Against Interpretation
Susan Sontag is one of those people who is surrounded by dramatically divided opinions. She died twenty years ago, and from her first novel, written at the age of 30 years old, through to her examination of war photography, forty years later, she was constantly subjected to critical praise by some and simultaneously and often harshly denigrated by others. She managed to write about photography, and art more generally, she completed a series of novels over her lifetime, and she was a prolific commentator and essayist. She was an activist, the recipient of awards and prizes, and at the same time bitterly attacked as undeserving. She was an intellectual, and, like Christopher Hitchens, another whose essays I really enjoy, her writing ranged across several areas of non-fiction criticism as well as some outstanding fiction. The older she became, the harder it was to be certain you really understood where she stood on various issues. In my case, my ability to fully understand her views was challenged from the beginning.
I would like to write about Susan Sontag, but the task is beyond me. It would take years to delve into and understand her work, her character, what drover her, and why she did what she did. Complex, fascinating and even ‘difficult’. If you want to know more, Melinda Harvey’s review of Benjamin Moser’s biography, Sontag: Her Life, is helpful (in the Sydney Review of Books, 1 August 2022), and is further developed in his book. Harvey wrote, “That she was a woman who did not find empowerment in leaning in to any of the social identities she had to choose from: woman, queer, Jew. She preferred to escape from them. And there was a label that allowed escape from them: ‘writer’. Wrote Susan in her journal in 1959: ‘My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me.’ This is not a million miles from Charlotte Brontë in 1849 writing to her publisher, ‘I am neither a man nor a woman but an author’”.
Despite her extraordinary life and range of writing, much of my appreciation of Susan Sontag and her views come from one book. My copy of Against Interpretation is the UK First Edition, published in 1967. I bought my copy in 1968. It was one of those books that I only partly understood, and yet was immediately attracted to: it was speaking to issues I didn’t fully grasp, but I wanted to understand. Much of the book was critical essays on such writers as Camus, Sartre and Levi Strauss, playwrights, film directors, and even on happenings and the meaning of camp. However, it was the opening title essay that first held me, and I have read it, reread it, and every so often go back and read it yet again. The twelve pages of Against Interpretation ends with section 10: one line: “In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” If I didn’t understand that, I did get the last sentence of the preceding section: “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even if that is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
Before I return to that specific essay, I need to explain that the reason I was acquiring Against Interpretation back in 1968 was because, glancing through a copy in Heffer’s Bookshop, I saw there was an essay inside title ‘The anthropologist as hero’, and it was about Claude Lévi-Strauss. The man of the decade, and the essay was headed with an extract from Tristes Tropiques, the most tantalising of his books, as he considers what it means to study another culture:
“The paradox is irresoluble: the less one culture communicates with another, the less likely they are to be corrupted, one by the other; but on the other hand the less likely it is, in such conditions, that the respective emissaries of these cultures will be able to seize the richness and significance of their diversity. The alternative is inescapable: either I am a traveller in ancient times, and faced with a prodigious spectacle which would be almost entirely unintelligible to me and might, indeed, provoke me to mockery or disgust; or I am a traveller of my own day, hastening in search of a vanished reality. In either case, I am the loser … for today, as I go groaning among the shadows, I miss, inevitably, the spectacle that is now taking place.”
Sold, to the impecunious student!
Sontag’s essay on Lévi-Strauss was extraordinarily perceptive. If I had paid more attention to it at the time, my own understanding of Lévi-Strauss’s contribution to social anthropology would have been far clearer than it was. It took me years to see what I had missed, as I was absorbed in reading ethnographic studies of various pre-industrial societies. As I focussed on analyses of religious rituals, kinship categories and political systems, I was glancing past the obvious. What he saw was, as Sontag puts it, “The past, with its mysteriously harmonious structures, is broken and crumbling before our eyes.”.
As it happens, I abandoned pursuing ethnographic fieldwork in such tempting places as the New Guinea Highlands or the upper reaches of the Amazon. Married, with young children, I was drawn to research in the safer, comfortable world of contemporary British business, wanting to understand the emergence of a new profession, the computer programmer. The subject matter drew me over towards industrial sociology, as the world of social anthropology slowly disappeared from view. As Sontag makes clear in commenting on Lévi-Strauss, what I missed in my reading was understanding his insight into ‘anthropological doubt’, the realisation of what we don’t know, and the willingness to admit that ignorance. He was seeking to convey the importance of ignorance in the face of other people.
Sontag understood that, and she also understood that in the face of such ignorance, what we can study is how other people seek to make sense of their world. This was the agenda Lévi-Strauss was pursuing, to find the logical structures that underpinned other cultures. She ends her essay by concluding “The anthropologist is thus not only the mourner of the cold world of the primitives, but its custodian as well. Lamenting among the shadows, struggling to distinguish the archaic from the pseudo-archaic, he acts out a heroic, diligent and complex modern pessimism”. This is Susan Sontag the intellectual at work: probing, clarifying, and at the same time unable to hold back from translating her insights into vivid images and contradictions. It offers an insight into the person she was becoming, brilliant, controversial, with a consuming desire to say something more than others have, and in so doing establish her reputation. Smart, spiky, and often close to going too far.
Later in Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag included some of her film reviews. I suspect that cinema might have been the area in which this very clever observer was at her most perceptive and comfortable. She makes it clear that she sees ‘form’ as the critical element of great art, rather than focussing on meaning as the central issue for analysis. In examining Jean Luc Godard’s film Vivre Sa Vie, she explains that the film is a ‘demonstration’, that “something happened, not why it happened”. The film is episodic, and it has a structure that reflects the Christian story of the twelve stations of the cross. However, this is a secular story, and while each of the twelve sections of the film have a title, this is not to show us a path to resolution, to offering meaning to each scene, but simply as signposts: this happened next. For Sontag, this emphasis on form as opposed to meaning is what makes the film and its director so important in the history of cinema.
