Hybrid etymology.(Book Review)

Camille Paglia Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems. Pantheon, 272 pages, $20

Does Camille Paglia contradict herself? She certainly does contain multitudes. How better to describe a homosexual atheist who has so much good to say about Roman Catholicism? A feminist who outraged feminists by claiming that, if raped, she would "dust herself off" and get on with things? A strange and controversial critic of art and culture with the almost comic brashness to call her most beloved poems the "world's best"?

Well, a few adjectives spring to mind, but none are quite fair to the odd--albeit inconsistent--pleasure to be taken in reading her new book.

Paglia spent her girlhood in Endicott, a New York factory town, among "speakers of sometimes mutually unintelligible Italian dialects?' Her love of Italian, well known to readers of her scholarship, informs but is superseded by her love of English:

 
   What fascinated me about English was what 
   I later recognized as its hybrid etymology: 
   blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman 
   French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman 
   abstraction. The clash of these elements, 
   as competitive as Italian dialects, is 
   invigorating, richly entertaining, and often 
   funny... 

Two things (among others, no doubt) strike one about this capsule tribute. The first is its sincerity. Poets and, more unbearably, English professors assure us that they "love language," but only the rarest among them successfully prove it, by use or appreciation. The closest many come to true love is an omnivorous indulgence: I am thinking of professors who take no greater pleasure in a close reading of, say, The Faerie Queene than of dialogue from a B-movie or TV sitcom. Paglia's enthusiasm, by contrast, is genuine and confined mostly to works of substance.

I hasten to emphasize "mostly." In her introduction to this volume, Paglia calls the authors of a 1950s M&M candy jingle "folk artists, as anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals." As a specimen of hyperbole, this outdoes even Roland Barthes's comparison of early Citroen automobiles to the work of those ecclesiastical architects. It also underscores a second interesting feature of the passage quoted above: that phrase "hybrid etymology" and its usefulness in describing the vocabulary of Paglia's aesthetic appraisals.