The Sheila Variations

Against Interpretation

I am too young to remember living in a world where critics of art, literature, theatre, were giants of the form. I come from a post-post-post world. I can read their works in anthologies, etc., and am continuously breath-taken by how well they write, and how DIFFERENT they sound from critics today.

It is astonishing. It almost doesn't seem like the same genre.

Here is an extensive article on this very decline. The typeface is a bit too small for comfort, warning!

Susan Sontag wrote a formative book on the topic, called Against Interpretation, which was completely revolutionary at the time. She writes that the critic must describe the object of art (the play, the poem, whatever) - without interpreting it. A daunting task, indeed. We all interpret. We read stuff, we hear music - and we make up meanings for it all. Based on our own personal experiences and our own baggage. Moby Dick is not the same book to two different people.

The current trend of criticism (and who knows, maybe it's changing - I can't tell) - is that we, the public, need these hoards of interpreters. Art is WAY too loaded with meaning for us to understand without their translations. Hence, the almost unreadable prose of criticism these days, of "theory". With all its "isms" and long long long words - paleocriticalanthropologicalblahblah blah.

The interpreters have lost the meaning. Their language has tipped off the deep end. They now are imitating themselves. They are writing for one another, not for us.

Camille Paglia sees herself as an avenging angel in this regard. She hates "theory", she hates postmodernism, she hates isms in general. Her scholarship is a bit shaky and people rightly laugh at some of it. I read Sexual Personae, her runaway hit on the history of art. It's completely enjoyable in a kind of high-school-rebel "Hey, look at me knocking over all the traditions!" kind of way. She goes from the statues of Nefertiti to the poems of Emily Dickinson. It is an amazingly ambitious and arrogant book. I loved it. She draws connections between Roman friezes and Led Zeppelin. Which is ridiculous. She's a wacko! And yet - her knocking over of the chess pieces, while somewhat messy, was welcomed wholeheartedly by many.

A quote from the article:

For Paglia and critics like her, a poem or story (or piece of art or other artifact) is less object than touchstone in the vast cultural subconscious, and she takes advantage of this to push her readings beyond traditional limits of authorial intentionality or historical chronology. Exegesis at this level is less interpretation than parallel narrative, and sometimes it can be hard to tell if it expands a text’s impact or diffuses it through too many tangential, anachronistic, esoteric associations. Or, to put it another way, whenever I see a critic taking such liberties I’m not sure if I’m in the presence of genius or insanity, but I sure do laugh a lot. Which is, I’m pretty sure, the intention: among other things, the humour of a Camille Paglia or Wayne Koestenbaum or Dave Hickey makes conspicuous the subtle, easily ignored dramatic irony that informs all criticism. The idea that art—an enterprise whose primary function is to reveal the members of a culture to themselves—cannot be understood by that culture without Virgilian assistance seems, on the face of it, absurd, and this particular brand of exegesis, while often way off the mark (if not simply off the wall), nonetheless acknowledges its supplemental relationship to the text in question; its humour is inviting, yet also invites its own dismissal. How sad, by comparison, is the critic who seems unaware of the inner workings of his own profession, who acts as if he is the only one who sees Waldo in the picture and can point him out to you.

It is that last attitude - the critic who thinks "he is the only one who sees Waldo" - is why criticism has lost its broad appeal. Who wants to be condescended to like that? I don't!

Any genre goes through phases, any genre worth its salt evolves and morphs over time. Like the novel-form, or poetry ... Criticism is the same. I get the sense that the tide has begun to turn, and I'm quite glad about that.