Against Interpretation Review

Against Interpretation review: criticism as an art of restored attention

This Against Interpretation review begins with the distinction that keeps Susan Sontag's argument alive: she is not asking readers to stop thinking about art. She is attacking a habit of thought that treats an artwork as a container whose real contents must be extracted, translated into a message, and judged independently of the form that made the experience possible. The target is not intelligence but reduction. When criticism rushes to announce what a poem, film, novel, or performance is “really about,” it can replace the work's textures, rhythms, surfaces, and pressures with a cleaner proposition. Sontag wants criticism to answer first to what art does to perception.

Published in 1966, Against Interpretation was Sontag's first collection of essays. Its contents move across literature, theater, film, psychoanalysis, religious thought, and the emerging cultural categories of the 1960s. The title essay and “Notes on Camp” became the most widely recognized entries, but the volume's force comes from the larger pattern: again and again, Sontag asks how a work's style embodies a way of seeing. Her subjects include writers and thinkers such as Simone Weil, Albert Camus, Michel Leiris, Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Nathalie Sarraute, alongside filmmakers including Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, and Alain Resnais. The breadth is not decorative. It is evidence for her belief that criticism must be as alert to artistic difference as art itself.

The collection remains worth reading because it makes a bracing demand on criticism: describe more accurately before explaining more aggressively. That demand can correct criticism that turns every work into an illustration of a ready-made doctrine. Yet Sontag's polemic also invites resistance. Interpretation is not one activity, and attentive description cannot remain innocent of judgment, history, or concepts. The book is strongest not as a ban on interpretation but as a discipline imposed upon it: no claim about meaning should make the artwork's particular form disappear.

The collection's central argument is narrower—and stronger—than its slogan

The phrase “against interpretation” sounds like a rejection of commentary itself. The essays are too intellectually ambitious for that reading. Sontag interprets constantly: she classifies, compares, evaluates, draws implications, and makes distinctions about style. What she opposes is a particular hierarchy in which content is assumed to be the artwork's essential substance and form becomes a detachable wrapper. Under that model, a critic proves seriousness by translating sensory experience into abstract meaning.

Sontag reverses the priority. Form is not a decorative route to content; it is where the work's intelligence becomes concrete. Pace, tone, composition, repetition, silence, framing, and performance are not secondary matters. They organize the audience's attention. This is why her argument travels so naturally between media. A film cannot be adequately understood by reducing its images and cuts to a paraphrasable theme, just as a literary style cannot be replaced by a summary of the opinions apparently expressed through it.

That reversal makes Against Interpretation a useful companion to Poetics. Aristotle's method is more taxonomic and systematic, while Sontag's is more polemical and modern, but both insist that an artwork's effects depend on arrangement. The comparison also exposes an important difference. Aristotle tries to identify stable principles within dramatic form; Sontag is suspicious of any critical machinery that becomes more vivid than the artwork before it. One builds an analytic vocabulary, while the other warns that vocabulary can harden into interference.

The title essay therefore succeeds less as a final theory than as an intervention in critical conduct. It asks readers to notice when explanation has become substitution. That question has not lost urgency. Any interpretive method can become reductive when it already knows what every work must reveal. Sontag's corrective is to slow that confidence and return attention to the singular object.

Style is the book's method, not merely its subject

Sontag's own prose enacts the authority she assigns to style. These essays often move by compressed declaration, sharp opposition, lists, and quick changes of scale. A sentence can pass from a local judgment about an artist to a broad claim about modern sensibility without the patient scaffolding expected in academic argument. That speed is exhilarating because it makes criticism feel like discovery occurring under pressure. It is also where the book's limitations become visible.

The voice is not neutral, and it does not pretend to be. Sontag writes as a critic for whom taste is accountable but irreducibly active. She names distinctions with confidence, sorts works and modes of sensibility, and treats judgment as something more exacting than either personal preference or rule-following. “Notes on Camp,” with its serial observations on a sensibility, is an obvious example. Its form resists the illusion that a living cultural mode can be captured by one definition. Accumulation, contrast, and qualification do more work than a conventional thesis followed by proof.

This makes the collection unusually revealing about criticism itself. Sontag argues that form carries thought, then chooses forms designed to produce the very alertness she values. Her provocations are not detachable from their cadence. A calmer, more exhaustive presentation might answer more objections, but it would also diminish the sense that inherited habits of perception need to be interrupted.

Readers drawn to this problem from the direction of language and metaphor may find Poetic Diction a useful contrast. Owen Barfield builds a more extended account of how poetic language can alter perception. Sontag is less interested in a unified historical theory and more interested in clearing away habits that prevent an immediate encounter with form. Both books refuse to treat language as packaging, though their ambitions and argumentative methods differ considerably.

A cultural map of literature, film, theater, and modern sensibility

The collection's range is one of its genuine achievements. Sontag does not write as if serious criticism belongs exclusively to established literary monuments. Film, experimental performance, the novel, drama, intellectual biography, psychoanalysis, and varieties of popular taste can all become occasions for exact judgment. The book thereby records a moment when older divisions between high art and mass or emergent culture were being tested, but it does more than preserve that moment. It models a critic learning how different media ask for different kinds of attention.

The film essays are especially important to the collection's larger logic because cinema makes the insufficiency of content-summary easy to see. Camera placement, duration, montage, sound, gesture, and the material presence of bodies shape meaning before a viewer can convert the work into a statement. Sontag's interest in Bresson, Godard, Resnais, science-fiction cinema, and underground film is varied, but the recurring question concerns the relation between technique and sensibility. She wants to know not just what these works say but what kinds of attention they demand.

