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Cliff Notes from Mt. Olympus: review of Nabokov’s LECTURES ON LITERATURE

I should credit my editor at The Soho News, Tracy Young, for the title of this review, which ran in their November 26, 1980 issue. For my younger readers, and even for some of my older ones, it might be helpful to add that the “snake oil salesman” alluded to in my final sentence is (or, rather, was) Ronald Reagan. –J.R.

Lectures on Literature

By Vladimir Nabokov

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $19.95

“Let us not kid ourselves,” intones the tall athletic Russian professor to his students at Cornell. “Let us remember that literature is of no practical value whatsoever, except in the very special case of somebody’s wishing to become, of all things, a professor of literature. The girl Emma Bovary never existed; the book Madame Bovary shall exist forever and ever. A book lives longer than a girl.”

No doubt. And even at the price of four first-run movies, this long-awaited volume of aristocratic riches has got to be the publishing bargain of the year. Comfortably oversized, decked out with plentiful reproductions of the Great Man’s notes, annotated teaching copies, diagrams, and sketches, it might be the best analysis of fiction by a practitioner to have come along since The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor’s masterly study of the short story.

Never mind that this is only Part I, with a companion volume on Russian writers still on the way. [2009 note: a third volume in the same series on Don Quixote was also eventually published.] These Wellesley and Cornell lectures, delivered between 1941 and 1958 (until the runaway success of Lolita finally enabled Nabokov to retire from teaching) — splendidly edited by Fredson Bowers, warmly introduced by John Updike — offer as good a do-it-yourself course in 19th and 20th century European fiction as a student is likely to find, inside or outside a university.

A control freak who wrote out every lecture word for word, in advance — the same method he employed with interviews (explicated at some length in his collection Strong Opinions) — Nabokov was no less exacting in spelling out the precise details of an imaginary location or object. These included the physical layouts of Mansfield Park, Dr. Jekyll’s house, the Samsa flat in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” a Proustian orchard and the “pathetic and tasteless” cap worn by Charles Bovary on his first day of school. Like the diverse routes traced through Dubin and Ulysses [see above], these descriptions — careful enough to be drawn in careful sketches — are regarded virtually as prerequisites to serious participation in a fictive space.

It’s no wonder, then, that Nabokov has so many wisecracks reserved for Freud and Freudians. (”I am interested here in bugs,” he says in his Kafka lecture, which decisively proves that Gregor is a beetle and not a cockroach, “not in humbugs.”) As a concrete recounter and recaster of dreams himself, he knew his competition when he saw it.

By the same token, he knew quite well who his competition wasn’t: “I differ from Joseph Conradically,” he asserted in one interview, and equally disassociated himself from “Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles,” “Mann’s asinine Death in Venice,” “Pasternak’s melodramatic and vilely Zhivago,” and “Finnegans Wake, that petrified superpun.”

***

Much of the time, as Updike points out, we are simply being read to — but read to by someone whose selections and commentary constitute a very personalized reading. Nabokov’s Bleak House is a Dickens quite deliberately shorn of social significance, through a series of quick, snooty exclusions that often register like an emigré crank’s major defense against the vicissitudes of troublesome history. Satire is meaningful only insofar as transcends and outlasts its objects, while “study of the sociological or political impact of literature has to be devised mainly for those who are by temperament or education immune to the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature.”

One suspects that Nabokov, who had the politics (or nonpolitics, depending on the church of your choice) of an upper-class snob, would have felt little kinship with the Russian Formalists. Yet the whimsical accuracy of his formal observations is often no less apt and eclectic than theirs. Charles’ cap and the Bovary house in Yonville are described in the form of a layer cake; to trace the movement of Fanny’s emotions in Mansfield Park, Jane Austen “uses a device that I call the knight’s move, a term from chess.”

No less acute are discussions of Flaubert’s uses of counterpoint, structural transitions, an “unfolding method of description” (a bit like the layer cake), The French imperfect tense, and “the word and preceded by a semicolon” — potentially difficult or elusive aspects of form or style that the Master makes easy through the tempered grace of his exposition.

***

Not all these lectures are equally inspired. (The one on Proust — limited by the fact that the accompnaying class assignment was to read only the first of the novel’s seven volumes — is a distinct disappointment.) None was prepared for publication by Nabokov himself, and a certain lack of satisfying completion seems to hover over a few, including those on Dickens and Stevenson.

