Incomprehensible

 One late night in Somerville, years ago, I turned down all the lights and put on Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura. I even managed to finish it, somehow. It was the most excruciatingly boring piece of arthouse cinema I'd ever forced myself to watch, just for the sake of saying I had done so. 

Even once I made it to end, however, the victory felt hollow. I realized that there were few bragging rights to be won simply from having viewed it, start to finish. Anyone could do that. I felt I ought to have been sophisticated enough that have "gotten something out of it" too. But what? 

The standard retort is that a work of this sort does not need to "say" anything, beyond what it is. Susan Sontag, in Against Interpretation, condemns the quest for "meanings" behind art as a form of philistinism. As Archibald MacLeish put it, "a poem should not mean/ But be." 

One can say, then, of L'Avventura, as of kindred films, that whatever it "means" is simply what the camera records. When a character in a Martin Amis novel is asked what a ponderously difficult novel is "saying," he replies: "It’s saying itself. For a hundred and fifty thousand words."

The figurative painter Francis Bacon (not to be confused with the Elizabethan philosopher) reportedly liked to share a similar anecdote about the dancer Pavlova. When she was asked about the meaning of the Dying Swan, she replied: "Well, if I could tell you, I wouldn't dance it."

Susan Sontag portrays any attitude other than this as a cop-out. The desire to make a "difficult" work of modern art "mean" something that can be put in words is a "philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone." It is a capitulation; a refusal to accept the difficulty on its own terms. 

And admittedly, I feel that the glove fits, in my case. Nearly all my engagement with art is filtered through the desire to transform it into blogs. If I couldn't write about what I read, I don't know how I could read at all. And nothing facilitates writing like finding intellectual content in a work.

So this is surely a failure on my part. The ideal critic would accept that a poem of Wallace Stevens or a work like Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, say, need not "mean" anything at all, but should only "be." But I demand it "say" something so that I'll have something to write about in response. 

Sontag acknowledges that lesser mortals like me will struggle with her approach: "The commonest complaint about the films of Antonioni [is...] that they are 'boring.'" By being labeled "common" and placed in inverted commas, my complaint is thus annihilated (Hey, I liked Blow-Up!)

But, apart from noting that the complaint is prevalent, how does Sontag refute the charge that L'Avventura is boring? She doesn't really. She simply acknowledges the film is "frustrating" (she groups it with the novels of Beckett in this regard, but this seems wrong to me—because Beckett, crucially, is funny.)

It's possible that my desire for L'Avventura to be something other than "frustrating" is a philistine one. It may indeed be a cop-out and capitulation: an unwillingness to accept the work of art on its own terms; the product of a need to make the Dying Swan into something other than a dance. 

But it occurs to me that the "Against Interpretation" approach may also be a cop-out in its own way. After all, if one abandons the quest to extract "meaning" from art, then one need never confess that a particular work is "over one's head." No meaning in art can ever elude one, because it is not there. 

One does not have to confess that one was baffled by Tender Buttons, then, because one discovers—by intellectual jiu-jitsu—that it was never meant to mean anything to begin with. A book "should not mean/ But be." And so one is absolved of intellectual effort. 

I have been guilty of this cop-out too. Attempting to divine the meaning behind a book like Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus—which I liked for reasons I could not explain (unlike L'Avventura, which I disliked for reasons I can explain), I cited the Pavlova principle above. 

A book like that, I said, does not have to mean anything other than what it says. It should not mean, but be. And yet, even as I wrote it, I knew I was absolving myself of further effort to understand. So, which was the real "capitulation" here—which the real philistinism? 

Is it a greater capitulation and conformity to refuse to accept the artwork in silence—to try to wring some sort of meaning from it, no matter how recalcitrant? Or is the cop-out not rather to be found in the attitude of uncritical acceptance—the one that demands that L'Avventura do nothing but exist?