Some notes on my recent readings of Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" and "On Style".
In "On Style", Sontag argues that the appreciation of art is troubled by the false division of "content" in a work of art from "style" or "form". The example in my mind of this division is the stereotypical English class analysis of a novel - the search for symbols and an explanation of the "deeper meaning" behind the work. To her, modern criticism is plagued by interpretation, the searching for this second layer of meanings obscuring the true form of the work of art. She says:
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.
Therefore:
To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings." It is to turn the world into *this world.
The image of the shadow is powerful here - rather than adding meaning and depth (as we might normally think), the interpreted version of the work is lean and lifeless; even neutered:
Real art 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, conformable.
As an alternative, Sontag argues for an appreciation of the primary layer of the work of art, the original world (as opposed to the shadow one), the top layer which is dug behind. She says:
Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.
The artist's goal is to further this transparence by creating art which shines through over-intellectualized layerings of meaning:
Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that work can be ... just what it is.
The critic, or the consumer of art, can contribute by focusing on form and the sensory experience of art as it exists, manifest in the world:
What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so we can see the thing at all. ... In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
This emphasis on form calls to my mind (of course) the Grateful Dead. Sontag (in "On Style") acknowledges the fact that form is more readily appreciated in music than in other mediums; this must be doubly true for the live, improvisational music of the Dead. To me, playing and inventing music in real time ensures a pre-constructed barrier against the insertion of "content" (in the negative sense) into the music - there's just no time! Instead, listening to live Dead music is a purely formal experience - the textures are certainly transparent, erotic, and encompassing.
But where is the value of form really rooted, besides as an alternative to content? Sontag also tackles this question in "On Style". She first ties together the ideas of form and style by arguing that style is not, as we might think, merely decoration, but instead the manifestation of the underlying form of the art object:
Even if one were to define style as the manner of our appearing, this by no means necessarily entails an opposition between a style that one assumes and one's "true" being. In fact, such a disjunction is extremely rare. In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being. The mask is the face.
It's this style that makes the work of art into art, because to Sontag a work of art definitely is an experience, and an experience that exists with style:
A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary of the world.
She further says:
Which is to say that the knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than a knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judgement) in itself.
I read this as saying that the value of art is to provide you with the sense of having had an experience without requiring the experience itself. Or, in another sense: a work of art works like a VPN for experience - through engaging with art in one moment and setting, you are receiving at least a reflection of an experience from another moment and setting.
Importantly, this second experience is not broader - art is not intended to convey universal truths. Rather, the truths that art reveals are narrow and personal:
A work of art is a kind of showing or recording or witnessing which gives palpable form to consciousness; its object is to make something singular explicit. ... What a work of art does is to make us see or comprehend something singular, not judge or generalize.
The consciousness that art gives form to is the consciousness of the artist, and the consciousness is made manifest in the artist's style. To Sontag:
Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist's will.
This gets at my earlier post on style - Sontag is here arguing that style (which she has already equated to the underlying form of the art) is the manifestation of the will of the artist within (or even outside) the thousands of decisions made in the course of the project of creation. Through the imprint of their personality (although that may not be the right word) on their art, the artist is helping to share and convey their personal and subjective consciousness into the impersonal form of the work of art. The more the art is driven by the animating force of the artist, the better:
But the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed.
Sontag is not saying here that the great art should be personal, in the sense of a diary or a self-portrait. Rather, she is asserting that the greatest art should provide the most transparent representation of the artist's consciousness, without (to some extent) the "content" of the artist (their political views, or lived experience, or any other layer of meaning which they might attempt to assert into their art). Indeed, the greatest art to Sontag is that where everything falls away but the unshakeable imprint of their fingerprint:
In other words, what is inevitable in a work of art is the style. ... The most attractive works of art are those which give us the illusion that the artist had no alternatives, so wholly centered is he in his style.
This again is exactly what is special to me about the music of the Dead. What is magical about Jerry Garcia's guitar playing is not that it fits some high aesthetic standard, but instead that it is individual, and instantly recognizable. His playing helps to convey his experience, not on a personal level (as a famous musician born in 1942 in California) but instead through a sense of embodiment. There's some type of Gestalt interpretation available here, where the increased individuality expressed by Garcia's playing serves to highlight further the larger overarching patterns connecting our disparate lives. Perhaps that's what Sontag is getting at here:
To become involved with a work of art entails, to be sure, the experience of detaching oneself from the world. But the work of art itself is also a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.
There's more to think through here, but I'll leave it off for now. I could not, however, recommend either of these essays more highly. They are extremely lucid, to the extent that I don't think I understood what people meant by lucid writing until I read Sontag's essays. If you haven't, please read them and let me know - I would love to hear other thoughts on the layers of meaning (coexisting, not replaced through interpretation) available here.