PARTISAN REVIEW
395
a domain of trash, immature myths, indefensible passions ... a secondary
domain of compensation." Not everything erotic or violent or "junky" in
our culture arises this way, but the perception is a true one; in the
generation after Gombrowicz what has happened is that this secret
world has come to make itself public.
That there is something we might call
serious
funk or pop, earnest
grotesquerie, is a recognition we have to make, in the face of the abund–
ance of exploitation of the new mood. The Theater of the Ridiculous,
for example, has been an enormously serious enterprise, mocking the
frozen practices of drama and releasing new energies toward their thaw.
Donald Barthelme's prose, made up of all our "polluted" vocabulary,
all of what he calls the verbal "dreck" we have piled up, acts powerfully
to create a new basis for language's health.
So
does Barth's writing and
that of Peter Handke, whose plays and fiction come to us out of the
literary tradition ( "the avant-garde is always rediscovering a lost tradi–
tion" - Ionesco), but like the work of a mind amazed that language
is what it is.
This kind of knowing naivete, this tactical astonishment, is one con–
dition of innovation. And this is what is lacking in those traditional
writers (or those who have become
traditionalized)
who carry on as
though all the resources were still at hand, as though language need only
be approached with determination and large ideas about mankind in
order for it to yield up literature. As though will can do the work of
imagination.
The avant-garde is that element in the exercise of the imagination
we call art which finds itself unwilling (unable really) to reiterate or
refine what has already been created.
In
this sense there will always be
an avant-garde, simply as a matter of the renewal of forms and the
effort to make the imagination capable of new actions to meet new
experiences. An avant-garde considered as a kind of salvation or one
built on belligerence and contempt are historical accidents, not inevita–
bilities. What we might call the secularization of art, its chastening and
the removal from it of the "values" that ought to be obtained elsewhere,
are large factors in the apparent decline of the avant-garde. For stripped
of its apocalyptic qualities, its competitive aspects and myths of progress
- all characteristics that, as I've tried to show, have largely been im–
posed from outside - art takes on its simple and irreplaceable task of
inventi::m , invention in the order of possibility, invention that makes
life known to itself.
Yet, it has to be asked, what of life's wanting to know itself directly,
without the intervention of imagination or at any rate of imagination
