Chapter 11
Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.
How to Format Entries
Quoted Text
Explanation or analysis of Quoted Text
- Individual opinions or discussion. Sign by writing "~~~", if you like.
To add a page: Type ==Page xx==
Please add entries for each page in the order they appear on the page.
Contents
Page 116
"a deep sympathy modified by contempt"
In her Notes on "Camp" (1964), Sontag writes "To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion." Notes on "Camp"
A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Camp, in particular, has never been discussed. It is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric -- something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques. Apart from a lazy two-page sketch in Christopher Isherwood's novel The World in the Evening (1954), it has hardly broken into print. To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it. If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves. For myself, I plead the goal of self-edification, and the goad of a sharp conflict in my own sensibility. I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.
