1. Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography (1914-1926) (London: John Calder, 1982), 1. [BACK]

2. And as his biographer Jeffrey Meyers notes, "The sudden reputation and notoriety that Lewis achieved in 1914 as the leader of the Vorticists and editor of Blast had disappeared when peace broke out in 1919." Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 102. [BACK]

3. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering , 5. [BACK]

4. For a historical examination of these and related myths, see Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 85-121. Wyndham Lewis criticized the myth of a "missing" or "blank" generation in The Old Gang and the New Gang (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1933). [BACK]

5. Any full discussion of nonliterary modernism lies outside of the scope of this book, but a few indices in other artistic fields suggests a similar rhythm of crisis commencing in the late twenties. Focusing on architecture and urban planning, Manfredo Tafuri points to 1931 as the year in which "the crisis was felt in all sectors and at all levels." Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), 48. K. Michael Hays, in his recent book, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), indicates a "posthumanist" paradigm shift beginning in the late twenties in the architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. Laurent Jenny has traced the crisis of early surrealism through a debate, beginning in 1930 and culminating in the latter years of the decade, about the nature and function of automatism. Roughly summarized, he sees a shift from the notion of automatism as the expression of inner, psychic facts (essentially a Freudian update of romantic poetics) to that of delirious interpretation, in which a deliberate course of destruction of socially sanctioned meanings is pursued. The former emphasizes individual self-expression; the latter emphasizes social effect and encourages a more immediate political link between artistic practices and the nonartistic collective. Jenny, "From Breton to Dali: The Adventures of Automatism," October 51 (1989): 105-114. [BACK]

6. I follow Theodor Adorno's definition of artistic autonomy as art's "crystallizing into an entity unto itself—rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying itself as 'socially useful.' " Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 335; my translation. This autonomous status, he argues, offers a resistance to society in the mere existence of a sphere unsubordinated to its norms and instrumentalities. Art's social status lies precisely in its difference from other modes of social practice (335). Peter Bürger, following Adorno, suggests that the aesthetics of Kant and Schiller, which emphasize "a sensuousness . . . that was not part of any means-ends relationships," provide a philosophical formulation of art's autonomy. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde , trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 46. [BACK]

7. Wambly Bald, On the Left Bank , 1929-1933, ed. Benjamin Franklin V (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987), 74. [BACK]

8. F. Scott Fitzgerald complained: "By 1928, Paris had grown suffocating. With each new shipment of Americans spewed up by the boom the quality fell off, until toward the end there was something sinister about the crazy boatloads.'' Fitzgerald, quoted in Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), 240. [BACK]

9. In his study Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1962), esp. 69-75, Jürgen Habermas traces the emergence in the eighteenth century of a general "public sphere" out of the critical discussion of literature. Literature served as a conveyor and mediator of fundamental values. Modernism broke that contract, negating publicly held norms in favor of the special demands of the artist and his or her coterie of followers and friends. Yet the radicality of this gesture was paid for by its loss of effectivity: it compromised in advance the position from which autonomous art pronounced an implicit judgment over the society from which it set itself apart. [BACK]

10. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 280. In "Reflections in Conclusion," Jameson offers a more general view of modernism (i.e., not strictly focused on modernist narrative ), which provides a useful qualification to the strong statement quoted above: "Modernism would then not be so much a way of avoiding social content—in any case an impossibility for beings like ourselves who are 'condemned' to history and to the implacable sociability of even the most apparently private of experiences—as rather of managing and containing it, secluding it out of sight in the very form itself, by means of specific techniques of framing and displacement which can be identified with precision." "Reflections in Conclusion," in Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977), 202. [BACK]

