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A N D O T H E R E S S A Y S

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Susan S o .v ta i,
T HE N O O N D A Y PRESS a division of

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

N E W Y O R K
 Copyright © 1961, 1 9 6 2 ,1 9 6 3 , 1 9 6 4 ,1 9 6 5 , 1966
by Susan Sontag
“Resnais' Muriel” © 1964 by the Regents of the
University of California. Reprinted from Film Quarterly,
V ol. X V II, N o. 2, pp. 23-7, by permission of the Regents.
All rights reserved
Library of Congress catalog card number: 6 5 -2 0 9 1 6
First printing, 1966
Noonday Press
Published simultaneously in Canada by Ambassador
Books, Ltd., Toronto
Printed in the United States of America
by H . W olff, N ew York
Designed by JoAnn Randel
for Paul Thek
 A note and some
acknowledgments

T h e articles, reviews, and critical journalism collected here make

up a good part of the criticism I have written in the last four years,
and seem to me to express a developing but nonetheless cohesive
point of view. JWha^ A at point of view-is.J,.shalLuQtLattempt to
summarize here, since that's what the more recent essays trjf to do.
'W h e n I was rereading everything that T ha 3 ’'written'”fb decide
what to include in this book, I was surprised at how little I dis­
agreed with most of my opinions of two, three, and four years ago.
(Some things dismayed me. But not as many as I had expected.) I
realized, though, that many issues and themes that had engaged me
seemed remote now, no doubt because I had written about them.
W riting criticism has proved to be an act of intellectual disburden-
ment as much as of intellectual self-expression. I have the impres­
sion not so much of having, for myself, solved a certain number of
alluring and troubling problems as of having used them up. I should
 vivi • A note and some acknowledgments

perhaps explain that the assessment of this or that novel, film, play,
or whatever, does not greatly interest me: I don't, ultimately, care
about handing out grades to works of art (which is why I dislike
and have mostly avoided the opportunity of writing about things
I don't admire); and I have no illusions about the likelihood that
some of my specific appraisals are wrong, that I have, say, over­
estimated or underestimated the merit of certain works I have dis­
cussed because of a passionate interest in some problem raised by
the work. W hich is to say that, in the end, what I have been writ­
ing is not criticism at all, strictly speaking, but case studies for an
aesthetic, a theory of my own sensibility. It was not (though I
didn't always know it) the particular judgment about the particu­
lar work of art I was really after. I wanted to expose and clarify the
assumptions underlying certain judgments and tastes. W hat might
have been objects of criticism have been, instead, materials avail­
able for this task of theoretical clarification. I hope to persuade
some of my readers of the urgency of this task; without attempting
it, any challenge (in art and in critical discourse) to prevailing
standards of taste falls into arbitrariness.

The pieces are not arranged in chronological order, but at the

end of each I have noted the year in which it was written. All of
them have appeared in magazines—very different kinds of maga­
zines, and since one never writes without wanting to be under­
stood and without considering one's probable audience on a given
occasion, there is some variation in tone and degree of explicitness
from article to article, which I wish I could eliminate for this col­
lection. But, short of recasting everything, it can't be done. As
much as I could, I have resisted the temptation to rewrite. It
wasn't always possible to resist; in two instances (the articles on
Sarraute and Resnais) I rewrote a great deal, because I couldn't
, bear what I had written. To the article on Lukdcs I added a short
postscript; to the L6vi-Strauss and Pavese, a footnote each. The
rest are reprinted with only minor changes.
“Sartre's Saint Genet," “The Death of Tragedy," “Nathalie Sar­
raute and the Novel," “Going to Theater, etc.," “Notes on
'C am p,'" “Marat/Sade/Artaud," and “On Style" originally ap-
 A note and some acknowledgments • ix

peared in Partisan Review; “Simone W eil,” “Camus' Notebooks,”

