Camille Paglia in her 1990 book, “Sexual Personae seeks to demonstrate the unity and continuity of western culture….and rejects the modernist idea that culture has collapsed into meaningless fragments.” Western culture, which she believes had its roots in ancient Egypt, is essentially pagan in subject and method. By subject it is worldly as in concerned with this world; by method it is focused on the actions of the eye and its gaze. Western culture is contrasted and contested against Semitic culture whose subject is outer worldliness and whose method is the ear and what it hears. In this sense Judeo-Christianity never did defeat paganism.” Western and Semitic; eye and ear; this world and outer world are in constant strife for the allegiance of the people. Western pagan culture far from being meaningless, fragmented, and dying is very much alive and thriving – in all its forms from the popular to the highbrow.
Paglia wants to “show how much of western life, art, and thought is ruled by personality, which the book traces through recurrent types or personae (‘masks’).” Her method is to add badly missing emotion to intellect because the formal classroom today is no place for emotional meaningful culture. Rather meaning and emotion come from everyday things and events which are ignored by the overly learned. “The amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in great art have been ignored or glossed over by most academic critics.” And thus they have missed a major aspect of the art. This missing aspect (which she calls “chthonian”) is everywhere hidden in plain sight.
In her first chapter, “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art,” she first introduces us to her basic theory and its foundations. First she contrasts nature and society. Nature is real power; it is dangerous, mean, unbiased, and unsympathetic. “Human beings are not nature’s favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force.” The higher, more developed, or more complex the civilization the more culture it will have developed. With proportionally more culture comes a proportionally larger collective delusion that we have somehow conquered nature. In other words, the more we imagine that we have conquered nature or parts of nature the more deluded we are while simultaneously being more cultured. “Society is our frail barrier against nature.” We quite often prefer society, its culture and its delusion to the reality of nature. Society is the much weaker power but it is what keeps the full force and face of nature at bay – usually; but never fully and so there is always the fear of nature’s cataclysmic return.
Sexuality is close to nature and is therefore very dangerous. No matter how much we try to tame it, there is no such thing as safe sex in any sense of the term. Feminist notions of sexual equality, freedom, or liberation as well as romantic notions of peace, harmony, goodwill, and happiness-ever-after are all delusionally insane coping mechanisms. “Sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted. Behaviorist sex therapies believe guiltless, no-fault sex is possible. But sex has always been girt round with taboo, irrespective of culture. Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges….Eroticism is a realm stalked by ghosts. It is the place beyond the pale, both cursed and enchanted.” In other words sex is always a violent, pleasurable, multi-level, power dynamic.
Paglia discerns two camps of thought in modern western culture. First there are the delusional idealists. They are people like J.J. Rousseau, J. Locke, and the whole liberal tradition; they are completely and naively misguided about nature. Paglia is firmly in the antagonist camp made up of T. Hobbes (who famously described man’s life in a state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”), Sade (who advocated cruelty), and Nietzsche. “Aggression comes from nature; it is what Nietzsche is to call the will-to-power. For Sade, getting back to nature (the Romantic imperative that still permeates our culture from sex counseling to cereal commercials) would be to give free rein to violence and lust. I agree. Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex have set themselves against nature. Sex is power. Identity is power. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live.” Realistically, the world is full of unpleasantness and this means one cannot be a romantic nor a liberal while also being a realist because both are full of pleasant lies meant to hide the unpleasantness of the real world.
Western notions of romantic love are also delusional. “Western love is a displacement of cosmic realities. It is a defense mechanism rationalizing forces ungoverned and ungovernable. Like early religion, it is a device enabling us to control our primal fear.” Pretty much everything we believe, we believe because it makes us feel better – it takes away our real and rational fear. We, in the west, believe a lot more than most other civilizations. “…the west’s greatness arises from this delusional certitude.” Consider that in many western myths man challenges the gods (who are the personification of natural forces) and often times wins. In Christianity we killed our God – but that did not stop him from coming back. This delusion that we can beat nature appears to be a unique aspect of the western mythological tradition.
