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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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One of the great things about the modern era, culturally speaking,
is that it is increased exponentially the number of ancestors.
History puts up for adoption.
That's right, we don't only adopt children, but ancestors as well.
To some of our ancestors we are bound through our bloodlines,
others we choose through elective affinity or spiritual kinship.
But there, for example, adopted Edgar Allan Poe
and is so doing gave Poe a legacy in France, the likes of which
he's never had in his own native country.
But there in turn, like all the other dead in the vast
deletion fields of cultural memory, stands by for adoption too.
We don't adopt ancestors because they're orphans.
On the contrary, we adopt them so as not to remain orphans ourselves.
[Music]
One of these days, maybe we'll do a show on ancestor adoption.
It's a topic of particular interest to me.
In fact, I've written about it in a book of mine that came out a few years ago
called the Dominion of the Dead.
Oh, come on!
Now that's not true. I never plug myself on this show.
In fact, this is the first time I've ever mentioned a book of mine on air.
What's that? All right, I accept the apology.
So, where were we? I was saying that this is not the show to develop the
notion of ancestor adoption because we're going to talk today about the
avant-garde in art and literature.
No one was less interested in ancestry than the so-called avant-gardeists.
They were, in fact, distinctly hostile to it.
They spent most of their time trying to disinherit the past
and articulated an aesthetics that would be fuddle,
a front, and even disgrace the predecessor.
They weren't called the avant-garde for nothing.
In military terms, the advanced guard is the first into battle.
In artistic terms, the avant-garde sees itself as the cutting edge of exploration,
discovery, and innovation. It is in advance of the times as it were,
leading the way into the future.
One of the earliest uses of the term comes from Gabriel Dizzyhe la
Vérdal, who in 1845 wrote, "Art, the expression of society
manifests in its highest soaring the most advanced social tendencies.
It is the forerunner and the revealer.
Therefore, to know whether art worthily fulfills its proper mission as
initiator, whether the artist is truly of the avant-garde,
one must know where humanity is going,
what the destiny of the human race is."
That's nonsense, as far as I'm concerned. A little entitled opinion, if I may.
It's nonsense because if an artist has to know where humanity is going,
and that's with the capital H, by the way.
Or what the destiny of the human race is before he or she makes art.
That means the artist has to take counsel from the social theorists,
the ideologues, the dour gurus with their crystal balls and
iron laws of history. These prophets of the future are not typically reliable,
and if you're an avant-gardeist who happens to be listening to the wrong guru
about the direction humanity is headed,
you put yourself at the forefront of a dead end.
Besides this endless scramble to stay ahead of things,
lacks a certain composure and dignity.
Innovation, novelty, the forward thrust.
It's a little too frenzied and self-programmatic for me.
In the elitian fields of the dead, I would rather adopt as an ancestor
the German poet, Hödgenin, who speaking of his poetry said,
"I know account do I wish it were original.
For originality is novelty for us,
and nothing is as dear to me as things as old as the world itself.
Or I would adopt Bodlehr, who detested military metaphors when they were applied to art,
and who had a particular disdain for what he called
"le lite d'ad-d'ad-davongat."
These habits of using military metaphors he wrote,
they do not denote militant spirits, but spirits who love discipline,
that is to say conformity,
servile spirits, who can only think within the confines of a group or society."
And who will deny that there is such a thing as the conformity of anti-conformity?
I have with me in the studio someone who I'm sure does not share these somewhat
unintusiastic opinions of mine about the avant-garde,
and who knows, maybe by the end of today's show,
I will want to renounce them myself,
having been persuaded by her, that they are not in fact well-founded.
Her name is Marjorie Pearl Off, and this is not the first time she's been my guest on this program.
Marjorie is one of the world's leading critics and theorists of the avant-garde movements of the
20th century, and we're grateful to her for coming on to share her expertise and
eminently entitled opinions with us.
Professor Pearl Off taught in the English department here at Stanford for several years,
and lives in Los Angeles, where she's in fact now teaching a course at USC called Theory of the
Avant-garde. I have her course description with me and it consists exclusively of a string of questions.
What was the avant-garde? What is the avant-garde today, and does the term still have any meaning?
Was the avant-garde a historical phenomenon, or do we always have an avant-garde?
What is the relationship of avant-garde to modernism, and then postmodernism?
Do avant-garde aesthetics and radical politics go hand in hand?
If not, why not?
I'm not sure we have the time to address all these questions with her, but we'll do our best.
Marjorie, welcome back to entitled opinions.
Thank you Robert, and I'm pleased to be here.
Marjorie, why don't we take these questions one at a time, maybe starting with the first one?
What was the avant-garde?
