Fascinating Fascism

[Michael Bailey]

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 9:37 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
< wonder if SS ever read the book


http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/news/gilbert-rolfe/gilbert-rolfe1-4-05.asp

By the end of 1970 I was in New York and had met more than one person
who wanted to be Susan Sontag, but couldn't be because you can only do
that once. I also got to meet and communicate with her a handful of
times between then and a couple of years ago. I remember driving her
back to New York from Princeton at some point early in the 1970s on
the day when she'd brought her son to look at the place and arguing
all the way about Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which she insisted was
"just" science fiction and for which I was engaged at that time in
making considerably larger claims for its literary and cultural
significance.

She was a delight in that she was quite prepared to take an argument
as far it could be taken, but I think it might have been during that
ride that I also formed the opinion that Susan was what she was
because she straddled two epochs. Like Godard, she didn't see what was
coming, she saw what was happening. She saw how things had suddenly
become extremely different than they had been. But also like Godard,
as a member of the generation that went to college in the ‘50s she
belonged as much to the last wave of the Depression and war epoch as
the first of what was next.

She was born in the year that Hitler was elected Chancellor but then
decided it would be best if he did everything by himself, and although
the people who got off on her most were the next generation --
post-Hitler, and post-Hiroshima too -- rather than her own, her
position on Pynchon was I think revealing. She remained committed to a
canon in which science fiction ultimately couldn't be serious. I am
happy to agree that it can't, but only because science is too dull to
sustain the needs of prose fiction, while she rejected it because the
characters were one-dimensional.

I think the ‘50s were the last time dimensionality of a psychological
sort was a prerequisite for esthetic ambition, and besides causing
Susan to miss the point where Pynchon was concerned I think it was
that sort of thing that made it possible for her to write about
Marguerite Duras earlier in her career and Emma Hamilton later. Both
are made for an esthetic in which developed characters interact with
politics at a remove which is at once erotic and esthetic. I think she
wanted an art that did that more than anything else, and that she
looked at everything with a view to how much of that it did.