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his powers of polemic were animated and challenged by the hostility
with which his efforts were met.
In America especially, official middle-class opinion
is
always
relegating its avant-garde to the ash-can, but the phoenix rises
again. The death of the avant-garde could only come about if all
expressions of taste and opinion were reduced to standardized com–
modities, such as are purveyed by mass culture.
If
this should
happen there would be so little openness of mind, so little variability
of preference and commitment, that not only the .avant-garde but
all significant activities in arts and letters would cease to be. But
there does not seem to be any immediate danger of this, despite the
enormous influence of the mass media. The vital dialectics of Ameri–
can culture still have room to operate.
Any cultural vanguard must have roots in its native soil, yet
it is freer of nationalism than the rest of middle-class opinion and
feels its ties with foreign intellectual movements. The dissident
intelligentsia, if one may use so grand a term, is therefore inter–
national as well as national and has a unity of purpose apart from
local economic and political conditions. Thus one may find inspira–
tion and hope in the continuing identity of the restive avant-garde
in Communist countries, like Poland and Hungary, where the
cultural commissar exerts a crushing influence in imposing con–
formist values on artists and thinkers, values which are in so many
ways indistinguishable from those of the middle-class philistine in
non-Communist countries.
But if the avant-garde is not dead, it remains true that its
recent phase of "modernism" and experimentalism in the arts is,
after forty years of struggle, finally exhausted. Why should it not be
exhausted?-considering that, as Joseph Frank says, "we are now at
the tail-end of the greatest flowering of American arts and letters
since New England transcendentalism- a flowering that far surpasses
the earlier one in force and originality." Without the concerted effort
of the free spirits of the time, in the flow and upsurge of their power,
this flowering would not have come about. We now inevitably find
ourselves in a period of suspended animation and cultural confusion.
If
we are ever to set the ball rolling again, we have got to be clear
first about the traditional significance of the avant-garde in its inter–
national and its native aspect and, second, about the cultural dialectic
