"An erotics of art"

       I think I know why I didn't read Susan Sontag's essay "Against Interpretation" when it came out.  It was the year I wrote my PhD. dissertation, got my doctorate, had our daughter, obtained our next place to live and work, in California, and moved there with Connie and Elizabeth.  I had an intense tunnel vision during the year 1964.

       But  I was moved to look at the essay once again when Sontag was one of the writers featured in The 50 Year Argument film about The New York Review of Books.

       Sontag's famous concluding sentence of that essay was "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art."  Sontag says critics want to know what the "content" of the work of art is, the intellectual "take-away" so they can put the art work itself behind them, having gleaned what it has to "say," having "interpreted" it.

       Sontag thought that what was needed rather was engagement, a falling in love with the work in its palpable, material form and letting it have its way with you.  If you gave an account of that with your experience and joy in the work intact, that could be a proper criticism.  And she gave examples. 

       My field was (and is) "oral interpretation of literature," and had I read and thought about Sontag's essay at the time, I think I would have seen her as an ally rather than an enemy.  Yes, we try to understand the literature, but in doing it through performance, we are embodying and envoicing the work, not "saying other things" about it.  In giving ourselves to the work, we are fulfilling what Sontag identifies as the need for "an erotics of art."