More sinister than sweet

Ordinarily, I love books that answer questions I’ve never asked, but Simon May’s baffling book has blown my mind. The self-deprecator in me wants to tell you I’m too stupid to understand a word of it. The rest of me suspects that this is a sneaking yet sparkling satire on what a university education will get you (£50,000 of debt and the authority to pronounce a penguin cuter than a mermaid).

I like the visiting professor of philosophy at King’s College London very much. ‘What is a bear with the head of a wolf?’, he demands. ‘Who is a human with cat’s eyes? What is the inner world of a sphinx “really”?’ He writes brilliantly and quotes exuberantly. The problem is his subject. Early on he explains that his approach to ‘Cute’ was inspired by Susan Sontag’s Notes On ‘Camp’ and Harry Frankfurt’s essay ‘On Bullshit’. But the former was so of its moment and the latter so enduring. By comparison The Power of Cute seems at best esoteric and at worst outdated. Most of the cultural artefacts of ‘Cute’ exhibited to us — ET, Mickey Mouse, Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dogs, Cabbage Patch Kids — are at least 20 years old.

Cute can’t be defined. Despite copious footnotes and a seven-page bibliography, it proves to be pindownable only in its ‘unpindownability’ and we are told this several times. But still, May makes bold claims for it. Cute, he reckons, was invented by the Japanese as a preserve against nuclear attack. ‘It’s a big jump in self-conception from Samurai to Cute, but it perfectly suits Japan’s historical position after the disaster of militarism,’ he argues. ‘Where today Germany does remorse, Japan does Cute, a spirit which can magically make vanish everything about Japan that is aggressive and threatening.’