1. “In my more extravagant moments,” writes David Rieff in his introduction to Susan Sontag’s As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, “I sometimes think that my mother’s journals, of which this is the second of three volumes, are not just the autobiography she never got around to writing…but the great autobiographical novel she never cared to write.”
2. In my review of Reborn, the first of the trilogy Rieff alludes to, I wrote, “Don’t expect, of course, to get a definitive sense of who Sontag was, let alone a narrative account of her life here. Subtitled Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963, Reborn veers closer to the “notebook” side of things.”
As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh is far closer to the ‘notebook’ side of things too, which I think most readers (or maybe I just mean me here) will appreciate.
3. I mean, this isn’t the autobiographical novel that Rieff suggests it might be (except of course it is).
Consciousness/Flesh offers something better: access to Sontag’s consciousness in its prime, not quite ripe, but full, heavy, bursting with intellectual energy, her mind attuned to (and attuning) the tumult of the time the journals cover, 1964 through 1980.
It’s an autobiography stripped of the pretense of presentation; it’s a novel stripped of the pretense of storytelling.
4. Sontag’s intellect and spirit course through the book’s 500 pages, eliding any distinction between lives personal and professional. “What sex is the ‘I’?” she writes, “Who has the right to say ‘I’?” The journals see her working through (if not resolving, thankfully) such issues.
5. An entry from late 1964, clearly background for Sontag’s seminal essay “Notes on Camp” (itself a series of notes), moves through a some thoughts on artists and poets, from Warhol to Breton to Duchamp (“DUCHAMP”) to simply “Style,” which, Rieff’s editorial note tells us, has a box drawn around it. The entry then moves to define
Work of Art
An experiment, a research (solving a “problem”) vs. form of a play
—before turning to a series of notes on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni.
6. A page or two later (1965) delivers the kind of gold vein we wish to discover in author’s notebooks:
PLOTS & SITUATIONS
Redemptive friendship (two women)
Novel in letters: the recluse-artist and his dealer a clairvoyant
A voyage to the underworld (Homer, Vergil [sic], Steppenwolf)
Matricide
An assassination
A collective hallucination (Story)
A theft
A work of art which is really a machine for dominating human beings
The discovery of a lost mss.
Two incestuous sisters
A space ship has landed
An ageing movie actress
A novel about the future. Machines. Each man has his own machine (memory bank, codified decision maker, etc.) You “play the machine. Instant everything.
Smuggling a huge art-work (painting? Sculpture?) out of the country in pieces—called “The Invention of Liberty”
A project: sanctity (based on SW [Simone Weil]—with honesty of Sylvia Plath—only way to solve sex “I” is talk about it
Jealousy
7. The list above—and there’s so much material like it in Consciousness/Flesh—is why I love author’s notebooks, We get to see the raw material here and imagine along with the writer (if we choose), free of the clutter and weight of execution, of prose, of damnable detail.
There’s something joyfully cryptic about Sontag’s notes, like the solitary entry “…Habits of despair” in late July of 1970—or a few months later: “A convention of mutants (Marvel comics).”
If we wish we can puzzle the notes out, treat them as clues or keys that fit to the work she was publishing at the time or to the personal circumstances of her private life. Or (and to be clear, I choose this or) we can let these notes stand as strange figures in an unconventional autobiographical novel.
8. Those looking for more direct material about Sontag’s life (and really, why do you want more and what more do you want?) will likely be disappointed—everything here is oblique (lovely, lovely oblique).
Still, there are moments of intense personal detail, like this 1964 entry where Sontag describes her body:
Body type
- Tall
- Low blood pressure
- Needs lots of sleep
- Sudden craving for pure sugar (but dislike desserts—not a high enough concentration)
- Intolerance for liquor
- Heavy smoking
- Tendency to anemia
- Heavy protein craving
- Asthma
- Migraines
- Very good stomach—no heartburn, constipation, etc.
- Negligible menstrual cramps
- Easily tired by standing
- Like heights
- Enjoy seeing deformed people (voyeuristic)
- Nailbiting
- Teeth grinding
- Nearsighted, astigmatism
- Frileuse (very sensitive to cold, like hot summers)
- Not very sensitive to noise (high degree of selective auditory focus)
There’s more autobiographical detail in that list than anyone craving a lurid expose could (should) hope for.
9. For many readers (or maybe I just mean me here) Consciousness/Flesh will be most fascinating as a curatorial project.
Sontag offers her list of best films (not in order),her ideal short story collection, and more. The collection often breaks into lists—like the ones we see above—but also into names—films, authors, books, essays, ideas, etc.
10. At times, Consciousness/Flesh resembles something close to David Markson’s so-called “notecard” novels (Reader’s Block, This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, The Last Novel):
Napoleon’s wet, chubby back (Tolstoy).
and
Wordsworth’s ‘wise passiveness.’
and
Nabokov talks of minor readers. ‘There must be minor readers because there are minor writers.’
and
Camus (Notebooks, Vol. II): ‘Is there a tragic dilettante-ism?'”
and
‘To think is to exaggerate.’ — Valéry.
and so on…
11. Sometimes, the lists Sontag offers—
(offers is not the right verb at all here—these are Sontag’s personal journals and notebooks, her private ideas, material never intended for public consumption, but yes we are greedy, yes; and some of us (or maybe I just mean me here) are greedier than others, far more interested in her private ideas and notes and lists than the essays and stories and novels she generated from them—and so no, she didn’t offer this, my verb is all wrong)
—sometimes Sontag [creates/notes/generates] very personal lists, like “Movies I saw as a child, when they came out” (composed 11/25/65). There’s something tender here, imagining the child Sontag watching Fantasia or Rebecca or Citizen Kane or The Wizard of Oz in the theater; and then later, the adult Sontag, crafting her own lists, making those connections between past and present.
