Authors: William H. Gass
There appear to be at least three kinds of avant-garde. One, such as the architectural modernism of the Bauhaus, of Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Neutra, aims to improve man and his life; it naturally allies itself with other forward-looking agents of change (the machine, for instance), and it preaches progress with the sort of rosy-cheeked optimism characteristic of metaphysical Rotarians. It tends to be impatient with the past, maintaining that little can be learned from history but its errors, and fearing nostalgia above all other passive emotions. Although the members of this avant-garde are largely arty intellectuals, there is a sense of common cause with the impoverished and downtrodden—a shared powerlessness. This is what I call the liberal avant-garde. Its influence is strongest among the arts that have a public posture (architecture, theater, cinema). When the liberal avant-garde wants to become doctrinaire, it embraces the fascism of the Left. Picasso, Le Corbusier, and Brecht are characteristic types.
The avant-garde of Gautier, Degas, and Flaubert, however, has
nothing but scorn for these pimps of progress. The talismanic word here is “original,” and the focus of the group tends to be on individual and artistic freedom, on disengagement and withdrawal. Artists in this second group are ready to take from tradition and often oppose the present by looking to the past. They have a natural affinity with the aristocracy, and in general their movements are marked by an extreme dislike of the masses. Their image of the artist is the individual in his isolation. This is the conservative avant-garde, the avant-garde of Rimbaud, Lawrence, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Céline, and it is most prevalent among the poets. When it wants to become doctrinaire, it embraces the fascism of the Right, and often shows, alas, a racist face.
Both of these avant-gardes occupied important places in the movement called Modernism. Both were wholly opposed to the state of affairs in which they found themselves; both felt oppressed by the Establishment; both sought to produce something “new” and something thought to be revolutionary. Whether formalistic or expressionist, they shared a dislike of what was central to bourgeois taste (i.e., philistinism): representation and edification. However, history was still linear for the liberal wing; for them not every utopia was totally tarnished; society of some sort was still worth saving; and art could, as in the old days, do the job. The conservatives regarded such avant-gardes as fatally contaminated by bourgeois values; for them, society was not worth rescuing, only art was. Again, however—despite the purity and freedom they advocated—their works were scurrilously critical and contemptuous, and hence revisionary with respect to values. There was no hope to be found anywhere that would lighten their point of view or soften their animosities.
The conservative avant-garde poisoned itself. Its dislike of society could not be confined to the page, score, or canvas but seeped into the souls of its artists. As in Flaubert’s case, retching became a continuous condition. The liberal avant-garde failed when its social program failed; when the Left took over; when Modernism became, for it, the new rule of reason and the real source of righteousness.
The urban reforms urged by many architects were ruthless, arrogant, and authoritarian. Yet when the political thrust of this avant-garde was blunted (as it largely was when it migrated to America), its radical works remained, ready for a reinterpretation that might return Brecht’s plays and Miesian buildings to their origin in art.
One interesting chapter in the history of co-option might concern itself with the eagerness and ease with which corporations all over the world made Modernism their business image, the skyscraper the cathedral of credit, and the steel cage a manifestation of commercial hubris, while the domestic work of those same architects was largely rejected. Avant-garde apartment complexes, on the whole, did not prosper, and tract housing went ranch as readily as souring cream. Of course, architects tend to begin their careers with less extensive projects and scheme their way from factories and shops to banks and office towers; nevertheless, the percentage of domestic architecture in the corpus of Mies, Aalto, Saarinen, Le Corbusier, and Gropius (for example) remains shockingly small. The Weissenhof project in Stuttgart (which commissioned Le Corbusier, Oud, Mies, and others to design apartments, villas, and row houses) is unique in Europe, and suffered for a while from indifference and neglect. Wright, almost alone, worked as a domestic, yet even his houses, eventually admired and critically influential, did not make it in the market. No Levittowns were built of his low-cost and brilliantly designed Usonian houses.
