CRITICISM
A three-cornered quarrel
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`Seligman's pleasure and excitement in this whole project — placing Sontag and Kael next to each other as perfect foils in their approaches, their purposes and their personalities — is evident on every page, every line.'
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I HAVE fantasised about a book like this but never thought somebody would write it: Criticism as autobiography. What Craig Seligman has done in Sontag and Kael is to write his own intellectual autobiography by closely reading the life and work of Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael — two of America's most influential culture critics — and telling us what they have meant to him. He basically sets up a "three-cornered quarrel" and invites us to argue with him.
Marvellous premise
One of the classic critical texts decades ago was George Steiner's Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? which attempted to see who the greater writer was (and if I'm not wrong, by the end, Fyodor edges out Leo) but it's interesting that Seligman's title is Sontag AND Kael, not Sontag OR Kael. It's a marvelous premise for a book: put two great critics side by side, not to see who is better but to illuminate each other, to examine two very different but valid critical styles. "Opposites attract me," says Seligman, and feels that he doesn't have to choose between them, that he can find pleasure in both kinds of writing.
And he nearly succeeds. Nearly — because he wears his bias for Kael on his sleeve right through the book. On page one he confesses: "I revere Sontag, I love Kael." He tried hard to not have a villain in the book but Sontag "kept making it hard" for him. Kael is likeable, Sontag is lofty, distant. His constant warmth for Kael throughout the book is easily explained: Seligman knew Kael as a friend for 23 years but he has never met Sontag, and doesn't wish to. I, too, read Sontag and Kael in college and was instantly drawn to Pauline Kael, not simply because she wrote on the movies but because she was so entertaining, so stylish, so personal. But reading Seligman, I found myself surprisingly rooting for Sontag. I feel I need more Sontag and less Kael. I find Sontag more absorbing now; her writing is the kind of writing that is interesting sentence by sentence. Towards the end, Seligman grudgingly admits Sontag as the greater writer but he is quick to add: "And what does the greater writer mean, anyway? It certainly doesn't mean the BETTER writer." It doesn't? I always thought that's what it meant.
But I think I see his point — something about Kael's writing being consistently exciting — every essay, every review — and thus making her the better writer, while Sontag's individual essays build to a crescendo, her greatness to be found in her spectacular body of work, whose scope and range and amplitude was — is — magnificent. Sontag's subject was everything (Kael too was trying to write about everything through the movies): from aesthetics to pornography to silence. Sontag once said that she could only write about the things she loved and admired; it felt distasteful to her to be negative, to write about things she didn't care about. Seligman draws our attention to this, to point out that Sontag saw herself as a critic who commented on art, not evaluated, while Kael felt happy evaluating. "Kael never lost the excitement of the `this-weekness of this week's movie'... for Sontag the work at hand (which is nearly always a great or important one — the evaluating is finished before she sits down to write) is a stepping stone: she's eying bigger fish, using individual works to reach larger conclusions. Kael is a reviewer down to her toe; her responses are specific. Sontag is an aesthetic theorist."
I like the later Sontag even better, the Sontag of Where The Stress Falls, where she gets down to specifics and away from larger arguments, looking at writers and books she cares deeply about. Seligman doesn't like the later Sontags precisely because they lack polemics. Sontag herself has since moved to fiction (The Volcano Lover, In America) and feels "narrative lasts more than ideas"; it is her fiction, she says, that she likes more now than her criticism! Whether it is the early polemical essays or the later portrait essays, Sontag has never wavered from her purpose: "to defend the idea of seriousness — true seriousness".
Perfect foils
Kael hated seriousness in art, championed the vulgar and trashy in cinema. Kael was subjective, Sontag left herself out of her writing. She wrote slowly, precisely, agonisingly (fanatically spending an hour on just one word), Kael wrote quickly, confidently, recklessly. For Seligman, Kael's writing glitters, Sontag's "sentences give off a soft glow." They "glimmer with a subdued but very beautiful light." He remarks on the "lunar beauty of her prose", and gives as an example, her definition of beauty: "a gladness of the senses".
A book critic for The New Yorker and Salon.com, Seligman's pleasure and excitement in this whole project — placing Sontag and Kael next to each other as perfect foils in their approaches, their purposes and their personalities — is evident on every page, every line. Reading their work closely, he makes this astonishing discovery: "writing is not a conduit to thinking, writing IS thinking." The one obligation a critic has, says Seligman, is to get it right. And Sontag and Kael, each in their own way, got it right. So does Seligman.
Sontag and Kael, Craig Seligman, Counterpoint, $23.
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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