Sontag
on Barthes
I
often preface any semiotic analysis with a predisposition towards the writings
of Roland Barthes as championed in 1960s America by Susan Sontag. My reasoning
extends from Barthes’ turn away from a more academic structural approach in writings
for popular magazines, writings collected in his collection Mythologies.
In these short works, Barthes shows how a specific area of popular culture such
as the world of pro-wrestling or the use of margarine in place of butter acts as
a symbol for a more complicated underlying system of artistic or political
thought. The cultural act becomes the symbol, though the act is embodied by a
tangible thing. The tangibility of the thing is secondary to the cultural idea,
and, therefore, symbology evolves into a more complicated science, that of
semiotics.
Symbology does not lose its roots in
poetry, even as Sontag evaluates Barthes. Sontag begins her essay on Barthes
with an incipit from Wallace Stevens, “The best poetry will be rhetorical
criticism” (from an essay of 1899 quoted on p. 425). She paves the way for
aesthetics as an artistic value in and of itself, a statement which yields
fruit when investigating the criticism on pop culture of Barthes. Not only will
Barthes commentaries on pop subjects such as “The World of Wrestling” be a kind
of artistry approaching poetry, but the subject matter of these critiques will
evolve into a new way of viewing any work of art.
Sontag writes that Barthes will
elevate above his usual labels of structuralist or semiotician (426). She goes
on further to say that this elevation will occur most likely on account of his
penchant for small forms, one which makes him an ideal writer to go to for
aphorisms, or small bits of wisdom (427). The narrowing down of attention to
essay forms, aphorisms, and moments of instant glory which come and pass
quickly, lend his work to develop into her own work on immediacy in “Against
Interpretation” (1966).
Sontag’s is a turn away from the
constraints of modernist structuralism, especially the constrictions of the New
Criticism which permeated literature education in the 1960’s. This is Sontag’s
form of radical anti-establishment. Her ideas of immediacy react to the
generation before her which she, like many in her day, saw as a rigid
establishment intent on imposing sterile values on the new generation. In 1963,
she 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” (101). Sontag’s new
generation wanted art as a true statement within the moment. Art is doomed to a
withering away after the instantaneous moment, but art is worthwhile and
meaningful when taken out of an imposed hierarchy of defined values.
This postmodernist reaction to the
modernism of the New Criticism is then destined to evolve as the decades pass.
When the aesthetic world approaches the 1990s a certain movement emerges in
which the concepts of postmodernism become the establishment which needs a way
to evolve to meet the demands of what is then contemporary. One of the first
ways in which this post-postmodernism is questioned is in the field of positive
psychology. The questioning of psychological methods evolves as too negative
with a need to turn and focus on the positive. And eventually these
psychological methods will come back around to the idea of semiotics, the
object or symbol as the center of the idea of positivity.
Though the Sontag/Barthes postmodernist aesthetic evolves, readers can still use the ideas to pursue an intrinsic understanding of a work of art, especially one which passes in linear time such as the reading of literature. In prior blogs, I use the moment-by-moment cultural appreciation to help define the impact of a story such as Thomas Hardy’s “The Withered Arm.” I also use broader implications to speak to cultural umbrellas which hover over major characters in Hardy novels. The use of cultural symbology and immediate impact makes the reader feel an intimacy with the text that a broader critical approach disseminates to a degree with its emphasis on mental logistics within structural frameworks. As Sontag observes, Barthes teaches us to move beyond the confinements of structural aesthetics to “the evangelism of pleasure” (441). Such proselytizing creates a bond between the reader and the text that makes the reading important in a way that a distant mental structuralism cannot. This message defines the concerns of the Sontag/Barthes dialog.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1972.
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984, 95-104.
_____. "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes." The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984, 426-446.
Nick Harris, March 2024
