by Susan Sontag
4. The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950 by Cesare Pavese. Translated by A. E. Murch (with Jeanne Molli). New York, Walker & Co.
Camus’ Notebooks
5. Notebooks, 1935-1942, by Albert Camus. Translated from the French by Philip Thody. New York, Knopf.
Michel Leiris’ Manhood
6. Manhood by Michel Leiris. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. New York, Grossman.
The anthropologist as hero
7. In 1965, Lévi-Strauss published Le Cru et le Cuit, a lengthy study of the “mythologies” of food preparation among primitive peoples.
8. Lévi-Strauss relates in Tristes Tropiques that although he had long been familiar with the writings of the French anthropologists and sociologists, it was a reading of Lowie’s Primitive Society in 1934 or 1935 which effected his conversion from philosophy to anthropology. “Thus began my long intimacy with Anglo-American anthropology … I started as an avowed anti-Durkheimian and the enemy of any attempt to put sociology to metaphysical uses.”
Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss has made it clear that he considers himself the true legate of the Durkheim-Mauss tradition, and recently has not hesitated to situate his work in relation to the philosophical problems posed by Marx, Freud, and Sartre. And, on the level of technical analysis, he is fully aware of his debt to the French writers, particularly by way of the Essai sur Quelques Formes Primitives de Classification (1901–2) by Durkheim and Mauss, and Mauss’ Essai sur le Don (1924). From the first essay, Lévi-Strauss derives the starting point of the studies of taxonomy and the “concrete science” of primitives in La Pensée Sauvage. From the second essay, in which Mauss puts forth the proposition that kinship relations, relations of economic and ceremonial exchange, and linguistic relations are fundamentally of the same order, Lévi-Strauss derives the approach most fully exemplified in Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté. To Durkheim and Mauss, he repeatedly says, he owes the decisive insight that “la pensée dite primitive était une pensée quantifiée.”
The literary criticism of Georg Lukács
9. Studies in European Realism, translated by Edith Bone. New York, Grosset & Dunlap. Realism in Our Time, translated by John and Necke Mander. New York, Harper. (Essays on Thomas Mann was translated and published in England in 1964. The Historical Novel, written in 1936, has also recently been translated.)
Sartre’s Saint Genet
10. Saint Genet, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York, George Braziller.
Nathalie Sarraute and the novel
11. The Age of Suspicion by Nathalie Sarraute. Translated by Maria Jolas. New York, Braziller.
Ionesco
12. Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the Theatre by Eugène Ionesco. Translated by Donald Watson. New York, Grove.
Reflections on The Deputy
13. The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York, Grove.
The death of tragedy
14. Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, by Lionel Abel. New York, Hill & Wang.
Spiritual style in the films of Robert Bresson
15. Even here, though, there is a development. In Les Anges du Peché, there are five main characters—the young novice Anne-Marie, another novice Madeleine, the Prioress, the Prioress’ assistant Mother Saint-Jean, and the murderess Thérèse—as well as a great deal of background: the daily life of the convent, and so forth. In Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, there is already a simplification, less background. Four characters are clearly outlined—Hélène, her former lover Jean, Agnès, and Agnès’ mother. Everyone else is virtually invisible. We never see the servants’ faces, for instance.
16. The film has a co-title, which expresses the theme of inexorability: Le Vent Souffle où il Veut.
Resnais’ Muriel
17. Most of the principals of Muriel are remarkable as actors and in the clarity of their physical presences. But it must be noted that, unlike the other two feature films of Resnais, Muriel is dominated by a single performance, that of Delphine Seyrig as Hélène. In this film (but not in Marienbad) Seyrig has the nourishing irrelevant panoply of mannerisms of a star, in the peculiarly cinematic sense of that word. That is to say, she doesn’t simply play (or even perfectly fill) a role. She becomes an independent aesthetic object in herself. Each detail of her appearance—her graying hair, her tilted loping walk, her wide-brimmed hats and smartly dowdy suits, her gauche manner in enthusiasm and regret—is unnecessary and indelible.
Piety without content
18. Religion from Tolstoy to Camus. Selected and introduced by Walter Kaufmann. New York, Harper.
19. Kaufmann claims that he has presented “a heterogenous group, selected not to work toward some predetermined conclusion but to give a fair idea of the complexity of our story,” but it’s just this that he hasn’t done. It is unfair to represent Catholicism by papal encyclicals plus two and one half pages by Maritain of neo-Scholastic argument on “the contingent and the necessary,” which will be largely unintelligible to the audience to whom this anthology is directed. Selections from Gabriel Marcel, or Simone Weil, or some of the letters exchanged between Paul Claudel and André Gide on the latter’s possible conversion, or Newman on “the grammar of assent,” or Lord Acton, or Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest—any of these would be more interesting and richer than what Kaufmann has given. Protestantism is more generously, but still inadequately, represented—by two sermons of Pastor Niemoller, a weak excerpt from Paul Tillich (one of the essays in The Protestant Era would have been far more appropriate here), the least interesting chapter from Albert Schweitzer’s epochal book on eschatology in the New Testament, the Barth-Brunner correspondence, and the tame selection from Enslin mentioned above. Again, one may ask, why these? Why not something substantive from Barth or Bultmann? For Judaism, Kaufmann makes only the obvious choice, Martin Buber, represented by a chapter on the Hassidim. Why not more nourishing Buber, say, a chapter from I and Thou or Between Man and Man, or, better yet, a text by Franz Rosenzweig or Gershom Scholem? Of the fiction, why is there only Tolstoy and Dostoevsky? Why not Hesse (say, The Journey to the East) or some of Kafka’s parables or D. H. Lawrence’s Apocalypse? The emphasis on Camus, whose name appears in the title and whose great essay against capital punishment closes the book, seems particularly mysterious. Camus was not, nor ever claimed to be, religious. In fact, one of the points he makes in his essay is that capital punishment derives its only plausible rationale as a religious punishment and is therefore entirely inappropriate and ethically obscene in our present post religious, secularized society.
