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

Curb Your Enthusiasm: TV, The State of Criticism, and the Dramatic Potency of Abusive Relationships

Remember back in 2000, when Big Brother brought reality TV to North America and everybody thought that this was the end of television drama? Or by “everybody” perhaps I mean me. But I couldn't have been more wrong. TV drama was about to undergo a renaissance, beginning with HBO and Showtime and later extending to basic cable. First came The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, then The Wire, Mad Men, and now, Breaking Bad. TV that's such a pop culture phenomenon you can't escape it; TV that's everywhere; TV that you have to watch or be profoundly exiled from the cultural loop. It's not just what everyone's watching, it's what everyone has to watch.

There is a blanket consensus among TV critics, whether writing for established, elitist magazines like The New Yorker or for pop culture websites like The AV Club and Slant, about the quality of the trendiest shows that baffles me. It's not just that there are no dissenting voices: there is nothing to temper the breathlessly laudatory terms in which these shows are praised, as if there weren't five centuries of Western literature to measure them against; as if the “showrunners” (a term recently introduced into cultural discourse) of premium cable shows invented drama roughly three decades ago.

The 1960s French intellectuals who defended the value of studio-era Hollywood cinema and their American acolytes, like Andrew Sarris, may have been guilty of taking themselves as seriously, but at least they were struggling against a cultural consensus when they argued for the art of American movies. In contrast, online TV critics are setting the cultural consensus when they praise the premium cable show du jour. And this strikes me as a shame, because I once hoped that the internet might be a place where you could find writers with a healthy scepticism towards cultural trends. But I couldn't have been more wrong about that, either: the internet has turned into a place where giddy praise of pop culture poses as pop culture criticism. And since practically no one at all is paying any attention to the traditional arts, pop culture criticism is criticism today. And it's not good enough. Pop culture deserves better criticism; it deserves more critical criticism.

In fact, however, I'm less worried about pop culture than I am about the state of criticism. A small portion of pop culture has become very smart, but criticism has dumbed way down. Not its prose, not its analysis of tropes, not its close readings – that's all as sophisticated and earnestly thorough as you can ask for. But it's dumbed down its expectations.

And Then There's Robot Chicken

One problem with regarding TV as an art form is that it offers nothing new as a medium. To cinephiles like Pauline Kael it was a repetition of cinema on a small scale, visual-kinetic storytelling with none of the power and grandeur of the big screen. Technically TV shows are serial drama, which was introduced by radio, but no one has ever seemed much excited about that novelty in either medium. Yet it gave rise to the familiar TV format, which may be summarized briefly as: a group of characters have adventures. Although most TV shows have a protagonist (the owner of the workplace where the show takes place or the business the show is about; the character whose name is in the title; the character who narrates; the normal one; the newcomer; the boss or leader or captain or mother or father, although sometimes the son if the show is after a youth audience; the one with the skill or ability or problem the show is about; in the case of some comedies, the star, even if their character isn't named after them and in the title), TV shows are much less focused on the protagonist than either the majority of novels written for adults or stage dramas. An adventure-of-the-week show can have as few as two regular cast members, the protagonist and the sidekick, and in a long-running show the sidekick can be replaced. The pure soap opera (the daytime soap) has no protagonist; it's about families and couples. Some sitcoms give it away in their title that protagonist duties are shared (Mork and Mindy, Laverne and Shirley, Will and Grace). The father is the protagonist of most family sitcoms, but sometimes a sitcom really is about the entire family, like The Simpsons. If the daughter is the protagonist, you may have a sitcom-soap hybrid, like Mama's Family.

Serial drama, it seems, is a democratic genre at both its poles, the sitcom and the soap, one made up of self-contained episodes in which at best only the romance between the leads develops, the other of ongoing dramatic developments: the sitcom is virtually always about a family (whether nuclear or metaphorical); the soap opera is always about multiple families. The affection the viewer feels for the characters, which is necessary for the sustained interest the medium demands, is built up by watching the family-like ways in which the characters interact every week. In TV's implicit epistemology, “family” is the only way in which we know how to relate to the rest of the world. This has sometimes been mistaken for a cozy worldview, but the nuclear, workplace, and friend families portrayed on TV have often been deeply dysfunctional since long before premium cable.

Adventurous TV doesn't so much challenge the established genres and sub-genres as see what can be done with them: it's a question of how dark and complex the writers can make the soap, how dark and messed-up they can make the sitcom. TV is only ever dark and complex relative to TV, not to other media (messed-up, I'm not sure about); and as for experimental, the closest you'll get to that other than half a dozen Twin Peaks episodes is the pop surrealism of some children's fantasy programming and animation. I'm thinking of British fantasy from the 60s and 70s and Henson's Muppets in the 70s (Looney Tunes shorts, being made for theatrical release, don't count); but for a contemporary examples there's the stop-motion-animated Robot Chicken, which updates the pop nihilism of MAD magazine in the 50s in ways so vulgar and deranged that Robert Warshow might have taken back his endorsement of Krazy Kat if he knew where this was going. But then, we're post-South Park, and post-internet.

“She Wouldn't Even Harm a Fly”

Breaking Bad is the first critically untouchable TV series that hasn't made me fear for the critics' sanity. It's not that I think it's notably well-written, and I wouldn't quite count myself a fan, but at least it's not just another campy soap, like Mad Men or the colossally stupid Downton Abbey. I like Breaking Bad but I don't love it; I watched the first four seasons on Netflix in a couple of weeks with half-attention, but I kept watching.

