It was over a year ago that I resolved to finally read a book by Susan Sontag. Because I expected she would make for difficult reading, when Sontag was released, I reached for it. Clearly, it was evident "Notes on Camp" was the place to start, and Against Interpretation compiled many of her most influential essays, including this one.
Sontag was primarily a critic, and secondarily a novelist. She writes about art almost exclusively, especially in this collection. It appears to contain several "breezier" reads, at least two of which are diaries released by Camus and Pavese (who I had not heard of before).
One of the pleasures of the text is its curatorial quality--the writers and artists that have been, more-or-less, forgotten by time, that Sontag effectively preserves through these essays. While the appropriate place to start the review is with "Notes on Camp," it actually appears near the very end of the book, so perhaps we can end there. The first one I want to address is the review of Manhood by Michel Leiris. I had never heard of this writer before but from the way Sontag describes this book, I sort of feel like I have to read it:
"Manhood begins not with 'I was born in...' but with a matter-of-fact description of the author's body. We learn in the first pages of Leiris' incipient baldness, of a chronic inflammation of the eyelids, of his meager sexual capacities, of his tendency to hunch his shoulders when sitting and scratch his anal region when he is alone, of a traumatic tonsillectomy undergone as a child, of an equally traumatic infection in his penis; and, subsequently, of his hypochondria, of his cowardice in all situations of the slightest danger, of his inability to speak any foreign language fluently, of his pitiful incompetence in physical sports.....
Far more than any avowals to be found in the great French autobiographical documents of incestuous feelings, sadism, homosexuality, masochism, and crass promiscuity, what Leiris admits to is obscene and repulsive. It is not especially what Leiris has done that shocks. Action is not his forte, and his vices are those of a fearfully cold sensual temperament--wormy failures and deficiencies more often than lurid acts. It is because Leiris' attitude is unredeemed by the slightest tinge of self-respect. This lack of esteem or respect for himself is obscene. All the other great confessional works of French letters proceed out of self-love, and have the clear purpose of defending and justifying the self. Leiris loathes himself, and can neither defend nor justify. Manhood is an exercise in shamelessness--a sequence of self-exposures of a craven, morbid, damaged temperament. It is not incidentally, in the course of his narration, that Leiris reveals what is disgusting about himself. What is disgusting is the topic of his book." (62-63)
One can see from this excerpt that Sontag is both a flashy and articulate critic. She praises most of the work that she covers ("I don't, ultimately, care for handing out grades to works of art (which is why I mostly avoided the opportunity of writing about things I didn't admire)."(x)), with notable exceptions (After the Fall by Arthur Miller; Marco Millions by Eugene O'Neill). She distrusts literary theory, turns up her nose at Freudian and Marxist readings of texts (a gross simplification, but reasonably accurate, I think). Above all, she provokes and one could talk about the ideas in these essays for days. Just as writing a review of a short story collection is very difficult, so too is it for an essay collection. The essays are fit to be discussed by students in college and pretentious coteries in salons. Reading them by oneself, in 2021, it is possible to misinterpret her general theories, for she is hyper-intellectual, and able to casually refer to the most complex philosophical concepts with pithy conclusions--allusions that may be entirely lost on readers that are not familiar with, say, Heidegger. She never condescends to her readers, never "writes down to them." It is understandable, however, that she still held (holds?) popular appeal.
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While Sontag wrote criticism of all art forms, she appears most passionate about film here. Film, she mentions several times, has eclipsed the novel. And there are several essays on film--her favorite directors seem to be Robert Bresson (The Angels of Sin, The Ladies of the Park, The Diary of Country Priest, A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, and The Trial of Joan of Arc--several of which she acknowledges as bad) and Jean-Luc Godard (mostly Vivre Sa Vie). At a certain point (in "Notes on Camp"), she references the Marlene Dietrich film The Devil is a Woman and though I never really watch movies from the 30's, I got it from the library and found it reasonably entertaining, with noteworthy art direction and costumes.
