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Susan Sontag
NOTES ON "CAMP"
Many things in the world have not been named; and
many things, even if they have been named, have never been de–
scribed. One of these is the sensibility-unmistakably modem, a
variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it-that goes by
the cult name of "Camp."
A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest
things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Camp, in
particular, has never been discussed. It isn't a natural mode of sensi–
bility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of Camp is its love
of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric–
something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small
urban cliques. Apart from a lazy two-page sketch in Christopher
Isherwood's novel
The World in the Evening
(1948),
it
has never
broken into print. To talk about Camp is therefore to betray
it.
If
the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it pro–
vides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves. For myself, I plead
the goal of self-edification, and the goad of a sharp conflict in my
own sensibility. I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as
strongly frustrated by it. That is why I want
to
talk about it, why
I can talk about it. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a
given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention,
exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw the contours of it, to re–
count its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.
Though I'm speaking about sensibility only-and about a sensi–
bility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivol–
ous-these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or
taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious