By the close of the nineteenth century, English music hall or “variety,” an entertainment form that incorporated comic acts, animal tricks, dramatic sketches, and dance, attracted middle-class patronage, thereby losing its exclusive character as working-class entertainment. Variety halls such as the upscale Alhambra and the Empire now claimed the attention, not to mention lucre, of mass audiences. This chapter argues that the music hall provided a new testing ground on which enterprising intellectuals could flex their evaluative muscle. Perhaps more than any other late-Victorian man of letters, poet and critic Arthur Symons frequented the music hall with an eye toward representing it, a service that he regularly performed for newspapers such as the Star or more elite cultural journals such as the Fortnightly Review.
Crucial to my purposes, Symons theorized his relation to music-hall entertainment. It seemed that variety’s mass appeal prompted some intellectuals to revise their previous understanding of aesthetic value. Symons took up this challenge. His accounts of the form exceed a mere description or review of music-hall performance: they evidence a reflexive awareness of the taste-making process and challenge traditional notions of cultural hierarchy.
The 1892 travelogue “A Spanish Music-Hall” stands as Symons’s first extensive theoretical statement on the halls. Here Symons alights on the figure of the aficionado, or eager amateur, as shorthand for his role with respect to the entertainment. In his words: “I am aficionado, as a Spaniard would say, of music halls.”1 The claim has room to resonate before Symons substantiates it with an evidentiary list of different halls that he both patronizes and studies. The self-designation seems to suggest that Symons understands his devotion to the music hall as genteel, an amateur enthusiasm distinct from the work of the specialist whose emergence was redefining labor practice in the fields of law, medicine, and civic administration at this time.2
In point of fact, Symons’s authority appears to stem from his having a special field of his choosing largely to himself: the aficionado has no clear collaborators as he moves among London’s music halls, records the proceedings, and makes crucial distinctions. Aficionados seem distinguished by their isolated labor, a singularity that could also be seen to complicate their claims to authority, for these savants speak for what most cultured observers define as esoteric passions.
Symons further marginalizes his admiration for music hall by defining it as mere amusement: “And then it is so amusing” (my emphasis), he continues, “to contrast the Pavilion with the Trocadero, to compare the Eldorado with La Scala; to distinguish just the difference, on the stage and off, which one is certain to find at Collins’ and the Metropolitan, at La Cigale and the Divan Japanois.” These may be exceptional claims, but they also underscore the fragile grounds on which the dandy bases his evaluative privilege. The aficionado addresses culture for cultured readers, but seems to speak from the margins.
Yet Arthur Symons achieves something more substantial than a fan letter in “A Spanish Music-Hall.” Even if the passionate nature of his commitment to the music hall compromises his claims, the search for critical authority remains central to the essay in instructive ways. The essay strives not only to amuse and provoke, but, in good Kantian fashion, to persuade readers of the rational basis for his appreciation. “To study the individuality of a music hall,” he writes, “as one studies a human individuality, that is by no means the least profitable, the least interesting of studies.”3 Symons does not merely announce a passion for the halls, but makes the more provocative claim to have discovered a node linking desire with knowledge.
That an apology for studying the halls can eventually move to Kant-like claims for what constitutes a proper, humanist study suggests the aficionado has ambitions that counter his or her initial rhetorical modesty. I contend that the music hall provoked Symons to a considered rhetoric that challenges our still regnant amateur/expert binary. Aficionados appear to reside on the margins, where they proudly announce their unique autonomy and individuality. Yet once they accept the duty of representing their passions, they assume a more functional role. They address the public in an attempt to serve it. Initially, Symons resists putting the aficionado in the same category as the expert, but he comes to use the figure to remake the expert in a fashion that troubles a strict opposition between amateurs and professionals.
Still, Symons’s aficionado likely raises our suspicions, since his or her private pleasures suggest a version of the contemporary, modish, cultural professional. When Symons declares to readers of the prestigious Fortnightly Review that a popular culture they may disdain is in point of fact creative, complex, or significant, he indulges in the rhetoric of discovery that Pierre Bourdieu associates with the bad faith practice of the academic professional: “It is a form of dominant chic among intellectuals to say, ‘Look at these cartoons,’ or some other cultural item, ‘do they not display great cultural creativity?’ Such a person is saying, ‘You don’t see that, but I do, and I am the first to see it.’ The perception may be valid, but there is an overestimation of the capacity of these new things to change the structure of the distribution of symbolic capital.”4 Bourdieu would most likely dismiss Symons’s posturing along with the moves made by later “chic” intellectuals. Yet we can claim with some plausibility that Bourdieu in turn underestimates the complex affective component behind professional activity. For Bourdieu’s culpable intellectual is something of a stock character acting in accord with a single, and singularly bad, motive. Bourdieu views the freedom to flout conventional taste as merely a signifier of prestige, in a profession that licenses transgression for members with good standing. A narrow form of self-interest is the only reason Bourdieu can offer to explain why intellectuals might celebrate a common culture.5
A discussion of Symons’s particular expertise in popular culture also requires a discussion of camp, a sensibility that saturates his critical vocabulary. Symons appears to have learned from the music hall that convention making and rule breaking are closely allied. “Camp” is a handy term for this dialectical, topsy-turvy insight into the process of taste making. Symons brought a camp sensibility to music-hall performance that even his shrewdest readers appear to have missed or ignored.6
“A Spanish Music-Hall,” his inaugural piece on the music-hall phenomenon, announces the rise of the music-hall expert: at the same time, it serves as a primer on camp pleasures. Music halls, he declares, “amuse me, and I am always grateful to any one or anything that amuses me.” In this instance, the aficionado distinguishes between the drama, a “serious art,” and the “art of the music hall,” which is “admittedly frivolous—the consecration of the frivolous.” It is “frivolous” and therefore culturally peripheral. Yet the oxymoron—“the consecration of the frivolous”—remains suggestive: it suggests that frivolity contains enough charisma to reorganize a life. An ethical point lies behind the distinction: given a choice, the aficionado sides with the frivolous, or vulnerable and marginalized. When Symons writes on the music hall, he emphasizes the “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” that Susan Sontag defines as camp.7 Frivolity may be “nothing,” yet it has the power to liberate: “And I come for that exquisite sense of the frivolous, that air of Bohemian freedom, that relief from respectability which one gets here, and nowhere more surely than here.” The passage hails a “nonsense” that frees us from the coercive demands of the mundane. “A Spanish Music-Hall” does more than proclaim its writer an aficionado and expert: it announces that music hall is an excuse to camp it up.
