English Lit and Its Discontents: Some Thoughts After Re-Reading Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Why is literature central to the humanities? And why is it so difficult to study it?

The answers are related. The first thing to note is that among the humanities, literature is the odd man out because it is an art. Students and scholars of literature do not use specific, more-or-less scientific methods to study a specific component of human life; they study an art that takes human beings as its subject. Literature is the only art that inevitably takes human beings as its subject, which is one reason, presumably, that's it's grouped with the humanities rather than the fine arts. The other reason is that literature does not, like music, involve learning a new language, or, like music and the visual arts, isolatable and teachable techniques (the exception is poetry, which traditionally was grouped with the fine arts).

Literature was originally included in a liberal arts education, alongside the human sciences, because it was considered that a familiarity with the classics of literature was a necessary part of being a cultivated person. In order to become familiar with the classics of literature, however, all one has to do is read them. It has never been clear how one teaches these texts. After all, you don't “teach literature” the way you teach music, or teach painting, or teach dance. Art is represented in the humanities as Art History, but as such, like Religious Studies, it's taught as a special branch of history, looking at a cultural phenomenon on which great importance has traditionally been placed. Literature, on the other hand, is supposed to stand alongside History, as its own liberal art and area of the humanities.

The reason that literature, as an academic subject, has lagged behind the other humanities in becoming a type of (soft) science, is not that English students are especially backward or fuzzy-headed, but that at bottom, students and professors know that what they are there to do is read books. Literature students are not engaged in a practice, as historians are when they study history or philosophers when they practice philosophy. (Philosophy, the other non-scientific humanities field, asks many of the same broad questions about human beings and human life as science, but uses abstract reason rather than empirical analysis and testing to develop answers.) Literature students are reading books. Moreover, because of the status that canonical literature acquires, the humanists within Humanities departments often want to interfere as little as possible in the student's experience of the books, from which students are supposed to get everything they need.

Naturally this has led to a lot of confusion about what English, as an academic subject, is, and what its students and scholars are or should be doing. The confusion that what students are doing is studying literature as a cultural product leads to Cultural Studies and to attracting students to English with courses about popular new books (which can of course be made interesting through postmodern theory: everything can). We have already seen that students cannot be engaged in the study of literary history if English is, as it is taken to be, its own subject; although there is a large component of literary history to what English students do.

Another way in which English students become confused about their subject is that a large component of any university subject is reading books. In other subjects, however, the books present information or arguments about the subject (say, American history, or epistemology, or biology). In English, the books are the subject. Confusion about this difference leads to the idea that what one is studying is the author's ideas, making English into a less rigorous form of philosophy.

There are a couple of reasons why so much radical theory found a home in English departments, from Freud and Marx to feminism, queer theory, and postcolonialism. First, the literary canon has the peculiar feature of coming to stand for cultural authority, quite regardless of whatever ideas the authors represented in it may have had. We often view this as an ex post facto sacralization of literature, but although the phenomenon is most familiar from sacred texts (e.g. The Bible, The Koran), it occurs just as often with secular texts (The Confucian Four Books and Five Classics, The Iliad, Shakespeare). Although any art will acquire a canon, none of the others have anything like the cultural authority of the literary canon: no matter how visual the culture becomes, writing continues to bear authority. At the same time, humanists, understanding that literature is central to the humanities, mistakenly took this to mean that the literary canon exemplifies humanist values. Accordingly, those who are critical of or disappointed in humanism found a logical target in the literary canon, which is also a useful target because of its embodiment of authority.

As Frye recounts in the “Polemical Introduction” to the Anatomy: since neither English students nor English professors are exactly sure what they're supposed to be doing, professors have had to look outside of the subject area for ideas that are teachable, and have found no shortage of them. Since the nature of textual interpretation is such that you can make almost any text into an allegory for almost anything, literature turns out to be a fantastic way of teaching the ideas of the professor's favourite thinker; and as a bonus, you can also symbolically attack authority.

This is how English has gone, or always already went, from being about gaining familiarity with canonical literature as part of becoming a cultivated individual, to being about attacking canonical literature in order to prove you're duly sceptical of bourgeois Western values.

For Frye, rectifying this situation begins with understanding that what the literature student or scholar is doing (as the philosopher does philosophy or the physicist does physics) is not “literature”; literature is what writers do. What literature students and scholars are doing is criticism. It would therefore go a long way toward clarifying things to rename English, English Criticism.

This both is and is not a solution. Students who are avid readers will show up to gain a familiarity with literature; students who are pissed off (with good reason) about Western values or who just like symbolically attacking authority will show up for the other stuff. But I'm not sure who would show up to study English Criticism. We certainly believe that literature is as important as philosophy or history; but do we believe that criticism is?

And yet is makes sense. The philosophy student or professor who reads the work of a canonical or contemporary philosopher, as they will do in their studies, is reading the work of a person engaged in the same activity as they are. When an English student or professor reads the work that they are supposed to be studying, they are obviously not reading the work of a person engaged in the same activity as they are. Yet the literary works, and not criticism, are made central to the study of literature (which is exactly why humanists are always shrieking that they're losing centrality); and, moreover, justify it as a field of study.

For Frye, the real reason that literature is central to the humanities and the liberal arts is that it bridges history and philosophy, with the specificity, the ties to reality and necessity, of the former and the power of generalization and speculation of the latter. In doing so, it creates a hypothetical construct that liberates the reader by freeing her from having to recognize the mere contingency of the natural world (let alone the social world) as necessity. The impulse of imaginative literature is to always propose an alternative; and literature is most important to us of all when that alternative can't be realized, but can only be imagined. Behind these descriptions is presumably some kind of Kantian notion of art as the mental faculties of human beings in free play, liberated from instrumentalism and delighting in themselves.

Frye is all thunder and brimstone in his “Polemical Introduction”; curiously, in his “Tentative Conclusion,” as the title suggests, he has lost his fire, and states more than once that he's not suggesting that literary critics should change what they're doing. Supposing, however, that the study of literature were to become Frye's criticism, and were accordingly to become more scientific. This would doubtless be useful, since if nothing else, the magisterial, densely argued, wildly erudite, elegantly written, and occasionally mad-as-a-hatter Anatomy succeeds in showing what fascinating things can result if we stop reading literature as humanists, for the characters, author, and meaning (or their replacement, the oppressed and the means of oppression), and start studying it methodically and analytically.

This would be a great discipline that would definitely advance human knowledge more than the way we currently study literature does; but would studying literature in this way still do the humanist job that produces some of Frye's greatest flights of rhetoric in the Anatomy? For a man who wants literary criticism to be a science, he sure gets excited about the benefits of the liberal arts.

As an illustration (and only a minor one) of what Frye's kind of criticism can do, the portion of the Anatomy with most relevance to subjects I've written about on this blog is where he distinguishes between the different types of prose fiction (in the Fourth Essay): the novel (by which he means the social novel), the romance, the confession, and Menippean satire or anatomy. In other words, while public criticism currently consists of babbling about whether or not Sheila Heti or Karl Ove Knausgaard is really making art, Frye just throws confession (i.e., literary autobiography) in with “prose fiction,” which makes sense considering that particularly since Modernism, novelists have been blurring the line between fiction and autobiography, and, as Frye points out, the novel and the confession develop together and mutually influence each other. And yet we still can't get over this blurring, because in speaking of book-length prose fiction we have no vocabulary other than “novel” (by which we mean the European social novel) and “experimental novel,” which is every extended work of prose fiction that is not like “the novel,” although it may in fact be trying to be something else, and therefore be neither a novel nor experimental (even though the author himself or herself may make this same mistake).

