Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  49

  ON CANONS*

  GUNTER AXT: Where do you place yourself in the tradition of thinkers who focus on the major canons of Western art?

  CAMILLE PAGLIA: Canon-formation and canon-revision are the obligation of the true critic. Artistic tradition is like a magnificent flowering tree, whose vitality in its spreading branches must be traced to its roots. The postmodernist allegation that all canons are the product of political ideology is malicious propaganda. Membership in the canon is first determined by artists themselves. That is, we define the importance of an artist by his or her influence on other artists, either at that moment or (as with El Greco and Emily Dickinson) much later in time.

  At the birth of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s, we were told that we would soon discover many “female Michelangelos”—the great women artists whose names had been erased from art history by sexist male scholars. A massive rewriting of the official canon was prophesied. Well, a half-century has gone by, and no woman artist even remotely near Michelangelo’s titanic achievement has ever been found. Yes, we now know more about minor women artists, such as Artemisia Gentileschi or Mary Cassatt, but the old canon of art history remains essentially unchanged—because it was always based on artistic evolution, not politics. Women were indeed denied opportunities in workshop-centered crafts like sculpture, but in music composition, for example, middle-class women have had access to the piano at home for over two centuries. Yet there is still no female Mozart. As I argued in my first book, Sexual Personae, women have never invented a major new style in the arts because in order to create, you must first destroy—something most women are reluctant to do.

  The centrality of canons can be seen in popular music. Seventeenth-century British ballads, preserved in America’s Appalachian Mountains, were reinterpreted during the 1930s and ’40s by the leftist folk singers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Guthrie’s devoted disciple, Bob Dylan, then shaped the imagination of an entire generation and made an immense impact on other singers and bands worldwide. The canon in black music is equally obvious: West African motifs (with melismatic Muslim tonalities) survived under slavery in rural African-American blues and were transmitted through singers Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf to young musicians in the postwar British blues revival, such as the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. In Brazil, prolific canonical figures of genius status, such as Antonio Carlos Jobim and Dorival Caymmi, can be easily identified.

  Critics should engage the public to dispute established canons and propose new ones. For example, I have waged war for decades against the widespread claim in the U.S. that Meryl Streep is the world’s greatest actress. For me, Jane Fonda, with her emotional depth and lithe physical grace, is a far greater actress than Streep, whom I find mechanical, superficial, and pretentious. Indeed, in terms of cultural influence, there is no one more canonical than Marlene Dietrich, who created the sophisticated “hard glamour” seen everywhere in fashion magazines and who through her direct impact on Madonna has massively influenced women’s assertive performance style and costume throughout the world.

  * [Interview with Gunter Axt, CULT magazine, São Paulo, Brazil, August 15, 2014.]

  50

  THE RIGHT KIND OF MULTICULTURALISM*

  The field of archaeology is under a political cloud because of its allegedly racist and exploitative history. American Indians have protested the “desecration” of tribal burial grounds by archaeological digs. A longstanding argument rages about the legal ownership of antiquities acquired by museums through donation or purchase since the late eighteenth century.

  The brief against archaeology for its physical predations has been extended to its interpretive system. Militant identity politics claims that no culture can be understood except by its natives, as if DNA gave insight. All scrutiny by outsiders is supposedly biased, self-interested, and reductive.

  A related complaint comes from post-structuralism, specifically the work of Michel Foucault, whom Edward Said introduced to American literary criticism in his 1975 book, Beginnings. Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University and president of the Modern Language Association, adopted Foucault’s view of oppressive power, operating in Western conceptual systems as a covert instrument of domination, in his 1978 book, Orientalism. Far less talented academics followed Said’s lead in the dreary movement called New Historicism, which sees imperialism under every bush.

  Erudite, cultivated, accomplished, and prolific, Said is a major scholar. Unfortunately, his sharp critiques of European interest in the Near East focus on literature (which he sees as a mask for colonialism), to the exclusion of the visual arts and architecture. In his central books, Said gives dismayingly short shrift to the massive achievements of Egyptologists and Orientalists, fomenting a suspicion of and cynicism about archaeology that have spread through the humanities.

