2. Camp is not intended for belief. This is true above all with respect to the arts of the act. It rejects the emotional and intellectual bonding with the “manifest content”—i. e., the onstage lives of characters and their stories—in favor of a cool savoring of the aesthetic exaggerations of the camp sensibility. It preserves all the appearances of the belief engagement while allowing a superior distancing from it, and encouraging immersion in the territory between, whose essential spirit is mockery. While asserting that her strong attraction to camp was balanced by an aversion to it, Sontag’s Notes on Camp constituted its big permissions slip to intellectual respectability. The aversion (or “revulsion,” to use her word) is not much in evidence.

Into the camp dumpster Sontag merrily tosses, along with Swan Lake, the operas of Bellini (really? Norma?) and those of Strauss (really? Elektra?), with a special citation for Der Rosenkavalier—though not those of Wagner. But let’s pause for a moment. For all her formidable intellect, have we the slightest grounds for credentialing Sontag as an opera critic? Let’s take a look. In Thirty Years Later, an afterword she wrote for the 1996 republication of Against Interpretation, she allows that while Notes on Camp remains among the essays she is most pleased with, the ones she most dislikes are two theatre chronicles whose commission she’d accepted against her better judgment. Good call. While it cannot be argued that Miller’s After the Fall or O’Neill’s Marco Millions are among their authors’ best works, the arrogance and mean-spiritedness with which Sontag goes after them, without any concession to the authors’ standing, bespeaks a desperation to be rid of those authors entirely, to erase them from the canon altogether. Even S. N. Behrman—no great playwright, just a capable one then slipping past his sell-by date—does not deserve the contempt she visits on him. These pieces suggest a lack of sympathy and patience with the live theatre project as a whole. And she evidently believed that Oscar Wilde wrote Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. ^(I)

So there goes one leg of Susan Sontag’s qualifications as an opera critic. What of the other one, music? In the title essay of Against Interpretation, she urges us to receive art sensorily, immediately, and to take it for what it appears to be at first impression. She also wants criticism to proceed from there, rather than searching for subtextual “meanings” according to the critic’s psycho/socio/political bent. I’m with her so far. But to do that, there must be a strong predilection. The receptor’s sensorium must be tuned—keenly so, in the case of a critic—to the artwork’s wavelength. So we need to search in Sontag’s writing for signs of such tuning to the opera and/or classical music wavelength. We find nary a hint. Sontag was through-and-through a visual/literary person, not an aural/oral one, even in part. All her work on the arts, including her best-known essays, are on painting, film, architecture, photography, and a few out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new writers then intellectually fashionable. I do not believe she had the basic equipment for the reception of opera through its music, or of singing, or of classical music in general. If she had, she certainly would have written about it beyond the casual dismissals of Notes on Camp, and would have shown a sensitivity to the musical qualities of superior prose, written or spoken. She did not. So there goes the other leg. I remain nonplused by Heartbeat/WTF’s quest for validation in her writing.