Journal of Modern Literature

Passage between Anglo-American and European notions of the avant-garde has never been easy; indeed, with the publication in English of Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde in 1984, readers in Britain and America were suddenly invited to see their literary traditions as singularly lacking in genuine avant-garde activity. Bürger's book proposed a radical differentiation of the two previously cognate terms, modernism and the avant-garde, construing twentieth-century culture as a falling away from the achievements of the historical avant-gardes (dada and surrealism) into the compromised domain of the merely "new." The dust of ensuing debates has settled now, of course, and Bürger's argument seems less compelling and more contradictory than it once did. At the same time, though, the terms he put in play may help us to understand how American writers have sometimes found that it is only through the failure or "death" of the avant-garde that an authentically 'new' poetics has been able to emerge. My example here is George Oppen, a poet whose scepticism about the avant-garde is worth taking seriously in view of his parallel commitment to a poetics of the new. Why did Oppen, with his left-wing politics and his unshakeable belief in the transformative power of poetry, distance himself so deliberately from any claim to avant-gardism?

One answer to that question lies in Oppen's complicated reaction to an event that took place in 1969. On March 21 of that year, the Living Theater group organised by Julian Beck and Judith Malina held a symposium on "Theater or Therapy?" at the Friends Meeting House on Gramercy Square in New York.¹ Advocates of anarchy, drugs and nudity, The Living Theater had by this time achieved notoriety for their commitment to a spontaneous, Artaudian aesthetic that sought "pure theater" in the violent conflation of art and reality.² [End Page 1] Some five hundred people attended the event, including Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Stephen Spender, Stanley Kunitz and Norman Mailer. Reactions to The Living Theater's tactics were mixed, however. Critic Robert Brustein, who had previously praised the group for its ability to, as he put it, "break down barriers between what was going on onstage and what was going on in life," now spoke critically of their "anti-intellectual" bias (Tytell 158, 257–8).³ Brustein's contribution to the panel was followed by one from Paul Goodman who in "cautious and moderately conservative tone" argued that contemporary America was confronting not a revolutionary moment but one analogous to the Protestant Reformation. It didn't take long for members of the Living Theater and the Theater of the Absurd to show their disapproval. Discussion was quickly drowned by chants of "Stop analyzing! Start living!"; a woman's fur coat was seized and handbags overturned in the auditorium. Bent on destroying "illusory" theatrical space and ensuring that spectators "confront the real world through conscious decision-making" (Aronson 120), actors roamed the crowd, screaming obscenities at the audience and the speakers and spitting at everyone they encountered.

Caught up in the mêlée was Harvey Shapiro, poet, editor of the New York Times Magazine, and an old friend of George Oppen. Two days later, Shapiro wrote Oppen a letter in which he puzzled over his own ambivalence toward the events of the evening. He couldn't help feeling, he said, that for all the chaos something portentous had been expressed, particularly in the theater group's aggressive response to one young man who had tried to speak about poetry: "All words," they'd screamed, "dead words by dead people" (Shapiro, Unpublished Letter). The point of the tirade, observed Shapiro, "as far as I can understand it, was to demonstrate that theater is happening all the time, that it does not take place in a theater under authoritarian direction, that it is created by people freed of their blocks, and therefore an evening of discussion (lousy words) such as this is absurd & shd [sic] not take place." The hostility to language and to "discussion" confirmed a tendency in the...