Susan Sontag’s Essay “Against Interpretation”

Susan Sontag is an avante-guarde writer (who discards conventions) who belongs to the American school of criticism. She has written novels like The Benefactor (1964) and Death Kit (1968) . “Notes on Camp”, an essay was first published in 1964, and was republished in 1966 in her collection of essays, Against Interpretation. 

Susan Sontag in her essay “Against Interpretation” focuses on what an interpretation really is. She discusses and mixes the ideas of other writers and further differentiates two kinds of interpretation – form based interpretation and content based interpretation.

She talks about the past with the present interpretation. Nothing was rejected in classical interpretation. She believes that it was the classical period which gave importance to ‘content’ of a work other than meaning and other things. She also believes that margins are always inverted. The title “against” does not mean that Sontag is against interpretation, rather it questions those that are against and tries to defend interpretation. 

Hence, Sontag advocates against interpretations of a work that plays more importance in finding the meaning, message, intention in a work. She strongly believes that in trying to establish the content of a work the interpreter avoids the form of the work. This is because it has been believed that literature or any work of art has two major functions; – ‘to teach’ and ‘to delight’ in trying to assimilate art into thought or art into culture. An interpreter exercises all the sensory experiences to set up a “shadow world of meanings” and “turn the world into this world”. The world here she refers to is the text in all it’s gestalt glory and this is what the interpreter recreates. Hence, the world of art gets depleted and impoverished in the transformation of ‘the’ to ‘this’ work, art or world. 

Sontag traces interpretation with all its doubtful, corollaries, to the classical theory of art as mimesis (imitation) of reality. Plato speaks of the value of art being dubious, since the poet-creator is “twice removed from reality”. Therefore art was neither useful nor true. Aristotle disputed this idea and interpreted that art is “medicinally useful in arousing and purging dangerous emotions” (catharsis). Here, Aristotle does not reject Plato but only adds more meaning to substantiate and defend the value of both the poet and his heart. She argues that, yet they both have looked upon art as (in Freudian terms) manifest content with the intention to communicate meanings alone. Until the advent of New Criticism, the study of ‘form’ was never given a serious thought or exercised diligently. Form is present in all animate and inanimate things even as content is. Modern theorists following soon after the formalist school believed the theory of art as a subjective expression to the point of viewing art as semiotics (study of signs) and power relationships.

Irrespective of the conceptions on the theories of art, whether art is a picture of social reality or of language, the content of it is what all finally look to (that something it says or it is trying to say or it has said). The only difference is in classical theory interpretation, only alter in order to reconcile meaning where insistent but respectful in their opinions and give one more meaning to the existing meaning without rejecting the original. On the other hand, modern theorists were radical, aggressive and dismissive in their act of interpretation. These modern theorists acting as interpreters question the truth and started excavating in order to create new meanings by “digging behind the text”. That is, in the classical period of interpretation, the old is not discarded but only revamped. On the contrary, modern interpreters discarded established truths in order to recreate their own. Therefore interpretation does not give absolute and complete meaning that is it does not have absolute and complete meaning; that is, it does not have absolute value. On the other hand, Sontag believes interpretation must be self-evaluated, with the historical view of human consciousness. 

So there has been two phases in understanding art – the innocent acceptance of art (needed no defence or support outside itself) and secondly, the experienced justification of what it says or attempts to say. In this case art began needing support from outside to appreciate it. The theory of interpretation both makes and mars context as she believes that the task of interpretation is virtually one of translating through transforming. In reducing the work of art to its content, an interpreter “lames the work of art”. Sontag cites Thomas Mann as an over-cooperative author and “the mars ravishment” of Kafka. 

By three armies of interpreters one citing is writing as a social allegory, the other as psychoanalytic allegory and the third as a religious allegory. Among the three interpretations, Kafka as Kafka is lost. In the same way, Samuel Beckett is read as an absurd world of man’s alienation from meaning or from God and from the psychological point of view looked on as an allegory of psycho-pathology. The numerous writers that Sontag cites show that interpretation has only undone the gestalt of a work. Answering the question, what kind of criticism or commentary on the arts is disabled today, Sontag begins saying that works of art are ineffable and cannot be described or paraphrased. 

A work of art can be as Sontag believes that more attention to form in art should be given. She also asks for “a vocabulary of forms” that is like descriptive rather than prescriptive. Thirdly she finds equally valuable those criticisms which are accurate, sharp and feels the form of a work of an art. In conclusion Sontag advocates against looking at an interpreting art didactically or as a delight. What is needed according to her is to refine our senses “to see, more to hear more and to feel more”. If a reader learns to remove the content from focus, one will begin to see things as they are and as they should be. She closes with a very debatable punchline saying “in place of a hermeneutics we need and erotics of art”.