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Avant-Garde, Neo-Avant-Garde, Modernism: Questions and SuggestionsAuthor(s): Miklós SzabolcsiSource: New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 1, Modernism and Postmodernism: Inquiries,Reflections, and Speculations (Autumn, 1971), pp. 49-70Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468380 .

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Avant-garde, Neo-avant-garde, Modernism: Questions and Suggestions

Mikl6s Szabolcsi

I

HE LITERATURE of recent years and, not to the least extent, the various literary and artistic phenomena of our days and the increasing complexity of their development call for a pro-

found and critical revision of everything we understand by the terms "modern" or "contemporary." The following attempt is the outcome of such considerations, without, however, claiming to answer all the questions it raises.

II

We shall discuss the set of phenomena we understand by the term "avant-garde," meaning by it one of the trends, one certain group of incidents in the more recent development of literature and art. The term itself is, of course, like so many others in the field of art, open to argument. A few words about its history: Originally it was used in a military sense and the first journal so named is a military one from the period of the French Revolution, launched in 1794. As a political term it seems to appear around 1830 in Republican circles and among the opposition of the monarchy in general. It becomes more popular in Utopian Socialist terminology; the Saint-Simonite Emile Barrault is probably the first who uses it in 183o, then around 1845 it appears in the works of G. D. Laverdant, disciple of Fourier, and about the same time in Proudhon's writings, too, already as a label for social progress, for socialist ideas and the collective efforts of artists. By the second half of the century the "avant-garde" becomes part of the stock phraseology of politics; in France between 188o and 191o countless newspapers, periodicals and publications bear it as a title, and its novelty is worn off in political slang. Naturally, in most cases



50 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

it is used to designate "progressive," "leftist," radical, freemasonic or Jacobin movements; sometimes it can even acquire an anarchist accent, as when in 1878 the followers of Bakunin chose it for the title of their review published in Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. However the term soon grew so elastic that it admitted right-wing, anti-liberal, anti-Semitic and nationalistic interpretations and was used in those senses, too, from the i88o's onward. In the first decade of the twentieth- century the use of "avant-garde" with a political meaning grew less frequent, and turned up again in the 1920os to mark, at least in France, mostly Socialist and Communist attitudes in politics.

The term was applied to the phenomena of literature and art quite late. Even Baudelaire used it in its politico-military sense. It was towards the end of the 19th and early in the 20oth century that it began to denote literary and artistic trends; from that time onward its use was gradually restricted to the field of literature and art, at least in scholarly and critical terminologies. The political meaning of the word, however, acquired a new charge in the movements of the i96os.1

III

Side by side with, or instead of, the term and concept of "avant-garde" the majority of literary and art historians use the expressions "modernism," "modernness" or "the Moderns," meaning the period in literature beginning with Baudelaire or, in some cases, Rimbaud, and coming up to the present. The term "modernism" (or "modernness") has, for some of the Marxist critics, the pejorative secondary meaning of bourgeois disintegration, decay, decadence; others, more temp- erately, apply it to literary phenomena that fall outside the line of realism and that reveal, as an essential feature, an attempt to find refuge in the increasing isolation of the artist; later, just an aimless, anarchist revolt.2 Similarly, literary scholarship in English-speaking countries and in France uses the term "modernism" in a generalizing sense, usually understanding by it every trend that is in sharp contrast with the previous period, that of Romanticism and realism.

I myself am in doubt about this generalizing use of the word: this "modernism" effaces the fundamental differences and contradictions

I See R. Estivals, J. Ch. Gaudy, G. Vergez, L'avant-garde (Paris, 1968); H. E. Holthusen, "Kunst und Revolution," Avantgarde (Munich, 1966); R. Poggioli, Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardie (Bologna, 1962). 2 See mainly Gyorgy Lukacs' works; for recent detailed elaboration of subject in Hungarian criticism, see Istvin Kiraly, Endre Ady (Budapest, I970), 2 vols.



AVANT-GARDE, NEO-AVANT-GARDE, MODERNISM 51

between the various trends and tendencies it stands for. If we call everything that in some way or other deviates from the principles of critical realism, from Baudelaire to the German revolutionary activists, from Apollinaire to the absurd drama, "modernist" (no matter from which side), we shall, I think, gain a vague category, but one that would conflate radically different tendencies. If we label Mallarm6 and Apollinaire alike as "modernist," we disregard the fundamental disparity between Mallarm6, the great precursor of the cult of the isolated Ego, of the transformation of literature into linguistic symbols, and Apollinaire, who with his openness, his deep interest in man and in the people, his cheerfulness and irony and humanism is at the source of a powerful current in European poetry, open, impulsive, reconciling man with society; between, that is, the forerunner of hermetic word- play of our days on the one hand, and that of the present realistic poetry on the other.

Similarly the term "modernist" will be applied to the later Rilke and early Mayakovsky, to the young Nezval and the mature Eliot without discrimination; which shows that instead of the vague categories of modern literature and modernism we are to find terms that define the individual trends and tendencies more precisely. The trends in the complex development of literature and art, beginning with 1905, can be divided into groups; one of the principal groups being, I think, the avant-garde.

True, the avant-garde waves that appear around I905 are characterized by gradual transitions from the very beginning: they are linked to previous trends in more than one point, and the avant-garde literature has a lot in common with that of the end of the century as far as their philosophical background and their attitudes are con- cerned. In searching for common features we could, however, go back as far as the Romantics; indeed more than one trend of the 2 oth century can be derived from some type of Romanticism-still, the time that has passed since the disintegration of Classicism cannot be considered as one integral period. Earlier critics of the conservative wing like Lasserre or Irving Babbitt, and more recently and on an evidently higher level, Walter Muschg and Hans Sedlmayr in their histories of literature and art (respectively Tragische Litera- turgeschichte and Verlust der Mitte) have shown an inclination towards this conception; in their opinion everything that has happened during the last century and a half adds up to one single process of disintegration: since Goethe there has been no literature to speak of.

