On Susan Sontag's The Benefactor

Dear Readers,

Here I sit, listening to the last couple of movements of Mozart's Symphony #35, the Haffner symphony, on a rainy day with the pounding of the jackhammer as construction workers spend their second day outside of my home.  I have been reading Susan Sontag's first novel, The Benefactor (published in 1963), and find it quite good, even though most critics and many of her friends thought it wasn't her best.  I am definitely more interested in her essays than her fiction, but this novel has captured my imagination because its main character, Hippolyte, is a disenchanted intellectual who has left the academic world in pursuit of something else which he cannot define.  (For those of you who know me, don't worry--I am not planning on leaving academics.).

The novel is told in flashback so far, working through that wonderful charting of memory that the best Modernist novels do so well.  It is written from the vantage of Hippolyte as a sixty-one-year old, looking back on his twenties and the choices he made then.  He is very much someone I find sympathetic.  Listen to how he explains his disenchantment with academics even though he is an intellectual and one who quests after knowledge: "Inspired [at university] by the project of becoming learned, I enrolled in the most varied courses of lectures.  But this very thirst for inquiry, that led to investigations which subsequently preoccupied me, did not find a proper satisfaction in the divisions and faculties of the university.  Do not misunderstand me, it was not that I objected to specialization...Neither did I object to pedantry.  What I objected to was that my professors raised problems only to solve them, and brought their lectures to a conclusion with maddening punctuality." I just love that description and find it fascinating that we have changed only somewhat in our ways of teaching since then, and perhaps not quite enough.  Further, I think this description is in part autobiographical and could be applied to Sontag, who herself left academics around this date having not finished her dissertation on Simone Weill, and living much of her time after leaving in Paris.  (If Hippolyte now moves to Paris or even Europe in his twenties, I will know even more certainly that he is based on her.)

One brief note here about the use of memory--I know that in this novel, Hippolyte is going to start blurring his real life and his dream life.  I love the interplay between memory, remembrance and the present, and how faulted memory can shape present life.  Sontag has a compelling vision of the memoryscape of her central character here, as she is very well-read in Freudianism and Surrealism.  This lack of playing with memory, remembrance, and its relationship with the present is the key reason I find Stephen King's Lisey's Story an important but ultimately unsatisfactory novel; memory in that novel is just too darn clear!

The book cover of The Benefactor lists as its models Kafka, and this influence is certainly apparent.  I also see a strong influence of Vladimir Nabokov, especially his later books like Look at the Harlequins! (one of my favorites), which may date after Sontag's early novel.  Where I am in the novel Hippolyte is becoming more and more obsessed with his own mind, and particularly his developing habit of vivid and rather verbal dreaming.  (Sontag will explore the dreamworld again quite strongly in her second novel Death Kit (1967), which is also more profoundly Surrealist and, at least to me, not as successful as The Benefactor appears to be).  Yes, as critics have noted, The Benefactor has all of the hallmarks of Surrealist fiction, but even more because of Sontag's essays and background, I think we can conclude that Freud in general and his Interpretation of Dreams in particular has a lot to do with the structure of this novel's explorations.  (Of course the influence of Freud on Surrealism and the impact of Surrealism on Freud is a long and interesting history that I know too little about at present to write with any precision.)  Thus I see the early '60s in Sontag's work--both essays and fiction--as a long, drawn-out conversation with her ex-husband Philip Rieff and his apologetic approach to Freud (more about that in my book on Sontag when it comes out!).

Good fiction has a way of drawing us in, often through empathy.  (This is one of the reasons why I find most postmodern fiction unsatisfactory, as I find nothing to hold on to in relation to the characters.  Please fault me here if you choose, but my model for the best novels ever written are still Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, and George Eliot's Middlemarch.)  So far in my reading of The Benefactor, I would list it as one of Sontag's better novels, alongside The Volcano Lover.  I will let you know what I think as I continue reading this fascinating early text.

Beginner's Mind

Dear Readers:

I have been thinking a lot these days about Beginner's Mind, a Buddhist concept that has major implications for our understanding of the writing process and improving our life itself.  Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones (one of the best books about writing out there) argues that returning to "beginner's mind" is "what we must come back to every time we sit down and write." This is certainly a best and a true practice.  The blank, white page is, in essence, a nice symbol for beginner's mind.

What got me thinking again systematically about beginner's mind--beginning at the beginning--was going back through Susan Sontag's essay "Thirty Years After..." in a close reading for the introduction to my current book project on Sontag's essays.  Sontag reflects that she always likes looking forward, and never likes looking back.  (The essay was for a reissue of her collection Against Interpretation and Other Essays.) Sontag often avers that she is always at the stage of beginning and that that place is the most exciting.  For me, that has been true over and over again.