Michel Leins' Manhood,” “The Anthropologist as Hero,” and
“Ionesco” appeared in The New York Review of Books; “The
Literary Criticism of Georg Lukacs” and “Reflections on The
Deputy” in Book W eek; “Against Interpretation” in Evergreen
Review; “Piety W ithout Content,” “The Artist as Exemplary
Sufferer,” and “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition” in
The Second Coming; “Godard's Vivre Sa Vie” in Moviegoer; “One
Culture and the New Sensibility” (in abridged form) in Madem­
oiselle; “Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures” in The Nation; “Spiritual
Style in the Films of Robert Bresson” in The Seventh Art; “A Note
on Novels and Films” and “Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown's
Life Against Death” in The Supplement (Columbia Spectator);
“The Imagination of Disaster” in Commentary. (Some articles
appeared under different titles.) I am grateful to the editors of
these magazines for permission to reprint.
It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to thank William Phillips
for generous encouragement though he often disagreed with what
I was saying; Annette Michelson, who has shared her erudition
and taste with me in many conversations over the last seven years;
and Richard Howard, who very helpfully read over most of the
essays and pointed out several errors of fact and rhetoric.
Last, I wish to record my gratitude to the Rockefeller Founda­
tion for a fellowship last year which freed me, for the first time in
my life, to write full-time—during which period I wrote, among
other things, some of the essays collected in this book.
S.S.
 Contents

I
Against interpretation 3
On style 15

II
^ T h e artist as exemplary sufferer 39
Simone W eil 49
Camus' Notebooks 52
Michel Leiris’ Manhood 61
The anthropologist as hero 69
The literary criticism of Georg Lukacs
 Sartre's Saint Genet 93
Nathalie Sarraute and the novel 100

III
Ionesco 115
Reflections on The Deputy 124
✓ 'The death of tragedy 132
^ Going to theater, etc. 140
-^M arat/S ade/A rtaud 163

IV
Spiritual style in the films of Robert Bresson 177
Godard's Vivre Sa Vie 196
The imagination of disaster 209
Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures 226
Resnais' Muriel 232
A note on novels and films 242

y
Piety without content 249
Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown's
Life Against Death 256
Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition 263
Notes on “Camp" 275
One culture and the new sensibility 293
 Notes on
"C a m p"

H L a n y things in the world

have not been named; and many things, even if they have been
named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility
"—unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly
identical with it—that goes by the cult name of “Camp.”
A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest
things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Camp, in
particular, has never been discussed. It is not a natural mode of sen- 1
sibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of Camp is its love
of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is
esoteric—something of a private code, a badge of identity even,
among small urban cliques. Apart from a lazy two-page sketch in J
Christopher Isherwood's novel The World in the Evening (1954),
it has hardly broken into print. To talk about Camp is therefore to
betray it. If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edifica-
 276 • Against inte rp re ta tio n

tion it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves. For my­

self, I plead the goal of self-edification, and the goad of a sharp
conflict in my own sensibility. I am strongly drawn to Camp, and
almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about
it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given
sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, ex­
hibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount
its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.
Though I am speaking about sensibility only—and about a sensi­
bility that, among other things, converts the serious into the
frivolous—these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility
or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those myste­
rious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under
the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste
play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this
attitude is naive. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste
is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to
rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in
people, visual taste, taste in emotion—and there is taste in acts, taste
in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in
ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to
develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good
visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)
Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something
like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and
, gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite,
ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold
of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer
a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea. . . .
To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and
powerful,* one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jot­
tings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive
argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something
* T h e sensibility of an era is not only its most decisive, but also its m ost perish­
able, aspect. O ne may capture the ideas (intellectual history) and the behavior
(social history) of an epoch without ever touching upon the sensibility or. taste
which informed those ideas, that behavior. Rare are those historical studies—
like Huizinga on the late M iddle Ages, Febvre on 16th century France— which
do tell us something about the sensibility of the period.
 Notes on "Camp" • 277

of this particular fugitive sensibility. It's embarrassing to be solemn

and treatise-like about Camp. One runs the risk of having, oneself,
produced a very inferior piece of Camp.
These notes are for Oscar Wilde.