Warning: SPOILERS for up to the end of Season Four.

The show starts out with a premise combining the premises of two premium cable hit shows, Weeds and Dexter: a genteel white parent launches a career in drugs to get money for their family and must make their way in the violent but authentic world of the non-white Other; in the process developing a criminal double life under the nose of a sibling who works in law enforcement. On my Netflix home page, Dexter and Walter glower out at the viewer like the white dude badasses they are.

In no time at all, however, Breaking Bad has virtually nothing to do with drug manufacturing or dealing. Walter no sooner cooks a batch than all hell breaks loose and he spends the rest of the season struggling to survive. If the show is about anything, it's about the relationship between Walter and his “partner,” Jesse, a former high school student of Walter's. But where that relationship comes from or what it's about is, again, enigmatic.

Walter and Jesse's relationship is about the only humanly recognizable one in the series; it's certainly the only relationship that seems to have any meaning for Walter, despite his posturing about his family, whom he pursues with the tenacity of a stalker after his wife, Skylar, discovers his double life and tries to leave him. He seems to view his family as possessions, and as we'll see, he treats Jesse the same way, but at least there's passion in his grotesquely abusive and destructive relationship with his partner. His wife is viewed satirically from the outset as a spouter of platitudes, only taking on a certain dignity and interest after she goes over to the criminal side of the plot, while his son is barely characterized – moody teenager, victim, or daddy-worshipping angel as the plot demands. For his part, Walter seems incapable of relating to them except through lies and platitudes. None of these family members know each other, which makes it difficult to believe that any very valuable relationship exists between them; instead I often felt during the first two seasons that I was watching a satirical Douglas Sirk-style characterization of a middle-class family, except that the effect didn't seem altogether intentional.

For me the show kicked into gear in the third season, with the introduction of Gus, and really started to fly in the fourth season, with the establishment of a chess game between Mike and Gus on the one hand and Walter on the other, with Jesse as pawn. By this time most of the drama was going on between Walter, Jesse, Mike, Gus, and Saul, with Gus as an entertaining villain and Saul as an entertaining comical crooked lawyer. Obviously, this is a show that's all about men and their world of one-upmanship; Skylar and her sister are the only regular female cast members in the whole series, and except for Jesse, none of the men in the criminal plot seem to ever give women a thought. It's hinted that Gus's relationship with his murdered partner was homosexual, which extends Gus's function of Clare Quilty-like double for Walter to Walter's relationship with Jesse. Certainly, whenever Jesse tries to establish a heterosexual life for himself, independent of Walter, Walter attacks it – responsible for his crossing of the Moral Event Horizon at the end of the second season and again at the end of the third. In the first instance, he's just getting rid of a “Yoko,” as Saul sulkily dubs Skylar after she takes charge of her husband's money laundering (she was a bookkeeper, you see), but the second and, in dramatic terms, morally graver attack – that's got to be pure spite.

Season Four's admirably constructed, darkly comic melodrama of manipulation reminded me of the chess game between Maggie, her father Adam, and her friend and stepmother Charlotte in Henry James's The Golden Bowl, in which Maggie marries off father and friend only to discover that Charlotte is having an affair with Maggie's husband; she then has to figure out how to vanquish Charlotte and win Amerigo back, in a long and exhausting mental game in which no one may be directly confronted and in which every move Maggie makes against her rival compromises her impeccable moral credentials. Similarly, after Gus moves against Walter by using Mike to seduce Jesse away, Walter must figure out how to win Jesse back, which he does in a desperate gambit that delivered the best season finale audience anagnorisis I've seen since “Death is my gift” on Buffy, though to very different emotional effect.

Again, there's no explanation for the destructive passion that exists between Walter and Jesse. Walter is either telling Jesse he's shit or saving his life, and it's hard to understand why he does either, and impossible to understand why Jesse remains loyal to Walter: he behaves like Ariel but gets treated like Caliban by Walter the irascible chemist-magician. Their sadomasochistic relationship fills up practically the whole universe of Breaking Bad, in a grand tradition of love-hate fictional character relationships that extends from Lovelace and Clarissa to George and Martha to, oh, Sam and Diane. In a couple of striking episodes that evoke the starkness, simplicity, and claustrophobia of modernist theatre, “Four Days Out” from Season Two and the even more stylized “Fly” from Season Three, Walter and Jesse respectively spend the episodes stuck in the middle of the desert facing likely death under absurd conditions (all because Jesse forgot the key in the ignition of the RV) and trying obsessively to kill a fly in Gus's lab, which with its bulky equipment and shiny red floors looks like some circle of hell envisioned by Samuel Beckett via 1970s sci fi. I can't recall the last time a TV show was confident enough in its writing, or in writing, to offer up episodes consisting entirely or almost entirely of dialogue between the two main characters. I only wish I found the characters compelling enough to remember any of that dialogue, instead of finding them vaguely, distantly fascinating.

The Great Man and The Girl

Speaking of destructive, obsessive relationships: I was surprised by the furor, particularly in England, over the HBO-BBC TV movie The Girl, about the relationship between Tippi Hedren and Hitchcock. The British are sure protective of their cultural institutions, and in this case it's turned into cries of “How dare that little slut make up stories about a great man” vs. feminist rejoinders of “How dare you men not believe a woman who says she was sexually harassed?” Step right up and choose an archetype to irrationally defend: the victim-woman or the great man.