Notes on “Camp”
20. The sensibility of an era is not only its most decisive, but also its most perishable, aspect. One may capture the ideas (intellectual history) and the behavior (social history) of an epoch without ever touching upon the sensibility or taste which informed those ideas, that behavior. Rare are those historical studies—like Huizinga on the late Middle Ages, Febvre on 16th century France—which do tell us something about the sensibility of the period.
21. Sartre’s gloss on this in Saint Genet is: “Elegance is the quality of conduct which transforms the greatest amount of being into appearing.”
One culture and the new sensibility
22. Ortega remarks, in this essay: “Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.”
Afterword
Thirty Years Later …*
To look back on writings of thirty or more years ago is not a wholesome exercise. My energy as a writer impels me to look forward, to feel still that I am beginning, really beginning, now, which makes it hard to curb my impatience with that beginning writer I once was in the literal sense.
Against Interpretation, my second book, was published in 1966, but some essays in it date from 1961, when I was still writing The Benefactor. I had come to New York at the start of the 1960s, eager to put to work the
writer I had, since adolescence, pledged myself to become. My idea of a writer: someone interested in “everything.” I’d always had interests of many kinds, so it was natural for me to conceive of the vocation of a writer in this way. And reasonable to suppose that such fervency would find more scope in a great metropolis than in any variant of provincial life, including the excellent universities I had attended. The only surprise was that there weren’t more people like me.
I’m aware that Against Interpretation is regarded as a quintessential text of that now mythic era known as the Sixties. I evoke the label with reluctance, since I’m not keen on the omnipresent convention of packaging one’s life, the life of one’s time, in decades. And it wasn’t the Sixties then. For me it was chiefly the time when I wrote my first and second novels, and began to discharge some of the cargo of ideas about art and culture and the proper business of consciousness which had distracted me from writing fiction. I was filled with evangelical zeal.
The radical change I’d made in my own life, a change embedded in my moving to New York, was that I was not going to settle for being an academic: I would pitch my tent outside the seductive, stony safety of the university world. No doubt, there were new permissions in the air, and old hierarchies had become ripe for toppling, but not that I was aware, at least not until after the time (1961 to 1965) these essays were written. The freedoms I espoused, the ardors I was advocating, seemed to me—still seem to me—quite traditional. I saw myself as a newly minted warrior in a very old battle: against philistinism, against ethical and aesthetic shallowness and indifference. And I could never have imagined that both New York, where I had come to live after my long academic apprenticeship (Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard), and Paris, where I had started spending the summers, in daily attendance at the Cinémathèque, were in the early throes of a period that would be judged as exceptionally creative. They were, New York and Paris, exactly as I’d imagined them to be—full of discoveries, inspirations, the sense of possibility. The dedication and daring and absence of venality of the artists whose work mattered to me seemed, well, the way it was supposed to be. I thought it normal that there be new masterpieces every month—above all in the form of movies and dance events, but also in the fringe theater world, in galleries and improvised art spaces, in the writings of certain poets and other, less easily classifiable writers of prose. Maybe I was riding a wave. I thought I was flying, getting an overview, sometimes swooping down to get close.
I had so many admirations: there was so much to admire. I looked around and saw importance which no one was giving its due. Perhaps I was particularly well-fitted to see what I saw, to understand what I understood, by virtue of my bookishness, my Europhilia, and the energy I had at my disposal in the search for aesthetic bliss. Still, it surprised me at first that people found what I said “new” (it wasn’t so new to me), that I was thought to be in the vanguard of sensibility and, from the appearance of my very first essays, regarded as a tastemaker. Of course, I was elated to be apparently the first to pay attention to some of the matters I wrote about; sometimes I couldn’t believe my good fortune that they had waited for me to describe them. (How odd, I thought, that Auden hadn’t written something like my “Notes on Camp”). As I saw it, I was merely extending to some new material the aesthete’s point of view I had embraced, as a young student of philosophy and literature, in the writings of Nietzsche, Pater, Wilde, Ortega (the Ortega of “The Dehumanization of Art”), and James Joyce.
