Is Camille Paglia’s “Decadence” a type of horror in modern society?
Her takedown of Kafka and the early Romantic poets starts with Wordsworth, who “wants nature without sex” and sparked a “movement in modern literature leading to . . . Kafka’s crippled cockroach”, a literary invention that “forfeits maleness for spiritual union with mother nature: wholeness through self-mutilation.” (pp. 300-301) I never thought of Kafka as a metaphorical eunuch, but then again Paglia makes the same charge of James Joyce, whom she lumps together with Henry James, “a eunuch-priest of the mother goddess.” (p. 49) Paglia traces this line of emasculated malcontents back to Rousseau and related ideas such as the ‘noble savage’. To large degree I agree with her about Rousseau, who I’ve read also inspired Pol Pot. However, sometimes I find her ideas about maleness a bit trifling, almost like her entire argument rests on a straw man (haha pun intended). Certainly most writers don’t live normal lives any more than serial killers do. It strikes me as paradoxical that Paglia would like to describe poetry and art in terms of sexual virility, yet she would have us believe that mother nature demands that her priests be castrated. Still it occurs to me I have misunderstood Paglia. She is essentially a real pagan, insofar as any materialist can worship anything, and insofar as paganism exists in modern society through ripples in the art subsystem, popular ‘new age’ movements, and even via remnants in Catholicism. G. K. Chesterton made a similar point about Catholicism being most of what’s left of paganism, which I would say includes folklore. Modern folklore would include cinema and other forms of pop culture.
It seems to me though, that Paglia would love to travel back to the time when art lived in “magic circles . . . sacred spaces . . . [and] sexualized spasms of creation”. (p. 328) She posits a rear guard action of premodern paganism against modern society, a “war between vision and language”, (p. 339) waged across an enchanted battlefield haunted by the godlike forms of Apollo and Dionysus, the spirits of Nefertiti and Emily Dickinson, all bound in ritual service to the demigods and demigoddesses of ‘Iconos’, Hollywood, and perhaps even ancient mystery cults reborn as the castrati of ‘the deep State’. Then you take a breath and remember that art is just another differentiated subsystem of modern society, with no more weight than politics, law, science, religion, or even sports. The pagan cinema may rule the western eye, but the written word still controls the western courtroom and the electoral college. At least that’s what you tell yourself. Even Luhmann called out modern distinctions as “illusion” now and again. The written word ironically enough does appear to still govern scholarship, but Paglia argues that the written word too can be Dionysian. (discussing Wilde p. 562 and Whitman p. 604) Certainly the word appears necessary to explain the image. Even folklore must be spoken to survive in meaningful form. Some visual arts exist in folkloric crafts, sigils, signs and dance, but meaning remains confined to the word no matter how many Amish barn hexes are photographed. Cinema which can be visual storytelling is perhaps the best example she’s got of the image as meaning, but this book isn’t really about cinema, and besides, do all of these oicotypes on the screen actually support her argument or would she be forced to cherry pick?
Regardless, I would call her a boxer, a fighter, an Amazon as she might admit but most of all a terrorist in the sense that she is a terroristic thinker. For anyone who studies academic communication this should come as no surprise as academics are in the business of erasing modern distinctions as it suits them, so long as their own professional distinctions remain intact. The terroristic thinker like an actual terrorist seeks to destroy modern distinctions but with metaphorical bombs aka words. Paglia leads with a Molotov cocktail from Egypt, then a letter bomb from the Greek theater, and then she heads for the central bank of the humanities, aka poetry and literature, to read the entrails of her hostages.