Her quality as a "tastemaker" is singular in her era. Clearly, a note of praise from Sontag would make any artist forget about any other negative reviews of their work. Her essay on Flaming Creatures, for example, makes a case for it when so many other critics found it execrable. I feel like I may have heard of this movie once before, but maybe it was from a section of Sontag. In any case, the essay is from 1964, and the film seems a bit graphic for its time, and seems to have a kind of Warhol-ian edge to it, or maybe a kind of proto-John Waters vibe. Many found this film disgusting but Sontag saw the beauty in it: "a triumphant example of an aesthetic vision of the world--and such a vision is perhaps always, at its core, epicene. But this type of art has yet to be understood in this country." (231)
I had to look up "epicene," which means indeterminate sex, having characteristics of both sexes, or characteristics of neither sex.
It is impossible for me to move on from the film essays without reference to "The Imagination of Disaster." Here, Sontag reveals herself to be a disaster movie junkie. One wonders what she thought of Independence Day, or perhaps Deep Impact or Armageddon. (While Sontag is totally an art snob, she frequently asserted that guilty pleasures should not be seen as such, and it amused me to read that one of the last films she saw was Spiderman 2, which was not a bad choice.) In this essay, she basically writes the template for any such "end of the world" movies. She goes on for so long about all the different "cookie cutter plots" of these films that it could provide inspiration for less imaginative filmmakers for decades to come. It is remarkable that this essay is from 1965, and that there had already been so many books and films fantasizing disaster scenarios--and how little they have truly evolved:
"Another version of the first script involves the discovery of some fundamental alteration in the conditions of existence of our planet, brought about by nuclear testing, which will lead to the extinction in a few months of all human life. For example" the temperature of the earth is becoming too high or too low to support life, or the earth is cracking in two, or it is gradually being blanketed by lethal fallout.
A third script, somewhat but not altogether different from the first two, concerns a journey through space--to the moon, or some other planet. What the space-voyagers discover commonly is that the alien terrain is in a state of dire emergency, itself threatened by extra-planetary invaders or nearing extinction through the practice of nuclear warfare. The terminal dramas of the first and second scripts are played out there, to which is added the problem of getting away from the doomed and/or hostile planet and back to Earth." (211-212)
Now this essay is most likely influenced by the burgeoning Cold War, and the threat of nuclear annihilation, but these do not sound all that different from The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, Interstellar, or Oblivion (which I just watched last weekend and made me think of this essay). She says that the science fiction film is concerned with the aesthetics of destruction, "the peculiar beauties found in wreaking havoc, making a mess." (213) The films also reflect world-wide anxieties, and serve to allay them. She says this may be morally fallacious. For whatever philosophizing she may be doing to these B-movies and matinees, it certainly elevates the viewer of a "cheap thrill" into a noble aesthete. I just find it amusing that she basically lays out the contours of Star Wars, in all of its ubiquity, more than a decade before it appeared. One wonders how many directors of such films have read this essay and whether they have purposefully or unintentionally "stolen" one of her plots, or made a film in the hopes of pleasing her. Regardless, this was the most surprising essay in the collection for me.
