Camp Wilde
I always find myself returning to Oscar Wilde. Writer, aesthete, gay man, precursor of camp — he is a figure who continues to resonate throughout the decades. Thus, Wilde is a well-chosen focal point through which Susan Sontag attempts to explain camp.
As Sontag states in her piece “Notes on ‘Camp,’” “the essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” However, she is careful to explain that camp is almost undefinable, choosing to instead provide a list of notes which she claims are for Oscar Wilde. This style of writing serves almost as a conversation — while it is certainly one-sided, it is more accessible than a format such as a lecture as it allows the reader to dip in and out of a subject — camp — which is quite foreign to many individuals.
Sontag’s piece is also incredibly effective in its use of quotes. Sprinkled throughout her notes, they are unobtrusive and serve to provide further insight into the world of camp. Much like her notes, they are also stand-alone pieces in themselves, allowing the reader to not have absorb too much information in one section of writing.
Another interesting component to Sontag’s essay is her delineation of three categories of sensibilities. Simply, these categories are labeled as the art of high culture, the art of overstraining the medium, and the art of camp. While she calls high culture “moralistic” and describes overtraining the medium as “gain[ing] power [through] a tension between moral and aesthetic passion,” she refers to camp as “wholly aesthetic.”
Yet, it is interesting how she chooses to end her notes focusing on the statement “it’s good because it’s awful.” Here is where she appears to diverge from Wilde, who would perhaps almost disagree completely even with the idea of labeling art as good or bad. Thus, Sontag’s camp is quite different from the aesthetic vision of Wilde, though both have quite a bit to offer in regard to improving one’s writing. Camp, as a sensibility, is perhaps best used within writing as a way to find the story in the mundane and emphasize those qualities which seem unnoteworthy.
