Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  One interesting chapter in the history of co-option might concern itself with the eagerness and ease with which corporations all over the world made Modernism their business image, the skyscraper the cathedral of credit, and the steel cage a manifestation of commercial hubris, while the domestic work of those same architects was largely rejected. Avant-garde apartment complexes, on the whole, did not prosper, and tract housing went ranch as readily as souring cream. Of course, architects tend to begin their careers with less extensive projects and scheme their way from factories and shops to banks and office towers; nevertheless, the percentage of domestic architecture in the corpus of Mies, Aalto, Saarinen, Le Corbusier, and Gropius (for example) remains shockingly small. The Weissenhof project in Stuttgart (which commissioned Le Corbusier, Oud, Mies, and others to design apartments, villas, and row houses) is unique in Europe, and suffered for a while from indifference and neglect. Wright, almost alone, worked as a domestic, yet even his houses, eventually admired and critically influential, did not make it in the market. No Levittowns were built of his low-cost and brilliantly designed Usonian houses.

  It was also natural for painters to take on the coloration of their patrons, and for artists in general to exploit the system that exploited them, becoming personalities for the press and pets of the powerful. Many remained unsure of themselves for some time, unable to decide to whom to sell their souls, while others—poets and composers, mainly, who would have prostituted themselves for a shiny penny—looked on with envy while fame and fortune went to flamboyant virtuosi, tyrannical maestros, over-the-register opera singers, and abject scribblers of rape and romance. Initially confused by the liberal image that critics had reflected for them, John Dos Passos and Norman Mailer eventually righted themselves.

  The existence of a third avant-garde is more problematic. The activities of any such “group,” whether artistically oriented or socially focused, are so determined by the times that to call one sort permanent seems to court contradiction. Yet I believe there are works to which habit won’t have a chance to get us comfortably accustomed; works that will continue to resist the soothing praises of the critics, and that will rise from their tombs of received opinion to surprise us again and again. These works may pay a dreadful price for the role they have chosen to play, but if they are going to be a permanent part of “the” avant-garde (that avant-garde common to all kinds), they must remain wild and never neglect an opportunity to attack their trainers; above all, it is the hand that feeds them which must be repeatedly bitten. They have to continue to do what the avant-garde is supposed to do: shatter stereotypes, shake things up, and keep things moving; offer fresh possibilities to a jaded understanding; encourage a new consciousness; revitalize the creative spirit of the medium; and, above all, challenge the skills and ambitions of every practitioner. Such a pure avant-garde must not only emphasize the formal elements of its art (recognizing that these elements are its art); its outside interests must be in very long-term—if not permanent—problems. It may have to say no to Cash, to Flag, to Man, to God, to Being itself. It cannot be satisfied merely to complain of the frivolities of a king’s court or to count the crimes of capitalism or to castigate the middle class for its persistent vulgarity. The avant-garde’s ultimate purpose is to return the art to itself, not as if the art could be cordoned off from the world and kept uncontaminated, but in order to remind it of its nature (a creator of forms in the profoundest sense)—a nature that should not be allowed to dissolve into what are, after all, measly moments of society.

  In order to define the permanent avant-garde, or even suggest its possibility, I must turn in particular to such works as Bach’s Six Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin, Beethoven’s Opus in, Liszt’s Transcendental Études, Bartók’s 1926 Piano Sonata, Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano Opus 25, Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Kafka’s story “A Country Doctor,” Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Stein’s The Making of Americans as well as Tender Buttons, Beckett’s trilogy, late Turner and Rothko, some Duchamp, Hölderlin’s late piece “In lovely blue …,” the poetry of Mallarmé and Paul Celan, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, that most beautiful and disturbing of diaries, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet.

  The critical theories accompanying these three avant-gardes—to defend, explain, and ballyhoo them—have, in addition to such customary functions, another one that is just as important, although less advertised. That function is to disguise, both to itself and to others, how backward-looking this forward-looking group of revolutionaries is. The avant-garde looks over its shoulder at the main body, of course, and by making that look adversarial, turns against itself as well; for it was once part of the main body; it was born in that body; and while it will reject resemblance, while it will wish to forget its parents and desire to shake the dust of its cultural village forever from its feet, it cannot escape its genetic links, its childhood history, and all its early loyalties.

  In retrospect, neither Impressionism nor Post-Impressionism were as avant-garde as they were once made out to be. (The only true cuckoo in their increasingly comfortable nest was Cézanne.) Because the plastic artists made merchandise, commercialism came to them first, and asked, among other things, for the continuous production of the newsworthy and the interestingly odd; and there were plenty of journalists ready to supply the necessary subterfuges, welcoming each new wave of the future with artificial wonder and bought applause, earning their daily bread with a daily puff. In addition, commerce found it desirable if the work of art could offer the public “a handle” or two in order to facilitate the item’s sale and co-optation, if not in the form of sweet scenes and innocuous material (Utrillo’s Paris, for instance, as opposed to an Olympia who stares intently out of the canvas to discomfit the stare we are giving her), then in the shape of personal scandal and comic cutups (such as self-mutilation and madness—always excellent; syphilis acquired from native girls—good; drunkenness and drugs—okay, but routine; tough talk on TV), or the really regressive literary reading Surrealist paintings asked for, or the smile-inducing puzzles contained in Magritte’s visual puns. Such handles can magically appear without much help from anybody. If Proust is now one of history’s social pages, Finnegans Wake is a carcass on which doctoral candidates feed.

