Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Embodying the Fragments: A Refl ection on the Reluctant Auto-Biography of Brigid Brophy
- 2 Brigid Brophy’s Paradoxical World of Childhood
- 3 Intr oduction to ‘The Librarian and the Novel’
- 4 The Librarian and the Novel: A Writer’s View
- 5 Penetrating (the) Prancing Novelist
- 6 ‘Shavian that she was’
- 7 ‘Il faut que je vive’: Brigid Brophy and Animal Rights
- 8 Brigid Brophy’s Phenomenology of Sex in Flesh and The Snow Ball
- 9 Letter to Brigid
- 10 Encoding Love: Hidden Correspondence in the Fiction of Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch
- 11 ‘Heads and Boxes’: A Prop Art Exhibition Collaboration by Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy
- 12 Prancing Novelist and Black and White: Experiments in Biography
- 13 ‘Mo nster Cupid’: Brophy, Camp and The Snow Ball
- 14 ‘A Felicitous Day for Fish’
- 15 The Dissenting Feminist
- 16 A Certain Detachment?
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
13 - ‘Mo nster Cupid’: Brophy, Camp and The Snow Ball
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Embodying the Fragments: A Refl ection on the Reluctant Auto-Biography of Brigid Brophy
- 2 Brigid Brophy’s Paradoxical World of Childhood
- 3 Intr oduction to ‘The Librarian and the Novel’
- 4 The Librarian and the Novel: A Writer’s View
- 5 Penetrating (the) Prancing Novelist
- 6 ‘Shavian that she was’
- 7 ‘Il faut que je vive’: Brigid Brophy and Animal Rights
- 8 Brigid Brophy’s Phenomenology of Sex in Flesh and The Snow Ball
- 9 Letter to Brigid
- 10 Encoding Love: Hidden Correspondence in the Fiction of Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch
- 11 ‘Heads and Boxes’: A Prop Art Exhibition Collaboration by Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy
- 12 Prancing Novelist and Black and White: Experiments in Biography
- 13 ‘Mo nster Cupid’: Brophy, Camp and The Snow Ball
- 14 ‘A Felicitous Day for Fish’
- 15 The Dissenting Feminist
- 16 A Certain Detachment?
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
It would be foolhardy to dismiss Brigid Brophy's works as the witty artefacts of a Firbankian epigone, who, like Ronald Firbank, would seem merely to have aped the aesthetes and decadents of the 1890s; indeed, neither her work nor that of Firbank should be the stuff of dismissal at all. Rather, Brophy's oeuvre should be treated like a missal, as a mode of instruction, celebration and worship. More specifically, a sustained reading suggests that her devotion both to artists such as Firbank and Beardsley and to the baroque/rococo in general work to produce a missale plenum of experimental camp. I contend that camp is not trash, nor is it kitsch; I, like Brophy, insist that camp is a form of allegory – specifically, baroque and rococo allegory – that attempts not only to rescue allegory from the banality of being mere illustration, but also, crucially, to present it as a particularly apt form of modernist expression and critique.
As Brophy tells us in Prancing Novelist, ‘Firbank is perhaps the inventor, certainly the fixer, of modern camp.’ The qualifier ‘modern’ is essential here. Modern camp, as a symptom of the limits of a taste for symbolism, for totality, through allegory produces a temporal gap between the beautiful and the sublime that seizes upon the failed moments of the baroque, of rococo, of aestheticism and decadence by, as Brophy suggests, ‘pioneering backwards’. Why? The reason is that camp allegory, in its steely fascination with artifice, ruins and excess, steadfastly does not produce an illusion of totality or of unity. Camp allegory ironises, critiques and escapes the limits of the illusion provided by beauty as symbol of totality. Camp allegory stands as a truth procedure, one could say, that explicitly acknowledges that there is no longer any seamless unity of the immanent with the absolute. The ruins, the absurdities, the extravagance, the very worldliness of the world form signposts on this often treacherous, mysterious, enigmatic path to the absolute – an absolute that Brophy contends is bound up in both psychological and classical truth.
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- Brigid BrophyAvant-Garde Writer, Critic, Activist, pp. 193 - 209Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020