Against Interpretation

by Susan Sontag

  * * *

  It is perhaps unfortunate, though, that the two works which hereby introduce Lukács to an American public are both works of literary criticism, and both of the “late” rather than “early” Lukács.9 Studies in European Realism, a collection of eight essays dealing mainly with Balzac, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Zola, and Gorky, was written in Russia during the late thirties, at the time of the purges, and bears the scars of that awful period in the form of several passages of a crude political nature; Lukács published it in 1948. Realism in Our Time is a shorter work, written in the fifties, less academic in style and more sprightly and rapid in argument; in the three essays, Lukács reviews the alternatives for literature today and rejects both “modernism” and “socialist realism” in favor of what he calls “critical realism”—essentially the tradition of the 19th century novel.

  I say this choice of books may be unfortunate because, while here is a quite accessible Lukács, not hard to read, as he is in his philosophical writings, we are forced to react to him as a literary critic alone. What is Lukács’ intrinsic value and quality as a literary critic? Sir Herbert Read has praised him lavishly; Thomas Mann called him “the most important literary critic of today”; George Steiner regards him as “the only major German literary critic of our epoch” and claims that “among critics, only Sainte-Beuve and Edmund Wilson have matched the breadth of Lukács’ response” to literature; and Alfred Kazin clearly regards him as a very able, sound, and important guide to the great tradition of the 19th century novel. But do the present books support these claims? I think not. Indeed, I rather suspect that the current vogue for Lukács—promoted by such effusions as the essays of George Steiner and Alfred Kazin offered as prefaces to the present translations—is motivated more by cultural good will than by strictly literary criteria.

  It is easy to sympathize with Lukács’ boosters. I, too, am inclined to give Lukács all the benefit of the doubt, if only in protest against the sterilities of the Cold War which have made it impossible to discuss Marxism seriously for the last decade or more. But we may be generous toward the “late” Lukács only at the price of not taking him altogether seriously, of subtly patronizing him by treating his moral fervor aesthetically, as style rather than idea. My own inclination is to take him at his word. Then, what about the fact that Lukács rejects Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, Beckett, almost all modern literature? It is scarcely adequate to remark, as Steiner does in his introduction, that “Lukács is a radical moralist … like [the] Victorian critics.… In this great Marxist, there is an old-style Puritan.”

  This type of shallow, knowing comment, by which notorious radicalisms are domesticated, amounts to a surrender of judgment. It is cute or appealing to discover that Lukács—like Marx, like Freud—is morally conventional, even positively prudish, only if one has started with a cliché about an intellectual bogey-man. The point is: Lukács does treat literature as a branch of moral argument. Is the way he does it plausible, powerful? Does it allow for sensitive and discriminating and true literary judgments? I, for one, find Lukács’ writings of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s to be seriously marred, not by his Marxism but by the coarseness of his argument.

  Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility. And a writer who—as Lukács does—dismisses Nietzsche as merely a forerunner of Nazism, who criticizes Conrad for not “portraying the totality of life” (Conrad “is really a short-story writer rather than a novelist”), is not just making isolated mistakes of judgment, but proposing standards that ought not to be assented to.

  Nor can I agree, as Kazin in his introduction seems to suggest, that, regardless of where Lukács went wrong, where he is right he is sound. Admirable as the 19th century realist tradition in the novel may be, the standards of admiration which Lukács proposes are unnecessarily coarse. For everything depends on Lukács’ view that “the business of the critic is the relation between ideology (in the sense of Weltanschauung) and artistic creation.” Lukács is committed to a version of the mimetic theory of art which is simply far too crude. A book is a “portrayal”; it “depicts,” it “paints a picture”; the artist is a “spokesman.” The great realist tradition of the novel does not need to be defended in these terms.

