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

 

Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale and Barthes’ Wrestling

Before likening Byatt to both a Neo-Platonism of her stoic contemporary novelists (if British literature of the late twentieth century reflects this obedience to logic, as I think it does) and the neo-Aristotelianism of the search for Ethics in Literature reminiscent of the work of Martha Nussbaum, but perhaps best used in the context of Byatt’s other contemporary novelist, Milan Kundera, we should liken the reading of Byatt to Sontag’s wrestling, to use the Barthes metaphor, with high culture and popular culture. The entire reading of A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale is an exercise in wrestling. The main character delves into the research of his subject with a juxtaposition of himself onto the object that ends up in a tussle both literal and figurative. The literal tussle is one of form; the author presents the novel in fragmented bits contrasting the biographer’s life with that of his object who is, in turn, a biographer himself with an object of his own. Therefore, a multi-layered swirl of activity arises from the very form of the novel. The wrestling of the points of view around each other lead to a confusion for the reader as to who is literally whirling by at any one time.

Barthes calls this interpretation of narrative as “wrestling” as the purest form of theater. He symbolizes the novel with the sport of wrestling in which emotions are always front and center, even though confounded in a whirlwind of excitement. “The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess” (Mythologies, 15). This spectacle is on display in The Biographer’s Tale from the beginning. “”I made my decision, abruptly, in the middle of one of Gareth Butcher’s famous theoretical seminars…. I’m not going to go on with this anymore” (The Biographer’s Tale, 3). Thus, our biographer abandons his academic pursuits in lieu of a more exciting premise. He pursues academic research, true, but on his own terms, on a vibrant and electric pursuit of the life of another biographer.

But in The Biographer’s Tale, Nansen’s intensity of purpose leads him increasingly into a crazed obsession with Gaston. As the chapters go by, he identifies more and more with the biographer is using as his subject. He finally becomes so disoriented in his cross-referencing of Gaston's quotations and his own notes on Gaston that he hallucinates.

 

"In the day I was trembling, calm and collected. At night I inhabited a phantasmagoria....Erik and Christophe stalked through my dreams, in many guises,

 all appalling...They pranced across the veldt in leopard skins and feathers, they

crawled out of the jungle in enormous penis-gourds carrying pathetic, shrinking, decomposing heads....Once I saw the crucified man Galton had seen—that is I saw

his vision, of a completely identifiable hanging figure in agony" (232-233).

 

He accepts the confusion of Galton's visions with his own. "It was of course my mind, the mind of Phineas G. Nanson that was doing all this work of redesign and recombination. [np] It wasn't nice" (BT 233). Through hallucination Nanson becomes one with his subject, Calton, and with Galton's subjects, Erik and Christophe, in a swirling miasma of grotesque imagery. The wrestling metaphor becomes increasingly pronounced as the images tumble and twirl around each other on the mat of Nanson’s imagination.

 

Nanson has left the academic world, but not the world of high culture. He seeks to find the beauty and the worthiness behind research of a complicated subject. Not only does he question the validity of his subject’s findings, but he also questions the validity of his own work, and it sends him reeling.

 

Byatt thus brings the reader not to resolution, but to further questioning of purpose, questioning of goodness, and questioning of the beauty of interpretation. As an author, she causes her reader to question his own role in the research, for the act of reading is a research tool in itself. Reading a Byatt novel becomes the at of playing a game of interpretation, a game that asks the reader about his/her own purpose, the search for beauty and the search for what is right and good, if readers can equate the concepts of validity and goodness.

 

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References

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. (1957) translated by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers, New York: Hill and Wang, 2012.

Byatt, A.S. The Biographer’s Tale. New York: Random House, 2000.

 

Nicholas Harris

Blog 04/07/2025 

 

Surreality

A slice into the pleasure of the text. My impressions of Le Marteau sans Maitre, chamber piece by Pierre Boulez, poems by Breton-inspired Rene Char. Surrealism as revolution, the Art of Protest. The idea of Marcuse (he attributes to Aristotle) that the cathartic effect of art has a dual nature: “both to oppose and to reconcile, both to indict and to acquit, both to recall the repressed and to repress it again” (Eros and Civilization, 145).

