Anti-Critic
Against Interpretation.
by Susan Sontag.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 304 pp. $4.95
Once upon a time, the temptation of intellect was to overreach. Faustus, to feed the greed of an archetypically aspiring mind, sacrificed his kinship with mankind and his immortal soul. He wanted to know too much. In the 20th century, intellect seems to be faced with a different temptation: suicide by immersion. Twentieth-century intellectuals have often been converts—to Marxism, to Freudianism of one brand or another, to Catholicism—to some doctrine which has intellectual appeal and at the same time saves the convert from isolated despair by uniting him with the Workers or History or Science or the Church. Once safely converted, he can go on thinking and writing, but he no longer questions premises.
For minds trained in the arts and humanities, conversion at present takes the form of hitching on to cultural modernity. “Elitecult” and/or “popcult” become salvation. In the name of free thought and free feeling, the wishful intellectual sells out to get In. After that, comes the expounding of the Cause.
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The chief commodity of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, according to its author and her reviewers, is a modern sensibility. Stress the modernity here, since she is distinguished less by a decided or passionate point of view (compare her as a film critic, for example, with two such disparate personalities as James Agee and Kenneth Tynan) than by an eagerness to explore anything new. At times this eagerness lapses deliberately into inarticulateness, as in her celebrated essay on Camp, which will probably be unintelligible in ten years. At its best—for example in the essay on Happenings—it reports immediate emotions unpretentiously and sensitively. But sensitive people are a dime a dozen. The rarer gift Miss Sontag has to offer is brains. The theoretical portions of her book are delightful to read because she can argue so well. Even when she fudges her argument with standby ploys like name-calling, the shifted definition, the straw man, or the historical distortion, she does it with the skill of an expert. Her literary and philosophical references are broad and applied with originality. Her ideas are consistently stimulating, particularly when they do not get in the way of her major theoretical premise—as in the little essay “Piety Without Content,” where she uses the analogy of political fellow-traveling to destroy, beautifully, the rosy idea of common-denominator religiousness.
For all that, however, her major premise is that brains are bankrupt. This is explicit in the snide comments about “philistinism” and about the bad effects on culture of “people with minds,” in the vague asides about “magic” in art, in the preferences for non-verbal over verbal art, in the insistence that we need more feeling and less thought. It is implicit everywhere in her refusal to carry any line of reasoning through to the end. Finally, it cripples her attempt to develop “case studies for an aesthetic” (her own description of her intention) because an aesthetic is an intellectual thing.
What Miss Sontag wants to encourage, in art and criticism, is respect for sensuous surfaces, for feeling, for form, for style. What she apparently wants to encourage in real life is respect for the unconventional, the amoral, the extreme sensation, be it sensuous gratification or madness. So far so good. Anybody who does Freudian criticism or looks for morals in art, or whose vision is directed only toward what is happy, healthy and prudent, needs this book. But it is not enough to offer a corrective to such people.
Miss Sontag, seems to think it is enough, perhaps because she has despaired of the possibility that artists, critics, or the public can use their minds to create new syntheses of matter and manner, good and evil, health and insanity. She shares, perhaps, in a popular and anti-rationalist superstition according to which intelligence has not only failed to solve the problems of mankind, but is also indirectly responsible for getting us into our contemporary fix with the Gog and Magog of alienation and the bomb.
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A juster approach might blame the contemporary fix, insofar as it is temporary and not a permanent human condition, on too little exercise of intelligence, not too much. Similarly, the cure for the “steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience,” if it is indeed due to “a culture based on excess, on overproduction . . . material plenitude . . . sheer crowdedness,” is surely not more pure objects. Miss Sontag advises us “to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” We might try instead to understand what we see, hear and feel. As a white knight of art, Miss Sontag is in danger of wounding the creature she wants to save.
The sensuous bias of such criticism has severe limitations. It is so preoccupied with what we presumably need that it is ready to throw out a lot of what we can get. It asserts that we don’t need “content”; but “content” is precisely what most verbal and much visual art, and even much music, from Buxtehude to Beethoven to the blues, ultimately depends on. Such criticism cautions that some arts are too prone to interpretation; of course they are: so is anything interesting. Because pedants flourish, shall we have no more cakes and ale? Reminding us to remember that Hamlet is about Hamlet, Miss Sontag omits the fact that Hamlet is importantly distinguished from Joe Schmoe because he “contains” a pattern of human behavior which is both permanent and significant. Jeering at psychoanalytical, religious, and sociological interpretations of Kafka because they can’t all be right, she neglects to observe that they all may be relevant, and that Kafka’s genius may lie precisely in his ability to perform a psychoanalytic study and a study of bureaucracy and a religious manifesto in a single fantastic fable.
