Top Comments: The Notes on Camp Edition, Part 2

You may remember that I began to write about this issue at the beginning of May, and I didn't get all that far into what Susan Sontag had to say about Camp and its role in cultural history because I thought it would be a lot easier to do than it was. We ended up with a consideration of Note #10 because that's how far I was able to get before it got to be half an hour before that published:

I can see this will take up most of the month for me [a lot more than a month, as it turned out]. Skipping #9 for the time being, we'll close with Note #10 today:

Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman." To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

Being-as Playing-a-Role. And you wonder why Camp is at the center of pre-Stonewall gay "knowing." Could this really be any more obvious?

It's about gay sensibility as it was when she wrote the essay. So we proceed into the essay, and we'll see how far we get THIS time.

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So we'll start with #9 and proceed as quickly as I can through the remaining 48 points because, after all, there's a limit to how interesting this is. I skipped #9 last time because here, she begins

As a taste in persons, Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated.

Persons. And now, she tries to impersonate one of James McCourt's more queeny characters. Of course, there's the androgyne. BUT there are also the beefcake and cheesecake actors and actresses. To explain that, we must turn to the lyrics of John Lennon and Paul McCartney:

Well you should see Polythene Pam She's so good-looking but she looks like a man Well you should see her in drag dressed in her polythene bag Yes you should see Polythene Pam Yeah yeah yeah

That's, as she puts it, "the most refined form of sexual attractiveness [which] consists of going against the grain of one's sex. Camp taste, she says.

Of course, there's also this:

The great stylists of temperament and mannerism, like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead

The great camp icons. Ah, well.

Since we have this analysis of camp persons, it shouldn't surprise you that she soon uses the concept of artifice to get to theatricality and here she concludes that the origins of Camp taste are in the 18th Century (see Versailles). Drag in Shakesperean plays isn't camp; drag in Der Rosenkavalier is (this is why it used to help to be an opera queen).

Not that Camp taste didn't inflect cultural production as early as the Renaissance

(CARAVAGGIO, Narcissus, Galleria Nazionale di Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini, Roma).

But during the 18th century, cultural production in Western Europe developed a feeling for artifice and the picturesque almost universally, which by the end of the 19th century became a "special taste." Movements? Aestheticism, English Arts and Crafts, and, most completely, Art Nouveau.

And, of COURSE (from note 15)

A full analysis of Art Nouveau, for instance, would scarcely equate it with Camp. But such an analysis cannot ignore what in Art Nouveau allows it to be experienced as Camp. Art Nouveau is full of "content," even of a political-moral sort; it was a revolutionary movement in the arts, spurred on by a Utopian vision (somewhere between William Morris and the Bauhaus group) of an organic politics and taste. Yet there is also a feature of the Art Nouveau objects which suggests a disengaged, unserious, "aesthete's" vision. This tells us something important about Art Nouveau -- and about what the lens of Camp, which blocks out content, is.

So here we understand artifice as something without content, if I'm reading this correctly. At any rate, in note 17  she gets at the concept of "knowing" as it applies to Camp insofar as it conceals meaning (the cognoscenti "get" it, the masses don't).

And then we get to the various levels of Camp:

18. One must distinguish between naïve [unintentional] and deliberate [intentional] Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying.

What's unintentional camp? From Gold Diggers of 1935:

Deadly serious, no matter what it looks like in 2014. The Maltese Falcon? Unintentional Camp. All About Eve? Intentional, self-aware Camp. Thus

22. Considered a little less strictly, Camp is either completely naive or else wholly conscious (when one plays at being campy). An example of the latter: Wilde's epigrams themselves.

"It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." - Lady Windemere's Fan

Camp is extravagant, in fact, too much (de trop), the product of an uncontrolled sensibility, fantastic. But Camp also changes over time because time provides detachment.

Thus, things are campy, not when they become old - but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt. But the effect of time is unpredictable. Maybe Method acting (James Dean, Rod Steiger, Warren Beatty) will seem as Camp some day as Ruby Keeler's does now - or as Sarah Bernhardt's does, in the films she made at the end of her career. And maybe not.

We're not talking about anything gay here. Sontag is trying to claim it for the cultural historians and critics as a category. Artifice, yes, but extravagant artifice, sometimes taken seriously, sometimes not.

