CORRESPONDENCE
Two Camps
SIRS :
Miss Sontag might have profitably
begun her lengthy tribute to "camp"
by quoting a lexicographer. Thus Eric
Partridge's
Dictionary of Slang
defines
the noun as "effeminate, esp. homo–
sexual mannerisms of speech and ges–
ture," and the adjective as "homo–
sexual, Lesbian." But to the extent that
"camp" is a taste, it depends on three
stratagems.
1.
Inversion.
Making the real seem
unreal, the genuine artificial, and vice
versa.
If
on Scopitone D-Day becomes
a mere background for the crooning
and cavorting of a helmeted female
pop singer, something terribly real be–
comes a travesty.
If
a gross and dilapi–
dated actress, of whom Miss Sontag
speaks respectfully, pretends on stage
that her pseudo-male neuterness is de–
sirable feminity, something unreal is
being peddled as if it were real.
2. Esthetic transvestitism.
The orchid
which is really a lamp, the grotto which
turns out to be a living room, the three
million feathers posturing as an eve–
ning gown.
3. The outrageous.
Cocteau's
scandale
as art. Carrying the ostentatious, exag–
gerated, gratuitous, wasteful to ex–
tremes- as in a Firbank novel, women's
clothes of the twenties, or
Flaming
Creatures
(extolled by Miss Sontag
elsewhere) .
All this "camping" serves the pur–
pose of confusing esthetic as well as
moral issues, by ultimately making the
good undistinguishable from the bad,
the purposive submerged in the sterile,
backwards as good as forwards. Once
the
outre
and the inverted become the
quotidian, the aberrant becomes the
order of the day. Miss Sontag can posit
in all seriousness this "truth of taste" :
" the most refined form of sexual at·
tractiveness (as well as the most reo
fined form of sexual pleasure) consists
in going against the grain of one's sex."
Obviously, "camp" spreads: the hetero–
sexual Smiths will be induced, through
the mediation of the androgynous "fash–
ion world," to keep up with the homo–
sexual Joneses. Indeed, Miss Sontag's
catalogue reads very much like
Harpers
Bazaar's
"Chic is . . ." or
Vogue's
"People are talking about .. ." or any
of numerous similar tabulations of what
is "in" and what is "out."
The basic trouble with the "camp"
sensibility is that it is imposed on the
cult
object from the outside: that it is
founded neither on patient interpreting
of an artist or artifact, nor on pas–
sionate commitment to an idea, but on
endowing, for the reasons given above
of trivial or preposterous objects and
people with a mystique, an importance,
or just acceptability, totally beyond
their due. The result is that artistic
value now resides purely in the
attitude
of the beholder as distinguished from
his judgment, let alone in any intrinsic
merit of the thing itself. Hence Miss
Sontag can juxtapose as seemingly
equivalent Beardsley, Bellini,
Swan
Lake
with Scopitone, the Cuban pop
singer La Lupe (whoever she may be),
and "stag movies seen without lust."
Hence "great stylists" for her include
pellmell the inspired Edwige Feuillere,
the able but declining Bette Davis, the
commonplace Barbara Stanwyck, and
the unmentionable Tallulah Bankhead.
Hence, too,
Drole de Drame
becomes
tantamount to a bit of Mae West
De,
Rosenkavalier
can be brought :mder
the same hat with "the concoctions of
Tin Pan Alley," CrivelIi's paintings
with Sternberg's
The Devil Is
11
Wo–
man,
de Gaulle with De Mille.
This leads to contradictions, or at
least tergiversations : "Art Nouveau
