ARGUMENTS
THE NEW TRADITION
Obviously there's no progress in art. Progress toward what?
The avant-garde is a convenient propaganda device but when it wins
the war everything is avant-garde which leaves us just about where we
were before. The only thing that's sure is tha t we move, and as we
move we leave things behind - the way we felt yesterday, the way we
talked about it. Form is your footprints in the sand when you look
back. Art consists of the forms we leave behind in our effort to keep
up with ourselves, define ourselves, create ourselves as we move along,
like Malone dying or Genet in prison. Traditions, also, are after the
fact. Traditions a re inventions - a decision accumulates about which
part of the museum is most useful to us in the ongoing present. Now
and then a reorganization seems in order. We suddenly discover a kin–
ship with Donne or Greek antiquity. Pieces are moved up from the
basement and dusted off, there's a major turnover in the catalog, we
"discover" Japanese art. It's hard to believe the novel has a future
because, like certa in women, it has the wrong kind of past. What we
think of as the novel has lost its credibility - it no longer tells what
we feel to
be
the truth as we try to keep track of ourselves. There's no
point pushing ahead with fiction, we might as well write a utobiography
and documentary, or social criticism and other how-to books. But sup–
pose fiction is something other than what we tend to think it is? I
would like to propose the invention of a new tradition for fiction.
You can't manufacture a tradition with a whole body of work,
its successes, its examples, its interconnections, its ways of thinking and
proceeding. By definition it must already be there awaiting only one
final element - that we say it exists: We have already had some work
that talks about a new line of fiction as if it exists. Such people as
Robert Scholes, Ihab Hassan, Hugh Kenner, Ala in Robbe-Grillet have
a lready digested some of this material for us, and an important new