 

Executioners of Solitude

 

The music hits with the impact of lightning. Three poems set to three diverse types of variations. Middle range instruments: viola, guitar, alto flute, alto voice. Percussion drum drumming in the ears, and that too atypical quincunx of bongos, so much so that it floods out of the peripheral notes and diagrams and crashes onto the pillory of the individual pieces. One poem sung then mirrored in a hall of three drummer’s variations, One poem sung with a before and afterward. Then the Executioners.

One poem garroted twice as if one sluice of the blade were not enough to do the damage. Twin blades. Doubles. Bloody and electric. Char and Boulez. Twelve pitches, twelve diacritical dynamics. – Would a player pay attention in their long hours of practice in solitary rooms, the shadings between mezzo-piano and forte, side by side by side again. Two blades slicing down simultaneous and apart, the condemned hanging in two spheres. One sphere is imitation, or perhaps the handkerchief of relief, thrown on the dial of the sun, now dark. Alone, the hangman walks with me to the green room, a draught of some cool liquid, and finally, after two labored attempts at life, accepts the restraint of an unconscious purpose that allows us both to do the things we do. 

 

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Reference

Marcuse, Herbert, Eros and Civilization. Beacon Press, 1955.

 

Nick Harris

3/19/2025

 

Transitioning to The Biographer’s Tale

Steiby writes of Kundera’s use of characters as all too human with the supreme character failing of an untrustworthy memory. Kundera turns to the novel as the means of dealing with the physical human frailty. He deals with D.H. Lawrence’s insistence on the novel as a means of dealing with human physicality, or the physical body is all we can know of the spirit (Lawrence, 43). But Kundera takes this insistence one step further, into the realm of memory and its inconsistencies. The novel tells of the dilemma of human existence as the individual attempts to escape the inescapable. The social situation of the individual is as much a reflection of this attempt to escape as is the limitations of the body. Steinby describes Kundera’s search to escape as a search for happiness. Through pleasure, therefore, the search of the individual becomes a hedonistic philosophy; but this hedonism “appears as a possibility no longer available to contemporary individuals” (209). The limitations of the body render hedonism ineffective.

The sisters of Byatt’s The Game show a need to achieve an identity that transcends their constrictive reality. Kundera might say this is the purpose of all novels, to show characters like these. The sisters’ game represents “a longing for a devouring love which, one sees, wisely, to be impossible” (The Game, 56). The sisters see the absurdity of games humans develop in order to pursue happiness through love. An absurd character, an academic named Storrin, presents himself at a party thrown by Julia as someone who “saw himself as a man of the world”; he attacks would-be romantics among the women at the party, “He gave her a gem of a lecture on the dangers of being a fat red woman and in love with la vie boheme or Baudelaire” (142, italics Byatt’s). Julia finds delight in sparring with men like Storrin, but Cassandra “was not the sort of woman who would have called out in Storrin the lively malice he now displayed” (143). But their various ways of presenting their game still betray a linear representation of how the sisters progress toward their goal of victory. Though the reader grapples with the sisters’ dilemmas of identity, the narrative progression is still fairly easy to understand.

Perhaps with her novel The Biographer’s Tale, Byatt goes one step deeper into Kundera’s search for beyond the limits of physical limitations. This “Tale” is one of not only the subject of the Biographer, but the Biographer himself. The novels were first published thirty-three years apart, 1967 and 2000 respectively, and the evolution into a more fragmented narrative is apparent. In stepping into the muddy waters of identity in The Biographer’s Tale, Byatt makes the reader contend with the object’s search for identity as well as the storyteller’s search for identity. Ultimately, the two will become confused. The Biographer’s search for resolution of his subject’s identity becomes the biographer’s own search for identity. The happiness brought about by one outcome, that of defining the object, becomes intertwined with the Biographer’s own search for happiness.

In contrast to The Game, The Biographer's Tale takes a more fragmented approach to the theme of storytelling, as Byatt writes of the academic Phineas G. Nanson as he attempts to research and write a biography about another literary biographer, Roland Michell, who, in turn, wrote about great adventurer’s from Britain’s colonial period. Fragments from the writing of all these subjects become intertwined. Two women surface to help Phineas in his research, only to become a part of romantic relationships with him, intensifying his search for his own happiness, often at the expense of his objects. Michell, it turns out, has told a few beyond-truths in order to help himself into resolutions he wished to make about his characters, finding his own happiness.

__________

References.

Byatt, A.S. The Biographer’s Tale. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000.

-----. The Game. Random House, 1967.

Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. [1986] trans. by Linda Asher [1988], Harper, 2000.

Lawrence, D.H. “Why the Novel Matters” in The Book of Twentieth Century Essays, ed. Ian Hamilton. Penguin, 1999, 43-48.

Steiby, Lisa. Kundera and Modernity. Purdue UP. ebook Academic Collection (EBSOhost), Comparative Cultural Studies, 2013. Accessed Feb. 2025.

 

Nicholas Harris

Blog. March 13, 2025.

 

 

Comparison of A.S. Byatt and Thomas Hardy’s conflict of society and individual, Pt. 2. Kundera’s The Art of the Novel.

 

The scientist views life as an abject to be studied. Such is the legacy of the modern world according to Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel. But Kundera is a novelist, and he wants to take the study of an objective world beyond that objectivity and into a realm that exceeds mere “being” (3-4). The novelist aspires to take human existence beyond the scientific, the historical, the political, to give the individual his/her right to illuminate “the various dimensions of existence” (5). In the determinist works of nineteenth-century naturalism, such as Thomas Hardy’s novels, such illumination is sought for desperately by the characters only to be thwarted by an omnipresent social construct that determines a tragic fate. For example, Jude’s aspirations to live a life of the mind are brought low by his need to engage in stonemasonry in order to support his wife and children, only to have those children, and his partnership with Sue Bridehead, taken away from him by a cruel and violent fate. What makes the novel, though, is Jude’s search for something beyond the cruelty of fate. Likewise, the sisters in A.S. Byatt’s The Game are confounded in their search for meaning through writing novels (Julia) and romanticizing about science (Cassandra) by their constant return to a cruel game they invented in their childhood in which each sister is forever trying to dominate the other. The early modernist Hardy and the early postmodernist Byatt show Kundera’s thesis in a similar fashion, the attempt to get beyond the objectivity of the world brought on by deterministic circumstance.

 

According to Kundera, the novel, or any form of artistry, is a proclamation of the individual who is caught in a trap. Firstly, the trap of history confines the individual and keeps him/her from free expression of identity. Beyond history, according to Steiby’s interpretation of Kundera with which I agree, is “an anthropological trap in which humankind finds itself caught from the very beginning and which thwarts an autonomous and authentic mode of existence” (207). The novel has the unique ability to show the tedium of life that is the result of resigning one’s self to the trap of history and to traps of gloom and cynicism.

 

The novel is also the agent that can transport the individual from the tedium of his/her traps. The traps would render the search for identity nonexistent. But, as Steiby writes, “In Kundera’s view, identity is not a possibility of human existence either, but rather the main issue with which the novel has been preoccupied throughout its history” (208). Hardy’s novels show Kundera’s position in their questioning of an inevitable determinism that renders the individual helpless despite a dogged determination by that individual to determine identity. Byatt takes this defiance one step further by comparing her twentieth-century characters to the idealistic individuals of a century (or more) earlier. Byatt’s comparison is a longing for relative identity, for instance the sisters of The Game constantly wrestling with each other’s emotions using Biblical and medieval imagery, Eden-like serpents and knights from Arthuriana.

 

The novel tells the dilemma of the individual as he/she attempts to escape the inescapable. Steiby writes of Kundera’s use of character, “Aging, forgetting and the selectivity of memory, being trapped in a body, and mortality are no longer examined as the existential problems of particular individuals, but appear more directly as inescapable aspects of human existence” (209). Kundera escapes from the inescapable through dreams. “The dream” he writes, “is the only model for the sort of imagination that I consider the greatest discovery of modern art” (81). His characters pursue dreams outside of the history which binds them.

 

As a novelist looking back on the form and themes of the modern novel, Byatt reflects this pursuit of dream. The Game of the sisters is a trap, but it is also a means of escape from chaos. This chaos is explained by Cassandra’s scientist bfriend Simon:  “the individual fate—the fate of the species, or of the individual creature—is different from what may seem laid down by general laws of change or fate. We don’t know shy almost all reptiles died. Nor do we know why these did not” (61). In contrast, Thor, Julia’s lusty fisherman husband, chastises her for her obsession with hopelessness. He says, “All this about the sister you never see—you will positively wear yourself out if you take everything with this personal intensity, really. Try a bit of deliberate and conscious selfishness for a change. You’re an artist…and artists have got to be detached and ruthless” (67, italics are Byatt’s). Turn away from your chaos, Byatt is saying. Turn inward 9as if dreaming perhaps) toward what keeps you from fostering hopelessness. Such delving into your inner psyche is the definition of art, and the path to happiness.