I was a pugnacious aesthete and a barely closeted moralist. I didn’t set out to write so many manifestos, but my irrepressible taste for aphoristic statement conspired with my staunchly adversarial purposes in ways that sometimes surprised me. In the writings collected in Against Interpretation this is what I like best: the tenacity, the succinctness (I suppose I should say here that I still agree with most of the positions I took), and certain psychological and moral judgments in the essays on Simone Weil, Camus, Pavese, and Michel Leiris. What I don’t like are those passages in which my pedagogic impulse got in the way of my prose. Those lists, those recommendations! I suppose they are useful, but they annoy me now.
The hierarchies (high/low) and polarities (form/content, intellect/feeling) I was challenging were those that inhibited the proper understanding of the new work I admired. Although I had no programmatic commitment to the “modern,” taking up the cause of new work, especially work that had been slighted or ignored or misjudged, seemed more useful than defending old favorites. In writing about what I was discovering, I assumed the preeminence of the canonical treasures of the past. The transgressions I was applauding seemed altogether salutary, given what I took to be the unimpaired strength of the old taboos. The contemporary work I praised (and used as a platform to re-launch my ideas about art-making and consciousness) didn’t detract from the glories of what I admired far more. Enjoying the impertinent energy and wit of a species of performance called Happenings did not make me care less about Aristotle and Shakespeare. I was—I am—for a pluralistic, polymorphous culture. No hierarchy, then? Certainly there’s a hierarchy. If I had to choose between the Doors and Dostoyevsky, then—of course—I’d choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?
The great revelation for me had been the cinema: I felt particularly marked by the films of Godard and Bresson. I wrote more about cinema than about literature, not because I loved movies more than novels but because I loved more new movies than new novels. It was clear to me that no other art was being so widely practiced at such a high level. One of my happiest achievements in the years when I was doing the writing collected in Against Interpretation is that no day passed without my seeing at least one, sometimes two or three movies. Most of them were “old.” My absorption in cinema history only reinforced my gratitude for certain new films, which (along with my favorites from the silent era and the 1930s) I saw again and again, so exalting were their freedom and inventiveness of narrative method, their sensuality and gravity and beauty.
Cinema was the exemplary art activity during the time these essays were written, but there were astonishments in the other arts as well. Fresh winds were blowing everywhere. Artists were insolent again, as they’d been after World War I until the rise of fascism. The modern was still a vibrant idea. (This was before the capitulations embodied in the idea of the “post-modern.”) And I have said nothing here about the political struggles which took shape around the time the last of these essays were being written: I mean the nascent movement against the American war on Vietnam, which was to consume a large part of my life from 1965 through the early 1970s (those years were still the Sixties, too, I suppose). How marvelous it all does seem, in retrospect. How one wishes some of its boldness, its optimism, its disdain for commerce had survived. The two poles of distinctively modern sentiment are nostalgia and utopia. Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the time now labeled the Sixties was that there was so little nostalgia. In that sense, it was indeed a utopian moment.
The world in which these essays were written no longer exists.
Instead of a utopian moment, we live in a time which is experienced as the end—more exactly, just past the end—of every ideal. (And therefore of culture: there is no possibility of true culture without altruism.) An illusion of the end, perhaps—and not more illusory than the conviction of thirty years ago that we were on the threshold of a great positive transformation of culture and society. No, not an illusion, I think.
It is not simply that the Sixties have been repudiated, and the dissident spirit quashed, and made the object of intense nostalgia. The ever more triumphant values of consumer capitalism promote—indeed, impose—the cultural mixes and insolence and defense of pleasure that I was advocating for quite different reasons. No recommendations exist outside a certain setting. The recommendations and enthusiasms expressed in the essays collected in Against Interpretation have become the possession of many people now. Something was operating to make these marginal views more acceptable, something of which I had
no inkling—and, had I understood better my time, that time (call it by its decade-name if you want), would have made me more cautious. Something that it would not be an exaggeration to call a sea-change in the whole culture, a transvaluation of values—for which there are many names. Barbarism is one name for what was taking over. Let’s use Nietzsche’s term: we had entered, really entered, the age of nihilism.
So I can’t help viewing the writings collected in Against Interpretation with a certain irony. I still like most of the essays and a few of them, such as “Notes on Camp” and “On Style,” quite a lot. (Indeed, there’s only one thing in the collection I don’t like at all: two theater chronicles, the brief result of a commission from a literary magazine with which I was allied, that I had accepted against my better judgment.) Who would not be pleased that a collection of contentious writings from more than three decades ago continues to matter to new generations of readers in English and in many foreign languages? Still, I urge the reader not to lose sight of—it may take some effort of imagination—the larger context of admirations in which these essays were written. To call for an “erotics of art” did not mean to disparage the role of the critical intellect. To laud work condescended to then as “popular” culture did not mean to conspire in the repudiation of high culture and its complexities. When I denounced (for instance, in the essays on science fiction films and on Lukács) certain kinds of facile moralism, it was in the name of a more alert, less complacent seriousness. What I didn’t understand (I was surely not the right person to understand this) was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries. Now the very idea of the serious (and of the honorable) seems quaint, “unrealistic,” to most people, and when allowed—as an arbitrary decision of temperament—probably unhealthy, too.
