breaking of that flesh into morsels that do not have their own integrity
or meaning any more, but the integrity and meaning of the biter, the
deconstructionist. The greatest appreciator of “beauty” in the postmod-
ern cinema is Hannibal Lecter, the “cannibal lecteur”, the Dahmer-
deconstructionist who likes to have his friends for dinner with a nice
Chianti. Lecteuris French for “reader,” as in T.S. Eliot’s quotation of
Baudelaire’s early modernist phrase: “Hypocrite lecteur—mon sem-
blable—mon frère!” Hypocrite reader—my mirror-image—my brother!
But all is not lost. New classicists are aiming to restore the pleasure
of the arts.
One way of defining the new movement is in terms of a return to tra-
ditional forms, genres, and techniques in the arts. In “serious” music
there is a recovery of the deep pan-human roots of melody, a renewed
interest in worldwide folk music, a focus on the immediacy of perform-
ance, improvisation, and the context of audience and performer, and a
disillusionment with Schoenberg’s theories of seriality and the twelve-
tone row, with the atonality of Stockhausen and his followers. In archi-
tecture and landscape design there is a renewed attention to the classical
languages of building, ornament, fittingness to the environment, and
humane proportions.
In visual arts there is a return to representation, to landscape and the
figure, a rejection of the modernist authority of abstraction, and a turn
away from the idea of art as the ideological enemy of ordinary human
life. In poetry there is a wave of renewed interest in poetic meter, rhyme,
and clear storytelling, a questioning of the role of poetry as therapeutic
private expression, and a return to the great public themes of enduring
human interest. Modernist critics of the new formalism have suggested
that versification is elitist, but have been staggered by the rejoinder that
it is free verse that is confined to a small group of academic cognoscenti,
while meter and rhyme are the normal forms for blues and jazz lyrics,
country and western songs, Cole Porter songs, rap, and Broadway musi-
cals. In theater there is a renewal of the audience’s ability to feel concern
about the fate of the characters. In fiction there has been a swing toward
storytelling and “moral fiction,” identifiable characters and plot and
theme and setting.
In painting and sculpture the new art has been dubbed “visionary
realism.” The new art does not make a fetish of exactly representing
gritty reality, although many of its landscapes, portraits and still-lifes are
exquisitely detailed. The realism is rather a revelation of the psycholog-
ical, spiritual, and cultural meanings that burn beneath the surface of the
world. A central term associated with the new movement is “classi-
A Changing of the Avant Guard 135