Against Interpretation (44 page)

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.

I suppose it’s not wrong that
Against Interpretation
is read now, or reread, as an influential, pioneering document from a bygone age. But that is not how I read it, or—lurching from nostalgia to utopia—wish it to be read. My hope is that its republication now, and the acquisition of new readers, could contribute to the quixotic task of shoring up the values out of which these essays and reviews were written. The judgments of taste expressed in these essays may have prevailed. The values underlying those judgments did not.

[
1996
]

*
 “Thirty Years Later…” was written as the preface to the republication in Madrid in 1996 of the Spanish translation of
Against Interpretation.

Also by Susan Sontag

Fiction

THE BENEFACTOR

DEATH KIT

I, ETCETERA

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

THE VOLCANO LOVER

IN AMERICA

Essays

STYLES OF RADICAL WILL

ON PHOTOGRAPHY

ILLNESS AS METAPHOR
AND
AIDS AND ITS METAPHORS

UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN

Filmscripts

DUET FOR CANNIBALS

BROTHER CARL

Play

ALICE IN BED

AGAINST INTERPRETATION.
Copyright © 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966 by Susan Sontag. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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“Resnais’ Muriel” © 1964 by the Regents of the University of California, Reprinted from
Film Quarterly,
Vol. XVII, No. 2, pp. 23–7, by permission of the Regents.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sontag, Susan.

Against interpretation, and other essays / Susan Sontag

p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-28086-6

1. Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Criticism. I. Title.

[PN771.S62 1990]

809'.04—dc20

90—367
CIP

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

eISBN 9781466853522

First eBook edition: August 2013