A Carnival of Archaeology: Camp and Commemoration

“What is a ruin but Time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time. It is the body and the blood of ecstasy, religion and love.” Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“The carnival was petering out in a gloomy banality. Change was imminent in every direction. Why not make a clean sweep of the old life and, escaping to some strange new existence, create a fresh illusion of pleasure?” Compton Mackenzie, Carnival

Camp has a rather curious relationship to centenaries and to commemoration. It is grimly aware that nostalgia is a reactionary lure, a longing for what never was. But camp, with its neo-baroque sensibility, is much more interested in the archaeology of remembrance, in rummaging about for “a fresh illusion,” one that is often hidden in plain view. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, “It is not eternity that is opposed to the disconsolate chronicle of world-history, but the restoration of the timelessness of paradise. History merges into the setting.”[1] It is precisely because of this merging that the longing for the unity or repletion of what has passed is impossible. The merging of history and its setting is marked by ruination, one produced by fracturing time. In camp, the gaze of commemoration is T. S. Eliot’s “Sunlight on a broken column.”[2] In sum, camp is a paradise not in ruins, but of ruins. Indeed the camp moments in modernist texts like The Waste Land (evinced in the parodically baroque room in “A Game of Chess”) and Ulysses (much of the genderqueering of “Circe,” couched in the “ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry”) demonstrate that camp and its more canonical others are not opposites.[3] It is perhaps that Eliot and Joyce’s work suffered for a long time from being taken as being more earnestly commemorative than the texts themselves suggested.  In short, camp offers a parallax view not just of modernity, but also how modernism itself has been subjected to repeated misprision—first by those who enshrined them as monuments and still later by those who Oedipally tried to damn them for “failing” to be Postmodern.

As one of modernism’s others, camp is not as interested in “making it new” when compared to its more aggressive novelty-seekers. That said, Michael North rightly tells us that the “it” in Pound’s formulation invokes a history of novelty, and thus the “it” should be read as “the old.”[4] Camp makes the neglected, even dismissed possibilities of the past perform anew with wit and aplomb. With its profoundly historical and histrionic taste for the obscure, the forgotten, the passé, camp was already engaged in rituals of remembrance in modernism’s name. From a camp perspective, the historical pleases by virtue of its modernity, the happy surprise of aesthetic detail. According to The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent, Janet Flanner, modern interior decorator and bonne vivante Elsie de Wolfe (Lady Mendl) summarized her delight with The Parthenon thus: “It’s beige—just my color!”[5]

But camp is not merely studied frivolity; in its modernist incarnation, it is an aesthetic born of disenchantment, of engaging with a peculiar logic of commemoration—one that seeks not to restore a lost time before the Great War (the 1890s, or even the baroque or rococo), but to reflect upon, and play among, its ruins. Susan Stewart could be talking about camp as a form of nostalgia when she contends that it is “enamored of distance, not of the referent itself.”[6] The problem with centenaries is that the temporal distance they imply is simply too contained, too tidy. The spirit of camp is one of excess. Its rites are always archaeological and carnivalesque: the sediment and sentiment of parades past form mirrors, reflecting audience and performer alike in virtual apposition. The spirit of camp, as excess, gives enthusiasm its form. In its plasticity, camp welcomes deformation, defilement, and distortion. As Christian Lassen reminds us, one of camp’s duties is to drag “sublime mystifications” by “dragging them through the mire.” [7] For camp, ceremony is always profane, always in transition. Commemoration, in the velvet gloved hand of camp, polishes ruins into follies.

A camp form of nostalgia—evinced in the work of figures like Norman Douglas, Max Beerbohm, Compton Mackenzie, Ronald Firbank, Edith Sitwell, Jean Cocteau, Claude McKay, Djuna Barnes, Aldous Huxley, and Wallace Thurman, among others—is driven by a wit, a sense of the absurd, and a recognition that the past is a site for potentialities, for transitions, for a reimagining of the future. More pointedly, camp sees the past neither as a monument nor as bound to the chauvinistic strictures of national memory. Although by no means possessing a radical politics, camp, in its preference for ruins and ritual, explores the affects of individual memory that come to shape, however contingently, collective memory, and mocks those who are comforted by a reactionary nostalgia’s cathexis to imperialism.

In effect, modernist camp offers us a form of commemoration that is more archaeological than teleological, marked by travesty and carnival. It is a species of cultural production that can help us think about how modernism may be commemorated more generally. For camp, commemoration must fit into a scheme, most often a theatrical or ceremonial one, but one that is nevertheless a testament to profusion, extravagance. In temporal terms, camp performs what Svetlana Boym, in The Future of Nostalgia, would call reflective nostalgia, not its restorative, conservative counterpart.[8]  Admittedly, camp dwells in memory—at times melancholically, at others ironically, and at yet still others critically. As good archaeologists, camp figures know that history and memory are material and artificial by turns, marked by gaps, fractures, and failures.

