Toward Cancellation of the Self

...or, in the piece on Leiris: "techniques of emotional disengagement...

...Reviewed by RICHARD HOWARD Contributor, "Poetry," "Partisan Review" "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," says Stephen Daedalus...

...In all of them, the author is determined to find the forms, the styles which can endure and accommodate the burden of merely thereness: "by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be just what it is...

...There is a beneficent inertia in us which at times prevails, she suggests...

...I have the impression not so much of having, for myself, solved a certain number of alluring and troubling problems as of having used them up...

...I have italicized here the significant metaphors, which occur also, of course, in The Benefactor, whose insufferable, androgynous narrator speaks of "enjoying the waning tribulations of subjectivity" or again, "For me, the very advent of myself suggested the problem of my own dissolution.' The two dozen essays in Against Interpretation proceed in this characteristically dialectical way to disgorge the self (banality) and then to dissolve it ("banality is the modesty of the inexpressible...

...There would only be what is...

...Sontag asks us, and then asks herself to do better than prize art as a species of "moral journalism...

...In fact, one might say that Sontag's entire effort is to embrace the reality of boredom, neutrality, affectlessness, not by conjuring it out of the way in the practice of an...

...That is why, throughout this learned, witty, explicit book, we keep encountering such phrases as, in a definition of Bresson's undertaking: "the beauties of personality effaced by a project...

...even the balm of intelligibility is denied to us...

...on Beckett: "dramas of the withdrawn consciousness...

...she asks, quite literally, that we come to our senses, that we aspire to life in the body, that we create an eschatology of immanence, as she calls it in her feracious piece on Norman Brown...

...These pieces, then, are not only a defense pro domo ("speculation turns not to itself till it hath travell'd, and is mirrored there where it may see itself"), but a series of enabling ventures: They define a "modern" sensibility which we may place in a pediment of appearances with those contemporary examples from other arts and nations which Miss Sontag is at pains, or at play-it was Nietzsche, her hero, who said that our maturity is to have regained the seriousness we had as children at play-to exfoliate in her studies of Leiris, of Bresson, of Camp...

...With its firm programmatic stance and its wide-ranging bravery about the demands of the new art-silence, longueurs, messiness, boredom-Against Interpretation reminds me more than any other book of Cocteau's famous Le Coq et l'Arlequin, which half a century ago declared its determinative intentions: "This book is not concerned with any existing school of art but with a school to whose existence nothing points-were it not for the first-fruits of a few young artists, the efforts of the painters, and the tiredness of our ears...

...So privative, so benumbing is so much of our life, that this apolaustic writer has resolved on a way-extreme, tendentious, utterly alien to the tradition of Polite Letters-of exploiting the arts, on a project of accommodating history which will for once be responsible to such withering of response...

...Psychological analysis is superficial,' she says, apropos of Bresson's films, because "it assigns to action a paraphrasable meaning that true art transcends...

...The phrase is her own, and I believe it represents the "developing but nonetheless cohesive point of view" Miss Sontag refers to in her opening note: "writing has proved to be an act of intellectual disburdenment as much as of intellectual self-expression...

...Miss Sontag's is not only a ritual imagination, but an obsessed one (she is in good company, as she makes clear...

...and the private histories whose inherent meaninglessness she explains thus in The Benefactor: "The truth is always something told, not something known...

...They submit to the nightmare and try to survive...

...Against Interpretation is a book which will make it possible for her to continue writing novels in the (natively scorned) mode of The Benefactor...

...on Jack Smith: "the sensibility which disclaims ideas, which situates itself beyond negation...

...There is instead a saving inadequacy (as she puts it in the essay on films of apocalyptic fantasy, "the imagery of disaster is above all the emblem of an inadequate response") which Miss Sontag is the first to seize upon as a modern possibility, actually a modern hope, against the old notions, the 19th century pieties of emotional correspondence, psychological explanation, moral recovery, etc...

...Was it not Hippolyte himself who defined ritual as "that way of performing an act which guarantees the need of doing it again...

...Indeed, so traumatizing are history's records and residues that most artists since Joyce cannot bear even to make the effort to awaken...

...Like Sartre's Saint Genet, it is her way of reminding herself of "the autonomy of the aesthetic...

...For she has made a discovery: We are not always prepared to respond appropriately, or to respond at all, to the demands of "high art...

...Author of a fiction about what Hegel calls love playing with itself, Susan Sontag demands, in her discursive texts written over the last four years, an erotics of art...

...on Ionesco: "the obliteration of personality...

...A generous taxonomist of her enterprise, if generosity is the power to make anything a new beginning, she calls her book "not criticism at all, strictly speaking, but case studies for an aesthetic"-an aesthetic that will come to terms (her terms, in this "theory of her own sensibility") with our obsessive affectlessness...

...a self that-rightly-resists interpretation, rejects the commitment of intelligence to "meaningfulness," abhors the substitutive commentary we fall back on not only in our experience of art, but in our experience tout court...

...Yet not finding what it is she would move toward or move in on, at least not finding it at hand, she embarks, in her book of essays, on a series of discoveries among her foreign allies, the novelists and critics, thinkers and painters, anthropologists and composers (she gives lists) whose disclosures of the appearance of withdrawal parallel her own enterprise: the heroic quest for the cancellation of the self...

...Like Cocteau, whose "spiritual style" she has so beautifully understood, Miss Sontag is as much concerned to move toward something, something she herself hopes to do, can do, must do, as to move away from something...

...Survive the public history which Susan Sontag describes in her descensus on The Deputy as "a wound that will not heal...

...If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything...