Sex, Art and American Culture.

IT IS POSSIBLE that some of the people who, two years ago, read Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, an eccentric seven-hundred-page survey of Western art from the Stone Age to the Yellow Decade, were so taken with its discussions of Goethe's "Venetian Epigrams" and the paintings of Sir Edward Burne-Jones that they are now thinking of buying Sex, Art, and American Culture hoping for more of the same. More likely, Miss Paglia's first readers want Madonna, pornography, date rape, and roller-derby bouts with feminists and deconstructionist literary theorists.

For Goethe, go elsewhere. All the other stuff is here.

"[Madonna] sensed the buried pagan religiosity in disco." "I accept Mapplethorpe as a pornographer, but for me Donatello, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio were also pornographers." "You go back to the Kennedy compound late at night and you're surprised at what happens? [Willie Smith's accuser is] the one who should be charged--with ignorance. Because everyone knows that Kennedy is spelled S-E-X." "American GIs (including my uncles) got shot up rescuing France when she was lying flat on her face under the Nazi boot. Hence it is revolting to see pampered American academics down on their knees kissing French bums."

Camille Paglia, you'll notice, is not Lionel Trilling. More to the point, she is not the sort of jargon-afflicted postMarx, post-Heidegger academic exhibited by Roger Kimball. She says everything with a lead-writer's punch.

There is a theory that stalks through Miss Paglia's pages, though. An atheist, she sees nature--chaotic, wasteful, and irrational--as the fundamental reality. Human institutions and activities are efforts to impose a margin of order, and men, who feel most threatened by the welter, do most of the imposing. (One of the punchiest sentences of Sexual Personae was: "If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts." Miss Paglia liked it so well, she repeats it here.) It is possible, she believes, and sometimes desirable, to construct human artifacts which, in their brittle brilliance, go totally against nature's grain. But our most enduring works are those which acknowledge the dark forces they seek to channel.

Hence her preferred religion is paganism (she believes in astrology). Failing that, Roman Catholicism, so long as it is Italianate and contentfree. Politically, she is an instinctual libertarian, in favor of both prostitution and capitalism, though this doesn't stop her from recommending federal grants for rock musicians. Art in the West, she thinks, tames the dark forces by crystallizing around sexually charged male and female archetypes. Everything else, presumably, is decoration or journalism. In the twentieth century, popular art, mainly Hollywood and rock, has done the job better than high art.

As with anyone who tries to explain everything, there are gaps, caused by the inevitable holes in an individual's knowledge or taste. The gap most obvious to me is Miss Paglia's tin ear. Music exists for her only as soundtrack for spectacle, whether for a rock video or a death scene at La Scala. This partly explains Miss Paglia's worship of Madonna. Whatever her other assets, Madonna sings like Alvin the Chipmunk's sister.

Miss Paglia also falls into patterns of error. She talks about society, without having a feel for it, or for the units on which it rests: about the only family she ever discusses is the Paglia family. Social novels, ending in marriage, are so many closed books to her (she does better with Shakespearean comedies). This limitation showed mostly clearly in her treatment of Wuthering Heights in Sexual Personae. I recently read Wuthering Heights for the first time since ninth grade. It is as shocking as Miss Paglia says it is, far more so than anything by Bret Easton Ellis. She dismisses the second half, though, after Cathy dies, as so much noodling. What it is instead is an examination of the effects a lifelong program of revenge like Heathcliffs would have on its victims, and on the revenger. Miss Paglia is only interested in demon lovers.

Her most annoying trait is the nihilist's effort to have everything all ways. What else could we expect from someone who sees all human efforts as arbitrary dikes against destruction? In one sentence, we get Dionysus, whores, drag queens. In the next, we get Catholicism, the canon, scholarship. "The institutional religions, Catholic and Protestant," writes Miss Paglia in a typical passage explaining why she opposes the ordination of homosexuals, though she is "of wavering sexual orientation" herself, "carry with them the majesty of history.

Their theology is impressive and coherent. Efforts to revise or dilute that theology for present convenience seem to me misguided." But the relevant criterion for a religion, and for many other institutions as well, is not impressiveness but truth. If Christianity isn't true, then its temples should be turned into museums or parking lots. If it is, then a lot of what Miss Paglia thinks is false.

One piece of advice. Miss Paglia attributes her non-stop full-blast style to her ethnicity: don't blame the decibels on me, I'm Italian. But, as Luigi Barzini knew, the best Italian gestures are economical. "Sicilians, for instance, are known to convey a vast range of grave and sometimes mortal messages practically without stirring a muscle of their faces or moving their hands." If Miss Paglia doesn't learn to insert some Sicilian moments, for variety's sake, her readers may tuck her next book in with the fishes.