Reviews for Notes on Sontag

The average rating for Notes on Sontag based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-10-08 00:00:00 Spencer delgado 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.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-03-23 00:00:00 Christopher King 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.