Then, we have an explanation of the relationship between Camp and the development of character in a cultural property. Sontag identifies Greta Garbo as "the great serious idol of Camp taste" because she doesn't act, she always plays herself. Sontag also distinguishes theater and film (less Camp) from opera and ballet (more Camp because there are fewer opportunities for development of character), and explains that, because there IS an opportunity for development of character in La Traviata,

it's less campy than Il Trovatore (which has none).

Finally,

34. Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different -- a supplementary -- set of standards.

Different and supplementary. Again, "knowing," and this time, "code" - and pre-Stonewall gay culture had codes, as we know.

That brings us to Note 35 and a discussion of how we value a work of art, which which I'll begin Part 3 sometime in September. I'm taking a hiatus from writing for Top Comments, mostly because, like last fall, I have a new course to build, and we all know what happened when I tried to build TWO courses and keep writing for Daily Kos last August and September. I noticed in that diary that I felt I had to assure you that I was all right after nine months of bereavement. Now, I'm beginning to get the impression that at least some of you don't want to hear about it anymore after eighteen months, and this is making me uncomfortable. So I might not be around this diary a whole lot for the next month either (and I'll be travelling this month as well).

And now for the stuff that makes this Top Comments:

TOP COMMENTS, July 30, 2014: Thanks to tonight's Top Comments contributors! Let us hear from YOU when you find that proficient comment.

From Angie in WA State:

In TrueBlueMajority's diary, Guilty verdict in Renisha McBride murder trial, BronxinTN makes a comment that speaks (loudly) for itself.

From bluezen:

BlackClouds hits it right on the head with a comment in chrislrob's diary No. Blacks Don't Vote Republican Because of Bad Republican Policies.

From arizonablue:

horsefeathers kicks off a LONG thread (27 comments!) in which the pootie people try to explain the meaning of "eye candy" to Andy (I presume he's the cat in the first photo) in triciawyse's Thursday diary. Special kudos to Ninepatchfor providing REAL eye candy.

From chrislrob:

Val points out what you would REALLY do if you cared about abortions more than controlling women.

From Youffraita:

gjohnsit's comment in his own snarky diary about GOP hypocrisy on terrorism is surely Top Comment material.

From your diarist, Dave in Northridge:

Flagged by Kentucky DeanDemocrat,KYRockypoints out the importance of education in benamery21's diary about college debt.

TomLeg gets off a nice bit of snark about a school system with untenured teachers (although I think he's serious) in zenbassoon's diary about Whoopi Goldberg and teacher tenure.

TOP MOJO, July 29, 2014(excluding Tip Jars and first comments):

  1) Eleven years ago the best dog I've ever had by ontheleftcoast— 194   2) The only bootstraps he and his siblings... by JeffW— 159   3) He calls food stamps payment not to work by FishOutofWater— 133   4) Wow.. came in to my life by ontheleftcoast— 131   5) Socialism! by CwV— 126   6) Oh, her mouth is so mellow and beautiful by on the cusp— 110   7) tmservo433... by maggiejean— 110   8) LOL!! What is funny is that when I read it I saw by mrsgoo— 102   9) See? The market is self-correcting. by Words In Action— 97 10) Charles Koch, the "man of the people." by karmsy— 95 11) Elaine Chao by MartyM— 90 12) a month or so ago, I read by agnostic— 88 13) actually, his ad was disgusting by agnostic— 82 14) Abso-fucking-lutely! by Darth Stateworker— 81 15) Fiction. by IndieGuy— 80 16) Oh please by Paleo— 77 17) Here's one more problem with this by elwior— 75 18) Virtually All American Families Were Struggling by Gooserock— 73 19) That's awesome. by Silencio— 73 20) nature is self-correcting, too. by joe shikspack— 70 21) Wiesel has written important works and... by Ralphdog— 70 22) Not true.  The "Let him die" crowd don't take by ColoTim— 68 23) Awesome! Many a mickle makes a muckle, and by Wee Mama— 68 24) Her webpage says this: by grover— 67 25) And unfair to s*t, too. by Samer— 67 26) you mean disagreeing is a smear? by Shahryar— 66 27) one of the saddest moments in my time by rexymeteorite— 65 28) He touched many people here. by commonmass— 64 29) Congratulations! nt by a2nite— 62 30) Yeah. Didn't some insane New Yawka jump down... by leftykook— 62

For an explanation of How Top Mojo Works, see *mik's FAQing Top Mojo

TOP PHOTOS, July 29, 2014: Enjoy jotter's wonderful PictureQuilt below. Just click on the picture and it will magically take you to the comment that features that photo. Have fun, Kossacks!