Where the Stress Falls: Essays

by Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag has said that her earliest idea of what a writer should be was "someone who is interested in everything." Thirty-five years after her first collection of essays, the now classic Against Interpretation, our most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last two decades that illustrate a deeply felt, kaleidoscopic array of interests, passions, observations, and ideas.

"Reading" offers ardent, freewheeling considerations of talismanic writers from her own private canon, such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Randall Jarrell, Roland Barthes, Machado de Assis, W. G. Sebald, Borges and Elizabeth Hardwick. "Seeing" is a series of luminous and incisive encounters with film, dance, photography, painting, opera, and theatre. And in the final section, "There and Here," Sontag explores some of her own commitments: to the work (and activism) of conscience, to the concreteness of historical understanding, and to the vocation of the writer.

Where the Stress Falls records a great American writer's urgent engagement with some of the most significant aesthetic and moral issues of the late twentieth century, and provides a brilliant and clear-eyed appraisal of what is at stake, in this new century, in the survival of that inheritance.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Art, Theory

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne’s College, Oxford.

Her books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time. In 1982, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published A Susan Sontag Reader.

Ms. Sontag wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both in Sweden; Promised Lands (1974), made in Israel during the war of October 1973; and Unguided Tour (1983), from her short story of the same name, made in Italy. Her play Alice in Bed has had productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland. Another play, Lady from the Sea, has been produced in Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Korea.

Ms. Sontag also directed plays in the United States and Europe, including a staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city.

A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.

Her stories and essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, and Granta. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.

Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow.

Ms. Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.

Reviews

[Tajei · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing was five stars (or more), but I just wasn’t that interested in some of the subjects (e.g. dance, photography)

[David Huff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ran across this substantial collection of Susan Sontag's later essays in a Virginia bookstore I visited with some of my family over the holidays. While I had read and seen a number of interviews she gave over the years, aware that she was a brilliant, sometimes tempestuous public intellectual, this was my first chance to read some of her work in depth.

These essays cover many topics, including several pieces on some of her favorite writers and literary interests, and on the joy of reading and craft of writing. There was also an extensive section of essays on theater, photography, cinema, dance and more, as well as thoughts on her activism and a memorable production she staged, in Sarajevo, of Waiting for Godot.

Her breadth of knowledge was immense, and her views clear and often sharp. These essays will increase your thirst for broader learning, and deepen your appreciation for writers, literature and fine arts.

I'll close with this excerpt which I think represents her personality quite well:

"To look back on writings of thirty or more years ago is not a wholesome exercise. My energy as a writer impels me to look forward, to feel still that I am beginning ... which makes it hard to curb my impatience with that beginning writer I once was in the literal sense .... I was a pugnacious aesthete and a barely closeted moralist. I didn't set out to write so many manifestos, but my irrepressible taste for aphoristic statement conspired with my staunchly adversarial purposes in ways that sometimes surprised me."

[Lazarus P Badpenny Esq · Rating 4 out of 5]

These later, shorter, somewhat quieter essays, shorn of any supplicatory tendency to establish their author's theoretical mark on the world {accomplished as they unarguably are, earlier collections such as Against Interpretation possess, with all their youthful vigour, the capacity to leave one feeling a little intellectually punch-drunk}, remind one most of those votive candles one lights in Church overlooked by tight-lipped icons or at the lacquered feet of alabaster saints. Not because singly any one of these essays necessarily contains the requisite revelatory authority to illuminate the intellectual landscape with the brief but bright incandescence of a flare but rather because collectively they radiate an affirmation of Sontag's simultaneously generous and scrupulous intelligence. There may be nothing ground-breaking about these pieces but they are full of the usual infectious enthusiasms - in this case, under-valued {at least amongst the English-speaking literary establishment} books by Machada de Assis and Witold Gombrowicz, a eulogy for WG Sebald, writings on ballet, Barthes, naturally - perhaps the only false-note being some rather silly gender politics from the introduction accompanying Women, a book of photographs by her lover, Annie Leibovitz.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Her long introduction to the 'Roland Barthes Reader,' reprinted here, is wonderful. The other pieces are less substantial, but readable and informative--good literary journalism. She writes pleasurably about things I'm now into. She would look with approval at the Barthes, Cioran, Kirstein and (James) McCourt on my bookshelves; the availabily of those writers to my noticing is probably partly due to her advocacy, back in the 70s.

[Klaudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notatki o Sarajewie doprowadziły mnie do łez.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's interesting. Sontag is such a compelling critic when she writes about writing: fiction, nonfiction, poetry. Famously, she wrote an essay on photography (which I haven't read). But with painting, you get the sense she's flailing around, searching for a vocabulary and a syntax. She seems out of her element in the essay on painter Howard Hodgkin. Perhaps this is uncharacteristic of her writing on the visual arts.

When it comes to Wagner, it's all deliciousness. The essay is titled "Wagner's Fluids." Two excerpts:

1. The Viennese music critic and leader of the anti-Wagnerians, Eduard Hanslick, said that the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde "reminds me of the Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel." Parsifal, he said, made him seasick. "There are no longer any real modulations but rather a perpetually undulating process of modulation so that the listener loses all sense of a definite tonality. We feel as though we were all on the high seas, with no firm ground under our feet." Yes. We are. (p. 206)

2. Wagner's adaptations of the myths of the European and specifically the Germanic past (both Christian and pagan) do not involve belief. But they do involve ideas. Wagner was highly literate, and reflective in a literary way; he knew his sources. The creators of Einstein on the Beach made it clear that they knew nothing about Einstein, and thought they didn't have to. The emblems and bric-a-brac of heroic mythologies of the past that litter the work of the modern Wagnerians only express an even more generic pathos, and a generalized striving for effect. It is firmly thought that neither the creator nor the audience need have any information (knowledge, particularly historical knowledge, is considered to have a baleful effect on creativity and on feeling - the last and most tenacious of the cliches of Romanticism). The Gesamtkunstwerk becomes a vehicle for moods - such as paranoia, placidity - that have floated free from specific emotional situations, and for non-knowing as such. And the aptness of these anti-literary, emotionally remote modern redemption-pageants may have confirmed a less troubled way of reacting to Wagner's highly literary, fervent ones. The smarmy, redeeming higher values that Wagner thought his work expressed have been definitely discredit (that much we owe the historic connection of Wagnerian ideology to Nazism). Few puzzle anymore, as did generations of Wagner lovers and Wagner fearers, about what Wagner's operas mean. Now Wagner is just enjoyed ... as a drug.

"His pathos topples every taste." Nietzsche's acerbic remark about Wagner seems, a hundred years after it was made, truer than ever. But is there anyone left even to be ambivalent about Wagner now, in the way that Nietzsche and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Mann were? If not, then indeed much has been lost. I should think that feeling ambivalence (the opposite of being indifferent - you have to be seduced) is still the optimal mood for experiencing how authentically sublime a work Tristan und Isolde really is, and how strange and troubling. (pp. 208-209)

[saml · Rating 2 out of 5]

quite nice little essays. very personal. liked the reflections on against interpretation and her waiting for godot in sarajevo, and on photographs, and on machado de assis, perhaps, simply, because they were personal. it is hard to say that the book interested me in things or people that were not her, however

[amelia ʚïɞ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know if I want to write like her or for someone to write as nicely about me as she does about all these writers and art people.
This collection of essays was not perfect. Not all of the texts thrilled me however the level of Sontag's writing was always of an equally high standard which only served to raise my own ambitions as a writer.
Also, it was amazing to be able to read all these stories from so many intriguing places in the world - including my beloved country. Sontag showed here that America didn't limit her, and that's something I really appreciate because I've come across this attitude less and less lately.

