THE FATE OF THE AVANT-GARDE
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ways to concern himself with whatever looks like the most powerful
form of obscurantism and the most self-interested and successful kind
of cultural mystique and polemic at any given time. There is no
service in attacking the avant-garde critics, as everyone, including
most of the critics themselves, are doing these days. It is all too clear
what is wrong with them. Or if not, let me repeat: their specifically
polemical task of the last forty years has expired with the success of
the movements they championed. They have not yet clearly form–
ulated what their duties in this interim period are. Meanwhile, they
suffer from the well-known maladies of the avant-gardist, especially on
the ebb tide of his influence: sterility, academicism, willful and ex–
cessive intellectuality.
But although the most forward-looking critics of the day should
be trying to keep alive such imperfect dialectics as have been evolved
in the effort to understand American culture, although they should
be asking what is meant by "the parent intellectual body" and "the
mainland of American thinking," the familiar attitude is quite differ–
ent. William Barrett has recently expressed the widespread feel–
ing of intellectuals by saying: "since I have left the world of the
highbrow, the terms 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' do not seem to me
to clarify human issues as much as I once thought they did." There
is much to be said for this attitude, suggesting, as it does, two things
-first, that the goal of the relaxed and enlightened man should be
.a
flexibility of taste and, second, that the terms "highbrow" and "low–
brow" only imperfectly correspond to realities. But to this latter
argument I am always moved to reply that, imperfect as they are,
they refer broadly to the main fact of our culture- its discontinuity
and inner contradiction. These terms, or something like them, are
therefore not dispensable, unless historically realistic statements about
American culture are also dispensable.
Yet the tendency of the best critical minds of the time is to
try
to achieve a flexible receptivity which breaks down distinctions and
allows the critic to be highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow all at once.
The best critics find an article like that of Brooks in the
Times,
or
a highbrow reply to Brooks which uses the same terms, to be artificial.
In other words, their ideal is to contain and express the contradic–
tions of culture, rather than to take a stand on one side or another.
Edmund Wilson, for example, was once a hero of radical intran-
