Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Reading of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein

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Modernist Articulations A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein

Alex Goody

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Modernist Articulations

10.1057/9780230288300 - Modernist Articulations, Alex Goody



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A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein Alex Goody




© Alex Goody 2007

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230500495 hardback ISBN-10: 0230500498 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goody, Alex, 1971 Modernist articulations : a cultural study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and Gertrude Stein / Alex Goody. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 9780230500495 ISBN-10: 0230500498 1. American literature“20th century“History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature)“United States. 3. Barnes, Djuna“ Criticism and interpretation. 4. Loy, Mina“Criticism and interpretation. 5. Stein, Gertrude, 18741946“Criticism and interpretation. 6. American literature“Women authors“History and criticism. 7. Women and literature“United States“ History“20th century. I. Title. PS228.M63G66 2007 813 .5209112“dc22 2006052045 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


To my father, Peter Goody 1943–2000 And to Jasmine




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List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Abbreviations

xii

Introduction: Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies Modernist studies? Cultural studies? Articulations Culture, desire and the real Literary machines

1 4 9 13 15 21

1 Becoming-Modernists: Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein Becoming, modernism Barnes, the middle class and the Oedipal family Intension, extension and Loy’s feminist effects Stein’s making: progressive verbs, dynamic subjects

27 27 33 41 48

2 The Great War, Hysterical Men and the Modernist Lyric The Great War and modernist studies Hysterical men Death of the literary I Love and letters: Loy and Stein write war

57 58 63 68 75

3 Dada, Cyborgs and the New Woman in New York Spectacular, spectacular: Barnes writes New York The modern woman Loy, blind men and mechanomorphic women Cyborg-women making Dada

85 88 95 99 110

4 Fashions for Genius and the Flâneur: A Guide to Paris Modernism, urbanism and genius Stunning subjects

118 119 125

vii



Contents

‘Pablo and Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius, Moi aussi perhaps’ Curie of the laboratory of vocabulary Portraits of the artist Out of the city

132 136 140 146

5 Carnival Bodies, the Grotesque, and Becoming Animal Becoming-grotesque and grotesque modernism Bodies, buttons and cows: Gertrude Stein From repulsive women to becoming-animal: Djuna Barnes Urban detritus and the abject: Mina Loy

150 151 157 164 173

6 Wandering and Wondering: Jewish Identity and Minority Writing The Jew in the modernist (con)text Jewish modernism and modernist Jews ‘The Jew’s history a commodity’: Barnes, Nightwood and the Jew Anglo-mongrel modernism: Loy and the wondering Jew Yiddish, Zionism and patriarchy: Stein’s Jewishness

178 179 183 188 192 199

Postscript

207

Notes

210

Bibliography

219

Index

233



viii Contents

1 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917; photograph by Alfred Steiglietz. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP Paris and DACS London, 2006. Photograph courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale 2 Francis Picabia, Fille née sans mère (Girl Born Without a Mother) (pen and ink on paper) 1915. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art; © ADAGP Paris and DACS London, 2006 3 Francis Picabia, Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’etat de nudité (Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity), from July–August 1915 issue of 291; © ADAGP Paris and DACS London, 2006 4 August 15 1915 issue of Rogue (2:1) pages 10 and 11, showing Mina Loy’s ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’, © Mina Loy Estate, and Clara Tice’s Virgin Minus Verse. Photograph courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale 5 Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes photographed by Man Ray c.1920, Sylvia Beach Collection, Princeton University Library. © Man Ray Trust/ ADAGP Paris and DACS London, 2006 6 Jo Davidson, Gertrude Stein (bronze), 1920, Whitney Museum of American Art © DACS London, 2006

ix


100

106

107

109

129 131


Figures

I owe a debt of gratitude to many people for this book, a project that has ended up travelling with me for a good while. Steven Matthews has been as supervisor, then referee, then Head of Department and colleague an enormous influence on me and I can only begin to express my gratitude to him for his encouragement and support through the years. I would like to thank him and my colleagues at Oxford Brookes University, particularly Catherine Morley, Simon Kovesi and Rob Pope, for interesting and helpful conversations. I am also incredibly grateful to Roger Conover for his championing, support and editing of Mina Loy’s work, without which this project would have been impossible to complete, and for his permission (as Literary Executor) to quote from Loy’s poetry. I would also like to thank my colleagues and friends in Cornwall, Maria Magro, Mark Douglas, Jason Whittaker, and those who escaped, Catherine Spooner and Clarissa Smith, for making my time at University College Falmouth unforgettable; so much of what I encountered there has been important for this book. Jon Howell has reminded me, for too long to recall, that there is a real world out there and I thank him for that. The rest of you know who you are, even if I have forgotten you. I am grateful to the School of Arts and Humanities at Oxford Brookes for the generous support of a sabbatical on which to write the majority of the following pages and to all the librarians, here and in the United States, who have helped me to find the sources for this study. I also wish to acknowledge my Mother and my sisters Steph and Vicki, and their families. They have been the most loving of families and have all put up with my nonsense for so long: I hope they find something worth reading here. Without Dan this book would not be what it is. I owe him so much, not just for his intellectual comradeship and his editorial eye, but for the joy of the life that we share. I only hope that there is time enough for me to say it all. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my Father, who gave me a belief in myself and whom I still miss every day, and to my beautiful daughter Jasmine, who is my reason for doing anything. For permission to quote from Mina Loy The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ‘To You’ and Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose grateful acknowledgement is given to Roger Conover, Literary Executor of Loy’s estate. Extracts x



Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

xi


from Homage to Sextus Propertius and ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ from PERSONAE ©1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp and Faber & Faber. Extracts from Nightwood by Djuna Barnes reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber.


References to primary texts will be noted parenthetically throughout the text under the following abbreviations. All texts refer to the editions cited in the bibliography.

Djuna Barnes B CP I LA NW NY R RS S

The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings Collected Poems with notes towards the Memoirs I Could Never be Lonely Without A Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes Ladies Almanack Nightwood New York Ryder At The Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays Smoke and Other Early Stories

Mina Loy AM LLB GS

Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose The Lost Lunar Baedecker ‘Gertrude Stein’

Gertrude Stein A E GP LB M SW TB Y

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Everybody’s Autobiography Geography and Plays Lifting Belly The Making of Americans Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein Tender Buttons The Yale Gertrude Stein

xii



Abbreviations

Gertrude Stein became a name recognised for more than extreme literary experimentalism when her The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas became a bestseller soon after its publication in 1933. In this text Stein recalls meeting with Mina Loy in 1911 and describes Loy’s reading of her huge work in progress, The Making of Americans: ‘Mina Loy equally interested was able to understand without the commas. She has always been able to understand’ (A: 145). The instinctive understanding with which Stein endows Loy here suggests an affinity between them, a shared understanding ‘without the commas’ that could mark the presence of a mutual aesthetic. The ongoing acquaintance of the two women writers and their similar marginalisation from canonical modernism – Stein is mentioned but infrequently read, Loy is an occasional reference – could be mobilised as further evidence of the common ground from which their modernist experimentation proceeds. Loy’s close friendship with Djuna Barnes, their similar reclusiveness in later life and exclusion from the modernist canon, could be taken as the proof of their shared ‘outsider’ position, while Barnes’s sexuality could be used as a point of connection between her and Stein. A range of such textual and biographical coincidence has indeed been used as proof of an ‘other’ modernism that Barnes, Loy and Stein share (one which stands in opposition to the pronouncements and activities of mainstream modernists),1 but my intention is to avoid such narrow, causal accounts which reify an oppositional form of modernist practice. It would be just as factually true to begin an account of Loy and Stein’s modernist practice with a mention of Djuna Barnes’s Three American Expatriates, drawing in the New York Tribune of autumn 1923 which places Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein alongside Marsden Hartley, or the evidence that Loy and her daughter Fabienne coloured copies of Barnes’s Ladies Almanack with her in her 1



Introduction: Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies

rue St-Romain apartment in spring 1928. There are many such points of biographical and textual proximity between Barnes, Loy and Stein that might suggest a substantial structure, a web, of connection between the three writers, any of which could be taken as a starting place in an account of their modernism. In what follows the often incidental associations between Loy, Barnes and Stein will feature, but the assertion of a deep affinity or essential narrative of correlations between them will be resolutely resisted. There are propinquities between Barnes, Loy and Stein and there are connections that can be drawn between them or created out of them, but these are not grounds for ascertaining the existence of an ‘other’ modernism, defined and practised by the three writers. The work of these writers has been used to define a variety of different modernist practices which have themselves achieved a dominant status in the taxonomy of ‘other’ modernisms: Stein as the lesbian-linguistic experimenter, Loy as the feminist voice for women’s bodily experiences, Barnes as the champion of the popular and carnivalesque. What emerges from such a taxonomy is a fixed and internally consistent notion of Barnes, Loy or Stein’s oppositional endeavours in the face of a rigid, masculinist, elitist, heterosexist, racist modernism. In other accounts that recoup these writers to a mainstream canon Stein stands as the apolitical arch-abstractionist, Loy as the inheritor of the symbolist tradition through Jules Laforgue, and Barnes becomes the disciple of Eliot, exploring metaphysical poetry in her later works and rejecting her early, populist writing. This book emerges from, but does not attempt to resolve, the contradictions between different ‘versions’ of the three writers. Their incongruities and anomalies, as much as any consistent set of feminist or avant-gardist principles, is what interests me. Rather than offer rigid readings, my aim is to open out their work to each other, to the modernist field it participates in and helps to produce, and to specific theoretical frameworks that do not fix either writer or cultural practice. Barnes, Loy and Stein’s literary and cultural practice, as modernists, is fundamentally heterogeneous and discontinuous and thus deserves to be read in a way that acknowledges and attempts to analyse this. Barnes’s work has often been described in terms that emphasise its sui generis status; individual pieces or collections of writing can be defined, but Barnes’s sources, influences, styles and modes seem to contradict and cancel each other out: the macabre gothic of some of her poetry, the populist journalistic voice, the Shakespearean-Jacobean free verse of The Antiphon, the pastiche Ladies Almanack, the Rabelaisian influences,



2 Modernist Articulations

the Han dynasty rewrite in ‘To the Dead Favourite of Lui Ch’e’, and so on. Resisting an impulse to elide this heterogeneity in a seamless account of an ‘other’ modernism requires a close attention to the way that such texts and influences are read. In the case of Loy, her denial of literary status – ‘I was never a poet’ she is quoted as saying (The Last Lunar Baedeker, 1982: lxxviii) – stands in contradiction to her status as logopoeic exemplar (as Ezra Pound cast her), her Italian Futurist affiliations do not square with her feminist principles or later work on/with urban detritus, and should her artistic practice be seen as primary or secondary to her writing? Is it impossible to extrapolate an ‘aesthetic’ from this bricolage of statements and influences that does not simplify it? Stein’s work too often suffers from attempts to impose an organic unity, a singular aesthetic, on her huge corpus, one which would order the discontinuous textual experiments she was engaged in. Seeing her sexuality as the fundamental catalyst for her work, or cubism as the aesthetic she attempted to approximate in her writing, is to ignore the texts that are not about lesbianism or to overlook the other ways of writing she explored. Using Stein’s later lectures and expositional prose (the more accessible writing) to provide a key to her experimental texts, as is so often done in critical writing on Stein, is to assert a contrived retrospective coherence that rewrites, rather than unearths the meanings of her texts. Such a consistent aesthetic emergence that is identified through the analeptic application of methodological statements actually characterises the canonical career of mainstream modernists such as T. S. Eliot. This is not to assert an absolute division between mainstream modernists and the three writers this book focuses on; Eliot’s construction, as critic, editor and object of study, of a specific version of his modernism (and the modernist aesthetic in general) also imposes an artificial unity that nullifies the centrifugal energies at play. Modernism in a wider sense, even if this is expanded by a pluralisation into modernisms, cannot be defined as a stable structure of ideological or aesthetic effects. Such a construction of consistent ‘modernisms’ that have a developmental, temporal rationality ultimately tends to exclude writers like Barnes, Loy and Stein; a discontinuous narrative, an alternative mode of analysis needs to be devised which resists any form of artificial coherence. This book therefore rejects consistent narratives and fully acknowledges the discontinuities within the work of Barnes, Loy and Stein; it celebrates the heterogeneity of their work and seeks to expand and expound on it in an approach that refuses to capture and fix them or their practice. This undertaking is inextricable from a resistance to a



Introduction 3

homogenous ‘modernism’, a recognition instead of the multiplicitous factors, forces and places that constitute modernisms. The focus of the following chapters on particular moments and nodes of cultural anxiety and interest does not provide a seamless historical account of either writers or modernist practice. Starting from the recognition that there is no essential or consistent modernism as such, what I embark on here is intended as an inorganic, inessential engagement with the textual and cultural productions of Barnes, Loy and Stein and of the individuals and places around them, texts, people and spaces that fall within but always exceed modernism.

Modernist studies? Beginning a study of modernism with an admission of the impossibility of accurately defining this key term is a risky undertaking, but nonetheless such a beginning is necessary if this book is to avoid many of the generalisations that it seeks to contest. That there is no such thing as a ‘modernism’ is now a truism, but studies such as the present one persist in identifying the distinctness of the culture and literature of the early twentieth century. Rather than citing a list of historical factors, formal features, ideological concerns or aesthetic innovations in yet another attempt to solve the ‘problem’ of defining this distinctness, Modernist Articulations begins with a genealogy. This will not be a detailed account of the origins, use and application of the terms ‘modern’, ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’, or an accurate tracing of the lineage and precedents of the moderns of the twentieth century, all these have already been essayed. Rather, what is offered is a sketch of the fortunes of modernism after the event; the ‘modernist’ of Modernist Articulations is arrived at through a Foucauldian genealogy that ‘rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies [and] opposes itself to the search for origins’ (1991: 77). There are some discernable trends in the study of modernism that have attempted to define and critically interrogate the culture of the early twentieth century. In the field of visual arts Clement Greenberg, and his idea of the ‘purity’ and ‘independence’ of modernism achieved by the self-reflexive use of the ‘methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself’ (1965/1984: 5, 6), have been of central importance. Although Greenberg’s statements about modernism lie specifically within the discipline of art history, they do share much common ground with formalist configurations of literary modernism by Harry Levin, Stephen Spender and Irving Howe. Levin’s 1960 essay ‘What was modernism’




emphasises the intellectuality and metamorphic power of the ‘giants’ of the modernist generation, whilst in The Struggle of the Modern (1963), Spender highlights the synthesising and restorative power of the vision of the ‘moderns’ in contrast with the belief of ‘contemporaries’ in progress. Howe’s Literary Modernism (1967) continues the presentation of the heroic efforts of modernist endeavour and all three highlight an awareness of ‘modernity’s consciousness of time’ (Habermas, 1987: 1–22). Levin, Spender and Howe’s accounts share a sense of the passing of a great modernist moment and through their emphasis on formal experimentation, and on a resistance to the forces of mass-production, mass-culture and ‘domestication’ (Levin’s term), they offer a critical endorsement of Ezra Pound’s prescription to ‘make it new’. As Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s highly influential Modernism: a Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930 (1976) indicates, the ramifications of the construction of a modernism of specific types of innovation and modes of formal technique brings with it a tendency to privilege certain writers and practices: in the Anglo-American canon of Bradbury and McFarlane’s collection this means Joyce, Yeats, James, Stevens, Eliot, Pound and Lawrence feature heavily, with Woolf, Stein and Williams second in importance. The challenging, or at least reconfiguring, of this canon (or versions of it) has occupied critics from the 1980s onwards. The development of the notion of the avant-garde and the study of modernism have been intertwined across the century and, as Andreas Huyssen puts it ‘the boundaries between modernism and avant-gardism remain fluid’ (1986: viii). Renato Poggiolo’s The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1962) is an indicative, and foundational, text in such attempts, identifying broad modernist themes and concerns (activism, antagonism, nihilism, agonism and the dehumanisation of art) alongside a (politicised) avant-garde lifestyle defined by its group rejection of bourgeois norms. A much more highly theoretical approach is taken by Peter Bürger in Theory of the Avant-Garde in which he defines the historical avant-garde as ‘an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society art as an institution’ (1974: 49). For Bürger ‘only an art the contents of whose individual works is wholly distinct from the (bad) praxis of the existing society can be the center that can be the starting point for the organization of a new life praxis’ (ibid.: 50). Both Poggiolo and Bürger have influenced constructions and understandings of modernism, but whilst their conceptions of the avant-garde and of modernism cannot be described as apolitical they do elide many of the aspects of subjectivity (race, gender and sexuality) that have increasingly come to the forefront



Introduction 5

of literary critical studies. Thus, these theories of the avant-garde can be seen to reinforce many of the assumptions and blind spots of a formalist construction of modernist and avant-gardist practice, assumptions that were challenged as new critical paradigms emerged in modernist studies in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Andreas Huyssen’s influential book After the Great Divide (1986) extends the consideration of modernism and avant-gardism by highlighting particular facets of the uneasy modernist rejection of massculture. This decentred cultural ‘other’, which returns with a vengeance in postmodernism, is not so easy to disavow, Huyssen claims, and the troubled divide set up between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture is both implicitly and explicitly associated with a masculine – feminine dichotomy (that echoes the ‘domestication’ that Levin bemoaned in the decline of modernism). Huyssen was not the first to suggest such a connection – Ann Douglas’s 1977 The Feminization of American Culture, for example, reads a ‘matrophobia’ into the American moderns and their rejection of everything they associated with the white, middle-class, Victorian woman. However, in highlighting the gendering of mass-culture in modernism, Huyssen’s study came to play a role in the feminist critique of existing modernist configurations. The impact of feminist revisions on a monolithic idea of modernism cannot be overestimated: a practice that had been characterised as a heroic, and implicitly male, struggle against the commonplace underwent a fundamental re-evaluation throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. With accessible works such as Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia L. Smyers’s Writing for their Lives (1987), a range of ‘overlooked’ women modernists, including Loy, were introduced to an audience as different modes of feminist theory were being taken up by scholars and academics. Thus, Susan Stanford Friedman’s championing of H.D. from Psyche Reborn (1981) onwards rescued this important poet and writer from relative obscurity so that H.D. stood at the forefront of the early gynocritical reassessment of modernism. Stein had resisted total obscurity on the margins of the modernist canon, but during the 1980s the sexual and gender politics of her work began to be acknowledged and explored as she shifted, in some accounts, from being an androgynous experimentalist to the epitome of feminist language practices. Marianne DeKoven’s seminal A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing therefore describes Stein’s work as functioning ‘anti-patriarchally: as presymbolic jouissance and as irreducible multiple, fragmented, open-ended articulation of lexical meaning’ (1983: 76). Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank stands as a crucial text, not




just in the recovery of a substantial range of women modernists, but in revealing and exploring communities of women writers (Barnes, Loy and Stein amongst them) and confronting the ways in which ‘the prevailing interpretations of the Modernist experience had excluded women from its concerns’ (1987: ii). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s three-volume No Man’s Land (1988, 1989, 1994) sought, in a slightly different vein, to expose the sexual politics of modernist writing, valorising women’s experiments with language and identity and drawing on contemporary gender theory such as Judith Butler’s idea of performativity. Bonnie Kime Scott’s anthology, The Gender of Modernism (1990), also influenced by the turn towards gender studies, served to further foreground issues of gender in both women’s and men’s modernism at a time when the term ‘modernism’ in its singularity was more generally coming under question. With the general turn in theory and criticism towards ideas of identity and difference that marked the closing decades of the twentieth century, modernist texts were increasingly regarded less and less as autotelic aesthetic artefacts; historical and social contexts for their production became increasingly part of the process of reading. The last decade or so has seen an extraordinary variety of textually and theoretically informed work on modernism, from Bridget Elliot and Jo-Ann Wallace’s materialist and Bourdieu-influenced Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (Im)Positionings (1994), to Trudi Tate’s historiographically thorough Modernism and the First World War (1998), and Lawrence Rainey’s sociologically dense Institutions of Modernism (1998).2 An interest in the contexts of modernist literature is not merely the product of 1990s scholarship, this interest can be seen in works such as Michael Levenson’s The Genealogy of Modernism (1984), but Levenson’s focus is primarily on literary and philosophical contexts, while Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era from the previous decade is culturally dense, but aimed at constructing a monolithic Poundian modernism that radically imbalances its focus (note the glaring absence of H.D. in Kenner’s study) With the poststructuralist negation of any single or final point of meaning and the postmodern emphasis on located, multiple subjectivities, it became impossible uncritically to explore some of the core hegemonic sociohistorical ideas of modernism. There have even been attempts, in the wake of Huyssen’s work, to discover a protopostmodernism (or historical avant-gardism) in the work of certain modernist writers (Stein, Joyce and Beckett, for example), and so radically to rewrite both their status and the dominant definition and periodisation of modernism. This playing with labels is unhelpful



Introduction 7

and contributes little to the ongoing debate about the structures and effects of early twentieth-century culture. The recent turn in what now can be termed ‘modernist studies’ is much more theoretically and culturally open. Explorations of the wider cultural context of modernism and engagements with mass or popular cultural forms have tested Huyssen’s thesis and, in the case of Suzanne Clark’s Sentimental Modernism, for example, revisited the distinctions he draws to recover an alternative women’s practice in ‘recovering bonds of emotional identity’ (1991: 13). In the main, however, it has been the growing impact of cultural materialism and the institutionalisation of cultural studies in the American academy that has brought about the redrawing of the boundaries of modernist studies. Not only have questions of race, sexuality and gender become central to modernist studies, and literary, cinematic, art historical and philosophical texts examined alongside mass-circulation magazines, advertising and popular theatre, but wider definitions such as Pacific-Rim modernism have come within the purview of the field. The journal Modernism/Modernity was founded in 1994 and marks the beginnings of the shift towards ‘new modernisms’. The official emergence of the ‘new modernist studies’ was triumphantly announced at the inaugural meeting of the Modernist Studies Association in October 1999 and has led to a significant, but not always theoretically sound embracing of a more ‘cultural studies’ approach to modernism. In the light of the interdisciplinary nature of modernist movements,3 the new modernist studies can perhaps best be seen as the recognition of an always already heterogeneous modernist practice which was elided in the formalist canonisation of specific practitioners. This book recognises the ways that modernism has been reimagined and reconstructed and takes from such reimaginings crucial ideas about how we could explore and theorise the work of modernists, the connections between them and the function of their work within different conceptions of their cultural-critical fields. Within the framework of this book, and its self-conscious positioning, modernist studies is a political reconfiguring of the terrain of early twentieth-century literature and art, so much more than a cultural tokenism that re-enables an unreconstructed focus on modern masters. However, it is the indiscriminate turn to poststructuralism, and the assumption of an easy materialism that have been most damaging to the remit of modernist studies. In the first case we are left with an endless regress of difference, and an acceptance of the text as always and only a representation; in the second we discover a very rich and varied historical and textual context, but little




way of theorising the relationship between historiography and literature or of rethinking the hierarchy of text over context to describe how particular cultural configurations and texts function together. In my use of context therefore, I seek to pay close attention to questions of how culture can actually be studied, though not to reconstruct an accurate ‘moment’ of modernism (a return) which would be to instate a natural or organic idea of cultural process. What I am doing is affecting an artificial assembly of textual and contextual proximities, an assembly that embraces the impossibility of a totality of context, one that selects and excludes, but that nevertheless experiments with the working of specific texts and produces readings that activate the intensive forces of these texts – it is an assembly that necessarily selects and excludes in order to produce these intensive readings. This is a deliberate and self-conscious cutting across the limitations of criticism and exposing and exploring these limitations in a necessarily culturalist methodology.

Cultural studies? The impact of cultural studies in the literary field, especially its growing academic hegemony in the United States, is key to the emergence of the new modernisms and contemporary modernist studies. The increasingly prominent role of the study of culture in the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s has not necessarily led to a theoretically astute engagement with the methods and practices of cultural studies. As Rita Felski notes ‘a phrase [cultural studies] that once named a distinct project, an intellectual tradition, a core cluster of ideas and arguments, is now being stretched to subsume a grab bag of differing and often incompatible textual methods’ (2003: 502). This does not mean that cultural studies is inapposite for the study of modern, as opposed to contemporary, culture. As Michael North demonstrates in his Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, a post-war world of globalisation, mass-consumption, communication networks, spectacle and political atomisation could be an accurate description of the year 1922, as well as 2002. Perhaps the deployment of the term ‘modernity’ within cultural studies, when it features at all, as the signifier of much that is antithetical to the radical, cutting-edge, non-elitist scope of the discipline may explain the relative absence of an active dialogue between cultural and modernist studies. But such a dialogue is imaginable, especially, as Felski argues, because ‘Modernity holds the blueprint for the insurrectionary impulses of cultural studies, which are easily traced to the antinomian spirit of modern bohemianism and the avant-garde’ (ibid.: 503). Indeed



Introduction 9


Felski’s call for a critical and productive re-evaluation of the relationship of new modernisms, and of modernist studies in general, to the tools and purposes of cultural studies is one of the issues that this book addresses. It is crucial to recognise both the benefits and limits of cultural studies; it is clearly ‘not an all purpose panacea or the only valid way of thinking about culture and power’ but does offer specific ways of thinking about what Felski terms ‘an expanded notion of the aesthetic field’ (2003: 504). In her analysis Felski is crucially concerned to distinguish modernist cultural studies from other modes of reading that explore either political interest and power struggles (‘sociology of literature’), or expose the radical politics of certain texts through ‘political formalist’ readings. Her terminology is designed to counteract the wide-range of claims to cultural studies status that seems to characterise much work in new modernisms. The vague application of the term ‘cultural studies’ is indeed dangerous if it is used to validate an otherwise theoretically nebulous approach to the texts and culture of modernism or to appropriate some kind of vanguard theoretical radicalism. In her introduction to the edited collection Modernism, Gender and Culture: A Cultural Studies Approach, Lisa Rado describes cultural studies as a ‘loosely connected series of critical approaches and methodologies’, involving the ‘identification and understanding of cultural contexts’ which persists in an ‘ambiguity and philosophical messiness’ (1997: 4). She goes on to outline the relevance of cultural studies for feminist/gender studies – it helps locate and identify ‘the patriarchy’, it valorises ‘low’ culture, it foregrounds the dialogic aspect of texts – and for modernist studies – it returns modernism to its originary interdisciplinarity and challenges the ‘exclusionary aesthetic assumptions’ of high (male) modernism. The practical ‘use’ of cultural studies as described in these general claims is valid; however, without an actual account of how texts, culture, context and power are configured or connected, it is impossible to understand or argue for the ‘real’ effects of their functioning. This is not to say that the essays contained within the collection are theoretically naïve, or that they make no contribution to our revised understandings of modernist culture. But what Rado’s introduction does is elide the great methodological differences between the contributors’ analyses and assume that the label ‘cultural studies’ offers a short-hand for an emancipatory reading practice that requires no active theorisation of the relationship between such practices, the discourses of power and the specific configurations of culture. It is such vague definitions and deployments of a cultural studies methodology that have undermined the real critical force that cultural



10

studies can bring to the field of modernism, reinforcing the argument of those who would denigrate it as an outdated trend. ‘It is not surprising’ writes Lawrence Grossberg ‘that as cultural studies has become more popular, more visible, and in some ways more successful it has also come under increasing attack. It has been described as a fad and as having succumbed to the history of theoretical fads’ (1997: 5). North’s Reading 1922 is a good example of a thorough and consistent modernist cultural study, though as Felski notes he ‘steers clear of any explicit reference to cultural studies’ (2003: 507). In this text North juxtaposes a broad sweep of events, philosophical ideas, modernist texts, and cultural fashions to reveal concerns and conceptions that cross aesthetic and institutional boundaries. His study may well offer ‘an anthropology of modern culture in which the aesthetic bursts out of solitary confinement in order to saturate the social field’ (ibid.: 507), but merely juxtaposing and intermingling what would traditionally be considered ‘text’ and ‘context’ does not advance any understanding of how text might produce context, or context produce text, or how either might be more than simple ‘representation’. The lack of anything other than an implicit theory of how these connections are constituted and what the relationship between cultural discourses, cultural practices and real effects are, undermines the power of North’s readings. By avoiding any kind of cultural studies methodology North offers an exercise that amounts to little more than a ‘thick’, interdisciplinary, formalist reading. Recent work by Ann Ardis and Edward Comentale should also be recognised as important contributions in the field of modernist cultural studies. Ardis explicitly claims to offer a ‘ “thick description” of the JoycePound-Eliot nexus of literary modernism’ (2002: 4), seeking to ‘denaturalize’ existing literary and cultural historiographies of modernism and expose the ‘gendered dynamics of power at play’ (ibid.: 9). Her interest is in how the ‘margins’ of modernism can be revealed while, by contrast, Comentale is highly suspicious of an emphasis on ‘multiplicity and otherness’ which, because of the fetishisation of otherness that regulates the society of the moderns as well as our own ‘tends to reproduce the very object it hopes to critique’ (2004: 3) Both critics provide contextually rich alternatives to dominant accounts of modernism which expose the importance of other cultural enterprises for the modernist endeavour, but neither ultimately solve the problem of how to conceptualise this context and how, despite their obvious political commitments (to feminist and Marxist critique respectively), their readings can actually reconceive the modernist world. Ardis relies on the concept of ‘mapping’, without arguing how this



Introduction 11


functions as anything more than a field of representation(s), while Cometale resorts to poststructuralist terminology to describe Wyndham Lewis’s ‘deconstructive performance’ (2004: 12). Thus their rich readings require a more thorough methodology tied to an active conception of context and the real which could underpin their political, culturalist explorations. No cultural studies methodology exists that can simply be taken off the peg and used to clothe new readings in modernist studies. Contemporary cultural studies does not conspire in a consensus of how to understand and analyse the relationships between power, discourse, ideology, cultural practice and cultural meaning, but this very diversity is a strength, rather than a weakness of the field. Rather than evincing a lack of clarity the fact that, as John Storey describes it ‘Cultural studies is not a monolithic body of theories and methods’ (2003: 1), requires the discipline to be permanently attentive to its own processes, assumptions and frameworks while remaining, in general terms, a materialist critical practice. Cultural studies has developed considerably since its inception in the work of Hoggart and Williams in the 1950s. With the influence of Althusser, and of Foucault and Bourdieu, key concepts such as ideology, resistance to the ‘dominant’, and the cultural field have become increasingly nuanced with cultural studies responding and adapting to the developing theoretical terrain of discourse and culture. The work of Stuart Hall, particularly, has been key in the mobilisation of a theory and technique of cultural studies that accepts neither a depoliticised view of cultural practice, nor an instrumentalist view of the determining effects of ideology: Hall defines the struggle of cultural studies as the struggle of the ‘conditions and problems of developing intellectual and theoretical work as political practice’ (1996: 268). In discussing ‘Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies’ therefore, Hall highlights both the processual nature of knowledge within this discipline and its role as a theoretical and practical ‘intervention in a world’ (ibid.: 274). For Hall what cultural studies most forcefully needs to resist is the ‘overwhelming textualization of cultural studies’ (ibid.) that has been one of the results of its co-option by literary studies, a textualisation which would ultimately negate the transformatory power of politicised practice: I come back to theory and politics, the politics of theory. Not theory as the will to truth, but theory as a set of contested, localized, conjunctural knowledges, which have to be debated in a dialogical way. But



12

Introduction 13

My personal institutional positioning is crucial to my own approach to this area. In stating my own location and tendency I am not claiming some authenticity by an autobiographical turn, but I am insistent that I cannot occupy an (impossible) place of academic disinterest or objectivity. As a British literary studies academic, I am distanced from the mainstream position of cultural studies in American literature departments. Indeed, I find myself in an academy that, instead of the massinstitutionalisation of cultural studies, continues to treat the discipline with some caution or suspicion. I am located outside the ivory towers of the ‘old’ British Universities, but still within an academic field that views cultural studies as an anti-aesthetic, politically rigid and reductive mode of textual analysis. The closure of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies in the summer of 2002 has not necessarily heralded the death of British cultural studies, though the fact that this crucible for cultural studies has fallen victim to institutional ‘restructuring’ precipitated by the funding crisis in British Higher Education does say something about the discipline’s position and changing history. With the turn towards aesthetics or new formalism in literary studies, and the general announcement of the end of theory, it might indeed seem that cultural studies has had its day. I would argue, however, that any weakness in, or suspicion of, cultural studies and its application in fields of literary inquiry stem from a misapprehension of its methods and a failure to recognise what cultural studies can and does offer for modernist studies – a way of thinking textual effects as real, of destroying the chasm between the representational text and the impenetrable concreteness of context and politics, and of evaluating how specific texts, in this case the work of Barnes, Loy and Stein (and the ways they are read) can enact an actual ‘intervention in a world.’

