Thinking About Camp and Susan Sontag

In the last twenty-four hours I have had reason to think about Susan Sontag's essay "Notes On 'Camp'" and what the ideas in that essay might mean for me. Two factors started me thinking about this essay:

1. Last night, my son Michal started asking me something about homosexuality and this led to a discussion of how people who are not interested in being straight, that is, not interested in connecting sex to marriage and children, might view the world differently. And this different way of viewing the world has consequences for aesthetics.
2. My friend Rand Bellavia was having an online conversation with me today and we briefly discussed James Thurber. I suggested that James Thurber, because he wrote short pieces, has not been ranked higher in the canon of twentieth-century American literature than he should be ranked. The gatekeepers, in my opinion, rank novelists higher than those who create other forms of literature. (I would note that Sontag, like James Thurber, also was an excellent writer worth reading for her ideas who is slipping into obscurity because, while she did write some novels, her best work, at least in my opinion, was in her essays and non-fiction books.) Rand asked if the reason for Thurber not receiving the proper amount of attention from contemporary critics and readers might be because a good amount of his published work was cartoons.

Last year, I read Benjamin Moser's epic biography of Sontag -- 800 plus pages, a book that is much easier to carry in electronic form -- and came away deeply impressed. She never really made much money, and, while she did teach for a few years, she had quit teaching by her early thirties in favor of full-time writing. In other words, Sontag was a devoted writer and intellectual who, throughout her adult life, never had much money of her own. Her passion was the written word -- both reading it and producing it.

So that gives some context as to why I was thinking about Susan Sontag today. I was specifically thinking about how Sontag was one of the first American writers to theorize the relationship between high and low culture. One of the places she did this was in her essay on "Camp."

So, I re-read "Notes on 'Camp'" when I was at the public library today. I noted the following passages as I was reading:

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.

7. All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice. Nothing in nature can be campy. . . .

10. Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman." To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

23. In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.

25. The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.

26. Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is "too much."

34. Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different - a supplementary - set of standards.

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.

51. The peculiar relation between Camp taste and homosexuality has to be explained. While it's not true that Camp taste is homosexual taste, there is no doubt a peculiar affinity and overlap…. not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard - and the most articulate audience - of Camp.

54. The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste.

56. Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character." . . . Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as "a camp," they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.

58. The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful. . . . Of course, one can't always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I've tried to sketch in these notes.