The Last Call

Julia Friedman

Camille Paglia, Provocations: Collected herself as a “dissident feminist,” but for over Essays on Art, , Politics, Sex, and forty years she has also carried the cross—or Education. Pantheon, 736pp., $40 cloth. the laurels —of being a dissident academic). Despite a number of erudite, encyclopedic chapters whose topics range from portrayals alemil Paglia’s latest book of Middle Eastern women in Western is the very definition of protean. culture, through love poetry, to cults and The eight sections of this seven- religious vision in 1960s America, Chundred-page volume, fittingly titled Provocations is the printed equivalent of a Provocations, cover popular culture, film, cattle prod. Much like Nabokov’s Strong sex/gender/women, literature, art, education, Opinions (1973), and Robert Hughes’ politics and religion. Paglia, who calls herself Nothing if Not Critical (1992), Provocations “pro-pop and pro-sex,” has also proven a stems from a cultivated personal taste and fierce advocate of the canon, which for her adamant convictions. As with Hughes, the encompasses the best of civilization. Those words “waning” and “decline” appear in more familiar with her writings will know that this than one title of this volume. And like both breadth is not an indication of some Hughes and Nabokov, Paglia does not mince egomaniacal attempt at a “theory of her words, as she calls out the “ruthless, everything,” but a sensible shortcut to sorting soulless careerism” of elite academics with out decades of writing on an expansive range their “self-interested [slippery] scholarship, of subjects. After all, the author’s scholarly where propaganda and casuistry impede the maiden voyage— (1990)— objective search for truth.” What are her was another seven-hundred-page tome that demands? To rejoin the mainstream; to rely addressed the continuity of Western culture on facts rather than propaganda; to replace through an analysis of sexuality and identity politics with rigorous scholarly eroticism in art. Intellectual ambition is still standards; to accord high value to erudition. Camille Paglia’s middle name. But of course it is not 1973, and not even The unifying agent of the six dozen texts 1992, when opinionated and critical writing that comprise Provocations is their author— could still count as intrepid. In the coddled, a lover of the arts, a dedicated teacher and an consensus-obsessed climate of 2018 the outspoken dissident (she often refers to very act of putting out a compilation of

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9.30_Athenaeum Review ISSUE 3_FINAL.indd 172 10/3/19 11:02 AM controversial essays seems nothing short of clearly-worded, evidence-supported quixotic. Paglia is aware of that. She has no arguments that incorporated aesthetic illusions about saving people from the dark judgment. Sex, Art, and American Culture side, so she begins her introduction with a (1992), Paglia’s first collection of essays, with litany of those who would not make a good its reprint of “Junk Bonds and Corporate readership for her book: “those who believe Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf,” that they… found the absolute truth; those was revelatory. Having completed my who believe that language must be policed; primary schooling in a society steeped in those who believe that art is a servant of ideology and propagandistic lies (the USSR), political agendas; those who see women as I instinctively saw through the false idols victims and men as the enemy, and those worshipped by many of the faculty at Brown. who see human behavior as wholly formed Now, thanks to Paglia, I had an explanation by oppressive social forces.” Not to be overly for why the indiscriminate use of French cynical, but the above list of those who theory to the detriment of other approaches cannot handle being provoked does not bode was indeed as toxic as I had always suspected. well for sales, given the current situation on Her debunking of the “four legs good, two college campuses and amongst the organized legs bad” mentality that ostracized people art establishment. seen reading The New Criterion, or using Yet, while Paglia’s potential readership is formal analysis, or citing Walter Pater, was a a minority, the timing of Provocations is breath of fresh air. Her “street-smart perfect. Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Haidt feminism” seemed similarly logical to me: have recently joined a sparse but stentorian in the early 90s, as college co-eds were chorus of voices in defense of the Western bombarded with warnings about date-rape, canon and against the politicization of I could not wrap my mind around the idea higher education, reviving debates that raged that a scantily-dressed young woman could decades ago, when Paglia’s dissertation enter what Paglia called the “testosterone advisor had to forego a flat” of a frat house, get smashed, and then customary Q & A after a public lecture on expect equally smashed brothers to remember Shakespeare to avoid being mobbed by that she is a lady. Paglia’s second collection faculty eager to attack the of essays, Vamps & Tramps (1994), cleared that he allegedly represented. A small issue up. I was so taken by her common sense number of the intellectual catacomb dwellers (both scholarly and mundane) that I acted can certainly enjoy Paglia’s epigrammatic like a Jehovah’s Witness in proselytizing her sermons: “Beautiful women are a fascinating writings to anyone who would listen. I even conflation of nature and art.” briefly considered asking her to be an external For the sake of disclosure, I count myself reader on my dissertation committee, until I among these catacomb dwellers. I have had a came to my senses. It was 1998, and Camille two-and-a-half decade-long intellectual crush Paglia was emitting a steady radioactive glow. on the author of Provocations, ever since I It was impossible to imagine completing my discovered her writings in the mid-1990s, doctorate with this academic enfant terrible while in graduate school at Brown. The overseeing my efforts. elegant erudition of Sexual Personae (never Provocations is Paglia’s third collection of mind the fact that it took Paglia a decade to essays on a broad range of topics. Last year get it published) reaffirmed my faith that, she came out with a more focused volume contrary to all appearances, scholarship was titled Free Women, Free Men, which addressed not yet dead. There was still room for sex, gender and feminism. Some of the

