Gass: Post-Postmodern Transrealism

[alice malice]

Someone asked about Gass, that, and all this talk of realism and
modernism, Nabokov and McHale...got me thinking of this fine essay by
Gass.

Every effort to prolong an avant-garde beyond a certain point becomes
of doubtful value, because an avant-garde can have but a mayfly’s
life: the artists have only their negations to chorus; both their
attitudes and their art will alter as they age; society’s methods of
co-optation and disarmament will, in general, be effective; their
anger will be softened by success and their aims divided, their
attention distracted; the institutions set up by most Establishments,
even if assaulted, will take longer dying than most avant-gardes can
expect to live; while the strength of the support groups, so necessary
to the energy of any movement, are even more fragile and momentary,
depending, as they do, on the loyalty of a publisher, the generosity
of a patron, the length of a love life, the cuisine of a café.

Artists who do not grow old gracefully, but rage and change through
the whole of life, find themselves, at the end, alone with their
innovations and not part of a refurbished movement. In that sense, the
later works of Goya, Verdi, Monet, or Yeats constitute a solitary
interior development whose deepest effects, like those of Turner’s
final oils or Beethoven’s last quartets, are sometimes delayed for
generations.

http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/story_detail.php?id=1289



http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/story_detail.php?id=1289
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l