Between the will and the slime

Duncan Fallowell

SEXUAL PERSONAE by Camille Paglia

Yale, £25, pp.718

hat is the overall thesis here? The operation of sexual archetypes in art and literature. But there has been an attempt to hijack the book for a banal purpose, the subtitle reading `Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson'. This is a pointless distraction — perhaps the pub- lisher dreamed it up as a marketing gim- mick. The implication is that sexuality in art is somehow linked to decadence, which is ludicrous — and certainly not borne out by the book Camille Paglia has written which is an enthralling investigation of the battle between the Apollonian and Diony- sian, the sky-cult and earth-cult, the male principle and the female, the will and the slime, in high Western culture. This battle, as she demonstrates, is present in all phases of art, decadent or otherwise, and indeed in all lives, and it is the germinal flashpoint for her series of magnificent extemporisations on art objects and texts. She stays very close to both as an anchor for her intellectual bravura, and reading on, one seems to know less and less about what she's ultimately trying to say but more and more about the matter in hand. If very often you cannot see the wood for the trees, don't worry. The trees are astonishing enough.

She can be very acute: `The liberated woman is the symbol of the English Re- naissance, as the beautiful boy is of the Italian.' Or 'Light seems to penetrate blonde forms, so they seem midway be- tween 'matter and spirit.'

She can be devastating: 'Spiritual en- lightenment produces feminisation of the male.'

She can be breathtaking: `There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.' This made me think that perhaps the macabre fascination exerted by Myra Hindley is the result of her unique rebellion against all female archetypes.

She can be spectacular: `Edith Weigert- Vowinkel endorses the view that the Phry- gians borrowed castration from the Sem- ites, who altered it over time to circumci- sion, and that the celibacy of Catholic priests is a substitute for castration.' Or wildly spectacular: `Henry James's Deca- dent late style is the heavy ritual transvest- ism of a eunuch-priest of the mother goddess.'

She can be disturbing: `Heterosexuality for men will always carry the danger of loss of identity . . . Goethe was heroically self-contained and self-sufficient. Like Beethoven, he married himself.' In fact she's usually disturbing: `Individualism, the self unconstrained by society, leads to the coarser servitude of constraint by nature. Every road from Rousseau leads to Sade.' The Marquis de Sade is one of her heroes but because this is not a book of moral considerations (the Great Earth Mother devours and brings forth without qualm) she is not interrupted by the connection between de Sade and Nazism which Pasolini saw so clearly.

She can be wry: `. . sycophancy is political sodomy.' And amusing: `In Late Romanticism, the death-bed is the only bed.' And cute: `Charisma is electro- magnetism, a scintillating fusion of mascu- line and feminine.' That works for, say, Garbo, but not for Monroe. Incidentally, her references to a popular culture are usually fun and sometimes clever, although a couple of appearances by Bob Dylan are decidedly irritating. I wonder why.

She can be childish: `Female jiggle is the ducklike waddle of our wallowing Willen- dorf . . .' Eat your heart out, James Joyce? I think not.

She can be wrong: `The Venus of Willen- dorf . . . is unbeautiful because art has not yet found its relation to the eye.' This is the proto-anorexic American speedfreak career woman speaking. She can be very wrong: `Early man saw no necessary con- nection between coitus and conception . . .' But, well, is that wrong? Even at her most implausible, she sets one thinking.

Camille Paglia writes in an explosive, powerful style which throws vertiginous bridges across the chasms between unlikely concepts, and sweeps you over them in helpless excitement. Outlandish, yes — but for pages at a time I agree with everything she says. Do I really agree? Well, in the moment of reading I am drawn in and convinced — in other words, there is here what there so rarely is in books of criticism, a truly passionate individual voice which 'With me it's sex first, then dinner.' awes one to attention because it is also terribly well-informed.

Her main weakness in prosody is rhetor- ical repetition. Her favourite word is ththonian'. That's all right; it's one of my favourites too. But she uses it about 600 times. OK, her prose is influenced by Jackson Pollock. And being a woman, she contemplates themes. Her concepts go round and round rather than describe an evolutionary curve. Sometimes she thrashes too much in the circumambient bogs of laterality. She is herself Dionysian, though not at all scornful of the Apollo- nian. There is also something of the puritan too — that red-herring of deca- dence. And being a woman, she has a lot to tell men: `Western woman is in an agonistic relation to her own body: for her, biologic normalcy is suffering, and health an ill- ness.' Is this the anorexic talking again? But she is not at all a feminist: `Men's egotism, so disgusting in the talentless, is the source of their greatness as a sex.'

So how to label her? She says `I follow in the Italian sado-baroque line of Mario Praz.' True. But I'd add a strain of panting paranoia — the Mona Lisa she finds threatening, as Pater did, but not more than threatening. She says there is nothing beautiful in nature. `Beauty was made by men acting together.' This is a dissociated, neurotic view. Even Wilde couldn't hold on to it.

She is riveting on cats, Elvis Presley, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Byron (whom she sees as the prototype of the 20th-century traveller who skims the sur- face of the planet to avoid being swallowed by the earth or sucked into the sky).

Since she identifies creativity as the interplay between Apollonian and Diony- sian impulses, great importance is given to those types which consciously synthesise them — the epicene, the androgyne, the hermaphrodite. She is riveting on these too, occasionally touching peaks of sub- lime folly: `. . . a man putting on women's clothes is searching for God.'

The last three chapters are devoted to an exploration of the leading 19th-century American writers. At this point her major themes somehow acquire a bonnet and shotgun and don't seem so interesting any more. Paglia's attempt to aggrandise Emily Dickinson into the supreme she-monster of poetry, for me, fails; and a tapering-off into the cultural provinces is the book's only disappointment. However, another of my favourite words is 'apophthegm' and

these she keeps coming to the very end. 'It is no coincidence that while some major female artists have married, very few have borne children.'

She sexualises everything and the result is a revelation. Our entire culture emerges

throbbing and moist from beneath its marmoreal carapace of critical high- mindedness. One doesn't review a book like this; one attempts to digest it. An extraordinary, brilliant work.