Sex, Art, and American Culture.

Two years ago an obscure humanities professor in Philadelphia, Camille Paglia, burst on American higher education and the press like a bombshell, firing raucous, unconventional views in all directions - on feminism, popular culture, Madonna, human nature, date rape, and almost everything else. Her style of presentation, more or less that of a stormtrooper injackboots, has not always made it easy to hear her, and this book makes a valuable introduction to her ideas and opinions.

Paglia came to public notice in 1990 after her gigantic book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale University Press) appeared. This is quite a swath, and it reveals the mind of one who must lecture to undergraduates several times a week on anything and everything. Beneath her bluster Paglia is a woman of staggering learning and a fine writer, one who takes the craft seriously. In Sexual Personae she argues that a definable set of archetypes, including the beautiful boy, the dandy, the mother goddess, and the vampire, recurs cyclically throughout the history of Western culture and gives it a coherent if raunchy pattern. She emphasizes the savage and erotic - Nietzsche's "Dionisian" - over the "Apollonian," or rational and orderly, and sees culture and life in society as requiring the wearing of masks (personae) to give disciplined expression to wild, libidinous human nature. As big as it is, this is only the first of two volumes; the second will treat her obsessions in twentieth-century popular culture, "cinema, television, sports, rock music." Here we can expect to find evidence of the wine god's work aplenty.

Sex, Art, and American Culture is a collection of her miscellaneous writings produced since Sexual Personae. Its core is a long essay which began as a review of two books on a subject close to her heart, homosexuality in ancient Greece. After cutting the books to ribbons, she launches into a forty-page afterword diagnosing the ills of American higher education which have encouraged such sloppy, trendy scholarship. A hilarious pop version of the essay follows, in the form of a lecture she gave at MIT on "Crisis in the American Universities." There are, besides, two pieces on date rape, a phenomenon she takes seriously but has little patience for (young women should learn to take care of themselves, she says); several reviews of books, art exhibitions, and current events (Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill); and brief essays on those sexual personae par excellence, Madonna and Liz Taylor. Packed in at the end is a section of cartoons and commentary about herself - an unusual appendix in an academic book. The target for which she reserves her most potent venom is "academic feminism," which she thinks fascistic and glacial. She cannot abide its version of history as a dank, oppressive blanket of "patriarchy," and, instead, extols male power and creativity, which she claims have built the world. Most feminists detest her, but she is one herself, though one for whom the term coined in the sixties, "women's liberationist," is more apt. That is, she claims freedom and equality for women but does not hate men or blame them for all the evils in the world.

More deeply, she opposes the devaluation of nature by feminism and other recent intellectual movements that overestimate the power of culture. This, she says, has to do with Americans' subservience since about 1970 to fashionable French intellectuals like Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan (her three arch-villains). Her awareness of the role of nature owes, she says. to havin, been raised in a big, feisty Italian-American family and to her roots in Roman Catholicism. Images of martyred saints in churches and procession are "evidence of the ancient, buried paganism of Roman Catholicism." (I wonder if she has darkened the doors of many Catholic churches lately; she would be disappointed.) She owes a vast intellectual debt to Nietzsche, the source of the Apollonian and Dionisian categories in which she puts so much stock, and her own persona, with its quick, caustic judgment and zany sense of humor, is a triumph of Dionisianism.

Paglia's heat and directness are in refreshing contrast to the turgid, labyrinthine prose one meets too often in the humanities today, and I warmly second her appeal to North American scholars to end their affair with cynical, pessimistic currents in continental theory and philosophy and return to the wellspring of Anglo-American pragmatic empiricism. The problem is that the theories that form her building-blocks have their drawbacks, too. True. as Procrustean beds go. the ideas of Freud and Nietzche fit better than most and are certainly more energizing and liberating; but they are Procrustean beds nonetheless and do not always accommodate reality well.

In particular I find her obsession with sexuality, especially sadomasochism, disturbing and a bit frightening. For her, sex is a path into the unevolved wildness of nature, Freud as rewritten by the Brothers Grimm. But her fixation on this makes her seem at times like a one-trick pony. There are countless other avenues to nature and reality: sports, music, and theater (of all kinds), vacations, raising children (Paglia is single), arguing, fighting, laughing, crying, political debate, and on and on. While she does not mean to overlook these (to the contrary, I think), her emphasis falls too often on sex, especially its darker, kinkier forms. This leads her to make questionable judgments. For example, she praises Robert Mapplethorpe, whose shocking photographs of sexual pain and degradation raised such a ruckus three years ago, and calls him her "spiritual brother." (The cackling patriarch of this strange family is the Marquis de Sade.) She urges us to see in Mapplethorpe's photos the latest chapter in the Western chronicle of the mysterious, uncontrollable side of sexuality. This is valid, but..."spiritual brother"? Mapplethorpe's aim, I think, was precisely to make such brotherhood impossible. Similarly, she adores rock music and considers it an authentic art, a contemporary manifestation of "the Romantic archetypes of energy, passion. rebellion, and demonism." (I confess I like some rock myself.) But how can she reconcile that with her concerns for cultural quality, continuity, and resonance'? Among her more bizarre ideas is to send rockers to art schools (like John Lennon) and give them NEA grants. But why would "brawling, boozy bad boys...storming from city to city" let themselves be co-opted that way? This is High Noon in Dodge City, not luncheon at the National Gallery of Art!

Parents, too, may have difficulty recognizing their children (and themselves) in her colorful, timeless archetypes. Boys have a harder time growing up than girls, she says, because they must not only identify with the masculine but also leave the feminine, in the person of their mothers. behind. Experience and psychological research tend to bear her out on this, but her image of men and boys as primitive, macho denizens of forest and sports bar - one, incidentally, not unlike that pushed by the men's movement - is a simplistic caricature. Like women, we men are complex, changeful creatures, and while reading Paglia I kept wishing she had boys of her own to raise to test against her theories. I suspect she would find (as some feminists have) that children have a way of breaking out of stereotypes. She has a real flair for acute description of personality types. but no one fits them exactly. Some college women who are raped on dates are indeed overprivileged, naive, and self-righteous. but some are victims of terrible crimes. And the ancient archetype of the prostitute as the scarlet woman who finds out men's weakness and crushes their gonads under her stiletto heel is a literary type, but how many prostitutes on the street tonight feel like her or have her power? Life conforms to art only in a measure.

In short, the reader, while enjoying Paglia's chutzpah and being challenged by her daring, must beware of being seduced. She asks good questions, and her answers are often refreshingly liberating. Her bias against theory is a valuable corrective, but we all operate from theories, and hers must be seen as theories too, not gospel.