Close Writing by Sontag

“Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described,” writes Susan Sontag by way of introduction to her “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964). Her essay is not an argument, but a reflective description, an exemplary one, in which Sontag encircles the elusive notion of Camp through a series of propositions which are stated with bold authority: “Camp is… / Camp taste has… / Camp is art that… / The experiences of Camp are… / Camp taste is, above all,… / The Ultimate Camp statement: …”

Yet Sontag’s notes are notes indeed. Her propositions are tentative, and they’re illustrated or rendered plausible by examples that are compared and contrasted. So examples serve as qualifiers that mark differences between pure Camp and Camp that fails, naïve Camp and self-conscious Camp, etc. The angle changes and the light shifts as we go along, and I kept thinking that this ought to be tried out as a rhetorical exercise. By way of a parallel treatment, paragraph by paragraph, even sentence by sentence, one might approach, let’s say, the elusive notion Gonzo journalism or Gonzo sensibility:

If “the hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance” what is the hallmark of Gonzo? If Camp is “a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers”, what is Gonzo? If “without passion one gets pseudo-Camp… merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic” what quality differentiates pure Gonzo from pseudo-Gonzo? And so forth.

Basically, Sontag’s notes made me try this at home, shifting my focus into my fingers.