Against Interpretation and Other Essays

by Susan Sontag

It is easy to see how this view of love is peculiarly congruent to the modern vocation of the writer. In the Aristotelian tradition of art as imitation, the writer was the medium or vehicle for describing the truth about something outside himself. In the modern tradition (roughly, Rousseau forward) of art as expression, the artist tells the truth about himself. Therefore it was inevitable that a theory of love as an experience or revelation of oneself, deceptively presented as an experience or revelation of the value of a loved person or object, should suggest itself. Love, like art, becomes a medium of self-expression. But because making a woman is not as solitary an act as making a novel or a poem, it is doomed to failure. A prevailing theme of serious literature and cinema today is the failure of love.