For my part, I heard the stories about Hitch and Hedren years ago, mainly, I think, in Camille Paglia's BFI monograph on The Birds. That's because I am actually a Hitchcock fan, and do occasionally read a book about him. Hedren's stories seemed perfectly plausible given other things known about Hitch through his own admission as well as what anyone can see: that he was repulsive in appearance and had never had sex with anyone but his homely wife, in a marriage that, by the time of The Birds, had been celibate for years.

As for why other Hitchcock blondes didn't have the same experience with him, that makes perfect sense to me as well: Hedren was nobody when Hitchcock cast her in The Birds, whereas after Psycho he'd risen to a position of unprecedented power in Hollywood. He simply couldn't have gotten away with it with any of his other leading ladies. And then, too, as a nobody with the quality of impassivity that Hitch had always valued in his blondes, Hedren was a blank slate; Hitchcock may have thought he could play Svengali (an obvious reference that The Girl makes at one point) like Scottie in Vertigo. However, since he was dealing with a real woman, not a character written for him, he was in for a rude surprise.

Believing all of this as Hitchcock (and I do happen to believe Hedren's stories, which does not, of course, mean I'm right) has had no effect whatsoever on my opinion of him as a filmmaker: I think he's a genius. If anyone finds such stories shocking in association with Hitchcock, they evidently haven't been paying a lot of attention to his best films, which are precisely about sexual obsession, voyeurism, and the physical and/or psychological torture of his blondes. Not that it follows that an artist will act out the obsessions of his art, but surely Hitchcock fans shouldn't find it surprising that a human being could act as the Hitchcock character does in The Birds.

As a movie, The Girl is not very interesting if you already know the stories: although I only caught about an hour of the movie on HBO, it adds little to what I've already read and appears to be directly dramatizing incidents recounted by Hedren or others, with loads of exposition and little attempt to interpret the material. (There's a bit of pop psychology here and there, but it's talk, again; the motivations aren't dramatized.) However, I “got” the dramatic interest the story does have even from that partial viewing: I understood that the movie was about a battle of wills between a powerless and vulnerable but strong young woman and a powerful young man, in which the woman refuses to be crushed. The value of the movie is in providing inspiration for other sexually harassed young women – or really for anyone struggling with a huge power imbalance in a relationship, to which men are hardly immune. The interviews I've now read on the internet with Hedren on the movie have confirmed that this was the intention. It pains me to think that you would have to be a woman to understand and appreciate what the movie was doing, but from the reaction of male reviewers and commenters on the internet, for whom the movie is character assassination or at least “one-sided,” it appears to be the case. A movie about Hitchcock that's not about Hitchcock? Then the title wasn't kidding.

The reaction to the movie is ultimately more interesting than the movie itself – and so are Hedren's interviews, in which she fills in more of the picture and of her perspective. She speaks, for example, of how her moral and religious upbringing gave her strength in the situation, which was not apparent from the hour or so of The Girl I watched. Ultimately, the Hedren-Hitch story is an inspiration for young women in a curiously conservative way. Hitchcock's movies with cool blonde heroines inherit the rape theme of the British novel that goes back to Clarissa, but the Hedren-Hitch relationship, as recounted by Hedren, much more closely resembles the plot of Clarissa than anything he put on film – with the difference that instead of being sexually irresistible, like the diabolical Lovelace, Hitch was the opposite. Hedren was not only physically, but also morally repulsed by his sexual attention, and no doubt Hitch bombarded her with vulgarity all the more in an effort to break down the reserve that attracted him. 

The Pleasures of Incomprehension

In the article “Child's Play,” New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum notes that despite Vince Gilligan's daring in pulling the moral carpet right out from under Walter at the end of Season Four, fans have found ways to justify Walter's reprehensible action – an action that makes him arguably worse than his supposed double, Gus, or at least every bit as bad. I'm sure this is nothing new; I'm sure the readers of Clarissa found ways to justify Lovelace's rape of the heroine. They must have, since fans (surely female readers among them, who were surely Richardson's main readership) wanted Clarissa to forgive and agree to marry Lovelace. Never mind if the writer wants to portray a character's tragic moral downfall; the reader/viewer's desire for two characters with chemistry to get together and live happily ever after, or to root for the protagonist, trumps all merely fictional crimes, no matter how great their magnitude.

Didn't Nabokov definitely prove that in Lolita? We forgive Humbert the ultimate taboo crime because he's the sole protagonist, the narrator in fact; we're stuck with his point of view; and he's charming. How much do we forgive Walter because he's positioned as “normal” and “safe”? He's a WASP, middle-class, middle-aged high school teacher and husband and father with children, and so, even though we've had more evidence of his anger management problems and seen him commit worse crimes every season, we continue to assume that he must be a good guy after all. Whereas what we learned in the paradigm-shifting Season Four finale is that we weren't on the side of good (however deeply compromised); we were simply, contingently, on a side in a war between identically vile individuals.

Like much of the best television drama of recent decades, Breaking Bad succeeds in keeping the objective stakes for the characters high, delivering dramatic gratifications unknown to stage drama since the Greeks and certainly absent from 20^th century stage drama, whether in its middle class or avant-garde manifestations. Because of our pleasure in these high objective stakes, we forgive TV drama the silliness of fantasy – plots about saving the world from evil or overthrowing psychotic drug lords. My problem with accepting Breaking Bad either as “great TV” or great drama, period, isn't so much that Walter is too awful and Jesse too passive for me to care much about them, as that I don't understand what the stakes of their relationship are. I know why Clarissa and Lovelace can't live with or without each other; I understand the fantasy and mutual disappointment that bind George and Martha. But I don't understand what Walter and Jesse need from each other, practically or psychologically, and even in TV land, “subtextual homoeroticism” can't explain everything.