Susan Sontag famously asserts that camp is “a seriousness that fails.”[9] Here is the full quotation: “In naïve, or pure, camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.” The first problem with this formulation of camp is that there is no such thing as “pure” camp. To nominate anything as absolute or pure is to claim that there is success—that is, a successful infinitude, itself an excess, has been formed into a finite object. Camp is perforce sullied by excess. It is often at its most comfortable in clutter of the archive, if not ruins. However, I agree with Sontag that camp plays with, and is fascinated by, excess, exaggeration. But I would invert the terms to say that camp is not a species of “seriousness that fails”; rather, it reveals the failure of the serious. That is to say, there is a failure inherent in seriousness that Sontag refuses to accept. Camp makes fun out of seriousness precisely because it fails. That failure is the space or gap that camp occupies and makes so much of—the aesthetic implications of the distance between desire and satisfaction, between the sacred and the profane. Camp might be a species of redemption, but it is not redeemed by “successful” seriousness. Instead, it is the case that seriousness misses or dismisses forms of enjoyment, forms of desire, forms of affect that bourgeois, serious art will have no truck with. For these reasons, camp cannot be reduced to chiasmus (being “serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious”) (Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 288). It calls for a kind of comfort in failure that bourgeois aesthetics cannot countenance. This penchant for failure—which often manifests itself in absurdity and paradox—is essential to camp’s ability to commemorate the past for a future that may again require it.

Because camp is “an ontology of appearances,” renowned for its fascination with aesthetics, with surfaces, we can recognize camp as a mentor in its particularly archaeological (Foucauldian) insistence upon “the function of existence.”[10] That is, camp’s preoccupation with form, a preoccupation it shares with modernism, with its fissures and failures, is both aesthetic and ontological because it searches restlessly for ways of functioning, of being and becoming in the world. Camp objects are the result of the collisions of import and function, of history and conflict that are often misread as being merely aesthetic, when they are instead rituals of (being) becoming.

An excellent early example of this relationship to ritual and remembrance is Norman Douglas’s South Wind (1917), which takes place on the Mediterranean isle of Nepenthe, primly forgetting its real name: Capri. Douglas’s style and substance would influence many a modernist in their camp and outré modes. The novel was enormously popular in its day, offering welcome diversion to thousands of soldiers in the trenches. It is telling that Woolf said of it, after comparing the novel’s style to that of Thomas Love Peacock and Oscar Wilde, that Douglas’s “book has a distinguished ancestry, but it was born only the day before yesterday.”[11] South Wind is a camp fiesta, combining overripe Catholicism and paganism, human sacrifice, eccentrics and exiles, arcane rants and disquisitions, sex, art forgery, bigamy, blackmail, and a blithely witnessed murder. It also has a useful lesson about commemoration.

When a nearby volcano, with its “wreaths of violet vapour” and its seeming flirtation with its zenith, “as though … desirous of drawing attention to its pretty manners,” begins spewing ash over Nepenthe, the locals decide that the only solution is “an alchemic process of adjustment,” or proper remembrance of and obeisance to its patron saint, Dodekanus.[12]  His relics, that is, what remains of his julienned and cannibalized body (he was dined on by pagans), are paraded through the streets, and the volcano’s ashen displeasure is immediately soothed (Douglas, South Wind, 293). The stratagem is a success. Yet the clergy are privately loath to give their patron saint credit; instead, they suspect that the person whose idea it first was to have the procession might be the real author of the miracle. Why? Because this is a camp novel, and so commemoration itself is not enough. The aesthetics of managing materiality, the real of disaster, as it were, is as crucial as the act of commemoration itself. In narrative terms, miracles require transparent orchestration, lest they fall prey to conspiracy theory. The possibility that the procession and the volcano’s return to dormancy are pure coincidence must be, in order to calm the still-agitated citizenry, mitigated by a shift in perspective: a turn to tradition and the presence of individual talents. In modernist terms, the novel occupies the gap in seriousness; the procession, in aesthetic terms, “succeeds,” but the profane doubt surrounding the miracle itself points to seriousness’s failure to explain or manipulate irruptions of the real. In short, it is a melancholy comedy, commemorating how very modern and necessary the past is, when the day before yesterday is remembered in parallax.

