Note: This will be the penultimate post in the GOAT literary critics series, with the final post being about Harold Bloom (brilliant but not great). This post provides (partial) context for that judgment.
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I have chosen to write about Susan Sontag because she was one of the best known public intellectuals of the last half forty years of the previous century. She started publishing in the 1960s and died in 2004. She is roughly Harold Bloom’s contemporary, but charted a different path. While she did graduate work in philosophy and literature at Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne, she never completed her doctorate. I was certainly aware of her during my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins. I remember Dick Macksey referring to her as “Susan Suntan” on more than one occasion, just why, I’m not sure. But I don’t remember actually reading her, though I may well have. In any event I have read her now.
Her thinking about interpretation, and about Claude Lévi-Strauss – and the latent interactions between them – make an interesting prelude to my final essay in this series, which will, once again, be about Bloom, brilliant but not great. Think of Boom’s work as falling into the yawning chasm between these two Sontag essays.
On form and for an “erotics” of art
“Everyone” read Susan Sontag’s best-known essay, “Against Interpretation,” originally published in 1964 and then republished in 1966 as the title essay in the collection of the same name. Everyone but me, though I was certainly aware of it. Literary critics, however, paid it no mind, as they kept on interpreting and are still at it.
Here's the opening two paragraphs:
THE earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. (Cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etc.) The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.
It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.
And that second paragraph eventually leads to this:
Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something.
This emphasis on content led, in turn, to interpretation.
Sontag will then go on to point out the limitations of interpretation, which “it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.” First, notice the spatial metaphors, digs behind, subtext; these are common when talking about the relationship between critic and text. Similarly, the New Critics talked of “close reading.” How close? Is your nose only 12 inches from the text rather than 18? Too literal. But, really, what kind of distance are we talking about if not physical?
Continuing on, while Sontag allows that “in some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act,” that is not true today. Today “the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling.” Interpretation has become “the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
She goes on to assert:
Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.
This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else.
Whether or not one believes interpretation to be philistinism – academic literary critics, obviously, did not for the most part believe that – it is certainly true academic literary criticism was interpretative in character, though not quite for “decades” (more like a decade and a half). As I remarked at the outset, it remains so to this day.
She then goes on to elaborate on her assertion that “a great deal of today’s art may be understood as motivated by a flight from interpretation,” which I’m going to skip over. A couple pages later she arrives at her central point:
What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms.
And then:
What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
Her final sentence: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
That’s all well and good, but just what would such a criticism actually be like? In talking about recovering our sense, of hearing and feeling more, she’s not using the metaphor of distance, of close reading, of digging behind the text. Is she calling for a criticism which itself engages our feelings, that somehow facilitates our ability to experience the work of art?
This is not at all obvious. It’s vague. Nor, when I think of it, is a purely formal approach to either literature, or film, for that matter. Just what does that mean as critical practice, not as abstract statement of policy? I’ll return to those topics after a look at her essay on Lévi-Strauss.
Lévi-Strauss, hero and formalist
A year before she wrote that essay, she wrote one about Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The anthropologist as hero.” She begins:
MOST serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness. The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo. And the only way to cure this spiritual nausea seems to be, at least initially, to exacerbate it. Modern thought is pledged to a kind of applied Hegelianism: seeking its Self in its Other. Europe seeks itself in the exotic —in Asia, in the Middle East, among pre-literate peoples, in a mythic America; a fatigued rationality seeks itself in the impersonal energies of sexual ecstasy or drugs; consciousness seeks its meaning in unconsciousness; humanistic problems seek their oblivion in scientific “value neutrality” and quantification. The “other” is experienced as a harsh purification of “self.” But at the same time the “self” is busily colonizing all strange domains of experience. Modern sensibility moves between two seemingly contradictory but actually related impulses: surrender to the exotic, the strange, the other; and the domestication of the exotic, chiefly through science.
She ends her next paragraph, her second, by presenting our hero: “And, more recently, Claude Lévi-Strauss has invented the profession of the anthropologist as a total occupation, one involving a spiritual commitment like that of the creative artist or the adventurer or the psychoanalyst.” Hmmm. It sounds good, but just what does it mean? No matter. It’s the sort of thing that appeals to intellectuals in search of adventure.
Somewhat later:
The anthropologist is not simply a neutral observer. He is a man in control of, and even consciously exploiting, his own intellectual alienation. A technique de dépaysement, Lévi-Strauss calls his profession in Structural Anthropology. He takes for granted the philistine formulas of modern scientific “value neutrality.” What he does is to offer an exquisite, aristocratic version of this neutrality. The anthropologist in the field becomes the very model of the 20th century consciousness: a “critic at home” but a “conformist elsewhere.” Lévi-Strauss acknowledges that this paradoxical spiritual state makes it impossible for the anthropologist to be a citizen.
