Here it comes.
In “Against Interpretation,” Sontag writes
“Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article of use for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”
Sontag goes on to dismiss interpretation of art as a model for its evaluation. She specifically targets Freudian and Marxist schemas of understanding art as ones that defile art (though objects more to latent and manifest content than she does to dialectics or class struggle). These hermeneutics as Sontag sees them, what a Marxist would call “ideologies,” sees events as seemingly “intelligible,” but meaningless without interpretation. Thus, Freud must uncover repressed trauma in psychoanalysis, so Marx must find a productive cause for the social and political world.
In 1964 at the time of writing, Sontag saw this desire to interpret art as “reactionary and stifling,” the never-ending blossom of interpretive modes (feminist theory soon to the scene, queer theory arriving just later), as a substitute for criticism or reverence for art. Interpretation, as she sees it, makes art “manageable and comfortable;” art becomes “about something” criticism becomes a math problem, one simply needs to balance the sides of the equation. She relates a story of Elia Kazan finding intelligibility and clarity when directing A Streetcar Named Desire: when he discovers that Stanley Kowalski is vengeful barbarism and Blanch Du Bois is Western Civilization, the film becomes easier to direct. “Apparently,” she deadpans, “were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle it would not be manageable.”
What draws viewers and readers to art in the first place, eros, is scooped out when we interpret. Entertainment fades quickly to a lesson on the Oedipus complex, or dialectical materialism. Criticism then certainly suffers because there is not wonder or awe in interpretation, there is only technique or occluded meaning, so criticism’s efforts are forsaken for explanation (what has more recently become plot summary).
Interpretation further flattens and codifies modes of criticism; where once things like taste or even style had preeminence, things possessing elusive “meaning” or technique take precedence in the world of interpretation. One can perhaps imagine seeing a painting of high technical quality and being impressed, but that is not the same thing as the painting being good.
Sontag identifies a problem with content that allows interpretation to run amok. Stagnations in form that art takes, particularly she suggests American novels of the mid-century, allow interpretation to proceed because the “sensory experience of art is taken for granted.” What for Dante may have been revolution in form, is for us commonplace. We have so much art, so much content, the result of overabundance of artistic production is “a steady loss of sharpness” in our experience of it. We are inured to art’s affects, everything has become art, all is rote, little is shocking, less is enjoyable, more is predictable. There are waves of it; everything happens all the time.
In search of understanding this phenomenon, we have created narratives as to why this has occurred. Sontag saw this as a mistake to apply to art but perhaps not to society. Still, she engaged in polemic against metanarratives within art, of explanatory forces that jump from the page and a desire to decode them.
Polemic has its limits.
Parul Sehgal recently wrote “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” in the last issue of The New Yorker of 2021. The subtitle: “Fiction writers love it. Filmmakers can’t resist it. But does this trope deepen characters, or flatten them into a set of symptoms?” This bit begs the question, but alas.
Sehgal suggests this logic for a “trauma plot” stands in place of traditional characterization: “Evoke the wound and we will believe that a body, a person, has borne it.” At face value, Sehgal is correct. There is an equation that often creators or writers have allowed to creep in to their work. X character behaves Y way because they suffered from Z traumatic event.
I could crudely apply this method to classic works of art. In Moby Dick, Captain Ahab hunts the White Whale because he lost his leg hunting whales. Hamlet behaves like an insane person because his father was murdered by his uncle and only he knows the truth. In Beloved, Sethe reincarnates her dead-daughter because she feels guilty about murdering her. See how hollow these stories become?
But Sehgal isn’t talking about how we understand past works (though she mentions adaptations of classics with additional traumas to make the events more intelligible, more interpretatively satisfying), she is arguing this is a mode American art exists in now. The essay argues not by suggesting cause and effect, but in a barrage of cultural examples and citations from trauma theory.
It has an interesting premise (and one that I agree at face value exists) but is perhaps both misnamed as she doesn’t really identify a plot but perhaps a mode of characterization and also because Sehgal fails to identify any primary mover for these artistic forces. Are they cultural, political, something else?