[Haymone Neto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comprei o livro por conta do ensaio sobre a montagem de Esperando Godot em Saraievo durante o cerco dos sérvios na guerra, mas acabei lendo tudo. A erudição de Susan Sontag é admirável: ela passa com naturalidade por temas como literatura da Europa Central, dança contemporânea, pintura e até grutas de jardim (sim, grutas de jardim). Mas meus ensaios preferidos são os do fim, em que ela trata da própria obra e do papel dos intelectuais. Gostaria de ler mais coisas dela; aceito sugestões.

[a · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the first part about the art of writing and examples of writers who use poetical and autobiographical elements in their writing. One of the best resources I found so far on topics sich as: what is literature? What is writing? cross genre with T. W. Sebald, Desire & Roland Barthes, the role of a diary with Gombrowicz etc.
The rest of the book includes texts on different topics from cinema, photography and dance to garden literature and caves. Good to know, but leave for later.

[Dario Andrade · Rating 4 out of 5]

O livro é uma coletânea de ensaios escritos ao longo de vários anos desde o início da década de 1980 até o início dos anos 2000.
Vários, talvez a metade, eram sobre assuntos que ou não me interessavam ou eram sobre coisas muito específicas de um momento da cultura americana. Por esses, apenas passei os olhos.
A outra metade do livro trata de uma variedade enorme de assuntos: literatura, música, cinema,

[johannaevida · Rating 4 out of 5]

Samlingsvolymer likt denna är alltid ojämna men kan inte ge lägre än en fyra pga en medioker text av Sontag är fortfarande av högre kvalitet än så mycket annat jag får för mig att läsa.

Älskar Sontag men ändå är det något med henne som skaver. På vissa plan känns hon daterad även i nyare texter. Men uppskattar även konsekvensen som i och med det finns där, att hon var true in i det sista.

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked it. This lady is somebody I’m gonna pay more attention to.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The presence of people, if just one person, makes this not only a space but a moment of stopped time.” Susan Sontag’s book of essays, Where The Stress Falls, enchanted me so vitally and vividly that I still feel its vibrations writing this review months later. There is so much — too much — to love in a book like this. Its first part, ‘Reading’, contains exquisite essays on Barthes and Don Quixote, writing on spectacle and imagined “bookscreens”; it also dispatches some myths (“The amount of history, or horror, a writer is obliged to endure does not make him or her a great writer.”) while defending others: “Poet’s prose is mostly about being a poet. And to write such autobiography, as to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self.” The second part, ‘Seeing’, contains some of my favourite essays (of Sontag’s; of anyone’s), particularly the luminous ‘A Lexicon for Available Light’ on the choreography of Lucinda Childs, plus other dance essays ‘In Memory of Their Feelings’ (“A dancer eats space”), ‘Dancer and the Dance’ (“dance *is* the dancer”). There are great essays on adaptation, on art (“the painting is not just the view of something but […] something as viewed”) and photography, particularly the arresting ‘Borland’s Babies’: “Most of the sexual acting-out understood as deviant is theatre.” The third part, ‘There and Here’, bridges the two earlier parts and throws in more autobiography. “There is a deeper reason why the books are not me. My life has always felt like a becoming, and still does.” Standouts include ‘Writing As Reading’, ‘Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo’, and ‘On Being Translated’, closing the collection.

[Marco Díaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tan solo podemos aspirar a tener una pizca de la mirada y sensibilidad artísticas de Sontag. Es deslumbrante la caleidoscópica gama de temas que ensaya en esta colección. Lo que más me impresionó fue que en la década de los 90 demostró una valentía inigualable al dirigir la obra de teatro Esperando a Godot de Beckett en pleno sitio de Sarajevo —el asedio más prolongado a una ciudad en la historia de la guerra moderna—, además de hacerlo con un elenco serbocroata, cuyo idioma dista mucho del inglés.

Curiosamente, la colección concluye con un ensayo sobre la traducción titulado Traducida, donde Sontag plasmó reflexiones penetrantes sobre este oficio y de las cuales me limitaré a reproducir a continuación la que me pareció más metafórica y crítica:

Las traducciones son como los edificios. Si son buenos, la pátina del tiempo les da un mejor aspecto: el Montaigne de Florio, el Plutarco de North, el Rabelais de Motteux (¿Quién dijo «El mayor escritor ruso del siglo XIX: Constance Garnett»?). Las más admiradas, y perdurables, no son las más exactas.