Well, you although negatively just spelled it out somewhat, the term literally means the front flank
of the army, and you have in the turn of the twentieth century in different countries, in Italy,
in Russia, and France, groups who are self-consciously consider themselves the avant-garde,
and it is usually considered a group formation. One of the questions I have though is whether you do
need to be a member of a group, and I'm not sure avant-garde is a good term. I agree with you up to that point,
although I think what you say about their nastiness and provocation is in many cases,
somewhat exaggerated. I think that the issue is does group formation help after all, after a while,
people always split off from their group and do something else, and that has been the history,
but that's what makes avant-garde so fascinating. It is, and there is incredible fascination with it
today. I'm not quite sure why, a hundred years later. There is great fascination with these movements,
beginning with the Italian Futures movement in 1909 with Marineri's wild manifesto, and then the
Russian avant-garde, then Dada, through surrealism and their other isms and movements, partly perhaps
the effect, the fact that you need a group in order to make a real impact, otherwise,
people aren't going to take notice, but for me, and I say this in an essay, I think you haven't read,
the great avant-garde is the Russian was the Russian avant-garde, so let's take that as a
slight sample for what was the avant-garde. In Russia, you really had that rupture, which is
associated with avant-garde, a sharp break, namely, even as most painters were doing portraits, very
traditional portraits, landscape paintings, painting cresanthe mums, as Ma'eavage said, you had a group
of young people, young men mostly, but they were also women involved, coming from the provinces,
usually lower class or lower middle class, who came to Moscow and Petersburg to study mathematics,
engineering, science, at least what they were supposed to study, who really formed a cohesive group
and started transforming art, made incredible, especially in the visual arts that it was notable,
more than in the verbal arts, and gave us some of the really exciting works we have. Now,
that doesn't mean that then individuals didn't rise to the fore. The reason I think the Russian avant-garde
and I'll answer one of my other questions here too on politics is that they were all of a
piece politically and aesthetically. They thought of themselves as real political radicals,
they did, Adjut Prop, they did look ahead to some form of revolution, which in Russia,
being so, so staid and really needed it in a way. Of course, when the real revolution came,
then it also was the end of the avant-garde in many ways. But their politics went together with
their aesthetics. They were very much all of the piece. They were very influenced by the science
of the time, and I think the avant-garde has everything to do with the kind of outburst of technology
at the beginning of the century, flying, flight, especially images of flight.
Can you give us some names of people in the school?
The great one would be my Yevich, the great visual artist, but who, of course, is a great artist
and is owned right, and for me, is perhaps the great 20th century painter in many ways,
for me a more important figure than say Picasso. Why is that? Well, the work is just so totally
beautiful, which I can't just show here, but my Yevich moved through the very stages very quickly
from the knife grinder of about 1912, which is still a kind of recognizable, almost
representational painting to the kind of kubo, futures collages, and to his black square,
and his color paintings that are just some of the most beautiful paintings ever made that are on
the one hand abstract, but on the other have very rich spiritual connotation. The avant-garde
contrary to what you, I think, said a little bit in your opening statement, the Russian avant-garde,
at least, was a very spiritual movement. I'm curious, was he working by method that was spelled out
in a theory, or was there a great quotient of intuition? A great quotient of intuition,
but he did write very well with theory. He did write a lot of manifestos, though,
and the theory was very stark thing. I love, I always teach my Yevich's first long manifesto,
the zero degree of art, where he says, "I have transformed myself into the zero of art."
I was thinking of Bart and writing degrees zero, and have freed myself from the circle of objects.
Now, what does that mean? Got free from the circle of everyday trivia, in a sense, objects,
and moved out into a kind of higher realm. All these people believed in the fourth dimension,
they believed in a spiritual, kind of, otherworldly connotation that you could get to by art.
So my Yevich is a big figure, Tatlene, who designed the beautiful tower, one of the most gorgeous
artworks ever that, of course, then wasn't built by the Soviets, because it was too considered to
impractical. And lots of other, a Natalia Gontorova, Mihailari Anov, and then the poets in the group
of Klebnikov, one of the, for Roman Yachos and perhaps one of the great 20th century poets,
Maya Kovsky on the edges of it, and Khrushchev and so there were numbers of poets,
and they also all wrote together. They collaborated, victory over the sun, the wonderful play,
and did wonderful, they did do wonderful group work, group manifest as little artist books and so on.
Yeah, one of the hesitations I have is whether art can be produced from theory. And again,
that's the question that I asked you is how much of it was coming, was being derived from theory,
or how much was it was out ahead of theory, and that's where some of the lesser
geniuses of the avant-garde, I think, who were a little bit programmatic in terms of following
Certainly that is a totally Italian futurism. Italian futurism is not only is it politics pretty terrible,
kind of proto-fascist, war is the hygiene of the people, Mary Nettie said in the 1909 manifesto,
but the Italians first came the theories and then came the paintings to the theories.