Articulations This book, therefore, stands as an attempt to synthesise some of the methodologies of cultural studies into what amounts to a cultural study of three modernist women writers. The main issue facing such an approach, as I have already highlighted, is how to theorise the connection between text and context without asserting that either is fixed or



also as a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect. (Hall, 1996: 275)

14


An articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? So the so-called ‘unity’ of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be re-articulated in different ways because they have no necessary ‘belongingness’. The ‘unity’ which matters is a linkage between that articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions, but need not necessarily, be connected. Thus, a theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects. (Hall in Grossberg, 1996: 1412) For Hall, articulation is a non-necessary connection, it produces a contingent unity and it is dual-faceted; that is, it can link elements together in a discourse to produce an ideology and can link ideological discourse to subjects. Articulation is not Hall’s coinage; he is developing an idea first proposed by Ernesto Laclau who himself draws on Gramsci. In Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), Laclau tackled the predominant reductionist view of class in Marxist theory, proposing instead, through an elaboration of Gramsci’s concept of articulation, that there was no necessary correspondence between practices and ideology. Hall’s reworking of articulation rescues it from the extreme possibility of ‘necessary non-correspondence’ or seeing nothing outside discourse, arguing that ‘[i]t does not follow that because all practices are in ideology, or inscribed by ideology, all practices are nothing but ideology’ (1985: 103).4 For Hall, the crucial recognition of a contingent unity is that ‘since those articulations are not inevitable, not necessary, they can potentially be transformed’ (Hall in Grossberg, 1996: 142). What is very useful for my purposes, and what lies at the heart of Hall’s application of articulation, is the double meaning contained in the term: articulation identifies a voluble, non-necessary connection, one



immutable (that is to ignore the fact that language is indeed mobile, or to assume that any overarching context can simply be discovered), or positing that any connection is organic or essential. To avoid this reductionism I turn to Stuart Hall, and the concept of ‘articulation’ that he develops and practices in his work. Hall explains articulation as follows:

that speaks of propinquity without chaining elements (texts, practices, subjects, power structures) together. Fundamentally, articulation is not a finished theory or fixed methodology, one that can be applied in an objective way, it is ‘not just a thing (not just a connection) but a process of creating connections’ (Slack, 1996: 114) and, as a process of making connections, it is an expressive and interventionist practice. Moreover, it includes a recognition that context does not simply sit outside practices, affecting them, but that the practices and participants themselves affect and form context. Articulation does not solve the methodological problems of cultural study, or close the circle of reading, rather it is an ongoing process of thinking through and producing cultural effects.5 In using articulation therefore, I agree with Jennifer Daryl Slack that ‘Theory is thus a practice in a double sense: it is a formal conceptual tool as well as a practising or “trying out” of a way of theorizing’ (ibid.: 113).

Culture, desire and the real In his work on popular culture Lawrence Grossberg further develops the ‘theory’ of articulation, and it is his particular attempt to foreground the status of the ‘real’ that informs the readings here practised on Barnes, Loy, Stein and modernist culture. For Grossberg: Articulation is the production of identity on top of difference, of unities out of fragments, or structures across practices. Articulation links this practice to that effect, this text to that meaning, this meaning to that reality, this experience to those politics. And these links are themselves articulated into larger structures, etc. (1992: 54) Articulation crucially ‘offers a theory of contexts’ but is never ‘merely acknowledging the context, for example, of interpreting the text and taking its context “into account” ’, because ‘context is never a stable object of study’ and because the linkages go both ways, indeed ‘it is the background that actually articulates the focus’ (ibid.: 55). Thus we recognise the complexity of context as ‘a structured field, a configuration of practices’ which exist ‘in multiple contexts, across the space of a particular moment, articulated into different, sometimes competing and sometimes contradictory sets of relations’ (ibid.: 60). Grossberg also emphasises that articulation ‘often involves delinking or disarticulating connections in order to link or rearticulate others’ (ibid.: 54). Articulation is ‘the non-necessary link, between a social force which



Introduction 15


is making itself, and the ideology or conceptions of the world which makes intelligible the process’ being undergone (Hall in Grossberg, 1996: 144); it is also a methodology for understanding the location and forces that momentarily define a practice or text and the location and forces that a text momentarily defines. Fundamentally it is a creative and continual process of ‘constructing, dismantling and reconstructing structures which have real effects’ (Grossberg, 1992: 56). What Grossberg’s method of articulation can offer, therefore, is a way of creatively engaging in readings of modernism which refuse to postulate either a beginning or end to the story of modernism, readings which rest in the middle of the complex and ever-shifting structures that articulate modernism to itself, to the cultural, economic, aesthetic, libidinal, material, emotional and political practices and effects of its location, and to the twenty-first-century reader. The issue of effects is crucial if, as this study seeks to do, we are to combat the erasure of the ‘real’ that predominates in contemporary literary studies. With poststructuralism the traditional structures of communication have been disrupted, but in emphasising difference and the play of signification within the field of meaning, these poststructuralist theoretical positions remain inside the field of signification; that is, they do not get outside the Kantian problematic of mediation. As Grossberg suggests ‘the erasure of “the real” is not merely a strategic choice, but an epistemological assumption built upon the Kantian prohibition of metaphysics’ (1992: 47). In imposing an absolute distinction between the noumena (the real) and the phenomena (the experience of the real), Kant’s legacy has been to condemn human experience to a realm of mediation, of communication through structures (culture) within which reality is at one remove, never actually available, always and only semanticised. The real, by this argument, is an impossible chaos, a white noise, all we have is discourse and representation. In conducting a cultural study of the work of Barnes, Loy and Stein, and one that is firmly committed to a materialist feminist politics, being able to discuss real effects is a fundamental and political concern. I do not want to be caught in an endless spiral of representation, but neither can I return to some prelapsarian state of blissful ignorance where subjectivity, agency, domination and resistance exist as essentialised determinants. The idea of articulation is useful for a feminist engagement because it opens out the possibility of considering the mutual, two-way affective relationship between text and context, or representation and world. If these structures are seen as real, but not essential or universal, a term such as patriarchy can be used productively, without an



16

assertion of the absolute or eternal nature of the structures of patriarchal domination. As Grossberg suggests with reference to Marx’s analysis of capitalism, what Marx posed as the necessary structure of capitalism; that is, an identity between ‘the contradiction between capital and labor; and the contradiction between the forces and the relations of production’ (1992: 59), is a specific social formation of nineteenthcentury Western Europe where ‘the two contradictions were articulated together’ and is articulated differently in the United States (ibid.: 60). Patriarchy can be similarly analysed as a structure within the field of effects (context) that has real power, but that is constantly rearticulated with other relations and practices within the field. Like capitalism for Grossberg, any account of patriarchy in the early twentieth century ‘would have to acknowledge and describe its extraordinary ability to negotiate its own contradictions and to survive’ (ibid.). This is not to reduce patriarchy or capitalism to a ‘story’ or a representation, as the effects of both remain as real effects, it is to recognise that the determining effects of their power are specific and contingent. My feminist concern to explore reality as a structure of effects chimes with Grossberg’s concern, and he finds in the work of Gilles Deleuze, and his work with Félix Guattari, a materialism that does connect human existence and culture back to the real, what Grossberg terms a ‘wild realism’ or ‘new empiricism’. A philosophy of ‘wild realism’ rejects a transcendent principle or telos in favour of a recognition of the fundamentally immanent process of life that always operates in the middle. The real is not simply the realm of tangible ‘things’, somehow independent of our emotions and relations with them, the real is the whole field of forces, beyond an idealist and realist distinction, that constitute the world. My own interest in, and use of, Deleuze and Guattari stems crucially from their potential for use in a feminist praxis, and thus a way out of the dead-ends of poststructuralism. What they offer is a philosophy and process of reading that delivers minoritarian experience from molar or majoritarian (or arborescent) structures and principles, that deterritorialises the molecular, flexible, contingent, local and singular so that its processes and becomings, which are always processes and becomings in the real, can be activated.6 One of the difficulties with the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari is that it is often, mistakenly, viewed as dwelling in the outer reaches of poststructuralist stuffology: an arcane and obtuse enterprise that baffles the uninitiated reader with its non-referential terminology. But what such terminology signals is a fundamental break with the structures, hierarchies and objects of Western philosophical thought: Deleuze



Introduction 17


and Guattari reject the ‘subject’ of Western philosophy – there is no individual, only ‘others’ and ‘the real’ – and in their central emphasis on desire (energy, libido, flows) they denounce psychoanalysis which has erroneously thought desire through structures of lack, law and signifier. The unconscious is not the theatre of the Freudian or Lacanian model, but a factory fabricating itself in an ongoing productivity and desire should be thought of as desiring production, always social and never individual or subjective (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 25). Deleuze and Guattari speak of desiring machines and describe desire as the force that precedes any coding or organisation (the subject, ideology, institutions). Desiring production is not an homogenous mass but a ‘pure multiplicity, that is to say, an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity’ (ibid.: 45). It functions through interruptions in the associative flow (the natural and biological forces of the world), interruptions which are slicings off (coupures-prélèvements), detachments (coupures-détachments) and residual breaks (coupure-reste) and which are the ‘real operations of desire in the material world’ (ibid.: 41). Deleuze and Guattari’s example is the baby who throws up milk when it burps, interrupting the associative flow of milk – breast – mouth – intestine – anus and so taking a portion away which defines the ideal continuity of the flow from which it comes (coupure-prélèvement), detaching the milk from this flow so that it becomes a mobile segment (able to associate in different ways) (coupure-détachment), and breaking the flow in a way that produces a residuum which constitutes a subjectivity for the baby (coupure-reste) – the flow itself exists and is defined in its existence by the action of the baby-mouth-intestine machine on it, crucially the breaks and reassemblages are productive in and of themselves. Desire is primary and productive and is the producer of organisms and organisation as its productions enter into assemblages, aggregations that function on different axes,7 machines plugged into machines plugged into machines (ad infinitum), which do not precede desire but come into being through the coding and organisation of the productions of desire (the baby – mouth – intestine machine plugged into the mother – breast – baby machine, plugged into the mother – baby – father machine, plugged into the family machine, and so on). Stratification designates the thickening, sedimentation or coagulation of the productions of desire (codes, milieus, forms, rhythms) – for Deleuze the three great strata are the organism, signifiability and subjectification – which function at a molar, rather than molecular level (the family machine captured by the bureaucratic – patriarchal – state machine). Like the assemblage, the strata are territorialising (they extract



18

from the flux a zone or territory) and decoding (creating meanings and properties from fragments), but are also mobile and, necessarily, constituted by complexes of lines: these can be lines that are ‘molar, and form a segmentary, circular, binary, arborescent system’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 505) what is elsewhere described as a majoritarian system (e.g., a nuclear, productive family) or they can be lines that are deterritorialising, differentiating, rhizomatic (e.g., a nomadic, teenage gang). In place of an arborescent ‘regime of unifiable multiplicities’, the rhizome functions within the regime of pure multiplicities, ‘an acentered, nonheirarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states all manner of “becomings” ’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 21). This gives rise to a different understanding of the place of the text and the process of reading: [t]here is no longer a tripartation between a field of reality, the world, a field of representation, the book, and a field of subjectivity, the author. But an arrangement places in connection certain multiplicities taken from each of these orders. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 23) In key texts such as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari describe a method, which could also be called ‘nomad thought’, or ‘schizoanalysis’, a mode of drawing the map of desiring production and exploring social production and psychic desire as the same process which, as Grossberg points out are ‘operating in different regimes but [are] always already infiltrated by the other’ (1997: 87). Schizoanalysis is the obverse of psychoanalysis; it explores, not a single line of its own articulation, but the atemporal lines and flows that are constantly produced in and by desire which can produce partial objects, as breaks or cuts in the flow of desire, and also lines of flight out of stratification and territorialisation. This is unavoidably a political praxis that engages with the real: Schizoanalysis does not pertain to elements or aggregates, nor to subjects, relations or structures. It pertains only to lineaments running through groups as well as individuals. Schizoanalysis, as the analysis of desire, is immediately practical and political, whether it is a question of an individual, group or society. For politics precedes being. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 203)



Introduction 19


In his translator’s foreword to A Thousand Plateaus Brian Massumi relates schizoanalysis to Spinoza’s ‘ethics’, Nietzsche’s ‘gay science’, Artaud’s ‘crowned anarchy’, Blanchot’s ‘space of literature’ and Foucault’s ‘outside thought’ (ibid.: xiii) suggesting, not only a philosophical ‘heritage’ for schizoanalysis, but a contiguity with certain types of avant-garde practice. In such theory-practice the inextricability of the productivity of desire and the real is tantamount, ‘[i]f desire is productive it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 28). The conception that emerges from Deleuze, and his work with Guattari, is one in which representation and reality are not at one remove from each other: culture is a field of lines and effects and all actions of desire are actual rather than representational, as real as the objects we experience and relate to. Thus discursive events have a singular, real existence, they are not confined to a realm of representation, just as desire is not confined to a theatre of lack and loss. For Grossberg such an understanding of culture and the real underpins and produces a new way of thinking about and analysing cultural practice:

It is a matter of reality producing itself; it is both produced (contingent) and productive (real). Reality is nothing but the effects of its own rearticulation, cultural practices are complex technologies and organizations that produce the real as maps of power. They impose a particular conduct and organization not only on specific individualities and collectives, but also on planes of effects. Reality then ‘consists of’ events that are definable and describable only by their affect, that is by their ability to affect and their susceptibility to being affected. These ‘becomings’ can be mapped only as lines across space, along the trajectories of their effectivities, rather than as temporal continuities and discontinuities. Reality as the effect of power at every level has to be conceptualised in terms of mobilities rather than change, of lines of intensities rather than identities. It is a matter of orientations and directions, of entries and exits, rather than structures and processes. [I]t means that we have to see cultural practices as places where multiple trajectories of effects and investment are articulated, as the point of intersection and negotiation of radically different kinds of vectors of determination – including material, affective, libidinal, semiotic, semantic, and so on. (1997: 21–2)



20

Introduction 21

Grossberg’s use of Deleuze (along with Foucault), as a philosophical alternative to ‘the space of Kantian modernism’ (1997: 21) is a particularly useful turn for one seeking to adapt Grossberg’s methodology for the practice of modernist studies, for Deleuze and Guattari propose an understanding of the book that exceeds and displaces the hermeneutic circle of determining what a text means (even though this may be the determination of an indeterminate meaning). Instead of the imperial-despotic system of interpretation, reading a text ‘is a productive use of the literary machine’ (1984: 116), a diagnostic analysis of how a literary work can ‘work’, of what it can do: ‘the greatest force of language was discovered once a work was viewed as a machine, producing certain effects, amenable to a certain use’ (ibid.: 119). An anatomy of the text is anathema to a Deleuzian reading, which rejects the idea that the ‘minimum real unity’ lies in ‘the word, the idea, the concept or the signifier’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 51). Any utterance is instead ‘the product of an assemblage – which is always collective, which brings into play within us and outside us populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, effects, events’ (ibid.). Thus we are working with the recognition that ‘[a] book exists only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine etc. – and an abstract machine that sweeps them along’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 4). A Deleuzian mode of reading requires that we ‘experiment never interpret’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 48) and Deleuze and Guattari use a predominantly machinic vocabulary in their description of desiring production and cultural affects. Such terms and ideas do seem particularly pertinent to some forms of modernist writing which foreground the fabricated and machinic aspect of literature: William Carlos Williams describes the poem as a ‘small (or large) machine made of words’ (2000: 54), the Italian Futurists offer a ‘Technical Manifesto’ for writing, Gertrude Stein experimented with automatic writing early in her career, and the automatic was crucial in Surrealist practice. Indeed, as Chapters 2 and 3 go on to discuss, the technological forces of early twentiethcentury culture can be articulated in a variety of ways with modernist texts and these articulations are productive of extraordinary aesthetic and affective intensities and agencies. But, there are other currents in modernist writing which emphasise organic, ancient rites, in Ezra



Literary machines


Pound and D. H. Lawrence for example, which seem to be in opposition to such a machinic vocabulary. However, Deleuze and Guattari’s book-as-machine is not intended as a homage to the technological age of culture, instead it functions as part of their alternative philosophical lexis which describes a materialism without subjectivity. The machinic exists only in terms of its production and productivity, just as the book exists only in terms of the lines and effects it assembles and projects: the book is a manifestation of desiring production that acts in the real, not organically or representationally but actually processing and fabricating real affects. The emphasis then is on the outside, not a simplistic idea of context as ‘just there’, but a multidimensional, multi-directional field that is traversed by different planes of effect, a productive field of contingent connections between particular point-signs: We will never ask what a book means, as a signifier or signified; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 4) It is such an understanding of the book as functioning with and through the real, transmitting intensities and inserting itself into a field of forces and multiplicities that this study works with. The ‘book’ – by which I mean the individual and collective works of Barnes, Loy and Stein – is read as a productive machine, plugged into the machines of culture (social production) and desire, neither passively reflecting them, nor simply reworking them on a figurative plane. Textual effects are evaluated as real effects, productive on material, affective, libidinal, semiotic and semantic levels, and political in that all production and effect is political. The practice of articulation provides a way of describing or drawing context as mobile, contingent and multi-dimensional, shifting the practice of historical contextualisation from being a molar enterprise of recovering truth, to a conditional and molecular tactic of articulating elements, drawing maps which ‘fabricate the real in an attempt, not to represent or mimic it, but to strategically open up its possibilities’ (Grossberg, 1992: 64). In my consideration of the work of Barnes, Loy and Stein certain articulations are selected and certain modes of evaluating effects are chosen to be most productive, particularly for releasing the ‘book’ from arborescent and majoritarian principles and structures.



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Introduction 23

For me, a text is merely a small cog in an extra-textual practice. It is not a question of commentating on the text by a method of deconstruction, or by a method of textual practice, or by other methods; it is a question of seeing what use it has in the extra-textual practice that prolongs the text.8 Eschewing the possibility of a totality of contextual articulations, without ever losing sight of the real, Chapter 1 begins in the middle, not offering thorough biographies of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein but meeting them in 1913, when Barnes was embarking on her journalistic career in New York, Loy was involved with the Italian Futurists in Florence, and Stein had already completed her major early works (Three Lives, The Making of Americans, Tender Buttons) and had established herself as an avant-garde writer in Paris and in a lesbian couple with Alice B. Toklas. Through exploring the outside of these different contexts, the discussion establishes some of the initial forces and flows that are articulated in and through their work. What emerges is a disjunctive account of some very different early modernisms and a suggestion of the complex and often contradictory aesthetic, cultural and philosophical assemblages that they plug into and manufacture. Barnes, Loy and Stein are thus placed within a version of modernist beginnings that identifies its multiplicities without homogenising or hierarchising them. Following this, each successive chapter starts in a different place, emphasising the centrality of discontinuity in the critical approach adopted here. Chapter 2 focuses on the event most often cited as a ‘cause’ of modernism: the Great War. Loy and Stein’s ‘war writing’ collocates with Marinnetti’s futurist poetic, Pound and Eliot’s experimentation with the modernist lyric and First World War poetry, posing an alternative configuration of the forces and effects of war. Taking the Great War as a hinge point at which a crisis of masculinity is manifested, the discussion looks at how Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and other responses to the war repeated and reproduced a compulsive and homoerotic defence of a masculine Symbolic. A schizoanalytical reading of the textual self-assertions and phallic manoeuvres of these texts exposes their reliance on a regressive denial of desiring production. Loy and



In fabricating maps of the real, in tracing how power functions and how power, forces and effects can be reconfigured, I make no assertions of closing the circle of interpretation, my intention is not to ‘explicate’ texts but to activate them. As Deleuze writes:


Stein offer alternative tactics: instead of an assemblage of forces desperately disavowing the collapse of masculinity, the war can function as a catalyst for enabling experiments with language and identity. What this might consist in is suggested in the reading of Loy’s Love Songs and Stein’s Lifting Belly, deterritorialisations of poetic language and effect which posit ways of re-articulating the war at its point of discursive construction. The machinic destruction of human and cultural life serves to foreground the encroachment of a technological age, the apparatus of which was already a feature of the modern forces of consumerism and mass-production. In the third chapter, the responses of New York Dada to the modern techniques of subjectification, mass-culture and art are examined as a working through of the blurring of gender distinctions in the era of the New Woman and the orthodoxy of industrialised consumerism. Reading Barnes’s popular journalism, Loy’s New York writing and the work of Picabia, Man Ray and Duchamp, the chapter explores different articulations which either playfully engage with the artificial identity constructions enabled by mass-production and mass-culture, or exhibit a fear of the threat of domination by the machine and by the liberated female. The cyborg potentials of New York, envisaged in a range of machine and human conjunctions and images, are followed through into the responses of the women of Dada (Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Beatrice Wood, Juliette Roche, Clara Tice) who reveal the limits and possibilities of such machinic becomings. Chapter 4 moves to another city, Paris, in the 1920s, to expand the consideration of artificial constructions and inorganic becomings. Here the construction and marketing of the modernist genius and the flâneur come to the fore and this chapter will consider how these assemblages function within and generate both majoritarian (rigid and generic) and minoritarian (singular and specific) modernist ideas and texts. Using Bourdieu’s ideas of cultural capital and interrogating the gendering of the flâneur, a map of Parisian modernism is realised, which is subsequently applied to Stein’s own construction and production of genius, and Loy and Barnes’s interrogation and reassembly of ideas of expatriate genius and flâneurie. The chapter culminates in a discussion of Barnes and Loy’s suggestion of other forces and effects in expatriate modernism, showing how they create lines of flight out of the stratification of gender, creativity and the city. Where one set of articulations demonstrates modernisms’ productive relationships to capitalism and economics, Chapter 5 draws on another



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map that opens out articulations with the body and transgressive modern culture – from the high modernism of Ulysses to the spectacle of the circus freak-show. Considering the overwhelming bodily excesses in Barnes’s work (both visually and verbally) and the oral – anal delights that Stein’s writing celebrates, this chapter explores the possible productions of desire, the bodily interruptions and the animal-becomings of such work and its effective relationship to a culture of repression and transgression. Expressing a fear of the abnormal, T. S. Eliot’s anxiety in his ‘Introduction’ to Nightwood, that readers might see a ‘horrid sideshow of freaks’ reveals a rigid demarcation of the acceptable and unacceptable. In contrast the libidinous lesbian bodies of Stein’s erotic writing, the grotesques of Loy’s later poetry, and Barnes’s Nightwood undermine the distinction between normal and freak, the real and artificial. Exploring their work and using recent feminist thinking on the grotesque, this chapter reveals the functioning of texts that incorporate and activate, rather than contain or segregate, carnivalesque misrule and the erotic interruptions of the modern. The final chapter focuses squarely on the revolutionary forces of Barnes, Loy and Stein’s writing. Working though the idea of the minority and minority writing, the point of articulation for the discussion is the ‘Jew’ and his/her construction and iteration in popular, intellectual and avant-garde culture. Debates about Jewishness connect with the theories and practices of modernist creativity, as this chapter discusses, but also figure as an ambiguous heritage for both Loy and Stein, and as a telling ‘anomaly’ in the opening chapters of Barnes’s Nightwood. Exploring Jewishness through and across their work enables an examination of their modes of minority (self-)expression and the becomings released by such expression. Thus the varied articulations of race, creativity, identity and language in the writing of Barnes, Loy and Stein challenge the very real structures of power and discourse, producing an intensive and expressive material that escapes from the imperative linguistic system. My aim throughout the following pages is not an exhaustive reading of Barnes, Loy and Stein’s connections and similarities, or even a programmatic Deleuzian reading of a selection of modernist texts and contexts. There is a very real and active reason for this study, a need to read Barnes, Loy and Stein’s work as heterogeneous, active and political, not in a systematic (and systematising) way, but through a concrete engagement with the multiplicity of context and affect. By articulating their work together, and to the forces and affects that produce it and that it produces, the ‘modernist articulations’ of this study are intended to



Introduction 25

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create maps of reading that activate the texts and contexts of Barnes, Loy and Stein, to consider processes and possibilities that exceed accepted modes of reading and being. This book ultimately aims at ‘a productive use of the literary machine a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 116)


Becoming-Modernists: Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein

[A]ll becomings are already molecular. That is because becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or someone. Nor is it to proportion formal relations. Neither of these two figures of analogy is applicable to becoming: neither the imitation of a subject nor the proportionality of a form. Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, of the functions one fulfils, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming and through which one becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 272)

Becoming, modernism Barnes, Loy and Stein pre-exist this present study as modernist figures as well as embodied subjects who inhabited and wrote within the first half of the twentieth century. As I am seeking to launch new ways of considering their work, this pre-existence needs to be taken into account in an act of dialogue but also in a critical enterprise to draw new lines of meaning-production and theoretical relation; that is, articulations. Of the three writers Stein has been most extensively explored and most extensively reconfigured, shifting between a modernist persona, a linguistic-poetic innovator and a lesbian-feminist icon. None of these are sufficient designations, but none of them are completely false either; ‘Gertrude Stein’ has been created in these different guises through (mostly unacknowledged) critical acts of articulation. As ‘Mother Goose 27



1


of Montparnasse’ or the ‘Mother of Dada’, Stein persists in culturalist accounts of expatriate modernism as a colourful and well-connected character. Her sexuality becomes integral to her writing in some feminist and gender studies appraisals of her work, with various versions of écriture feminine deployed as a theoretical frame for evaluations of her linguistic experimentation. The lesbian body and lesbian sex can be seen as keys to understanding texts such as Tender Buttons (1914) but more recently questions of race and her own relationship to her Jewishness, have informed Stein criticism.1 Barnes’s modernist presence is founded most strongly on her novel Nightwood (1936) but the achievement of that work continues to overshadow her other work, indeed her early journalism and short stories are still often read as preparatory work towards the novel. Examinations of Barnes’s representation of binaries and dualities, and her relationship to Decadence or Symbolism, have been present since early criticism of her work in the 1970s and 1980s and the queering of Barnes, despite her own rejections of such labels, has inflected many readings. The tendency towards biographical interpretations, a feature of some of the criticism of all three writers, has some weight in the case of Barnes with both her biographers (Andrew Field and Phillip Herring) emphasising the autobiographical context for Ryder (1928) and many critics seeing this text and the late play The Antiphon (1958) as based in Barnes’s own family experiences. Thus issues of incest, rape and the female body are read through Barnes’s close physical relationship with her grandmother, the journalist, feminist and spiritualist Zadel Barnes, and her father’s treatment of her in her youth.2 Like both of the other writers, Loy’s presentation of women’s bodies and her exploration of female sexuality and creativity have featured prominently in critical versions, not least because of her explicit engagement with such topics in the Feminist Manifesto (1914) and poems such as ‘Parturition’(1914). Such an interest in a feminist Loy has run alongside criticism that has sought to examine her through her relationship to the modernism of her male peers and colleagues, and their forebears – Jules Laforgue, Ezra Pound, the Italian Futurists, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting. Carolyn Burke, most recently with her 1996 biography of Loy, has been very influential in establishing the parameters for criticism with Roger Conover’s editions of her poetry, in 1982 and 1996, bringing Loy into print for the first time since the 1950s.3 Loy’s use of language (which has been compared to Stein’s), her interest in fashion and her later reclusiveness (which has been linked to Barnes’s own position), and her position as outcast, most notably in relation



