527 / 676
NOTES ON CAMP
527
40. Style is everything. Genet's ideas, for instance, are very
Camp. Genet's statement that "the only criterion of an act is its
elegance»2 is virtually interchangeable, as a statement,' with Wilde's
"in
matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but
style." But what counts, finally, is the style in which ideas are held.
The ideas about morality and politics in, say,
Lady Windemere's
Fan
and
in
Major Barbara
are Camp, but not just because of the
nature of the ideas themselves. It is those ideas, held
in
a special play–
ful way. The Camp ideas in
Notre Dame des Fleurs
are maintained
too grimly-and the writing itself is too successfully elevated and
serious-for Genet's books to be Camp.
41. The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp
is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more
complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the
frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
42. One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that "sincerity"
is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual
narrowness.
43. The traditional means for going beyond straight serious–
ness--irony, satire-seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally
oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled.
Camp introduces a new standard: the idea of style, theatricality.
44. Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bit–
ter or polemical comedy.
If
tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolve–
ment, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
"I adore simple pleasures, they are
the last refuge of the complex."
-A Woman of No Importance
45. Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy
is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters
of culture, so Camp is the modem dandyism. Camp
is
the answer
to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.
46. The dandy was overbred. His posture was disdain, or else
ennui.
He sought rare sensations, undefiled by mass appreciation.
(Models: Des Esseintes in Huysmans'
La
Bas, Marius the Epicurean,
Valery's
Monsieur Teste.)
He was dedicated to "good taste."
2. Sartre's gloss on this in
Saint Genet
is: "Elegance is the quality of conduct
which transforms the greatest amount of being into appearing."