Now the irony though is that they did produce beautiful, I think the visual works of the
townfuses wonderful, as far as literature goes, it's negligible. So I don't consider it one of
the great avant-garde's all in all, or less than the Russian because it didn't really produce any
literature to speak of. And some of the manifestos are more funny and provocative than they are,
and then they can be taken very seriously as great art. And I agree with you on that. And so when
it just followed the theory, that's something of a problem, it needn't be though. The funny thing
is that the theory couldn't have been fulfilled in the way it was placed theoretically, so there
was always a sort of shift away to something else, and you don't have to read it according to that theory,
you don't have to look at the paintings according to the theory. But you're right that in a sense
it's theory driven and bold layer with whom you began who had no use for these groups.
And he was writing before the big movement of the film. He was writing before the big
but he also had no use because he felt that art is an individual thing, and that art is not
is produced by individuals like Haldalyn and is not produced by groups, programmatic groups. And I
agree with that. I think the groups have a lot of problems and especially Dada, what happened with Dada
was when it starts at the Cabaret Voltaire during the war and you have Zurich Dada, and then you have
Paris Dada, and German Dada, by the time you have German Dada, it isn't really Dada at all, it's a very
programmatic left-wing satire. Shetorical work, some of it very exciting, but not that different from
Dome, or earlier satire, and I don't know why we want to call it Dada, the early Dada is mostly
disappeared. The ones from the Cabaret Voltaire, Houssenbeck became a cycle analyst,
Baal entered a monastery, some of them stopped working, and those who continue to work worked in
different modes, changed their mode of working. So one of the fascinating things about avant-gardes,
if you think of images and pounds, images and mr. avant-garde, how many other images do we read?
I'm in pound and HD, Williams, but we don't read John Gould Fletcher much, so there's an avant-garde that
was then transcended by its own founder. You mentioned that there's still a great fascination with
avant-garde movements today, a hundred years later, and especially in the case of Dada, I think,
is extremely popular. What was it about Dada that makes it still today such a movement of fascination?
I think a kind of childish irreverence, an irreverence, an attorney against everything, and nothing
makes any sense. We take that word out of the dictionary, Dada, it can mean whatever you want,
hobby horse, daddy, Dada, whatever you want, and you can perform, and you can do cabaret,
and you can get out there and do things and be original and the hell with the establishment.
It's a young people's thing. It's a young people's thing against the establishment. There's a
movement today that one of my students at USC just wrote a paper on it and I'd never heard of it,
called "Flarf," have you ever heard of "Flarf?" F-L-A-R-F, "Flarf." Flarf is a group of people. One of them
went to Stanford, Casey Hicks, as he was known here, K. Cilam Mohamid, who went to Stanford and, in
fact, majored in Renaissance. Worked on Renaissance for his doctorate. He's a flarfist,
and they want to produce the worst poetry possible, which I must say many of them have succeeded in
doing it adversely, perhaps. So why do they want to be a part of this silly flarf movement?
Well, because they get attention and on the internet, the internet has really pushed these movements.
Are you in flarf? Oh, let's print something from flarf. You see,
you see, flarf is not going to last 100 years, whereas that is still a staying power that it means
that they must have done something in the realm of the aesthetic that was genuine.
Well, they print the irony there is this, that the great greatest of the Dada's and the ones who
without whom it would not be a movement that would be very popular today is Marcel Duchamp,
who didn't want to be considered a Dadaist, and who wrote to a young woman who was a friend of
his named Eddie Stetheimer and said, "From a distance these movements look good, but from close up
they are very boring, I assure you." And he would not participate in the Paris Dada show,
and he sent in an empty canvas with the words, "Podbal," written in it, "Falls to you." And would not participate
later on the surrealist tried to enlist him in their cause, and he would not be part of that
movement either. However, most of the things that get associated with Dada today are really
Duchamp things like showing the urinal and calling it fountain by our mut at the first Salah in New
York at the in Salah of the Independence, and it's Duchamp who had the big influence on people like
Man Ray and Piccabia. None of those people could have quite last today if it weren't for Duchamp,
as far as the ones in Zurich, I don't think too many people read "Hugbal," but he did do some
great sound poems like "Gajibari Bimbain," that's all great fun, but that's all it is.
I mean, I agree with your original statement that, you know, it's not held a lid, I mean, it's not,
going to have that kind of staying power. Here's a question about genealogy, because when you were
talking about the Russian avant-garde and the spiritual dimension that they had, belief in a
forced dimension and needing to, let's say, to use a Ramboldian term to a deregulation of all the
senses in order to penetrate into this other realm, was French symbolism, Rambold is somehow the
first embryonic, enabling agency for the avant-garde. Well, here's what it becomes complicated.
