The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art by Roger Kimball

Author:Roger Kimball [Kimball, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, Criticism & Theory
ISBN: 9781594031212
Google: 8vd6i3dVJhkC
Amazon: 1594031215
Goodreads: 303561
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2003-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Beyond the bounds of credibility

It is amazing to contemplate, but in all this Professor Lubin was just warming up. The real gravamen of Act of Portrayal—the thing that Professor Lubin is clearly proudest of and the thing that made his book such an academic hit—is the giddy word play he delights in on the name “Boit.” Indeed, one wonders whether he scoured Sargent’s oeuvre not for a good or moving or attractive or beautiful painting, but one that, with determined critical aggressiveness, could be made to serve as a prop in his hermeneutical hothouse.

Professor Lubin’s first point is that the French word for box, boîte, is only one letter and an accent mark away from the surname of the painting’s subject: “Boit.” “The Boit Children makes a visual-verbal pun by translating into Les Enfants de (la) Boît(e): the children of Boit and the children of the box.” In fact, it is not the painting that makes the pun—and a silly enough pun it is—but Professor Lubin. And that’s just the beginning of his charade. “Another way of accounting for the overall emptiness or lack that the painting bespeaks,” Professor Lubin intones, “is that the Female Child enclosed within this geometric and ideological box is also trapped within a biological box: the lack of the father’s E, his penis.”

Bring you up short, did it? Perhaps you’re thinking that the real issue here is not the totally fortuitous and irrelevant similarity between the surname “Boit” and the French word for “box” but the much more pertinent congruence between “Boit” and the third person singular of the French verb boire, to drink: il boit, he drinks, he is a drunkard, sot, lush, tippler.

You feel that Professor Lubin knows he is straining here, for he hastily issues one of his periodic disclaimers: “Why in the world,” he asks, “have I equated the Boit’s father’s first initial, the letter E, with the male organ?” An excellent question, that. We don’t get a satisfactory answer but rather a flurry of persiflage about how “it is less ironic than predictable that in French, boîte is a feminine gender noun.” It is also less ironical than predictable that a present-day academic would assimilate the grammatical category of gender to the biological category of sex. What we call “gender” in grammar often has but a tenuous relation with sexual identity. Thus for example the German word for young girl is das Mädchen, a neuter noun. Professor Lubin says that “Sargent’s portrait not only uses the devices of realist representation to depict Boit’s girls as feminine, but also doubles the depiction by enclosing them within a superstructure for which the French term is feminine.” Er, not quite, professor. Sargent represented Edward Boit’s daughters “as feminine” because—how can I put this?—the people he was painting were little girls. I know that is a difficult thing to get one’s mind around, but with patience Professor Lubin will discover that little girls are often, indeed regularly, “represented as feminine.” With a little practice, he may even discover why this is so.

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