Camp (Wilde, Sontag, Bersani, Sedgwick)

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.
     —Oscar Wilde

One must have a heart of stone to read The Ballad of Reading Gaol without laughing.
     —Gore Vidal

What [Camp] does is find success in certain passionate failures. ... The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful...
     —Susan Sontag

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "camp" as "ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; pertaining to or characteristic of homosexuals," and simply lists the word's etymology as "obscure." The first use cited is from 1909, and remarks that the word describes "actions and gestures of exaggerated emphasis" and is "used chiefly by persons of exceptional want of character." 

Parmigianino, Madonna with
the Long Neck (c. 1535). Sontag
and others cite mannerist paintings
like this one, which exaggerate,
both physically and emotionally,
features of High Renaissance art,
as examples of camp sensibility
avant la lettre.

The O.E.D.'s pile of adjectives suggests something of the difficulty of defining the term, which more properly names an aesthetic relation (between audience and object) than a characteristic of the object in itself: what I take to be camp might be serious for you, and vice versa. And that's because we might judge differently what counts as "exaggerated" or "affected"--the first set of adjectives in the O.E.D. definition all name judgments, subjective but not arbitrary, about what counts as a natural or proportional response.

The claim in that first, 1909 use indicates a further problem: to use the word is to classify not only an object, but yourself. And as camp evolved into an aesthetic category, it named objects recognizable as examples of camp primarily to a (usually gay male) subculture. In "Notes on Camp" (1964; collected in Against Interpretation), Susan Sontag describes it as "esoteric...something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques. ... To talk about camp is therefore to betray it." Sontag's essay, interspersed with quotations from Wilde, goes on to list a number of characteristics consonant with the O.E.D. definition: camp art values artifice and exaggeration (including attenuation); it tends to androgyny; it is "often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content"; it is citational, "sees everything in quotation marks." But she also goes a bit further: camp taste is "anti-serious," and if it's ironic, it's also "a kind of love... Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying... Camp is a tender feeling." Camp seems to lead to oxymorons: affectionate irony, loving detachment, vulnerable flaunting (or flaunted vulnerability), successful failure, glamorous abjection (hte latter phrase is Halperin's). Camp is so bad it's good. But good for whom?

Sontag also calls camp "apolitical," and I suppose that's not altogether wrong. But her remark that "to talk about camp is...to betray it" also sounds eerily like the first rule of Fight Club, and in the way it makes contestable claims about what's exaggerated, camp is often polemical if not political (see the "Storm is Brewing" video below). We've seen Bersani and Butler disagree about the extent to which the drag performances of Paris is Burning count as political, and indeed that seems like a typical argument to have about camp aesthetics. Yet if their argument seems a bit stalled, it's perhaps because they're both thinking about what counts as political in terms of camp's effects on mainstream (non-camp) culture. Is drag subversive?  If that's a question about what consequences the Harlem balls had on, say, homophobia during the '80s, then the answer is perhaps no. But then that's not really who the performances were for. 

Camp is good for those who love it, whatever else it is. Sontag writes that "camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain personal objects and styles," and Sedgwick, in her lovely paragraph on reparation, refines on this claim: 

The desire of a reparative impulse, on the other hand, is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self. To view camp as...the communal, historically dense exploration of a variety of reparative practices is to do better justice to many of the defining elements of classic camp performance. ("Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading," 149-50). 

Sontag (at least in that last quote) and Sedgwick see camp, and culture more broadly, from the point of view of those who practice it, whether as performers or spectators; for the practitioner of culture, on this view, culture is first of all a form of sustenance, of nourishment. (In Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic theory, the first object to provoke a reparative impulse is the mother's breast). If the available culture isn't sustaining for you, if it's hard to find (or lose) yourself seriously, through the "normal" identifications, in Titanic or Leave it to Beaver, you might have to do a bit of cultural work (as creator or spectator) to make it so.

Joseph Cornell, Box with bird's
nest and oak galls

That last sentence might explain any creative, imaginative work; perhaps what distinguishes camp from other forms of creativity is its avowedly heterogeneous artifice and its simultaneous refusal to behave as if its object is insufficient. There can be something uncanny in this, rather as it may seem strange (if you're not a bird) that a bird isn't all that bothered by the still visible bits of different materials that make up its nest. Camp is a mess, and it's home. What a dump!