11. David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), xv. [BACK]

12. For a general account of the post-World War I reconstruction of the European economies, see Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, German),, and Italy in the Decade After World War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Maier argues that postwar Europe was marked by the emergence of corporatism as a means of stabilizing society, a tendency also reflected within and directly fostered by the United States. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, The Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism , trans. Martin Sohn-Rethel (London: CSE Books, 1978), provides an inside look, based on Sohn-Rethel's experience working within an employer's organization, of the economic and political integration of German capital during the Weimar Republic; he too emphasizes the importance of American financing in the rationalization of German heavy industry. Arthur Marwick documents the changes in British society due to mobilization of resources and labor power for World War I, in The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965). E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968, 1969), 207-224, depicts the broad economic and politicoeconomic trends between the wars in Britain. He notes that while in Britain the apparatus for state controls on industry was quickly dismantled after both world wars, the "private" forms of integration advanced precipitously between the wars: "In 1914," he notes, "Britain was perhaps the least concentrated of the great industrial economies, and in 1939 one of the most" (214). [BACK]

13. On this point, see Antonio Carlo, "The Crisis of the State in the Thirties," Telos 46 (1980-1981): 62-80. While the state had always played a role in the economy, Carlo argues, the nature and direction of its interventions changed with the crisis of 1929: from ''directed" capitalism, in which the state tries to direct the economy into certain channels but does not act to stave off cyclical crises, to "organized" capitalism, in which the state intervenes to sustain markets and profits against cyclical tendencies. This greater degree of intervention also entailed a reorganized, intensified state power, of which fascism, Stalinism, and the New Deal social welfare state represented alternative visions and forms. See also Antonio Negri, "La teoria capitalistica dello stato nel '29: John M. Keynes," Contropiano 1 (1968): 3-40. [BACK]

15. For further discussion of Weber's displacement of politics, see Fredric Jameson, "The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller," in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, 2: The Syntax of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 3-34. [BACK]

16. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, "The New Age" (1930), reprinted in The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), 169. [BACK]

17. This tendency to objectification was distinct from earlier abstraction, which tended to focus not so much on the object as on the presentation of inner states or moods (as with Kandinsky) or of the "nonobjective world" (Malevich) of ideal intellectual entities. The faktura of Russian constructivism and the emphasis on functionality in the Bauhaus, postwar tendencies that dovetailed into socially useful fields like industrial design and typography, in contrast represented rationalizing interventions into the structure, production, and distribution of objects. [BACK]

18. Popova, quoted in Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 175-176. [BACK]

19. Lodder, Russian Constructivism , 175. [BACK]

20. On this point, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "From Faktura to Factography," October 30 (1984): 82-119. [BACK]

21. Sergei Tretiakov, "Biographie des Dings" [trans. from Russian], in Gesichter der Avantgarde: Porträts, Essays, Briefe (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1991), 106. [BACK]

22. The Bauhaus use of photography and photomontage is an obvious example. More surprising, however, is the integral role of photography in the work of Le Corbusier; see Beatriz Columina's superb stud),, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). [BACK]

23. Cf. the related examples of Hilberseimer and Meyer, discussed by Hays in Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject . [BACK]

24. For a discussion of this ongoing interpenetration of aesthetic design and functional system, see lean Baudrillard, "Design and Environment, or How Political Economy Escalates into Cyberblitz," in For a Critique of the Political Economy oft he Sign , trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 185-203. [BACK]

25. Louis Zukofsky's early "objectivist" program provides a concrete example. In his 1931 essay, "An Objective," he writes:

A poem. The context based on a world—Idle metaphor—a lime base—a fibre—not merely a charged vacuum tube—an aerie of personation—The desire for inclusiveness—The desire for an inclusive object.

