In Praise of Being “Against Interpretation”

One of the things that usually inspires me to write is reading something that coalesces several ideas I’ve been thinking about into a unified whole. One of the essays that has done that for me recently is Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation.” The thing is, I used to think of interpretation as something that I did every day, but the reality is much more complex. At the same time, I’m very much against the kind of interpretation that goes on in college literature courses because of how it’s destroying--or by this point has already destroyed--literary theory in universities all over the country, and liberal arts in general. It was Sontag’s essay from 1964 that made me realize how to articulate what the actual difference is. Her essay is preceded, quite appropriately, with an eye-opening quote by Oscar Wilde--whom professor Mark Edmundson says, “is almost never wrong”--that states, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” When I read this I thought immediately of one of the best things a college professor ever told me. He said that there are no hidden meanings in a text. Everything that can be known about a piece of writing is actually in the text itself. The kind of interpretation Sontag is talking about, then, is allegorical interpretation, something that has nothing to do with the work itself.

She begins by going back to Plato and Aristotle, the earliest discussions of what art actually is, a mere representation of reality, mimesis, an imitation of the real world. For Plato, this serves no obvious function, and while Aristotle finds a useful emotional outlet in art, he basically agrees with Plato on its mimetic nature. This is something I wholeheartedly agree with. While Sontag is speaking about art in general, including the visual arts, my area of study is primarily textual arts, including film, which is something of a combination of both. In either case, however, art is always representative of something, whether it is the imitation of the outer world experienced by the senses, or the inner life of the artist’s emotions and feelings represented in tangible form. While some will quibble with examples like abstract art, Sontag sums up my feelings on this as well:

          Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as represent-
          ation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the
          mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a
          picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still
          comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic.
          But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content.

This is actually one of the reasons that I don’t care for science-fiction writing. While the conceit of such stories is that they are about other planets, other sentient beings, and things beyond our ken, the reality is as human beings we are incapable of imagining things that we can’t imagine. Everything that a human can imagine is firmly locked within our human experience, and therefore cannot, by definition, represent something outside of it. While an author may come up with something we haven’t thought of before, it is something we could think of.

Given that fact, Sontag says, presents a problem, because with no intrinsic purpose art must now justify itself, and this need for justification has split art into two separate things: form, which is the mode of transmission (the use of language in writing, shot selection in film, brush strokes and medium in painting) and the content, which is the actual meaning of the work itself (the message or the statement of the work). Because of this, Sontag says, the enjoyment of art for art’s sake has been destroyed in the quest to interpret the meaning of the work, and implicit in this is the belief that art without meaning isn’t really art at all. But Sontag makes the bold statement that it is not art itself that should be in danger of losing its purpose, but interpretation. “[I]t is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.” Sontag takes time out here for a parenthetical statement to clarify that by interpretation she doesn’t mean the theory that all of human existence is interpretation through the senses. She states that in the world of art, interpretation is synonymous with translation, and the reason for this is the scientific revolution that rendered the ancient, mythical texts suddenly meaningless. Unless, of course, they had a sub-textual meaning, an allegorical content that could still make them relevant to a modern generation.

One of the unfortunate occurrences that attended the differentiation between human beings and the other animals is their imaginative brains. It didn’t take long before the human consciousness of their own existence--and primarily their own deaths--needed to be justified by a continued existence beyond the physical plane, which evolved quite naturally into religion. Even as far back as Plato, Sontag notes, human existence presupposed a divine existence, that objects themselves were merely “imitations of transcendent forms” just as humanity was an imitation of god. This presupposition of divinity is faced with a problem when the literal texts become meaningless, a problem that interpretation solves quite neatly. Even before modern science, Romans “allegorized away the rude features of Zeus and his boisterous clan in Homer’s epics,” just as later generations “interpreted the literal historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms . . . The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning.” But modern interpretation is far more insidious, and far more destructive in what it is actually doing to the texts themselves. “The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.”

Sontag begins with the two most influential examples of this kind of interpretive tyranny, Freudian and Marxist. “According to Marx and Freud . . . events only seem to be intelligible. Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation.” This, then, becomes the justification for ideas like deconstructionism, where all meaning in works of art must be constructed by the audience, that the work itself actually has no meaning without the audience. But this is merely a dialectic argument along the lines of the tree falling in the forest without anyone to hear it. Of course true communication depends upon two parties, the sender and the receiver, and without the receiver communication cannot be said to exist. That, however, is distinctly different than determining meaning in a work of art. The fact is, the tree that falls in a forest outside of human perception most certainly does make a noise, just as a work of art without an audience contains meaning: the meaning that the creator endowed it with. This is where allegorical interpretation goes awry. If the only meaning of art is what the audience decides it is, then the art has no intrinsic value, and thus the art itself is devoid of meaning until the audience creates that meaning. But art does have intrinsic value, and instead it is the very act of interpretation that is debasing it and making it worthless. “Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities.”

The place where this poison is the most deadly is in our colleges, where allegorical interpretation goes by the name of deconstructionism, Lacanianism, feminism, queer theory, and the identity politics of multiculturalism, all of them different ways of taking the thinking out of education. “Real art,” Sontag rightly asserts, “has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.” College, however, as a place of learning, should be anything but intellectually comfortable. In his essay “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students,” now nearly twenty years old, professor Mark Edmundson says that reading should be more than just communication, it should be a confrontation between the author and the student, “where the stakes matter.”

          [T]his generation of students . . . are inclined to see the books they read as a string of entertain-
          ments to be placidly enjoyed or languidly cast down . . . [K]ids don't come to school hot to learn,
          unable to bear their own ignorance. For some measure of self-dislike, or self-discontent . . . seems
          to me to be a prerequisite for getting an education that matters. My students, alas, usually lack the
          confidence to acknowledge what would be their most precious asset for learning: their ignorance.

But college students don’t become this way in college, they get there already fully formed. In Edmundson’s words, “It’s my generation of parents who sheltered these students, kept them away from the hard knocks of everyday life, making them cautious and overfragile, who demanded that their teachers, from grade school on, flatter them endlessly so that the kids are shocked if their college profs don't reflexively suck up to them.” One of the ways that those college profs manage to “suck up” to students is by allowing their already atrophied intellects to coast along without being challenged, comfortable in the thought that analysis of literature is no more strenuous than tossing out whatever uninformed opinion pops into their heads. The denigration of the written word through interpretation, then, continues to reinforce in our young people the debilitating notion that not only is beauty in the eye of the beholder, but meaning is as well.

Another former university professor who has written about this same idea is Joseph Epstein. In an anecdote from his essay “Who Killed the Liberal Arts,” he demonstrates the lengths that professors have gone to in destroying the idea that any meaning in art is inherent in the work itself:

          A bright young female graduate student one day came to ask me if I thought David Copperfield
          a sexual criminal. “Why would I think that?” I asked. “Professor X thinks it,” she said. “He claims
          that because of the death in childbirth of David Copperfield’s wife, he, Copperfield, through mak-
          ing her pregnant, committed a crime.” All I could think to reply was, “I guess criticism never sleeps.”

This is no less than the wholesale destruction of intellectual thought, inculcated into generations of young people, and tantamount to making them unable to actually read. For if the literal meaning has no place in comprehending a work of art, then nothing does. Sontag also makes explicit the emphasis that this kind of interpretation has on the written word. “This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else.” From here, however, she then moves into an area of art that has been more resistant to interpretation, at least in her day, and that is the cinema.

Because of the domination of imagery in film over narrative, in movies, “there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret,” and that “films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were understood to be part of mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds.” Unfortunately that is not the case today, and it’s no surprise that many young people apply the same type of facile interpretation to film that they learned in their college literature courses. It’s here that Sontag’s argues for a shift away from content (meaning) and toward form (method). The problem with this wholesale shift toward form is that it seems to denigrate meaning, implying that if meaning denigrates art it should probably be done away with altogether. My contention, though, is that meaning is still important, and it is actually form that gives the audience the way to discover true meaning in a work of art. Rather than an allegorical interpretation that divorces the literal elements of the art--both visual and narrative--from meaning, true analysis actually relies upon the literal as a way into discovering the actual meaning of the work. Though that should not be misunderstood as being the same thing as the artist’s intent, for the work of an artist stands alone. Rather, what I call a valid interpretation rests on the inherent wholeness of the interpreted meaning as one that makes sense in all aspects of the literal.

Sontag seems to agree with this when she talks about the idea of “formal analysis,” which I see as entirely different from allegorical interpretation. “The function of criticism,” she says, “should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” But it’s difficult to know if she and I are talking about the same thing at this point. For in my method of analysis, the purpose of looking at how a work of art is what it is stems from a desire to know what it means. What it means, not what I think it means, and that is a profound difference. For I believe that there are intrinsic meanings in works of art, especially literature. And while that ultimate meaning of a work may not be quite what the author intended, I am quite certain that it’s not what I want it to be. That true meaning is in the work itself, visible, as Oscar Wilde calls it, and it’s not my job to overlay some allegorical interpretation over the top of it, or worse yet, to “dig behind the text,” as Sontag says, and thereby destroying the work in the process. The true meaning is there, in the words, for all to see, and the job of formal analysis is to identify a meaning as accurately as possible that is valid both textually and contextually in order to better understand the literal work itself. Sontag calls this transparence: “experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” But whether we agree or not on the finer points of meaning, we are both clearly in agreement on our stance Against Interpretation.