The literary and theatrical essays place different pressure on the same thesis. A writer's stance toward suffering, a dramatic tradition's exhausted conventions, or a novelist's treatment of consciousness cannot be separated cleanly from tone and structure. The result is not a balanced survey of mid-century culture. It is a selective map drawn by a critic with strong preferences. That selectivity should be acknowledged rather than disguised, because the collection's value lies partly in the clarity of its commitments.

Readers who want a broader, more introductory map of intellectual traditions may prefer The Story of Philosophy. Will Durant offers orientation through accessible portraits; Sontag offers immersion in acts of judgment. Durant can help a beginner locate major thinkers. Sontag is more useful when the reader wants to watch criticism take risks in real time.

Strengths: precision of attention, critical courage, and productive friction

The first major strength is the book's defense of experience against paraphrase. Sontag reminds readers that understanding an artwork is not identical to extracting a proposition from it. This is not an excuse for anti-intellectualism. It is a higher standard for intellect, because the critic must remain answerable to features that resist easy summary. Good criticism should make a work more available to perception, not congratulate itself for having decoded it.

The second strength is cultural courage. Sontag treats contemporary forms and disputed tastes with the same seriousness traditionally reserved for consecrated subjects. She does not collapse differences between them, but neither does she allow prestige to decide in advance what deserves attention. This makes the collection a record of active canon formation rather than passive inheritance.

The third strength is friction. These essays provoke disagreement that sharpens the reader's own standards. Even when a judgment feels too sweeping, it forces a useful question: what evidence would make a more precise distinction? Even when the opposition between form and content appears overstated, it exposes how casually those terms are often used. A critical book can be valuable not because every conclusion settles its subject but because its claims make vague agreement impossible.

Finally, the collection offers a persuasive model of criticism as writing. The essays are not neutral containers for positions. Their sequence, emphasis, and rhetorical pressure matter. Readers interested in criticism as a literary art, rather than merely a service that assigns verdicts, will find the book's example difficult to ignore.

Cautions: polemic can clarify a problem while simplifying its field

The most important caution is that interpretation has more forms than Sontag's target sometimes allows. Historical context can illuminate what an artwork made perceptible to its first audiences. Political criticism can identify exclusions or assumptions that formal description alone will not disclose. Psychoanalytic, philosophical, and social readings need not erase sensory experience. They become reductive only when they treat the work as interchangeable evidence for conclusions already secured elsewhere.

Sontag's argument is therefore most persuasive as a warning about sequence and proportion. Attend to the work before converting it into an example; make interpretation earn its claims through the object's particular details; do not confuse a paraphrase with an encounter. Taken as an absolute prohibition, the thesis defeats itself, because Sontag's own finest passages depend on interpretation in this broader sense.

The second caution concerns density of reference. The collection assumes readers willing to move among European and American writers, filmmakers, theatrical traditions, and intellectual debates. Prior familiarity enriches the essays, though it is not necessary for every piece. Readers who prefer a guided entry into philosophical systems may find An Introduction to Philosophy more architecturally explicit, even though Jacques Maritain's Thomist framework is very different from Sontag's aesthetic modernism.

The third caution is tonal. Confidence gives the prose force, but it can make provisional distinctions sound final. Readers should approach the collection as an invitation to test judgment, not as a handbook of approved taste. The book teaches best when its authority produces counterargument rather than obedience.

Reader fit and the best way to approach the essays

Against Interpretation is best for readers who enjoy criticism as intellectual performance: alert, selective, argumentative, and stylistically charged. Students of aesthetics, film, literature, theater, and twentieth-century cultural history will find multiple points of entry. Essay readers who value a strong critical persona will also see why Sontag became such an influential public intellectual.

It is less suitable for readers seeking a neutral introduction to literary theory or a step-by-step method they can apply mechanically. The collection does not offer a systematic taxonomy of interpretive schools, and it does not try to settle the philosophical problem of meaning. Its unity is a sensibility and a recurring critical demand, not a textbook structure.

A good reading strategy is to begin with the title essay, then move to “On Style” and “Notes on Camp,” before choosing subject-specific pieces that match existing interests. That route establishes the central vocabulary while demonstrating that the collection cannot be reduced to a single slogan. It also helps to pause when a reference is unfamiliar without treating complete prior knowledge as an admission requirement. Sontag's judgments can direct further reading and viewing; they need not be the last word on any artist she discusses.

The book rewards rereading because its contradictions are instructive. A reader may first be persuaded by its assault on overexplanation, later notice how interpretive its own procedures are, and finally arrive at a more durable version of the argument: criticism should deepen contact with a work rather than merely announce mastery over it.

Verdict: an indispensable provocation, not a complete prohibition

Against Interpretation remains a powerful collection because it changes the burden of proof in criticism. The critic cannot simply uncover a theme and declare the work understood. Form, sensation, style, medium, and the organization of attention must remain present in the account. Sontag makes that demand with unusual range and rhetorical force.

The collection's limits are inseparable from its achievement. Its oppositions can be too sharp, its confidence can outrun qualification, and its attack on interpretation can obscure more responsible versions of the activity. Yet a polemic need not provide a complete theory to correct a damaging habit. Sontag's best claim survives precisely because it can be restated without absolutism: interpretation is valuable when it returns us to the artwork with greater attention, and suspect when it makes the artwork dispensable.

That is why the book still belongs on a serious shelf of aesthetics and criticism. It does not end arguments about meaning. It makes them more accountable to the experience they claim to explain.