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Wyndham Lewis Literary Work-OUT.Indd Ana Gabriela Vilela Pereira de Macedo Wyndham Lewis’s Literary Work 1908-1928 Vorticism, Futurism and the Poetics of the Avant-Garde To Claudio Every Year 1 Now, in this night in which I love you White clouds skim across the heavens without a sound And the waters snarl over the pebbles And the wind shudders along the barren ground. 2 White waters go trickling Downhill every year. Up in the heavens The clouds are always there. 3 Later, when the years grow lonely Clouds, white clouds, will still be found. And the waters will snarl over the pebbles And the wind shudder along the barren ground. Bertolt Brecht WWyndhamyndham LLewisewis LLiteraryiterary WWork-OUT.inddork-OUT.indd 5 110-11-20140-11-2014 008:26:018:26:01 WWyndhamyndham LLewisewis LLiteraryiterary WWork-OUT.inddork-OUT.indd 6 110-11-20140-11-2014 008:26:018:26:01 Acknowledgements I wish to thank the guidance, endless support and extreme kind- ness that Dr. Geof Hemstedt demonstrated towards me, since the early days of my arrival at the University of Sussex as a foreign postgraduate student, until the completion of my doctorate. I wish to invoke the memory of Dr. Allon White, who was to me a precious friend and an inexhaustible source of intellectual support and encouragement. I wish to thank Dr. Alistair Davies for his help and guidance during part of my research. I am indebted to Dr. Robert Young, and Dr. Chris Wagstaff for reading and commenting on parts of my work, and giving me incentive to pursue it. I must also thank the staff of the University of Sussex Library for their efficient and kind assistance at all times of my research. The accomplishment of this thesis would however never have been possible without the support of the Universidade do Minho in Portugal and the Scholarship of the Gulbenkian Foundation. To my parents, all my friends, and especially the community of Sussex graduates, my gratitude for their solidarity and infinite encouragement. WWyndhamyndham LLewisewis LLiteraryiterary WWork-OUT.inddork-OUT.indd 7 110-11-20140-11-2014 008:26:028:26:02 WWyndhamyndham LLewisewis LLiteraryiterary WWork-OUT.inddork-OUT.indd 8 110-11-20140-11-2014 008:26:028:26:02 Wyndham Lewis’s Literary Work 1908-1928; Vorticism, Futurism and the Poetics of the Avant-Garde SUMMARY The focus of this thesis is Wyndham Lewis’s early literary work, namely: The Wild Body, an anthology of stories mainly written in the pre-war years and revised in 1927, Tarr, a semi-autobio- graphical Vorticist novel first published in 1918, and Enemy of the Stars, a Vorticist play first published in the magazine Blast in 1914. These texts are studied in the context of the Vorticist movement, of which Lewis was a leader and main entrepreneur and also in connection with the principles and manifestos of the Futurist movement. The methodology used draws on the work of Julia Kristeva on the poetics of the avant-garde for the analysis of the vorticist/futurist “revolution in language”, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “carnivalesque literary genre”. Thus, the texts by Lewis referred to above will be analysed in the light of the concepts of popular and modernist grotesque, carnivalesgue and polyphony. The poetics and politics of Wyndham Lewis’s vorticist discourse are here analysed and understood as aesthetics of challenge and provocation, transgressive in its incorporation of society’s own fragmentation and ideological crisis, rather than as an aesthetics of compensation within the context of Modernity. WWyndhamyndham LLewisewis LLiteraryiterary WWork-OUT.inddork-OUT.indd 9 110-11-20140-11-2014 008:26:028:26:02 WWyndhamyndham LLewisewis LLiteraryiterary WWork-OUT.inddork-OUT.indd 1100 110-11-20140-11-2014 008:26:028:26:02 Contents 7 Acknowledgements 9 Summary 15 Foreword 17 Introduction 27 PART I 29 CHAPTER ONE JULIA KRISTEVA AND THE POETICS OF THE AVANT-GARDE AND MIKHAIL BAKHTIN’S THEORY OF THE NOVEL 30 1. Julia Kristeva and the Revolution of Poetic Language 33 1.1. Kristeva’s theory of language 37 1.2. Manifestations of the pre-symbolic in avant-garde poetics 39 2. “Une littérature à venir”; Futurism and the “future anterior of language” 44 3. A critique of Kristeva’s poetics of the avant-garde 51 4. Mikhail Bakhtin, his Circle and theory of the novel 53 5. The concept of dialogism 59 5.1. Carnival 61 5.2. Carnival Laughter 63 5.3. Carnival; the “communal performance” and the “masquerade culture” 64 6. Conclusion 69 CHAPTER TWO FUTURISM 69 1. Futurism; Italian and Russian 73 2. The influence of late 19th century French poetry 79 3. Futurism: aesthetics and ethic of the movement 79 3.1. Futurism: origins and first manifestos WWyndhamyndham LLewisewis LLiteraryiterary WWork-OUT.inddork-OUT.indd 1111 110-11-20140-11-2014 008:26:028:26:02 