  So even the most secure members of the avant-garde were not untouched by this tension between the old and the new, success and starvation. Between Joyce’s many interleavings, we can hear a sentimental Irish tenor with a wine-dark voice, while Leopold Bloom’s Dublin is built of the Realist’s heavy bricks. Nor should we ignore the fact that decorating the present with the glitz of an imagined future (a habit of Japanese architects) is every bit as reactionary as the cosmetic activities of post-mods who doll up their façades with familiar and colorful fragments from gone-by times. Art, the honest article, lives (with other realities) only in an active present.

  If there were, beneath the eternally changing seas of sameness, a submerged and unrelenting avant-garde, like reefs upon which pleasure vessels might occasionally come to grief, then there would also have to be—since the avant-garde defines itself through opposition—a permanent class of philistines … a proposition quite easy to believe. In the fifties, such writers as Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet tried to dismiss bourgeois concepts about fiction by describing them (character, atmosphere, story, message, content, and so on) as “obsolete notions,” yet these obsolete notions have remained as lively in their obsolescence as they were in their heyday: performing a minuet with mummies, if not a dance of death. Even Marx is not immune. Consider the characters who cross the stage in that drama of his: commerce, capital, industrialization, technology, the clash of classes, social uplift, glib scientism, a tantalizing determinism with its promised happy ending. The ranks of the political avant-garde are filled with philistines. Who else would want to enlist? As Robbe-Grillet remarks, “One thing must trouble the partisa
ns of socialist realism, and that is the precise resemblance of their arguments, their vocabulary, their values to those of the most hardened critics.” Both Right and Left want their art to be mimetic, and both share a naive faith in the explanatory power of narrative.

  In the history of modern Europe, three great sources of cultural dominance have established themselves, and therefore, since avant-gardes say no, there have been, for them, three opponents: Church, State, and Commerce (although now we would say Corporations). That is: religion, politics, and business. Although Modernism was made of many avant-gardes (some, like Symbolism or Cubism, profound; others, like Imagism and Futurism, shallow), they were all united in their opposition to the middle class, to the rule of monetary values and an unprincipled pragmatism. At that time, the “modern” still had the power to shame: the painters shocked their clients; the composers created a frightful din to dismay their listeners; the novelists tore their readers limb from limb. But by dint of the dollar, nothing now abashes these consumers, for culture has gone Pop, and where Pop goes, goes the weasel.

  In this sense, the avant-gardes of Modernism—liberal and conservative alike—opposed the elevation of the bottom line, and in so doing, acted more like rear guards. Even in Schoenberg’s day, the paradox was painfully evident. In 1918 Schoenberg founded the Society for Private Musical Performances. Alban Berg wrote the prospectus. The intention of the Society was to withdraw both music and its performance from the reigning system, already compromised by commerce, so that those who came would have to come in ignorance of the program. There were to be no reviewers. The works performed were to be adequately rehearsed, and the performers were to be the servants of the score. It was not long before an evening of Strauss waltzes had to be given in order to raise money to sustain the society. The names of the arrangers of the evening’s waltzes (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) may have dignified a string trio; nevertheless, somebody else’s music was all these great composers had to sell.

  The marketplace has always been important (you went there to buy vegetables and goats); so has the begging letter been, the charming smile, the grant application, the flattering dedication, the buttering up of influential critics and patrons, the wheedling of favors, and so forth, since these sometimes put money in the purse you wished to open at the market; but bins of potatoes, sacks of flour, tubs of fish, bolts of cloth, the bank, the bourse, investments in oil or heavy water, Cos. and Corps.—what these businesses and commodities stand for—have not always been the decisive determiners of cultural worth.

  The religious tradition may have been based on fraud and hypocrisy, but at least it claimed to serve transcendental values. The State may have been another liberator that became a tyrant, yet it, too, pointed its gun at the sky where the flag flew. Furthermore, in each case, there were doctrines to be adhered to, ideals to be followed, practices that promised an improvement to the spirit. Now it’s all Vic Tanny. And ideals last as long as their symbols can continue to be sold for profit. We have at last reached the democracy of the five-and-dime. The cross that hangs around the neck and the T-shirt that displays a product’s logo deal, as we know, with illusions; but now illusions are all equal, and my bumper sticker is worth every bit as much as your rosary.

  Alas, no one assails the artist anymore, only their funding agencies. The railings of a utopian socialist such as P.-J. Proudhon belong, sadly, to another century, when a word like “form” could fill a shopkeeper’s soul with a surge of anger.