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to her own Jewishness and petit bourgeois upbringing, have all been instrumental in the construction of a version of Loy. In exploring the work of Barnes, Loy and Stein, in making a meaningful map of articulations that situate, are productive of, and are produced by, their work, this study necessarily intervenes in readings of the three writers that already exist. My purpose is to consider them as modernists and, in doing so, to re-evaluate the definitions and boundaries of what modernism is. But what I will produce will not be a final reading, a comprehensive assessment or an absolute idea. The concern with becoming that motivates this chapter and underpins many of the conclusions that I will go on to draw throughout this study precludes the possibility of a final statement of intention or achievement. It is the process, the line of becoming that matters, not in order to establish points between which the line is drawn, but to reveal the line itself as a force of speed and intensity which pushes towards a deterritorialisation of affects and codes. I am searching for ways of reading that resist the closure of theoretical labels and teleologies of traditions without wanting to reject the specificity of early twentieth-century literature and culture. In opening out the work of Barnes, Loy and Stein I am seeking not simply to situate them in a context, or relate them to cultural and artistic events, but to read the event of specific texts as a force which can take flight from dominant formations, majoritarian structures, a rigid segmentarity which imposes a signifying regime on bodies, relations and encounters. Becomings as I read them in the following pages are simultaneously the processes of Barnes’s, Loy’s and Stein’s work, the affective events of modernist cultural practices, and the intensities of these events and practices as they can be activated in the contemporary moment. I am concerned to assess these as haecceities in the sense in which Deleuze employs this term. Haecceity, derived from Haecceitas, as Deleuze explained, is ‘a term frequently used in the school of Duns Scotus, in order to designate the individuation of beings. Deleuze uses it in a more special sense: in the sense of an individuation which is not that of an object, nor of a person, but rather of an event (wind, river, day or even hour of the day). Deleuze’s thesis is that all individuation is in fact of this type’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 151, n.9). I am therefore seeking to understand, not the style or themes of the work of Barnes, Loy, Stein and their contemporaries, but its very individuation. I am also aware of the potential pitfalls of a faithful application of Deleuzian method (whatever that is) in a feminist reading of these modernist writers, particularly as becoming itself seems to be explicitly



Becoming-Modernists


gendered in Deleuze’s work. The argument in A Thousand Plateaus is that all lines of deterritorialisation go through ‘becoming-woman’, which is the starting point for the whole process. Becoming-woman, however, does not refer to actual females, but to affective states and positions. Deleuze does support a feminist position,4 as the reference to the need for women’s ‘molar politics’ in A Thousand Plateaus demonstrates (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 276). It is the position of women within phallogocentrism which has established the preeminence of becoming-woman, as Braidotti argues: ‘the generalized becoming-woman is the necessary starting-point for the deconstruction of phallogocentric identities precisely because sexual dualism and its corollary – the positioning of Woman as figure of Otherness – are constitutive of Western thought’ (2002: 80). However, Deleuze is interested in a non-feminine revolutionary subject; that is, a becomingwoman that is not specifically feminine, ‘dissolving “woman” into the forces which structure her’ (ibid.: 81). As Braidotti points out Deleuze’s position suggests a ‘symmetry between the sexes’, he ‘proceeds as if there was a clear equivalence in the speaking positions of the two sexes and consequently fails to take into account the central point of feminism’ (ibid.). Or, as Claire Colebrook asks, ‘Just what are Deleuze and Guattari doing when they take Woolf and the women’s movement away from concepts of identity, recognition, emancipation and the subject towards a new plane of becoming?’(2000: 3). Feminist appropriations of Deleuze, by Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, demonstrate that the problem of becoming-woman is not insurmountable, but debates between orthodox Deleuzians, with their critiques of the molar stance of feminism, and feminist Deleuzians persist. My own use of Deleuze is far from faithful, co-opting him as I am into a methodological structure that draws on cultural studies and focuses squarely on modernist literature and culture. As also a feminist methodology, I am working with the recognition that becomings can be differently gendered; they can have a different valency and necessity depending on the gender experience of the becoming-subject, and can have a different urgency depending on the becoming-subject’s relationship to majoritarian structures. There are many ways in which the early twentieth century can be understood as a potential site for becomings, for lines of speed and affect that move towards ‘the (anorganic) imperceptible, the (asignifying) indiscernible, and the (asubjective) impersonal’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 279). The new century inherited many of the forms and structures that had developed to both produce and maintain the modern subject



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and his modern society. As Foucault has described, this process does not solely originate in the Victorian era, nor can it be seen as an intentional process of the subjugation of the individual (it is productive as well as restrictive), but by the early twentieth century the normalisation of the law had produced the modern state, the modern family and modern sexuality, all focused on the modern subject. Subjectivity as a desiresdriven network of impersonal or machine-like connections is, in the modern subject, fixed to a supposed One who is normalised into a hierarchical power structure that negates the multiplicity of material and semiotic conditions that constitute the process of the subject. Normalisation establishes difference in a binary opposition to the Same, institutionalising a reductive dualism at the core of the subject. So, the psychoanalytic production of the normal explicitly required the identification of deviations from the norm through the knowledgeproduction of deviant pleasures and abnormal identities. But, the visibility of such others serves not only to define the self, but to suggest the permeable boundaries of that self, to pose proximities which put the self close to others; the tentative becoming-animals of masochism, the asignifying bodies of hysterics, the machinic delirium of schizophrenics. The regulated man witnesses otherness which may confirm his-self/same, but which may also force the Same to recognise the other as an incommensurably different mode of being. The desire to move beyond the Same and release becomings is a key force in the modernist impetus. The regulatory production of a subject, and the corollary urge to escape this regulation, is accompanied by specific philosophical tendencies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, tendencies that we could term vitalist. The thought of both Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson is crucially influential on modernism, and on the potential for modernist becomings, and is just as important for Deleuzian ideas of the subject and of heterogeneous multiplicities. But, in articulating a framework for modernist becomings I do not want to prioritise theoretical structures, as articulation, as I am deploying it, is embedded firmly in the embodied experience of culture and society. Indeed, the affective experiences of the early twentieth century are perhaps the most important for activating and releasing the potential for becoming (at the level of individual, artistic and cultural production). Advanced capitalism and consumerism, mass-production, technological change, the modern urban zone, colonial encounters, and the shifts in gender and class relations are experiences as much as they are social trends. It is a commonplace to describe modernism as a response to these factors, but



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what I want to consider is how the embodied and embedded experiences of the early twentieth century produce certain potentials, in the real, that are realised in modernist literature and culture. I am concerned with exploring entries and exits rather than structures. Reality manifests the effect of power at every level, but can only be defined and described by affect (i.e., the ability to affect and be affected) and it is to this affect that I turn. Thus the Fordist and Taylorist models of harnessing and controlling the flows of modernity are principles and theoretical structures but are also affects that produce efficient machines and efficient human machines of production, explicitly ordering the world of society and industry and the individual human subject. The shift from organic work and life that they foreground also signals a release, for the flows and networks of desire that constitute the subject, from the constraints of a natural or innate ‘being’.5 The flows of modernity, made manifest in the city spaces of the twentieth century, can thus be experienced in their intensity and multiplicity in opposition to, or even within, the structures that attempt to order them. Capitalism and consumerism, too, harness flows and desires, but in their actual production of desires again signal a double movement where the ordering and control of production (the production of goods and the production of the desire for these goods) highlight the necessary productivity of desire that easily exceeds the hierarchy of segmentation and majoritarian structures. In this context socialist and feminist activism can be recast, not as movements towards the rational liberation of subjects, but as the creation of new types of desiring social production. The reliance on molar identities in such politics means that they can easily be captured by an arborescent signifying regime and put in the service of the (renewed) State, for example, but this does not preclude the possibility of minoritarian becomings, rejections of the majoritarian subject position, launching from their space. Racial encounters too, quintessential acts of territorialisation and decoding within the regimes of Western thought, can also instantiate proximities that trigger different becomings-other. In my reading, therefore, modernity and its effects can be seen as the denaturalisation of existence and experience, the unseating of the sovereign rational subject, and the production in and of intensitive desires. The cultural practices of modernity, modernism and the early twentieth-century avant-garde are themselves complex organisations, places at which the real effects and investments of power are articulated. Whether different places produce becomings or re-territorialisation is something that I am actively exploring here. I am not simply assuming



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that ‘male’ modernism is majoritarian, or that women’s modernism is minoritarian. In taking on board the pre-existing versions of Barnes, Loy and Stein, I am crucially concerned to resist a generalised celebration of an alternate or ‘other’ modernism that the three writers either define or participate in, whether this is defined through assertions of ‘non-heterocentric existence’6 or political generalisations about textual form. The methodology of articulation is what will enable me to assess moments and texts as specific mobilities, rather than general processes. As I have already stated, in considering Barnes, Loy and Stein as becoming-modernists in this chapter, becoming is not cast as an end but as a process. I do not intend to start at a beginning and trace faithful origins out of their background, education or upbringing; instead I will take a moment – 1913 – and explore each of their becoming-modernisms out of this moment/place. 1913 is an arbitrary year; it does not have the huge cultural resonances of ‘1914’, but in its very arbitrariness I am seeking to avoid the idea of an accurate ‘return to the scene of the modern’, to use a phrase from Michael North’s Reading 1922. The remainder of this chapter will therefore be drawing a map through and across texts by Barnes, Loy and Stein, locating them, not in an accurate and complete cultural and aesthetic context, but in an active map of articulations so that I can explore their becoming-modernisms, and I can establish some of the ideas that will recur through this study. Ideas themselves are lines of intensity: I am not looking for stable concepts (which would be contradicting a Deleuzian approach) but the singularities of thought-events, where thinking is recognised as doing and thought as difference.

Barnes, the middle class and the Oedipal family On 19 March 1913, Barnes left the Pratt Institute art school in Brooklyn, New York, after less than six months of classes, almost the full extent of her formal education. At about the same time she moved out of the Bronx flat she shared with her mother and younger brothers, and began to pursue a career as a freelance journalist. Barnes was hired as a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where her first articles appeared in June 1913 by which time, aged 22, she was resident in a Greenwich Village flat. By Christmas 1913 Carl Van Vechten hired her to write for the New York Press and over the following years her journalism, short stories, poems, drawings and one-act plays appeared in most of the major New York papers and in the avant-garde small magazines The Trend, Others and the Little Review. Barnes was a resident of the Village for the next eight



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years, during which time she was engaged to Ernst Hanfstaengl (from 1914–16), a German-American gallery owner; lived with the socialist writer Courtney Lemon (from 1917–19); and had affairs with Van Vechten, Mary Pynne and others. By 1917 her journalism and other writing were earning her up to $15 a piece (an annual income of about $5000). As a popular features writer – covering topics as diverse as Tango dancing, Coney Island, women’s suffrage, Chinatown, theatre, and soldiers in New York – and interviewing subjects from Diamond Jim Bradley to Helen Westley, the labour activist ‘Mother’ Jones to Alfred Steiglitz, Barnes’s journalism positioned her within the new world of mass newspapers. Journalism across the Anglo-American world, fundamentally affected by changes in production, presentation and distribution techniques, had undergone a transformation with the late nineteenth century seeing the rise of visually accessible sensational newspapers and ‘yellow journalism’. It is within this field of cultural production that Barnes writes, adopting the roles and subject matter suited to it. Katherine Biers describes how Barnes inhabited ‘a varied repertoire of roles for her public from flamboyant female “stunt journalist” and investigative reporter in the tradition of Nellie Bly to straightforward chronicler of local color and notable events around the city’ (2003: 239). Barnes, in earning her living in New York in the 1910s, firmly participates in the popular world but, despite her marginalisation from mainstream critical accounts of the Greenwich Village avantgarde,7 she was also a member of this bohemian community, playing a key role, for example, in the founding of the Provincetown Players. Her short stories, poems and one-act plays engage with many of the stylistic and thematic features that predominate in the writing of the New York avant-garde at the time, and proffer an interesting articulation to the legacy of decadence and symbolism. The Greenwich Village that Barnes settled in already had a reputation as a bohemian area with, from 1910 onwards, a huge influx of artists, writers, intellectuals and single women following the early bohemians who were drawn to this Italian area by the subdivision of redbrick residences and mews into cheap rooms and studios. The Village became a centre for experiments in art, politics and life, celebrated in the galleries, restaurants and small periodicals of the American avant-garde, and publicised for tourists by enterprising individuals like Guido Bruno. 1913 was a turbulent year for the Village avant-garde community. It saw both the Armory Show (the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the 69th Regiment Armory) in February which brought



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the furthest reaches of the European artistic avant-garde to an American public, and the mobilisation of socialist intellectuals, artists and writers in support of the strike at the Paterson silk factory in New Jersey, culminating in the huge Paterson Strike Pageant in Madison Square Garden in June. Barnes was not a major player in these key events by comparison with Mabel Dodge, for example, who founded her reputation as avant-gardist and patron on the Armory Show and supported her lover John Reed’s activities on behalf of the Paterson strikers. However Barnes’s early journalism does demonstrate an interest in the experiences of working people and in modern art. The July 1914 issue of Alfred Steiglitz’s Camera Work included Barnes’s statement on the meaning of the 291 Gallery, and her ‘Veterans in Harness’ series in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (from October to December 1913) explored the lives of a postman, a waiter, an elevator operator and a physical culture teacher. The ‘Veterans in Harness’ articles demonstrate Barnes’s particular style, opening as they do with a specific dramatic ‘Scene’ that acts as the background for each ‘Veteran’, and subtly combining impressions of the economic and political changes the men have experienced with their personal and family stories. Many of the elderly men are immigrants, arriving during the great wave of immigration of the late nineteenth century, and the issues of race, employment and American history are all presented as constituent of each man’s character and their place in New York. This Naturalist approach to character and life coexists in Barnes’s New York journalism with elaborate visual metaphors and similes: the engineer Thomas Baird stands near the docks ‘among the many doors and the many high stools that lean against the walls like sad and world-wise herons’,8 the fire-fighter Michael Quinn is imagined spending his evenings ‘supervising the rising of the asbestos curtain of the last act of life wherein there are ballet girls and nights at home’.9 Throughout, Barnes’s reporting voice is present in an editorial tone of knowledge and interpretation, and it is this aspect of her feature writing, Douglas Messerli argues, that influences the style and construction of her early stories which ‘through informational asides, directions to the reader, and other narrational manipulations, expose the author as the source of the story, as the apparent agent of a series of shared events’(1993: 17). Barnes’s early stories, published in All Story Cavalier Weekly, The Trend, and the New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine between 1914 and 1917, also share some of the character-typing and deterministic facets of her journalism (notably in the representation of race and racial heritage), but this early work cannot simply be categorised as Naturalist.



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Barnes is certainly closer to Theodore Dreiser than James Joyce in her resistance to deep psychological explanation and emphasis on event, but her avant-garde work is set apart by her stylisation and artifice, the unresolved plot of many of the stories, and the special emphasis on ‘beauty’, ‘cowardice’, ‘sensitivity’ and ‘freedom’ as intensive, affective states. Barnes’s early stories, like her journalism, are produced out of a specific milieu. They may not have the fundamental impulse of being produced from contemporary events, as the journalism necessarily does, but are still the products of, and with, a context that can make the work meaningful, but which is also produced by the works themselves. Thus the tension in America between liberalism and conservatism within reform movements, the visibility of race and immigration in New York, the influence of the tradition of paternalistic reform, the perpetuation of female virtue and nurturance as ideals in American feminism, are all social forces that can be articulated to Barnes’s journalism and early stories, but are also forces that are articulated by her work in her attempt to make intelligible a specific conception of the world. They come to Barnes, not as abstract social forces, but as the particularities of her experience as a child in the polygamous household of her New England radical father and feminist spiritualist grandmother, and as an inhabitant of the Brooklyn and Greenwich Village of immigrant New York. As a particular American subject, and as a particular woman in the city of New York, Barnes draws specific forces together. Thus, in writing and reporting New York, Barnes articulates and produces an inhabited city whose meaning is struggled for by a broad range of populace and visitors. In this she engages with the public act of making race and nationality meaningful, of articulating them into the intelligibility of an individual or area. But this reported New York, and Barnes’s journalistic texts themselves, are also a space of visible spectacle. In articulating New York to its readers and to the events and forces that shape it, Barnes’s journalism self-reflexively considers the mechanisms of the spectaclem particularly the way that the spectacular moment places certain forces in evidence while making others invisible. Many commentators have noticed the prevalent interest in feminism and the position of women in Barnes’s journalism, but the status of the key terms (of ‘women’, ‘feminism’), how they are made intelligible and what narratives they connect with is paramount. Her early writing evinces a suspicion of middle-class reformism and even her endorsements of freethinking are accompanied by a recognition that individualistic radicalism can also harbour paternalistic and restrictive



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imperatives.10 In her articles on National American Women Suffrage Association events in 1913, Barnes presents neither an endorsement nor rejection of the movement, but does highlight how spectacle and presentation are emphasised to foreground personality and style, rather than politics and effects. It is given to the 82-year-old labour activist Mary (‘Mother’) Jones, in a 1915 interview, to actively dismiss the American suffragette in her fashionable hobble skirt as ‘an ‘incher’ ’ (NY: 99). For Mother Jones the suffragette ‘incher’ is on a continuum with the other charitable associations of America – ‘relief work made possible by slavery’ (NY: 102). In contrast to the fashionable suffragette, Mother Jones is a minoritarian force, ‘born of the struggle and the torment and the pain’ (NY: 97), she has ‘never had time to become individual’ (NY: 103) and persists at the molecular level of a ‘remedy’ (NY: 97) rather than an individual. Just as interesting is Barnes’s piece ‘How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed’ (September 1914) in which she undergoes the forcefeeding process inflicted on hunger striking British suffragettes, offering her own body as an object taken over by the irresistible force of the fluid nourishment that chokes her nose and throat. In its re-enactment of the suffering of Barnes’s British ‘sisters’ this article is political, at the level of immanent experience or the localised and affective point of conjunction between forces: feminist resistance and state power. And in the article’s status as popular entertainment, complete with photographic display of the ordeal,11 it furthermore interrogates the cultural construction of the feminine body as vessel or object of resistance and/or assault. In the short story ‘Paprika Johnson’, first published in The Trend in January 1915, Barnes explores, as she does in other stories, the position of the single woman and her relationship to the expected roles of wife and mother. Paprika is an attractive and generous stenographer who is also an artist (she plays Chopin on her banjo and appreciates the aesthetics of the evening city scene from her fire escape). She misses her chance of the traditional happy ending with the ‘boy from Stroud’s’ through helping her ‘bosom friend’ Leah continue to deceive her new husband – the blind Gustav has married Leah thinking she has the charm and generosity of Paprika, who agrees to be the person he sees when he regains his sight after an operation. ‘Paprika Johnson’ presents sets of social codes and structures against which Paprika’s nascent becoming is explored; she is abstractly contained by the codes of decency and virtue by the presence of her ‘moribund mother’ who lies ‘under the counterpane, a chaperon who never spoke or moved since she was paralysed, but who was a pretty good one at that, being a white exclamation



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point this side of error’ (S: 36). This startling metaphor exposes the rigid construction of codes of femininity that contain Paprika and her friend Leah while also revealing its rigid constructedness, its status as a textual curtailment of potentiality. Paprika and Leah are also defined and coded by their position in the urban economy, by their jobs and homes, by Paprika’s ‘one-fifty “American Madame” ’ (S: 41) and Leah’s ‘forty-ninecent belt’ (S: 45). But the city itself as a zone of denaturalised becomings is perceived as a place of beauty by both Paprika and the narrative voice: ‘Across the cliff she looked and watched the moon grope its way up the sky and over condensed milk signs and climb to the top of the Woolworth building’ (S: 37). The status of paralysis and blindness is crucial in this story, associated as it is with the male characters (Gustav and the boy from Stroud’s who has only seen Paprika in ‘silhouette’ from a distance), and the mother figure of feminine propriety. It marks, not the boundaries of true seeing, but the impossibility of accurate perception from within the majoritarian structures of patriarchy, the family and the state. Against these structures Paprika is a potential who fails (despite her aspirations) to be captured into an appropriate feminine subjectivity, ending instead as the ‘first cabaret artist’ (S: 46), playing her banjo from her fire escape for the patrons of Swingerhoger’s beer garden below. The story struggles to present Paprika as haecceity, a specific and singular event, just as she struggles to produce her own intensities out of the codes and structures that define her as a subject. What the story presents is not simply a negotiation of early twentieth-century urban milieux in which ‘liberated’ working women struggle with the traditional expectations of femininity alongside the economic pressures of modern life, but a consideration of identity as the chance production of the forces and flows of desire. Paprika’s final fate as a cabaret artist does see her launched, however unintentionally, on a line of flight out of the bourgeois institutions of marriage and family, but this is not to fix such a position as an ideal exit from norms of femininity. In the penultimate poem from Barnes’s The Book of Repulsive Women, there is a Cabaret Dancer who is subject to the controlling gaze and opinion of her audience who, in their attraction to her increasingly repulsive dislocation from acceptable femininity, push her towards ruin. The audience’s complicity in the dancer’s descent into dissolution and self-destruction is fully acknowledged. The unavoidable presence of a complex desire (the audience’s, the dancer’s, the reader’s) produces the dancer as repulsive woman from what is previously ‘laughter’ and innocence. The Book of Repulsive Women, published



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by Guido Bruno in 1915, presents a variety of ‘portraits of women in states of physical and moral degeneration’ (Parsons, 2003: 15) of which the Cabaret Dancer is one, but which also include a prostitute, a lesbian, female suicides and a woman who has had an abortion. The book draws on the decadent tradition in both its representation of abject femininity (in the poems and Beardsleyesque drawings) and its anti-bourgeois stance, proffering these repulsive women as evidence of alternatives to the clean, straight aspirations of modern America. The use of decadent rhetoric is apparent elsewhere in Barnes’s journalism and in some of her one-act plays, and it does manifest a desire to prepare the ground for a radical, anti-bourgeois sensibility. But Barnes’s decadence is also a refusal of an easy realism or a psychological realism, and it sets these works apart from a rhetoric of progressive radicalism as well as alienating them from a tradition of middle-class reform. The decadent encounter with otherness, most explicit in the moment of becoming-other, is paramount in Barnes’s reproduction of it, a movement out of rational subjectivity into decay, death or animality. Decadence was not just a cultural heritage that Barnes could connect with, but a personal one that emerges from her grandmother Zadel’s presence in British fin-de-siècle decadent circles. This family connection forges an interesting articulation, as what Barnes’s short stories and plays also effect, and what emerges from The Book of Repulsive Women, is a disturbance of the Oedipal family through tropes of incest and dead fathers. Thus, for example, the three Carson brothers in the play Three from the Earth (1919) visit Kate Morley, the erstwhile lover of their dead father, to retrieve letters from him. The play concludes with the youngest brother John, who is probably Kate’s son, incestuously embracing and kissing her. The Dove (1926) powerfully satirises the aspirations to corruption and perversion of the Burgson sisters with their garishly voluptuous apartment and (unfulfilled) decadent desire. The demur young woman, the Dove, who stands as the child-lover in the Burgson sisters’ would-be degenerate household, actually threatens the myth of the household by realising their professed desires – wielding swords, enacting a lesbian-vamp bite on Amelia Burgson, and finally shooting the Burgson’s picture of ‘Deux Courtisanes Vénitiennes’ (RS: 161). In all these actions she blurs distinctions between binaries (masculine – feminine, hetero – homosexual, active – passive, aggressive – defensive) and refuses her role in the mock family. The rejection of the Father and the subversion of family and normative desire in Three From the Earth and The Dove produce an anti-Oedipal



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flight out of the restrictive structures of desire and the individual figured through castration and loss: these texts are not bound up by narratives of lack and guilt. Anti-Oedipal desire in Barnes’s writing is powerfully productive, but also ambivalent and disturbing, productive of death, of mute becomings-animal and decay as often as productive realisations and intersections. The little girl, a liminal space before the actions of gender and acculturation act to create Woman, is key to Barnes’s subversion of the Oedipal family and her rejection of the narrative of lack that underpins the phallogocentric folly of patriarchal culture. In her later works Ryder and The Antiphon, the actions of this culture on the little girl, the forced containment of her as passive vessel for the actions of the male (as cultural and as individual force), are imagined as the actual (incestuous) rape of the female child: the disruptive potential of the little girl is also explored in Barnes’s stories from the 1920s, and of course in plays such as The Dove. The little girl emerges from these texts as an ambiguous in-betweenness that confuses the rigid segmentation of genders, behaviours, individuals: girls do not belong to an age, group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce n molecular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross right through. The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be in-between, to pass between, the intermezzo. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 277) In stories such as ‘Cassation’ (originally published as ‘A Little Girl Tells a Story to a Lady’ [1925]) and ‘The Grande Malade’ (originally published as ‘The Little Girl Continues’ [1925]) the little girl refuses narrative expectations about cause, effect and role. What comes to prominence in these stories is the girl herself, ‘her speed, her freely machinic body, her intensities, her abstract line or line of flight, her molecular production, her indifference to memory, her nonfigurative character’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 277). The little girl has not (not yet) been captured by a psychoanalytic narrative of the mournful and negative desire to enslave the other to a specular reflection of the subject, trapped into a family romance that always constructs her as incomplete and subject to the desire of and for the Father. She signals a becoming in Barnes’s text, a potential that could escape and take flight beyond the Oedipal, bourgeois family: hers is an inbetweenness that is reflected in Barnes’s own status both inside and outside the modernist avant-garde.



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In January 1913 the journal Lacerba was founded in Florence, and within two months was propounding many of the Futurist principles that F. T. Marinetti was popularising across Italy and presenting in London and Paris. In November a Futurist art exhibition of the work of Boccioni, Balla, Carrà and others was held in Florence, followed by a heavily attended Futurist serata in December which was a typical cross between theatrical event and riot. At this time Mina Loy was living on the Costa san Giorgio in Florence as her first marriage to Stephen Haweis deteriorated – in February 1913 he left for the South Sea islands without Loy and their two children. Loy was in the middle of one of her recurrent bouts of neurasthenia, something that she hoped her recent discovery of Christian Science would help her with, but during the following months encounters with a range of figures and forces would produce the affective force that propelled Loy onto a line of modernist becoming. Loy had been a friend of Mabel Dodge (who occupied the nearby Villa Curonia during her Italian summers) for some years and had met Leo and Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas at Dodge’s villa, striking up an acquaintance with the two women that would extend into the Paris of the 1920s. It was through Dodge that Loy met John Reed and Carl van Vechten when they visited the Villa Curonia in the summer of 1913. Van Vechten would fictionalise his holiday in the 1921 bestseller Peter Whiffle, but crucially their meeting provided Loy with an agent who would go on to place her work in the New York small magazines The Trend, Rogue and Others. Loy was thus exposed to the forces of Greenwich Village radicalism through Dodge and her guests, as well as already having encountered Stein’s writing (The Making of Americans and ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia’) and being, although now distantly, still connected to the Parisian art world: she exhibited a painting and three drawings at the 1913 Salon D’Automne.12 Like Barnes, the deployment of the visual and verbal rhetoric of decadence was a feature of Loy’s early modernism and their production of it coincides in the adoption of a pre-existing rhetoric for anti-bourgeois art. But whereas Barnes’s decadence is a self-conscious deployment of tropes with a key intention of resisting the rhetoric of her American context, Loy’s decadence marks a more straightforward rebellion against a middle-class Victorian background that was also to resonate in her personal life: her choice of Haweis as lover and husband appears, through the frame of his presentation as ‘Esau’ in her long poem



Intension, extension and Loy’s feminist effects


Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923–25) to be a choice of decadence over bourgeois sensibility. However, Loy’s ‘Three Moments in Paris’ sequence shares with Barnes’s ‘To A Cabaret Dancer’ a sense of the destructive effects of the decadent aesthetic expectations of an audience, both works being published in New York in 1915. In Café du Néant’ (the second poem of ‘Three Moments in Paris’), a cabaret-café is populated by the etiolated, degenerate and ‘nostalgic’ ‘baited bodies’ of decadent stereotypes who watch a performer: Who Having the concentric lighting focussed precisely upon her Prophetically blossoms in perfect putrefaction. (LLB: 17) In the autumn of 1913, through her young boarder the American painter Frances Stevens, Loy encountered the Futurist movement. She became acquainted with Carlo Carrà and Giovanni Papini on their visits to the Costa san Giorgio, met Marinneti when he visited Florence, and would come to have a brief affair with Marinetti and a more complicated involvement with Papini. For the Futurists, and most forcefully for Marinetti, modern literature, art and culture needed to reject the passeist elements of nostalgic European culture, throw off the burdens of artistic tradition and embrace the new rhythms and forces of speed and technology. Marinetti’s manifesto urgings to ‘Burn the museums’ and ‘murder the moonshine’, to expose the reality of sex, to revel in the machinic forces and flows of modernity, to celebrate ‘war, the world’s only hygiene’, and to liberate language into a parole-in-libertà, are radical articulations of a modernist sensibility that embraces the shock of the new. Loy’s own embracing of this sensibility was first manifested in ‘Aphorisms on Futurisms’ published in Camera Work in 1914, but as her ‘Feminist Manifesto’ demonstrates, she also responded to the problematic gender politics of futurist ideas, particularly Marinetti’s disprezzo della donna (scorn for women), the ninth tenet of The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909). As will be discussed in the next chapter, Marinetti’s futurist rhetoric seeks to construct a defence of a masculinity that was threatened by those very forces (technological advance, war) that futurism also celebrates. Loy’s ‘Feminist Manifesto’ echoes the iconoclastic tone of the futurist manifestos, but also resonates with contemporary debates about the roles and rights of women, particularly in sex and reproduction, that were occupying bohemian and other radicals on



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both sides of the Atlantic. In opposition to the purity reform movement, Loy’s call for the ‘surgical destruction of virginity’ and insistence that ‘there is nothing impure in sex’ (LLB: 155, 156) seeks to disengage feminine identity from female chastity, but she also celebrates maternity, with eugenicist undertones to her embrace of reproduction. As Paul Peppis highlights, Loy is engaging, along with figures such as Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, in the attempt to ‘modernize gender by rewriting sex’ (2002: 566), and like Barnes, Loy is suspicious of a feminist movement that would perpetuate traditional roles for women and fail in addressing the need for a revolution in consciousness. The mixture of futurist and feminist ideas and approaches which are articulated through the becoming of Loy’s modernist aesthetic can be seen in her earliest poetry publications. In ‘Italian Pictures’, the sequence of three poems published in The Trend (November 1914), Loy offers striking verbal collages of Italian life and society which exemplify her experiments in form and subject matter. Loy’s attraction to Italy derived from the vitality and directness she perceived in Italian life, a complete contrast to the repression and denial of Victorian England, and in these pieces Italy functions as the source both of an inspiring dynamism and openness, and a dangerously seductive lack of control. This tension intersects with Loy’s concern about the limitation of dualistic gender roles through her resistance to the association of the female with natural, elemental abandon. Elizabeth Arnold argues that Loy’s reaction to what she saw as ‘something inherently primitive about the Italians that both fascinated and repulsed her’ mirrored her attitude toward the Futurists (1989: 105). In the first poem in the ‘Italian Pictures’ trilogy, ‘July in Vallombrosa’, Loy juxtaposes Britain with Italy through images of rigid motionlessness and the purging of a dynamic polytheistic nature. The immobility of trees and the paralysis of death stands in macabre contrast to the dynamic rhythm and syntax of Loy’s poem, and to the Italian vitality and physicality. The British opposition to a principle of vitalism presented in this poem can be articulated to Barnes’s ‘Paprika Johnson’, in which paralysis and blindness signal the impossibility of dynamic existence within the majoritarian structures of family or state. In the following poem in the trilogy, ‘The Costa San Giorgio’, Loy’s use of alliteration, typographical innovation, and disjunctive syntax and images, all apparent in ‘July in Vallombrosa’, become a central element of the poem’s purpose. Loy offers a turbulent and dynamic piece of



