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NARCISSUS IN THE WILDE
Textual cathexis and the historical origins of queer Camp
Gregory W.Bredbeck
A species comes to be, a type becomes fixed and strong through the
long fight with essentially constant unfavorable conditions.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
In the early 1960s, Susan Sontag published her famous “Notes on Camp” and
dedicated them to Oscar Wilde. Aside from a few passing comments about
Wilde within the essay, there is no explanation of the dedication, as if to imply
that the link between Wilde and Camp should go without saying. Since that time,
Wilde’s almost mythical status as the origin of modern gay Camp has been
constantly reinscribed. Michael Bronski, for example, in his wonderful act of
guerrilla scholarship, Culture Clash, honors Wilde as “perhaps the most
important figure in the history of gay sensibility” (58), and associates him with
several cultural trends leading to modern gay male political Camp. Stephen
Gee’s history of gay activism suggests both Camp and Wilde as models of how
to read moments of gay resistance hidden in history: “gayness might be
suggested by the use of Camp as in Oscar Wilde, or in the dark fatalistic
metaphors of horror films” (203). Jack Babuscio’s pioneering examination of
cinematic Camp exhibits Wilde as an example of what is termed the aesthetic
mode of Camp (42). Eve Sedgwick has placed Wilde squarely amidst “the
intersections of sexual definition with relatively new problematics of kitsch, of
camp, and of nationalist and imperialist definition” (132).
At the same time that Wilde has been increasingly written into the history of
Camp, Camp has been increasingly written into the history of gay male politics.
While contending that much gay male politics simply imitates dominant orders,
Gregg Blachford’s early theoretical address of the problem also suggests that
the processes at work in the subculture are more complicated than might
appear at first glance, for there is some evidence that the gay subculture
negotiates an oppositional challenge to some aspects of the dominant
order. The best way to understand this innovatory style is to examine one
phenomenon of the gay subculture—camp—and to show how it transforms
conformity into a challenge.