Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  The destructive power of reality over his dreams still haunted him retrospectively after sixteen months of free movement. The new girlfriends he went to bed with were invariably prisoners in the murky, elusive world of his nightmares. The prisons where he had rotted—bars, walls, courtyards, warders—maintained a cruel force. A hermetic, unassailable camp with no possibility of escape, his inner world remained anchored in prison. [Forbidden Territory: The Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo, 1931–1956, translated by Peter Bush, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989; pp. 69–70.]

  I quote this bit at length not only to show how one person’s biography becomes a part of another’s; but in order to exemplify the autobiographical situation as some see it. Denmark’s a prison if the world is one, and each of us, as Beckett has repeatedly suggested, lives in the cell of the self, which merely widens to include our friends, our family, our ideas, our pets. The self is a crocodile named Midas, and whatever it touches is instantly eaten; whatever it does is as much itself as its leathery skin; whatever it dreams is crocodilian.

  Nevertheless, we should not mistake the adjective for the noun. A fiction does not become an autobiography simply because some of its elements are autobiographical; an autobiography is not a form of fiction merely because a few passages are mistaken, or misleading, or metaphorical. Just as anything properly called philosophy may be assumed to be philosophical without need of remark, so to describe a text as autobiographical is to imply it is not a biography of the self by the self but is employing somewhat similar data or attitudes or techniques. And normally we would not study the autobiographical in order to decide what autobiography ought to be. That would be putting the quality before the noun. And the quality hasn’t the weight of the horse or the bulk of the cargo in the cart.

  Perhaps the gravest misuse of the adjective concerns the unconsciously epiphanal text. Any word, any gesture, any act, may reveal some bit of the inner nature of its agent, and if we seek concealment, achieving it may seem easiest inside clichés, behind conformities, by means of immobility or any of those responses that are so entirely required by circumstance as to prohibit individuality: running from the bull; answering “hi” to “hi” and “fine” to “howya-doin’?”; dying when shot through the heart. But if Kafka puts a period on a piece of paper, we are shortly trying to lift it to look on the other side. “Yes, he ran from the bull but in a feminine way.” “His ‘fine’ was flat as yesterday’s soda.” “Did you notice? he wouldn’t say ‘hi’ till I said ‘hi’; otherwise, he wouldn’t have recognized me at all but would have skated by.”

  Freud preferred to examine the little tics that accompany more intentional behavior—our slips, mistakes, our silly errors—on the ground that these were free to be determined more entirely by the inner self. So a painting that is wholly abstract might be more revealing of the painter’s nature than a realistically rendered city street, because on the city street the lamp would have to go here, the pub’s sign there, the leaded glass beneath, and the narrow sidewalk would have to accompany the stretch of cobbles.

  However, autobiography is about a different business: it is an intentional revelation that may in addition, and by its openness, conceal; but it is not a fundamental mode of concealment, which then habitually slips up. And the finer the artist, the less likely epiphanies will be plentiful, because the requirements of form are far more demanding than most determining historical causes, and create their own outlines, their own noses, their own internal relations.

  In an autobiography, the self divides, not severally into a recording self, an applauding self, a guilty self, a daydreaming self, but into a shaping self: it is the consciousness of oneself as a consciousness among all these other minds, an awareness born much later than the self it studies, and a self whose existence was fitful, intermittent, for a long time before it was able to throw a full beam upon the life already lived and see there a pattern, as a ploughed field seen from a plane reveals the geometry of the tractor’s path.

  When we remember a life, we must remember to remember the life lived, not the life remembered. For first there is the stunned child, the oblivious child, the happy child, playing in war-torn streets, stealing rings from lifeless fingers, pissing down basement steps, bragging to his friends of the horrors he has seen; and then there is the old man he will become, looking back, horrified by the horrors the child was a party to, outraged by the awfulness of it all; or, conversely, pooh-poohing those few tears once shed over a broken balloon—unimportant to the wise old observer writing down the words “broken balloon”—which, when those few tears occurred, stood for total disconsolation and the child’s first sense of how fragile the world and its pleasures are. Upon the child the autobiographer must not rest her knowledge of Greek, her memories of deportation, of her father’s fascism, of the many untrustworthy men she has had to turn away; yet she cannot look back as if blind to the person she now is, as if unable to think or write as she now can, just because she is recalling the death of her father, and how he sat for several hours in his favorite chair before the fire, growing cold beneath the warmth of his familiar and friendly flames.

  So shall we undertake, first, to describe the nature of this historian who picks now at the scab of his history? And to do that, won’t we have to split ourselves once more, as M. Teste imagines, becoming the observer of our present self, the so-called autobiographer, the self whose life has been no longer than … six hours? since it was then we decided to write an account of our life … ten days? since it was then our spouse left the family house forever … or, eight weeks? since it was then our finances were found to have been fraudulently obtained … or, twenty years? is it that long since we’ve changed? if we ever have; if we haven’t been Sir Walter Scott, the author of Waverley, from the day we were born, when the nurse came to our papa and said: You have a bouncing baby boy, sir, the author of Waverley, who has arrived at fully half a stone; as if our books were in our genes as well as in our definite descriptions.

