The habits of consciousness:

...Cioran in Styles of Radical Will...

...In the sixties, there was a whole period in my life when I was spending a lot of time with Jasper Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Marcel Duchamp...

...That goes back at least to Apollinaire...

...Today, if it's not the Supremes, it's Bruce Springsteen...

...Each conceived of itself as the terminal "ism...

...One of the chief ideas of modernism was this new relationship between high culture and popular culture...

...My f"yst novel, The Benefactor, is about acquisition and disburdenment...

...But it would be imbe-cilic simply to defend beauty or to contend that there is something called beauty which exists absolutely apart from any kind of historical coloring or ethical mandate...

...There's a paragraph in your story, ' 'Debriefing'' which begins, "We know more than we can use...

...I recently met a young woman at a major university who is writing her Ph.D on Proust...

...I do confess to reading television reviews...

...I now think the juxtaposition of Cioran with Cage was sophistical...

...but I don't think I'd learn any more from actually watching television than I already know from movies, magazines, spending time with a lot of young people, and going to bars, rock concerts, and discos...

...The reason I've always been so shy about allowing myself to be called a critic is that I know how eccentric these essays are- although I believe them to be true...

...To single out the melancholy element in his temperament is obviously limiting, but that's what I identify with...

...All of my essays, without exception, are attempts to ask what it means to be modern, to delineate the modern sensibility from as many different angles as possible...

...and he doesn't feel the least bit burdened by "history...

...I think it's in On Photography that you credit Benjamin with the most profound surrealist sensibility on record...

...Of course, these views are also moral and political...

...I think by temperament I was attracted to dramaturgical kinds of language...

...Kurt Vonnegut...

...and the counter-projects of disburdenment and silence-the temptations of silence...

...Do you own a television set...

...And I asked, "Hard compared to what...

...I remember Hilton Kramer's article in The Times after you published your piece on the aesthetics of fascism...

...It's . . . my Canetti.ough my temperament...

...If I were to write about Cioran today, I would proceed rather differently...

...Interesting" was a favorite word of theirs...

...It's the same sort of thing I've done with Canetti...

...things that weren't so hard in the past seem more difficult today...

...It started with the sixth essay in On Photography where I argued that one of the ways in which photographs are untrue is that they make everything "interesting...

...Of course, I have indulged myself from time to time in neb-Wildean sallies as one does sometimes when one gets impatient with other people's insen-sitivity to beauty...

...VL.C.lnyour essay on Cioran, you seem to be lamenting the rise of historical consciousness in the 19th Century-Kleist's notion that there's no return to innocence, that we have no choice but to go to the very end of consciousness...

...I'll match my detailed sociological knowledge of American popular culture and more against anyone's...

...It's not just what people do or feel...

...Am I right...

...Consciousness as a form of acquisition...

...There's a part of me that identifies with most of the people I write about...

...For example, in literature, John Gardner's dreadful book, On Moral Fiction, is only the most outrageous of the new manifestos declaring that modernism is over...

...I'd had many influences in my head from the time I was born till the time I was sixteen, from Edgar Allan Poe to Lionel Trilling-but the first person I met who exerted an influence on me was Kenneth Burke...

...And you don't even feel a sociological curiosity about television...

...I'd never seen a literary magazine before...

...What strikes you as surreal about Benjamin is his practice of collecting quotations, not any special interest in dreams...

...That's actually not as surprising as it sounds at first...

...and I just began to tremble with excitement, and from then on, my dream was to grow up, move to New York and write for Partisan Review...

...but that doesn't justify it for me...

...S.s...

...I'm still the same person, enjoying the same or an even greater range of pleasures...

...but I'm aware of the fact that I conceive of surrealism in a very personal way...

...What fascinates me about this Pirandello play is the theme of psychological cannibalism...

...Is it fair to say that the dilemma you describe in "Debriefing" is your own dilemma...

...By finding something in it that is also part of my repository of fantasy, I could make a very strong experience out of it-but at the same time, a very limited, idiosyncratic experience...

...and in the mouths of people like Cage and Johns, the word sounded very glamorous and aristocratic...

...Please understand that I'm not attempting to put myself on the same level with these people...

...You can see the way people live now...

...The habits of consciousness ROGER COPELAND: I don't know if it's possible for a brief passage in a short story to sum up an entire body of work, at least not one that includes films, novels, and essays as well as short stories...

...So I moved the character played by Greta Garbo in the film version to the center of my production as a sort of queen bee who entraps the other characters...

...For me, it's an absolutely visceral dislike...

