Калужская правда

28 декабря исполнилось 20 лет, как умерла Сюзен Сонтаг. The Paris Review вспоминает интервью, которое в июле 1994 взял у Сонтаг американский поэт Эдвард Хирш.

INTERVIEWER

Is it old-fashioned to think that the purpose of literature is to educate us about life?

SONTAG

Well, it does educate us about life. I wouldn’t be the person I am, I wouldn’t understand what I understand, were it not for certain books. I’m thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century Russian literature: how should one live? A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

INTERVIEWER

Do writing an essay and writing a piece of fiction come from different parts of yourself?

SONTAG

Yes. The essay is a constrained form. Fiction is freedom. Freedom to tell stories and freedom to be discursive, too. But essayistic discursiveness, in the context of fiction, has an entirely different meaning. It is always voiced.

INTERVIEWER

It seems as if you have pretty much stopped writing essays.

SONTAG

I have. And most of the essays I’ve succumbed to writing in the past fifteen years are requiems or tributes. The essays on Canetti, Barthes, and Benjamin are about elements in their work and sensibility that I feel close to: Canetti’s cult of admiration and hatred of cruelty, Barthes’s version of the aesthete’s sensibility, Benjamin’s poetics of melancholy. I was very aware that there’s much to be said about them that I didn’t say.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think much about the audience for your books?

SONTAG

Don’t dare. Don’t want to. But, anyway, I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.

https://theparisreview.org/interviews/1505/the-art-of-fiction-no-143-susan-sontag

The Paris Review

Susan Sontag, The Art of Fiction No. 143

On Yeats’s assertion that one must choose between the life and the work: “Of course, if by life you mean life with other people, Yeats's dictum is true. Writing requires huge amounts of solitude.”

❤6

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224 viewsJan 6 at 11:10

28 декабря исполнилось 20 лет, как умерла Сюзен Сонтаг. The Paris Review вспоминает интервью, которое в июле 1994 взял у Сонтаг американский поэт Эдвард Хирш.

INTERVIEWER

Is it old-fashioned to think that the purpose of literature is to educate us about life?

SONTAG

Well, it does educate us about life. I wouldn’t be the person I am, I wouldn’t understand what I understand, were it not for certain books. I’m thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century Russian literature: how should one live? A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

INTERVIEWER

Do writing an essay and writing a piece of fiction come from different parts of yourself?

SONTAG

Yes. The essay is a constrained form. Fiction is freedom. Freedom to tell stories and freedom to be discursive, too. But essayistic discursiveness, in the context of fiction, has an entirely different meaning. It is always voiced.

INTERVIEWER

It seems as if you have pretty much stopped writing essays.

SONTAG

I have. And most of the essays I’ve succumbed to writing in the past fifteen years are requiems or tributes. The essays on Canetti, Barthes, and Benjamin are about elements in their work and sensibility that I feel close to: Canetti’s cult of admiration and hatred of cruelty, Barthes’s version of the aesthete’s sensibility, Benjamin’s poetics of melancholy. I was very aware that there’s much to be said about them that I didn’t say.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think much about the audience for your books?

SONTAG

Don’t dare. Don’t want to. But, anyway, I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.

https://theparisreview.org/interviews/1505/the-art-of-fiction-no-143-susan-sontag

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