Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) Read Online Free Page A

increasingly important visual innovation, the movies. When Kreisler appears in Bertha’s hallway ‘like a great terrifying poster, cut out on the melodramatic stairway’ (p. 170), he becomes a nightmarish advertisement out of German Expressionist cinema, a kind of Nosferatu before the great 1922 vampire film of that name by F. W. Murnau; before his death as a ‘tramp’ jerked around by waiters and in need of Time (p. 244) Kreisler becomes a kind of ghastly parody of screen comedian Charlie Chaplin, whose international popularity Lewis criticized in the prologue to the 1918 version of
Tarr
(see Appendix). Lewis tells us at one point that Kreisler grasps his situation with Anastasya ‘cinematographically’ (p. 88) and in so doing Lewis implicitly alerts his readers to the dangers of living life ‘filmically’—melodramatically, prey to the vagaries of time—no less so than when criticizing the Futurists. Bertha and Kreisler are doomed to be the victims of such aesthetic flux and its associated psychological and emotional upheaval. Only the aesthetically advanced Tarr and Anastasya, who embrace highbrow art, casual (‘swagger’) sex, and the life of the mind, have the tools to survive as observers of life rather than its hapless subjects, the theatrical or cinematic audience rather than its performers.
Tarr
and Contemporary Fiction
    But do Tarr and Anastasya indeed become life’s masters, by the novel’s end? One way to gauge their ultimate ‘success’ in Lewis’s world is to disengage
Tarr
temporarily from the traditions of the European novels and avant-garde visual experimentation, and consider it among its contemporaneous novels of English and Irish Modernism.Thematic and formal linkages are surprisingly plentiful between
Tarr
and Ford’s
The Good Soldier
(1915), Lawrence’s
Women in Love
(1920), and Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916). Ford’s and Lawrence’s novels tell stories, as does
Tarr
, of two sets of intertwined couples, whose social and sexual experiences become the subject of philosophical observation by one of the male members of its foursome. Lewis’s novel shares with Lawrence’s, whose fiction he loathed, a sometimes surprisingly sexual candour. (John Lane, who had published
Blast
, refused to publish
Tarr
in part because he worried it was ‘too strong a book’ in the wake of criminal proceedings brought against Methuen for publishing Lawrence’s novel
The Rainbow
. 13 ) Lawrence’s novel shares with
Tarr
a concern for the place of sexuality and marriage in modern culture (albeit in a very different tonal register), as well as its inclusion of one male character who is largely defined by his theories about life, Rupert Birkin, and another, Gerald Crich, whose path to self-destruction is predicated in part, as is Kreisler’s, as a criticism of Futurism. 14 Ford’s novel shares with
Tarr
a structure in which one male character observes the self-destruction of a second male character whose motivations he tries to understand, while Joyce’s novel presents a male protagonist who struggles to grow into his nominally mature status as an artist. And like Joyce, Lewis presents his readers with a portrait of an artist as a young man, for he introduces Tarr as being in his early twenties, roughly the same age as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus when he goes off to Paris at the end of
A Portrait
. It is tempting, indeed, to read the beginning of
Tarr
as a near-parodic continuation of Joyce, with Stephen transformed into Lewis’s very different young artist in Paris, no longer delivering aesthetic lectures on the streets of Dublin but rather theorizing about aesthetics in a series of cafés and studios.
    But what
Tarr
mainly shares with all of these novels is a pervasive ironizing that ultimately undermines the readers’ uncomplicated endorsement of their protagonists’ visions of the world. Early in
The Good Soldier
the reader comes to suspect that Ford’s Dowell,