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Apart from "Camp," there are several essays on theater which mine topics and writers one would expect Sontag to mine: Artaud, Brecht, and Peter Brook, including a paean to "Marat/Sade." She writes about "Happenings," a peculiar spectacle at its apex in the mid-1960's in New York City, one of which became the Velvet Underground. She references Warhol, but does not seem particularly interested in pop art (except when it is camp--which it sometimes is, right?). She writes about Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre and Alain Robbe-Grillet, rather often. One of the most intriguing essays concerns Nathalie Sarraute and what the novel can do and where it can go:
"Whether or not one enjoys Sarraute's novels (I really like only Portrait of a Man Unknown and The Planetarium), whether or not she really practices what she preaches (in a crucial respect, I think she does not), the essays [from The Age of Suspicion] broach a number of criticisms of the traditional novel which seem to me a good beginning for the theoretical consideration long overdue on this side of the Atlantic." (105)
Sarraute envisions the novel as a continuous monologue, where dialogue between characters is a functional extension of that monologue, "real" speech a continuation of silent speech, a "sub-conversation," comparable to theatrical dialogue, without any exposition or interruption by the author, but not broken up or assigned to clearly separable characters. She directs that the novel should disavow introspection and proceed by immersion instead. It must "record without comment the direct and purely sensory contact with things and person which the 'I' of the novelist experiences. Abstaining from all creating of likenesses (Sarraute hands that over to the cinema), the novel must preserve and promote 'that element of indetermination, of opacity and mystery that one's own actions always have for the one who lives them.'" (108)
I have not read Andrew's Brain by E.L. Doctorow, but a friend recommended it to me, and maybe it reads something like what Sarraute proposes. In any case, the novel undergoes a certain evolution with each new generation, and while I have seen numerous rejections of quotation marks and other expository "empty" phrases (i.e., he said, she said...), few writers today seem willing to write from such an amorphous perspective. Protagonists and narrators may go nameless, or barely named, yet I am hard-pressed to think of any novels with inseparable characters. The nouveau roman flowered in this era, and while it transformed French literature in a similar way that nouvelle vague transformed French cinema, such works demand the type of attention the modern American audiences may no longer possess. There is another distraction waiting on our phone. The future of the novel, here at least, became Dept. of Speculation and a willingness to compete with the collective ADHD of our society, a novel that does not chide the reader for their short attention span. This is rather depressing but perhaps inevitable as Tik-Tok and Instagram (and still YouTube...) boil amusement down to short bursts of 15-60 second videos, as streaming entertainment upends traditional television and cinema, and as novels are expected to "grab" the reader. There is no great mainstream literature, as in early parts of the 20th century. Now, in order to find truly revolutionary literature, one must seek out books that no one else really discusses, apart from the cognoscenti of small and independent presses. Generally this is because, revolutionary work does not tend to make for good business. We await the exception.
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"Notes on Camp," then, is a 17-page essay consisting mostly of 58 numbered points, separated only by non-sequitur quotes from works of Oscar Wilde. In it, Sontag attempts to define the idea of "camp." It is practically impossible to sum up a fair definition, for the essay is as much of a work of art as it is a work of criticism. This is the most famous example of Sontag's boldness in experimentation as an essayist. It is very reader-friendly, and yet the overarching meaning is elusive.
Camp is a "sensibility" (which is distinct from an idea, and one of the hardest things to talk about), or "a certain mode of aestheticism," (277) that is "unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication, but hardly identical with it." (275)
Rather than attempting to summarize my understanding of the concept, it would be easiest to simply list--as she does here--things that are camp, and things that are not camp.
Things that are Camp
-Zuleika Dobson
-Tiffany lamps
-Scopitone films
-The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in LA
The Enquirer, headlines and stories
-Aubrey Beardsley paintings
-Swan Lake
-Bellini's operas
-Visconti's direction of Salome and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
-certain turn-of-the-century postcards
-Schoedsack's King Kong
-the Cuban pop singer La Lupe
-Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts, God's Man
-the old Flash Gordon comics
-women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.)
-the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett
-stag movies seen without lust (277-278)
-the personality and many of the works of Jean Cocteau
-the operas of Richard Strauss
-concoctions of Tin Pan Alley and Liverpool
-the major films of Louis Feuillade (which may be approached as Camp) (278)
-Art Nouveau (the Paris Metro entrances, as an example)
-the androgyne
-Greta Garbo
-a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms
-Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida, Jane Russell, Virginia Mayo
-Steve Reeves, Victor Mature
-Bette (279) Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Edwige Feuilliere
-Pope, Congreve, Walpole, etc.
-les precieux in France
-the rococo churches of Munich
-Pergolesi
-much of Mozart (280)
-Burne-Jones, Pater, Ruskin, Tennyson
-Wilde and Firbank
-the number devised for the Warner Brothers musicals of the early thirties (42nd Street, The Golddiggers of 1933...35...37, etc.) by Busby Berkeley
-Trouble in Paradise and The Maltese Falcon
-Wilde's epigrams themselves
-a seriousness that fails--but only with the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naive.
