Tenured Radical: I think it’s important that Sontag isn’t a feminist, even though she has always been honored by feminists. In contrast, I’ve begun to develop a relationship with a highly successful feminist writer from the 1970s, and she seems to be very clear why our work is differently important, and she is making a point of being generous about the kind of collaboration that can be possible between two very different kinds of writers. It’s just one example, but it is a strikingly different experience than I have had in the past with “famous” people who rely on me for all kinds of support, but wouldn’t dream of offering to introduce me to an agent. I think the Sontag essay also illustrates two paradoxes that you allude to in your comments, paradoxes that actually structure the whole book. The first is that the cost of being smart and accomplished as Castle is – particularly because she is a woman and of working-class and immigrant origins– is the ever-present fear of humiliation, that humiliation that comes from not belonging. In “Courage Mon Amie,” Castle’s essay about her love affair with World War I, she emphasizes the inescapable humiliation of being female in a world where female heroism is impossible, and particularly impossible for those who suffer from the dread and fear of not belonging. “I was female,” she writes dolefully about her inability to face the post- 9/11 world with stoicism; “and a wretched poltroon.” (21).
The second paradox you raise is that we academics seek out larger than life “female/heroes” like Sontag and The Professor, but inevitably, the heroism of such people is not unconnected to their narcissistic need to humiliate us. The question is, are we drawn to them because somehow we actually know that they will do that thing which we fear the most? In this sense, all the essays strike me as exercises in coming to terms with humiliation and the longing to be part of the most exclusive club. It’s no accident, I think, that Castle’s obsession with Art Pepper, maniac cockmeister and a sublime, brilliant drug-addicted jazz musician covered with tattoos, takes hold at the exact time she is driving around in her persona as a respectable professor with a trunk full of research intended for an article she knows, in her heart, she will never write.
One might argue that visiting the childhood home she fled at eighteen to become a fancy literature professor, bound by rules and conventions, triggers an ongoing fantasy of becoming a brilliant outlaw. If I go back to “The Marie Antoinette Obsession,” I see that not only its structure and style has a jazz sensibility, but it displays a keen awareness that humans have experiences that evade rational scientism. Hence, fantasy and improbable narratives become bridges to the modern, since people do not necessarily understand what they are experiencing at the moment it is happening, even if technically the language exists for it.
I’m taking too long to get back to “The Professor,” I know, but I think this, and the Sontag essay, set us up for that final, blockbuster title essay about what it means – and what it it might cost – to join the “club” we all belong to as professional scholars. Castle’s living memory of the first approach from Sontag – “when I replay it in my mind, I still get a weird toxic jolt of adolescent joy, like taking a big hit of Krazy Glue vapors out of a paper bag” (93) – is a hint of things to come as she reflects on her calamitous introduction to both lesbianism and the academy, and of the craziness that she will agree to in her affair with The Professor. It is a craziness that nearly destroys her. Part of what I admire about the essay is how naked it is about both these things. She is able to describe the filthiest forms of abuse and, at the same time, make us understand the logic of the affair, the intensity of her desire and why she sought it out something that nearly destroyed her. In fact, part of how I read the essay was as a lesbian bildungsroman, a heroic journey of suffering that will liberate her to become not just a scholar but an artist. The Professor is her heroin. Because of this affair, in which Castle demonstrates no small capacity for offering herself up for abuse, she is transformed from being a desperate, conventional little workaholic drone to being a profoundly imaginative and original scholar.
. And now, because I think it captures the mood here quite nicely, I give you the sounds of humiliation and longing by Art Pepper: