(no subject)
I gave up on Benjamin about the time that Sarah’s gameboy somehow moved on to my lap. For a while tonight, I wrote angel!fic, for anael (and, I suspect, son_of_darkness). Three and a half thousand words later, I needed a break and so turned to Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretations.
My bad.
No, in all seriousness, this is very, very interesting. It might even be Very, Very Key. Listen:
Interpretation is all mimetic, but before the Greeks invented it, art didn’t need to be interpreted. It was “incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual.” Art wasn’t sitting around debating the underlying Freudian meanings of the mass, art was the mass, the magic of plainsong echoing off of stone, the way wooden pews suddenly seemed bearable, the tradition of praying and receiving sustenance from the prayer, the ritual of Communion. It wasn’t the Marxist shudder at the bourgeois sheep instinct, but the incantation of the Lord’s Prayer. It wasn’t the Da Vinci Code, it was the beauty of the painting, the rich and vibrant colours, every stroke of the brush, every hidden nuance of shadow and light. It wasn’t the underlying meaning of her gaze, but the way her gaze made one feel as if her eyes pierced the soul.
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous…Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable.
Most American novelists and playwrights are really either journalists or gentlemen sociologists and psychologists. They are writing the literary equivalent of program music. And so rudimentary, uninspired, and stagnant has been the sense of what might be done with form in fiction and drama that even when the content isn’t simply information, news, it is still peculiarly visible, handier, more exposed.
What Sontag wants is an avant-garde that will actually be avant-garde. A change in the form, but not at the expense of content, that makes interpretation difficult. The Waves, for the twenty-first century. “Works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the art can be…just what it is."
And I agree, for the most part, but what makes this so ‘ARGH!’ to read is that no one will publish the avant-garde. It seems like it was so much easier one hundred years ago, when all one had to do was find a sympathetic journal, because there were so many of them and the glittering literati of the day actually enjoyed finding new people to read, to see, to watch. In a world of globalization, where the only time a really new or different method of writing is appreciated is in a college fiction writing class (and then, only sometimes), it’s almost impossible to break into the group of the published. It’s almost impossible to find someone, anyone, willing to take a risk on something that hasn’t been seen before. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but I don’t remember seeing anything really, really different on my last few trips to a bookstore. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places (which, considering I live in the middle of a state of corn and soybeans, might very well be the case), but if so, point me in the right direction!
I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to find Sontag. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to read her.
Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now….Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience….What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more….The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art-and, by analogy, our own experience-more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
Questions to ask:
-Why does this work?
-What does it make the audience feel?
-How is it that…?
-How are our responses plucked from us?
-Not why this or why not this, but rather what is the result of this?
-What parts of our senses does this appeal to and how?
-How alive is this?
-How does it connect with me (if it does, or how doesn’t it, if it does not)?
-How is this breathtaking?
-How is the form interwoven with the content?
-How is form produced?
-How is the content given life?
-How does the work transmit a multitude of meanings?
Sontag’s most famous line: “In place of a hermeneutics of art, we need an erotics of art.”
This is the next critical theory. It is still being developed; too many people are wary. How can a psychoanalytic Lacanian Marxist even think of buying into this?
“What we don’t have yet is a poetics of the novel, any clear notion of the forms of narration.”
Why not?
My bad.
No, in all seriousness, this is very, very interesting. It might even be Very, Very Key. Listen:
Interpretation is all mimetic, but before the Greeks invented it, art didn’t need to be interpreted. It was “incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual.” Art wasn’t sitting around debating the underlying Freudian meanings of the mass, art was the mass, the magic of plainsong echoing off of stone, the way wooden pews suddenly seemed bearable, the tradition of praying and receiving sustenance from the prayer, the ritual of Communion. It wasn’t the Marxist shudder at the bourgeois sheep instinct, but the incantation of the Lord’s Prayer. It wasn’t the Da Vinci Code, it was the beauty of the painting, the rich and vibrant colours, every stroke of the brush, every hidden nuance of shadow and light. It wasn’t the underlying meaning of her gaze, but the way her gaze made one feel as if her eyes pierced the soul.
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous…Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable.
Most American novelists and playwrights are really either journalists or gentlemen sociologists and psychologists. They are writing the literary equivalent of program music. And so rudimentary, uninspired, and stagnant has been the sense of what might be done with form in fiction and drama that even when the content isn’t simply information, news, it is still peculiarly visible, handier, more exposed.
What Sontag wants is an avant-garde that will actually be avant-garde. A change in the form, but not at the expense of content, that makes interpretation difficult. The Waves, for the twenty-first century. “Works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the art can be…just what it is."
And I agree, for the most part, but what makes this so ‘ARGH!’ to read is that no one will publish the avant-garde. It seems like it was so much easier one hundred years ago, when all one had to do was find a sympathetic journal, because there were so many of them and the glittering literati of the day actually enjoyed finding new people to read, to see, to watch. In a world of globalization, where the only time a really new or different method of writing is appreciated is in a college fiction writing class (and then, only sometimes), it’s almost impossible to break into the group of the published. It’s almost impossible to find someone, anyone, willing to take a risk on something that hasn’t been seen before. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but I don’t remember seeing anything really, really different on my last few trips to a bookstore. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places (which, considering I live in the middle of a state of corn and soybeans, might very well be the case), but if so, point me in the right direction!
I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to find Sontag. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to read her.
Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now….Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience….What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more….The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art-and, by analogy, our own experience-more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
Questions to ask:
-Why does this work?
-What does it make the audience feel?
-How is it that…?
-How are our responses plucked from us?
-Not why this or why not this, but rather what is the result of this?
-What parts of our senses does this appeal to and how?
-How alive is this?
-How does it connect with me (if it does, or how doesn’t it, if it does not)?
-How is this breathtaking?
-How is the form interwoven with the content?
-How is form produced?
-How is the content given life?
-How does the work transmit a multitude of meanings?
Sontag’s most famous line: “In place of a hermeneutics of art, we need an erotics of art.”
This is the next critical theory. It is still being developed; too many people are wary. How can a psychoanalytic Lacanian Marxist even think of buying into this?
“What we don’t have yet is a poetics of the novel, any clear notion of the forms of narration.”
Why not?