We pay a huge price for reading literature the humanist way: not only a deeply confused academic discipline, but also an impoverished, ahistorical public criticism. No one took heed of Frye in 1957 and no one is going to do so now, but reading the Anatomy helps to clarify why English is the strange, fraught subject it is, as well as being extraordinarily, if fitfully, illuminating on the subject of literature. Frye manages the seemingly impossible feat of producing a methodical and theoretical work of literary criticism that is nevertheless consistently personal in tone, full of aperҫus and insights; which makes it, after all, the rarest and most valuable form of criticism, not scientific but humanist, a work of literature in itself, though not a work of (in the familiar meaning of the word) fiction – in a word, an anatomy.

V. C. Andrews, Family Romance, and the Aesthetics of Adolescent Shame

Dolly Haze, Meet Cathy Dollanganger

A middle-aged man boarding in a widow's house, Humbert Humbert, becomes infatuated with her 12-year-old daughter, and when the widow is killed in a car accident takes advantage of the opportunity to kidnap the daughter with the intention of raping her. After becoming lovers they settle in another town, posing as father and daughter, until the girl tires of his possessiveness and escapes with the help of another older man who is infatuated with her. They split up after he tries to involve her in pornography and she ends up married, pregnant, and poor. Humbert helps her out with money, but she dies in childbirth at the age of 17.

This, as everyone knows, is the plot of Nabokov's Lolita (1955), considered one of the greatest novels of the 20^th century.

After losing her husband in a car accident, Corrine Dollanganger, a beautiful young widow reveals to her children that their family is fabulously wealthy and that she will be taking them to her grandparents' mansion, Foxworth Hall. They arrive at night and are taken to a far-off room leading to the attic, as well as meeting their grandmother, a terrifying Bible-thumper who makes no secret of hating them. Corrine explains that her sternly religious parents' disapproved of her marriage to their father because he was her half-uncle, and that they will have to stay in the room for a few days or weeks, until she wins her father over. The “few days” turn into months and then years of waiting for the old man to die, during which their mother appears less and less frequently. The children can only play in the attic, which they decorate to resemble a garden. The monotony of their existence is broken up by surprise visits from the Grandmother, who spies on them and doles out whippings and other torture for disobedience or any hint of sexuality. The growth of the two younger children is stunted because they are never outdoors, while the two older children go through puberty and, with no one else around, develop a romance. Meanwhile, their mother gets remarried, to a man who knows nothing about them. When one of the young twins dies, from pneumonia according to their mother, Cathy and Christopher resolve to finally escape. When they see that their dead brother's pet mouse died after eating one of the powdered-sugar donuts that has been added to the picnic basket recently, they realize that they're being poisoned. Worse, they deduce that the poisoner is not their grandmother but their mother, having learned that the grandfather added a codicil to their will that she will forfeit her inheritance if it's proved that she had children from her first marriage.

This, as everyone knows (though perhaps not in all cases the same “everyone” who knows about Lolita), is the plot of V. C. Andrews's Flowers in the Attic (1979), which is set in the 1950s upon which Lolita is often presumed to pass scathing commentary. Whereas both Lolita and Flowers critique the nuclear family and the cheerful, suburban American ideal that conceals its secret passions, Lolita also criticizes the kitsch of American existence – tacky hotels and slangy, gum-snapping teens. Both novels are also first-person narratives, although Lolita is told from the perspective of the abusive adult (every bit as much of a charmer and self-deceiver as Corrine) and Flowers from the perspective of the abused young girl (the oldest girl, Cathy).

The interesting question before us is, of course, why Lolita is considered a masterpiece and Flowers in the Attic a piece of irredeemable yet strangely undying trash. Usually a novel is only considered “trash” if its subject matter is “trash,” which is to say, deals with an unacceptable form of sex; otherwise the milder pejoratives “garbage” or “junk” suffice. Obviously I have no systematic way of proving this anecdotal observation, but you know what I mean: novels dealing with taboo sex are put in their own category of “badness” and assumed to be bad until proven, by the defense of the cultural elite, to be aesthetically good, which, according to that elite, mitigates or negates their moral badness, and is in any case the more important value, or perhaps I should say, the appropriate value when dealing with art. The fact that Humbert Humbert keeps the reader morally anaesthetized by aestheticizing his predation of a child only makes the novel better by making us aware that the aesthetic defense is problematic.

But no novel survives because of its prose style. We make distinctions between novels based in part on the sophistication of the language, concepts, and structure, in part on things like whether or not it belongs to a genre (most genre fiction has to be around for a very long time before it's accepted into the canon), on its marketing, on what happens to be popular among the literati at the time (e.g. since Modernism you have to be a Modernist), and, yes, still in many cases the gender of the author (and presumed audience). But novels survive because of their archetypal power, and at that level there is frequent continuity between acknowledged great novelists and great popular novelists: it's interesting to compare the character types and the romantic endings of Portrait of a Lady and Gone With the Wind, for example, and Henry James is another progenitor of Flowers in the Attic, particularly in “The Turn of the Screw.”

Childhood, the Gothic, and Freud

Dickens is a rare case of a great popular novelist who is also considered uncontroversially canonical; but this is unlikely to happen to V. C. Andrews, because there is far too much shame associated with her oeuvre. If the day comes that that shame is no longer present, the novels will have lost the power that makes them important. If FITA's chronologically immediate progenitors include sensational bestsellers like Peyton Place (1965), with its themes of incest, illegitimacy, and adultery, and the child abuse memoir Mommie Dearest (1978), it also takes its place among such memorable horror novels of the 70s as Stephen King's Carrie (1974), the ultimate account of female adolescent shame, and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1976), which also features a tremendously dysfunctional mock-nuclear family, this one headed by two male vampires, and the idea of doll-like children who are at once mature beyond their years and unable to achieve physical maturity, in a hellishly suspended puberty.

Both Rice and Andrews revived and developed the “Turn of the Screw” theme of the sexualization of children that appeared at the same cultural moment as Freud's theory of child sexuality – an idea that still makes as uncomfortable. The question that torments the Governess in James's Gothic novella is whether she is projecting sexuality onto the children or whether she has accurately assessed their sexual knowledge, in which case the source of contamination was their previous caretakers, Jessel and Quint. Her morbid fascination with the question of the children's innocence, however, is itself a kind of voyeuristic objectification of them – which finds one kind of logical development in Lolita, whose heroine is erotic for the narrator because she is non-sexual, and another in IWTV, in which our cultural fetishization of children and infantilization of women is played out in the form of a kind of nightmarish curse instead of the usual fantasy. Peter Pan is another fairy-tale progenitor to these horror novels; the Lost Boys are motherless children taken care of by Wendy, the Victorian Little Mother who can't wait to get out of the nursery, or rather get out of the nursery and then re-enter it as a mother. Only Peter Pan himself (like Rice's Nietzschean Lestat) boldly refuses to grow up (or in Lestat's case, grow old and die). It's perhaps interesting to note that a dead child featured centrally in the lives of both J. M. Barrie and Anne Rice: in Barrie's case, his older brother, whom Barrie would imitate (e.g. by wearing his clothes) in order to get the attention of his grieving mother; in Rice's, her daughter, who died of leukemia soon before her sixth birthday.

