A list of essay collections and non-fiction books I’ve read lately:
(Works by the same authors are grouped together, but the titles are in the order in which I read them).
- James Wood:
The Fun Stuff and Other Essays (2012)
- Virginia Woolf:
The Moment and Other Essays (1947)
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
On Being Ill (1930)
- Joan Didion:
Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
The White Album (1979)
- Susan Sontag:
Against Interpretation (1966)
Illness as Metaphor (1978)
I meant to take a break from reading fiction and from blogging, but perhaps I should jot down a few lines about these reads.
James Wood and Virginia Woolf have always been two of my favourite literary critics and essayists, the others are new discoveries. It is a good thing that I read Joan Didion and Susan Sontag close to each other because Sontag wrote about the culture of the 60s and Didion also wrote about the 60s but focused on the counter-culture movement; Sontag wrote about the theoretical and the abstract whereas Didion wrote about people she met and things she saw.
My feelings about Sontag are complicated—she is undeniably erudite and fascinating, she seems to have read everything in Western culture and writes with lots of authority, and has a strong persona on the page. Against Interpretation is an excellent essay collection and Illness as Metaphor has many interesting points and is understandably popular even if the book as a whole is a bit weak and confusing in its intentions. The problem with Sontag, by which I mean my problem with her personally, is that I blame her for promoting Camp, “bad taste”, and so on, which I see as partly responsible for postmodern art and certain trends in popular culture today, and Sontag has also said some crazy things such as the “white race” comment. It’s also hard to take her very seriously when she likes Marx and Freud and keeps mentioning them in Against Interpretation (even though each of her essays probably mentions about 50 different names).
Joan Didion I do like. I have heard of her for years but never picked up her books—only did recently because I was curious about the joke that all female novelists are compared to Jane Austen and all female essayists are compared to Joan Didion. Like Austen, Didion is extremely popular (and perhaps often liked by the wrong people), which may similarly make her reputation appear suspicious, but she is very good. I like her sentences, she makes me rethink writing. I have very little interest in the 60s and 70s of America, even less in the hippies, but she’s good and I keep thinking about certain images in Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album: image of the orchids, image of the horses and the birds in the Malibu fire, image of people temperamentally affected by the Santa Ana wind, image of the quick weddings and the waiter serving alcohol to everyone except the bride because she’s not old enough to drink, image of Didion herself in bed with a bad migraine, image of the 5-year-old on acid and another kid having almost set the house on fire while the adults in the house don’t notice as they’re trying to retrieve some good drugs that drop through the floorboards, and so on.
Didion has a sharp eye and writes well and selects good, striking images, and there is a rhythm to her prose that I like.
The White Album isn’t as interesting as Slouching Towards Bethlehem in subject matter, but I do love some of the essays in it like the “Women” essays (especially “The Women’s Movement”), “In Bed” (about her migraine, to which I can relate), and the one about the orchids and the Malibu fire.
I should read more from Didion, especially The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights.
At the moment, I’m reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. Fascinating stuff.
I never got the impression that Sontag "likes" Marx and Freud. There are essays in this collection about Lukacs and Norman O. Brown...hence Marx and Freud are bound to get some play. But she is openly critical of both in the title essay. Perhaps to a fault, actually, by which I mean not that I necessarily want to defend either of them but because neither theory was hatched as a theory for the interpretation of artworks. That part came later and was seen by true believers as an idle distraction. In other words, the application of Marx's and Freud's theories to the interpretation of artworks was a betrayal not just of the artworks but also of the theories themselves. It could be argued, then, that the rage to interpretation must run deeper than theory.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, when you say that you "blame her for promoting Camp," I think something of the same restraint is necessary. She was describing things that were already happening. We can safely assume that had there been no Sontag there would still be plenty of "bad taste." There's certainly room for personal judgment here, but causation is trickier.
You may be right about her views on Marx and Freud. What's the essay called? In the books I've read, she constantly references them and doesn't seem particularly critical of their ideas.
DeleteAs for Camp, certainly there would still be plenty of bad taste without her essay, but she still wrote a long piece promoting and elevating it and was part of the people making it a thing.
I was thinking of the essay "Against Interpretation," specifically the latter part of section 3, starting with:
Delete"The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation."
She's right of course that many who "interpret" artworks had turned to these theories for cover, and this is still true today, but her account here of the theories themselves is extremely reductive, so much so that it actually disserves her argument (an argument which I otherwise very much accept). I'm not up on my Marx. I've dug deeper into Freud et al and there it seems especially clear that the application of psychoanalytic theory to film, e.g., on the basis of film's "oneiric" qualities, is a pretty dicey proposition.
