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Wednesday, December 29, 2004
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15,000 books and no television set …
… that’s what the inside of Susan Sontag’s New York apartment looked like. It’s hard enough to imagine an American interior with no televisions; it’s much harder to imagine an American space with so many books. But Sontag was more European - high modernist European, at that - than American, UD thinks. Sontag complained, in “Against Interpretation,” that American culture “is based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness -- conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities … that the task of the critic must be assessed.” Forty years later, our strongest novelist, Don DeLillo, writes about the “narcotic undertow” of the televisions his characters watch all day and all night. More than ever, critics should, if Sontag is right, awaken and excite our deeply sedated senses so that we can see the world more clearly. Sontag’s work, now subject to fresh reading because of her death, stands as a timely rebuke to much of what’s happening at the meeting of literary critics now wrapping up in Philadelphia. Sontag’s attack on content-driven interpretation, which “poisons our sensibilities … like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere,” targets the deadly ideologies of her day - Freudianism, Marxism - but describes equally well the prevailing race/class/gender industrial zone. Sontag mentions Randall Jarrell's essay on Walt Whitman as an exemplar of the sort of criticism that “suppl[ies] a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art.” Jarrell’s essay is able to “reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” One of the things Jarrell says about Whitman in that essay makes me think of Sontag herself: “When you buy him you know what you are buying. And only an innocent and solemn and systematic mind will condemn him for his contradictions: Whitman’s catalogues of evils represent realities, and his denials of their reality represent other realities, of feeling and intuition and desire. If he is faithless to logic, to Reality As It Is -- whatever that is -- he is faithful to the feel of things, to reality as it seems; this is all that a poet has to be faithful to, and philosophers have been known to leave logic and Reality for it.” |