A poem. This object in process—The poem as a job—A classic—

In Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 15. Zukofsky saw objectification as the basis of ethical integrity: sincerity, rather than the rampant subjectivity of sloppy writing ("an aerie of personation"). At the same time it guaranteed enduring literary value: "A classic—." In a later interview, Zukofsky would comment on his stance of the thirties: "The objectivist . . . is one person, not a group, and as I define him he is interested in living with things as they exist, and as a 'words-man,' he is a craftsman who puts words together into an object." Interview (''Sincerity and Objectification") with Zukofsky, in Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet , ed. Carroll F. Terrell (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1979), 268. [BACK]

26. Literature would have to wait for post-World War II developments in cybernetics, computers, and mass media before anything analogous to radical constructivism in architecture and the visual arts could emerge. This differential rhythm of development may account for the widely divergent characterizations of post modernism, depending on whether the critic stresses architecture and the visual arts, with their postmodern historicism and rejection of abstraction, or literature, in which postmodernism is often equated with formal abstraction and radical self-reflexivity. [BACK]

27. André Breton, "What Is Surrealism?" in What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings , ed. Franklin Rosemont (New York: Monad Press, 1978), 138. [BACK]

28. André Breton, "Surrealist Situation of the Object" (1935), in Manifestoes of Surrealism , trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 263. Cf. "Crisis of the Object" (1936), "Surrealist Exhibition of Objects" (1936), and "The Object-Poem'' (1942) for further discussion of surrealism and the object; all three essays are collected in Breton, Surrealism and Painting , trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 275-280, 282-283, 284-285. [BACK]

29. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space , trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 19. [BACK]

30. Franco Moretti, "From The Waste Land to the Artificial Paradise," in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms , trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1988), 235. [BACK]

31. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia , 72-73. [BACK]

32. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia , 74. [BACK]

33. Orwell, "Inside the Whale," 250. [BACK]

34. Wyndham Lewis, The Childermass (London: John Calder, 1928), 320. Nor was this ending simply fight-wing nihilism. Left-wing writers seemed compelled to end books in analogous ways. Thus, in 1925, John Dos Passos sent Jimmy Herf of Manhattan Transfer stepping out to nowhere: " 'How fur ye goin?' 'I dunno. . . . Pretty far.' " Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 404. In his 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz , Alfred Döblin has his untragic hero Franz Bieberkopf marching off, in imagination, to another war: "The way leads to freedom, to freedom it goes. The old world must crumble. Awake, wind of dawn!//And get in step, and right and left and right and left, marching: marching on, we tramp to war, a hundred minstrels march before . . . one stands fast, another's killed, one rushes past, another's voice is stilled, drrum, brrumm, drrumm!" Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz , trans. Eugene Jolas (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961), 635. [BACK]

35. For a discussion of the later fate of the object as a site of both material presence and meaning, see Jean Baudrillard's first book, Le système des objets (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). Translated excerpts from this work appear in Baudrillard, Selected Writings , ed. Mark Poster (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1988), 10-28; and in Baudrillard, Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny, 1968-1983 , ed. Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis (London: Pluto Press, 1990), 35-61. [BACK]

36. Georg Simmel, "Metropolis and Mental Life," in On Individuality and Social Forms , ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 335; translation modified. Published in German as "Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben" (1903), in Georg Simmel, Brücke und Tür , ed. Michael Landmann and Margarete Susmann (Stuttgart: Koehler, 1957). [BACK]

37. Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity," New German Critique 22 (1981): 3-14. [BACK]

38. Massimo Cacciari, Metropolis: Saggi sulla grande città di Sombart, Endell, Scheffler e Simmel (Rome: Officina, 1973), 9-10. I cite from the English translation provided in part 1 of Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture , trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 4. For further discussion of Cacciari's concept of Metropolis, see my review of this volume in Textual Practice 10, no. 2 (1996). [BACK]

39. Hermann Broch, Massenwahntheorie: Beiträge zu einer Psychologie der Politik , ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 70. [BACK]

40. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 66. [BACK]

41. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy , 3 vols., trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988/1991). [BACK]

42. Baudrillard, "Design and Environment," 192. [BACK]

43. In "From Adorno to Marx: De-Aestheticizing the Modern," in Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 3-31, Neil Larsen challenges Adorno's generalization of specific problems of representing class in political society to problems of representation in art, which then becomes a primary locus of resistance for Adorno. See also Jaime Concha's foreword to Larsen's book: "From the Modernism of Adorno to the Contemporaneity of Marx," ix-xxi. [BACK]

44. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life , trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 236. [BACK]

45. Minima Moralia , 238. [BACK]

46. Minima Moralia , 54. [BACK]

47. It is useful here to compare Adorno's conception of trauma with that offered by Kaja Silverman in her recent essay "Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity," in Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 52-121. Adorno emphasizes the repetition and compulsive behavior, both for the individual and for the collective, that follow on the inassimilable event of trauma. This event is in one sense "never experienced," because it exceeds the subjective means by which events become individual and historical memory. In another (and for Adorno terrible) sense, however, the event has never ceased to be experienced, even in its apparent passage, because of its continuing grip on the psychic life of the traumatized subject. In clear contrast to Adorno's focus on the overpowering event of trauma and its subjective persistence, Silverman emphasizes the effects of trauma, particularly as they traverse the divide of sexual difference. She thus defines historical trauma as ''any historical event, whether socially engineered or of natural occurrence, which brings a large group of male subjects into such an intimate relation with lack that they are at least for the moment unable to sustain an imaginary relation with the phallus, and so withdraw their belief from the dominant fiction. Suddenly, the latter is radically de-realized, and the social formation finds itself without a mechanism for achieving consensus" (55). The event, in Silverman's account, is largely contingent; it can be natural or social in origin. Her crucial interest lies in the crisis this event precipitates in the male subject. For Adorno, in contrast, the specificity of the traumatic historical event—the convergence of world war, fascism, and culture industry in the 1930s and 1940s—is necessary to account for the fate of the subject in these times. Adorno saw this fate as part of a larger historical narrative, as an outcome of the domination of nature through technology and of political domination by the state. While Silverman offers an important perspective on the gender specificity of Adorno's notion of trauma, Adorno nevertheless raises the serious question whether the traumatic destruction of the ''dominant fiction" represents grounds for hope. Silverman assumes that the power over subjects (state power, economic power, sexual and racial oppression) is grounded on a "prior reality," a "stable core around which a nation's and a period's 'reality' cohere" (41)—the fiction of phallic power on which ideological belief is predicated. Adorno, however, takes up the problem of the continued existence of power after the traumatic destruction of the (male) subject's grounding fiction. In his view, power is even more efficacious for this dispossession of the subject, its dissipation into what lean Baudrillard would later call "the ecstasy of communication." In the place of centered belief, an objectless desire for "the new" fostered by postwar consumerism and culture industry emerges within the traumatized subject, which, paradoxically, perpetuates the trauma's efficacy in psychic life. For Adorno, then, the event of trauma and the transformation of "damaged life" into consumerism (with the consumer's desire for commodified "newness" understood as the deaestheticized face of modernism) are two moments of a single historical process following World War I. [BACK]

48. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering , 342. Lewis employed this image of the "magnetic" force of the war earlier, in his novel The Childermass , in which the dead souls of the fallen soldiers of World War I wait in a camp outside the gates of the "Magnetic City," hoping to be drawn into its inner sanctum. [BACK]

49. I follow Jonathan Crary's suggestion that it is possible to situate the emergence of what Guy Debord called "the society of the spectacle" in the late twenties and thirties. As indices of this emergence, he points to the perfection of television technology,, the generalized appearance of sound film, and the cultural politics of fascism. Moreover, he views surrealism and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as left-wing, avant-garde attempts to come to terms with a new "organization of perceptual consumption" in these years. Crary, "Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory," October 50 (1988): 97-107. For Debord's theses on spectacle, see his Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983). [BACK]