Incidentally, I came across something later last night saying that Sontag did, in fact, believe in "communism" for a time, then disavowed it in the 1980s. Water under the bridge, perhaps, but certainly curious in light of the above passage.
I have to reread that essay.
DeleteAs for Freud, have you read my blog post about Hamlet? Freud's interpretation seems quite crazy to me.
I think I heard something like that about Sontag. Not surprised. She can be brilliant and may say some shockingly stupid stuff.
Ah yes, Hamlet. I'm also an IB kid, which is where my knowledge of Shakespeare begins and ends. I'm the wrong person to discuss Hamlet with: the first time we had to read it was way too soon for me; by the second time it came around I was already plotting my escape into the non-literary world of symphonies and bebop. It was demoralizing to find all of the Freudian and Marxist literary stuff running amok in musicology and music criticism too. That's the life context in which Sontag first really grabbed me. Reading "Against Interpretation" (the essay) after finishing music school was like reading a diary of my own angry thoughts during all the ridiculous lectures I had just sat through. I found many of my own thoughts staring back at me, nearly verbatim in a few cases. But of course she was not terribly concerned with music, at least not in this early compilation. And, for literary people, even I can see, from a distance as it were, that some of her statements here could indeed be shocking.
DeleteI have no aptitude for literature, so I'll defer to others there. A novel is not a symphony is not a dance, and sometimes I feel like we are all trapped together against our wills in this unwieldy thing called The Arts, like a country with artificial borders drawn around it encompassing mutually hostile ethnic groups. But here we are! Lit critters and beboppers living side by side, occasionally warring, and inevitably borrowing each other's ideas from time to time, whether or not we should.
When Sontag writes,
Delete"Transparance means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are."
certainly this sits more easily within some Arts than others. Perhaps ultimately it is an empty rhetorical statement. But as for Freud and Hamlet, I do think it hits the mark. (Fortunately my copy of The Interpretation of Dreams, unlike my copy of Against Interpretation, has an index.)
Freud writes,
"The play is built up on Hamlet's hesitations over fulfilling the task of revenge that is assigned to him; but its text offers no reasons or motives for these hesitations and an immense variety of attempts at interpreting them have failed to produce a result."
Now, who knows what exactly he means by "failed to produce a result." He was a terrible self-aggrandizer. I would guess that a "result" for him here means conclusiveness, a settled matter. Which is perhaps contrary to the very spirit of literature, theater, The Arts, etc. in some cosmic sense of everyone being entitled to experience things their own way. But that aside, what I think Sontag took aim at, specifically, is the fact that he (or whoever else) finds it simply intolerable that the "text offers no reasons or motives" for Hamlet's behavior. It is the desire to settle the matter conclusively, to win the argument, and to elevate oneself in the process; that, I think, is a big part of what she is taking aim at.
"Things being what they are," in this case, means that Hamlet hesitates, and that the reasons for this are unclear. Many people have read Sontag to be saying that the reader should not be curious about things like Hamlet's motives, that we should not wonder to ourselves. I don't think that's what she's saying at all. Rather, she writes against the notion that there is, somewhere out there, a "result" waiting to be "produced" by someone, which tells us what a play is "about," according to "certain rules of interpretation" which may well, as in the case of psychoanalytic theory, be quite arbitrary or tenuous. Though she does not say so explicitly, it's easy enough to notice that "interpretation" in her account tends to issue from places of power or authority. And, once all of this has been going on for a while, it starts to feed back on itself. Much of that "postmodern" work you dismiss (and I suspect we are on the same page there) is precisely this kind of feedback loop. e.g. Chris Burden's "Through the Night Softly." Many "interpretations" are available there! But if you're into "things being what they are" then it's just a guy crawling naked over a bunch of broken glass, which in the actual world (as opposed to the "shadow world of "meanings"" Sontag warns against) is totally pointless.
I think literature is different from dance, painting, music, even cinema, in that these other arts directly affect you emotionally. Cinema does have dialogue, does have words, but it is mainly visual art.
ReplyDeleteLiterature is made up entirely of words and a literary work presents the author's vision of life, so when we're talking about interpretation, interpreting a literary work is very different from interpreting a dance or a painting or a film. I do love Sontag's approach to Persona.
The problem with much of literary criticism today, I think, is not interpretation per se, but seeing a literary work through some lens such as Marxist, Freudian, postcolonial, feminist, etc. Such readings do distort the work terribly, but as you said literature wasn't your thing, I won't go further.
By the way, it was from Hamlet that Freud developed the concept of Oedipus complex (yes, that's how he interprets Hamlet's delay).