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"Literature's endless murders and disasters are there for contemplative pleasure, not moral lesson. ... The ritual of art is the cruel law of pain made pleasure" (Paglia 29-30).

Paglia’s thesis is basically saying that sexuality is the reason men and women are naturally so different in their thought process, tendencies, and overall aura. Again, naturally different, so that no matter how politically correct or sex neutral society is we cant get rid of the way men will be rational and women will be emotional. Men will use reason, form ideas and be head strong. Women will be grounded, chaotic, and close to nature. These along with many other opposites are naturally in us and although there can be slight variance, women and men will almost always follow their natural instinct.

Paglia’s work was called “guerilla scholarship.” Guerilla is defined in Webster’s Dictionary as: a member of an irregular armed force that fights a stronger force by sabotage and harassment. Two relevant definitions for scholarship are: (1) The methods, discipline, and attainments of a scholar or scholars. (2) Knowledge resulting from study or research in a particular field. Combing these two definitions I am going to guess that “guerilla scholarship,” as written by this critic, is targeting her approach to convey an idea. He is recognizing that Paglia is well informed and knowledgeable on her topic, but the way she argues it is unconventional. He uses the extreme word guerilla, which is also used when describing criminals. I agree that her approach is very different than typical scholarly arguments, but not that her work is criminal. I enjoyed her style of writing and her blunt arguments. I think that critics had to bash her approach because they couldn’t bash the content of her argument.

If I was to critique Ellis’s work with Paglia’s quote in mind I would say that his writing comes from an internal pain. Ellis’s art of writing is expressed through Patrick Bateman. Bateman’s art of living is painful in my eyes. He really isn’t happy, but can fake it well. While Paglia’s book is designed to be a moral lesson, Ellis’s book is an example of “Literature’s endless murders and disasters are there for contemplative pleasure, not moral lesson…” He is work is obviously fictionally turning Bateman’s pain into pleasure, but maybe really turning his own pain into literature pleasure.

Regarding Camille Paglia’s “Sexual Personae”, some critics have responded to it as a “guerilla scholarship”. To be very honest I was not very familiar with this term and spent many hours researching it. The only concrete definition I was able to find was by a PHD by the name of Sheldon Greaves. He defines the term as, “The use of unconventional methods to help independent scholars gain access to tools and resources normally available only to academicians”. I think that Paglia does just that. He use of unconventional methods to me is simply her path of explanation. This book was published in the early 90’s at a time where feminism and equality was powerful and flourishing. She simply took her opinion and spelled it out to the world using the Apollonian Dionysian conflict to portray her point. In a very intelligently constructed argument, she was telling the feminists of the world to “shut it” while they were still ahead. She first introduces this in her thesis that states, “Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture”. I completely agree with his because I feel that everything around us is based on sex or sexuality, in fact this is how we are defined. I think it would be amazing to walk around disguised, as the opposite sex just to see how different things would be.
Now as far as Ellis goes it seems to me that they have completely different approaches but end up in the same place with their writing. Neither of them are writing to appease any of the readers unless the reader wants just that. According to Ellis, “Literatures endless murders and disasters are there for contemplative pleasure.. not moral lesson.. the ritual of art is the cruel law of pain made pleasure.” Ellis takes all the things that people think about but never say out loud and make it pleasure. Paglia does the same thing but instead of using a morbid-psycho mind set uses our sexual impulses to reach the reader. Both of these writers decided to say exactly what we are all thinking and are afraid to say. The great thing about literature is that you can read what someone else writes and agree in your mind all alone. These authors allow us to indulge in our pain and eroticism alone at home and allow our mind to follow the novels to places we thought were not possible. Do you think maybe the two of them should have dated? See look at my mind already?

Camille Paglia’s style of “guerilla scholarship” pops up at multiple points on the radar. She’s touting a new way to look at all literature and literary scholarship before her that originates not from some new theory but a review of how misguided and gilded edged the current ideas seem within a redefinition of sexual identity that attempts to unmask the multiple layers of disguise. These layers form the dynamic that allows western society to function quite well, in a number of ways, but also allows it to falter under certain conditions. In her own words,
“Sexual Personae seeks to demonstrate the unity and continuity of western culture… The book accepts the canonical tradition and rejects the modernist idea that culture has collapsed into meaningless fragments…”
She begins by analyzing the fundamental differences between gender and immediately from this shows the forces operating between nature and human order. Essentially women are of nature, of the natural order, are associated with sex and reproduction, and are connected with the lunar cycles and subtle fluctuations of the earth. Men on the other hand act against the grain of the natural order. The man’s position is to protect the female from the destructive entropy of nature through the development of agriculture, tool-making, shelter, civilization, economy, and society. Paglia marks the shift from nature to society with the demise of earth centered religion and the birth of the sky cults. This also marks the change from connection with the earth and a concrete, substantial, and simple worldview to a more abstract, detached, and complex worldview. Her first chapter, Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art, begins with western man’s formation of God as an attempt to quantify nature through ritual and religion.
“Society is an artificial construction… against nature’s power. Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature.”
This need and want to quantify not only nature but everything and everything stems from man’s inability to accept or fear of acceptance of the “humiliating passivity”.
The subservient role of the woman in western society illustrates our tendency to place in an inferior role anything that nature cannot be separated from. And she points out that society sustains itself by this very defense mechanism,
“Without [the idea of the ultimate benevolence of nature and God], culture would revert to fear and despair.”
Paglia finally attacks Rousseau at the heart of the “organic society” in an attempt to challenge feminism at it’s most basic level. Her attack works to a certain point and she shows that modern attempt to change the inequalities of the chthonian equation by sociological witch hunt cannot change the nature of Man himself. The attempt of feminism to balance the role of gender is a prime example of the nature of Man overcoming the will of Man. Very Nietzsche. And from here she goes straight to the horse’s mouth (can you tell I hate it when people abuse Nietzsche quotes?) for her next radically reactionary yet also very indisputable examples of THE WILL TO POWER which forces philosophy to acknowledge that the most powerful will defeat the humanitarian notion of justice. So, read Nietzsche…

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"Literature's endless murders and disasters are there for contemplative pleasure, not moral lesson. ... The ritual of art is the cruel law of pain made pleasure" (Paglia 29-30).