Adolescent Shame and Aesthetic Embarrassment

Although King's Carrie may be the ultimate account of female adolescent shame, with the DePalma movie still being discovered by new generations of teenage girls (even those who would never otherwise watch a movie made before they were born), FITA goes a step further: thanks to its “icky” incest theme, it is itself contaminated by that shame. The shame that one felt reading this smut as a pubescent girl transmutes later into an even more agonizing aesthetic shame: one can see it in the comments, essays, and blog posts by former readers of the series, who are only willing to confess their former fandom if they also excoriate Andrews's writing. The more recent the repudiation, the more hysterical the tone; the psychological mechanism is similar to the one whereby a generation of American movie critics who grew up with Jerry Lewis turned him into the bete noir of American film criticism when, as adults, they attempted to establish the seriousness of the medium, their enterprise, and their country's films in particular. Lewis, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has argued, epitomized the shame of the unruly pubescent body; but the sexuality of the persona was officially neuter, with even his lavish displays of sexualized affection for Dean Martin falling under the permissible neuter category of male puberty. In FITA, the shame that the pubescent girl feels about her changing body and biology and her curiosity about sex are projected onto the mother, who hides her children away and then forgets about them, while the book itself becomes another dirty secret, the act of incest objectifying and rationalizing the shame and embarrassment that the hazy idea of sex inspires in well-brought-up young virgins. Internet fan fiction, mainly written and consumed by young women and girls, now serves this purpose, and is aesthetically excoriated accordingly. It's perhaps to be expected that this demographic has internalized the idea that “female genres,” such as romance, are aesthetically worthless, and mixed up this cultural embarrassment with their sexual embarrassment and general adolescent shame or the shameful memory of it.

Andrews's Gothic Tropes

Andrews may not have been much of a prose writer, but, based on the names dropped in FITA, shewas a great reader, and there is a sophisticated as well as an instinctive side to her understanding and development of the Gothic genre. Take the invented name that the children's parents adopt for the family: Dollanganger calls attention to the doll-like qualities not only of the family's “all-American” beauty, but of their approach to gender roles (with Cathy as the ballerina doll and Chris as the doctor doll); it suggests the “gangliness” of adolescence and Cathy's “anger” at their mother's betrayal, as well as containing the word “gang”; and of course, as many have pointed out, it resembles “doppelganger.” Camille Paglia has written about how the profusion of doppelgangers in Gothic suggests psychological obsession and claustrophobia on the part of the writer. The Dollangangers are all doppelgangers for each other and serve as substitutes for each other: Cathy competes with her mother first for her father, then for Chris, as a substitute for her father; she wins (partly because of their sexual relationship), but only precariously, aware that Chris may at any time revert to his original love for their mother, for whom, Cathy knows, she is only a substitute.

Brother-sister incest has a respectable Gothic pedigree going back to Byron's Manfred, and Paglia has written about how Romantic incest is idealizing, with the “sister-spirit” as a manifestation of the poet's androgynous nature. FITA, however, is told from the sister's perspective. Chris is no Muse; he is, curiously, the sexually safe choice within the terms of women's romantic fiction: incest as the comfort of the familiar, a little like Isabel Archer's relationship with her cousin Ralph in James's Portrait of a Lady. Like many a romantic novel (or novel series) heroine, Cathy isn't especially in love with any of the men she seduces, but any of the others are more challenging to her than Chris – including Julian, whose “vulgar” attitude to sex she can't abide, and Bart, whom she comes closest to loving because her competition with her mother for him creates emotions that are strong enough that she mistakes them for love. But the only actual emotion Cathy is capable of feeling the love-hate (mostly hate) she feels for her mother/doppelganger, with whom she's stuck in the adolescent position of wanting to establish her own identity/wanting to be nothing like her and wanting to be just like her (the all-powerful seductress that she worshiped in childhood). She ends up with Chris not because they're Cathy-and-Heathcliff-like soul-mates, but because she can't escape the matrix of her family romance: she can't cathect onto anyone outside her immediate family. That claustrophobic psychological situation is spatially reproduced in the room and attic where they're kept prisoner, a womb-space where unpleasant emotions strangely change into pleasant ones. The reader, too, wants to return to that site of trauma, supercharged with emotion and meaning, which is why even though the second novel in the series, Petals on the Wind, is an enjoyably soapy coming-of-age and revenge story, the most exciting scene is the one where Cathy returns to Foxworth Hall to confront the Grandmother, raising the spectre of a horror that Cathy learns, to her disappointment, is now part of a past so irretrievable that revenge will always miss its mark, even though that past will haunt her for the rest of her life.

The Southern Gothic, Invalidism, and the Family Romance

One of the ways that reviewers of the new Lifetime movie adaptation dealt with their embarrassment over the subject matter of FITA was to accuse the movie of not being “campy” enough. But FITA, although full of stylized (successfully or not) dialogue and first-person narration, is the least campy of the novels actually written by V. C. Andrews. The feverish My Sweet Audrina, whose heroine must attempt, like the young J. M. Barrie, to channel the spirit of her dead older sister, “the first and best Audrina,” in order to please a parent, is easily the campiest of the novels actually written by Andrews (there are so many deaths-by-falling-down-the-stairs that it's like Ed Wood wrote a soap opera), and as such would probably best lend itself to dramatization. It also best fits into the Southern Gothic tradition exemplified by writers as diverse as Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. Like those other famous female Southern authors, Andrews found inspiration in illness, in Andrews case the arthritis that afflicted her from the time of a teenage accident; like McCullers she used a wheelchair, and like O'Connor, who moved in with her widowed mother as an invalid, she lived most (all?) of her life with her widowed mother. (All of this I've gleaned from the Wikipedia article on Andrews and a couple of web biographies.) Andrews and O'Connor were also both visual artists as well as writers; Andrews, however, did not turn to writing until she was in her 50s, and died of breast cancer early in her bestselling writing career. My Sweet Audrina features two classic Southern Gothic “grotesques”: Billie, a double leg amputee who becomes Audrina's mother-in-law as well as her dad's girlfriend, and Audrina's intellectually disabled little sister, Sylvia. The plot, however, is Henry James meets Robert Aldrich.

Unlike the angry, vengeful heroines of the Dollanganger and Casteel series, Audrina is purely passive: she's Andrews's Maggie Verver, except that the libidos and drama swirling around her belong to hillbillies instead of members of high society. Just as Maggie gets her marriage into hot water by clinging to her emotionally incestuous relationship with her father, Adam, thus driving her husband into the arms of her friend Charlotte, who's also, by the way, her stepmother, since she married her off to her father so he wouldn't be left lonely by her marriage; so Audrina, by clinging to her childhood and shrinking from the physical side of her marriage, lets her jealous cousin and illegitimate half-sister (that's right: dad had an affair with her mother's sister before he met her mother) step in and seduce her husband. Audrina, however, has a pretty good excuse for her regressive tendencies: although she thinks she's afraid of men and sex because her older sister was gang-raped and murdered in the woods, in fact she was the rape victim, although everyone in her life has conspired to persuade her otherwise.