  This is regrettable, since archaeology is a perfect model for multiculturalism in the classroom. During three decades as a college teacher, I have found that archaeology fascinates and unites students of different races, economic backgrounds, and academic preparation.

  First, archaeology gives perspective, a vivid sense of the sweep of history—too often lacking in today’s dumbed-down curriculum. Second, archaeology shows the fragility of culture. It illustrates how even the most powerful of nations succumbed to chaos and catastrophe or to the slow obliteration of nature and time.

  The epidemic of violence in American high schools is, I suspect, partly a reaction to the banality of middle-class education, which is suffused with sentimental liberal humanitarianism. Anything not “nice” is edited out of history and culture—except, of course, when it can be blamed on white males. Archaeology, with its stunning panoramas of broken ruins, satisfies young people’s lust for awe and destruction.

  Third, archaeology introduces the young to the scientific method, presented in the guise of a mystery story. Greek philosophy and logic, revived at the Renaissance and refined in the seventeenth century, produced the archaeological technique of controlled excavation, measurement, documentation, identification, and categorization. Modern archaeology is one of the finest fruits of the Western Enlightenment.

  Stratigraphy, the analysis of settlement layers or ash deposits, is a basic tool of archaeology, cutting through the past so it can be read like a book. Dumps, latrines, and cave floors are mined for microscopic study of seeds and pollen and for radiocarbon dating of wood, plant fibers, and textiles. Chewed bones and worn teeth reveal diet and diseases and help draw the map of migration patterns and trade routes. With saintly patience, archaeologists laboriously collect shattered potsherds and reassemble them like Cubist jigsaw puzzles.

  Western technology has given archaeology a wealth of tools. Aerial survey reveals the faint traces of buildings, earthworks, and irrigation channels. Underwater archaeology, born after World War Two, recovers artifacts from lakes and seas via scuba diving, unmanned submersible vehicles, and side-scanning sonar.

  Archaeology has restored human memory of vanished societies like that of Pakistan’s prehistoric Indus River Valley civilization or that of the mighty Khmer Empire centered at Cambodia’s Angkor Wat. We now know about the Olmec of Mexico, whose society began a thousand years before Christ, and the Maya of Central America, whose pyramids at Tikal were slowly buried in the tangled jungle.

  In the 1880s, thanks to European archaeologists, Akhetaton, the utopian city on the Nile built by Akhenaten and Nefertiti and destroyed by their political rivals, was rediscovered at Tel el Amarna. In the 1890s, Sir Arthur Evans’ excavations at the labyrinthine palace at Knossos revealed the greatness of Minoan Crete.

  In the 1920s, C. Leonard Woolley excavated the forgotten Mesopotamian city of Ur, whose ornate treasures grace the University Museum in Philadelphia. In 1975, tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets found in Syria helped resurrect Ebla, a commercial capital of the third mill
ennium B.C., and also deepened our understanding of biblical texts. Archaeologists are still at work on the tantalizing conundrum of the Etruscans, who heavily influenced Rome.

  The British Museum is currently celebrating the bicentenary of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, a second-century B.C. basalt slab whose tripartite inscription was the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone, found during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt when it was still an Ottoman province, is a symbol of Western intellectual virtuosity and achievement.

  The modern disciplines of knowledge, far from being covert forms of social control as the leftist post-structuralists tediously claim, have rescued ancient objects and monuments from neglect and abuse and have enormously expanded the record of our species. Degree-granting programs in archaeology are few and beleaguered in the U.S. Funding for archaeology, at school and in the field, is as crucial as for space exploration. Archaeology is our voyage to the past, where we discover who we were and therefore who we are.

