Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Bukowski, Charles - Julian Smith (essay date 1985)

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Julian Smith (essay date 1985)

SOURCE: “Charles Bukowski and the Avant-Garde,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 5, No. 3, Fall, 1985, pp. 56-9.

[In the following essay, Smith discusses the humor in Bukowski's short stories.]

What is the avant-garde? A cultural elite, making Advanced or High Art, but it is also a tradition of the untraditional. Precedents exist for virtually every avant-garde eccentricity or innovation. As Roland Barthes puts it, “The avant-garde is never anything but the progressive, emancipated form of past culture.” While it may become politicized (during the Vietnam War, even “the gloriously impertinent Bukowski” was temporarily radicalized), it is typically individualist, antiformal, anarchistic. Bohemian life-styles, épater les bourgeois, the alienation (psychological, ethical, economic) of the artist from society: Bukowski's writing echoes all these attitudes.

Bukowski's opposition...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Thomas R. Edwards (review date 1972)
   2. David Evanier (review date 1973)
   3. William Feaver (review date 1974)
   4. Peter Ackroyd (review date 1974)
   5. Michael F. Harper (review date 1983)
   6. Carole Mansur (review date 1984)
   7. David Montrose (review date 1984)
   8. Julian Smith (essay date 1985)
   9. Norman Weinstein (essay date 1985)
   10. Russell Harrison (essay date 1994)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright