1. Astadur Eysteinsson, in his book The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), offers a wide-ranging survey of the diverse hypotheses that artists, critics, and literary historians have offered about modernism and the related concepts of postmodernism and the avant-garde. Modernism has alternately been seen as a form of cultural decadence and as a renewal sweeping away decadent Victorianism; as continuous with romanticism, aestheticism, or naturalism and as a break with these previous movements; as a reflection of historical conditions and as a flight from them; as a revolutionary culture and as a reactionary one; as the "hegemonic" form of culture and as a marginal ivory-tower culture. These varying conceptions reflect both the ideological commitments of the authors and the more or less unconscious rhetorical structures of historical and critical writing. Hayden White has, in several essays and books, sought to reveal the prefigurative web in which history is enmeshed: Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). See also Paul Veyne, Writing History , trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984).

2. Two recent accounts of France in the interwar years which contribute significantly to a revised picture are Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), and Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). The cultural-political interest of this period in Austria has been especially well documented by the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri in "Austromarxismo e città: 'Des rote Wien,' " Contropiano 2 (1971): 259-311; The Sphere and Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d'Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987); and (with Francesco dal Co) Modern Architecture 1 and 2, trans. Robert Erich Wolf (Milan: Electa, 1976).

3. Two exceptions are the new, two-volume study by Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism , 1: The Women of 1928 ; 2: Postmodern Feminist Readings of Woolf, West, and Barnes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); and in the American context, Walter Kalaidjian, American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). There is also a highly suggestive discussion of the later works of key "high" modernists in Bob Perelman, The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

4. In an essay devoted primarily to early modernism, Fredric Jameson has suggested the parallelism of the end of modernism and the restructuring of imperialism as a world system. It is this parallelism that for him suggests that debates around modernism represent more than just arbitrary assignments of historiographic boundaries: "However extrinsic and extraliterary the fact of imperialism may at first seem, there is at least a chronological justification for exploring its influence. . . . But when . . . the parallel also seems to hold at the other end of such chronological series and the end of modernism to coincide with the restructuring of the classical imperialist world system, our curiosity as to possible interrelationships can surely only be sharpened." Jameson, "Modernism and Imperialism," in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 45.

5. The assumption that this "aging" has already irreversibly affected modernist art underlies Peter Bürger's article "The Decline of Modernism," in The Decline of Modernism , trans. Nicholas Walker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 32-47. Though critically directed especially at Theodor Adorno's discussions of modernist music, Bürger's hypothesis of an institutional undermining of modernism could find support in the developments in other media and genres.

6. A view that, for example, Phillip Brian Harper has in part developed in his recent study, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

7. George Orwell, "Review of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller," New English Weekly , 14 November 1935; reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell , 1: An Age Like This , 1920-1940, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 154-156.

8. George Orwell, "Inside the Whale" (1940), in A Collection of Essays (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 252.

9. Charles Jencks, "Postmodern vs. Late-Modern," in Zeitgeist in Babel: The Post-Modernist Controversy , ed. Ingeborg Hoesterey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 4-21.

10. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 305.

11. Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 19.

12. Alan Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 120—121.

13. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 12.

14. I take this concept from Oskar Negt's essay on Ernst Bloch, "The Non-Synchronous Heritage and the Problem of Propaganda," New German Critique 9 (1976): 58.

15. Maurice Blanchot calls such writing, which emerges from points of opacity to the narrative exposition of history, "demise writing." Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster , trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 33. For a discussion of heterotopias, see Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22-27.

16. John Hawkes, "Symposium: Fiction Today," Massachusetts Review 3, no. 4 (1962): 784-788.

17. For an analogous study of French writing of the 1930s and 1940s, see Allan Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris, and Ponge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

18. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama , trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 176.

19. Walter Benjamin, "Krisis des Romans: Zu Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz, " in Gesammelte Schriften III, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 230-236.

20. André Gide, "Journal of The Counterfeiters, " in The Counterfeiters [French orig. 1927] (New York: Vintage Books, 1951), 416.

21. Peter Nicholls, "Divergences: Modernism, Postmodernism, Jameson and Lyotard," Critical Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1991): 1-18. See also Nicholls's recent book-length study, in which he develops this idea of "divergences" into an account of multiple histories of modernism, that is, of distinct "modernisms": Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

22. Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). For English translations, see "The Dream-Work Does Not Think," trans. Mary Lydon, in The Lyotard Reader , ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 19-55; and "The Connivances of Desire with the Figural," in Driftworks (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984), 57-68. A helpful discussion of Lyotard's theory of discourse and the figural appears in Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 56-102.

23. On the existence and definition of this mainstream, see Douwe Fokkema and Elrud Ibsch, Modernist Conjectures: A Mainstream in European Literature, :1910:1940 (London: C. Hurst, 1987).

24. For a discussion of the rise of the prose poem as a transgressive form of "counterdiscourse," see the third part of Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counterdiscourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth- Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 261-343.

25. Richard Ellmann, Interview with Samuel Beckett, quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 108.

26. Beckett to MacGreevy, probably June 1930, quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame , 121.

27. T. S. Eliot, " Ulysses , Order, and Myth" (1923), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot , ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 175-178.

28. Beckett, notebook entry, 15 January 1937, quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame , 228.

29. Wyndham Lewis, The Childermass (London : John Calder, 1928), 81.

30. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts [1936, 1937, 1962], ed. Cheryl J. Plumb (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), 65.

31. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1953), 124-125.

32. This process is closely akin to what M. M. Bakhtin, with reference to a general history of genres, called "novelization." Of particular interest here are two central aspects of Bakhtin's account: his emphasis, on the one hand, on the opening of literary forms to contingency and contemporaneity; and, on the other hand, his account of laughter's central role in the process of novelization as the instrument of a "comical operation of dismemberment," reflected both formally and thematicalls,. See Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination , ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 3-40; esp. 22-24. In addition, Bakhtin's relation of Dostoevsky's works to Menippean satire has broad relevance to my characterization of late modernism. See Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics , ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 101-180.

33. C. Barry Chabot, "The Problem of the Postmodern," in Zeitgeist in Babel: The Post-Modernist Controversy , 30.

34. Author's note (1920) to Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes [1911] (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 49-50.

35. Art Berman suggests that "high modernism" as a distinct mode emerges together with a formalist critical discourse to legitimate a particular, hegemonic conception of modernist writing, excluding other possibilities latent in earlier modernist experimentation; see Berman, Preface to Modernism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 6off.

36. Bürger, "The Decline of Modernism," 44.

37. Wyndam Lewis, Men Without Art , ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 89. Lewis's emphasis.

1. Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography (1914-1926) (London: John Calder, 1982), 1.

2. And as his biographer Jeffrey Meyers notes, "The sudden reputation and notoriety that Lewis achieved in 1914 as the leader of the Vorticists and editor of Blast had disappeared when peace broke out in 1919." Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 102.

3. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering , 5.

4. For a historical examination of these and related myths, see Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 85-121. Wyndham Lewis criticized the myth of a "missing" or "blank" generation in The Old Gang and the New Gang (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1933).

5. Any full discussion of nonliterary modernism lies outside of the scope of this book, but a few indices in other artistic fields suggests a similar rhythm of crisis commencing in the late twenties. Focusing on architecture and urban planning, Manfredo Tafuri points to 1931 as the year in which "the crisis was felt in all sectors and at all levels." Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), 48. K. Michael Hays, in his recent book, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), indicates a "posthumanist" paradigm shift beginning in the late twenties in the architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. Laurent Jenny has traced the crisis of early surrealism through a debate, beginning in 1930 and culminating in the latter years of the decade, about the nature and function of automatism. Roughly summarized, he sees a shift from the notion of automatism as the expression of inner, psychic facts (essentially a Freudian update of romantic poetics) to that of delirious interpretation, in which a deliberate course of destruction of socially sanctioned meanings is pursued. The former emphasizes individual self-expression; the latter emphasizes social effect and encourages a more immediate political link between artistic practices and the nonartistic collective. Jenny, "From Breton to Dali: The Adventures of Automatism," October 51 (1989): 105-114.

6. I follow Theodor Adorno's definition of artistic autonomy as art's "crystallizing into an entity unto itself—rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying itself as 'socially useful.' " Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 335; my translation. This autonomous status, he argues, offers a resistance to society in the mere existence of a sphere unsubordinated to its norms and instrumentalities. Art's social status lies precisely in its difference from other modes of social practice (335). Peter Bürger, following Adorno, suggests that the aesthetics of Kant and Schiller, which emphasize "a sensuousness . . . that was not part of any means-ends relationships," provide a philosophical formulation of art's autonomy. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde , trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 46.

7. Wambly Bald, On the Left Bank , 1929-1933, ed. Benjamin Franklin V (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987), 74.

8. F. Scott Fitzgerald complained: "By 1928, Paris had grown suffocating. With each new shipment of Americans spewed up by the boom the quality fell off, until toward the end there was something sinister about the crazy boatloads.'' Fitzgerald, quoted in Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), 240.

9. In his study Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1962), esp. 69-75, Jürgen Habermas traces the emergence in the eighteenth century of a general "public sphere" out of the critical discussion of literature. Literature served as a conveyor and mediator of fundamental values. Modernism broke that contract, negating publicly held norms in favor of the special demands of the artist and his or her coterie of followers and friends. Yet the radicality of this gesture was paid for by its loss of effectivity: it compromised in advance the position from which autonomous art pronounced an implicit judgment over the society from which it set itself apart.

10. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 280. In "Reflections in Conclusion," Jameson offers a more general view of modernism (i.e., not strictly focused on modernist narrative ), which provides a useful qualification to the strong statement quoted above: "Modernism would then not be so much a way of avoiding social content—in any case an impossibility for beings like ourselves who are 'condemned' to history and to the implacable sociability of even the most apparently private of experiences—as rather of managing and containing it, secluding it out of sight in the very form itself, by means of specific techniques of framing and displacement which can be identified with precision." "Reflections in Conclusion," in Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977), 202.

