Avant Garde & the Widowed Image

What’s left of the avant-garde–there isn’t much because anything can be packaged and made mainstream in this county–continues to insist on the (highly problematical) concepts of innovation and marginality. The old is relegated to the dustbin of history, and the new is briefly given its moment, usually by an outsider. This set of ideas replicates the production, use, and waste model of industrial consumption and capitalism. It also claims to be an attack on the bourgeoisie, but it uses a commodity model from free enterprise capitalism, and it packages itself with outrage. Outrage sells. Commercially successful commodified outrage is dubious but by no means unknown category in American culture. One branch of the avant-garde has always thrived on throwing things out. To make it new, you have to haul the garbage away, and, in this particular ideology, there’s a lot of garbage. Against this model of aesthetic clear-cutting one could propose a kind of ecology aesthetics, opposed to the obsession with innovation and waste.

-Burning Down the House. Charles Baxter. Page 30.

…I want to cite an idea from the notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins concerning the nature of the obsessive image, the “widowed” image, the image that sticks in the memory as if glued there…Hopkins appeared to believe that images became memorable  when some crucial part of their meaning had been stripped from them…Hopkins describes these obsessive images of objects as things for which he has not “found the law.” They are unfulfilled in meaning, but they take up a lot of room in the memory as if in compensation. They seem both gratuitous and inexplicably necessary.

Charles Baxter. Page 30