She has definitely given us something to chew, a bloody piece of chthonian meat, but will the gorgons of ancient empires or even the silver screen turn us all to stone? Paglia does hint at this separation between art and life when she says “Greek tragedy is a conceptual cage in which Dionysus, founder of theater, is caught.” This has been said about horror movies too, well before this book was written even, by film critics also influenced by Freud, speaking in context of ‘the return of the repressed’, and Paglia largely agrees when she says that “[a] play is an anxiety-formation freezing . . . barbaric Protean energy.” (p. 101) It is easy to see the Bacchae as a horror or disaster movie. I am reminded of how prominently the Bacchae features in My Dinner with Andre, a film also about the battle between society and nature. Andre Gregory would likely agree with Euripides’s assessment of a society in its “late or decadent phase”. (p. 102) Dionysus, like the horror film boogeymen of our own age, represents “the return of the repressed, the id . . . bursting from bondage.” (p. 103) Andre Gregory’s idea to use the actual head of a human cadaver in his production of the Bacchae seeks to sever the modern (‘decadent’?) distinctions between theater and life, performance and consummation, society and nature. Like terrorists both ancient and modern, Dionysus destroys distinctions and tears apart differentiation, or as Paglia says, “dissolves the Apollonian borderlines between objects and beings.” (p. 103)
Last I checked, military weapons also perform this function in modern society, both because of and irregardless of their ‘hard Apollonian edge’. This is another paradox that Pagalia does not approach directly, the idea that the hard modern edge actually destroys itself, as part of its autopoietic function, in order to allow space for ‘the individual’. As other commentators such as Matteo Pasquinel have argued in discussing the “uncanny . . . neurological traumas [of] the alien hand . . . first described by the German-Jewish neurologist Kurt Goldstein in 1908” (see Pasquinel’s article “The Alien Hand of the Technosphere. Kurt Goldstein and the Trauma of Intelligent Machines”, available at Academia.edu), trauma itself could be a part of society, a source of identity and even growth for the individuals caught up in society’s web. “The Bacchae [like Andre Gregory’s avant-garde pretensions] deconstructs western personality.” (p. 104)
Andre Gregory is surprised that his privately commissioned personal flag ends up including the Tibetan swastika; he is careful to stress its less sinister quality as “not the Nazi swastika . . . one of the most ancient Tibetan symbols”, yet he continually brings up his subtle connections (social and psychological) to Nazism. If you read his autobiography Gregory accuses his own father of having been a Nazi collaborator. Furthermore, he mentions in the autobiography his avant-garde theater company had connections to the CIA among its board members. The hydra of MK Ultra and its attendant conspiracy tales rears its many heads, a modern gorgon that has given form to American conspiracy folklore since the sixties. The paradox is also a distinction, order/chaos, and order thus also includes chaos or the Dionysian power to disorder someone’s mind. Disinformation or counterintelligence is specifically relevant, but always must contain some truth to do its work.
In context of the academic coding ‘true/false’, Paglia’s book then to me appears something of a tangled mess but perhaps it is meant to be. Paglia draws lines such as between distinctions like ‘image/word’, and then scribbles over them hastily in places, revising her theory as she goes. There are some inconsistencies here that serve her terroristic ends. Terror in its political sense, and horror in its theatrical, like tragedy I would agree with Paglia, “springs from the clash between Apollo and Dionysus” (p. 104) or one could say the conflict between order and disorder. The classical horror narrative always cycles through safety and security (order), to threat (disorder), and back to order again. (see Monsters and Mad Scientists by Andrew Tudor) Andre Gregory and his pet avant-garde (again perhaps so delicately shepherded by the CIA in both its board connections and top secret LSD experiments) would like to let Dionysus out of his cage, even if still keeping the (lower case) god on a leash. Niklas Luhmann’s riposte to all of this is that order/disorder still functions to maintain society, its autopoietic ebb and flow like nature itself, now beyond the ability of individuals to control. “Individualism and self-realization as a model” (p. 10) may easily become decadence, is what Paglia suggests and even celebrates, but without order there can be no decay. A living system or ‘nature’ has its own order that perhaps the acolytes of Dionysus are too blind to fully describe. Though Paglia never mentions him, I would say that as Jack Kerouac pointed out (more or less), decay is a part of the life of human systems like cities, society, or empire.