  Both of the present books, “late” writings, lack intellectual subtlety. Of the two, Realism in Our Time is by far the better. The first essay in particular, “The Ideology of Modernism,” is a powerful, in many ways brilliant, attack. Lukács’ thesis is that modernist literature (he sweeps Kafka, Joyce, Moravia, Benn, Beckett, and a dozen others into this net) is really allegorical in character; he goes on to develop the connection between allegory and the refusal of historical consciousness. The next essay, “Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?” is a cruder, and less interesting, restatement of the same thesis. The final essay, “Critical Realism and Socialist Realism,” refutes from a Marxist point of view the base doctrines of art which were part of the Stalin era.

  But even this book disappoints in many ways. The notion about allegory in the first essay is based on ideas of the late Walter Benjamin, and the quotations from Benjamin’s essay on allegory leap off the page as examples of a type of writing and reasoning much finer than that of Lukács. Ironically, Benjamin, who died in 1940, is one of the critics influenced by the “early” Lukács. But, irony aside, the truth is that Benjamin is a great critic (it is he who deserves the title “the only major German literary critic of our epoch”), and the “late” Lukács is not. Benjamin shows us what Lukács as a literary critic might have been.

  Writers like Sartre, in France, and the German school of neo-Marxist critics whose most illustrious members, besides Benjamin, are Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, have developed the Marxist (more accurately, the radical Hegelian) position as a mode of philosophical and cultural analysis capable, among other things, of doing justice to at least certain aspects of modern literature. It is against these writers that Lukács must be compared, and found wanting. I am sympathetic to the reasons and experiences which underlie Lukács’ reactionary aesthetic sensibility, and respectful even of his chronic moralizing and the burden of ideology which he valiantly carries, in part, to assist in the taming of its philistinism. But as I cannot accept either the intellectual premises of Lukács’ taste or its consequences, his sweeping strictures against the greatest works of contemporary literature, neither can I pretend that, for me, these do not vitiate his entire later critical work.

  For his new American audience, the best service to Lukács would be to translate the earlier books, Soul and Form (which includes his thesis on tragedy), The Theory of the Novel, and, of course, History and Class Consciousness. Besides this, the best service to the vitality and scope inherent in the Marxist position on art would be to translate the German and French critics I have mentioned—above all, Benjamin. Only when all the important writings of this group are taken together can we properly evaluate Marxism as an important position vis-à-vis art and culture.

  [1964]

  POSTSCRIPT:

  Karl Mannheim, in his review (published in 1920) of Lukács’ Theory of the Novel, described it as “an attempt at interpreting aesthetic phenomena, particularly the novel, from a higher point of view, that of the philosophy of history.” For Mannheim, “Lukács’ book moves in the right direction.” Putting aside judgments of right and wrong, such a direction is clearly a limiting one, I should say. More precisely, both the strength and the limitation of the Marxist approach to art arise from its commitment to a “higher point of view.” There is no question in the writings of the critics I have cited (the early Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, etc.) of a narrow forcing of art per se into the service of a particular moral or historical tendency. But none of these critics, even at their best, are free of certain notions which in the end serve to perpetuate an ideology that, for all its attractiveness when considered as a catalogue of ethical duties, has failed to comprehend in other than
a dogmatic and disapproving way the texture and qualities, the peculiar vantage point, of contemporary society. I mean “humanism.” Despite their commitment to the notion of historical progress, the neo-Marxist critics have shown themselves to be singularly insensitive to most of the interesting and creative features of contemporary culture in non-socialist countries. In their general lack of interest in avant-garde art, in their blanket indictment of contemporary styles of art and life of very different quality and import (as “alienated,” “dehumanized,” “mechanized”), they reveal themselves as little different in spirit from the great conservative critics of modernity who wrote in the 19th century such as Arnold, Ruskin, and Burckhardt. It is odd, and disquieting, that such strongly apolitical critics as Marshall McLuhan have got so much better grasp on the texture of contemporary reality.

