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After the historical avant-gardes: postmodernism

Postmodernism, whatever it may be – a period, style, literary movement, or cultural condition – is, by its very name, seen as a successor to the historical avant-gardes and, more specifically, to modernism. And yet, as Brian McHale points out, “nothing about the subject is certain, resolved, or uncontentious.” Questions of the when, how, and why of postmodernism loom unanswered. Furthermore, postmodernism’s ambiguous politics and debatable relationship to popular culture pose an even greater question: Is the literature of the postmodern experimental at all? It is precisely this controversial topic that McHale raises in his essay for the volume, first recalling the unsettled dispute on the matter between philosopher J.F. Lyotard and architecture critic Charles Jencks, who advocated a postmodern experimentalism rooted in modernism and a postmodern eclecticism associated with the popular, respectively. For McHale, there are two key tropes of postmodern literature that complicate each side of the argument: the process of world-modelling and the presentation of an unpresentable textual sublime.

True to the spirit of postmodernism, McHale ultimately refuses to pit the experi-mental and the eclectic against each other in a straight dichotomy. Similarly, Elana Gomel in her discussion of popular genre fiction (itself a progeny of the postmodern) interrogates the absolute segregation between genre fiction as low art and the avant-garde as high art. As she says in the opening words to her essay, rather “Two trains

JOE BRAY, ALISON GIBBONS AND BRIAN McHALE

collide.” Concentrating on the popular genres of fantasy, science fiction and horror, Gomel shows that, like postmodern literature, avant-garde genre fiction is concerned with the creation of new worlds and exploration of ontological arenas, particularly through devices of allegory, displacement, and incoherence. However, while post-modern works often rely heavily on parody and pastiche, avant-garde genre works

“create new fictional spaces that attempt to resurrect/reconstruct history, and in doing so, question their own role as commodities.”

Focusing on writing of the present, both Liam Connell in his discussion of the lit-erature of globalization and Alison Gibbons in her account of altermodenist fiction suggest that contemporary experimental novels exhibit a heightened awareness of the value of commodities in the international market place. The literature of globalization explores themes of “complex connectivity,” the numerous and sometimes intertwined modes of social interaction available today, and the ways in which these interactions produce a perceived sense of “proximity.” In exploring these themes, such literary experiments also trouble them, highlighting “the interplay between local and global as mutually interpenetrating forms.” In doing so, time and space become intertwined. The concatenation of time and space is one of the commonalities shared by the literature of globalization and altermodernist fiction. Gibbons’s account of altermodernism, which stems from the writings of art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, identifies three central tenets of fiction of this period: the representation of time as a spatialized landscape, the con-ceptualization of identity as nomadic, and the integration of genres and modes. Both altermodernist fiction and the literature of globalisation are interested in “networks”

– temporal-spatial, formal, intersubjective and ontological. Moreover, both have sub-versive intent, challenging forms of contemporary internationalism and offering, in Gibbons’s words, “an implicitly politicized aesthetic resistance to globalization.”

The politics and manifestoes of experimentalism

The political connotations of experimental literature have been prominent ever since Surrealism, described by Stockwell as “the prototype of the modern avant-garde.” Noting that “even if it was not a political movement in itself, most of the first Surrealists were marxist communists,” Stockwell traces Surrealism’s roots to Dada, a somewhat chaotic grouping of writers, artists and performers which emerged in Zurich in 1916. The targets of the group’s creative energy were many and various; as Stockwell says of the move-ment, “it is the anti-X, where X is whatever you can think it is.” He shows how, as Dada evolved into Surrealism, the art produced became “more constructively framed, more shaped by principle,” and also more infused with “the language of revolutionary social-ism.” While Dada’s ethos had often been anti-establishment in the abstract, Surrealism

“excelled in the production of manifestoes, pamphlets, essays and debates.”

In her wide-ranging chapter Laura Winkiel also highlights the importance of the manifesto in the construction of the “avant-garde,” pointing out that the term was first used by radical groups of Jacobins during the French Revolution. For her the implied metaphor in the term of elite troops sent ahead in battle suggests that “revolutionary

INTRODUCTION

battles increasingly became a war of words and ideas,” and that it thus encodes “the entwining of aesthetics and politics that structures the manifesto form and determines its functioning for the next two centuries.” This “duality” is particularly heightened, Winkiel claims, in the first four decades of the twentieth century, when “manifestos’

staunch refusal to accommodate ‘tradition’ in any form captures the militancy of the artistic avant-gardes.” She gives as examples Marinetti’s futurist manifestoes, yet her comments could apply equally to Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism. Both aimed at, in Stockwell’s words, “a radical re-evaluation of society through the medium of an artistic movement.”

This aim is also crucial to Lettrism and Situationism, which Tyrus Miller describes as “post-World War II outgrowths of Surrealism.” Though early Lettrist enthusiasts such as Isidore Isou and Guy-Ernest Debord often scornfully dismissed current Sur-realism as tired and mainstream, they openly acknowledged their debt to the radical ideas that it had advanced in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In journals such as Inter-nationale lettriste (1952–1954), Potlatch (1954–1957), and InterInter-nationale Situationniste (1958–1969) Debord and Gil Wolman formulated their proposals for overthrowing the commodified, consumerist “spectacle” of capitalist society, developing key con-cepts such as dérive (the exploration of urban space) and détournement (the recontex-tualizing of appropriated cultural materials). Miller argues that such strategies “possess an ‘artistic’ status at least equal, if not more important, than those works that relate to recognizable artistic categories such as poetry or film.”

Two years after the first appearance of the Internationale Situationniste, the literary journal Tel Quel was founded by a group of relatively unknown French writers. Though the two journals differed in format and approach, they both played a crucial role in shaping French culture and politics in the tumultuous years leading to the uprisings of May 1968. Tel Quel was more literary-focused, and closely aligned with the emergence of the nouveau roman, yet as Danielle Marx-Scouras observes, “the cultural politics of the journal were shaped as much by the historical events of the era as they were by theoretical advances in literary studies, semiotics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.”

The writers published in the journal, who included Alain Robbe-Grillet, Natalie Sar-raute and Jean Ricardou, turned away from Sartrean engagement, and its belief that literature passively reflects social practice, promoting instead, under the influence of semiotics and psychoanalysis, a critique of language itself, and a greater understanding of its role in shaping, and sometimes frustrating, meaning. As Marx-Scouras notes, however, this preoccupation with language was not an act of political disengagement;

indeed quite the contrary.

A focus on language and its ways of making meaning was also key in the 1970s and 1980s for another, disparate group of writers, based mainly in the U.S. and Can-ada. The term L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E describes less a movement or a school than a

“site of conversation,” as Charles Bernstein, a leading practitioner himself, notes in his chapter. As with the groups centered around the Internationale Situationniste and Tel Quel, a serial publication was crucial in shaping a collective rationale, namely L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, which Bernstein edited with Bruce Andrews from

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1978 to 1982. Although, in marked contrast to earlier experimental movements, the writers associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E tended to steer clear of manifestoes and explicit statements of intent, the turn to language and an examination of its poten-tial for ideological bias, led, as with the Tel Quel group, not to a disassociation from politics and contemporary events, but rather to a deeper, more sustained engagement with them. Bernstein notes that “there was a strong desire to connect oppositional political and cultural views with linguistically inventive writing.”

One particular kind of oppositional politics, which according to Bernstein had a sig-nificant influence on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, is addressed by Ellen Friedman in her chapter on women’s avant-garde writing in the twentieth century. Highlighting the importance of the poststructuralist turn to language and psychoanalysis in the 1970s and early 1980s, Friedman discusses how Hélène Cixous and other French women theorists advocated l’écriture feminine in order to emphasize their difference from canonical male authors. Having traced this non-hierarchical, open-ended style to the modernist experiments of Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, amongst others, Friedman claims that the female avant-garde becomes harder to iden-tify in the late twentieth century, as experimental tropes and techniques are incorpo-rated into the mainstream. She suggests that contemporary feminist experimentalists, such as Kathy Acker, Bharati Mukherjee and The Guerilla Girls, have been driven to

“find new forms of subversion, adapting, for instance, the trickster figure.”