...He was the first living influence on me...

...But I really think it's the death of western civilization...

...And I suppose-at least at one time-I would have said I wanted to write essays that are like fiction and fiction that has the quality of essays...

...Actually, the various avant-garde ' 'isms'' were not supposed to replace one another...

...certainly I'd never seen anybody read one...

...It's not that I imagine you putting down a book of Roland Barthes's because "Laverneand Shirley'' is about to come on...

...Were you influenced by Burke's ideas about dramaturgy, or his conception of language as symbolic action...

...And there were moments while working on the essay that I felt I was making Canetti into my Kien...

...R.C.I think what you're saying right now is going to surprise some of those children of the McLuhanite sixties who saw you as America's premier intellectual swinger, someone whose consciousness was large enough to take everything in without compromising its seriousness...

...I don't mean that what I say about Canetti isn't true...

...Today, we are living out the paradoxes of eschatological thinking...

...One of the more discouraging reactions to my new book or to my recent work in general is that people always want to find some great change from the work of the sixties...

...I carry this fortuituous, journalistic label as a spokesperson for the sixties...

...The following year I went to the University of Chicago where I became a student of Kenneth Burke's...

...Also, you've directed both films and plays...

...For example, I talk about the way Canetti must have projected a lot of himself into the figure of Kien, the "bookman" in his novel, Auto-da-F't...

...Actually, the first person to attack the idea of the interesting is Hegel...

...And then, of course, in Illness as Metaphor, I talk about this 19th century notion that tuberculosis makes one more interesting...

...I think you're kidding yourself if you believe you're on top of it because you're looking at it sociologically or because you have an ironic relationship to it...

...In fact, for a couple of years now, I've been accumulating notes toward a critique of this notion of "the interesting...

...Cage is certainly one hell of an alternative to someone like Cioran-which explains, I suppose, why you contrasted the two of them in your essay on E.M...

...These are unifying notions in my fiction and the essays...

...For me, they're what candy or quaaludes or scream therapy are for my neighbors...

...Even if I couldn't subscribe to the way he was resolving these questions, I felt that somebody was talking about the things that mattered...

...but you're so attuned to the tenor of the culture, it surprises me that you never watch...

...Absolutely...

...No one believed that, least of all Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, Valery, or Barthes...

...Early in the 19th century, it's already being proposed as a criterion for art...

...But we've discovered that there is no terminal "ism...

...Certainly, Cage is much more optimistic than Cioran...

...Ideas of this kind naturally give rise to disjunctive forms of writing, to the techniques of collage, assemblage, and inventory...

...She would rather have gotten undressed in the middle of the street than say, shamelessly and rather wistfully, "Don't you think that Proust is kinda hard...

...One that you've experienced in an immediate, visceral way...

...It became clear I situated his work in too abstract a way...

...I can't help thinking of what you say about Elias Canetti in the last essay of your new collection*-that unlike Walter Benjamin who collected books as objects, Canetti's sole obsession was to put the content of the books inside his head...

...It seems that people don't want books-or any form of art-to be hard...

...I ask that in part because you own one of the most extraordinary personal libraries I've ever seen...

...A few moments ago, you said that you identify strongly with the melancholic element in Benjamin's temperament...

...Then within a year, I'd read all the New Critics and had become a great fan of Kenneth Burke's...

...They all seemed to exude a sort of cool, detached, euphoria, a sophisticated cheerfulness...

...But I think in some ways, I've made it into a better play than it really is...

...The essay came at & moment when all this Warhol stuff was starting and people needed a catchphrase to describe it...

...But particularly with Canetti, I felt I had invented a figure to dramatize my own fantasies...

...The first time I read it, I just couldn't believe what I was reading, something that addressed so many of the problems I was worrying about...

...You can tell me till the cows come home that I've missed this or that interesting program...

...In "Notes on Camp," I was taking a piece of slang that had a certain currency in the homosexual world and trying to generalize it, to go beyond whatever meaning it might have had as a code word...

...SUSAN SONTAG: Certainly...

...I think of the essays in Under the Sign of Saturn as stagings of a certain kind, dramatizations...

...Nobody knows that I was a student of Burke's...

...Lionel Trilling, for one, was a great influence on me...

...I understand you recently staged a Pirandello play in Italy...

...But let me suggest one way in which I think your ideas have changed over the last several years...

...Certainly my relationship to books is more like Canetti's than Walter Benjamin's...

...Any book, in any edition, as long as I can read it...

...In a sense, I suppose I stretched the term surrealism in much the same way I stretched the notion of camp so as to examine the phenomenon of dandyism in modern life...

