The Last Call Julia Friedman Camille Paglia, Provocations: Collected herself as a “dissident feminist,” but for over Essays on Art, Feminism, 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 a MiLLE 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—Sexual Personae (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 172 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 Harold Bloom 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 Wellesley College faculty eager to attack the of essays, Vamps & Tramps (1994), cleared that patriarchy 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 Literary lives 173 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 Theodore Roethke,” 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.