And this:
And back home there were the great consumers of anthropological data, building rationalist world views, like Frazer and Spencer and Robertson Smith and Freud. But always anthropology has struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. The horror of the primitive (naïvely expressed by Frazer and Lévy-Bruhl) is never far from the anthropologist’s consciousness. Lévi-Strauss marks the furthest reach of the conquering of the aversion. The anthropologist in the manner of Lévi-Strauss is a new breed altogether. He is not, like recent generations of American anthropologists, simply a modest data-collecting “observer.” Nor does he have any axe—Christian, rationalist, Freudian, or otherwise—to grind. Essentially he is engaged in saving his own soul, by a curious and ambitious act of intellectual catharsis.
All this is very heroic, just the sort of thing one wants in the figurehead of an intellectual movement. And that’s what Lévi-Strauss had become by that time. He’d published an intellectual autobiography, Tristes Tropiques, in 1955, which became a hit in intellectual circles. Sontag hailed it as ”one of the great books of our century.” Much of her essay is based on that book.
But by no means all of it. She gives extensive attention to La Pensée Sauvage (1962) – later translated at The Savage Mind (1966) – mentions his early book on kinship systems, Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté (1949) – later translated as The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969) – and his collection of essays, Structural Anthropology (1963) giving special attention to his 1955 essay on myth, “The Structural Study of Myth,” which had been published in The American Journal of Folklore. She mentions that essay in the following passage:
However, it must be emphasized that this literary-sounding conception of the anthropologist’s calling—the twice-born spiritual adventure, pledged to a systematic déracinement—is complemented in most of Lévi-Strauss’ writings by an insistence on the most unliterary techniques of analysis and research. His important essay on myth in Structural Anthropology outlines a technique for analyzing and recording the elements of myths so that these can be processed by a computer. [...] But his nearest affinity is to the more avant-garde methodologies of economics, neurology, linguistics, and game theory. For Lévi-Strauss, there is no doubt that anthropology must be a science, rather than a humanistic study. The question is only how. [...] But recently, a doorway to paradise has been opened by the linguists, like Roman Jakobson and his school. Linguists now know how to reformulate their problems so that they can “have a machine built by an engineer and make a kind of experiment, completely similar to a natural-science experiment,” which will tell them “if the hypothesis is worthwhile or not.”
Notice that parade of disciplines, “economics, neurology, linguistics, and game theory,” and none of them are humanities disciplines (except, perhaps, depending on intellectual style, linguistics). That range of reference is one of the reasons that structuralism became an important mid-century intellectual movement, one that even aimed at a rapprochement between the humanities and the sciences. The structuralists were seeking consilience well before E. O. Wilson adopted it as his motto.
And so:
Thus the man who submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual ends by aiming to vanquish his subject by translating it into a purely formal code. The ambivalence toward the exotic, the primitive, is not overcome after all, but only given a complex restatement.
That’s quite a tangle, from inner alienation to formal code. I can’t say that I believe it, but it does make a kind of sense and it explains why literary scholars, among others, would pay attention to his work on myth. The alientated urban intellectual approaches myths as the work of an Other, an “exotic,” “the primitive,” the not us. And what does that urban intellectual do? Translate myth into a purely formal code.
Thus:
To the general reader, perhaps the most striking example of Lévi-Strauss’ theoretical agnosticism is his view of myth. He treats myth as a purely formal mental operation, without any psychological content or any necessary connection with rite. Specific narratives are exposed as logical designs for the description and possibly the softening of the rules of the social game when they give rise to a tension or contradiction.
In “Against Interpretation” Sontag went on to advocate attention to form as an alternative to, perhaps even a replacement of, attention to content, that is, interpretation. Here the formal operations of myth are treated as a specific kind of content, “logical designs” about “the social game.” In “Against Interpretation” form is framed and opposed to content. Here it is being framed as a kind of content.
Consider Lévi-Strauss’s seminal essay, “The Structural Study of Myth,” the one Sontag was alluding to in her remarks about Structural Anthropology. That essay contains a number of charts and diagrams, including this one:
It’s a very abstract depiction of how matters progress in some of the North American trickster tales. Lévi-Strauss’s idea, which became quite influential, is that individual myth tales start with an extreme binary opposition, such as Life and Death. They proceed by making substitutions for the opposites until they arrive at a term which mediates the opposition. In this case (I’m quoting from his article): “carrion-eating animals are like prey animals (they eat animal food), but they are also like food-plant producers (they do not kill what they eat).”
