The Illiterate

I have to admit to being somewhat perplexed by all the fuss over Camille Paglia’s critique of Lady GaGa in London’s Sunday Times (behind a paywall, unfortunately). For one thing, I didn’t think anybody (at least among the punditry) paid much attention to Paglia anymore. Not that she isn’t worth paying attention to, but simply because Paglia herself hasn’t been doing much to attract any. She still writes a regular column for Salon, but she’s only written two books since 1995, one a monograph on Hitchcock’s The Birds for the BFI film series (kind of a 33 1/3 for films), and the other a collection of critical readings of poetry, neither the kind of thing to raise much notice in the public press. The long-promised second volume of Sexual Personae still hasn’t appeared, and though I assume she’s still working on it in some way, I don’t expect to see it until her literary executors finally get it out five or so years after her death—which could be a long time yet.

What perplexes me even more about the reaction, though, is that no one seems willing to admit that, though she gets a good deal wrong (her writing off of social networks is a terrible mistake, though it will still be a few years before it’s proven so), she also gets a good deal right. When she calls Gaga a sexless blank, she’s absolutely right, even if, as Kira Cochrane has suggested in The Guardian, GaGa does this intentionally. She’s also right that GaGa represents some sort of turning point in the representation in pop of sexuality. But Paglia’s negativity about this seems misplaced. GaGa may very well represent the end of the 20th Century’s sexual revolution, as Paglia suggests, but one revolution is always supplanted, or replaced, by another. The revolution that GaGa started, or is perhaps clearing space for, hasn’t yet cohered into anything that anyone could give a name, or even suggest a direction, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t brewing.

But it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be an improvement, either, which would make Paglia’s pessimism prescient. It’s interesting to see how’s Paglia’s attack on cell phones and iPods fits in with Cochrane’s references to the distancing effect of GaGa’s costumes. If the new sexual revolution adds up to nothing more than a world full of sexting and virtual bisexuality, then I want no part of it either. But I don’t think that’s going to happen, or what GaGa’s suggesting. I have no idea what’s going to happen, and neither, I think, does anybody else. It seems foolish to worry about it.

I also agree with Paglia that Madonna is a ridiculous comparison to make to GaGa. The roots of this, as far as I can see, have to do with the obvious musical influences (but then, name a dance-pop singer of the last twenty years who isn’t influenced by Madonna) and the fact that she changes her clothes a lot. But Madonna’s changes in image from album to album or video to video really was just a change of clothes: she was always Madonna and only Madonna; the force of her personality came through no matter what she was wearing, and her career through the 80’s was a steady climb in a single direction, focusing and refining the themes of her music until they reached their ultimate expression in Erotica. GaGa’s outfits, meanwhile, are a replacement for personality, an intentional façade that changes as rapidly as the settings of a dream, an armor, as Cochrane suggests, that allows her to face the world on her own terms for as long as she can keep it up. For the moment, at least as far as the public is concerned, GaGa has no personality.

Paglia trips up, though, when she downplays any comparison of GaGa to David Bowie. To me, the connection seems obvious. Like Bowie, GaGa is a rummager through the pop past whose music, at least at this stage of her career, is largely pastiche, but who is more than willing to name-check her influences and give them credit. When Paglia puts GaGa down for lacking avant-garde credentials, she forgets that Bowie’s own credentials, at least in his early years, consisted mostly of being a Velvet Underground fan, referencing his musical and cultural heroes in his songs, and wearing heavy makeup and a dress. The only thing avant-garde about his music was the limp-wristed wispiness of its sound, which made even the most blaring rock and roll sound somehow decadent and effete. And, just like GaGa, Bowie had no real public personality, just a series of parts that he played from record to record. Where GaGa will go with her music is anyone’s guess, but experimentalism is bound to happen once she exhausts her original inspiration, and there’s no reason to think she won’t turn to the avant-garde herself.

What’s oddest about Paglia’s criticism is that she either doesn’t recognize, or is unconsciously denying, the influence that her own work appears to have had on GaGa’s thinking. Considering their surface similarities, I find it impossible to believe that GaGa hasn’t had some exposure to Paglia’s work, if only through curiosity concerning a controversial woman who in many ways is just like her—both Italian-Americans from New York State (though Paglia grew up in Saratoga Springs, not in NYC), both precocious children steeped in Catholic ritual, art, and fashion, both tightly-packed bundles of energy (if I’m not mistaken, they’re even the same height: 5’2”).

When I first saw the “Bad Romance” video I thought of it as something taken straight out of Paglia’s dreams, especially the ending, where the woman’s sexual power causes the man, who thinks he own her, to spontaneously combust. I suspect that part of Paglia’s irritation with GaGa is that she’s seeing her own ideas reflected back at her, almost as farce, and worries that it casts her entire theory of culture in doubt.

It doesn’t. I know that it’s a fun game among some critics to write off Paglia for her occasional social and feminist faux pas (most of which occurred almost twenty years ago), but at the heart of her thinking is a serious, carefully constructed theory of art and culture which, if not always right (when Paglia infamously said that if women ruled the world we’d still be living in grass huts, she forgot to consider that if men had complete control over the world, we wouldn’t even have the huts), is right often enough to take seriously and approach seriously. That includes her opinion of Lady GaGa.