Camp, a mode of being-in-irony, remains a vital part of our current style repertoire. In a hundred years or more, it has assumed a variety of forms. We can find it in our contemporary modes of consumer hauteur; in self-conscious, assertive fandom; even in media self-understanding and self-promotion (“Nick at Nite’s” hyperreal, self-mocking ads turn their programming of sitcom reruns into high concept). Camp also has a venerable tradition in queer fandom, and a generative role in queer identity. If Symons anticipates the cultural studies intellectual and his or her concern with the popular in essays like “A Spanish Music-Hall,” he also clears the path for camp experts. His wry distance and appreciation of the social performances that surround the music-hall stage honor camp imperatives: “In a music-hall the audience is a part of the performance. . . . Here we have a tragic comedy in the box yonder, a farce in the third row of the stalls, a scene from a ballet in the promenade. The fascination of these private performances is irresistible; and they are so constantly changing, so full of surprises, so mysterious and so clear.”8
Since camp also names a sensibility, it is difficult to situate cleanly within a historical frame. However, Andrew Ross provides a useful link between camp and the Victorian intellectual. As Ross observes, Victorian aesthetes refused to assume the role of the traditional intellectual, who shored up ruling-class beliefs, and that of the organic intellectual, who represented the people. Instead, this unaligned intellectual promoted values—frivolity, leisure, hedonism—that a hegemonic middle class disdained as aristocratic, and therefore obsolete.9
Ross correctly suggests that Victorian camp had a desperate, reactionary quality; the camp critic sought to reanimate poses and stances originally derived from an aristocratic matrix. In revolt against middle-class standards, Symons often assumed a pose of aristocratic hauteur in matters of culture. Yet this pose of mastery was clearly problematic when applied to popular culture. Cultivating a formal appreciation of practices either neglected or derided in the dominant culture is no sure path to popular success. In Symons’s case, we need to balance Ross’s claims with Raymond Williams’s insight that invoking the residual tokens of a culture can have a destabilizing effect. As often as not, these signs of the past assume a counterhegemonic force: “[A]t certain points,” Williams reminds us, “the dominant culture cannot allow too much residual experience and practice outside itself, at least without risk.”10 It is reductive to read Symons’s appreciations of the music hall as simply iterating his critical authority; his camp views more likely ironized the whole business of taste making.
There is another reason for the links between camp and aesthetic expertise in Symons’s music-hall accounts. Historically, camp taste has smuggled cultural contraband across carefully patrolled borders, often in the plain view of arbiters of taste. Camp legitimizes the distasteful, or the socially abject; it lightens prejudice toward the unconventional. As Mark Booth puts it, camp works “to [annex] and [civilize] areas of delight that have otherwise hardly been explored. It has beaten tracks through jungles of enjoyment and made them accessible.”11 Camp taste, the expert assertions of the aficionado: the idioms overlap because both lay claim to an unstable middle ground of cultural endeavor, beyond the traditional high/low culture binary.
Symons’s music-hall accounts reveal his faith that aesthetic hierarchies can be challenged if rendered in the rational idiom of the professional critic. He seems keenly aware of the ability of critical endeavor to legitimate its objects of scrutiny. Symons understood that criticism enabled relations of power, but could also reform them, so that the careful representation of culture forms amounted to an elevation of the “frivolous” and enfranchisement for the marginalized.
The expert’s sense of purpose and the search for pleasure: Symons’s meditative pieces on popular amusements suggest that disparate cognitive styles met in music-hall appreciation. Indeed, the two music-hall accounts early and late in Symons’s music-hall patronage that I focus on, “A Spanish Music-Hall” and the 1896 essay “At the Alhambra,” elaborate on the tension between participation and observation that defines critical spectatorship for Symons. He sought to embrace different tastes and represent this charged encounter to his readers. The results are tense and contradictory, but I suspect he believed the messy results unavoidable. The critic has no choice but to enter the fray. Bourdieu’s critique of intellectual chic is salutary, but his call for a “redistribution of cultural value” that will put an end to the strict class tracking sustained by aesthetic value systems requires a collective endeavor that includes even the professional intellectual whom Bourdieu suspects.12
“A Spanish Music-Hall” and “At the Alhambra” negotiate the tensions between the critic’s private taste and public obligation. Both elaborate Symons’s central insight into professional behavior: namely, that expert claims need not shut down egalitarian impulse. In “A Spanish Music-Hall,” the search for an expert view of the form levels class and gender difference. Outside its preamble, “A Spanish Music-Hall” details how camp both transforms and disciplines the critic. The effort to represent music hall, to speak for himself and others, involves Symons in a dynamic model of expertise humanized by camp views. And in Symons’s later essay, “At the Alhambra,” camp too gets criticized and recast. The limits of camp, particularly the privilege it accords detachment, provoke Symons to a passionate defense of criticism and theory. He argues for the critic’s right to move from experience toward more reflective, and reflexive, views.13
Arguing for the right to theorize amounts to an apology for the professional, since, as Bruce Robbins observes, what distinguishes professionals from amateurs is “the necessary possession of theory.”14 The conclusion of “At the Alhambra” suggests that such conceptual rigor is required of the responsible, critical intellectual seeking to both participate in and reflect on culture.
An immediate problem of context and interpretation posed by “A Spanish Music-Hall” is: why Spain? Put another way: why is the music-hall intellectual translated into Spanish, into the “aficionado”? A postcolonial reading of the essay might provide answers to these questions. First, the desire is ascribed to the dandy to discover something new and different and claim it for his own. The self-styled modern travels to Spain in order to locate primitives who unsettle his identity while in fact establishing it, and securing his credentials as a cultured observer. And, at least in part, Symons’s text is amenable to these criticisms. The author in fact lingers on the ease and control of the singers and performers he locates in a small music hall; he wonders exactly how these folks manage to command the nightly attention of the collective gathered at the Alcazar, a Barcelonan music hall.
However, the postcolonial critique of Symons is likely to conclude that Symons in fact believes that the power of these performers resides solely in some putative exotic character, in their inability to rise above local circumstance or essence. And this conclusion is precisely where a hermeneutic of suspicion does Symons a profound disservice. For while “A Spanish Music-Hall” often cagily—campily—begins by asserting that meaning is rooted in the body, it also expands on an alternative explanation for the performances that Symons witnesses. The playful deferral of the final meaning of these performances seems pure camp esprit, blurring the traditional binarisms of nature and culture, mind and body, esteemed in the dominant culture.
“A Spanish Music-Hall” is infused with camp attitudes and laughter; the irony marking Symons’s description of the Alcazar signals both his distance from and his extreme empathic proximity to what he surveys. The space of the Alcazar follows the tourist imperative—“the most characteristic place I could find” Symons avers—but the space is no sooner discovered than it is recast.15 Its hybrid qualities suggest the space has already been inhabited, remodeled to fit camp specifications. Symons’s account brings out the in-between, unsettling nature of a space that is neither a café nor a theater, and whose patrons are also its performers. The room, Symons observes, is “just like an ordinary café.” The place fills, but “the audience [is] not a distinguished one”; none of the women, Symons notes, “wear hats,” and “few of them [assume] an air of too extreme superiority to the waiters.”16 Musicians and performers gather in the café, pass through a stage door, and after their performance return to the crowd from which they have been only momentarily separated or distinguished. The Alcazar is undistinguished enough for the spectator to feel superior to the surroundings, yet the proximity of performer and observer is enough to insinuate and unsettle spectator hubris.
A sketch is performed with “a mise-en-scene of astonishing meagerness.”17 Symons informs us that the puppet show he witnesses is something that he’s seen before and better; “the repertoire of these miniature theatres,” he notes, “seems limited.” He complains that “the songs I heard at the Alcazar Espanol at Barcelona were almost without exception the same that I had heard at the Montagnes Russes at Paris.” The blasé account is double-voiced, suggestive of Symons’s superiority to, as well as his intense involvement with, what he describes.
This is not to claim there is no evidence on the face of things for a reading of Symons as colonial tourist. He lingers on the “native” dance, which appears to provide the English spectator definitive proof in an uncertain space of his own aplomb, status, and essential remove. Viewing the “Baile Sevillanas,” Symons demonstrates a pedant’s knowledge of the distinctions between Orientalisms. “Spanish dances,” he orates, “have a certain resemblance with the dances of the East.”18 Yet where “the exquisite rhythms of Japanese dancers are produced by the subtle gesture of hands . . . the delicate undulations of the body,” the Arab dance, from which, he claims, the Spanish dance derives, “is a dance in which the body sets itself to its own rhythm.”
Spanish dancing, which no doubt derives its Eastern colour from the Moors, is almost equally a dance of the whole body, and its particular characteristic—the action of the hips—is due to a physical peculiarity of the Spaniards, whose spines have a special and unique curve of their own. The walk of Spanish women has a world-wide fame; One meets a Venus Callipyge at every corner; and it is to imitate what in them is real and beautiful that the women of other nations have introduced the hideous mimicry of the “bustle.”19
The passage seems straightforward, “naturalist” in tone and “scientific.” It also seems decidedly uncamp: at its core, there is an affirmation of the freedom of the natural exotic, used in turn to denigrate the fashion world of the European feminine.
And yet: the invocation of the Moors seems designed less to set the dance within a biological frame, or a normative history, than to recognize the dance for what we might call its avant-garde qualities. The “Moors” here, then, are less the “Egyptians” of racial science or Orientalism than the decidedly artificial, kitsch figures that populate Walter Scott fictions (for the generation of Scott’s readers after Scott). The homage to the dance celebrated in the passage seems an early move in what would prove a long, elaborate history of camp investment in, and transvaluation of, all things Egyptian and African.20 In other words, this is less Orientalism than a fantastic camp reorientation of Spain and the Orient. This is translation without tact, performed less to explain the dance than to valorize—or better, to liberate—facts and bodies from the mundane order. Symons’s sympathy for Mediterranean culture grants him a distance from conventional Western dance and Englishness that allows him to recognize their relative lack of edge, or “cool.”
Symons’s account of the dance, therefore, is an homage, not a biology lesson. Still, if Symons “saved” the dance by virtue of his self-consciousness, his account would be of interest but unremarkable. The account might simply attest to the critic’s acute and intelligent self-consciousness. What distinguishes the essay is Symons’s suggestion that a similar critical remove animates others at the Alcazar and not only the English tourist. He pays fascinated attention to how the dancers utilize space, particularly to how they negotiate the space between the public arena and the performing stage. In Symons’s account, the “Baile Sevillanas” is fiery and furiously physical; it evokes a natural, libidinal, heterosexual charge; it reflects the frenetic excess of a natural and uncontrolled sexuality. Yet Symons also insists that excess gives way to the undoubted control of the dancers over their performance and their nature.
If we took Symons’s body talk seriously, there would be severe limits placed on the Alcazar’s performers; for one thing, stepping out of character would be as impossible as shedding one’s history, or one’s skin. But in point of fact, the performance of the erotic seems just that: a performance these actors can leave behind. The dance and the song of Senorita Villaclara that follows close upon it are the most libidinously charged events Symons witnesses at the Alcazar. The dance follows a male sexual logic; it grows frenetic, and then climaxes. “The dance grew more exciting, with a sort of lascivious suggestiveness, a morbid, perverse charm, as the women writhed to and fro, now languishingly, now furiously, together and apart.”21 However, after “two encores,” Symons adds, “the women went tranquilly back to the corner where they had been drinking with their friends.” We are reminded of what Symons took care to establish as the central fact of the Alcazar’s performance: the flimsy, arbitrary divide between the stage and the audience. That these women can change so quickly and seamlessly from frantic bodies to coffee drinkers in a mundane, civil society could be said to reinforce stereotypes about “everyday life” in Spain: this world, Symons might believe, is one in which high passion, fierce desire, and violent turmoil rule. Yet it appears the return to passivity suggests quite the opposite: the performers placidly negotiate different spaces, in control of their performance, able to turn off and on their charisma. Their ability to signify their Spanishness and distance themselves from it, their very mobility, has a ready equivalent only in Symons’s own leisurely gaze. The performers, too, are experts who prove their authority by setting it at risk.