If I had to define beginner's mind, I would say it is beginning where you are, in the moment and place and time where you find yourself, and with the tools readily at-hand, and knowing that you and that moment are sufficient to gain and do what you need.  It means recognizing what you know and what you don't know, and being excited to find out more.

One of my best examples of beginner's mind happened when I was an undergraduate at Marietta College.  One of the most monumental decisions that I made as an undergraduate (even though I did not recognize it at the time) was signing up for a history class on a subject I knew nothing about.  I liked the professor, Dr. William Hartel, who was my adviser, and I have often had the attitude that if I know nothing about a topic, then I have everything yet to learn, and that to me is exciting!  The course was on the French Revolution; when I signed up for the junior-level history course (I was a first-semester sophomore), I could not even tell the dates of the event(s).  My interest in this period and, in particular, what came before the historic events of 1789 in Europe have become a guiding interest of my research and teaching in academics, as my areas of specialty are English and European literature from about 1660 to roughly 1840.  That is perhaps my prime example of beginner's mind.

Beginner's mind also means the habit of returning to the beginning time and again.  I must confess, I tend to hate repetition, whether in teaching or exercise.  I have to stop and take a breath every time I go to the gym and do the same warm-up exercises that my trainer has prescribed.  I have to make a conscious decision to do it rather than run out the door (it's own form of exercise, I suppose).  It is the same with eating healthy, especially when it is perfectly good leftovers (that, by the way, is a battle I do not often win; I almost always opt to go out rather than face leftovers).  Yet each time has to be a new beginning--no regrets for the last meal or last workout, forging ahead from the start once again.

I often ask myself as I write both what I know and what I don't  know.  Sometimes, in fact, when I am writing, I am cowed by all that I don't know, and this can cause me to stop and stall.  When that happens, I return to beginner's mind, affirming what I know and what I know I don't, but can find out. The most exciting part of writing is the findings and indeed epiphanies one has in the process of writing itself.  If you always know where you are going, then getting there becomes less fun!

Starting Here

Welcome, readers!

There is something to be said for the practice of blogging as a means of keeping the writing juice flowing.  I am a new blogger though not a new writer.  I have published one book (Understanding May Sarton) and several articles and poems.  Sarton is a model for me as a writer and even as a blogger; her journals are like blog posts and I wonder if she had lived into the age of blogging if she would have gone in that direction as well.  It would be fascinating to see her writing in this format!  (If you have never read Sarton, start with any of her journals; my starting place was Recovering but I would recommend any of them, especially Journal of a Solitude).

I am also interested strongly in religion and spirituality.  I am a liberal Anglican/Episcopalian--not liberal theologically (mostly) but politically, which grows out of my commitments to my faith which includes pacifism and social justice.  My faith makes a Christian socialist at heart, though I would characterize my socialism as neither of the Marxist nor Maoist varieties (although I have learned much from studying Marx).  I rather think I am a kind of agrarian socialist as the Levellers or Diggers were in Seventeenth-Century England.  As the title of my blog suggests, I am very interested in the contemplative life, and find much in ancient and medieval Christianity (and some more recent writers like Thomas Merton) that supports that life.  I have also learned a lot from Buddhism, particularly Zen, although I do not share many of their beliefs.  Finally, I am an associate professor of English, which is one of my motivations for starting this blog as a practice place for other writing I wish to do.

A few summers ago (actually 2009) I started doing writing exercises from Natalie Goldberg's Old Friend from Faraway in the process of beginning to think about a memoir.  I wrote many many pages and I will share some of these in revised form as well.  Please offer feedback and thought; no name calling please.  I like friendly, heart-felt, and intellectual discussions, something we do not see much in the public or internet sphere these days. (I have been recently called names and threatened on facebook by complete strangers and some former friends.)

One of the things I am thinking about these days is the differences between Modernism and Postmodernism, particularly in the works of Susan Sontag (I am writing a book on Sontag).  She does not like the term postmodern and considers it a mere outgrowth of the earlier form.  I have been reading A Postmodern Reader, an older book on these issues from SUNY press in the 1990s, and it is interesting to me that many claim certain essays of Sontag's and thus Sontag herself for definitions of postmodernism; something I think she herself would not have liked.  (The essays they tend to claim for postmodernism are her early essays on Camp and other new sensibilities; by the 1980s, when postmodernism seems to be on its way to being fully conceptualized, she is already writing her tributes as in Under the Sign of Saturn of her models--all male--from the past.)  If there are any avid Sontag readers out there, what do you think of connecting her with postmodernism?

Well, I think that is all I will write in the blog for today.  See you soon!