Gass: Post-Postmodern Transrealism

[Mark Kohut]

GREAT. THANX.

PYNCHON?

On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 2:11 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
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