For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself – albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony – the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.
Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 8.
In section five of “Against Interpretation,” Sontag distinguishes between two types of authors: “overcooperative authors” and “stubborn authors.” In an essay that is first and foremost concerned with reading, the attention that Sontag pays to authors and the influence on their works, or rather their interpretation, deserves consideration. According to Sontag, there are authors whose works offer themselves to interpretation more so than others do. These “overcooperative authors” are unable “to leave the work of art alone” and, not unlike critics, they seek to “tame the work of art,” which includes their own (8). Thomas Mann is Sontag’s prime example of such overcooperative authorship, someone who appears nervous when faced with “the naked power of his art,” someone who inscribes a “clear and explicit interpretation” into his text (8). In contrast to such “overcooperative authors,” Sontag puts what she labels “stubborn authors.” They leave it to the critics to detect interpretations as their works themselves withhold such obvious auto-readings. Among these stubborn authors, Sontag mentions Kafka, Proust, Faulkner, Rilke, and Gide, around whose works have grown “thick encrustations of interpretation” (8). Their popularity with the critics, however, is not a sign of their works’ merit: although, or rather because, these works elicit critical responses, they tend to be “defective, false, contrived, lacking in conviction” (9).
Sontag published her essay collection Against Interpretation in 1966, four years before Roland Barthes, in S/Z, established the difference between so-called readerly and writerly texts. The first category refers to texts which open up easily towards the reader, the second to texts that refuse to be understood in any straightforward manner. A writerly text, according to Barthes, turns the reader into a “producer of the text,” whereas readerly texts put the reader into a position of “idleness.”1 The 1960s were the time of the so-called Canon Wars and their critical scrutiny of literary traditions and the authority of author figures. Unlike with Barthes, however, the author as creator of art is not “dead” for Sontag, nor is criticism detached from its maker.
Sontag’s own canon of writers, critics, and film directors, while international and multilingual, is predominantly male. She is, of course, writing just before the influential calls for a feminist revision of the canon by gynocritics such as Elaine Showalter or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. But the obvious absence of both “overcooperative” and “stubborn” female writers is striking, especially when considering the contemporaries of modernists like Faulkner, such as H.D. or Gertrude Stein, and their often rather cryptic writings. “Stubborn,” in Sontag’s sense, and as exemplified by the writers she mentions, implies a high cultural status. While these female modernists live up to this expectation, the crusts of interpretation their works have elicited are not as thick as those of Faulkner’s.
In the light of the 60th anniversary of Sontag’s essay collection, Sontag’s view of authorship as divided into overcooperation and stubbornness begs for reconsideration. After all, she clung to the author and the intentionality of their writing just a few years before Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in his eponymous essay from 1967, followed by Michel Foucault’s introduction of the author function in 1969, another attempt to de-personalize the work of the writer.2 It is around this time, too, that the vast meta-ization of fiction during and following postmodernism, with writers turning critical commentary into a part of their creative work, emerges as a way out of the impasse that Sontag placed critics in. Postmodernism may have become history for some and thus no longer an adequate framework to examine the role of writers and readers in the 21st century. But the last sixty years have called into question some of Sontag’s tenets while proving their relevance for some discourses. Her strong notion of authorship in “Against Interpretation” is a case in point. In the 21st century, the author has returned powerfully, with renewed interest in authorship studies and of course with growing awareness of a global marketplace in which authors need to find their place, social media included.3 In this context, Sontag would not get away these days with her white, male, and Eurocentric canon.
Furthermore, speculation on what Sontag would make of the bland visibility of authors today, using Instagram and other platforms to provide interviews, TED talks, comments on their work and the process of their making, is tempting. Or consider the vibrant award culture that turns the publication of any long or shortlist—previously a somewhat arcane process—into a media event. Needless to say: many of today’s authors are not only overcooperative, but hypercooperative. More generally, reading is coupled with interpretation in faster and more public ways than in Sontag’s time. Goodreads is an example of the expansive growth of online and amateur reviewing, which democratizes literary criticism, but also turns interpretation into an activity almost inevitably tied to reading more generally.4 Reading has always been a social activity, but never before have the “crusts” that Sontag bemoans been verbalized and shared with such immediacy and attached to the act or experience of reading itself.
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Endnotes
- Roland Barthes, S/Z, translated by Richard Miller (Hill and Wang, 1974), 4.
- Roland Barthes. “The Death of the Author,” in Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, edited by Séan Burke (Edinburgh University Press, 1995). 233-246. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, edited by Séan Burke (Edinburgh University Press, 1995). 125-130.
- See Ingo Berensmeyer, Gert Buelens and Marysa Demoor, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship (New York: Cambridge University Press 2019); Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (New York: Palgrave, 2007).
- See Julia Straub. “Canon Theory and the Velocity of Book Histories in Times of Digitization.” Anglia 39.1 (2021): 224-241.
Julia Straub
