Positions

Sontag's progression towards Benjamin is strange, fascinating. More than finding him, she finds herself. Encountering Benjamin translated into a clear sense of belonging to a theoretical tradition; above all, it gave her a more nuanced narrative of the critical act.

Sontag had earned her place as a literary critic by emancipating herself from firmly held beliefs in the critical establishment. This, however, took some time. Despite her youthful rebellion, in her first book of essays she was still working with a rather traditional notion of interpretation. She thought that ‘great art induces contemplation’ and that ‘the reader or listener or spectator […] must be detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation and approval’ (‘Against Interpretation’ 27). For the most part she echoed René Wellek, who defined the aesthetic object as that which the reader does not attempt to reform, possess, or consume, because it is something that induces contemplation or amorous attention (Wellek and Warren 327). She transformed Wellek's amorous contemplation into ‘dynamic contemplation’ (‘Against Interpretation’ 27), but she was still under the influence of a traditional view according to which interpretation was commentary aimed at evaluating bad and good literature, bad and good art. Her difficulty is palpable in the contradictions in her claims. On the one hand, she dutifully stands by accepted academic opinions on the value of art: ‘The greatest artist attains a sublime neutrality’ (26). On the other hand, extolling ‘transparence’, she rejects hermeneutical depth.

Benjamin was in the avant-garde of critical thought: earlier than other thinkers and in more nuanced ways, he ‘strove to relate a new image culture […] to a modernity that involves new forms of subjectivity and social organization’ (Andrew viii). One of the primary signs of his influence on Sontag is her effort to place the critic and his task in the forefront of these new forms of subjectivity. Perhaps it would not be wrong to say that Walter Benjamin did for Sontag what she did for Thek; he ‘rearranged [her] head’. The world he left her, rearranged by the reproducibility of the work of art, must have felt like the flat, fragmented plane of a Rauschenberg canvas.