Y, como en la construcción, la traducción produce en la actualidad algo cada vez más efímero. Pocas personas creen en una traducción definitiva; es decir, una que no sea preciso rehacer. Y también está el brío de la novedad: una «nueva» traducción, como un coche nuevo. Sometidas a las leyes de la sociedad industrial, las traducciones parecen desgastarse, hacerse anticuadas más pronto.

[Paulo Sousa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Livro lido 1°/Jun//29°/2017

Título: Questão de ênfase - Ensaios
Título original: Where the stress falls
Autor: Susan Sontag (EUA)
Ano de publicação: 2005
Tradução: Rubens Figueiredo
Editora: @companhiadasletras
Páginas: 448
Minha classificação: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

_______________________________________________
A coletânea de ensaios da escritora e crítica de arte norte-americano Susan Sontag é um primor das letras. Sendo meu primeiro contato com a autora de "Questão de ênfase", não poderia ter sido mais feliz.

Nesse livro estão reunidos mais de 40 artigos de Sontag, que vão desde a análise da obra e escrita de Roland Barthes, Machado de Assis e Jorge Luis Borges até a experiência da autora ao produzir uma peça de Samuel Beckett em Sarajevo.

Mas Susan Sontag não se limitou a análise da literatura. Excelentes ensaios sobre diários de viagens, fotografia, dança e o conceito de cultura são encontrados nesse volume cuja tradução do mestre Rubens Figueiredo coroam o livro.

Os ensaios, todos eles, são deliciosos de se ler, apesar da profundidade do tema e de como a autora expõe sua crítica. A escrita, de uma límpida clareza apesar da inteligência com que as frases são escritas tornam a literatura de Susan Sontag acessível a qualquer leitor disciplinado. Sem falar no ganho cultural, já que ela apresenta, além de escritores super conceituados como Borges e Barthes, tomei conhecimento de um escritor polonês chamado Danilo Kiš, de quem pretendo buscar algo para ler.

Magistral é o ensaio de Sontag sobre o "Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas" (texto que foi afinal o que me fez decidir a ler o livro). Ali, Sontag esclarece que é um demérito Machado não ter sido amplamente traduzido para as línguas europeias, ou mesmo exportado como alguns autores de lingua espanhola da América Latina. Machado foi contemporâneo de outros grandes baluartes da literatura mundial como Eça de Queiroz e quase com o próprio Tolstói. Se tivesse publicado seus livros em francês ou mesmo em inglês, talvez estaria definitivamente fincado na galeria da "Grande Biblioteca", referência de Susan Sontag aos magistrais clássicos da ligeiro. E eu não ficaria tão tristemente surpreso de saber que Philip Roth lera apenas um livro de Machado, tão escassa a sua obra nos Estados Unidos...

[Johanna E. H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our interpretations of anything depend on what we pay attention to. The meaning of a sentence depends on what word(s) you enunciate. Where the stress falls changes the meaning.

I dearly wish I was a famous writer, if only so I could write elaborate essays about random artists or situations I was interested in. If you are going to go on this journey Sontag dragged me along on, please have Wikipedia open in your browser. I did not have the level of knowledge that she apparently assumed I did.

Separated into three sections ("Reading," about books and authors, "Seeing," about movies, art, dance, and photography, and "There and Here," about identity and travel), this book is a collage of countless ideas and subjects.

I can't give this book 5 stars, if only because there were multiple points of frustration and boredom, but I can't say it was bad because of the parts that blew my mind. Sontag says that "No book is worth reading once if it is not worth reading many times," and I would disagree. This book was worth reading once.

[Natalia Hernández Moreno · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Now I think there's no escaping the burden of singleness. There's a difference between me and my books. But there's only one person here. That is scarier, lonelier. Liberating.”

From “Singleness” (1985), featured in the section “Here and There”.