  * [The Wall Street Journal, September 30, 1999. Author’s original title: “In Defense of Archaeology.” Reprinted in Archaeology Odyssey magazine, May/June 2000.]

  51

  CANT AND FAD IN CLASSICS*

  VICTOR DAVIS HANSON AND JOHN HEATH, WHO KILLED HOMER? THE DEMISE OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION AND THE RECOVERY OF GREEK WISDOM

  Bullets are still flying in the culture wars of the last decade, but the front has changed. As costs rise and as competition for students intensifies, administrators are taking increased control of curricular matters from the often bitterly factionalized faculties. By terminating or transferring vacated faculty positions and by relying on poorly paid part-time instructors, many institutions are being reshaped by purely economic criteria. Among humanities programs, classics departments have been the most vulnerable to drastic downsizing and outright annihilation.

  Victor Davis Hanson is professor of Greek at California State University in Fresno, and John Heath is chairman of the classics department at Santa Clara University. In Who Killed Homer?—a murder-mystery title wittily echoing that of Christina Hoff Sommers’ groundbreaking 1994 book, Who Stole Feminism?—Hanson and Heath demonstrate in riveting detail the actual scale of the threat to Greco-Roman studies in the United States.

  Who Killed Homer? is a blistering indictment not just of administrators, who must meet the bottom line, but of classicists themselves, who ignored the developing crisis over the past thirty years. Instead of reaching out to the general public to defend the classics, many professors withdrew into insular academic conferences and narrow, “obscurantist” scholarship saturated with French post-structuralism and postmodernism. Surveying recent academic critiques (my own exposés are briefly cited), Hanson and Heath suggest that the media’s false portrayal of the culture wars as a quarrel between tolerant liberals and reactionary conservatives has helped the most ruthless campus careerists, who gained major professorships with huge salaries and reduced teaching loads by espousing a fashionable leftism.

  Hanson and Heath eloquently assail the systematic denigration of Western culture in prevailing campus “trend, cant, and fad”: “Why do few professors of Greek and Latin teach us that our present Western notions of constitutional government, free speech, individual rights, civilian control over the military, separation between religious and political authority, middle-class egalitarianism, private property, and free scientific inquiry are both vital to our present existence and derive from the ancient Greeks?”

  Sternly rebutting the misleadingly rosy picture of classics studies given by such partisan figures as Garry Wills, Hanson and Heath show that, from 1962 to 1976, the number of high-school students studying Latin “plunged 80 percent” and has never recovered. Decline is also clear at the college level: “Of over one million B.A.’s awarded in 1994, only six hundred were granted in Classics.” Yet classics professors themselves merrily spin on: since 1962, “twice as many scholars now publish 50 percent more material in twice as many journals.”

  “Our own Founding Fathers,” Hanson and Heath point out, “helped establish an American cult of antiquity….To walk through Washington, D.C., is to experience Graeco-Roman institutions, architecture, sculpture, and city-planning at first hand.” They argue that enthusiasts and amateurs, not professional classicists, made the great breakthroughs in our understanding of the ancient world, from Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, to Milman Parry, who established the Homeric oral tradition, and Michael Ventris, who cracked the code of Linear B, the Minoan script.

  A long chapter called “Thinking Like a Greek” intricately presents the “Greek paradigm,” with its principles of democracy, rational thought, and the “free exchange of ideas.” The material on Greek warfare is particularly fine: military history is shamefully neglected in contemporary education, to our future national peril. Another chapter, “Who Killed Homer—and Why?,” asserts that the university has been hijacked by “therapeutics”—“diversity training, journal writing, gender and racial sensitivity, multiculturalism, situational ethics.”

  Hanson and Heath believe that interdisciplinary experiments, such as “Mediterranean Cultures” programs, have compromised scholarly standards for both professors and students, from whom deep, rigorous learning is no longer expected. In concealing the autocracy and brutality of non-Western societies, academic multiculturalism is “intellectually naive” and “hypocritical to the core.” Many feminists’ anti-male rhetoric has marred legitimate inquiry into the status of women in antiquity, and some gay-studies scholars have used their field for “self-projection of their gender preferences.”