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Oranges half-rotten are sold at a reduction Hoarsely advertised as broken heads BROKEN HEADS and the barber Has an imitation mirror And Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see ourselves Shaving ICECREAM Licking is larger than mouths Boots than feet Slip Slap and the string dragging And the angle of the sun Cuts the whole lot in half (LLB: 11) This strophe opens with a metrically regular line, a tetrameter of dactyl, trochee, dactyl, trochee, followed by an irregular line in which the idiosyncrasies of language are emphasised by Loy’s transliteration of the orange-seller’s vernacular proclamation, ‘Oranges’ ‘advertised as broken heads’. Any remnant of rhythmic regularity is completely disrupted by the repetition of ‘BROKEN HEADS’, the uppercase emphasis halting the flow of the poem and emphasising the volume and sound of the orange-seller’s voice. These various formal strategies invoke the presence of the orange-seller without the use of description (except for the adjective ‘Hoarsely’ to describe his/her voice) or other literary conventions. The poem turns, mid-line, to focus on a ‘barber’, a free association of ideas and sensations which mirrors the movement of consciousness – ‘BROKEN HEADS’ leads to ‘the barber’ conceptually (head/hair/barber) and aurally (with the alliteration on ‘b’). The barber provides another ‘voice’ from the street; the communal voice/thought of his customers presented in a quotation of their cultural idiom, ‘And Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see ourselves’. Another free associative leap goes from ‘Shaving’ to ‘I C E C R E A M’ (shaving/shaving cream/ice cream) with the line reproducing the design and emphasis of the advertising board. This leads into a conceptual and ocular juxtaposition of images (‘Licking is larger than mouths/ Boots than feet’), enhanced by the onomatopoeic and visual presentation of footsteps ‘Slip Slap’. The strophe ends with a painterly description which translates



‘Italian life-traffic’ (LLB: 10) in a form which attempts to reproduce the spontaneity and simultaneity of its subject:

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the stark juxtapositions and rapid shift of images and sensations into a contrast of light and shadow. This verbal collage is not static or two dimensional though. As signified by the present-tense verbs and present participles, Loy intends to represent a continuous, dynamic experience of Italian life. In the final poem of the ‘Italian Pictures’ sequence, ‘Costa Magic’, Loy confronts familial and patriarchal structures. Through the trope of a ‘magical’ curse the poem constructs the abstract functioning of these structures in the oppression of women. The father of a young woman Cesira, jealous of her proposed marriage, condemns his daughter to death through a curse. The ‘Viscuous/ Malefic’ (LLB: 13) potion that he pours to make his daughter ill has a clear hint of incestuous desire and/or jealousy (amplified by the implications of the neologism ‘viscuous’) which becomes explicit by the end of the poem:

It is unnatural in a Father Bewitching a daughter Whose hair down covers her thighs (LLB: 14)

As in some of Barnes’s writing, incest here functions to express the capture and destruction of the girl/daughter by the Oedipal family, the negation of her becoming by her inscription into a reductive narrative of familiar and familial desire and taboo. ‘Costa Magic’, as do Loy’s other early poems, also invests itself in the material and semiotic conditions of the female subject, representing her body as intelligent matter with the capacity to affect and be affected, as a slice of forces with a process of desire, a becoming that the dualistic machine would condemn to rigidity and death. Loy’s 1914 poem ‘Parturition’ functions most expressly through writing out (of) the forces that constitute the body and the extension of those forces in the action of desire and the intermingling with others. As the title suggests, the becoming that emerges from the poem is a becoming-woman but the text’s concern is not to establish an essentialist definition of femininity: just as Barnes’s ‘How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed’ discovers in the extremis of the female



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I am the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction The business of the bland sun Has no affair with me In my congested cosmos of agony From which there is no escape On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations Or in contraction To the pin-point nucleus of being Locate an irritation without It is within Within It is without The sensitized area Is identical with the extensity Of intension (LLB: 4) In one set of articulations ‘Parturition’ responds to the Futurist’s ideas about women, especially those expressed through Marinetti’s image of the ‘closed circle’ employed in ‘Against Amore and Parliamentarianism’. The circle of female being may at one point be ‘congested’, but in this experience it is also one that opens out to external forces, that moves and fluctuates, blurring the distinction between ‘within’ and ‘without’. The embodied consciousness of the parturient woman, in the intensity of the experience, extends into the particles and flows of life. The words ‘extensity’ and ‘intension’ are key here: intension is both the intensity of the experience (content) and the intensional force (form) of the embodied consciousness, while the extensity is the spatial expansion of the experience (including that of the poetic line as its length fluctuates in the poem) and also the comprehensive dispersion of subjectivity as the One disintegrates into ‘sensation’ and ‘forces’. Life is central to the poem – the word is repeated seven times – and this life is a Nietzschean or Bergsonian vitalism, connected to dynamism,



body an asubjective, anorganic movement, in ‘Parturition’ the subject’s construction is dissolved into relations of speed and proximity:

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intension and extension. In considering life, Loy demonstrates how the experience of giving birth opens the woman up to the universe of desiring production, of birth, life and death. Thus she presents images of life, a ‘cat/ With blind kittens’ (LLB: 7); of life-in-death, a ‘dead white feathered moth/ Laying eggs’ (LLB: 6); and of death, a ‘small animal carcass/ Covered with blue – bottles’ (LLB: 7). She even identifies a parturient woman with a ‘wild beast’ (LLB: 5) but similarly disturbs the inviolate humanity of man with the ironical use of the words ‘Brute’ and ‘male’ (LLB: 5). Such images figure an extension towards becomingother, towards an absorption into an ‘infinite’ ‘cosmic’ process, into ‘LIFE’ (LLB: 6). This moving beyond is the destruction of the self as a bounded circle; the local experience of ‘Maternity’ is equal to a boundless ‘infinite Maternity’ (LLB: 6). The infinity that is discovered is a perpetual motion not a goal, indicated by ideas of ‘Unfolding’ (LLB: 7) which echo the earlier inside/outside interconnectedness. In ‘Parturition’ Loy attempts a linguistic enactment of childbirth, rather than a simple reflection or mimetic reproduction of the experience (as perhaps the ‘fashionable portrait-painter’ in the poem does in his representational art). Using the innovations of modernist poetics, her aim is to evoke affectively the disjunctions, extremities and realisations of parturition, not offer a semantically intelligible description. However, the becoming that the poem realises is circumscribed by majoritarian structures and dualistic decodings of woman that seek to assert the ‘superior Inferiority’ of women, containing the potential of childbirth within a narrative of feminine sacrifice and subservience. Thus the poem closes with an ironic reference to the machines of Christianity: I once heard in a church – Man and woman God made them – Thank God. (LLB: 8) Loy’s modernist becoming, in ‘Parturition’, ‘Italian Pictures’ and other early work, establishes itself through an obvious proximity to Italian Futurism, reproducing but also reconfiguring it in the mechanics of her texts. There is also an obvious proximity to a range of other ideas about modern consciousness and the modern sexual subject, all of which are particularly inflected by a proximity to woman as a mobile category of relations and roles. In Loy’s early texts, therefore, becoming-modernist and becoming-woman are inseparable, but in doing this Loy is not



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Stein’s making: progressive verbs, dynamic subjects In 1913 Gertrude Stein, with her brother Leo, had been in residence at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris for ten years; Alice B. Toklas had been living permanently with them since 1910. During this time the Steins had amassed an impressive collection of modern art which hung on the walls of the atelier and attracted many visitors to the regular Saturday evenings there. Beginning with Leo’s purchase of an early Cézanne landscape in 1903 and including other Cézannes, as well as Renoir, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec, the Steins collected French, Spanish, German and English modern art. In 1905 Leo and Gertrude bought Matisse’s Woman with a Hat for 400 francs, and soon after the atelier walls began to fill with Fauve landscapes. Later that year Gertrude met Picasso for the first time and began what would be a life-time friendship by sitting for a portrait during the winter and spring of 1905–06; Picasso went on to complete the portrait without his sitter in the late summer of 1906 after a visit to Spain, famously painting a mask-like face that looked ahead to cubism. By 1913 Stein had been exposed not only to the forces of cubism, but to most of the forces of the volatile Parisian art and cultural scene, including the Italian Futurists during one of Marinetti’s visits to Paris in February 1912. In 1913 itself Stein and Toklas visited London, in search of publishers for Stein’s work, attended the second evening of the controversial Rites of Spring, spent the summer in Spain, as they had done for the first time the previous year, and following Leo’s final retreat from the rue de Fleurus, found themselves living alone as a couple in their own home as they would do for the rest of their lives. 1913 was also the year that Stein, by an introduction through their mutual friend Mabel Dodge, met Van Vechten, who was to be even more important to her literary career than he was to the launching of Loy’s. She also met Francis Picabia on his return from the New York of the Armory Show, and his colleague Marcel Duchamp, described in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as ‘looking like a young Norman crusader’(A:146). The work that she produced at this time can be put into productive contiguities with this range of meetings, particularly to a New York context that may not seem immediately applicable.



essentialising female experience as ‘other’ (modern), or production as a ‘natural’ process. Instead, it marks the threshold from which the stratified subject can open out to the flows of desire and production, to the affective force of (literary) creation.

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Stein’s situation in 1913 could be contrasted with that of either Barnes or Loy. At least a decade older than either of the other women (Stein was 39), she had an independent income sufficient to sustain her household and this, along with her education as a philosophy and psychology student at Radcliffe (the Harvard Ladies’ Annex) and at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, sets her apart from both Barnes and Loy. Moreover, Stein’s engagement with the visual arts was as a collector and salon hostess, rather than practitioner, and while she was at the scene of the emergence of cubism in the work of Picasso and Braque, Barnes and Loy connected in their early work to an alternative avant-garde nexus of decadence. They found different propulsions to modernism (Barnes through popular urban culture, Loy through futurism), while Stein is often either seen as a singular innovator, creating her own form of semiotic modernism, or as strictly tied to the avant-garde ruptures of cubism. However, as Barnes’s writing on Greenwich Village bohemia demonstrates, the distinction between different modernist ‘movements’ is elided by the fact that the anti-bourgeois rhetoric of the avant-garde shares a powerful molecular impulse, a primary direction against a stratification and coagulation of cultural forces. Contrasting these women writers is not a sufficient way of understanding the different articulations that produced their becomingmodernism, or of reading a field of effects that is articulated to and by their work in 1913 and after. 1913 has been seen as a point of consolidation for Stein, both personally and aesthetically: she throws off the influence of her brother Leo and establishes herself in a lesbian couple with Toklas, and has adumbrated (by Tender Buttons) all the major premises of her experimental work (present-tense vision, rejection of habitual associations, subversion of the discursive order of language) that would be expressed, elaborated and explained in her subsequent writing. Such an account imposes an internal coherence and teleology on Stein’s writing, and negates the possibility for continuous differencein-repetition, it is fundamentally at odds with the very present-tense vision of her writing through the 1910s to 1930s. Such a teleological account also tends towards a validation of the ‘abstractionist’ label that has dogged Stein,13 and ignores the productive and effective engagement with reality in Stein’s texts, or even the attempt in some of these texts to ‘be’ the real in and of itself. Resisting teleological accounts, the analysis being undertaken here is one that reads texts not as a development of a personal aesthetic, but as events that forge connections and alignments, as actions ‘situated in social, institutional, and conceptual space’ (Grosz, 1995: 126).



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In 1913 Stein was at the beginning of her career as a published writer, although she had completed a number of longer works and shorter pieces, some of which would be published in the 1922 Geography and Plays. The vanity publication of Three Lives by the Grafton Press in New York had been Stein’s only appearance in print before 1912, but in the summer of 1912 two of her portraits ‘Henri Matisse’ and Pablo Picasso’ were published in Steiglitz’s Camera Work. This marked a turning point for Stein’s public reputation, which was augmented in 1913 by the publicity that Mabel Dodge aroused with her private publication (bound in Florentine wallpaper) of Stein’s ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia’ that she distributed at the New York Armory Show. The ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge’ was then reprinted in a Camera Work special number in June which further draws Stein into an articulation with the New York avant-garde, an articulation that persists in the Stein’s lending of Matisse’s Woman with a Hat for the Armory Show. Dodge’s involvement with this show was a textual intervention, as much as financial or organisational participation, and it was one that produced a modern(ist) identity for herself (as the subject of Stein’s portrait) as well as producing a modernist context for Stein. The comments on, interest in and satirising of Stein’s ‘Portrait’ reinforced the presentation of Stein that Alfred Steiglitz had already offered, describing her texts as ‘a decipherable clew to that intellectual and aesthetic attitude which underlies and inspires the [modernist] movement.’14 As a becoming modernist, enmeshed in the Parisian art scene, Stein was emerging in New York as a modernist innovator and one with an audience that was being constructed through the events associated with Greenwich Village. The direction of her work at this point is a response to the possibility of an (American) audience, a deliberate turn towards an external public.15 At this point Stein had already completed two of her major works, Three Lives (originally entitled Three Histories) and The Making of Americans, a manuscript that Dodge had greatly praised and had also been read by Loy, but which did not find a publisher until 1925 (having been serialised in The Transatlantic Review the previous year). These texts have been open to an enormous variety of interpretations, and have preoccupied much of Stein criticism, each analysis attempting to establish the influences and epistemologies they express, and their role in the development of Stein’s aesthetic (and in many cases feminist politics). In a refusal of such tactics of deep expositional reading and, with an attention to my focus on 1913, I wish instead to extract from Three Lives and The Making of Americans a sense of the mechanics of Stein’s texts.



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Three Lives is most often seen as a literary attempt to approximate the impressionist and post-impressionist mechanics of Cèzanne (in ‘The Good Anna’), Matisse (in ‘The Gentle Lena’) and Picasso (in ‘Melanctha’), with Flaubert’s ‘Un Coeur Simple’ serving as the instigation for the initial story.16 The discontinuous episodic narratives of the stories and the increasing use of repetition are seen to mark Stein’s first attempt at a realism that would bring to literary realisation a Jamesian conception of consciousness wherein a rejection of habitual perceptions is paramount. In ‘Melanchtha’ this realism comes to the fore, both as the ‘colloquial realism’ of dialectical speech which pervades the narrative idiom, and as the repetition which produces the contrasting rhythms of Jeff Campbell and Melanctha. Whether or not Stein is being cubist or Jamesian is not as important as the fact that the real in this story is apprehended and produced through this repetition which embodies the rhythm of the life process as continuous happening, a flow of being. The linguistic production of the flow of being is achieved by Stein’s use of the ‘continuous present’. What this actually refers to is the omnipresent deployment of the present participle, accompanied by gerundal constructions that express permanent action. In the huge work The Making of Americans the continuous present emerges through the attempted history of the Hersland and Dehning families. Repetition lies at the core of this text’s attempt to classify the ‘bottom nature’ of character, a classifying, comprehensive and stratifying desire that struggles against a simultaneous pure desire in/of repetition, repetition as pure difference and delight:

Mostly every one loves some one’s repeating. Mostly every one then, comes to know then the being of some one by loving the repeating in them, the repeating coming out of them. There are some who love everybody’s repeating, this is now a description of such loving in one. Mostly every one loves some one’s repeating. Every one is always repeating the whole of them. This is now a history of getting completed understanding by loving repeating in every one the repeating that always is coming out of them as a complete history of them. This is now a description of learning to listen to all repeating that every one always is making of the whole of them. Now I will tell of the meaning to me in repeating, of the loving there is in me for repeating. Always from the beginning there was to me all living as repeating. This is now a description of loving repeating as a being. This is now



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The text produces ‘loving repeating’, ‘living as repeating’ that is emerging, ‘always coming out of them’. Instead of a fixed ‘description’ or an incremental substitution that produces a final sense of character and history, the ‘repeating’ is the ‘being’. Thus, as Jane Walker describes, ‘repetition, not a linear sequence of discrete events linked in a chain of causality that manifests progress, is the form and force of history in Stein’s text’ (1984: 43). As can be seen in this extract the ‘now of the discursive moment’ is what the text struggles to articulate, demonstrating through the ‘unusual usage of [knowing, understanding, thinking] normally stative verbs as verbs of activity that knowledge, in this text, is not a static state but a temporal process occurring within the ongoing present of the discourse’ (ibid.: 52). Knowledge is a process, just as being is a process, just as the text is a processual, situated, temporal force. This text only moves towards, rather than fully realises a ‘completed understanding’. As Lisa Ruddick points out in a very interesting feminist reading of The Making of Americans, three narrative voices can be discerned which ‘engulf and include each other in turn’: the ‘bourgeois chronicler’ a good son recording middle-class life, the ‘psychological theorist’ who attempts to illustrate a theory of human nature, and the ‘intimate voice of a hypnotized producer of sentences with moods and bodily rhythms of her own’ (1990: 67). These voices share the space of the text, and can be articulated to different intellectual, personal and social forces, but what Ruddick’s analysis does highlight is the struggle between the voice(s) and the paternal rule that seems to forbid the emerging process of this text. A key passage from the ‘Alfred Hersland and Julia Dehning’ chapter of The Making of Americans presents what Ruddick describes as a ‘murderous fantasy’ (1990: 109) of killing an incestuous father: There was a man who was always writing to his daughter that she should not do such things that were wrong that would disgrace him, she should not do such things, that he was her father and was giving good moral advice to her and always he wrote to her in every letter that she should not do things that she should not do anything that would disgrace him. He wrote this in every letter he wrote to her, he wrote very nicely to her, he wrote often enough to her and in



a history of learning to listen to repeating to come to a completed understanding. (M: 294)

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every letter he wrote to her that she should not do anything that was a disgraceful thing for her to be doing and then once she wrote back to him that he had not any right to write moral things in letters to her, that he had taught her that he had shown her that he had commenced in her the doing the things that would disgrace her and he had said then when he had begun with her he had said he did it so that when she was older she could take care of herself with those who wished to make her do things that were wicked things and he would teach her and she would be stronger than such girls who had not any way of knowing better, and she wrote this letter and her father got the letter and he was a paralytic always after, it was a shock to him getting such a letter, he kept saying over and over again that his daughter was trying to kill him and now she had done it (M: 488–9) The nexus of writing, sexuality, incest and authority that this extract articulates produces a sense of the protagonist (‘she’) destroying the limitations (on her desire and writing) that are literally embodied by her father. In paralysing/killing the incestuous father the morality (the structures and codes) he reiterates are revealed in their immobility as the writing-self takes flight from them. Connections can be drawn here to the incestuous father of Loy’s ‘Costa Magic’ and the dead fathers of Barnes’s early writing – what such connections produce is a fictional image of a repressive paternal-machine that captures the female subject, codifying her desire in an Oedipal triangle. It is only in a violent deterritorialisation of desire from this Oedipal machine that the becomingwoman, becoming-writer can be launched. As she completed The Making of Americans Stein was also devising portraits wherein the shift from narrative and history to an attempt to write the unmediated continuous present of an individual can be seen: ‘Ada’ for example moves from a narrative text of repetition to a final paragraph of present participle ‘loving repeating’. If The Making of Americans seeks to connect with and produce an American context, as the title implies, Stein’s portraits of the artists, acquaintances and scenes of her Paris life are not necessarily a break with this Americanness. She writes later of the subjects of her portraits as a generation that ‘has conceived an intensity of movement so great that it has not to be seen against something else to be known, and, therefore, this generation does not connect itself with anything, that is what makes this generation what it is and that is why it is American, and this is very important in connection with portraits of anything’ (Stein, 1985: 98–9). This generation and



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Stein’s portraits are articulated to an Americanness that indicates their dynamism and difference. It was her portraits, that create an unmediated reality and the pure difference of being, that brought Stein to her audience and they thus figure as the hinge between Stein’s verbal experiments and a public emergence. Alongside the portraits of Matisse, Picasso and Dodge that appeared in Camera Work in 1912 and 1913 respectively, ‘Aux Galaries Lafayette’ was published in the inaugural issue of Louise and Allen Norton’s Rogue (March 1915). Soon after, Stein’s ‘M. Vollard et Cézanne’ appeared in the New York Sun (in October 1915) and ‘Mrs Th——y’ in The Soil in 1916; even Stein’s play ‘IIIIIIIIII’ was edited down to the ‘speeches’ of M—N H—. (Marsden Hartley) to appear as a portrait of the painter in Hartley’s exhibition catalogue and in the New York Sun when his exhibition opened in January 1914. Many of Stein’s portraits function with a very limited lexicon, a sparse deployment of adjectives, an objectival use of ‘thing’ or ‘something’ rather than specific concrete nouns, and they are pervaded by progressive verb forms. The portraits are real productions of and with their subjects: they are not representational, they are not sound games (though the surface texture is crucial in the production of the rhythms of recurrence of the subject), but they are real in that they seek to produce the effect of the subject and to signal the existence of that subject as a temporal, dynamic and progressive process: they produce ‘a rhythm of the visible world’ (A: 130) By the time of writing her ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia’, Stein had explored a range of literary mechanisms for evoking the presence of a subject, but it was Dodge’s publicity efforts with this text, publicity for her own modernist-becoming as much as for Stein’s literary experiments, that brought this text into conjunction with a context beyond Stein’s own personal one. The ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge’ is neither a typical nor exceptional ‘example’ of Stein’s modernist becoming. But as an event that articulates this becoming to an American audience and to an American and European artistic avant-garde, constructed by the moment of the Armory Show and its subsequent place in art-historical accounts, the ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge’ is incredibly productive. ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge’ offers a welter of objects, rooms, passions and activities without, as in the other portraits, making any direct reference to person or thing. In producing the presence of Dodge and her Villa Curonia, the portrait uses the recognisable features of



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In burying that game there is not a change of name. There is not perplexing and co-ordination. The toy that is not round has to be found and looking is not straining such a relation. There can be that company. It is not wider when the length is not longer and that does make that way of staying away. Every one is exchanging returning. There is not a prediction. The whole day is that way. Any one resting to say that the time which is not reverberating is acting in partaking. (SW: 466) The effect is certainly a sense of presence, but also an indication of the kineticism and heterogeneity of life, embodied in the Portrait by its subject. Lois Palken Rudnick writes that ‘it is obvious that Gertrude found in Mabel the kind of discontinuous motion and ever life-renewing energies that she associated with being American’, and that Dodge was ‘delighted with her portrait’ (1984: 51). Stein’s text is full of energy, emphasises activity, refuses quantification and stresses relations and proximities. Whether or not there is the biographical information to show that Stein, working at night at her writing, was privy to Dodge’s nocturnal adventures with her son’s 22-year-old American tutor, or that there was a sexual tension between Stein and Dodge,17 the text is permeated by an indiscriminate desire (for subjects, objects and states of being) and yearning for pleasure: ‘This is the bliss’ (SW: 466). In this the Villa and Dodge exist as an epitome of a fully sensuous experience, ‘the stuff’ that occupies the ‘space’ of the portrait, the villa, the people in the villa (SW: 468). The text strives towards an approximation of energetic processes of life at the same time that its matter and form recognise frustration, discontinuity and incompletion: ‘There is that desire and there is no pleasure and the place is filling the only space that is placed where all the piling is not adjoining’ (SW: 467). The portrait closes with an acknowledgement of the impossibility of actually capturing and fixing a full heterogeneous presence: ‘There is not all of any visit’ (SW: 468). In the chapters that follow New York will be returned to (in Chapter 3), as a potential scene for the modern, though any exemplary status for this place is undermined by the succeeding chapter’s turn to Paris in the 1920s. Offering such an articulation, however contingent, in New York in 1913 certainly shifts the focus away from the events in Europe in 1914 which have so often come to stand as a necessary and sufficient causality for modernism for both male and female writers. I want to refuse this



Stein’s writing: incremental repetition, rhyme, an emphasis on present participles, gerundial constructions and indefinite pronouns:


causality, but at the same time to consider how the forces and effects of the 1914–18 European war could have been configured in experimental texts of the time. The war does not instigate modernism, or modernist becomings, but its event can be articulated in useful ways to the events of a range of texts. For Stein the period of her portraits, at the end of and beyond the completion of The Making of Americans (about 1910 to 1913), also saw the emergence of her interest in writing plays, an interest that is linked both to a comprehension of the externality of affect (figured as landscape) and to the compulsion to violent interactions in this field of affect (war): ‘she says a landscape is such a natural arrangement for a battlefield or a play that one must write plays’ (A: 145).



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The Great War, Hysterical Men and the Modernist Lyric

And it seemed that there was something less than death in these two dead and a something less profound than the meaning of the tomb, and the moving figures, hats in hands, seemed like strange, inhuman things crawling around a stranger, more inhuman hole, a pit filled with darkness and death, and yet somehow less melancholy and inspiring than the depths of a cistern that sound with the low droppings of rainwater. (Djuna Barnes, 1918)1 I got the war fever so badly that I’m working hard in a surgical hospital – an Italian surgical hospital! – entirely devoid of sentiment – entirely on the chance of getting near a battle field & hearing a lovely noise – I love my practical side I am sure to express this experience soon – you have no idea what fallow fields of psychological inspiration there are in human shrieks & screams. (Mina Loy, 1914)2 Against this ever rising tide of national enthusiasm, while immersed in this prodigious task, with some surprise with some surprise, with thousands of skilled stirrups with no dismay, with what is important with surprisingly great surprises, with some surprise and with no dismay, against this ever rising tide of national enthusiasm, the greatest enthusiasm no doubt, it echoed in the preliminary recitations. No I don’t . 57



2


The only prudent course now was to retreat north. Cruelly and in an obstinate fight. For a time the weather had been singularly tried so that the sun was won by the barometer and it did it shone. Now then. He clasped his now precious naturally heartless man. (Gertrude Stein, 1914)3 There is an accepted and established historical proximity between modernism and the 1914–18 engagement of forces from across Europe, the British Empire and North America that became known as the First World War, and the conflict features in the lives and texts of modernist writers: Ford Maddox Ford, Richard Aldington and e e cummings all wrote of their war experiences, while the stories in D. H. Lawrence’s England, My England and Other Stories (1922) are populated by returning soldiers, H.D. offers a personalised survivor’s war in Bid Me to Live (1960), Woolf examines the war as event and aftermath in Jacob’s Room (1922), and Mrs Dalloway (1925), and the battlefields of the Great War echo thematically and aurally throughout Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Possible articulations between the First World War and modernism have remained at the level of personal or thematic influence for some time, and it is only in the last decade that the contiguities of the cultural context of the war and the emergence of specific modernist forms and texts have come under close critical scrutiny. Many of these recent accounts have explored how language and communication and the boundaries and distinctions of the masculine subject were fundamentally disrupted by war, and the impact this had on the modernist texts that were produced out of, and after, the war.4 In this chapter I am concerned with revisiting such claims and attempting to replace the indefinite causality they attribute with a set of articulations that reveal some real effects of the war particularly in the disruption and reconstruction of the lyric voice. The intention is to compare and consider how Barnes, Loy and Stein produce texts in concert with the war and, in particular, how Stein and Loy rearticulate the war to an intimate space of language and communication, and potential becomings.

The Great War and modernist studies Paul Fussell’s landmark study, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) is one of the first to explore how the propaganda of war and its physical manifestations disrupted the traditional logic of soldering masculinity.



