Sontag’s disenchantment with interpretation reminds me of something that the American author Flannery O’Connor once said, in relation to literature: “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.”