Art and Eros and Murdoch and Sontag

Popular aestheticism of the mid twentieth century produced both Susan Sontag and the philosophical writings of novelist Iris Murdoch. Murdoch's attacks Plato's philosophy (in the play Art and Eros for example) by saying that Plato is overly idealistic, placing “goodness” on a pedestal that cannot be broken by any artistic endeavor. Murdoch claims that art is worthwhile, so perhaps she is not as literally Platonic as one would think of a self-described Platonist. But to Murdoch art has its place as reflection and teaching to and by people so that they can know as much about themselves and humanity in general as they can through the perusal of artistry. Furthermore, this act of reflection through artistry is a necessity and not simply a pass-time of members of an idle society. She speaks of a high art, but also of the art of every day. Her search is for what is “good” art, but her ‘goodness’ directly addresses that of Plato and not the Aristotlean equation of ethics and beauty. (Such an equation of ethics and artistry would eventually come bursting forth in the 1980s in the Ethics and Literature debates of philosophers Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum and novelist Milan Kundera, among many others.)

Sontag also embraces high art, admittedly. “I never thought I was bridging the gap between high and low cultures. I am unquestioningly, without any ambiguity or irony, loyal to the canon of high culture in literature, music, and the visual and performing arts. But I've also enjoyed a lot of popular music” (“Against Postmodernism” Par. 5). Here we see that Sontag never admits that “popular” and “low culture” mean the same thing. She does not think so, even while embracing “high art.” Indeed, this message is the focus of her most popular essay “Thoughts on Camp”  from the Against Interpretation and Other Essays collection (her first volume of essays).
 

Sontag is a darling of the 1960s counter-revolution, even to the point of having a well-referenced interview in the iconic Rolling Stone magazine, that harbinger of pop cultural thinking. She, Murdoch, and Kundera produced best-selling novels, though I don’t think any of those works would be classified as “pop” by any cataloger. All of these aesthetes, whether thought of as elite or not, have left a collective influence that makes the individual in today’s society look at reading with a different perspective than the modernist. The modernist who would claim that only certain authors have achieved quality status based on certain prescribed criteria that lay outside of the individual. Sontag and Murdoch, among others, invite us to examine our desires as a part of the reading process, in line with what Roland Barthes would call The Pleasure of the Text.

 

I am a fan of modernism. I love to revel in the structural achievements of Faulkner and the sought-for simplicities of Hemingway. I love that in contrast a reader can find surprising simplicities in Faulkner and absolute chaos in a Fitzgerald narrative long thought of as concise. I love the way that these concerns with form open up texts to new insights that a more sensational reading, concerned only with the senses that is, appear less fulfilling.

But I also love the basic symbolism of Barthes admiration for wrestling as drama and the Sontag celebration of campiness, as well as Iris Murdoch’s middle-class characters searching for self-purpose in the midst of an artless world. And this journey, the post-modern one, leads us to recognize the way the thinking of society turns, against how formal interpretation can devalue the sensory experience. In these days of the necessity of communicating with artificial intelligence, the fear is especially great. Readers need to know how to be “against” interpretation, for the fear of all of us is that we will get lost in the artifice of thinking, the strategic pounding of the artificial combatting our intelligence, rather than the engaging of our senses and our intellect to find our purposes, our definitions.

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References.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Richard Miller, trans. Hill and Wang, 1975. 

Chan, Evans. “Against Postmodernism etcetera: A Conversation with Susan Sontag” Postmodern Culture,  2001.

Murdoch, Iris. Acostos:  Two Platonic Dialogues – “Art and Eros” and “Above the Gods” Penguin Books, 1988.

Sontag, Susan, 1933-2004. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York :Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966.

Nick Harris

blog, 5/12/2025