 

Hardy’s student in spirit, D.H. Lawrence wrote of the turn to the inward world in the individual within the novel. Writing his novels in the decades after Hardy had put up his novel-writing pen in favor of poetry, Lawrence’s type of sensory post-romanticism reflects the turn away from society’s oppression in favor of the individual’s inward turn inward to achieve happiness. In Lawrence’s turn inward, though, the spirit and the body are one and must be treated as one, especially by the novelist: “Let us learn from the novel. In the novel, the characters can do nothing but live” (47). Lawrence’s view of life he defines as “Me alive ends at my fingertips” (43). Anything beyond the body is beyond the spirit also, unalive to the individual. Byatt’s admonition to the artist to delve inward in order to escape hopelessness means to delve into the body/spirit as one. The oneness separates the individual from the traps that Kundera sees upon us. The oneness is the dream, but it is also, as with Lawrence, the only reality the individual has. The novel points this out to us all, and that is it’s worth, it’s necessity. A necessity, I suppose, as needed as turning Kundera’s thoughts on the novel back to D.H. Lawrence.

 

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References

Byatt, A.S. The Game. Random House, 1967.

Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. [1986] trans. by Linda Asher [1988], Harper, 2000.

Lawrence, D.H. “Why the Novel Matters” in The Book of Twentieth Century Essays, ed. Ian Hamilton. Penguin, 1999, 43-48.

Steiby, Lisa. Kundera and Modernity. Purdue UP. ebook Academic Collection (EBSOhost), Comparative Cultural Studies, 2013. Accessed Feb. 2025.

 

Nicholas Harris

Blog. March 6, 2025.

 

 

 

Comparison of A.S. Byatt and Thomas Hardy’s conflict of society and individual, Pt. 1.

The Game.

The purpose of this essay is to compare the interpretation of Thomas Hardy’s novels that I have made in my 2024 blogs with interpretations of more recent novels, namely those of A.S. Byatt. Byatt’s style reflects Victorian prose with a contemporary sense of individual characters’ psychological transcendence of story. The importance of character, and the contemporary interpretation of characters from past times  (especially the emotional side of the Victorian era) renders the novel’s forward momentum more complex and more under the microscope than traditional formal views of structural writing.

For simplicity’s sake, I shall in this brief introduction to the Hardy/Byatt comparison examine Byatt’s early novel The Game. Byatt’s novel reflects the themes of individual in angst with society, and character involvement with both the intellectual and the emotional. I find these these themes have much in common with Milan Kundera’s exploration of The Art of the Novel (19  ). Kundera’s emphasis on the novel’s ability to convey multiple perspectives – a character’s need to confront an oppressive society coupled with his/her need to declare their own identity --  is echoed in Byatt’s multilayered narrative techniques. Lisa Steiby examines Kundera’s transformation of character determined by self versus society in “beyond Modernity” in Kundera and Modernity, especially Chapter 10, “The End of Modernity, the End of the Novel?” (207-226). Byatt frequently constructs her novels with shifting points of view, alternating between historical and contemporary perspectives, and between different characters’ inner lives. In The Game, the historical perspective is the created world of “the game” the sisters invented as children, a game that echoes themes from the Biblical Eden, themes or good and evil as well as lust and purity.

The Game concerns two sisters. Julia is a novelist who has married a robust figure of a fisherman named Thor. Incongruously, Julia is the deterministic one of the two, a cynical rationalist, while Thor exhibits total immersion in romantic emotionalism. In contrast to Julia is her sister Cassandra, enthralled with a scientist, Simon, whose examination of biology is totally rationalistic  while Cassandra, who, as a science lover, should be also that impersonal, cannot escape the angst of emotion that she felt in her youth, largely due to the psychological games she played with her sister.

My posts of 2024 interpreted Thomas Hardy’s novels The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure in terms postmodern ideas of reader approach theory, especially that reminiscent of Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” in which immediate feelings by the reader to the impact of the text become the important aspect of the reading experience. This reader’s impact confirms the “absence” of the author theory of Roland Barthes that influenced Sontag. Barthes writes, “There is supposed to be a mystique of the text. – On the contrary, the whole effort consists in materializing the pleasure of the text” (58). Thus, the author’s mystical purpose becomes secondary ot the reader’s immediate pleasure. Applying the sense of immediacy to the reading of classic deterministic novels such as Hardy’s makes the reader question the sense of fatalism that Hardy shows society has over the individual. For if the individual is the important thing about interpretation, then the individual and their role of self-determination, no matter how small and/or ineffective it may be, stand out as the important interpretation of the novel.

