“It is to criticism that the future belongs”
– Oscar Wilde[1]
“In protesting the independence of criticism,
Wilde sounds like an ancestral …Roland Barthes”
– Richard Ellmann[2]
“Postmodern is not to be taken in the periodizing sense”
– Jean-François Lyotard[3]
The above three quotations delineate the typography of a particular trajectory within literary theory which covers more or less the entire span of the twentieth century. Wilde’s prediction in 1891 seems to find its answer in Lyotard’s claim less than a hundred years later that postmodernism must not in any way be understood as a temporal marker, but rather as an aesthetic attitude or position. For, if we are ‘in’ the postmodern we are in it precisely because we always already inhabit the possibility of its recognition, presentation or expression. As such, texts or artworks that predate the critical emergence of the term can nevertheless be understood to be postmodern – and usefully so. For it gives us permission to name, once again, though differently, perhaps, a particular phenomenon, or a particular convergence of phenomena; one we most typically name the avant garde. In this essay I would like to use the above three quotations as markers for the trajectory of my argument. In this sense, I will be using Wilde and Lyotard as both meetings points and end points for an arc that loops around to create a circuit, or a band, upon which – or within which – we might usefully place the concept of the postmodern/avant garde in ways which will shed light upon the notion of the untimely. I would suggest that the postmodern and the untimely are, in short, other ways of naming and apprehending the avant garde as that which emerges without consensus, but which contains within it the criteria for its own assessment. As Ellmann comments, Wilde seems, in his formulation of a new kind of art-criticism, to express something that Roland Barthes would develop sixty odd years later[4]: the self-sufficiency of criticism as an end in itself, or as a new form of aesthetic expression. In this sense, Wilde’s work will be understood as posthumous, or untimely.[5] That is, avant garde. Keep Reading
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