Sontag argues that our Western perception of art is just a continuation of Plato's and Aristotle's views. (Who would have guessed, right?) For Plato, art's main purpose was mimesis. The issue was, however, that Plato didn't believe in our reality (see Plato's cave); therefore, the art was an imitation of an imitation. What benefit is that, really?
Well, Aristotle had an answer for that. To participate in the art is to purge from all the emotions dragging us daily, cumulating in our minds unable to find a release—katharsis.
Even though they disagreed, their views had one thing in common: they both saw a piece of art not as a whole, but as combined from two elements: content and form. As we can deduce, content is the more important, essential part. Form, however, is merely an accessory, a means to an end.
And that, this distinction, is a core of Sontag's accusation towards interpreters and interpretations. We tend to focus solely on the content; we dismiss form as unimportant, tedious, and not worth our attention. She says the function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than what it means.
Sontag also notices that the new style of interpretation stubbornly, almost rudely, digs behind the text to find a new meaning to replace the literal one. In contrast, the old style of interpretation tried to form another meaning on top of it. She says that interpreting the looking-for-things-that-are-not-there style may sign (un)conscious dissatisfaction with the work as we try to replace it with something else.
Another reason why we interpret the way we do is because we want to domesticate art. Sontag (and she's not alone in it) explains that real art has the power to make us nervous, and nobody wants to feel this way, so we reduce it to its content and look for “hidden meaning” as a means to make it manageable and conformable. And that, Sontag says, is a reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling act—the revenge of the intellect upon art.
But why should we even care? Why shouldn't we humbly accept Plato and Aristotle's heritage and carry on? To those, Sontag replies: We no longer live in Dante's era. When he was creating a piece of art to have more than the literal meaning could have been revolutionary, but we moved on a long time ago. Our current culture is based on excess and overproduction; nobody remembers Ockham and his razor (do not multiply entities beyond necessity). Our sensory experience has become dull, and Sontag calls on us to reclaim the sharpness that we have lost. She says we can no longer take the sensory experience of the work for granted. And when you put your mind to it, it's even more relevant today than in 1966, when Susan Sontag was publishing the essay.
In 2024 AD, in the era of self-proclaimed intellectualism, it was quite refreshing to read Sontag's words. I have never thought about interpretation from that point of view, even though sometimes my mind made attempts to reach a similar conclusion. I write poetry, and many of my works were written without any specific meaning behind them. I just wrote what I found to sound good, to leave a particular taste on the reader's tongue and mind. It often surprised me that these were the poems other people engaged with the most. I heard so many theories about my lines, about what could they mean. I never dared to admit that they hold no particular meaning, at least on my part.
Maybe it is our doom as a humankind, this indomitable urge to keep looking for meaning everywhere. Instead of that, we should simply read Tarkovsky's words one hundred, one thousand, one million times and focus on experiencing things. Because even though things can be as deep as we want them to be, we need to realize that our lust for meaning is not everything that there is.
No comments:
Post a Comment