The idea that the avant-garde has failed and that one must back track is absurd. The avant-garde must by definition fail, because each writer must go to the ultimate conclusion of his or her ideas. Each writer must continue to progress in his/her chosen direction.
“I’m filled with the sadness that afflicted the Roman patricians of the fourth century: I feel irredeemable barbarism rising from the bowels of the earth. …I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.”
Gustave Flaubert | in a letter to Ivan Turgenev