Up Jenkins
MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
The Theory of the Avant Garde Renato Poggioli translated by Gerald Fitzgerald (Harvard UP/ OUP 62s) Renato Poggioli, who was killed in a car crash in 1963, was a much loved Italian scholar who became an American citizen in 1950. His The Theory of the Avant. Garde, published - in Ifaly in 1962, and the result of twenty years' work, is probably the most comprehensive analysis of the subject ever made: A difficult book, it is worth reading carefully all through.
Poggioli begins by quoting Matthew Arnold: `To ascertain the master-current in the litera- ture of an epoch, and to discern this from all minor currents, is one of the critic's highest functions; in discharging it he shows 'how far he possesses the most indispensable quality of his office—justness of spirit.' And for Poggioli the 'master-current' of this epoch is its "avant- garde: 'Not only Eliot and Pound, Joyce and Bely, Stravinsky and Picasso, Klee and Henry Moore, but also Yeats and St Jean Perse, Pasternak and Blok, Ungaretti and Montale, Guillen and Garcia Lorca, Despiau and Rouault, all these, both groups, prove that the modern genius is essentially avant-gardistic.'
In other words Poggioli believes that all im- portant writing is 'avant-gardistic,' which is an attitude that usually has weaknesses. Those who hold it,tend to indulge in critically irrelevant special pleading or in facile projection when they are dealing with writers, such as Yeats, who, though obviously important, are not con- spicuously 'avant-gardistic.' Worse still, the simplistic avant-gardist quite fails to deal with those good writers who are content to work in traditional forms—or who appear to do so. Hence the neglect of the best work of such poets as Walter de la Mare, Andrew Young or Edmund Blunden, and the frightened uneasiness of much criticism of Hardy.
Poggioli was too intelligent, too generous and too just, in Arnold's sense, to suffer seriously from such weaknesses. He was sensitive, and his sufferings—from watching what Mussolini did to his country—Tfurther humanised him. Al- though the intention of this book is to develop st- 'unified theory,' academicism of the most iterile kind is restricted in it to the dense, over- abstract style. For the theory itself is formid- able: a convincing attempt to reveal what
avant-gardism means not only in literary but also in sociological and political terms. There is no comfort for the facile, bandwagon avant- gardist—or for the more responsible but none the less jargon-trapped advocate of 'the new.'
The trouble—and this is at least partly a tribute to Poggioli—is that this book overloads the term that gives it its title: it is more a critic's theory of creative literature than a use- ful account of what is generally taken to be avant-garde writing. Impressive though he is, Poggioli fails to come to grips with his actual material, or to appraise it satisfactorily as literature. He is finally more concerned with movements than with writers, with the theory of literature than with literature itself. Though no Arnold Toynbee, superimposing a sixth-form `philosophy' upon a collection of facts, Poggioli would have done well, if only to assimilate the point of view, to study Wyndham Lewis's The Demon of Progress in the Arts. For the idea of progress, as Poggioli shows when he dismisses the Futurists, can be a vain and harmful one.
So we still have the problem of the unphilo- sophical, actual avant-garde in all its aspects— from the pitiful to the meaningful, from Adrian Mitchell to Nathalie Sarraute. English literature has always tried to keep itself immune from continental influences, partly because of ob- stinate insularity but also partly because of the very nature of the English language. Thus, if Kingsley Amis or John Braine provide horrible examples of native fiction, then some of the pseudo-continental novels by English writers provide equally horrible examples of misdirec- tion of employment. Such clearly avant-garde movements as dadaism and surrealism hardly penetrated this country. Our pale equivalent of Jacques Vache, who killed himself in 1919 after dedicating his life to humour, was the forgotten and never well-known Roger Roughton; our only surrealist poet was David Gascoyne. The macabre, humorous, aggressive, anti-establish- mentarian energy of the European 'twenties and 'thirties has re-emerged in contemporary Britain in the triumphantly commercial form of the Beatles and their successors, or of harmless pseudo-revolutionaries such as Christopher Logue. It is only one short step, now, from the world of the pop-poet or writer to that of Eamonn Andrews, Simon Dee or Malcolm Muggeridge.
And yet there are British novelists who are aware of the problems of writing fiction in the twentieth century; some have even begun to solve these problems. They no more resemble Irish, Polish or French novelists in their tech- niques than Wyndham Lewis's satirical assaults of the 'twenties resemble, say, the surrealist declarations of the playboy Dali. Their solu- tions are English.
Perhaps the most original and successful of all genuinely avant-garde living novelists is Nathalie Sarraute. She describes some- thing of what really happens between people. Beside her Robbe-Grillet seems a sour and limited behaviourist, although a potent critic, posing as a novelist. But Sarraute writes in French, and she cannot be imitated in English. And so who is there in England who is actually solving some of the problems?
Earliest in the field was Ivy Compton-Burnett, even tentatively with Dolores (1911), but clearly with Pastors and Masters (1925). As Nathalie Sarraute herself has pointed out, Ivy Compton- Burnett uses dialogue as an instrument for hint- ing at the existence of another world—a world that in her novels is utterly terrifying. The affinities between Ivy Compton-Burnett and Henry Green are too obvious to need pointing. out; but the other, secret but more real world is gentler and less terrifying in Green's novels.
One can of course argue for the ex- pression of this world in some nineteenth- century novelists—the ones whose achievements go beyond magnificent descriptions of the ap- parent, 'normal' world. But in these novelists this world was never consciously realised: it existed only in their imaginations. It even existed—quite unconsciously—in the horror- models of, say, M. R. James; but in a crudely melodramatic form. Virginia Woolf was aware of the problem, but tried to solve it by means of techniques too rigidly applied.
But the most distinguished, subtle and consis- tent practitioner of avant-garde fiction in Great Britain today is Anthony Powell. It has been said that A Dance to the Music of Time is the product of 'an enormously intelligent but com- pletely untheoretical mind.' How that misses the point! Like so many non-theorists, Mr Powell shockingly knows that any old theory will do when something like fiction has to be accomp- lished . . . He understands in his own way Apollinaire's advice, as Andre Billy reported it: `When you're dry . . . write anything, any sentence, and forge straight ahead.' I have no talent,' he has said, 'for inventing plots of a dramatic kind in a comparatively small space . . .
For Mr Powell's Nicholas Jenkins is a sensi- tive instrument, the most sensitive in modern English literature, for the apprehension of just that world of sub-conversation of which Nathalie Sarraute speaks. It is significant that one complaint against Mr Powell is that he is boring because he is 'too like real life.' He reveals as much about real life as any living English novelist. And I don't think Poggioli would have understood this. To that extent I prefer books to books about theories.
Previous page