Where is the place of the avant-garde among the literary and artistic trends of the 20th century?




This question leads to another that neither the Marxist nor the bourgeois scholars have as yet answered although the problem of trends in 2oth century world literature has been recently brought up in Soviet criticism.3 The development of the literature of our century is polymorphous, so manifold that unlike almost all previous periods it cannot be included under the heading of one single principle of style, one prevailing method or intellectual concept.

The literature of the 2oth century shows a strong realistic current that embraces a whole range of different trends, from the intellectual realism tending to irony (the type that Thomas Mann represents) to plebeian realism (that of M6ricz or Sadoveanu) with a scattering of nuances and varieties between. It is this realism that, at its best, produced the great works of this eventful and complicated period, from Brecht to Heinrich Mann, from Roger Martin du Gard to Hemingway. There is no doubt either that one of the strongest trends of our century, gaining more ground every day, is socialist realism.

At the other extreme we find the obviously cheap literature, and the ultra-conservative literature (sometimes in the guise of realism) -we can all agree to that, too. And between the two poles?-the "inter- region" as Boris Suchkov ingeniously called it?

In this "inter-region" are, first of all, situated the trends and oeuvres (sometimes of a conservative and aristocratic character) that we can classify under the headings of late symbolism and neo-classicism, from the late Rilke to Ezra Pound, from Yeats to Valdry; the work of Proust can also be classed here. These trends are rooted, in my opinion, more in the past century, carrying on and perfecting its heritage, than in the present. If nothing else, this must make us wary of calling them "avant-garde" and identifying them with the trends that came into being just to challenge them, even if the careers of some of these artists were for some time linked with the avant-garde movements, and even though the trends and groups we usually term "avant-garde" are also to be found in this "inter-region."

Pure and homogeneous trends and formations have, of course, never existed; a multitude of transitional forms come into being and, consequently, the above categories apply to them only approximately. The period itself is one of transition, and there is a section in literature and art that deliberately accepts this transitional character and assumes a mutable, flexible, fluid shape.

Another methodological remark: the place of artists, trends, tendencies and schools is far from being permanently fixed. If we can

3 Boris Suchkov, Istoricheskie Sudby Realisma (Moscow, I957)-




accept the above outlined grouping of the various trends as true to life or at least as a serviceable hypothesis we can work upon, we must see that the artists get into contact with, draw inspiration from and break with more than one of these groups, and every great artist produces his own particular synthesis even in our century; he is not simply part of a trend, but has a hand in formulating, maintaining, improving and surpassing it. On the other hand the trend itself develops, under- goes changes and modifications as well.

IV

What I understand by "avant-garde" are thus the trends and tendencies that possess a definite aesthetical, philosophical, in many cases, political, program. They usually crystallize in creative communities and appear in the first years of our century, starting with Italian Futurism, French Cubism both in art and in literature, and German Expressionism in literature and painting. Their first culminating point comes in the first decade of the 20oth century, a new wave follows at the beginning of the

920os (Dadaism, Surrealism, Constructivism), and their aspect and effect markedly change around 1935-38. We can thus put the first great period of the avant-garde roughly between 1905 and 1938.

Let us go back to the antecedents once more. The avant-garde movements did not appear suddenly out of the blue, without any prepara- tion; the literary, artistic and social process that eventually called them into existence had started in the mid-Igth century. The complex trends of the end of the century, Naturalism, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau, cannot easily be conceived as the mere close of a period either-they indicate the beginning of a new one as much. The impact of poets like Whitman and Verhaeren, Laforgue and Rimbaud is difficult to separate from what follows after them: there is no clear dividing line between Rimbaud and Apollinaire. As an antecedent to the organized avant-garde we find the steps "Symbolism-Symbolist Naturalism-Symbolist Expressionism" in nearly every country and every sphere of art. Still, the thing that begins with Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism is so fundamentally new, such a total change in aims and conceptions, in the relation between the artist and the world, the subject and the object, that we are entirely justified in starting the history of the 20oth century avant-garde with them. They themselves emphasized with angry defiance that they wanted to break with overripe Symbolism, with the civilization of the close of the century. Most trends in the fine arts emerge in violent reaction to




Impressionism. A new way of looking at the world and a new system of codes appear after the year 1905.

In contrast, the years between 1938 and I945 seem to be a period of faltering and fatigue in the avant-garde movements; they even give the impression of having exhausted their resources and dying away. After I945, however, some of them were restored to life, re-invigorated, and grew strong enough to become, in some countries, the dominant trend.

V

How can we characterize these avant-garde waves, and the avant- garde movement in general?4

Several kinds of descriptions and approaches to the question are possible. We would like to introduce a sociological approach first, which naturally involves some criteria of a philosophical nature, too. If we adopt this angle, we shall find that the common basis for these trends is the dissolution of the relationship between the writer or artist and the public. Literature and art cannot fulfill their traditional function, the existence of artist and art becomes precarious, its justification challenged in the rapidly changing, more and more complicated and incomprehensible world. The process had started earlier but became really menacing in the early 20oth century." Generally speaking, the