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9.30_Athenaeum Review ISSUE 3_FINAL.indd 173 10/3/19 11:02 AM entries on these subjects reappear in a good student of Marshall McLuhan. For Provocations. Between Vamps & Tramps and Paglia the Internet has a double allure. It Provocations she published The Birds (1998), provides the opportunity to create hybrid a monograph on the eponymous movie, text incorporating both word and image, Break, Blow, Burn (2005), an analysis of while serving as an uncensored forty-three poems, and Glittering Images communication platform for “an invisible, (2012), another collection of analyses, this subterranean resistance movement.” time of twenty-nine visual images. It is under the “Ask Camille” rubric for the As does Nabokov’s Strong Opinions, Salon that Paglia succumbs to solipsism, Provocations contains essays, lectures, short which in turn results in some slips of articles, and interviews. Some, like “Dance judgment. Her attempt to draw a parallel of the Senses: Natural Vision and Psychotic between herself and Ayn Rand, the subject of Mysticism in ,” and her eponymous article whom she praises as “‘Stay, Illusion’: Ambiguity in Shakespeare’s “a bold female thinker who should Hamlet” are original scholarly articles. immediately have been a centerpiece of Others, like “Cults and Cosmic women’s studies programs” leads Paglia Consciousness: Religious Vision in the astray. Her gratuitously generous evaluation American 1960s,” “Free Speech and the of Rand is at odds with historical evidence Modern Campus,” and “The North American that reveals the Russian-born writer as a Intellectual Tradition” are well-researched, power-hungry, sadistic, manipulative vamp comprehensive historical surveys. One of the whose ideas about rational egoism were most brilliant essays in the volume is entirely derived from the most unpalatable “Theater of Gender: David Bowie at the characters of Russian imperial history, Climax of the Sexual Revolution,” which was including Dmitry Karakozov, Sergei Nechaev Paglia’s hefty contribution to the catalogue and Vladimir Ulianov (Lenin). Rand’s actual for a retrospective exhibit of Bowie’s legacy, as far as American history is costumes at the Victoria & Albert Museum concerned, is the “subprime crisis” of 2008, in 2013. Her erudite contextual analysis which sprang from the Federal Reserve’s traces the genesis of Bowie’s hybrid, eclectic failure to regulate the derivatives market. persona to nineteenth-century Romanticism, How was this Rand’s fault? At the time of the and epitomizes what she calls the crisis, the Federal Reserve was headed by “respectful illumination” of the artist and Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand’s favorite disciple, the artwork. In these longer essays (some of groomed and ideologically reprogrammed which originated as lectures) the language is in her New York salon. To be sure, Rand flowing, lucid, and jargon-free, and Paglia’s subsequently accompanied Greenspan to the authorial voice retains the appropriate White House, where he was sworn in as the scholarly detachment. Her tone changes in chief economist to the president. After her the pieces written for digital consumption. death, Greenspan became head of the In her online Salon articles, as Paglia notes, Federal Reserve, where he conducted it becomes “punchy, scrappy, take-no- real-life experiments with the US economy prisoners,” a suitable mode for a “myth-critic in an attempt to build Rand’s objectivist and pagan cultist.” Paglia’s embrace of popular paradise. Rand was not “the Camille Paglia culture made her a pioneer of Internet writing of the 1960s,” and the difference between by academics, while her seamless sashay them is not rationalism (Rand) vs. mysticism between print op-eds on current issues and (Paglia), as Paglia informs her Salon readers. digital columns for Salon proves that she is Rand was a derivative sociopath whose

