A History of Modernist Literature by Gasiorek Andrzej; Gnasiorek Andrzej ;

Author:Gasiorek, Andrzej; Gnasiorek, Andrzej ; [Gasiorek, Andrzej]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2015-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

For Tarr, a relationship between two vigorous individuals is essentially a fight to the death between competing artists. Anastasya has offered a relationship between equals, but for Tarr this suggests mutual annihilation. Lewis’s distance from his protagonist is signalled not just by her mockery of his views but also by the novel’s aporetic structure. Far from resolving his difficulties, the text’s would-be artist remains trapped by them: at the end of the text he is left swinging on a pendulum from one type of unsatisfactory relationship to another.

Is the reader expected to take Tarr’s theory of art seriously? The novel’s eponymous protagonist claims at one point that ‘deadness’ is art’s ‘first condition’ (T 299), while its second is ‘absence of soul, in the sentimental human sense’ (T 300). This position leads him to differentiate ‘life’ from ‘art’ and to argue that a preoccupation with interiority has no place in the latter: ‘No restless, quick flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside’ (T 300). We should be wary of generalising from this account because it refers initially to painting and then, more specifically, to sculpture.115 As several critics have pointed out, it does not apply to the text of Tarr and almost certainly was not intended to be taken as a description of how this novel, and fiction more generally, works.116 Tarr’s remarks about art are suggestive, nonetheless. They might plausibly be read as a last-ditch attempt to hold at bay the sexual and emotional anxieties the novel has explored. The male artist then starts to look more like a beleaguered, defensive figure than a confident, heroic one. Tarr does not endorse its protagonist’s conception of art but calls it into question by exploring its unresolved contradictions and exposing its conspicuous limits.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in contrast, directs its energy against the weight of an oppressive history. Whereas Tarr battles against an ersatz culture, Stephen struggles against a congeries of inherited values. Lewis and Joyce both mount critiques of language, which they see as a potent mediator of ideology, but their approaches to this issue take different forms. Tarr focuses on language’s capacity to naturalise social practices to such an extent that the individual ‘apes the forms of conventional life’ (T 32) that the majority blindly accept. Portrait presents language as a source of wonder but also of subjection. For inasmuch as Stephen comes to consciousness through a language that he cherishes for its flexibility and sensuous power, he fears its capacity to dominate individuals’ minds and to win their allegiance to causes that do not represent their real interests. The novel registers a wide range of idiolects and explores the effects they have on the formation of subjectivity. In Stephen’s case, linguistic diversity produces two reactions: an aesthetic response to the beauty of language and to its expressive possibilities, on one hand, and a political anxiety about its ideological implications and coercive power, on the other. His strongest predilection is for the deeply interiorised aesthetic reaction.

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