Perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it, and still being good.
Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 11.
There is a striking confluence of value, vitality and erroneousness in this portmanteau claim of Sontag’s. I will refer in what follows to some of the Romantic sources for this confluence, and I’ll also examine the aesthetic medium that, for Sontag, best demonstrates its vitality by tolerating mistakes: film. I’ll approach Sontag’s claims about film via D. A. Miller’s reading of a director that Sontag doesn’t namecheck, but who is arguably hovering in the background of her essay: Alfred Hitchcock.
In her next sentence, Sontag elucidates what she means by this confluence via the example of Ingmar Bergman films, particularly The Silence (released one year before her essay, in 1963). For Sontag, Bergman’s are films “crammed with lame messages about the modern spirit, thereby inviting interpretations,” but that “still triumph over the pretentious intentions of their director (11). The idea is that film as a formal medium outruns any intention on the part of its auteur, as well as the hermeneutic efforts of viewers to attribute symbolic meanings to it (such as the phallic reading of the tank in the famous street scene in The Silence, which Sontag also debunks in her essay). Sontag suggests that a kind of sensory immediacy, and the speed of delivery of that immediacy, allows films to outrun their creators. Given this, it would seem important to ask about what kinds of mistakes Sontag might have in mind. In film’s capacity to tolerate the pretentious intentions of its auteur and to invite symbolic, Freudian interpretations, is it the ideas of aesthetic intention and symbol that are mistaken, or is the very outrunning of intention by sensibility a kind of self-valorizing mistake that films make?
It is notable that Sontag appeals to a late Romantic, D. H. Lawrence, in articulating the idea that we should discard authorial intention, that we should, as Lawrence wrote, never trust the teller, but trust the tale (9). The notion of sensuous immediacy in art, and of a value found in its vitality, is generally an inheritance of Romantic ideas of aesthetic education, traces of which can be found in Sontag’s Wordsworthian idea of art as a way for a sensorium dulled by modern experiences of urban life and mediatization to revitalize itself; or in her Schillerian appeal to a naïve mode of artistic reception, an irrecoverable “innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself” (4). As Romantic scholar James Chandler has noted, the shift from mythic belief into enlightenment science is a key topic of some Romantic poets, and especially of John Keats. In his “Ode to Psyche” (1819), Keats’s speaker grieves the loss of belief in Psyche, a late arrival to the Olympian pantheon, and tracks her conversion into a figure for enlightenment sciences of the mind (a role for which her name and fabled curiosity made her especially apt).1 For Keats, as for other poets before him concerned with the problematic relation between belief and scientific enlightenment, art became a space where we can rest in beliefs which had come to seem erroneous according to the standards of that enlightenment. As John Milton wrote in his elegy “Lycidas” (1637), poetry allows our “frail thoughts to dally with false surmise.”2 As part of art’s serving the uses of enlightenment, it became a space where mistaken views of the universe could be tolerated, and even enjoyed.
All of this might seem to be a long way from Sontag, and from film. To start to get back towards “Against Interpretation,” and to my question about what Sontag might mean by mistake, I want to make a brief further detour into D. A. Miller’s stunning reading of Alfred Hitchcock, and especially into his “Too-Close View” of Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). Hitchcock was of course very much active at the time Sontag wrote her essay, releasing Marnie in 1964, and he is also very much in the background—or in fact in the foreground—of a film that Sontag does cite, 1961s Last Year at Marienbad, where he is to be noticed inconspicuously floating in the foyer of the film’s hotel in a surreal spin on the classic Hitchcock cameo.
Early on in Rope, Philip, with Brandon as apparent lover and accessory, has just strangled their old schoolfriend David shortly before hosting a dinner party to which David’s father and fiancée are invited. Brandon asks him, “You don’t think the party’s a mistake do you?” Just at that moment, Miller notices, a candle—one of a series of six—comes into shot at a canting angle, out of sync with its neighbors. It is almost, Miller writes, as if what Philip says were a caption to the canting candle (as it is in my feature image). With Poe-like levels of obsessional attention, Miller goes on to track the career of this candle in the film’s opening sequence, as it resists Brandon’s repeated efforts to right it, his obsession with this little drama making Miller forgetful of the socializing content of the film’s suspense plot. Miller’s interest is in what he calls “the coincidence of art and mistake,” and in particular the claim that artistic style, and especially the search for stylistic perfection in practitioners like Hitchcock, is a kind of high-wire act that works by wrestling with an ever-present threat of mistake, decay, humiliation, or just plain lack of symmetry.3 In Rope, this work of style is embodied in Brandon’s heroic battle to get the candle to stand up straight.
That is how Hitchcock’s style works, for Miller: as a continual generation of mistakes that are deftly covered up, in such a way that we can never know for sure if our witnessing of the mistake, and its repair, is somehow willed by the author. Brandon tries and fails across the scene to make the candle look straight, only for it to be magically repaired by one of Hitchcock’s cuts. But this invisible act of repair in turn generates a tiny continuity error, such that “correction becomes mistake; and in repairing Brandon’s oversights, Hitchcock must resemble him in making gaffes of his own, fouling up the uninterrupted spatio-temporal flow that is Rope’s obvious formal ideal.”4 This silent correction of a mistake forces the question of intentionality, since it becomes hard not to think of Hitchcock as a kind of Godlike figure who wills an animating imperfection on his creations, “to bestow on his own lapses a strange, secret assent.”5
So this is Miller’s “discovery” as he calls it: that Hitchcock, the master stylist, seems to intend his mistakes, and to select obsessive viewers like Miller himself to notice them, and in doing so to resist the lure to overlook detail that the film’s compelling plot entails. And these mistakes, it would seem, cannot ever really be repaired. Noting the little drama of the candle, Miller writes, “I imagine how Jefferies must have felt in Rear Window (1954) when, wild with surmise, he got solid proof of Mrs. Thorwald’s murder.”6 Fellow Romanticists might recognize this “wild surmise” as a reference to Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816), at the end of which, the conquistador Cortez is imagined to have “star’d at the Pacific” as “all his men/Look’d at each other with a wild surmise– / Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”7 The sonnet is famous for its own mistake – Keats didn’t seem to know that it was Balboa, not Cortez, who first “discovered” the Pacific Ocean. And Miller seems to be probing an assumption that mining texts for hidden hermeneutic meanings will always issue in satisfaction and social recognition, rather than revealing itself to be an abject and obsessional, lonely activity.
To that extent, Keats’s sonnet anticipates the kind of distinction that Miller implies between two kinds of viewing. On the one hand, we have the sociality of the look, as Cortez’s men look at each other, sharing their wild surmise, and Hitchcock’s audience assembles itself around a plot-driven experience of suspense, destined to overlook the errors that seem reserved for the attentive gaze of Miller himself. And on the other hand, there is that gaze of the “too-close viewer” himself, and the psychotic loneliness of Cortez’s stare at the Pacific— as if, in another quasi-intentional mistake, or a mistake that queers the relation between intention and chance, Cortez were staring, like Miller, at the specific, forgetful of the bigger picture, viewing too closely, fixating in intense agitation on an inert, passive detail that juts out of the wide expanses of plot.
In “Against Interpretation,” Sontag’s final plea for an erotics of art implies that aliveness to the sensuous immediacy of art should yield communality; interpretation, by contrast, is implicitly isolating (as Miller abundantly goes to show). Miller’s reading serves to uncover a fault “primal and irreparable” at the heart of aesthetic experience, and certainly acts out the loneliness of any hermeneutic impulse.8 I think this raises questions, finally, about what Sontag might mean, in my epigraph, by an art which is alive: do its mistakes suggest a quasi-evolutionary capacity to mutate, to remain vital by sustaining and growing, even through malfunctioning, or are they instead suggestive of a death-driven obsessional commitment to an automatic impulse that cannot be repaired or undone?
In Section 4, Sontag writes that interpretation is:
the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.) The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. (7)
Something about the intransitivity of art implies a kind of being in the world, albeit an ecologically depleted world in Sontag’s reading, polluted both by toxins and interpretations. De-toxifying the world of interpretations would make having the same thing as experiencing. But what would it mean for us to be able to experience what we have? And how don’t we experience it? Sontag’s answer to that latter question, I suppose, would be: by interpreting it.
In a famous letter that he sent to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds in the Spring of 1818, when he was nursing his dying brother Tom, Keats writes of his inability to compare himself to “the giant Wordsworth” who “makes discoveries” while Keats himself has “nothing but surmises.” Right at the end of the letter, Keats writes, “Tom has spit a leetle blood this afternoon, and that is rather a damper, – but I know – the truth is there is something real in the World.” How might the world refer to itself without that self-reference becoming tautologous? Is its self-reference condemned to only ever happen under the shadow of a threat to its vitality? Much of Sontag’s argument seems to tend towards an intentionally redundant claim that the artwork is the thing itself, that it is itself. The penultimate sentence of her essay runs, “The function of criticism should be to show how [art] is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means” (14). It is what it is, the world is the world —something that can be shown aesthetically, but only in terms drawn from the world itself, rather than the shadow world that interpretation makes, so that art’s being the world itself annuls any opposition between aesthetic intention and chance or contingency, and its doing so is the mark of its success, and its vitality.
Yet Sontag also claims, strangely, that an artwork is capable of paraphrase. Maybe the function of criticism at the present time, for Sontag, is to make the mistake of heretical paraphrase. But how can the world find a description of itself in art that is not drawn from its own terms, without becoming an interpretation, or that accepts tautological redundancy, while remaining alive? Finally, the world describes itself, and film is how it does it.
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Endnotes
- James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Cast of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 389-395.
- The Poems of John Milton ed. John Carey and Alistair Fowler (Longmans, 1968), 251.
- D. A. Miller, “Hitchcock’s Understyle: A Too-Close View of Rope,” Representations 121 (Winter 2013): 5.
- Ibid., 14.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 12.
- John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” in Romanticism: An Anthology, edited by Duncan Wu (Blackwell, 2012), 1397.
- Ibid., 17.
Simon Swift