“One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of a rt/'

—Phrases & Philosophies for the Use of the Young ~

1. To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheti­

cism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.
That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms
of the degree of artifice, of stylization.
2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an
attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without
saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized—or at
least apolitical.
3. N ot only is there a Camp vision, a Camp way of looking at
things. Camp is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the
behavior of persons. There are “campy” movies, clothes, furniture,
popular songs, novels, people, buildings. . . . This distinction is
important. True, the Camp eye has the power to transform expe­
rience. But not everything can be seen as Camp. It's not all in the
eye of the beholder.
4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of
Camp:

Zuleika Dobson
Tiffany lamps
Scopitone films
The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Bouevard in LA
The Enquirer, headlines and stories
Aubrey Beardsley drawings
Swan Lake
Bellini's operas
Visconti's direction of Salome and 'Tis Pity She's a
W hore
certain tum-of-the-century picture postcards
Schoedsack's King Kong
 278 • Against inter pr et at ion

the Cuban pop singer La Lupe

Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts, God's M an
the old Flash Gordon comics
women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed
and beaded dresses, etc.)
the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Bur-
nett
stag movies seen without lust

5. Camp taste has an affinity for certain arts rather than others.
Clothes, furniture, all the elements of visual decor, for instance,
make up a large part of Camp. For Camp art is often decorative
art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense
of content. Concert music, though, because it is contentless, is
rarely Camp. It offers no opportunity, say, for a contrast between
silly or extravagant content and rich form. . . . Sometimes whole
art forms become saturated with Camp. Classical ballet, opera,
movies have seemed so for a long time. In the last two years, popu­
lar music (post rock-’n'-roll, what the French call ye ye) has been
annexed. And movie criticism (like lists of “The 10 Best Bad
Movies I Have Seen") is probably the greatest popularizer of Camp
taste today, because most people still go to the movies in a high-
spirited and unpretentious way.
6. There is a sense in which it is correct to say: “It's too good to
be Camp." Or “too important," not marginal enough. (More on
this later.) Thus, the personality and many of the works of Jean
Cocteau are Camp, but not those of Andr6 Gide; the operas of
Richard Strauss, but not those of Wagner; concoctions of Tin Pan
Alley and Liverpool, but not jazz. Many examples of Camp are
things which, from a “serious" point of view, are either bad art or
kitsch. Not all, though. Not only is Camp not necessarily bad art,
but some art which can be approached as Camp (example: the
major films of Louis Feuillade) merits the most serious admiration
and study.
 Notes on "Camp" • 279

"The more we study Art, the less we care for N ature/'

—The Decay of Lying

7. All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of

artifice. Nothing in nature can be campy. . . . Rural Camp is still
man-made, and most campy objects are urban. (Yet, they often
have a serenity—or a naivete—which is the equivalent of pastoral.
A great deal of Camp suggests Empson's phrase, "urban pastoral/')
8. Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particu­
lar kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the "off," of
things-being-what-they-are-not. The best example is in Art Nou­
veau, the most typical and fully developed Camp style. Art Nou­
veau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the
lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room
which is really a grotto. A remarkable example: the Paris Metro en­
trances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the shape
of cast-iron orchid stalks.
9. As a taste in persons. Camp responds particularly to the
markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated. The androg­
yne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility. Ex­
amples: the swooning, slim, sinuous figures of pre-Raphaelite
painting and poetry; the thin, flowing, sexless bodies in Art Nou­
veau prints and posters, presented in relief on lamps and ash­
trays; the haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty
of Greta Garbo. Here, Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowl­
edged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness
(as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in
going against the grain of one's sex. W hat is most beautiful in
virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in fem­
inine women is something masculine. . . . Allied to the Camp
taste for the androgynous is something that seems quite different
b u t isn't: a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and
personality mannerisms. For obvious reasons, the best examples
th at can be cited are movie stars. The corny flamboyant female­
ness of Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida, Jane Russell, Virginia
Mayo; the exaggerated he-man-ness of Steve Reeves, Victor Ma­
ture. The great stylists of temperament and mannerism, like Bette
 280 • Against in te rp re ta tio n

Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Edwige Feuilli&re.

10. Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp,
but a “lamp”; not a woman, but a “woman.” To perceive Camp in
objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is
the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as
theater.
11. Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibil­
ity of “man” and “woman,” “person” and “thing.” ) But all style,
that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene. Life is not stylish. Neither
is nature.
12. The question isn't, “W hy travesty, impersonation, theatri­
cality?” The question is, rather, “W hen does travesty, impersona­
tion, theatricality acquire the special flavor of Camp?” W hy is the
atmosphere of Shakespeare's comedies (As You Like It, etc.) not
epicene, while that of Der Rosenkavalier is?
13. The dividing line seems to fall in the 18th century; there
the origins of Camp taste are to be found (Gothic novels, Chinoi-
serie, caricature, artificial ruins, and so forth.) But the relation
to nature was quite different then. In the 18th century, people
of taste either patronized nature (Strawberry Hill) or attempted to
remake it into something artificial (Versailles). They also inde-
fatigably patronized the past. Today's Camp taste effaces nature, or
else contradicts it outright. And the relation of Camp taste to the
past is extremely sentimental.
14. A pocket history of Camp might, of course, begin farther
back—with the mannerist artists like Pontormo, Rosso, and Cara­
vaggio, or the extraordinarily theatrical painting of Georges de La
Tour, or Euphuism (Lyly, etc.) in literature. Still, the soundest
starting point seems to be the late 17th and early 18th century,
because of that period's extraordinary feeling for artifice, for surface,
for symmetry; its taste for the picturesque and the thrilling, its ele­
gant conventions for representing instant feeling and the total pres­
ence of character—the epigram and the rhymed couplet (in words) ,
the flourish (in gesture and'in music). The late 17th and early 18th
century is the great period of Camp: Pope, Congreve, W alpole, etc.,
but not Swift; Ies pr&ieux in France; the rococo churches of Munich;
Pergolesi. Somewhat later: much of Mozart. But in the 19th cen-
 Notes on "C am p"' • 281

tury, what had been distributed throughout all of high culture now
becomes a special taste; it takes on overtones of the acute, the
esoteric, the perverse. Confining the story to England alone, we see
Camp continuing wanly through 19th century aestheticism (Burne-
Jones, Pater, Ruskin, Tennyson), emerging full-blown with the Art
Nouveau movement in the visual and decorative arts, and finding
its conscious ideologists in such “wits” as W ilde and Firbank.
15. Of course, to say all these things are Camp is not to argue
they are simply that. A full analysis of Art Nouveau, for instance,
would scarcely equate it with Camp. But such an analysis cannot
ignore what in Art Nouveau allows it to be experienced as Camp.
Art Nouveau is full of “content,” even of a political-moral sort; it
was a revolutionary movement in the arts, spurred on by a utopian
vision (somewhere between William Morris and the Bauhaus
group) of an organic politics and taste. Yet there is also a fea­
ture of the Art Nouveau objects which suggests a disengaged,
unserious, “aesthete's” vision. This tells us something important
about Art Nouveau—and about what the lens of Camp, which
blocks out content, is.
16. Thus, the Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double
sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the
familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one
hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference,
rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the
thing as pure artifice.
17. This comes out clearly in the vulgar use of the word Camp
as a verb, “to camp,” something that people do. To camp is a mode
of seduction—one which employs flamboyant mannerisms suscep­
tible of a double interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with a
witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for
outsiders. Equally and by extension, when the word becomes a
noun, when a person or a thing is “a camp,” a duplicity is involved.
Behind the “straight” public sense in which something can be
taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.
 282 • Against int er pr et at ion

“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep u p /'