While Hardy, a 19th-century novelist and poet, is often associated with his tragic portrayals of rural life and the struggles of individuals against societal forces, A.S. Byatt, a contemporary novelist, engages with history, myth, and complex psychological portraits of characters. In The Game Byatt posits a man confronting a woman as a herpetologist with subliminal sexuality, a scientist specializing in snakes. The woman is one of two sisters who create the contrast in theme in The Game. The meeting between this first sister, Julia, and the herpetologist is virtual, her watching him on videotape. The meeting is nonetheless suggestive of an emotional Garden of Eden scenario wherein she is tempted by him as he holds his snake and bemoans the fact that the natural world does not cherish the snake but is repulsed by it. (13-15)

Byatt here chooses to write on Chastity, the decision to refrain from physical passion – she questions the ability of the individual to retain a purity of the spirit, “uninvaded and complete”?

“We shall do better…to think of chastity as purity, a scrupulous purity, and to associate it with innocence, if we are to apprehend at all the moral force either of Lancelot’s sin or of Galahad’s virtue…,” and “We shall do better if we think of ‘that which the maiden would never have again’ as an original innocence.”(16) 

Julia (on pages 13-15) is confronted with symbols of sexuality that she posits from a scientific situation (sexual only in a blatantly unemotional type of way) contrasted with another situation of rhapsody about Chastity (p. 16). This confrontation of the sexual and the chaste concerns much of Byatt’s writing about the human condition. The reading of sexual situations into science and the miasmic meanderings about whether or not to remain chaste in the emotional life provide a stark contrast in human life in Byatt’s presentation of it.

But the other sister, Cassandra, comes forward in the narrative. The serpent plays a significant role in both sisters’ worldviews. Cassandra revels in the poetry of the serpent, ascribing to it many layers of symbol. Cassandra revels in the words of a professor as he describes the snake: “They are worshipped in association with running water and with lightning. As a symbol—for the life, the life that drives us” (22).  Also, “The people here tell me that during the night the anaconda changes into a dark boat with white sails, and skims over the swamp….I don’t know whether the wings and sails turn the creature into a ship of death, or a more ambiguous symbol of some kind of release from the earth” (22).

In The Game, the reader views the Eden symbolism that obsesses the sisters, making them create complex relationships with their romantic and scientific partners. Society denies the sisters the openness in which to pursue this symbolism, so they do so in secret in the guise of a created “game.” Despite their different historical contexts, both Hardy and Byatt explore themes of fate, the tension between individual desire and societal constraints, and the complexities of human relationships.

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References

Barthe, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Richard Miller trans., Farrar, Straus, & Giroux., 1975.

Byatt, A.S. The Game. Random House, 1967.

Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. [1986] trans. by Linda Asher [1988], Harper, 2000.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984, pp. 95-104.

Steiby, Lisa. Kundera and Modernity. Purdue UP. ebook Academic Collection (EBSOhost), Comparative Cultural Studies, 2013. Accessed Feb. 2025.

 

Nicholas Harris

Blog. March 1, 2025.

 

Two Sue’s:  Hardy’s Sue Bridehead from Jude the Obscure in the Context of Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation”

 

Nick Harris, Nov. 22, 2024

 

            Hardy presents the character of Jude Fawley’s love interest Sue Bridehead in the novel Jude the Obscure as a young woman determined to live her life by her own emotional needs and not by constrictions put upon her by British Victorian society. The reader of Jude today cannot but wonder if we should view Sue’s character under the same rebellious conditions. Susan Sontag, in her essay “Against Interpretation” calls for such a reading of any aesthetic work, not by the terms of a restricted view of critical interpretation, but by the emotional impact of each moment the reader receives from the artistic work. If we view Sue’s character as an artistic work, then we may view her likewise “Against Interpretation” in the Sontag manner, especially since Sue’s character longs to live life “against” the restrictions thrust upon her by the judgements of the individuals in the society that surrounds her.