The not-so-hidden link between the aficionado and the spectator is underscored in Symons’s account of the singer. Here, camp provides a way of admitting one’s distance and one’s attraction, the desire to cross the gulf between the watcher and watched. A “fair complexioned woman, with dark sleepy, wicked eyes, and black hair trailing over her forehead,” Villaclara blurs the lines between a European look and something duskier. She performs the “Malagueña,” a local song that Symons returned to and heard from other “native” voices in his later trip to Seville. Here it is pregnant with a threatening and opaque alterity. “It was a strange, piercing, Moorish chant, sung in a high falsetto voice, in long, acute, trembling phrases—a wail rather than a song—with pauses, as if to gain breath, between.” Wail, not song, the “Malagueña” signifies as noise and is marked by a repetition that spells threat:
A few words seemed to be repeated over and over again, with tremulous, inarticulate cries that wavered in time to a regularly beating rhythm. The sound was like nothing I have ever heard. It pierced the brain, it tortured one with a sort of a delicious spasm. The next song had more of a regular melody, though still in this extraordinary strained voice, and still with something of a lament in its monotony. I could not understand the words, but the woman’s gestures left no doubt as to the character of the song. It was assertively indecent, but with that curious kind of indecency—an almost religious solemnity in performer and audience—which the Spaniards share with the Eastern races. Another song followed, given with the same serious and collected indecency, and received with the same serious and collected attention.22
Another exotic voice, a Russian tenor intoning the liturgy, would prompt Roland Barthes to speak of voices that “bear along directly the symbolic, over the intelligible, the expressive,” “the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue.”23 Symons, too, seems to express here what Roland Barthes characterizes as “the impossible account of an individual thrill that I constantly experience in listening to music.”24 It is impossible because the voice signifies a conflicted project: the truth of the singer’s body, which belongs to the realm of representation, and, at the same time, a body that somehow exceeds the mediation of the sign. For Symons, the “Malagueña” declares the primacy of the body over ideal notation and idealized truths, including the truths of his own system of representation. For Barthes, and Symons, too, the grain of the voice signifies the real and sidesteps the symbolic. The noise attests to a camp truth, even truism: meaning and significance begin and end with the body. Yet Villaclara is not a folksinger here as much as a virtuoso, a camp diva: the grain of her voice works against the normative codes that the dandy listener believes might otherwise curtail his pleasures. The singer is the critic’s full-blooded paradox, a personal aporia, inspiring him to his own impossible account amid the rush of his own blood, the tingle of his own spine.
Symons’s account appeals to the body as the final court or repository of meaning. Body talk can body forth any number of essentialisms and serve as a foundation for racism. Isn’t the “Malagueña” lodged halfway between nature and culture, more precisely in a zone where the sacral has just emerged out of the primeval, carnal ooze? And doesn’t Symons appear to locate Villaclara in an emotional hinterland, in the outback where the passions hold exclusive sway? That the native audience matches Villaclara’s familiarity and reserve in the face of dark and sacred passions provides further proof that the locals share a proximate psychic location. We might advance the case for Symons’s racism further: the song does not overwhelm the audience, perhaps, because it corresponds to truths of the race that the audience intuits.
All these readings substantiate claims for the colonial dandy: but the case must proceed rather selectively to fully convince. Such an interpretation must pass over the special care that Symons takes to situate Villaclara back in the everyday once her performance is finished. The close of the account, with a bored Villaclara, underscores the performer’s control and agency. “When the applause was over, she . . . came back to the table at which she had been sitting, dismally enough, and yawned more desperately than ever.”
The ability of performers to cross the gap between native character and the everyday is enormously significant to Symons, and I suspect it is intended as a cue for the reader as well. The forays of the performers from normal life to exalted states and back mark the Alcazar as a transformative space, but also as a contact zone. Symons and these performers seem alike in crafting their attitude and stance in a conscious attempt to meet the world with a stance and an attitude. Symons’s own self-conscious spectatorship ends with a love of artifice for its own sake and allows him to extract lucid pleasures from his own internal dis-location. Yet Symons must work to get to the level of sophistication that Villaclara has already achieved, not by birthright, but through labor. There are two forms of displacement on display in the essay, and two modernisms. We are trained to recognize one of the modernisms: the statements of the formalizing imagination of a dandy abroad. There are other moderns beside the dandy expert in Symons’s account: the dancers of the “Baile Sevillanas,” the audience at the Alcazar—at least when they exhibit their carefully modulated attention to Villaclara—and certainly Villaclara herself. Their performance, and above all their distance from the performance, suggests a kindred dislocation, similar to Symons’s critical stance; we might say, following W. T. Lhamon, that they both speak “modernism,” one doing so in the vernacular.25
Symons equates the experience of modernity with the prevalence of new forms of mass entertainment that blur segregated tastes and social groups; further, he seeks to speak for the modern from vantage points not limited to his own. Yet the expert remains aware that by his reckoning he is not the only modern at the Alcazar, for he is not the only one both alert and off-center. His pleasure and unease are enriched by an encounter with folks who might seem, to Symons and his readers, to be primitive. However, the insight that the “locals” are in fact other moderns is at the core of “A Spanish Music-Hall.” Camp distance ends with the recognition of fellow experts. These experts signify their distance from and mastery of national codes and signifiers; they are proficient in a vernacular modernism the dandy comes to esteem.26
Camp remains with us as a double sign and gesture; it signifies our appreciation for but internal distance from media texts and artifacts; it also signifies our great, excessive, and disruptive passions. Wherever we attend, or love, what the dominant culture encourages us to devalue, neglect, or disrespect, camp rises as a way out of this double bind. We look, but feel we shouldn’t. Or we love what others tell us to despise, and love turns curious and queer. As with any practice coming from the margins, it can be accused of honoring the dominant order in the breach, revising taste agendas without confronting issues of power and inequity. That’s not to say that camp lacks a politics or even the aspiration toward a collective; indeed, “A Spanish Music-Hall” suggests some of its egalitarian or legitimating powers. Camp doublespeak permits Symons to legitimate himself, clearly, but brings others into this trail of authorization. Camp channels these different experts together: patrons, Symons the tourist, and Villaclara all enter into the modern from varying positions, wielding different kinds of authority. If expertise tends toward a zero-sum game, with room only for the expert, camp taste draws conditional lines between those who get it and those who don’t. In “A Spanish Music-Hall,” Camp bridges the gap between experts. The close of the essay hints at this kind of mutual recognition when dancer Isobel Santos receives Symons’s especial praise as a “professional.”27
Dance dominates the night’s entertainment at the Alcazar, according to Symons’s account; there are not many opportunities for the sing-along that was a staple of English music hall. Singsongs, improvisation, ad-libs that broke down the “fourth wall”: these were staples of English music hall. A remarkable essay by Peter Bailey elaborates on how music-hall entertainment fostered a self-conscious, plebeian crowd who claimed certain songs and singers for their own, and whose participation in music-hall interactive space allowed them to style themselves as experts within the popular culture forms they patronized and defined. Plebeian expertise was not just a way of knowing but a mode of assertion in subculture style. The youth who yelled the key words and phrases of the song “Pine-apple Rock,” “detonating” its sexual depth charge before a hapless Henry Mayhew, laid bare something Mayhew the social explorer would rather have forgotten: the sexual energy and expertise of London’s young lumpen.28 The music-hall crowd’s way of knowing would change from this kind of class warfare to something less precise and certainly less confrontational. Plebeian expertise begins to resemble something closer to subculture “cool” or, conversely, the calmer, more orthodox role of “expert,” who “signifies competence beyond the formal demonstration of its particular knowledges” through the sly aside or casual implication of her fellow specialists.29
Bailey’s arguments bear on my own: he closes with a nod to camp (which he tacitly assumes to be an exclusively queer argot) that recognizes its “obvious affinities with knowingness.” I share Bailey’s conviction that camp needs inclusion in a map of music-hall taste: certainly it resonates in Symons’s account of the Alcazar. However, Symons seems after more than securing an advantage over Villaclara; he also wishes to his record his responsiveness, and his vulnerability, as spectator.