11. David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), xv.

12. For a general account of the post-World War I reconstruction of the European economies, see Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, German),, and Italy in the Decade After World War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Maier argues that postwar Europe was marked by the emergence of corporatism as a means of stabilizing society, a tendency also reflected within and directly fostered by the United States. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, The Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism , trans. Martin Sohn-Rethel (London: CSE Books, 1978), provides an inside look, based on Sohn-Rethel's experience working within an employer's organization, of the economic and political integration of German capital during the Weimar Republic; he too emphasizes the importance of American financing in the rationalization of German heavy industry. Arthur Marwick documents the changes in British society due to mobilization of resources and labor power for World War I, in The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965). E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968, 1969), 207-224, depicts the broad economic and politicoeconomic trends between the wars in Britain. He notes that while in Britain the apparatus for state controls on industry was quickly dismantled after both world wars, the "private" forms of integration advanced precipitously between the wars: "In 1914," he notes, "Britain was perhaps the least concentrated of the great industrial economies, and in 1939 one of the most" (214).

13. On this point, see Antonio Carlo, "The Crisis of the State in the Thirties," Telos 46 (1980-1981): 62-80. While the state had always played a role in the economy, Carlo argues, the nature and direction of its interventions changed with the crisis of 1929: from ''directed" capitalism, in which the state tries to direct the economy into certain channels but does not act to stave off cyclical crises, to "organized" capitalism, in which the state intervenes to sustain markets and profits against cyclical tendencies. This greater degree of intervention also entailed a reorganized, intensified state power, of which fascism, Stalinism, and the New Deal social welfare state represented alternative visions and forms. See also Antonio Negri, "La teoria capitalistica dello stato nel '29: John M. Keynes," Contropiano 1 (1968): 3-40.

14. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," trans. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, in Max Weber: Sociological Writings , ed. Wolf Heydebrand (New York: Continuum, 1994), 302-303.

15. For further discussion of Weber's displacement of politics, see Fredric Jameson, "The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller," in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, 2: The Syntax of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 3-34.

16. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, "The New Age" (1930), reprinted in The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), 169.

17. This tendency to objectification was distinct from earlier abstraction, which tended to focus not so much on the object as on the presentation of inner states or moods (as with Kandinsky) or of the "nonobjective world" (Malevich) of ideal intellectual entities. The faktura of Russian constructivism and the emphasis on functionality in the Bauhaus, postwar tendencies that dovetailed into socially useful fields like industrial design and typography, in contrast represented rationalizing interventions into the structure, production, and distribution of objects.

18. Popova, quoted in Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 175-176.

19. Lodder, Russian Constructivism , 175.

20. On this point, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "From Faktura to Factography," October 30 (1984): 82-119.

21. Sergei Tretiakov, "Biographie des Dings" [trans. from Russian], in Gesichter der Avantgarde: Porträts, Essays, Briefe (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1991), 106.

22. The Bauhaus use of photography and photomontage is an obvious example. More surprising, however, is the integral role of photography in the work of Le Corbusier; see Beatriz Columina's superb stud),, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).

23. Cf. the related examples of Hilberseimer and Meyer, discussed by Hays in Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject .

24. For a discussion of this ongoing interpenetration of aesthetic design and functional system, see lean Baudrillard, "Design and Environment, or How Political Economy Escalates into Cyberblitz," in For a Critique of the Political Economy oft he Sign , trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 185-203.

25. Louis Zukofsky's early "objectivist" program provides a concrete example. In his 1931 essay, "An Objective," he writes:

A poem. The context based on a world—Idle metaphor—a lime base—a fibre—not merely a charged vacuum tube—an aerie of personation—The desire for inclusiveness—The desire for an inclusive object.

A poem. This object in process—The poem as a job—A classic—

In Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 15. Zukofsky saw objectification as the basis of ethical integrity: sincerity, rather than the rampant subjectivity of sloppy writing ("an aerie of personation"). At the same time it guaranteed enduring literary value: "A classic—." In a later interview, Zukofsky would comment on his stance of the thirties: "The objectivist . . . is one person, not a group, and as I define him he is interested in living with things as they exist, and as a 'words-man,' he is a craftsman who puts words together into an object." Interview (''Sincerity and Objectification") with Zukofsky, in Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet , ed. Carroll F. Terrell (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1979), 268.

26. Literature would have to wait for post-World War II developments in cybernetics, computers, and mass media before anything analogous to radical constructivism in architecture and the visual arts could emerge. This differential rhythm of development may account for the widely divergent characterizations of post modernism, depending on whether the critic stresses architecture and the visual arts, with their postmodern historicism and rejection of abstraction, or literature, in which postmodernism is often equated with formal abstraction and radical self-reflexivity.

27. André Breton, "What Is Surrealism?" in What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings , ed. Franklin Rosemont (New York: Monad Press, 1978), 138.

28. André Breton, "Surrealist Situation of the Object" (1935), in Manifestoes of Surrealism , trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 263. Cf. "Crisis of the Object" (1936), "Surrealist Exhibition of Objects" (1936), and "The Object-Poem'' (1942) for further discussion of surrealism and the object; all three essays are collected in Breton, Surrealism and Painting , trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 275-280, 282-283, 284-285.

29. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space , trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 19.

30. Franco Moretti, "From The Waste Land to the Artificial Paradise," in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms , trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1988), 235.

31. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia , 72-73.

32. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia , 74.

33. Orwell, "Inside the Whale," 250.

34. Wyndham Lewis, The Childermass (London: John Calder, 1928), 320. Nor was this ending simply fight-wing nihilism. Left-wing writers seemed compelled to end books in analogous ways. Thus, in 1925, John Dos Passos sent Jimmy Herf of Manhattan Transfer stepping out to nowhere: " 'How fur ye goin?' 'I dunno. . . . Pretty far.' " Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 404. In his 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz , Alfred Döblin has his untragic hero Franz Bieberkopf marching off, in imagination, to another war: "The way leads to freedom, to freedom it goes. The old world must crumble. Awake, wind of dawn!//And get in step, and right and left and right and left, marching: marching on, we tramp to war, a hundred minstrels march before . . . one stands fast, another's killed, one rushes past, another's voice is stilled, drrum, brrumm, drrumm!" Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz , trans. Eugene Jolas (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961), 635.

35. For a discussion of the later fate of the object as a site of both material presence and meaning, see Jean Baudrillard's first book, Le système des objets (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). Translated excerpts from this work appear in Baudrillard, Selected Writings , ed. Mark Poster (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1988), 10-28; and in Baudrillard, Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny, 1968-1983 , ed. Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis (London: Pluto Press, 1990), 35-61.

36. Georg Simmel, "Metropolis and Mental Life," in On Individuality and Social Forms , ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 335; translation modified. Published in German as "Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben" (1903), in Georg Simmel, Brücke und Tür , ed. Michael Landmann and Margarete Susmann (Stuttgart: Koehler, 1957).

37. Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity," New German Critique 22 (1981): 3-14.

38. Massimo Cacciari, Metropolis: Saggi sulla grande città di Sombart, Endell, Scheffler e Simmel (Rome: Officina, 1973), 9-10. I cite from the English translation provided in part 1 of Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture , trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 4. For further discussion of Cacciari's concept of Metropolis, see my review of this volume in Textual Practice 10, no. 2 (1996).

39. Hermann Broch, Massenwahntheorie: Beiträge zu einer Psychologie der Politik , ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 70.

40. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 66.

41. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy , 3 vols., trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988/1991).

42. Baudrillard, "Design and Environment," 192.

43. In "From Adorno to Marx: De-Aestheticizing the Modern," in Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 3-31, Neil Larsen challenges Adorno's generalization of specific problems of representing class in political society to problems of representation in art, which then becomes a primary locus of resistance for Adorno. See also Jaime Concha's foreword to Larsen's book: "From the Modernism of Adorno to the Contemporaneity of Marx," ix-xxi.

44. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life , trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 236.

45. Minima Moralia , 238.

46. Minima Moralia , 54.

47. It is useful here to compare Adorno's conception of trauma with that offered by Kaja Silverman in her recent essay "Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity," in Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 52-121. Adorno emphasizes the repetition and compulsive behavior, both for the individual and for the collective, that follow on the inassimilable event of trauma. This event is in one sense "never experienced," because it exceeds the subjective means by which events become individual and historical memory. In another (and for Adorno terrible) sense, however, the event has never ceased to be experienced, even in its apparent passage, because of its continuing grip on the psychic life of the traumatized subject. In clear contrast to Adorno's focus on the overpowering event of trauma and its subjective persistence, Silverman emphasizes the effects of trauma, particularly as they traverse the divide of sexual difference. She thus defines historical trauma as ''any historical event, whether socially engineered or of natural occurrence, which brings a large group of male subjects into such an intimate relation with lack that they are at least for the moment unable to sustain an imaginary relation with the phallus, and so withdraw their belief from the dominant fiction. Suddenly, the latter is radically de-realized, and the social formation finds itself without a mechanism for achieving consensus" (55). The event, in Silverman's account, is largely contingent; it can be natural or social in origin. Her crucial interest lies in the crisis this event precipitates in the male subject. For Adorno, in contrast, the specificity of the traumatic historical event—the convergence of world war, fascism, and culture industry in the 1930s and 1940s—is necessary to account for the fate of the subject in these times. Adorno saw this fate as part of a larger historical narrative, as an outcome of the domination of nature through technology and of political domination by the state. While Silverman offers an important perspective on the gender specificity of Adorno's notion of trauma, Adorno nevertheless raises the serious question whether the traumatic destruction of the ''dominant fiction" represents grounds for hope. Silverman assumes that the power over subjects (state power, economic power, sexual and racial oppression) is grounded on a "prior reality," a "stable core around which a nation's and a period's 'reality' cohere" (41)—the fiction of phallic power on which ideological belief is predicated. Adorno, however, takes up the problem of the continued existence of power after the traumatic destruction of the (male) subject's grounding fiction. In his view, power is even more efficacious for this dispossession of the subject, its dissipation into what lean Baudrillard would later call "the ecstasy of communication." In the place of centered belief, an objectless desire for "the new" fostered by postwar consumerism and culture industry emerges within the traumatized subject, which, paradoxically, perpetuates the trauma's efficacy in psychic life. For Adorno, then, the event of trauma and the transformation of "damaged life" into consumerism (with the consumer's desire for commodified "newness" understood as the deaestheticized face of modernism) are two moments of a single historical process following World War I.

48. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering , 342. Lewis employed this image of the "magnetic" force of the war earlier, in his novel The Childermass , in which the dead souls of the fallen soldiers of World War I wait in a camp outside the gates of the "Magnetic City," hoping to be drawn into its inner sanctum.

49. I follow Jonathan Crary's suggestion that it is possible to situate the emergence of what Guy Debord called "the society of the spectacle" in the late twenties and thirties. As indices of this emergence, he points to the perfection of television technology,, the generalized appearance of sound film, and the cultural politics of fascism. Moreover, he views surrealism and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as left-wing, avant-garde attempts to come to terms with a new "organization of perceptual consumption" in these years. Crary, "Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory," October 50 (1988): 97-107. For Debord's theses on spectacle, see his Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983).

50. On this point, cf. Peter Nicholls's important article on Wyndham Lewis, "Apes and Familiars: Modernism, Mimesis and the Work of Wyndham Lewis," Textual Practice 6, no. 3 (1992): 421-438. I differ from Nicholls in my historical framing of this issue and in certain aspects of the concept of mimesis and mimetism. Nicholls distinguishes at least three contemporaneous strains of modernism in his essay: a European avant-gardism; a modernism associated with Conrad, Woolf, and Lawrence; and a modernism associated with "the men of 1914," Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and Lewis. In my view, even the early Lewis should not be too quickly assimilated to this quartet of writers and his polemical assertions of difference from them must be given their due. A key factor, I would argue, is Lewis's direct involvement in combat during the war years, as it affected his career, his political-cultural views, and his personality; the other three were noncombatants and made crucial advances in their work precisely during the period Lewis was serving in the trenches. Though Nicholls does not take up these biographical factors, he does later consider Lewis's distinction from a theoretical point of view—the relation of mimetism to intertextuality. He connects Lewis's rejection of Pound, Joyce, and Eliot to their practice of intertextual appropriation. Lewis, he argues, attempts to block the processes of identification and assimilation by emphasizing spatial exteriority, separation of bodies, and deadness. Art, as satiric violence, counters "the passivity of a generalized social mimetism" (432). Nicholls discusses the concept of mimetism through the theoretical writings of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jacques Derrida, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, and Kené Girard. Mimetism was already part of the theoretical discourse and debate of the thirties, however, among such intellectuals as Walter Benjamin, Roger Caillois, Theodor Adorno, Pierre Klossowski, and others. Accordingly, my discussion of mimetism, while indebted to Nicholls's work, returns to this intellectual context, which I understand to form a theoretical corollary to the literary responses of late modernist writers.

51. Wyndham Lewis, The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator (New York: Haskell House, 1971), 238.

52. Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled , ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 157. Cited in text as AOBR .

53. In the latter text, Lewis recurs to the exact example used in The Art of Being Ruled to criticize surrealism: "Art at its fullest is a very great force indeed, a magical force, a sort of life , a very great 'reality.' It is that reality, that magic, that force, that this 'dream-aesthetic' proposes to merge with life, exactly on the same principle as the Producers at the Moscow theatres today merge audience and performer, stage and auditorium." The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator , 69. For an account of Lewis's battles with transition , see Dougald McMillan, transition: The History of a Literary Era , 1927-1938 (New York: George Braziller, 1975), 204-231.

54. Lewis, Men Without Art , ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 103. Cited in text as MWA .

55. Barnes, quoted by Meryl Altman, " The Antiphon : 'No Audience At All?' " in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes , ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 275.

56. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment , ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 70.

57. Beckett, Disjecta , 82.

58. For further discussion of this interpermeability of subject and object, see my article "From City-Dreams to the Dreaming Collective: Walter Benjamin's Political Dream Interpretation," Philosophy and Social Criticism 22, no. 6 (1996): 87-111.

59. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering , 16.

60. Most poignantly with the fatal accidents of Victor and Margot in The Revenge for Love and Hester in Self-Condemned .

61. Peter Bürger, in his article "Dissolution of the Subject and the Hardened Self.' Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Wyndham Lewis's Novel Tarr, " reads Lewis's first novel as revealing "two equally aporetic forms of life in the crisis period of bourgeois society, the defensive armored self of the professional person on the one hand and the diffused identity of the proto-fascist character on the other." In Bürger, The Decline of Modernism , trans. Nicholas Walker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, Press, 1992), 136. I find Bürger's schematization of these two elements at war in Lewis's concept of subjectivity (as revealed in his fictional and theoretical works) highly suggestive. Far less convincing, in my view, is Bürger's rather mechanical attempt to align these two "poles" of Lewis's subject with "modern'' and "avant-garde'' respectively. I see this move as a largely unargued attempt to leap from suppositions about subjectivity as exhibited by Lewis's texts to Lewis's own subjectivity as a producer of artworks. While this move is not in itself illegitimate, it would require a more concrete and nuanced articulation than is possible with a simple opposition of "modern" and "avant-garde," as components of Lewis's artistic personality.

62. Thomas Mann, quoted in Peter Sloterdijk, The Critique of Cynical Reason , trans. Michael Eldred, Theory and History of Literature 40 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 532.

63. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle , trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 21.

64. See also Helmut Lethen's study of "coldness" as a mode of behavior in Germany between the world wars, Verhaltenslehren der Kälte: Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994).

65. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment , trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972), 180.

66. André Bazin, "Charlie Chaplin," in What Is Cinema? Vol 1., ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 149.

67. Roger Caillois, "Mimetisme et psychasthénie légendaire," Minotaure 7 (1935): 4-10. English translation: "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," trans. John Shepley, October 31 (1984): 16-32. Cf. Denis Hollier's discussion of Caillois's essay, ''Mimesis and Castration 1937," trans. William Rodarmor, October 31 (1984): 3-15.

68. Julia Kristeva, "Place Names," in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art , ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gore, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 283.

69. Wyndham Lewis, Tarr: The 1918 Version , ed. Paul O'Keefe (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1990), 42.

70. Lewis, Tarr , 43.

71. Wyndham Lewis, "When John Bull Laughs" (1938), in Creatures of Habit, Creatures of Change: Essays on Art, Literature, and Society , 1914-1956, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 282.

72. Georges Bataille, "Un-knowing: Laughter and Tears," October 36 (1986): 97.

73. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics , ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 163.

74. The classic study of this process of "reduction" and sedimentation of laughter in texts is Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World , trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), especially his opening chapter, "Rabelais in the History of Laughter," 59-145.

75. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious , trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 117.

76. Helmut Plessner, Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior , trans. James Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Grene (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 25.

77. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 18.

78. In his 1934 article, "Studies in the Art of Laughter," Lewis discusses satire in terms that suggest Beckett's use of the term "tragicomedy" in characterizing Waiting for Godot . Lewis writes: "Satire, some satire, does undoubtedly stand half-way between Tragedy and Comedy. It may be a hybrid of these two. Or it may be a grinning tragedy, as it were. Or, yet again, it may be a comedy full of dangerous electrical action, and shattered with outbursts of tears." "Satire Defended,'' in Lewis, Enemy Salvoes: Selected Literary Criticism , ed. C. J. Fox (London: Vision Press, 1975), 48.

79. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1953), 48.

80. Beckett, Murphy , 41.

81. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts [1936, 1937, 1962], ed. Cheryl J. Plumb (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), 21. Cited in text as N.

82. In my chapter on Barnes I discuss Matthew O'Connor's role as hermeneutic mediator between the reader and the text. As I will show, the stakes of interpreting the world presented in the book constitute a central theme of Barnes.

83. Fredric Jameson, in his discussion of Lewis, discusses at length the "centrifugal" tendencies in Lewis's style. Jameson goes on to examine the strategies of "recontainment" Lewis used to organize his texts on the large-scale, "molar'' (as opposed to "molecular") dimension. While I am skeptical about Jameson's strong emphasis on the unifying, "reterritorializing'' aspect of Lewis—which I see as generally weak and usually overpowered in the fiction by Lewis's "deterritorialization" of form—I believe Jameson's approach nonetheless discloses a fundamental characteristic of late modernism, in Lewis and other writers. (Jameson, in fact, refers to Beckett's Watt in passing.) See Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), esp. chap. 2, "Agons of the Pseudo-Couple."

84. See also my essay "Dismantling Authenticity: Beckett, Adorno, and the 'Post-War,' " Textual Practice 8, no. 1 (1994): 43-57.

1. Letter of Lewis to Julian Symons, 21 November 1937, in The Letters of Wyndham Lewis , ed. W. K. Rose (New York: New Directions, 1963), 246.

2. Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography , ed. Toby Foshay (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1984), 148-149. Cited in text as RA.

3. Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography, 1914-1926 (London: John Calder, 1937), 6. Cited in text as B&B .

4. Lewis advances a political analysis of male homosexuality in The Art of Being Ruled , especially the section entitled "Man and Shaman": The Art of Being Ruled , ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 239-273.

5. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway [1925] (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 81.

6. Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God [1930] (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1984), 624. Cited in text as AOG .

7. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 223.

8. Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain (Chelsea: British Union of Fascists, 1932), 23-24.

9. By June 1930, according to Stevenson and Cook, there were z million out of work in Britain and a total of 11 million in 33 countries. John Stevenson and Chris Cook, Britain in the Depression: Society and Politics, 1929-1939 (London: Longman, 1977, 1994), 9.

10. See Mosley, The Greater Britain , 19: "The Modern Movement is by no means confined to Great Britain; it comes to all the great countries in turn as their hour of crisis approaches, and in each country it naturally assumes a form and a character suited to that nation. As a world-wide movement, it has come to be known as Fascism, and it is therefore right to use that name."

11. This question has become, perhaps, the crucial question for the Lewis criticism. Attempts to answer it have included a number of source-influence and contextual studies, most prominently: Geoffrey Wagner, Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), derives his political views from French neoclassicism; Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism , follows Wagner's lead on this point; D. G. Bridson, The Filibuster: A Study of the Political Ideas of Wyndham Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), challenges the conclusions of Wagner by considering the precise context in which Lewis's political statements were made; Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), interprets Lewis's work as exemplifying the historical affiliations between fascism and modernism while cogently criticizing modernism's evasion of politics; SueEllen Campbell, The Enemy Opposite: The Outlaw Criticism of Wyndham Lewis (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988), focuses on the rhetorical and critical strategies of Lewis's "Enemy criticism"; Tom Normand, Wyndham Lewis the Artist: Holding the Mirror Up to Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), considers Lewis's development of a political iconography in his art and literary works to reflect and comment on current social life; David Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (London: Macmillan, 1992), argues that anti-Semitism was central to Lewis's literary and political ideas; Reed Way Dasenbrock, "Wyndham Lewis's Fascist Imagination and the Fiction of Paranoia," in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture , ed. Richard J. Golsan (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992), 81-97, considers the paradoxes of Lewis's radical suspicion of ideology and its tendency to shade over into political paranoia; Andrew Hewitt, ''Wyndham Lewis: Fascism, Modernism, and the Politics of Homosexuality," ELH 60 (1993): 527-544, concentrates on Lewis's attitudes toward homosexuality as the pivotal aspect of his fascist allegiances. This list is by no means exhaustive; it is intended to illustrate the scope and diversity of positions about the problem of Lewis's political views and the relation of his writing to them.

12. See Lewis's letter to the Jonathan Cape director, G. Wren Howard, of November 1936 in The Letters of Wyndham Lewis , 240.

13. Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art [1934], ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 137. Cited in text as MWA .

14. Richards himself was relatively positive about Lewis's work, and in the forties and fifties struck up a correspondence and friendship. See the fascinating documentation published in Wyndham Lewis and I. A. Richards: A Friendship Documented, 1928-57 , ed. John Constable and S. J. M. Watson (Cambridge: Skate Press, 1989). Included in this collection is Richards's approving review of Time and Western Man in the 9 March 1928 issue of the Cambridge Review . In the twenties and thirties, however, the admiration was not mutual. Constable and Watson suggest that Lewis may have seen Richards as a rival for the attention and friendship of T. S. Eliot, whom Lewis saw as a potential ally against those on whom he was waging polemical warfare. Lewis even went so far as to offer to share with Eliot the masthead of his periodical The Enemy when it seemed that The Criterion would fold. "Last week after hearing of its suspension, I saw Eliot," Lewis wrote. "I suggested that he and a few of the more important of his staff of reviewers, should come over into The Enemy lock stock and barrel." Letter of 16 December 1927 to Herbert Read, Letters of Wyndham Lewis , 172-173. Cited in text as LWL.

15. William Empson, "The Cult of Unnaturalism," in Argufing: Essays on Literature and Culture , ed. John Haffenden (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 627.

16. F. R. Leavis, "Mr. Eliot, Mr. Wyndham Lewis and Lawrence" (1934), reprinted in The Common Pursuit (London: Hogarth Press, 1952), 243.

17. T. R. Barnes, Review of Porteus ( ~933 ), in A Selection from Scrutiny I, ed. F. R. Leavis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 131

18. Normand, Wyndham Lewis the Artist , 51.

19. Paul Edwards, Afterword, in Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man , ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), 482.

20. Edwards, in his afterword to Time and Western Man , 481-498, presents a detailed account of the transformation of The Man of the World into separately published texts. My synthesis, which has somewhat different emphases than Edwards's essay, is indebted to his philological research.

21. Wyndham Lewis, Letter to Ezra Pound, 29 April 1925, in Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis , ed. Timothy Materer (New York: New Directions, 1985), 144. Cited in text as P/L .

22. See Lewis's letter to Pound, 7 May 1925, in Pound/Lewis , 147. Enemy of the Stars would not be reissued until 1932, when it appeared with Desmond Harmsworth.

23. For biographical discussion of these figures and their activities, see Hugh Ford, Published in Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris , 1920-1939 (New York: Pushcart Press, 1975 ); Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983); and Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris , 1900-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

24. Edwards, Afterword to Time and Western Man , 487. On the convergence and divergence of the "men of 1914," see Dennis Brown, Intertextual Dynamics Within the Literary Group — Joyce, Lewis, Pound and Eliot (Hound-mills: Macmillan, 1990); Julian Symons, Makers of the New: The Revolution in Literature , 1912-1939 (London: André Deutsch, 1987).

25. Pound to Lewis, 6 June 1925, in Pound/Lewis , 149.

26. Lewis to Pound, 11 June 1925, in Pound/Lewis , 150.

27. As Edwards points out, Lewis was also granted patronage by Sir Nicholas and Lady Waterhouse in 1926, which gave him greater financial independence from the modernist community in Paris and London (afterword to Time and Western Man , 489).

28. Tom Normand suggests an analogous trajectory toward "naturalism" in Lewis's painting: "In the final years of the 1930s Lewis was to produce his most accomplished work as a painter. Subtly unorthodox, cerebral and censorious, this work was all the more remarkable because it was completed in a portraiture that bordered on the naturalistic" ( Wyndham Lewis the Artist , 128).

29. On Lewis's late turn away from satire, see Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 183-190.

30. Edwards, afterword to Time and Western Man , 463

31. Edwards, afterword to Time and Western Man , 463. Of course, aside from purely ideological differences, the mimetic, "realist" bias of much Marxist criticism would have precluded a sympathetic view of Lewis's far-from-classical fictional prose.

32. Ferenc Fehér, "Ideology as Demiurge in Modern Art," Praxis 3 (1976): 185-186.

33. Stephen Spender, "Writers and Politics," Partisan Review 34, no. 3 (1967): 359-381.

34. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1931), 135.

35. For a similar point with respect to academic readings of Joyce and Pound, see Bob Perelman, The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

36. Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 11.

37. Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 6-7.

38. Bernard Lafourcade, "Metaphor-Metonymy-Collage: Post-Modernist Aspects of Lewis's Style," Enemy News 25 (1987): 7.

39. Daniel Schenker, Wyndham Lewis.' Religion and Modernism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 45-

40. Timothy Materer, Wyndham Lewis the Novelist (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1976), 161.

41. Dasenbrock, Literary Vorticism , 135.

42. David Graver has characterized well the performative aspects of the original format of the play. He sees in the presentation of Enemy of the Stars a "displacement of performance" onto the page and its semiotic elements. See "Vor-ficist Performance and Aesthetic Turbulence in Enemy of the Stars," PMLA 107, no. 3 (1992): 482-496.

43. For the complex relations of professionalism and modernism, see Lawrence Rainey, "The Price of Modernism: Reconsidering the Publication of The Waste Land," Critical Quarterly 31, no. 4 (1989): 21-47; Bruce Robbins, "Modernism in History, Modernism in Power," in Modernism Reconsidered , ed. Robert Kiely (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 229-245; David A. Hollinger, "The Canon and Its Keepers: Modernism and Mid-Twentieth Century," in In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 74-91; Lisa Tickner, "Men's Work? Masculinity and Modernism,'' Differences 4, no. 5 (1992): 1-37; and Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace, ''Professionalism, Genre, and the Sister(s') Arts," in Elliott and Wallace, Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (Im)positionings (New York: Routledge, 1994), 56-89.

44. Reprinted in The Letters of Ezra Pound , 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1950), 43-44.

45. U.S. copyright © 1963 by Wyndham Lewis. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. U.K. and elsewhere © Wyndham Lewis and the Estate of Mrs. G. A. Wyndham Lewis, by kind permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity).

46. On this point, see Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 124: "By the time of the writing of Ulysses advertising . . . [is] so firmly ensconced as the necessary accompaniment to production of all kinds that literature begins to be colonized by it. Ulysses records this process, but by no means succumbs passively to advertising's takeover. The novel incorporates the interloper, and puts advertising language to work for its own purposes."

47. Bradford Morrow and Bernard Lafourcade, A Bibliography of the Writings of Wyndham Lewis (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1978), 57-58. See also Omar S. Pound and Philip Grover, Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Bibliography (Folkestone, Kent: Archon Books, 1978).

48. Wyndham Lewis, Paleface: The Philosophy of the 'Melting-Pot ' (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 100.

49. Northrop Frye, "Neo-Classical Agony," Hudson Review so, no. 4 (1957): 597-598.

50. Lewis felt a kinship in this respect to the painter Francis Bacon. In a review of Bacon from 17 November 1949, Lewis wrote: "Liquid whitish accents are delicately dropped upon the sable ground, like blobs of mucus—or else there is the cold white glitter of an eyeball, or of an eye distended with despairing insult behind a shouting mouth, distended also to hurl insults. Otherwise, it is a baleful regard from the mask of a decayed clubman or business executive—so decayed that usually part of the head is rotting away into space." Wyndham Lewis, "Round the Galleries," in Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings, 1913-1956 , ed. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969), 393-394. Stylistically, the language of this review is far closer to the expressionistic prose of The Childermass or The Apes of God than to most of Lewis's fictional prose of the 1940s.

