BOOKS
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uncompromising and even rigid formal experimentation can we achieve
accuracy of perception about the structures of consciousness. The role
of criticism must therefore be to explicate, or rather to describe explicitly,
these inherent structures. And it seems to me that in a number of in–
stances, Miss Sontag has been largely successful in doing just this. The
essay on Bresson is one of the most striking pieces of film criticism (and
inventions of a vocabulary of film criticism) that I have seen; the ex–
position of Sartre's
Saint-Genet
is brilliantly accurate; the articles on
Camus, Levi-Strauss and
Marat/Sade
are excellent. As expositor and
propagandist, Miss Sontag is at her best when engaged with these
exemplary figures. Yet since she considers these individual forays valu–
able less for themselves than as "case studies for an aesthetic"-a critical
view that would extend to Robbe-Grillet, Rauschenberg and Resnais,
that would formulate the common terms ,of their enterprise--her
book
also has theoretical yearnings. And when she formulates her theories
-mainly in "Against Interpretation" and "On Style"-the results are
murky.
These essays are undermined by failures of logic, language and
historical understanding that cast some doubt on Miss Sontag's under–
standing of her critical models. She is strangely unable to move beyond
an argument that inscribes itself wholly within the tradition of Sym–
bolist or late-Romantic esthetics. She wants an art (and the correspond–
ing criticism) that is nondiscursive, sensuous, self-contained, "thingy." In
fact, she can sound rather like Stephen Daedalus:
"Transparence
is the
highest, most liberating value in art-and in criticism-today. Transpar–
ence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things
being what they are." While the term "transparence" may come from
Husser!, or from Starobinski, this statement does not represent much
progress beyond Joyce's Aquinean
quidditas,
or Mallarme's dancer, or
the image as conceived by Pound or T. E. Hulme.
It
expresses a tradi–
tional argument about the indissoluble union of form and content in
transcendent image, a view one thought had been accepted long ago.
Miss Sontag thinks not: she finds that "what haunts all contemporary
use of the notion of style is the putative opposition between form and
content." Her solution, reintroducing content as a sort of undergrowth
to be pruned, merely compounds her dilemma: "Our task is to cut back
content so that we can see the thing as all."
To argue on such bases is surely to prolong a sterile and exhausted
debate, and to fall into a defensive, unproductive estheticism. One grants
that interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art: as Northrop
Frye has remarked, all commentary on a text is really allegorization of