Paglia favors pagan empires over Christian ones, and prefers “ritual orgy” to “street carnival”. (p. 138) Her idea here could be only that ‘ritual’ is more honest than ‘carnival’. “Religion, ritual, and art began as one,” (pp. 28-29) but of late our society is differentiated as Niklas Luhmann points out. ‘Invisible hierarchies’ may be constructed to replace the premodern ‘visible’ hierarchies of the ancient world, Paglia is telling us, and with that I think Luhmann would agree. “Freedom makes new prisons.” (p. 235) Apparently modern society can repress the pagan rituals only so much as they will always resurface in the dreams and fantasies of society, aka cinema and folklore. However in a differentiated society is this such a big deal?
Just rewatching the classic 80s action flick Highlander which has a brilliant fade out from the hero’s face to a mural of the Mona Lisa on the side of a skyscraper in New York City. Paglia calls the Mona Lisa a kind of totem in the art world, “the premiere sexual persona of western art”,(p. 154) which functions as “an apotropaion, a charm to ward off evil spirits, like the giant eye painted on the prows of ancient ships. (p. 49) The Mona Lisa to Paglia presides “over her desolate landscape . . . a gorgoneion, staring hierarchic of pitiless nature.” (p. 49) The immortal catch phrase from Highlander of ‘there can be only one!’ might as well be the battle cry of every sperm on its way to the egg. The immortals here seek to decapitate all the other contenders. Alan Dundes the folklorist points out that decapitation is a substitute in stories for the motif of castration. This story then softens the harsh realities of nature for a wider audience perhaps. The story told in the film is of the efforts of an immortal few to civilize the barbarism of earlier ages. The crude and premodern Highlander calls the civilized Ramirez a “Spanish peacock”, to which Ramirez replies that he’s originally Egyptian, a detail I find intriguing in reflection of Paglia’s argument. Vampires too in the popular imagination can always be traced back to Egypt (see Anne Rice, The Hunger, etc.), and the immortals in Highlander are also compared to vampires. Also the bit about “holy ground” which is a traditional no-conflict zone that none of the immortals will violate, even the evil, barbaric antagonist, the Kurgan. I’m sure Paglia would make much of the scene where the Kurgan jokingly says “Mom” in mock affection to his carjacking victim. Yet this bit of folklore cannot escape a moral view. One can say it is merely ‘quasi-Christian’, a global universalism perhaps, with Churches still considered holy and assuming as it does a super nature without speculating much about the origins of this “kind of magic”. The “prize” here is a single unifying mind to guide humanity (a kind of monotheism?!). The failure of the heroic Highlander to secure this ‘treasure’ would be to leave this power in the hands of the Kurgan, an evil (Dionysian) force opposed to all decent, reasonable and humanitarian ends, i.e. antisocial in every sense, and with this I think Paglia would agree, that society creates these distinctions to protect the weak.
However, Paglia’s idea is that these good intentions are illusory, or at least ‘on the road’ to somewhere entirely unintended. Always underneath the good intentions of society, there is a destructive darkness, she would say. As a social systems theorist might say, there is no perfect system. “Every road from Rousseau leads to Sade” is Paglia’s Nietzschean gauntlet cast down at the feet of modern pieties. (p. 14) She points out correctly that in movies we can also see this in the example of “the femme fatale [who] reappears, as a return of the repressed”. (p. 13) In communication one can only observe what is not discussed as an ‘unmarked space’ according to Luhmann, and Paglia makes a similar observation when she says “what is not said presses upon what is.” (pp. 615-16) So each communication one could say ‘represses’ that which it does not discuss, an inevitable result of the reduction in complexity necessary for communication to occur. (This is perhaps one reason why autopoietic communication may never stop—there is always something left out of the previous system operation.) I’m surprised that so far Paglia doesn’t address directly the possibility that horror movies are a modern version of Sade. Of course she mentions pornography, but reading her descriptions and quotations from Sade, I was struck forcefully with the connection between Sade’s writings and body horror. Sade was perhaps an aristocratic version of Ed Gein, at least on paper. Too bad Tobe Hooper never made a movie about the French Revolution. Again, I had to repeatedly remind myself that despite the bombastic and nearly apocalyptic tone of this book, it is mostly about the art subsystem.
