Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview by Jonathan Cott

Author:Jonathan Cott [Cott, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300189797
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

In his poem “Élévation” from Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire wrote: “Agile you move, O my mind, and as a strong swimmer / swoons on the wavy sea, gaily you cleave/the unfathomable vastness with ineffable, male, voluptuous joy.” So here the poem connects thinking and feeling with a specifically “male” type of consciousness and sexuality. Recently, however, I came across an interview with the French writer Hélène Cixous in which, using another swimming image, she says: “To claim that writing doesn’t betray sex differences is to regard it simply as a manufactured object. From the moment you admit that it springs from the entire body you have to admit that it transcribes a whole system of impulses, entirely different approaches to emotional expenditure and pleasure. … In writing, femininity produces a much greater impression of continuity than masculinity does. It’s as though women had the faculty of remaining below the surface, coming up for air at very rare intervals. So obviously, the result is a text that leaves the reader very winded. But for me, that’s completely in accord with feminine sensuality.”

Cixous began as a professor of English literature at the University of Paris, wrote a book on James Joyce, and now she’s thought of as one of the leading women writers in France. Obviously, she considers herself to be a feminist. But I have to say that her statement doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s a fascinating contrast between Cixous and Baudelaire, but I think those images will yield anything you want them to. Baudelaire, after all, was the person who said that woman is natural, therefore abominable, and who had a very classic kind of nineteenth-century misogyny—the kind you find in Freud, i.e., women are nature and men are culture, as though women are this kind of slime that drags you down, and the spirit is always trying to escape from the flesh.

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