My own favorites are the extraordinary examinations of Madame Bovary and “The Metamorphosis,” which seem to engage the greatest number of Nabokov’s talents and emotions. But emerge as occasions for the lecturer’s deeply felt hatred for mediocrity on all levels. In the case of the Kafka tale, the reading is built as methodically as a legal brief. “Let us first of all study every detail in this story; the general idea will come of itself later when we have all the data we need.”

By the time Nabokov arrives at his critical epiphany, the preparatory work makes it shine with absolute conviction: “Here is a point to be observed with care and love. Gregor is a human being in an insect’s disguise; his family are insects disguised as people.”

His patient, chapter-by-chapter appreciation of Ulysses — first in his personal pantheon of 20th century prose masterpieces (followed by “The Metamorphosis,” Bely’s Petersburg, and “the first half of Proust’s fairy tale”) — runs a close third to his empathetic treatments of Flaubert and Kafka. Here his discourse is enlivened by the most commonsensical caveats and objections.

Part 2, Chapter 4, of Ulysses, set in newspaper offices, “seems to me to be poorly balanced, and Stephen’s contribution to it is not especially witty. You may peruse it with a skimming eye.” And the mixing and intertwining of “the theme of sex” and “the theme of the latrine” in Ulysses — which, in my own college days, once made Ted Weiss refer to readers of that book as “conno-sewers” — is criticized not for its frankness but for its lack of verisimilitude, assuming that Leopold Bloom “is supposed to be a rather ordinary citizen”.

If there’s a more reasonable way of dealing with the literal overflow of Joyce, I don’t know what it is. In fact, if one were trying to define what a cultivated sense of civilization consists of — a utopian task, perhaps, in a country poised on the brink of investing its future in a snake oil salesman — one could conceivably do worse than cite such a distinction.

–The Soho News, November 26, 1980

Mudpie Modernism [on THE PERFUMED NIGHTMARE]

From The Soho News, November 26, 1980. — J.R

The Perfumed Nightmare

A film by Kidlat Tahimik

An odd, elusive 1971 Filipino filibuster, a first feature that somehow disassembles more than it assembles, Mababangong Bangungot (The Perfumed Nightmare) has a nearly total absence of “technique” — pacing, composition, acting, rhythm, budget — that is inextricably bound up with its subject, an all-around ambivalence about American knowhow. This makes it intermittently sluggish to watch, and theoretically fascinating to think about. Combining autobiography with fantasy, “magical realism” with cornball folklore and enchantment (with American technology) with disenchantment, it’s as unremittingly screwball as a house built of chewing gum wrappers and cigarette packs.

Don’t go expecting anything remotely decadent, despite the fancy title: the movie is as pure and innocent as the driven snow. (Or almost — the filmmaker, unlike his movie counterpart, spent almost a decade in Europe.) Kidlat Tahimuik, who wrote, produced, directed, and stars in this doggedly homemade production, presents himself as the driver of a brightly painted taxi-bus in his native Filipino village. He’s the proud possessor of a transistor radio, whose broadcasts lead him to become the founder of a local Werner von Braun Fan Club.

After writing a letter to Voice of America asking what were the first words spoken on the moon, Tahimik grossly mispronounces part of the reply (”That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for for mankind”) — a nice ironic touch suggesting that language colonizes as much as guns or property. Later, after the hero is whisked away to Paris by an unconvincing cartoon American to work as a loader of gumball machines, he mispronounces the French inscription on a building even more pointedly, so that ordre (order) becomes ordure (garbage) and but (goal) turns into boue (mud).

Working with the most nonexistent sense of rhythm since the films of Daniel Schmid, Tahimik’s nontechnique initially recalls the wittier stance of a conscious technical primitive like Luc Moullet. Yet after a bit, as it becomes clear that Tahimk has much less historical or critical knowledge of film than Moullet, one becomes equally aware that he does have a metaphorical/conceptual imagination of some density. (The movie is an anthology of bridges and rocket-shaped structures, along with gumballs, eggs, and onions.) Strained through Tahimik’s impoverished means — Heaven’s Gate cost 4000 times as much to make — this quasi-literary talent comes out looking and sounding pretty weird.

