Sontag's Barthes: A Portrait of the Aesthete (Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Though it is clear that "aestheticism" and "dandyism" are not mutually interchangeable terms, most observers would agree that the two enjoy a harmonious convergence in the person of Oscar Wilde, as it has been constructed, not least by himself. Wilde the aesthetic dandy, the dandified aesthete, wearer of the violoncello coat and disciple of Pater, the playwright and the essayist, is an important figure for Susan Sontag. The "besotted aesthete," as she calls herself (Salmagundi Interview 331), (1) inscribes her work in a filiation consciously inflected by Wilde. The most obvious instance of this occurs, of course, in "Notes on 'Camp,'" fragments written between the lines of Wilde, several of whose aphorisms constitute the essay's intertitles. Sontag's celebrated essay on Roland Barthes, "Writing Itself"--one of the critical works of which she herself, it seems, was most proud (2)--is also in thrall to Wilde, who appears implicitly in its interstices, as well as being mentioned by name several times. Over the course of this essay, Sontag skilfully moulds Barthes into the exemplification of an explicitly Wildean trope: the critic as artist. As a first effort to elaborate Sontag's characterisation of Barthes as aesthete, and its inextricability from her own critical procedure, it seems useful to look at the manner in which Sontag discusses how "the aesthete" ascribes praise. It seems to be Wilde who licences Sontag's oscillation between the terms "aesthete" and "dandy" at the point when she describes, in "Writing Itself," the manner in which aesthetes in general, and Barthes in particular, express praise for the objects most preferable to their tastes. Sontag gives here a brief typology of the two directions of "dandy taste" whereby "the aesthete" can be either "a willful exclusionist of taste," or an inclusivist, who would tend to express praise in a "whimsical aesthete polyphony" (xxvi). Sontag decides that Barthes is (aesthetically) more of an inclusivist than an exclusivist, distributing praise in a kind of "democratizing [...] aesthete leveling."