The Avant-Garde and American Modernity: Small Incisive Shocks (review)

In an age when anything already goes and nothing stays for all that long anyway, what does it mean to be avant-garde? Once the term urged rebellion and touted unchecked innovation; with it came the aura of risk and the heroic, exultant blare of manifestoes. But in our postmodern condition of impeachable artists and impoverished markets, at a time when “indeterminacy,” “pastiche,” “paranoia,” “an-aesthetics,” and “exhaustion” are not underground concerns but infamous catchwords, what program (and with what confidence) might the avant-garde pretend to advance? It would seem that in The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity Philip Nel’s initial task is one of redefinition. His implied premise is that each of the cultural figures he investigates demonstrates an idiosyncratic set of avant-garde principles indicative of and suitable to a society in which “resistance can be contingent, qualified, and multivocal.” In place of the disruption of continuity, the postmodern avant-garde proposes the continuity of disruption. Nel’s representative artists—Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Dr. Seuss, Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Chis Van Allsburg, Laurie Anderson, and Leonard Cohen—offer a revised sense of postmodern possibility, one which not only contests the presumption of an absolute break with modernism, but also accommodates itself to a society that so quickly and so willingly absorbs and employs the very confrontations and incongruities historically associated with the avant-garde.

This surprising selection of major players suggests one of the chief attractions of Nel’s study. By ranging among a variety of media and between canonical and popular works, Nel indicates just how thoroughly the aesthetic landscape has been inflected by the avant-garde argument. In his estimation, these artists “offer a repertoire of techniques . . . [that] can be deployed along a range of possibilities, from the affirmative to the critically engaged, from the mystification of the workings of capitalism to a materialist critique of the same.” What we are given, then, is not so much a coherent claim as a confluence of options, whose variety of tone, method, and operative urges may recall the Carl Rose cartoon “A Surrealist Family Has the Neighbors to Tea,” which Nel features by way of introduction to his study. Implicit here, too, is that instead of the dissipation of avant-garde energies, we are witnessing their vindication and relevance, albeit in the conditional form of what Don DeLillo calls “small incisive shocks.” Call it opportunism informed, but not invalidated, by its worldly context. Accordingly, indirection, self-qualification, and contingency may begin as idiosyncratic stylistic gestures, but they necessarily affect aesthetic standards and aesthetic strategies throughout mass culture, which are in turn re-imagined as new literary ventures.

Surrealism, once the scourge of the real, may now be its standard; the provocation has become the point of departure. To Nel’s credit, he neither subordinates examination of the unique efforts of his chosen artists to a set of inherited measures of adversarial legitimacy nor enlists them to serve primarily in the ongoing war of terminology between “modern” versus “postmodern.” Instead, Nel recognizes how each writer employs and extends avant-garde techniques in ways that recall both predecessors and peers, as well as how their respective methods of engagement and resistance of their socio-historical circumstances simultaneously echo and repudiate past masters. Thus in Nel’s estimation there is less disruption than evolution evident between modernism and postmodernism. Nel convincingly demonstrates how the avant-garde—as multifarious, brazen, tenacious as ever—ensures their connection, breeding anxious objects within the culture and anxious objections to it.

One of the obvious highlights of The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity is the sheer range of its investigation. It is brave and bracing indeed to include Djuna Barnes and Dr. Seuss in the same conversation, to juxtapose Donald Barthelme and Leonard Cohen under the same lens, and to seat Don DeLillo and Laurie Anderson in close proximity. In addition to inspecting works from writers, Nel appropriates examples of avant-garde technique and attitude from movies...