It was also natural for painters to take on the coloration of their patrons, and for artists in general to exploit the system that exploited them, becoming personalities for the press and pets of the powerful. Many remained unsure of themselves for some time, unable to decide to whom to sell their souls, while others—poets and composers, mainly, who would have prostituted themselves for a shiny penny—looked on with envy while fame and fortune went to flamboyant virtuosi, tyrannical maestros, over-the-register opera singers, and abject scribblers of rape and romance. Initially confused by the liberal image that critics had reflected for them,
John Dos Passos and Norman Mailer eventually righted themselves.
The existence of a third avant-garde is more problematic. The activities of any such “group,” whether artistically oriented or socially focused, are so determined by the times that to call one sort permanent seems to court contradiction. Yet I believe there are works to which habit won’t have a chance to get us comfortably accustomed; works that will continue to resist the soothing praises of the critics, and that will rise from their tombs of received opinion to surprise us again and again. These works may pay a dreadful price for the role they have chosen to play, but if they are going to be a permanent part of “the” avant-garde (that avant-garde common to all kinds), they must remain wild and never neglect an opportunity to attack their trainers; above all, it is the hand that feeds them which must be repeatedly bitten. They have to continue to do what the avant-garde is supposed to do: shatter stereotypes, shake things up, and keep things moving; offer fresh possibilities to a jaded understanding; encourage a new consciousness; revitalize the creative spirit of the medium; and, above all, challenge the skills and ambitions of every practitioner. Such a pure avant-garde must not only emphasize the formal elements of its art (recognizing that these elements
are
its art); its outside interests must be in very long-term—if not permanent—problems. It may have to say no to Cash, to Flag, to Man, to God, to Being itself. It cannot be satisfied merely to complain of the frivolities of a king’s court or to count the crimes of capitalism or to castigate the middle class for its persistent vulgarity. The avant-garde’s ultimate purpose is to return the art to itself, not as if the art could be cordoned off from the world and kept uncontaminated, but in order to remind it of its nature (a creator of forms in the profoundest sense)—a nature that should not be allowed to dissolve into what are, after all, measly moments of society.
In order to define the permanent avant-garde, or even suggest its possibility, I must turn in particular to such works as Bach’s Six Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin, Beethoven’s Opus
in, Liszt’s Transcendental Études, Bartók’s 1926 Piano Sonata, Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano Opus 25, Henry James’s
The Golden Bowl
, Rilke’s
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
, Kafka’s story “A Country Doctor,” Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
, Stein’s
The Making of Americans
as well as
Tender Buttons
, Beckett’s trilogy, late Turner and Rothko, some Duchamp, Hölderlin’s late piece “In lovely blue …,” the poetry of Mallarmé and Paul Celan, Malcolm Lowry’s
Under the Volcano
, Italo Calvino’s
Invisible Cities
, that most beautiful and disturbing of diaries, Fernando Pessoa’s
The Book of Disquiet
.
The critical theories accompanying these three avant-gardes—to defend, explain, and ballyhoo them—have, in addition to such customary functions, another one that is just as important, although less advertised. That function is to disguise, both to itself and to others, how backward-looking this forward-looking group of revolutionaries is. The avant-garde looks over its shoulder at the main body, of course, and by making that look adversarial, turns against itself as well; for it was once part of the main body; it was born in that body; and while it will reject resemblance, while it will wish to forget its parents and desire to shake the dust of its cultural village forever from its feet, it cannot escape its genetic links, its childhood history, and all its early loyalties.
In retrospect, neither Impressionism nor Post-Impressionism were as avant-garde as they were once made out to be. (The only true cuckoo in their increasingly comfortable nest was Cézanne.) Because the plastic artists made merchandise, commercialism came to them first, and asked, among other things, for the continuous production of the newsworthy and the interestingly odd; and there were plenty of journalists ready to supply the necessary subterfuges, welcoming each new wave of the future with artificial wonder and bought applause, earning their daily bread with a daily puff. In addition, commerce found it desirable if the work of art could offer the public “a handle” or two in order to facilitate the item’s sale and co-optation, if not in the form of sweet scenes and innocuous material (Utrillo’s Paris, for instance, as opposed to an
Olympia who stares intently out of the canvas to discomfit the stare we are giving her), then in the shape of personal scandal and comic cutups (such as self-mutilation and madness—always excellent; syphilis acquired from native girls—good; drunkenness and drugs—okay, but routine; tough talk on TV), or the really regressive literary reading Surrealist paintings asked for, or the smile-inducing puzzles contained in Magritte’s visual puns. Such handles can magically appear without much help from anybody. If Proust is now one of history’s social pages,
Finnegans Wake
is a carcass on which doctoral candidates feed.