4 For further reading about the respective trends of the avant-garde, i.e. Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism, rich documentary and critical material is available. There is also a vast list of reference books, already counted among the classics, dealing with the whole of avant-garde art, from Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art (London, 1950) and Mario de Micheli, Le avanguardie artistiche del Novocento (Milano, 1959) to R. Delevoy, Dimensions du XXe sidcle. 1900oo-945 (Geneve, 1965). Fewer attempts have been made to sum up the literary avant-garde: the fullest account is that of G. de Torre, Historia de las literaturas de avanguardia (Madrid, 1925; Madrid, 1965), the most thorough, that of R. Poggioli, Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardie (Bologna, 1962). From among the recent comprehensive studies let us mention that of B. Goribly, Le avanguardie litterarie in Europa (Milano, I967). See also M. Bakos, "O literairnej avantgarde," Literaria, Studie e dokumenty, No. 9 (Bratislava, 1966) ; K. Chvatik, Strukturalis- mus und Avant-garde (Miinchen, 1970); F. Kermode, "The Modern," Continuities (New York, 1968); H. Kofler, Zur Theorie der modernen Literatur (Neuwied, Luchterhand, 1962); H. Lefebvre, La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (Paris, 1968); "Avantgarde. Geschichte und Krise einer Idee," Gestalt u. Gedanke, XI (1966).-Finally let me list here my own attempts: "L'avantgarde litteraire et artistique comme phenomhne litteraire," Actes du Ve Congrds de l'AILC (Amster- dam, 1969), pp. 319-37, and Yel is kidltds (Symbol and Outcry) (Budapest, 1971). 5 See A. Hauser, Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur, II (Miinchen, 1968), and, from another aspect, P. Bourdieu, "Disposition esthetique et competence artistique," Temps Modernes ( x 971 ), 1345-78.




artist, the writer, can no longer see the function, aim, meaning and place of his work; consequently, he has to find new ways and means; he wants to bring about a radical reform in art or, if necessary, in society itself.

This radical reform-whether we speak of a conscious wish for the new and a deliberate activity for achieving it, or of panic and hesitation at the sight of the changes in society-results in the dissolution of the relationship between person and object, between the representer and the represented, the artist and his subject-matter. The subject-matter itself changes; it acquires multiple meanings and becomes incomprehensible. The artist is no more satisfied with the superficial appearance, the familiar image of reality; he wants to penetrate through the surface of everyday reality, he fights the mechanical reflexes, routine and habit. Instead, he wants to expose unexplored connections, to find the Essence of things-either with the help of a passion that seeks out the essential or with intellectual insight, by way of ecstasies or speculations. This basic sociological situation, this sense of a break between artist and public, art and the consumer, the consciousness of the artist's crisis, etc. are common features in the "fin-de-siecle" trends and the avant- garde. What distinguishes the avant-garde from the former is that it not only faces, endures and registers this crisis but also tries to master it, to find the way out, to get the upper hand. That is, it wants to restore, to recreate the unity of art and public, and bring about a radical change in art and society, even if these attempts at a solution are sometimes utopian and anarchic.

As a result, in the avant-garde trends the traditional time factor changes and so does conventional space; time and space amalgamate: the world seems to be disjointed, continuity turns into discontinuity. The artist feels compelled to reflect the disjointed world by giving a disconnected, fragmentary, patchy effect to his work. Everything is in motion, accelerating, and the artist manages to keep up the pace for a while, he strives after contemporaneity. Then overcome by dizziness he, too, denies the existence of measurable time and space and wants to reflect an achronic state, mere quantitative rapports, abstract relations. Character-drawing in the novel and the drama changes: the prevailing aspect is the relativity of time and space, the timeless process of inner consciousness. Literary forms and genres change, too: description and plot are dropped, the characteristic feature of the work is its elliptical and fragmentary construction. And the arch-enemy of the artist, the sum of everything that is outdated and petty-bourgeois is




emotion; he wants passion and will instead, or even better: laughter, ridicule, the grotesque, the "humour noir."

All this is an external, secondary index of the changes in the relationship between art and society, art and the world. In the rapidly changing world of the second industrial revolution, in the Age of Technology, in the society that the artist, this solitary rebel of the age of imperialism and proletarian revolutions, finds more and more confusing, surrounded by a nature that, following the recent scientific discoveries grows even more chaotic, art seems to lose its former position and weight; in the age of mass culture many an artist finds his art void of reason. Art absorbs the slang, notions and problems of modern life, of technology, of the city, but it does not stop at that: it wants to destroy the hierarchy of art forms, to efface the dividing lines between "high" and "low," all in order to get closer to the public and overcome the alienating effect of the division of labor. Hence the interest the avant-garde takes in the circus, the music hall, choral speaking, gym festivals and various new types of theatre. The artist wants to do away with the dividing lines between the arts, the division of architecture and sculpture, poetry and plastic arts: this is at the origin of the "rythme colore" and "poemes-dessins," of visual sym- phonies and literary collages.

But soon it is art itself that the avant-garde challenges. The avant- garde trends are characterized from the first by an aggressive spirit: they claim that, compared with life and action, art has no significance to speak of. Art now aspires to the status of industry, seeks to attain scientific exactness, technical precision and validity. The artist, if a painter or a sculptor, wants to master technology, if a writer or a poet, to adopt its speed, exactness and devices. "Art is dead. Long live Tatlin's new mechanic art"-declined the poster of G. Grosz and Heartfield as early as 1920.

The art of the avant-garde is deeply influenced by the social and political forces of the age. One index of the artist's helplessness is his more and more frequent resorting to the grotesque, to the "humour noir," the desperate grin, angry laughter, vain outcry in poetry, painting or drama-phenomena which became really prevalent in our time. Alienation, solitude, isolation in the middle of society are expressed by the artist whether he submits to them and, accepting the reduction of human personality as inevitable, shouts his terror and anguish to the wide world, or rebels against them and tries to avoid them.

The avant-garde also has tendencies and stages that are not satisfied merely with changing the nature of art and defining the new position of the artist, but determinedly strive to transform society in its entirety.




