Against Interpretation--Brief Summary

Susan Sontag

 

In ancient times, Man experienced art as incantation. Art was an instrument of ritual.  The Greeks proposed the earliest theory of art. Art is an imitation of reality ( mimesis).

The mimetic theory wanted art ‘to justify itself’. Art had to prove its value. Plato believed that art had no value. Even the best ‘painting’ of a bed is only an 'imitation of an imitation' and useless for practical purposes. Aristotle, the disciple of Plato, modified the theory of imitation. Aristotle said art was just ‘imitation’, not an ‘imitation of an imitation’.  He claimed that art has therapeutic value. ‘Art is useful …medicinally in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions’ (Catharsis).

Sontag argues that ‘all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art … remained within the confines of mimesis or representation.' That theory made art ‘problematic’ and ‘in need of defence.' The defence gave birth to the dichotomy between form and content, asserting that ‘content’ was essential and ‘form’ was an accessory.

 

Today, many critics discard mimesis. They prefer the theory of art as a subjective expression of personal perspectives. However, the main features of the mimetic theory have not disappeared. Today, the content of a work of art receives much attention.

 

We cannot return to the age when there were no literary theories and no need for art to justify itself. Then, nobody asked what a work of art said because one knew what it did. Sontag regrets that, till the end of consciousness, we have to go on defending art.

 

Content has become a 'hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle ...philistinism.' Content initiates a ‘perennial’ and never-completed project of interpretation. According to Sontag, interpretation is ‘a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a code and “rules” of interpretation’. ‘The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreters read their meanings into the work of art. Interpretation, in effect, transforms a work of art.

 

Interpretation began in the ‘culture of late classical antiquity’ when scientific development destroyed myth's ‘power and credibility'. The progress of science made it impossible to accept ancient texts in their 'pristine form'. The seemliness of the religious symbols became questionable. ‘Then, interpretation became necessary to reconcile the ancient texts to modern demands.

 

Sontag cites the examples of the Stoic philosophers, who, to make their Gods moral, ‘allegorized away the rude features’ of Zeus and his unruly clan. They explained that the depiction of the adultery of Zeus and Leto (Homer) was not adultery but ‘the union of power and wisdom’. Similarly, Philo of Alexandria interpreted the literal, historical narrative of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms.

 

We can see from the examples cited above that there is a clear difference between the meaning of the text and the demands of later readers. Interpretation tries to solve the difference. The text has become unacceptable (for some reason), but we cannot discard it. Here, interpretation becomes a ‘radical strategy’. We defend the text through an acceptable interpretation. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. However, he cannot admit to doing this. He claims to make it intelligible by disclosing its true meaning. The interpretation may be very far from the original meaning of the text. However, the interpreter will claim to be ‘reading of a sense that is already there’ in the text. The Rabbinic and Christian spiritual interpretations of the erotic Song of Songs provide ‘a notorious example’, says Sontag.

 

Today, interpretation is more complex. It is prompted not by ‘piety toward the troublesome text’ but due to an ‘overt contempt for appearances’.  ‘The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one’.

 

Sontag says that the doctrines of Marx and Freud offer us examples of interpretation as excavation. Their doctrines rest on ‘elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation’.

 

Marx and Freud classify all ‘observable phenomena’ as ‘manifest content’. The ‘manifest content’ is ‘probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning--the latent content beneath’.

 

Marx treated all social events as revolutions and wars as occasions for interpretations. Freud considered all neurotic symptoms, slips of the tongue, and texts as cases for interpretation. Both believed that the events ‘only seem to be intelligible’. They have no meaning without interpretation. ‘To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect, to find an equivalent for it.’

 

Sontag regrets that the ‘project of interpretation’ has become ‘reactionary and stifling’. She compares interpretation to the fumes of automobiles and heavy industry that pollute our atmosphere. The effusion of interpretations pollutes our art and ‘poisons our sensibilities’. Our culture already suffers, Sontag feels, from ‘the hypertrophy of the intellect’ gained at the expense of ‘energy and sensual capability’.