  The variety of particular judgments made by the neo-Marxist critics may seem to indicate less unanimity of sensibility than I have argued. But when one notes the recurrence of the same terms of praise throughout, the differences seem slight. True, Schoenberg is defended by Adorno in his Philosophy of New Music—but in the name of “progress.” (Adorno complements his defense of Schoenberg with an attack on Stravinsky, whom he unfairly identifies with just one period, the neo-classical. For raiding the past, for making musical pastiches—an analogous case could be made against Picasso—Stravinsky is labeled as a “reactionary,” in the end, a “fascist.”) However, Kafka is attacked by Lukács for the qualities which, mutatis mutandis, in the history of music, would have made him in Adorno’s terms a “progressive.” Kafka is a reactionary because of the allegorical, that is, the dehistoricized, texture of his writings, while Mann is a progressive because of his realism, that is, his sense of history. But I imagine that Mann’s writings—old-fashioned in their form, riddled with parody and irony—could, if the discussion were set up differently, be labeled as reactionary. In the one case, “reaction” is identified with an inauthentic relation to the past; in the other, with abstractness. Using either standard—despite the exceptions allowed by individual taste—these critics must be generally inhospitable to or obtuse about modern art. Mostly, they don’t get any nearer to it than they have to. The only contemporary novelist the French neo-Marxist critic Lucien Goldmann has written on at any length is André Malraux. Even the extraordinary Benjamin, who wrote with equal brilliance on Goethe, Leskov, and Baudelaire, did not deal with any 20th century writers. And the cinema, the only wholly new major art form of our century, to which he did devote the better part of an important essay, was singularly misunderstood and unappreciated by Benjamin. (He thought the movies embodied the abolition of tradition and historical consciousness, and therefore—once again!—fascism.)

  What all the culture critics who descend from Hegel and Marx have been unwilling to admit is the notion of art as autonomous (not merely historically interpretable) form. And since the peculiar spirit which animates the modern movements in the arts is based on, precisely, the rediscovery of the power (including the emotional power) of the formal properties of art, these critics are poorly situated to come to sympathetic terms with modern works of art, except through their “content.” Even form is viewed by the historicist critics as a kind of content. This is very clear in The Theory of the Novel, where Lukács’ analysis of the various literary genres—epic, lyric, novel—proceeds by an explication of the attitude toward social change incarnated in the form. A similar prejudice is less explicit, but equally pervasive, in the writings of many American literary critics—who get their Hegelianism partly from Marx but mainly from sociology.

  There is certainly much that is valuable in the historicist approach. But if form may be understood as a certain kind of content, it is equally true (and perhaps more important to say now) that all content may be considered as a device of form. Only when the historicist critics and all their progeny are able to accommodate into their views a large measure of devotion to works of art as, above all, works of art (rather than as sociological, cultural, moral, or political documents) will they be open to more than a few of the many great works of art which are of the 20th century, and will they develop—this is mandatory for any responsible critic today—an intelligent involvement with the problems and objectives of “modernism” in the arts.

  [1965]

  Sartre’s Saint Genet

  Saint Genet is a cancer of a book, grotesquely verbose, its cargo of brilliant ideas borne aloft by a tone of viscous solemnity and by ghastly repetitiveness. One knows that the book began as an introductory essay to the collected edition of Genet’s works published by Gallimard—some fifty pages, perhaps—and grew to its present length, whereupon it was issued in 1952 as a separate volume, the first, of the Collected Genet.10 To read it, familiarity with Genet’s writings in prose, most as yet untranslated, is surely essential. Even more important, the reader must come equipped with sympathy for Sartre’s way of explicating a text. Sartre breaks every rule of decorum established for the critic; this is criticism by immersion, without guidelines. The book simply plunges into Genet; there is little discernible organization to Sartre’s argument; nothing is made easy or clear. One should perhaps be grateful that Sartre stops after six hundred and twenty-five pages. The indefatigable act of literary and philosophical disembowelment which he practices on Genet could just as well have gone on for a thousand pages. Yet, Sartre’s exasperating book is worth all one’s effort of attention. Saint Genet is not one of the truly great, mad books; it is too long and too academic in vocabulary for that. But it is crammed with stunning and profound ideas.

