Reading this book is daunting. Paglia's voice is intimidatingly confident, hyperventilating with erudition, with huge jumps in logic in a single sentence, and acid opinions on everything. It often made my head spin, other times it was very hard to follow. Nonetheless, at its best, it brings many pleasures and fascinating ideas, sparking an interest to try to read all that she has (however impossible that task).
As I see it, Paglia wants to unearth and analyze the principal archetypes in western visual arts and literature, which requires her to explain religion, society, and even human nature while she's at it. Her methodology, as she puts it, is to link James (Golden Bough) Frazier with Freud; what I think this means is to combine the concept of ancient fertility cults - the earth mother - with Freud's notion of the id, which reflected our deepest, most animalistic urges, and our attempts to contain it by both religion and reason.
According to Paglia, the most basic of these notions is the dark nature/earth mother versus the civilizing force that fights against it. Nature, in this view, is chaotic and destructive as well as fruitful and fertile, traditionally identified with the female; women are powerful givers of life, mysterious in their sexuality and urges, necessary for propagation of the species but also dangerous. The best early exemplar of this, she says, is the Venus of Willendorf, a female form devoid of individuality and rounded as a sign of fertility. She is from a period (30K BCE) before man began to believe he could gain control over nature with such constructions as religion, society, technology and culture, which she argues are all illusions of control over nature and fundamentally male, with straight lines and abstractions about the world, later expressed in art. For her counter-example, she takes the Egyptian bust of Nefertiti, which is highly individual and presents an abstraction of perfect beauty. This is the clearest contrast she presents, in a chapter that is brilliant and concise. In Greece, she continues, these notions are best expressed as Dionysian and Apollonian, the former an androgynous sower of chaos and ecstatic joy and violence, the latter a keeper of order in the universe, a healing god who brings light, with a virgin twin sister (Artemis) who manages the forest and the hunt.
These notions, Paglia asserts, underlie all of the greatest western art, a defiant act of will against the darker side of nature and death. With that, she goes through western culture to the 19C, interpreting the interplay of the Dionysian and Apollonian, interpreting the various societies and cultures in which they arose. It can be very fun, but also illuminating if you are interested in history, the visual arts and literature. Indeed she attempts to pull together such a vast amount of work and history that I am in awe of her ambition.
While there is a great deal of insight in what she says, which makes the book worth the price of admission (and the effort to get through it), I often found myself bewildered at her references or disagreeing with her conclusions and generalizations. That makes the book an uneven reading experience. It isn't helped by her prose either. An example, picked at random: "But Swinburne's eroticism comes from the symmetrical heraldry of female androgynes, who pin the male in a fatal double bind." Many passages are worse.
Most significantly, I found a lot of her reasoning like Freud's later works, where he purports to explain the meaning of certain symbols in art and religion. While his clinical work made a seminal contribution to the understanding of the human mind and the treatment of its maladies, his more general works strike me as, well, off the wall. For example, his essay on religion asserts that its illusions and belief systems represent a neurosis of human society. Even I, a hard core atheist, think there is more to the religious experience than that, much of it positive. Yet Paglia is confident she has found the deepest, most definitive meanings of many works of art in a similar manner. I just can't get there: I think truly great art can be interpreted in multiple ways by different people and in different times, i.e. there is no correct interpretation.
That being said, I hugely enjoyed that book and enthusiastically recommend it as an intellectual adventure worth taking.
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