It's not unlike my reaction to this year's critically-acclaimed film The Master, which was also about a warped father-son love affair between an aimless younger man and an older man who at least offers the semblance of authority, although in this case it was the younger man with anger management problems. At least, however, the reviews of The Master that I found online through Rotten Tomatoes acknowledge how tremendously strange the film is. So far I'm willing to say about Breaking Bad: it's strange, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. I think I might like TV criticism better if it would linger with me in incomprehension more often, rather than rushing to a verdict. It's safe to say that until you don't understand everything, you don't have an art form.  

In which I discover Goodreads, Archer, and Brideshead Revisited, basically

For the past few days I've been fooling around with Goodreads, after a friend mentioned it again. I've developed a fidgety past time of cataloguing my reading, so I thought I might as well do it on the internet, like everyone else. My Goodreads account isn't a matter of boasting, though; it's more of a source of shame.

As I suspected, despite the designation “reader” being at the core of my identity, I haven't actually read that much. In the internet era, anyone who might be timidly inclined to congratulate themselves on their knowledge of literature or film has learned that the true bibliophile has read thousands, not hundreds, of books, as the true cinephile has watched thousands, not hundreds, of movies. If you exclude the picture books and children's novels I read as a child, or the popular fiction I read from 10 to 15 (probably around 80 novels), from 12 to nearly 37 I've only read around 300 “books.” I suspect, based on just how slow and picky a reader I am, that in another 25 years I will have only read another 300, at most. In fact, such is my desire to be free of the obligation to read the thousands and tens of thousands of great books out there, that I'm toying with the idea of drawing the line and not reading any more fiction after my 50s, except perhaps new works. Right now, my “to read” tag contains around a hundred books, and I don't particularly want it to grow much more; the only books I want to add to it are those I haven't heard of yet, new ones especially.

Now look at this picture, which I will come back to at the end of this post:

In the meantime, back to dry reflections that are only of interest to myself. 

Of course “books” is a dubious way to quantify one's reading. Though not so dubious that I don't think it gives a fairly accurate representation of my shame. First, individual plays and some long short stories, essays, and poems count as a “book,” but so do collections of them. I'm inclined to choose the anthology I read if I can find it in the database; however, that doesn't allow you to rate the individual works in it.

Other kinds of reading are left out entirely. It's hard to say where to draw the line, of course: do magazine articles on how to apply eyeshadow count as part of your “reading”? Does the newspaper? At the moment I follow the NYRB and LRB, and several online literary sites; in university I had to read all kinds of academic essays and book chapters; as a teenager I read a lot of criticism for pleasure. I could track down some of those books, but it seems pointless; I wasn't reading out of interest in the essay-writer, but in the book under discussion, the same way I might, now, read a blog post without taking note of the author if I find it through a google-search for a topic. Such reading is enormously important in helping me form my opinions, but authorial “anonymity” seems an essential part of it. On the other hand, I've included classics of criticism in my Goodreads catalogue.

Another inaccuracy is that I often can't find the translation I read, or not without searching through many pages, which I don't have the patience to do. The ratings seem to apply to particular works, not editions – meaning not translations either. I can't help feeling odd recommending a translation I didn't read. The difference a translation makes is obvious in the case of two different collections of Robert Walser that I rated, with different translators: one got 5 stars from me, the other 2. In rare cases I couldn't even find the work, in any edition, either on its own or in a collection – for example, I found Colette's Innocent Libertine, but not its sequel, Minne.

Other interesting quantifications that Goodreads allows me to perform on my reading: I have forgotten nearly a quarter of what I've read (mostly books I read before the age of 21); and the books I read as a teenager account for nearly a third of my reading. (Which I suppose makes sense, since that was nearly a decade of my life, and since then there has been another decade and another near-decade.) Books I read for university, on the other hand, account for only a miniscule amount of my reading, which doesn't surprise me, although it was even less than I'd thought.

Reading, Memory, Mortality

Preparing my Goodreads catalogue has made me reflect on what I've only thought about glancingly in the past: what it means to “remember,” or not remember, a book. To begin with, I was surprised and pleased to discover that in about 80 per cent of cases I remembered the covers of the books I read (which is how I knew what editions I'd read) even if I read them 20 years ago or more, no longer own them, or have them in storage and have seldom looked at them since. On the other hand, if the editions I read were clothbound volumes from the library or purchased second-hand, they'd be impossible to identify even if Goodreads included pictures of hardcovers without their dust jackets. In some cases I selected editions that I owned at one point, although I may have first read – or only read – another edition from the library.

Some prolific authors I've read in numerous collections over many years – such as Freud, whom I've read in volumes I've owned and in volumes I've taken out from the library. I know which works I've read, but I can't always remember which collection they're in. If I took the volume out from the library I was only interested in a particular essay and would have left everything else in the volume alone. With Emerson, again, I've read him in a number of editions, both owned (second-hand, new) and taken out from the library; I summarized this in Goodreads by choosing a complete works I've never touched and tagging it with “partial reads.”

Reading is, simply, much less tidy than the idea that one reads authors in the form of particular, discrete volumes assumes. Again, if I read a play in an anthology of drama for university, I'm disinclined to look up the anthology and mark it as even a “partial read,” since I may have read less than a third of it for the course; instead I'll find and review a random edition of the play; however, I will also have no idea who the translator was if it was a foreign play.