51. Dasenbrock, Literary Vorticism , 158.

52. Dasenbrock, Literary Vorticism , 165-168.

53. Douglas Messerli, "The Role of Voice in Nonmodernist Fiction," Contemporary Literature 25, no. 3 (1984): 281-304; see also Norman Friedman, "Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept," in The Novel.' Modern Essays in Criticism , ed. Robert Murray Davis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 142-171.

54. Messerli, "The Role of Voice," 289.

55. Messerli, "The Role of Voice," 286.

56. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 4-7.

57. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film , 7-9.

58. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 149-165.

59. Christian Metz, "The Impersonal Enunciation, or the Site of Film (In the margin of recent works on enunciation in cinema)," New Literary History 22, no. 3 (1991): 747.

60. On this point, see Jacques Aumont et al., Aesthetics of Film , trans. and rev. Richard Neupert (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 35-36; see also Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen , trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

61. Details about this work have been drawn from Elizabeth Salter, Edith Sitwell (London: Bloomsbury Books, 1979) and The Sitwells and the Arts of the 1920s and 1930s (London: National Portrait Gallery, ca. 1994), as well as from Sitwell's autobiography, cited below.

62. Edith Sitwell, I Was Taken Care Of(New York: Atheneum, 1965), 140.

63. Leavis, quoted in Salter, Edith Sitwell , 12.

64. O. Pound and Grover, Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Bibliography , 165-166.

65. Wyndham Lewis, Engine Fight-Talk. The Song of the Militant Romance. If So the Man You Are. One-Way Song. Envoi . (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), 25.

66. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man [1927], ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993) 249-250. Cited in text as TWM .

67. See "The Prose-Song of Gertrude Stein" and "An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce," in Time and Western Man , 59-66 and 73-110. For the Joyce-Lewis relationship, see Paul Edwards, " 'Clodoveo' and 'Belcanto': Wyndham Lewis and James Joyce," Blast 3: 126-133; and Scott W. Klein, The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Lewis might have found an example ready-to-hand in the "Hades'' chapter of Ulysses , in which Leopold Bloom thinks of the gramophone as the auditory equivalent of the photograph, and of both as a means of preserving the memory of the dead against forgetting: "Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather. Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeagain hellohello amawf krpthsth. Remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds you of the face." James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text , ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 93. Indeed, in an 1878 article for the North American Review , Thomas Edison had already mentioned this function as one among ten that he projected for the newly invented phonograph: ''The 'Family Record'—a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons." Edison, quoted in Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1995), 3. See also Jacques Derrida, "Ulysses Gramophone: Her Say Yes in Joyce," in Acts of Literature , ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 253-309, for a discussion of Joyce's novel as a "gramophonic," "anamnestic and hypermnesic" machine.

68. Steve Neale, Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Color (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 73. See also Patrick Ogle, "The Development of Sound Systems: The Commercial Era," Film Reader 2 (1977): 198-212; and Douglas Gomery, "Failure and Success: Vocafilm and RCA Photophone Innovate Sound," Film Reader 2 (1977): 213-221.

69. Ogle, "Development of Sound Systems," 203.

70. Wyndham Lewis, The Childermass (London: John Calder, 1928), 63.

71. U.S. copyright © 1963 by Wyndham Lewis. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. U.K. and elsewhere © Wyndham Lewis and the Estate of Mrs. G. A. Wyndham Lewis, by kind permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity).

72. Fredric Jameson's term.

73. The Childermass , 18. Cited in text as Ch .

74. The similarity (which may indicate influence) between passages like these in The Apes of God and Beckett's free-floating dialogues in Waiting for Godot and Endgame is striking. Both Lewis and Beckett explore the seepage of theater into human relations, rendering action inconsequential and conversation unreal. Such conversations, since they are "scripted" in advance, are also infinitely repeatable—eventually, as Beckett suggests in Krapp's Last Tape and several of the late plays, even when the speaker is dead.

75. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1953), 156.

76. Wagner, Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy , 73.

77. On these issues of Starr-Smith's identity, see James English's excellent discussion of The Apes of God in Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 67-97, esp. 96-97.

78. Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as a Masquerade," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 303-313; cf. Stephen Heath, "Joan Riviere and the Masquerade," in Formations of Fantasy , ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London: Routledge, 1986), 45-61.

79. According to James English, Mosley was taken to fashioning himself after the German socialist leader Ferdinand Lasalle. Comic Transactions , 96.

80. Dasenbrock, "Wyndham Lewis's Fascist Imagination," 89.

81. Schcnker, Wyndham Lewis: Religion and Modernism , 78.

82. Julian Symons, "The Thirties Novels," Agenda 7/3-8/1 (1969-1970): 47.

1. Series 1, Box 9, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park.

2. Phillip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (New York: Viking, 1995), 233.

3. T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1937), xi. I cite this edition only for Eliot's introduction. For all other references to Nightwood , I cite the new corrected edition: Djuna Barnes, Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts , ed. Cheryl J. Plumb (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995). References to this edition are noted in my text as N followed by the page number.

4. Critics have had great difficulty in characterizing Barnes's work in literary historical terms. Louis Kannenstine, for example, describes it as "transitional": "As Miss Barnes's art can be seen as both related to its time and yet apart from it, it can be concluded that she is a transitional writer whose purpose was to get out of the mainstream and participate in a great tradition, and who now takes a place in her own time between the early innovators of this century and the later generations of experimental writers." Kannenstine, The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation (New York: New York University Press, 1977), xvii. Douglas Messerli takes Nightwood (along with Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God , notably) as an exemplary instance of "non-modernist fiction." This term refers to works with an intrusive authorial voice that exceeds the boundaries of modernist personae and concerns itself more immediately with the reader. Messerli, "The Role of Voice in Non-Modernist Fiction," Contemporary Literature 25, no. 3 (1984): 281-304. Marilyn Reizbaum, following Jane Marcus, speaks of Barnes's ''modernism of marginality," which compels a reexamination of the central categories by which modernism has been described and its canon selected. Reizbaum, "A 'Modernism of Marginality': The Link between James Joyce and Djuna Barnes," in New Alliances in Joyce Studies , ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1988), 179-189. Most recently, Donna Gerstenberger describes Barnes as having a ''free-floating relation" to both modernism and postmodernism: "Barnes clearly shares time and space with those we call our British and American modernist writers, a definition that has been increasingly generalized with the circulation of descriptive notions of postmodernism. What Barnes does not share is a clear adherence to some central tenets of modernism, even given modernism's shifting critical constructions." Gerstenberger, "Modern (Post) Modern: Djuna Barnes among the Others," Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 3 (1993): 33-40.

5. I refer, of course, to Eliot's renowned essay of 1919, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." I cite freely from the text as printed in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot , ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 37-44.

6. Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 64.

7. Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Post-Modernism," in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation , ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 235.

8. Owens, "Allegorical Impulse," 235.

9. Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack (Elmwood Park, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992), 55. Cited in text as LA.

10. In a notebook jotting, probably from November 1917, Barnes writes: "Even God could not keep straight the things he had planned in a line—." Series 1, Box 1, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park.

11. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel , trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 40-41.

12. "The face is what anglers catch in the daylight, but the sea is the night!" (N, 79).

13. Elsewhere, to Felix, O'Connor speaks of "the almost fossilized state of our recollection" ( N , 100).

14. Djuna Barnes, "When the Puppets Come to Town," Morning Telegraph , 8 July 1917.

15. Dietmar Voss and Jochen C. Schütze argue that the family provides a privileged space for the bourgeois novel's presentation of individual fate as typical: "The novel is forced, according to its logic of form, to orient itself toward social spaces corresponding to the basic character of that familial space in which individual and class history were still mediated in a particular way." Voss and Schütze, "Postmodernism in Context: Perspectives of a Structural Change in Society, Literature, and Literary Criticism," New German Critique 47 (1989): 122. In the modernist novel, they argue, familial space is still crucial, but the link between class and individual becomes problematic, and subjective consciousness and memory take on a preponderant importance (122-123). Only with such "advanced montage novels'' as those of Alfred Döblin and John Dos Passos, they conclude, is the "image space" of the novel "emancipated from the horizon of the individually experienceable" (123), and thus logically also from its familial focus.

16. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 446.

17. Walter Benjamin, "Central Park," trans. Lloyd Spencer, New German Critique 34 (1985): 35.

18. Gertrude Stein, "The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans," in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein , ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 252.

19. Djuna Barnes, Ryder [1928] (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990). Cited in text as R.

20. Kannenstine, "The Art of Djuna Barnes," 36.

21. For a discussion of filiation and affiliation in modern literature, see Edward Said, The Text, the World, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 16-17.

22. See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination , trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 172ff., for Rabelais's use of this technique.

23. In her poem "The Ineffectual Marriage," Barnes's friend Mina Loy satirized the futurist writer Giovanni Papini in an analogous way. "Miovanni" pompously declares his visionary independence of time and space, including the mundane matter of the dinner "Gina" has cooked for him. The poem breaks off with an ironic note to the reader: "This narrative halted when I learned that the house which inspired it was the home of a mad woman?' Loy's poem appeared originally in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse , ed. Alfred Kreymborg (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917).

24. In returning to the settings and characters of Ryder in a tragic mood in her post-World War II play The Antiphon , Barnes will make this Noah analogy explicit. The father-polygamist in that play calls his house "Titus's Ark."

25. Elsewhere Sophia offers the following portrait of the artist: "[Wendell] plays, he writes, he can do many things; he has, only imagine! operas to his credit, with full orchestral directions planned, and executed amid the din of hungry children, on a deal table, littered with nothing more than the never-out-of-sight-of-the-hungry-and-the-distressed, bread and water" (178).

