Religion and the Arts in America Camille Paglia Spark Notes
Siding With the Men
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July 22, 1990
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SEXUAL PERSONAE
Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.
Past Camille Paglia.
Illustrated. 718 pp. New Oasis:
Yale Academy Press. $35.
Camille Paglia, who clearly believes that big books should first with a big bang, makes the following pronouncements on the outset page of ''Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson'': ''Sexual Personae seeks to demonstrate the unity and continuity of western culture.'' ''The book accepts the approved western tradition and rejects the modernist idea that culture has collapsed into meaningless fragments.'' ''My stress on the truth in sexual stereotypes and on the biologic basis of sex differences is sure to cause controversy.'' ''My method is a course of sensationalism.''
That's quite a laundry list, even for a 700-page book. Even so, Ms. Paglia manages to keep near of her promises. Ostensibly a critical study of the representation of human sexuality in Western fine art, ''Sexual Personae'' is besides a scorched-earth set on on the underlying philosophical assumptions of liberalism and feminism. Such attacks are not taken lightly in the academy these days, and Ms. Paglia is doubtless being picketed at this very moment past a gang of irate undergraduates. But Ms. Paglia, an associate professor of humanities at Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts, is no bourgeois, either, and whatever canon-loving traditionalist who takes the trouble to read her book from cover to cover is more than likely to join the picket lines.
The argument of ''Sexual Personae'' runs roughly as follows: Nature is vicious and tearing, though people cull to pretend that it is chivalrous rather than succumb to utter despair. Art can be either Apollonian, camouflaging the ''dehumanizing brutality'' of nature, or Dionysian, accepting and jubilant it. The Apollonian striving for order is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is responsible for ''western personality and western achievement.'' Western civilisation nonetheless contains a Dionysian dimension (Ms. Paglia prefers the term ''chthonic'') that liberal humanists prefer not to acknowledge. In art, the chthonic realities of nature are typically represented by sexual symbolism, which is unremarkably trigger-happy and compulsive. ''The amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in slap-up art,'' Ms. Paglia argues, ''take been ignored or glossed over by almost bookish critics.'' To this end, ''Sexual Personae'' serves as an illustrated catalogue of the heathen sexual symbolism that Ms. Paglia believes to exist omnipresent in Western art; a sequel devoted to popular civilisation is in the works.
All of this may audio rather conventional, if non actually stodgy, but Ms. Paglia heats things up considerably past cartoon a flashy assortment of extreme conclusions from her basic premises. Not just does she praise ''the spectacular glory of male civilization,'' she flatly rejects Rousseau's vision of ''benign Romantic nature'' and its offspring, ''the progressivist strain in nineteenth-century culture, for which social reform was the means to achieve paradise on globe.'' Feminism, she claims, is ''heir to Rousseau'' in that it ''sees every bureaucracy as repressive, a social fiction; every negative about adult female is a male lie designed to continue her in her place. Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, homo limitation past nature or fate. . . . If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.''
Ms. Paglia'southward aggressive antiliberalism is deceptive, however. While she pays lip service to traditional Western values (''Happy are those periods when marriage and religion are stiff.'' ''The banning of pornography, rightly sought past Judeo-Christianity, would be a victory over the west's stubborn paganism''), her incessant assaults on liberalism and feminism are in fact profoundly anticonservative. Far from merely arguing for the significance of the chthonian dimension of Western art, Ms. Paglia positively wallows in information technology. A self-styled ''advocate of aestheticism and Decadence,'' she seems to believe that decadent art is great precisely considering information technology is decadent - that is, because it offers a truer vision of ''the amorality of the instinctual life'' and thus provides Apollonian civilization with a necessary catharsis for its chthonic fears and fantasies. ''Nosotros may have to have an ethical cleavage between imagination and reality,'' she says happily, ''tolerating horrors, rapes, and mutilations in fine art that nosotros would not tolerate in gild.''