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9.30_Athenaeum Review ISSUE 3_FINAL.indd 174 10/3/19 11:02 AM legacy was a staggering economic calamity, disconnected images, there will be a particular while Paglia is an oppositional intellectual, need for what she calls “a sympathetic dedicated to elevating “free thought and instrument” to analyze them. In “The Magic free speech over all other values,” who sees of Images: Word and Picture in the Media “art and the contemplation of art as a Age,” a version of a lecture at a 2002 medium of intuition and revelation.” conference on literacy, she draws a By Paglia’s own admission, her Salon connection between the decline in the quality column takes on “the hectoring personae of of primary education which, combined with old-time radio and TV: the host, the standup the rise of personal computers, has comic, and the pitchman, a descendant of “unmoored” the younger generation “from the carnival barker,” so perhaps inaccuracies the mother ship of culture.” In turn, this are inevitable. When her attention is directed affects their ability to concentrate or to attain outward, Paglia’s erudition and common the patience necessary to analyze complex sense produce staggeringly acute evaluations texts, build organized argument, and apply of the art world, politics, education and deductive reasoning. Her now decade-and- religion. Her pithy analysis of the NEA’s a-half old observation that the Internet’s debacles during the 1990s culture wars is as “addictive unfurling hypertext… encourages riveting as her evaluation of the problems restless acceleration,” has since been with American higher education. In the first confirmed by the widespread digital instance she nails the problem by pointing addiction to social media. Time has shown out the “degeneration of standards in our that Paglia was also right about the increasing Playskool model of primary education, in balkanization and bureaucratization of which everyone is an artist, without the American higher education, as well as about discipline of technical mastery” and the the importance of popular culture in any prevalent “feel-good relativism.” Her serious discussion of art. However, as Andre diagnosis that in the United States “the Left Gide once said, however, “since no one was as well as the Right— as well as listening, everything must be said again.” Puritanism—has abused art” is the best And that is the point of Provocations: to explanation I have heard for the current state continue the fight for art, culture and of grants and museums, most of which are against indoctrination. Hopefully, at some now overseen by liberal-leaning point, someone will listen. administrators. Paglia argues that, in order to Paglia is obsessed with fluidity. Her function properly, and to avoid becoming insistence on the superiority of the androgen/ “political penny arcade[s],” both art and model is part of this larger education need to be depoliticized. An expert theme, which encompasses thought, as well provocateur herself, she is against “pointless as sex and gender. Just as she deplores the provocation” of the kind that takes place “therapeutic customer-service operations” when publically funded institutions engage that universities have become, she is proud in scandalizing the public to prove their of the “flexibility of [her] system of open-mindedness, correctly describing that interpretation.” Paglia’s genuinely strategy as “adolescent wallowing in slack interdisciplinary scholarship, equally at ease ‘oppositional’ art.” with the verbal and the visual, gives her a Paglia’s expertise in combining images and clear strategic advantage over text drives one of her keenest insights. In a compartmentalized disciplines. Her television-dominated environment, where decades-long crusade to give equal young people are bombarded with consideration to the gems of the canon and

