Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation was first published in 1961. It’s hard in 2020 to accept that this was almost 60 years ago, especially since many of the works reviewed in this critical volume, which contain essays dating from 1966, probably won’t make it in the mainstream today. If, and it must be repeated for emphasis, if the objects of his criticism in the 1960s were manifestations of the current mainstream in the arts, then 60 years ago, at least for this reader, then theater, film, and art Today’s contemporaries seem much more conventional, even conservative. No one now, it seems, takes risks.

There are names that are still familiar in Susan Sontag’s reviews. We have Genet, Sartre, Camus, Ionesco, Godard, Brooke, Arthur Miller, but there are many others who would now claim only anonymity. But what’s really interesting is how reluctant Susan Sontag is to even mention trends in popular culture, a term that she personally finds inappropriate.

In fact, essays are, by contemporary standards, elitist. Isn’t it ironic that they come from the decade that became famous for challenging elite status? Perhaps we forget that an element of the culture of the 1960s was to invade elite structures, cram them with experience that they would find both challenging and uncomfortable. Susan Sontag herself refers obliquely to this attempt at change by noting that “…the American theater is ruled by an extraordinary and uncontrollable enthusiasm for intellectual simplification. Every idea is reduced to cliché, and the function of the cliché is to emasculate a idea”. The implication is that much-needed change was already occurring through infiltration. One wonders what her opinion might be today.

As already said, these essays on how shamelessly intellectual. There is no indication that they also want to address popular issues in popular language or on their own terms. Susan Sontag does deal with popular culture, but sometimes, as in her analysis of science fiction movie scenarios, to put on record her belief that it is formulaic. She wasn’t the only one to take a seemingly academic look at mass-market culture. At the same time, in Britain, we had Kenneth Tynan and Bernard Levin, both young Mavericks on their way, but also solidly established figures, despite Tynan’s enduring celebrity stemming from his use of the f-word on a chat show. live television. And Bernard Levin, for those who want to remember, delivered a satirical and critical monologue on Saturday nights in That Was The Week That Was, the satirical magazine populated largely by upper-class intellectuals who would later become superstars and mainstays of the establishment. This was a fate that did not befall Susan Sontag and some of her ideas still ring contemporary.

How about this as a plea to the writers to imagine a different state than God? “The welcoming and immediate acknowledgment that the realist induces in most novels is, and should be, suspicious… I wholeheartedly sympathize with what she objects to in the old-fashioned novel. Vanity Fair and Buddenbrooks, when I read them recently, as wonderful as they were. It still seemed to me, it also shuddered me, I couldn’t stand the omnipotent author showing me such is life, making me compassionate and tearful, with his resounding irony, his confidential air of knowing his characters perfectly and taking me, reader, to feel that I knew them too. I no longer trust novels that fully satisfy my passion to understand. How many later writers took note of this advice? My suggestion is some, but none of them popular.

At the heart of Susan Sontag’s ideas about art, theater, literature, and criticism is the need for the public to be open to challenge. She writes: “Hence, too, the peculiar dependence of a work of art, however expressive, on the cooperation of the person having the experience, since one can see what is ‘said’ but remain impassive, either out of boredom or distraction. Art is seduction, not rape. A work of art possesses a kind of experience designed to manifest the quality of imperativeness. But art cannot seduce without the complicity of the experiencing subject.” Perhaps the intervening 60 years have conspired to reduce this willingness to tolerate the unexpected? Or maybe nothing has changed. The public was never very good at it.

In the Modern Classics edition of her work, Susan Sontag had the opportunity, some 30 years after its publication, to offer her own reflections on the meaning of writing. She reflects on how the artistic climate had already changed and on the characteristics of the decade in which her critical essays were written. These three brief quotes from the final essay of the 1990s indicate why Against Interpretation is now an achievement in its own right and not simply a response to the work of others.

“Perhaps the most interesting characteristics of the era now labeled the 1960s was that there was very little nostalgia. In that sense, it was indeed a utopian movement.”

“Now, the very idea of ​​what is serious (and honorable) seems quaint, ‘unrealistic’ to most people and, when an arbitrary decision of temperament is allowed, is also probably unhealthy.”

“The judgments of taste expressed in these essays may have prevailed. The values ​​underlying those judgments did not prevail.”

We truly live in a different era.

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