Patchy throughout, The Perfumed Nightmare has been aptly described by Tahimik as “an exercise in learning the art of filmmaking.” A starting-from-scratch enterprise by a late starter (born in 1942), encouraged along the way by Werner Herzog (who featured him in a small part as a Peruvian Indian and circus freak in The Mystery of Kasper Hauser), it might have been more memorable if it were every bit as technically chaste and original as some of its champions contend.

But an early sequence recalls Buñuel’s Mexican Bus Ride, while a late episode, intercutting the lowering of an onion-shaped church dome with the cries of a pregnant woman Tahimik’s real-life Bavarian wife), suggests a grammar-school version of Dovzhenko crossed with, say, Little Lulu. As a form of mudpie Third World modernism, it’s a unique mixture all right — but one whose static conceits, like those of Syberberg;s Our Hitler, often hover on the edge of monotony.

– The Soho News, November 26, 1980; tweaked February 9, 2010

The Awkward Agee

This film review appeared in The Soho News‘ November 12, 1980 issue. Agee (the writer) has long since then gone up again, considerably, in my estimation of his work.

Ross Spears’ documentary about Agee, which was later nominated for an Oscar, can be ordered now on DVD, along with An Afternoon with Father Flye, from this site. As far as I know, Agee is the only access we now have to The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (1952), a film I’ve never seen, which appears to be impossible to access on either VHS or DVD. (Directed by Bretaigne Windust, it was originally paired with an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, which I haven’t seen either, that was directed by John Brahm – in a feature called Face to Face that, to all appearances, has disappeared entirely from the face of the earth. The tiny photo below appears to be a still from it.) —J.R.

Agee
A film by Ross Spears
Bleecker Street Cinema (The James Agee Room),
Nov. 14-16 and 21-23

When I first saw this feature-length documentary (which is now officially inaugurating the Bleecker Street Cinema’s small, additional screening room) a year or so back, I was pleasantly surprised to find Jimmy Carter — on the campaign trail for the Presidency in ’76 –- making a guest appearance. In the opening moments of the film, he speaks with real intelligence and sensitivity about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men –- an angry, experimental, unclassifiable work of reportage, poetry and analysis about three Alabama tenant families near the height of the Depression, with photographs by Walker Evans and text by James Agee.

This wasn’t a bit like Richard Nixon declaring that he’d seen all of John Ford’s films, or Ronald Reagan leaking sincerity and integrity like a reptilian wallet in his old General Electric TV spots. It was the testimony of man who actually liked Agee’s outrageous, uneven, idiosyncratic book, comparing its style to that of Henry David Thoreau:

“I give the book to friends and tell them not to worry about the style when they read it, just to relax with it. I tell them it’s poetry,” Carter says warmly. Watching him say this a second time, on Election Day, at the beginning of Ross Spears’ slightly better-than-average (if conventional) literary bio-pic, I wondered if I was watching an ode to the defeat of guilty liberal humanism in more ways than one. Which is another way of saying that what seems interesting, troubling, and at the same time very ordinary about the legacy of James Agee applies in some ways to Carter, too.

As a scene-stealer, Carter actually takes a back seat to a handsome object that precedes him in closeup: a rare 1941 first edition of  Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with a dust jacket -– an edition that originally sold fewer than 600 copies. Throughout the movie, the sheer physical presence of books, and poems and stories in their initial pristine magazine appearances, creates an arresting sort of literary erotics — peekaboo glimpses of print as sexy, in a way, as the burning, turning pages shown in Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451.

Unfortunately, this sort of fleeting pleasure in Agee is often dovetailed into the tacky strategy of silently “staging” part of a text (e.g., The Morning Watch, A Death in the Family) with actors, while excerpts are monotonously read, with suffocating piety, offscreen. It’s a practice that Agee himself would surely have detested. And the fact that Spears does it “well” actually makes things worse, not better -– like Agee writing beautiful “appropriate” prose about Hiroshima for a Time cover story in 1945.

This brings me to the nub of my second thoughts about Agee (as well as Agee). If the correct and responsible way to deal with this movie is to start raving about Agee’s everlasting importance as a writer, I may be less than ideally suited to this task today. As someone who identified with the man excessively 20 years ago — perhaps because I was a Southern cigarette-smoking film freak and self-absorbed writer sequestered at a New England prep school — I can’t bring any fresh sense of discovery to his work. Like Fitzgerald and Hemingway and unlike Faulkner, his popular image as an artist conceivably has less to do with work produced than with a reputation for creative agony and carousing. It seems significant that his successes are mainly a matter of fragments and short distances, where he doesn’t have to worry as much about complex structures or overall dynamics.

