Where The Stress Falls: Essays (2015) - Plot & Excerpts
It's interesting. Sontag is such a compelling critic when she writes about writing: fiction, nonfiction, poetry. Famously, she wrote an essay on photography (which I haven't read). But with painting, you get the sense she's flailing around, searching for a vocabulary and a syntax. She seems out of her element in the essay on painter Howard Hodgkin. Perhaps this is uncharacteristic of her writing on the visual arts.When it comes to Wagner, it's all deliciousness. The essay is titled "Wagner's Fluids." Two excerpts:1. The Viennese music critic and leader of the anti-Wagnerians, Eduard Hanslick, said that the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde "reminds me of the Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel." Parsifal, he said, made him seasick. "There are no longer any real modulations but rather a perpetually undulating process of modulation so that the listener loses all sense of a definite tonality. We feel as though we were all on the high seas, with no firm ground under our feet." Yes. We are. (p. 206)2. Wagner's adaptations of the myths of the European and specifically the Germanic past (both Christian and pagan) do not involve belief. But they do involve ideas. Wagner was highly literate, and reflective in a literary way; he knew his sources. The creators of Einstein on the Beach made it clear that they knew nothing about Einstein, and thought they didn't have to. The emblems and bric-a-brac of heroic mythologies of the past that litter the work of the modern Wagnerians only express an even more generic pathos, and a generalized striving for effect. It is firmly thought that neither the creator nor the audience need have any information (knowledge, particularly historical knowledge, is considered to have a baleful effect on creativity and on feeling - the last and most tenacious of the cliches of Romanticism). The Gesamtkunstwerk becomes a vehicle for moods - such as paranoia, placidity - that have floated free from specific emotional situations, and for non-knowing as such. And the aptness of these anti-literary, emotionally remote modern redemption-pageants may have confirmed a less troubled way of reacting to Wagner's highly literary, fervent ones. The smarmy, redeeming higher values that Wagner thought his work expressed have been definitely discredit (that much we owe the historic connection of Wagnerian ideology to Nazism). Few puzzle anymore, as did generations of Wagner lovers and Wagner fearers, about what Wagner's operas mean. Now Wagner is just enjoyed ... as a drug."His pathos topples every taste." Nietzsche's acerbic remark about Wagner seems, a hundred years after it was made, truer than ever. But is there anyone left even to be ambivalent about Wagner now, in the way that Nietzsche and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Mann were? If not, then indeed much has been lost. I should think that feeling ambivalence (the opposite of being indifferent - you have to be seduced) is still the optimal mood for experiencing how authentically sublime a work Tristan und Isolde really is, and how strange and troubling. (pp. 208-209)
رساله های سونتاگ در زمینه ی هنر و جامعه، گاه از رمان ها و کارهای ادبی اش جلوه ی بیشتر و بهتری دارند. اگرچه سوزان سونتاگ در ایران بیشتر به یک منتقد ادبی و اجتماعی نویس معروف است، و در این زمینه ها کارهای بزرگی تالیف کرده، اما رمان های سونتاگ کارهای زیبایی ست که ندیده یا نشنیده ام به فارسی ترجمه شده باشد. روشن نیست چرا بجز چند مقاله، آثار او به فارسی برگردانده نشده. سوزان سونتاگ از روشنفکران آمریکایی دهه ی 1960 است، با همان دید رادیکال نسبت به جوامع غربی. بعدها به شکلی از آمریکا زده شد و به تبعیدی خودخواسته به اروپا، سوئد و بعدن فرانسه رفت. سال های اقامت سونتاگ در اروپا یادآور زندگی بسیاری از نویسندگان نسل پیش از او هم چون همینگوی است که بخشی از دوران جوانی و میانسالی شان را در اروپا و عمدتن فرانسه گذراندند. اگرچه سونتاگ در میان دانشگاهیان و در رسانه ها بیشتر به یک روشنفکر نق نقو و ایرادگیر معروف است، با این همه نمی توان از نقش او به عنوان یک زن نویسنده در روند تفکر دایره ی روشنفکری آمریکایی ها چشم پوشید.
What do You think about Where The Stress Falls: Essays (2015)?
If there is one flaw this collection has, it's that it is a bit undermined by its breadth. There are a few shorter pieces that don't really stand on their own even with a frame of reference of what is being discussed, probably because some of those writings were originally prefaces or program notes that lack the sense of passion and persuasiveness and the personal that the rest of the works in Where the Stress Falls have (short or long-er) even when they're disagreeable (particularly her take on cinephilia). Much of the book contains some of Sontag's best writing, especially her Sarajevo essays (even though almost every piece in the final section is essential) and her overview and analysis of Roland Barthes.
—Philip Bardach
"My prick is still hot and stiff and quivering from the last brutal drive it has given you when a faint hymn is heard rising in tender pitiful worship of you from the dim cloisters of my heart."That shit gets me every time!
—Eric
Susan Sontag's writing is always engaging and alive.Some of my favourite essays in this book include:A Poet's ProseWhere the Stress FallsA Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?SinglenessWriting As ReadingGod, I would love to be half the writer Sontag was. One of the reviews (at the back of the book) says that she met her own qualification for what a writer should be: interested in everything.I don't know that I am interested–or will be able to take interest–in everything. I can work on that, though. Here's a quote that touched me in a special way, from the essay entitled Writing As Reading: Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired up by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. And, long after you've become a writer, reading books others write—and rereading the beloved books of the past—constitutes an irresistible distraction from writing. Distraction. Consolation. Torment. And, yes, inspiration.Ah, Sontag.She makes me shudder in love.
—Yossie