26. Barnes, like Beckett, at times saw the invention of speech—which for humanism differentiated humans from the animals—as a natural-historical disaster. In a film review, she once wrote of a mute character: "So exceedingly painful and poignant he makes silence, that I begin to wonder if we as a race have not made a great mistake in becoming articulate." Quoted in Kannenstine, "The Art of Djuna Barnes," 15. Wendell Ryder threatens to generalize this mistake to the whole of creation.

27. In certain respects, this boy anticipates Felix's son Guido in Nightwood , who, in his feebleness and his desire to become a priest, destroys his father's vision of perpetuating the Volkbein lineage.

28. Letter to Peter Heggie, 5 September 1970, Series 1, Box 1, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park.

29. For discussion of the various figures to whom Ladies Almanack is "keyed," see the essays by Frances M. Doughty, Susan Sniader Lanser, Frann Michel, and Karla Jay in Silence and Power: A Reevluation of Djuna Barnes , ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 137-193.

30. Though not funded by Natalie Barney, as Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace claim in Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (im) positionings (New York: Routledge, 1994), 154. According to Phillip Herring, "Barney had nothing to do with its publication." It was paid for by Robert McAlmon, with Barnes herself footing the bill for reproduction of the drawings and William Bird supplying some production help. See Herring, Djuna , 149-153.

31. Karla Jay, for example, argues that on both social and economic grounds Barnes had to be careful about identifying herself as a lesbian. Jay, "The Outsider Among the Expatriates: Djuna Barnes' Satire on the Ladies of the Almahack, " in Broe, Silence and Power , 193.

32. Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays , trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo, 1964), 12.

33. Guillaume Apollinaire, The Poet Assassinated and Other Stories , trans. Ron Padgett (London: Grafton Books, 1985), 46-47.

34. The OED gives as variant spellings of the word almanac : "almenak, almanch(e), amminick, almanacke, and almanack."

35. See Herring, Djuna , 112-116, for Barnes and yon Freytag-Loringhoven.

36. Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), 270.

37. Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," in Reflections , ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 192.

38. Theodor W. Adorno, "Looking Back on Surrealism," in Notes to Literature , vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicolsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 88.

39. Herring, Djuna , 218.

40. On this point, see Vincent P. Pecora, Self and Form in Modern Narrative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 17.

41. As Alan Wilde writes, "What we confront finally is a different kind of complexity: the heroism of consciousness making art of its own uncertainty and expressing in its very form, in the express rejection of an easy resolution, the difficult aesthetics of crisis." Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Post-modernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 27.

42. Pecora, Self and Form in Modern Narrative , 30. In quite different terms, Leo Bersani has also criticized the redemptive appeal in modernism, as a devaluation of both art and historical experience: "The catastrophes of history matter much less if they are somehow compensated for in art, and art itself gets reduced to a kind of superior patching function, is enslaved to those very materials to which it presumably imparts value." The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1.

43. On this tradition, see Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

44. In Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), Carolyn Allen offers a sophisticated discussion of the problematic of identification in lesbian fiction, including that of Djuna Barnes. She seeks to reveal the "erotics of reading" set in play by lesbian fictions. The reader, in her oscillation between surrender to the text and mastery of it, is seduced by it; the movements of desire shaped by the reading are integral to the meaning of the text, and, alternately, the formal and figural elements of the text evoke certain perturbations of desire. This kind of reading, in turn, has given rise to a tradition of lesbian writing, as in the case of Bertha Harris, who was "seduced" in this way by the example of Barnes and her Nightwood . Although she places ''identification" in scare quotes, and emphasizes "resemblance" over "sameness,'' Allen nonetheless envisages primarily identificatory ways of reading these texts, ways of reading in which the reader's erotic desire is directly engaged. Methodologically, she employs a homology between lived relations between women, representations of characters' relations with one another, and the relation of the reader to the lesbian text. My interpretation of Nightwood parts company with Allen's otherwise salutary focus on dynamics of reading at just this latter point. For in her treatment of the diegetic relations of characters in Nightwood , Allen treats them as empirically given and uses psychoanalytic concepts to analyze them. Her interest in the "exemplary" value of literary representations for questions of lesbian erotics as such overshadows a key aspect of the characters in Nightwood : they are, through and through, readers—obsessive producers, consumers, transmitters, interpreters, and advocates of texts. I would argue that through her handling of character-readers, Barnes puts obstacles in the way of her text's functioning as "exemplary." As I suggest in what follows, Barnes pushes this problem to the brink of a radical uncoupling of desire from the text, at the cost of its deconstruction as a meaningful narrative and the acceptance of its derisive loss of sense.

45. Cf. the opening chapter of Ryder , "Jesus Mundane," in which an unidentified voice delivers a homily on the image, which, read against Felix's statement, seems a warning for his sort: "Reach not beyond the image. For these idols and these lambrequins and these fluted candles . . . and the altar, and the chancel, and the nave, and aisles, are not for thee in the spirit, but for thee only in the outward manifestation; nor are the Beasts for thee, with the eyes back and the eyes front, nor for thee the bleeding of the heart, with its fire and its ice" (3-4 ).

46. In a striking letter of 1919 in which Barnes tells of a bedside vigil with a dying woman, she reveals her horrified fascination with the uncanny idea of life-in-death: "Mary has been given up by z nurses, z doctors and a score of others at least 10 days back, but she still breathes. . . . It looks as if I might be left alone with her in the last hours. . . . The last doctor said that he could not see how she still lived—She sleeps with open eyes and has to gasp for every breath and no longer gets any clots up neither do her bowels move and she has not eaten more than half a glass of milk a day for 5 days—She is delirious but knows it is delirium while she is going through it, and she suffers a great deal—and yesterday she about killed me by trying to put her arms around me saying 'You see the way it is with me' and then 'Can't you help me?' Of course the most terrible—is that she has lived beyond her own death." Letter to Courtenay Lemon, 1919, Series I, Box 9, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park.

47. As Cheryl Plumb notes, this arrangement of chapters was not Barnes's original order but rather a suggestion of the editors: see pages xii-xiii of her introduction to Nightwood . Nonetheless, Barnes accepted this suggestion and never amended it in any later edition. Therefore, whatever the conditions of genesis of this particular ordering of the work, effects of the arrangement, such as I discuss here, must be seen as arising out of an objective situation of the text.

48. Barnes's flirtation with Catholicism as an answer should be seen in the context of a neo-Catholic tendency within modernism advocating a "rappel à l'ordre": Cocteau, de Chirico, and Eliot, most prominently. Barnes's mother, interestingly, gave a cultic interpretation of Nightwood's significance for modern humanity: "Some day you will produce the almighty man or woman who will go down the ages as the typical character for man to emulate. And then you will have started a new religion, which we need more than ever since they—meaning mankind—has swept Christ into limbo."—Letter to Djuna Barnes, 3 November 1936, Series I, Box z, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park.

49. Michel de Certeau, "The Arts of Dying: Celibatory Machines," in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other , trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 159.

50. In a letter to her mother, Barnes expressed her view of life as something "monstrous" and "obscene," "with the most obscene track of the end." Letter of 19 February 1923, Series 1, Box 2, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park. More directly relevant here, however, is Barnes's strong resistance to T. S. Eliot's suggestion that she change her description of Robin's final fit of laughter as ''obscene" to ''unclean." Barnes glossed Eliot's page proof correction thus: "Sample of T.S.E.'s 'lack of imagination' (as he said)." Series II, Box 4, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park.

51. Alan Singer, A Metaphorics of Fiction: Discontinuity and Discourse in the Modern Novel (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1983), 58.

52. Georges Bataille, "The Practice of Joy Before Death," in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 , trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 235-239.

53. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman , trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 198.

54. This incoherence is especially manifest in the editions previous to the recent restored edition. A connecting anecdote was cut, which exacerbates the gap between Felix's question and O'Connor's answer. However, the difference between the editions is a matter of degree, not of essence. Shortly after the "horse that knew too much" anecdote, Barnes herself underscores the mono-logic nature of O'Connor's response, indicating that she intended his answers to seem inappropriate and incongruous: "The doctor, as he grew older, in answering a question seemed, as old people do, to be speaking more and more to himself" ( N , 101).

55. In this respect, O'Connor's fallible mysticism could be seen to cast its shadow over the spiritual interpretation urged on Barnes by her friend Emily Coleman. Coleman felt that Nightwood , despite its evident genius, failed to realize the tragic potential in the love of Robin and Nora; Dr. O'Connor's storytelling and homilizing distracted, Coleman thought, from this "central" tragic node. Coleman even went so far as to edit out some of O'Connor's more ribald stories before submitting the manuscript to Eliot (putatively anticipating his response) and to offer Eliot her own views about which passages might be cut. Coleman, however, believed that Barnes was capable of achieving a genuinely religious pathos. Thus, in a letter of 1 August 1935, Coleman told Barnes: "Poetry changes life for me: it is moral. I can never be quite the same after reading your chapter on Night, and what you say in your book about evil." In another letter of 27 August 1935, Coleman tells Barnes explicitly: "Your writing is original mystic poetic writing." Barnes was considerably irritated over what she perceived as Coleman's meddling (despite Coleman's heroic efforts to get Nightwood published). I believe this irritation came not just from Barnes's legendary testiness and suspicion but also from Coleman's insistent failure to grasp the book's overall satiric design. (The correspondence with Coleman is in Series 1, Box 3; Coleman's essay, in Series 1, Box 4, Djuna Barnes Collection, University of Maryland, College Park.)

56. Maurice Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death," in The Gaze of Orpheus , trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1981), 39.