84 Painting 85 Music 87 Photography 88 Sculpture 90 3.2. The Futurist revolution in language 103 3.3. Futurist Stage Manifestos 113 3.4. The banner “War, the World’s Only Hygiene” and futurist misogyny 139 CHAPTER THREE THE VORTICIST MOVEMENT, BLAST, AND THE RECEPTION OF FUTURISM IN ENGLAND 139 1. The reception of Futurism in England 144 2. The Rebel Art Centre 151 3. Blast and the launching of Vorticism 153 4. The Reception of Blast and Vorticism 157 5. The Vorticist Manifestos 166 6. The Blast Manifesto 168 7. Futurism and Vorticism reviewed 171 8.1. The aesthetical and philosophical context of Vorticism; 171 the influence of T. E. Hulme 176 8.2. Bergson and Nietzsche 181 PART II 183 CHAPTER FOUR THE WILD BODY 183 1. The making of “The Wild Body” 185 2. Lewis on Satire 188 3.1. Visual and narrative satire and the problem of representation 190 3.2. The “Tyros” 192 4. “A Soldier of Humour” and the identity of “The Wild Body”’s narrator 198 5. The carnivalized language of “The Wild Body” 205 6. “Bestre” 212 7. Beau-Séjour 212 8. “Sigismund”. “The Death of the Ankou” and “Franciscan Adventures” WWyndhamyndham LLewisewis LLiteraryiterary WWork-OUT.inddork-OUT.indd 1122 110-11-20140-11-2014 008:26:028:26:02 217 9. “The Cornac and His Wife” 223 10. “Brotcotnaz” 228 11. Conclusion 231 CHAPTER FIVE TARR 232 1. Satire in Tarr 235 2. Tarr, the showman as the narrator’s alter-ego 243 3. The representation of the rape 249 Sex and Power 251 4. Kreisler 255 5. Dialogism and Hybridization in “Tarr” 257 6. Carnival in “Tarr” 259 Crowning and decrowning 261 The Threshold in the Novel 263 7. Conclusion 265 CHAPTER SIX ENEMY OF THE STARS – A THESIS AND A PERFORMANCE 265 1. The play – an introduction 266 2. The play’s dialoqism 280 3. The Modernist grotesque style of “Enemy of the Stars” 282 4. The structure and style of the play 289 5.1. The theatrical structure of the play 296 5.2. Enemy of the Stars and the “Futurist Theatre” 300 6. Conclusion 303 CONCLUSION 311 Appendix I 313 Appendix II 316 Appendix III 321 Appendix IV 323 Appendix V 325 Bibliography WWyndhamyndham LLewisewis LLiteraryiterary WWork-OUT.inddork-OUT.indd 1133 110-11-20140-11-2014 008:26:028:26:02 WWyndhamyndham LLewisewis LLiteraryiterary WWork-OUT.inddork-OUT.indd 1144 110-11-20140-11-2014 008:26:028:26:02 FOREWORD 1914 saw the launching of Blast, the bright pink magazine which claimed to be the Review of the great English Vortex, that announced to the world the outburst of Vorticism, probably the only recognizable face of the English Avant-Garde, a move- ment that grew at exactly the same time as the world was being overwhelmed by the roaring sound of the cannons of the most bloodstained of wars, the First World War. One hundred years have gone past each of these indissolubly linked events, at least in as much as aesthetics and politics can be considered proxi- mate, but very poignantly so if we pause to consider the num- ber of artists and writers who fought in this war and died on the front and in the trenches. Thus, the word commemoration while substantially appropriate in one case, is totally perverse and almost disrespectful when the abyss and the carnage of the other are evoked. Evocation of the latter is probably the more just word for all it stands for in terms of preserving memory and vindicating humanist values. Vorticism and Futurism, Wyndham Lewis and Marinetti, one the founder and key figure in art and literature of the English movement, the other the self-proclaimed “caffeine of Europe”! Difficult to tell apart, when the role, the pose and the perfor- mance of each of them is considered, but totally antagonistic figures, with the animosity and the malignancy twin brothers can have against each other! “Futurism as preached by Mari- netti, is largely Impressionism up-to-date. To this is added his Automobilism and Nietzsche stunt”, proclaimed Lewis in “The 15 WWyndhamyndham LLewisewis LLiteraryiterary WWork-OUT.inddork-OUT.indd 1155 110-11-20140-11-2014 008:26:028:26:02 ANA GABRIELA VILELA PEREIRA DE MACEDO Melodrama of Modernity” (Blast 1, p.143). And he further claimed “Futurism (…) is a picturesque, superficial and roman- tic rebellion of young Milanese painters against the Academism which surrounded them” (Ibid.). And yet one can hardly ignore the strident language and the vibrancy of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto when reading the Blast Manifesto. The publication of this thesis in its original form is meant to make available for further consideration and analysis the research done on a particularly controversial literary and artistic movement, crucial in the making of Modernity in England and in bringing to the fore its links with the European Avant-Garde, namely Futurism, from a comparativist perspective.
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