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However, his drawing of a distinction between active soldiers and the ‘major innovative talents who were not involved with the war Yeats, Woolf, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Joyce’ (1975: 313–4) establishes and reinforces a divide between the two groups which prevents his claims about the war describing wider cultural effects; this leads, as Vincent Sherry points out, to an ‘odd allocation of timely and anachronistic temperaments, majority and minority statuses’ (2003: 8). Jay Winter draws an even sharper line between modernism and the war in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, uncovering ‘traditional languages of loss, in the visual arts, in prose and poetry, and inscribed in social forms of mourning’, and pointing to ‘a wealth of evidence as to the war’s mobilization of motifs and images derived from the classical, romantic, and religious traditions [of Europe]’(1995: 227, 178). For Winter, the Great War did not usher in modernism but produced cultural artefacts that resurrected traditional symbols and iconography; the modernist response to the war is indeed overshadowed by widespread ‘collective remembrance’ of European culture during and after the First World War. Other recent critics, however, forge parallels between the war, war writing and culture, and modernism: Allyson Booth traces shared ‘perceptual patterns’ through which modernism ‘begin[s] to bridge the space’ between civilians and combatants ‘and to delineate a cultural and imaginative landscape that could take both combatant and civilian experience into account’ (1996: 9). For Booth the actual experience of warfare is not important as ‘the dislocations of war often figure centrally in modernist form, even when war itself seems peripheral to modernist content’ and modernism shares with combatant writers specific features such as ‘frictions with the verbal tactics endorsed by governments or with the imaginative structures relied on by military leaders’ (ibid.: 4). This approach is not wholly separate from the one taken by Vincent Sherry in The Great War and the Language of Modernism in which he argues that the work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf (and Stein and Wyndham Lewis to a lesser extent) ‘attains a good deal of its significance in the exception it presents to the mainstream standards of liberal modernity’ (2003: 52) responding as it does to the way that the reason and ‘verbal logic’ of the Liberal war ‘opens into the abyss of its own irrelevance’ (ibid.: 297). What many commentators on the Great War highlight is the stress on language and symbolisation during and after the war. For Fussell ‘one of the cruxes of the war is the collision between events and the language available – or thought appropriate – to describe them’ (2000: 169), and he also points to the linguistic manoeuvres of euphemism,



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vernacular usages and form-rhetoric that attempted to negotiate the war in communication. For Winter, Julia Kristeva’s analysis of symbolisation and mourning in Black Sun provides a key insight into the persistence of traditions during the period. The ‘resurrection’ of ‘symbols of meaning’ in mourning (Winter, 1995: 226), corresponds to Kristeva’s analysis that religious discourse alongside artistic and literary creation produce features and symbols that offer ‘a very faithful semiological representation of the subject’s battle with symbolic collapse’.5 The heart of Sherry’s analysis of modernism and the Great War lies in this very area of symbolisation and in the way that Eliot, Pound and Woolf critique the ‘crisis of English liberalism’ (2003: 154). This idea of symbolisation under strain is crucial to the analysis which takes up the idea of a pressure on language and articulates it to the crisis of masculinity that emerged in the face of the maimed, exploited and psychically damaged men of the Great War. Many recent analyses of the Great War point to the damage it inflicted on language and symbolisation, particularly in Europe. America was late joining the war (entering in spring 1917) and different effects and responses consequently emerge. Amelia Jones describes how Vanity Fair and avant-garde journals, such as Rogue, often adopted a ‘trivializing’ or ‘facetious’ tone about the war (2004: 77),6 while the New York socialist magazines The Masses and its successor The Liberator (from 1917) resolutely presented the war as a confidence game played on the oppressed people who fought it for their overlords. Djuna Barnes did not write for such magazines, but even in her mainstream New York journalism and published poetry the unavoidable presence of the war in Europe is articulated to just that failure of language and propaganda that seems ubiquitous in European writing. Her poems ‘When Emperors Are Out of Men!’ (1914), ‘Just Lately Drummer Boy’ (1914) and ‘Who Shall Atone?’ (1915) describe the horror of war wherein ‘the soldiers stalk/ Like terrible gray wheat’ (CP: 28) and men become ‘mounds of murder’ (CP: 36).7 Barnes also points to linguistic discrepancies, writing that ‘There is no diary in war,/ No splendid paragraph’ (CP: 26) and, playing with the double meaning of line (as line of troops or line of verse), suggests that ‘the tragic lines despair/ The dead’ (CP: 36). In ‘Seeing New York With the Soldiers’ (July 1918) Barnes describes a sightseeing tour around New York with soldiers on leave – young French, Canadian and US troops – who are taken past many sights, including the General Grant National memorial in Riverside park in Manhattan.8 The mausoleum bears Grant’s epitaph, ‘Let us have peace’ and it is this epitaph which carries a striking resonance in July 1918. As the tour views the tomb, its significance shifts so that we are presented with ‘inhuman



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things crawling’ around a ‘hole’, a ‘pit filled with darkness and death’ (NY: 333) all terms which could be accurately describing an external view of trench warfare. In articulating Barnes’s piece to the war in this particular way the parallels between the sunken crypt and the trenches of the European war emerge, in both places the ‘inhuman’ (NY: 333) nature of the war becomes apparent, an inhumanness which is ‘less profound’ ‘melancholy’ and ‘inspiring’ than the monumentalising of war heroes and the hypocritical celebration of peace (which masks the reality of combat victory) (NY: 333). That the monument is contiguous with the tourist and museum industry (a tour-guide sells postcards, the museum has ‘embroidered pictures’ NY: 333), further marks this space as one in which the symbolisation of war as sombre triumph collides with the marketing of culture (where symbol becomes commodity) and with the reality of modern warfare (the final destination of the young soldiers) which is stripped of all but the most non-human of symbols possible – ‘the depths of a cistern’ (NY: 333). Barnes’s piece produces an understanding of the failure of propaganda to capture and contain the war, and in this it seems to exemplify the conclusions of Fussell, Winter and Sherry about the collapse of signification. But their conclusions lack a coherent theorisation of the relationship between history (reality) and cultural events and expressions: Fussell’s approach is primarily historical, seeing literary texts as biographical documents and relying heavily (as he confesses in his ‘Afterword’ to the 2000 edition) on the structures of Northrop Frye’s analysis of myth. Winter claims to offer a ‘cultural history’ and he certainly draws on a range of sources while posing a ‘comparative approach’, but the ‘journey past a number of “sites of memory” ’ that he offers does not theorise how events, traditions and texts are actually connected in any real sense (2000: 10, 7). Booth makes even less of an attempt to theorise her method, writing of ‘broad cultural context’ and ‘overlaps’ between the writing of modernists and combatants (1996: 4), while Sherry relies on assertions of ‘predispositions’ (2003: 150) ‘background’ (152) and even (in the case of Woolf) ‘genetic memory’ (235) to account for specific textual events. In the place of such methodological aporia I am deploying the practice of articulation to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct maps of meaning and effect which have real consequences in texts and culture. By articulating specific cultural practices (war, writing, modernism), my intention is to open up the possibilities of texts and activate their embedded and embodied politics. Trudie Tate’s 1998 Modernism, History and the First World War avoids many of the mistakes of her fellow commentators on modernism and



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the war. Rather than a single conclusion that her texts and evidence are used to prove, she reveals how different writers – combatants, survivors, witnesses and civilians – at different moments construct and express their own responses to the trauma of war. Tate draws on objects, such as the tank, and political contexts, such as the post-war Armenian Question, to elucidate the varied constructions and figurations of the effects of war in the texts of modernism. Again, her method is not theorised beyond the term ‘cultural history’, but she does activate, rather than close off, the potentials of the texts she explores and highlights the pleasurable and fantasmic relations between texts and the war, a result of the ‘success of the pro-war campaign’ (1998: 145). Tate very usefully points to a particular aspect of the deformation of language. She analyses how language, under state control in the form of rumours, lies and propaganda becomes a monopolised commodity, as Freud suggested in ‘Thoughts for the Time on War and Death’, through which ‘citizens become passive consumers’ (1915: 48). As well as the passivity and fantasmic relations produced by the propaganda of war, Tate also highlights the fraught and often contradictory debates and representations of masculinity and the male body. As she writes ‘[t]he Great War was not simply a “crisis” of masculinity, rather, it made visible – and intensified – differences within masculinity in this period’ (1998: 96). For Joanna Bourke too that fragility of masculinity was a very visceral actuality: ‘[t]he most important point to be made about the male body in the Great War is that it was intended to be mutilated’ (1996: 31). Both Bourke and Tate are explicit about the problems with a simplistic interpretation of the war’s cultural effects as a gendered conflict, and their caution is justified. It is too great a simplification to reduce gender relations during the war and its aftermath to the figure of a ‘sex war’, as Gilbert and Gubar do in their three volume study No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century.9 There are texts by men, D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Eloi, Eloi Lama Sabachthani’, for example, which suggest ‘an apocalypse of masculinism’ and an attendant ‘apotheosis of femaleness’ (Gilbert and Gubar, 1989: 262), but the war and its effects far exceed the reversal of a traditional male – female hierarchy. Some of the popular propaganda for the war does reinforce a sense of a sex war, pitching the self-sacrificing soldier at the Front against those (women) at home; in the light of this a popular poet such as Jesse Pope is incautious and inflammatory in her celebrations of heroic war and the liberating efforts of ‘War Girls’. There is also much evidence for a sense of liberation for women through participation in the new opportunities opened up by the war as Gilbert and Gubar describe:



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Vera Brittain’s ‘exhilaration’ as a war nurse;10 or the liberation felt by the heroine of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Stephen Gordon, as an ambulance driver. Loy herself, as revealed in the opening quotations for this chapter, is a good example of a woman’s triumphal and positive construction of the effects of war. For her the war is a ‘lovely’ chance to distance herself from traditional femininity (sentiment, passivity) and establish a proximity to the dynamism of war, a futurist-inspired response to war as the exemplary activity of modernisation. The ‘fallow fields of psychological inspiration’ that Loy discovers can be associated, again, with the field of extreme experience that is denied and repressed in traditional femininity and which she seeks as a productive force for writing. But Loy’s move to non-combatant New York in 1916 and her revision of the war through her Love Songs do proffer a different set of articulations to the war, ones which cannot be subsumed into a narrative of women’s liberation and men’s destruction in the war. Thus though there may be clear differences between the woman civilian and man combatant’s experience of the war, these are traversed by the differences between a man civilian and man combatant’s experience, and a woman civilian and a woman hospital worker’s experience, for example. The gender divide cannot be reified through this war, particularly in the face of the damaged and uncertain bodies of men.

Hysterical men The maiming of men and masculinity in the Great War was, of course, not just a matter of physical damage; the psychical damage to men was as visible and central a concern as the disabled bodies of amputees (and the self-inflicted wounds and illnesses of many troops and the somatic disturbances of shell-shock victims testifies to the difficulty of separating the psychological from the physical). In considering the meaning of the shell-shocked soldier I wish to link shell-shock, the collapse of language and fragile masculinity in an articulation with the malfunction of the state war machine in this modern war. The three major modes of capturing desiring production and producing subjects and order – subjectification, signifiability and the organism – are pushed to their limits in the extremes of trench warfare. Here subjectification requires the individual to act in opposition to its instincts, signification becomes an arbitrary function in the propaganda of war governments and the organism was literally disintegrated in shell attacks. Moreover, in the brutality of war and its propaganda, where fake atrocity stories and rumours also produced pleasures, signifiability no longer serves



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containment and control but releases unstable desires and unstratified responses to war. Shell-shock itself was not the invention of the First World War, though the term was coined by Dr C. S. Myers (a psychologist commissioned into the Royal Army Medical Corps) in a February 1915 article in the Lancet. ‘Mind wounds’ among Union and Confederacy troops in the American Civil War had been noted, at a time when the study of nervous and mental diseases was producing the medical specialism of Neurology: the late-nineteenth-century neurologists Jean-Martin Charcot in France and Charles Beard in America pioneered the categorisation of nervous disorders – hysteria and neurasthenia11 respectively. By 1913 psychoanalysis had begun to emerge as a systematic form of therapy under the influence of Freud and Pierre Janet, and all the tools of the new science of the mind were brought to bear as, by the end of 1914, high numbers of British soldiers were being evacuated from the Front with nervous or mental shock.12 By early 1915 reports of war neurosis were appearing in newspapers such as The Times, but there was much debate as to its exact causes among doctors and scientists – Myers’s validation of the army-slang term ‘shell-shock’ described a physiological cause (proximity to an exploding shell) for the variety of neurotic symptoms manifested in afflicted soldiers, though he was to repudiate this diagnosis just a year later. Versions of shell-shock were also identified in French and German troops (though they had no equivalent umbrella term), and the governments of each country instituted procedures and treatments intended to ‘cure’ patients and return them to active duty whenever possible. In some cases psychoanalysis was used, most famously at Craiglockhart Military Hospital under Dr William H. R. Rivers. But this was not an indicative treatment regime, particularly for rank and file troops, despite the widespread use of hypnosis as a method of talking victims through their traumatic experiences. More authoritarian regimes involving work therapy and regular cold baths were often deployed, while Dr Kauffman in Germany and Lewis Yealland in Britain were well known for their use of electric-shock treatment. In one of Yealland’s cases a 24-year-old private exhibiting hysterical dumbness was locked in a darkened room and subjected to four hours of electric shocks to the inside and outside of his throat until he spoke, previous treatments with cigarette ends on his tongue and hot plates on the back of his throat having failed.13 The mechanical reproduction of a normal subject in this torture-cure exemplifies well the structure of medical attempts to redress the dissolution of the individual that constitutes the form and functioning of shell-shock.



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The fact that shell-shock was not a radically new mental disorder and that ‘the soldier’s strange symptoms were just the “functional disorders” or psychoneuroses of peacetime – hysteria and neurasthenia – dressed up in new guises’ was eventually the consensus opinion among British, French and German neurologists and psychologists (Shephard, 2000: 99). A representational connection between shell-shock and hysteria was made; for example, in the filming of the hysterical symptoms of shell-shock cases in two English Army hospitals in 1918.14 The tics, twitches, contortions and strange gaits of the soldiers on film recall the subjects of Charcot’s Salpetriere photography of hysterics. By the end of the war shell-shock had been represented and deployed in a range of cultural events, from a February 1917 advertisement in The Times for ‘Muller Nutrient’ (a ‘nerve food restorative’ for ‘shell shock’, ‘invalided officers, suffering from nervous trouble’) (ibid.: 109) to Chris Baldry, the amnesiac, regressed protagonist of Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918). But the precise pathology and most effective cure for shellshock or ‘war neurosis’ would continue to be debated through another war and beyond. In 1919 a group of psychoanalysts – S. Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Ernst Simmel and Ernest Jones – produced a study of Psycho-Analysis and the War Neurosis, reports from a symposium at the Fifth Psycho-Analytical Congress in Budapest (September 1918). Freud wrote the introduction to the volume in which he maintains the possibility of the ‘sexual theory of the neuroses’ to be applicable to war neuroses (1921: 2), while Ernst Jones’s contribution also suggests repressed ‘sexual hunger’ (in a narcissistic form) as a key aspect of the intra-psychichal conflicts of war neuroses (ibid.: 48). A year later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud was to connect the symptoms of war neurosis with those of peace-time ‘traumatic neurosis’ (such as following a railway disaster) and suggest that it ‘approaches that of hysteria in the wealth of its similar motor symptoms’ (1986: 222) as well as demonstrating a ‘fixation to the moment at which trauma occurred’ which has ‘long been familiar to us in hysteria’ (223). The symptoms of shell-shock are, for Freud, like the symptoms of hysteria, and the hysterias that Freud’s psychoanalytic machine produces are a somaticisation of a psychic conflict which stems from a disgust with the sexual body (with the proper sexual function of femininity or, indeed, masculinity). It results from the failure of a successful transference of affections from the Oedipal mother to a proper object, and from polymorphous bisexuality to genital eroticism. What, then, is the effect of Freud’s articulation of shell-shock to the repetitions of hysteria (and its oscillations in sexual identification), to



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the shocks to the organism resulting from modern technology (whether in the destruction of war, or in a railway accident), and to the loss that symbolisation seeks to control? Well, an articulation outwards can be drawn to George Beard’s description of neurasthenia resulting from ‘the complex agencies of modern life’, ‘steam power, the periodic press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women’.15 What both diagnostic descriptions share is the articulation of nervous disorder with modern technological life (technology, consumerism, cities, war) and with a failure in sexual difference (mentally active, immasculated women, emasculated hysterical men). This is a long way from a direct assertion of a war between the genders. What is being diagnostically produced, through ‘hysteria’, ‘neurasthenia’, ‘war neuroses’, is a failure of subjectification, a collapse of the organism so that gender difference can no longer signify in a hierarchy of meaning and organisation. The extensive debates, fraught diagnoses and treatment regimes of shellshock during and after the First World War mark multiple attempts to retain and reproduce subjectification, signifiability and the organism as the war machine fails to stratify and capture desiring production. Psychoanalysis, perhaps the most influential cultural assemblage to emerge from these years, is itself, as Trudi Tate suggests, a fetishistic denial of what is happening in the war. Psychoanalysis produces and requires lack and loss, those supposed traumas at the core of the subject re-opened by shell-shock, in order to codify and stratify difference, the binaristic code on which the system of psychoanalysis rests. Freud’s writing in the 1920s about women as castrated and scarred makes sense as a fetishistic response to the traumatic sight of damaged men, ‘which simultaneously acknowledges the fact of war injury and displaces the image onto women’ (Tate, 1998: 100). Shell-shock and its effects on language and communication are more fundamental than just the collapse of ideas of heroic and justifiable combat. What it evinces is a malfunctioning in the machines of meaning and the stratifying machinic assemblages of state, nation, war and identity so that flows of desire, productive both negatively and positively, surge against and over the limits of the individual, the organism. The emerging frameworks of psychoanalysis, in terms of (war) neuroses and sex-identity, when articulated to these effects of war, can be read as a fetishistic attempt to control and contain the unindividuated, productive flows of desire. Basing the construction of sexual difference on women’s ‘wound’ (the symbol of loss and lack and the obverse of phallic plenitude), psychoanalysis emerges at a time when ‘the presence of large numbers of physically damaged men exposes the tenuous and contradictory nature of this



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construction’ (ibid.:99). Thus, paradoxically, psychoanalysis emerges as a bolster to the individual masculinity and cultural phallogocentrism that the war unsettled, a reproduction of it that draws on the very terms, images and states produced out of the war that had actually revealed the malfunctioning of such modes of cultural being. The abyss into which the war plunges logic, order and (sexed) identity, and out of which psychoanalysis constructs itself as an escape, is something that Stein considers in some of her early writing about the war. In ‘Painted Lace’, from which the opening quote to this chapter is taken, the war intrudes as ‘news’ and the propaganda of that war speaks a repetition into absurdity of the logical structures of rational defences for war. As Vincent Sherry rightly argues, ‘this character-in-voice sounds like a liberal individual of classically balanced rationality. Beyond the ongoing repetitions of an opening maneuver, however, these overtures go nowhere a rationalistic metaphysic full of the high sentence it cannot deliver’ (2003: 152). But more than just the empty logic of prowar rationality, Stein’s writing here exposes the attempt to recoup a power and control over the world and the subject that is lost as the modern man is surrendered to the machinic destruction of war. A ‘cruel’ and ‘obstinate’ retreat is countered by a technological ‘trying’ of the weather, an absurd attempt to control it through the linear barometer. The victory over ‘the sun’ is exposed as an overdetermined emptily rhetorical victory suggesting in turn the emptiness of any victory in war. And what emerges from the empty rhetoric of war and the illogical assertion of phallic power over the world that Stein writes here, is an impossible ideal of masculinity: ‘his now precious naturally heartless man’. Stein’s writing of war differs from the war effects produced by Pound and Eliot, but not necessarily as Vincent Sherry argues because of their different levels of exposure to, and engagement with, the rhetoric of the liberal pro-war government. In Stein the collapse of symbol, order and logic is an enabling release for the possibilities of desire and intercommunication, not in terms of a binaristic sex war where women are liberated at the expense of male injury and trauma, but through the transformative potential of desiring production and deterritorialising flights out of subjectification. Eliot and Pound’s war shares with the militaristic futurism of F. T. Marinetti and the disillusioned front-line experience of Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon, a hysterical response which reproduces, in neurotic textual gestures and in fetishistic assertions of masculinity, the terms of the organism, subjectification and signification that Freud’s psychoanalytical theory also attempted to shore up against ruin.



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It is in Italian Futurism that it is easiest to see the extremes of masculinism only tentatively masking a neurotic anxiety about sexual difference in modernity and war. Ostensibly futurism enacts a Nietzschean rejection of the past and all passeist elements of culture. In ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (published in Le Figaro, Paris, 20 February, 1909) Marinetti articulates the futurists’ position: We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed. (Marinetti, 1972: 41) This hypermodernity, which embraces technology and rejects history, also apparently rejects the ‘I’ in favour of a futurist dynamism, but it is clear from Marinetti’s own rhetorical tropes that his aesthetic vision actually interposes a restrictive totality, one which privileges a gendered notion of force, power and dominance in the character of the artist. In announcing the ‘Death of the literary I’ Marinetti rejects the ‘obsessive I’ of lyric poetry and the ‘habit of humanizing nature by attributing human passions and preoccupations to animals, plants, water, stone, cloud’, but not the absolute structuring and comprehending power of the artistic consciousness (Apollonio, 1973: 100). Marinetti does not, as Marjorie Perloff claims, abandon ‘articulating a particular sense of selfhood’ (1986, 59), nor is he ultimately advocating the disorganisation of the subject into a becoming-molecular. He attacks subjectivism and anthropomorphic lyricism for dispersing and diverting the ‘free intuitive inspiration’, but acclaims an ego-driven domination of self-world interactions which is also manufactured in his own ego-driven futurist performances: ‘I declare lyricism is the exquisite faculty of intoxicating oneself with life the ability to colour the world with the unique colours of our changeable selves’ (Apollonio, 1973: 99, 98). Ultimately, Marinetti’s futurist poetic, ‘the imagination without strings’ (Marinetti, 1972: 89), is not the destruction of a molar perspective, rather it is a celebration of the artist as heroic masculine disseminator. In undeniably gendered terms, Marinetti defines ‘Art [as] a need to destroy and scatter oneself, a great watering can of heroism that drowns the world’ (ibid.: 89). His obverse definition of woman as ‘a closed circle, purely animal and wholly without usefulness’ or ‘too earthly a symbol of



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the earth that we ought to abandon’ (ibid.: 75) further exemplifies this neurotic need to assert and maintain sexual difference. Again, a vocabulary of masculine dominance pervades Marinetti’s work which abounds with extreme statements of control: ‘Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man’ (ibid.: 41). Thus, while Marinetti poses a poetry of the continual flux of life, of the energy of progress and of intelligence, there is an implicit anxiety throughout his writing that his gendered binaries of past – woman – earth and future – man – technology are unsustainable particularly given the range of cultural articulations of women with modernity and technology in Europe and America. Thus he acknowledges the technological advances of the new century as the inspiration for this new ‘Futurist lyricism’, or celebrates the invigorating power of war, in terms that become hyperbolically masculinist – ‘the agile projectiles’ (ibid.: 105) and enormous ‘pneumatic machines’ of ‘Electrical War’ (107), and the ‘huge invisible arm’ that will be man’s externalised will of ‘Multiplied Man and the reign of the Machine’ (91). However, the ‘amorous hands’ (ibid.: 40) on cars and the ‘caressing’ (41) of machines that Marinetti frequently describes have an undeniably erotic charge which Cinzia Blum describes as ‘manifestations of displaced homoeroticism in Futurism’s fetishization of the machine’ (1996: 32). It is impossible to ignore the homoerotic elements of Marinetti’s identification of his mechanical muse at the opening of his ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’ (11 May 1912): Sitting on the gas tank of an airplane, my stomach warmed by the pilot’s head, I sensed the ridiculous inanity of the old syntax inherited from Homer. A pressing need to liberate words, to drag them out of their prison in the Latin period. (1972: 84) The erotic subtext of the futurist’s pedantic celebration of virility and phallic mastery, is an aspect that Loy satirises in ‘Giovanni Franchi’ with her (as Conover puts it) ‘incriminating portrait of the Futurist as Pederast’ (LLB: 184, n. 8). It is not difficult to construct a link between Marinetti’s rhetorical and phallicised celebration of masculinity and modernity, and the threats to that masculinity actually posed by technology, modernity and ultimately war: Marinetti’s futurism embraces modernity, a revolution of language in poetry and the advances in technology, but attempts to stem the tide of merging and multiplicity that the ‘modern’ might usher in. His masculinist rhetoric, in somaticising



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the (sexed) difference of the binaries he attempts to maintain, actually serves to undermine the very terms of that masculinity. His polemical texts produce an equivocal (perhaps even hysterical) male body that both embraces and denies its own sexual objectification. Such equivocations and uncertainties about the male (sexed) body emerge as prominent tropes in the writing of war. With the connections drawn between the symptoms of shell-shock and hysteria it does not require a great leap to identify a hysterical oscillation underpinning the work of war poets such as Graves, Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg. Such poets, to a greater or lesser extent, present an experience in which the boundaries of the male body have been disturbed and the sense of containment, self-sufficiency and masculine identification through the sexual body have been undermined. Their work can be read as somatically (hysterically) enacting the threat to meaning and language that arises when traditional absolutes and identities prove to be arbitrary and incomplete. Although not necessarily formally fragmented, the work of Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg can enunciate an emasculation of male soldier-heroes (whether erotically marked, or physically or mentally wounded) exposing a crisis in identity and meaning that the poetry also attempts to contain in a reassertion of male identity. The poetry written by combatants in the First World War offers many examples of fragmented male bodies, torn apart, dismembered, distorted by injury and death, and the poetry itself stammers over this destruction. Thus Sassoon offers ‘green clumsy legs’, ‘naked sodden buttocks’, ‘Bulged, clotted heads’ in ‘Counter-Attack’ and Rosenberg describes ‘A man’s brains splattered on/ a stretcher-bearer’s face’ and the ‘sinister faces’ of the ‘dead with the older dead’ in ‘Dead Man’s Dump’. In many cases the incomprehensibility, not just of the brutality of war, but of what it actually does to embodied subjects, to the line between life and death, and to wholeness and (masculine) individuality, is what is at stake in the poetry. It is necessary, in reading war poetry, not to force an articulation between the extremes of homosocial comfort and bonding in the all-male trenches, the supposed sexual orientation of various poets, and the marking of men’s bodies in certain texts. There is certainly a fetishistic element to the detailing of body parts, wounds and beautiful soldier boys, and as Fussell describes, ‘Sassoon’s “The Kiss” and Owen’s “Arms and the Boy”, make much of the quasi-erotic desire of the bullet (and in Sassoon, the bayonet) to “kiss” or “nuzzle” the body of its adolescent target’ (Fussell, 2000: 160), but there is a complex of forces at work here. Such poems and images are produced by the functioning of the war as



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it amplifies and makes explicit the artificial and manufactured nature of molar identity, hierarchical order and signifiability. The subjectification and gender identification of the individual relies on binaries, divisions and hierarchies which the war literally blows apart, leaving the poets of the war trying to recoup a space and voice for the desiring masculine ‘I’. Faced with the reality of war, established notions of masculinity, heroism, meaning even, collapse as language fails. So, beyond the immediate experience of the Great War, the impossibility of a masculine identity, the chasm between desire and meaning invades the work of many writers. This can be linked, moreover, to the dynamism of expression, the rejection of monistic lyric expression that was already at play in the experimental poetry of the early twentieth century. Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ predates the war, but like Marinetti’s early futurist pronouncements, it produces an embrace of the dynamism of modernity – in this case the dynamism of a poetry released from adherence to the forms, language and perspectives of tradition. What also results is a dislocation of masculinity that results in either a male uncertainty (Prufrock’s questions) or an overdetermined reinscription of maleness (futurist rhetoric). Perloff is correct in describing the author of ‘Prufrock’ as ‘Avant-Garde Eliot’, pointing to the distinctive sound structure, ‘attenuated hypotaxis’, ‘complex perspectivism’, ‘particular brand of urbanism’ and use of ‘material form as an active compositional agent’ that makes this poem a radical break for the poetics of its time (2002: 19–27). Crucially the ‘you–I’ of Prufrock are not a stable duality, but a dynamic, multiple and inconsistent scheme of perspectives, a lyric ‘I’ not murdered but multiplied, becoming. The poem also has a very distinctive sound patterning and use of space and silence (the blank page) which produces an aural complexity that stands in disjunction with the patterns of traditional lyric harmony. Eliot’s later poetry abjures such radical disjunction of the singular lyric voice and thus ‘between Eliot’s radical poetry of the avant guerre and its postwar reincarnation, a decisive change had taken place’ (ibid.: 39). The collapse of Eliot’s trust in his own avant-garde lyric experimentation and his resulting transformation into an Anglo-Catholic ‘classical’ poet can be read, as Perloff suggests, through a number of factors: his troubled personal life, financial worries, distance from European centres of culture and politics, the different literary affiliations he developed. This transformation could, also, be articulated to the war making Eliot’s retreat from the avant-garde and disrupted lyric ‘I’, a retreat to the stable productions of institutional assemblages, to molar identity and secure



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signification, to a modernism that acknowledges the war, but has not been fundamentally re-engineered by it. It is through his friend Jean Verdenal, who died in the war, that Eliot links most directly to it, and to the issues of unmanning and the failure of language. His first book Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) has the dedication ‘To Jean Verdenal 1889–1915’, which he later extended to include an epigraph from Dante’s Purgatorio: La quantitate comprender del amor c’a te mi scalda quando dismento mostra vanitate tranttando l’ombre come cosa salda’ (comprehend the measure of the love that burns in me for you, when I forget our vanity and treat a shade as a solid thing). Eliot’s very close friendship with Verdenal is recalled in the Hyacinth Garden episode of The Waste Land. As he himself writes in the Criterion in 1934, this episode describes a memory of ‘a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli’.16 This moment in The Waste Land, one of intense desire,17 produces a fall into a failure of language and the disruption of boundaries of the (masculine) subject with the same effect of the war poets’ writing of the trenches. By the time that Eliot arrives at The Waste Land, he has produced (with the help of Pound’s editing) what Maud Ellman calls ‘the most hysterical of texts’ (1987: 92). This long poem oscillates between a multiplicity and dynamism embodied in the multiple voices of the text, and a desire for a single perspective (that the notes would attribute to Tieresias). The potential multiplicity is envisioned ultimately only as a fragmentation, somaticised as the sterility of the Fisher King and other figures of emasculation within The Waste Land. Individuals are brought low by modernity, as Europe is brought down by war and the hordes of Chaos, and the quest for renewal, figured through the trope of the refreshing rain, the mystical Ganges, aims for an impossible phallic plenitude, an absolute masculinism that, of course, Tieresias can never embody or express. The hysteria of this poem is not just produced by the female voices of ‘A Game of Chess’, for example, but by its confused adherence to dualities that the poem itself (in its form, meaning and the culture it describes) reveals to be impossible. Pound, like Eliot, begins his career in England and, like Eliot, loses a close friend to the war – Gaudier Brezska. Pound’s early modernist endeavours in poetry, however, explore a hard lyric certainty in the sculpted lines of Imagism and assertions of the singular creative genius. Even Pound’s overdetermination of le mot juste can be seen as a resistance to the dissolution of lyric certainty in poetry, something that is enacted in Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’. The war comes to Pound’s poetry in his Homage to Sextus Propertius (1917) which translates and renews Propertius’ mockimperial verse produced in the Roman Empire:



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Out-weariers of Apollo will, as we know, continue their Martian generalities We have kept our erasers in order. Annalists will continue to record Roman reputations, Celebrities from the Trans-Caucasus will belaud Roman celebrities And expound the dissentions of Empire, But for something to read in normal circumstances? (Pound, 1975: 79) The assertion and erasure (and uncertain erasure) of imperial, Martian prowess that Pound conducts in this poem can serve as a connection to the propaganda of war which was itself distending language and thereby undermining the surety of the sovereign rational ‘I’. While experimenting with the distanced and also contemporarily relevant voice of Homage, Pound was embarked on the first three (ur)Cantos and developing the multiple voices that would go on to carry through the enterprise of the Cantos, a development away from a central lyric ‘I’ towards performative identities and voices. These are liberated, as Sherry suggests, by the exposure of verbal logic and the rational subject to the incomprehensible facticity of war, but Pound is also made uneasy by the verbal and other effects of the war. ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ with its two personas and excavation of the decline and loss of/in decadence also, centrally, mourns the loss of an initial and original modernist force in the war in a formal disruption of the quatrains that measure the rest of the sequence: Died some, pro patria, non ‘dulce’ non ‘et décor’ Walked eye-deep in hell Daring as never before, wastage as never before. Young blood and high blood, fair cheeks, and fine bodies; fortitude as never before frankness as never before, disillusions as never told in the old days, hysterias, trench confessions, laughter out of dead bellies. (Pound, 1975: 100–1)



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As in Eliot, Owen and others, the older generation in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley are to blame for the loss of vital and vigorous youth and the collapse of the distinction between death and life. Yet, despite this mourning for a destroyed (masculine) generation, Pound’s war does not lead him simply to the safety of an authorised and authoritarian subjectivity. The multiple perspectives and dynamic history of the Cantos continues the work in radical lyricism that ends, for Eliot, in The Waste Land. Pound alleviates his anxieties, his own particular war neuroses in a specific way, turning to a rhetoric of creativity that matches Marinetti in its masculinist extremeties and focus on the male form Pound’s 1922 is not a year of the dry and sterile ‘waste land’; it is a time to assert the vital power of male creativity: ‘Poetry speaks phallic direction’ as he wrote in later life (Kenner, 1972: 104). In his translation of Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love of this year, Pound locates, through Gourmont’s sexual ethnography and hypotheses about human sexual difference, a renewed emphasis on the power of male creativity. Manifest most obviously in his own ‘Translator’s Postscript’ to Gourmont’s texts, the postwar Pound presents a somatic systematisation of the phallic aesthetic that has its origins in his earliest prose and criticism. In the ‘Translator’s Postscript’ Pound speculates that ‘it is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve’, ‘[t]here are traces of it in the symbolism of phallic religions, man really the phallus or spermatozoid charging, head-on, the female chaos; integration of the male into the male organ’ (Pound, 1922: vii). The phallic poetics that continue through the Cantos does not efface the fact, demonstrated in Pound’s poetry and prose, that he rejected the transcendental posture of being, resisted the retreat to a monumental and stratified tradition and instead celebrated life and an energetic, unsystematised and invigorating tradition. But to preserve the authority and control of the self, and to answer the anxiety of post-war (masculine) self-grounding, however, Pound resorted ultimately to the sanction of phallic power. In reading these responses to war I have stayed within the boundaries, reproduced in my readings, of the Oedipalised, psychoanalytical structures which emerge in concert with a range of war writings that attempt to assimilate the torn and annihilated bodies of men and take control of a language denuded by the rationalising force of pro-war rhetoric. In each case the turn to a self-certifying, signifying masculinity, or an hysterical oscillation on the borders of (sexed) masculine identity marks a yearning for a wholeness, a subjective coherence that



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denies the movement and fullness of desire and desiring production as a continuum, a flow. The phallus constitutes an attempt to capture desire, to anthropomorphise it, to create a (sexed) identity and arrest desiring production in a single meaning, defined by lack. Thus, despite its best endeavours, psychoanalysis contradictorily confirms ‘castration [as] the basis for the anthropomorphic and molar representation of sexuality’ (emphasis in original) for ‘instead of being the principle of sex conceived as the masculine sex (the great castrated soaring Phallus), [castration] becomes the result of sex conceived as the feminine sex (the little hidden absorbed penis)’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 324–5). In turning to the writing of Loy and Stein now, what is affirmed is the possibility of a schizoanalytical reading of writing of, in and to the First World War, a schizo-modernism that deterritorialises desire. This would be a desire not plagued by the contradictions of castration, nor trapped within the theatre of the unconscious, nor limited by the machines of psychoanalysis or tyrannised by Oedipus.

