Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me [Hardcover]

Craig Seligman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 25, 2004

For fans of high culture, pop culture and American genius, a personal and idiosyncratic exploration of two of the 20th century's most distinguished cultural icons. With wit and style worthy of his subjects, Craig Seligman explores the enduring influence of two critics who defined the cultural sensibilities of a generation: Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael. Though outwardly they had several things in common--they were both Westerners who came east, both schooled in philosophy, both secular Jews, and both single mothers--they were polar opposites in temperament and approach. From the very beginning Seligman makes his sympathies clear: Sontag is a writer he reveres; but Kael is a writer he loves. He approaches both critics through their work, whose fundamental parallels serve to sharpen their differences. Tone is the most obvious area where they're at odds. Kael practiced a kind of verbal jazz, exuberant, excessive, intimate, emotional, and funny. Sontag is formal and a little icy--a model of detachment. Kael never changed her approach from her first review to her last, while mutability has been one of the defining motifs of Sontag's career. Moral questions obsess Sontag; they interested Kael but didn't trouble her. Then there's the matter of self-revelation. Under Sontag's aloofness smolders an impulse toward autobiography so strong that it isn't an exaggeration to call it confessional. Kael seems to be terribly intimate and forthcoming, and yet she turns out, when you peer closely, to be surprisingly guarded. But the question that Seligman keeps coming back to is: Can criticism be art? In seeking to answer it, he performs an unusual and remarkable feat: he has produced a nuanced, luminously written examination that stands as an answer in itself.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Though both were Berkeley-educated single mothers, critics Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael could not have been more different on the page. Where Sontag’s tone was "formal and rather icy," Kael’s was "verbal bebop"; where Sontag’s diction was dense and meticulously worked, Kael’s was colloquial and straightforward. Former New Yorker editor Seligman, however, applauds both approaches and exuberantly celebrates his "reverence" for the former writer and "love" for the latter in this engaging book. Writing with a tangible joy that oozes from his first paragraph to his last, Seligman begins his paean to Sontag and Kael by documenting their controversy-filled rise to prominence as writers in the 1960s. A supporter—and later a critic—of "camp" and a dissector of Leni Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetics, Sontag is the more criticized of the two, and Seligman spends a great deal of time justifying her ideological flip-flops and her comparatively unemotional response to 9/11. Kael, on the other hand, is a veritable goddess to Seligman. A late-comer to film criticism, she wrote her first review (of Chaplin’s Limelight) at age 32 and was decrying screen violence and declaring Orson Welles a monster for the New Yorker by 1968. Replete with emotional asides, textual excerpts and personal anecdotes, Seligman’s text often loses its focus. But what his stream-of-consciousness narrative lacks in organization, it more than makes up for in lyrical enthusiasm.
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From Booklist

Two resounding critical voices made sense of the creative ferment of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, two opposing forces of high-octane intellect and demanding aesthetics, two outspoken and revolutionary women: Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael. Seligman has drunk deeply at the well of both of these seminal and controversial thinkers, but his adoration takes different forms: he loves Kael and reveres Sontag. This crucial difference underlies his bravura inquiry into their ethos and influence, a dazzling performance of close reading in which he so vigorously parses each critic's style, ideas, temperament, politics, and emotional valence it's almost as though he's broadcasting color at a boxing match. And he's no slouch himself when it comes to piquant and exacting language and thought as he analyzes Sontag's mutability, austerity, and iciness versus Kael's puckishness, abundance, and pugnacity. Seligman's brilliant and far-ranging critique of two paradigm-altering critics inspires the reader to think hard about art's place in life and criticism's role in culture, and to renew delight in blazingly bold interpretative writing. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; 1ST edition (May 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582433119
• ISBN-13: 978-1582433110
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,346,565 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Judgment and Taste, September 19, 2008

By 

Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me (Paperback)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hail and Farewell to Two Great Women, December 28, 2004

By 

H. Espen (Santa Fe, NM United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me (Hardcover)

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.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Who would have thought criticism could be so much fun?, August 26, 2004

By 

Jon Morris (Binghamton, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me (Hardcover)

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.