  What made the book grow and grow is that Sartre, the philosopher, could not help (however reverentially) upstaging Genet, the poet. What began as an act of critical homage and recipe for the bourgeois literary public’s “good use of Genet” turned into something more ambitious. Sartre’s enterprise is really to exhibit his own philosophical style—compounded of the phenomenological tradition from Descartes through Husserl and Heidegger, plus a liberal admixture of Freud and revisionist Marxism—while writing about a specific figure. In this instance, the person whose acts are made to yield the value of Sartre’s philosophical vocabulary is Genet. In a previous effort at “existential psychoanalysis,” published in 1947 and kept to a more digestible length, it was Baudelaire. In this earlier essay, Sartre was much more concerned with specifically psychological issues, such as Baudelaire’s relation to his mother and his mistresses. The present study of Genet is more philosophical because, to put it bluntly, Sartre admires Genet in a way that he does not admire Baudelaire. It would seem that, for Sartre, Genet deserves something more than perceptive psychologizing. He merits philosophical diagnosis.

  And a philosophical dilemma accounts for the length—and the breathlessness—of the book. All thought, as Sartre knows, universalizes. Sartre wants to be concrete. He wants to reveal Genet, not simply to exercise his own tireless intellectual facility. But he cannot. His enterprise is fundamentally impossible. He cannot catch the real Genet; he is always slipping back into the categories of Foundling, Thief, Homosexual, Free Lucid Individual, Writer. Somewhere Sartre knows this, and it torments him. The length, and the inexorable tone, of Saint Genet are really the product of intellectual agony.

  The agony comes from the philosopher’s commitment to impose meaning upon action. Freedom, the key notion of existentialism, reveals itself in Saint Genet, even more clearly than in Being and Nothingness, as a compulsion to assign meaning, a refusal to let the world alone. According to Sartre’s phenomenology of action, to act is to change the world. Man, haunted by the world, acts. He acts in order to modify the world in view of an end, an ideal. An act is therefore intentional, not accidental, and an accident is not to be counted as an act. Neither the gestures of personality nor the works of the artist are simply to be experienced. They must be understood, they must be interpreted as modifications of the world. Thus, throughout Saint Genet, Sartre continually moralizes. He moralizes upon the acts of Genet. And since Sart
re’s book was written at a time when Genet was chiefly a writer of prose narratives (among the plays, only the first two, The Maids and Deathwatch, had been written), and since these narratives are all autobiographical and written in the first person, Sartre need not separate the personal from the literary act. Although Sartre occasionally refers to things which he knows through his own friendship with Genet, it is almost entirely the man revealed by his books of whom Sartre speaks. It is a monstrous figure, real and surreal at the same time, all of whose acts are seen by Sartre as meaningful, intentional. This is what gives Saint Genet a quality that is clotted and ghostly. The name “Genet” repeated thousands of times throughout the book never seems to be the name of a real person. It is the name given to an infinitely complex process of philosophical transfiguration.

  Given all these ulterior intellectual motives, it is surprising how well Sartre’s enterprise serves Genet. This is because Genet himself, in his writings, is notably and explicitly involved in the enterprise of self-transfiguration. Crime, sexual and social degradation, above all murder, are understood by Genet as occasions for glory. It did not require much ingenuity on Sartre’s part to propose that Genet’s writings are an extended treatise on abjection—conceived as a spiritual method. The “sanctity” of Genet, created by an onanistic meditation upon his own degradation and the imaginative annihilation of the world, is the explicit subject of his prose works. What remained for Sartre was to draw out the implications of what is explicit in Genet. Genet may never have read Descartes, Hegel, or Husserl. But Sartre is right, entirely right, in finding a relation in Genet to the ideas of Descartes, Hegel, and Husserl. As Sartre brilliantly observes: “Abjection is a methodical conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoché: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of the divine understanding. The superiority of this method to the other two lies in its being lived in pain and pride. It therefore does not lead to the transcendental and universal consciousness of Husserl, the formal and abstract thinking of the Stoics, or the substantial cogito of Descartes, but to an individual existence at its highest degree of tension and lucidity.”