Paul Goodman's "Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals"
I asked Henry Abelove who were his intellectual guiding lights in his youth, and he cited Paul Goodman. What a surprise! I found Paul Goodman at Sarah Lawrence and consumed his poetry and essays on education. After hearing HA's answer, I bought Goodman's Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals. The most striking aspect of this book is how Goodman manages to be both so logical and so imaginative. Whether he is discussing pornography, writer's block, making pacifist films, or banning cars from Manhattan, he is both persuasive and surprising. His imagination is not bounded by logic, and his logic is not softened by imagination. Some of the essays here are outdated, but the thinking behind them remains fresh and interesting.
About advance-guard writing in America (and how commonsensical is the use of the English expression, instead of its pretentious French counterpart), Goodman writes as a committed writer himself:
"An artists does not know that he is advance-guard, he must be told so or learn it from the reaction of the audience. All original composition—classical, standard, or advance-guard—occurs at the limits of the artist's knowledge, feeling, and technique. Being a spontaneous act, it risks, supported by what one has already grown up to, something unknown. The action of all art accepts an inner problem and concentrates on a sensuous medium. Obviously if one has an inner problem, one does not know beforehand the coming solution of it; and concentrating on the medium, one is surprised beyond oneself. Art-working is always just beyond what one can control, and the thing"does not turn out the way I planned." (In the best cases it is just beyond what one can control, and one has indeed learned to control the previous adventures up to that point, has acquired, as the ancients used to say, the habit of art that now again, in act, is in a present and therefore novel urgency.) Thus, whatever the subsequent social evaluation of a work—it may be quite traditional—to the creative artist as he makes it, it is always new and daring, and he cannot be morally or politically responsible for it. How could he be responsible, if he does not know what it will be? And further, the more powerfully spontaneous the working, the more he himself as a moral being will resist and disclaim it; a poet says what he does not wish to hear said. (Of course he is responsible artistically, to let the coming figure form with the utmost clarity and unity.)"
And he argues for the social purpose of advance-guard writing in this manner:
"But finally, the essential aim of our advance-guard must be the physical re-establishment of community. This is to solve the crisis of alienation in the simple way. If the persons are estranged from one another, from themselves, and from their artist, he takes the initiative precisely by putting his arms around them and drawing them together. In literary terms, this means: to write for them about them personally, and so break the roles and format they are huddled in....
As soon as the intimate community does exist—whether geographically or not is not essential—and the artist writes for it about it, the advance-guard at once becomes a genre of the highest integrated art, namely Occasional poetry, the poetry celebrating weddings, commencements, and local heroes. "Occasional poetry," said Goethe, "is the highest kind"—for it give real and detailed subject matter, it is closest in its effect on the audience, and it poses the enormous problem of being plausible to the actuality and yet creatively imagining something unlooked-for."
About advance-guard writing in America (and how commonsensical is the use of the English expression, instead of its pretentious French counterpart), Goodman writes as a committed writer himself:
"An artists does not know that he is advance-guard, he must be told so or learn it from the reaction of the audience. All original composition—classical, standard, or advance-guard—occurs at the limits of the artist's knowledge, feeling, and technique. Being a spontaneous act, it risks, supported by what one has already grown up to, something unknown. The action of all art accepts an inner problem and concentrates on a sensuous medium. Obviously if one has an inner problem, one does not know beforehand the coming solution of it; and concentrating on the medium, one is surprised beyond oneself. Art-working is always just beyond what one can control, and the thing"does not turn out the way I planned." (In the best cases it is just beyond what one can control, and one has indeed learned to control the previous adventures up to that point, has acquired, as the ancients used to say, the habit of art that now again, in act, is in a present and therefore novel urgency.) Thus, whatever the subsequent social evaluation of a work—it may be quite traditional—to the creative artist as he makes it, it is always new and daring, and he cannot be morally or politically responsible for it. How could he be responsible, if he does not know what it will be? And further, the more powerfully spontaneous the working, the more he himself as a moral being will resist and disclaim it; a poet says what he does not wish to hear said. (Of course he is responsible artistically, to let the coming figure form with the utmost clarity and unity.)"
And he argues for the social purpose of advance-guard writing in this manner:
"But finally, the essential aim of our advance-guard must be the physical re-establishment of community. This is to solve the crisis of alienation in the simple way. If the persons are estranged from one another, from themselves, and from their artist, he takes the initiative precisely by putting his arms around them and drawing them together. In literary terms, this means: to write for them about them personally, and so break the roles and format they are huddled in....
As soon as the intimate community does exist—whether geographically or not is not essential—and the artist writes for it about it, the advance-guard at once becomes a genre of the highest integrated art, namely Occasional poetry, the poetry celebrating weddings, commencements, and local heroes. "Occasional poetry," said Goethe, "is the highest kind"—for it give real and detailed subject matter, it is closest in its effect on the audience, and it poses the enormous problem of being plausible to the actuality and yet creatively imagining something unlooked-for."
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