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Robbe-Grillet and Starobinski. But precisely these cntIcs, properly un–
derstood, should have shown Miss Sontag that her "putative opposition"
was naive and unnecessary, and could have indicated ways to go beyond
the essentially negative terms of her argument, the bases for formulating
some new "structural" vocabulary.
But engaging in speculative struggle with the protean Miss Sontag
is probably a vain occupation, since her theoretical and historical un–
certainties do not really infirm her central quest, which is, whatever she
may say, for the description of a sensibility rather than the definition of
an esthetic. Her championship of "form," constantly threatened with
violation by the intellect, is perhaps simply the traditional and necessary
stance of the propagandist for avant-garde art. As Harold Rosenberg has
written, "a critic who snubs a work for its formal audacity, seeing the
preoccupation with form as the antithesis of the large 'human' statement
and as indicative of a taste for distortion, will, most likely, shrink from
the radical events and personages of the age." Miss Sontag's insistent
return, not only to style but to stylishness, is in fact a polemical
prise de
position,
and it is one that can lead to fine discoveries.
One sees it most strikingly at work in the notorious "Notes on
'Camp,''' a glorious adventure in the modalities of "Being-as-playing–
a-role," or the theatricalization of experience. Where the "Notes" may
slightly disappoint is in Miss Sontag's unwillingness to explore more
thoroughly the historical dialectic of Camp and related sensibilities we
respond to with more "seriousness" (the relation between Art Nouveau
and Mallarme, say). When Miss Sontag remarks that Gaudl's architec–
ture reveals "the ambition on the part of one man to do what it takes
a generation, a whole culture to accomplish," it seems to me that she
is approaching a very important perception about the whole evolution
of style in modern art, and the prodigality with which this evolution
has created Camp objects. One would like to see a larger, and especially
a more historical development of the whole problem. But confronted
with such a richly festive orgy as Miss Sontag provides, it would be un–
generous to complain of inanition. And from these "case studies for an
aesthetic," Miss Sontag may yet go on to give us the "erotics of art"
of which we must all feel the need.
Peter Brooks
