Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Sontag was a thinker, and she is at her best when writing about other thinkers (Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes). Had she been an academic, she would have taught theory. Language was never an end in itself for her (as it was for Barthes), but rather a means to a political or a spiritual end (temperamentally she identified with Benjamin).

The lasting appeal of Kael lay in the way she unapologetically valorized her own eccentricities of judgment and taste. Even when you don't agree with her (which, for me, is often) it is impossible not to listen to her. I think her lasting importance is that she gave people permission to live in their own sensibilities. She had no real agenda, just an abiding love of visual pleasure that verged, at times, on the fetishistic.

The superficial appeal of Sontag was her ability to make intellectual rigor seem glamorous; but more lasting is her ability to make the intellectual life still seem viable (even in an age of mass culture). For Sontag I think intellectual pursuit was a framing device for her life, it was her way of living with dignity in an undignified age.

Like Seligman, I am fond of both of these cultural critics. I actually came into contact with Sontag one evening when she came into a Miami bookstore. I was behind the counter that night, it was late, near closing, the store was empty except for her. She bought three books --all obscure European authors. At the time I knew who she was (from the iconic black and white photographs of her that appeared in various literary periodicals, and from her appearance in ZELIG) but hadn't yet read her many books of essays and her novels that I began reading thereafter. In her brown trenchcoat and with her unkempt silvering hair she looked like a New York version of a slightly mad street woman. She seemed lonely, robbed of her beauty but still possessed of something equally luminous. It seemed an absurd breach of etiquette to charge Susan Sontag money for books. Less than a year after this strange meeting I learned, in a theory class, that she had passed away.

That part of me that is attracted to the always changing pulse of real life is attracted to Pauline Kael; that part of me that is attracted to that rare kind of intellectual rigor that actually does provide nourishment and sustenance is attracted to Sontag. Kael is learned and wise but also giddy and capricious in many of her evaluations (she seems to foreground the ephemerality of judgement and taste as if their ephemerality were the very thing that made them valuable); Sontag is fiercely intellectual and at times it seems that she is doing battle with the corporeal, and, despite the high quality of her intellectual engagment and achievement she seems frustrated that judgments rarely hold up for very long. So for her, criticism was a kind of contest with time and with ones own shifting sense of self. Nonetheless, even if individual judgments came and went, for Sontag the sanctity of the intellectual enterprise itself was never diminished.

I found Seligman's book of value because it allowed me to re-think my own views of two of my favorite essayists. I think if these two share anything (beyond the fact that they both came to prominence in the 1960's: no other decade could have produced both a Sontag and a Kael) it is that they are both at their best when they are in the presence of something (some film perhaps) that captivates them, that enthralls them, that challenges them to re-think and to re-formulate their love of a cherished art form. This and the fact that the only thing that these two loved more than art was writing about it. Of course as far as what kind of art each chose to write about and how they chose to write about it, these two were polar opposites.

I turned to this beautiful book again today after hearing the news about Sontag's death, in the aftermath of the mass reproduction of death in the Indian Ocean tsunami. Kael, strangely enough, died a few days before 9/11/01, a similarly huge onrush of mortality. In any case, the entwined biography and criticism of the two women this book undertakes to juxtapose absolutely should not work, but does, in spades. Mandatory reading for anyone who wants a complete and fearless assessment of what Sontag and Kael each achieved, and why they'll remain way cool forever.

I was initially hesitant about buying Sontag & Kael; I had read two reviews, one in The Book Forum (positive), and another in The Atlantic Monthly (more ambivalent). Despite the latter, I decided to buy the book... and what a pleasure it has been to read.

Seligman's look at these two thinkers is balanced and even-handed, but never timid. His textual analysis of the writers' works is erudite, meaningful, and lucid. Yet what is most striking about this work is how passionate the writing is. This is the sort of book that, after you've finished reading it, inspires you to re-read Sontag and Kael.

Short in length (about 200 pages of text), it nonetheless manages not only to provide an overview of Sontag's and Kael's critical ideas and works, but to ask also the big questions: What is art? What is the place of the novel in contemporary society? What is the role of the critic?

Juxtaposing Sontag's and Kael's responses is a fascinating way of thinking through these issues.

For someone who is less familiar with Kael than with Sontag, what I would really like to see would be a Kael Reader, or a collection of her essays. Maybe Seligman will be the one to edit it?

Until that happens, pick up this great little book.