“Seeing everything in quotation marks:” the paradox of Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’
“Notes on Camp” is an essay suspended in time while somehow still transcending it. Journalistically, references to actors like James Dean and The Devil is a Woman situate the piece in time, but the loose traits of what constitutes “camp” itself echo today in the literary devices it employs. Sontag leans heavily on the idea of a paradox, a concept that somehow contradicts and compliments itself. For example, Sontag uses a list format for her notes to create an illusion of an organization when the definition of the camp is anything but organized. Sontag refers to camp as something that “discloses innocence, but when it can, corrupts it” while it is also “naïve.” The idea of people as characters in fantasies, the spirit of extravagance, and the effortlessness of glamour all clash against such ideas. Opposing and conflicting qualities like these tell the greater story of human complexity through such a complex and intricate subject that imitates life.
Sontag also makes use of personification throughout these “notes” for Oscar Wilde, employing a literary device that gives “camp” a mind of its own. Its existence as a noun, an adjective, and a verb all at once broadens the reader’s understanding of camp as a concept, one not easily confined into a definition.
However, the lack of definition that came despite over fifty “notes” both frustrates and impresses me as a reader. There is something in me, perhaps what I call logic, that yearns for a Merriam-Webster definition of this “camp” that Sontag writes so romantically about. Part of me feels as if I’d read a stream of consciousness with no conclusion, a never-ending river without a bed. In truth, that can also be precisely what is wrong with my perception. “The essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails.” I wonder if I am too serious in criticizing Sontag’s “notes” this way. I wonder if I lack the necessary “fantasy” required. Perhaps a second or third read is in order to answer such burning questions.
