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The way I see it, the avant-garde emerged at a point when the professionalisation of artists had consumed itself and it became necessary to start again from scratch Art had already been invented, and the only thing to be done was to go on producing works, and the myth of the avant-garde came about to restore the possibility of making the journey from the origin again   If the actual process had taken two or three thousand years, what the avant-garde proposed could only function as a simulacrum or a pantomime version, hence the ludic, or at any rate the not-too-serious quality, the carnivalesque instability which avant-garde movements have possessed But history abhors stable situations, and the avant-garde was the response of a social practice – art – the purpose of which was to recreate an evolutionary dynamic   In effect, once the ‘professional’ novel – if we limit ourselves to the art of the novel – had come into existence, in a state of perfection that cannot exceed its premises (the novel of Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Manzoni), it runs the risk of becoming congealed One could say that if the only risk is that novelists might keep on writing like Balzac, then it is a risk we are willing to take, and with pleasure But in reality it’s optimistic to talk of a mere ‘risk’ because this process of congealment has actually taken place Thousands of novelists have continued to write Balzacian novels during the twentieth century: an unending stream of commercial fiction, fleeting, frivolous novels written for the purposes of either entertainment or ideology To take even a single step further, as Proust did, requires a colossal effort and the sacrifice of an entire life The law of diminishing returns comes into play: the innovator covers almost all the ground in his initial attempt, leaving his successors a space that gets smaller every day and in which it’s more and more difficult to move forward   Once a professional novelist is established, he has two equally melancholy alternatives: to keep writing the ‘old’ novels in updated settings; or to heroically attempt to take