A Note from Moser (and me) on Sontag’s “Art of Protest”

Susan Sontag’s “Art of Protest” (a moniker I am assigning to her themes) began as purely aesthetic, an attempt to understand the work of French symbolists that she studied in her brief time in Paris. She, like them, was attempting to speak to society through an examination of popularism and not through political protest. But the popularism was a protest all its own. Benjamen Moser, in his Pulitzer winning biography of Susan Sontag, makes note of the indifference to politics which the young writer Sontag displays in her 1950s and 1960s work (Moser 199). Sontag is more concerned with turning away from the modern. 

Moser uses T.S. Eliot’s modernism as the target of Sontag’s critique. The followers of Eliot saw their criticism as forming a “shield against the pollution tainting everything they held dear. The culture they defended was the culture that despised and rejected anything too easy, too popular, too in thrall to money and image and success” (225). To modernist sympathizers, Sontag works against the desired outcome of societal taste. “The idea that someone could write on science fiction films, or happenings, or a homosexual style known as ‘camp,’ and still wish to be taken seriously as an intellectual, was unsettling.”  Sontag attempted to bring the commonplace into the realm of artistry. Modernists had spent decades trying to divorce a concept of true artistry from the commonplace. “The elders saw their carefully drawn distinctions being carted off to the rubbish heap.” When Sontag works “Against Interpretation,” she is trying to point out the need to avoid the modernist distinctions. Modernists revel in the distinction. Herein lies the crux of Sontag’s protest, apolitical yet speaking to the deep-rooted culture of a society.

Sontag gives a battle cry to her protest, so I think “The Art of Protest” is a correct generalization of her work. In her essay “Against Interpretation,” say writes, “The world, our world, is depleted enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have” (99). This is one of my favorite quotes from Sontag. I use it often when analyzing any work of communication, be it literature, film, or public speeches. This quote is an attack on the modernist principle of interpreting art through a strict structuralism, something which was commonly taught in the 1960s when “Against Interpretation” was written (and, indeed, is still taught in many schools as the proper method of interpretation). Sontag calls for a more relevant means of interpretation, an anti-interpretation wherein the thing is not abstracted into forced structures but is appreciated for what it is to the observer in the immediate moment. Interpretation becomes a series of immediacies and visceral reactions.  Protest becomes the innate implement of cultural existence, of “what we have.”

 

Moser, Benjamin. Sontag: Her Life and Work.  Harper Collins, 2019.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984.