In a way, French symbolism, in fact, there was no movement in France, and there are good reasons
for that that are considered as striking as these other avant-garde movements. That's because
France is the established country. It is where it's happening. Avant-garde's come from marginalized
cultures. It's not surprising that it happened in Italy, recently, the unified country that was
always being put down, and the great feat that Marinetti had was that he got his first manifesto
published on the front page of the Paris Figaro. He wasn't interested in having it published in Italy
so much, but to impress the French, not that they were all impressed. Rambo, if you think of his
ideas, of course he was avant-garde. He was a revolutionary figure, but this is where the whole
term gets so complicated. That's why, as that question, is it a group-movement or individuals?
How can one say that Kafka wasn't avant-garde? Who invented more than Kafka? I mean, we think of
Kafka as a total breakthrough in a way. If you think of it as a breakthrough art or revolutionary art,
what about Gertrude Stein? She was never part of any Senaka hated groups, really. Her best friend was
that male macho artist Picasso. She had no use for women's groups, lesbian groups, which she might
have been in. This is the question that you ask here in your course description is what is
a rich version of avant-garde and modernism. I think these are, when you speak about these specific
individuals, we're talking about maybe a fault line. Do you want to say something about
difference between avant-garde and modernism? Well, I used to think there is very much difference,
but there actually isn't so very much. You might say that avant-garde is just the sort of height
of modernism in a way. In other words, we wouldn't say Thomas Mann was an avant-garde.
We would say Thomas Mann was a great modernist, but basically his genres, the way he wrote novels,
his basic way of dealing with narrative character, any of these. Is that because there was nothing
traditional? You know, vade of a revolutionary about it? Yeah, I'd say his modes of working
were quite traditional. So innovation is the necessary condition for being there.
What people usually think of is avant-garde, that innovation is the key. So that when
doesn't think of T.S. Eliot as being avant-garde, although I argue that the early Eliot and
where it is, in my book 21st century modernism, but Pound was more so because he really
turned, in other words, you think of avant-garde as doing something shocking as by Peter
Berger's definition, which I don't like, but Peter Berger defines the avant-garde as an attack
on the bourgeois art market that overturns it or tries to overturn it. And since according to
Peter Berger in his theory of the avant-garde, it failed to overturn it. But in fact,
in the next century, in the next century, they have four, that was the end of the avant-garde.
Now, I disagree with that about as strongly as one can. I don't think it's true that it was
commodified and in next. I think much of the avant-garde has remained just as avant-garde and shocking
to people as it was before. I mean, these historical avant-garde's people still go to museums
and look at the black square by my average and say, "Oh, my four-year-old can do that."
It hasn't gotten co-opted all as much as you would think. And that was Berger's idea about capitalism
in the art market and the bourgeoisie. And I think it's just, you know, it's a very dramatic notion.
It was his way of trying to show Adorno who hated the avant-garde, that it was possible to be
interested in the avant-garde. But he only took very few cases and very few case studies. And then, of
course, argued that you can't have an avant-garde later. And Berger's words there are,
"If today an artist puts pieces of stove pipe in a museum, nobody's going to be impressed. It's just
more stuff." Well, that's true. But that isn't what a real avant-garde is for today. They wouldn't put
stove pipes in the museum because it's just boring. They wouldn't do something else. I can't
tell you what else because it would be something new. Do you see what I mean? Well, we talked off-air, of course.
You know, I had my brother on this program a few months back. We talked about the expressionist of 1910.
And there, I think, I remember a conversation with you where you, I was asking you why you're
not crazy about the expressionist when you have a lot of sort of enthusiasm for the avant-garde movements.
And there you could say that the connery of artists and writers that we were talking about
on that occasion, which includes Sean Bergen and music, Kandinsky,
real counsel for that. There was something about the expressionist that you feel is not within the horizon
of the avant-garde. And yet you could say that they were as innovative as anyone else.
So why would they not qualify? Well, we have to distinguish between some of the different
people, Shonberg was certainly. I would say they had decadence, the painters, especially a really
better classified. And of course, the line is very fine as decadence in this sense. They were
basically still romantic. If you look at their theories, they are romantics who have moved to the
emstigory of emotion and self-expression and use wild colors, exaggerated motion,
purposely ugly drawing and so forth to create a kind of shock effect, certainly. But basically,
their basic theory is still basically romantic theory, 19th century theory. They're very much in the
19th century. That's not just my idea. I think that's generally held. If you take somebody like Monk,
who's the bridge, they are the cry of Monk, the very idea of the human cry. That would not have been
an avant-garde idea because the avant-garde is felt, forget about, forget about individuals. This is not an
age of individuals. And I think one of the big features of the avant-garde, now whether individuals
like to shon or groups, is not to worry so much about individual fulfillment, individual self-consciousness.
And so I feel the group that Tommy, I like his book, 1910, very much, but I disagree with it.
I think in large ways because the people that he's dealing with there are in a way latter day,
and it is the last to raw in some ways, individualists. He does say that. He does say it's not.