—An Ideal Husband

18. One must distinguish between naive and deliberate Camp.

Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp
(“camping” ) is usually less satisfying.
19. The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are
dead serious. The Art Nouveau craftsman who makes a lamp with
a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charm­
ing. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voila! the Orientl Genuine
Camp—for instance, the numbers devised for the W arner Brothers
musicals of the early thirties (42nd Street; The Golddiggers of
1933; . . . of 1935; . . . of 1937; etc.) by Busby Berkeley—does
not mean to be funny. Camping—say, the plays of Noel Coward—
does. It seems unlikely that much of the traditional opera reper­
toire could be such satisfying Camp if the melodramatic absurdities
of most opera plots had not been taken seriously by their composers.
One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. T he work
tells all. (Compare a typical 19th century opera with Samuel Bar­
ber's Vanessa, a piece of manufactured, calculated Camp, and the
difference is clear.)
20. Probably, intending to be campy is always harmful. T he per­
fection of Trouble in Paradise and The Maltese Falcon, among the
greatest Camp movies ever made, comes from the effortless smooth
way in which tone is maintained. This is not so with such famous
would-be Camp films of the fifties as All About Eve and Beat the
Devil. These more recent movies have their fine moments, but
the first is so slick and the second so hysterical; they want so badly
to be campy that they're continually losing the beat. . . . Perhaps,
though, it is not so much a question of the unintended effect versus
the conscious intention, as of the delicate relation between parody
and self-parody in Camp. The films of Hitchcock are a showcase
for this problem. W hen self-parody lacks ebullience but instead
reveals (even sporadically) a contempt for one's themes and one’s
materials—as in To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, N orth by
Northwest—the results are forced and heavy-handed, rarely Camp.
Successful Camp—a movie like Camp's Drole de Drame; the film
 Notes on "Camp" • 283

performances of Mae W est and Edward Everett Horton; portions

of the Goon Show—even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-
love.
2 1 . So, again, Camp rests on innocence. That means Camp dis­
closes innocence, but also, when it can, corrupts it. Objects, being
objects, don't change when they are singled out by the Camp vi­
sion. Persons, however, respond to their audiences. Persons begin
'‘camping": Mae W est, Bea Lillie, La Lupe, Tallulah Bankhead in
Lifeboat, Bette Davis in All About Eve. (Persons can even be in­
duced to camp without their knowing it. Consider the way Fellini
got Anita Ekberg to parody herself in La Dolce Vita.)
2 2 . Considered a little less strictly, Camp is either completely
naive or else wholly conscious (when one plays at being campy).
An example of the latter: W ilde's epigrams themselves.

"It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either
charming or tedious."
—Lady Windemere’s Fan
23. In naive, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness,
a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can
be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of
the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naive.
24. W hen something is just bad (rather than Camp), it's often
because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't at­
tempted to do anything really outlandish. ("It's too much," "It's
too fantastic," "It's not to be believed," are standard phrases of
Camp enthusiasm.)
25. The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is
a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.
Camp is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels
and trompe-l'oeil insects and cracks in the masonry. Camp is the
outrageous aestheticism of Sternberg's six American movies with
Dietrich, all six, but especially the last. The Devil Is a Woman. . . .
In Camp there is often something d6mesui6 in the quality of the ^
ambition, not only in the style of the work itself. Gaudi's lurid and
beautiful buildings in Barcelona are Camp not only because of their
 284 Against inter pr eta tion

style but because they reveal—most notably in the Cathedral of the

Sagrada Familia—the ambition on the part of one man to do what
it takes a generation, a whole culture to accomplish.
26. Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken
altogether seriously because it is “too much.” Titus Andronicus and
Strange Interlude are almost Camp, or could be played as Camp.
The public manner and rhetoric of de Gaulle, often, are pure
Camp.
27. A work can come close to Camp, but not make it, because it
succeeds. Eisenstein's films are seldom Camp because, despite all
exaggeration, they do succeed (dramatically) without surplus. If
they were a little more “off,” they could be great Camp—particu­
larly Ivan the Terrible I & II. The same for Blake's drawings and
paintings, weird and mannered as they are. They aren't Camp;
though Art Nouveau, influenced by Blake, is.
W hat is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way
is not Camp. Neither can anything be Camp that does not seem to
spring from an irrepressible, a virtually uncontrolled sensibility.
W ithout passion, one gets pseudo-Camp—what is merely decora­
tive, safe, in a word, chic. On the barren edge of Camp lie a num ­
ber of attractive things: the sleek fantasies of Dali, the haute cou­
ture preciosity of Albicocco's The Girl with the Golden Eyes. But
the two things—Camp and preciosity—must not be confused.
28. Again, Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary.
But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous.
(The curved line, the extravagant gesture.) N ot extraordinary
merely in the sense of effort. Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not items are
rarely campy. These items, either natural oddities (the two-headed
rooster, the eggplant in the shape of a cross) or else the products
of immense labor (the man who walked from here to China on his
hands, the woman who engraved the New Testament on the head
of a pin), lack the visual reward—the glamour, the theatricality—
that marks off certain extravagances as Camp.
29. The reason a movie like On the Beach, books like W ines-'
burg, Ohio and For W hom the Bell Tolls are bad to the point of
being laughable, but not bad to the point of being enjoyable, is th at
they are too dogged and pretentious. They lack fantasy. There is
 Notes on "Camp" • 285

