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 REVIEW Dissecting Dianamania An irreverent collection of essays attempts to make sense of the world's reaction to the death of a princess. BY JAMES McQUILLEN |
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After Diana edited by Mandy Merck Verso, 228 pages, $16 When a Mercedes bearing the celebrity formerly known as Diana Spencer plowed into Pillar 13 of the Pont de l'Alma underpass in Paris last year, all the world felt the impact. Mourners flocked to London (or the most convenient alternative, the nearest British embassy), and remembrances and encomiums filled the airwaves and the print media. The fabled English stiff upper lip was said to tremble; eyes everywhere were moist. But it wasn't just hearts that went soft--heads did, too, in a sentimental suspension of critical thinking. After Diana, a commemorative collection of essays, attempts to set that right. Princesses and fairy tales go hand in hand, and Diana's image was a product of a myth machine in overdrive. Tony Blair declared her "the people's princess," neatly summing up the classic commoner-turns-royalty formula in two words. The epithet played remarkably well in this country, considering that by our standards the uppercrust Spencers hardly qualify as "the people" and that marrying the odd-looking scion of an inbred, moribund family (rather than, say, a film star) was a sign of downward mobility. But never mind the life of wealth and privilege; Diana was a victim--of Prince Charlie's cheatin' heart, an icy and scornful mother-in-law, an eating disorder and, most tragically, the voraciousness of the media. After Diana, which is subtitled "Irreverent Elegies," addresses the fairy tale head-on, asking us to question Diana's posthumous designation as Everywoman, to wonder whether post-Di Britain really was feminized and the royal family warmed, and to ask just what people really were mourning (hint: look in a mirror). It also paints a broad portrait of contemporary Britain, using Diana as a touchstone to reveal the nature of New Labor, English Catholicism, the media and British society as a whole. The tone of the essays, written by a wide range of critics and commentators, ranges from the journalistically concise (a review of Kitty Kelley's The Royals) to the philosophically lofty (an exegesis of Diana's bulimia). The French contributors are reliably opaque. Françoise Gaillard, who is listed in the author notes as the editor of Diana Crash, begins her essay: "Perhaps nothing happened on August 31, 1997." Even the barely intelligible theorist Jean Baudrillard weighs in, with a cryptic lyric entitled La Complainte de Lady Di, complete with musical score. Critics will surely heap opprobrium on this book as generously as mourners strewed flowers before the gates of Kensington Palace. Many will not have read it; seeing that Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens are among the contributors will doubtless be enough to convince them that it is merely a work of leftist sniping. True to form, The Nation columnists are unsparing and dry-eyed in painting Diana as a creature of wealth and power. Cockburn points out how her saintly image was a convenient cover for the corruption of the "appalling Al Fayed family"; Hitchens refers to Di and her friend Mother Teresa as "a simpering Bambi narcissist and a thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf" and to the media reaction to Di's death as a "mounting tide of drool." In the venom department, special mention goes to Glen Newey, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sussex, and his essay "Diarrhoea." "Loopy fanzine drool and schoolgirl crush-gush became the order of the day [in the media]," he writes, echoing Hitchens' salivary metaphor. He goes on to lay waste to every element of the Diana myth. Third-world babies were for her, he says, "the ultimate designer accessory," and despite her appearances with AIDS patients, "she confided to one well-known homosexual activist that she did it for the families of the dying, rather than 'your lot.'" That she was a beauty is also part of the myth, according to Newell, and he doesn't buy it, describing the post-bulimia Diana as "Medusa on crack." His astonishing invective takes down a good many other targets besides, including Prince Charles ("a man of stupendous vacuity") and the rest of his family ("a clan of stolid zombies"); breathtaking in its acidity, "Diarrhoea" makes Rush Limbaugh sound like Barney. By and large, however, the essayists have come neither to bury nor to praise Diana but rather to make sense of her persona--cultivated by her as much as by others--and of the strange phenomenon that was the public response to her death. The world seemed instantly ready to canonize Diana a few short days after her death, but sainthood, or what passes for it outside the Vatican, is harder to attain than royalty or celebrity. With devil's advocates like the writers of After Diana, it will, for Di, be harder still.
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