Interpretation is an act of violence against the artist. At least that’s what Sontag believed. Read on to find out why and my thoughts on it.
Historical Context
If you’re unfamiliar, Susan Sontag was a well-known cultural critic and essayist (among other things). She started publishing in the mid-’60s and continued all the way into the 2000s.
Against Interpretation was published in 1966.
The context here is interesting.
If you’re unfamiliar academic literary criticism, there was a period of time starting around the early ’40s where literary theorists thought a text could stand on its own.
The text would make you feel something. The symbols and themes would mean something to you. And that was how it should be since you were the one doing the interpreting.
The nail in the coffin of the author came a bit later with Barthe’s Death of the Author. This school of thought was roughly associated with something called “New Criticism.”
The New Critics argued for doing close readings of a text, and this came to dominate the scene so much that we were all taught this as the only way to analyze literature.
Hirsch reacted to the New Criticism as somehow being too loose. You could make anything mean anything through a close reading. He wanted only certain narrow, well-justified interpretations, based on the author’s intent, to be valid.
For an in-depth examination of Hirsch’s viewpoint, check out my article: Authorial Intent and Validity in Interpretation.
Sontag’s Interpretation
In “Against Interpretation,” Sontag also reacts to the New Criticism, but in the opposite direction: the whole idea of interpretation is wrong-headed.
She begins by lamenting for a time when we weren’t so inundated with theory. She argues that we’ve become too obsessed with content.
We tend to approach a work of art ready to interpret and extract its content. We start pulling out symbols and translating these into some meaning before we even have a chance to experience the work.
Art is supposed to be messy, complicated, and uncomfortable at times. The act of interpretation clears out the mess, simplifies it, and makes it comfortable.
We often feel an overwhelming urge that works of art must be about something.
How often do you hear:
I’ve heard of that book. What’s it about?
It is even possible that the artist intended certain objects to be interpreted as symbols, but the meaning is not what gives art its merit.
Abstract art tries to be all form and no content in order to resist the destruction of interpretation. But artists shouldn’t have to flee from interpreters in order to escape.
In the seventh section of the essay, Sontag makes a startling prediction.
The fact that films have not been overrun by interpreters is in part due simply to the newness of cinema as an art.
From our vantage point, 50 years later, we can say she was correct.
Open any newspaper or go to a film blog or find an academic journal of film studies. Cinema gets dissected through interpretation as much as any other art form.
Sontag’s Solution Against Interpretation
She ends the essay with a solution to this problem of over-interpretation.
Commentary and criticism are both possible and necessary. We need to switch from our obsession with content and talk more about form.
She points to Barthes and others for people who have given solid formal analysis. We could also try to “reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.”
We can focus on description rather than on what you think the description means.
When we interpret, we take the sensory experience for granted. The purpose of art is to be experienced, not over-analyzed.
Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The goal of criticism should be to make works of art more real to us.
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.
My Thoughts
Now that I’ve summarized the essay, I’ll comment on it.
I think this is in some sense an overreaction or maybe even a straw man argument.
For example, Hirsch, who values the author’s intent, would probably say that if the author intended for the work to be a purely visceral experience with no excess symbolism in it, then to read that symbolism in it would be an invalid interpretation.
More specifically, genre matters.
Some genres call for detailed, complicated interpretation and some call for no interpretation. Sontag’s essay seems to call for a complete rejection of interpretation whereas the other side seems to argue that if you want to interpret, then here are some tools for it.
Maybe this is the 50-year gap, but I don’t know anyone that calls for always interpreting all the time.
Even the most analytic of critics would admit that it is perfectly valid to just experience a work sometimes. So, I guess I’m somewhat confused at what this essay is really arguing against.
On the other hand, I fully agree that we often over-analyze and reach for interpretations without first experiencing a work.
I absolutely hate the question: what is that about?
- Romance novels can be about something.
- A TV sitcom can be about something (or in a particularly famous case about nothing).
- Essays can be about something.
Great art stops being art if you try to reduce it to some five-sentence plotline.
The thing that it is about is not the thing that makes it worth experiencing.