But the question of recalling the content of a book is the most fascinating, and depressing, of all. In many cases, I don't remember the book itself, but plot summaries and thematic analyses from the criticism I've read (e.g. Pale Fire). In most cases, even if I can only recall one or two scenes from the book, I do remember my reaction: it may have been violently negative (1 star), or blissful (4 or 5 stars), or indifferent and a little contemptuous (2 stars), or indifferent but respectful (3 stars): there you have my interpretation of the 5-star system for rating books (subjective in all cases, no doubt). There are two cases where I feel I can't give a book a rating even if I do remember it: if I didn't actively dislike it, but the pleasure I got from it did not outweigh the effort, and consequent frequent boredom, of reading it (the case with monsters like Paradise Lost and Middlemarch); and if I read it largely for its reputation of being sexually subversive (the case with many books I read as a teenager, such as Naked Lunch and Story of the Eye).

In almost all cases where a film adaptation (or, even better, audio book) hasn't prompted my memory and I haven't read much criticism of the book, I will not remember most of the events in any novel or play I haven't read several times without looking up a summary online. Because I'm such a slow reader, I seldom re-read; exceptions include the Shakespeare plays I've read (most of them twice or three times, Hamlet around a dozen times), Jane Austen's novels (most of them twice, Pride and Prejudice around half a dozen times), Henry James's Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove (twice each), Jane Bowles's Two Serious Ladies (twice), and a few other favourite plays (e.g. Importance of Being Earnest, Streetcar Named Desire, Hedda Gabler). “Pure” cases of forgetting a novel include Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which I read as a teenager and remembered enjoying, but didn't recall a single event from it, and The Brothers Karamazov, which I read in my late 20s and enjoyed, but couldn't recall a thing that happened in it almost immediately afterwards. To my mortification, I'm in that position with Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives and 2666 now: although I read both recently and loved them more than almost anything else I've read, I recall few of the characters by name and very little of what happened to them. In this case, though, I will certainly re-read.

Then there's the problem of applying ratings to books you haven't read in over a decade. As I said, I can always recall my reaction even if I can't recall anything about the book; that doesn't, however, mean I'd have the same reaction if I read it now – either again or for the first time. Many Goodreads users mention this phenomenon and give the context of their reading in their reviews. The sense of dissonance arises when trying to list one's all-time favourite books; it would be more accurate, perhaps, to list them by decade, keeping to the books read that decade. Or even by year.

Films, oddly, seem to be a different case, at least for me. It's far easier to rewatch a film than to reread a book, and while I may like a film slightly more or slightly less than the first time I saw it in subsequent decades, my tastes in film were more formed by my 20s then my tastes in literature will ever be: there is nothing I liked or loved in my 20s (in contrast to my teens) that I'm likely to repudiate now, although there are things I hated in my 20s that I may appreciate now. My taste in films follows the course that Northrop Frye considered ideal for the literary critic: an increasing catholicism. (Though, I have to admit, incrementally increasing.) I can't think of many books I've loved that I'd repudiate now, either, but I'm not sure that Pride and Prejudice would have had such an impact on me if I hadn't read it at 16, or Portrait of a Lady or Wings of the Dove if I hadn't read them in my early 20s. Often, my favourite novels are those in which I powerfully identify with the protagonist due to perceived psychological or circumstantial similarities. One may consider this a limited response to literature, but the fact is that I expect literature to translate my experience into literary terms, and in the process help me to make sense of it and help to make it more endurable. I do not have that expectation of film; I expect, from a film, to be entertained, perhaps moved, perhaps even gain a little insight into myself, but I don't expect it to explain me to myself. For one thing, movies usually only follow the main character's life for a few weeks or months; novels follow the main character or characters for years, concentrating on a period of formative development and typical experiences – growing up, struggling to acquire money or achieve fame, falling in love, falling out of love, getting married, getting divorced. Movies are a type of drama, and also (as Hitchcock, I think, pointed out) related to the short story: they deal with a particular event or episode in a character's life that changes them forever. (Often, it destroys them.) The novel is... the novel. It encourages the application of one's entire life story to the character's entire life story. In the best cases, it encourages the conscious or unconscious reassessment of one's entire life story, or large portions of it.

There is another kind of book I can't review, and those are the books that changed my life as a teenager. With the exception of Paglia's Sexual Personae, the most important of them, which I gave 5 stars; I am still reasonably confident that it's a masterpiece, though every year that I have to hear more out of Paglia shakes my confidence. I'm also reasonably confident that Ellmann's Oscar Wilde is a masterpiece of the biography genre, although some of its interpretations have since been challenged; however, I can't review it, because the 5 stars wouldn't be for that, but for the impact it had on me when I read it at 13. What one reads as a teenager has an impact that nothing ever will again, because it forms one's identity and view of the world. One is also, of course, unconsciously shaped in many little ways by the things one reads, watches, and listens to as a child and teenager; but I don't believe that any of it is as important as the conscious influences of adolescence: the books (and in rare cases, popular culture) that challenged the assumptions with which one was raised (the assumptions of parents, class, and mainstream culture) and made one aware of additional, or alternative, possibilities.