What Symons seizes from Villaclara’s performance is her indifference to the “local” song she performs. She holds up better than the aficionado on this score, for he admits her song to “pierce” and “torture” him; Symons is compelled to learn the lesson of composure from Villaclara, not to mention from the Alcazar’s regular patrons. Peer pressure—or peer review?—sets Symons back on track. The singer offers the dandy a lesson in cool or composure. Symons’s emphasis on the singer’s backstage poise insinuates that the aficionado realizes he has much to learn from the vernacular modernist about how to strike a pose or deflect the gaze.
“A Spanish Music-Hall” begins with the singular case of the aficionado yet ends in concert with others. The Alcazar is a meeting ground for a league of modernists in the making, who approach the “modern” experience, of dislocation and anomie, from different locations. The aficionado, who doubled as the conventionally literate subject, begins in curious isolation, soliloquizing; the essay ends with the aficionado’s eye cocked on another cultural professional.
“At the Alhambra,” Symons’s last and fullest meditation on the music hall, compacts, or distills, several visits undertaken over the course of several years to a celebrated, upscale English music hall, Leicester Square’s Alhambra, one of the premiere sites for ballet in London before Diaghilev revolutionized, and professionalized, the field. Camp and expertise coexist and work toward surprisingly egalitarian ends in “A Spanish Music-Hall”; but in “At the Alhambra,” camp taste and expert claims interrogate each other.
According to Symons himself, the Alhambra’s manager, entrepreneur and impresario John Hollingshead, gave the self-styled aficionado backstage privileges in a scene that has the taste of fantasy; as a reward for loyal patronage, Symons gained access to the “secret world” of music hall and to the corps de ballet.
Wayne Koestenbaum memorably argues that backstage views have an inevitable fantasy structure when they are given textual form: the gaze backstage is about the possibility of celebrity attainment and exposure.30 It proves to be an inclusive fantasy for Symons as well; he seems eager to act as our proxy in the forbidden areas, in the unknown. In a remarkable 1893 letter to fellow aesthete Herbert Horne, insider privilege becomes shared fantasy and camp misrule. The correspondence initially narrates in fragments the author’s relations with two dancers (soon after composing this letter, Symons would become involved with a half-caste dancer named Lydia whom he would thoroughly exoticize, leading to jealous fears that culminated in his nervous collapse). The next scene described occurs in the badlands backstage. A tale of flirtation or high jinks becomes a camp tale of heroic cruising.
The girls who were not on, you understand, had sought refuge in front, and petticoats and stockings sprawled over all the stalls and lounges. On one of the lounges, by the side of the stalls lay three ladies . . . Rosie Dawn and two others. They were coiled inextricably together, somewhat in the manner of a design by Felicien Rops. I was standing in front of them with great dignity, addressing moral remarks to them, when a fatal remark of Rosie . . . precipitated me . . . upon the too tempting seat, and before I knew it my arms were round her waist, and the group was not less extricably, but I was one of the group. Rosie’s funny little legs kicked in the air; she squirmed with delight, shrieked with laughter: and I need not say the Alhambra—respectable institution!—trembled to its foundation. What is more essential, our little ebats were witnessed by far too many spectators.31
The letter freeze-frames an exaggerated camp fantasy, and more: the message to Horne is shot through with the kind of coterie references and search for subversion that announce it as a subculture communiqué. For all the brag and bluster, the chance encounter and seduction of the aficionado both publicizes and stylizes sexual behavior. Intertwined with the myth of the frankly salacious chorister there is a fantasy strut of manliness whose primary function seems to be cementing Symons’s bonds to Horne. Following a subculture logic, Symons’s brag suggests a complex relation between dissidence and visibility; he shrinks from the gaze, from the “too many spectators” he all but exclaims to attend to his transgressions. For all the theatrical flirting here, these private acts seem a play for the crowd, a fantastic notion of “sex” in the service of an equally spectral “politics.” The assumption is that a cross-class alliance will somehow bring the respectable world that denies the encounter tumbling down. Symons and Rosie act up under a watchful gaze, in full view of unmentioned and unseen, but scarifying, authorities. The result is a stylized, ineffectual revolt that nonetheless succeeds in reading heterosexuality against the grain, investing the “romance” with all the energies of the taboo or transgressive.
The above suggests that Symons assumed a highly artificial and contentious stance in his forays into the Alhambra. But it also models a confident spectatorship Symons proved unable to sustain or believe in for long. His Alhambra study begins in these moments of stylized revolt, in large part motivated by a desire to outrage an outside world of “straights.” Judging from the essay that Symons produced from the “fieldwork” recorded in this letter to Horne, camp poses inevitably led to specific dissatisfaction with camp itself: for “At the Alhambra” takes up camp poses without the requisite hauteur. The result stretches the term to the utmost.
There is a clear sense of camp limits in Symons’s portrait of the “front row” men. Their stance and response to the ballet appear to resemble his own; the sum total of their poses offers a composite of Symons’s own response to music-hall ballet at different points in his music-hall patronage. Representing other aficionados, objectifying them, allows Symons to figure his own labor as critic as well as the limits of his labor and perception. The variety of these spectators emerges in Symons’s account, but, different as they are, they offer a single lesson to Symons. Camp, it seems, requires a rare equilibrium: otherwise its rare sensitivity turns into solipsism. The emphatic declaration of one’s desire, a partisan, minority taste, tends to freeze the object of one’s desire and both isolates the observer and coarsens his or her sensibility. The front row men begin with a receptive attitude but end up insensible to the performance unfolding before them.
This much is made clear in the description of the Alhambra’s regular patrons, men who must sit in the good seats so that they can be seen occupying them.
