OK, so I'm ready now to write about Susan Sontag and her relationship to theory. I'm using three books for research. I'm not going to refer to any biographies. The three books I'm going to read from are, the first book of essays she published - Against Interpretation and Other Essays, the last book of her essays that was published - At the Same Time, and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947 - 1963 (so these were her diaries between the ages of 14 and 30).
I'll probably read in a cycle - an essay from the first, an essay from the second and then some pages from the third, then repeat the cycle. I thought about reading a biography, but this felt more right...to read what she wrote herself. From what I've heard, she was never very receptive to the idea of anyone writing her biography. I think these three books in particular will give me a good sense of her thinking...at least it's a good starting point.
In her shear intellectual audacity - the huge claims she makes, and convincingly prosecutes - she reminds me of Harold Bloom. She demands that you suspend your sense of disbelief and accept her argument on her terms. Also like Bloom, her work encompasses so much learning and reading. In short passages, even individual sentences, Sontag encompasses whole bodies of literature, complex ideas and major historical developments and combines them in original ways to suit her argument.
I'm reading the essay, 'Against Interpretation'. I do see a link to theory. Much of theory is what Sontag is calling interpretation, but there's no need to complicate it....interpretation is basically what we understand it to be: assigning some kind of meaning to the text - saying, it means x or y, and that's what a lot of theory or criticism does. I think Sontag's problem with it is that it's lazy. It reduces the work of art rather than celebrating and appreciating it. She writes that interpretation, as she defines it in this essay - at least the kind of interpretation she is opposed to, 'is a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain "rules" of interpretation'.
But in order to critique examples of what she is calling interpretation, she has to do her own kind of interpretation. Here's an example:
Beckett's delicate dramas of the withdrawn consciousness - pared down to essentials, cut off, often represented as physically immobilized - are read as a statement about modern man's alienation from meaning or from God, or as an allegory of psychopathology.
After this she gives numerous more examples of writers, 'around whom thick encrustations of interpretation have taken hold'.
It's definitely interesting that Sontag introduces her criticism of an interpretation with an interpretation of her own. But there are important differences between what she is doing here and what the kind of interpretation she is criticising does. She's making a one-off observation suitable for this context. She's not making a definitive statement or giving an explanation of what Beckett's work really means. Again, Sontag is a lot like Bloom in that she sees reduction and generalisation as the enemy. In this sense, yes, she is anti-theory, because much of theory wants to de-code the text, and explain it - tell us what the underlying issues are or devise principles about how the text works - how it generates meaning.
Sontag sees this kind of analysis as an attempt to 'disarm' the text, to contain it, to render it inert (because 'Real art has the capacity to make us nervous'). I think her criticism of interpretation is like Blake's criticism of Newton. She believes in the pre-eminence of particulars over principles and systems. For example, she sees Streetcar Named Desire as 'a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois' whereas, 'in order to direct the play, Kazan had to discover that Stanley Kowalski represented the sensual and vengeful barbarism that was engulfing our culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilisation, poetry, poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings and all, though a little worse for wear to be sure'.
On the face of it, I think there's something to be said for both approaches, to be honest. The texts that really resonate with us do so because they touch on issues that we can relate to. The problem I see, and maybe the problem that Susan Sontag has, with interpretation, is when so-called experts want to claim authority for their interpretation and want to say that this - whatever this is - is what the text really means - this is what the text is about. Again, it really brings Bloom to mind because, as he would say, texts aren't ultimately about anything except other texts. And this is theory. 'Against Interpretation' is about literary theory, because it proposes a better way of understanding and engaging with texts. And Sontag admits this when, towards the end of her essay, she begins to consider what a better kind of criticism - one not based on what she calls interpretation - would look like. She suggests that more attention should be paid to form, as opposed to content (because focusing on content leads to interpretation) and that good criticism achieves a kind of transparency, faciltating a more direct and vibrant engagement with the text. She writes near the end of her essay:
The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
I think one of the best points Sontag makes in the whole essay, both in terms of making her argument and also in terms of understanding literature and literary criticism is this:
From interviews, it appears that Rennais and Robbe-Grillet consciously designed Last Year at Marienbad to accommodate a multiplicity of equally plausible interpretations.
She does go on in the next sentence to say that, in any case 'the temptation to interpret Marienbad should be resisted.' but I think that's because the whole point of her essay is opposition to interpretation.
That idea - that the meaning of literary texts is indeterminate - means that no one interpretation is ever right, because that's just not how texts work. Literary texts are made in such a way that they continue to yield new meanings. Each person gets their own meaning from the work, which is as unique as each of us is unique, but at the same time, there will be themes and ideas that speak to us as a member of one group or another.
The meaning I take from 'Against Interpretation' is that, in literary theory, the question we should be asking is not what does it mean?, but how does it mean? - how does it do what it does?
The next essay in the book is, again, a critique of the contemporary state of literary criticism at the time Sontag was writing these essays....then, flipping through the rest of the book, it's pretty much a work of literary and cultural criticism and theory. Sontag writes about writers, artists of different kinds, and their work.
So this is what I see happening in Against Interpretation and Other Essays ⇾ she begins with two essays critiquing the current state of affairs in literary and cultural criticism, and then she says, this is how it's done....and proceeds to give her own version of theory/ criticism in the rest of the book.
After writing this, I read an introductory note that sheds some further light on the book. She explains that she wrote most of the essays in the book between 1962 and 1965, which she says was a very sharply defined period in her life...in early 1962, she finished her first novel, The Benefactor, and in late 1965, she began a second novel. She writes:
The energy, and the anxiety, that spilled over into criticism had a beginning and an end.
I think that's a very important piece of contextual information. The frustration with the prevailing type of criticism and the production of her own kind of criticism, were informed by her practice as a writer of literature.
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