  That’s not an entirely silly suggestion. When, in former philosophies, the existence of a soul or self was argued for, it was always pointed out that our birth name named us as a subject, not as a predicate; that the subject was that enduring and unchanging substance to which life’s changes occurred, and if there were none such, and the self altered as a cloud, there’d be no nucleus around which our characteristics might circle like wagons, no title to the text of our doings and days. Autobiography (the noun) was the search for and definition of that central self (which might indeed be genetic), whereas the autobiographical (the adjective) took up the cause of the predicates and was concerned solely with the accidents of time and place, the vicissitudes of the instincts.

  Reading, haven’t we often encountered a passage which perfectly captured a moment in our own lives? in language both apt and beyond our contriving? Mightn’t we then collect these in a kind of commonplace book, arranging them chronologically in order to demonstrate, not the differences between lives, but their sameness, their commonness, their comforting banality? Three or four or five such compilations might suffice to serve for all personal histories.

  And if—as we might imagine—it was the substantive central self which watched us while our outside self shaved (not the mirror); and if it was that same resourceful eye which saw through our daily life’s evasions; and if it were timeless, always the same, through defloration, divorce, remarriage; then there is a very good chance it is also the author of any true autobiography; it is the ageless ego which compiles the history of its aging Other, pitiless as it should be, remote, immune to praise; and if so, might not it be the case that we are jointly human (instead of merely animals of the same species), because that sleepless watcher, like an eye in the sky, like God was once flattered to be, is, in each of us, pretty much One, unchanging and unchanged, even in Mozart or Mantovani, the saintly Spinoza or the beast of Belsen?

  IV

  THE VICISSITUDES OF THE AVANT-GARDE

  The term “avant-garde”
has had a strange and ironic history. From the main body of an army in medieval times, two smaller units were detached: one protected the rear during retreats, or from surprise attack, and sent back stragglers and deserters; the other was composed of a line of scouts who went ahead to seek out, test, and estimate the enemy. By the sixteenth century, when the term was first applied to a literary movement associated with Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay, the avant-garde had become seditious, because its enemy turned out to be the very military unit it was supposed to serve. Thus the spacial image of a marching army was modified to describe a course of rebellious events that had a temporal shape instead: initial spark, fanned flames, full conflagration, final burnout, concluding ash, and consummatory cinders.

  Certainly Ronsard’s great odes broke every established rule. They employed shocking and bizarre language, including some peasant idioms and coinages of Ronsard’s own devising. They introduced a new orthography and abandoned traditional French verse forms for classical ones. Above all, against the conception of the poet as a clever craftsman, Ronsard chose not to notice the irony in Plato’s Ion in order to claim for the poet the inspiration of the gods.

  Ronsard and his work were young when they were given this belligerent description. Certainly the image of an avant-garde made up of rambunctiously inspired graybeards is essentially comic. Repeatedly, in many fields, the young find their way blocked by middle age and settled success, so they try to outflank their adversaries; they call for change when often they merely want to occupy the comfortable chairs of their elders. Not only do time and repeated employment relax the rigid posture of their pens; so does the passage of centuries smooth the once revolutionary roughness of what they wrote. Thirty years after the appearance of his Odes, Ronsard is striking notes most poets have sounded since the art began. Dust has closed Helen’s eyes. Brightness has fallen from the air. Alas, poor Yorick, where are the snows of yesteryear? At the gravesite of a grandparent, you contemplate death differently than you do when you have one foot in your own.

  We owe death a debt: our bodies and the body of our work;

  We die to begin with, and then the waves of many ages

  Roll up to wash away our words;

  This is the fixed intent of Fate and Nature.

  God alone lasts; of man’s poor parts

  There remains in the end neither heart nor husk.

  What’s worse, man feels, man thinks, no more—

  A fleshless roomer in a tomb of dust.

  The delightful irony is that God is now dead, whereas Ronsard’s words are still being read. Deep down, where they lie, most poets must relish this result. Why else would their skulls grin?

  During the nineteenth century, the avant-garde adopted a tone that was essentially negative and oppositional, and its chief enemies were members of the expanding middle class, the so-called bourgeoisie. This increasingly influential segment of society still embraced a kind of religious patriotism that many intellectuals felt had been thoroughly discredited. The bourgeoisie also practiced an unprincipled utilitarianism, a greedy love of money and its powers that left them open to charges of hypocrisy.

  Avant-gardes are fragile affairs. The moment they become established, they cease to be—success as well as failure finishes them off. Their unity depends upon a common “no,” not on some “yes” that is jointly loved. And insofar as the movement moves at all, it requires the shoulders of many others at its wheels, support which most of the artists suspect is actually their exploitation. Poems must be written, paintings must be painted, but mere coffeehouse talk is not irrelevant to the success of the cause, nor are letters, broadsides, feuilletons, essays, reviews, catalogue copy, the quarrels of the cafés and the slanders of the salons; nor are tumults in the stalls, outrages of public decency, arrests, or other excursions and alarms.

