Introduction & Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation"

The first time I thought about doing a blog on literature was when I picked up two books, excited to read them, and realized I'd already done that years ago. This was when I first started on my quest to tackle the canon , which eventually took a tangential turn toward literary criticism / contemporary drama / the avant-garde. Between all this, I decided it might be wise to keep track of where I am and my opinions, however they evolve. Mostly, I want this to be a guide to do-it-yourself lit study, requiring only an internet connection and a library.

So, here's where I'm at now: not the beginning, but very very close. After reading "On the Road" as per the canon, I read "Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters" and from there resolved to read "The Idiot" by Dostoevsky (currently purchased) and to acquire a reasonable guide to the world of literary philosophy and contemporary thought. Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation and Other Essays" fell into my lap (and I imagine will be followed by Milan Kundera's "Encounter"). That's what I start with.

Against Interpretation

1. We understand art as mimesis or representation; art by definition says something

• "form" vs "content" -- What's the difference? Form is words on a page or images in a painting, whereas content is what those words are about and what the images resemble.

2. Extreme examples of content representation: Freud & Marx (everything is sexual or everything is economics and class) where without interpretation there is no understanding

3. Last Year at Marienbad - I'm putting this here only because it's the second time this week I've heard of this film by Resnais (Jim Emerson being the editor for Roger Ebert).

4. "To avoid interpretation, art may become parody. Or it may become abstract. Or it may become 'merely' decorative. Or it may become non-art."

• Sontag cites Godard's "Breathless" as a film that does not demand interpretation, as "anti-symbolic"

5. Sontag champions transparence, "experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are" and faults our dulled senses.

• "What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more." (Is this related to Artaud's total theater?)
• And how to go about doing this? Perhaps more emphasis on form instead of so much content-based interpretation.

Sontag gives several examples of form-based criticisms (essay links below):

• Erwin Panofsky "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures"
• Northrop Frye "A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres"
• Pierre Francastel "The Destruction of a Plastic Space"
• Roland Barthes on Robbe-Grillet
• Erich Auerbach "The Scar of Odysseus"
• Walter Benjamin "The Story Teller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov"

And on the appearance of art, rather than formal analysis:

• Dorothy Van Ghent "The Dickens World: A View from Todgers"
• Randall Jarrell on Whitman

Updated -- things that impressed me from Jarrell's Whitman essay:
"... It is the contradictions in works of art which make them able to represent to us - as logical and methodical generalizations cannot - our world and our selves, which are also full of contradictions."
"There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so. [...] If some day a tourist notices, among the ruins of New York City, a copy of Leaves of Grass, and stops and picks it up and reads some lines in it, she will be able to say to herself: 'How very American! If he and his country had not existed, it would have been impossible to imagine them.'"
Updated II -- things that impressed me from Walter Benjamin's essay:
"Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated."
... and further, the idea of eternity fades and the idea of death fades; it's possible now "to avoid the sight of the dying" (although I'm not sure why this diminishes the idea of eternity; wouldn't it enforce it?)
"The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader."
"A man ... who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five."