  Art for art’s sake, as it has been called, not having its legitimacy within itself, being based on nothing, is nothing. It is debauchery of the heart and dissolution of the mind. Separated from right and duty, cultivated and pursued as the highest thought of the soul and the supreme manifestation of humanity, art or the ideal, stripped of the greater part of itself, reduced to nothing more than an excitement of fantasy and the senses, is the source of sin, the origin of all servitude, the poisoned spring from which, according to the Bible, flow all the fornications and abominations of the earth.… Art for art’s sake, I say, verse for verse’s sake, style for style’s sake, form for form’s sake, fantasy for fantasy’s sake, all the diseases, which like a plague of lice are gnawing away at our epoch, are vice in all its refinements, the quintessence of evil.

  Oh, to be lice like that (if ever we were), gnawing (if ever we did) at the scalp and follicles of civilization! To be sure, artists wanted to reject Mammon and have their Mammon too, but it was once romantically supposed by both audience and author that the poet’s or the painter’s motives were ultimately out of the ordinary—dedicated, pure—and the avant-garde artist’s aims more admirably elevated than anybody else’s.

  Theology invented a besouled self so the soul could be damned, saved, and fought over; and the State did the same with the taxpaying soldier-citizen, who was English or German before he was conceived, and a kindergarten patriot before he was confirmed. Now Capitalism and Communism have given us the economic self: either the worker who is defined by what he produces, or the buyer who is defined by the goods he consumes. We may not have a classless society, nor be aiming for one, but we are all equally crass; high culture rests on the same penny-ante base as low; preference is power; and pushpin, as Bentham said, is as good as poetry.

  In the act of attacking their enemies, the avant-garde declared those enemies to be their equals—the main body. Can we nowadays imagine any self-respecting artistic movement turning upon the comic book, the blood flick, the gooey erotic romance, minimal moonshine or similar musics, painted photographs as large as small buildings, sideshow sensationalism and other vocal groups, TV’s endless inanities, as if these had betrayed some noble cause, or had lured us off the high road of art and onto the low road of love and other lyrics? Any avant-garde that believes itself up to the mo should have the High Moderns as its foe, but these artists are, in fact, among the avant-garde’s few friends, and its only equal; although there is at present some doubt about even that, because the avant-garde itself—in name, if not in substance—is now a trademark for the trendy. Avant-garde condoms should do well, like those unrepressed avant-garde underpants. Even if a genuine note were to be sounded, it could not be heard, for commerce has filled the whole of cultural space with rock bands, celebrity trials, and other little cultural commotions.

  In a large and diversified market, if the numismatics magazine can make a profit, any heresy can too. Against such a Medusa-headed enemy there is no point in calling yourself an avant-garde. Rebel against the Establishment, bugger all or any, and your check will be in the mail. Against such an enemy, there is nowhere to aim your anger; there is no real object for your scorn because business, they will tell you, is in the business of giving its substance away: to museums to put on “the Greatest van Gogh on Earth,” to orchestras to replay the classics, to public television to emasculate the masters, to writing-program writers to succeed with the superficial where other superficialists have failed. And from the makers of merchandise themselves, well … what will not be richly forthcoming: commissions for bank lobbies and boardrooms, investment acquisitions by conglomerates, arty trophies bought by the intrepid bankroll whose cultural greed will one day be honored with a gallery enshrining its purchases.

  When there is no windmill to tilt at—tilt not. At the present time one can only practice silence, exile, and cunning, except that “silence, exile, and cunning” is a cheer for the basketball team representing the Sisters of the Poor. Why be silent? Because if you open your mouth, your saliva will be sold as a prescription for something. Why speak of exile when you live very comfortably as a gargoyle facing a quiet quad? And your cunning cannot compete with those who smell new money the way—as the old joke had it—Napoleon smelled de-feet.

  Many and various are the vicissitudes of the avant-garde, and it is true that now there is nothing that a group of this kind can do that such a group once honestly did; nevertheless, there is one sort of something—one theme, one theory—that throughout all common connivanc
es cannot hang its head, although the old romantic myths of the artist have been remaindered and each of his motives questioned. “To live is to defend a form,” Hölderlin said. It might be defended still, if painters refused to show, composers and poets to publish, and every dance were designed to be danced in the dark. Non serviam. That would be a worthy no.

  But it will never be uttered.

  Where shall we find breath enough to say such a long, long word?

  EXILE

  Let us begin where we began—in darkness: a darkness in which there was yet no color to the skin, no distinction between thine and mine, no tangle of tongues, no falsely alluring ideas, no worries which might spread like an oil slick over our amniotic ocean; hence no hither-and-thithering either, no mean emotions, treacheries, promises, prohibitions, no lifelong letdowns. We began in a place where darkness really did cover the face of things, and not because the shades were drawn and the lights were out, but because darkness was our ether, and let us sleep. It was a world where ¿Qué pasa? could be honestly answered: Nada.

  What colored this darkness with calamity? We soon grew too big for our boots, our britches, and our own good. So the walls of our world moved against us, squeezing us out as though we were a stool: what a relief for the old walls, loose at last, lax as a popped balloon; but what confusion for us, now overcome by sensation, seared by the light. Some still call it a trauma—birth—and the earliest Greek poets bewailed the day just as the babies bewailed it, explaining that we cried out at the cruelty of being cast into the harsh bright air where perceptions and pain were one, where screaming was breathing.