Against Interpretation
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Authors: Susan Sontag
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Contents
A note and some acknowledgments
The artist as exemplary sufferer
The literary criticism of Georg Lukács
Nathalie Sarraute and the novel
Spiritual style in the films of Robert Bresson
Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown’s
Life Against Death
Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition
One culture and the new sensibility
Afterword: Thirty Years Later …
for Paul Thek
A note and some acknowledgments
T
HE
articles and reviews collected here make up a good part of the criticism I wrote between 1962 and 1965, a sharply defined period in my life. In early 1962 I finished my first novel,
The Benefactor.
In late 1965 I began a second novel. The energy, and the anxiety, that spilled over into criticism had a beginning and an end. That period of search, reflection, and discovery already seemed somewhat remote at the time of the American publication of
Against Interpretation
and seems even more so now, a year later, as the collection is about to be reissued in a paperback edition.
Although in these essays I do talk a great deal about particular works of art and, implicitly, about the tasks of the critic, I am aware that little of what is assembled in the book counts as criticism proper. Leaving aside a few pieces of journalism, most of it could perhaps be called meta-criticism—if that is not too grand a name. I was writing, with passionate partiality, about
problems
raised for me by works of art, mainly contemporary, in different genres: I wanted to expose and clarify the theoretical assumptions underlying specific judgments and tastes. Although I did not set out to devise a “position” about either the arts or modernity, some kind of general position seemed to take shape and to voice itself with increasing urgency no matter what particular work I wrote about.
I disagree now with a portion of what I wrote, but it is not the sort of disagreement that makes feasible partial changes or revisions. Although I think that I overestimated or underestimated the merit of several works I discussed, little of my present disagreement owes to a shift in particular judgments. Anyway, what value these essays may possess, the extent to which they are more than just case studies of
my
evolving sensibility, rests not on the specific appraisals made but on the interestingness of the problems raised. I don’t, ultimately, care for handing out grades to works of art (which is why I mostly avoided the opportunity of writing about things I didn’t admire). I wrote as an enthusiast and a partisan—and with, it now seems to me, a certain naïveté. I didn’t understand the gross impact which writing about new or little-known activities in the arts can have in the era of instant “communication.” I didn’t know—I had yet to learn, painfully—the speed at which a bulky essay in
Partisan Review
becomes a hot tip in
Time.
For all my exhortatory tone, I was not trying to lead anyone into the Promised Land except myself.
For me, the essays have done their work. I see the world differently, with fresher eyes; my conception of my tasks as a novelist is radically changed. I could describe the process this way. Before I wrote the essays I did not believe many of the ideas espoused in them; when I wrote them, I believed what I wrote; subsequently, I have come to disbelieve some of these same ideas again—but from a new perspective, one that incorporates and is nourished by what is true in the argument of the essays. Writing criticism has proved to be an act of intellectual disburdenment as much as of intellectual self-expression. I have the impression not so much of having, for myself, resolved a certain number of alluring and troubling problems as of having used them up. But no doubt this is illusory. The problems remain, more remains to be said about them by other curious and reflective people, and perhaps this collection of some recent thinking about the arts will have a certain relevance to that.
* * *
“Sartre’s
Saint Genet,
” “The Death of Tragedy,” “Nathalie Sarraute and the Novel,” “Going to Theater, etc.,” “Notes on ‘Camp,’” “Marat/Sade/Artaud,” and “On Style” originally appeared in
Partisan Review;
“Simone Weil,” “Camus’
Notebooks,
” Michel Leiris’
Manhood,
” “The Anthropologist as Hero,” and “Ionesco” appeared in
The New York Review of Books;
“The Literary Criticism of Georg Lukács” and “Reflections on
The Deputy
” in
Book Week;
“Against Interpretation” in
Evergreen Review;
“Piety Without Content,” “The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer,” and “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition” in
The Second Coming;
“Godard’s
Vivre Sa Vie
” in
Moviegoer;
“One Culture and the New Sensibility” (in abridged form) in
Mademoiselle;
“Jack Smith’s
Flaming Creatures
” in
The Nation;
“Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson” in
The Seventh Art;
“A Note on Novels and Films” and “Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown’s
Life Against Death
” in
The Supplement
(
Columbia Spectator
); “The Imagination of Disaster” in
Commentary.
(Some articles appeared under different titles.) I am grateful to the editors of these magazines for permission to reprint.
It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to thank William Phillips for generous encouragement though he often disagreed with what I was saying; Annette Michelson, who has shared her erudition and taste with me in many conversations over the last seven years; and Richard Howard, who very helpfully read over most of the essays and pointed out several errors of fact and rhetoric.
Last, I wish to record my gratitude to the Rockefeller Foundation for a fellowship last year which freed me, for the first time in my life, to write full-time—during which period I wrote, among other things, some of the essays collected in this book.
S. S.
1966
I
Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny—very tiny, content.
WILLEM DE KOONING
,
in an interview
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
OSCAR WILDE
,
in a letter
Against interpretation
T
HE
earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. (Cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etc.) The earliest
theory
of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.
It is at this point that the peculiar question of the
value
of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.
Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious. Since he considered ordinary material things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures, even the best painting of a bed would be only an “imitation of an imitation.” For Plato, art is neither particularly useful (the painting of a bed is no good to sleep on), nor, in the strict sense, true. And Aristotle’s arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato’s view that all art is an elaborate
trompe l’oeil,
and therefore a lie. But he does dispute Plato’s idea that art is useless. Lie or no, art has a certain value according to Aristotle because it is a form of therapy. Art is useful, after all, Aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions.
In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art goes hand in hand with the assumption that art is always figurative. But advocates of the mimetic theory need not close their eyes to decorative and abstract art. The fallacy that art is necessarily a “realism” can be modified or scrapped without ever moving outside the problems delimited by the mimetic theory.
The fact is, all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation. It is through this theory that art as such—above and beyond given works of art—becomes problematic, in need of defense. And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call “form” is separated off from something we have learned to call “content,” and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.
Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something. (“What X is saying is…,” “What X is trying to say is…,” “What X said is…” etc., etc.)
2
None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it
did.
From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense. Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice.
This is the case, today, with the very idea of content itself. Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.
Though the actual developments in many arts may seem to be leading us away from the idea that a work of art is primarily its content, the idea still exerts an extraordinary hegemony. I want to suggest that this is because the idea is now perpetuated in the guise of a certain way of encountering works of art thoroughly ingrained among most people who take any of the arts seriously. What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of
interpretation.
And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.
3
Of course, I don’t mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain “rules” of interpretation.
Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?