The reader can view Sue Bridehead as the expression of emotional pronouncement over societal pronouncement, over what society demands as proper and aesthetically pleasing. Sue’s attitude becomes synonymous with that of the rebel against aesthetic values, a rebel that Sontag proclaims to be. Sontag’s ideas are an outgrowth of the pragmatism of John Dewey. Dewey writes in Art and Experience:

 

Many a person who writes from a museum conception of art, still shares

the fallacy from which that conception springs.  For the popular notion comes

from a separation of art from the objects and scenes of ordinary experience that

many theorists and critics pride themselves upon holding and even elaborating.

                                                                                                p. 6

 

We may equate the “museum conception of art” with critical “interpretation” for Sontag uses this idea of “interpretation” as something for which she is “against.” The “scenes of ordinary experience,” then, we can equate with emotional and visceral reactions that the critics may eschew as unworthy of “interpretation.” But Sontag’s point is that these immediate reactions are the valid replacement for interpretation. For Sontag agrees with Dewey when she writes of “the sensual and vengeful barbarism that [is] engulfing our culture” (100, brackets mine). Sontag, however, elevates these cheap and vulgar recognitions of immediate emotions to a status of aesthetic validity. Here she likens herself to Thomas Hardy’s heroes. Sue Bridehead, the female hero of Jude likewise elevates the proclamation of her emotional life as valid, even though it may go against the values of what her society considers proper, may even go into the world of the vulgar and the barbaric.

            The reader is first introduced to Sue through a picture that Jude’s aunt owns. The aunt will not give him the picture of the girl “from the inimical branch of the family,” and thus Sue is immediately poised as a symbol of rebellion (Part Second, Chapter 1, par. 5 ). The hazy reality with which Jude views Sue through this picture makes Sue an example of what R.P. Dawson calls a characteristic attribute of the novel, a surreal or anti-realism (“Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy” 654). Because of the heightened extremes of the events in the novel, especially the brutal death of Jude and Sue’s children, Dawson writes “this almost deliberate antirealism” makes the novel a precursor to modernist surreal convention, or even the postmodernist movements of negating the surreal with purposeful confusions of narrative truths (such as in the novels of Fowles or Ackroyd). The reader should not be surprised that Sue, under the view of this lens, also brings a surrealistic quality to her rebellious nature, one that we can only understand by delving into Sue’s immediate motives in each of her circumstances.

            When Sue first meets Jude, for instance, her immediate attraction to him makes her instantly question her intentions, for she is debating, at this point, whether to take as valid the attentions of another, older suitor (Part Third, Chapter7). Sue eventually marries this older man, but when her impetuous nature of independence asserts that she asks her husband to let her go to Jude, he gives in to her request (Part Fourth, Chapter 3). She leaves to have a nonlegal union with Jude, one that produces children and, eventually, discontent and tragedy.

            Sontag, though not speaking specifically to Hardy, tells the reader to view each artistic action with an immediacy of affect. Sontag claims we must ally with Sue as she proclaims her immediate desires as her true reality. This sense of immediacy that Sue exhibits makes her a strong candidate for a Sontag model. Sontag writes, “The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have” (99).These words could be Sue Bridehead’s cry as she leaves her husband. He is a duplicate of reality, an enforced prescription put upon her by society. Her world must be one of more immediate sensation. So she goes to Jude, tragic as that situation is to become.

            Sue’s sense of immediacy defines her character. Her refusal to accept the norms of society as enforced duplicates of reality sends her into the real life with Jude that she craves. It is a life rife with disheartenment, but she experiences each tragedy as a subsequence of joy that she must feel with a desperate immediacy. This refusal of the real defines Sue’s surrealism. Eventually she is met with the immediate reality of the return of Jude’s wife. This ironic development, ironic because Sue genuinely likes Jude’s wife, causes her to go back to her own husband. Each instance of the progression of her life she feels with a desperate attempt to be a part of her real world. Sometimes this immersion is painful. But Sue always feels the passion of each moment of her life, and she acts according to her own sensations, not those of the “depleted, impoverished” world that Sontag rails against.

 

 

 

References

 

Dawson, R.P. “Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy 1895” in Encyclopedia of the Novel, Volume 1, ed. by Paul Schellinger. Chicago: Fitzroy-Dearborn, 1998, pp. 654-655.

Dewey, John. Art and Experience. 3^rd ed. NY: Capricorn Books, 1938.

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984, pp. 95-104.