ABSTRACT
Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany, homosexual rights groups are proscribed, official action against the Jews begins, all pamphlets issued by the Jehovah's Witnesses are banned, and the Sturm Abteilung builds numerous concentration camps. The author believes the reason lies in the sympathetic impulse of camp. Isherwood's most complex use of camp to deal with issues of elitism, oppression, and cultural inclusiveness is not in the style of his writing but in his representation of the novel's hero, Mr. Norris, as a twentieth-century dandy whose Aestheticist values accord with his support for sexual diversity, a relation strengthened by Isherwood's sympathetic camp portrayal of the character. The incorporation of Nazi soldiers into Norris's camp comedy through an S&M fantasy of domination functions to intensify the characters, and possibly the readers, awareness of the aestheticization inherent in less obviously performative social roles. Camp cannot become the principal mode of representation because, in the acquisition of authority, it would lose its satiric potency.
