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SUSAN SONTAG
36. But there are other creative sensibilities besides the serious–
ness (both tragic and c0mic) of high culture and of the high style
of evaluating people. And one cheats oneself, as a human being,
if
one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one
may do or feel on the sly.
For instance, there is the kind of seriousness whose trademark
is anguish, cruelty, derangement. Here we do accept a disparity
between intention and result. I am speaking, obviously, of a style of
personal existence as well as of a style in arti but the examples had
best come from art-Bosch, De Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, Kafka,
Artaud, most of the important works of art of the twentieth century,
that is, art whose goal is not that of creating harmonies but of
overstraining the medium and introducing more and more violent,
and unresolvable, subject matter. This sensibility also insists on the
principle that an
oeuvre
in the old sense (again, in art, but also in
life) is not possible, only fragments. . . . Obviously, different
standards apply here than to traditional high culture. Something is
good not because it is achieved, but because another kind of truth
about the human situation, another experience of what it is to be
human-in short, another valid sensibility-is being revealed.
And third among the great creative sensibilities is Camp, the
sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience.
Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the
risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling.
37. The first sensibility, that of high culture, is basically
moralistic. The second sensibility, that of extreme states of feeling,
represented in much contemporary "avant-garde" art, gains power
by a tension between moral and esthetic passion. The third, Camp,
is wholly esthetic.
38. Camp is the consistently esthetic experience of the world.
It incarnates a victory of style over content, of esthetics over morality,
of irony over tragedy.
39. Camp and tragedy are antitheses. There is seriousness in
Camp (seriousness in the degree of the artist's involvement), and,
very often, pathos. The excruciating is also one of the tonalities of
Campi it is the quality of excruciation in much of Henry James
(for instance,
The Europeans, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the
Dove)
that is responsible for the large element of Camp in his
writings. But there is never, never tragedy.