins in water, ends in fire)
[Canetti] has stayed free of the temptation of the left. How?
12/27/78 Venice
Venice in December, a photographic negative of the sun-lit summer Venice. A kind of seeing-for-the-first-time.
Abstract Piazza San Marco—geometric—defined by borders of lights—space defined by thickness of light. Every figure is a silhouette.
In the vaporetto coming up from the Casino (Palazzo Vendramin …): seeing nothing on either side of the boat. Looking into a brown-grey void.
The basilica from the top of the campanile—barely visible—The Doge’s Palace like a Monet or a [Georges] Seurat drawing in the fog.
Winter Venice is metaphysical, structural, geometrical. Drained of color.
I’ve re-read [Henry James’s] The Golden Bowl.
To feel the pressures of consciousness, to be informed, to understand anything, one must be alone. Being with people, being alone—like breathing in and breathing out, systole and diastole. As long as I’m so afraid of being alone, I’ll never be real. I’m in hiding from myself.
I act in haste—I reason for results—my intelligence is facile.
The depression I feel when I’m alone is only the first layer. I can get beyond it if I don’t panic. Sink down—let it happen. Listen to the words.
…
(Talking to Bob [SS had by then made several trips to Japan and was contemplating a short book of her impressions] on the phone) Japan:
Feudal society that has been modernized. Full of Western “signs” that don’t signify anything in particular except modernity. Parody of Western “culture.” National project: To “transcribe” (adapt, transmogrify) modern Western capitalism … No law in our sense, but rather an immense system of accomodations, deferences, hierarchies. Consensus society—everyone is recuperable (leaders of [the extreme left student movement] Zengakuren in the late 60s are now important business executives) except for criminal underclass. Ritualized violence—in strikes, demonstrations against Narita [the construction of an airport there], etc.—which provide signs for new accommodations. Much energy, many signs—little substance. Big homosexual culture, 1000 gay bars, see Don [SS’s friend in Tokyo, the American writer Donald Richie] and his German friend [Eric Klestadt]. In the green room of the Kabuki Theatre—prize is to know transvestite actors:—like ballet dancers or opera singers in the 19th c. Twelve department stores in Tokyo like Bloomingdale’s: everything looks the same but it’s really endlessly different.
…
1979
1/1/79 Asolo
Syberberg essay [SS had discovered the films of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg some years earlier, helped arrange of the U.S. distribution of Hitler: A Film from Germany, and by the beginning of 1979 had been planning this essay for several months.] Begin with the idea of “Trauerarbeit” [“work of mourning”]
“It’s worse than being a child.”
The statue of St. Sebastian in the Duomo of Vicenza. (Altar nearest entrance on the left). The tradition of the beautiful nude youth transported from G[reco]-Rom[an] art into Christianity—was homoerotic—now an object of erotic contemplation by women mostly and men. The first three-dimensional St. Sebastian I’ve seen. The eroticism of this figure even more flagrant as a sculpture than as a painting … The number of arrows (I’ve seen as few as two, as many as ten) and their placement.
Again and again, I’m struck by the erotic obsessions that are so much in the foreground in Christianity. The Virgin—the breast of the Virgin / mother—the swooning woman—the beloved disciple leaning into Jesus’ lap—the tortured male body, almost naked (Jesus, Sebastian)
[The poet Robert] Browning’s word “asolare”
How modern were Ruskin’s pleasures? Not our mix of enthusiasm and nostalgia (almost mourning) when we see Venice, Florence, Verona, etc. He was a discoverer. For whom? What does it mean to discover something already known? Known by whom?
The circle of removable plastic set in each of the two windows (Cipriani Hotel—Asolo). Like the removeable glass carreau in mullioned windows in the 19th century—but this is ugly, because it’s an unbroken piece of glass—not mullioned.
1/5/79 Paris
One to six with [György] Konrád (Scossa > Stella [two cafés]). Stories about Eastern Europe. “L’étatisation des écrivains” [“the subsuming of writers into the state”]. What it means to receive a prize …
A story in this—about getting a prize?
When I say, how can you compare the Russian empire with the American empire (“it’s the same if I die from capitalist bombs or from communist bombs”—his Venice speech last December), he reminds me that I forget the periphery, the colonies of the American empire. Of course, if one compares New York with Moscow, there is no doubt that one is infinitely freer in New York—one is free, “tout court” [“and that’s that”]. But, Cambodia apart, there is nothing as cruel, as bloody in the Communist countries as what went on in Iran (the Shah’s SAVAK [secret police]), in Nicaragua, + in Argentina right now. Intellectuals are not being murdered in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc. They are being wooed—or expelled.
…
[Wagner’s] The Flying Dutchman is a vampire story
anoxia = lack of oxygen
1/13/79 Paris
A novella based on the idea of “the portrait game” [a book by Ivan Turgenev and his lover Pauline Viardot-García]—+ the triangle Viardot, husband, Turgenev. A Jamesian story. A Resnais film (Last Year in Baden-Baden). A García Márquez–ish fantasy. A Borges retrouvaille [“rediscovery”] in the World Library.
1/14/79 London
Jonathan: “I wrote the medical book to make money and staple-gunned a few ideas in the middle.”
I was praising [Henry James’s] The Golden Bowl. J[onathan] said, “if you could have bolted Henry + William together you would get Proust.”
J. talks of his long-projected book on 19th c. spiritualism. Description of cataleptic trance in “Maud” comes from Tennyson having read Harriet Martineau’s Letters on Mesmerism (1845).
…
[Henry] James consulted [the British neurologist John] Hughlings Jackson in the 1890s in London for his migraines; Jackson told him about “temporal lobe epilepsy,” during whose aura all sounds seem to stop, there is a strange smell, + one is overwhelmed by an awareness of unbearable evil. This is
the origin of James’s description of the governess’ “hallucination” (?) in The Turn of the Screw … The Golden Bowl is about observation, about seeing, about how one really never knows what another person feels.
Fascination in 19th c. with altered states of consciousness. Two traditions of interpreting these. (1) An alter ego—another state, side, aspect of me; exalted states (cf. Wordsworth, Dostoyevsky)—the egotistical interpretation. (2) An other world—the supernatural—spirits. (cf. Poe, [E.T.A.] Hoffmann)
1/15/79 London
V. Woolf lost, Arnold Bennett won—here
Madness is single-mindedness
1/27/79 Rome
Carmelo Bene’s [production of Verdi’s] Otello. The action is mostly played on a huge bed—begins with O[tello] strangling D[esdemona]. It is played inside the handkerchief. Everyone wears white. O. in brownface. People pass their hands over each other’s faces, leaving them black. Voices are miked. Music of Verdi, Wagner, etc.
[Undated]
Conversation with Jacob [Taubes]
“ideas with broken wings” (Adorno)
[In the margin:] Jacob’s right hand as he talks. “Turning the celestial screw,” I called it in 1954.
Adorno to Jacob in 1968: “If they [the students] invade the Institute, I’ll put on a yellow star.”
[The Marxist philosopher and SS’s friend in the 1950s in Cambridge, Herbert] Marcuse’s position in 1956, for Soviet repression of Hungarian revolution; his complicity with students in 1968 (cf. Adorno)—because he comes from Heidegger
2/1/79
[The early French filmmaker Georges] Méliès > Syberberg. Méliès filmed imaginary newsreels (The Emperor of China at the Court of St. James) in his back yard in Paris.
[Méliès’s contemporaries Auguste and Louis] Lumière > Godard?
Language as a found object: [the Argentine writer Manuel] Puig. He can’t create his own language. It’s all found. He’s an extraordinary mime—has converted his liability as a writer into a system.
[The Belgian surrealist René] Magritte show at Beaubourg. L’Empire des lumières ([1953–54])—named something, as an image, that now everyone sees: blue sky, dark trees, the street lights on.
An imperial mind. Writers like Joyce, Gadda, Nabokov
2/8/79
The aura around each thing.
Respect it—pause a moment—before you grasp something
Aesthetic space: [the eighteenth-century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Simeon ] Chardin, [the American experimental filmmaker ] Jack Smith
America + Western Europe are growing apart—becoming as different as they were in the 1950s. Western Europe has chosen Social Democracy (whatever the party in power calls itself), America has rejected it. Events of the 70s: 1) the discrediting of utopian communism as a plausible anchor-belief for intellectuals + artists; 2) the Euro-ization of the Western European countries; 3) the collapse of American imperialist ideology + growing cultural / political isolationism of the U.S.
