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Vorticist Performance and Aesthetic Turbulence in Enemy of the Stars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David Graver
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Abstract

More than just an innovative early-twentieth-century play or the product of an avantgarde movement, Wyndham Lewis's Enemy of the Stars assails conventional notions of art without rationalizing its attack through an appeal to an explicit aesthetic or social program. Lewis is not so much establishing an aesthetic position as playing with the idea of aesthetic positioning. An examination of the shifting stances taken in the play highlights some of the most important sources of formal and thematic turbulence exploited by the nonprogrammatic avant-garde and exposes the means by which this turbulence is contained. The mimetic world of the drama is at first undercut by the visual enticements of the page and by references to the social institution of art; then the drama is hybridized with narrative representational techniques and overlaid with shifting allegorical implications. Ultimately, these aesthetic contortions turn the text into a performance staged on the pages of the magazine Blast.

Type
1. Writing Performance: Harmony, Silence, Noise
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 3: Special Topic: On Poetry , May 1992 , pp. 482 - 496
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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