With this quote Paglia is trying to show that the prime device for the exercise of Chthonian violence (which will always present itself, in benign ways or terrible ways) has is theater, drama, the stage, and within fictions, where “Almost everything we call ‘high culture’ is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.” (Nietzsche.) Paglia says that we even enjoy the contemplation of cruelty and vented “Chthonian”, that we rank and qualify our art and culture by how much cruelty it allows us to absorb. We invent art and the idea of art because, “Art is sacrificial, turning it’s inherent aggression against both artist and representation.” within art there is an inborn system of self actualization that threatens cruelty and ridicules itself and its meaning; it is a Chthonian outlet that vents the evil nature we would otherwise find other more destructive ways to express. The quotation following it, “Their status as fiction, removed into a sacred precinct, intensifies our pleasure by guaranteeing that contemplation cannot turn into action.” refers exactly to American Psycho’s port of entry, method of terror, eerie introspection into the mind of a modern day killer.

The first words “abndon all hope ye who enter here” are a reference to Dante’s Inferno and mark the descent into hell. But in American Psycho their written with paint on the side of a chemical bank, immediately after this Price (who read the words) gives the cabbie a five dollar bill just to turn up the radio. This sentence, the first one in the book, can sum up the entire meaning of Paglia’s quote, "Literature's endless murders and disasters are there for contemplative pleasure, not moral lesson. ... The ritual of art is the cruel law of pain made pleasure". So we have the disaster in a number of forms, starting with the graffiti which is a symbol of the failure of society, the defacement of the forms of culture, the feeble and choked silent criminalized voice of the oppressed expressing anger with establishment… in a number of ways graffiti is a symbol of Chthonian angst generated by the people who feel the strictures of society and who spit back at the society within the “sacred precinct” in a misplaced, undeveloped, but public way. The bus bears the ad for “The Miserable”. The bus interrupts Price’s contemplation of the herald on the bank wall and lunges into his view with meaninglessness.
The message “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” refers directly to the bank (money is the root of all evil, etc.) and to Price who has read it; the proof that it (the disaster) isn‘t there for moral lesson and is there for contemplative pleasure is just the fact that he doesn‘t get it at all, its satire, he uses his hell bank note for hedonism, says turn it up here’s another five bucks for the fire, lights a cigar, whatever. The moral lesson of the bank sign is obvious and actually weak, cliché. The interesting elements are the satirical cliché choices that are contemplative hedonism…and those satirical choices serve to create “the ritual of art” by changing his folly into a greater speculation and a joke, pain() into pleasure)(.

Camille Paglia’s extensive essay entitled, “Sexual Personae” is a retort to feminism, a denunciation of modern organized religion, and a dissection of society and sociology in general. In her work, Camille Paglia makes a strong effort to demonstrate the relationship between nature versus society or earthliness versus civilization, etc. In demonstrating the polarity of these relationships, she sets out to prove that, while not necessarily harmful, society and civilization is a contrived ideal brought about by the fear of man to get away from the “chthonian” muck from which he ultimately came from. Within that thesis, she says that society and structure is mostly a male contrivance, whereas the female tends to be more naturally on the opposite (earthly) side. She goes further to say, essentially, that these relationships are how the world is now, that it can’t be changed, and that the feminist view of tinkering with society, or to ultimately lose the parameters that have been bestowed upon them by men is not only a useless effort, but not a very wise one either. I agree with the first part of this thought. She gives good evidence that civilization, government, and civil obedience may be based on the male effort to get away from their chthonian roots. I would even take it a step further and say that the evolved nature of man has become one of structure, government, etc., and that this polar relationship of earthly versus civilized may not always be one of opposites. It’s man’s nature—-it’s human nature—-to make structure out of chaos, so to put them on a scale and say that they belong at opposite ends wouldn’t be a very accurate description of the relationship. I think of it as being more of a circle, like two electrons in the same orbit. They have more in common than not.

On page 29, Paglia talks about art being, at it’s roots, a celebration of pain and cruelty. She says, "Literature's endless murders and disasters are there for contemplative pleasure, not moral lesson. ... The ritual of art is the cruel law of pain made pleasure.” Throughout the excerpt, she mentions art as being a bridge between the two polar ends of nature and society. Whereas art certainly has built in rules and regulations that make it enjoyable to take in, its root, in the end, is always the infernal: eroticism, chaos, earthly pleasures. By this quote, I believe she is saying that at its root, art is not enjoyable unless it is a derivation of pain. In other words, art and sadism (or masochism depending on the observer’s point of view) are almost always one and the same. This philosophy, again, makes sense to me, and it can be related, in my opinion, to what Curtis White gripes about (and disagrees with) in “The Middle Mind,” that all art, at its root, is the same. It’s all pulp, maybe even all sensationalism. It is how that material is presented which makes it good or not. A good example of this is Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho.” While considered by most to be an example of high art, at its roots, “American Psycho” is a story of extreme pain, and thus pleasure. I mentioned in class that while it makes me sick to read—-the materialism and general jack-ass-y-ness of the main characters, the graphically descriptive murder scenes—-I derive an extreme amount of pleasure in reading it. In other words, it’s a page turner. The mere fact that it is highly taboo and chthonian makes it more interesting to read; a more interesting piece of art.