Avant-garde in Modernism
Etymology time, Shmoopers! This brain snack is cool: the term "Avant-garde" comes from French military terminology. It refers to the front line of soldiers, the vanguard, who are out in front of the rest (which is a super-dangerous place to be).
It also refers to creating new art. This was also dangerous, both figuratively and sometimes even literally. Writers were taking their positions on the battle lines, fighting against the forces of the outmoded traditions to offend, upend, and destroy the surviving vestiges of the old order. Out with the old, in with the new.
Artistic experimentation wasn't just about getting attention, but about creating a new role for art and artists and helping to bring a new order into being. These guys were playing for pretty high stakes.
We're supposed to be talking about literature here, but Modernism tends to blur the lines between media. Maybe that's because Modernist writers hung out with visual artists all the time, and these kinds of art tended to cross-pollinate.
Crazy-pants artistic movements like Cubism and Surrealism definitely influenced writers. If visual artists could paint from all angles at once, or paint their dreams, what was stopping their literary pals from doing the same?
Nothing but tradition, that's what. And Modernists weren't keen on the same ol' same ol'.
Chew On This
Heard of Finnegan's Wake? Notice we said, "heard of" not "read": it's generally acknowledged to be unreadable (something that didn't keep the authorities, ever suspicious of such subversive efforts, from claiming that it was obscene!). It's almost impossible to read Joyce's book without a dozen reference texts and dictionaries in several languages. What could the point of such dizzying confusion-making be?
Take a gander at the strange poems in Gertrude Stein's collection Tender Buttons. It's crazy-weird, and, like Finnegan's Wake, it requires its own Wiki to contain all the references it makes to other (older) literature. If Avant-garde works like this require knowledge of conventional literary history, are they really as new as they pretend to be?