***

The simple structure of Agee is basically built around interviews with the author’s friends and spouses. The latter, like his lifelong friend and teacher Father Flye, are accorded one chapter heading apiece in the film’s orderly procession of people and places: “Father Flye and Tennessee,” “Olivia, Harvard and New York,” “Alma and Alabama,” “Mia and the Movies”.

The friends — mainly Flye (who calls Agee “a sovereign prince of the English language”), poet Robert Fitzgerald, critic Dwight Macdonald, and director John Huston — are every bit as articulate as the wives, and fun to watch and listen to. It’s largely the relaxed, critical affection of these people that  gives Agee a slight edge over the usual NET-style documentary.

Other artifacts and relics include Weegee footage of New York in the 40s, a Universal newsreel about the Hollywood Ten, and Agee’s brief appearance as a town drunk in The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, which he scripted. (Regrettably missing are excerpts from In the Street and The Night of the Hunter, perhaps the two best films he collaborated on, although we do get a corny, characteristic clip — more drunk jokes, in fact — from The African Queen.)

Put this all together and what have we got? A pyrotechnical, passionate writer who, like the jazz pianists Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson, occasionally raises the question of whether pyrotechnics is always the best or most useful creative equipment to have. (One wife, Alma, speaks nicely about his agreeable lack of technique in playing tennis and piano.) One can continue to admire much of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men for the purity of its rage while realizing, at the same time, that the career of writing for Fortune, Time and Life that preceded, followed, and in many respects occasioned this rage — like the enormous quantities of alcohol, talk and tobacco associated with his legend — may have defined him as accurately in the long run.

This is also true of his film criticism for the Nation in the 40s — writing which is neither as avant-garde as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men nor as populist as Time but seeks, often brilliantly, to out-wisecrack other gifted malcontents. Unlike his younger friend and colleague Manny Farber, whose sharp conceptual eye could spot a major macho filmmaker — a Sam Fuller or Michael Snow –years before most people could imagine his existence, Agee was never much of a trailblazer in relation to movies. More precisely a performance artist in relation to writing, he could sing and dance about movies better than he could explain them.

At his best — on slapstick, Jean Vigo, Bogart/Hawks or fighting off the philistine hordes about Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux — Agee had a richly evocative prose, but seldom very much in the way of ideas (which made him, perhaps, the ideal Luce employee). Agee, as a film, hasn’t an idea in its head either. But as a middle-brow introduction to a writer whose baroque patches of pour-it-on prose and turgid swamps of liberal guilt inspired me for almost two decades (before I started overdosing and outgrowing it), it certainly delivers the goods.

–The Soho News, November 12, 1980

Barthes of My Heart

This book review originally appeared in the September 10, 1980 issue of The Soho News. Maybe it qualifies less as a book review than as a short polemic, but if I recall this assignment — my first review of a book by Barthes– accurately, I had some space limitations. –J.R.

Barthes of My Heart

New Critical Essays
By Roland Barthes
Translated by Richard Howard
Hill & Wang, $10.95

It’s reported that when a celebrated American film critic was asked what she thought of French theory, she replied that the trouble with folks like film theorists is that they forget movies are supposed to be fun. When this response was quoted to me, my heart sank. It made me feel as if all the fun I’d had reading Roland Barthes over the years was no longer legal -– that it wasn’t even supposed to exist.

I’m not trying to pretend here that all of Barthes goes down easily: I still haven’t gotten all the way through S/Z, a favorite among some American lit-crit academics. And I’ll grant you that he may be an acquired taste for puritanical empiricists who mistrust too much sensual, imaginative, and poetic play in their literary puddings — particularly when these occur outside of fiction, and under the auspices of social and aesthetic analysis.

But next time you’re in a decent bookstore, sneak a look at the opening paragraph of the first essay in New Critical Essays, on the epigrams (“reflections or sentences and maxims”) of  La Rochefoucauld. And tell me who else among contemporary intellectuals since Eisenstein has exhibited such a rollicking, euphoric style, phrase by phrase, thought by thought.

