It strikes me that I've perhaps been talking
about the avant-garde as if it was somehow sectioned off
from the rest of literature
behind a perimeter fence of some kind
when that is not the case.
The avant-garde is actually part of the body
of literature, of writing.
And you will find
that things that were immensely avant-garde in their day
will carry out a slow passage
to the very heart of writing, the very heart of culture
until they're everywhere.
I mean, perhaps the first
modernist or postmodern novel
although it certainly wasn't seen as that at the time
would be Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy
where it is
the narrator, Tristram Shandy himself
is attempting to tell his life story.
However, he becomes so digressive
that he doesn't get past his birth.
This is an incredibly modern, and incredibly funny technique.
Very avant-garde at its time.
Another thing would be, say, Virginia Woolf
in her novel Mrs Dalloway
where she introduced the stream of consciousness technique.
Now, what this is
it's where you're inside a character's thoughts
and where you are pursuing them thought by thought.
The things that something reminds them of, momentarily.
It's a very compelling
rush of experience
that since Virginia Woolf introduced it
has been used by everybody
from the beat writers to the cyberpunks.
It is now right at the centre of literature
and is something that is there for any writer to utilise
whenever they want.
There are lots of other examples.
Marcel Proust
in his...
Remembrance of Things Past.
He was actually
the first person to write about memory
in that way.
Turns out that... he was ahead of the game
and that memory as we currently understand it
works exactly the way that, er, Proust said that it did.
These are things that pervade our culture now
but when they started
they were seen as radical and different and strange.
Actually
in most normal literature
if I can call it that
in most everyday writing
you will find that using avant-garde techniques
in otherwise non-avant-garde writing
can be like adding a vital pinch of spice.
It can bring the flavour of an entire work alive.
Just by making some slight change
to the way that you present it
it can make old ideas suddenly new again.
So yes, the avant-garde is vital
and it doesn't have to be as repellent
to a regular, average audience
as it is depicted as being.
Something that always particularly impressed me
from the age of about 12 or 13
was Patrick McGoohan's extraordinary television series
The Prisoner
where it was as avant-garde as hell.
It was relentlessly modernistic.
It was using all sorts of strange
shifting levels of reality.
Modern approaches to psychology.
Things that for mainstream television
in the '60s were completely unheard of
and yet, somehow
Patrick McGoohan actually got this thing commissioned
and it certainly wasn't repellent
to the audience of the day.
Although it was dealing with all of these
strange, unprecedented things
it had got an incredibly wide audience
that seemed to go across all of the class barriers
that people were discussing
the philosophy, the meaning of The Prisoner
when they were in the newsagent's
buying a packet of cigarettes.
It was a wonderful example
of how the avant-garde
can be introduced into mainstream culture
and that is certainly a technique
that you should not ignore.
Be seeing you.