50. On this point, cf. Peter Nicholls's important article on Wyndham Lewis, "Apes and Familiars: Modernism, Mimesis and the Work of Wyndham Lewis," Textual Practice 6, no. 3 (1992): 421-438. I differ from Nicholls in my historical framing of this issue and in certain aspects of the concept of mimesis and mimetism. Nicholls distinguishes at least three contemporaneous strains of modernism in his essay: a European avant-gardism; a modernism associated with Conrad, Woolf, and Lawrence; and a modernism associated with "the men of 1914," Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and Lewis. In my view, even the early Lewis should not be too quickly assimilated to this quartet of writers and his polemical assertions of difference from them must be given their due. A key factor, I would argue, is Lewis's direct involvement in combat during the war years, as it affected his career, his political-cultural views, and his personality; the other three were noncombatants and made crucial advances in their work precisely during the period Lewis was serving in the trenches. Though Nicholls does not take up these biographical factors, he does later consider Lewis's distinction from a theoretical point of view—the relation of mimetism to intertextuality. He connects Lewis's rejection of Pound, Joyce, and Eliot to their practice of intertextual appropriation. Lewis, he argues, attempts to block the processes of identification and assimilation by emphasizing spatial exteriority, separation of bodies, and deadness. Art, as satiric violence, counters "the passivity of a generalized social mimetism" (432). Nicholls discusses the concept of mimetism through the theoretical writings of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jacques Derrida, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, and Kené Girard. Mimetism was already part of the theoretical discourse and debate of the thirties, however, among such intellectuals as Walter Benjamin, Roger Caillois, Theodor Adorno, Pierre Klossowski, and others. Accordingly, my discussion of mimetism, while indebted to Nicholls's work, returns to this intellectual context, which I understand to form a theoretical corollary to the literary responses of late modernist writers. [BACK]

51. Wyndham Lewis, The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator (New York: Haskell House, 1971), 238. [BACK]

52. Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled , ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 157. Cited in text as AOBR . [BACK]

53. In the latter text, Lewis recurs to the exact example used in The Art of Being Ruled to criticize surrealism: "Art at its fullest is a very great force indeed, a magical force, a sort of life , a very great 'reality.' It is that reality, that magic, that force, that this 'dream-aesthetic' proposes to merge with life, exactly on the same principle as the Producers at the Moscow theatres today merge audience and performer, stage and auditorium." The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator , 69. For an account of Lewis's battles with transition , see Dougald McMillan, transition: The History of a Literary Era , 1927-1938 (New York: George Braziller, 1975), 204-231. [BACK]

54. Lewis, Men Without Art , ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 103. Cited in text as MWA . [BACK]

55. Barnes, quoted by Meryl Altman, " The Antiphon : 'No Audience At All?' " in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes , ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 275. [BACK]

56. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment , ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 70. [BACK]

57. Beckett, Disjecta , 82. [BACK]

58. For further discussion of this interpermeability of subject and object, see my article "From City-Dreams to the Dreaming Collective: Walter Benjamin's Political Dream Interpretation," Philosophy and Social Criticism 22, no. 6 (1996): 87-111. [BACK]

59. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering , 16. [BACK]

60. Most poignantly with the fatal accidents of Victor and Margot in The Revenge for Love and Hester in Self-Condemned . [BACK]

61. Peter Bürger, in his article "Dissolution of the Subject and the Hardened Self.' Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Wyndham Lewis's Novel Tarr, " reads Lewis's first novel as revealing "two equally aporetic forms of life in the crisis period of bourgeois society, the defensive armored self of the professional person on the one hand and the diffused identity of the proto-fascist character on the other." In Bürger, The Decline of Modernism , trans. Nicholas Walker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, Press, 1992), 136. I find Bürger's schematization of these two elements at war in Lewis's concept of subjectivity (as revealed in his fictional and theoretical works) highly suggestive. Far less convincing, in my view, is Bürger's rather mechanical attempt to align these two "poles" of Lewis's subject with "modern'' and "avant-garde'' respectively. I see this move as a largely unargued attempt to leap from suppositions about subjectivity as exhibited by Lewis's texts to Lewis's own subjectivity as a producer of artworks. While this move is not in itself illegitimate, it would require a more concrete and nuanced articulation than is possible with a simple opposition of "modern" and "avant-garde," as components of Lewis's artistic personality. [BACK]

