I reread Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” yesterday. Amusing and challenging at turns, the essay calls for an erotics of art in the final sentence, rebuking the need for analysis—interpretation—of what art really means. But how can we proceed with this sensual understanding of art? How can we write about it?
Modernism was plagued by form cut away from content, leaving open how exactly any given piece of art fit against our expectations, the semantic churn of meanings that we want to apply to a work of art. There must be a framework but the depth of analysis is really what Sontag is questioning. Take the examples she gives, like Auerbach’s The Scar of Odysseus. In it, we are scanning around a particular event in The Odyssey, namely the recognition of a scar on Odysseus’s thigh. The author asks us to understand how Homer uses the scar as a focus in the verses, then takes us back to the events in his youth when he was injured. The narrative form is then contrasted and compared with the Old Testament, which might have been compiled around the same time frame as Homer’s work. But what might rise to erotics rather than interpretation? Take the following:
The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly placed in relation to one another; a large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and other syntactical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in meaning, delimit persons, things, and portions of incidents in respect to one another, and at the same time bring them together in a continuous and ever flexible connection; like the separate phenomena themselves, their relationships—their temporal, local, causal, final, consecutive, comparative, concessive, antithetical, and conditional limitations—are brought to light in perfect fullness; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths.
A cynical take on this could be well, that is writing after all, but all praise to the imagination and skill of Homer. So is an erotics of art a pure analysis of form without any assumptions of symbolism, situation, cultural context? Is it just a massage of syntax and narrative structure, a liquid flowering of progressions of description leading to the climactic realization that the form stands alone and for something that is designed to be felt, observed, absorbed, and not reduced beyond that?
But Auerbach in the comparison between Homer and the Old Testament quickly moves from form to authorial analysis. The goals of the writers are contrasted using their styles as a focus. Where Homer lied to delight an audience, the Elohist author lied with absolute faith in their narrative. The hiddenness of the Biblical narratives, contrasted with the perfect descriptive fullness of Homer, is a cultural context, is an embedding. Or, as much, may just reflect different writing traditions, as do the worship hymns of the much older Rig Veda or the other Middle Eastern writings. So our erotics breaks down and begins to intermingle with history, with textual criticism, with contextualized goals.
This erotics is itself an interpretation.
Edits always!