2/11/79
Conversation with Enzensberger (lunch in Chinatown): Darwin as an alternative to Hegel. Hegelianism assumes the biological + the historical are two different processes. But maybe the historical proceeds naturally. An evolution, but one that can’t be predicted. (What was attractive about Hegelianism was its notion of the irony of history.) Nobody has thought about Darwin[’s] implications for 50 years in Germany, E. says. Survival of the fittest is mistrusted as survival of the strongest.
Wants to write a free kind of essay. Cites Heine as a model. I mention Lucretius—he agrees.
Canetti:
biologistic model (Crowds + Power). No “history” in the Hegelian sense
one of the great death-haters of the 20th century
not Eurocentric. Cites Chinese or Arab thought—not as something from another culture to be “understood,” but because it’s true
not a reductionist—never asks what makes an idea possible, but: “is it true?”
The strength, independence—+ marginality of Canetti’s work. Was supported in the late 1930s + ’40s by the Guggenheim Foundation (E. says. True?) Knew—had affair with Iris Murdoch. E. was introduced to Canetti in London by Ingeborg Bachmann …
Canetti: Avidity, appetite, craving, longing, yearning, insatiability, rapture, inclination. Is this the life of the mind?
2/13/79
Watching Nureyev rehearse for two hours this afternoon.
2/18/79
M[other] called in the late afternoon to say that she had received a letter from Mary Penders that Rosie died of a “massive heart attack” last Sept. 30 … I was surprised, and touched, by how moved she was; I didn’t think she could feel much of anything …
2/20/79
Joseph [Brodsky]: “There is nothing more important for a narcissist than a smooth surface”
“If there is an Olympic record for tyranny, both in terms of the degree + duration, then the USSR has the gold.”
2/25/79
[The American choreographer] Twyla Tharp reconciles me to being a woman + to being an American … Non-sexist dancing—strong women with their own energy, subjects not objects, playful with men—not afraid of them … Use of American vernacular movement (from Mack Sennett comedy, Fred Astaire, black disco dancers), of American energy. Constant contact with the floor, which is not just something to leave—as in [the work of the choreographer George] Balanchine. Slapping the floor—falling on it flat out, trying to get up, hugging it.
The account of Philip’s Trilling lecture [at Columbia University ], first by Bob, this afternoon on the phone by Diana [Trilling].
“Homage to Mr. Casaubon.” Why not write a story about Philip? Do I dare? I’m afraid of my anger. Lizzie can’t write about Cal—but what do I have to protect?
Write about a man who hates women—hates sex—hates love.
I’ll find all the energy I need—as in “Baby.”
How much damage did those eight years w[ith] Philip do?
Isn’t it time I can write the truth? I’m still protecting him—Cranston in [SS’s story] “Old Complaints Revisited”—still eager to take the responsibility on myself.
Dream: I’m a nun (?) Sexually happy, with a young adoring shy girl. Another couple? I’m convened to be reprimanded—an old gothic building—think I have gotten off—leave, accompanied throughout by a friend—In the courtyard am told I’ve forgotten to fill out a form—do it with some difficulty (I have to borrow pencil from friend)—go in other building with friend—am kidnapped—sexually mutilated—will bleed (“estrous vagina”)—told I won’t be able to have sex again.
Sources: reading [the Indian novelist R. K.] Narayan today; Diana about Philip ([his lecture was on Gustave] Courbet painting + [Andrea] Mantegna [Lamentation over the Dead Christ]—woman as castrated man); Philip as Grand Inquisitor
…
Venice > Ruskin
Artist as oracle, public figure [—Gabriele] D’Annunzio, Ruskin, Wagner
…
Writer as Penelope—write during the day, undo it at night
Writer as Sisyphus
In I, etcetera, the best stories: my “Cubist” method, telling story from different angles
Max Ernst litho[graph] (?)—1919 “Art is Dead, Let There Be Fashion”
[Undated: A reminiscence of SS’s encounter with William Phillips, the editor of Partisan Review. It must have taken place in 1960 or early in 1961.]