So even the most secure members of the avant-garde were not untouched by this tension between the old and the new, success and starvation. Between Joyce’s many interleavings, we can hear a sentimental Irish tenor with a wine-dark voice, while Leopold Bloom’s Dublin is built of the Realist’s heavy bricks. Nor should we ignore the fact that decorating the present with the glitz of an imagined future (a habit of Japanese architects) is every bit as reactionary as the cosmetic activities of post-mods who doll up their façades with familiar and colorful fragments from gone-by times. Art, the honest article, lives (with other realities) only in an active present.
If there were, beneath the eternally changing seas of sameness, a submerged and unrelenting avant-garde, like reefs upon which pleasure vessels might occasionally come to grief, then there would also have to be—since the avant-garde defines itself through opposition—a permanent class of philistines … a proposition quite easy to believe. In the fifties, such writers as Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet tried to dismiss bourgeois concepts about fiction by describing them (character, atmosphere, story, message, content, and so on) as “obsolete notions,” yet these obsolete notions have remained as lively in their obsolescence as they were in their heyday: performing a minuet with mummies, if not a dance of death. Even Marx is not immune. Consider the characters who cross the stage in that drama of his: commerce, capital, industrialization, technology, the clash of classes, social uplift, glib scientism,
a tantalizing determinism with its promised happy ending. The ranks of the political avant-garde are filled with philistines. Who else would want to enlist? As Robbe-Grillet remarks, “One thing must trouble the partisans of socialist realism, and that is the precise resemblance of their arguments, their vocabulary, their values to those of the most hardened critics.” Both Right and Left want their art to be mimetic, and both share a naive faith in the explanatory power of narrative.
In the history of modern Europe, three great sources of cultural dominance have established themselves, and therefore, since avant-gardes say no, there have been, for them, three opponents: Church, State, and Commerce (although now we would say Corporations). That is: religion, politics, and business. Although Modernism was made of many avant-gardes (some, like Symbolism or Cubism, profound; others, like Imagism and Futurism, shallow), they were all united in their opposition to the middle class, to the rule of monetary values and an unprincipled pragmatism. At that time, the “modern” still had the power to shame: the painters shocked their clients; the composers created a frightful din to dismay their listeners; the novelists tore their readers limb from limb. But by dint of the dollar, nothing now abashes these consumers, for culture has gone Pop, and where Pop goes, goes the weasel.
In this sense, the avant-gardes of Modernism—liberal and conservative alike—opposed the elevation of the bottom line, and in so doing, acted more like rear guards. Even in Schoenberg’s day, the paradox was painfully evident. In 1918 Schoenberg founded the Society for Private Musical Performances. Alban Berg wrote the prospectus. The intention of the Society was to withdraw both music and its performance from the reigning system, already compromised by commerce, so that those who came would have to come in ignorance of the program. There were to be no reviewers. The works performed were to be adequately rehearsed, and the performers were to be the servants of the score. It was not long before an evening of Strauss waltzes had to be given in order to raise money to sustain the society. The names of the arrangers of
the evening’s waltzes (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) may have dignified a string trio; nevertheless, somebody else’s music was all these great composers had to sell.
The marketplace has always been important (you went there to buy vegetables and goats); so has the begging letter been, the charming smile, the grant application, the flattering dedication, the buttering up of influential critics and patrons, the wheedling of favors, and so forth, since these sometimes put money in the purse you wished to open at the market; but bins of potatoes, sacks of flour, tubs of fish, bolts of cloth, the bank, the bourse, investments in oil or heavy water, Cos. and Corps.—what these businesses and commodities stand for—have not always been the decisive determiners of cultural worth.