Notes on Sontag

by Phillip Lopate

Notes on Sontag is a frank, witty, and entertaining reflection on the work, influence, and personality of one of the "foremost interpreters of . . . our recent contemporary moment." Adopting Sontag's favorite form, a set of brief essays or notes that circle around a topic from different perspectives, renowned essayist Phillip Lopate considers the achievements and limitations of his tantalizing, daunting subject through what is fundamentally a conversation between two writers. Reactions to Sontag tend to be polarized, but Lopate's account of Sontag's significance to him and to the culture over which she loomed is neither hagiography nor hatchet job. Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence about Sontag. Lopate also describes the figure she cut in person through a series of wry personal anecdotes of his encounters with her over the years.

Setting out from middle-class California to invent herself as a European-style intellectual, Sontag raised the bar of critical discourse and offered up a model of a freethinking, imaginative, and sensual woman. But while crediting her successes, Lopate also looks at how her taste for aphorism and the radical high ground led her into exaggerations that could do violence to her own common sense, and how her ambition to be seen primarily as a novelist made her undervalue her brilliant essays. Honest yet sympathetic, Lopate's engaging evaluation reveals a Sontag who was both an original and very much a person of her time.

Genres: Essays, Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Phillip Lopate is the author of three personal essay collections, two novels, two poetry collections, a memoir of his teaching experiences, and a collection of his movie criticism. He has edited the following anthologies, and his essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The Paris Review, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, and New York University. He currently holds the John Cranford Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches in the MFA graduate programs at Columbia, the New School and Bennington.

Reviews

[Kyaw Zayar Lwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

ဆွန်တက်ကို သိပ်သဘောကျပုံမရပေမယ့် လူသားဆန်အောင် ရေးဖွဲ့နိုင်တာမို့ စာအုပ်ကိုတော့ ကြိုက်မိပါတယ် ။

[John Pistelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Known as the maven of the personal essay, Lopate writes a digressive and fragmentary set of reflections on that most impersonal of essayists, Susan Sontag.

Lopate is disturbed by Sontag's impersonality, just as he finds many of her literary theories and political interventions tiresomely extremist; in his reminiscences of his infrequent dealings with Sontag, he stresses her fantastic hauteur. His good sense makes this book a pleasant reading experience, especially because he is sensible enough to know that if Sontag were so sensible she wouldn't have been an icon.

But despite Lopate's defense of personal writing and his own recourse to recollection, this book's chief advantage over other instances of Sontagiana (Terry Castle, Camille Paglia, Sigrid Nunez) is its erudite discussion of Sontag's actual arguments in their intellectual and philosophical context (Lopate's argument that Sontag's polemical style derives from the hermeneutics of suspicion, especially as practiced by Adorno, is persuasive) and of her sometimes surprisingly traditionalist approach, especially as an essayist, to literary form.

Three examples, then, of Lopate's informative analysis. First on a too-little-explored topic, usually eclipsed by Sontag's uneasy relationship to gender and sexuality: Sontag's uneasy relationship to Jewishness. Lopate very gently proposes that the attraction to the abolition of critical consciousness in art and of capitalist complexity in society found in Sontag's '60s writings bespeaks a kind of introjected anti-Semitism:

Sontag herself seems in many ways a paradigm of the Jewish middle-class radical tradition, embodying that "critical spirit" which she herself identified as a Jewish trait. I think she took some pride in being Jewish, and happily assumed her place, after migrating to the East Coast, in the circle of New York Jewish intellectuals. But I think she also equated "grace" and "transparency," two of her desiderata, with not being Jewish, and it is clear from the above passage that optimism belonged in that non-Jewish category as well. At this time in her life, Sontag still had optimism, hoping there existed a state of grace, probably somewhere in the Third World, for people of color, if not for her.

Next is Lopate's useful corrective to Sontag's unthinking Hegelianism of the arts, her belief that to be modern was to be progressive, to be radical, to aim toward some catastrophic telos, to break absolutely with tradition. Lopate cannily replaces Hegel with Nietzsche to promote a pluralism of the arts:

Now I don't dispute that these innovations were great advances; I love Schoenberg, Mondrian, Pollock, and Coltrane, too, but I fail to to be convinced that literature should undergo the same process of abstraction for its own good. Literature may be composed of a fundamentally different material than music and painting, clinging as it does to the debased, meaning-dependent coin of language. Even in the other arts we have seen, since the midsixties when Sontag made her argument some paintings return to figuration and some music return to tonality without resulting in the moral setback of either form. A better model for the arts than linear progression might be the eternal return Nietzsche speaks of, a dialectical recycling of certain tendencies, such as realism or abstraction, that spiral helically toward and away from each other in different eras.

Relatedly and finally, a superb analysis of Sontag's own traditionalism, as indicated by the aspect of her work that first attracted me when I was in my teens, the lordly voice of her essays:

The crisis that Sontag saw in the modern novel—the loss of authority that arose from the death of God and eventually spread to the death of the author—she never extended to the essay. That is, she never seemed to doubt her right to put forth her thoughts via a unified, coherent narrative voice in either impersonal or personal essays, without ever raising such self-reflexive specters as the death of the author, the unstable fluid self, the mass-media's conditioning mechanisms challenging our very notion of the individual, et cetera. Certainly, she wrote eloquently about the breakdown of authority that had undermined large philosophical treatises, and the recourse of modernist thinkers to fragment, notebook, and aphorism, just as she herself experimented with catchments of notes, quotes, fragments, abecedaries, letters, dialogues, prose-poems, and other formal arrangements in her essays. But she took a quite traditional approach, on the whole, to essayistic discourse. Even in her own most splintered essays, she employed a powerful synthesizing voice that oriented the reader like a tuning-fork to an unfolding persuasive argument, and that contributed, from essay to essay, to the multidimensionality of that one truly vivid character she created from scratch, the speaker of her essays.

Because of this book's deliberately discursive and dilatory form (a tribute to Sontag's love of fragmentary and montage styles), its insights sit side-by-side with more trivial musings (a tribute to Lopate's vindication of the personal): on the page Lopate creates the intellectual friendship and exchange he never enjoyed with Sontag in life.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Closer to 3.5 stars... Lopate, who was an acquaintance of Sontag's and apparently a well-known essayist himself (this is my first exposure to his work), has written a somewhat informal collection of notes that is, first and foremost, a felt reflection on her writing. Every one of her books gets at least a few lines, but the bulk of Lopate's considerations are focused on the essays (and rightly so). He has much to say on her aphoristic style, her polemical "radicalism" in art in the sixties (and how this shifted over the years), her public persona, her insecurities, her intelligence, her arrogance. The book, as criticism, suffers from a certain lack of depth. Lopate quibbles with a line here and there, makes clear his opposition to some of her more hyperbolic statements, is quick to note that most of her fiction is mediocre if not outright "awful", but doesn't engage with any one text enough to give the reader something new to consider at length. This is perhaps an effect of both Sontag's still-fresh ability to polarize opinion and the chosen form of the book itself. One feels that after some time has passed (and after all the Diaries are published, fair or no), Sontag's legacy (or lack of one) will be clarified. As for Lopate, he comes off as thoughtful and intelligent. I liked the book.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

The blurb describing this reflective collection of essays reads: "Despite admiring and being inspired by her essays, he admits a persistent ambivalence about Sontag." Most peole who dare to approach Sontag invariably fall into this ambivalence. "She was great. Then she kinda' changed. But she was still great, but in a different way. Or maybe not; maybe she became too snobby and opinionated. Maybe she always was." Whatever she was, I love reading about her wry way of looking at artistry. And I love recollections such as Lopate's that indulge in that wry, satirical view of the world of intelligentsia. Yes, let us celebrate the immediate, the visceral, let us formulate new values of what art can be. But Sontag, and Lopate, remind us that, though so many critics throw "art" away with the concept of its visceral value, "art" nonetheless still exists.

[Zoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've liked Phillip Lopate ever since he wrote "Being With Children" in 1975 (which is when I read it). I really enjoy his human, personal tone, and I was pleased to discover this particular vehicle for approaching the work of Susan Sontag. This book also led me to The Art of the Personal Essay, which I am VERY excited to be reading right now...

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phillip's easy gait through Sontag's body of work belies the intellectual rigor such a task requires at every turn. I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity to journey along -- without having to do any of the heavy lifting.

[Yu · Rating 4 out of 5]

He gives some rare read details about Susan Sontag, it feels like a combination of memoir and a long essay.
Now there are few people wrote on Susan Sontag, few memoir, therefore, however touched this topic, could easily be on top of the wave, but remember, Sontag won't let you do it that easy.