In her classic 1962 essay, "Against Interpretation," Susan Sontag bemoans the way too many obsess over what the content of a work of art means rather than simply experiencing it. Where is the appreciation of sensuality in art? Where is the play with form? Where is the love? Her famous, drop-mic last line insists that "In place of a hermeneutics of art we need an erotics of art."
Sontag gravitates to cinema as the art form that most allows us to simply experience it just as it is. She finds fiction, however, to be wanting in this regard. "Most American novelists and playwrights are really either journalists or gentlemen sociologists and psychologists. They are writing the literary equivalent of program music." So what would it look like in writing, I wondered, to play with form, to immerse the reader in a sensual experience, and to be utterly in love with the art of words?
Why, like Vladimir Nabokov.