Camp in such bad movies as The Prodigal and Samson and Delilah,
the series of Italian color spectacles featuring the super-hero Ma-
ciste, numerous Japanese science fiction .films (Rodan, The Mys-
terians, The H-Man) because, in their relative unpretentiousness
and vulgarity, they are more extreme and irresponsible in their fan­
tasy—and therefore touching and quite enjoyable.
30. Of course, the canon of Camp can change. Time has a great
deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or
lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it
resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic na­
ture of which we don't perceive. W e are better able to enjoy a
fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.
31. This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are
old-fashioned, out-of-date, demod6. It's not a love of the old as
such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration pro­
vides the necessary detachment—or arouses a necessary sympathy.
W hen the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a
work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time
liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to
the Camp sensibility. . . . Another effect: time contracts the
sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category
of the contemporary.) W hat was banal can, with the passage of
time, become fantastic. Many people who listen with delight to the
style of Rudy Vallee revived by the English pop group, The Tem­
perance Seven, would have been driven up the wall by Rudy Vallee
in his heyday.
Thus, things are campy, not when they become old—but when
we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be
frustrated by, the failure of the attempt. But the effect of time is
unpredictable. Maybe Method Acting (James Dean, Rod Steiger,
W arren Beatty) will seem as Camp some day as Ruby Keeler's does
now—or as Sarah Bernhardt's does, in the films she made at the
end of her career. And maybe not.
32. Camp is the glorification of "character." The statement is of
no importance—except, of course, to the person (Loie Fuller,
Gaudi, Cecil B. De Mille, Crivelli, de Gaulle, etc.) who makes it.
W hat the Camp eye appreciates is the unity, the force of the per-
 286 ♦ A g a i n s t i n t e r p r e t a t i o n

son. In every move the aging Martha Graham makes she's being
Martha Graham, etc., etc. . . . This is clear in the case of the great
serious idol of Camp taste, Greta Garbo. Garbo's incompetence (at
the least, lack of depth) as an actress enhances her beauty. She's
always herself.
33. W hat Camp taste responds to is “instant character" (this is,
of course, very 18th century); and, conversely, what it is not stirred
by is the sense of the development of character. Character is under­
stood as a state of continual incandescence—a person being one,
very intense thing. This attitude toward character is a key element
of the theatricalization of experience embodied in the Camp sensi­
bility. And it helps account for the fact that opera and ballet are
experienced as such rich treasures of Camp, for neither of these
forms can easily do justice to the complexity of human nature.
Wherever there is development of character, Camp is reduced.
Among operas, for example, La Traviata (which has some small
development of character) is less campy than II Trovatore (which
has none).

“Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it."

—Vera, or The Nihilists
34. Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary
aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue
that the good is bad, or the bad is good. W hat it does is to offer for
art (and life) a different—a supplementary—set of standards.
35. Ordinarily we value a work of art because of the seriousness
and dignity of what it achieves. W e value it because it succeeds—in
being what it is and, presumably, in fulfilling the intention that lies
behind it. W e assume a proper, that is to say, straightforward rela­
tion between intention and performance. By such standards, we
appraise The Iliad, Aristophanes' plays, The Art of the Fugue,
Middlemarch, the paintings of Rembrandt, Chartres, the poetry of
Donne, The Divine Comedy, Beethoven's quartets, and—among
people—Socrates, Jesus, St. Francis, Napoleon, Savonarola. In short,
the pantheon of high culture: truth, beauty, and seriousness.
36. But there are other creative sensibilities besides the serious­
ness (both tragic and comic) of high culture and of the high style
 Notes on "Camp" • 287

