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FRANK KERMODE
minority public is a recognized feature of modern literature, and
certainly conditions are such that there may be many small minorities
instead of one large one; and certainly this is in itself schismatic. The
history of European literature, from the time the imagination's Latin
first made an accommodation with the
lingua franca,
is in part the
history of the education of a public-cultivated but not necessarily
learned, as Auerbach says, made up of what he calls
La cour et La ville.
That this public should break up into specialized schools, and their
language grow scholastic, would only be surprising if one thought
that the existence of excellent mechanical means of communication
implied excellent communications, and we know it does not,
McLuhan's "the medium is the message" notwithstanding. But it is
still true that novelty of itself implies the existence of what is not
novel, a past. The smaller the circle, and the more ambitious its
schemes of renovation, the less useful, on the whole, its past will be.
And the shorter.
A great many different kinds of writing are called avant-garde,
though the expression itself has virtually dropped out of the vocab–
ulary of writers, who tend or pretend to think that it connotes a past
historical period of literature, much as the expression "modern" has
dwindled into a periodic concept. The more avant-garde a writer is,
the less can he afford to be called avant-garde. Nevertheless we all
have a vague notion of what it means in terms of current experiment.
The work of William Burroughs, for instance, is avant-garde. His is
the literature of withdrawal, and his interpreters speak of his hatred
for life, his junk nihilism, his treatment of the body as a corpse full
of cravings. The language of his books is the language of an ending
w.orld, its aim, as Ihab Hassan says, is "self-abolition."
Nak ed Lunch
is a kind of
satura,
without formal design, unified only by the per–
sistence in its satirical fantasies of outrage and obscenity. Later Bur–
roughs sought a self-abolishing structure, and tried to defeat our codes
of continuity, cultural and temporal, by shuffling his prose into
random order. "Writers until the cut-up method was made explicit,"
he says, "had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity." But
it seems that in the logic of the situation we shall find such accidents
happy only when we see in them some allusion, direct or ironical, to
our inherited notions of linguistic and narrative structure; and I am
not surprised that Mr. Hassan, a notable exponent of Burroughs,
