lOOKS
261
the history of the genre,
to
break ground in matters of technique. The
para-military imagery of
avant-garde
and
arriere-garde
perfectly express
the new didacticism. Art is the army by which human sensibility advances
implaca:bly into the future; and the hunger of modem art for ever newer
and more formidable techniques finds an unappetizing parallel in the
modem military's commitment
to
ever newer and, however unusable,
bigger weaponry. This mainly negative relation of individual talent to
tradition, which gives rise
to
the rapid and built-in obsolescence of each
new item of technique, and each new use of materials, has vanquished
the conception of art as giving immediate accessible pleasure, and
produced a body of work which is principally didactic and admonitory.
AJ
everyone knows by now, the point of Duchamp's "Nude Descending
a Staircase" is not
to
represent anyone, much less a nude, descending
a staircase, but to teach a lesson on how natural forms may be broken
into a series of kinetic planes. The point of the prose works of Stein
and Beckett is to show how diction, punctuation, syntax, and narrative
order can
be
recast to express continuous impersonal states of con–
sciousness. The point of the music of Boulez and Stockhausen and Cage
is
to show how the possibilities of silence, cacophony, and certain con–
structed instruments can be exploited.
The victory of the modem didacticism has been most complete
in music and painting, where the most respected works are those which
give little pleasure but make important advances in the technical
revolutions which have taken place in these arts. Compared with music
and painting, the novel, like the cinema, lags well to the rear of the
battlefield. A body of "difficult" novels comparable to Abstract Ex–
pressionist painting and
musique concrete
has not overrun the territory of
critically respectable fiction. On the contrary, most of the novel's few
brave ventures to the front-line of modernism get marooned there.
Mter a few years they seem merely idiosyncratic, for no troops follow
the brave C.O. and back him up. Novels which, in the order of difficulty,
are comparable to the music of Gian-Carlo Menotti and the painting of
Bernard Buffet, are garnished with the highest critical acclaim. The
ease of access that causes embarrassment in music and painting is no
embarrassment in the novel, which remains intransigently
arriere-gar.de.
Why should this be so? The sociological explanations- the novel
as a middle-class art. form, and so forth- don't convince. I think the
explanation for the resistance of the novel to the "modem" is simpler,
and follows from what it is as a physical object: a book that has to be
read. Compare reading a novel with looking at a painting. The frustra–
tion the spectator may experience standing before a largely empty or
