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Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me

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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.

Craig Seligman's highly enjoyable dialectic study of critics/intellectuals Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael who enjoyed considerable attention during the 60's and 70's. Seligman elegantly contrasts the two writers, Sontag the intellectual and Kael the fervent populist. He's pretty straightforward in his preference for Kael as a film critic, although he does acknowledge that Sontag was far from a purely devoted film critic, as she also wrote novels and essays on photography, literature, politics, and pretty much anything else you can think of, therefore the comparison isn't exactly fair.

Seligman argues that Sontag was ultimately the greater writer and intellectual, yet he feels that her writing was often too cool and detached, and of course humorless. Kael on the other hand, was a strident iconoclast, she insisted that movies were special in their fusion of pop culture with intelligent artistry, a principle that was made manifest by the likes of Altman, Godard, and DePalma. Yet Kael was no theorist, she spent a great deal of time and garnered much attention in her attack on the auteur theorists like Andrew Sarris and the New Wave critics, she insisted that film aesthetics could not be theorized (a sentiment I for one share), and that a film's quality was more often the product of many talents, not merely the director. Kael's biting criticism made her as many enemies as she had friends; she was attacked by Sarris, by Renata Adler, by Peter Bogdanovich, and later by Jonathan Rosenbaum for her views expressed in her book "Raising Kane." However, Kael was also loved and admired for her witty and personal essays which would leave an impact on David Denby and even influenced the filmmaking of Quentin Tarantino and a number of other prominent directors in recent years.

Sontag never reviewed films she didn't like; preferring to analyze entire bodies of work in extended essays, often besides major intellectual writings on literature. Perhaps Seligman's book falters a bit in his extended defense of Kael; he defends her review of Shoah, and her writings on Orson Welles, but also provides a slightly absurd defense of her alleged homophobia, which he refutes essentially by indicating that he himself is a homosexual and was friends on Kael. This work is a solid comparison and contrast of the two writers, yet I was left feeling that he went a little too hard on Sontag for her difficulty and a little too easy on Kael for her unshakable refusal to reevaluate her opinions (she notoriously never viewed a movie twice).

Seligman goes slightly overboard in his praise of Kael, writing that she "flourished with a consistency unmatched by any American writer since Henry James" (pg. 192). Please. I think Kael was a terrific writer and critic, but those who create works of art should never be equated with those who merely comment on them. Never the less, Seligman has rendered this critical study with very fine writing and an acute awareness of the two author's sensibilities; it makes you want to seek out their work immediately.

A lively, argumentative, and engaging piece of critical writing about two of the major "celebrity" aesthetic figures of the past fifty years.

Kael made her name writing acerbic, witty, urbane movie reviews; Sontag made hers writing cerebral, careful essays about culture and ideas. Kael and Sontag share some surface similarities, but Seligman's book is mostly about their differences: how beautiful Sontag's writing is, yet also how impenetrable, how aloof Sontag can be from anyone who is not "in the know," how contemptuous she is of what is not High Art, yet how crucial her voice is, even if that voice has trailed off in recent years in the pursuit of the fictional muse. (The only difficulty with Seligman's adulation of Sontag is that it is sometimes hard to understand what earns it, although he spends much of the book trying to make the case for her.)

Kael, on the other hand, is more of a populist, almost to a fault sometimes, according to Seligman, who nonetheless has little bad to say about her, about her feistiness, about her professed inability to care what others thought of her judgments (although ultimately she did care a great deal, as Seligman points out in an extended section on the ludicrous assertion some of her enemies made that Kael was anti-gay, which, as Seligman demonstrates, is about the furthest thing from the truth imaginable).

Seligman has a lot of interest to say not only about the two women but about the blurring of the division between high art and "pop culture," as well as the absurdity of the in-fighting that goes on in American intellectual circles. He comes to no real conclusions about which of the two writers is likely to be remembered most 100 years from now, although that's not really his purpose.

This book should be taught (and read!) as a model text of what criticism can be...witty, humane, passionately engaged and always rational and ultimately balanced. Certainly biased at times toward Kael and against Sontag (which even Seligman acknowledges in the text) but that is a critic's perogative - to have opinions. Seligman clearly relishes the opportunity to talk back to Sontag, especially for the ways she has enraged him over the years, but he just as clearly admires her as well.

Critics who review this book are participating in a real pomo experience: critiquing a critic who is not only criticizing two critics but the critics of those critics as well (follow? no matter). Anyway: read, enjoy, applaud.

I was gratified to come across this book almost without looking for anything like it. I was even more pleased to find it so well written and researched. I am a fan of Pauline Kael but I haven't read much about her that does her justice, pro or con, as this book does. I know much less of Susan Sontag but Mr. Seligman provides an intelligible picture of her without giving the show away. I look forward to reading more books by him.

If, like me and Craig Seligman, you are an admirer of Sontag and Kael, then this book--as suggested by its susbtitle--will be fascinating, illimuniating and revelatory for you. Yes, Seligman is tough on Sontag (softer on Kael), but just listen: "Sontag's style is a model of density without condescension, and her refusal to make things easier for the reader is enormously flattering.... If I'm eroticizing Sontag's writing (and I don't deny that I am), it's because I find it so deeply seductive; Garboesque, almost. There's a mystery in Sontag-in her unreachability, her refusal to curry favor, to charm-that is her charm."

While I found the book completely engaging from beginning to end, I couldn't help but think that there's something "off" about the author (at points, his interest in Sontag and Kael borders on sociopathic -- what's this about him having "many opportunities" to meet Sontag, and not wanting to? Is he afraid of her?). Craig Seligman is an excellent writer, but only a so-so critic. He draws the reader in with his enthusiasm for his subjects, but leaves the reader dangling... The book, it seems, he wrote for himself. You have to be in his head to get the full picture of his obsession. And I wonder what Sontag and Kael would think of him.