Which giant Philistine did David defeat with a sling and a stone?

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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: March 5, 2008 at 6:00 pm by Eve Tushnet

2008-03-05T18:00:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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“THUS WE KNOW THE SQUID’S SECRET GENDER.”: Sexual Personae. I’m developing a theory that you can tell more about a work of literary criticism by what doesn’t appear in its index than by what does. One tendril of this theory posits that any lit-crit work is fundamentally unsound if it devotes more than two sentences to de Sade and not a one to Pauline Reage (our true nouvelle Heloise). I find both the theory and its subtheory (…so to speak) vindicated by Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, a big, weird, brilliant, silly book that sometimes seemed more lacuna than presence.

This is a big-idea book, revolving around the opposition of mother-nature-chaos and son-reason-linearity-order. (And yes, I know that’s an oversimplification, but I’m trying to give people some sense of what they’re getting into, here….) Each of the sexual personae turns out to be one attempt among many to negotiate or conquer this opposition.

If you want to get the best of this book, I’d suggest starting with the chapters on Spenser and Dickinson and then seeing if you want more. I really love both authors, and was not sure I wanted Paglia getting her lipstick all over them, but her readings in those chapters are terrific–violent, erotic, brash, but always rooted firmly in the awesome texts. I think there may have been one minor problem with the Spenser chapter–it’s been almost a month since I finished the book, so I may be misremembering, but I vaguely recall insufficient attention being paid to The Faerie Queene as a narrative progression rather than a series of episodes or incidents–but in general, these were fantastic, challenging chapters.

Paglia is better at picking her battles than many academics working the same Everything Is Either Phallic Or Vaginal territory. Several times, I found myself saying, “Oh, c’mon, you’re just being trendy with that reading–this bit really isn’t about daemonic lesbians or whatever”… but then she’d quote a few more passages from the same work, and I’d have to say, “Uh… you know, she’s kind of on to something here.” That didn’t always happen–her reading of De Profundis as Wilde’s sentimental return to his mommy is just infuriatingly bad, more on this in a moment–but it happened often enough that I’d say she earned the benefit of the doubt with me.

My real problem with Paglia, I think, is that she and I consider different things interesting and important–worth taking the time to explore on their own terms and as fully as possible. I summarized this to Ratty as, “She’ll go to the mat for the belief that cats have rich inner lives, but she doesn’t seem to think the Crucifixion is worth talking about.”

I’m pretty sure her lack of attention to the Crucifixion is related to her disdain for King Lear (“obvious”–well, yes, Camille, torture is generally obvious, that’s kind of the point of torture) and to the bathos of her utterly annoying misreadings of Wilde. (I will say that her take on The Importance of Being Earnest is fun and mostly right. Her failure, which is large but not devastating, is that she doesn’t take the play as a narrative of conflict and resolution. Paglia points out lots of interesting things about that conflict, but she swerves around the fact that it is resolved, and that it would be a much less satisfying play without that resolution.) Paglia’s unwillingness to consider suffering and powerlessness as points of view is as ideological as any Randroid’s. You can see it in her oh-so-edgy approving use of the term “fascism”–seriously, lady often sounds like a repressed homosexual with a crush on a skinhead, and it’s not a good look for her–and it genuinely warps her criticism.

I feel like I should mention the strenuous overwriting, so… here I am, mentioning it. “The real honeyed crotch in which we all drown is the womb-tomb of mother nature”–that’s a completely random example from the page opposite the squiddess–there’s one of those on every other page, and you just have to resign yourself to it. I’m tempted to say that this stuff got into the book because Paglia was trying to import the techniques of classroom performance into writing, and written lit-crit requires different performance techniques; not sure if I’m giving her too much credit, there.

…Finally, the title of this post is entirely within context. Respect, y’all.

Comments, criticisms, howls of execration? Email me with your chthonic and/or fascist insights….

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