Yet another of the essays looks at ‘Happening: an art of radical juxtaposition’. Happenings back in the 1960s were a rather different kind of experience from the musical happening that are occasionally seen today. Our 21st century happenings are ‘flash-mobs’, a group of people that assembles suddenly in a public place, performs for a brief time, then quickly disperses, often with their activities some strange combination of entertainment, satire, and/or artistic expression. There are some famous examples of this to be seen on YouTube, like the unannounced performance of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy outside a Spanish bank, or the Sound of Music Do Re Mi performance at Antwerp’s Central Station. Incidentally, these brief performances actually took weeks of planning and preparation.
Happenings were deliberately presented as if they improvised on the spot, although they, too, had been planned and rehearsed in advance. These happenings were a form of participatory art, emphasizing an interaction between the performer and the audience. They are like a scene from a play, but only that one scene – often a brief and problematic vignette. In most cases part of the intention was to break down the wall between performer and spectator. This might mean the action happens in front of you or around you and might even involve the spectators as performers. In some happenings, everyone present is included in the making of the art. An actor relates a brief episode, bursts into tears, and then seeks consolation from the audience. Most had no set rules, only vague guidelines that the performers follow with various props. Unlike other forms of art, happenings often allowed chance to enter into the performance and were ever-changing. When chance determines the path the performance will follow, there is no sense of failure: the performance is just what ‘happened’.
What Sontag realised was that they often have an underlying aggressive component. Many happenings unfolded in such a way that it was unclear what was going on. The event might take part in a darkened environment, sightlines might be deliberately blocked, or the performance space deliberately constructed in such a way that as to restrict observation, as when they took place in a long narrow hall. Indeed, often the audience wasn’t just ‘involved’ but actually subjected to various indignities: in some cases they were sprayed with water, doused in flour, subjected to extremely loud noises, or even had coins thrown at them. As she noted: “This abusive involvement of the audience seems to provide, in default of anything else, the dramatic spine of the Happening”. After all, if the audience are merely traditional spectators as in normal theatre, the event is less compelling, less of a ‘happening’.
These observations take the reader back to the opening essay, and Sontag’s comments on the topic of Against Interpretation. It is the epitome of her style, both in its brilliance and in what it doesn’t do. She begins her commentary by going back to Plato, and his view that art is nothing more than representation. He wasn’t keen on art, and as a result left the appreciation of art with a distinction, between ‘form’, the nature of the representation, and ‘content’, what is being represented. Perhaps that wasn’t such an issue when most art was mimetic, when portraits and landscapes were like many of the photographs we see today, trying to reproduce what the eye sees as accurately as possible. However, once artists ceased focussing on direct representation, then the distinction between form and content became central. We could no longer look at a painting without being expected to ask questions: ‘what is this artist saying to us?’, ‘what does this painting mean?’
This is the core of this essay, and of Sontag’s collection of essays. As she explains, “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?”. She explains this further by first offering some examples of how traditional texts, like Biblical stories, are now explained as allegories, this interpretation being justified by explaining its ‘true meaning’. Her compelling example is the Biblical story of the exodus from Egypt and arrival in the promised land, which has been explained as “really an allegory of the individual soul’s emancipation, tribulations and eventual deliverance.” And there was me thinking it was me thinking it was an account of Moses running away from oppression in Egypt and finding a new location for the Jewish people. Silly fellow.
Sontag goes further to explain the latent aggressiveness in contemporary modes of interpretation: “The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs behind ‘behind’ the text, to find the sub-text which is the true one.” This is the distinction that Freud was to make between manifest content and latent content, the true meaning of a text. In interpreting art, often the outcome impoverishes our experience and imagination, by turning the richness of art into prosaic accounts of our world. Alice in Wonderland is really about puberty, and Turner’s amazing painting of The Fighting Temeraire is really about the decline of Britain’s naval power, the passing of the ‘glorious’ age of sail and the growth of ‘modern’ technology in an increasingly industrialised Britain.
She writes so well. Now with the bit between her teeth, she’s having fun, and is especially perceptive when it comes to theatre and cinema, as in this commentary of Elia Kazan’s commentary on directing Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire:
“… in order to direct the play , Kazan had to discover Stanley Kowalski represented the sensual and vengeful barbarism that was engulfing our culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilisation, poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings and all, though a little the worse for wear to be sure. Tennessee Williams forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of Western Civilisation. Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be manageable.”
How did I miss all that, and think it was about the relationship between two complex, fascinating and deeply flawed people?
Susan Sontag is far too clever to stop after making a few perceptive jabs. She goes on to point out that there is an important task in describing works of art, but asks the reader to consider what form of criticism would comprise an approach that “served the work of art, not usurp its place?” She makes it clear that she is arguing for a return to focussing on form. To quote just once more, she explains that “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art – and in criticism – today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the things in itself, of things being what they are.” Sontag was mounting an argument that addressed the need to see more in looking at art, to hear more, to feel more, as she puts it. It is a passionate perspective, and it’s one I embrace.
Recently while I was attending a live concert at the National Gallery of Australia to hear Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, writing about Susan Sontag was on my mind. However, once the music began, for the next 40 minutes that was all there was. I was totally absorbed. I didn’t have to think about explanations, introductions or overviews of the work, why was written, the structure of the movements. I just experienced it. Going to art galleries now, I tend to prefer spending time in just 2-3 rooms, my time taken up with focussing on just a few paintings. When I was younger, I’d read the commentaries on the wall or the gallery guide: now I just look and let what I see fill my mind and shape my experience. Sontag was right.
