I don’t think the avant-garde applies in this country, anyhow. I think it’s a whole different kind of thing that goes on here. Because the continental avant-garde was, first of all, elitist. It depended on the existence of a literary class, which we don’t have here, not in the same sense as you have there. It implies a militant approach, it implies leaders and followers. What we have here is much more diffuse throughout the country at large.
“On the whole, people had shown less resourcefulness and flexibility, less foresight, than a wild bird or animal would. Their basic survival had been so dulled, so overlaid by mechanisms designed to serve secondary appetites, that they were totally unable to protect themselves. They were the helpless victims of a deep-rooted optimism about their right to survival, their dominance of the natural order which would guarantee them against everything but their own folly, that they had made gross assumptions about their own superiority.”
J. G. Ballard | Wind From Nowhere