Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo

Chapter 4. Selves, Sentences, and the Styles of Holism

123 How does one become “avant-garde”? The term migrated from the military to the cultural arena with Saint-Simon in the nineteenth century, but a classic image for it was given by Wassily Kandinsky at the start of the twentieth: The life of the spirit may be fairly represented in diagram as a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest segment uppermost. The lower the segment the greater it is in breadth, depth, and area. The whole triangle is moving slowly, almost invisibly forwards and upwards. Where the apex was today the second segment is tomorrow; what today can be understood only by the apex and to the rest of the triangle is an incomprehensible gibberish, forms tomorrow the true thought and feeling of the second segment.1 For Kandinsky, those committed to “the life of the spirit” are the vanguard of history. But their brilliance also destines them to a life of solitude and q Chapter 4 Selves, Sentences, and the Styles of Holism 1 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (1912; New York: Dover, 1977), 6. Henceforth cited parenthetically as CSA. On Saint-Simon’s initiation of the term avantgarde , as well as its role in Kandinsky and beyond, see Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age, trans. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 124 Part II. agents WIthout disdain from the rest of the triangle, the masses who “have never solved any problem independently” and are “dragged as it were in a cart by those the noblest of their fellowmen who have sacrificed themselves” (CSA 6). Although responsible for a society’s evolution, the true avant-gardiste necessarily stands scorned and misunderstood, remote from his or her contemporaries : “Even those who are nearest to him in sympathy do not understand him. Angrily they abuse him as charlatan or madman” (CSA 6). It is roughly this sense of “avant-garde” that could be applied to Stein and, a few decades after her, Robbe-Grillet. As part I argued, both Stein and Robbe-Grillet trace the sources of their work to a form of agency residing “inside,”estranged from the public world of material bodies and the ordinary words describing them. And the result of this internalism is in each case, as in Kandinsky, a strongly progressivist view of the history of the arts (as if artworks of the past were not just out of fashion, but false) and an attendant belief that intransigent experimentalism, a relentless challenging of settled habits, is the only option for writers who don’t want to see themselves condemned as common. Recently, however, Houston A. Baker has described the experimentalism of Ralph Ellison not in order to praise the author’s progressivism but in order to explain, as his essay’s subtitle declares, why Ellison “was never avantgarde .”2 For Baker, the critical shift that allowed Ellison to replace Richard Wright as the central figure in twentieth-century African-American literary history is “disturbing,” for one of the conspicuous aspects of Ellison’s career is his “utter failure as a ‘Prophet of Tomorrow’” (“Failed” 5). Though more stylistically elegant than anything Wright ever wrote, Ellison’s Invisible Man nowhere hints at the emergent “black southern public sphere” that “would lead a cataclysmic rights revolution” through Dr. Martin Luther King and others in the decade after it was published (“Failed” 5). Whereas Wright engaged in strict scientific critique of capitalism, Ellison hibernated in an effete literary world, relinquishing an analysis of “the intimate horrors of racism” for “a mess of Eliotan or Hemingwayesque allusions” (“Failed” 8). Wright was “an embattled, public, activist, black intellectual,” whereas Ellison 197ff. Some major considerations of the concept in recent decades include Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987). 2 “Failed Prophet and Falling Stock: Why Ralph Ellison Was Never Avant-Garde,” Stanford Humanities Review 7 (1999): 4–11. Henceforth cited as “Failed.” A revised version of this essay appears in Baker’s Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001). selves, sentences, and the styles of holIsm 125 remained blind to “the nascent energy of...