62. Thomas Mann, quoted in Peter Sloterdijk, The Critique of Cynical Reason , trans. Michael Eldred, Theory and History of Literature 40 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 532. [BACK]

63. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle , trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 21. [BACK]

64. See also Helmut Lethen's study of "coldness" as a mode of behavior in Germany between the world wars, Verhaltenslehren der Kälte: Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994). [BACK]

65. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment , trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972), 180. [BACK]

66. André Bazin, "Charlie Chaplin," in What Is Cinema? Vol 1., ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 149. [BACK]

67. Roger Caillois, "Mimetisme et psychasthénie légendaire," Minotaure 7 (1935): 4-10. English translation: "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," trans. John Shepley, October 31 (1984): 16-32. Cf. Denis Hollier's discussion of Caillois's essay, ''Mimesis and Castration 1937," trans. William Rodarmor, October 31 (1984): 3-15. [BACK]

68. Julia Kristeva, "Place Names," in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art , ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gore, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 283. [BACK]

69. Wyndham Lewis, Tarr: The 1918 Version , ed. Paul O'Keefe (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1990), 42. [BACK]

70. Lewis, Tarr , 43. [BACK]

71. Wyndham Lewis, "When John Bull Laughs" (1938), in Creatures of Habit, Creatures of Change: Essays on Art, Literature, and Society , 1914-1956, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 282. [BACK]

72. Georges Bataille, "Un-knowing: Laughter and Tears," October 36 (1986): 97. [BACK]

73. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics , ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 163. [BACK]

74. The classic study of this process of "reduction" and sedimentation of laughter in texts is Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World , trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), especially his opening chapter, "Rabelais in the History of Laughter," 59-145. [BACK]

75. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious , trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 117. [BACK]

76. Helmut Plessner, Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior , trans. James Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Grene (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 25. [BACK]

77. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 18. [BACK]

78. In his 1934 article, "Studies in the Art of Laughter," Lewis discusses satire in terms that suggest Beckett's use of the term "tragicomedy" in characterizing Waiting for Godot . Lewis writes: "Satire, some satire, does undoubtedly stand half-way between Tragedy and Comedy. It may be a hybrid of these two. Or it may be a grinning tragedy, as it were. Or, yet again, it may be a comedy full of dangerous electrical action, and shattered with outbursts of tears." "Satire Defended,'' in Lewis, Enemy Salvoes: Selected Literary Criticism , ed. C. J. Fox (London: Vision Press, 1975), 48. [BACK]

79. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1953), 48. [BACK]

80. Beckett, Murphy , 41. [BACK]

81. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts [1936, 1937, 1962], ed. Cheryl J. Plumb (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), 21. Cited in text as N. [BACK]

82. In my chapter on Barnes I discuss Matthew O'Connor's role as hermeneutic mediator between the reader and the text. As I will show, the stakes of interpreting the world presented in the book constitute a central theme of Barnes. [BACK]

83. Fredric Jameson, in his discussion of Lewis, discusses at length the "centrifugal" tendencies in Lewis's style. Jameson goes on to examine the strategies of "recontainment" Lewis used to organize his texts on the large-scale, "molar'' (as opposed to "molecular") dimension. While I am skeptical about Jameson's strong emphasis on the unifying, "reterritorializing'' aspect of Lewis—which I see as generally weak and usually overpowered in the fiction by Lewis's "deterritorialization" of form—I believe Jameson's approach nonetheless discloses a fundamental characteristic of late modernism, in Lewis and other writers. (Jameson, in fact, refers to Beckett's Watt in passing.) See Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), esp. chap. 2, "Agons of the Pseudo-Couple." [BACK]

84. See also my essay "Dismantling Authenticity: Beckett, Adorno, and the 'Post-War,' " Textual Practice 8, no. 1 (1994): 43-57. [BACK]