12. While Reborn showcased the intimate thoughts of a nascent (and at times naïve) intellect, Consciousness/Flesh shows us an assured writer at perhaps her zenith. In September of 1975, Sontag defines herself as a writer:
I am an adversary writer, a polemical writer. I write to support what is attacked, to attack what is acclaimed. But thereby I put myself in an emotionally uncomfortable position. I don’t, secretly, hope to convince, and can’t help being dismayed when my minority taste (ideas) becomes majority taste (ideas): then I want to attack again. I can’t help but be in an adversary relation to my own work.
13. Readers looking for a memoir or biography might be disappointed in Consciousness/Flesh; readers who seek to scrape its contours for “wisdom” (or worse, writing advice) should be castigated.
But As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh will reward those readers who take it on its own terms as an oblique, discursive (and incomplete) record of Sontag’s brilliant mind.
I’ll close this riff with one last note from the book, a fitting encapsulation of the relationship between reader and author—and, most importantly, author-as-reader-and-rereader:
Recycling one’s own life with books.
As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh is new in trade paperback from Picador; you can read excerpts from the book at their site.
1. Ah, 1985. I was just a kid. A young kid. And my folks took me to see Walter Murch’s Return to Oz, an unofficial sequel to The Wizard of Oz.
Return to Oz is a film so bleak and dark and bizarre that its imagery still lives in the nooks of my nightmares.
2. Not that I didn’t enjoy Return to Oz—to be clear, I did. But it horrified me in ways that surpassed the deep horror I’d experienced viewing the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
3. (The green Wicked Witch cackling “I’ll get you my pretty” in The Wizard of Oz being something of a founding moment of horrific horror, a horror amplified by my mother’s tendency to act out the line at weird moments as she tickled me or chased me or picked me up from school).
4. But Return to Oz: this movie is dark. It’s fucked up.
Dorothy gets institutionalized and treated with electroshock therapy. Then she goes to Oz, where she’s pursued by Wheelers, these things that roll around on rollerskate hands and feet, which, you know, should be whimsical, but are instead horrific. Then there’s this cabinet of detached heads, which could have been handled playfully, but no, instead it’s like something out of Hieronymus Bosch. Even Dorothy’s friends are these weird, off-putting versions that don’t match up to the original trio of Scarecrow, Tinman, and Lion. Instead we get Tik-Tok, an android who looks like a swollen pot-bellied C3PO, and Jack Pumpkinhead, a guy with a pumpkin for a head. These friends don’t look human at all (because they aren’t). There’s a quest; they cross a desert; they save the day, etc.
It ends with Dorothy returned, not exactly safely, to aunt and uncle.
5. So Disney made another unofficial sequel, Oz the Great and Powerful, this time from director Sam Raimi (Return’s Murch never directed another film, by the way). Despite his franchise work on the first trilogy of Spider-Man films, Raimi is an auteur who gave us cult classics like Darkman and the Evil Dead trilogy. I loved his last film Drag Me to Hell, which mixed humor with noir and genuine horror.
6. Oz the Great and Powerful is of course doomed, no matter how much money it makes. It’s doomed in the way that The Two Jakes was doomed, or Godfather III was doomed, or Citizen Kane 2: Electric Boogaloo was doomed: There’s no way that it can surpass, let alone stand up next to, the strength of the prototype.
7. Still, I think that if Raimi has brought enough of his own weirdness to the film, we might get a fascinating artifact. My real hope is that there will be a strong streak of Evil Dead 2 in Raimi’s Disney, a streak of bizarre dark weirdness to baffle and disturb a new generation. Hell, maybe I’ll take my kids.
“The Glass Dog” by L. Frank Baum
An accomplished wizard once lived on the top floor of a tenement house and passed his time in thoughtful study and studious thought. What he didn’t know about wizardry was hardly worth knowing, for he possessed all the books and recipes of all the wizards who had lived before him; and, moreover, he had invented several wizardments himself.
This admirable person would have been completely happy but for the numerous interruptions to his studies caused by folk who came to consult him about their troubles (in which he was not interested), and by the loud knocks of the iceman, the milkman, the baker’s boy, the laundryman and the peanut woman. He never dealt with any of these people; but they rapped at his door every day to see him about this or that or to try to sell him their wares. Just when he was most deeply interested in his books or engaged in watching the bubbling of a cauldron there would come a knock at his door. And after sending the intruder away he always found he had lost his train of thought or ruined his compound.
At length these interruptions aroused his anger, and he decided he must have a dog to keep people away from his door. He didn’t know where to find a dog, but in the next room lived a poor glass-blower with whom he had a slight acquaintance; so he went into the man’s apartment and asked:
“Where can I find a dog?”
“What sort of a dog?” inquired the glass-blower.
“A good dog. One that will bark at people and drive them away. One that will be no trouble to keep and won’t expect to be fed. One that has no fleas and is neat in his habits. One that will obey me when I speak to him. In short, a good dog,” said the wizard.
“Such a dog is hard to find,” returned the glass-blower, who was busy making a blue glass flower pot with a pink glass rosebush in it, having green glass leaves and yellow glass roses.
The wizard watched him thoughtfully.
“Why cannot you blow me a dog out of glass?” he asked, presently.
“I can,” declared the glass-blower; “but it would not bark at people, you know.” Continue reading ““The Glass Dog” — L. Frank Baum”
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