At one end, there are movies and books; on the other, music and visual art. We are expected to remember the basic plot of narrative fiction to say that we “know” it, even though we will also insist that knowing the plot a work of fiction is not equivalent to reading the work, or we could all read the Sparks notes (and anyone who thought that knowing the plot of a movie was equivalent to watching the movie would be considered crazy). But it's the texture of a novel that makes up the bulk of our experience of it – the prose, the wit, the observations, the descriptions, the dialogue – and that it what is likely to escape our memory, except in the form of a general impression. It's a rare reader who can recite prose from a novel or story; not so with dialogue-based works: most movie and play fans can recite lines from their favourites; monologues, like poems, lend themselves to memorization.

We are not, however, expected to “memorize” music or paintings. There's no shame for the classical music fan in only being able to hum a bar or two of a composition, or in having forgotten how it goes completely. And we don't know what it would mean to memorize a painting; I can vaguely call to mind most of my favourite paintings (particularly the figural ones) as well as others I've seen often, though not in any detail. (I should add that, as a Canadian who hasn't travelled much, almost all of my experience of famous paintings is through books, posters, and the internet; I think I saw one Picasso during a trip to San Francisco, but I can't remember which one.) But this is simply a fact about memory; it's not an accomplishment.

Contemplating the books I've read and haven't read, and making decisions about what I still want to read and what I have determined inessential, is one of the ways in which I come to terms with my mortality; I've started to wonder whether, since I'm not religious, it's the main way. I feel more shame and regret over the number of books I've forgotten than the amount of events in my life I've forgotten (who remembers more than a handful of days, a dozen experiences, from every year, despite the number of minute events that obsess and oppress us daily?), perhaps because reading time is time stolen from life – not time deliberately wasted, however, like watching junky TV or piddling around on the internet, but time that is supposed to be invested; the experience of art is transcendence at one's command, taking time away from one's life but, in return, giving an experience that's worth any number of mundane days spent obsessing about minute things one will not remember and watching junky TV and piddling around on the internet.

Arrested Development: Brideshead Revisited and Archer

What if readers approached books as the music fan approaches music (in the age of recorded music, at least): re-read a favourite book whenever they want to in order to experience the pleasure it gives, without expecting to remember anything about it (except that pleasure) between readings? Consider the difference between books and movies here: most cinephiles think that you must watch a good film many times in order to see all of the things in it, and that, consequently, a critic like Pauline Kael, who refused to watch movies more than once, was irresponsible, or just plain crazy. But although everyone would readily admit that a great 19^th century novel like Middlemarch is more complex than even the most complex film, I don't think any literary critic would claim that you have to read them many times in order to “get everything out of them.” A single careful, attentive reading will do.

Are film critics more pretentious than literary critics? Or are they unconsciously motivated by the fact that watching a movie is, for most people, considerably less time-consuming, as well as far easier, than reading a novel? Or is there the idea that meaning is far less contained in films – because of its visual nature – than in novels, so that, as with poetry, the meanings that can be discovered are potentially infinite? In any case, although readers who are at once faster and less ambitious than I am (slowness and ambition: what a terrible combination) are doubtless more inclined to re-read than I am, unless you're Harold Bloom – you knew that he had not only a freak speed-reading ability but a medical condition that makes it unnecessary for him to sleep – you will probably, as an adult, read most books once. Whereas, in contrast, if I like a movie I am extremely likely to watch it more than once, and I can think of dozens of favourites that I've seen anywhere from half a dozen to several dozen times.

Recently I read Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisisted for no reason except the pleasure of reading it: I went to it straight from watching the 1981 mini-series, a roughly 13-hour affair that's such a faithful adaptation that there is practically no difference between watching it and reading the book; somehow, however, it made me want to read the book anyway. The major departure was in the ending: the screenwriters wisely dramatize incidents related in the novel in dialogue. Otherwise, between Waugh's strong reliance on dialogue and the screenwriters' use of great swathes of the first-person narration in voice-over, the mini-series is practically a word-for-word, scene-by-scene adaptation. The only odd note was in the casting: Anthony Andrews as a blonde Sebastian is iconographically correct as a homoerotic beautiful boy, but it underlines how little he resembles Diana Quick as his twin, Julia. (In the novel as in the mini-series Julia is dark-haired; the colour of Sebastian's hair is not given in the novel, that I noticed.)

I gave Brideshead a miss when I read Waugh's satires as a teenager, having read that it was his most “conservative” novel. While that may be true politically, it certainly isn't true sexually: although Catholic theme of the novel is the working of grace in the lives of the main characters, Waugh's attitude (and the attitude of those main characters) towards sexuality is startlingly worldly for a novel published in 1946. Not only is Charles, the narrator, depicted as being reciprocally in love with the beautiful young aristocrat Sebastian, but he later goes to what he specifically refers to as a “pansy bar” with their flaming queen friend from Oxford, whom he specifically refers to his “pansy friend” – both to his mistress, Sebastian's sister Julia. Neither Charles's love for Sebastian nor his friendship with Anthony is ever repudiated, nor does Waugh depict Charles as feeling any shame over them – other than his early ambivalence towards the outrageous Anthony.

One of the most interesting things about the novel is how much Waugh leaves opaque about the characters and their motivations – and I don't mean just the depiction of Charles and Sebastian's relationship, which is at once elliptical and absolutely direct. We never learn precisely what causes Sebastian's disintegration, although we know that in his own mind it is connected with his family, especially his mother. From what I've seen on the internet, readers love projecting their own issues with their mothers onto Lady Marchmain, complete with early 21^st century babble about “narcissistic” parents (as if there were any other kind) – just as Anthony and Sebastian himself love to do. It almost makes me wonder if Waugh was influenced by T. S. Eliot's essay on Hamlet, Gertrude, and the objective correlative. Waugh gives no objective correlative for Sebastian's distress; it is simply the case that families do this to one; it is part of what we understand, in 20^th century literature, the family to be.