One shouldn’t be put off by the occasional obscurity and/or campiness of Barthes’ reference points and apparent subjects. The concept of the critic as some enlightened Buddha of the marketplace, affixing all the proper  price tags to consumer items, seems entirely foreign to his talents and temperament. Apart from his early (and now, perhaps, rather dated) defenses of Robbe-Grillet in Critical Essays, I can think of few occasions when he’s made me want to read or reread other writers, at least right away. Even here, when he deals with the traumas of Flaubert while writing sentences and the names used by Proust, he makes me want to rehtink these authors more than reread them.

Somewhat like the late virtuoso jazz pianist Art Tatum, who swamped and devoured any musician he tried to accompany, Barthes’ voice is sufficiently mellifluous to crowd out other voices — even the ones he is occasionally called upon to sponsor or introduce. That’s why an essay such as “Pierre Loti: Aziyadé,” the last in this collection — about a writer and book I doubt I’ll ever encounter firsthand — comes across not as a gangplank leading to something else, but as a flamboyant, extended circus act in its own right. Consider the opening sentence. which amply explains how film critic Gilbert Adair could once describe Barthes’ style to me as creamy:

“In the name Aziyadé, this is what I read and what I hear: first of all the gradual explosion (like a bouquet of fireworks) of the three brightest vowels in the French alphabet (the opening of the vowels = the opening of the lips, of the senses); the caress of the z, the sensuous, plump palitalization of the y, this entire sonorous series sliding and spreading, subtle and rich; next a constellation of islands, stars, peoples, Asia, Georgia, Greece; and then a whole literature: Hugo who in his Orientales uses the name Albaydé, and behind Hugo all of philhellene romanticism; Loti, a traveler specializing in the East, the bard of Istanbul; the vague notion of a feminine character (some Désenchantée); finally the prejudice of dealing with an insipid, sweetish, old-fashioned novel: in short, from the (sumptuous) signifier to the (paltry) signified, utter disappointment.”

If the concluding phrase suggests the ciorcus equivalent of being shot from a cannon onto a tightrope and then leaping from three successive trapezes, only to land in a five-gallon can of Mello Yello, the reader should bear in mind that Barthes intends to build on precisely such an effect. One sentence later, he’s suggesting that, “Perhaps we, too, can learn to disappoint the name Aziyadé in the right way and, having slipped from the precious name to the pathetic image of an outdated novel, work our way back to the idea of a text: fragments of the infinite language which tells nothing but in which occurs `something unheard-of and shadowy.‘”

Readers who find the above sentence pretentious are cordially invoted to check out the essays here on the plates of the Encyclopedia and the mythology of Jules Verne, which cheerfully demonstrate just how pretentious we can be — and pretentiously misguided — when we think that we’re doing simple, mundane things (like having fun). For playful, adventurous readers who like to scavenge as well as savor what they read, New Critical Essays is like a small bouqet of eight flowers from the late master, fresh and ready to be mixed into  a hardy and heady salad.

–The Soho News, September 10, 1980

Under the Sign of Sontag

This book review, which I’ve alluded to previously on this site, appeared in the November 2, 1980 issue of The Soho News. —J.R.

Under the Sign of Sontag

Under the Sign of Saturn

By Susan Sontag

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $10.95

If, dialectically speaking, every book can be said to have an unconscious — a repressed subtext — one can find glimpses of the unconscious of this one in the misleading flap copy  that quotes from an interview (”Women, the Arts, and the Politics of Culture,”  Salmagundi 31-32) and mentions the inclusion of a “famous exchange on fascism and feminism” (apparently with Adrienne Rich, in the March 20, 1975 New York Review of Books), both regrettably missing from this slim volume of seven essays.

These omissions betray the absence of a gritty, indecorous social context — a sense of Sontag existing in the world, not merely staging grand Platonic shadow-plays in the theater of her mind. Much as Illness as Metaphor (1978) was partially structured around her refusal to allude once to her own personal struggle, this book discreetly, indirectly dances around the notion that the subject of every essay proposes a different kind of mirror to the author, a speculative self-portrait.

Against Interpretation (1966) is one of the best popular guidebooks ever written to mid-century modernist taste and its diverse encounters with the sexuality of thought. Styles of Radical Will (1969) is a series of variable skirmishes on some of the exciting, if treacherous, battlefields of the late ’60s. Speaking as someone who used the parenthetical examples of these essays rather like the way an earlier generation used Eliot’s footnotes to The Waste Land — as a central tool in my liberal arts education — I am disappointed in not being able to appropriate Sontag’s recent, more inner-directed essays in quite the same fashion. As an old college friend observed recently, “She doesn’t belong to us anymore.”