Believe in a kind of individual fulfillment and their individual self-importance,
whereas my average would say, "We're not that important. Yes, we have feelings. Yes, we have emotions,
but why should they be so important to everybody else?" John Cage put it very well later on,
and I certainly think of him as an avant-garde, when he said, "Joyce, here comes everyone,
everybody, you know, H-C-W, Finnegan's Wake, here comes everybody." Now, I think the person who actually
showed this very nicely in some ways was Tom Stoppard in the Play Travis Dees, which ACT is doing this
coming year. I don't like some of Tom Stoppard's things, but I love that particular play,
because he hasn't Zoraic, and it was accurate historically, choice,
ta-ha, and Lenin. Now, you have the three ranges of modernism in some ways to answer your earlier question.
Lenin is going to be the epitome of modernist politics, if you will, the revolutionary,
and he only liked Mozart and Beethoven, and so forth. As did Marx, you know, when it came to
the arts, had no use for these arts at all, neither did Trotsky, Trotsky attacked the
av-the-Russian av-an-garde.
Either did Naziism.
What? Yeah. Right. "Joyce falls somewhere in between. Joyce, you might say, is the most important
20 cent, you know, great, much greater than Tostansawa. How can one even compare them?
And M'Tostansawa seems like peanuts compared to Joyce. Tostansawa with his ideas about renovating
everything, and yet Joyce is usually called a modernist, a high modernist, because, and this,
I think, is what you would like, he preserves the best of tradition, really. I mean, you couldn't
write your lissies without knowing the Odyssey, and not just knowing the Odyssey, but knowing
Dante." Well, he's the one who had that's many adopted ancestors as anyone I know in his
opinion. Right. And so Joyce is greater in a way than these av-an-gardeists, because on the one hand,
he has all this respect for tradition, and he knows it. And he renews it. And he renews it. So clearly,
that's in a way the greatest side of modernism, greater than the av-an-garde as groups.
No doubt, and even compared to Pound, if you compare Joyce in Pound, it's hard to say
the way, but I guess I would have to say, if you were going to do a scale of greatness,
certainly in terms of what Joyce means to most people. Joyce has never stopped being popular,
a century has gone by, and Joyce is just as popular now as he ever was, and read, I think by many
people translated to every language of the world, known in every country, and our great writer in
that sense, Pound would be more a coterie figure, certain in certain ways, although also,
you know, right up there, because it is perhaps too eccentric.
Would it be fair to say that the av-an-garde movements were particularly fertile for the visual
arts, whereas modernism is particularly hospitable to poetry and, well, let's say literature.
I think that's actually a very interesting point. I had never, Robert, I never really thought of it
that way, but I think it's probably true. I think first of all, poetry is always the most,
especially poetry, but fiction too, but poetry is always the most traditional art. It's
tradition is so long. It goes back to the origins. The number was a time when there's no poetry,
and we think of biblical poetry, or the poetry of Gilgamesh, so that poetry is always going to go
back to its roots in ways and be rooted, and it doesn't want to just go into Gagibari Bimbar,
you know, too much, or if it does, it has a short life. Schmittis is a very good example of what
you just said, because he wrote poetry and he painted. It's poetry, I don't think, is really,
there's the wasanata, you know, they're all the "I'm not blue, man, these kind of joke poems,"
but I don't really think his poetry is that notable ways of visual art is really wonderful,
and I do think that's right, that the avant-garde may have more to do with the visual arts,
music somewhere in between, in this sense, in music, there really isn't avant-garde,
but it's never been fully accepted, and it is still not accepted. You still have,
a lot of it's very bad, but you still have, even when it's Schoenberg, you still have,
they're going to start having classes at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, which is the first
time I sort of European Study Center, because the director said to me, "Well, a lot of the old
funny dudies who come here have no use in it, as soon as they hear it's going to be a Schoenberg
concert, they won't come. They only want to come for Schumann, you know, Schubert."
Because you can listen to them, so you can't listen to Schoenberg.
Well, there are people who would quarrel with that, but it is very interesting, and yet you had
Wittgenstein, who after all was highly trained in music, everybody in his family paid the piano,
they had nothing but concert in his house, and he also preferred Mozart and Beethoven,
but he versus Schumann was already so bad that he'd leave the concert when they were playing Schumann.
Now, does that mean he liked Schoenberg? No, not at all. Schoenberg admired him,
but it wasn't reciprocal. He had no use for that at all, though. There was a certain respect
that there's something going on here, but he wasn't quite sure what. So I think it is true that in the
visual arts, the avant-garde quickly merged with modernism, and it's hard to say is Mondrian
was Mondrian, he belonged to a group to steal. That's considered an avant-garde group in a way.
Is he a modernist or is he avant-garde? Well, what do we care about the terms?