The power to infuriate both antagonists in an ideological struggle is often a sign of a first-charge per unit book. ''Sexual Personae'' will undoubtedly antagonize the vast bulk of its readers, and it contains patches of real luminescence, only Ms. Paglia is constantly tripping over her ain pretentiousness. ''My largest ambition,'' she says at the kickoff, ''is to fuse Frazer with Freud.'' The pages of ''Sexual Personae'' are littered with every bit prideful little packages of cocky-regard. (''Chaucer'due south comic persona resembles that of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, whom I seem to be alone in loathing.'' ''Unlike older scholars, some of us discover Male monarch Lear ho-hum and obvious, and we dread having to teach it to resentful students.''
Ms. Paglia'due south esthetic judgment is as erratic every bit her cocky-esteem is salubrious. Her standard gimmick, endlessly repeated, is the loftier-depression cultural comparing: Lord Byron and the Embankment Boys, Coleridge and Rod Serling, Sir Frederick Ashton's ballets and ''The Avengers.'' Some of these yokings are so ludicrous as to seem near campy: ''Patrick Dennis' Auntie Mame (1955) is the American Alice in Wonderland and in my view more interesting and important than whatsoever 'serious' novel after Globe State of war Ii.'' But at that place is zippo intentionally funny well-nigh ''Sexual Personae,'' which is all too clearly the piece of work of a humorless, lapel-grabbing fanatic with a universal theory to hawk. Ms. Paglia's elaborate schema of sexual symbolism, impressive though it may sound in the telling, has led her to construct a bizarre anticanon of decadence in which hostage dullards like Charles Dickens and Henry James are shoved aside in favor of that old fraud, the Marquis de Sade.
Sade, to be sure, is not without his significance. Mario Praz and Edmund Wilson, to proper name but 2 critics of distinction, recognized and acknowledged his noxious influence on diverse cardinal figures in the Romantic movement. Simply Ms. Paglia is not but interested in Sade - she admires him. She is, in fact, the latest of the Sade cultists who take been haunting the fringes of serious literary criticism for decades. Like the rest of her fellow Sadeans, she complains that her idol is underrated and ignored, ''the most unread major writer in western literature. . . . No education in the western tradition is consummate without Sade.'' Comparison with Sade, not surprisingly, is the ultimate superlative in her critical vocabulary: ''William Blake is the British Sade, as Emily Dickinson is the American Sade.''
Afterward reading ''Sexual Personae,'' i rather expects Camille Paglia to turn upwardly, whip in hand, as a character in David Lodge'due south next novel, locking horns with Morris Zapp at a Mod Linguistic communication Association convention. Ms. Paglia is quite real, though, and she is also a conspicuously gifted author. She is an exciting (if purple) stylist and an admirably close reader with a hard cadre of common sense. For all its flaws, her first book is every bit as intellectually stimulating as information technology is exasperating. Merely ''Sexual Personae'' is tainted with the kind of symbol-mongering reductionism that sees one thing in everything, and despite its considerable virtues, information technology left me thinking of Earl Long's pithy appraisal of Henry Luce and his notoriously single-minded magazines: ''Mr. Luce is like a man that owns a shoe store and buys all the shoes to fit himself. Then he expects other people to buy them.''
SO'S HENRY JAMES'South MOTHER
[Henry] James'due south world, we have seen, is ruled by women. . . . The mother herself presses turgidly on the late novels, a paralyzing biographical force. . . . We feel her hovering in his ornate mode. . . . She is too the aqueduct of the daemonic, through which man is crushed and humiliated past nature. . . . He is detained by her in a median state, halfway between Romanticism and the social novel, his artistic goal. And then we wait - and wait and look. Zero ever happens in James. . . . James's repressions and evasions are many, varied, and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredded James novels in their hands, I cannot say. . . . Merely if James is understood as a Belatedly Romantic, a Decadent . . . then his sadomasochistic perversities take coherent form, integrated with his witty aestheticism and ambiguous sexual personae. . . . George Moore called James a cocky-fabricated ''eunuch,'' implying he was a prude and sissy. This is much likewise simple. Sex cannot be understood apart from nature. James'south rhetorical impediments and frustrations arise from a suppression of the daemonic, in which sex is included but to which sex likewise is field of study.
From ''Sexual Personae.''
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/22/books/siding-with-the-men.html
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