Against Interpretation and Other Essays

by Susan Sontag

Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious. Since he considered ordinary material things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures, even the best painting of a bed would be only an “imitation of an imitation.”

Art is useful, after all, Aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions.

Interpretation first appears in the culture of late classical antiquity, when the power and credibility of myth had been broken by the “realistic” view of the world introduced by scientific enlightenment. Once the question that haunts post-mythic consciousness—that of the seemliness of religious symbols—had been asked, the ancient texts were, in their pristine form, no longer acceptable.

Then interpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to “modern” demands.

Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers.

interpretation is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius. It is, indeed, the modern way of understanding something, and is applied to works of every quality.

Thus, in the notes that Elia Kazan published on his production of A Streetcar Named Desire, it becomes clear that, 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 civilization, poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings and all, though a little the worse for wear to be sure. Tennessee Williams’ forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of Western civilization. Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be manageable.

It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else.

Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art.

Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be … just what it is.

Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there.

practically all metaphors for style amount to placing matter on the inside, style on the outside. It would be more to the point to reverse the metaphor. The matter, the subject, is on the outside; the style is on the inside.

In art, “content” is, as it were, the pretext, the goal, the lure which engages consciousness in essentially formal processes of transformation. This is how we can, in good conscience, cherish works of art which, considered in terms of “content,” are morally objectionable to us. (The difficulty is of the same order as that involved in appreciating works of art, such as The Divine Comedy, whose premises are intellectually alien.) To call Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will and The Olympiad masterpieces is not to gloss over Nazi propaganda with aesthetic lenience. The Nazi propaganda is there. But something else is there, too, which we reject at our loss.

Because they project the complex movements of intelligence and grace and sensuousness, these two films of Riefenstahl (unique among works of Nazi artists) transcend the categories of propaganda or even reportage.

Genet, in his writings, may seem to be asking us to approve of cruelty, treacherousness, licentiousness, and murder. But so far as he is making a work of art, Genet is not advocating anything at all. He is recording, devouring, transfiguring his experience.

Pornography has a “content” and is designed to make us connect (with disgust, desire) with that content. It is a substitute for life. But art does not excite; or, if it does, the excitation is appeased, within the terms of the aesthetic experience. All great art induces contemplation, a dynamic contemplation. However much the reader or listener or spectator is aroused by a provisional identification of what is in the work of art with real life, his ultimate reaction—so far as he is reacting to the work as a work of art—must be detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation and approval.

the world (all there is) cannot, ultimately, be justified. Justification is an operation of the mind which can be performed only when we consider one part of the world in relation to another—not when we consider all there is.

If art is the supreme game which the will plays with itself, “style” consists of the set of rules by which this game is played. And the rules are always, finally, an artificial and arbitrary limit, whether they are rules of form (like terza rima or the twelve-tone row or frontality) or the presence of a certain “content.”

To the extent that a work seems right, just, unimaginable otherwise (without loss or damage), what we are responding to is a quality of its style.

But the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed.

In the strictest sense, all the contents of consciousness are ineffable. Even the simplest sensation is, in its totality, indescribable. Every work of art, therefore, needs to be understood not only as something rendered, but also as a certain handling of the ineffable.

Whenever speech or movement or behavior or objects exhibit a certain deviation from the most direct, useful, insensible mode of expression or being in the world, we may look at them as having a “style,” and being both autonomous and exemplary.

Pavese rediscovers, with Stendhal, that love is an essential fiction; it is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. What one takes to be an attachment to another person is unmasked as one more dance of the solitary ego.

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.

There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie.

But what about boredom? Can that ever be justified? I think it can, sometimes. (Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.) We should acknowledge certain uses of boredom as one of the most creative stylistic features of modern literature—as the conventionally ugly and messy have already become essential resources of modern painting, and silence (since Webern) a positive, structural element in contemporary music.

Man, haunted by the world, acts. He acts in order to modify the world in view of an end, an ideal. An act is therefore intentional, not accidental, and an accident is not to be counted as an act. Neither the gestures of personality nor the works of the artist are simply to be experienced. They must be understood, they must be interpreted as modifications of the world.

Corresponding to the primitive rite of anthropophagy, the eating of human beings, is the philosophical rite of cosmophagy, the eating of the world.

The use of the psychological microscope must not be intermittent, a device merely in the furthering of the plot. This means a radical recasting of the novel. Not only must the novelist not tell a story; he must not distract the reader with gross events like a murder or a great love. The more minute, the less sensational the event the better.

(She has some particularly sharp and mocking words to say about the creaky he said’s, she replied’s, so-and-so declared’s with which most novels are strewn.) Dialogue must “become vibrant and swollen with those tiny inner movements that propel and extend it.” The novel must disavow the means of classical psychology—introspection—and proceed instead by immersion.

