Re: Parody of Shakespeare; Susan Sontag on "Camp"
bookburn
"bookburn" <book...@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:...
| The following long essay by Douglas Lanier is about Shakespeare
parody
| and burlesques by others, not his use of parody.
(snip)
(quote)
| But in any
| case, Shakespearean parody is often a particularly revealing
barometer
| of how a culture is (re)fashioning and (re)negotiating the specific
| terms of Shakespeare's ever-evolving reputation. And for that
reason,
| paradoxically, it deserves to be taken seriously.
(unquote)
Comparible to parody as a version of Shakespeare might be "camp,"
which Susan Sontag wrote about back in the '60s, mentioning
Shakespeare in this context.
Here is a quote from her notes on her essay, which I find comparible
to Lanier's analysis; both of them into cultural constructionism or
re-constructionism [Lanier says "(re)fashioning and (re)negotiating];
although Lanier's focus is 19th Century, and hers is 18th. See her
question about Shakespeare in no. 12.
I Saw Sontag on "Booknotes" yesterday for three hour interview, and
it was awsome, looking better than I've ever seen her, with hair dyed
black; especially knowing she passed away last month. Don't know
what Tomas Wolf says about her idea of "camp." bookburn
From Susan Sontag, Notes on "Camp," 1964; at:
http://pages.zoom.co.uk/leveridge/sontag.html
(quote)
. . . .
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.
11. Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of
"man" and "woman," "person" and "thing.") But all style, that is,
artifice, is, ultimately, epicene. Life is not stylish. Neither is
nature.
12. The question isn't, "Why travesty, impersonation, theatricality?"
The question is, rather, "When does travesty, impersonation,
theatricality acquire the special flavor of Camp?" Why is the
atmosphere of Shakespeare's comedies (As You Like It, etc.) not
epicene, while that of Der Rosenkavalier is?
13. The dividing line seems to fall in the 18th century; there the
origins of Camp taste are to be found (Gothic novels, Chinoiserie,
caricature, artificial ruins, and so forth.) But the relation to
nature was quite different then. In the 18th century, people of taste
either patronized nature (Strawberry Hill) or attempted to remake it
into something artificial (Versailles). They also indefatigably
patronized the past. Today's Camp taste effaces nature, or else
contradicts it outright. And the relation of Camp taste to the past is
extremely sentimental.
14. A pocket history of Camp might, of course, begin farther back --
with the mannerist artists like Pontormo, Rosso, and Caravaggio, or
the extraordinarily theatrical painting of Georges de La Tour, or
Euphuism (Lyly, etc.) in literature. Still, the soundest starting
point seems to be the late 17th and early 18th century, because of
that period's extraordinary feeling for artifice, for surface, for
symmetry; its taste for the picturesque and the thrilling, its elegant
conventions for representing instant feeling and the total presence of
character -- the epigram and the rhymed couplet (in words), the
flourish (in gesture and in music). The late 17th and early 18th
century is the great period of Camp: Pope, Congreve, Walpole, etc, but
not Swift; les précieux in France; the rococo churches of Munich;
Pergolesi. Somewhat later: much of Mozart. But in the 19th century,
what had been distributed throughout all of high culture now becomes a
special taste; it takes on overtones of the acute, the esoteric, the
perverse. Confining the story to England alone, we see Camp continuing
wanly through 19th century aestheticism (Bume-Jones, Pater, Ruskin,
Tennyson), emerging full-blown with the Art Nouveau movement in the
visual and decorative arts, and finding its conscious ideologists in
such "wits" as Wilde and Firbank.
15. Of course, to say all these things are Camp is not to argue they
are simply that. A full analysis of Art Nouveau, for instance, would
scarcely equate it with Camp. But such an analysis cannot ignore what
in Art Nouveau allows it to be experienced as Camp. Art Nouveau is
full of "content," even of a political-moral sort; it was a
revolutionary movement in the arts, spurred on by a Utopian vision
(somewhere between William Morris and the Bauhaus group) of an organic
politics and taste. Yet there is also a feature of the Art Nouveau
objects which suggests a disengaged, unserious, "aesthete's" vision.
This tells us something important about Art Nouveau -- and about what
the lens of Camp, which blocks out content, is.
. . . .
(unquote)