&DPS0RGHUQLVP,QWURGXFWLRQ

0DUVKD%U\DQW'RXJODV0DR

Modernism/modernity, Volume 23, Number 1, January 2016, pp. 1-4 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mod/summary/v023/23.1.bryant.html

Access provided by Shanghai Normal University (22 Feb 2016 23:11 GMT)
Camp Modernism
Introduction

Marsha Bryant and Douglas Mao

What’s perhaps most remarkable about extant scholarship modernism / modernity

touching on camp and modernism is that it so rarely focuses volume twenty three,
explicitly on their intersection. Discussing the postwar fate of the number one,
avant-garde in Five Faces of Modernity a few decades ago, Matei pp 1–4. © 2016
Calinescu disparaged camp for cultivating “bad taste—usually johns hopkins

the bad taste of yesterday—as a form of superior refinement”; in university press

Epistemology of the Closet some years later, Eve Sedgwick would

Marsha Bryant is
observe that a “gay male rehabilitation of the sentimental” had Professor of English and
“been in progress for close to a century under different names, Distinguished Teaching
Scholar at the University
including that of ‘camp.’”1 More recently, Dennis Denisoff has
of Florida, and an associate
offered a substantial demonstration of how camp sustained editor for Contemporary
“aestheticism’s political utility into the twentieth century,” while Women’s Writing. Her most
recent book is Women’s
Christopher Nealon has illuminated the “camp messianism” of Poetry and Popular Culture;
recent “post-Language” poetry.2 Scholars have also shown how she is also the author of
camp’s accoutrements were taken up by protomodernist and Auden and Documentary in
the 1930s and the editor
modernist figures from Whitman, Wilde, James, and Beerbohm of Photo-Textualities: Reading
to Pound, Stein, H. D., and Proust.3 And in Modernism/moder- Photographs and Literature.
Douglas Mao is Professor
nity itself, we find Wendy Moffat pairing Forster and Liberace,
of English at Johns Hopkins
Pamela Caughie pondering Sandra Bernhard in an analysis of University. He is the author
passing, David Boxwell exploring drag performances in British of Solid Objects: Modernism
and the Test of Produc-
army camps, and Sam See bringing camp and queerness to bear
tion and Fateful Beauty:
on Darwin and Woolf. Aesthetic Environments,
Wide-ranging and ravissant as this body of work has been, Juvenile Development, and
Literature 1860–1960 as
however, few scholars have devoted substantial attention to well as the editor of the
camp’s relation to modernism so named.4 In this journal, camp Longman Cultural Edition
has graced a title only once, in a review of Pamela Robertson’s of E. M. Forster’s Howards
End and the coeditor, with
revelatory Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Rebecca Walkowitz, of  Bad
Madonna. Nor does a larger survey of the secondary literature Modernisms.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