The writer, she says, must renounce “all desire to write ‘beautifully’ for the pleasure of doing so, to give aesthetic enjoyment to himself or to his readers.” Style is “capable of beauty only in the sense that any athlete’s gesture is beautiful; the better it is adapted to its purpose, the greater the beauty.”

Within Germany, when the Catholic hierarchy strongly opposed Hitler’s euthanasia program for elderly and incurably ill Aryans—the trial run for the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem—it was stopped.

In the world envisaged by Judaism and Christianity, there are no free-standing arbitrary events. All events are part of the plan of a just, good, providential deity; every crucifixion must be topped by a resurrection. Every disaster or calamity must be seen either as leading to a greater good or else as just and adequate punishment fully merited by the sufferer. This moral adequacy of the world asserted by Christianity is precisely what tragedy denies. Tragedy says there are disasters which are not fully merited, that there is ultimate injustice in the world.

Every idea is reducible to a cliché”, and the function of a cliché is to castrate an idea.

one feature of the liberal sensibility hangs on. We still tend to choose our images of virtue from among our victims.

The rest of the performances gave only various degrees of pain.

some performances rose to the height of mediocrity,

Proof differs from analysis. Proof establishes that something happened. Analysis shows why it happened. Proof is a mode of argument that is, by definition, complete; but the price of its completeness is that proof is always formal. Only what is already contained in the beginning is proven at the end. In analysis, however, there are always further angles of understanding, new realms of causality. Analysis is substantive. Analysis is a mode of argument that is, by definition, always incomplete; it is, properly speaking, interminable.

Being free means being responsible. One is free, and therefore responsible, when one realizes that things are as they are.

In the classic models of Utopian thinking—Plato’s Republic, Campanella’s City of the Sun, More’s Utopia, Swift’s land of the Houyhnhnms, Voltaire’s Eldorado—society had worked out a perfect consensus. In these societies reasonableness had achieved an unbreakable supremacy over the emotions. Since no disagreement or social conflict was intellectually plausible, none was possible. As in Melville’s Typee, “they all think the same.” The universal rule of reason meant universal agreement. It is interesting, too, that societies in which reason was pictured as totally ascendant were also traditionally pictured as having an ascetic or materially frugal and economically simple mode of life.

For science fiction films may also be described as a popular mythology for the contemporary negative imagination about the impersonal. The other-world creatures that seek to take “us” over are an “it,” not a “they.” The planetary invaders are usually zombie-like. Their movements are either cool, mechanical, or lumbering, blobby. But it amounts to the same thing. If they are non-human in form, they proceed with an absolutely regular, unalterable movement (unalterable save by destruction). If they are human in form—dressed in space suits, etc.—then they obey the most rigid military discipline, and display no personal characteristics whatsoever. And it is this regime of emotionlessness, of impersonality, of regimentation, which they will impose on the earth if they are successful.

(The dark secret behind human nature used to be the upsurge of the animal—as in King Kong. The threat to man, his availability to dehumanization, lay in his own animality. Now the danger is understood as residing in man’s ability to be turned into a machine.)

The theme of depersonalization (being “taken over”) which I have been talking about is a new allegory reflecting the age-old awareness of man that, sane, he is always perilously close to insanity and unreason. But there is something more here than just a recent, popular image which expresses man’s perennial, but largely unconscious, anxiety about his sanity. The image derives most of its power from a supplementary and historical anxiety, also not experienced consciously by most people, about the depersonalizing conditions of modern urban life.

Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.

The first assumption is reflected in Freud’s own acceptance of the view that sexuality is “lower” and the sublimations in art, science, and culture “higher.” Added to this is the pessimistic view of sexuality which regards the sexual as precisely the area of vulnerability in human personality. The libidinal impulses are in uncontrollable conflict in themselves, a prey to frustration, aggression, and internalization in guilt; and the repressive agency of culture is necessary to harness the self-repressive mechanisms installed in human nature itself.

For Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content.

The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Art Nouveau craftsman who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient! Genuine Camp—for instance, the numbers devised for the Warner Brothers musicals of the early thirties (42nd Street; The Golddiggers of 1933;… of 1935;… of 1937; etc.) by Busby Berkeley—does not mean to be funny. Camping—say, the plays of Noel Coward—does. It seems unlikely that much of the traditional opera repertoire could be such satisfying Camp if the melodramatic absurdities of most opera plots had not been taken seriously by their composers. One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all.

Probably, intending to be campy is always harmful. The perfection of Trouble in Paradise and The Maltese Falcon, among the greatest Camp movies ever made, comes from the effortless smooth way in which tone is maintained. This is not so with such famous would-be Camp films of the fifties as All About Eve and Beat the Devil. These more recent movies have their fine moments, but the first is so slick and the second so hysterical; they want so badly to be campy that they’re continually losing the beat….