In both the Dollanganger and the Casteel series, the heroine has younger siblings whom she feels obligated to take care of, but in My Sweet Audrina it's obvious that Sylvia – who, like Carrie in Petals on the Wind, but intellectually instead of physically, can never grow older – symbolizes Audrina's regression. Audrina has been trying throughout to escape from her controlling father and his house, but in the end, even after learning the truth, she agrees to stay because Sylvia wants to. Andrews's abused children ultimately don't want to leave the scene of trauma, which is also the cozy womb of family romance, and Audrina and Sylvia's choice reflects the one that Andrews actually made. Incidentally, this excellent essay, "V. C. Andrews and 'Disability Horror,'" by Madeleine Lloyd-Davies, avoids the hysterical or otherwise embarrassed tone of much internet commentary on Andrews and also reflects the intelligent analysis of someone who's read My Sweet Audrina a lot more recently than I have.

Performance in Inside Llewyn Davis

Towards the end of the new Coen Brothers movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, the titular character, a folk singer, plays a song about seafaring for his elderly father, who's in a nursing home and unresponsive to the world around him. After the events of the movie, Llewyn has given up on his chosen career and is taking his farewell of his father before joining the merchant marines, his father's own profession. We know from a previous discussion with his sister that he has a troubled relationship with his father, whom he has contempt for as a non-performer who “just exists.” What we're witnessing, then, is Llewyn's attempt to reconcile with his father and have a moment of connection with him before he leaves. It's significant, too, that he's trying to forge this connection through his art, which he's renouncing. We watch and listen as Llewyn sings the beautiful, moving song, wondering if Llewyn's music will be able to break through their estrangement, through his father's dementia, through the barriers of taste and personality that separate them even as Llewyn is resigning himself to becoming his father. The elderly man's face changes; there appears to be some emotion, some struggle in it, though we can't tell what it means. What will his verdict on the performance be? Then Llewyn's expression changes and he stammers out "Wow," twice, in shock. Jump to the next scene, where we were learn in another conversation between Llewyn and his sister that his father shit himself during the song.

The Sublime and the Scatological 

What does this mean? Is it a statement that art is not powerful enough to transcend all of those barriers? Is it the filmmakers' verdict on Llewyn's art? The father's? Is it an absurd juxtaposition of the sublime and the scatological, art and mortality, with no further meaning? A comment on Llewyn's egotism even when he seems to be doing something generous and loving for another person? In any case it seems to be the movie's most succinct proof that Llewyn is incapable of doing what his more successful peers effortlessly do: in the language of Bud Grossman, the Chicago impresario who told him (after another moving performance) that there's no money in his music, he can't “connect with people.” It also literalizes the rancorous metaphor of his friend's girlfriend, who's pregnant with a child who may or may not be Llewyn's, in which Llewyn turns everything he touches "to shit, like King Midas's idiot brother.”

The Coen Brothers make movies that connect with people – both critics and the public – although oddly by concocting protagonists who can't connect with people. Or so I've heard. Actually Inside Llewyn Davis is the first time I've watched a Coen Brothers movie all the way through since Barton Fink (1991). Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of that film, as vitriolic as Jean's attitude to Llewyn, so eviscerated the filmmaking duo for me that it's taken me over 20 years to want to watch another one of their movies. Ironically, Inside Llewyn Davis is Barton Fink revisited, and while it's more artful and less arty than the much earlier film, Rosenbaum's central complaints still apply: that the filmmakers refuse to commit to any side, instead condemning artists and commercial impresarios alike as phonies. If the brothers are fond of anyone at all in Barton Fink, it's John Goodman's psychopathic, pyromaniac “common man,” with his furious refrain, “I'll show you the life of the mind!” But although Goodman seems to have materialized to take revenge on Fink, the intellectual, political playwright, for his condescending delusion that he can write about the lives of ordinary people, one suspects that the brothers are able to get behind him because his nihilistic viewpoint is where their true sympathies lie. In Inside Llewyn Davis, that viewpoint is encapsulated by the encounter between father and son and art and shit in the nursing home.

The viewpoint for which the Coens seem to have the most sympathy in Inside Llewyn Davis, however, is the non-human one of the two identical (except in gender) cats: Ulysses, who starts off Llewyn's adventures by escaping when he leaves the apartment where he's crashed; and the female cat whom Llewyn mistakes for Ulysses, who accompanies him on the trip to Chicago when she's rejected by Ulysses' owners, who is abandoned by him on the highway, hit by him on his way back in a different car, and is last seen hobbling into the snowy woods in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. Nothing too bad is allowed to happen to either astonishingly resilient feline, which somehow makes the movie feel relatively gentle-spirited despite the protagonist's ill-luck and ill-behaviour. The Coens may still have contempt for humanity, but they've found a way to give their movie a heart even so, and it's a relief for the viewer, as for Llewyn, to be able to just worry about the cats rather than about the meaning, if any, of Llewyn's loser life. Cats, after all, don't seem to be troubled by the fact that they just exist.

The Good and the Great

The other big advance over Barton Fink is that it's not as simple to dismiss Llewyn as a phony when several times in the course of the film he treats us, rather beautifully, to a song. He may be an obnoxious fuck-up whose career is going nowhere, but he's a talented guitarist and singer who appears to be fully in earnest when he sings. For that reason, the movie raises, in Rorschach fashion, many more questions about art and the artist's life than Barton Fink. I went to the movie with a musician friend who confidently asserted at the end of it that the protagonist was “only mediocre” as a performer; most reviewers seem to more or less agree, with the general consensus being that Llewyn Davis is “good but not great,” and the movie a parable about what happens to artists in that category, who are, after all, more numerous than the great; a minority of reviewers, however, have thought that the protagonist is obviously talented and merely unlucky.

It's comforting, of course, to think that great artists will always be recognized, sooner or later; but I don't think we have to take that away from the movie. What I took away was the rather more unsettling notion that an artist may be as good as anyone else and yet never become successful. Everyone knows that the majority of artists are unsuccessful, and not necessarily because most of the unsuccessful artists are merely good and most of the successful ones great. First, someone in a position to help you has to believe, rightly or wrongly, that you're good, or that money can be made off of you, or both; and then you have to be able to sustain a career after the first break. It's accepted wisdom that the wise accept the verdict of those in the industry and quit when it's clear that they're getting nowhere, as Llewyn does; on the other hand, it's also accepted wisdom that many famous artists faced a lot more rejection than that without giving up; then again, sometimes going on despite years of rejection and failure really is delusional (compare Burton's Ed Wood).