The Late, Great Planet Earth

Back in high school when I was a Jesus freak there was one author that captivated the imagination of me and my Christian friends, and that was Hal Lindsey. His best-selling book, The Late, Great Planet Earth, was a biblical template for the end times. He had combed through the bible to look for all of the prophecies in both testaments that talked about the return of Christ and the destruction of the earth that would accompany it. What we were most intrigued by is the idea of the rapture, when god would come down and save all of the true believers, taking them to heaven without the necessity of death to transition them. That book was from 1970 but his most recent book at the time, called There’s a New World Coming, was a thorough analysis of the book of revelation. We not only devoured that book but the youth pastor at my church also taught a class on it for teenagers on Wednesday nights. Well, it’s forty years later and Hal Lindsey is still preaching the end of the world, this time on television in The Hal Lindsey Report, in which he continues to espouse dispensationalist doctrine that also includes castigating the Muslim world and calling President Obama the Antichrist. The Earth is still here and so am I, and Christ, like the Christian god, is nowhere to be found. But one aspect of Linsey’s proselytizing is coming true, and that’s the destruction of the Earth, but it isn’t from the hand of god. Instead, the end of life on Earth is going to come at the hands of man himself.

Now, this isn’t anything new. Since 1945 man has had the ability to obliterate life on this planet through the deployment and detonation of nuclear bombs. But this kind of dramatic occurrence is obvious and much of the world has recognized the folly of allowing such a major disaster to occur and have worked toward minimizing the possibility of mutually assured destruction. What hasn’t been typically been understood by the average person, however, are the long-term effects of human presence on the planet and the ways in which the increased population of humans as a species are currently threatening their own survival. In the 1999 film The Matrix, actor Hugo Weaving makes this point through the character of Agent Smith:

          Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding
          environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until
          every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another
          area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know
          what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague . . .

It’s a startling revelation. Humans routinely call cancer cells the stupidest organisms in nature because they kill themselves by killing their host, but that is exactly what is going on now with humanity. What the Wachowskis, who wrote the screenplay for the film, failed to fully explain--or perhaps didn’t quite understand--is that the virus of humanity is not only killing other species by destroying the planet, it is actually killing itself.

Most of the efforts to preserve the planet have been, until recently, exactly that: preservation efforts. Beginning in the seventies in this country--with the realization that we were actually polluting ourselves to death--we began a systematic attempt to reverse the effects of decades of industrial pollution and toxic waste in an effort to reclaim wilderness areas and wildlife itself. All the while, however, industrialization continued to do harm to the environment through deforestation, invisible pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane, as well as unchecked pollution elsewhere in the world. Though the problem existed, and scientists were aware of it’s significance long before the year 2006, global climate change didn’t really make front-page news until former Vice-President Al Gore decided to lend his story to a film called An Inconvenient Truth. The film focused on what were called greenhouse gasses, and the results of their emission, which was tabbed global warming. The hotter temperatures, which were a fact around the world, not only caused more heat waves, but increased in number and magnitude events like hurricanes, tornadoes, and typhoons. Just as important, however, the melting of the polar ice caps slows down the warm ocean currents, causing equally catastrophic cold snaps that have been occurring more recently, plunging most of this country into record lows during the winter, thus prompting a name change to more accurately reflect the results of this kind of pollution: climate change.

While the attempt to save animal species through vehicles like the Endangered Species act in the U.S. and The Convention for the International Trade in Endangered Species worldwide is well known, what isn’t typically grasped is the way in which the extinction of those species is like a dead canary in a coalmine: whatever killed those species also has the potential to kill us. One masterful demonstration of this is the film Racing Extinction by Oscar-winning director Louie Psihoyos. While the film begins as a plea to reverse the effects that man is having on the planet in order to save animal species from extinction, in evolves quite naturally into a demonstration of how continuing these destructive practices can lead to the end of our own species through the destruction of the oceans and forests which produce the oxygen necessary to sustain life on Earth. The film discusses the ideas set forth in a book entitled The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert who also appears in the film, which traces the five major extinctions visible in the fossil record of the planet. The fifth event was the asteroid that hit the Earth and caused the dinosaurs to go extinct. The sixth event is man’s presence on the Earth, an era labeled the Anthropocene, an epoch in which the human imprint upon the planet is so large that is able to actually alter the planet itself. Psihoyos believes that we are at the tipping point, where man either has a final opportunity to reverse the devastating effects of his destructive presence on the planet, or that it is already too late to go back.