Love and letters: Loy and Stein write war The modernist debate on poetics [was] a contest initially engaged on the ancient battle-scarred terrain of the love song. From 1914 to 1918, while the forms of Western civilization were being smashed on the battlefields of Europe, Anglo-American poets contested the erotics and poetics of the love song in the bellicose little magazines of Chicago, New York, and London. (Kouidis, 1994: 5) Love poetry and the Great War are connected in experimental modernist writing; as Virginia Kouidis suggests, they were the intersecting terrains of struggle over the meaning of modernity. But more than this historical coincidence, love and war are states that exceed the restrictions of the symbolic apparatus, moments in which the subject is pushed to extremes, pushed beyond the boundaries of contained subjectivity. Loy’s Love Songs to Joannes (1915–17) and Stein’s Lifting Belly (1917), both love poems written during the Great War, move beyond the lack, negativity and mournful self-referentiality of the semiological apparatus. Rejecting the idea that the blank spaces of Loy’s poems or Stein’s language-games are an attempt to express an experience beyond language, I want to explore instead their attempts to write the potentia of the becoming subject; a subject torn apart by war but reconstituted in intensity by the act of love.



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Lifting Belly and Loy’s Love Song are set against the backdrop of war, but in both texts this backdrop seems incidental. In Lifting Belly the war figures as just a part of the range of personal, domestic and historical details that create the fabric through which the intense language of lesbian desire is woven – there are mentions of ‘Verdun’, ‘veterans’, ‘the war’ (TB: 8, 22, 6). In Love Songs the war is the temporal, historical context for the text, but only surfaces obliquely through odd snippets (the ‘battle-field’ of Poem XVII), but also perhaps in the bloody conflict that intertwines with the much more playful interaction between the two lovers in Poem X. However, these details are not merely incidental scenery, these texts pose alternatives and digressions to the State apparatus of ‘an institutionalized, regulated, coded war’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 353). In Love Songs and Lifting Belly what takes shape against the ‘structural relation’ of the Great War is a ‘dynamic interrelation’ (ibid.: 354) produced by the ‘trauma’ of war that enables the loving subject of these poems to follow a line of flight beyond the limits of the melancholic self. Loy’s most overt war poem is ‘Der Blinde Junge’ from 1922 which articulates the effects of war on the most marginal peoples of Europe. The poem focuses on the central figure of the ‘kriegsopfer’, here a blind busker on the streets of Vienna, a ‘Void and extinct’ ‘planet of the soul’ (LLB: 83). The blind youth stands as a challenge to abstractions and intellectualised responses to the Great War, the heavy alliteration of the poem reinforcing the materiality and presence of this sign of war. Reduced to thingness both by the conflict and its effects in Europe and by the elitism of hegemonic modernism, the youth’s subvocal exposition engulfs and undermines the autotelic closure of high art: Listen! Illuminati of the coloured earth How this expressionless ‘thing’ Blows out damnation and concussive dark Upon a mouth-organ (LLB: 84) The absence of the Great War from Loy’s poetry of the 1914–18 period is striking, particularly given Loy’s clear concerns in ‘Der Blinde Junge’, the fact that the war occupies a central place in her Italian correspondence (of 1914–15) with Mabel Dodge and Carl Van Vechten,



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and Loy’s own war effort. The only poem to address Loy’s experience as a Red Cross nurse in Florence is ‘Babies in Hospital’ (published 1916) which explores gender and motherhood rather than war. Loy left Florence in early 1916 for New York, where she remained amongst the many European war émigrés and draft dodgers until she left for Mexico with Arthur Cravan in 1917. Loy’s major poetic work from the war period is the sequence of 34 poems that form the Love Songs, a sequence which depicts in a sexually frank and direct way a liaison eroded by suspicion, incompatible desires and expectations (Loy draws on her actual love affair with the Italian Futurist Giovanni Papini).18 The fragmentary Love Songs move backwards and forwards in time and space, engaging with a range of experiences and encounters, to reach a final conclusion of deception: ‘Love —— —— —— the preeminent literateur’ (LLB: 68). This last poem identifies the fundamental delusion of the sequence, that ‘Love’, the site of illimitable possibilities for conjunction, communication and creativity, for becoming (Loy’s dashes suggests this potential), has been manipulated and distorted. Loy’s nonce word ‘literateur’, suggests literator, literati, the French term littérateur and literature, thus calling on ideas of language and culture as restrictive and proscriptive, sedimenting and segregating rules of behaviour. The word implies how love and desire have been co-opted into the political economy of sexualised identities that assigns the suitable forms of erotic agency to masculine and feminine subjects which are then enshrined in cultural codes – a power relation that literalises the social relations of phallogocentrism, enforcing a mutually exclusive dialectic of molar identities. That the Love Songs describe much more than a personal disappointment in love is suggested by Carolyn Burke’s foregrounding of the importance of the Great War in Loy’s text, which she reads as ‘drenched in the atmosphere of World War I’ (1996: 208). Love Songs does indeed have multiple images of combat, carnage and mechanical hostility such as a ‘butterfly’ that has ‘the daily news/ Printed in blood on its wings’ (LLB: 54), a ‘humid carnage’ of passion, desire and heterosexuality (LLB: 57) and ‘machines’ who cut a ‘foothold/ With steel eyes’ (LLB: 63). Burke goes on to point out the formal corollaries to the war: Their range of attitudes – the tonal shifts from hopefulness and anticipation through wariness and suspicion to vexation and bitterness – may all be understood as those of the outsider, the nonparticipant, the woman whose life is put on hold yet deeply affected by the collapse of civilization around her. Similarly, what now seem like



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hallmarks of modernist style – the ironic swerves, the impossibility of resolution, the emphasis on shards, fragments, flickers of meaning, the distortion of time and closing off of the future – are all historically based, in a period when Italy temporized and Europe fought its ‘war machine’. (1996: 208) Burke’s reading, despite recognising the formal and thematic engagement with the war, skirts dangerously close to a basic Marxist/materialist (Lukàcsian) assertion that the poems are a passive reflection of a cultural chaos. In addition it serves to over-emphasise the negative aspects of the Love Songs, which precludes a nuanced reading of the potentia that the text also articulates. The poems do chart the course of a failed love affair and possible abortion or miscarriage, and offer a brutal exposure of the enslaving ideology of Love. There is also a sense of the destruction or elision of the self, of the self embattled which can be related to the contemporaneous destruction of the Great War. In Poem XVII loss (of a baby, a lover, a sense of self) is articulated, through the colour red, to the ‘battle-field’ of war and its meaningless destruction of life, figured through the word ‘counter’ (which evokes casualty numbers and counter-attacks): Red a warm colour on the battle-field Heavy on my knees as a counterpane Count counter I counted the fringe of the towel (LLB: 60) Within the figurative schema of Love Songs the colour red, the colour of blood and the battlefield, indicates the tearing apart of the female subject, while ‘white’, the colour of sterility and death, represents the annihilation of this subject, her complete obliteration in the noncreative confrontations of the relationship. Thus in Poem XVIII the speaker is ‘burnt quite white’ by the ‘withdrawal’ of her lover (LLB: 64), left in a position of incomprehensibility, a place of the ‘Unthinkable’ (LLB: 65). In these poems the devastation and violence of war are metonymically evoked to stand for the destruction of the female subject in a traditional romance and her relegation to the place of non-being. It is not the case, however, that Loy’s sequence simply announces the conflicting dialectic of sexed relations that inevitably destroys the feminine by forcing her again into the position of lack. Some of the falls into imperceptibility in Love Songs begin to mobilise a different



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Leading astray Of fireflies Aerial quadrille Bouncing Off one another Again conjoining In recaptured pulses Of light (LLB: 61) This poem articulates a move towards a radical immanence, a becominginsect that indicates a non-anthropomorphic opening out, an exit from the human into a field of forces and intensities ‘pollen/ smelling space’, ‘Drinkable’ ‘white telling’ (LLB: 60). The syntactical inversions and discontinuities disengage from the linear sequence of memory. The physicality of the language here, the perpetual activity of the verbs (as present participles), the engulfing insistent phonemes are a feature of the whole sequence. They voice the immanence of the encounter between subjects, which is also the encounter between forces, an encounter of mutual affect and exchange, and potentially of creative transformation. This transformation is produced also in Poem XIV: Today Everlasting passing apparent imperceptible To you I bring the nascent virginity of – Myself for the moment No love or the other thing Only the impact of lighted bodies Knocking sparks off each other In chaos (LLB: 58-9) Thus, there are poems in Love Songs which speak of a new way of knowing, an immanently actualised language that communicates through the bodies of the lovers, through the materiality of the words,



discourse. From Poem XIX emerges a ‘Clear carving/ Breath-giving/ Pollen smelling/ Space’, a ‘slaking’ and growth (LLB: 60), and a process of becoming:


‘Something taking shape’ beyond the stratifications of signification, ‘Something that has a new name/ a new dimension’ (LLB: 57). Loy’s poems emphasise the materiality of desire; love or desire as the creative opening out to another stands distinct from the Love which enslaves an Other to its own mournful internalisation of constitutive loss. Also, as Jeffrey Twitchell-Wass puts it, ‘the formal possibilities of the Songs point toward an evolution beyond entrapment in the speaker’s sense of disillusion and scepticism, indeed, beyond entrapment in the voice of the romantic lyric’ (1998: 115). Throughout Love Songs the linguistic patterning and formal arrangement of the poems reaches beyond a language of solipsism, lack and melancholia, but not into a realm of hysterical signification or mythical plenitude. With the internalised subject destroyed by the war and/or the romantic liaison, the poems gesture towards a place where desire and language happen in the articulation of material subjects who share the sameness of the forces that drive them. Gertrude Stein’s Lifting Belly is a love poem to the mutuality of the lesbian erotic and the multiplicity of language and writing. The repetitions, linguistic permutations, punning and riddling of the text playfully enact a coming to writing, a coming to orgasm, a becoming in which subjectivity is a contingent and intensive assemblage. This is exemplified by the key phrase ‘Lifting belly’ and its multiple incarnations, as figure of female desire, lesbian sex, orgasm, eating, creativity, verbal joke and so on. There is no hysteria here, only the kinetic incarnation through language of an embedded and embodied subject. Lifting Belly was written during Stein and Toklas’s residence in Mallorca in 1916 (seen by some commentators as their ‘honeymoon period’). The piece was finished during their return to Paris and activities as transporters of medical supplies (in their new Ford, nicknamed ‘Aunt Pauline’ or ‘Miss Polly’), and as members of the American Fund for French Wounded. As letters from 1917–18 demonstrate, Stein and Toklas’s involvement in the war effort was textual as well as actual: they received regular written requests for medical and other supplies (stockings, bedding) as well as regular correspondence from the soldiers they befriended. In his article ‘Gertrude Stein’s Lifting Belly and the Great War’, David Owens places Lifting Belly in a close structural relationship to the war; he reads the text in two parts: the ‘Mallorcan Movement’ in which ‘the lovers had each other and shared an anxiety about the war’ (1998: 614) and the ‘Paris Movement’ where ‘there is a sense of excitement and anticipation, a sense that they feel involvement in something greater than themselves’ (ibid.). Owens is right to highlight the presence of the war in Stein’s text, demonstrating that this is much more than a biographical, coded



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expression of same-sex lovemaking. However, he fails to see beyond a level of superficial correspondence, interpreting the boat that ‘has been sunk’ from the beginning of the first section, and the statement ‘The Englishmen are coming. Not here’ from the end of this section as simply ‘a reaction to some sort of war news’ (1998: 610). The war news they react to is respectively ‘the German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare and newspaper accounts of attacks on such vessels as the Lusitania in 1915’ (ibid.) and ‘news of the British invasion at Gallipoli, Turkey in the spring and summer of 1915’, (611). But the war is never simply historical detail in this text, what it represents and enables is a movement from anxiety about external threats to the lesbian textual dyad to an opening out of the (already multiple) subject to a nomadic mode of textual encounters. So, at the opening, the war threatens to sink the ‘boat’ of Lifting Belly’s creativity conceived of in an insular, molar mode, just as the war threatens the molar identity of the subject of Western culture: ‘Some when they sigh by accident say poor country she is betrayed’ (LB: 11). But as the interactions and encounters of the text repeat and multiply, the fear of invasion and the collapse of the subject give way to a joy in repetition and permutation in which the multiplicity of specific embedded moments reconfigures the subject as a positive, dynamic intensity of forces: Lifting belly is a language. It says Island. Island a strata. Lifting belly is a repetition. Lifting belly means me. I do love roses and carnations. A mistake. There can be no mistakes (LB: 17) As the desire and eroticism of two women, ‘Lifting belly’, is a form of expression that replaces or reforms the significatory demands of dominant codes. ‘It says Island’, creates a safe place, a haven (I land), but also the ground for an alternate mode of being (no man is an island after all, the implicit reference here is both to John Donne and to the no-man’s land of war, as well as to the island of Mallorca). The ‘Island’ or new space of the ‘I’ of Lifting Belly presents new possibilities of meaning and organisation, alternate ‘strata’ that embrace rather than attempt to arrest the movement of desire and difference; ‘Lifting belly is a repetition’, not a state of Being. And in both affirming and removing the female subject (a ‘mis-take’ or erasure of the ‘miss’), lifting belly also embraces its own contradictions and inconsistencies, the necessary diversity of the desiring flow, ‘a mistake’ and ‘no mistake’.



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As Owens states, the war has a structural presence in Lifting Belly, but the progression towards ‘involvement in something greater than themselves’ (note the plural subject) is much more fundamental than he indicates. The ‘I/we’ of the text opens out into a dynamic multiplicity, tracing a line of flight out of the ‘paranoid, signifying, despotic regime of signs’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 121). The process of Lifting Belly (the text itself and as a phrase) is what happens when ‘a sign or packet of signs detaches from the irradiating circular network and sets to work on its own account’ (ibid.). As Lifting Belly progresses, the war offers a further mode of structuration: the polylogue or the configuration of the voices of the text, that many critics have found so difficult to place. Lifting Belly is not simply ‘composed mostly of one line tributes to “lifting belly” followed by a cool even sardonic response’, as the early commentator Richard Bridgman would have it (1971: 150); instead, the multiplicity of the text, with its repetitions, questions, mishearings, through all of which ‘lifting belly’ rises and falls, breathes a radically enfleshed erotic which enacts a dynamic horizon of multiple other encounters: Lifting belly is my joy. What did I tell Caesars. That I recognised them. It is the custom to answer swimming. Catch a call. Does the moonlight make any difference to you. Lifting belly yes Miss. I can lean upon a pencil. Lifting belly yes address me. I address you. Lifting belly magnetically. Did you make a mistake. Wave to me. (LB: 29) With verbal and rhythmic echoes, the text produces waves of encounter (erotic, domestic, conversational) and creates a seriously ludic (and ludicrously serious) interrogation of authority and certainty. The pull towards an other is ‘magnetically’ imagined, the evocation of the beloved is a ‘yes address’, a positive affirmation of difference, not a cooption of otherness. The traditions of romance are rejected, as in Loy’s Love Songs, in favour of an embodied encounter: ‘Does the moonlight



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make any difference to you’? And the ‘Caesar’, or seizure of orgasm, an obliteration of self in a radically immanent proximity is also played as a pet-name for the butch-lover; the author/lover thus emerges as would-be General, who needs to be, and is, babied elsewhere, and who jokes about writing as phallicism (‘lean upon a pencil’). ‘Caesar’ was a common nickname for Stein, and ‘Baby’ was Toklas’s private nickname for her. The potential meanings produced are further multiplied by the Caesar salads that Toklas made for her partner. Meeting and eating and no fixed hierarchy, this is the coming together that ‘Lifting belly’ creates, a (be)coming that is a process, like writing, in the midst of things: In the midst of writing there is merriment (LB: 62) The multiple, dynamic encounters of Lifting Belly can be connected to ‘Letters and parcels and wool’, a text from the same period (1916) which shares many stylistic and thematic overlaps.19 ‘Letters and parcels and wool’ is composed of letters and letter fragments making requests, offering presents or advice, and relaying events past and future. In so doing it undermines the intelligibility of the epistolary mode by destroying coherence and correspondence – the contents of the letters are not matched to the addresser or addressee, the requests for olive fire logs or descriptions of stockings are not met with a response. As the war disrupts contact (delaying letters, moving people, interrupting visits), the dominant dialectical model of communication gives way. So in Lifting Belly questions are not answered, or answers to other questions are given; reported speech or events (she said, we said, you are, I am, he has, there are, it is) are not stable acts of reference, and ‘news’, domestic details, erotic moments and theories of writing intersect with each other within sentences, phrases, words: Who is Mr. Mc. Bride. In the way of laughing. Lifting belly is an intention. You are sure you know the meaning of any word. Leave me to see. Pink. My pink. (LB: 39) ‘Letters and parcels and wool’ exemplifies how Lifting Belly takes off from a binary mode of communication and offers a textual



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body-without-organs that assembles a field of desire which rejects what Rosi Braidotti elsewhere describes as ‘the principle of adequation to and identification with a phallogocentric image of thought’ (2002: 124). There does not need to be equivalence between statement and referent, a direct line of transmission from addresser to addressee. The text is a gift of intensive language: If I were a postman I would deliver letters. We call them letter carriers. (LB: 13) The war does not simply propel Stein out of the Mallorcan honeymoon period and offer her and Alice an active role as drivers (a shift from a lesbian enclave to an engagement with the real world). Much more, it produces a disruption and a distance which enables a transformation of sensory, perceptual and conceptual habits, a transfiguration of language in which desire drives us forward towards the horizon of becoming. Crucial in this transformation is the desegregating impact of love on the self. The resultant ‘smooth space’ of the text offers open questions, physical requests and domestic details that do not become hierarchised and are not fastened to a speaking subject. The Great War cracks open the speaking subject of the lyric and annihilates the stable, signifying capacity of language and gender. For Loy and Stein this produces the possibility of thinking language otherwise and of writing desire that reaches out towards a multiplicity. This argument is not just an overintellectualised way of repeating the point that the Great War had a positive effect on the lives of women; my intention is not to forge a sociohistorical correlation. The point is that modernist men such as Eliot and Pound remain trapped in a melancholic interiority and hysterical response to the trauma of war, while in Lifting Belly and Love Songs the subject becoming imperceptible, becoming intensive, is projected by love, out of the zone of lack. Articulating women and the war in this way produces a positive and transformative reading of the modernist love lyric.



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Dada, Cyborgs and the New Woman in New York

Who is she, where is she, what is she – this ‘modern woman’ that people are always talking about? Is there any such creature? Does she look any different looks or talk any different words or think any different thoughts from the late Cleopatra or Mary Queen of Scots or Mrs Browning? Some people think the women are the cause of modernism whatever that is. But then, some people think woman is to blame for everything they don’t like or don’t understand. Cherchez la femme is man-made advice, of course. (New York Evening Sun, 13 February 1917)1

New York in 1917, particularly with the first Independents Exhibition and the events surrounding it, was in the grip not just of an American flowering of modernist innovation, but of the specific manifestation of New York Dada. The term New York Dada is a retrospective appellation emerging from Zurich Dada and from 1920s popular press reflections on New York modernism; it suggests a more coherent movement than was understood by those living and working in this arena at the time. The many individuals participating in or on the margins of New York Dada included French expatriates such as Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp and Americans such as Alfred Steiglitz and Man Ray. Even Ezra Pound was touched by New York Dada, writing two poems for The Little Review in 1921 that explored the interchange between one of its most visible figures, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and William Carlos Williams.2 It is not incidental that while the First World War in Europe raged, disturbing the boundaries of ‘natural’ identity and enacting a machinic destruction of cultural and human life, artists and writers in New York 85



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explored the technological encroachments of consumerism and massproduction. Amelia Jones has convincingly argued for the importance of the First World War for New York Dada highlighting the ‘pressures on artistic subjectivity stemming from the war’ that were negotiated in New York at the time (2004: 40). Jones points particularly to the New York Dada articulations of an ‘equivocal masculinity, one compromised by its distance from European ideals of proper, patriotic, heroic male behaviour, hugely inflated by propaganda during the war’ (ibid.). Jones’s argument builds on preceding feminist criticism which has revealed how, despite its iconoclasm and the actual, central role of women writers and artists, Dada ‘embodied the male as a term and a movement’,3 thus serving to codify a repression at the heart of its absolute rebellion. Dominant understandings of New York Dada as the first American avant-garde, heroically struggling with the encroaching mass of industrial capitalism have now been revised to address the elision of Dada’s fundamental negotiations and presentations of gender equivocality. New York Dada fully confronted the early twentieth-century world as a place of technological innovation, industrial rationalisation, mass consumerism, challenges to individualism, and disturbances of traditional gender identities. The modern world that New York Dada confronted was one which inherited a specific articulation of gender and the masses, an articulation that emerges from a range of late nineteenth-century psychological, philosophical and fictional texts, and which reinforces aesthetic judgments that were being made at the time about sentimental and popular literature. In this conjunction women become identified both with and as the mass, and as the consumers of popular art and commodity culture. Thus, as Rita Felski argues, ‘the idea of the modern becomes aligned with a pessimistic vision of an unpredictable yet curiously passive femininity seduced by the glittering phantasmagoria of an emerging consumer culture’ (1995: 62). The impact on modernist formations of anti-bourgeois artistic practice is profound, as Andreas Huyssen points out: the nightmare of being devoured by mass culture through co-option, commodification, and the ‘wrong’ kind of success is the constant fear of the modernist artist, who tries to stake out his territory by fortifying the boundaries between genuine art and inauthentic mass The problem is the persistent gendering as feminine of that which is devalued. (1986: 53)



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Huyssen’s diagnosis of mass-culture as modernism’s gendered other has had a great influence on subsequent remappings and rewritings of modernism and has informed many revisions of the hegemonic idea of High Modernist practice. However, what Huyssen has also highlighted is a corollary connection between women and fears of technology in the face of industrialisation and the ‘increasing technologization of human nature’ (ibid.: 70). The diagnosis he offers of this articulation is a classically psychoanalytic one: ‘[t]he fears and perceptual anxieties emanating from ever more powerful machines are recast and reconstructed in terms of the male fear of female sexuality, reflecting, in the Freudian account, the male’s castration anxiety’ (70). But there might be a different reading of the mass, popular culture,4 the feminine and technology, one that develops but does not psychoanalyse the ambivalence of machines. Machines are not neutral objects, or simply and easily recuperable into a rational industrial-technical teleology. As Rosi Braidotti writes, ‘Machines fulfil a fundamental libidinal structure, which mimes the workings of sexual energy’, crucially ‘they question the boundary between the functional and the gratuitous, productivity and waste, moderation and excess’ (2002: 217). The articulation of technology with productivity, organisation and advancement, not gratuitous ‘theatricality’ or ‘play and pleasure’ (ibid.) is one that dominates in early twentieth-century America. This is metonymically enacted in the technological achievements of the New York skyline,5 but it is also explored and reworked in the playful ironies of New York Dada. This chapter focuses on the productions and practices of a selection of New York writers and artists in the mid-1910s and, in so doing, explores the articulations of modernism, woman, mass-culture and technology in this time and place. As the opening quotation of this chapter highlights, ‘women’ and ‘modernism’ were brought together at the time: the following discussion (as does this study as a whole) seeks to actually understand the configuration of practices that really produced such statements as ‘women are the cause of modernism’ and thus to consider how they are articulated to and through certain texts, and to explore the sets of relations and effects they determine. This chapter focuses specifically on the connections between mass and spectacular culture and the avant-garde that Barnes’s work produces, on Loy’s role in the Dada moment, and on how the conjunction of women and technology is forged, reworked and radically reimagined through the practices of New York Dada.



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Among the variety of journalistic pieces that Djuna Barnes wrote in the 1910s, four pieces explore the experiences to be had at Coney Island, the resort just outside New York on the southern coast of Brooklyn. This writing does not stand distinct from the concerns of Barnes’s fellow New York avant-gardists though, and her pieces explore the economic and political stratifications, as well as the import, of the mass-cultural and technological milieu that constitutes the core of the Coney Island experience. Existing already as a favourite seashore resort, with the establishment of huge amusement parks – Steeplechase Park (opened 1897, destroyed by fire in 1911), Luna Park (opened 1903) and Dreamland (opened 1904) – Coney Island attracted tens of thousands of visitors daily. The resort became the ‘Electric Eden’ where sideshows, beer gardens, cycloramas, dancing pavilions and spectacular rides competed for custom, encapsulating the changing technological episteme of the early twentieth century. Many of Coney Island’s attractions were the direct result of technological innovation, including the ‘Titanic Disaster Show’ in which an electric model of the Titanic sank hourly, the ‘Trip to Mars’, the Ajeeb chess-playing automaton,6 and the Baby Incubator exhibit (premature babies on display in an early version of the incubator). This was technology as amusement and diversion, play and pleasure, rather than efficient function and production and, crucially, it was also liberating for a specific class of woman. As Ellen Wiley Todd describes, in distinction from ‘middle-class new women’ who ‘bypassed marriage for careers and women-centered social and political activities’, young immigrant women found in ‘new forms of commercialised leisure’ ways of expanding ‘the traditional boundaries of permissible heterosexual interaction’: Brightly lit dance halls, amusement parks, nickelodeons and later movie houses opened them up to a stimulating, often erotic, world of pleasure. New dances demanded sensuous bodily movement or physical closeness. Darkened theaters encouraged kissing and petting. Mechanized rides at Coney Island flung couples together or exposed women’s bodies to eager male bystanders. (1993: 3)7 That technological advances did not just function in the clean efficiency promised by Americanism, but were also fully implicated in masscultural pleasures is something that Coney Island exemplifies, offering



Spectacular, spectacular: Barnes writes New York

as it does both a literal other space for New Yorkers and a figurative other New York, which might serve to expose forces that New York ‘proper’ attempts to capture in a narrative of rationality and progress. In ‘The People and the Sea’ (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 1913), ‘The Tingling, Tangling Tango as ’Tis Tripped at Coney Isle’ (Daily Eagle, August 1913), ‘If Noise Were Forbidden at Coney Island a Lot of People Would Lose Their Jobs’ (New York Press, June 1914) and ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl; On the Restless Surf at Coney’ (New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine, July 1917), Barnes explores different aspects of Coney Island. In ‘The People and the Sea’ the Coney Island shore is a place where humanity unburdens itself of its ‘individuality’ along with its ‘clothes’ and where the transcendent power of the patriarch is re-embodied and engaged with his family: ‘a man lies down on his back and feels at last unembarrassed, when, a leg on either side of him, his two hands above his breast, his “kiddie” utilizes his chest for all the springing power that it is worth’ (NY: 34, 35). ‘The Tingling, Tangling Tango’ presents the bourgeoisification of modern dances as the Tango is tamed for a family audience under the ‘glare of the electric lights’ (NY: 43), while ‘If Noise Were Forbidden at Coney Island’ foregrounds the presence of women from the ‘corset-hampered wail of sensation that a women lets loose as the dip of death is taken’ on a ride, to the girls who are ‘usually alone or with another girl’ rather than in a safe heterosexual pair (NY: 144). What ultimately emerges from Barnes’s accounts of Coney Island is the sense of a space apart, it produces ‘a kind, glad feeling which is not a vacation; it is an awakening those few hours that we don’t count’ (NY: 35). Coney Island is both a liminal space, and a space that has a levelling effect on social and cultural hierarchy: ‘[t]here are things here that hide the obvious – the sun that touches cheap linen lightly, the wind that shares its caresses equally, the waters that engulf the awkward tyro’ (NY: 149). But the space/place of Coney Island is not outside capitalist modernity, as Barnes repeatedly emphasises: the labouring classes must join endless queues for the ‘municipal bathhouse’ (‘The People and the Sea’), the professional male dancer must amuse ‘[t]he middle-aged women who have motors and painted cheeks’ (‘The Tingling, Tangling Tango’), and a homeless ‘thin little girl like an old woman’ copies the hawkers cries around her (‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl’). The amusements, novelties and spectacles of Coney Island are thus fully implicated in an economy of exploitation and exchange, whatever liberation and disruption they also produce.





In ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl’ Barnes offers the full spectrum of Coney Island amusements, from the sideshow freaks – ‘THE FATTEST FAT LADY, THE OSSIFIED MAN, THE SNAKE CHARMER THE CIGARETTE FIEND’ (NY: 279) – to a ‘less pretentious’, ‘not afraid to be natural’ Irish beer hall (NY: 281), to the Steeplechase ‘Pavilion of Fun’ and a ‘Ferris Wheel’. Barnes’s sketch of Coney Island here emphasises a facet of the resort that is only implicit in her other pieces: the abnormal or animal (the freaks), the ‘natural’ (the beer hall or indeed the beach) and the mechanical (the rides and amusements) coexist in this space, a space where such distinctions (between freak, natural and mechanical) are profoundly unsettled. Indeed, Barnes comments that ‘at Coney one feels that the inanimate objects are the only things that are animate and that people are there merely to exclaim: “At last it is as it should be – characteristic with the rest of America’s hurry and whirl” ’ (NY: 280). Thus, the ‘hurry and whirl’, encapsulated by the technological efficiency and speed of Fordist principles becomes, in the Coney Island space of amusement, an intensive state of blurred boundaries where abnormal, natural and mechanical are transitive and uncertain terms. The ‘incubator babies’ that Barnes passes on her way out of Luna Park in ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl’ exemplify this well: are they ‘freaks’ to stare at, techno-scientific advances, or babies that could be mothered? ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl’ was published in 1917 and demonstrates the development of Barnes’s journalistic style. This piece is not ‘yellow’ journalism and has little of the cub-reporter or stunt-girl journalist to it, demonstrating a much more arch and self-conscious tone and attitude towards its subject material. Opening in Europe with a vignette of a Jewish-Norwegian woman, a failed revolutionary who balances ‘sanity and insanity’ and declares ‘that people were not people, they were “dolls” ’ (NY: 275), ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl’ both celebrates and resists the attractions of Coney Island and implicitly debates the meaning and worth of this alternate space. In it Barnes meets up with ‘Allen Norton, Bob Carlton Brown and Rose Watson’ (NY: 281), key figures and activists in Greenwich Village Bohemia. ‘Bob’ (writer and editor for the Masses) shows a ‘copy of the Coney Island Splash, a little magazine for Coney Islanders and those enjoying a French flavor with their sodas and sandwiches’ (NY: 281–2). Barnes speculates on the contents of this spoof magazine but doesn’t get to read a copy. However, after a ride on a Ferris wheel ‘Bob and Rose have another idea to submit to Allen for the Splash’ (NY: 283), inspired perhaps by the strange perspective the technology of the ride provides (‘how strange the sky is in this wheel that might never come down at all’ NY: 283). The



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little magazine, bohemianism and popular culture thus meet in Barnes’s piece. As can be seen in her journalism directly on Greenwich Village, ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl’ is indicative of Barnes’s double positioning. She is a journalistic commentator on (mass)culture who brings her irony to bear on it, but also a compatriot of bohemian radicals and author of avant-garde stories and plays who, in her ironic textual stance and position as published writer, reveals the extent to which New York Bohemia negotiated itself through and with the mass-market. Her work presents a ‘campy sort of pop decadence’ to use Michael Murphy’s term for Vanity Fair’s style (1996: 64), a ‘cultural savvy’ (ibid.) which is most in evidence when she deals with Greenwich Village Bohemia in some of her 1916 reflections on the New York avant-garde and its radicals (one in Bruno’s Weekly, one in Pearson’s Magazine and two in the New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine). Barnes’s tone and attitude varies in these pieces from the arch, mock-portraits of ‘Vermouth, Absinthe and Yvette’ and their decadent affectations in ‘The Last Petit Souper (Greenwich Village in the Air – Ahem!)’,8 to the ironic presentation of Greenwich Village tourists in ‘Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians’.9 In ‘Greenwich Village As It Is’, Barnes writes from a position of identifying with the ‘bohemians’, writing a plea that ‘you of the outer world, be not so hard on us, and above all forbear to pity us’ (NY: 232). In an apparent rejection of mainstream, commercial culture, she presents the ‘impossible people living here’ (NY: 227)’, their activities and convictions as the necessary ‘contrast’ to the ‘greater part of New York [which] is as soulless as a department store’ (NY: 225). In the light of her other pieces on the Village, though, it is impossible not to read the terms of Barnes’s plea as, in some sense, an excessive parody of the very bohemian stance she is supporting. Barnes is much less idealistic and anti-capitalist in her New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine articles which, in complex manoeuvres of tone and position, publicise the bohemian life while also bemoaning its denigration into a tourist spectacle; ironically, she simultaneously satirises the tourist public (‘Madame Bronx’ and her daughters) that this very publicity would elicit, and wryly trivialises the stance and principles that set bohemians apart from the ‘public’. Barnes was not the first or only mediator between Greenwich Village and mainstream New York culture, but her four articles appear right across the period that saw the emergence and commodification of bohemia: a ‘Who’s Who in New York’s Bohemia’ featured in the New York Tribune on 4 November 1915 and by 1917 a mainstream Guide to Greenwich Village had been published for tourists. Across this period of





about a year, while the Provincetown Players installed themselves for their first New York season and individuals such as Hart Crane and Edna St Vincent Millay arrived in the Village, ‘rents for studio apartments more than tripled’ and uptown visitors could smoke ‘Greenwich Village Cigarettes’ and sport ‘Fashions to be worn in the Village’ (Watson, 1991: 233, 231).10 Barnes’s articles demonstrate an awareness of the marketing of Bohemian New York that is also a recognition that such marketing, and indeed mass-culture in general, is not alien to that modernism – the cultural savvy that her articles articulate demonstrate the reliance of the avant-garde on a knowingness about mass-cultural forms and trends which, in turn, inform their own positions and activities in a variety of ways. This is not to deny that an ‘anxiety of contamination’ does exist, or to cast modernism as simply a response to mass-culture. What is revealed is that the modernist avant-garde cannot be defined, cannot even exist without mass-culture. This ‘mass’ may ultimately be projected by High Modernism as a (feminised) other, but in its very contemporaneity and negotiation of emergent forms of communication and culture the mass-market is inextricable from the avant-garde. As Barnes writes ‘Real things that are beautifully mixed in dreadfully with that which is sham; a wonderful, terrible hash on the table of life’ (NY: 243). The oxymorons in this statement undermine the ostensible nostalgia and desire for cultural purity and what emerges is a sense of the impossibility of distinguishing the ‘real’ (bohemia, modernism, avantgarde culture) from the ‘sham’ (marketed bohemia and/or modernism, mass-culture). For Barnes this constitutes an optimistic, not a pessimistic, fuzziness. Just as a part of modernism’s knowingness is a consciousness of its own symbiotic relationship with the spectators who mark its novelty, so Barnes’s modern(ist) market savvy is overtly focused on the spectacular aspects of Greenwich Village, that which attracts the sightseer. In so doing her articles often mark the visible presence of avant-garde women. ‘Madame Bronx’ herself, in her pursuit of the real ‘Greenwich Village’, attempts to locate this in different women, one ‘a mere woman in a gingham gown with a portfolio under her arm’ and another, ‘a redhaired woman who had somehow forgotten to cut her hair’ (NY: 238). That the tourist and her sights are both feminine does reflect the fact that Barnes feminises the forces of mass-culture and the spectacle, but this is not an unequivocal articulation. By bringing them together, Barnes questions rather than reinforces the natural visibility of women and presents subjects for scrutiny that confound the easy capture of Woman into a visual economy.



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Or one sees the baroness leap lightly from one of those new white taxis with seventy black and purple anklets clanking about her secular feet, a foreign postage stamp – cancelled – perched upon her cheek; a wig of purple and gold caught roguishly up with strands from a cable once used to moor importations from far Cathay; red trousers – and catch the subtle, dusty perfume blown back from her – an ancient human notebook on which has been written all the follies of a past generation. (NY: 249) The Baroness Elsa, as demonstrated in many other accounts of New York in this period, presents a lived Dada appropriation of mass-produced objects in her visual display and an extreme challenge to gender conventions. Louis Bouché described Elsa as ‘the Original Dada’ who wore ‘a black dress with a bustle on which rested an electric battery tail light’.11 George Biddle remembers Elsa standing ‘before me quite naked – or nearly so. Over the nipples of her breast were two tin tomato cans, fastened with green string around her back. Between the tomato cans hung a very small bird-cage and within it a crestfallen canary. One arm was covered from wrist to shoulder with celluloid curtain rings, pilfered from a furniture display in Wannamaker’s. She removed her hat, trimmed with gilded carrots, beets, and other vegetables. Her hair was close-cropped and dyed vermillion’ (1939: 138). Barnes describes how ‘She made a great plaster cast of a penis once, & showed it to all the “old maids” she came in contact with.’12 In Barnes’s account in ‘How the Villagers Amuse Themselves’, Baroness Elsa marks a merging of ancient female embodiment and cutting-edge technology in her arrested moment of leaping from the recently introduced ‘new white taxis’, presenting an unsettling ‘machinic’ subjectivity that crosses distinctions and binaries. As well as the spectacularity of Greenwich Village Bohemia, Barnes’s journalism also demonstrates a profound interest in the spectacle of other features of New York. Indeed, the visual appeal of yellow journalism and her frequent assignments on ‘entertaining events and sights around New York’ meant that, as Katherine Biers describes, Barnes’s ‘aesthetic signature became irrevocably bound up with the



The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was a German-born poet, artist, model and performance artist who played a central role in New York Dada and in disturbing its convenient conclusions. In ‘How the Villagers Amuse Themselves’, Barnes presents this unorthodox woman:


paradoxical logic of the spectacle’ (2003: 243).13 Biers suggests that Barnes’s journalism explores the ‘violent exchange of spectatorship’ and ‘violent reduction to the bodily’ that the spectacle produces in the ‘crowd’ as well as the ‘victim’. Barnes interrogates both the arrested object in view and the arrested gaping crowd, even presenting herself as a spectacle in ‘My Adventures Being Rescued’, where she describes how she jumped from a building and ‘swung against the sky some hundred feet or so above the city pavement’, while a butcher ‘with a screaming white apron tied about a conscienceless girth grinned in the glare of light shining and dancing upon his cleaver’ (NY: 186–7). Like ‘How It Feels to Be Forcible Fed’, ‘My Adventures Being Rescued’ is accompanied by photographs of Barnes which emphasise the visual display and indeed objectification of her embodied self. The violence of spectacularity seems paramount, but the unnatural nature of the spectacle is also emphasised (no more so than in the fact of its presentation only through technological mediation). In addition, Barnes’s photographic presentation in these articles can certainly be articulated with her interest in women’s place in culture and society and their representation by (and subjection to) a classifying male gaze. Barnes is not interested in simply reproducing the power relations of women’s objectification, but in exploring the political nuances of women’s visible presence, positioning and construction by and in culture – whether this is ‘The Wild Aguglia and Her Monkeys’, the Sicilian-American Actress famous for her performance in Oscar Wilde’s Salome; ‘Yvette Guilbert’, the comic singer that Toulouse Lautrec often drew; or the girls that Florenz Ziegfeld puts in his chorus.14 But, as with her presentation of Greenwich Village, men do not escape the reduction to the bodily that the spectacle produces, both as audience (in ‘ “Twingeless Twitchell” and His Tantalizing Tweezers’ and ‘My Sisters and I at a New York Prizefight’) and on display themselves, as in her interviews with Diamond Jim Brady, Billy Sunday and John Bunny. Thus, what Barnes’s writing of the city produces is an articulation of New York, women, popular culture and bohemia in a visual field of spectacular display in which a tension and violence inheres and which, in the arrested moment of the spectacle, foregrounds the constructed, self-conscious and ‘savvy’ nature of the display. Thus, the smooth functioning of the display of femininity is disturbed, the gendering of the spectacular object as female and the gaze as male is disrupted, and, as is the case of figures such as the Baroness Elsa, there is the ever-present danger that the modern(ist) woman on display will not conform to expectations at all.



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There are the evenings in the studios, blue and yellow candles pouring their hot wax over things in ivory and things in jade. Incense curling up from a jar; Japanese prints on the wall. A touch of purple here, a gold screen there, a black carpet, a curtain of silver, a tapestry thrown carelessly down, a copy of Rogue on a low table open at Mina Loy’s poem. A flower in a vase, with three paint brushes; an edition of Oscar Wilde, soiled by socialist thumbs. A box of cigarettes, a few painted fans, choice wines (this here the abode of the more prosperous). (NY: 242) This stylised picture of a bohemian studio appears in the middle of Barnes’s ‘Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians’ and continues her double-edged presentation of Greenwich Village to a popular audience. She draws on the usual decadent stereotypes to evoke an avant-garde aura simultaneously ironising such stereotypes and questioning the politics of the avant-garde – their decadent aloofness and epater les bourgeoise stance is the privilege of the ‘more prosperous’. The paragraph immediately following the studio scene presents a cheaper, poorly furnished attic room upstairs that houses an ‘underfed’ writer responsible for copy for a ‘cheap magazine’ and for ‘free verse’. So, how does Mina Loy figure in the scene that Barnes presents? Ostensibly she is a fashionably bohemian ‘name’ in a radical little magazine, but she is also the author of the type of radical ‘free verse’ that could inspire the struggling writer. Loy’s poetry, and her reputation, had arrived in New York long before her actual arrival from Florence in October 1916. Loy had had a range of work published in small American periodicals, submitting (unsuccessfully) some of her early work to Mabel Dodge for publication in The Masses, and through Carl Van Vechten placing pieces in The Trend and Others. Her poem ‘Parturition’ appeared in The Trend (October 1914), her poems, plays and drawings appear in all but two of the issues of Rogue (Allen and Louise Norton’s New York magazine), and the first of her Love Songs appeared in the inaugural issue of Others.15 Loy’s initial American appearance was, however, the publication of her ‘Aphorisms on Futurism’ in Stieglitz’s Camera Work in January 1914, one of the earliest presentations of Italian Futurism to a New York audience. It was this connection to futurism that brought Loy to notice but, as a potentially spectacular woman, she was also almost immediately opened up to the voyeuristic interest of the American public. So George



The modern woman


Cram Cook’s New York gossip column in the Chicago Evening Post in September of that year describes the prominent futurist F. T. Marinetti as a ‘manifesto-writing painter’, his one-time colleague Giovanni Papini as a ‘pragmatist philosopher’ and Loy, who had been involved with both men, as ‘the woman who split the futurist movement’ (1914: 7). He also reports that Loy had wanted to bear Marinetti’s child. ‘The woman who loves Marinetti voiced, albeit a little theatrically, the august desire, so marked in ancient Hebrew literature, to “preserve the seed” of valued men’, Cook wrote, going on to speculate that the child of their union might become ‘an intolerant academician which would be disconcerting to the mother who bore him’ (ibid.) In mythologising his anecdotal material (probably passed on by Loy’s friend Neith Boyce), Cook creates a Mina Loy for the consumption of his American audience. Loy’s Jewishness is emphatically invoked, along with her role as reproductive (and disruptive) woman, producing a character who is fashionably exotic and ‘theatrical’, but ultimately knowable. Loy offers a much more complex, self-analytical, even farcical account of these events in her satiric poem ‘Lions’ Jaws’ (first published in The Little Review, September-December 1920): These amusing men discover in their mail duplicate petitions to be the lurid mother of ‘their’ flabbergast child from Nima Lyo, alias Anim Yol, alias Imna Oly (secret service buffoon to the Woman’s Cause) (LLB: 49) The ‘copy of Rogue on a low table open at Mina Loy’s poem’ in Barnes’s essay may well have been revealing Loy’s ‘war poem’, ‘Babies in Hospital’ (published in Rogue 3:2, November 1916) or another of her ‘flabbergast’ satires ‘Giovanni Franchi’ from the previous month. ‘Giovanni Franchi’ and ‘Sketch of a Man on a Platform’ (also published in Rogue, April 1915) parody the masculinist pose of the Italian Futurists, with ‘Sketch of a Man on a Platform’ most pointedly suggesting the phallic certainty, the ‘absolute physical equilibrium’ of Marinetti (LLB: 19). The poem, as it both reembodies and satirises Marinetti’s ‘genius’, ultimately produces Marinetti as a performing puppet, as Roger Conover describes ‘Marinetti is reduced to an amusing spectacle – Marinetti as marionette’ (LLB: 181, n. 5).



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Such pieces, and Loy’s futurist fame, meant that soon after her arrival in New York. a New York Evening Sun reporter, spurred on by a quest for the ‘ “modern woman” that people are always talking about’, decided to ‘Try Mina Loy; you know she writes free verse and things like that ?’(LLB: 10). The article articulates a specific version of Loy: despite its opening emphasis on ‘free verse’, it focuses mainly on the ‘things like that’ describing her design activities, her appearance and her opinions on America and contemporary femininity. In this the article emphasises a generational split between the ‘grandmother’ who thinks, feels and says ‘according to the rules’ and would be ‘puzzled’ by Loy’s poetry, and ‘the modern’ who ‘flings herself at life and lets herself feel what she does feel’. What is presented is a spectacular modern woman always, picturesquely, ahead of her own time: ‘this lady is always half way through the door into To-morrow she sat in the middle of a harmonious confusion of half dry colours she had been applying to a work of art and read from a yet unpublished, unacted play’. There is a shared perspective with Barnes’s bohemian article negotiations, but where Barnes carefully articulates Greenwich Village to an economic and sexual politics, complicating an easy presentation of avant-garde life, the Evening Sun article attempts to reduce the modern woman and her aesthetic endeavours to a desirable and acceptable form, after all we are told Loy’s ‘Clothes Suggest the Smartest Shops’. Loy’s centrality to a certain conception of trendy, bohemian femininity is reiterated in Clara Tice’s ‘Who’s Who in Manhattan’ drawing in Cartoons (August 1917) which features 13 ‘celebrity’ New York women with Loy, described as ‘Painter-Poet’, amongst Frances Stevens ‘Futurist Painter and Horsewoman’, Beulah Livingston ‘Press Agent’, Betty Turner ‘Actress’ and Lou Arensberg (whose key role is not identified). However, this drawing of Loy can be located in a network of articulations that emphasise the multiple possibilities of the spectacular modern woman, of whom Clara Tice was one. An artist and illustrator, Tice had had work published in Vanity Fair since June 1915, but in March of that year she had been at the centre of a minor sensation when Anthony Comstock (leader of New York Society for the Suppression of Vice) had attempted to seize some of her drawings at a Greenwich Village exhibition. In September 1915 Crowninshield actually published some of the offending nude drawings in Vanity Fair. Tice was both a commercial illustrator and an avant-garde artist, using the same pen and ink, minimal, almost cartoon-like style in each. Her drawings usually featured nude females accompanied by birds, insects and other animals, and her work appeared in most issues of Rogue, while the ‘Who’s Who in Manhattan’





drawing was part of a series of seven contributions to Cartoons magazine between April and October 1917 that also included ‘Leaps and Jumps from the Hits of 1917’ depicting famous dancers (including Isadora Duncan, Waslav Nijinsky and ‘Doyle and Dixon’ from the ‘Century Theater’). Tice is neither mainstream apologist for the avant-garde, nor radical interloper into popular culture but, like Barnes, occupies an ambivalent position of cultural knowingness, presenting a modernism characterised by a pop decadence and an awareness of the exchangevalue of particular cultural currencies. Tice herself, and the modernism she represented, were fully implicated in the populism and popularity of the avant-garde: she appears in a photograph in Vanity Fair in January 1917 with bare arms and a divided skirt, posed in mid-movement, one knee raised, one arm extended, the other holding a cat on a lead; in December 1918 she was designated by Crowninshield as ‘the uncrowned queen of Greenwich Village’.16 Loy’s reputation in Greenwich Village and beyond was also established through a ‘scandalously frank’ artistic production. The first four of her explicit Love Songs to Joannes were published in the opening number of Others (July 1915), with the extended 34-poem sequence appearing as an entire issue of Others in April 1917 (3: 6). The poems provoked intense reactions in their audience. William Carlos Williams, referring to the (in)famous opening poem, recalls: ‘Never shall I forget our fascination with Mina’s “Pig Cupid”, his rosy snout rooting erotic garbage’ (1951: 147). The mainstream American audience was scandalised by such poetry, what one critic termed ‘hoggerel’,17 while Alfred Kreymborg claimed that ‘It took a strong digestive apparatus to read Mina Loy’ (1929: 489). As well as the reality of sex, the Love Songs explore the impact of military technology (and the militaristic technologisation of the human) on the individual subject. Thus several poems are populated by automata, ‘machines’ with ‘steel eyes’ (LLB: 63) or puppets of the ‘WirePuller’ (LLB: 55). The machinic possibilities expressed in Love Songs are easy to articulate to a futurist-inspired celebration of the machine and the techno-speed of the new century. But the technologisation of life (and death) does not open itself up to a single interpretation; like the other becomings released by war that these poems address, the becoming-machinic of Love Songs is an unsettling loss of certainty (and of certain gender roles). This leads, on one line of effect, to the absence of ‘the other thing’ of normative androcentric sex, fertility or pregnancy, and on another to a liberating process of inorganic metamorphosis which is much more than the mechanisation of sex alone. As ‘Poem II’



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relates, the lover is a dysfunctional sex-machine, ‘a clock-work mechanism/ running down against time/ To which I am not paced’ (LLB: 54), while the implication of the sequence is that, moving beyond the stratifications of ego and gender as well as the assemblages of Romance and Tradition, the true machinic phylum might enable genuine ‘incognitos/ In seismic orgasm’ (LLB: 66). Another of Loy’s Others poems, ‘Human Cylinders’ (1917), also explores the possibilities of machinic subjectivity. Again, the ‘human cylinders’ of the poem can be articulated with futurist technophilia, and here the poem is more explicit about its limits. The ‘lucid rushtogether of automatons’ is countered by the ‘singularity’ and ‘absence of reciprocity’ of these ‘simplifications of men’ (LLB: 40). Instead of the ‘indistinctness’ which might signal an escape from molar subjectivities the potentials of inorganic becomings are undermined by a reliance on ‘the absolute’ (LLB: 41), a desire for a mastery, an ‘impartiality’ and complete understanding which, rather than dwelling in, would ‘Destroy the Universe/ With a solution’ (LLB: 41). It is in her involvement with New York Dada that Loy would find a new alternative to the ‘absolute’.

Loy, blind men and mechanomorphic women In New York in autumn 1916 a group of artists and writers, including Walter Arensberg (managing director) and Marcel Duchamp (director of installation), formed the Society of Independent Artists and began organising their first annual exhibition for the following year. The Independents Exhibition would have a ‘no jury – no prizes’ policy, would be open to anyone paying the $6 fee ($1 initiation fee and $5 annual membership) and the exhibits would be arranged, following Duchamp’s suggestion, alphabetically with the first letter picked from a hat (it was ‘R’). The first Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists opened at the Grand Central Palace (on Lexington Avenue) on 10 April 1917 with 2125 exhibits. During its four-week run it received over 20,000 visitors and was extensively covered in New York and other newspapers and magazines. This interest in modern art was not completely novel: the Armory Show of February 1913 had also been extensively covered, with Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase attracting much of the attention.18 Duchamp’s submission to the Independent’s committee in 1917 was to prove as ground-breaking as his (in)famous Nude. As all accounts of New York Dada rehearse, Duchamp anonymously submitted a commonplace urinal, signed by ‘R. Mutt’19 and entitled Fountain (Figure 1) in what is generally seen as an attempt to test the democratic




Figure 1 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917; photograph by Alfred Steiglietz. © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP Paris and DACS London, 2006. Photograph courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale

principles of the Committee. Fountain was refused and so sparked a debate which was prominent in the short-lived little magazine The Blind Man (founded to discuss and support the Independents exhibition), and which resonates through art history. Fountain has become an iconic symbol of Duchamp’s ironic negotiation of the ‘aura’ of the art object, the sanctification of the artist and the forces of mass-production, guaranteeing his status as the Dada-daddy of postmodern and pop art.




The initial issue of The Blind Man (10 April 1917) presents manifesto statements by Henri Pierre Roché, Beatrice Wood and Mina Loy about the role of the Independents in an American artistic revolution (both Wood and Loy had pieces in the exhibition). In general it foregrounds the need to connect the public with contemporary art (the public is represented on the front cover as a blind man being led by a dog past a modern-art nude) and the naïve vision required to understand this art. Wood and Loy are less iconoclastic than Roché in their contributions. Wood offers a ‘Dream of a Picture Hanger’ in which s/he is unable to escape the multiple canvases by artists named Schmidt and is caught up in a flood that ‘swamped all the first floor’ and brings ‘blue arms and green legs’ floating past (1917: 7). Loy’s ‘In Formation’ presents the similarities between ‘The Artist’ and ‘The Public’, a public who ‘knew before the Futurists that Life is a jolly noise and a rush and sequence of ample reactions’, and suggests that the two can meet ‘at every point except that of pure uneducated seeing’ (1917a: 7). The pages of the second (and last) issue of The Blind Man focus on ‘The Richard Mutt Case’, with Alfred Steiglitz’s photograph of Fountain accompanying Louise Norton’s defence of the piece, ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’. Also included in the second issue of The Blind Man are Walter Arensberg, Francis Picabia, Alfred Steiglitz, Mina Loy, Charles Demuth, Robert Carlton Brown, Clara Tice, Joseph Stella and Frank Crowninshield, and many of their contributions highlight Fountain’s articulation of mass-production, technology and the quotidian or ‘found’. Joseph Stella’s Coney Island (full title Battle of Lights, Coney Island) a colourful futurist oil painting of the movement and noise of Coney Island, is reproduced, while Arensberg’s poems ‘Axiom’ and ‘Theorem’ combine the languages of mathematics and technology with poetry, ‘Theorem’ in particular deploying the language of physics and photography to evoke the materialisation of ‘an emotion’ in the ‘three dimensions’ of human existence (1917: 9). Crowninshield, in a reflection of Vanity Fair’s correlations of popular cultural forms with the modernist endeavour, explicitly applauds: ‘an American art which shall truly represent our age, even if the age is one of telephones, submarines, aeroplanes, cabarets, cocktails, taxicabs, divorce courts, wars, tangos, dollar signs’ (1917: 10), while Demuth’s short poem, ‘For Richard Mutt’, emphasises the processual over the terminal in art: ‘For the going every thing has an idea./ The going run right along./ The going just keep going’ (1917: 6). Loy’s contributions are an ‘interview’ with Louis Eilshemius, the ‘eccentric American visionary painter’ (Naumann and Venn, 1996: 11) discovered by Duchamp at the Independents Exhibition, and ‘O Marcel - - - otherwise