But the noncommittal stance of Inside Llewyn Davis undermines an idea about art that's even more fundamental than the idea that greatness will ultimately be recognized and rewarded: the idea that we are able, without any external cues, to tell a good performance apart from a great one. How, aside from the reaction of the people in the movie, do we know that the performance we've seen is a great one? And how often, in real life, are we exposed to new music, or a new movie, or new book, without any context at all – not a murmur of buzz, not a glimpse of a review, not a word of reputation? The last time it happened to me was with Lana Del Rey's “Video Games,” a song that made me believe I'd discovered a new artist of genius; and after I went online and read that she was a label-manufactured phony, and then read all of the stuff about what an embarrassment her Saturday Night Live performance was, I doubted my impression. I'm often incredulous at the things that people think are great (especially premium cable TV shows), but I'm easily intimidated into thinking that things aren't as good as I think they are, at least if there's no vocal, influential, articulate minority taking up the cause of artist or artwork. 

So Inside Llewyn Davis, whether purposefully or incidentally, raises questions not only about the life of the artist but also about art itself. There's only one director I can think of who uses performances in his movies in such a way that the viewer is convinced that the performance we've witnessed is great even though we're unfamiliar with the performer: I'm talking, of course, about David Lynch. The two most striking instances occur in Mulholland Dr., and they are Betty's audition scene and the Club Silencio performance of “Llorando,” in which Lynch lays bare the elements that go into making us believe that a performance is great. Our ability to be moved by the performance depends on our belief that the singer is, in that moment, feeling the emotions she's singing about, even though we know that we're watching a recorded performance and that, even if it were live, the singer may just be “putting on” the emotion. It helps, too, that the song is intimately familiar and yet rendered in a foreign language so that our sense of its emotional power isn't hindered by the banal lyrics of Orbison's classic pop song. Likewise, in her audition scene Betty transforms the banal soap opera dialogue and scenario she's been given into great drama by calling upon her tortured emotional life and unearthing her dark sensuality. When Lynch has the singer collapse onstage while her pre-recorded voice goes on, he calls attention to our assumption that a great performance means the unveiling of the performer's inner life in front of our eyes. It couldn't be that the performer is faking, or miming, that experience. If the most authentic emotion can be faked, how can we ever trust that we know what's going on inside another person; and if we can't do that, how can we allow ourselves empathy? Is performance a window into the performer's soul, or a mask that the performer assumes?

The Coen Brothers' interest in performance in Inside Llewyn Davis is very different from Lynch's in Mulholland Dr. or than Jerry Lewis's in films like The Bellboy, The Errand Boy, and The Patsy: Llewyn the loser and failure is not allowed a moment even in dreams or in a fantasy sequence where his skill as a performer is unmistakably spotlighted, and his father's reaction to his song in the nursing home is at a polar extreme from Betty and Rita's tearful, epileptic/apocalyptic response to “Llorando” at Club Silencio. It would seem that one of the things that Inside Llewyn Davis is about is, after all, countering the alchemical myth of art: no matter how beautiful it may be, it cannot transform dementia into lucidity or estrangement into a miraculous rediscovery of the meaning of home and family, which is to say, the sense of presence. “It's not opera!” Llewyn shouts at the man who's beating him up in an alleyway, It's a Wonderful Life style, for heckling his wife the night before. But when he finds some opera on the radio while driving home through a snowstorm at night, the gorgeous, peaceful music becomes the soundtrack to suddenly slamming into the reappearing cat. The beauty of art offers us no shelter from the demand of other beings that we respond to their needs, or our demands on them, or from our and their complete inability to meet those needs; nor does it count as a response, although it may count as an appeal.

Critics, Artists, Idols, Fans: Camille Paglia's Intestinal Flora and Joseph Cornell's Cultural Detritus

In her brief heydey of the early 90s, my teenage idol Camille Paglia called out her teenage idol, Susan Sontag (“Notes on Camp” was published when Ms. P was 17, my age when my life was changed by Sexual Personae), for her failure to maintain her visibility and public centrality of the 60s. One can now say exactly the same thing about Paglia, although her seemingly wilful withdrawal from relevance has been less mandarin (the accusation she levelled against Sontag) than schoolmarmish. In fact, Paglia's failure has been far more conspicuous and embarrassing than Sontag's, since she herself gave us the terms by which to measure it, boasting prematurely in the first volume of Sexual Personae that its two volumes made it the longest book ever written by a woman... only for the second volume, on sports and pop culture, to never materialize.

Instead of that volume, we got two collections of provocative articles, plus a BFI monograph on Hitchcock's The Birds, in the 90s; in the new millennium, we've been gifted with one slender volume in each decade to date, the first on poetry, the most recent on the visual arts. Meanwhile Paglia has stuck industriously to her teaching gig at the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts (now University of the Arts) to which she once attributed the maintenance of her intellectual acumen (she's a real teacher, not like those celebrity academics and conference schmoozers) and, until recently, produced a rambling column for Salon.com that illustrates Paglia's decline from the late 90s to the late 00s, as steep as her previous decline from the early to late 90s. To use a Paglian analogy, Paglia's falling-off as a critic after Sexual Personae – composed in the 70s and 80s – is as striking as the difference between Lauren Bacall's glowing, fresh-faced appearance in To Have or Have Not, her breathtaking debut, and every movie afterwards, when the 19-year-old's baby fat melted away, leaving only the hard, prematurely matronly mask.  

As with To Have or Have Not, Sexual Personae has taken Paglia a long way, and she's as deserving a star as Bacall. And yet it gets worse, though not quite as bad, just yet, as Crawford and Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? By the way, how do you like this for a coincidence of the kind which Google can magically call up: Who's Afraid of Bette Davis? was released on October 26, 1962, 13 days after Whatever Happened to Martha's Baby?, Edward Albee's similarly-named play, also a bit of camp Grand Guignol about a couple of old hags tearing each other apart, opened on Broadway. Stuff like that makes me think that maybe there really is meaning and order in the universe. And that God is a drag queen.

My Little Monet

Miss P's latest, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars, hopefully bears a subtitle reminiscent of Sexual Personae's Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, but its poverty of ideas, imagination, and language is accurately represented by its thuddingly stupid title. Glittering images? Really? That's the best description of Western art that Paglia could come up with? (And although it doesn't say so in the subtitle, it's all Western art inside.) Because for me it conjures up not Bernini and Monet so much as Barbie and My Little Pony.

The title may be representative of the book's problems, but it's also the least of them. Pagsy trumpets in the polemical-as-usual Introduction, “This book is an attempt to reach a general audience for whom art is not a daily presence.” Well, goody gum-drops, but in fact Glittering Images (really?!??) can't decide whether it wants to be Art History for Dummies or revisionist in the manner of SP. So we get a really dull tour of the obligatory (Laocoon, The Death of Marat, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon), but major artists are often represented by lesser-known works, and some choices, like Donatello's Mary Magdalene, are downright strange – though the Christian denial of the flesh here is interesting if you've already read Paglia's scintillating commentary on the pagan beauty-worship of the same artist's David in SP. Never was there a starker representation of Christian spirituality=ugliness (denial of the flesh and world) and classical spirituality=beauty (physical beauty as divine) than in the juxtaposition of these two sculptures.

