Funny how writers can unlock one’s mind.

Joan Acocella’s article on Matthew Bourne (New Yorker 12 March 2007) helped me understand something about modernism, camp, and sincerity that I’d not quite understood before. Many milestones on this journey for me: John Hollander in 1978 talking about returning to “the truth of the noble remark,” ASE‘s Barbara White talking about glam-rock in 2003, and now Joan Acocella writing about a choreographer whose name and work were new to me:

In his move away from camp, Bourne was following a well-worn path. Camp was an escape route from modernism, a return to the charm and glamour that had been banned by that austere movement. The purveyors of camp had been raised on modernism, and so they treated their pretty things with irony as well as with love, but, over time, in the work of many artists–Pedro Almodovar is a good example–love won out. The left turn (irony) became a U-turn (sincerity). Macaulay, in one of his interviews with Bourne, says of Julie Andrews and “The Sound of Music” that he thinks “half the point of growing up is to outgrow her films.” “Oh, I can’t take that kind of talk,” Bourne replies. “That film’s so much a part of me.” This statement is echt camp, but it is also about three-quarters heartfelt, and it is on that ratio that the post-camp artists, including Bourne, have built their art.

Reading this, I feel the tumblers in my mind click into place, and I hear a door swing open. That’s the grim evangelism I felt in my Modern Novel class in grad school. That’s the reason camp leaves me cold, but not as cold as modernism. That’s the strength I feel in Eliot more than in other high modernists. That’s why I prefer Woolf’s essay on Thomas Browne to her essay on Modern Fiction. Ah.