Camille Paglia sings as the Boy does by the Burying Ground, because she is afraid.

Tuesday, cigarette #1

Eve baits the hook with thoughts on Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae:

Several times, I found myself saying, "Oh, c'mon, you're just being trendy with that reading--this bit really isn't about daemonic lesbians or whatever"... but then she'd quote a few more passages from the same work, and I'd have to say, "Uh... you know, she's kind of on to something here." That didn't always happen--her reading of De Profundis as Wilde's sentimental return to his mommy is just infuriatingly bad, more on this in a moment--but it happened often enough that I'd say she earned the benefit of the doubt with me.

I have my own reasons for liking Camille Paglia. Her roaring erudition leaves out-of-the-blue quotes in its wake, and while I'm not sure that quoting Wilson Knight's reminder to wary bridegrooms that "we regularly let ourselves be born from a woman of whom we know nothing" or Mae West's opinion that "lesbians are not humorous persons" enhanced my appreciation of Henry James quite the way Paglia intended, those quotes sure were fun to come across, and there's one on every tenth page. She even pointed out a Wilde aphorism that I'd never come across: "People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that it is almost impossible to count them accurately." Whee! Also, it should not be surprising to any regular reader that, as someone who spends has been told "You sure read a lot of queer theory for a girl," I have affection for any woman with an appreciation for straight-woman-gay-man relationships. (This comes out more in Paglia's other books, but it's there in SP, i.e. "Gay men have an instinct for hierarchy unparalleled in contemporary culture, outside of Roman Catholicism.") My close relationships with gay men are characterized by highly mannered verbal style and an overabundance of ritualized activity in a way that my friendships with straight men and women unfortunately aren't, so Paglia, as a sister fruit fly (I think she prefers this expression), has my goodwill right out of the gate.

Still, Eve is right that her reading of Wilde is unforgiveably bad. It's hard to get on board with her proclamation that "no great work of Romantic imagination has anything to do with conscience" when the book she's writing about is Dorian Gray. Wilde summarized the book by saying, "The reason he destroys [the portrait] is that he says, 'This picture mars my pleasure in life. It is conscience to me; I shall kill it; I shall get rid of this visible emblem of conscience,' and by trying to kill his own soul the man directly dies." It's hard to read amoral Decadent paganism into this. A narrative of Wilde's artistic development that says "Wilde became humane only when he was already ruined as an artist and thinker" (p.515) ignores that fact that, though he wrote his best plays after embracing homosexuality, he wrote his best poem ("Reading Gaol") after embracing Catholicism. I always thought it was impossible to take tragedy seriously without also taking morality seriously, and I'm surprised that Paglia's intuitions seem to tell her just the opposite: one can care about either tragedy or morality, but not both.

It's most frustrating when she sets up the Apollonian/Dionysian dynamic in opposition to Christianity (under the assumption that Christianity can be neither?), because she so obviously understands that when secular thinking replaces religious thinking, bad things happen! From the Swinburne/Pater chapter:

Since Romanticism, sexuality has been asked to bear a burden for which it is ill-equipped. Swinburne's poetry is one of the most comprehensive modern attempts to turn sex into epistemology.

Surely she means "one of the most comprehensive modern attempts to turn sex into epistemology, aside from the book you are holding."

Sex is one of a dwindling number of interactions that people still accept as being too grand and mysterious to be explained merely in terms of contracts and rational choice, so it's understandable that, when religion, love of family, and art no longer fill people's spiritual needs, they seize on something that can. ("The man who knocks on the door of the brothel is looking for God.") But that doesn't mean that sex can bear the entire weight of man's desire for transcendent experience, and, after 650 pages, I still wasn't sure whether Paglia realized this or not.

Go, RTWT.