The front row of the stalls on a first night, has a character of its own. It is entirely filled by men, and the men who fill it have not come simply from an abstract aesthetic interest in the ballet. They have friends on the other side of the footlights, and their friends on the other side of the footlights will look down . . . to see who are in the front row. . . . A running fire of glances crosses and re-crosses, above the indifferent, accustomed heads of the gentlemen of the orchestra; whom it amuses, none the less to intercept an occasional smile, to trace it home.32
The men have a “personal” relation to the ballet because, Symons insinuates, they know the women on the other side. The results of this concourse are, I believe, something that Symons treats with suspicion and from which he strives to distance himself. One wary observer in particular mirrors Symons’s own poised aficionado, but not necessarily to anyone’s credit.
On the faces of the men in the front row, what difference in expression! Here is the eager, undisguised enthusiasm of the novice, all eyes, and all eyes on one; here is the wary practised attention of the man who has seen many first nights, and whose scarcely perceptible smile reveals nothing, compromises nobody, rests on all. And there is the shy, self-conscious air of embarrassed absorption, typical of that queer type, the friend who is not a friend of the ballet, who shrinks somewhat painfully into his seat as the dancers advance, retreat, turn, and turn again.33
The world of the front row is a homosocial space divided as the performance unfolds; however, these men largely share a common invulnerability to what they perceive. The men are also divided subjects, caught between conflicting impulses or desires: the desire to see and be seen, the wish to have one’s desire validated in turn by the returned gaze of the chorister or the stoic, jaded musicians in the pit. These are confident men in all cases but one, the “queer” viewer who is threatened and remains passive before the spectacle, yet they share a common inability to connect to what they see.
Where camp appreciation helped meld performer and spectator in the Alcazar, the front-row men seem insufficiently cosmopolitan, even smug. This is the danger of being an insider, Symons suggests, while no doubt aware that this position is one that he too occupies. The wary dandy, able to fend off the crowd, stays outside the network of gazes that circulate here, but gains little else. And even he participates in the strange, stealth masculine heroics that are staged for public scrutiny but remain invisible to it.
The audience and performers become involved in a reciprocal movement of the gaze, at some points the fetish object, at other points wielding the gaze. As glances are held and exchanged, a third party traces back the gaze to its original onlooker. The women become fixed as objects of exchange in a network of exchange; the men too are caught up in the circulating looks. The knowing glances of the orchestra men save the front-row men from simple narcissism, or love of their kind, and authenticate the legitimate nature of these men’s passions. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the passage attests, these men do not love each other but other women. The circle of glances Symons highlights is little more than an ostentatious performance of heterosexuality. In subculture style, self-managing techniques and high artifice assert identity; but while this coterie asserts itself in the established network of gazes that comprises these seating arrangements at the Alhambra, something, Symons suggests, becomes lost: namely the ballet itself.
Symons’s essay describes in depth only a single performance of the ballet Aladdin. By all accounts, including Symons’s own, Aladdin unfolded according to a predictable Western logic, equating the “Oriental” with the refulgent and opulent. The ballet’s staging honored camp notions of the “Moorish” or exotic, full of genies, princes, carpets, and quick changes.34 As water circulated in the original Spanish Alhambra, heightened visibility, aided by state-of-the-art lighting, marked the Alhambra ballet. But regardless of circumstances and setting, ballet stands for something more in Symons’s account: on its own terms it stands as a veritable engine of difference. The possibility of endless vistas and an infinite combination of actions and gestures demonstrate a fluidity counter to the fixed literary text, a static entity that makes for monotony in Symons’s evaluation. This is how Symons puts the comparison: “The difference between seeing a play and seeing a ballet is just the difference between reading a book and looking at a picture. One returns to a picture as one returns to nature, for a delight which, being purely of the senses, never tires, never distresses, never varies.”35
The description of Aladdin that Symons provides is brief but significant; he returns to the phrase “transformation”: bodies shift and move, costumes change, light changes, and finally the perceived essence of the dancer shifts.36 Iterating “transformation” in the account hardly amounts to a stammer; rather the word signals Symons’s philosophic intent.37 For the image of ballet that emerges is of a form that deterritorializes bodies, freeing them from practical demands and constraints, in part through the labor of the dancer but also through the use of various technologies, like lighting and stage sets. The body becomes the body assemblage: ballet as form opens the body to new functions and possibilities. Constructed from the organized movement of bodies, ballet transmits a thousand shifting signs that refuse or beggar description.
These signifiers can be processed or mastered, through a pose of camp hauteur, or read formally in the name of certain aesthetic values, such as “beauty” and “unity”; yet Symons’s reading of Aladdin insinuates that neither the pose nor the technical language quite captures the shape-shifting he witnesses. Since the ballet does not permit itself to be grasped as a totality, it cannot fully be translated into aesthetic terms that depend on a distanced view of discrete phenomena. With the usual maps useless, Symons discards them and begins a series of arduous labors. He traces instead the palimpsest of his memory, embroidering his “thought-events.” Symons returns obsessively to the ballet in the process of being produced. Since the event defies the possibility of a full representation, he intensifies his own labor as observer and makes his work visible.
The ballet’s own thematization of flow and change in part explains the loose, meditative form of the essay: part realist catalogue or inventory, part nostalgic reverie. It explains why the aficionado keeps moving and why the sectioned essay nonetheless does not order the experience of the ballet in a clear sequence. We have instead a palimpsest of looks and gazes; actualities blur. When memories are differentiated or actions are delineated, they do so along unpredictable axes. So, for example, section 3 of the essay, with its brief, partial reading of a single ballet, provides reasons why the first two sections work as a formal anatomy of the ballet, focusing on the chorister in her various preparations for a performance. Symons’s approach in this section hints that the ballet can be comprehended only if approached crabwise, in a ruminative yet exacting account, sensitive to temporal and spatial contingencies. The endeavor to account for the ballet and the power of this performance initiates a decisive break between Symons and the front-row men, and detaches the writer both from his subculture and from their certitudes.
The initial sections of “At the Alhambra” try to redress the limits of camp; the ballet is removed from distanced view and abstract apprehension. Symons makes an effort to represent himself as the observer in search of the quickened perception, concentrating on the tactile surfaces of people, objects, and activities. The desire to provide a multiple account comprises a critique of his former views and of camp spirit. The men in the front row, earlier versions of Symons, fail to comprehend the ballet because they feign disinterest; they move in advance of the experience and without knowledge of the “thought-events” that comprise the subject at hand. So while camp allows the expert to find company in his labor, camp taste, frozen in a superior pose, requires retooling in the latter essay. It could be concluded that camp generates the need to revise its protocols even if it doesn’t seem to provide the means.
