Notes on Camp
Sontag's guide to Camp aesthetics
Description
In 1964, a thirty-one-year-old American writer named Susan Sontag published a piece called "Notes on 'Camp'" in the Partisan Review. It was not an article in the usual sense. It was fifty-eight numbered notes, some a paragraph long, some a single line, deliberately unfinished and arranged like a scattered card index. She opened by quoting Oscar Wilde and warning that to write about Camp was already to betray it — that a sensibility this slippery could be approached only by jottings, never pinned down by a thesis. The form was the argument. Camp could not be defined; it could only be circled.
And yet the notes circled something real. Sontag was naming a way of seeing that everyone half-recognized and nobody had pinned down — the pleasure people took in Tiffany lamps, in old Hollywood glamour, in feather boas and gilded excess, in things so overripe they tipped into delight. She gathered objects that had no business sharing a sentence: the swooning androgyny of Greta Garbo, the original King Kong from 1933, certain art-nouveau door handles, even Mozart in one of his moods. The list felt arbitrary until you stood back, and then a single sensibility flickered through all of it.
The essay landed in her debut collection, Against Interpretation, the following year, and it made her famous almost overnight — a downtown intellectual who could write about high theory and a B-movie monster with the same seriousness. What she had caught was a sensibility with a long underground history and a charged present, a private signal passing between people who could not always speak openly. The notes were light on their feet. What they were doing underneath was not light at all.
The question we’re asking : What exactly was Sontag pointing at when she said "Camp" — and why did she insist it could only be sketched in fragments, never defined?What we’ll see : How a writer turned a feeling everyone half-recognized into a sensibility with its own logic, its own history, and its own quiet stakes.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — Fifty-eight notes on a thing that resists notes
Sontag began with a confession dressed as a warning. Camp, she wrote, is not an idea but a sensibility, and a sensibility is the hardest thing to write about, because to talk about it at all is to convert it into the very thing it isn't — a system, a doctrine, a set of rules. A sensibility, she said, is almost unspeakable. So rather than build an argument, she would offer notes: provisional, partial, sometimes contradicting each other, in the spirit of the thing itself. The number fifty-eight wasn't sacred. It was just where she stopped.
The first move was to insist that Camp is a way of seeing the world, not a quality in objects. The same Tiffany lamp can be looked at as a lamp or seen as Camp; the difference is in the eye, not the glass. Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a woman but a "woman," not a lamp but a "lamp." To get Camp is to relish the artifice, the stylization, the sheer too-muchness, rather than to ask whether the thing is good in the ordinary sense. It is, she wrote, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation — never of judgment.
02Chapter 2 — Artifice taken seriously, seriousness made absurd
At the heart of the notes is a single distinction, and almost everything else hangs from it. Camp, Sontag wrote, is the love of the unnatural — of artifice and exaggeration. The natural, the spontaneous, the effortless: none of that is Camp. What Camp adores is the thing that announces its own construction, that wears its stylization on the outside. A gesture is Camp when it is too much, when the quantity of effort is wildly out of proportion to the occasion. The androgynous is one of its great images precisely because it scrambles a category nature is supposed to fix. Garbo's face, she suggested, is Camp because its beauty is almost too perfect to be a person — it becomes a mask, a pose, a "face."
The crucial nuance is that real Camp is unintentional. The purest examples don't know they're Camp. They are dead serious. A film, a building, a performance becomes Camp when it reaches for grand effect, fails, and the failure is somehow glorious — when the ambition so exceeds the result that the gap itself becomes the pleasure. King Kong is not trying to be funny. The old swooning silent melodramas were not winking at the audience. That naive, full-hearted commitment to an impossible seriousness is what makes them sublime in the Camp sense. The moment a thing tries to be Camp, Sontag warned, it usually curdles. Self-conscious Camp is rarely as satisfying as the genuine, oblivious article.
03Chapter 3 — The texture of failed seriousness
Once the distinction is in place, Sontag's scattered examples start to rhyme. What unites Tiffany glass, an art-nouveau Métro entrance, a Sternberg melodrama, and a particular kind of operatic gesture is a relationship to style as something laid on thick, on purpose, with total conviction. Art nouveau, she noted, is the most fully developed Camp style — it converts one thing into another, a lamp stem into a flowering plant, a doorway into a vine. The form refuses to be merely functional. It insists on being decorative beyond all reason, and that insistence is the whole charm.
She drew a useful contrast between Camp and the high seriousness of the modern. The modern temper, she wrote, prizes the difficult, the austere, the morally weighty — the art that makes you uncomfortable. Camp offers something else: it dethrones the serious without becoming frivolous. It says that one can be serious about the frivolous and frivolous about the serious, and that this double game is itself a kind of sophistication. There's a generosity to a sensibility that can find pleasure where the official guardians of taste find only embarrassment.
04Chapter 4 — The sensibility that knew it was a code
Sontag was careful, but not silent, about the fact that Camp had a home. She noted that the sensibility was bound up with a particular community — that it was, as she put it, something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among certain urban cliques. In 1964, that was as far as a mainstream essayist could comfortably go, but the meaning was legible to anyone who needed to read it. Camp had been, for decades, a way for queer men in particular to signal to one another, to find each other across a hostile public, to take pleasure in styles and stars and gestures that straight respectable culture dismissed. The love of artifice, the relish for the over-the-top diva, the theatrical view of identity as a role one performs — these weren't accidental. They were the survival aesthetics of people for whom the gap between the self shown and the self lived was a daily fact.
05Conclusion
The fifty-eight notes never resolve into a definition, and that was always the point. Sontag had warned at the top that a sensibility resists the net of a thesis, and she kept her word — she left the thing alive, circling it with examples and refusals rather than capturing it. What she handed her readers wasn't a rule for spotting Camp but a trained eye: the capacity to see the Tiffany lamp, the swooning melodrama, the gilded excess of Louis XIV's court as objects of a particular, tender enjoyment. The essay teaches a way of looking, and a way of looking is harder to forget than a definition.