They really disappear after while you're right that the avant-garde is more important for the
visual arts and architecture is another one, by the way, than they are for literature, and especially
when it comes to the novel. I don't think there is really much. I mean, the avant-garde novel
is not a major. Maybe there's something about the constraints of the genre in painting,
a painting has to have its own compositional integrity if it's going to become beautiful.
As you said, some of these paintings are very beautiful. Whereas a poem avant-garde poem is maybe
overly compromised with the semantics that is part of the linguistic medium, and therefore it
can theorize a little bit too much about itself in the semantics, rather just the poetic. So that
might have something to do with it. What about this other question, Margie, about
"avant-garde aesthetics and radical politics go hand in hand?" You ask that question in your course,
this is great for you. You don't answer it. We talk about it a lot. Well, these are just questions to
begin with. Exactly. So how does one get into that question? Before we even answer it? Well, originally,
and symbolism in a sense, what's certainly a forerunner, but originally they regarded themselves
as just as political as they were aesthetic, and that the two had to go together. In other words,
you were going to change everything down with everything, down with the papacy, down with the
monarchy, etc. And therefore we're going to have a new politics and a new art and it's all going
to go together. It only took 10 or 20 years for that all to shift, and the two not to go hand in hand.
The movement, where I suppose you could say they would hand in hand was in surrealism, which we
haven't talked about because I don't like surrealism. I had never teach surrealism.
I kind of like it, actually. Yeah, I know. You like it, then, as I do.
Why don't you like it? I don't like the politics at all, and I don't like the aesthetic much either.
Well, where's the politics? It's a creepy movement. As a movement, of course, they're individuals.
The politics of Stalinist, the politics quickly became Stalinist. You had Aragong, really was a
Stalinist. And these people thought of themselves as great left-wing, whatever revolutionaries
went in fact. They were using women in some of the worst ways. I think of all the movements,
surrealism was the one where the woman is more person as in Eloard, and the woman is always sort of the
little star, the fish, or naja is a mad woman in some ways, and always has to be treated like a child.
There are wonderful surrealists. But surrealism is not my favorite movement by a long shot,
but it was all of a piece. It was all of a piece in some ways they tried to do
very innovative aesthetic techniques, and they considered themselves to have innovative political techniques.
The fact though being that neither the aesthetic techniques, which is all Freudian,
that's what I was going to ask. Don't you think Freudianism is much more important to surrealism than
folks, but I don't like Freudianism either. So these are just personal things.
I mean Freudianism to me is again, is a kind of real throwback to romanticism.
And I like real romanticism, but I don't like, I think Freudianism has a kind of
decadent quality. Well, because it's rooted in the self, and I guess you don't like things that
bring us always back to the self. Not the self-importance of the self. No, not with that irony.
Not with that a lot of irony. Although you could say that the the whole quest for the unconscious,
the liberation from the conscious self that you have in surrealism and liberating what the contents
of the unconscious, that that could be actually militating against self-importance and opening up the
self to what the Russian avant-garde is, what you admired about it, to kind of break through to the
other side to some kind of spiritual dimension. I love some of them. I like Max Ernst, who also have
comic, very comic things with the use of the subconscious and dreams and so on. But where there's
this sort of very high seriousness is in Bhatong. And in, well, I should say actually surrealism
became very interesting again when it migrated to Latin America. A surrealist poet I love is M.A.
Says, yeah, where you get it combined with negativeitude, where it's very powerful and it's very
political and it was left wing two. But there's where it's all of the peace and his beautiful. So you get
certain the individual forms where it works. But on the whole, the avant-garde, the aesthetic avant-garde
and the political avant-garde sort of split with the more aesthetic variants becoming kind of
apolitical or feeling they couldn't deal with politics really. And today we have a terrible situation,
I think as far as avant-garde's go in the United States, you have the nation, which is probably one of
the more radical, right, political magazines, where the poetry is the most old-fashioned, old hat,
uninteresting thing I've ever seen. And that's true in the New York Review of Books. It's true in,
you know, the more radical the journal kind of politically, the more old-fashioned they are as far as
and by old-fashioned I don't mean then a wonderful reading Thomas Mann, but I mean old-fashioned
for a kind of work that's done now that's sort of neo. I agree with you. I don't know. Those kind
of poems, but just to take the other side, can't you say that at a certain point the public knows
best and there are certain kinds of music which are very very difficult to listen to with any that
doesn't cash out into a pleasure principle if you're the early Schoenberg for example. There are some
there are certain kinds of language poems which don't yield a certain pleasure in their reading,
and that doesn't mean you go to the opposite extreme of these very traditional and rather
as kitschy traditional poems, but at a certain point a poem is either readable, a piece of music is either
listenable and a movie is watchable or not and these are criteria that have to end up deciding what
well not that the public knows best, not that they don't believe that. No, but neither does the
professor always know best either. No, no, certainly. Well, I can't say too much about music because
somewhat illiterate music. I really don't feel I can talk about Schoenberg in a meaningful sense.
