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PARTISAN REVIEW
and writers had been thrown by the falling away of aristocratic
patronage. (Ostensibly, at least, it meant this-meant starving in
a garret-although, as will be shown later, the avant-garde re·
mained attached to bourgeois society precisely because it needed
its money.)
Yet it is true that once the avant-garde had succeeded in
"detaching" itself from society, it proceeded to tum around and
repudiate revolutionary politics as well as bourgeois. The revo–
lution was left inside society, a part of that welter of ideological
struggle which art and poetry find so unpropitious as soon as it
begins to involve those "precious," axiomatic beliefs upon which
culture thus far has had to rest. Hence it was developed that the
true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to
"experiment," but to find a path along which it would be possible
to keep culture
moving
in the midst of ideological confusion and
violence. Retiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or
artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrow·
ing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all rela–
tivities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the
point. "Art for art's sake" and "pure poetry" appear, and subject–
matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague.
It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has
arrived at "abstract" or "non-objective" art-and poetry, too. The
avant-garde,poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating
something valid solely on its own terms in the way nature itself is
valid, in the way a landscape-not its picture-is aesthetically
valid; something
given,
increate, independent of meanings, simi·
lars, or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into
form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole
or in part to anything not itself.
But the absolute is absolute, and the poet or artist, being what
he is, cherishes certain relative values more than others. The very
values in the name of which he invokes the absolute are relative
values, the values of aesthetics. And so he turns out to be imitating,
not God-and here I use "imitate" in its Aristotelian sense-but
the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves. This
is the genesis of the "abstract.
on
In turning his attention away from
subject-matter or common experience, the poet or artist turns it
in
upon the medium of his own craft, The non-representational or