 

Interpretation is ‘the revenge of the intellect upon the world.’ ‘To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world… to set up a shadow world of “meanings”. ‘Our world is already ‘depleted and impoverished’. Interpretation duplicates our world. We must keep it away. Let us experience (more immediately) what we have.

 

The philistinism of interpretation is more rampant in literature than in any other art. Literary critics assume that their task is to transform a poem, play, or novel into something different. The works of Kafka have been subjected to mass ravishment by armies of interpreters. They read them as social allegories, as studies of frustrations and insanity, or as religious allegories. Samuel Beckett's works have attracted interpreters like leeches. They read the works as statements about alienation from meaning or from God or as allegories of psychopathology.

 

 

Sontag points out another subtle aspect of interpretation. She says interpretation ‘indicates a dissatisfaction with the work’, a wish to replace it with something else. Sontag recommends methods to escape the tyranny of interpretation. She says that ‘a great deal of today’s art may be understood as motivated by a flight from interpretation’. Sometimes, art becomes a ‘parody’ to avoid interpretation, or it may become abstract, decorative, or non-art.

 

‘Abstract painting is the attempt to have …no content; since there is no content, there can be no interpretation’. Pop art takes the opposite means to escape interpretation. Here, the content is so blatant that interpretation becomes unnecessary. Much modern poetry attempts to bring back ‘the magic’ of words to escape ‘the rough grip of interpretation’.

 

Avant-gardism provides no lasting defence against ‘interpretation’. It will force art to be ‘perpetually on the run’. It also perpetuates the distinction between ‘form’ and ‘content’. The ideal defence against interpretation is to make art ‘unified’, ‘clean’,  and with ‘rapid momentum’. ‘The address of the work is direct. The work can be just what it is. Films employ this method. ‘In good films, there is always a directness that frees us from the itch to interpret’. Sontag points out that many old Hollywood films have ‘this liberating anti-symbolic quality’.

 

Sontag believes that films do not face the problem of interpretation due to ‘the newness of cinema as an art’. Films were also part of mass culture, as opposed to high culture, and were largely ignored by most people. ‘Then, too, there is always something other than content in the cinema to grab hold of for those who want to analyze. The cinema (unlike the novel) possesses a vocabulary of forms—the explicit, complex, and discussable technology of camera movements, cutting, and composition of the frame that goes into filmmaking.

 

Sontag shares her ideas about the desirable kind of criticism.  The first thing we have to do is to pay attention to ‘form’ in art. Undue stress on ‘content’ leads to ‘arrogance of interpretation’. The stress on ‘content’ must be replaced with ‘more extended and more thorough descriptions of form’. To achieve this, we need a ‘vocabulary’ for forms. The best criticism, says Sontag, is that which ‘dissolves considerations of content into those of form’.

 

Unfortunately, we do not have a ‘poetics’ of the novel. We do not have a clear idea about the forms of narration. Film criticism, Sontag hopes, will lead us to a better understanding of the novel form.

 

Concluding her arguments, Sontag writes about ‘transparence’, the most liberating value in art and criticism. She defines ‘transparence’ thus: ‘Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are’.

 

Once, writers created works of art to be experienced on multiple levels. Today, it is unwelcome because redundancy has become ‘the principal affliction of modern life’. Once, interpreting works of art was ‘revolutionary and creative’. Now we do not need to assimilate Art into Thought, or… Art into Culture.

‘Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience.’ All the conditions of modern life ‘dull our sensory faculties’. We have to recover our senses. ‘We must learn to see more...hear more... feel more.' We must not ‘squeeze more content out of the work than is already there’. Our aim should be to reduce the content so that we can experience the work of art. ‘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. In place of hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art. [1559]

Revised on 28/01/26

Dr. S. Sreekumar, Retd. Professor of English, Govt. Arts College, Coimbatore-18.

Disclaimer 

All the essays in this blog are intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Indian universities. They are meant to provide guidance and do not substitute for the original texts. Students must make sure to read the original works. The writer hopes to support students from underdeveloped areas of our country.