AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH
37
"abstract,"
if
it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary
and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy con–
straint or original. This constraint, once the world of common,
extraverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in
the very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have
already imitated the former. These themselves become the subject
matter of art and literature.
If,
to continue with Aristotle, all art
and literature are imitation, then what we have here is the imitation
of imitating. To quote Yeats:
"Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence."
Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even
Klee, Matisse and Cezanne, derive their chief inspiration from the
medium they work in.
2
The excitement of their art seems to lie
most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and
arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclu–
sion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors. The
attention of poets like Rimbaud, Mallarme, Valery, Eluard, Pound,
Hart Crane, Stevens, even Rilke and Yeats, appears to be centered
on the effort to create poetry and on the "moments" themselves of
poetic conversion rather than on experience to be converted into
poetry. Of course, this cannot exclude other preoccupations in their
work, for poetry must deal with words, and words must communi–
cate. Certain poets, such as Mallarme and Valery,S are more radi–
cal in this respect than others-leaving aside those poets who have
tried to compose poetry in pure sound alone. However, if it were
easier to define poetry, modern poetry would be much more "pure"
and "abstract." ... As for the other fields of literature-the defi–
nition of avant-garde aesthetics advanced here is no Procrustean
bed.
But aside from the fact that most of our best contemporary
novelists have gone to school with the avant-garde, it is significant
that Gide's most ambitious book is a novel about the writing of a
novel, and that Joyce's
Ulysses
and
Finnegan's Wake
seem to be
above all, as one French critic says, the reduction of experience to
expression for the sake of expression, the expression mattering
more than what is being expressed.
That avant-garde culture is the imitation of imitating-the
fact itself--calls for neither approval nor disapproval. It is true
that this culture contains within itself some of the very Alexan-