Avant-garde art is characterized by a feverish quest for the new and striking, and a hatred for everything that is outdated, retrograde, fossilized or conservative: two weapons in the struggle to change the outdated and conservative structure and elements of society. Nearly every avant-garde trend tries to outline the features of the New Man; this New Man is sometimes an utopian, unreal personality, often the artist himself, but as often the freely developing member of a new type of society. It is the wish to overcome alienation that formulates this image of man: the ideal of a happy and complete personality, the product, as some artists hope, of a future classless Communist society. Throughout the history of the avant-garde we see the fight and alter- nation of two contrasting tendencies, two extremes, two types of revolt: the individual and destructive and the collective and constructive, respectively. This dichotomy is manifested in the contrasting pairs of Surrealism and Constructivism, or Dada and late Expressionism. Several groups of avant-garde artists want to build, to create and also to form a more or less permanent alliance with revolutionary movements and the revolutionary working-class movement: here we ought to mention the activist wing of Expressionism, H. Walden's Sturm, the "au service de la revolution" phase of Surrealism, the Polish Nowa Sztuka movement, the Slovak DA V, the entire development of the Czech avant-garde or the LEF. The other wing of the avant-garde (the Dada or the early Surrealism) breaks into an unintelligible and grotesque wail at the sight of war, of irrationality, of the stale social system; they grab at everything; they ridicule, expose and destroy.

Thus if we are thinking in purely sociological terms and not those of art, the avant-garde is an intellectual movement, the action of the intelligentsia-complete with not a few misconceptions and false ideologies, from aristocratism to anarchism, so characteristic of "sects" and "outcasts." And, in its wake, the multifold and complex distortions and restrictions that alienation produces. The majority of the adherents of these movements did however cherish a sincere desire to see a change both in the arts and in the world of reality. Also it is a fact that the avant-garde movements challenged the validity of a lot of conceptions that had long been outworn, such as the rigid division between "high" art and mass culture, the hierarchy in literature, the rigidity of literary forms, the glossed-over representation of the facts and so on. They set off a process, took the first step on a road that could have led to new forms in literature and art and to the reforma- tion of their entire existence.




VI

Up to now we have discussed the avant-garde from a sociological viewpoint-and hinted at its philosophical implications. The question is, do these tendencies possess a comprehensive ideology, a distinct philosophical aspect of their own over and above the discussed features. It is a well-known fact that Poggioli has made an attempt at a phe- nomenological description.' The philosophical-ideological basis of the avant-garde movements is heterogeneous, and cannot be uniformly treated. No ideology can be said to be exclusively characteristic of them, neither existentialism nor the German idealistic philosophy, neither that of Marx nor Nietzsche; consequently we cannot "ex definition" qualify these tendencies as anti-realist and anti-Marxist, or materialist and Marxist. They draw on various philosophical systems and combine their borrowings to make up their own ideology.

The picture is perhaps a degree more unified if we consider the preoccupation of these movements with psychology or the natural sciences and technology. We cannot pass over the theory that one of the sources, one of the basic experiences of the first great wave of the avant- garde resulted from the findings of the natural sciences, i.e. the discovery that the until then impenetrable substance is open to the ques- tioning eye (as biochemistry, physics and, after Freud, psychology demonstrated). The revelation of hitherto invisible provinces-to see the hitherto invisible, to learn the hitherto unknown without having to resort to mysticism and irrationalism-this overwhelming experience is, among others, at the source of the avant-garde waves. So, too, is the exploration of the hidden domains of reality-the dreams, fantasies and illusions of Surrealism-or, in the case of Futurism, Cubism, and particularly Constructivism, the until now unfathomable operative system of things. The primacy of the experience versus literary trends, the relationship between experience and form, etc., are inquiries where there are still multitudes of questions to answer-this can be a track we should follow in the future.

Finally, can we speak of a specific prosodical, stylistic, or, more generally, a formal-aesthetic feature that commonly characterizes the entire avant-garde; is it possible to define it from a purely formal aspect, by its poetical accomplishments? I am hardly in the position to answer the question here and now; the detailed work in this field still has to be done. The chief methodological problem lies in the fact that nearly every single trend of the avant-garde follows a different aesthetic

6 Op. cit.




canon, employs a different method, works on a different principle of construction. They may be similar in some negative traits as, for instance, the revolt against poetic standards of the 19th century, the rejection of certain forms, the dissolution of certain limitations (the old-type novel structure, metrical forms, types of drama, syntax, etc.) but these in themselves are not sufficient to characterize the trends. Perhaps we may say that the entire development of the recent past, the phenomena, forms and concepts of the 2oth century are comprised and concentrated, as if in culminating points, in the various trends of the avant-garde.

We can observe this in the example of the poetic image. The language begins to live a life of its own, becomes important on its own account; the sign suppresses the thing it stands for, the words turn into magic and perfume, the elements of the literary text become independent; the image breaks away from the body of the poem to live a self-dependent life. The poet's wish to create this independent image will produce literary theories and schools that, on their part, give additional support to the writer's endeavors: we witness such fruitful interrelations in the well-known cases of the English Imagism and the New Criticism (Eliot, Hulme), the Czech Poetism and the Structuralism of the Ecole de Prague (Nezval, Mukarovsky), or the Spanish and South-American Ultraismo and the resulting theoretical work of J. L. Borges. The independence and prominence of the image is a phenomenon we come across in the nineteenth century, in Romanticism, and in other twentieth-century trends as well.

In Surrealism, however, and in the succeeding trends up to the present, it is set up as a program: the prevalence of the image is so marked that it almost becomes the construing principle of poetry and prose.7 In other trends it disappears to be replaced by other principles, by previously practised methods. This is perhaps the area where it is most difficult to distinguish the general development and the general characteristics of modern literature and art from their specific features, and, for this reason, a sociological classification yields much better results.

7 For the last treatment of the question see P. Caminade, Image et me'taphore (Paris, 1970).

VII

We have used the expression "movements" and on this occasion we shall have to say a few words about the particularity of the phenomena




that this expression covers. School or current or trend or style-in which of these categories should we place the avant-garde? Or, in other words: what is in fact the avant-garde?

We are now treading the most dangerous and most controversial territory of literary history and theory. The interpretation and appli- cation of "current, trend, style, etc." is a much debated issue even in the case of periods whose historical evaluation presents less problems; what then in the case of our complex, polymorphous and changeable century?