In making her selections for GI, no doubt Paglia went through a dilemma comparable to that of the critics who have to come up with 10 Greatest Movies lists for the Sight & Sound poll and can only produce a mish-mash of consensus masterpieces, personal favourites, and perverse selections that they hope to bring to wider attention. The book's lack of a unifying purpose or thesis could be forgiven if the individual essays were brilliant; unfortunately, they're barely diverting. The prose and thought of GI (the title's sugary-pop-song-like adjective-noun combination is picked up in the chapter titles: “Living Letters,” “Solitary Watcher,” “Satin Knights” – that pointless “Knights in White Satin” reference is worthy of an academic conference paper title – “Swirling Line,” “Melting Color,” and on and on) bring together the weaknesses of Paglia's later works, Break, Blow, Burn and The Birds, without their relative strengths. GI has the same gift-booky format as B, B, B: Paglia writes short appreciations/close readings of great poems/artworks with said poems or paintings reproduced for handy reader reference. But whereas in Break, Blow, Burn, she really did produce close readings, if nothing else, the chattier essays in GI often seem to talk about everything but the images. Is it possible that the image-worshiping Paglia is actually much better at reading literature than she is at reading visual artworks?

For some reason the essays in GI go after a shapeless, junk-pile accumulation of facts – bits of historical context, gossip, and tangential “fun facts” like the history of the yacht that the daughter of the guy in the painting is “cavorting aboard” in a photo taken by the same guy who took a photo of the guy dancing the tango, which it sort of looks like he's doing in the painting (I shit you not). This accretive style worked in The Birds, since Hollywood movie fandom can support a gossipy approach in which every detail is precious. Moreover, in that book, Paglia was still paying close attention to the details of the movie itself; in GI, in contrast, she seems bored to death by the artworks, which are accorded about half the essays' pages, or less. I agree with the blogger, a fellow Paglia fan, whose review I found on some scary right-wing website, who said that at times the essays remind him of Wikipedia, only I'd say they're like a Wikipedia entry crossed with the book review of a diligent high school student who's spent more time on the research than the writing.

Like her former mentor at Yale, Harold Bloom, and at exactly the same age (mid-60s, which for Bloom was in the mid-90s, the time of the publication of The Western Canon), Paglia seems to have completely forgotten that paragraphs are supposed to have topics. Sentence follows sentence without progress of either sense or cadence, and at times the prose is so lazy it reads like a bad translation. There's no excuse whatsoever for a construction like “tension is felt from the unnaturally compressed space.” What's wrong with “the unnaturally compressed space creates a feeling of tension”? Not good enough for her? (Incidentally, Sexual Personae is such an influence on my prose that I can't put two words in a row without thinking about Paglia. Thanks to her and that other thorn in my side, my other teenage idol, Morrissey, I bleed alliteration and assonance. My style of criticism also owes everything to SP, in case you hadn't noticed.)

Also like Bloom since the mid-90s, Paglia's decided she's too good for not only footnotes but even a bibliography, which is a shame because it makes Paglia's various historical and biographical tidbits seem about as trustworthy as Wikipedia (we may be in the age of too much information, but at least all of it's uncertain), and also because the bibliography of Sexual Personae was a treasure trove of the classics of 20^th century criticism, such as Kenneth Clark's stylish The Nude, Arnold Hauser's two-volume The Social History of Art (to date I've only flipped through it, though I've owned it for nearly 20 years), the tomes of Kenneth Burke (way too dense for me), and Leslie Fiedler's marvellous Love and Death in the American Novel, which has influenced my thinking about the novel and film almost as much as Sexual Personae influenced my thinking about life. It goes without saying that Glittering Images is not in the league of any of these works, and the reason is that Paglia has no story to tell – about the representation of the nude body in Western art or the secret triumph of romance over the realism in the novel. No thesis; no argument; no story. She told her story in SP; here she points and says, “Lookit – art is neat! And did you know that in the 1920s people liked to tango?”

Tangoing Art Deco Doctors and Soap Opera Brain Tumours

That section on the tango that I keep mocking is from what may be my favourite chapter, on Tamara de Lempicka's Portrait of Doctor Boucard, where Paglia makes a persuasive case for her personal candidate for The Only Female Artist Allowed to Exist, in place of feminist favourite Frida Kahlo, preferring Lempicka's “Garbo cheekbones” and “naked ambition” to Kahlo's “ailments, accidents, and surgeries.” It's clear that for Pagsy, Lempicka is the Madonna to Kahlo's Courtney Love, whom Pagsy's bashed in the past, even though unlike Mads, who thought Pags was a creepy stalker, Love read Sexual Personae and was influenced by it – and is much more of a companion to Paglia as a provocative 90s female celebrity.

The Lempicka chapter woke me up a little because for the first time in the book Paglia was making an original argument instead of throwing facts at the page to see what sticks. Or seemingly original, though it's clear that she was turned on to Lempicka by “Laura Claridge's riveting 1999 biography,” as she calls it. Portrait of Doctor Boucard, with its Art Deco melodrama and gaudiness, initially looks out of place among the consensus masterpieces, but as soon as Paglia mentions Mannerism and especially Bronzino it all makes sense.

The portrait is in the tradition of representations of scientists like Vermeer's Astronomer, but unlike that rapt, contemplative being, Lempicka's Boucard is an Adolphe Menjou society type who looks out of place in the lab and as though he barely has time to glance at his microscope. Paglia sees Boucard's twisty torso as a “forceful positioning” and compares it to the cavalryman in Gericault's Officer of the Chasseurs Commanding a Charge, but I see Beardsley's flighty creature of fashion, who shares not only the doctor's angular, distracted stance but also his enormous shoulder pads, which androgynizes Beardsley's woman as the fanciful flowing “lab coat” androgynizes the Boucard of Lempicka's portrait, even as it anticipates the iconic trenchcoat of Bogie's hardboiled detective.

Boucard is also a soap opera doctor, like George Brent in Dark Victory, who falls in love with his patient, Bette Davis, a wild, spoiled rich girl who discovers she's dying of a brain tumour. What does the image say about science – if anything? The doctor as hero as dashing figure of idealized masculinity (blending assertion and suave passivity) out of a Hollywood movie or magazine ad? And speaking of the accomplishments of Boucard's profession that brought new prestige to the medical profession in the 20^th century, the Lempicka chapter also contains the single most hilariously self-parodic, po-faced sentence in the book: “Boucard was a biochemist who had become a millionaire through his development and marketing of Lacteol, one of the first probiotics, which restored intestinal floral to patients with severe diarrhea.”

RESTORED IT, YOU GUYS.

George Lucas's Vulgar Aestheticism

Paglia starts off the book, in the intro, by talking about the disastrous state of the fine arts, and that theme is what gives it any shape it has, although it only comes into play towards the end. The way Paglia has told things, Jackson Pollock was the last artist to be widely perceived as a genius, an attitude of the public towards art that died with his premature death. The Pop artists who followed, by necessarily embracing popular culture, put an end to traditional fine art. In the postmodern art world, there are no central figures or styles; there is only pluralism. Although Paglia does her earnest best to make the general reader (me) understand Conceptual, Minimalist, and performance art, flooding the essays with the names of artists and descriptions of works, I came away thinking that postmodern art is a lot like postmodern science, i.e. quantum physics: the artists are all working out their highly cerebral and insular art problems in their art, whether they set it in the landscape or street or interact with the audience or not, and no non-artist cares about or can understand what they're doing.