57. With his machinic assemblages, the Swiss artist lean Tinguely explored a terrain analogous to Duchamp's. In mockery of claims made by modernist critics that abstract expressionist paintings gave access to the subconscious, archetypal depths of the painter's mind, Tinguely assembled a painting machine to produce huge numbers of technically perfect abstract paintings, each as "new" as the last. His ramshackle musical machines, in contrast, parodied modernist serial music in its appeal to a rational, mathematical ideality. In both cases, however, Tinguely's mechanical supplanting of the creative artist satirizes modernism's appeals to a transcendent source of meaning for the artwork, wherever that source might be situated.

58. De Certeau, "The Arts of Dying," 161. For an insightful discussion of an author less equivocally committed to this mode than Barnes, see Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel , trans. Charles Ruas (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986).

59. Jean-François Lyotard, Duchamp's TRANS/formers , trans. Ian McLeod (Venice, Calif.: Lapis Press, 1990), 65, continued on 68.

60. Lyotard defines a simple machine as a device of two or more parts that produce effects disjunctively distributed; that is, its parts move in opposed directions. Hence the most rudimentary possibility for making a machine is to erect a transparent partition, which both joins and disjoins the two halves. Duchamp's TRANS/formers , 41-47.

61. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit trace the connection between violence and representation in Bersani and Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1985). Bersani develops this perspective further in his provocative study, The Culture of Redemption .

1. Richard Kearney, "Beckett: The Demythologizing Intellect," in The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions , ed. Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1985), 267-293; J. C. C. Mays, "Mythologized Presences: Murphy in Its Time," in Myth and Reality in Irish Literature , ed. Joseph Ronsley (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1977), 198-218; John P. Harrington, The Irish Beckett (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991). See also David Lloyd, "Writing in the Shit: Beckett, Nationalism, and the Colonial Subject," in Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 41-58; Mary Junker, Beckett: The Irish Dimension (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1995); John Fletcher, ''Modernism and Samuel Beckett," in Facets of European Modernism (Norwich: University of East Anglia Press, 1985), 199-217; and Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 7-31.

2. Samuel Beckett, "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce," in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment , ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 26.

3. Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 59. Hereafter cited in text as Proust .

4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 300.

5. Foucault, The Order of Things , 384.

6. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), 288-289.

7. Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women , ed. Eoin O'Brien and Edith Fournier (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), 102 (cited in text as DFMW); Disjecta, 48 .

8. For an insightful discussion of Foucault's relation to the cultural project of modernism, see John Rajchman, "Foucault, or the Ends of Modernism," October 24 (1983): 37-62; for the conception of an intransitive writing, see Roland Barthes, "To Write: An Intransitive Verb? in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 134-156. Notably, Barthes takes "the case of the Proustian narrator" as "exemplary": "he exists only in writing" (143).

9. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus (London: Penguin Books, 1988), xlvii, 1.

10. Harrington, The Irish Beckett , 48. John Fletcher writes of postindependence Dublin, "the city stood, in international terms, a bit higher than Monrovia, not so high as Copenhagen, and at about the same level as Bogotà" ("Modernism and Samuel Beckett," 199).

11. Such differences are, however, historical , not static, timeless essences. They are pertinent only as the shifting articulations of a hierarchical structure of relations, within which individual elements take on their meanings. As Louis Althusser suggests of such differential structures: "The present of one level is . . . the absence of another, and this co-existence of a 'presence' and absences is simply the effect of the structure of the whole in its articulated decentricity. What is thus grasped as absences in a localized presence is precisely the non-localization of the structure of the whole." Louis Althusser and Éti-enne Balibar, Reading Capital , trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 104. Yet Althusser's account also implies that the very differences that serve to localize literary artifacts in national and generic traditions, assigning them places in the historical narrative dedicated to these constructs, may also render them vulnerable to failure, subversion, and historical change. In their restless mobilis, their consistent recombination and reconfiguration, such differences rattle the frames by which, in traditional historicist writing, their geographical and textual mobility would be slowed and controlled: the metahistorical borderlines of genre and nation. On this latter point, see Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation," in Nation and Narration , ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 291-322.

12. On this point, see H. Porter Abbott, "Late Modernism: Samuel Beckett and the Art of the Oeuvre," in Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Post-modern Drama , ed. Enoch Brater and Kuby Cohn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 73-96. Abbott notes the peculiar rhythm of "return" that subsists between Beckett's prose and his dramatic works: "It was not nostalgia that animated Beckett when, at the moment he appeared to have abolished character from his prose fiction, he reinstated it so brilliantly on the stage. It has frequently been noted that when Beckett moves to a new genre or medium he appears to revert to an earlier stage of historical development from that to which he had brought the genre or medium in which he had been previously working" (85).

13. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984), 10.

14. Jacqueline Hoefer, " Watt ," reprinted in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays , ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 62-76.

15. Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 132.

16. Eric P. Levy Beckett and the Voice of Species: A Study of the Prose Fiction (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1980), 1-2.

17. Gerald L. Bruns, "Stevens without Epistemology," in Wallace Stevens : The Poetics of Modernism , ed. Albert Gelpi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 24-40.

18. Beckett, quoted by Linda Ben-Zvi, "Fritz Mauthner for Company," Journal of Beckett Studies 9 (1984): 66.

19. Beckett to MacGreevy, July 1930, quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 122.

20. Beckett to MacGreevy, September 1937, quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame , 248. See also Beckett's script for Film , which offers a particularly explicit instance of this hollow use of philosophy: " Esse est percipi. / All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains in being. / Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception. / No truth value attaches to above, regarded as merely structural and dramatic convenience." Samuel Beckett, Film (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 11.

21. Although his concerns are somewhat different from mine, I find support for my "anti-epistemological reading" of Beckett in M. Keith Booker's chapters on Watt and The Lost Ones in Literature and Domination: Sex, Knowledge, and Power in Modern Literature (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993), 20-41, 142-160.

22. Charles R. Lyons, "Beckett, Shakespeare, and the Making of Theory," in Brater and Cohn, Around the Absurd , 117.

23. For example, one plausible way to interpret Waiting for Godot might be to consider whether "waiting" is not a valid form of solidarity, a way of being together no worse, and perhaps better, than many others. Wolfgang Iser has noted that Beckett's designed foiling of the audience's desire to know—who Godot is, whether he will come—eventually produces a kind of freedom or "levity" in the actions and speech of the characters: "As the meaning projections of the spectator are incapable of removing the indeterminacy of the situations, so the two main characters seem more and more free and unconcerned. They seem to be quite indifferent to the earnestness assumed by the spectator." Iser, "When Is the End Not the End? The Idea of Fiction in Beckett," in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism , ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 60. We might put this otherwise by saying that if Beckett's writing still has an "intransitive'' quality to it, it is no longer because it refers back to the autonomy of a thinking consciousness, as did modernist writing, but rather to the autonomy of social forms and practices ungroundable by reliable knowledge: narrating, waiting, searching, playing.

24. Leo Bersani, "Against Ulysses, " in The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 170.

25. Both quotes are from Beckett, The Unnameable , in Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable (New York: Grove Press, 1955, 1956, 1958), 336, 348.

26. Bersani, "Against Ulysses, " 169.

27. This might seem a paradoxical statement given that I will explicate in detail Beckett's allusion to "the Stalinist comedians," Bim and Bom. This allusion, however, illustrates quite aptly how in his work a tidbit of cultural arcana may degenerate into a mere fragment of language, a kind of idiot's babble of minimal differences: "bim, bom . . ." The responsibility for any unfortunate resuscitation of meaning lies wholly with the explicator.

28. For a detailed account of Joyce's influence on Beckett's works, see Barbara Reich Gluck, Beckett and Joyce: Friendship and Fiction (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979). Cf. the essays on Joyce and Beckett by S. E. Gontarski, David Hayman, and Richard Pearce in the conference volume The Seventh of Joyce , ed. Bernard Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 25-49.

29. Samuel Beckett, "Sedendo et Quiesciendo," transition 21 (1932): 13.

30. Beckett to Charles Prentice, 15 August 1932, quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame , 156.

31. Harrington, The Irish Beckett , 70.

32. Samuel Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks (New York: Grove Press, 1972), 187.

33. Interestingly, in the early drafts of Watt , Watt's employer Mr. Knott was called Quin. See Ann Beer, "Watt, Knott, and Beckett's Bilingualism," Journal of Beckett Studies 10 (1985): 48ff. This suggests an occult relation between Mr. Knott's strange house and the punning source of his predecessor's name. "Cap-per Quin" of More Pricks Than Kicks , later declined as "Cooper" in Murphy , ultimately comes—according to J. C. C. Mays—from a Trappist monastery in Munster at Cappoquin. Mays, "Mythologized Presences," 215. This instance of mutilated incorporation is far from unique in Beckett's corpus; as more unpublished materials come to light examples will surely multiply. What is of interest, however, along with the thematic clues such connections provide, is their near-inscrutability in the published texts. Beckett retains just enough intertextual communication between works to suggest something missing, but not enough to allow us to reconstruct it or even know what there is to reconstruct.

34. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 247; cf. Leslie Hill, Beckett's Fiction in Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 28: " Watt , as a novel, as the presence of the Addenda show, is marked in its very structure by this puzzle of failed incorporation."

35. Rosalind Krauss, "Antivision," October 36 (1986): 149. Krauss is referring to the work of Beckett's contemporary Georges Bataille.

36. The original is in German. I cite from Martin Esslin's translation, provided in the notes in Disjecta , 172. H. Porter Abbott, in his already-cited essay on Beckett as "late modernist," cites this letter as evidence of Beckett's continuing sympathy for "his modernist masters," meaning for Abbott, Proust and Joyce. But he ignores both what Beckett says in the Axel Kaun letter, taking Gertrude Stein's part against Joyce, and what that choice implied in the concrete context. Since transition was Joyce's most important supporter while Finnegans Wake was "in progress," and the same journal had "indicted" Gertrude Stein following the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , Beckett's choice provides further evidence of his rejection of transition's program. As I have suggested, Beckett used the fulcrum of Lewis's aggressive antimodernist polemics and Stein's radical attack on ''literary" language as a means of articulating his own late modernist stance.

