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BOOKS
PARTI PRIS
AGAINST INTERPRETATION.
By
Susan Sontag. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux.
$4.95.
American critical discourse has, on the whole, either neglected
or failed to talk intelligently about Michel Butor, Jean-Luc Godard,
Roland Barthes or Claude Levi-Strauss-a few of the h eroes on Miss
Sontag's roster. This neglect and failure point to Miss Sontag's import–
ance : with a fine sense of timing and drama she has made herself the
authoritative propagandist for much that is vital in contemporary artistic
consciousness. She has the distinct advantage of being influenced less by
Anglo-American formalism than by European phenomenology and the
French "new criticism"-systems which tend to encourage a freer and
more relevant response to the most interesting recent productions. She is at
her best when she writes as one who has just come from the combat zone:
her enthusiastic engagement with the chosen problem, her desire to per–
suade and convince, frequently allow us to excuse her stylistic lugubrious–
ness, inexact vocabulary, failures of discrimination and incomplete absorp–
tion of critical models. Miss Sontag is sometimes either wrong or not very
original, and the critical substructure on which she is building often
comes close to theoretical collapse. Yet she has undeniably assembled in
Against Interpretation
an impressive collection of essays in the practical
criticism of the newest modernism.
For Miss Sontag, the philosophers and artists who matter are those
who have contributed to an understanding of our "intellectual homeless–
ness," and the intellectual adventures that have been its consequence.
Indeed, it is the sense of adventure, born from crisis and spiritual nausea,
that she manages to impart. She is unusually well served by the collec–
tion of what were originally occasional pieces: through the welter of
names and events, we discover one mind performing what Miss Sontag
calls Sartrean cosmophagy, "the devouring of the world by conscious–
ness." Jean Genet, Robert Bresson, Michel Foucault, Antonioni, Robbe–
Grillet, Lukacs, Norman O. Brown, Jack Smith: the insistent return