All of which leads up to Paglia's “controversial” final-chapter nomination of George Lucas as the greatest artist of our time. Not just our greatest visual artist, mind you, but our greatest artist, period. And while this appears to be based on his entire Star Wars franchise, Paglia courts ridicule (to borrow her phrase about Lennon and Ono's Bed-In interviews) by illustrating the chapter with an admittedly extremely Paglian image of the volcano planet from Revenge of the Sith, a movie that nobody went to see except hardcore Star Wars geeks.

The basis of her nomination is, it appears, Lucas's “pioneering boldness and world impact,” this boldness a matter of embracing technology... like Ingrid Bergman and Bob Dylan. Yes, because using CGI in films is exactly like using an electric guitar in popular music, and Ingrid Bergman (whose Persona was one of the main inspirations for Paglia's concept of “sexual personae”) is a great filmmaker because... he made films, not because of his subject matter or style. Paglia spits out information about Lucas's technological accomplishments like nails, and what she has discovered about his detailed attention to what we now, in the Fandom Era, call “world-building” is indeed impressive: Lucas comes off as a genuine craftsman as well as computerized special-effects visionary. I say “visionary” because as of this moment, and for better of worse, CGI has taken over film, in the sense that the mass audience is only interested in CGI spectacles; but this too shall pass, like all pop crazes.

Paglia reports in the chapter that Lucas isn't interested in either dialogue or plot, and that may be exactly the problem with the Star Wars prequels. It's fine to be essentially an abstract filmmaker whose overwhelming focus is the visuals, but the mass audience, including myself as a child, originally fell in love with the characters of the franchise – charmingly acted, imaginatively updated archetypes. Film acting itself is more about what can be communicated without words, but that requires a director who is interested in working on, and capturing, performances. And there's no way to care about what happens to the characters in a film without plot. Although I haven't seen them due to the little bit I've read about them, based on that little bit it seems likely that Lucas's Star Wars prequels will go down in history as kitsch spectacles of frequent great beauty due to the enormous craftsmanship of the ILM team, that were however sunk as works of even popular filmmaking by the billionaire-genius's self-indulgence.

Moreover, what Paglia calls Lucas's “mission statement,” “Movies are a mass of objects moving across a large surface,” sounds like something Leni Riefenstahl might say. Our current epic CGI filmmakers are Riefenstahl's heirs, and there's as much to deplore philosophically as there is to admire technically. A certain kind of epic wants to get away from the human, and CGI helps in that process – a point made by J. Hoberman in a recent NYRB piece about Jackson's The Hobbit. And although I take Paglia's point about the cross-sections tie-in books' “contribution... to the visual education of children around the world,” when I was going to pick up one of the beautifully-illustrated children's guides for my eight-year-old nephew one Christmas, I put it back on the shelf after reflecting that after all, it's a glorification of war, with exceptionally detailed, realistic weaponry. I accept that children are interested in violence, but I can't put my own authority behind the idea that war is cool; on the contrary.

In the end Paglia convinces that fine art is in a bad state without convincing that pop culture is in a better one. If there are any artists with global impact at the moment, they probably are the CGI epic filmmakers; so if you want to equate global impact with aesthetic significance and vice versa, that's what you're left with. The “death of the artist” staged by Warhol, who tried to keep his own hand (literally and metaphorically) out of his work as much as possible, and continued by postmodern artists through other theories, together with the insular games and shock-value provocations of postmodern artists, have caused the public to lose faith in art and artists. That doesn't, however, mean that anyone other than Star Wars geeks has faith in George Lucas. And the idea of a “greatest artist of our time” was always a myth anyway, albeit one that has currency when art and the public have a healthy relationship with each other. I have no idea who the greatest artist of our era might be; if there is a single one, I have not heard of him or her. I would probably choose David Lynch as the greatest living filmmaker. INLAND EMPIRE is as abstract and plotless as anyone could wish, but it's also all about Laura Dern's performance (conveyed mainly through silent sequences or absurd, fragmented dialogue, though Lynch also does give her a pivotal, theatrical marathon speech), profoundly anchored in the human through the director-actress collaboration, exactly like Bergman's Persona, an exploration of identity that Lynch has been drawing on extensively in his most recent work.

I'll give Pags the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume she made her pronouncement about Lucas because it's more apt to generate interesting debate (about art, pop culture, and technology) than yet another critic saying what amounts to, “Oh, uh, great living filmmakers? Um, David Lynch, he's pretty good. Yeah, him.” Unfortunately, saying that George Lucas is the greatest artist of our time in 2012 is sort of like saying that Walt Disney is the greatest artist of our time in 1942. The only new thing Paglia has brought to the argument, which in itself isn't stupid (although for my own part I do not care), is this “great artists of the technological age embrace technology” crap, or, the “art cannot be good any longer unless it uses the latest technology” position, which is indicative of the actual thought that Paglia has put into the essays in Glittering Images: exactly none.

These Fragments I Have Shored 

Joseph Cornell is not among Paglia's artists, a perhaps surprising omission given his fan-worship of the female stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, which Paglia shares, and his frankly devotional, religious attitude towards them and to other female performers, of which Paglia would approve. Wouldn't it have done more good to acquaint newcomers to art history with a work like Cornell's Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall (1946) than to include Warhol's Marilyn Diptych (1962), which is as familiar to even those with no interest in art whatsoever as the Mona Lisa? But Paglia seems ignorant of Cornell, not even mentioning him in the context of Eleanor Antin or Walter De Maria's boxes, although Cornell was making box art decades earlier.

As detailed in Deborah Solomon's Utopia Parkway – the evocative title comes from the distinctly unromantic street in Queens where Cornell lived for decades with his widowed mother and disabled younger brother – the reclusive, celibate Cornell spent his spare time scavenging flea markets, dime stores, Woolsworths, and second-hand bookstalls for cheap mass-produced objects and images and texts for his extensive dossiers on 19^th century ballerinas and opera divas and glamourous Hollywood actresses, which he then brought into odd, graceful, mysterious juxtaposition in his collages and boxes. Besides female performers, other motifs of the boxes over the years included birds, sky charts, hotels, and Cornell, who did not draw or paint, also appropriated images from the paintings of the great masters.

Cornell shared Warhol's interest in machines, but whereas Warhol saw machines as impersonal, passive recording devices (hence his aspiration to be one), Cornell's machines are interactive and, like Duchamp's masturbatory chocolate grinding machine, productive of pleasure. At present, wed to our innumerable digital devices as we are, I think we see machines in terms more of homely Cornellian amusement than of futuristic Warholian anxiety.

Cornell also beat Warhol to making avant-garde movies, first editing forgotten, discarded films with results like the dreamy, hypnotic Rose Hobart (which incurred the wrath of Dali, who, to the dismay of the nervous and timid Cornell, swore that the American artist had stolen the idea of how to make a surrealist film out of his brain), then collaborating with underground filmmakers who shot footage under his direction. But Cornell's relationship to pop culture, unlike Warhol's, was essentially romantic: Warhol reproduces the experience of being assaulted by garish images of sex, violence, and product, a world in which Liz Taylor, Elvis Presley, and Campbell's Soup (or Jennifer Aniston, Justin Bieber, and iPods) are our intimate familiars whether we like it or not; Cornell, in contrast, is interested not in the big, triumphant brands, but in the discards and detritus of pop culture. Cornell loves pop culture transfigured by the pathos of its own transience. The destiny of pop culture, for Cornell, is the opposite of the destiny of art: to not last, and therefore to inspire a Proustian yearning for the past. Part of his project as an artist is to recover the irrecoverable – like Proust, except that he has projected his personal memories onto impersonal objects and beautiful, glamourous movie stars, who, as the appellation suggests, are as distant as constellations. And this pathos touches Cornell as well, the ultimate collector-fan who lived only through pop culture. Cornell anticipated not only Pop Art but also our internet Age of Fandom and the nostalgic hipster appropriation of the mass culture of their youth.