There is a widely held opinion which says that the avant-garde is an attitude, a disposition rather; and applies the term, whether with a tone of commendation or censure, to the ever-present spirit of innovation, to feverish enthusiasm, to the spasmodic reflections of a spasmodic age. I for one cannot agree with such an extension of the notion, or to be more exact, with a psychological definition of this kind; in my opinion the avant-garde is a phenomenon that occurs in a certain historical period; one that calls, above all, for a historical analysis. We cannot consider it as a "movement" either, as so many literary historians do; the "movement" is an outward aspect, an organizational frame, a fact of the sociology of literature, like the "school" in classical trends, or elsewhere the "cenaculum" or the "circle."

And if we insist on classifying it, we cannot call the avant-garde one specific school or one single current. A group of currents, a set of schools rather; and the definition will indicate that within the same trend we should look for a diversity of aims, styles, philosophical and ideological backgrounds; what they have in common are just some general features. The realism of the 2oth century, for instance, is such a group of currents, and so, in my opinion, is the avant-garde.

VIII

The spread of the avant-garde, its appearance in different countries, and the changes in its shape and function give rise to some peculiar phenomena of which I should like to pick out two.

I) The avant-garde movements undergo a change in function. If it is true that at the origins of the avant-garde we find the changes in society, the wish to determine the function of literature, and the artists' search for new possibilities, then we are justified in assuming that in social systems afflicted with the same problems these trends will appear in the same manner. In other countries, standing on a different level,



AVANT-GARDE, NEO-AVANT-GARDEj MODERNISM 6i

with a different literary development and different social conditions it may happen that they do not appear at all, or with a modified significance, and their formal and linguistic innovations assume a different function.8

In Central Europe we witness the change in function or the shift in character of more than one avant-garde trend. One of the earliest examples of the change in function was the German development of the Dada; the destructive, desperate, ultra-nihilistic movement had a revolutionary wing that became more and more involved in political activities and, by the 1930s produced the provocative and fresh in- gredients of a modern realism (Huelsenbeck, Herzfelde, G. Grosz, O. Dix). And, as we know, the "activist" wing of German Expressionism followed the same course. In Croatian literature Expressionism was the trend that brought about the renewal of the whole. Owing mainly to Krleza's activity, it turned to a strongly social and even socialist direction and helped to shape the emphatically social character of the whole literature. In Czech and Polish literature the wave of avant-garde trends (in Czech literature that of Surrealism in particular) had the role of counter-balancing the Symbolist and Impressionist tendencies turned ultra-nationalistic, by displaying an international outlook and social sensibility and by letting their international aspects prevail. One wing of the avant-garde in Poland and the Czech Surrealism showed a strong social preoccupation, retaining simultaneously their social pathos and their role of setting free the language. The poetry of V. Nezval is an example of a progress starting with Surrealism, assimilat- ing its achievements, and creating out of the synthesis an individual voice. The development of Czech Surrealism was also different from that of the French. At its roots we find not Dada but a literary group of revolutionary and political aspirations. In the three generations of Roumanian Surrealism (Ilarie Voronca, B. Fundoianu-Geo Bogza, Geo Dumitrescu) the revolt against conventions and rigid doctrines eventually turned into concrete social discontent and the demand for social revolution.

In Hungarian literature the various avant-garde tendencies per- formed a different function. In the literature from 1915 to 1919 the reviews Ma (Today) and Tett (Action) stood "in the vanguard of revolutionary service"; they published a special "ideological number" and foretold the advent of Communism. The Hungarian versions of Dadaism and early Surrealism expressed the chaos and disillusionment that followed the suppressed revolution of 1919. They told about

8 For examples of the possible variations see my paper quoted in note 4 above, "L'avantgarde litteraire, etc."




lost hopes and a world deprived of sense; their vision of the world's end and their sense of chaos reflected real bloodshed, real pains (Lajos Kassik: Stakes are singing).

2) A special case of the change in function of the avant-garde is the phenomenon we can best describe as folklorization. Some avant-garde trends on reaching new countries tended to merge with the characteristic traditions of the respective national literatures, to resonate with and intensify some of their features, particularly if they themselves coincided with the popular traditions. In this case the avant- garde trends assume a peculiar national character. Their relations with national traditions and with the continuity of literature date from their very genesis, as was pointed out by Anna Balakian for French Surrealism.9 Symbolism, for instance, survived for long and had a significant role in the literature of various countries because it cor- responded with deeply rooted tendencies of national traditions and folklore. This is true, for example, of Roumanian literature, where Tudor Arghezi, their greatest 20oth-century poet, was the issue of this assimilated and nationalized Symbolism. European Symbolism and Hungarian folk-song and folk-ballad were married in the writing of Bela Balizs as early as the first decade of the 20oth-century. In some trends and works of the Russian avant-garde we can also detect popular features, connections with popular and national traditions. The early work of Kandinsky, the first period of Ivan Punin, the entire career of Chagall and one stage in the poetry of Mayakovsky all bear evidence of that; the products of the Russian avant-garde are characterized, colored and shaped by the fabulous, the magic, the play of the imagi- nation, by a passionate and untamable spirit, and at the same time by a propensity to profound philosophical thinking, a quest for comprehensive connections. In the Roumanian Lucian Blaga the avant- garde inspirations, deriving from German Expressionism, blend har- moniously with the national heritage. The poems turned out by the Finnish avant-garde-Hellaakoski, Mustapaiii, Juvonen-also display this balance between the classical tradition and the innovative. The poets of the neo-Greek avant-garde freely borrow phrases, lines and symbols from the various layers, from the formal and linguistic treasury of the several thousand-year-old Greek civilization and achieve an extraordinary effect by arranging them in a new kind of synthesis.

