Théophile Gautier

 

Though his role has been almost utterly forgotten within the community today, Théophile Gautier has exercised arguably the greatest influence of anyone over the continuation and self-conception of the avant-garde, for better and for worse. A co-organiser of close to a dozen avant-garde collectives including the Petit-Cénacle, Jeunes-France, Bouzingo, Bôhéme Doyenné, Club de Haschichins, and Parnasse Contemporaine; a publisher of Ultra-Romanticist journals such as the hugely influential l'Artiste; a critic and theorist who tirelessly promoted a wide range of underground and counter-cultural literature and plastic arts; and a key historiographer of the 19th Century avant-garde and its predecessors as far back as the Middle Ages: it is utterly conceivable that without Gautier, the very notion of a countercultural community founded in creative exchange, self-consciously unpopular and dedicated to alternative paradigms of human interaction, would have died out by 1840. i.e., the avant-garde might not exist today at all. The legacy of his influence is ambivalent: on the one hand, he had a guiding hand in nearly every collective effort in the avant-garde from its foundation in the late 1820s until his death half a century later, and worked tirelessly to ensure that the avant-garde would become a permanent community and not merely a one-off fluke that died along with the Bouzingo. On the other hand, he paradoxically became known as the originator of the contemporary avant-garde's opposite: "Art for Art's Sake".
 
Corollary to Gautier's seminal role in the formation of the avant-garde community, his initially radical formulation of Literature and Art as a form of secular religion--what within the French avant-garde was literally called the Cult of Art--gradually degenerated into the proto-Modernist 'Art for Art's Sake', a development which his complete disavowal of political engagement after 1835 did little to discourage. It is no doubt this legacy which caused the Dadaist and Surrealist historiographers to ruthlessly and entirely write him out of the history of the avant-garde, a strategy which, in retrospect, has had disastrous results. Gautier's weaknesses, which have become lodged at the heart of the avant-garde's self conceptions, are no longer under discussion and pass unnoticed; while his strengths have likewise been wiped away and have not been learned from. Moreover, while his disciples such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Jarry, and Huysmans have left dual legacies in both the avant-garde and in mainstream "scholarship", Gautier has been abandoned entirely to the mainstream, who have twisted and distorted him out of all recognition, and completely eliminated from his work and his life everything that he himself held dear: his devotion to community, his lifelong engagement with collective work, the Anti/Theological foundation of his work, his lifelong championing of Romanticism in all of its forms and with all of its currents and counter-currents as an attempt to salvage a kernel of humanity and life from an encroaching industrial society. Gautier has been turned into precisely what he most hated and fought against his entire life: a symbol of literary Legitimacy.