I suppose after awhile it appears to me this is also about a moment in our own contemporary history, the rise of gay rights, feminism, and the impact on our society of these movements. Paglia is a defender of “Decadence”, which she equates with “aestheticism”, (p. 512) and ultimately she connects these concepts to the creativity of both modern (differentiated) society and specifically the art subsystem. Paglia apparently has no concept directly equivalent to system differentiation and I would say she goes too far when she claims that “Romanticism freed art from society and Christianity”. (p. 513) So for Paglia, writing within the academic subsystem, she would describe the differentiated subsystem of art as “freed”. It makes sense to me that an academic would say that, but is it accurate? Certainly modern society has a place to stash its decadence, and no erstwhile Oscar Wildes will be thrown in gaol (aside from perhaps in a few extreme national segments within the global order that still entertain such a possibility). At least many artists continue to believe in the heresy that ordinary rules of society do not apply to them. A true Romantic might argue that Oscar Wilde’s power derives paradoxically and in some small part from his persecution. Niklas Luhmann argues that segmentation (such as into different national jurisdictions in the legal system) can facilitate global social system evolution by increasing variety and I would think the same holds true for differentiation. So Paglia’s case perhaps is a bit overstated or even hyperbolic. I won’t go so far as to call it ‘hysterical’, as that is out of fashion.
However, she does correctly diagnose the difficulty with all human systems of communication, which is the ultimate ‘tenemos’ (sacred or unobservable space)—consciousness. In rather spectacular fashion she gets at the root of all social system ‘problems’ which is to map the mind or personality. ‘As above, so below,’ as they say. Now humans are really attempting to build artificial brains that may outperform our own! Paglia correctly points out that older systems, social ‘maps’, or ‘models’ were essentially about the same problem, even if based in less than scientific methods. The “predictive part of astrology is less important than its psychology.” (p. 222) Setting aside for the moment the idea that nearly all of civilization can be traced back to writing and the theory that writing is founded in the practice of divination (prediction!), we are back to the ‘New Age’ and older ‘magical’ systems as ‘self-help’. (see Freemasonry for example) A dash of Jung’s “synchronicity” (p. 222) and the idea that the “Greek word zodiac means circle of animals” (p. 222) and we can return again to folklore and its animal fables, along with the ultimate end game in the west of all this theatricality, the hardest edge of all as far as personality goes, the sociopath, psychopath, antisocial or ‘predatory personality’.
The Zodiac killer perhaps not interested in scholarship but only in codes, even social codes or conventions, the cypher of the identity of ‘the individual’ as the ultimate secret, unobservable by even the most determined Quixote or tradecraft specialist (aka the classic ‘fool/detective’ or even ‘writer’). The text becomes a dream/nightmare for only a moment before we wake up to discover we have never left the art subsystem entirely. “Things happen in complex patterns of apparent coincidence, noticed by the keen eyes of the artist.” (p. 222) David Fincher (or George Smiley) couldn’t have said it any better. Paglia delves into what one might call the ‘philosophy of serial murder’, which she describes as “a perversion of male intellect. . . . There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.” (p. 247) Funny I find out later this is one of her most quoted lines. The folklore around serial killers is thick. However, Paglia’s high end taste has no room for “horror films . . . of the splattering kind” which she finds “pedestrian.” (p. 268) Nonetheless she argues “[h]orror films are rituals of pagan worship.” (p. 268) I would say they entertain modern audiences by allowing social description of a collapse of differentiation within the ‘cage of theatricality’, i.e. at a safe distance. Serial killers such as Edmund Kemper may claim to collect their victims as ‘spirit wives’, and the Zodiac claims to collect the souls of his victims as ‘slaves’, but no matter how much art goes into a work directed by David Fincher, like the “run-of-the-mill horror film” such killers remain “anti-aesthetic and anti-idealizing”, expressing “the form-pulverizing energies of Dionysus.” (p. 268) Yet no one who is not a specialist can recall the names of Kemper’s victims, or the Zodiac’s for that matter. They remain ‘slaves’ at least in a social sense, to serve their murderers in a social afterlife if not metaphysical, a true decadent ‘dead end’, as Paglia might admit.