...I suppose you could also say that the stories in I, etcetera contain essay elements...

...but in the last few years, it seems to me that you've become increasingly critical of the promiscuous way people use the word "interesting"-you seem to me to be arguing that it's not enough anymore to be merely ' 'interesting...

...And it was my reiterating of this older, modernist position in the early sixties which seemed so distinctive because there was nobody else around who had my commitment to the traditional literary and philosophical culture who also seemed to know about these other things and to enjoy them...

...It wouldn't have been sayable...

...And that of course is the same conception of history that helped bring the avant-garde into being, with one movement or ' 'ism'' displacing its predecessor at a dizzying rate of speed...

...The people officially called "Surrealists" -Breton and Company- all had a particular view of romantic love and a cult of woman with a capital "W...

...Of course, like any person who's had a traditional education, I prefer hardcover to paperback because I like the way hardcover books feel in my hands...

...What's actually happening is that it's destroying your ability to concentrate and pay attention...

...And now one is obliged to start defending again the things that one had begun to take for granted...

...This is her sixth year as a graduate student...

...but basically I don't care at all about the difference...

...I believe to some extent I have done that...

...In fact, long before that, when I was a fifteen-year-old kid at North Hollywood High School, I discovered a newsstand on the corner of Hollywood and Highland that carried literary magazines...

...But the great achievements of 20th century art have been hard, demanding a certain kind of commitment, piety, and investment of attention...

...The whole question of decorum tells you a lot about where you are...

...History doesn't end-although particular histories end...

...To know about America, you only have to travel around and listen to people talk about television...

...I think it's part of everyone's over-eagerness to repudiate the sixties...

...Yes, As You Desire Me for the National Theatre...

...What's there in the essay is filtered through my temperament...

...But I don't think you ever pitted the aesthetic and the ethical against one another...

...The fact is, I don't think you can have everything...

...I've probably left out ninety percent of what Canetti is about...

...Jean-Luc Godard once said that he wanted to make fiction films that are like documentaries and documentaries that are like fiction films...

...These ideas are not only obsessions and fantasies, but formal strategies as well...

...But that of course wasn't what I was talking about at all...

...After all, you were the intellectual who said it's all right to listen to the Supr ernes...

...She was 100 percent wrong...

...But let me give it a try...

...Again, I don't mean to suggest that this isn't also a valid portrait of Canetti, but it is an invention, a construction-as is the portrait of Benjamin in the new book...

...But certainly, at one point in time, you thought it was "enough," perhaps even preferable in some ways-or on some occasions-to "the truth...

...Yes, you're quite right...

...How many newspapers and magazines do you read...

...They want art to be decorative...

...and I really felt my essay had been kidnapped, hijacked...

...Better to use a word that people won't get so excited about...

...Of course, I pulled back in horror when I learned that I'd hatched this '.'thing" that people wanted to transform into a commercial enterprise...

...it's different from the way they lived before...

...It's the death of literature, the death of literacy, and the death of politics...

...But people today seem terribly eager to declare this phase of modernism dead and done with...

...In that sense, my work is an example of my thesis that form is a kind of content and content an aspect of form...

...Whatever I said about high culture and the Supremes, they still have to be in certain proportions...

...That's why photographs are so popular, because photographs seem easy to encounter and decipher...

...The condition of our attention, the condition of our seriousness has been progressively altered...

...People don't even know what they can't say anymore...

...The first time I saw television, it just gave me a headache...

...It's . . . my Canetti...

...And what I did with Pirandello is not so different from what I did with Canetti in the last essay of the book...

...Of course to do this, I had to leave a great deal out...

...If there's been a real change in my views over the years, it's that I've had to give the historicist approach a more central role in my reaction to things...

...There are some real similarities between you and Burke...

...rockets and Venetian churches, David Bowie and Diderot, nuoc nam and Big Macs, sunglasses and orgasms...

...and she asked me, "Don't you find it hard to read Proust-all those long sentences...

...but she said something in it that struck me as terribly ironic: she thought she was praising you by writing, ' 'Scarcely anyone is more alive to the interesting . . ." Now that might have been true in the mid-sixties...

...What interests me about your definition of surrealism here-and in so many of your other essays-is that it has less to do with the actual content of dfeam life or the subconscious than with techniques of collage and radical juxtaposition, Lautreamont' s sewing machine and umbrella meeting by chance on a dissecting table...

...Aside from those recurring images of acquisition and disburdenment, are you aware of any other similarities-either formal or thematic-between your fiction and your critical essays...

