Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) Read Online Free

canvas—‘When she laughed, this commotion was transmitted to her body as though sharp sonorous blows had been struck upon her mouth’, ‘her head was an elegant bone-white egg’—the details of which overwhelm Kreisler by their multiplicity, a ‘cascade, a hot cascade’ (p. 84). These passages are also keys to characterization. Lewis’s Vorticist-inflected descriptions tend to cluster around Tarr, Anastasya, and Paris itself, reaffirming the continuity of those characters and that location with Lewis’s approved ideas about art and selfhood. Conversely, Lewis’s descriptions of Bertha and Kreisler tend to visualize their outmoded Romanticisms as a reflection and partial parody of Futurism. For instance, when Lewis describes Bertha’s leg as appearing ‘like the sanguine of an Italian master in which the leg is drawn in several positions, one on top of the other’ (p. 39), he invokes not only a Renaissance sketch, but also the ‘multiple exposures’ of Futurist canvases, in which action through time is represented by the superimposition of shapes in space. 10
    This description helps to suggest that Bertha’s identity is ‘out of focus’, and descriptions of Kreisler throughout are overtly anti-Futurist in their comic exposure of the limitations of Marinetti’s fetishizing of instinct, masculine power, militarism, and the Futurists’ programmatic ‘contempt for women’. Kreisler’s mayhem at the Bonnington Club, in which he becomes a pure mechanism of movement as violence, is as Futurist as a speeding automobile, and as ultimately doomed to crash and burn. Kreisler’s perversely mixed feelings of hate and love for Soltyk at the duel owe as much to Marinetti as to Dostoyevsky. 11 And Kreisler’s rape of Bertha, which is both the most painful and the most technically virtuosic sequence of
Tarr
, can be understood as both an apotheosis of Futurist ideology and the logical endpoint of the sexual politics of
Mitteleuropa
that produced the very idea of the duel. Kreisler’s cultural inheritance elevates ‘woman’ (
das Weib
) into an abstraction of purity that is worthy of masculine protection, even as it simultaneously reduces her to an object subject to masculine control. As such the idea of rape becomes a mere extension of the ideology of the duel, and both dovetail all too neatly with Marinetti’s praise of intuitive action, destruction, and hatred of the conventionally feminine. As John Cournos wrote in
The Egoist
in a wartime essay ‘The Death of Futurism’, ‘Some day a book may be written to show how closely war is allied with sex. For the Futuristic juxtaposition of the glorification of war and “contempt for women” is no mere accident. This contempt does not simply imply indifference, but the worst form men’s obsession with sex can take, that is rape!’ 12
    Cournos could not have known that the book he was seeking was being serially published in the same issue in which he wrote. Yet Lewis’s ideological analyses are most powerfully delivered not by harangue but by means of visuality.
Tarr
’s single most memorable and disturbing image is perhaps the description of Bertha, after the rape, perceiving Kreisler as four disconnected figures impossible to reconcile with one another in space or time (p. 167). As a reflection of psychology the image tells us much about Kreisler’s increasingly fractured anddiscontinuous selfhood, as well as Bertha’s attempt to cope with the trauma of her physical and psychic violation. But as pure imagery it also presents readers with an experiment in representation comparable to the fracturing of time and space by the human body in Marcel Duchamp’s painting
Nude Descending a Staircase
(1912), or to the sequences of stop-motion photography made by Eadweard Muybridge in the 1870s that inspired both Duchamp’s painting and the creation of cinema.
    As this comparison suggests, the prose of
Tarr
responds not only to modern painting, but also to that other