On the same night I saw this documentary, I also watched an episode of Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel and was surprised to see two segments on the destruction of the elephant population in Africa, something that the Psihoyos film only touches on. Thirty years ago the elephant population was somewhere around a million and a half, but since then they have been reduced to just four hundred thousand. Their deaths are primarily caused by poaching and big game hunting, and those rates don’t show any inclination of slowing. As long as there is a market for tusks, then poachers will kill as many as they can get their hands on. And, of course, hunters refuse to acknowledge that there even is a problem. The ugliness of human behavior toward all animals in the wild was also part of the story. I’m ashamed to be related to these creatures with whom, in the words of Nathaniel Hawthorne, I feel a “loathful brotherhood.” And this is the message that seems to come out loud and clear from all of these films, that man simply can’t be bothered. I used to be fascinated at the idea of lemmings, who would follow the rest of the herd right off a cliff to their deaths. How could they do that, I wondered. But then they were just animals, a “lower” form of life. Humans have no such excuse, or at least they shouldn’t. In the area of climate change, however, as in so many other human endeavors, it seems that people are just as stupid as animals. And when looked at from the Wachowski’s point of view, even more so.

One of the other major forces for destruction of the earth is, ironically, food production. Three quarters of the land used for food crops grown in the world is for the raising of livestock, the single most wasteful use of natural resources in world history. Over twenty-five years ago, when I discovered this fact, I stopped eating meat for that very reason. It wasn’t an ethical issue for me, it was one of pure waste that I could prevent simply by stopping my consumption of farm-raised animals. In addition to the waste of land by deforestation needed for meat animals as well as their grain and water consumption, there is also the fact of methane emissions from the animals that is even more destructive than carbon dioxide. All of the major extinction events on Earth prior to this one have been associated with an increase in carbon dioxide but none of them as extreme as what is going on today. The CO2 that is indirectly increasing the temperature of the water in the world’s oceans is also directly being absorbed into the water, creating carbonic acid and raising the acidity of the water, killing fish, shellfish and coral reefs. But the most damaging effect of this ocean destruction is the way in which it is killing plankton. Dr. Boris Worm has done extensive studies on the effects of absorption of carbon dioxide into the oceans. Plankton account for half of all the oxygen produced on the plane, and yet plankton numbers have been reduced by forty percent in just the last fifty years. The end of oxygen production on Earth would certainly wipe out a majority of land-dwelling species, including most human life.

In the movie The American President, written by the great Aaron Sorkin, actress Annette Benning is attempting to get a bill presented to Congress that would mandate lowering emissions levels by twenty percent. In talking to a congressman she finally says in exasperation, “Harry, think like a father for a second. Wouldn’t you like your kids to be able to take a deep breath when they’re 30?” In the context of the film--produced four years before The Matrix--the line is humorous because of its hyperbole. Twenty years later it’s not. The destruction of the plankton in the oceans, combined with deforestation on the land, is going to result in a major decrease in worldwide oxygen production at some point. If it was just that people were ignorant and didn’t care that would be one thing, but the reality is much more insidious. A great portion of the world’s population, deluded by the promises of religion, actually denigrates the world itself as well as all life on it. Both Muslims and Christians believe in a fairy tale of life beyond this one, and their holy books tell them to focus on that and ignore hardships and struggles here. This has led to an unprecedented amount of human death and destructing at the hands of religion, not just the terrorism we’re experiencing today, but terrorism from Christians in the form of the Inquisition, the Crusades, and Witch Trials which have murdered more people than all Muslim terrorist attacks put together.

One of the most powerful lines from An Inconvenient Truth comes early on in the film, something of a thesis statement, really. Al Gore states: “There are good people who are in politics, in both parties, who hold this at arm’s length, because if they acknowledge it and recognize it, then the moral imperative to make big changes become inescapable.” It’s a great line because it stresses the moral obligation that we have to stop destroying our planet. But morality has been kicked to the curb in recent years, in the cruelest of ironies by those from the right who used to espouse it the most. With the ascension of Donald Trump, however--not to mention scandals too numerous to count--the right has no more moral high ground on which to stand. They are liars who deny climate change in order to line their pockets with money from fossil fuel producers and get elected by a base constituency that is too ignorant to understand what they’re doing. They pander to evangelicals by telling them that science is lying to them, because Christians are not allowed to believe that god is not in full control of nature or it would expose what they’ve childishly believed for the last two thousand years as the giant deception it really is. By killing the planet and everything on it, we are really killing ourselves. It’s that simple. Forget black lives matter, all life matters, not just human life. Because without those other lives on Earth, it may very well mean the end of our own.