Let’s put it differently: the pieces here are all precisely dated — from 1972 to 1980 — without being existentially placed. Like Goethe or Thomas Mann (both frequent reference points), they speak to us from some remote Mount Olympus of the imagination, an exclusive key club whose members are either male misogynist bookworms (Roland Barthes, Elias Canetti, Paul Goodman) or at least their kindred spirits (Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg) — doleful, solitary visionaries shoring their heroic ruins against the fragments of a discontinuous culture.

***

The essays in this collection become more interesting when one examines them in pairs or in threesomes, where the ideas and inflections gain in depth by being carried through different settings. One should shake up their chronological order and view them in other groupings: very personal obituaries of Goodman and Barthes; Artaud, Benjamin, and Canetti — an ABC of lonely, eccentric accomplishment — examined for the climates of their temperaments and the shapes of their careers.

A largely unconvincing panegyric to Syberberg’s interesting Hitler, a Film from Germany is complemented by essays located to the left and right of its arguments. On the left is “Fascinating Fascism,” a bracing attack on formalist defenses of Leni Riefenstahl and some troubled reflections on the erotic currency of Nazi symbolism — the only genuinely political and socially engaged article in the book. On the right is “Mind as Passion,” the closing essay, which argues that “Canetti’s thought is conservative in the most literal sense. It — he — does not want to die….Recurrent images of needing to feel everything inside himself, of unifying everything in one head, illustrate Canetti’s attempts through magical thinking and moral clamorousness to ‘refute’ death.”

Both these forays help to explain, in their different ways, how and why the Black Maria (Edison’s first film studio) of Hitler, which stirs Sontag’s and Syberberg’s imaginations to such hyperbolic flights, resembles the inside of a tomb –catalogued and inventoried at lyrical lengths in the final pages of her novel Death Kit. “The enterprise that one takes through a Surrealist landscape,” she writes of Hitler, “is always quixotic — hopeless, obsessional; and, finally, self-regarding.”

The same could be said of this peculiarly airless appreciation, which stops just short of defining a masterpiece as a work that reflects and restages Sontagian preoccupations rather than expanding or elucidating them. Somewhere along the line the radical modernist has turned into the decadent classicist.

The problem is that Hitler is removed “through magical thinking” from any social history or space of its own. “Taste is context, and the context has changed,”  Sontag writes earlier of fascist art. But what about the contexts of Hitler — shown in German classrooms, as a weekly serial on BBC, or presented by Francis Coppola in Lincoln Center with a different title (Our Hitler) at $12 a head — that help to determine its own social meanings and about which Sontag remains resolutely silent? (By furnishing a quote to Coppola’s ads for the latter event — “One of the great works of art of the 20th century” — she certainly chose to contribute to that context.)

***

Other objections to this essay are more a matter of style and rhetoric. It’s disconcerting to read, “A posthumous event, in the era of cinema’s unprecedented mediocrity,” on page 140 and then, on 163, “In the era of cinema’s unprecedented mediocrity, his masterpiece has something of the character of a posthumous event.” When we’re told that unlike Ivan the Terrible and 2001 (among other “mega-films”), Hitler is “open to personal references as well as public ones,” it’s hard to believe that viewer as sophisticated as Sontag could fail to see the personal references in the Eisenstein and Kubrick films. Is she merely not listening to herself, lulled by the sound of her own voice?

It is often, to be sure, a melodious, mellifluous voice, even in its bittersweet, half-defeated ironies, ambivalences, and love-hatreds (that animate so much of On Photography), or in its odd tics, like a determination to drag surrealism in at every juncture of this book, to explain anything, everything. A fondly remembered writerly voice whose delicate, desperate clarity still sometimes shines through the stardust tarnish that diffuses so much light.

Why, in the Barthes obit, does she fail to mention that great writer’s happiest, most ecstatic books, The Pleasure of the Text and the still untranslated meditation on “Japan,” L’Empire des signes? Perhaps because, as Sontag herself usefully pointed out in the Salmagundi interview, her 1964 “Notes on Camp” was merely a second attempt to name a sensibility, after trying to accomplish the same thing with morbidity and death — a subject that eventually swamped her. It swamps too much of the present, saturnine collection.

–The Soho News, November 12, 1980