Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” @ 60 / Against Interpretation – In Favor of Description?

“What is needed is a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms. The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form. […] Equally valuable would be acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art. [… Meaning] essays which reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it” (Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 12–13).

A central question that arises from reading Susan Sontag’s polemical essay “Against Interpretation” (1964) is what should take the place of interpretation. The answer is intriguing to this day for all literary scholars and perhaps especially for those interested in descriptive criticism and ekphrasis. What exactly does Sontag mean when she proposes to replace interpretation with a descriptive “vocabulary […] for forms”? Does she suggest, for example, that pointing out the structure of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18”—its three quatrains followed by a rhyming couplet—will enhance the reader’s aesthetic experience of it? Would it still count as “description” if we pointed out how the sonnet’s couplet self-referentially enacts the very act of immortalization it speaks of, or would that cross into interpretation? The crux of these questions lies in how we define “description” and whether it is understood as the opposite of interpretation. “Against Interpretation,” like all of Sontag’s writings, keeps the terminology semantically ambivalent. What is clear, however, is that she advocates for a shift in criticism from an emphasis on content and meaning to a focus on form. Sontag’s ideal critic thus enhances the aesthetic encounter through description by highlighting the sensuous, seductive surface of the artwork. 

Anticipating Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s concept of “surface reading” and Heather Love’s so-called “descriptive turn” in academia by nearly five decades, “Against Interpretation” can be read as an ur-text for descriptive criticism. Descriptive critics attend to surfaces rather than depths because “so much seems to be on the surface” today;¹ and they employ methodologies that read texts flatly, distantly, “close but not deep.”² Importantly, the negative associations of the surface are discarded: the surface is no longer considered as “superficial and deceptive,” easily “perceived without close examination,” or ultimately “false upon closer scrutiny.”³ In contrast to these newer approaches, Sontag’s elevation of description is less fleshed out. Is it possible that she bases this term on the brittle notion of “transparency,” to use her own word from the ninth section of the essay (13)? Because any scholar of description today will assure you that description is anything but “transparent,” and that it can conceal as much about the artwork as it can reveal. Transparency indicates a quality of see-throughness and thus stands in opposition to the notion of the “surface,” which does not want to be looked through but to be looked at. According to Sontag, “good” (i.e. descriptive) criticism is transparent and enables us a clear, sharp look at the surface of the artwork. Bad criticism, by contrast, in its search for depth, creates “thick encrustations of interpretation” that obstruct the view of the artwork’s surface” (8). 

Descriptions are not transparent, but they can certainly attune the reader to the different layers that make up the work of art—from its surface right down to its depth. To rely on description as a critical practice is to shift into a mode of interpretation that is sensitive to the various orders of meaning of the artwork. The recent wave of contemporary fiction that extensively employs ekphrastic descriptions of visual art—Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013), Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (2014), and Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (2016-2020), to name just a few examples—attest to the centrality of description as a key aspect of media literacy and aesthetic practices today.⁴ Contemporary authors are clearly keen to make us look at surfaces more intentionally. Even in the digital sphere, where “content” seemingly reigns supreme on social media and streaming sites, the importance of the surface cannot be overstated: it is present in every YouTube thumbnail, every Instagram trend, and every Netflix home screen.

The idea of the “surface” occurs throughout Sontag’s oeuvre, for example when she writes about it in the context of camp sensibility, aesthetic style, female beauty, and fascist aesthetics.⁵ In “Against Interpretation,” the “surface” first crops up in the seventh section when Sontag states that it is “possible to elude the interpreters […] by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be…just what it is” (11). Here, the word “surface” keeps company with two very odd adjectives: “unified and clean.” These descriptors are often used in religious contexts to evoke the sacred form of the human body, which is pure, undisturbed, free of sins. This sacral imagery is not surprising, as a lot of what Sontag writes in this essay is also reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s 1936 notion of the “aura,” which he derives from the artwork’s unique, ritualistic, and quasi-sacred originality.⁶ Is the artwork’s surface its aura? Not quite, but the importance of the body and its senses is central to both of these aesthetic concepts. 

The occurrence of the surface in Sontag’s oeuvre remains a conundrum. Is it a visual metaphor for form and style (as opposed to content)? But in the essay “On Style,” which Sontag wrote only a year after “Against Interpretation,” she insists against the separation of “form” and “content” because it entails misconceptions such as the “placing of matter on the inside, [and] style on the outside.”⁷ Indeed, if this spatial metaphor is to be used at all, Sontag claims, then it would be more accurate to reverse it by putting “matter, the subject, […] on the outside [… and] style […] on the inside.”⁸ This reversal challenges ideas that the “inside” is necessarily more important, more profound, more meaningful than the outside or the surface. So perhaps, for Sontag, the notion of the surface is not so much about hierarchies of importance, but about a mode of experiencing an artwork as a totality, in which form and content, surface and depth are not thought apart. “Art is not only about something; it is something,” writes Sontag, “A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.”⁹ She wants us to encounter this “thing in the world” as a totality. But how can the “surface” elicit such a holistic experience of an artwork’s “unified and clean” totality or challenge the binary pairs of inside/outside, top/down, surface/depth, when it is itself caught up within the logic of this binary, separatist thinking?