David Halperin, for whom camp is a major topic throughout How to Be Gay, describes camp's way of finding nourishment in a particularly powerful way: "camp works to drain suffering of the pain that it also does not deny" (187, Halperin's italics). The example he has most proximately in mind is a group of gay men who, in the midst of the AIDS crisis, paraded as Italian widows dressed in traditional mourning; this was a way, Halperin argues, to both claim and quote (in that they're not trying to pass as widows) a public acknowledgment of grief. 

His idea also lets us understand the quotations from Wilde and Vidal that I've taken as epigraphs: Wilde here is referring to the highly sentimentalized death of a child in a Dickens novel, but what's curious (and usually overlooked) about his remark is that he takes laughter as a sign not of detachment or indifference, but of sensitivity--of not having a hard heart. It's hard to say whether that laughter is devoid of or hysterically oversaturated with sympathy, not so much a mockery of tears as a defense against them. That Wilde, after his trial, abandoned his irony in favor of the passionate sincerity--for Vidal, the Dickensian sentimentality--of his late poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," tends to suggest the latter. 

As in most discussions of aesthetics, examples are probably worth more here than definitions. So here are a few. Sontag divides camp into two kinds: the "naive" or "pure" form, in which an object intended in earnest is taken otherwise, and deliberate camp (she finds the latter less satisfying): "Camp is either wholly naive or wholly conscious." The starkness of that either/or, though, seems to belie the both/and experience of camp (e.g., camp as both ironic and affectionate) that comes out elsewhere in Sontag's essay. With any given example and any given beholder, the question is really about what the beholder is conscious of, what the camp work of art is conscious (or unconscious) of. Of the examples below, it seems to me hard to classify neatly as wholly naive or wholly conscious either the scene from Mildred Pierce or the video by Psy--each calls forth a more mixed experience of identification and estrangement than those categories admit. Nonetheless, 'naive' and 'conscious' are schematically useful:

A lot of the films that have become camp objects for gay men are of the naive kind, popular with 'straight' audiences in their time but taken up in a different spirit by gay audiences. A central example for Halperin of the "glamorous abjection" of camp is the performance of Joan Crawford (the mother in the following clip) in Mildred Pierce (1945)--Halperin first became aware of this scene when he found himself puzzled at a boyfriend who enjoyed rehearsing Crawford's lines:

A more recent example of wholly unintended camp (and of paranoia, too) might be the following advertisement from 2009:

And of course if it's camp day, it's...

A friend of mine who knows the subject better than I do calls the following video "the Citizen Kane of camp"--wait for the ninjas before you judge:

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a classic example of deliberate camp:

And I'm tempted to say that "Gangnam Style," with its at once affectionate and citational relation to hip-hop and other popular cultures, is a pretty good recent example of campy appeal--the American obsession with the video seems like a way of winking back at Psy's wink at an American genre. It's cultural (rather than gender) drag in both directions, perhaps--Psy does hip-hop in drag, and Americans have been doing Psy in drag:

                                             


Literarily, perhaps the surest example of camp that I can point to is the beginning of the novel that gave rise to the gothic as a genre, Horace Walpole's relentlessly oedipal Castle of Otranto (1767):

Young Conrad's birthday was fixed for his espousals. The company was assembled in the chapel of the castle, and everything ready for beginning the divine office, when Conrad himself was missing. Manfred, impatient of the least delay, and who had not observed his son retire, dispatched one of his attendants to summon the young prince. The servant, who had not staid long enough to have crossed the court to Conrad's apartment, came running back breathless, in a frantic manner, his eyes staring, and foaming at the mouth. He said nothing, but pointed to the court. The company were struck with terror and amazement. ... at last, after repeated questions put to him, [the servant] cried out, Oh, the helmet! the helmet! ... What are ye doing? Where is my son? cried Manfred. A volley of voices replied, Oh, my lord! the prince! the prince! the helmet! the helmet! Shocked with these lamentable sounds, and dreading he knew not what, he advanced hastily. -- But what a sight for a father's eyes! -- He beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, a hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers.

Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is an example of more "conscious" camp--it would take more time than I have to figure out my own sense of how precisely that label fits it. (Sedgwick's reading of the novel in Epistemology of the Closet is a good place to see someone else think this through). In the hero's infatuation with Sibyl Vane, a beautiful actress at a very second-rate theater, there's a clear precedent for the 20th-century gay male affection for actresses in melodramas. And we see something of the camp taste for the decorative, the "additive and accretive," in the long chapter detailing Dorian's capricious infatuations with marginal and esoteric objects after Sibyl's death:

On one occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appeared at a costume ball as Anne de Joyeuse, Admiral of France, in a dress covered with five hundred and sixty pearls. This taste enthralled him for years, and, indeed, may be said never to have left him. He would often spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the various stones that he had collected, such as the olive-green chrys-oberyl that turns red by lamplight, the cymophane with its wire-like line of silver, the pistachio-coloured peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes, carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous four-rayed stars, flame-red cinnamon-stones, orange and violet spinels, and amethysts with their alternate layers of ruby and sapphire. (ch. 11; Norton, 2nd ed., 113)

It's hard, here, to find much distance between Dorian's erudition and Wilde's (though it may be significant that while Dorian is attached to gems, Wilde is attached to the words for them). 

Repairing Camp (Sedgwick and Bersani)
I think it might sound troubling, if you like Wilde, to suggest that his novel is 'camp,' and for good reason--one way the word can be used is pejoratively; I intend it to have that force with regard to the 'Storm is Gathering' ad above. It's telling, perhaps, that Bersani uses the word chiefly in a pejorative sense, not to name his own intense affection for something but to criticize someone else's excessive disproportionate investment in parody:

Heavy stuff for some silly and familiar campiness. ("The Gay Absence," 48, referring to an example of Butler's)

In short, Queer Nation complicates and enriches the social with its campy replications of given forms of the social. It does not put into question sociality itself. (75)

Bersani argues against both camp and seriousness--and this is odd given that Sontag thinks of camp as intrinsically unserious. Bersani won't take camp seriously, for the good reason that to do so would make it no longer camp--yet camp's unseriousness also, on his reading, seems to disqualify it as critically efficacious, and so Bersani turns to the apparently more radical, less naive imaginings of Gide and Genet. To require that critique "put into question sociality itself" is to set the bar admirably high for meaningful critique, and I admire Bersani's daring here. Yet I wonder if he leaps past other possibilities in his wariness not so much of campy parody, but rather of campy sentimentality.

In his discussion of the men in Paris is Burning and of Butler's account of them, Bersani writes that Butler "rather touchingly sees in the kinship in the various 'houses' ... a lesson for all of us who live outside the heterosexual family" (51). He concludes:

...the houses sustain their members 'in the face of dislocation, poverty, homelessness.' But the structures that sustain those ills are in no way threatened or subverted; here resignification is little more than a consolatory community of victims. (52, my emphasis)

It seems right here not to be consoled, if being consoled would entail obliviousness to the conditions that marginalize gay men and transsexuals. Yet it's not clear that avoiding such false consciousness requires us to believe that these men are suffering from false consciousness themselves, that they're merely victims drugged by the opiate of familial affection. The 'houses' may look camp, and camp is a mess--but it can still be a home.

At least it can on Sedgwick's reading of camp as reparative. Note the odd parallel in Bersani's passage between two quite different kinds of sustenance, of nourishment: the houses "sustain" the men, but this is of little value on his reading because the social conditions that put them there are also sustained. For Bersani, there seems to be a zero-sum game in effect here: any sustenance for a person that doesn't prevent the sustenance of poverty is just false sustenance, consolation, drug, fake food. It's impossible to see the houses as whole "objects" in themselves, in Sedgwick and Klein's sense; for Bersani, they have meaning only in relation to "sociality itself."

For Sedgwick, though, camp and other reparative practices are valuable insofar as they teach us "the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture--even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them" (150-151, my emphasis). Camp can be a "weak" practice without losing its value; this kind of vulnerability might be congenial at least to some moments in Bersani's own thinking about the value of powerlessness.

Perhaps the radical potential in Sedgwick's argument is to allow us to risk a kind of sentimentality in readings like this without either blindness or guilt--to find Butler's discussion of the houses "rather touching" without having to assume that it must therefore be naive or deluded. Sedgwick argues that the real problem here isn't that reparative practices are sappy and sentimental, but that we lack theoretical vocabularies to describe them in other terms (150). Passionate attachment, whether to persons or things, perhaps always has to take the risk of appearing excessive, of being unrequited by its object and unsanctioned by its community.