Ways of Re-Thinking Literature

Tom Bishop, Donatien Grau, Tom Bishop, Donatien Grau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138675759
• eBook ISBN: 9781317198390
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Ways of Re-Thinking Literature creates a unique platform where leading literary thinkers and practitioners provide a multiplicity of views into what literature is today.

The texts gathered in this extraordinary collection range from philosophy to poetry, to theater, to cognitive sciences, to art criticism, to fiction, and their authors rank amongst the most significant figures in their fields, in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Topics covered include an assessment of the role of literary narratives in contemporary writing, new considerations on the novel, a redefinition of the "poetic" factor in poetry and life, and a discussion of how literature engages with contemporary forms of individuality.

Under the auspices of literary luminaries Hélène Cixous and the late John Ashbery, these new pieces of writing bring to light contributions by innovative and well-established authors from the English-speaking sphere, as well as never-before translated prominent new voices in French theory.

Featuring original work from some of today's most influential authors, Ways of Re-Thinking Literature is an indispensable tool for anybody interested in the future and possibilities of literature as an endeavor for life, thought, and creativity.

With special cover artwork by Rita Ackermann, the volume includes contributions from Emily Apter, Philippe Artières, John Ashbery, Paul Audi, Dodie Bellamy, Tom Bishop, Hélène Cixous, Laurent Dubreuil, Tristan Garcia, Stathis Gourgouris, Donatien Grau, Boris Groys, Shelley Jackson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Camille Laurens, Vanessa Place, Maël Renouard, Peter Schjeldahl, Adam Thirlwell, and Camille de Toledo.

PART I

Literary narratives

1

The disappearing avant-garde

Tom Bishop

What happened to the avant-garde? Omnipresent not long ago, it is hard to find today. Has the avant-garde, the spirit of avant-garde, disappeared or perhaps it is merely hibernating? For much of the twentieth century, literature was profoundly influenced by the inventions, innovations, and discoveries of avant-garde movements, more at some times than others, more in some countries than others, but always present. And usually greatly influenced by avant-garde thrusts in the art world and at times by music. Much of the most interesting, certainly of the most exciting artistic creations during a significant part of the twentieth century were either part of the avant-garde movements of the time or were directly influenced by them.

Avant-garde movements tend to appear and, when successful, remain for a period of time and then be followed either by a period of absorption into the mainstream, or, when unsuccessful, by a period of reaction against. Both phenomena are cyclic, but the strength and duration of the cycles varies greatly; in the twentieth century, avant-garde movements tended to be strong and to remain active for a relatively long time so that one can reasonably think of it as a century of avant-garde. Or perhaps, to be more precise, that was true for about three-quarters of the century or perhaps even four-fifths of it, but in the final years of the twentieth century and these early ones of the twenty-first, the avant-garde seems, on the whole, remarkably silent.

So, whatever did happen to the avant-garde? That is a vast question, and this essay will attempt to deal with it by referring to the avant-garde in the theater today, and principally, though not exclusively, to the French theater. As in all forms of contemporary artistic expression, the avant-garde is all-present in the theater and notably in France—a country which has shown itself particularly hospitable to new forms of theatricality. In fact, since the end of the nineteenth century the French theater has been witness to a striking series of avant-garde movements which provided the principal thrust for the renewal of the establishment theater.

So much has been written about the avant-garde that the very expression has become suspect. It is difficult to pin it down because a universal definition applicable to all art forms and to all eras seems impossible. For some, the idea of the avant-garde is limited to what is daring—even though today “daring” applies only to the work whereas, during the Belle Époque and even afterwards, it applied also (and often principally) to the personal behavior of the artist who tried to shock the middle class, “épater les bourgeois.” Ubu’s “Merdre” defied acceptable stage discourse but some deliberately outrageous public behavior could be equally shocking and provocative. Perhaps the most celebrated incitement to an entire generation’s general avant-garde esthetic was Sergei Diaghilev’s quasi-order to Jean Cocteau, “Étonne-moi,” “Astonish me” (Never mind that Diaghilev, busy talking with Vaslav Nijinsky while crossing the Place de la Concorde during World War I, was being pestered by the very young but already very demanding-of-attention Cocteau, and threw out his challenge to shut the young man up—at least temporarily). But Cocteau did in fact elevate the injunction to astonish to the cornerstone of his life-long ambition to be an avant-garde artist; he in fact succeeded in becoming one for more than a decade, but not beyond.

