Beyond the Fashionable

...One of the more amusing aspects of Weightman's book, which he is wryly aware of, is the spectacle of the scholarly, sober, middle-aged, eminently common-sensical critic who in the course of his regular theater and movie rounds is incessantly exposed to "four-letter words, displays of pudenda, galumphing animality," then rushes home to write about the libidinous extravaganzas with calm detachment...

...The book's main focus comes from its long, ambitious title essay, and Weightman is first-rate on the history of avant-gardist thought, which he traces back to such figures of the French Enlightenment as Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot...

...The chic critical piety that "the boringness of the New Novel is a feature of its authenticity" quite properly strikes him as pretentious nonsense, for "if the aim of art were simply to reproduce the boringness of life, there would be no need for it...

...But if Weightman's title piece does noi...

...To be sure, some scholars and literary critics—Renato Poggioli, Irving Howe and Harold Rosenberg, among others—have made valuable and perceptive contributions toward a more precise definition of avant-gardism, and of such woolly synonyms as modernism and experimentalism...

...It is not uncommon," Weightman writes, "to come across modern artists who are convinced that the less they know and the more empty they can make their minds, the nearer they are to the unsullied purity of human nature...

...Thus, one must make one's own shift of tense when Weightman asks: "How has it come about that there is now such an obsession with change, such an urge to hurry it on, often in extreme and irrational ways, such as a desire, as it were, to soup-up time's winged chariot...

...It is this refusal to be deceived by the soi-disant originality of so much contemporary art— his uncanny genius for ferreting out the constricting narrowness and imaginative poverty behind esthetic dogmatism—that makes John Weightman one of the most uniquely instructive and illuminating critical voices to be heard today...

...His judgments are never predictable...

...To a professor of literature, what was especially alarming about the '60s and its commitment to change for its own sake was the corollary idea—expressed in its most way-out form by that much-revered avant-garde figure of the '30s, Antonin Artaud—that "the masterpieces of the past are good for the past...

...Calcutta...

...What the advocates of this intellectual primitivism forgot—or defiantly chose to ignore—was Weightman's point that man's "so-called nature has included such a bewildering variety of customs, attitudes, beliefs, and artistic products that it is impossible for any one person to comprehend more than a very small part of the possible range...

...Discussing a London performance of the Living Theatre's Frankenstein, he describes the "very fash'on-able and intellectual audience of pop-personalities, actors and writers, most of them in bright plumage...

...Sarraute...

...This notion was then expanded to mean that, for human beings, animality is somehow more authentic than culture...

...Because Weightman was writing in the heat of the '60s, his lead essay neglects the last ironic metamorphosis of that particular avant-garde decade, brilliantly described by Irving Howe...

...But the workaday critics of the performing arts, notably those in film and drama, have for the most part been unwilling (or unable) to probe the meaning of a word they so freely use in their tireless search for freshness...

...Now Weightman's diverse and fascinating interests have been brought together in The Concept of the Avant-Garde: Explorations in Modernism (Library Press/Open Court, 323 pp., $9.95), a fine collection that ranges from a theoretical and historical discussion of avant-gardism to studies of Gide and Rousseau, reviews of recent plays and movies, and some sharp and incontrovertible reflections on the French nouveau roman...

...In the 1960s distinct cultural moods—what the mass media would call "explosions"—rose and fell with such dizzying speed that an essay written in and about that decade can by 1973 appear to refer to an era of the distant past...

...And though Weight-man can detect an unexpected charm and directness in the Warhol movie Flesh, he scathingly brands the later Trash as "just another spontaneous boil on the face of contemporary American culture...

...Dennis Hopper's and Peter Fonda's pastoral poetry of alienation was gobbled up by the urban crowds, because nothing in the film truly offended their industrialized philjstin-ism...

...Although observations like these had a special timeliness in the '60s, several of Weightman's ideas about the implications of avant-garde thinking continue to merit our attention, for they get to the heart of certain confusions about esthetic judgment and human nature that are still part of the cultural scene, even if in attenuated and less frenetic form...

...He is not taken in by the seductive "sincerity" of the smash hippie movie Easy Rider, either, knowing better than most critics that "alienation can be genuine, without leading to total honesty of thought...

...Moreover, he demolishes Robbe-Grillet's imperious defense of the "ludic" (a fashionable neologism for "playful") principle in art...

...life itself would suffice...

...Weightman is especially shrewd about Mme...

...Similarly, in his discussion of Robbe-Grillet, Weight-man complains that the puzzling linguistic structures "provide me with little enlightenment and give me practically no pleasure...

...The middle class has discovered that the fiercest attacks upon its values can be transposed into pleasing entertainments...

...Certainly there is no one in this country to compare with the British critic John Weightman, who writes regularly for Encounter and is also a professor of French literature at the University of London...

...What has saved Weightman from collapsing in helpless laughter (or despair) at this situation is his deft ability to place all the flood-lit sexuality in his own witty, often profound context: After an orgy of movie-going that included Straw Dogs, Carnal Knowledge and Klute, Weightman remarks that "The rough, ugly, hairy, contemporary hero may be trying to look pubic all over, but he is not simply a set of walking genitalia, as someone has claimed...

...He repudiates the author's pompous paradox that "a writer is someone who has nothing to say," unabashedly admitting that he is "the sort of pedant who wants a writer to say something...

...And very profitable ones, too, for in the intellectual history of modernism the road to extinction is paved with box-office success...

...To exaggerate the animal within oneself is to do something beyond the scope of any animal...

...they are no good for us...

...THE VOLUME concludes with two marvelously astute essays on the New Novel that say far more about the respective failings of Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet than anything else I have read on the subject...

...Despite the elaborate theoretical huff-fing and puffing that she has expended on her tropis-mes—her collages of minute details and tiny responses that constitute what she believes to be the fundamental undifferentiated reality common to everyone—Weight-man does not hesitate to say, straight out, that her work bores him...

...to Lucky's torrent of gibberish in Waiting for Godot...

...This is not exactly what Sam Peckinpah or Mike Nichols had in mind, but it is far more interesting than any of the ideas they exhibit in their films...

...It is rare indeed to find a practicing movie and theater reviewer who can bring to his nightly judgments genuine cultivation and scholarship...

...By reducing everything to a game, by insisting that there are no necessary human principles, Weightman argues, Robbe-Grillet in fact equates the artist with the professional sportsman, whose "activities are inferior to serious art or serious thought, because they take place within a given narrow and arbitrarily defined field...

...directly confront that final farcical phase, his reviews of individual plays, films and novels display an acute consciousness of it...

...Waiters & Writing BEYOND THE FASHIONABLE BY PEARL K. BELL IN CONTEMPORARY criticism, few terms are used more often and more loosely than "avant-garde," that large, battered umbrella covering everything from the nudity of Oh...

...It is a pity, however, that in the sections dealing with recent artistic phenomena, so many of his remarks seem so dated...

...Weightman notes that if this doctrine were taken literally, "museums, libraries and most theaters and concert-halls would be closed down, the discussion of literature in the universities would come to an end...

...For example, much "new and original" art of the '60s was hailed as being more "true to nature" than the classics...

...In the war between modernist culture and bourgeois society, something has happened recently that no spokesman for the avant-garde quite anticipated...