-the spirit of extravagance
-Gaudi's buildings in Barcelona (283), notably the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia
-the attempt to do something extraordinary (284)
-the quality of excruciation in much of Henry James (The Europeans, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove) (287)
-Genet's ideas
-a peculiar affinity and overlap with homosexual taste
-an insistence on not being "serious," on playing" (290)
Things that are not Camp
-the personality and many of the works of Andre Gide
-the operas of Wagner
-jazz (278)
-Swift (280)
-All About Eve and Beat the Devil (283)
-William Blake's drawings and paintings (284)
-tragedy (287)
-Genet's books (288)
-Peyton Place (the book)
-the Tishman Building (292)
Judging alone from this list that I have compiled, it seems much easier to identify an item as Camp, rather than not, yet this must be a simplification. Here, Sontag has pinpointed a "sensibility," and attempted to define it through some amorphous quality of the work, which generally seems to include gaudy fashion. Why should we care about Camp? Perhaps the term is a relic of its era, but it still stands for something precise and pure, which Sontag owns by dint of this survey. The ability to write about a sensibility, with such refined meaning--and in such a studied and grandiloquent manner--is why we should care. "Notes on Camp" essentially created its own genre of essay, and its own way of thinking about art. We should care about Camp because Susan Sontag cared about Camp and showed us that we could write epochal essays on highly-specific convergences and similarities of feeling in art, or anything else.
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Against Interpretation is excellent, but it is not one of the Best Books reviewed on this blog because, as a collection of essays, the material is somewhat uneven, and jumps around between different modes of art, such that it cannot be compared to a consistently-engaging/amusing essay collection by David Sedaris, such as Me Talk Pretty One Day (Sedaris's work is clearly Camp, unless I am missing something). It is not one of the Best, but it is excellent, and it is important to this blog--namely, the question we sought to answer after reading Sontag: is the criticism published herein on Flying Houses actually "against interpretation," in the Sontag-ian sense?
In the title essay, she asks, "What kind of criticism, of commentary on the arts, is desirable today?...What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?" (12)
She answers that it 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." (12) What is needed is a vocabulary--a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary--for forms. [In a footnote, she says we don't yet have a poetics of the novel, any clear notion of the forms of narration]. "The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form." (12) She then lists a number of essays that fall into this category of formal analysis.
"Equally valuable would be acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art," (13) she writes, noting that this seems harder to do than formal analysis, and then offering a few examples.
She then states, at the beginning of the 9th and penultimate section of the essay, "Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art--and in criticism--today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are." (13)
"Our 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--its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness--conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the conditions of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed." (13-14)
Before ending it all with the one-sentence-section 10, "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art," she offers the clearest statement of what criticism that is truly Against Interpretation should be:
"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, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means." (14)
Have I done that here, over the past thirteen years?
Certainly there have been times when I have puzzled over the meaning of certain texts, or moments within them, such as marrying the chapters of Ulysses to the chapters of The Odyssey, or analyzing certain characters in The Magic Mountain (both pre-law school writings), but I have always been concerned foremost with the experience of reading the actual text, and whether it is enjoyable or not, for me personally. It does necessitate some reference to plot, or content, and comparison to other similar texts or works of art in my reading experience. But it always (or almost always) contains at least one excerpt from the text, so the reader of the review has a real idea of how the author actually sounds.
There is criticism of things current, and there is criticism of things past, and these seem to be diverge. Criticism of things current, of new works of art just being released, informs the reader of what the work is like, so they can decide if they would like to experience it or not. Criticism of things past--the a significant portion of the blog--also serves the same function, but serves additionally to ask if the work has survived its time. Perhaps I have not focused clearly enough on form, much of the time, but there is generally at least some small amount of discussion of it in each review. I have always tried, however, to describe how the work feels, or how it made me feel, and while sometimes such feelings may prove inaccurate or false or mistaken to others that have a better understanding of the work itself, or of the human experience in general, I have always done my best to remain honest about my limitations.
Grade:) A-
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