The most characteristic examples of the avant-garde trends merging with the popular and national culture can be observed in the literatures of Spain, Africa and the Antilles. It is a commonly known fact that,

9 A. Balakian, Literary Origins of Surrealism (New York, 1947).




from the I930os onward French Surrealism had a liberating, reforming effect on the peoples and literatures of some African countries and of the Antilles: in Cuban literature it was Guillen and Carpentier, in the French literature of the Antilles the work of Aim6 C6saire bore the stamp of this influence. The rejection of the present, the exposure of the lies of the established culture, the search for new values, all contributed to the awareness of specific Negro features, Ne'gritude, and helped to put into words and throw into relief, in opposition to the official and conservative trends in literature, the individual and the original. They sought the original sources of the Ego in the primeval, the popular; and though later the definition of Ne'gritude had to be modified to admit historical man, the African who is molded by the society he lives in, from the viewpoint of literary history this influence that brought to the surface something specifically national, primeval and also basically new, was very significant. National Sur- realism did the same for Brazilian literature by imbuing it with the awareness of an independent Brazilian reality, developing the consciousness of the indianit.

IX The first great wave of the avant-garde comes to an end in 1935- Indeed, already around 1930 the vigor of the avant-garde begins to ebb, its obituary is repeatedly prepared, after 1932 it is derisively spoken of by those who keep abreast of the times; by 1935 only small groups call themselves by this name. The motives, achievements, new forms and expressive devices of these movements have grown "classic," they have, that is, been integrated into modern realism. After 1938 the avant-garde is a thing of the past in Europe, becoming, where the political situation is favorable, a popular subject-matter for dis- sertations.

In the 1940os it lived in nostalgic remembrances as the wild adven- ture of youth . . . . And yet, in our day, since the end of the 196os, literature and art again abound in manifestoes and works coming from groups that qualify themselves as avant-garde. Things that were declared dead thirty years ago have risen from the dead; museum pieces come back to life once more. It certainly indicates that many of the questions the "first avant-garde" posed have not been properly answered yet, and the problem of the function of art and the artist is far from being satisfactorily solved.

Here the question may be raised if we can speak about avant-garde




in our day, or more accurately: is there a neo-avant-garde in being at present? In our opinion there is-particularly from the I96os onward. After 1945, immediately following the armistice, we can observe the quick but superficial revival of the first avant-garde wave, as a kind of aftermath. At the same time a modified and strengthened version of the earlier avant-garde waves appeared on the scene, freshly arrived from the United States. We can in general characterize these decades by the attempts to resume, to resuscitate the old movement, and by the rise of some new groups and schools-close sects rather-of lesser importance. The old and "classic" avant-garde became, in the decade from 1949 to 1960, part of the establishment; from the jest of "enfants terribles" it turned almost into a feature of the middle-class make-up, but in any case a very harmless spectacle. More than that. In the German Federal Republic, as Hans Magnus Enzenberger says, the function of the avant-garde was to provide an outlet, to neutralize the efforts to change the political system: "the overthrow of the rules of poetics compensates for the missing revolution in the social structure; the avant-garde in art covers up the political regression." 10 During these years the avant-garde found its way into museums, scholarly papers, educational series, and, as the final stage, the avant-garde got commercialized, became, all in all, a commodity.

Around I96O the situation changed, particularly in West-European literatures, but, to a smaller extent, in the Eastern socialist countries as well. It is from that time on that we are again justified in speaking of avant-garde, or more accurately, a neo-avant-garde.

Just as in the 19oos and 192os the change can be explained by political and social factors, especially since these movements are only a fraction of the more extensive changes, of the agitation that can be observed in everyday life, in attitudes, in life-style, and naturally in politics. Such changes account for the processes taking place in art. In some Western countries in the 196os a sense of crisis, an atmosphere of catastrophe, is gaining ground. Eastern and Western societies alike are in a state of change in many respects. (Without trying to oversimplify the question let me point out a few factors operating in different countries: the XXth Party Congress, the crisis of Cuba, the war in Vietnam, the Negro question, etc.) But we can add to the political factors some from the sphere of natural sciences: it goes without say- ing that the technological revolution and its immediate effect upon everyday life, and the great experience of cybernetics which offers

Io See Enzensberger, "Gemeinplitze, die neueste Literatur betreffend," Kursbuch No. 15 (1968), "Die Aporien der Avantgarde," Einzelheiten.




glimpses of hitherto unexplorable territories, greatly contributed to the rise of the neo-avant-garde waves.11

From among the complex processes that we can observe from the 196os behind the colorful, glittering and seemingly impenetrable surface of the literary and artistic scene some principal tendencies can be selected. There are, of course, no sharp dividing lines between the overlapping tendencies.

Four characteristic types can be noted within the neo-avant- garde: one with a "technocratic" inspiration that reduces literature to mere linguistic symbols, considers it as a "text"; an anarchic extremist one that passes for an outcry; a more or less organized movement sympathizing with Marxism and the workers' movement; and finally one that preaches utter despair and disillusionment, and expresses itself mainly through the grotesque. Here we cannot dwell on them too long-I have discussed the question at length in my book, published in Hungarian-so we shall simply hint at some of the characteristic features of these tendencies.

The dominance of the Text, the Linguistic Symbol, the Component; the absoluteness of the medium of literature: Language-these characterize commonly the experimental "technocratic," "structuralist," or "decomposing-combining" tendencies. This trend starts from two directions: in French literature with the works of Jean Cayrol and Beckett, then the "nouveau roman" and later the Tel Quel-while the other impulse, independent of this, or loosely connected with it at most, comes from technology. The poetry and drawings produced by computers and the possibility of electronic music have intrigued artists and artists' groups since as early as 1945. After 1958 in Germany around Eugen Gombringer, then, simultaneously with the "spatialist" movement of the French Pierre Gamier, in Brasilia, with Jan Finlay in England, with Edwin Morgan in Vienna, then in Nor- way, in Czechoslovakia and in other countries poets appear in large numbers who break up the texture of the poem into words or letters in order to vary and permute these elements manually or with the help of computers, following the rules of mathematics or just their

I For a testimony let me quote a recent declaration of Victor Vasarely: "Jusqu'ici quand on pensait 'nature', on signifiait seulement 'fleurs, champs, animaux, fruits etc.', mais en poussant plus loin les deux extremes on aboutit, exterieurement, A l'infiniment grand des galaxies et, interieurement A I'infiniment petit de l'atome . . . Nous vivons une periode oii l'on s'en va sur la lune, on projette d'aller sur d'autres planetes et peut- tre meme au-dela . . . Toute cette nature ne peut manquer d'avoir une action considerable sur I'artiste qui, jusqu'ici, il faut bien le dire, a travaill6 un peu en vase clos. La nature cosmique, me parait beaucoup plus materialiste. Elle est A la port6e de nos sens et de notre intelligence." Nouvelle Critique (1971 ), 44 ff.




own dispositions. Variations on the letter-poem, the picture-poem, the figure-poem, the sound-poem and the object-poem abound on the literary scene-the phenomenon is called "concrete," "phonetic," "objective," "visual," "phonic" or respectively "cybernetic" poetry- conveying intelligible moods, feelings and rhythms at first, but later on turning into pure arithmetics. These scattered openings soon find their theorists in the persons of Professor Max Bense of Stuttgart and the Parisian A. A. Moles.12 The French spatialists drew up their program in 1965, and both trends, the "nouveau roman" and the Tel Quel obtained scientific support from the so-called Structuralist or Neo-structuralist movement, revived after ten years' silence.

In the field of art, "op art" and the works called "kinetic" and "lumino-kinetic" correspond to these literary trends; whether we think of Victor Vasarely's exchangeable and expandable optical works, of his compositions reflecting the laws of physics, of the experiments of the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel, of which the best-known achieve- ment is Julio le Parc's statue, winner of the Biennale Prize, the mobile statues of Nicolas Schoffer placed on public squares, or Constant's Babylon. They are all based on the conception that the work is composed of elementary parts and the essence of art is the free com- bination and variation of these elements, i.e., the superiority of the structure over the expression, and the demand for scientific founda- tions. Indeed these endeavors have a long past in the fine arts, from the first decade of the 2oth-century to the "semi-mechanical" methods of the 1940s.

Towards the middle of the I96os, when Europe began to speak about avant-garde once more, the term temporarily denoted only the trends belonging to this circle. The famous and well-documented "avant-garde" numbers of the Times Literary Supplement 13 dealt for the most part with these schools: the "nouveau roman," the Tel Quel, the letterist experiments. Then in 1965 and 1966 everything was over- whelmed by the Structuralist wave: fine arts and film-the first famous example is L'annde derniere a Marienbad-ballet, electronic music and kinetic art. B6jart and his company were dancing a structuralist ballet-breaking up the figures of the dance into their basic elements and combining them into new "models." The basic principle is the same everywhere: all phenomena are independent, self-governing structures whose meaning is negligible, only their pattern

12 Cf. for instance A. A. Moles, "Manifeste d'Art Permutationnel," Rot, No. 8 (1965). 13 "The Changing Guard," TLS (1964) and "Sounding the Sixties," TLS (1965).




is important. These structures live in the present, without any historical context; they can be reduced to their elements. The binomial symbols we obtain in this process can again be put together after arbitrary "models" with or without the help of machines.

It is clear enough what these attempts are directed against, where the source of their disillusionment and dissatisfaction lies. Several scholars have pointed out, particularly the late Lucien Goldman,14 how works produced by these trends reflect the experience of ob- jectivism.

The second type of the neo-avant-garde which appeared on the scene in the early 1960s seems to be rather a late issue or the repetition, under different historical conditions, of Expressionism or, occasionally, Dadaism. A passionate anarchist revolt was spreading among certain groups of poets and actors, film directors and painters, in independent fits, then more and more like an organized movement. They joined in a wild and inarticulate outcry: they blew up every form, they got rid of every bridle, and despair, homelessness and nausea raised their voices to the pitch. They protested against making linguistic laboratory experiments of art; on the contrary: one had to surpass art, reject it as well as retain it ("aufheben"), turn it into life; the task of the artist was no longer to improve on art but to improve on life, on the world itself. Though the circumstances have changed, what we hear is really the echo of the avant-garde slogans that followed the First World War.

This passionate and anarchic revolt set out from the English- speaking countries, the United States in the first place. It was rooted in the traumatic experience of the Second World War and the disillusionment that followed: the career of Norman Mailer is very illustrative of this aspect. Its first great outburst came with "beat" literature, with Jack Kerouac's prose and the crying-complaining poetry of Gregory Corso, with the howl of Allen Ginsberg; and from the very beginnings this trend was accompanied by the discovery of the Folk-beat, the "revolution of the guitar." Now, though, the passionate revolt of the Beat has died down and, as almost any revolt, has assumed the status of an institution, getting commercialized, becoming part of the establishment. The first wave was followed by others: the literature of Black Power, linked with the name of LeRoi Jones, in the United States, the "underground film" connected with the activity of Andy Warhol, and the continuing wave of Folk-beat and "protest song," spreading from one country to another. Movements and works

14 L. Goldman, Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris, 1964).




akin to American Beat-literature appear in many places; in England we meet the Pop poets, the so-called Liverpool group in particular (Roger McGough, Brian Patten), and the poets gathered around the anthology New Departures. Groups like these form one after the other in Western Europe and in the European socialist countries, in some of the latter also with an anarcho-leftist tendency.

In connection with the problems of the first, the "classic" avant- garde we have already said that certain movements, groups or some artists who had previously belonged to avant-garde movements, man- aged to find their way to the revolutionary workers' movement. The third type of the neo-avant-garde of our days follows a similar course.

A typical way, though not one without contradictions and difficulties was that of the Italian movement. Its theorists deliberately adopt the designation "neo-avant-garde," the particle "neo" is there to refer to the repudiation of the old avant-garde, to indicate a different political and ideological attitude.15

The Italian neo-avant-garde began about I960 with the activity of the II Verri. The anthology I Novissimi appeared in 1961 ; in 1962 the review Menaba was launched; in I963 there was the Palermo meeting and the formation of the Gruppo 63; the 3rd Palermo meeting was held in September, 1965. This neo-avant-garde followed the pattern of the French linguistic revolution; it resulted from disappoint- ment with the dominant literary styles, Neo-realism in particular. Neo-realism fell short of adequately representing the new, more complicated and less conspicuous class divisions and differences, the new types of social conflicts. This is the common platform of the literary and artistic groups of the Italian neo-avant-garde. Its important preliminaries were the critical and literary organizing activity of Luciano Anceschi (in the review Il Verri) and above all the manifold inspiration and orientation of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the militant socialist poet with a Resistance background. Among the ideological factors of this trend were the works of the young Lukacs, of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and the French philologists. According to their theories it was necessary to break completely with commercialized culture and objectivized relations, and the most effective way of accomplishing this was the demolition of conventional language, carrier of these objectivized relations. The established ways of communication had to be rejected and a new way of speaking developed-the hyperbolical and apocalyptic speech of the avant-garde, which radically smashes every previously existing standard.

15 See E. Sugar, Avanguardia e neo-avanguardia (1966) ; Revue d'Esthe'tique No. 4 (1967), Nos. 3, 4 (1970).




The history of the Italian neo-avant-garde between I960 and 1963 is just another version of the French or other West-European movements, only in a more "ideological," sometimes more "Marxist," form. In practice, the pseudo-revolt of the intelligentsia was absorbed into the establishment, as they self-critically expressed themselves. Since 1963, however, diverse attempts have been made to break out and the "left wing" of the movement is resolutely working on the transformation of this negative program into some positive solution, of the linguistic revolution into that of the content, eliminating many of the illusionistic elements of the neo-avant-garde.

Complex and contradictory phenomena take place in the process. Eduardo Sanguineti, for instance, seems to be an adherent of the demolishing, language-transforming, "free association" line-and as such, shows kindred features with the French Tel Quel circle-if judged by his poems and "novels," which he publishes now in Italian, now in French. In his theoretical writings and polemic works, however, he takes up an increasingly orthodox Marxist standpoint.16

Following these preliminaries but surpassing them in force, and in noise, too, the French Tel Quel group took further steps in the same direction after the autumn of 1968 and particularly towards the end of 1969 and in 1970o.17 They, too, claimed that "the prerequisite of revolution is a revolution of the language." The claim is formulated in several versions: to make revolutionary activity possible, the prevailing ideology, i.e. conventional "discours," has to be abolished. The more profound, the more resolute, the more radical the innovations that a writer introduces into his language and design, the greater the service he does to the revolutionary cause; it must be made easier for the masses to absorb an entirely new type of culture. The conception originates in the illusory image of the Chinese "cultural revolution" that, miscon- strued, serves as its ideal. To this are added layers of Freud, Saussure, semiotics, Julia Kristeva, Sade ... all this in the name of a break-away, of the new and revolutionary!

1970 is characterized by a dialogue between these "semiotic," "language-demolishing" groups (the circle of the Tel Quel, Jean Pierre Faye, formerly a member of this circle himself, and others) and the French communists or non-structuralist poetic groups sympathizing with the party (Action Poe'tique).

Recently, since the end of 1969, those who follow with attention the West-European and North-American political neo-avant-garde

16 E. Sanguineti, Ideologia e linguaggio (Milano, 1965); "Pour une avant-garde revolutionnaire," Tel Quel, No. 29 (1965). 17 J. Henric, "Pour une avant-garde r6volutionnaire," Tel Quel, No. 40 (1970).




trends have observed a certain stagnation, some kind of dishearten- ment in their activities; there are some who already speak of their utter political and artistic failure. But might we not speak as rightly of a process of restoring spent energies or of experimenting with new forms?

Finally: we can regard as the modified version of one neo-avant- garde line the movement that arose in the I96os in some of the socialist countries, and particularly in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. After the XXth Party Congress the cultural commerce between East and West was re-established and the products of the years between 1948 and 1960 flooded these countries in one huge wave, bringing, without discrimination, the real and the sham of the old and the new avant-garde. Besides, in some countries we still find the active traditions of the first, classic, nationalized avant-garde. And beyond that this "new wave" can be accounted for by the presence of certain similar social factors, such as the rupture in the relations between writer and public, writer and political management, problems that re-produce the similar forms and devices of avant-garde literature or make literature susceptible to these forms. In other words: to render these problems, this rupture in art, the artists have ready at hand the full collection of avant-garde or neo-avant-garde devices, either in their own national traditions or in the contemporary world literature. These trends, both in Poland and Czechoslovakia, are characterized by the prevalence of the grotesque, the ridiculous, the ironical-from Slawomir Mrozek to Vladimir Paral. The neo-avant-garde trend that is developing in socialist countries shows not only the impact of the earlier avant- garde movements but also that of Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz. This tendency includes some vigorous distortions and often, also, illusionary and utopian answers to the questions it itself raises.

X There are other questions which exigencies of space prevent me from discussing. Let me just note some of them: How is the neo-avant- garde related to the old, the "classic," avant-garde? With what theoretical achievements did it enrich criticism? And the most difficult question that can be put to the critic: What is going to survive from these trends, to be integrated into the infinite chain of syntheses of the universal process of literature and art?

INSTITUTE FOR LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP

OF THE HUNGARIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