The Apollonian is the male strategy for overcoming the female, nature, and death. The female is initially an all-powerful mother from whom all boys rebel. This rebellion starts from the moment they start pissing standing up having realized that their mother cannot do that – this is the first feeling of power, capability, and superiority that boys feel over their mothers. Further on, this rebellion is pleasurably behaviorally reinforced each time a male holds his penis while pissing – something women lack anatomically and behaviorally. Finally it is further re-enforced after puberty due to the fact and sensual connection that semen and urine pass through the urethra – another singular male biological behavioural nudge. The Apollonian is also a strategy of resentment to overcome any sexual partner who drains men in a “little death”. Typical male sexual activity is drained by women and ends with an exhaustion not detected in women - physically experienced by men on both emotional and physical levels. “I see the mother as an overwhelming force who condemns men to lifelong sexual anxiety, from which they escape through rationalism and physical achievement.” This quest for rationalism and physical achievement starts with each time the male child aims at the toilet bowl (or pit). It is a subtle behavioral nudge to aim for a rational goal reinforced daily by biology and rewarded with feelings of pleasure and/or relief. Men need to do something to be men; women are reminded monthly for most of their lives that they are women. Death is never far away in nature so an Apollonian strategy was developed to hide that fact and to make men feel better about that fact. Therefore religion, technology, reason, art and science where developed by men and in a reoccurring theme, women constantly try to appropriate male achievement. The author makes a joke at her own expense claiming that she is guilty while she is using reason she “thinks like a man and writes obnoxious books.” She would not have been able to write her book if men had not developed all the reason, technology, and science that she was able to appropriate in order to write and publish her book.
“Our focus on the pretty is an Apollonian strategy. The leaves and flowers, the birds, the hills are a patchwork pattern by which we map the known. What the west represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means ‘of the earth’—but earth’s bowels, not its surface….I adopt [chthonian] as a substitute for Dionysian, which has become contaminated with vulgar pleasantries. The Dionysian is no picnic. It is the chthonian realities which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk and ooze. It is the dehumanizing brutality of biology and geology, the Darwinian waste and bloodshed, the squalor and rot we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons. Western science and aesthetics are attempts to revise this horror into imaginatively palatable form.” The chthonian is woman. The chthonian are forces outside of our control that just happen to us. Women embody this more than men through menstruation, lactation and giving birth. These three are cycles men cannot experience and which men find troubling. At the base is the cycle which men aim to overcome. Therefore Apollonian strategies, growth strategies or end directed strategies are delusions of overcoming nature’s chthonian cycles. All such creations such as Economics’ focus on GDP growth, Christianity’s focus on the goal of the afterlife or the second coming are attempts to destroy the cycles – but it is impossible because we cannot tame nature. As evidence consider that cycles keep appearing in all these creations meant to end cycles. Poor Apollonian attempts to control nature will always be with us and will always fail to stop the cycles. Just as certainly as men will always try to control and dominate women but will always be subverted and fail. “Nature is always pulling the rug out from under our pompous ideals.” However in this tension between men and women, between the Apollonian and the chthonian, civilization and all good things in it grow. It is this tension of biological and cultural forces between the sexes that propel men to action. “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”
Western Apollonian culture has developed some unique tools for its attempts to overcome the chthonian. The mystery genre with its reversal at the crucial point is one, as is the notion of a climax to a story. Paglia devotes a lot of pages to the unique nature of tragedy in western literature. “Tragedy plays a male game, a game it invented to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. It is not flawed choice, flawed action, or even death itself which is the ultimate human dilemma. The gravest challenge to our hopes and dreams is the messy biological business-as-usual that is going on within us and without us at every hour of every day. Consciousness is a pitiful hostage of its flesh-envelope, whose surges, circuits, and secret murmurings it cannot stay or speed. This is the chthonian drama that has no climax but only an endless round, cycle upon cycle.” Tragedy at its heart is chthonian because it just happens without reason – the art form may be cathartic in that it mirrors male sexual experience but it is also humorous at the end. Humor is the only real victory that man can take in his perennial tragic loss in the face of the chthonian: the realization of the ridiculousness of all Apollonian aspirations.