Fascinating Fascism

[rich]

Sontag does seem to make these utterly ridiculous sweeping statements
about things. guess comes with the terroritory of being a public
intellectual. with that said when she lessened a bit of the
pretentiousness her work really shines. the sentence I quoted from
that NYRB piece is such an example of that shining. I was also going
to say it describes Mr Blicero (he not dead he not dead) quite nicely
as well

rich

On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 1:32 AM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>