Cornell, Hipsters, and Twee Aesthetics

Cornell, however, is entirely without self-protective hipster irony; he belongs to the line of pop-loving major American artists with a broad strain of childlike naivety, which includes Warhol and David Lynch. Notably, all three were religious, though none of them Protestants: Warhol was raised Catholic, while Cornell found Christian Science as an adult and Lynch Transcendental Meditation. Lynch's twisted version of American pop culture is his surrealist reimagining of the “innocent” 1950s and early 60s of his youth: like Cornell, he's a fan of “teeners” (Cornell's Lynchian word for “teenagers”). Also like Cornell, he's fascinated by performers (usually but not always female) and performances, and is as much of an obsessive connoisseur of diner pie and coffee or a chocolate milkshake at Big Bob's as Cornell was of Automat pie, soda pop, and luncheon rooms where he watched the drab young waitresses with empathy, desire, and perhaps a wistful sex-crossing identification. (In her chapter on Manet's At the Cafe, Paglia suggests that the artist may empathize with the careworn, dreamy working girl staring into space on the left bottom of the painting.) Unlike Warhol and Lynch, however, Cornell never succeeded in making his own curious personality into a brand, possibly because by the time of the full ascendency of the mass media in the 1960s he was already a Beckettian depressed old man.

I see a continuity between Cornell's sensibility and the anti-ironic “twee” strain of hipsterism that's perhaps been most successful in indie music, where it's epitomized by bands like Animal Collective and of Montreal, the latter of which essentially is the elfin Kevin Barnes, whose pop sensibilities are matched only by the aggressive manic-depression related in his autobiographical lyrics and his Kate Bush-like natural affinity for the theatrical and avant-garde. The nature themes of Animal Collective, which seem like they're on the border between environmentalism and the nerd orientation, made notorious by the internet, “furry,” also rhyme with Cornell's concerns. Cornell stuck to birds – like fellow mother-dominated, candy-munching, reclusive object-maker Norman Bates – but his younger brother Robert, who was afflicted with cerebral palsy, and for whom Cornell felt a twinlike closeness, made drawings of an imaginary world of animal characters that sounds like the children's books envisioned by Jerry Lewis's unbearably twee, infantile, comics-addicted character in Artists and Models (1955), Frank Tashlin's pre-Pop satire of pop-crazed America in the form of one of its most characteristic products, a Martin and Lewis vehicle.

In Artists and Models, Martin and Lewis play bachelor best buddies, an aspiring artist and aspiring writer, who are practically wed to each other and who have an older-younger brother relationship of caretaking and dependency similar to Joseph and Robert's. It's as if the eccentric, unworldly Cornell brothers occupied the same twee fantasy world, of which Robert's was the even more regressive version. After losing his brother Cornell made collages of some of his drawings, which Solomon, in common with the rest of the art world, dismisses as possessing value for Cornell only. The hero of Robert's animal universe was The Mouse King, and in Artists and Models Lewis poses for Dorothy Malone's successful commercial artist as his own mouse character and spends most of the film's climax in a cumbersome, huge-bellied mouse costume, female-identified through his comical “pregnancy” like the archetypal clown. (And that, folks – the symbolic femininity of clowns – I learned from Sexual Personae.) Cornell-like, Lewis's character is stuck in a perpetual adolescence due to his sexual fixation on a fantasy-woman from his comics, the Bat Lady, which leaves him unable to respond to real women.

Solomon, whose psychology is very basic, views Cornell as a tragic figure of thwarted sexuality and independence, and there's little doubt that his was a Jamesian unlived life, though it's hard to say which caused which, his fear of direct experience or his unusually vivid fantasy life. Whichever it was, I find it hard to share Solomon's head-shaking view, even though it's clear that Cornell's depressive tendencies killed him relatively young, a fate he shared with a twee artist of an earlier era, the manic-depressive, nature-loving late Victorian religious poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was a celibate like Cornell but unlike Cornell was probably homosexual in orientation. In his early 60s Cornell suffered several losses: his brother died, then his mother, as well as the drug-addicted young waitress who may have been the great love of his life, although they never had a relationship. In a movie melodrama-like conflation of Of Human Bondage and Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, the young woman, together with her boyfriend, robbed the naive older artist of several of his boxes. Far more selfless, or masochistic, than either Leslie Howard or Edward G. Robinson, Cornell reluctantly pressed charges only to turn around and post her bail, and she repented and left the boyfriend only to end up murdered by a mentally ill acquaintance. Bereft of the two family members, brother-twin and mother, with whom he'd merged his identity and shared a home for his entire life, and the fallen woman he'd hoped to rescue in an imaginary Victorian scenario, Cornell shriveled up emotionally and lost his will to live.

Cornell practised what Paglia would call the masochistic feminine art of self-affliction; like the young Morrissey, whose private Catholic iconography of British northern women and androgynous male movie actors was displayed on The Smiths' album and single sleeves, Cornell made himself into a female Victorian invalid, like Henry James's sister Alice. Cornell's difference from constitutionally similar artists like Morrissey, James, Kevin Barnes, or Emily Dickinson, with whom he identified, is that at no point – as far as I can tell at this preliminary stage of familiarity with his work – did he release his aggression, either in his work or in his life. Instead he seems to have renounced it completely – the impossible, for a Paglian like me, even if that renunciation did help to kill him. Cornell seems to have channeled deviant, serial killer-like impulses of obsessive collecting and compulsive arrangement of his materials into an effervescent creativity from which all traces of the impulses' violence have been erased. This is in stark contrast to David Lynch, whose startling habit of examining animal carcasses out of curiosity is in keeping with the obscene violence in his work, which is locked in Manichean battle with his eccentric vision of innocence. As in Henry James, the price in Lynch of imagining innocence is imagining its violation.

To bring us back full circle: Cornell's last major celebrity crush/Muse was Susan Sontag, perhaps because she was the first pop-age female intellectual, posing languidly in publicity photos, radiating celebrity glamour. Since Cornell, as Solomon points out, preferred female celebrities with a touch of androgyny to them, creating Garbo and Bacall “portrait” boxes and turning Hedy Lamarr into a Renaissance pageboy in a collage, it's no wonder that he was so thrilled by Sontag, with her combination of “feminine” flirtatiousness and sensuality, on the one hand, and “masculine” severity and intellect, on the other. Sontag was an icon of that brief, brilliant period when a wide public remained interested in a high culture that was being invigorated by popular culture and that was, itself, part of popular culture, before high culture became so interested in pop culture that it lost interest in itself.

Coda: My Growing List of Men Who Look Like Samuel Beckett or Each Other