PETER BROOKS
a myth. But analysis is not necessarily interpretation: serious critics do
not take as a model for their statements (as Miss Sontag claims ) "What
X is trying to
.My
is .. ." but rather "What X is trying to
do
is...."
In fact, modern Anglo-American criticism is far more descriptive, and
less interpretive than Miss Sontag thinks, and she signally fails to con–
front the work of its main theorists, reserving her fulminations for the
hermeneutic systems of Marx and Freud, and for Walt Whitman, of all
people. The more valid point she makes, but does not develop, is that
while Anglo-American formalism has proved its ability to deal with
poetry, it has been far less fertile in talking about the novel and the
film, and is not fully equipped to respond to recent (largely European)
innovation in these genres.
Here, Miss Sontag refers us to the "elegant and persuasive anti–
rhetorical aesthetic for the novel" worked out by Robbe-Grillet, Barthes
and Foucault (what anti-rhetorial means in this context is unclear, since
these critics are explicitly seeking a new novelistic rhetoric), but again she
does not go beyond the terms she has rejected. To admire Robbe-Grillet
for his "disavowal of the traditional empirical content of the novel (psy–
chology, social observation)" and Resnais for his "rigorous if narrow solu–
tions to certain problems of cinematic form" is to neutralize the effect of
their formal experimentation, and sharply to limit their importance.
Matthew Arnold is one of Miss Sontag's historical villains; yet the novels
of Robbe-Grillet and Butor, the films of Resnais and Antonioni, neces–
sarily offer a "criticism of life"-not because they propound "moral,
social, and political ideas" (as Miss Sontag rather tendentiously interprets
Arnold to mean), but because their stylistic choices are in fact (as she
indeed sees) epistemological decisions. While
L'A'vventura
and
La Notte,
for instance, are social criticism (criticism of the way of life of a social
class in Milan) only in a superficial and uninteresting view, they are
striking phenomenologies of a certain contemporary urban consciousness.
The self-reflexiveness characteristic of much modern art does not
preclude criticism of life: Pop Art, collages, ready-mades, in their choice
of objects and of perspective on objects, are all "criticisms of life" if only
because of their critical relation to previous art styles.
Miss Sontag proclaims that we must see the "formal function of
content"; what she really means, I think, is that we must perceive the
internal structures, both organizing and significant, of a work of art.
The problem, of course, is to find a way to talk about such structures.
Miss Sontag admires criticism which "dissolves considerations of content
into those of form" (content still present, apparently, but now soluble),
and cites with approval the work of Panofsky, Frye, Barthes, Francastel,