Paglia sometimes fights against her own pessimism it seems though, arguing that “great literature and art [even if] never affirmative”, may still be celebrated “in order to win victory over something else, something uncontrolled.” (p. 383) So perhaps her end is control, steering. Luhmann says you can’t steer society, but he agreed that ‘problems’ are the ‘catalyst’ of social system function. I recall at this time Paglia’s discussion of Elvis, whom she calls “a myth-maker”, and when my wife and I visited Graceland, I pointed out a book (that belonged to and may even have been read by Elvis) in a glass case about ‘the Age of Aquarius’ opened to a page that had text underlined about how this age would be characterized by an empowerment of women. Oddly enough while raking leaves on a Saturday, the thought occurs to me how powerful Christ remains, despite his critics and the differentiation of modern systems of communication on display here. The words Paglia uses ultimately come across to me as defensive, a charge she often seems to level at the Romantic poets she studies. It strikes me that she feels compelled to compare all of this analysis against the example of Christ, even if she gets it mostly wrong. Her understanding of Christian doctrine on Gnosticism I would suggest is woefully lacking, to cite one example. All these petty magicians and artists, along with the bomb throwers accompanying them, cannot compete with the truth of Christ, no matter how many armies of academics hue and cry that modern society has been “freed” from the Holy Roman Empire. (see Radiohead for example) Religion remains as important as art for understanding society, precisely because so many seem compelled to attack it. With a description of the “social ostracism” of lesbianism as “heroic”, according to Walter Benjamin no less, even Baudeaire writes from a “world-view [that] is Christian” according to Paglia. (p. 426) To quote Gang of Four, “no escape from society.”
Paglia approaches this idea when she admits Oscar Wilde’s “glittering great chain of being is . . . not the actual world of law, finance, or aristocracy.” (p. 567) One could add ‘or religion’, but like Wilde, I would say Paglia remains trapped within her own academic “visionary construction” close to what some call ‘the genital chakra’. Such illusions of spirit or theory appear as a (false) method of escape (transcendence), to join with the too-serious scholars of Tao, other types of intellectuals, serial killers or similar ‘statistical unpersons’ desperate to communicate but unwilling to compromise a singular vision of either self or society. All of this ‘decadence’ may be not much more than the fracturing of identity under the weight of the differentiation of subsystems in modern society such as art, religion, economy and politics. I recall some studies show schizophrenia increases in many urban areas. Paglia herself points out scholarship indicating “the nineteenth century self came apart or ‘pluralized’” (citing Van den Berg, p. 493) As Luhmann points out in his treatise on the religious subsystem, the shaman does not always return from the trance journey aka ‘vision quest’. Poets too carry this risk. Any seeker of associative knowledge may become trapped in phantasms of dissociative agony, especially in a fragmented/differentiated society so keen to uphold individuality/trauma as a model of self actualization. If the shaman or the poet runs the risk of merely trading one form of trauma for another, then one can see this mirrored in the complexity and differentiation of modern society. Mother nature as much as man it seems is looking for the hard Apollonian edge of a rocket to carry her children off world. What could be more natural than to reproduce life on another planet? Conflict, both sexual and social, may be as much required as stability in order to self-generate these systems, whether psychic (individual) or social.
