MFS Modern Fiction Studies

Nel, Philip, 1969-
"A Small Incisive Shock": Modern Forms, Postmodern Politics, and the Role of the Avant-Garde in Underworld
MFS Modern Fiction Studies - Volume 45, Number 3, Fall 1999, pp. 724-752

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Philip Nel - "A Small Incisive Shock": Modern Forms, Postmodern Politics, and the Role of the Avant-Garde in Underworld - Modern Fiction Studies 45:3 Modern Fiction Studies 45.3 (1999) 724-752 "A Small Incisive Shock": Modern Forms, Postmodern Politics, and the Role of The Avant-garde in Underworld Philip Nel II. Postmodern Art and Authorship On May 13, 1997, Don DeLillo spoke at the New York Public Library's "Stand In for Wei Jingsheng," an event that coincided with the American publication of Wei's letters from prison and that was designed to call attention to human rights in China. The essay he read that day, "The Artist Naked in a Cage," draws parallels between three men in cages: Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik, Franz Kafka's hunger artist, and Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng. Reading a reprint of DeLillo's lecture in The New Yorker later that month, I was struck by the analogy because it was at once precise and imprecise. It was imprecise because both Kulik and Kafka's hunger artist chose to live in a cage, but Wei Jingsheng had been jailed against his will. Yet, on the other hand, the analogy between Kulik and Wei is apt, and perhaps performance art can act "in opposition to the state," as DeLillo says of Wei ("Artist" 7). Near the end of "The Artist Naked in a Cage," DeLillo argues that "the more nearly total the state, the more vivid the dissident artist" and concludes, "The deeper they conceal him -- the more remote the cell, the...