And nothing seems to bring out the pressures and repressions of the nuclear family – whether middle class or aristocratic – like the depiction of addiction: the horror of the addict's misery and uncouthness intruding upon the family's calm, respectable surface, its failure, dysfunctions, and deeply buried disorders personified; the attempts to control the addict without ever directly broaching the problem, at least to him. I found myself frequently thinking about Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and was therefore struck when, late in the novel, Charles calls the thwarted, hysterical Julia, “Cat on a roof,” and wondered if Brideshead could have influenced Williams. Waugh's blackly comic depiction of the dying paterfamilias's favouring of Julia and Sebastian, the adulterous but aesthetically pleasing scapegraces, over his pious but aesthetically displeasing eldest son and his vulgar new wife, also brought to mind the battle between Maggie and the “no necks” for Big Daddy's regard. And of course, in both play and novel, the alcoholic is also implicitly homosexual. Is Sebastian's homosexuality the sufficient cause for his depression and self-destruction? Is that what his family is trying to control? Waugh gives us very, very little indication of this, although the defender of this interpretation could argue that Waugh could not emphasize this interpretation without making the homosexual theme completely explicit. The mini-series – made 35 years later, after the legalization of homosexuality – gives a few more hints: in one Heavenly Creatures-esque scene that's not in the novel, after Charles and Sebastian are kept apart from each other in the evenings at Oxford due to their shenanigans, a drunk and sobbing Sebastian shows up outside Charles's rooms to wail pathetically, “I just want to see you!” If Lady Marchmain had allowed Sebastian and Charles to take up residence together as planned, instead of trying to put Sebastian under religious supervision, would they have lived happily ever after, with Charles – as he argues to her – able to keep Sebastian's alcoholism in check? I suspect that Waugh's answer would be the same as the Jesuitical Bridey's when Charles argues that Sebastian would be better off if he'd been raised without religion: “It's quite possible.” (On the other hand, it doesn't turn out too well when Jeremy Irons applies this logic to his homoerotic relationship to his drug-addicted twin in Dead Ringers.)

As it is, however, the novel testifies to the enigmatic nature of human character and relationships; in particular, the mystery of self-destruction, which always has too many causes and never enough. The heterosexual reader who is uncomfortable identifying with a homosexual character can argue that Charles's homosexuality was an adolescent phase (albeit one he never repudiates); the homosexual reader or more open-minded heterosexual reader can argue that Charles is bisexual or that he suppresses his homosexuality due to the social pressures of the time – the outwardly conservative Charles can't live like either Sebastian or Anthony. Whatever sociological or psychological explanation ones gives for Charles's sexuality in the novel, Waugh seems to be pursing the theme of a bisexual ideal, between Anthony's recitation from the Tiresias section of The Waste Land and Charles's transference of his love from a male to female twin (does “Sebastian” refer to Shakespeare's twins as well as the early homosexual icon St. Sebastian?); also a Platonic ideal of progression from the sensual to the spiritual in which his homosexual love for Sebastian is a forerunner of his “mature” love for Julia, which is in turn a forerunner of his fully sublimated love for God.

It doesn't quite work: mysteriously, Julia, although also conceived as a sort of charismatic androgyne, is not as successful a representation as Sebastian. Is it because the section that depicts the idyllic early days of Charles and Sebastian's relationship is drenched in nostalgia for the prelapsarian last days of youth and illusion – into which adult sexuality, to say nothing of responsibility and, worst of all, reality, is always a painful intrusion? The novel is as much in love with this adolescence, in a Gothic, regressive way (as Wuthering Heights is obsessed with the freedom of Cathy and Heathcliff's childhood) as Sebastian is with his childhood; this vision ruins Charles, as Anthony sees: he sees that charm has ruined him, just as it has led many homosexual men to destruction, starting with Wilde, who represented it as a beautiful boy in The Picture of Dorian Gray; but Charles is ruined by the charm of a family – insular and doomed.

Charles's – and Waugh's – fetishization of the upper class is made either better or worse, depending on the reader, by the fact the family, their estate, even or especially their Catholicism all stand in for the aesthetic way of life, as the aristocracy did for Wilde and Proust. Charles's bowels may shrink when his vulgar wife chatters to party guests that he “lives only for beauty,” but she's absolutely correct. There is nothing more to Charles: the modern world is vulgar and ugly; the fading past is beautiful; if the war does not bring about the end of the world, it will most certainly bring about the end of everything good and permanently usher in the modern. After reading over the years that Wilde's trial made things extremely difficult for male homosexuals for decades afterwards, it's astonishing to see, in Brideshead Revisited, 1920s Oxford represented as though it's the 1860s Oxford of Pater and Wilde's 1895 trial had never intervened. Anthony Blanche is more than up to the small amount of bullying from the macho element at Oxford that he receives, and aestheticism, hedonism, and homosexuality as a single education of the senses and cunning method of rebellion against social convention and parental expectation (with conversion to Catholicism as the seal upon one's aestheticism); it is all excitement, even the bit of shame that Blanche's shamelessness makes Charles feel; there is no fear or furtiveness.