Douglas finds an acolyte in Firbank, that doyen of camp modernism. His 1919 novel Valmouth finds its modernism in the bodies of the several centenarians who populate its pages. Valmouth is a spa, and the number of people living past one hundred there is attributed in part to the quality of the air. In the Firbankian world, great age is to be envied; the centenarians are not museum pieces. They are eminently alive: lewd, ironic, elliptical, sexual, and keenly aware of the value of jouissance. It is largely a novel of feminine desire; the dowagers live the future that we have had to wait for. The female centenarians cheerfully submit their bodies to the ministrations of the wise, dynamic Mrs. Yajñavalkya, a Black masseuse who promises always “to end off with a charming sensation.”[13] (She will have no truck with male clients.) Mrs. Yajñavalkya is of course a white Orientalist fantasy, combining Hindu and African, Tahitian, and Caribbean alike, pointing the characters away from the distractions of superficial difference. In this world, the mixing of races and sexualities is not only permitted, but celebrated, ritualized. Here, the shock lurking in such events is the stuff of etiquette, not of morality or politics. A thoroughly campy world of the very old, Valmouth, like South Wind, could not have been written at any time except the modern.

The Douglas and Firbank novels were published in the late war and immediate postwar periods respectively. Soon after, in the wake of the Armistice and the advent of the Roaring Twenties, would come a wave of modernist works in which the Great War echoed far more conspicuously—if by its absence rather than presence. We know that one of the reactions to the trauma of the war was repression. The melancholy of mourning was soon replaced by a cynical, ironic, witty distance from anything that smacked of the serious or the emotionally complex. It has become a truism to suggest that in the aftermath of the Great War, several modernist writers and artists (and those who enjoyed their work) turned to the frivolous or hedonistic by way of rejecting the horrors of what had preceded them. Camp became one of the watchwords of the 1920s, embodied in groups like the Bright Young Things, who primped and posed their way through the decade.

Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow appeared a scant three years after the Great War ended, and is firmly in this camp camp. In fact, several of Huxley’s novels of this period seem to encapsulate the prevailing attitude of cool detachment, yet he also satirizes the very people who assume this particular façade. When we think of other texts of the period, like those of Elinor Glyn, Dorothy Parker, Noel Coward, Michael Arlen, and Evelyn Waugh, they all point to a cosmopolitan distancing from the war. But modernist camp is nevertheless often haunted by it, as Crome Yellow illustrates with particular aplomb.

First, while modernist in tone (if not in generic experimentation), Crome Yellow is a camp Menippean satire. Prose narrative of this kind, which is punctuated by country house parties, carnivals, and banquets, has a long history. Despite its apparently old-fashioned form, however, Crome Yellow’s modernism surfaces in its irony, its episodic structure, and its fragmented, even desultory, plot. There is a tension in Huxley’s novel between a nostalgic view of the past and an ironic acknowledgment that the past is a space and time to which one cannot return. Why, then, nostalgia at all? This is a reaction characteristic of Modernity: the trauma of the war, of its devastation, produces an anxious desire to forget that past and retreat into a more distant one. But of course, one lives in the present, and the fresh ghost of the war invariably manages to intrude upon the absurd escapades of the novels’ characters.

Huxley’s novel offers its own kind of war commemoration. It appears in the paranoiac sermonizing of Mr. Bodiham, the local vicar. He obscenely links the trauma of the war to the Armageddon about which he constantly proselytizes: “The prospect, Mr. Bodiham tried to assure himself, was hopeful; the real, the genuine Armageddon might soon begin, and then, like a thief in the night…But, in spite of all his comfortable reasoning, he remained unhappy, dissatisfied. Four years ago he had been so confident; God’s intention seemed then so plain. And now? Now, he did well to be angry. And now he suffered too.”[14] Mr. Bodiham indulges in the luxury of disappointment; he bitterly regrets that the war did not bring the “end of days” after all. He imagined himself a prophet, but is left, not with the relief that the war is over, but with the conviction that surely the current political situation will inevitably prove him right. His melancholy is not the melancholy of recognizing the impact of the war, but of its narrative failure. His longed-for war has failed him. Millions have died, but the Day of Judgment eludes him. This failure has prompted his new crusade. He wants a War Memorial to be built, not as a reminder—“Lest we forget”—but to commemorate history in order to repeat it.

Coda in Scherzo:

Camp puts the archness in archive.

Camp is the rag and bone shop of carnival.

We remember camp because of its questions.

Modernism was Postmodernism’s conspiracy theory; camp is one of modernism’s alibis.

In modernism, camp is the simply divine.

Camp is one of modernism’s allegories.

Camp is magic delivered from the lie of being serious.

Camp treats the past as a needful weapon in the armoury of progress.

Camp may be found in the gutter or in the trenches, but it looks upon the stars in parallax.[15]

Camp is memory’s rococo theatre of the absurd.

Camp always fails for the better.

Camp is the profane illumination of faded limelight.

Camp uses the illusions of the peculiar to cure the ailments of the particular.

Camp is the impurity of remembrance; this is another dimension of its excess.

And like many modernisms, camp knows that what is best remembered is quite useless. [16]