What have we got? Physically, myths consist of strings of words. An analysis of the form of string would thus have be an analysis of what kinds of things are strung together and in what order. The analysis of rhyme schemes in poetry is about repetition and periodicity in the sounds of words in a string just as the analysis of the harmonic structure of a piece of music is about the succession of chords (note that music will become a recurring motif in Lévi-Strauss four-volume study of Latin American myths, Mythologiques). That diagram is a description of the succession of meanings in a story, from an extreme opposition to a very narrow one.
Would this sort of thing satisfy Sontag’s desire for more formal analysis of art? Does this look like an erotics of art?
On the outside looking in
Sontag wrote as a cultural observer, not as a professional academic, though she did have academic training early in her career. It is one thing to call for more discussion of literary form, that is also an “erotics.” That’s easy. Actually producing such, that’s something else. Because she wrote from the outside, it was easy to make the call, without at the same time having the responsibility for answering it.
It is easy to see that what Lévi-Strauss did with myth, in that 1955 essay as well as in the somewhat different treatment he gave myths in his four volume Mythologiques (1964-1971), is a formal analysis. It’s not so easy to see it as an analysis of form. As far as I know, no one saw it that way at the time. The terms of the analysis are so abstracted from the stories themselves and they are presented in two-dimensional diagrams and tables in a way that obscures the fact that, after all, those diagrams and tables characterize the semantic form of a given text. Lévi-Strauss’s treatment of myth is framed as a statement about the contents of myths and about the nature of the so-called primitive mind. The primitive mind is as logical as our minds, but the logic is of a different kind.
Whatever literary critics made of Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth, they didn’t connect it with the study of literary form in any systemtic way. Why should they? That’s not how Lévi-Strauss framed it. What they seem to have taken away from it is an emphasis binary oppositions in the content and the need to mediate between them, but that’s all. That Lévi-Strauss was ipso facto talking about how that content was deployed in a string of words, word after word after word... Everyone passed over that.
There is in fact a profound relationship between the way word meanings (signifieds) are related to one another in mental space, if you will, and how word forms (signifiers) are strung together in texts. Syntax is built on that relationship and so, for that matter, are the large language models (LLMs) that underly chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude – something I discuss in my working 2022 paper, GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons (pp. 15-19).
As an explicit example of content being arrayed along a strong, consider one of my current hobby horses, ring composition. It refers to texts that are organized like this:
A, B, C, ... X ... C’, B’, A’
The first unit is echoed by the last unit, the second by the second to last, and so forth. The text is symmetrically organized around a central structural unit. I’ve described a number of texts organized like that, including a manga (Japanese graphic novel), Metropolis by Osama Tezuka, Heart of Darkness, Gojira (the 1954 Japanese film), “A New Dance Turn” (poem by Yeats), and Obama’s “Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney.” Now, I’m not claiming that such analysis exhausts the form of these works, semantic and otherwise, not at all. But it is an important aspect of their form. Somehow I doubt, however, that that’s what Sontag had in mind when she called for more formal analysis.
Nor can I imagine that it answers her call for an erotics of art. Whatever that is it surely would be something that engages us affectively in the work of art. As Geoffrey Hartman observed in 1975: “modern ‘rithmatics’—semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism—are not the solution. They widen, if anything, the rift between reading and writing” (The Fate of Reading, p. 272). Notice that Hartman employs on the convention of spatial metaphor, widening the rift that we observed early in Sontag’s language in “Against Interpretation.”
She may have been against interpretation of content and so called for an analysis of form as an alternative. The call is abstract, she had little to say about what it meant concretely. Nor as far as I can tell, did anyone else. People may have read “Against Interpretation,” but they did not follow her recommendation. As for Lévi-Strauss, he was influential, as I have argued – GOAT Literary Critics: Part 3.2, Derrida deconstructs the signs while Lévi-Strauss tracks the system of myth – but more as a philosophical presence and oracle than as a guide to practical criticism. After all, he was talking about the myths of primitive peoples (though critics these days would sudder at my use of the word “primitive”), not about our works of literary art. Formal codes for them, but for us...just exactly what? That’s what literary critics were struggling with at the time.
As for Harold Bloom, he must have heard of Sontag. Whether he read her, I don’t know. Lévi-Strauss was certainly not his cup of tea. The idea of an erotics of criticism might have appealed to him, for all I know he might even have claimed that that’s what he was up to, something like it, but he didn’t share her fascination with popular culture, as in her famous essay on “Camp.” He started out as an academic literary critic and morphed into a public intellectual as critic, but always literature. She did, well, it seems like a bit of everything, including film and political activism. For what it’s worth, my guess is that her reputation will outlive his.
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