Vol. 33 No. 3 1966 - page 357

APOCALYPSE
357
finds the method successful only when it is clear that so far from
seeming random the collocations appear to be skillfully contrived.
Hassan's account of Burroughs is thoroughly apocalyptic, and at all
times shows an awareness that this in itself presupposes a signifi–
cant past.
If
Burroughs is a satirist, and he is, then that also
presupposes a significant past altered. And the critic ends with a
shrewd word on the historical associations between utopianism and
nihilism: "to neglect that history," he says, "is fateful in this moment
of our crisis." In a critic so strongly convinced of the need to adapt
criticism to the new demands of a literature proclaiming its total
alienation, this seems to me a very significant remark. It may be that
our presuppositions as to order, in the world and in books, can be
radically changed; Mr. McLuhan is one who would say so. But the
act of writing fictions continues to imply a public of a certain kind, a
public which cannot visualize the conditions which might obtain
after its own extinction. Our experience of the arts suggests that
Sartre's little tune in
La N ausee
sends a true if tedious message: ((
Il
taut souttrir en mesure." M esure
is rhythm, and rhythm implies con–
tinuities and ends and organization.
Somewhere, then, the avant-garde language must always rejoin
the vernacular. And randomness, much valued now, rejoins con–
trivance. I recently read a poem by Emmett Williams which was to
consist of five thousand lines all beginning "The new way ..."-for
instance, "The new way the jig saws," or "The new way the soda
pops." Each of these propositions was to be accompanied by a film
projection and a recorded sound, the three randomly mixed. When
the poet was required to make a selection of the lines for publication,
he made it at random; but he found that the lines chosen had
"acquired, unexpectedly, a beginning and a n end." So, he says, "i
destroyed the rest." (The
i,
it should be noted, is lowercase. This is
an index of much triviality in avant-garde writing. What
is
it? A
pathetic gesture towards a longed-for illiteracy?
If
so, it is a traditional
modernism. A rejection of the uppercase egotism of the
salauds?
It
might be worth a thesis.)
Mr. Williams' lines appeared in one of the two rather dismal
numbers devoted to the avant-garde by the
T imes Literary Supple–
ment
a year or so ago.
It
contained an essay by Allen Ginsberg which
showed rather clearly that for this poet, so much admired by the
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