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