  A sequence of appalling passages from recent classics books proves Hanson and Heath’s thesis that current scholarship is shot through with “bad prose,” “elitist vocabulary,” and “vacuous jargon,” which manage “to make Homer silly and absolutely dull.” Documenting “the strange cycle of self-promotion,” where “everything now is to be deconstructed except resumés,” the book boldly names names—as, for example, that of Martha Nussbaum, a prominent University of Chicago professor whose career gets a long-overdue public scrutiny here that raises serious questions about high-echelon academe.

  The remedies offered by Hanson and Heath are based on “classics as a core curriculum.” They laud the intellectual challenge of the study of ancient Greek, where the verb has over 350 forms. They provide a thematic teaching guide to Homer and a reading list of recommended scholarly works of unimpeachable quality.

  The authors’ proposals for academic reform are intended to reawaken a sense of professional ethics and to reorient universities toward undergraduate teaching. These include ending the exploitation of graduate students as “helot” teaching assistants; abolishing doctoral dissertations; dismantling tenure in favor of five-year contracts; and cutting off subsidies for pointless travel to conferences—which are underwritten by the tuition bills of unwitting parents and taxpayers.

  Hanson and Heath are perhaps too focused on American abuses; some broader consideration of still-vital classical studies in Europe and Great Britain would have been useful. The authors’ portrait of popular culture is excessively bleak, and I was distressed by their skepticism about psychoanalytic criticism and even undergraduate study of Egyptian art. However, Who Killed Homer? is the most substantive by far of the academic critiques that have appeared in the past fifteen years. This passionate protest, with its wealth of facts and its flights of savage indignation, is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of higher education in the United States.

  * [“Ancients and Moderns,” front-page lead review, The Washington Post Book World, March 29, 1998.]

  52

  INTOLERANCE AND DIVERSITY IN THREE CITIES:

  ANCIENT BABYLON, RENAISSANCE VENICE, AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHILADELPHIA*

  Tolerance and diversity emerged as ideal principles of campus discourse and governance forty years ago at the rise
of identity politics, which empowered formerly marginalized groups such as women, gays, African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asians. Once used relatively neutrally by historians and sociologists, these two terms now carry a distinct value judgment and even a punitive moralism. Insofar as both tolerance and diversity are usually the products of slow social forces in the wider culture, it is debatable to what degree they can be imposed from above by campus administrations or inculcated by professors. As a libertarian, I remain very concerned about the speech codes which, whether codified or ad hoc, have become a tool of enforcement of tolerance in American academe and which from my point of view threaten constitutionally guaranteed free expression.

  An uneasy tension persists between identity politics and tolerance: that is, the more forcefully group identity is affirmed, the more likely that rivalry or conflict with other groups will be perpetuated. Conditions of true tolerance eventually lead to assimilation, through which a tremendous amount of cultural heritage may be lost, as is happening to my own generation of Italian-Americans and perhaps also to secular American Jews. What I want to show in this lecture about three cities separated by hundreds of years is how intolerance, with all its persecutions and rampant injustice, has sometimes led to the consolidation of group identity through fierce external pressures. In my three choices—ancient Babylon, Renaissance Venice, and nineteenth-century Philadelphia—geographical and economic factors played a crucial role in the achievement or suppression of diversity. In contrast to the Marxist assumptions of the 1930s-based Frankfurt School which currently pervade the humanities, I would submit that commerce has often played a liberalizing role, breaking up the static traditionalism of agrarian societies and reducing provincialism and xenophobia through the introduction of new ideas. Furthermore, religion, which is often treated with indifference or hostility on today’s elite campuses, has been a defining force in ethnic history. (I am speaking here as an atheist.) At the end of this lecture, I will offer some personal reflections about tolerance and diversity in contemporary academe.