2 uncover much. A sweep for couplings of “camp” and “modernism” in the MLA Inter-
national Bibliography yields but one source that actually places the terms in relation,
a 1996 essay by Peter Horne. Perhaps the most pointed recent treatment of modernist
camp appears in Nick Salvato’s Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer
Performance (2010), which advocates viewing high modernist closet dramas through
the lens of camp as “affectively ambivalent queer parody” (180). Yet even this incite-
ment occupies only a few pages of Salvato’s monograph (180–83).5
In our view, more scholarly attention is due the camp-modernism nexus for a host
of reasons. At the level of the particular, we note that the cultural scene we claim as
scholars of modernism includes not just the literary icons already named but Josephine
Baker, Josef von Sternberg, Cecil Beaton, and Cecil B. DeMille. Our forum accord-
ingly constellates an array of costumes, criticism, little magazines, museums, novels,
objects, paintings, performances, photographs, and social networks that speak to some
of camp’s many dances with modernism. There are also more general affinities that
solicit attention, among which we would mention five.
First, there can be neither camp nor modernism without someone’s going over the
top. Daniel Albright has memorably defined modernism as a “testing of the limits of
aesthetic construction,” an art of extremes; doing camp means overdoing it, pushing
the limits of good taste, soliciting a verdict of outrageousness.6 In camp as in modern-
ism, critical evaluation involves distinguishing successful excess from excess that fails,
and in both, such judgments often hinge on how gender is constructed or construed.
Second, both camp and modernism enjoy complex relationships to popular culture,
which scholars have replotted in recent years. Revisiting the vexed figure of “mass
culture as woman” (Andreas Huyssen), scholarship in both areas has rightly called
into question gendered hierarchies between the individual and the masses, high and
low culture, and hard and soft art.7 Juan A. Suárez’s account of “pop modernism,” for
example, explodes the old opposition between high modernism and “the promiscu-
ous, pop-oriented avant-gardes” powered by kitsch and consumer culture, including
“the popular gay idiom of camp” (Pop Modernism, 2, 193). As David Bergman notes,
the claim that camp “exists in tension with popular culture, commercial culture, or
consumerist culture” raises issues of power, privilege, and identity that remain gen-
eratively contested.8
Similar complications arise when one tries to extricate cultural work from working
it—which leads to our third point of intersection. Camp’s salience, like modernism’s,
depends on a canon, a cultural literacy, and protocols of reading. For some, the monu-
ments of camp form an ideal order among themselves, and the relations, proportions,
and values of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Mommie Dearest toward the
whole will inevitably be modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) camp
classic among them. Whether or not one enjoys a tussle over this or that artifact’s
capacity to shelter beneath camp’s parasol, however, one can see that camp’s way of
laying mania on the altar of style bears comparison to the interplay of personality and
impersonality animating modernist practice.9 Joseph Allen Boone reminds us that
“modernist writing . . . is nothing if not a self-conscious performance of style, of textual
 Bryant and Mao / camp modernism
inscriptions that—like the coded gay body—simultaneously flaunt and conceal ‘mean- 3
ing’ in a masquerade of allusion and self-referentiality.”10 In drag culture, a “good read”
is a cascade of artful insults that play on intimate familiarity, an adroit interpretation;
if J. Bryan Lowder is right that drag queens are the “high priestesses” and “monks”
of camp, cultural custodians who “must study its manuscripts, illuminating them for
future generations through performance,” then how far, really, from Eliot’s historical
sense is camp’s hysterical sense?11 And what happens when drag queens—or devotees
of modernism—face audiences who just don’t get it?
Of course, when audiences do get it, another form of chagrin may arise, which
takes us to our fourth convergence. Both modernism and camp invite questions about
whether they die as soon as they’re coherently named, as soon as they’re discussed
routinely by intellectuals, or as soon as they become palatable to populations outside
the original cognoscenti. Just as Harry Levin’s 1960 “What Was Modernism?” struck
some as the death knell for modernist art production, so Susan Sontag’s “Notes on
‘Camp’” (1964)—which made camp an object of critical scrutiny—could sound like
the exit music of another smashing affair. This brings us to our final connection, which
also casts Sontag in a leading role. As James Penner has shown, “Notes on ‘Camp,’”
which first appeared in the Partisan Review, was among other things Sontag’s asser-
tion of independence from the New York Intellectuals—who received it unhappily.
In the magazine itself, John Simon denounced the piece’s undermining of aesthetic
discrimination; in 1968, Irving Howe would number Sontag one of the promoters of
a “new sensibility” opposed to many of the values (nuance, seriousness, rationality,
resistance to the culture of consumption) that the New York Intellectuals had associ-
ated with high modernism. For Sontag, clearly, shining a spotlight on camp meant
loosening modernism’s hold.12 Yet her predecessor Christopher Isherwood made camp
commentary a part of his late modernist practice.
The contributors to our forum address a range of questions about camp’s affections,
destructions, and modes of being. If the love that dared not speak its name too often
fell silent and camp dares to say too much, how do the inflections of camp love play out
across the modernist field? Madelyn Detloff illuminates how such love can be intimate
and communal, departing from the alienating affects of modernist irony. Allan Pero
declares that “camp dares us to love our shame.” For Scott Herring, camp love may
suffuse individual bodies, torquing sexual desire, while for Melissa Bradshaw it can
fashion bodies into gilded icons of artistic ambition. Camp may undo High Art, or it
may end the tyranny of taste (Pero). But camp can also succumb to formalist analyses
(Alexander Howard), to earnestness (Detloff), or to physical violence (Chris Freeman).13
Looking between love and death, meanwhile, our forum discloses a fundamental tension
between Sontag’s curatorial mode of privileging objects and canons and Isherwood’s
gravitation toward people and performance. The former may seem most congenial to
the “material deviance” that Herring examines in Samuel Steward’s handcrafted camp
and to Pero’s swag bag of bon mots, while the latter seems to lend itself to Howard’s
reading of Ford and surrealism, Freeman’s discussion of camp under fire, and Detloff’s
take on Jessica Thebus’s recent production of Orlando. Yet curatorial and theatrical
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

4 perspectives can overlap, as we see in the erotic charge of Steward’s objects (Herring),
in Ford’s canon making (Howard), in Isherwood’s high and low (Freeman), and in the
static monumentality of Edith Sitwell’s Lady Macbeth (Bradshaw). Moving beyond
Sally Bowles, the forum reminds us that women have not just been camp’s love objects.
They have also been camp’s creators and connoisseurs.
This forum thus makes a start on inquiries we hope more scholars will pursue. Is
camp the antidote to modernism’s high seriousness? A distinct form or mode of modern-
ism? Does camp lie curled in the heart of modernism like a boa? Is it time to bestow
more attention on camp emotions, camp bitchiness, camp dissimulation as we attend
to queer modernism?14 Ought we to consider further how the canon of modernism
hides camp in plain sight, and vice versa? How far apart, after all, are surrealist swag-
ger and camp flamboyance? Does anything finally out-camp the “Portrait of a Lady” of
T. S. Eliot? And does the “Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat” not sport a modernist plum?

Some people say I dress too gay,

But ev’ry day I feel so gay,
And when I’m gay, I dress that way.
Is something wrong with that?15

The play of repetition; the delight in the quotidian; the daring to be called out. Surely,
Carmen Miranda’s transvaluations abide in the pages of some long gay book, written
with flourishes and just beginning to be read.