THE NEW
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ences-anthropology, biochemistry, to use the instances provided by
William Burroughs for
The Nak ed Lunch.
This book (we are told by
an admirer) "has no use for history," which is all
ancient
history–
"sloughed off skin· . . . a 'mere wrinkling or furrowing of the surface"
of the world.
Broadly speaking, then, we are dealing with two attitudes to tra–
dition that are now found acceptable. 'One desires continuity and la–
ments its absence. The other desires, and tries to put into practice, the
. clean break with the past: it is an abolitionist view. There is too much
past, it says, and its relevance is dubious or non-existent: ignore it.
This abolitionist line is virtually a glorification of what the tradi–
tionalists call heresy or schism. It isn't, as I say, entirely new; probably
it has its intellectual roots in the same ancient millennialism as its op–
ponent. But it has a new intensity. Many revolutions, political and
literary, and indeed religious, have claimed to be purging institutions
that have grown corrupt, and have venerated an ancient heroic purity–
have made it a model. This is where the new abolitionism does seem
different.
It
may not be possible to achieve historical discontinuity ; but
that is what seems to be intended.
And this clean break with the past, myth or no, extends beyond the
arts. For instance, through popular versions of modern existentialism,
into ethics.
It
seems to be strongly felt that the past offers to the new
world much less guidance than to earlier generations. And such feelings
can be dressed in powerful arguments, as when Marshall McLuhan
tries to show that cultures are determined by technologies, and that we
are now at the end of a cultural phase which used typography as its
model, and at the beginning of a neW "electric" culture.
And yet, of course, it's a matter of common sense that the forces of
continuity are very strong beyond the power of individual acts of will
to break them. Institutions survive--"the strong shadows of the past
on the present." Ceremonies survive, emblems of historical moments
which mayor may not have an obvious meaning in the modern world.
In the arts, abolition is not simple. You can of course destroy a painting,
but you can't assimilate it and put it behind you as a biochemist or
physicist uses some important paper. So long as the painting exists it
makes demands upon sensibility and judgment: it is a problem never
obsolete. So--since it's not yet the practice to thin out the past by
calculated acts of destruction-the past grows constantly bigger. In our
world it also grows steadily more available.
If
it's true that everybody
makes his own past, then pasts also grow steadily more
numerous.
That's
