Outstanding Effort | Against Interpretation: And Other Essays

Praise and Forgive | Against Interpretation: And Other Essays | Susan Sontag

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	• Against Interpretation: And Other Essays Susan Sontag Picador, 2001 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Interesting and inspirational

I went to this collection after recently purchasing Camille Paglia's latest critical reading of forty-three poems in Break, Blow, Burn. In the dust cover notes, Paglia is described as "America's premier intellectual provocateur." I had always thought that honor belonged to Sontag.

Sontag's collection contains some of her most famous essays and some rather obscure ones. Instead of the most famous, I found myself re-reading the less widely discussed ones, like the essay "Godard's Vivre Sa Vie" and "Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition" and "A note on novels and films." These essays gave me something new to think about and re-introduced me to Sontag's renowned intellect. They inspired me to buy a few Godard DVDs from Amazon, to attend the Festival of New French Cinema here in Chicago this past weekend and they caused me to ruminate on the contemporary examples of "happenings."

Whether you agree with Sontag's opinions or not, you will probably agree after reading this selection that the depth and breadth of her interests and knowledge is impressive. And she thought and wrote about things that most, even academics, had not been willing to take on. For that, we should be appreciative. For her willingness to be a true public intellectual, we should be grateful. For her legacy to the realm of critical theory, we are indebted.

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Outstanding Effort

This may be Sontag's most rigorous and important collection of essays, complete with topics ranging from Levi-Strauss to Godard. In it is her famous essay "On Camp," which would later make her a superstar in the New York artistic community.

Sontag is worried about intellectual interpretation, the erudite and narrow approach to understanding a work of art. She calls on us to "show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means." Her approach is far reaching and yet acute and highly attuned to the intellectual aspects of the fine arts.

This collection includes fabulous essays on Sartre, Bresson, Beckett, Lukacs, Resnais, and many others. It is evidence of her astonishing ability to think seriously and with tremendous beauty about that which is most important.

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Praise and Forgive

America has very few independent intellectuals, that is, intellectuals free of academic responsibilities and tenure. Most grub for life-long jobs and then throw away their careers on campus duties and teaching. Gore Vidal, Richard Rodriguez, Susan Sontag...there are others, I'm sure, but not many. It's nearly impossible to make a living now in journalism, so the call to academic prostitution is great. Sontag got through and deserves our praise. God knows, like other free-lance intellectuals she lacked manners and never learned to grovel the way our teachers do, trained as they are to please the young. Much like Sartre, she could be dumb and silly and arrogant, but in the end she survived the culture wars, praising excellence for its own sake and refusing to bestow the title of greatness on to every bestselling author reviewed in the NY Times. She was great and her genius lay in one small area, as far as I can see. She introduced American readers to some very exciting European film makers, theorists, and writers. She herself is a forgettable author of fiction. She had limited talent as an artist, if any, but like Edmund Wilson she brought the latest European thinkers to the attention of American readers of the New York Review of Books and other periodicals. She wrote breathlessly and exhaustively on authors of all sorts. She was capable of passion and insight. She made you fall in love with writers as diverse as Sartre, Barthes, and Canetti. For this we should be grateful. I am.

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The wisdom of Susan Sontag

Critical writing serves to introduce a reader to non-mainstream writers when it is well done. This is well done. Sontag was a writer and thinker of high caliber. Her special interests in French literature, film, and psychoanalysis are highlighted in this collection of essays.
Discussions of form and content in art recall the art theory of the Greeks of art as representation. Interpretation is a conscious state of mind interpreting a code. Interpretation is a radical strategy conserving an old text. It is the modern way of understanding something. Flight from interpretation seems to be a feature of modern painting. Films may have a liberating anti-symbolic quality. To be able to experience art on several levels is a matter of redundancy. Unfortunately, the author contends, redundancy is a principal affliction of modern life.

All agree that style and content are indissoluble. The duality persists, nevertheless, particularly in criticism. Style necessarily persists. Even realism is in truth a stylistic convention. Stylization reflects ambivalence. Morality is a code of acts. Art performs a moral task. Genet's books are both works of art and works about art. Great art overrides everything else. Nietzsche held that art is a metaphysical supplement to nature. Art exists at a distance from reality. An artist's style is a particular idiom.

Cesare Pavese showed delicacy, economy, and control. Sontag deems Pavese to have been more gifted than Silone and Moravia. Pavese felt literature was a defense against the attacks of life. The writings of Camus embody moral beauty, not artistic or intellectual beauty. To Claude Lewvi-Strauss being an anthropologist is a total occupation. Anthropologists exploit their own intellectual alienation.

The critic Georg Lukacs had a free-wheeling speculative view of Marxism. He concentrated on nineteenth century authors and for the most part wrote in German, not Hungarian. Sartre practiced criticism as immersion. There are no guidelines. In SAINT GENET he tries to impose commitment on action. Genet's task is self-transfiguration. Ionesco discovered the poetry of cliche and language-as-thing to use in his work. Ionesco's development was the reverse of Brecht's.

Sontag identifies the supreme tragic event of the twentieth century as the murder of six million Jews. She remarks that tragedy is not an art form, but a form of history. It is appropriate to compare Rolf Hochhuth's THE DEPUTY with the Eichmann trial. Among other things, trial is a theatrical form. THE DEPUTY has a documentary intention. In her piece on Miller's AFTER THE FALL Sontag opines that Miller writes on the level of a left-wing newspaper cartoon. The classics of Broadway liberalism were too optimistic. The playwrights thought that problems could be solved. Weiss's MARAT/SADE is a play of ideas. The characters debate in it the meaning of the French Revolution.

Robert Bresson's films have a common theme, liberty and confinement. Godard's films focus on proof, not analysis. Camp, (defined by Christopher Isherwood), is something to which Sontag was drawn. It is a sensibility, a matter of subjective preferences. Taste governs every human response. Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism and it is mannerist.

In this review I have tried to give the prospective reader an impression of some of the excellent writings in this collection.

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A classic collection

Susan Sontag has the reputation of being infinitely pretentious and self-important, which is probably true. Ordinarily I hate these qualities, but somehow I'm able to overlook them because her thought - in this collection particularly - is just that good.

"Against Interpretation" compiles nearly 30 essays dealing with works of art (literary, cinematic, theatrical, etc.). Some deal with obscure topics - "Spiritual Style In the Films of Robert Bresson", "Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown's 'Life Against Death'" - others have practically become household names, as is the case with the standout piece "Notes On Camp".

All the essays address aesthetic problems - often minor, but nonetheless engaging. Each essay draws you in, causing you to mull over a topic thoroughly: for example, I'd never seen Eugene Ionesco as self-absorbed and aphoristic before, but Sontag's argument about his work is so quietly persuasive, with subtle touches of mockery driving the argument further home. Same goes for her thoughts on Simone Weil.

Sontag spent her professional life making people angry and uncomfortable with her political stances, which sounded infuriating taken out of context, and surprisingly sensible when heard with an open mind. These essays show a very different side of this great thinker - but regardless of her subject, it's her quiet wit and passion that keep her work so compelling, and which make this one of my favorite books despite its obscure topics.

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First published in 1966, this celebrated book--Sontag's first collection of essays--quickly became a modern classic, and has had an enormous influence in America and abroad on thinking about the arts and contemporary culture. As well as the title essay and the famous "Notes on Camp," Against Interpretation includes original and provocative discussions of Sartre, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thinking. This edition features a new afterword by Sontag.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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