Political subversion has indeed been a feature of recent experimental writing across the world. In her chapter on Anglophone postcolonial poetry, Priyamvada Gopal dis-cusses how postcolonial literature has been deemed “always already radical by virtue of speaking from the periphery to the metropole.” She is concerned to complicate this picture by distinguishing between both the political motivations and the techniques used in different national traditions. She critiques one especially widely-used term in postcolonial theory in particular: “hybridity.” Thus the poetry of Sujata Bhatt in India, Mutabaruka in the Caribbean and Mothobi Mutloatse in South Africa, to take three of her examples, differs not only in form and content, but also as a result of the

“political and historical imperatives which variously shape the reception, perception and use of English in the wake of colonial rule” in each region. In each case, however, Gopal emphasizes the potential of experimental poetry as a force for change, through its “refiguring multilingualism as a space of creatively politicized intersection.”

Technological influence and innovation

The experimental writing practices of Italian Futurism and Russian Cubo-Futurism were hardly isolated from the politics of the early twentieth century. Italian Futur-ism, as John White advises, was both “a deliberate riposte to the passéism of late 19th century poetry” and “a mode of discourse appropriate to the modern dynamic world of speed, technological efficiency and, ultimately, the mechanized slaughter of the First World War.” Indeed, in the turbulent climate of the First World War, Futurist experi-mentation was “invariably deployed with a political purpose in mind.”

INTRODUCTION

Nevertheless, while the political was clearly one motivation for the Futurists, the technological was a central inspiration. The rapid advancement of science and tech-nology at the turn of the century was heralded by founder F.T. Marinetti as an impetus for literary experimentation. As White details, the typographical vision associated with Futurism known as “words-in-freedom” or “the telegraphic device” enabled Futurist poets to express the speed and rapidity of trains and automobiles while “aeropoetry” sought to convey the physical and psychological dimensions of flying. Words-in-freedom gener-ated poems in which onomatopoeias abound, punctuation is replaced by mathematic symbols, and words themselves are dismantled. The Russian Cubo-Futurists take such linguistic deconstruction even further, creating neologisms from the existing lexicon, breaking words down into morphemes, or perhaps allowing only vowels to remain, all of which amount to what White calls “a process of linguistic de-familiarisation.”

Contemporary electronic code poetry similarly explores the fabric of language. As Steve Tomasula phrases it, code poetry “foregrounds that code is a language, and also that language is a code.” In his chapter on the electronic literature of code poetry and new media, Tomasula discusses a form of experimentalism that is rooted in the technology of its own creation. Code poetry, Tomasula explains, is highly self-conscious, and its aesthetics are concerned with revealing the mechanisms by which it is generated. It is a “practice that sees itself as poetry and programming in equal measure,” and thus “code poets have pushed to the foreground the scaffolding of code and its structures that normally reside hidden behind the scene/screen.” In contrast, new media fiction and poetry, while reliant upon their technological underpinnings and programming foundations, hide such infrastructure. Instead, such works exist as theatrical and engrossing hybrids of video, sound and music; they are often interactive;

and they recast experimental literary art as multimedia experience.

Visual experimentation

Code poetry, new media literature, and the Futurist impulse to experiment with typo-graphy all point towards the potentialities of the visual dimension of language, litera-ture and narrative. Concrete poetry explores not only the visuality of language but also of the page, which becomes a canvas, with white space as much a part of the literary work as words themselves. In his essay, Joe Bray outlines the history of concrete prose and poetry. While the origins of concrete prose can be found in early novelists such as Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding, Bray argues that the fascination with visual form has not abated in twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, pointing to modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary writers for whom the page is still very much an experimental surface. Similarly, having established the canon of concrete poetry, at its height in the 1950s and 1960s, through recourse to seminal poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, and of course Eugen Gomringer, Bray considers the way in which contemporary poetry might still be influenced by this heritage.

Alison Gibbons cites concrete poetry alongside modernist poetics, Futurist exper-imentation, and postmodern fictions, to name a few precursors, in contextualising

JOE BRAY, ALISON GIBBONS AND BRIAN McHALE

contemporary multimodal literature, that is, “literary texts that feature a multitude of semiotic modes in the communication and progression of their narratives.” She claims that the advent of digital technologies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has produced an upsurge of literary works which emphasize their own form through visual and material experimentation. In her essay, Gibbons suggests a for-mal taxonomy for contemporary multimodal literature: illustrated works, multimodal (re)visions, tactile fictions, altered books and collage fictions, concrete/typographical fictions, and ontological hoax.

Although graphic novels are certainly multimodal, Gibbons chooses not to discuss them, preferring instead to view such works as a genre in their own right. In her chapter on graphic narrative, Hilary Chute considers the relationship of comics to literary exper-imentation. Chute rebuffs the charge that comics are merely popular and low culture artefacts, proposing that they are experimental by way of having “vigorously expanded the rubric of ‘literature’ over the past thirty years.” More pertinently, comics are experi-mental in the sense that they self-consciously draw attention to their own construction and obstruct normal reading practices. In support of her argument, Chute invites readers on a tour of experimental comic practice starting in the early twentieth century, con-tinuing into the late twentieth century and concluding with the comics of today. Ulti-mately for Chute, comics, like multimodal literature and concrete poetics, explore “the spaces in between word and image” and “offer a rich and relevant visual-verbal syntax.”

While literature has incorporated the visual in experimental practices, art has assimilated the verbal. Reflecting on the presence of words in recent visual art, Jes-sica Prinz claims that in the twentieth century we witnessed “an eruption of language into the field of the visual arts,” an eruption prefigured and stimulated by avant-garde experiments such as Dada and Futurism. A key figure in the historical lineage of words in visual art, Prinz claims, was the avant-gardist Marcel Duchamp, “who influenced an entire generation of artists” in the latter twentieth century “for whom art was not only visual but also linguistic.” Moreover, the twenty-first century exhibits a further enhancement of the integration of word and image, with works of language art that are inspired by, offer tribute to, or appropriate literary texts. Consequently, Prinz inti-mates, the boundaries between art and literature are blurring and dissipating. The literary and the artistic are no longer necessarily distinct types of aesthetic artefact.

Experiments across media

From the beginning of the twentieth century right down to the present, experimental literature has had to find ways to coexist with other, competing media – visual art, music in a range of genres, performance, photography, film, television, digital media – competitors that have expanded in number, power, appeal and market-share over the course of the century. A common thread uniting several of the chapters in this volume is experimentation with these other, adjacent media. In some cases this exper-imentation has taken the form of collaboration across media, or even co-optation of one medium by another; in other cases, it has been more akin to baiting a threatening

INTRODUCTION

competitor, poking at this dangerous beast through the bars of its cage to stir it up and see how it reacts.

Richard Murphy views the Expressionism of the immediate post-Great War and the Weimar years as an avant-garde style that straddles the media of literature and film, which share a common “poetics of animism.” In both media, on the screen and on the printed page alike, an unstable, uneasy balance is struck between realism and the fantastic. In Expressionist literary works such as Kafka’s Metamorphosis, just as in films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Metropolis, subjectivity is dramatized, the protagonist’s interior state being projected onto the outside world so that, for the viewer or reader as much as for the protagonist, “exterior” reality becomes a hybrid of inside and outside.

If Expressionism straddles media, the experimental poetics of The New American Poetry, Donald Allen’s seminal anthology of 1960, modelled itself on adjacent art-forms, especially the bebop jazz and Abstract Expressionist painting of the postwar era, but also dance and performance. According to Ben Lee, in his chapter on post-war avant-garde poetry in the U.S., poets adopted the new music and painting as their models as a strategy for distancing themselves from a modernist literary tradition that they regarded as over-civilized and exhausted. Crucial to the aesthetic forma-tion of this generaforma-tion of poets was their encounter with experimental, collaborative cross-media practices, which some experienced in the New York artworld while others encountered it at Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina, an incubator of mid-twentieth-century avant-gardism.

If Expressionism straddles media, the experimental poetics of The New American Poetry, Donald Allen’s seminal anthology of 1960, modelled itself on adjacent art-forms, especially the bebop jazz and Abstract Expressionist painting of the postwar era, but also dance and performance. According to Ben Lee, in his chapter on post-war avant-garde poetry in the U.S., poets adopted the new music and painting as their models as a strategy for distancing themselves from a modernist literary tradition that they regarded as over-civilized and exhausted. Crucial to the aesthetic forma-tion of this generaforma-tion of poets was their encounter with experimental, collaborative cross-media practices, which some experienced in the New York artworld while others encountered it at Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina, an incubator of mid-twentieth-century avant-gardism.