Still Paglia hardly touches the gleeman poets, mostly keeping to the scholar poets (or those with sufficient wall of scholarship around them to guarantee a labyrinth). She scratches the surface of Elvis yes, briefly comparing him to Byron, but fails to remark on the long-standing feud between the scholar poets and the gleemen poets (or minstrels as they say). I’m not sure if the gleemen side would entirely support her thesis but she seems determined to add “the King” into her mix. Elvis though obviously a sexual icon is only barely androgynous. He owned a .45 with a turquoise handle initialed ‘E’ on one side and ‘P’ on the other. Fairly masculine I’d call that. Then again William S. Burroughs was fond of shotguns too. I think the Beat poets as I mentioned Kerouac above might also throw a few solid punches at Paglia’s thesis. I base this on watching the documentary about Kerouac where Gregory Corso said it best: “Spirit is a hard, tough baby.” Is Kerouac too a deformed priest of the mother goddess, or was he beaten down by Madison Avenue usurping and twisting his message? I suppose he did have some issues with his mother, who was also a drunk. I wonder where does Johnny Cash fit into her scheme? He walks the line yes, but that ring of fire is suspect. Or Bob Dylan? The resolution of the thousand year feud between the scholar poets and the gleemen finds this Nobel Prize winner calling for a truce! He just wants to be friends with mother nature one could say, and doesn’t want to get pulled down in a hole by those who are deformed by “society’s pliers”. (Paglia does finally get around to mentioning Bob Dylan, though she indicates he isn’t upset enough with Christianity for her tastes or Emily Dickinson’s haha.) Even the likes of Tom Petty might have a line or two about this ‘American girl’, but perhaps nothing that would satisfy Paglia, who nonetheless claims “[w]e still live in the age of Romanticism.” (p. 358) To my line of thought it is another example of a certain type of scholarly hyperbole when she calls Edie Sedgwick an “androgyne” who most men would say remains precisely female regardless of her haircut.
Ridiculous also when Paglia agrees with Bloom that Robert Graves is wrong about Keats and “his White Goddess”. (p. 385) Paglia has a real problem it seems with Graves whom she calls homophobic (p. 672), a decadent slur if ever there was one. As in her analysis related to Christianity, I detect some defensiveness on her part. Graves’s analysis more than any other agrees with her position on Wilde who in “trying to remove the chthonianism from nature, trivializes her, an error for which he will . . . suffer.” (p. 565) I’ve heard some folklore that editors who turned down Graves’s book The White Goddess suffered too. From Paglia’s perspective, Graves perhaps trivializes homosexuality or androgyny in relation to his ‘White Goddess’. The charge may be accurate but is Graves actually more correct in his reading of the relationship between poet and muse? My own reading of Graves suggests his analysis is more deeply connected to the poetic. Graves would never say the White Goddess demands castration of true poets, admitting though that seeking this prize may lead to madness or death. Graves also offers escape from Paglia’s ‘cult of self’ when he suggests that self-knowledge can be properly left in the care of a wife or mistress. I should note that Graves addresses Paglia’s concerns even more directly when he says that the real sin of Socrates was not homosexuality, but only the idea he could know himself “in the Apollonian style”. (see The White Goddess, p. 12)
Perhaps the problem here is that Paglia is merely a critic, and no poet so far as I know. She relies on the “principle that the western objet d’art is an Apollonian protest against the chthonian.” (p. 388) Yet the range of human emotion and personality, one might argue at least, transcends the sexual. She screams that the “eye” of decadent late phase art “becomes its own prison.” (p. 419) (Yet I searched for any reference to Georges Bataille but nothing in the index haha). She does get around to mentioning surrealism, but in the context of Dickinson’s ‘surreal’ poetry. I would maintain (and I think Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory supports me in this) that the eye is only perception and not all encompassing of society (communication) or personality (consciousness). Paglia finds the opposite to be true, namely that if “psychic . . . therefore sexual”. (p. 436) I would argue that this central assumption of her analysis rings false. For Paglia “sexuality, even at its most perverse, is implicitly religious.” Certainly this concept is blasphemous even for academia, which allows for study (observation) of sexuality as a purely biological function. One might as well say that physics is implicitly religious, certainly a collapse of differentiation. In accepting only a material interpretation of reality then, religion is only a connection to nature, a pagan concept for Paglia, and essentially premodern. “Sex is the ritual link between man and nature” is her claim, (p. 436) but is it the only such connection? In removing any possibility of ‘super nature’, Paglia essentially removes the connection between man and God, something which can exist both inside and outside of nature. Perhaps then her idea of decadence as “abandonment of . . . duty” (p. 437) at least is consistent with something (“duty”) which can be described as transcendent. Paglia rejects duty in favor of androgyny, but her idea about androgyny is a false idol.
