VV(12): Avant-Garde

[Dave Monroe]

Hey hey hey! Someone very kindly forwarded this along
to me ...

http://pages.whowhere.com/internet/f.vazquez/barthelme.html

... so now not only is my life apparently complete
(all I have of Donald Barthelme so far is Snow White,
The Dead Father, and a short story collection the
title of which eludes me right now), but I also note
...

"Trying to describe Barthelme's politics is as dodgy
as trying to label his work, but Watergate sure did
get him revved up. Nixon by then had already mutated
into a
desperate and impersonal force, no longer your
traditionally human-type President, but now some
faceless subgod of folly. Barthelme, perhaps as a
species of anarchist curse, just calls him 'the
President.'"

Cf. ...

"The aura of the dictator is predicated upon his lack
of specificity and intrinsic reproducibility.  In
other words, the aura attacked by the filmic medium
and the charisma of the dictator are not one and the
same; indeed, charismatic authority seems to be
created precisely by virtue of its  effacement of
aura.  For charisma is not created--as vulgar usage
would have it--by an act of individual volition, but
rather by a collective act of faith.  The aura of the
dictator consists in the recognition of a certain
arbitrariness:  in the awareness that he could be
anyone.  More than this, as an always already
reproducible representation of individual,
antidemocratic authority, the Fuhrer already is
anyone."

Again, from Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism:
Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford,
CA: Stanford UP, 1993), Ch. 6., "Fascist Modernism and
the Theater of Power," p. 169 ...



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