(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Sontag was an American author and literary critic.
She began reading at age three, and read “gluttonously” (Sontag 1995, 272). Before entering university her “intellectual work…was simply taking in”, but once there she learned a method for reading which was “comparative, and basically ahistorical”: “a constant dialogue of texts” (pp. 272–3). She was taught to read very closely, thoughtfully examining the text word by word (p. 273). This “was the best education for learning how to read that one could imagine”, and she continued to employ this method in her later work (ibid.). If there was any defect in this education it was its inattention to the historical context of what she read, and this took her a lifetime to correct (ibid.).
Sontag described most of her reading as rereading (p. 194). She told an interviewer that she was currently reading Mrs Dalloway for the forth time, and that each time “it has seemed like a different book, this time I thought it more extraordinary, more original, even stronger than I had remembered”, and her journal entries make frequent reference to this practice (ibid.; Sontag 2008, 19–20 (e.g.)). A book worth reading only once isn’t worth reading at all (Sontag 1993). A proxy for important books, then, is that they invite rereading. Another proxy is the literary canon because “the judgement of posterity is correct” in this regard: it is clear which authors are worth reading 25-30 years after their work is over (Sontag 1995, 240).
We have the habit of approaching books with the intention of interpreting them (Sontag 1966, 5). Interpretation is a process of translation whereby the interpreter asks: “don’t you see that X is really—or, really means A? That Y is really B?”—“plucking a set of elements…from the whole work” (ibid.). It assumes that what the text clearly means is not what later readers demand of it, so seeks to resolve this supposed discrepancy (p. 6). Modern interpretation is overtly contemptuous of appearances so “as it excavates, destroys; it digs”behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one” (ibid.). This can be seen as a “radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it” (ibid.). In this way Marxism and Freudianism, for example, are “aggressive and impious theories of interpretation” such that “[t]o understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon…to find an equivalent for it” (p. 7). We can learn to be conscious of reading in this way by asking ourselves: to what am I attempting to translate this text?
Instead of trying to translate the elements of a piece of literature into something different, considering the content independently, we should pay more attention to its form (pp. 8, 12). We must “reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it”, celebrate “transparence”: “experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are” (p. 13). Books become real to us when we “recover our senses”, learning to “see more, to hear more, to feel more” (p. 14). When we criticise a book we should “show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means” (ibid.).
In some contexts interpretation is a means of liberation from the “dead past”, but in others it’s “reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling” (p. 7). So the way in which we interpret texts “must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness” (ibid.). Interpretation of the reactionary sort is the “revenge of the intellect upon the world” because it impoverishes our world “in order to set up a shadow world of ” by which it makes books “manageable and comfortable” (pp. 7–8). Sontag summarises her position: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” (p. 14).
When Sontag was a child, “waiting to grow up, waiting to escape into a larger reality”, to read, to have access to literature “was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck” (Sontag 2007, 209). She made these remarks in her acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, where she described literature as both dialogue and “the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another” (p. 204). It is “the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom” (p. 209). In fact, Sontag concluded, particularly when “the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom” (ibid.).
To exercise this freedom we should read what has survived the judgement of posterity, and what benefits rereading, closely, comparing it to other texts with an eye to its historical context. We shouldn’t fixate on translating the text to fit our ideology or preconceptions, but rather make full use of our senses by also attending to its surface.