Is Literary Interpretation Defensible?

Abstract

In a provocative essay entitled ‘Against Interpretation’, first published in 1964, Susan Sontag asserted,

To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’ ….

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. 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.¹

Although one can find this essay reprinted in anthologies of criticism, it is doubtful whether it had much impact on literary critical practice when it first appeared. Susan Sontag had no great reputation as a literary critic and was more noted for her defence of some of the more bizarre manifestations of contemporary art. Her attack would also have been easy to relate to the tradition of formalism or aestheticism in the arts, a tradition which itself has not been invulnerable to criticism.