37. Cathleen Culotta Andonian's 1989 bibliography of criticism, Samuel Beckett: A Refrence Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), lists only one entry discussing Beckett and Stein together: a chapter in Bruce F. Kawin's book, Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972). That in the great industry of Beckett criticism almost nothing has been made of the Stein-Beckett connection, despite the clearly Steinian constructions in Watt and analogous uses of grammar and syntax in the late prose, can only testify to the immense academic attraction of the Joycean aesthetic, which legitimates the role of exegetes as the caretakers of culture, over one that calls in question the exegetical role.

38. For discussions of these hybrid styles see Marjorie Perloff, " 'A Fine New Kind of Realism': Six Stein Styles in Search of a Reader," in Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univcrsity Press, 1990), 145-159; and Perloff, "Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New Poetry;" in The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 135-154.

39. Sarmuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957) 1. Cited in text as Mur.

40. Samuel Beckett, "A Wet Night," in More Pricks Than Kicks (New York: Grove Press, 1972), 47-84. Beckett, in fact, implies this parallel; he calls Murphy's fantasy of "embryonal repose" quoted in the previous passage his "Belacqua fantasy" ( Mur , 78), referring both to Dante's denizen of purgatory and his own Dublin aesthete.

41. "Bim" published his memoirs in the year after Stalin's death; however, it is doubtful that the old clown needed to learn any new tricks for his new masters. Ivan Semenovich Radunskii, Zapiski starogo klouna (Memoirs of an Old Clown) (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1954).

42. This account of Bim and Bom derives from Tsirk: Malen'kaia Entsiklopediia (Circus: A Little Encyclopedia), 2d ed., ed. I. A. Dmitriev et al. (Moscow: Press "Soviet Encyclopedia," 1979), 67; Great Soviet Encylopedia , trans. of 3d ed. of Bolshaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia , ed. A.M. Prokorov (New York: Macmillan, 1973 ), 271; and Joel Schechter, "Bim, Bom and The Laugh," Theater (Winter/Spring 1980): 34-37.

43. See Schechter, "Bim, Bom, and The Laugh, " for a discussion of Serafimovich's novel and a translation of The Laugh . The issue of Theater in which Schechter's article appears also includes a recording of Bim-Bom's play.

44. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 670, n.4.

45. Richard Aidington, The Colonel's Daughter [1931] (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 351.

46. For the details of Lewis's debate with transition , see Dougald McMillan, transition: The History of a Literary Era , 1927-1938 (New York: George Braziller, 1975), 204-231. See also pp.148-156, on Beckett's ambivalent relation to transition . Although he contributed to transition's forum on Joyce's "Work in Progress," published poetry and prose works there, and signed the "Poetry Is Vertical" manifesto of 1931, he seems ultimately not to have been able to affirm Eugene Jolas's visionary poetics with any great conviction. As McMillan notes, "In their irreverent negative treatment of the interior expression of a metaphysical longing Beckett's works are almost a parody of the search for metaphysical experience undertaken by Crane, Jolas, and many, of the other transition writers" (152). "Almost," I believe, is too weak; Beckett explicitly parodies this search, satirizing above all the transition ephebe and aspiring modernist Samuel Beckett and discovering himself in self-reflexive laughter.

47. Fülüp-Miller, quoted by Lewis, "Paleface," The Enemy 2 (September 1927): 106-108.

48. Paul Mann has argued that this dialectical recuperation of marginal dissent is essential to the history and social functioning of the avant-garde. He writes: "In late capitalism the margin is not ostracized; it is discursively engaged. The fatality of recuperation proceeds not from any laws of nature but from dialectical engagement, the (never altogether conscious) commitment by any artist or movement to discursive exchange. The discourse of the avant-garde interests us not because it is an opportunity to promote or discredit another revolutionary romance but because it is the most fully articulated discourse of the technology of recuperation." Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 15. In my view, Mann's theoretically articulate argument is already implicit in the late modernist works of Lewis and Beckett.

49. It is notable that Beckett's one enduring political engagement was with the French Resistance. He was decorated after the war for his wartime activity and until his death gave significant sums of money to a fund for Resistance veterans.

50. David Lodge, "The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy," in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature , 1890-1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 484.

51. In the later fiction (perhaps even with The Unnameable , if taken out of the name sequence) Beckett recurs to the "metaphorical" mode of titling: How It Is, The Lost Ones , "Imagination Dead Imagine," Company, Worstward Ho, Ill Seen Ill Said , and so on. This may reflect Beckett's tendency toward prose that uses "poetic" means: the increasing dominance, in Jakobson's terms, of "paradigmatic'' devices like clusters of imagery and sound structure, while the "syntagmatic" dimension of the text, its narrational and other extensional structure, is progressively reduced.

52. After Murphy's death, at the inquest, the county coroner cheekily asks of Celia: " 'And this young lady . . . who knew him in such detail, such opportune detail—. . . . Did Miss Kelly murmur Murphy . . . or Mr. Murphy?" ( Mur , 268).

53. Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 53.

54. Beckett gives another faint echo of this pun in his portrayal of Neary, driven to distraction by Miss Counihan's rebuff of his attentions. Rescued by his former student Wylie at the Dublin Post Office, Neary is described as having "rocked blissfully on the fight arm of his rescuer" ( Mur , 43).

55. Bair, Samuel Beckett , 303. Bair cites a letter to George Reavey of 26 September 1939 as evidence.

56. Discussing the Beckett-Giacometti parallel (but of limited critical value) are Matti Megged, "Beckett and Giacometti," Partisan Review 49, no. 3 (1982): 400-406, and Megged, Dialogue in the Void: Beckett and Giacometti (New York: Lumen Books, 1985).

57. Rosalind Krauss, "No More Play," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 57-58.

58. Krauss, "No More Play," 62.

59. During the twenties and early thirties, Roussel was the subject of articles by Philippe Soupault, Roger Vitrac, Salvador Dali, André Breton, and Michel Leiris; for English translations of all but Leiris's articles (included is another article by Leiris from 1954, but not two others from 1935 and 1936), see Raymond Roussel.' Life, Death and Works (Atlas Anthology, no. 4) (London: Arias Press, 1987). Translations from Roussel also appeared in transition . It would be surprising, then, if Beckett, actively reading and translating the French literary avant-garde, were not aware of Roussel's work.

60. Raymond Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My Books , trans. Trevor Winkfield (New York: Sun, 1975), 5.

61. Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel , trans. Charles Ruas (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986), 26.

62. See, for example, how the hospital in Murphy , the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, becomes associated with Celia's "mercyseat," Murphy's sexual relief, through linguistic association. Thus, Celia the prostitute is recalled by (Mary) Magdalen; furthermore, Murphy's (or the narrator's) euphemism for sexual intercourse, "music," is conjured up by the initials M.M.M., like a moan of satisfaction (mmm . . .), and in turn self-consciously referred to the typographical conventions of the printed book (note, too, the intentionally faulty grammar of the sentence, eliding its actual subject, Murphy): "Late that afternoon, after many fruitless hours in the chair, it would be just about the time Celia was telling her story, M.M.M. stood suddenly for music, MUSIC, MUSIC, in brilliant, brevier and canon, or some such typographical scream, if the gentle compositor would be so friendly'' ( Mur , 236).

63. Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks , 38.

64. Beckett, Watt , 164.

1. Mina Loy, Insel , ed. Elizabeth Arnold (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1991), 103.

2. For the biographical background to Loy's composition of Insel , see Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 359-384.

3. Mina Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker , ed. Roger Conover (Highlands, N.C.: Jargon, 1982), 311.

4. William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1948 / 1949 / 1951), 319.

5. Beckett to MacGreevy, 20 December 1931, quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 142.

6. Hugh Ford, Published in Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris , 1920-1939 (Yonkers, N.Y.: Pushcart, 1975), 365-366.

7. Herbert Marcuse, Der deutsche Künstlerroman , in Schriften I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 17-18. My translation.

8. See also Theodor W. Adorno, "Jene zwanziger Jahre," in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II ( Gesammelte Schriften 10/2) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), 504-505: "With distance it can be observed that many artists, whose nimbus is equated with that of the twenties, had in that decade already passed their zenith; Kandinsky, probably also Picasso, Schönberg, even Klee. As unquestionably as Schönberg's twelve-tone technique emerged as the fully logical outcome of his own achievements . . . just so unquestionably is something of the best lost upon the shift to systematic principles." My translation.

9. Loy, quoted in Last Lunar Baedeker , lxxv.

10. Benjamin's essay appears in two versions in his Gesammelte Schriften I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 431-469, 471-508. It appears in English translation as "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217-251.

11. E. M. Forster, "Liberty in England," in Abinger Harvest (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1936), 67.

12. Peggy Guggenheim, Out of this Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (New York: Universe Books, 1979), 67. See also the colorful account of the lamp shade business in Jacqueline Bograd Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986), chap. 11; Laurence TacouRumney, Peggy Guggenheim: A Collector's Album (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), 58-59.

13. Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker , ed. Roger L. Conover (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996), 151.

14. For the connection between mass culture and femininity in Weimar Germany, see the 1927 article by Siegfried Kracauer, "Die kleinen Ladenmädchen gehen ins Kino" ("The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies") and "Das Ornament der Masse" ("The Mass Ornament''), in Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963); English translation in Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays , ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also Sabine Hake, "Girls and Crisis: The Other Side of Diversion," New German Critique 40 (1987): 147-164, and Patrice Petro's book-length study, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. chap. 4, ''Weimar Cinema and the Female Spectator."

15. Roger Caillois, "La Mante Religieuse," Minotaure 5 (1934): 23-26, and "Mimétisme et Psychasthénie Légendaire," Minotaure 7 (1935): 4-10.