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.