...What accounts for that loss of energy, do you think...

...only that it's a very selective view of him...

...And so, John Fowles and a lot of writers whose names I hardly know are the people Gardner proposes as the only serious writers...

...Something else that you seem to share with him is a fascination with certain surrealist ideas...

...Unguided Tour," the last story in I, etcetera, is also about travel and tourism as a form of accumulation followed by a project of disburdenment...

...but ultimately she is their victim...

...Yeah, I guess it's harder than Kurt Vonnegut...

...and Hegel says it's not enough...

...Perhaps I latched onto the word surrealism fleeing from notions like camp and kitsch...

...I don't think I did either, and who could...

...It was terrifically liberating for me to be with these people and hear their babble-I don't mean that condescendingly-it's just that they had a very special way of talking...

...I think I know what you mean...

...He argued that you had repudiated your earlier commitment to aesthetic autonomy, that the new essay on Riefenstahl was at odds with what you said about "Triumph of the Will" in an older essay, "On Style...

...One of the names I've found for this sensibility is surrealism...

...I think of the essays in Under the Sign of Saturn as seven stories in essay form, seven portraits of consciousness...

...Consequently, I haven't allowed that word to pass my lips since 1964-despite all the offers I've received to elaborate on or update the essay...

...I picked up Partisan Review and I started to read "Art and Fortune" by Lionel Trilling...

...No, never...

...There are all sorts of changes like this, of people more and more finding things hard, of people not having the necessary energy...

...S.S...

...it's also what they think can be said...

...I submit that twenty years ago, no graduate student in her sixth year at a well known university would even have been able to utter such a sentence...

...It's not just that people want things to be easy...

...But this surrealist attitude toward love has absolutely left me cold, so I've simply left it out of my version of the surrealist sensibility...

...But I don't have that sort of relation to books at all...

...Or is the desire to somehow escape this cul-de-sac simply one more consequence of the avant-garde conception of history, more hunger for change...

...I'd be interested in hearing you talk about some of the less obvious influences on your work, less obvious than say, Ortega, the Bloomsbury Group, or the New Critics...

...it's almost as if I'd invented them, as if they were fantasy projections of part of myself...

...You know, Benjamin once sold his complete edition of Kafka-and there was no writer he loved more than Kafka except perhaps for Proust-because he saw a rare book, an 18th Century children's book which he coveted as a beautiful object, not because it held any intellectual interest for him...

...My library is what I have in my head...

...Either they see you as the defender of some new barbarism or as a sort of closet Arnoldian, the ' 'Eminent Victorian" as The Village Voice recently labeled you...

...They suggest that this modern or experimental or avant-garde literature was elitist and that the only good writers are also commercially successful...

...When you write about Canetti in that way are you also writing about yourself...

...regardless of whether you're writing about Sartre, Godard, Cioran, Syberberg, or Canetti, you seem to return obsessively to a single theme: the predatory habits of consciousness, the desire to hold the whole world in one's head...

...I think that's an alibi...

...Elizabeth Hardwick wrote a very admiring profile of you in 1978...

...Not even in 1950...

...So then if people continue to like the work I'm doing in the seventies and eighties, it has to be shown that I'm not really the person I was labeled as-the intellectual passionana of the sixties- that I'm really humane or conservative...

...For one thing, the acceptance of television, the mentality and kind of attention that is the given of television...

...the mes-siah doesn't come...

...I was astonished by Elizabeth's remark...

...But I don't believe for a minute that it's actually necessary for me to watch television...

...There's a political dimension to Cioran's pessimism that comes from having witnessed the failure of Communism in Eastern Europe...

...You're both wide-ranging generalists, you're not academically pedigreed...

...Now here's what I'm getting at...

...Do you agree...

...Do you see any way off the avant-garde escalator...

...Look at all this stuff I've got in my head...

...The Fate of Pleasure" particularly, was a major event in my life...

...But I still think television is the enemy...

...I thought it was so dreadful to look at this tiny, out-of-focus image and than have everything interrupted all the time by commercials...

...Why is it, do you think, that people insist on putting you in one category or the other...

...very few people say this and even fewer of the people who say it actually live it...

...But I haven't changed in that respect...

...We've talked about some of the concerns that you've voiced over and over again in many different contexts...

...It feels as if the entire history of the world is contained here in your apartment, and for all I know, here in your head...

...I know this sounds terribly cranky and eccentric...

...and in Death Kit, the very notion of the kit, assembling the elements of a death, is another working out of this idea...