And it is true that modern music unlike modern art is let's just call it modernist now which they
themselves did Schoenberg didn't think of himself as avogard, he's a modernist, that it is true that
modern music is very difficult and has a small audience, but it has a small very devoted audience
and Francis Morton Feldman, the mid-century composer who for a long time was really a
coterie composer. Now they're all kinds of Morton Feldman concerts and I recently went to a minimalist
concert at the well at the Disney Center in LA where Terry Riley was playing his great work. What
is it M2 or B2? I mean 90 minutes of fantastic minimalist repetitions and the audience was all young
mostly kids and they went absolutely wild and that's certainly an avogard composition.
I remember spending a year years ago trying to really get into Edgar Farrez and finding with all
this good movie I wanted to be in the oven and finally how you just have to throw up my hands and say
I can't listen to it. Other people can get into it. How about Sati? How do you feel about that?
Don't know, no, but John Cage too is some stuff very interesting but again it's going to be a
small handful of people who can sit back and listen to some of that stuff with pleasure.
Well I'm not sure it's that small. I think there is a real audience for that but it is true that
the visual arts are now universally accepted, the things that were avogards, cubism,
futurism, all those in all the museums and are quite accepted whereas the same hasn't quite
happened for literature, for the avogard literatures and for music. It's hard to say there are many
reasons why that's so. It could be because we're a much more visual culture. People are much more
visually sophisticated when you go to a Magritia, let's say there was a big Magritia surrealist.
It's so crowded you can't get in. If you did a comparable poet, if you instead of Magritia did
Agong, Bratol, whatever you'd be lucky if you get three people, you know that also it's much too hard
and I can't figure it out. Then the question is well why is that? I mean it's not that it's so easy either
visually but some are other people are tolerant of things visually especially in our culture today.
They're used to it so that the visual does dominate and they will accept things in the visual and
how about an architecture. They'll accept all the Frank Gehry buildings and they'll accept
you know the Italian futurists have that wonderful architect, Sant Ellia. I think he was just great
who was killed in the war. I think he was 28. He wasn't a fascist. Futurism is always related to
fascism. We have to be very careful there too because but Joanie was killed and Sant Ellia was
killed and they were probably the two most notable ones. They were working class socialists actually.
They started out and actually Sant Ellia wanted to produce architecture for the people and he produced
these utterly beautiful buildings that are partly organic and fit with nature and partly a skyscrapism,
a very strange and colorful sort. Architects are now imitating these buildings, these designs,
they weren't built. These drawings of 1914, 1913, a hundred years later you have architects
using these now. So that's the case with the avant-garde is ahead of its time and leads people to
fruitful things. With some of the poetry and it's also led to some interesting developments but I agree
with you that it is more limited and that's because words have meanings and people do look for a kind
of you know a thing in language that in art maybe in the visual arts you can get away with more.
Right language one expects of language communication. Yes. Well you can say you expect of the
visual communication too. Well as you were saying the visual medium is we're much more comfortable with
much more of a visual culture and there's not the same sort of need to make sense of the visual
in a temporal way. In other words whether it's music or poetry the meaning or the communication
takes place through articulation and sequence succession of moments or of lines.
Yes. That's a good point. Whereas the eye can take in a visual artwork as a whole and of course it does
have a certain element of narrativity in it but nevertheless it doesn't make the same demand
of sustaining attention over a specific time period in order to grasp its coherence as a whole
the artwork does not. So that might have something to do with it. I think it's very interesting that
that you point to the wild popularity of people like Duchamp make heat or some of the architecture
that participates in the same aesthetics of literature or music that people will have the same
people will have no use for. Well Arthur Danto had a piece I've met with TLS a few years ago
Duchamp artist of the century just said he's the great artist and Arthur Danto writes for the nation
and he'll say Duchamp is the great artist of the century but the poetry the nation publishes
will be it's antithesis and if something like it were there in poetry they wouldn't like it.