Poor old conventional heterosexuality can't live up to this glamour, at least for some readers, though I'm not one of those who thinks there's less emotional conviction in the Julia section of the novel. On the contrary, the storm at sea drenches their affair in an atmosphere of roiling emotion and the overcoming, however briefly, of tremendous sexual repression. I don't think there's any way to get around Charles's psychosexual excitement at discovering his lost male love in the person of his twin sister, which also allows him to make an attempt to recreate that lost love and all it came to represent by entertaining fantasies of becoming the master of Brideshead. That he does not suggests the Oedipal fantasy underlying this ambition (also suggested by the adultery angle). At heart this is a Gothic novel, haunted by the ghosts of the family romance, which give it its emotional energy.

I came to the mini-series by hearing it mentioned in the same breath with Downton Abbey, which even in its first season is a poorly-written soap opera (I was too bored to go on to the second season, which I've read on the internet is supposed to be the bad one). It is also truly unfortunate in its social implications: the servants are either pure good or pure evil; they are good if they are loyal to their masters, evil if they harbour any class resentment; the only servants who are permitted to have social ambition move in the orbit of the cause-y aristocrat sister, presumably to make her look good. Fans of the massively popular series – a phenomenon in the UK, a cult hit in North America – appear to defend it as “escapism,” but I can't escape when the series keeps rubbing the ugliness of social divisions in my face with its retrograde assumptions. The character of Daisy, the simple-minded, childlike, superstitious young servant girl, is a throwback to Prissy of Gone With the Wind, but since she's white, I'm not even sure if fans have realized that this is an offensive characterization of the rural peasantry. Not that I know anything about the rural peasantry of the early 20^th century, but I did find myself wondering, as I watched the servants of Downton, “Did anyone, anywhere, ever talk or act like this?” I doubt it: Julian Fellowes is working from melodrama archetypes that haven't changed in hundreds, maybe thousands of years. If Downton was well-written I could forgive it its basis in snobbery; but then, its class condescension and poor writing are inseparable: the problem with the servant characters is that they are written like no human beings anywhere, ever. (The aristocrats don't correspond to any known human types, either, but at least they're allowed to have flaws and virtues without being depicted as strictly good or evil.)

The difference between Downton Abbey and Brideshead Revisited isn't the difference between bad and good writing; it's the difference between TV writing and real writing. Many contemporary novels, both commercial and “literary,” are so dreadful that sometimes I wonder if real writing exists or if it's something I made up; Waugh reminded me that it does exist, and it's not the unique preserve of untouchable masterpieces: the writing in Brideshead isn't flawless, nor does it exhibit Modernist difficulty; it seems to be absolutely lucid, but the characters and their dilemmas are finally opaque and their psychology murky. If Brideshead reminded me of how good even the lesser masterpieces of the early 20^th century Anglo-American novel could be, Downton reminded me, with a thud, of how bad TV writing usually is. TV is not especially good at realistic drama; it is very good at fantasy and sci-fi adventure (my own favourites are Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the revamped Battlestar Galactica), and in the best series, sneaks realistic depictions of relationships into these genres.

It is also very good at comedy; the sitcom seamlessly took over stage comedy (unchanged in its essentials since Greek New Comedy, as Frye observed) and combined it with the pleasures of the serial. Besides Brideshead, I also checked out the adult cartoon series Archer last month. It's ostensibly a spoof of the spy genre, with lots of gross-out comedy involving vomit and kinky sex, but its interest, for me anyway, lies in its satire of 21^st century masculinity in the figure of the main character, a Don Draper/James Bond type whose “retro” appeal is a cover for his thoroughly modern metrosexuality – and whose adventurous, womanizing ways are undercut by the fact that he works for his actual mother, who runs the spy agency – and who's played by the same actress who played the mother on Arrested Development. The adolescent boy's fantasy of being a misogynous, babe-magnet spy is acknowledged as such; Archer's inability to settle down, respect women, or get a real, grown-up job is attributed to his screwed-up relationship with his domineering, manipulative, cold, and neglectful mother – openly depicted as all the things readers tend to project onto Lady Marchmain. Waugh, by keeping the mother-son relationship enigmatic, sidestepped the Freudian explanation for Sebastian's arrested development; Archer, as a satire on ideas of masculinity, revels in it. Most of the reviews I've read note the quality of the voice acting, and when Archer and Malory are allowed to tear into each other with rapid-fire sitcom insults, it's a testament to the genius of H. Jon Benjamin and Jessica Walter that they manage to generate some kind of emotional truth and stakes; while the timing of the cast and the Bogey-and-Bacall energy they bring to Adam Reed's endless barrage of deliberately infantile sarcasm often produces small miracles of comedic ensemble work.

Early on, before serial plotting takes over and characters become more dramatic and less inclined to be the butt (or boobs) of the satire, much fun is had at the expense of the equivalence of Archer and the show's action girl babe, Lana, as sex objects; both are inclined to prance around in their underwear, wiggling and jiggling, but Archer is more of a narcissist and exhibitionist – or at least he's more out about it than Lana, who must cling to her feminist principles even as she prances around in post-feminist clingy mini-dresses or designer underwear “knock offs,” as Archer camply accuses her. As cartoons they can effortlessly embody the fantasy ideals for male and female bodies – which, as Mark Simpson argued in "Transexy Time!", are so similar, in the end, that it's hard to believe that they belong to opposite – or even different – sexes. I thought of that article as I watched Archer and Lana traipse across the screen in their undies and listened to them compare notes on the sleekness of their depilated genitals: these are not opposite sexes; they are one sex, the product of the pornographic imagination, which isn't interested in gender, but simply in sex – sex that has nothing to do with nature and everything to do with the perverse imagination.