Anti-Individualism and the Fictions of National Character in Wyndham Lewis's Tarr

Abstract

Dasenbrock, Reed Way. Anatomies of Internationalism in Tarr and Howards End. Unpublished paper presented at 108th MLA convention (28 Dec. 1992). Eksteins, Morris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and Birth of Modern Age. New York: Anchor, 1989. Foshay, Toby Avard. Wyndham Lewis and Avant-Garde: The Politics of Intellect. Montreal: McGill Queen's, 1992. Galton, Sir Francis. Hereditary Talent and Character. MacMillan's Magazine 12 (London, 1865). Rpt. Images of Race, ed. Michael D. Biddiss. New York: No reader of Tarr, Wyndham Lewis's first-published, most-studied, and arguably best novel, can ignore central role that nationality plays in text. As Lewis's international characters interact chaotically on streets and in cafes of pre-war Paris, they spend endless time contemplating their characteristics and justifying their actions in terms of character. They make so much of these topics, in fact, that ever since Tarr's first publication critics have periodically taken them as pivotal to novel's meaning. Most such analyses have focused on psychological drama of two characters: Bertha Lunken, over-sentimental lover of English painter Frederick Tarr, and Otto Kreisler, failed artist and financial parasite, whose obsession with unattainable Russian-German beauty Anastasya Vasek drives him to rape Bertha, to kill accidentally Soltyk (the Russian-Pole he means to kill on purpose), and finally to hang himself. Critics analyzing novel during times of anti-German sentiment in England and America--after First and Second World Wars--interpreted Tarr as an anti-German tract, reading Lewis's overly romantic and brutal Germans as literary instruments in critique, allegorical representations of their destructive fatherland. Rebecca West, in one of earliest and most frequently cited commentaries on Tarr, called it a work of art of power and distinction (69) and Kreisler of vast moral significance (67). Nonetheless, she took actions of Lewis's characters as manifestations of national ugliness: In watching Bertha Lunken, acquiescent sentimentalist, and Kreisler, murderous clown, whom she evokes by her spurious passions and inspires by her inertia to his most violent atrocity, we have same baffled feeling with which Europe has watched Germany for last four years: here are people whole of whose beings are oriented towards ugliness. (68) Writing after Second World War, Geoffrey Wagner echoed West: Bertha and Kreisler ... personify together romantic nihilism that is racial criticism of work.... They are tellingly brought together in brutal erotic clash, symbolic of social rape Lewis thinks Germans would like to effect on society of nations. (237) By attributing fixed repertoire of German traits to Bertha and Kreisler, however, West and Wagner oversimplified Lewis's characters, misconstrued his analysis of nationality's role in personal identity, and thereby reduced complexity of his novel. Recognizing such limitations, Fredric Jameson, in his celebrated 1979 study of Lewis's novels, offered provocative revisionist approach to Tarr's treatment of nationality. While Jameson's is most sophisticated and interesting analysis of Lewis's handling of nationality in novel, it is keyed more to his own theoretical preoccupations than to Lewis's aims. Like West and Wagner, Jameson interprets Tarr as in which the individual characters figure ... more abstract national characteristics which are read as their inner essence. But he criticizes partisan interpretations like those of West and Wagner that focus on a single foreign national essence alone because such readings use ... as instrument of cultural critique. In contrast, he contends that Lewis's treatment of national allegory is more complicated: A more complex network of interrelations and collisions emerges . …