She gestures to an answer in the opening paragraphs with her story of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Brown (the conclusion is culture, though she doesn’t say this exactly). Woolf notices a weeping woman on a train and writes “all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite.” An English novelist would write the woman as “eccentric, warty and beribboned,” while a Russian would turn her “into an untethered soul wandering the street.” Sehgal asks “how might today’s [American] novelists depict Woolf’s Mrs. Brown?” I added the American.
I don’t know why that crucial parallelism missed editorial attention, though I can be suspicious of why national culture in one context becomes flattened to a universal, mono-culture for America. Sehgal’s artistic examples come almost entirely from the American art world. I believe the only work considered as an example of the “trauma plot” that is either translated or not originally published/produced in the United States is Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. An inability to identify that within her essay belies the fervor and headiness Sehgal writes with. She is essentially mad-online in the pages of The New Yorker.
Why does it matter that the work she considers is almost exclusively American? Quite simply, if Sehgal had instead tracked literary or artistic history and criticism, an argument about the trauma plot as she sees it would perhaps become clear. There are two strands running through this literary history: the first, Sontag’s interpretation as I discussed above, and the second, what Terry Eagleton saw as American literatures temptations of conquest.
Sontag’s Grand Interpreter, with all their desire to hollow and sacrifice art at the altar of concrete scientific knowledge, has become our artists. In an age when the best things art can be is representative, relatable, and real what better way to understand and create characters than by giving them a concrete scientific reason to behave in a way deserving of a narrative such as a singular specific trauma?
As for Eagleton, he identified in American literature a dual impulse towards literary manifest destiny. He wrote that American literature has been defined by “frontier consciousness” and “euphoric individualism.” The frontier consciousness can be seen in the ramshackle swashbuckling adventures and picaresque novels of the 19th century, while the ure euphoric individualist literature to my mind would be the Beats and divorce/marriage novels of the American mid-century (Yates, Updike etc.). American literature comes structured within this context, but we’ve already reached the Pacific, Manifest Destiny is complete.
As I’ve written elsewhere in this newsletter, the final frontier of American conquest is the mind, splitting and atomizing the self. It would then seem fairly obvious to me that American artistic output comes to us as a trauma plot then. In place of an adventure west, let’s talk about your latest therapy session!
I will say that in art when things are identified as caused by a singular or specific trauma it is spoon-fed bullshit, plain and simple, and in every instance.
I don’t think Sehgal believes this despite her polemic. On the Book Fight Podcast, one of the co-hosts, Mike Ingram astutely noted that most if not all of the types of trauma plotting Sehgal rhetorically signals as good or acceptable come from or are about marginalized racial groups. Sehgal writes “with a wider aperture, we move out of the therapeutic register and into a generational, social, and political one” but she doesn’t delineate more than that. Her essay would have benefited from more lines in the sand and a lot less history of trauma.
To conclude, I want to linger on Sontag once more. Her target was critics and art criticism and she identified a mode of thinking that prioritized large narratives placed upon art not the narratives that spring from it. She was writing before American literature’s postmodern turn, away from metanarrative (though the supposed absence of a metanarrative is a metanarrative itself), which matters because Sehgal is now writing when we have micronarratives, individual “lived experiences” that struggle to connect or draw conclusions beyond “that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” Our existing artistic metanarrative isn’t trauma as Sehgal suggests, trauma theory and language is merely a new way we have spoken a particular American narrative. It is wrong to suggest it sprung simply from advances or changes in therapy or culture as Sehgal does. All of the changes in our artistic culture are political and follow how our politics, our lives have become more concerned with what’s going on inside ourselves, as individuals, and whether or not our behavior and thoughts are good/bad/ugly/a trauma response. We have sacrificed good art worrying about whether or not our characters deserve good or entertaining stories in the hopes that critics will label artists good people with ethical and moral justification for their suffering.
When Raskolnikov murders Lizaveta the next page asks a question and entertains the reader. It doesn’t explain his choice and the novel is better for it.