Vol. 36 No. 3 1969 - page 392

392
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
theater and movies that write off the medium. Nevertheless, it is an
unusually sophisticated exploration of the theoretical implications of
contemporary styles. Similarly, her discussion of pornography, though
it doesn't sufficiently explain the difference between potboilers and
literature, takes us out of the cozy limits that have kept literature
safe for academic criticism. Her idea of a "pornographic imagina
tion" goes beyond the liberal tolerance of .a subject; it legitimizes a
repressed faculty.
Actually, some of the implications of Susan Sontag's argument
are more far-reaching than the flamboyant views with which she
is
associated. Despite the fact that she is an elitist, she suggests a way
out of the predicament of elitism. For in pressing for the liberation
of the arts from their history, Susan Sontag opens them up to popular
exploitation, thus breaking with the elitist tradition which assumed
serious art to be alienated from middle-class society and hence from
the political and commercial manipulations of the mass mind. But
it is
also
a break with the kind of adaptation to popular taste in the
last few decades that made literature so conventional in form and
in subject. The effect is to rescue the experimental tradition from it
loss of power and the exhaustion of its subject, from its unbearable
isolation as it struggled to remain both pure and advanced. In
sense, this is a formal solution to a social problem, the problem of
the social role of art and its relation to an audience, for the loosening
of style has made it possible to be at the same time popular and un
conventional. Thus the period of Joyce and Kafka and Schoenber
and Picasso, instead of being a dead end - as it was for a few
decades - becomes a live tradition again in the movies, in paintin
and in the new theater. The missing links, as Miss Sontag implies,
are to be found in movements like Surrealism and Dada, which
played with low subjects in a high style, but a style nevertheles<l
that expressed a disdain for traditional style. And one of the strikin
things in Susan Sontag's essays is her recognition that the last few
decades have been a kind of interlude during which avant-gard
writing lost its elan, while most academic criticism went into the
business of educating readers or talking vaguely about the relation
o
literature to society. This is why most of Miss Sontag's critical refer-
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