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

thefirst-person narrator, is an arrantly untrustworthy guide to himself or to others, and Lawrence’s and Joyce’s novels present their protagonists Birkin and Stephen as quasi-autobiographical versions of their authors as both inspired and self-absorbedly egoistic. One can identify both Birkin’s and Stephen’s ideas, often presented at didactic length, with ideas held by their novelists’ younger selves. But the novels also demonstrate their protagonists’ arrogance and failures of insight. Lawrence’s Ursula acts as a kind of surrogate for the reader in criticizing Birkin’s self-importance throughout
Women in Love
, and the final chapter of Joyce’s
Portrait
demonstrates that Stephen may be aesthetically brilliant, but that he is also self-important, quixotic, superior to his peers in intellect but inferior to them in empathy.
    And so it is with Tarr. In a preface to the first edition, which he chose to omit in the 1928 revision published here (see Appendix), Lewis endorses Tarr’s ideas about art but firmly distances himself from Tarr’s management of his personal life. As the novel progresses, the attentive reader will note more and more flaws in Tarr’s dogged dependence on humour, anti-feminism, and egoism. After Tarr visits Kreisler in his rooms, for instance, Tarr feels ‘There was something mean and improper in everything he had done, which he could not define’ (p. 208). Later in the passage Lewis becomes yet more straightforward about Tarr’s misanthropy: ‘His contempt for everybody else in the end must degrade him: for if nothing in other men was worth honouring, finally his self-neglect must result, like the Cynic’s dishonourable condition’ (p. 209). These moments of temporary self-realization come in the wake of Tarr’s contemplations of Kreisler and Bertha, as he, and Lewis, begin to understand that jokes can be hurtful, that they may turn ‘too deep for laughter’ (p. 164) and are ‘able to make you sweat, even break your ribs and black your eyes’ (p. 211). As Tarr’s ability to juggle his ‘various selves’ threatens to desert him, he becomes at times defined by a Kreislerian theatricality: he is not only an actor, but an awkward one. Lewis describes Tarr at one juncture as ‘an untalented Pro on a provincial first-night’ (p. 187), and further declares that within the temporary triangle formed with Bertha and Kreisler ‘Tarr had the best rôle, and did not deserve it’ (p. 189).
    Lewis has suggested this inconsistency earlier in the novel. When Tarr threatens to return to England from the Vitelotte Quarter, thefurthest he can bring himself to flee from Bertha is Montmartre, an easy bus ride away on the other side of Paris. His reaction to the scandal of Bertha being seen kissing Kreisler in the street is positively Victorian. When he writes in a letter, ‘for God’s sake get married quickly. It’s all up with you otherwise’ (p. 143), he sounds less like an advanced artist than an outraged maiden aunt. And when Tarr ultimately marries Bertha ‘For form’s sake’ (p. 281) one wonders if he is truly turning social expectation to his own advantage. On the one hand, Tarr outrages convention to underwrite his continued dalliance with Anastasya, ‘his illicit and more splendid bride’ (p. 284), but on the other, he may have simply fallen into the trap of bourgeois expectations he has earlier criticized, exchanging artistic for social ‘form’.
    Tarr’s limitations are not lost on the novel’s other characters. Lewis initially mutes those criticisms, however, by putting them in the mouths of characters whom Tarr considers inferior. Hobson may appear passive in the face of Tarr’s prolonged tirade in the opening chapter, but he may also be all too used to hearing Tarr’s repeated invective to take it seriously. Indeed, Hobson rejects Tarr’s theorizing outright, saying ‘Your creative man sounds rather alarming. I don’t believe in him’ (p. 16). Bertha dismisses