BOOKS
ENDGAME
THE THEORY OF THE AVANT-GARDE. By Renato Poggioli. Harvard
University Press.
$6.50.
The critical literature on the problem of "literary modernism"
keeps growing rapidly, as if to acknowledge a shared impression that we
are witnessing the end of a cultural epoch. No one supposes such an
end can be dated precisely; it may stretch out over several decades;
and as if to demonstrate an attractive perversity, it may even go through
a series of convulsions that would bring about a new kind or phase of
modernism. Yet anyone attentive to the troubles of the serious writers
working in the sixties, to say nothing of the revolt against culture which
has swept through our culture, must recognize the appropriateness of
registering a stop, be it period or semicolon.
In Renato Poggioli's book, anxious musings of this kind barely
appear. First published in 1962, shortly before his premature death, the
book, I would guess, was written during the fifties. A serious and
provocative work, it breathes that confidence in survival which the
defenders of literary modernism shared as recently as ten or fifteen years
ago. We may suspect that even this confidence was by then no longer
warranted - though to say this is to indulge in the wisdom of hind–
sight. Poggioli writes, perhaps as a strategy of exposition and perhaps
out of his charming enthusiasm, as
if
modernism were assured of an
indefinite future, indeed a future as extensive as that of the social-his–
torical crisis from which it largely stems. But he may
be
in error here.
It
is almost impossible to see literary modernism as merely an immanent
development within Western culture; even the least socially-oriented
critics find themselves having to relate modernism to a crisis of historical
consciousness. Yet just as effect may survive cause, so cause may survive
effect. The persistence of the historical crisis of Western society into the
decades to come does not necessarily signify the flourishing or rebirth
of the culture of modernism.
The Theory of the Avant-Garde
is a perplexing book. Every page
bears evidence of a keen mind, a fine sensibility, a wide scholarship;
but the writing is so clogged and pulpy that one grows first impatient
and then enraged. I do not know Italian and therefore cannot judge
whether the trouble stems from the original or from the translation of
Mr. Gerald Fitzgerald; but in either case, the book as we now have
it
in English is something of a brilliant mess, likely to be indispensible to
