Against Interpretation

When American writer and critic Susan Sontag made its debut on the literary scene in the 60s' of last century, the United States was undergoing a radical transitional period. The conservatism after the World War II was fading under the impact of liberalism and various social movements, counterculture and revolutions were unleashed in Europe and the US., including anti-Vietnam war campaign, Black Power movement, feminism, gay movement, students' protests, coupled with the cultural permissiveness such as drug abuse, sexual liberation and hippies. The post-war economic recovery ushered in the culture of consumerism, which toppled the traditional literary theory that put emphasis on historical and moral contexts. Thus, the experimental arts that were prevalent in the 20s and 30s were once more explored by artists.Riding the wave of the new era was Sontag who inherited the tradition of social criticism of the New York Intellectuals, .yet she did not target her attack towards the popular culture that is opposed to elite culture and literature of modernism, but towards the psychological and positivistic approaches in literary analysis employed by academic professionals. She put forward the concept of "against interpretation", hoping to recreate the "erotic" art by scrapping the digging of social and moral implications in works of art, thus bettering and broadening man's aesthetic consciousness through pure artistic forms. The underlying goal of her advocacy is to have artistic appreciation on a par with dominant scientific culture, so that man's perceptual faculty can be liberated from the depression of rationalism, humanity be recovered and developed and the redemptive mission fulfilled by art.To promote the formalist art view, Sontag initiated the project of commenting on and introducing to American audience the works of European men of letters such as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Antonin Artaud. In a series of essays she penned pertaining popular culture, she set forth many aesthetic concepts such as "against interpretation", "camp", "aesthetics of silence", "aesthetics of Fascism", "new sensibility", pornographic imagination, etc., with which she highlighted the importance of experimental art of the new era, especially movie and dance theories. These new theories played a role of delivering people from the alienation of reason by way of expressive forms and liberating function of art. Her formalistic aesthetics is not only the continuation of Russian Formalism and the New Criticism, but is also more comprehensive, embracing a myriad of popular art forms of the 60s and thereafter.There has always been, however, a critical tension between Sontag's aesthetic ideas and popular culture as she never allows herself to follow the trend in a blind way. For example, she defined the "camp" style as a marginalized cultural phenomenonbetween high culture and avant-garde culture, which aimed at maintaining the "dandified" and "defamiliarized" aesthetic taste in avant-garde and popular arts, in order to counter "automation" and long-standing binary opposites of elite and popular cultures. "Aesthetics of silence" is also an extension of the above-mentioned theory with a view of constructing a new sensibility by discarding the old one, and unifying the "deep structure" of modernism with the artistic forms of popular culture.The Benefactor and Death Kit, two early novels by Susan Sontag, are footnotes of her theories, for the experiments in form create a unconventional narrative mode which, being both bizarre and conscious-exploratory, is obviously attuned to the concept of "against interpretation".Sontag's aesthetic theories are also the most open, always evolving in a dynamic fashion. Influenced by consumerism and market economy since the 1980s, she began to revert to realistic approach in her fiction-writing, which is apparent in her novels The Volcano Lover: A Romance and In America. Even so, we can still feel the formalist experiment and rich anti-realistic romantic elements in these two works. And this, of course...