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FRANK KERMODE
young and yet in his way so traditionalist a figure, the language ap–
propriate to general descriptions of avant-gardist effort is an old–
fashioned language: he speaks of the artist's reaction to unbearable
modern stimuli, "the expression in Art of the scream or weep or
supplication the EXPRESSION ... of that infinite Self- which still
feels thru the smog of BIakeansatanic war mills, etc." "Blakean–
satanic" is a noninvention of the same order as lowercase
i.
"There has
been," Mr. Ginsberg writes, "an outrage done to my feelings from
which I have never recovered." The emphasis is on a personal pain
as original to an act of creation not, a t this stage of the argument,
discussed. Even in the contributions which emphasized the technical
breakthrough, the abolition of the false forms of the past, the new
start, the tone was commonly one of exalted difference, of belonging, in
a phrase I borrowed earlier from a contributor to the
T.L.S.
sympo–
sium, to a circle in a square world. The technical talk is a further in–
dication of the fragmentation of the traditional language of criticism
and esthetics into private dialects notable rather for a reduction than
for an increase of power and scope. A disregard for the past makes such
movements easy to start; there is an analogy in the history of heresy,
where fanatics often reinvent the doctrines of earlier sects without
knowing it. The
T.L.S.
collection included an interesting essay by
Raoul Haussmann, which argued that much Neo-Dadaism, as he
calls it, is merely Dadaism with the Art left out. This may seem
strangely put, if you reflect that Tzara called for abolition, spon–
taneity in a tottering world, everybody dancing to "his personal boom–
boom," freedom, the "elegant and unprejudiced leap." Haussmann
sees that Art, something old, animated it. The new men have re–
invented the Happening, for example, the Lettrists claim novelty for
what was barely new in 1920; and they do it less well. But schismatic
movements can hardly be expected to care for continuity and the
past; the more schismatic they are, the less they know about the pos–
sibilities of novelty.
The earlier modernists may have picked up something from Dada
before it gave way to the less schismatic surrealism; they shared with
it a certain anti-intellectualism and a powerful sense of apocalypse.
But they were intellectuals and space-men, not time-men with a
special interest in the chaotic moment. On Eliot's view of literature,
for instance, newness is a phenomenon that affects the whole of the