The call to astonish, which also inspired many other writers and plastic artists of the twenties, could, of course, lead to trendiness and the avant-garde has been compared to fashion as if the spirit of the avant-garde were somehow linked to the psychology of the high fashion industry. In 1923, the great director Charles Dullin touched on an important aspect of the avant-garde when he stressed the nature of the audience: In the theater, as in all the arts, there are those who can see and those who are born blind. The latter require an entire lifetime to get used to great things and it is only after having heard it said over and over for fifty years that something is beautiful that they yield to the judgment of others. ¹

How can one hope to find a global definition when it is not even easy to say what the avant-garde is at any one time in any one field? It may be more fruitful to approach the problem negatively by considering that the essence of the avant-garde is opposed to the essence of what is currently accepted, to the establishment, to even the best of the establishment, especially to the best. Keeping in mind both the past and the present, the avant-garde—in theater, novel, or poetry, in ballet, music or painting—represents above all a reaction against the established forms in each of these fields. These reactions take different shapes in different eras and might have nothing more in common than their opposition to the established order. If for instance the current—and therefore, for the experimentalist, already degenerating—mode of literary expression is realism, then the avant-garde will tend to be anti-realist. If, on the other hand, it is symbolism, which, approaching its zenith, becomes formulaic and arbitrary and begins to lose contact with the artistic aspirations of a younger generation, then the avant-garde will be anti-symbolist.

The avant-garde artist is a revolutionary who wages a continuous minority struggle against the artistic forms generally appreciated by others. But these “others” are not the easily satisfied public of boulevard theater or of pulp fiction; rather the avant-garde writer takes issue with literate writers who attract a large, literate public. For example, the theater of a Samuel Beckett or a Jean Genet does not stand in opposition to the light entertainments of a Marcel Achard but rather to the intellectual plays of Jean Anouilh or Jean Giraudoux. It is only in this manner that the military metaphor inherent in the expression “avant-garde” makes sense. The small advance guard of an army prepares the terrain for the main body of troops; similarly, avant-garde writers, when they are successful, show the way not for mere commercialism but for those serious writers to come who will later command a large public.

But that does not mean that the avant-garde, when it exists, necessarily embodies what is most substantive in an art form. By its very nature, it is an esthetic-in-the-making rather than one already constituted, a “becoming” with which not everyone, even among the most refined critics, feels comfortable. Thus, for example, in 1971, at the height of Tel Quel and deconstruction, Roland Barthes was reticent, even demurred vis-à-vis the avant-garde of the absurd; only Bertolt Brecht’s political theater could find favor in his eyes. Barthes himself described his theoretical position candidly, perhaps not realizing its surprising weakness: “my own theoretical position is to be in the rear-guard of the avant-garde” he wrote (“ma proposition théorique est d’être à l’arrière-garde de l’avant-garde).” ² Antoine Compagnon was quite right in including Barthes among his “anti-moderns.”

It was Eugène Ionesco who best described the avant-garde phenomenon:

While most writers, artists, and thinkers believe they belong to their time, the revolutionary playwright feels he is running counter to his time. As a matter of fact, thinkers, artists, and so on, after a certain time only make use of ossified forms; they feel they are becoming more and more firmly established in some ideological, artistic, or social order which to them seems up to date but which in fact is already tottering and yawning with unsuspected cracks. By the very force of circumstances any system, the moment it is established, is already outworn. As soon as a form of expression becomes recognized, it is already out of date. A thing once spoken is already dead, reality lies somewhere beyond it and the thought has become petrified, so to speak. A manner of speaking—and therefore a manner of being—once imposed, or simply accepted, is already unacceptable. An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system. He is a critic of, and not an apologist for, what exists now. It is easy to criticize the past particularly when the prevailing regime is tolerant and encourages you to do it; but this is only to sanctify ossification and kowtow to tyranny or convention. ³