After reading this book, I’ve never been so sick of the word “androgyne” in all my life. Perhaps it is because my father is a narcissist. The “androgyne” (like the narcissist) is the perfect monster, a “[s]elf-complete” being that needs “no one and nothing.” (p. 441) When I was a teenager for a few weeks one summer I became half-convinced my father was planning to murder us (the whole family) with a shotgun. I say ‘half-convinced’ in that I almost believed it, and even took some actions to disrupt his possible plans, like hiding his shotgun shells for a week or so, before I suddenly put them back, nervously thinking I would be discovered, and telling myself I was being foolish, that my father wasn’t really planning on murdering us all, that it was only a strange notion in my head. I now see this anxiety as my conscious mind struggling with what my intuition (my ‘unconscious’) already knew, that the family was merely an accessory to my father’s monstrous ego. He could discard us at any time, as it suited him. So long as we served his purpose of perhaps securing his own position in society as ‘the breadwinner’ and ‘family man’, he would keep us around, but if we ever got in the way of his desires, he could cut us out of his life as easily as he cut out cancerous lungs from his patients. Years later, sitting out on a deck at Chimney Rock, my mother tells me that it has emerged through their marriage counseling sessions that my father is a narcissist. This all came out into the open due to a ‘blackmail attempt’ caused by my father’s ending of a long 20-year affair (that she knows of only because he had been forced to confess after the attempted blackmail). I would later connect all these dots to my anxiety that one summer from my youth.
This is one thread that goes through my mind reading Paglia, a little personal experience of decadence that contributed to my own fairly unsuccessful sojourn in the art subsystem during the 90s. By the time she gets to Swinburne, the journey through the narcissistic prison of the genital chakra has worn me out. “Decadence is about dead ends.” (p. 494) Is Paglia’s criticism itself decadent, a dead end? Oscar Wilde is close to the coup de grace. His “one liners . . . [owe] something to ‘the Irish—perhaps originally the theological—habit of paradox.’” (quoting Brigid Brophy, p. 545) In the old world I recall, the only one who could criticize the king was the court jester. Comedy in English, Paglia explains, depends on the conflict between order and disorder, aka “the context of British formality.” (p. 550) This connection between slapstick and zombie films is brought more fully into the light—perhaps the reason for the pie fight sequence in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). The zombie, like the ‘androgyne’ or narcissist, is self-sufficient (aside from a hint of cannibalism). Comedy and tragedy united in horror, together at last, “darting into the linguistic infinite on a jet of the English epicene.” (p. 550) Finally I feel quite dumb, a middle manager, not at all qualified to hang out with these sophisticates in their “matrix of perverse fantasy”. (p. 371)
She wants to somehow be able to cast certain decadents, or libertines, as defenders of civilization, as “Apollonian”. So to believe this line of thought, one must accept that “[f]or the idealizing Wilde, the chthonian is literally an alien realm”, and he desires somehow “to keep his native tongue in a state of Apollonian purity.” (p. 562) Isn’t the word always Apollonian at its root? Again as I’ve already pointed out, Paglia suggests it can also be Dionysian in the case of Wilde and Whitman. (pp. 562, 604) However by the terms of Paglia’s own argument, decadence can never be entirely Apollonian but always essentially Dionysian, as it creates chaos in the social order through abandonment of duty, a line that could be said to define modern society at the most basic level within every subsystem. For example in the law of tort we find its standard of care which all people in society owe to one another. In religion they call this ‘the golden rule’. Does the academic subsystem have its own version of this? Certainly tenure and other social structures such as rules against plagiarism could be seen as rigidly hierarchic and imposing of duty. Art in modern society of course faces a precarious position with its coding of ‘art/non-art’—those like Wilde who would like to live through their art, risk violating the only moral rule that does apply to the art system, namely that anything outside (‘non-art’), anything which steps beyond the ‘conceptual cage of theatricality’ reserved for the Apollonian/Dionysian battle in our society, no longer receives the same special dispensation generally granted to the genius to act outside the rules so to speak, as the village idiot, jester, fool, madman, or visionary he or she may claim to be. Artists like to play with this edge I agree.
