The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness

14 O, Paglia Mia!

chapter fourteen O, Paglia Mia! Not so much elegiac as apostrophic—but a little elegiac too: Oh, Camille Paglia, how long can you keep this up? Even manic Italians are mortal, Dionysian as they may happen to be. Even wellsprings of energy must run dry. Even radical intelligences, when all is said and done, remain (to use a Paglism) “chthonic,” sprung from earth’s double-crossing clay. But there are actually a number of Camille Paglias, one of whom sounds like this: But this blaming anorexia on the media—this is Naomi’s [Wolf] thing—oh please! Anorexia is coming out of these white families, these pushy, perfectionist white families, who all end up with their daughters at Yale. Naomi arrives in England, and “Gee, all the women Rhodes scholars have eating disorders. Gee, it must be . . . the media!” Maybe it’s that you are a parent-pleasing, teacher-pleasing little kissass ! Maybe you’re a yuppie! Maybe you, Miss Yuppie, have figured out the system. Isn’t it interesting that Miss Naomi, the one who has succeeded in the system, the one who has been given the prizes by the system, she who is the princess of the system, she’s the one who’s bitchin’ about it? I’m the one who’s been poor and rejected—shouldn’t I be the one bitching about it? No—because I’m a scholar, okay, and she’s a twit!1 Another one sounds like this: Everything great in western culture has come from the quarrel with nature. The west and not the east has seen the frightful brutality of natural process, the insult to mind in the heavy blind rolling and milling of matter. In loss of self we would find not love of God but primeval squalor. This revelation has historically fallen upon the western male, who is pulled by tidal rhythms back to the oceanic mother. 146 It is to his resentment of this daemonic undertow that we owe the grand constructions of our culture. Apollonianism, cold and absolute, is the west’s sublime refusal. The Apollonian is a male line drawn against the dehumanizing magnitude of female nature.2 And yet another, like this: The cutesy treatment of clerical dress as drag, with Tallulah Bankhead cited as an authority, sets a new low for cheap vulgarity and exposes the spiritual emptiness of academe. Even a passing familiarity with anthropology or comparative religion would have helped here. But [Marjorie] Garber’s interdisciplinary skills are amateurish: one of her principal sources is Vern Bullough, a contemporary archivist and unreliable popularizer. She treats history like cake batter in a swirling Mixmaster. Romanticism, the birth of modern sexual identity, is never mentioned, even apropos of Byron.3 The first specimen represents pop-star Paglia, the testosterone-driven rocker manquée; the second exemplifies Dr. Paglia, the archetypal/psychoanalytic polymath social philosopher; and the third introduces Professor Paglia, the imperious no-nonsense scholar, scourge of shoddy scholarship and screwball scholars. Pop-star Paglia does not always come off well. There’s too much weighty stuff in her head for a pop icon to convey without seeming loopier than pop icons usually do. During a five-minute interview on TV, one can see behind her eyes those tumultuous oceans of thought surging for an expression even she can’t negotiate in the allotted sound bites. So she seems frustrated, impatient, an explosion of half inarticulate emotion, a barrage of “Excuse me!” “Okay?” “Absolutely absurd !” “Gimme a break!” “Pull-eeze!” And thus the comic-strip effect she produces on innocent viewers: a motormouth (as the Brits call her), a crazy. With Paglia, more is better; she needs lots of expansion time; she has an immensity to say. This need for Sprechensraum was marvelously well demonstrated on November 15, 1994, in a performance Paglia gave in mobbed Mandel Hall at the University of Chicago shortly after the publication of her book Vamps and Tramps.4 In anticipation of the booing and riotous behavior that sometimes take place at her appearances, placards were handed out to willing members of the audience as they arrived in the vestibule, inO , Paglia Mia! 147 scribed with “respect camille” and similar injunctions to silence that could be held aloft if the going got rough. Paglia appeared onstage wearing an outfit that evoked Dracula in drag, starting off extremely mannered, very uptight, all her characteristic facial...