What then happens to the avant-garde once it exists? It becomes necessarily subject to the laws of artistic evolution. An avant-garde can never long remain an avant-garde since it defines itself in relationship to the current establishment which, itself, changes constantly. Thus, it is either rejected or absorbed. If an avant-garde fails (and that is the fate of most), it generally disappears without leaving any trace. But if it manages to impose itself, it eventually changes the current “establishment” or accepted forms. Its influence varies with circumstances: it might be limited to some new techniques or it might be much more extensive, as was the case for surrealism, for instance, which imposed a new esthetic with far-reaching implications, all the way down to advertising.

The very expression “avant-garde” is necessarily restricted to relatively few writers or artists who, at least at first, have only a limited influence. It is a minority thrust that cannot enter the mainstream without ceasing to be experimental. When an avant-garde movement becomes fashionable, its revolutionary value is already spent. At that point, having attained its goal of reform, the avant-garde becomes part of the establishment; it will ultimately inspire new avant-gardes which will rise to oppose the “tyranny” that it has itself become, in a perpetual cyclical movement.

Not so very long ago, during that extraordinary explosion of creative theatrical innovation in the 1950s, the very notion of the avant-garde, so much a part of the esthetics of French art in all its varied forms since the middle of the nineteenth century, finally triumphed in the theater with Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, and Arthur Adamov. La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) in 1950, followed immediately by Les Chaises (The Chairs), En attendant Godot, and the dazzling theatricality of Genet’s plays, and eventually numerous other dramatists writing in French and subsequently in various languages throughout Europe and the Americas, radically changed theater, first in France and soon throughout the Western world. This was an iconoclastic avant-garde, one which sought to change the rules of the game, to radicalize theatricality, to do away with what was left of realistic techniques after half a century of brilliant anti-realist reactions against the successful fourth-wall realist brainwashing initiated and exemplified by André Antoine and his Théâtre Libre in the 1890s—itself an avant-garde in its time—and a wildly successful one!

And this new theater was an immensely successful avant-garde. Word went out from the little Left Bank playhouses that new concepts of theatricality were downgrading the mainstays of even the best of the playwrights of the time—of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Henry de Montherlant, Jean Anouilh—namely, plot, character, psychology, coherent stories. The new playwrights did not offer a common vision; what united them to some extent though was their opposition to the status quo. Soon they were being performed in larger, more important theaters, like the Odéon and eventually the Comédie Française, and became the playwrights of the fifties and sixties. It is rare for an avant-garde to impose itself so thoroughly and for the experimentalists in revolt quickly to become the established figures of an art form. But that is, astonishingly, what happened with what came to be known, for better or for worse, as the “theater of the absurd.” ⁴

Serious playwrights could legitimately propose that one could no longer write theater as before. Obviously, some dramatists did continue to write theater as before, just as many twentieth century novelists continued to produce good or bad nineteenth century novels as if James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and the nouveau roman had never existed. But for those who thought seriously about the stage, the Parisian avant-garde of the 1950s had shattered the mold and made it impossible to go back to even the best of former models. But it also revealed a new, serious problem.

Ionesco, in his brilliant definition of the avant-garde, had warned that as soon as an avant-garde becomes so successful as to be the new establishment, it necessarily engenders its own reaction, another avant-garde which, in turn, seeks to destroy and replace it. However, following its fifteen or twenty years of undisputed triumph, the avant-garde of the absurd, yielded not to new writing but, in France at least, rather to the reign of the director.

To write as before after Ioneso was difficult, after Beckett, impossible. The towering figures, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, remained; others faded or disappeared. A few important playwrights, like Fernando Arrabal and Michel Vinaver, continue right to the present time creating absurd...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Prelude
• PART I Literary narratives
• PART II Literature and the novel
• PART III Literature and the poetic
• PART IV A new subjectivity
• Conclusion: Ay yay! The cry of literature
• Index