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.
By Camille Paglia.
Illustrated. 718 pp. New Haven:
Yale University Press. $35.
Camille Paglia, who clearly believes that big books should start with a big bang, makes the following pronouncements on the first 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 canonical 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 form of sensationalism.''
That's quite a laundry list, even for a 700-page book. Still, Ms. Paglia manages to keep most of her promises. Ostensibly a critical study of the representation of human sexuality in Western art, ''Sexual Personae'' is also a scorched-earth attack 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 by a gang of irate undergraduates. But Ms. Paglia, an associate professor of humanities at Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts, is no conservative, either, and any 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 barbarous and violent, though people choose to pretend that it is benevolent rather than succumb to utter despair. Art can be either Apollonian, camouflaging the ''dehumanizing brutality'' of nature, or Dionysian, accepting and celebrating it. The Apollonian striving for order is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is responsible for ''western personality and western achievement.'' Western culture 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 usually violent and compulsive. ''The amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in great art,'' Ms. Paglia argues, ''have been ignored or glossed over by most academic critics.'' To this end, ''Sexual Personae'' serves as an illustrated catalogue of the pagan sexual symbolism that Ms. Paglia believes to be omnipresent in Western art; a sequel devoted to popular culture is in the works.
All of this may sound rather conventional, if not actually stodgy, but Ms. Paglia heats things up considerably by drawing a flashy assortment of extreme conclusions from her basic premises. Not only 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 earth.'' Feminism, she claims, is ''heir to Rousseau'' in that it ''sees every hierarchy as repressive, a social fiction; every negative about woman is a male lie designed to keep her in her place. Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate. . . . If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.''
Ms. Paglia's aggressive antiliberalism is deceptive, however. While she pays lip service to traditional Western values (''Happy are those periods when marriage and religion are strong.'' ''The banning of pornography, rightly sought by 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 it. A self-styled ''advocate of aestheticism and Decadence,'' she seems to believe that decadent art is great precisely because it 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. ''We may have to accept an ethical cleavage between imagination and reality,'' she says happily, ''tolerating horrors, rapes, and mutilations in art that we would not tolerate in society.''
The ability to infuriate both antagonists in an ideological struggle is often a sign of a first-rate book. ''Sexual Personae'' will undoubtedly antagonize the vast majority of its readers, and it contains patches of real brilliance, but Ms. Paglia is constantly tripping over her own pretentiousness. ''My largest ambition,'' she says at the outset, ''is to fuse Frazer with Freud.'' The pages of ''Sexual Personae'' are littered with equally prideful little packages of self-regard. (''Chaucer's comic persona resembles that of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, whom I seem to be alone in loathing.'' ''Unlike older scholars, some of us find King Lear boring and obvious, and we dread having to teach it to resentful students.''
Ms. Paglia's esthetic judgment is as erratic as her self-esteem is healthy. Her standard gimmick, endlessly repeated, is the high-low cultural comparison: Lord Byron and the Beach Boys, Coleridge and Rod Serling, Sir Frederick Ashton's ballets and ''The Avengers.'' Some of these yokings are so ludicrous as to seem almost campy: ''Patrick Dennis' Auntie Mame (1955) is the American Alice in Wonderland and in my view more interesting and important than any 'serious' novel after World War II.'' But there is nothing intentionally funny about ''Sexual Personae,'' which is all too clearly the 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 earnest 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 name only two critics of distinction, recognized and acknowledged his noxious influence on various key figures in the Romantic movement. But Ms. Paglia is not merely interested in Sade - she admires him. She is, in fact, the latest of the Sade cultists who have 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 complete 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.''
After reading ''Sexual Personae,'' one rather expects Camille Paglia to turn up, whip in hand, as a character in David Lodge's next novel, locking horns with Morris Zapp at a Modern Language Association convention. Ms. Paglia is quite real, though, and she is also a conspicuously gifted writer. She is an exciting (if purple) stylist and an admirably close reader with a hard core of common sense. For all its flaws, her first book is every bit as intellectually stimulating as it is exasperating. But ''Sexual Personae'' is tainted with the kind of symbol-mongering reductionism that sees one thing in everything, and despite its considerable virtues, it 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'S MOTHER
[Henry] James's 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 style. . . . She is also the channel of the daemonic, through which man is crushed and humiliated by nature. . . . He is detained by her in a median state, halfway between Romanticism and the social novel, his artistic goal. So we wait - and wait and wait. Nothing 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. . . . But if James is understood as a Late Romantic, a Decadent . . . then his sadomasochistic perversities take coherent form, integrated with his witty aestheticism and ambiguous sexual personae. . . . George Moore called James a self-made ''eunuch,'' implying he was a prude and sissy. This is much too simple. Sex cannot be understood apart from nature. James's rhetorical impediments and frustrations arise from a suppression of the daemonic, in which sex is included but to which sex too is subject.
From ''Sexual Personae.''
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/22/books/siding-with-the-men.html
