812 Ch. 20 • Responses to a Changing World
the popular theater inevitably playing Gilbert and Sullivan in London or
soapy popular operas in Paris, music halls, military band concerts in Hyde
Park, and the cinema were the stuff of popular culture. The avant-garde
wanted none of it.
Avant-garde artists accepted nothing as absolute, certainly not the tradi
tional forms of cultural expression or morality. Showing Nietzsche’s influ
ence, some sought to transcend the limits of reason and moral purpose. Far
more than even impressionist painters, the turn of the century avant-garde
artists broke with the past. This was, to an extent, a revolt of the young—
because of the rise in population, a larger percentage of the population was
indeed young—and self-consciously so. In Austria, the avant-garde called
themselves “The Young Ones.” They were defiantly “modern,” a term they
embraced with passion. They paid less attention to their subjects than the
response their work would elicit in their audiences. The French playwright
Alfred Jarry (1873—1907) staged the play King Ubuy a mockery of an author
ity figure. The story of an avaricious oaf in desperate search of a crown, the
farce ran one tumultuous night in December 1896; it began with one of the
characters pretending to hurl human waste at the outraged audience.
The avant-garde did not write or paint for everybody. In Paris, a group of
artists and writers called themselves “Bohemians”—gypsy wanderers. These
avant-garde young men gloried in the condition of being outsiders, rebels
against the dominant culture in the way that romanticism had been a revolt
against the classical tastes of court and chateau, even rebels against the
strictures of their own middle-class social origins. They sought to surprise
with their spontaneity and creativity, and even to offend by creating a scan
dal. However, although the proponents of cultural modernism may have
mocked bourgeois “respectability” and popular culture by sporting long hair,
wearing strange clothes, and behaving erratically, they nonetheless sought
public acceptance and patronage of their work.
Many, including a number who were homosexual, celebrated their individ
uality and tried to keep themselves in the public eye. The flamboyant Irish
born poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), whose witty dialogues
greatly improved British comedy, became a symbol of contemporary “decad
ence.” When asked by a customs official if he had anything to declare on
arriving in France, Wilde replied, “Only my genius.” He faced prosecution in
1895 for his sexual orientation and was sentenced to two years’ hard labor
for “immoral conduct.” He died a lonely, premature death in a small Parisian
hotel in 1900.
New musical composition also reflected the contemporary discovery of
the unconscious, as avant-garde composers moved defiantly away from tra
ditional forms. Many abandoned the ordered hierarchical scale, in which
certain tones held precedence. The composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
sought to release in his audience dreams and fantasies, which he believed
could not be distinguished from real life, just as Freud sought to elicit them
from the patients on his office couch. The French pianist and composer