As for Paglia’s claims, despite the brilliance of this book, I’d say she is hyperbolic and sometimes clearly false. “Mythologically”, she claims, “there never has been a purely masculine vegetation deity.” (p. 588) Osiris? Yes in the myth cycle he is castrated and then reborn, but clearly masculine and so she’s off base about this claim. I wonder though if any man is ‘purely masculine’ enough for Paglia? Any man that shows tenderness is ‘homoerotic’ it seems, there is no such thing as a comrade in arms or a friendship, and any verse or man who is too masculine is repressing something—there is no escape from her labyrinth, her analysis has no doors or windows for the light to enter this oubliette, no opening in her vision for transcendence through the “umbilical noose” as Kurt Cobain called it. Trauma it would seem is a part of life, for both men and women, but does all art have to be erotic? Paglia's analysis is suddenly reminding me of that film by David Cronenberg, They Came From Within. Everything becomes sexual for Paglia. Anything “light and frothy” is actually “perverse psychodrama”. (p. 642) When the poet says “I had rather be loved than to be called a king in earth” this cannot be the simple cry of loneliness expressed by an emotional and physical shut-in, but must be “the option of a future sex change.” (pp. 640-41) Paglia accuses Melville of being “[w]hipsawed between paradoxes” but she ignores her own. (p. 589) I would say the biggest gap in her analysis is the New World, i.e. America, clearly a break in the ice of the ordinary decadent amusements of Europe, but she skates around these incongruities. For Paglia, Mark Twain is “completely out of sync with the internal development of major American literature.” (p. 623) She hates anything sincere or kind it seems, and imagines that writers and poets must follow her own theoretical time line and frame.
So I ask her, are poets not allowed to grow up? Is everything truly perverse or is that only her hope? Is there nothing outside this obsession with self? Has Paglia cherry-picked art that only supports her case? Perhaps all critics must do this to a degree but her choices sometimes break under close scrutiny. For example, she invokes traditional folklore in her analysis of Emily Dickinson when she argues “[t]he shoe is a male gift, not a prince’s glass slipper but a paternal tyrant’s iron boot.” (p. 645) Alan Dundes the folklore critic (another admirer of Freud) too describes the glass slipper or a shoe as metaphor for sex. Still I find Paglia’s analysis overwrought and avant garde, i.e. divorced from popular (‘folk’) meaning. Folklore and film critics make the same mistake when they call John Carpenter's Halloween ‘conservative’ in the political sense, ignoring the popular (and modern) thrill in watching social authority fail to stop the threat. For Emily Dickinson, a day at the beach, and the sea is a ‘he’? “His Silver Heel” fills up her shoe. (p. 645) Where is ‘mother nature’ in these words? How does this not express some degree of heterosexual desire? It has me thinking, could the ‘he’ be akin to Poseidon? Paglia does not comment on this pagan association but to me the line suggests another ‘nature divinity’ that is masculine and throws a wrench in her efforts to lay it all at the feet of mother nature. The unmarked space in this book is vast as the sea - so sweeping in its ambition, yet so narrow in its focus. I am reminded of Shakespeare: ‘the lady doth protest too much’. To return here to where we began, Paglia accuses James Joyce of writing a maze of words, lumping him together with Henry James as “a eunuch-priest of the mother goddess”. (p. 49) My thought here though (to borrow a phrase from childhood) is ‘takes one to know one’, i.e. that Paglia has also created a brilliant but “tangled reality of a labyrinthine construction . . . to entangle intruders”, (p. 49) a mess of a book as part of her own pagan worship of art amidst this “frigid, godless universe”. (p. 656) It drags at the end and feels masochistic to even finish it. I dare say I’ve had enough psychic vampirism in my own real life to want to read anymore about Emily Dickinson and this cult of necrophilia. How Paglia can find this to be invocation of the muse seems to privilege death over life, when love cannot exist without both sides of this distinction. Ultimately this tome reminds me more than anything of how C. S. Lewis described Narnia under the white witch, to paraphrase, ‘like winter without Christmas’. Finally though, what this odious quagmire of a book suggests more than truth is this unmarked space, that our merely human efforts to describe nature and even ourselves are forever incomplete.
