A review by logantmartin
Against Interpretation: And Other Essays by Susan Sontag

challenging reflective slow-paced

4.5

One thing about Susan Sontag I really enjoy is I often find myself disagreeing with her. She's a very sound writer, and her arguments are valid, but I sometimes just don't like her conclusions. For instance, in Against Interpretation, she argues that we need to resist the urge to ask what a work of art means and instead simply enjoy it as art. She gives several examples, from the Bible to Waiting for Godot, of works that have been evaluated to death, and it's hard to disagree with her that we should pack it up and simply enjoy these as literature rather than try to assign meaning to them; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and all that. But I think about works like Jeanne Dielman or Happening or the novels of Ursula K. Le Guin. These are all feminist pieces of art, generally with a specific goal in mind. It seems obvious to me that the point of these is interpretation.

But that's what I appreciate about Sontag: she does not intend her essays to be the end of the conversation. She stakes out the parameters of the debate and then situates herself at one point. In other words, I like her not for the answers she comes up with, but for the questions she asks.