of evaluating people. And one cheats oneself, as a human being, if

one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one
may do or feel on the sly.
For instance, there is the kind of seriousness whose trademark is
anguish, cruelty, derangement. Here we do accept a disparity be­
tween intention and result. I am speaking, obviously, of a style of
personal existence as well as of a style in art; but the examples had
best come from art. Think of Bosch, Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, Kafka,
Artaud, think of most of the important works of art of the 20th cen­
tury, that is, art whose goal is not that of creating harmonies but of
overstraining the medium and introducing more and more violent,
and unresolvable, subject-matter. This sensibility also insists on the
principle that an oeuvre in the old sense (again, in art, but also in
life) is not possible. Only “fragments” are possible. . . . Clearly,
different standards apply here than to traditional high culture.
Something is good not because it is achieved, but because another
kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of
what it is to be human—in short, another valid sensibility—is being
revealed.
And third among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the
sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experi­
ence. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness,
and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling.
37. The first sensibility, that of high culture, is basically moral­
istic. The second sensibility, that of extreme states of feeling, rep­
resented in much contemporary “avant-garde” art, gains power by
a tension between moral and aesthetic passion. The third, Camp, is
wholly aesthetic.
38. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It
incarnates a victory of “style” over “content,” “aesthetics” over
“morality,” of irony over tragedy.
39. Camp and tragedy are antitheses. There is seriousness in
Camp (seriousness in the degree of the artist’s involvement) and,
often, pathos. The excruciating is also one of the tonalities of
Camp; it is the quality of excruciation in much of Henry James
(for instance, The Europeans, The Awkward Age, The Wings of
the Dove ) that is responsible for the large element of Camp in his
writings. But there is never, never tragedy.
 288 • Against inte rp re ta tio n

40. Style is everything. Genet's ideas, for instance, are very

Camp. Genet’s statement that “the only criterion of an act is its
elegance”* is virtually interchangeable, as a statement, with
Wilde’s “in matters of great importance, the vital element is not
sincerity, but style.” But what counts, finally, is the style in which
ideas are held. The ideas about morality and politics in, say, Lady
Windemere’s Fan and in Major Barbara are Camp, but not just
because of the nature of the ideas themselves. It is those ideas, held
in a special playful way. The Camp ideas in Our Lady of the Flowers
are maintained too grimly, and the writing itself is too successfully
elevated and serious, for Genet’s books to be Camp.
41. The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Cam p
is playful, anti-serious. More precisely. Camp involves a new, more
complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the
frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
42. One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that “sincerity” is
not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual nar­
rowness.
43. The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness
—irony, satire—seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally
oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is
schooled. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal,
theatricality.
44. Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter
or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolve­
ment, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detach­
ment.

“I adore simple pleasures, they are the last refuge of the complex.”
5 ,.,.:; ^ —A W oman of No Importance
45. Detachment is the: prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy
is the 19th century’s surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of cul­
ture, so Camp is the modem dandyism. Camp is the answer to
the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.
* Sartres gloss on this in Saint G enet is: “Elegance is the quality of conduct
which transforms the greatest amount of being into appearing/'
 Notes on "Camp" • 289

46. T he dandy was overbred. His posture was disdain, or else

ennui. H e sought rare sensations, undefiled by mass appreciation.
(Models: Des Esseintes in Huysmans’ A Rebours, Marius the Epicu­
rean, Val&y1's Monsieur Teste.) He was dedicated to “good taste.”
The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures.
N ot in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the
coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use
does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess
them in a rare way. Camp—Dandyism in the age of mass culture—
makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-pro­
duced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.
47. W ilde himself is a transitional figure. The man who, when
he first came to London, sported a velvet beret, lace shirts, velve­
teen knee-breeches and black silk stockings, could never depart too
far in his life from the pleasures of the old-style dandy; this con­
servatism is reflected in The Picture of Dorian Gray. But many of
his attitudes suggest something more modern. It was W ilde who
formulated an important element of the Camp sensibility—the
equivalence of all objects—when he announced his intention of
“living up” to his blue-and-white china, or declared that a door­
knob could be as admirable as a painting. W hen he proclaimed
the importance of the necktie, the boutonniere, the chair, Wilde
was anticipating the democratic esprit of Camp.
48. T he old-style dandy hated vulgarity. T he new-style dandy,
the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity. Where the dandy would
be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is con­
tinually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handker­
chief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of
Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves.
49. I t is a feat, of course.. A feat goaded -on, .in the last analysis,
by the threat of boredom. T he relation between boredom and
C am p taste cannot be overestimated. Cam p -taste is by its nature
possible only in affluent societies, in societies o r circles capable o f
the psyehopatliology of'affluent*
 290 • A g a i n s t i n t e r p r e t a t i o n