The notion of “description” is just as rooted in oppositional thinking—active/passive, central/marginal, functional/ornamental, and so on—but recent scholarship, particularly in the field of ekphrasis, has highlighted how literary authors creatively challenge these entrenched ideas.¹⁰ Even Sontag, who primarily considered herself a fiction writer and only secondarily a critic,¹¹ conveys her understanding of description as a dynamic, complex mode capable of producing new forms of knowledge in her fiction. In her 1985 short story “Description (of a Description),” Sontag takes an excerpt from Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical book Daybreak (1881) and expands it by weaving her own sentences into his lines.¹² This interplay transforms Nietzsche’s passage, which evokes a simple encounter with a presumably fainting man, in a way that invites reflection on the short story’s titular interests: description and meta-description.

In the original passage, Nietzsche scrutinizes his own reaction to a stressful situation: when “a man suddenly collapsed right in front of [him] as if struck by lightning,” Nietzsche did not let emotions overwhelm him and simply “did what needed doing and went coolly on [his] way.”¹³ However, Nietzsche here is not interested in the moral imperative of helping a fellow human, but in how his calm, instinctive reaction in a moment of urgency could have been negatively impacted if it had been known and anticipated in advance: 

Suppose someone had told me the day before that tomorrow at eleven o’clock in the morning a man would fall down beside me in this fashion – I would have suffered every kind of anticipatory torment, would have spent a sleepless night, and at the decisive moment instead of helping the man would perhaps have done what he did. For in the meantime all possible drives would have had time to imagine the experience and to comment on it. – What then are our experiences? Much more that which we put into them than that which they already contain! Or must we go so far as to say: in themselves they contain nothing? To experience is to invent?¹⁴

In this passage, Nietzsche problematizes the nature of experience by suggesting that it is shaped far more by internal factors than by external ones. That is, the cognitive and affective processes of the experiencing self play a much greater role in defining an experience than the external objects we assume initiated it. This insight transforms an ordinary event from the past into an exemplary moment that invites deeper reflection on how we experience and relate to the world. If Sontag refers to this complex passage merely as a “description,” it suggests that she holds a high regard for it—one that acknowledges the pivotal role of description in critical thinking and philosophical self-exploration. Indeed, her short story creatively probes the affordances and limitations of description by offering a sort of “meta-description.” Sontag’s lines fragment Nietzsche’s sentences, set apart in italics, and transform a seemingly simple encounter with a fainting man into a multilinear, polyvocal, transatlantic, and transhistorical aesthetic experience for the reader. This nuanced understanding of “description” as something that can transcend the boundaries of mimesis is paired with a layering of multiple descriptions—one atop, after, and in between the other. With this interplay of differences, Sontag reveals the shimmering surface of description itself. 

“Against Interpretation,” like much of Sontag’s writing, is provocative and engaging. It is engaging precisely because it provokes, and because it raises more questions than it answers. The essay concludes with a call for an “erotics of art” (14). Sixty years later, we might reinterpret that cryptic final line as a call for an “erotics of description.” 

: :

1. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–2.
2. Heather Love, “Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (2010): 375.
3. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading”, 4.
4. See also Sofie Behluli, Art in Contemporary Anglo-American Fiction: The Ekphrastic Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025).
5. I am referring, respectively, to her essays “Notes on Camp,” “On Style,” “A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?,” and “Fascinating Fascism” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (Penguin, 2009).
6. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007).
7. Sontag, “On Style,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Penguin, 2009),17.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 21.
10. See, for example, W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Elizabeth Bergman Loizeaux, Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Renate Brosch, “Ekphrasis in the Digital Age: Responses to Image,” in: Poetics Today 39, no. 2 (2018); Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl, Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literature: Intermedial Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2020); Sofie Behluli, “Framing Lives as Paintings,” Women: A Cultural Review 32, no. 2 (2021).
11. Sigrid Nunez, Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag (New York: Riverhead Books, 2011).
12. Susan Sontag, “Description (of a Description),” Harper’s Magazine (January 1985).
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press 2006), 76.
14. Ibid.

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  Sofie Behluli

  Sofie Behluli works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern, where she researches and teaches for the North American Literature section. Prior to this post, she completed her doctorate, fully funded by the Berrow Foundation Scholarship, at the University of Oxford. Sofie’s research interests cover Anglo-American literature from the 19th century to the present, intermediality studies, ekphrasis, affect theory, life writing, gender studies and feminism, and relations between originals and copies. She has (co-)published a number of articles and essays, including “Art – Life – Planet: Ekphrasis Today” (Routledge Companion 2024), “On Literary Apathy” (Anglia 2022), and “Framing Lives as Paintings” (Women: A Cultural Review 2021). Sofie’s first monograph, Art in Contemporary Anglo-American Fiction: The Ekphrastic Novel, will be published with Oxford University Press in 2025.