Thursday, November 3, 2005
Paglia
[via Denis Dutton]
Camille Paglia is like a sports fan with depth. Rather than losing it for the home team, she loses it for art. Art for her is something that matters — her pronouncements have the unhinged assuredness of a home team fanatic. But the focus of her enthusiasm evolved from learning and thinking about art and artists, not from the geographical accident of home team sports mania. She cares about art because she cares about life.
Louis Menand had written a long and interesting piece about Pauline Kael for the NYRB in which he said that Paglia had been one of those very influenced by Kael. I think this is true, but like much talk about influence, you really have to be specific.
Kael's brilliance and huge ego evolved in some of her writing into exhibitionistic hyperbole — look at me, look at my verbal orgasm, Kael often seemed to say. It sometimes felt that it was all about her. But only sometimes. Most times Kael was right on target and her targets were skewered in a way that was very satisfying; boy, did they deserve it. Kael's brilliant insights and no-holds-barred approach were deeply engaging.
Paglia is a variant of that robust voice. But rather than writing about (and being constricted by) a collaborative entertainment form like movies, Paglia covers all of culture and pop culture. Kael used high culture as reference, but lost her context too often — she once compared Renoir the son, a wonderful director, with the genius of Renoir's father. Both father and son were sunny and light filled souls, but it was the father who was best able to express it.
I often don't agree with Paglia's judgments, but she is so great — her energy and intelligence, even when they don't convince in a particular instance, still elicit your admiration for her insights and knowledge — her boldness as she marches in, what seems to me, the right direction — toward an appreciation of art that expresses something that is inclusive of both intellect and emotion and spirit.
The fine interview is here. Some quotes:
- New Criticism was in its arid last stage when I was in college in the mid-1960s, and I detested it for its claustrophobic exclusions. I found it too genteel, too WASP, with its prudish evasion of sex and its hostility to psychoanalytic speculation.
- I am trying to make close reading fashionable again and to embolden graduate students and junior faculty to do likewise. Over the past 35 years, literature and art have too often been reduced to lugubrious victimology or crass political sloganeering.
- I find Eliot grindingly conceptual and calculated; everything is pre-programmed, mapped out like a crossword puzzle. He leaves little to intuition, to the suggestive power of words. And he's too priggish about basic emotion.
- About Ezra Pound: “Too much of it is pastiche—a compulsive showiness, a pillaging of culture for pretentious references that the general reader would need a thousand footnotes for. That's not deep or genuine art-making to me—it's adolescent skittishness, the posturing of a snippy, adenoidal grad student (I remember that type all too well).”
- My theoretical approach is militantly interdisciplinary: I believe that all the arts should be knitted together. It's my recipe for future creativity in the arts. We will never get important new artists again if we keep feeding students a sterile diet of cynical postmodernism.