Yeah well I'm curious about one figure of Marjorie I know he's dear to both of us
Samuel Beckett if you take him you can say that in the literary medium he has strong
affinities with someone like John Cage and you have talked about and written about that
and yet at the same time he has this other foot in what we were talking about earlier which is the
grand high modernist genre as well and there Beckett is someone who was as radical as you can get
but at the same time has survived with great popularity really to our own time and will continue to
do so. Why do you think that is what is it about Beckett's work that makes it at the one on the one
hand radical at the same time? I actually agree with you completely you work at an argument for me on
that at all and that Beckett is greater than the others because he combines both features he steeped
in tradition he absolutely has a thorough knowledge I think there isn't some of these American
avant-gardes current movements I won't name them fail a great deal is there's just no knowledge
you know literature is also knowledge there's no knowledge of the past there's no understanding of
how poetry ever was written there's no understanding that some of the things they think are new are not
so new at all and it's careless really in a way now Beckett of course was stumbled really in many ways
his first decade when he was writing in the 30s and writing his ironic kind of joy he works like
Murphy hadn't come into his own yet it really took the war to make Beckett come into his own in
his war experience I argue anyway his resistance experience but then when you come to the work even the
later very minimal work like ping or you know words and music these very short strange dance like
compositions a Joe the radio play a not I they all have actually a they they have some kind of precursor
or precursors one can find they fall into traditions in some ways they're perfectly traditional
and and they speak to the problems of the time they speak to the human condition but also to
vary specific modern things that have happened and Beckett is a much greater artist and I think I
would probably argue that as much fun as the avant-garde's are and why they're interesting to study
there's a lot for students to do a lot of room to maneuver varies things they it does bring
you back in the end to thinking yes but they're not as great as the great figures Paul Salah would be
another very difficult poet of the same period the second half of the exactly Beckett's period
who is you know I would not want to compare any of these sort of avant-garde poems he ain't no
Beckett you know you know no he's not as good as Beckett and again by the way Beckett's range
Beckett just plays novels poet in fact I've already asked you of these this wide range
where do you think he excels the most fiction in fiction yeah I don't think there's any question
I shouldn't just say fiction I think also his language and so I would want to say fiction
and poetry but not plays I think it's so funny that those who who think of him primarily as a
playwright which are many people as a dramaturg that's how they know Beckett and that's how they
study Beckett Beckett is terrific but it cannot really compare to the trilogy which is his great I
think thing Maloie Maloie does the unamable or how it is some of these like fictions I think Beckett
needed fiction because he did need an introspective a more a more subjective mode than theater in
some ways now he also in his own way if you stretch the meaning of poetry not the early poems
he wrote which are not so great you know he didn't himself like them much he did translations
but those late works are really like prose poems he'll seen ill said enough they are wonderful
they're just wonderful all his work is I think amazing and the real paradox being that he was a
devoted fanatical disciple of James Joyce who brought to the English languages incredible
richness perusion and exploded all of its resources and and when in all these directions
and achieved his own greatness in in those terms and Beckett this realization that he had that
you cannot follow Joyce in that direction that on the contrary what he does is take all that
inexhaustible richness choice in richness and impoverishes it down to a kind of minimalist
style and idiom and it's beginning with fact that he expatriates himself from English and writes this
great fiction actually in a foreign tongue in French and this kind of impoverishment minimalism
essentialism which is on the opposite spectrum from Joyce and yet at the same time an achievement
that is comparable absolutely and that that actually raises a very interesting issue namely and I
always again sort of tell students is influence never goes in a straight line when it does you get
bad work in other words images who were influenced by by pound by pound didn't amount to anything
very much you know and people who did imitate Joyce and they were plenty of imitators hard much
what Beckett had to learn it wasn't so easy for Beckett to learn that because he was so influenced
by Joyce is that he couldn't continue in that vein that vein fit with one period but it did not
fit with the post war era it did not fit with the world of the resistance in World War II it was
just too dark and and he wanted it to be spare and it also wasn't his own way of working and he
had to find his own own mache and and he says in his that wonderful quote where he's writing a
let it axle count I think it is it's in this check that uh... where he says we have to do something
with the language we just have to change it it can't stay that way it can't have this expansive
rich ring it has to be really pared down to something quite different and of course most important
of all if you we go back to the avant-garde and this sort of allegiance that they declared
the future and where i that lavere don't quote that i began with about uh... one has to know
if someone is a real avant-gardeist one must know where humanity is going what the destiny of the
human race is this sort of homeland is the future for Beckett it's all at the end there is
nothing out there at the he uh... he's not on the avant-garde of anything because endgame is really at
that edge that doesn't look into a future of humanity well but you have the line i can't go on
uh... i can't go on a lot i must go on yet i'll go on yet so there's the future but you have a
he's dragging himself into the future almost with his back to you know but when the future
say that for the future they're really talking about the present nobody really was living in the
future you just want to make the present is appealing to yourself now you're right it's true
but it's in two years ago going into the future with the being the leaders of the crowd no
back into so dark and on the other hand is he himself says if they were only
the mass you know if they were only darkness but there's also the light
i mean back it isn't always pessimistic as he was taken to be and um...
there's the whole question of french versus english packet in the new addition of good dough
whether it's you know french english back and you have the french on one side the english on the other
it's a different play it really is a different play
that's how different it is in other words you'll get on the french something like jicoot
i'm listening and on the english will say that is really most extraordinarily interesting
what is a broad farce the other is just she could
well this show has been most extraordinarily interesting marjey and new you come to the
end of our time for me too because you've you've showed some very important points
are already five no you have you have no you've shown the very important
because i never as often as i've worked with this never really
occurred to me about the literary art well thanks for coming on we'll get you back
bye bye
♪♪
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