The opening of the essay highlights this movement away from fellow patrons who are not unqualified but less inclined to represent the ballet. These sections prove elliptical, a veritable seafarer’s tale with the attendant digression. Symons pushes off in the essay away from safe harbor among peers in order to access a new territory and, finally, a broader public. “At the Alhambra I can never sit anywhere but in the front row of the stalls,” he asserts, but in point of fact the aficionado does not occupy that position generally in the course of the essay.38 We move with Symons in front of the Alhambra, backstage, side stage, back to the front row, focused on the product of the ballet, which seems to have emerged with delicate care from its hazardous process. Throughout, the essay underscores the expert’s own sense of displacement; the recollection of the ballet from a tantalizing, panoptic view of the ballet, collected “from the road in front” where “a brilliant crowd” is captured “drawn up in the last pose,” becomes subsumed under other memories, other prospects.
These opening moves reenact the observation of the ballet and leave the questions posed by the performance unresolved. The cogito recognizes things and gets in the details, moving among spaces while invoking and imagining other sights and spaces, prone to illusion and self-deception. “In the general way I prefer to see my illusions clearly, recognizing them as illusions, and yet, to my own perverse and decadent way of thinking, losing none of their charm.”39 This may seem camp presumption, but the underlying passivity suggests that Symons has abandoned his pretensions to mastery and thus avoided the errors of his peers. In sharp contrast, Symons inhabits a nomadic view of the ballet; by doubling as subject and object of his own reveries, the critic is accordingly deterritorialized.
The result, then, resembles a phenomenological account of music-hall space, faithful to the quirks and quiddities of the surfaces of things, confident about the truths of perception grasped by the cogito but never fully committed to recuperating and restoring the thinking subject as transcendent. The intense concentration on detail transforms fact into luminous practice. The recording work that Symons undertakes puts him at risk; he loses the full privileges that inhere in being merely a spectator. He strives to occupy a border zone that disorients the observer: “To watch the ballet from the wings is to lose all sense of proportion, all knowledge of the piece as a whole. . . . It is almost to be in the performance oneself, and yet passive, a spectator.”40 The statement recaps the search for a liminal perspective that opens the essay.
Symons’s search for moments of exchange and transaction at the Alhambra bolsters the main aim of the essay: to escape from conventional states of mind and being. For example, in this scene the choristers and their chronicler merge in the act of exchanging news and trading gossip: “I had the honour to know a good many ladies of the ballet, and there was little news, of public and private interest, to be communicated and discussed. Thus I gathered that no one knew anything about the plot of the ballet which was being rehearsed, and that many were uncertain whether it was their fate to be a boy or a girl; that this one was to be a juggler, though she knew not how to juggle.”41 The clap of the stage manager that halts the discussion affects not only the workers but the visitor who records the conversation. Both labor within the same space, admittedly at different kinds of work and under quite different conditions: the pose of mutuality is compelling enough to conceal these differences. Interfering with one worker, the chorister is represented as impinging on another worker, the writer. The exchanges portrayed work to unravel the pose of privileged spectator.
I take these anecdotes for performatives, fashioned in order to level the playing field that includes both performers and recorder. Symons’s search to occupy a multitude of stances as participant/observer, including hazardous ones, exhausts the self as it catalogues events. The aficionado becomes etherealized, stretched thin in the rush to describe and interpret. Perception clarifies little, but produces a doubling of wishes and impulses. Contradictory desires find articulation in a pell-mell rush of clauses: “I do not for a minute really want to believe in what I see before me; to believe that those wigs are hair; that greasepaint a blush; any more than I want really to believe that the actor whom I have just been shaking hands with has turned into a real live emperor since I left him.”42 The statement seems simple enough: Symons wants to be a pliant subject before artifice, yet never in fact to lose sight of reality. Yet this is the sort of claim that suggests a fundamental schism in the speaking subject. Which self speaks here, after all, and expresses the desire to be hoodwinked? Which is the self that remains intact? Can an observer maintain his hold on certainty at the same time as he announces his will to be fooled? Once the aficionado leaves behind his front-row cadre, he enters on a truly perilous journey, with the lonely cogito purposely relinquishing its reference points. The aficionado’s stance, his body, is left carrying the burden of his unsettling, compromising gazes.
The process is all the more confounding because it seems fully volitional. The systematic derangement of the senses and the turn to method suggest the seriousness with which the aficionado takes his newfound authority. I say “newfound,” since the assumed rigor that confers Symons’s authority foregrounds the problem of professionalism. The expert begins and ends by assuming a series of exacting responsibilities: this transformation is made all the more surprising by the fact that the journey first followed the itinerary and protocols of camp. The backstage that Symons painted in lurid hues in his letter to Horne becomes a space that denies fantasy in “At the Alhambra”; crowded with workers, it is now painted as a space of lowered expectations, or of sublimated desires. “I have never been disappointed, as so many are disappointed, by what there is to be seen in that debatable land ‘behind the scenes.’ For one thing, I never expected to find an Arabian Nights’ Entertainment of delightful splendour and delightful wickedness, and so I was never chagrined at not finding it. The coulisses of the Alhambra are in themselves, quite prosaic.”43
It would go too far to say that this new patience with limits constitutes a total break with camp, for these claims resemble camp judgment in their fealty to material fact. It is not fully crucial that my reader recognize the aficionado’s careful accommodation to the world of ballet, or take Symons’s approach to surfaces for the “pure presupposition-less description” of the world Edmund Husserl advocated.44 Yet I would contend that the dialectical tendency of the essay is inescapable to any careful reader. So is the essay’s philosophical conclusion: namely, that camp, apprehended rightly, produces its conceptual other, an unhappy consciousness determined to represent the object of scrutiny with care, from a position outside of events that in fact blurs the line between surfaces and depths. The flight from camp stirs Symons to provide a fuller account of his inscription within an already given system. I take these gestures to be an embrace of theory broadly defined: they constitute Symons’s openness and signify his accountability to other potential observers.
It is precisely this newly achieved accountability that underscores how Symons’s theoretical work follows a professional logic. And this logic is by no means inherently exclusive or elitist. For in this instance methodological or theoretical awareness is a way of clarifying one’s assumptions, and a justification of one’s labor before a skeptical public that the recorder internalizes. The move to theory, in this instance, resonates as more than a power grab. Theorizing ensures that intellectuals spin their wheels in public, which makes a spectacle of the intellectual, but also suggests a vulnerability that keeps the practitioner honest.
