Richard Chase
THE FATE OF THE AVAN T-GARDE
It
is the custom nowadays to pronounce the avant-garde
dead. But the fact seems to be that under modern conditions the
avant-garde is a permanent movement. Far from being merely the
isolated band of highbrows and sterile academicians many Americans
think it is, the vanguard of writers and artists has been, for more than
one hundred and fifty years, a necessary part of the cultural economy,
and the health of culture depends upon its recurring impulse to ex–
perimentation, its search for radical values, its historical awareness,
its flexibility and receptivity to experience, its polemical intransigence.
Historically the avant-garde is the heir to the aristocratic coterie
or court circle of artists and intellectuals. But whereas the aristocratic
coterie of medieval and Renaissance times had no commitment except
to itself and posterity and consequently felt free to cultivate the dis–
interested pursuit of art and ideas apart from the rest of society,
history has imposed upon the modern avant-garde the duty not only
of disinterestedly cultivating art and ideas but of educating and
leading an aimless body of philistine taste and opinion.
The historical role of the avant-garde was thus necessitated by
the breakdown of the aristocratic class and by the spread of literacy.
After the eighteenth century, the democratization of culture and the
new literacy confronted the advanced intelligence with a newly
arisen welter of taste and opinion which, left to itself, found no
other standards than the conformism, at once aggressive and com–
placent, of the bourgeoisie.
In
this situation the dissident intellectual,
himself characteristically a bourgeois, found his mission. The medioc–
rity and, as it were, historical helplessness of his class in matters of art
and ideas were an open invitation to his powers of discrimination and
foresight. At the same time, his instinct for self-preservation and