Obviously it makes a difference what writers say. It makes a difference what painters say, whether they choose to paint “about” virgins and children, the disasters of war, or the harmonies and cacophonies of colors. Miss Sontag’s kind of criticism fails to understand that great artists may want to change our lives by changing our vision; that Socrates would not have been content for Alcibiades to follow him around awestruck but still corrupt; that the only complete response to a work of art is to have one’s life changed by it, to create or become another work of art, to see visions like Dante and Blake, or to become incredibly flexible, comprehensive, and compassionate like Shakespeare.
This insufficiency of response spoils some brilliant analyses. For example, in her essays on Pavese and Simone Weil, Miss Sontag acknowledges the keen fascination for us of literary suffering, self-flagellation, obsession, and martyrdom. She sets them in historical perspective (the artist as sufferer replacing the Christian martyr) and poses them against psychological normality as being in some ways more intense, more exemplary. Yet instead of suggesting that the importance of the abnormal passions demands some shift of our own psychological center of gravity—some awareness at least of our own potential abnormalities, if not an acting out of them—she falls back on uplift. She asserts her assurance that “the sane view of life is the true one.” Which sane view? How does she know? Suppose it isn’t? And she declares that without any intention of imitating a Simone Weil or believing for a minute in her doctrines, we should “pay our respects” and be “moved” by Weil’s “level of spiritual reality.” So the contemplation of aesthetic surfaces brings us back to the old inspirational line of vicarious thrills and vicarious morality.
Another problem of sensuous modern criticism is that it gives minor artists too much credit. Many of the styles and authors Miss Sontag admires, like Surrealism, Pop, Happenings, Genet, Peter Weiss in Marat/Sade, can be classified as representing what Coleridge called Secondary Imagination, or Fancy, as opposed to the Primary Imagination. That is, they are works of combination and juxtaposition, not of synthesis. In dripping watches in the desert, in Campbell’s soup cans in the Modern Museum, in baby dolls glued to machine parts, in black people playing white people, in “discussions of the deepest issues of contemporary morality and history” used as “decor, props, sensuous material,” we see artists having ironic fun, fooling around with things. There is nothing wrong with this, until fooling tries to impose itself on all other possibilities. Miss Sontag declares that “the most interesting works of contemporary art are adventures in sensation, new ‘sensory mixes.’” Well, maybe so. In that case, our era resembles the latter half of the 18th century, which Coleridge found unsatisfactory because it contained no first-rate unifying, synthesizing imagination. In retrospect, it seems that most late 18th-century artists were trying to escape from a classical aesthetic that no longer compelled belief, but didn’t know where they wanted to get to. Hence the proliferation of sentimental junk about graves and peasants and mountain landscapes; hence also, perhaps, second-rate pornography like Fanny Hill. There may be more similarity than meets the eye between 18th-century picturesque, and 20th-century grotesque, adventures in sensation.
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In her final essay, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” Miss Sontag claims that this art is experimental in the same sense that science is: cool, rational, etc. But scientific experiment has as its assumption the real existence of facts and laws, and as its object the synthesis of principles or “models” which will resolve old paradoxes, which will incorporate all that is known, which will be simpler and more inclusive than anything thought earlier. So does some art; we are deceived if we sell our birthright to it for the mess of pottage in some new sensuous mix.
And, in fact, there is no reason to do so. Consider the films of Godard, Resnais, Antonioni, sometimes Bergman, who’ll present surfaces impervious to the arrows of psychology. These films do not tells us why characters act as they do, and they don’t let us ask—or else they tease us with false starts if we do ask. They portray us simplified, floating like particles in random motion without cause or purpose through landscapes or cityscapes which mean nothing to us, performing hopeless acts of love with people who mean nothing to us, dancing through simulacra of attempts to recapture or discover . . . and ending in violent death or indolent vacuum. All these films are in various ways about the experience of having no motivation, no will. If we reject interpretation, we can stop here, with the sensuous texture of such experience. Another alternative, however, is to integrate the ominous tidings with what we know already about states of existence in which motivation can be said to exist, and see if any more comprehensive truth appears. Are these states of missing will peripheral to human nature, representing some arrested development or degeneration? Or are they central? Is lack of will a step on the way to will, or vice-versa? Modern physics and philosophy reject the very notion of causality, a notion originally tied to theism. They discover, instead, typical patterns of events. The art of today also points toward discoveries to come; it demands new models of the human condition. This art, which is the music played in the silence of God, is prone to interpretation. Why not interpret it?