“W hat is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is

the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.”
—A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated

50. Aristocracy is a position vis-a-vis culture (as well as vis-&-vis

power), and the history of Camp taste is part of the history of snob
taste. But since no authentic aristocrats in the old sense exist today
to sponsor special tastes, who is the bearer of this taste? Answer:
an improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals, who consti­
tute themselves as aristocrats of taste.
51. The peculiar relation beween Camp taste and homosexuality
has to be explained. W hile it's not true that Camp taste is homo­
sexual taste, there is no doubt a peculiar affinity and overlap. N ot
all liberals are Jews, but Jews have shown a peculiar affinity for lib­
eral and reformist causes. So, not all homosexuals have Camp taste.
But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard—and the
most articulate audience—of Camp. (The analogy is not frivolously
chosen. Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minori­
ties in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest
sense: they are creators of sensibilities. T he two pioneering forces
of modem sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual
aestheticism and irony.)
52. The reason for the flourishing of the aristocratic posture
among homosexuals also seems to parallel the Jewish case. For
every sensibility is self-serving to the group that promotes it. Jewish
liberalism is a gesture of self-legitimization. So is Camp taste, which
definitely has something propagandistic about it. Needless to say, the
propaganda operates in exactly the opposite direction. T he Jews
pinned their hopes for integrating into modern society on promot­
ing the moral sense. Homosexuals have pinned their integration
into society on promoting the aesthetic sense. Camp is a solvent of
morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.
53. Nevertheless, even though homosexuals have been its van­
guard, Camp taste is much more than homosexual taste. Obvi­
ously, its metaphor of life as theater is peculiarly suited as a justifi­
cation and projection of a certain aspect of the situation of homo­
sexuals. (The Camp insistence on not being “seriou$,”on playing,
 Notes on "Camp" • 291

also connects with the homosexual's desire to remain youthful.)

Yet one feels that if homosexuals hadn't more or less invented
Camp, someone else would. For the aristocratic posture with rela­
tion to culture cannot die, though it may persist only in increas­
ingly arbitrary and ingenious ways. Camp is (to repeat) the rela­
tion to style in a time in which the adoption of style—as such—has
become altogether questionable. (In the modem era, each new
style, unless frankly anachronistic, has come on the scene as an anti­
style.)

“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell
without laughing."
—In conversation
54. The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery
that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refine­
ment. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that
there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste. (Genet talks about
this in Our Lady of the Flowers.) The discovery of the good taste
of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high
and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually
restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good
taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak.
Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty
hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before
he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the
digestion.
55. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of apprecia­
tion—not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only
seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it's not a ruthless
but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn't propose that it is in bad
taste to be serious; it doesn’t sneer at someone who succeeds in
being seriously dramatic. W hat it does is to find the success in
certain passionate failures.
56. Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It rel­
ishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensi­
ties of “character.” . . . Camp taste identifies with what it is en-
 292 • Against in te rp re ta tio n

joying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the
thing they label as “a camp/' they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender
feeling.
(Here, one may compare Camp with much of Pop Art, which—
when it is not just Camp—embodies an attitude that is related,
but still very different. Pop Art is more fiat and more dry, more
serious, more detached, ultimately nihilistic.)
57. Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into
certain objects and personal styles. The absence of this love is the
reason why such kitsch items as Peyton Place (the book) and the
Tishman Building aren't Camp.
58. The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful.
. . . Of course, one can't always say that. Only under certain con­
ditions, those which I've tried to sketch in these notes.

[1964]