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9.30_Athenaeum Review ISSUE 3_FINAL.indd 175 10/3/19 11:02 AM popular culture makes her adept to analyze (in both the second and third wave of Rhianna’s outfits and John Donne’s poetry. feminism) view of women as powerless Her war cry for young people questioning fragile victims, always under assault. She is their sexuality is “Stay fluid!” And when she driven apoplectic by the direction feminism refers to herself as “transgendered,” she is took after , which presented not talking about a physical change, which women as hapless victims of institutionalized in her view cannot be subjectively patriarchy, in need of special, state-mandated mandated, but about her ability to combine protections. Paglia identifies the merger of the desirable features of both genders— post-structuralist and feminist theory, and intellectually, psychologically, and perhaps the resulting fixation on the idea of gender emotionally. Like Vladimir Nabokov, who as an illusion of language as a cause a yet prided himself that his “lucid,… balanced, further alienation of regular women from mad mind” was able to rein his magical the feminism. What started as an inclusive imagery into honed prose, Paglia clearly equity movement, has succumbed to a enjoys having a backstage pass to both the “self-referential discourse” aimed at a Dionysian and the Apollonian modalities. narrow elite. She is not comfortable within one norm, While she respects Betty Friedan, and and prefers straddling the span of both to considers “a feminist the limitations of the juste milieu. colossus—bold, learned and devastatingly witty,” Paglia deplores anti-pornography, men-hating feminists like Catharine Provocations is the last call MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin who, in to a society that "can her view, “perversely turned against the 1960s sexual revolution,” forming a de facto barely survive the anxieties reactionary movement. In an essay entitled “Women and Law,” originally published as a of freedom." preface to a collection of interviews with female public prosecutors in Brazil, she traces This insistence on flexibility and subtlety the legal status of women across millennia of interpretation also permeates Paglia’s and through different cultures up to the views on sex, gender and feminism, an area birth of feminism, emphasizing the prone to declaratory statements and regression into puritanical mores among oversimplification. Her basic premise, American feminists of the 1980s. Her meticulously developed in Sexual Personae, conclusion comes in the form of a rhetorical is that women fail to realize their power question: “is woman a victim, mutilated by over men, who are biologically determined the horrors of history, or is she a capable to pursue them. Her definition of the and resilient agent, responsible for her own “tormented fragility of male sexual identity” actions and desires?” Paglia clearly values recalls one of the lesser known epigrams of capability, bravery and accomplishment— Oscar Wilde, printed in a Peter Pauper Press one of the most passionate pieces in edition that she discovered while in college: Provocations is a paean to Helen Gurley “The history of woman is the history of the Brown, originally published in The Sunday worst form of tyranny the world has ever Times in the aftermath of her death in 2012. known: the tyranny of the weak over the And although she does not mention her by strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.” name, Paglia must be an admirer of one of One of Paglia’s pet peeves is the pervasive the most accomplished women of the

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9.30_Athenaeum Review ISSUE 3_FINAL.indd 176 10/3/19 11:02 AM twentieth century: the writer, senator, and that, according to Paglia, consists largely of twice ambassador Clare Boothe Luce. “trashing great male authors and artists for The way Paglia sees it, the two options their hidden .” #MeToo is a women have are either to seek the protection continuation of that male-bashing of the state, repeating the centuries-old tendency, an “open sex war—a grisly death tradition of male guardianship, or to “value match that neither men nor women will freedom above all, despite its pain and risk.” win.” Paglia’s well-justified fear is that, far Her own stance here is unequivocal: in a from ending predation of women in the 2008 Guardian questionnaire she named workplace, the revival of decades-old, her greatest fear as imprisonment. “I have unsubstantiated allegations will resuscitate to be free!” she said. stereotypes of women as hysterical, vindictive The most recent article in this volume is and volatile. She warns that #MeToo’s legacy “Movies, Art, and Sex War,” whose original will be “endless sexual miscommunication title was “MeToo and Modern Sexuality: and bitter rancor,”— thus circling back to Endless Bitter Rancor Lies Ahead.” It spells the warnings of the importance of visual out Paglia’s opinion on the hash tag literacy offered in “The Magic of Images.” phenomenon. As might be expected from a Paglia’s argument is that, with the waning “street-wise” feminist who acknowledges of the projected image that magnified female strength and power, the victimization emotions on screen, young people (whose narrative appalls Paglia. It is clear to her default mode of communication is imageless that women will not gain from a movement texting) will eventually lose the ability to where collateral damage potentially read facial expressions and body language. encompasses the other half of the In short, #MeToo threatens to discredit the population. Her “pro-sex” vision has always essential human emotions behind the clashed with the views of the feminists like Western artistic tradition. Provocations is , whom Paglia labeled “a morose Paglia’s last call to a society that “can barely philistine” because of her book survive the anxieties of freedom.”

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