I don’t think I’ll ever set my mind around my favorite Sontag, but “A Century of Cinema”, “Novel to film: Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz”, “A Lexicon for Available Light”, and “Waiting for Godot in Saravejo” are now very powerful contenders. Deciding to make this collection of essays a very slow-paced read certainly accentuated my enjoyment of it. And lingering on each section’s specificity when I needed it the most gave a new meaning to that marvelous Elizabeth Bishop epigraph at the beginning.

[Lisa]

I've been trying to read more Sontag, and I started reading this because it was the first title immediately available to me via audiobook. This may not be the best format, and I'm far too ignorant on most of what she writes about to understand it or even appreciate it. Her writing on writers is totally out of reach for me, as is much of her writing on cinema. However, I was delighted to happen upon the essay "There and Here - Homage to Halliburton," which captures her reflections on the Book of Marvels.

[Rebecca Oliver · Rating 2 out of 5]

i’m sorry, i wanted to like this better! it took me months to finish it and that’s part of the problem, but also, this collection was pretty inaccessible to me and my background knowledge. usually that’s fine, but i would read the first page of an essay and feel no pull. i think that i think a solid reader should be able to enjoy an essay on any topic if the writer is doing their work well enough, and, well… obviously sontag is smart and smarter than me so i couldn’t in good faith call this a 1 star; i also am still excited to read more of her earlier work. whatever. sorry susan.

[Catarina Lobo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Susan Sontag, como sempre, primorosa. Ela desperta em mim a necessidade de conhecer tudo sobre o que é dito.

Minha única meta é chegar na idade em que ela escreveu esses ensaios (1980-2000s) com tamanho repertório.

Meus favoritos são: “Uma carta para Borges”, “Uma fotografia não é uma opinião. Ou é?” e “Isolamento”.

Só não dou cinco estrelas porque muitos ensaios eu era alheia ao tema, dada minha própria ignorância.

[Chris Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Generally good - some essays interested me more than others though.

I didn't agree with everything Sontag said though - for example, in her comparison between Barthes and Sartre ...

"Sartre was eager, too eager, to seek confrontation, and the tragedy of this great career, of the use he made of his stupendous intellect, was just his willingness to simplify himself"

This is the first time I've EVER heard Sartre criticised for simplification ...!

[Anna Porter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating collection of essays by someone I used to see in a range of magazines and journals. She is versatile, a passionate observer and reader of diverse literatures, including Danilo Kis, Sebold, Pushkin, Brodsky; interesting on why opera is still with us; her love of art; and her grief and sympathy for the people of Sarajevo during the bombardments. I would like to have seen her production of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo.

[Felipe Ronchini · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Aquilo a respeito de que eu escrevo não sou eu. Assim como o que escrevo é mais aguçado do que sou. Porque posso reescrevê-lo. Meus livros sabem o que eu soube, um dia — de maneira descontínua, intermitente. E conseguir as melhores palavras para pôr no papel não parece nem um pouco mais fácil, mesmo depois de tantos anos de escrita. Ao contrário” p. 306

[Gail Kennon · Rating 4 out of 5]

the only problem with this collection of essays is how many doors it's opened that i want now to go through in literature, opera, theater etc. she's terrific company with a razor sharp mind and clarity of expression.

[Aniqua · Rating 5 out of 5]

Susan Sontag's writing is everything that stands for exceptional precision and clarity of thought and expression, profundity of vision, tremendous intellectual prowess, and brevity of words. She has the ability to dissect most intricate of ideas and present it, all its complexities bared.

[Jonathan Valencia · Rating 4 out of 5]

No ha dejado de sorprenderme la lucidez de esta mujer. Especialmente rigurosa para el cine y la fotografía.
Ha sido una lectura grata y apasionante.
Gracias, Sontag 💡

[Dylan]

Grottoes

[Aroog · Rating 3 out of 5]

dnf because i’m not feeling quite so literary today, but really thoughtful—might even cite it in my thesis lol

[David Haws · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sontag was perhaps the perfect compiler of interesting ideas.