  Every effort to prolong an avant-garde beyond a certain point becomes of doubtful value, because an avant-garde can have but a mayfly’s life: the artists have only their negations to chorus; both their attitudes and their art will alter as they age; society’s methods of co-optation and disarmament will, in general, be effective; their anger will be softened by success and their aims divided, their attention distracted; the institutions set up by most Establishments, even if assaulted, will take longer dying than most avant-gardes can expect to live; while the strength of the support groups, so necessary to the energy of any movement, are even more fragile and momentary, depending, as they do, on the loyalty of a publisher, the generosity of a patron, the length of a love life, the cuisine of a café.

  Artists who do not grow old gracefully, but rage and change through the whole of life, find themselves, at the end, alone with their innovations and not part of a refurbished movement. In that sense, the later works of Goya, Verdi, Monet, or Yeats constitute a solitary interior development whose deepest effects, like those of Turner’s final oils or Beethoven’s last quartets, are sometimes delayed for generations.

  Ronsard wearies of the world. He retires from court, cultivates only essentials: his art. But he lives long enough to see the need for a new avant-garde, because the traditional enemies of poetry have returned; Ronsard’s reforms have been betrayed or abandoned. Nothing has changed (including the rust on old saws). Ronsard writes some verses concerning the declining times to his old friend Simon Nicolar, which begin:

  All is lost, Nick, the bad grows worse;

  The empire of France is empty as a beggar’s curse.

  Vice is king and virtue’s fled,

  The nobles have taken novel whores to bed:

  Sly courtiers, clowns, a vile race,

  Do park their asses in the muses’ place,

  Gamblers, crooks, and chatterboxes,

  Lickspittles, fops, and bobbysoxers.…

  This ferocious Pope-like poem suggests—when we put it alongside all the others, in different times and places, which express the same sentiments—that when the avant-garde turns against the army it is scouting for, it does so because it believes that army has betrayed the policies it had pledged itself to support, and that this betrayal, as well as the rebellion which is a response to it, is chronic and recurrent, if not perpetual.

  There appear to be at least three kinds of avant-garde. One, such as the architectural modernism of the Bauhaus, of Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Neutra, aims to improve man and his life; it naturally allies itself with other forward-looking agents of change (the machine, for instance), and it preaches progress with the sort of rosy-cheeked optimism characteristic of metaphysical Rotarians. It tends to be impatient with the past, maintaining that little can be learned from history but its errors, and fearing nostalgia above all other passive emotions. Although the members of this avant-garde are largely arty intellectuals, there is a sense of common cause with the impoverished and downtrodden—a shared powerlessness. This is what I call the liberal avant-garde. Its influence is strongest among the arts that have a public posture (architecture, theater, cinema). When the liberal avant-garde wants to become doctrinaire, it embraces the fascism of the Left. Picasso, Le Corbusier, and Brecht are characteristic types.

  The avant-garde of Gautier, Degas, and Flaubert, however, has nothing but scorn for these pimps of progress. The talismanic word here is “original,” and the focus of the group tends to be on individual and artistic freedom, on disengagement and withdrawal. Artists in this second group are ready to take from tradition and often oppose the present by looking to the past. They have a natural affinity with the aristocracy, and in general their movements are marked by an extreme dislike of the masses. Their image of the artist is the individual in his isolation. This is the conservative avant-garde, the avant-garde of Rimbaud, Lawrence, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Céline, and it is most prevalent among the poets. When it wants to become doctrinaire, it embraces the fascism of the Right, and often shows, alas, a racist face.

  Both of these avant-gardes occupied important places in the movement called Modernism. Both were wholly opposed to the state
of affairs in which they found themselves; both felt oppressed by the Establishment; both sought to produce something “new” and something thought to be revolutionary. Whether formalistic or expressionist, they shared a dislike of what was central to bourgeois taste (i.e., philistinism): representation and edification. However, history was still linear for the liberal wing; for them not every utopia was totally tarnished; society of some sort was still worth saving; and art could, as in the old days, do the job. The conservatives regarded such avant-gardes as fatally contaminated by bourgeois values; for them, society was not worth rescuing, only art was. Again, however—despite the purity and freedom they advocated—their works were scurrilously critical and contemptuous, and hence revisionary with respect to values. There was no hope to be found anywhere that would lighten their point of view or soften their animosities.

  The conservative avant-garde poisoned itself. Its dislike of society could not be confined to the page, score, or canvas but seeped into the souls of its artists. As in Flaubert’s case, retching became a continuous condition. The liberal avant-garde failed when its social program failed; when the Left took over; when Modernism became, for it, the new rule of reason and the real source of righteousness. The urban reforms urged by many architects were ruthless, arrogant, and authoritarian. Yet when the political thrust of this avant-garde was blunted (as it largely was when it migrated to America), its radical works remained, ready for a reinterpretation that might return Brecht’s plays and Miesian buildings to their origin in art.