The Concept of the Avant-Garde: Explorations in Modernism by John Weightman (review)

Books 331 Jacques Maritain (died 1973) was during his lifetime an outstanding promoter of what is called the ‘philosophia perennis’, called also Aristotelean Thomism or scholasticism . Hanke’s book givesattention to one particular aspect of this scholasticism by providing a detailed presentation of Maritain’s philosophy of art. As such the book is a collation of material gathered from Maritain’s published works. This material has been woven systematically together, serving the reader a rich and varied overview of Maritain’s basic approach to art in its many forms. After an introductory chapter which poses the ontological problem with reference to any work of art or aesthetic object, the author goes on to givea description of Maritain’s analysis of the concept of beauty, the relation of beauty to art, art as sign or representation and, finally, intuitional knowledge or poetic intuition that terminates in a work made. A book of this kind cannot be assimilated easilyor perhaps may not even be of much interest to any reader for whom philosophical analysis is foreign. Nevertheless, it is the type of book that should be in any art library, to be available to the special type of artist who finds delight in a philosophical approach to art, who wants to come to an explicit awareness of suchnotions asintegrity, proportion andclarity,characteristics that Maritain feels must shine out in the beauty that any artist seeks to put into his work. The book should also prove useful to those who wish to grasp these ideas or notions in relation to their own experience of delight when confronting a work of art. The Conceptof the Avant-Garde: Explorations in Modernism. John Weightman. Open Court, La Salle, Ill., 1973. 323 pp. $9.95. Reviewed by Michael Holt* ‘God is dead.’ Nietzsche’s dramatic phrase sums up the philosophy of the avant-garde and provides the keynote of Weightman’s collection of his essays and reviews of the late 1960’sand early 1970’s. He puts the avant-garde mentality at some 75years of age, which issomewhat older than commonly supposed, and he sees its roots stretching as far back as the scientific revolution in the works of Corneille, Racine, Molibre and others. Not that they were trying to say anything new; simply attempting to state timeless truths. The avant-garde came of age first in France with Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau. Weightman finds ‘most of the great 19th-century themes are already present in the French Enlightenment; there are intimations of Hegel and Marx in Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rousseau; of Darwin and Freud in Diderot; of Freud and Sacher-Masoch in Rousseau ...’.(Herea scientistmightcavil,foran intimation, unlessharnessed to, as Kuhn puts it, ‘paradigm applications’, is mere idle conjecture.) And playing father to a number of different avant-gardes was the Marquis de Sade himself. A case, perhaps, of the sins of the father being visited not so much on his own children as on those that have to listen to them. After an examination of Aspects of the Modern, the book covers the avant-garde in theatre, cinema and literature. Should the reader’s interest flag over such titles as Surrealism and Super-realism, Saint Artaud (of the Theatre of the Absurd fame) or Robbe-Grillet and the Ludic Novel (Ludic formed from ludo, ‘I play’,-or should it be ludicrous?) he can always whip his flagging interest by playing voyeur to intellectualized sex. Thus, about Robbe-Grillet’s torture scene, where the operator sets fire to a bundle of horsehair glued to his victim’s vagina, we learn that the ‘complexity. .. lies in the multiplicity of the items manipulated and their polyvalent relations to each other’. Neither Weightman nor Robbe-Grillet mention the attendant chemically polyvalent stink. While it is hard to be gripped by accounts of theatrical events long ago witnessed, Weightman’s subtle insights are provocative. For example, I learn that Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, ~ *The Old Parsonage, Eye, Leominster, Herefordshire, England. in which I saw Laurence Olivier play, to my mind brilliantly, was not about Nazism or Communism, as I naively thought: the rhinoceros, Weightman claims, is ‘too vague to be satisfactory’. Having seen a 4-ton rhino on the move...