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PARTISAN REVIEW
died or diminished them, but never to attempt to cancel them, which
would be to capitulate to the anticultural values of the establish–
ment.
We have here already, in the first and second meanings of the
term
avant-garde,
a distinction between
modern
and
contemporary.
Both
seek to alter the past. The modern, however, implies a serious and
involved relationship to the past, a relationship that requires criticism
and radical reimagining of the past . The contemporary is more
schismatic and implies a clean break with the past for the sake of the
new . This distinction lowe to Frank Kermode, and I will return to it
shortly . But first, I want to say more about the way in which the idea
of breaking with the past does not oppose, but risks capitulating to,
currently established and anticultural values.
The clue here is another word that, if not cause for embarrass–
ment in matters cultural (if not elsewhere), certainly should be . The
word is
progress.
The second of the two avant-garde waves proclaimed
itself contemptuous of the past and in favor of things new . But even
the dadaists did not believe that cancellation of the past was possible;
anyone who knows dadaism from study and not from rumor knows
that. While a sense of forward movement is important for art, that
sense (as Northrop Frye points out) is one of fresh discovery in the
renewal of familiar values . The reason that it is important (and why
the dadaists made so much noise about it) is that it is what saves art
from sentimentality, for the sentimental (according to Frye) is a fixa–
tion on the familiar, a wallowing in familiar responses to familiar
forms. It was this that the dadaists opposed (and rightly so) - only,
however, to get themselves into trouble at times when they, like
many others, confused this sense of discovery with progress itself.
Art, unlike industry, does not progress. But belief in progress is
implicit in the artistic conception of an avant-garde, carried over
from the political usage of that term and from the industrial society
to which political and artistic avant-gardes alike had an uneasily
symbiotic relationship. "Industrial society," writes the historian
j .
H . Plumb, "unlike the commercial, craft and agrarian societies
which it replaces, does not need the past. Its intellectual orientation
is towards change rather than conservation, towards exploitation
and consumption. The new methods, new processes, new forms of
living of scientific and industrial society have no sanction in the past
and no roots in it." Something of this attitude, this malaise, crept into
the idea of avant-garde and into modernism itself. Indeed, to a