The aficionado who faces the ballet finds himself in a critical situation in every sense of the word; he grasps for first principles, for the rationale of his labor is now a mystery requiring investigation. This act of self-analysis is conducted in public. All of the above signify labor that honors professional decorum. Symons’s interpretive work sets him outside the protocols of his coterie; it is this movement, and the exacting labor that accompanies it, that designates the work as professional activity. For his essay on the Alhambra records Symons’s resistance to sights and sounds that normally provoke his desire; the essay accrues authority as a record of resistance. Of course, if the expert effect arises solely from the ascetic impulse, it may be read and discounted as a power play. However, if Symons attempts to accrue authority by shaping experience into a method, the same self-conscious endeavor, he intimates, makes and keeps his labor subject to review. The move away from the coterie and the reliance on an esoteric language and system also constitute an escape from a sanctioned common sense; the new position leaves Symons vulnerable, and therefore accountable, to a host of others.
Symons’s search for method allows him a space for self-interrogation; there are discernible results of this effort to achieve critical distance. If on occasion the effort to represent the ballet brings Symons’s sexism to the fore, the acceptance of his collective responsibility counters the writer’s tendency toward misogyny. The expert function checks some of Symons’s fantasies in regard to the choristers, since, in his new role of aficionado, he is no longer at liberty to imagine that their labor or the production requires his presence as spectator. While Symons’s biography suggests the poet rarely achieved the distance from his exoticist or misogynist tendencies that might have allowed their revision, the Alhambra, for a time, was a space conducive to changing one’s attitudes and stances. While Symons claims the painted women of dress rehearsal combine “the sorceries and entanglements of what is most deliberately enticing in her sex . . . with all that is most subtle, and least like nature, in her power to charm,” this banality is soon challenged by the “realist” tableaux of working women that he produces.45 These tableaux are offered as highly artificial myths that counter the prior cliché, for they provide in compact form a more complex, irreducible image of the chorister. In one of the most striking of the tableaux, “charm” is less present than riddling details; it’s a picture of women in the workplace, at rest and labor, that insists on a fractious quiddity:
The walking ladies are in their walking dresses; and it is with the oddest effect of contrast that they mingle, marching sedately, in their hats and cloaks with these skipping figures in the undress of the dancing-school. Those not wanted cluster together at the sides, sitting on any available seats and benches, or squatting on the floor; or they make a dash to the dressing room upstairs or to the canteen downstairs. One industrious lady has brought her knitting. It is stowed away for safety in some unused nook of the piano, which is rattling away by my side. . . . Another has brought wool work, which is almost getting too big to bring; several have brought books; the works of Miss Braddon, penny novelettes, and yes, some one has actually brought the “Story of an African Farm.”46
The women at work and play here constitute an irreducible community; this is less charm or seduction than a mock epic of labor and leisure, caught in process. In the cliché about painted ladies, Symons naturalizes the dancers: they are there simply for his view. However, the effect of this tableau is an evacuation of the observer of the scene; at the very least, the “facts” here are not of the sort that could be put in the service of the spectator.
“At the Alhambra” is also remarkable for its final, and striking, refusal of the usual divide that separates professional claims from public service. I am tempted to use Symons’s keyword, “transformation,” to explain how expert talk becomes a public account; yet, faithful to the essay’s dialectical turn, I have a less mystical explanation for the essay’s shift in tone. The pursuit of expertise contains within it an orientation to social responsibility. The exchange that concludes the essay implies that the expert is now more responsive to others, having sundered his or her ties to “nature,” whether in the form of a customary spectatorship or the “second nature” of the coterie.
And then there is another reason why one can see a ballet fifty times, a reason which is not in the least an aesthetic one, but on the contrary very human. I once took a well-known writer, who is one of the most remarkable women of our time, to see a ballet. She had never seen one, and I was delighted with her intense absorption in what was passing before her eyes. At last I said something about the beauty of a certain line of dancers, some effect of colour and order. She turned on me a half-laughing face: “But it is the people I am looking at,” she said, “not the artistic effect!” Since then I have had the courage to admit that with me too it is the people, and not only the artistic effect, that I like to look at.47
The exchange between Symons and a “remarkable” woman writer—Olive Schreiner, on a visit to London before relocating in South Africa—seems a powerful indictment of the professional impulse. One cannot fully stand apart or above or beyond the ballet, Schreiner signals in her level view of the event. Symons trots out the language of aesthetics—of form and line—halfheartedly (the only time he does so in the essay), only to be gainsaid by Schreiner, the “naive” reader. In particular their brief closing dialogue counters the expert claim to stand apart or above or beyond.
The exchange would seem to unravel the expert role Symons has spent the essay exploring and in part inhabiting. There might be a part of the reader likely to cheer Schreiner on as she bravely deflates, and humanizes, critical pretension. Yet it seems that Schreiner’s naïveté gets certain things about the Alhambra, and about criticism, wrong. As Symons establishes in the essay, the move away from “naive” experience is as risky or compromising a position as that of the amateur. His rejoinder to Schreiner is not given in this account; it resides, however, in the fact that the exchange itself resonates. Schreiner’s criticism of critical pretension has expressive power in large part because the ground has been cleared by the expert’s prior, exploratory labor. The figure of the amateur and the chastened aficionado are set in clear relief because the background has been delineated by the theorist’s labor. The exchange between Schreiner and Symons serves, then, as an apology for theory; the prior analytic work means that their dialogue can proceed candidly. Schreiner’s naïveté stands as a rebuke to the critic’s excessive complexity, yet it is only by virtue of these elaborate maneuvers that expertise can become something public that can receive Schreiner’s critique. In Symons’s account, expertise is not the transcendent alternative to Schreiner’s common sense, but its exacting, and modest, supplement.
“At the Alhambra” resonates for us due to its salutary reminder that two categories we often conceptualize in sharp relief, expertise and service, exist in mutual relation. For experts become linked—in “A Spanish Music-Hall” and “At the Alhambra” both—with images of exchange, their expressive energies enacted in dialogue. Ultimately the passage from camp to expertise, a move that leaves neither category intact, underscores the capacity of the aficionado role. The expert emerges, not as a unique observer and legislator, but as a figure whose function seems to include the reallocation of the cultural capital the critic produces and accumulates. Symons’s music-hall essays endeavor, in an incomplete fashion that reflects the imperfect but worldly work of the professional, to open the work of the critic to public deliberation.