I Also Have Been to Louise’s’ (1917b: 14–15), a word collage of bohemian New York chatter. As the attribution indicates, ‘O Marcel’ is ‘Compiled by Mina Loy’, pointing to the ‘found’ aspect of this piece which, in its repetitions and variations shares formal grounds with Stein’s verbal portraits (and in doing so highlights the importance of Stein for the linguistic explorations of New York Dada). ‘O Marcel’ presents overlapping and interweaving conversations as the speakers enjoy an evening in a Bohemian haunt. The piece, self-conscious in its action of recording – ‘She can’t write it down anyway’ (1917b: 15) – details drinking and eating, snippets of anecdotes, and casual interactions, and mentions avant-garde characters – Marcel (Duchamp), Louise (Norton), (Charles) Demuth, Carol (Van Vechten) and Clara (Tice) – but also Billy Sunday (the charismatic baseball player turned evangelist): ‘is that Billy Sunday. One should have an additional star Billy Sunday’ (15). Thus, the avant-garde are not an elite group of ‘stars’, perhaps they are even popularisers of the ineffable (like Sunday), and are shown to engage in gossip, rather than highflown aesthetic or political discussion: indeed a potential epiphany, ‘Ah this is, this is, this is, is IT’(ibid.: 14) could also be the enjoyment of a much-needed drink. The conversations are also interlaced with repeated ambiguous sexual references, such as to ‘tongue sandwiches’ (‘I want some tongue I will give you some – but don’t do too much what? Suck it’ (14)), and to dubious desires or sexual escapades: ‘you have to squeeze it, maid of the - - - ’, ‘I give you my key Clara’ (14), ‘You know those two girls are crazy about that man, they mustn’t’ (15). The presence of Demuth, who went on to produce overtly homosexual art, in the conversation demonstrates that such desires are not just promiscuous heterosexuality, and there is even the strong possibility of financial aspects to the sex: ‘Well don’t do that because I am perfectly sober now - - - that’s the kid he looks like - . It will probably cost me very much’ (14). ‘O Marcel’ offers disruptions to the American status quo not through an explicit epater les bourgeois stance, or a rigid demarcation between high and popular culture, but through a destruction of boundaries, order and division, a disturbance of the stratification of culture and the decoding of desire within an androcentric framework. Thus America as ideal of democratic order and progress, figuring in the piece as the American stars and stripes, is exposed to the irrational: ‘Don’t let your flag get wet’ (15). ‘O Marcel’ can also be taken as an accurate transcription of the type of events that surrounded the Independents exhibition and New York Dada in general. Many critics have acknowledged the extent to




which bohemia in New York in the nineteenth-century teens revolved around the excessive consumption of alcohol and drugs (cocaine and cannabis), partying at Greenwich Village venues and fancy-dress balls, and intense sexual activities and liaisons. The ‘Ultra Bohemian, PreHistoric, Post Alcoholic’ ‘Blind Man’s Ball’ (advertised in the second issue of The Blind Man) was held in Webster Hall on Friday 25 May 1917, at which Duchamp got drunk and climbed a flag-pole, ending the evening in his studio bed sleeping with Mina Loy, Charles Demuth and Beatrice Wood. The Independents Exhibition also hosted events such as the poetry reading by Maxwell Bodenheim, Harry Kemp, Mina Loy, Allen Norton, Pitts Sanborn and William Carlos Williams, Robert Coady’s talk on recent American Film, a lecture on psychiatry entitled ‘Are Cubists Insane?’, and Arthur Cravan’s (soon to become Mina Loy’s second husband) infamous ‘lecture’ on 19 April when he started to undress before his audience and was escorted from the Grand Central Palace.20 But ‘O Marcel’ is not actually a piece of journalism, it plays with the status of the report, particularly in a reference to ‘yellow paper’ (1917b: 14) (recalling sensational yellow journalism) and the concern ‘Did you put the pronunciation down’ (15), in order to confuse rather than claim the authority of journalistic reportage. This is again bringing avantgarde modernism into propinquity with mass-culture, demonstrating the fluency of their dialogue with each other, but it is also foregrounding the ‘found’ nature of the material – the quotidian, unaestheticised stuff of which it is composed. In this ‘O Marcel’ shares with Fountain an interest in the ‘ready-made’ as art form: Duchamp’s Fountain can be classed with his other ready-mades and ‘rectified ready-mades’ of the nineteenth-century teens, the first of which was Bicycle Wheel (assembled 1913, termed a ready-made by Duchamp in 1915), a wheel and forks inverted and mounted on a stool and the In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), described in The Evening World (4 April 1916) as ‘Big Shiny Shovel Is the Most Beautiful Thing’.21 These objects are usually read as radical critiques of bourgeois values in their confusion of the distinction of industrial (mass-produced) and aesthetic (the work of an individual creator), of the institutions of art (in a proto-postmodern vein), or of capitalism and consumption (in a Marxian mode). However, I would want to concur with Amelia Jones who argues that in the ready-mades: ‘Duchamp negotiates the treacherous contradictions laid out by the very notion of avant-garde practice and points to the fact that any artistic practice is necessarily embedded in the same value systems (economic and otherwise) that structure bourgeois capitalism the ambivalence of




the ready-mades vis-á-vis industrialism and capitalism makes them important’ (2004: 141). The ready-mades can be seen as ambivalent interpretations and negotiations of the impact of mass-production on the material and aesthetic culture of America. In this they are machinic art, both literally (as technologically produced objects) and in their exploration of the territoriality and interdependence of ‘human’ existence, exploring a subjectivity beyond the frame of the anthropocentric humanistic subject. The machine as a governing paradigm for modern culture is one of the stratifications that concerns New York Dada, indeed as Barbara Zabel describes ‘the displacement of God by the machine became a defining attribute of New York Dada (1996: 281). Duchamp’s own explorations of the machinic are explicitly gendered and can be seen from Nude Descending a Staircase onwards. In this picture the cubistic form of the nude superimposed in a sequence of ‘descents’ recalls the photographic studies in Muybridge’s 1884–85 Animal Locomotion and Barbara Zabel sees it as ‘a kind of Dada automaton – both a humanized machine and a mechanized human – thereby acknowledging how profoundly human beings have been affected by the omnipresence of the machine’ (ibid.: 281). Duchamp also created his own techno-identities through photographic (technological) representations and performances. The most well know of these is ‘Rrose Sélavy’, Duchamp cross-dressed and photographed by Man Ray (Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, 1920–21). The relationship between these stills and Charlie Chaplin’s cross-dressing performance in A Woman (1915) have been noted (Naumann, and Venn, 1996: 25), but what I wish to emphasise is the technological nature of the gender confusion that Duchamp enacts, one impossible to realise, as with Muybridge’s photographs of human and animal movement or indeed Chaplin’s persona, without the advanced visual technologies of the early twentieth century. Rrose, an example of Duchamp’s ‘aggressive dislocations of traditional categories of masculinity and femininity’ (Jones, 1994: 204), is also a negotiation of the association of women with commodities, a self-conscious attempt to challenge the construction of women as both the irrational consumers of modernity and the sex-objects of modern masculine desires. Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass) (1915–23) also negotiates gender and sexuality in the machine-age, offering a bride-motor separated from the bachelor-machines below her. As Amelia Jones discusses, Large Glass is a ‘huge mechanized “portrait” of the impossibility of consummation, the breakdown of gender relations, and heterosexual erotic exchange, but it explores rather than represses




the ambivalence that structures the engagements and clanking “flows” of industrial-erotic energies, an ambivalence that threatens always to rupture their clear path to “production” (which utopically seeks to replace the mess of procreation)’ (ibid.: 241). The non-productive, onanistic facet of the Large Glass is crucial to the machinic becomings that it poses. In the presentation of the ‘celibate machine’ in the Large Glass, Duchamp produces what Deleuze and Guattari directly describes as a ‘new machine’ which achieves ‘autoerotic’ or ‘automatic’ pleasure, producing a ‘new alliance’ in which the ‘eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces’ (1984: 19). Duchamp’s explorations of gender, technology and machine-age portraiture are far from solitary in New York Dada; they are produced alongside an abundance of mecanomorphic portraits which seek to represent the American new woman. A particular figure, the jeune fille américaine – active, agile, athletic young women such as Anne Oakley and Mary Pickford – was important to the Dadaist impulse long before Duchamp and Picabia actually came to America. She was ‘the personification of the new century many artists and writers linked their own sense of radical liberation from tradition with that of the young American girl’ (Zabel, 1996: 282) and she ‘had a particular presence among the Parisian avant-garde’s earliest speculations about an alluring, exotic New York’ (Turner, 1998: 5). That the American woman was not just an image or archetype, that real radical and liberated women frequented the places of avant-garde New York such as Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery or the Arensberg’s apartment should be acknowledged and the machinewomen that New York Dada produced can be articulated with these real women and their real affects. The artist Man Ray, in his 1918 photographs Homme (Man) and Femme (Woman) presents a confusion of genders. Homme (entitled Femme in one print) is an egg-beater and Femme two photographer’s light reflectors attached to a glass plate that has six clothes pegs fastened to it; both pieces emerge in a milieu in which the association of women with domestic and reproductive functions had visibly been broken by the women who frequented the varied spaces of New York. It is the French artist, Francis Picabia, in New York in 1913, 1915 and 1917, who most obsessively negotiates the unnatural new women of New York. Picabia’s 1915 drawing Fille née sans mère (Girl born without a mother; see Figure 2) presents a peculiar blend of machinery and the organic with the rounded shapes (buttocks, breasts, eyes?) hardly attached to a set of sketchy springs and gears; ‘she’ actually seems to be a non-functioning organic-techno fusion. Picabia’s mechanistic




drawing removes the ‘girl-machine’ from the realm of normal procreative processes reproducing her through the frameworks of American industrialism, ‘she’ is produced free from her/the mother and is made instantly available for the production of erotic pleasure. The decoding and capture of the feminine-as-machine that is attempted in Fille née sans mère is more fully achieved in Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (Portrait of a young American

Figure 2 Francis Picabia, Fille née sans mère (Girl Born Without a Mother) (pen and ink on paper) 1915. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art; © ADAGP Paris and DACS London, 2006






girl in the state of nudity) from the same period (July – August, 1915, 291 Gallery, see Figure 3). Here Picabia has taken the functional representation of a spark-plug (repeating contemporary advertising for the Red Head Priming Plug) and offered it as a mecanomorphic young American

Figure 3 Francis Picabia, Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity), from July–August 1915 issue of 291; © ADAGP Paris and DACS London, 2006


girl with the straight lines reflecting the dress fashions of the time. It clearly suggests the jeune fille américaine as the catalyst or spark for modernisation: she is a mass-produced part, the heart of the Ford revolution, with the insignia ‘FOR-EVER’ promising perpetual activity and satisfaction. But rather than ‘liberating’ woman from reductive representations Picabia’s ‘young American girl’ is fixed as an image and object of and for mass-consumption. A later piece by Picabia, Americaine (1917; a drawing of a light bulb with the words ‘Flirt’ and ‘Divorce’ on the glass bulb) makes the ambivalence about the modern American woman even clearer: the inspiration or enlightenment she may offer is tempered by her threats to the androcentric sexual status quo. The link to massproduction and consumption is unavoidable – like the spark-plug, the light bulb is a cheap, modern technological object.22 That liberated women, the flows of mass-culture and the forces of consumerism are articulated in regressive and consolidatory ways by Picabia and others does not mean that they cannot be reconfigured in alternative ways, ones which highlight the limits and potentials of the mecanomorphic speculations of New York Dada. Loy’s poem ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’ clearly deals with the economic objectification and repression of women through a supposedly natural state (virginity), and its appearance in Rogue (2:1, 15 August 1915) faces Clara Tice’s seemingly incidental Virgin Minus Verse: the result is a doublepage spread (Figure 4) which deliberately articulates with other ways of understanding the natural–unnatural dichotomy as it relates to, and is undermined by, liberated women. ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’ offers many possible points of articulation: to Marinetti’s call to ‘Abolish all punctuation’ and use ‘mathematical signs’ in the ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’ (the mathematical symbols invoked in the title, + −, are an implicit part of the text of the poem); to a multilingual pun of ‘dots’, the French term for dowries with ‘dough’, the American slang for money; to actual dots (full-stops, ellipsis) which figure in the poem as the censored reality of sex. The Virgins are indoctrinated with a myth of Romance which they can never achieve, but which must suffice the physical urges of their bodies. The myth of Love, the lacy lingerie that disguises the fact of sex, is all these Virgins can hope for but can never achieve – they have no ‘dough’ and so will never have that which the ‘dots’ buys, signifies, and completes. Caught by the double bind of dominant ideology and economic hegemony, the Virgins are condemned to a cloistered, repressed existence. They are the victims of the fictitious value of Virginity, where virginity is revealed as the ultimate commodity fetish;





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Figure 4 August 15 1915 issue of Rogue (2:1) pages 10 and 11, showing Mina Loy’s ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’, © Mina Loy Estate, and Clara Tice’s Virgin Minus Verse. Photograph courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale

though endowed with supposed essential value (as intact, untouched and pure), its actual value is purely monetary and its meaning artificial. Loy’s poem, in its double-page format, is also articulated with Clara Tice’s drawing Virgin Minus Verse, and the juxtaposition between the poem and the drawing produces a multiple representation of unnatural womanhood. Tice’s drawing offers a corsetless young girl, enjoying her freedom from constraining underwear.23 Tice’s Virgin disturbs binaries, a liberated (and so ‘unnatural’) virgin (the epitome of traditional, natural feminine restraint), in contrast to Picabia who presents instead the traditionally artificial woman enshrined at the heart of the machine of the modern artist. Moreover, the title of Tice’s drawing – Virgin Minus Verse – reworks an interesting cultural trend of the time that is highlighted by Francis Naumann in the Introduction to his New York Dada (1994). An articulation was made between the invention of the bra (supposedly by Mary Phelps Jacob in New York in 1913) and the release of women’s bodies that it allowed, and the ongoing experiments in free-verse forms that dominated the small avant-garde magazines of New York. So for example, Emanuel Julius’s New York Call article on Robert Carlton Brown’s poetry (20 June 1915) was entitled ‘This Summer’s Style in Poetry, or the Elimination of Corsets in Versifying’. Avant-garde poetry without restraints and the cultural resonances of a fashion for corsetlessness are an interesting articulation to follow from the Loy/Tice double-page. If a change in fashion can redefine women’s bodies, undermining the ideal hourglass shape that embodied femininity in the nineteenth century, and a change in poetic form can expose the arbitrariness of traditional forms of literature, perhaps the artificiality of the virgin body can also be revealed, thereby making visible the inorganic, technological woman.

Cyborg-women making Dada The links between women and technology predate the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ at the end of the nineteenth century, but in the projection and representation of the New Woman in the Anglo-American world her specific association with new technology such as the bicycle is prominent.24 The visibility of the New Woman cyclist, in her divided skirt, can be connected to another increasingly visible fin-de-siècle technological woman, the Typist, who was imagined and represented within ongoing discourses about women’s independence, their sexuality and their relationship to technology, often with an attendant ‘uncertainty about the typewriter as a technology of emancipation’ (Shiach, 2000: 122).25 Typing,




like cycling, seems to offer liberation and independence, but it simultaneously challenges the traditional role of women in an androcentric (heterosexual, reproductive) sexual economy. Marcel Duchamp’s own acknowledgement of the changed position of the New Woman and her affinity with technology is demonstrated in two of his ready-mades which deploy the technology associated with her: Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Traveller’s Folding Item (1916), an Underwood typewriter cover held up by a stand that gestures, by the very hole under its ‘skirt’, to the presence of the female typist. The New Woman and her technological affinities exemplify the machinic interruptions of desire, interruptions and productions which fundamentally exceed the molar organisations of the bourgeois family and the normative functions of androcentric sex. She/it is a cyborg figure, what Felski typifies as an ‘uncanny blurring of conventional systems of binary classification; both organism and machine, animate yet inanimate’ (Felski, 1995: 198); she/it is undergoing a meta(l)morphosis which positions the human body ‘in the space between the traditional dichotomies, including the body-machine binary opposition’ (Braidotti, 2002: 228). The cyborg is a contradictory creature that undoes the ideals of organic wholeness and technological perfection. Across the cyborg, self and other, human and animal, natural and artificial are blurred, pointing towards an anti-essentialist paradigm for the specificity of women. Donna Haraway’s late twentieth-century ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ describes the cyborg as ‘resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity’ that ‘has no origin story’ (1991: 151), a ‘creature of social reality as well as a creature of science fiction’ (149) who concerns ‘lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints’ (154). That cyborg women disrupt the majoritarian structures and modes of the Western, masculine subject can be seen in the very fact that theory (psychoanalysis) and literature alike attempt to control her as a libidinal object or draw her back into an oedipalised story of castration. So, just as psychoanalysis emerges in an attempt to hysterisise the becomingwoman and the diagnosis of hysteria spreads across the variety of becomings and deterritorialisations that the Great War triggers, so does literature and art produce controllable women-machines. In Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve (1886), a fictionalised inventor ‘Edison’ creates the android ‘Hadalay’, a simulacrum with a finite number of movements, gestures and conversations (recorded on phonograph) to replace the all-too-human ‘Alicia Clary’. As the essence of the fundamental artificiality and limitedness of femininity




she improves on the ‘real’ thing and is also a technology that releases men from their enslavement to ‘real’ femininity: Hadalay is the incarnation of the fetishised, commodified female sex. However, ever present within this text is the fear of Hadalay’s potentially emasculating and disruptive power – she is an artefact, but in replacing Alicia Clary she becomes a subject – and so the text obsessively dissects, controls and ultimately destroys this ‘Future Eve’. Villiers’s Edison is an imagined one, rather than an accurate biographical sketch but as Gaby Wood points out ‘Villiers’s story had a factual counterpart’ (2002: 144) in Thomas Edison’s patent and production of a talking doll. Early designs for the doll were exhibited at the 1878 Paris Exposition along with his Grand Prize-winning phonograph, and ‘Edison’s Talking Doll’ went into production in 1889 in the huge machine shop at West Orange, New Jersey. Its body, which housed the miniature phonograph that ‘spoke’ one of a selection of nursery rhymes, was produced out of six different metal pieces attached to a Germanmade head, and wooden limbs and appendages from other parts of America. Wood describes a scene in which ‘eighteen young girls, each with her own cubicle, sat speaking into the machines, recording the words the dolls were to say’ (ibid.: 121). On such a Fordist production line the distinctions, not only between worker and machine, but between woman, machine, producer, product and machine-woman are fundamentally elided in a confusion of boundaries and identities: as a contemporary observer wrote ‘these sounds [of the girls speaking] united with the sounds of the phonographs themselves when reproducing the stories make a veritable pandemonium’ (ibid.: 121). The talking dolls were not a financial success, but nevertheless present a very voluble set of connections between femininity, technology and mass-culture. Edison, the pioneer of the American technological sublime, the exemplary engineer-inventor-hero, devoted an enormous amount of time, energy and resources to creating and marketing this mass-produced mechanised woman. Perhaps, as Wood suggests, he ‘privately thought of women as perfectible creatures, machines or products’ (2002: 145), and was realising Villiers’s fictional enterprise. In an article for Good Housekeeping in October 1913, ‘The Woman of the Future’, Edison does argue that electricity ‘will develop woman to that point where she can think straight’,26 but he is not simply echoing a desire to improve on the real thing. As Good Housekeeping, the Ladies Home Journal and other magazines of the early twentieth century reveal in their features and advertisements, the prosthetic, technological




enhancements of the machine-age were a visible and affective factor in the traditionally feminine (nurturing, natural) space of the domestic. Both texts and real manifestations of the New Woman’s affinity with technology express the ambiguities of the real/artificial, natural/technological divide: what the linking of woman–machine suggests is that there is no ‘real’ thing to improve on, only a process, a becoming-woman/becoming-machine which produces radically new subjectivities beyond the humanist models of self and the anthropomorphic figure of the productive machine. In the Deleuzian sense the ‘machinic’ is not a unitary figure to defuse the threat of the machine by establishing its metaphorical correspondence to organic systems and bodies (the ‘naturalistic’ approach to the machine), nor is it a teleology of transcendence; the ‘machinic’ expresses ‘the co-extensivity of the body with its environment or territory’ the ‘collective and interdependent’ status of the organism (Braidotti, 2002: 227). As a subject to challenge the majoritarian models of identity and the body, the Deleuzian cyborg presents a radical escape from the rigid models of phallogocentrism. However, the articulations of women and machine are, necessarily, contingent and inessential – conjunctions that have to be made meaningful, do not pre-exist the action of articulation and can provoke a gendered anxiety. For many artists of New York Dada, the New Woman’s disruption of boundaries produced apprehensions about the uncontrollable flows of commodity culture projected onto the female body-machine. Their cyborg-femininities function to reterritorialise the multiplicity of woman and of desire, to refuse to embrace the multiple possibilities of unnatural identity. Duchamp may offer a less fearful response to the circuits of desire that modernity puts into play, but it is by turning to some of the actual, unnatural women of New York Dada, like Loy and Tice, that the full possibilities of machinic femininity can be activated. With studies such as Naomi Sawelson-Gorse’s Women in Dada (1998), New York Dada has been reconfigured: the key role of women in this modernist moment is now recognised. Pre-existing accounts emphasised the articulations between key male figures – Man Ray and Duchamp, Picabia and Steiglitz – or demonstrated a male tradition emerging from the ‘Skyscraper Primitives’ of New York Dada – W. C. Williams, e e cummings, Charles Scheeler.27 Now it is possible to make a different set of connections, between Beatrice Wood, Katherine Nash Rhoades, Juliette Roche, Katherine Dreier, Clara Tice, Mina Loy, Baroness Elsa and Djuna Barnes, which enable a different reading of the mechanics and productions of New York Dada.




Beatrice Wood, Mina Loy and Clara Tice all exhibited work at the 1917 Independents Exhibition, all contributed to The Blind Man and all produced work that commented in particular ways on the construction of female identity, her relationship to mass-culture and the avant-garde, and the liberation of the unnatural New Woman. Wood’s art denaturalises iconic femininity; her Un peut d’eau dans du savon (A Little Water in Some Soap) – a painting of a voluptuous nude torso with a real piece of scalloped-shaped soap nailed over the pubic area28 – was the succès de scandale of the Independents Exhibition. The painting articulates with, and comments on, the whole Western Art tradition of the idealised nude, in particular, as Paul B. Franklin points out, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1485), and puts this in proximity to the female consumer of mass-market beauty products (the soap bar). Venus, the iconic ‘girl born without a mother’, is revealed as a sexual commodity (‘I am worth $800 dollars’ muses Wood as she becomes her canvas in her The Blind Man essay ‘Dream of a Picture Hanger’) produced within and for a masculinist Imaginary. But in revealing this icon as an assemblage, Wood also reveals how the forces and flows that are captured in the ‘nude’ can be reconfigured or released, instigated by the tide of technological production and consumerism that sweeps away the supposed ‘nature’ of woman : ‘I was a piece of soap with nails in my back stuck on a canvas. A big flood came I too, must melt’ (1917: 7). Other Dada women are explicit about the role of the technological in modern identity and the possible liberations of the machinic. The artist Katherine N. Rhoades, nominated in the ‘List of Presidents of the Dada Movement’ in the Berlin Dada Almanack (1921) (along with Mina Lloyd [sic]), had work published in Steiglitz’s Camera Work and collaborated with Marius de Zayas and Agnes Ernst Meyer on a visual poem, Woman in the May 1915 issue of 291. In the next issue of 291, which had a John Marin Skyscraper on the front cover with Picabia’s Fille née sans mere on the inside, Rhoades published the poem ‘Flip-Flap’. This piece implicitly compares the audience listening to a piano solo to riders on a rollercoaster: the ‘Flip-Flap’ was the first loop-the-loop roller-coaster in America, opened at Sea Lion Park (bought and amalgamated into Luna Park) in 1895. The audience in Rhoades’s ‘Flip-Flap’ are ‘cringing, countless,/ round heads, and shapeless – and hair upon hair – and hats – and heads again’ immersed in the ‘whirl and swirl’ of the music.29 All the speaker can posit is ‘A Laugh!’, ‘an inversion – a revision’ which turns the situation on its head. The ‘Laugh’ could function as ‘anti-art’ Dada rhetoric, as Tashjian suggests (1965: 36). But if this laugh is articulated to the roller-coaster Flip-Flap ride, it brings popular culture (the Coney




Island Ride) in conjunction with High Art (the piano recital): the seriousness of the audience’s response is undermined; they might as well be enjoying a fair-ground ride. In ‘Flip-Flap’ the ludic potentials of technology, the gratuitous flows of pleasure and play, counter an elitism of art. That this alternative might have its own dangers in terms of an absence of a closure and a complete loss of self is expressed in the final lines: ‘Could I ever stop?/ Who’s laughing?’ In her work Juliette Roche poses herself as an observer of, as well as participant in, New York Dada, challenging traditional gender roles and manufacturing a cyborg identity. Her visual poems from 1917– 19, published together in Demi Circle (1920), draw their material from the avant-garde circles of New York. In ‘N’Existe Pas Pôle Tempéré’ an evening at the Arensbergs’s salon is recorded with ‘H.P.R’ (Henri Pierre Roche) and ‘M.D.’ (Duchamp) placed either side of a pictorial rendition of a chess board. Vertically down the right-hand side of the page is the word ‘Kodak’, in which the eye of the observer and the technology of observation are conflated. As Burke notes, ‘the theme of the observer as recording device [is] enhanced by the typeface and positioning of “KODAK” – the camera eye’ (1998: 564). In Roche’s ‘Brevoort’ (1917) snatches of conversation in French and English are dynamically arranged on a page which has a central black triangle. The poem offers an evening in this Greenwich Village haunt where art, war and sex are discussed and, in one section, a ‘pientre’ says, ‘Je vois, elle est un manometer!’ This phrase seemingly identifies the observer/author of the poem with a device for recording pressure, again offering a mechanised observer/recorder as the poet.30 What Roche’s poems present is a mechanical woman who can register the masculinist and majoritarian contradictions of the New York avant-garde. It is the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, however, who extends the cyborg potentials of New York Dada into a lived transgression of the boundaries of human–animal–machine, walking the streets of New York with shaved and painted scalp, headdresses made of birdcages or a coal-scuttle, celluloid curtain rings as bracelets, assorted teaballs attached to her bust, spoons to her hat, an electric tail-light to her bustle. Her appropriation of the objects of consumer culture and massproduction, her prosthetic enhancement of her form through such artefacts, the supplementing and transformation of her body through the technological detritus of the New York streets, mark out her distinctive response to her contemporary context as a ludic embodiment of the mechanomorphic acts of New York Dada. Her ‘lived body satirically engaged the male-centered machine fantasies by planting the technolo-




gical and consumer items on her performing body, grafting them alongside organic matter, including gilded vegetables’ (Gammel, 2003: 196). Baroness Elsa’s poetry parodies the omnipotence of an American technological teleology, considers how the consumer products of a modern America confuse and blur the integrity of the human form and mocks the American fixation on feminine purity and virginity, a fixation that extends to the work of New York avant-gardists such a Picabia and Duchamp. In this, as Amelia Jones points out, the Baroness ‘exposes the “flagrant illogic” of such attempts (through “freak” notions such as virginity) to control and channel the flux of human (and perhaps particularly female) desire’ (Jones, 2004: 155).31 As well as her performative inscriptions and writing of poetry the Baroness constructed artefacts, such as God (1917), a twisted piece of iron plumbing set on a carpenter’s mitre box, and Limbswish (c.1920), a metal spring encircling a curtain tassel suspended on a wire that she wore from her belt. Baroness Elsa was lauded, however briefly, in The Little Review (where her work was published from 1918–22): in the pages of this magazine in 1922 its editor Jane Heap claimed ‘the Baroness is the first American Dada’.32 Djuna Barnes was to form a close relationship with the Baroness in the 1920s, trying vainly to find her the financial support she needed and collecting her papers and reminiscences for publication. But already in 1922, as Dada became more recognised by the international avant-garde and The Little Review presented a Picabia number and one on Joseph Stella, Baroness Elsa was being marginalised in the pages of this magazine and in the avant-garde circles of New York, Berlin and Paris. She died penniless and despite Barnes’s work on a ‘Baroness Elsa’ biography through the 1930s and attempts to get her poetry published, the Baroness was to slip into footnoted obscurity for many years.33 In her use of commodity objects and the detritus of techno-modernity, in both poetry and visual art, Baroness Elsa produces the body as an assemblage of prosthetic components and denaturalises identity into a processual interplay between artificially enhanced bodies and tools made organic. Amelia Jones associates the Baroness with other transgressive figures in New York Dada – Charles Demuth and Arthur Cravan – but rather than articulating the Baroness to an essentially ‘queer’ aesthetic’ here, it is the machinic, cyborg facets of the Baroness and her work that are important for this reading of New York Dada. By engaging with, reusing, rearticulating the mass-commodities, and commodity detritus of machine-age America, Baroness Elsa offers a radically new way of imagining the ‘fashionable’ woman, a woman




re-fashioned, not formed in the image of a teleology of modernity and progress: like other women in New York in the 1910s, she disarticulated the New Woman and rearticulated her and the transformations and manufacture of femininity to the radically denaturalised flows of the modern. In Barnes’s work on the New York avant-garde these denaturalised flows are of importance, particularly in unsettling the divisions of high and low, and between the feminine spectacle and her audience. Loy also seeks to disarticulate Woman from a supposedly natural role or form and, like Barnes, investigates the fuzzy boundaries between massand avant-garde culture as both are caught up in and produced by the machinic assemblages of ‘New York’. As women in this modern city, Loy, Barnes and their female peers confronted the possibility of fashioning a Modern Woman liberated by the technological forces of the twentieth century.




Fashions for Genius and the Flâneur: A Guide to Paris

Paris in the 1920s has largely come to epitomise a particular conception of High Modernism, or the consolidation and extension of some of the key cultural and aesthetic ideas and practices of the early twentiethcentury modernist avant-garde. From the Dada festival in Paris, to the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses, to Natalie Barney’s rue Jacob salon, postwar Paris becomes the space across which memoirs, autobiographies, newspaper articles and academic treatises inscribe a particular version of modernism that highlights the expatriate, urban experience. As a site of strategic articulations, Paris is a useful focus for a consideration of the relationship between certain social and ideological tendencies and the contingent practices and contiguities of post-war modernism. As both a geographical location and a discursive construct, it is through using ‘Paris’ that this chapter will read across the texts and contexts in which Barnes, Loy and Stein engage with key (modernist) ideas of genius and the city. The iconoclastic Dadaists in New York during the war years explicitly embraced, or were at times at least in dialogue with, mass-cultural production in both its material forms and cultural manifestations (in advertising, consumerism and so on). As the previous chapter has shown, this can, but does not necessarily, lead to a deterritorialisation of the role and representation of women in culture, thus highlighting at the very least that there is no inevitable link between certain cultural practices that are making themselves and the ideologies which make intelligible the process being undergone. New York Dada is neither anti-bourgeois nor anti-feminine, though at specific points the coalescence of certain forces makes such ideological statements tenable. The Parisian avant-garde, as it has been characterised both at the time and in subsequent accounts, may appear more consistent; a consensus exists 118



4

that this productive space enabled generalised ideas of originality and freedom underpinned by a strong opposition to bourgeois culture and institutions. Its attraction to young writers such as Ernest Hemingway lay in the belief that new and original culture and experiences could be found and produced in this artistic capital: to be a struggling writer in Paris was both easier (given the weakness of the French currency at the time) and more acceptable (there was a pre-existing community and tradition of bohemian, modern Paris), and it was already the home of iconically uncommmercial writers such as Gertrude Stein. However, as Stein’s own ‘popular’ patriotic (pro-French) war poems published in Vogue (March 1919) demonstrate, it may be difficult to maintain the separation between modernism and commercialism that seems to characterise Paris of the 1920s. Lawrence Rainey points to a ‘space in which modernism and commodity culture were not implacable enemies but fraternal rivals’ (1998: 76). The many memoirs of Paris – including Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle’s Being Geniuses Together (1938), Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964), Natalie Barney’s Adventures de l’esprit (1929) and Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) – reveal how Paris modernism is discursively constructed and marketed to and for an external audience. Janet Flanner’s fortnightly ‘Paris Letter’ in the New Yorker was an obvious vehicle for the presentation of a version of cosmopolitan Paris to an international audience of prospective tourists. Writing about gossip and celebrity, commercial enterprises and the avant-garde in a single letter, Flanner’s journalism offers a spectacular Paris ‘from the eye of the dallying, cosmopolitan flâneur’, (Parsons, 2000: 153), a world where modernist literature and art co-exist with fashion, society events and mass-cultural forms. Flanner’s textual position is of the exemplary expatriate ‘both at home and abroad’(ibid.: 155) in a Paris of the Left Bank: walking in the Place St-Germain des Prés, relaxing in Les Deux Magots, and mixing with her expatriate colleagues Hemingway, Dos Passos, Pound, e. e. cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Djuna Barnes.

Modernism, urbanism and genius At the end of Joyce’s archetypal modernist Künstlerroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus prepares to go into exile, to ‘discover the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom’ (1992: 267). And it was in July 1920 that Joyce arrived in Paris from Trieste, still looking for a confirmed publisher for Ulysses. The ‘unfettered’ artistic expression described by Joyce required both the metaphorical and actual freedom of exile and urban existence.



Fashions for Genius 119

For Malcolm Bradbury, the modern artist is an artist of the international city and he highlights the importance of ‘urban redefinition’ in the modernist künstlerroman. Ultimately ‘the writer himself [sic] becomes a member of a wandering, culturally inquisitive group – by enforced exile or by design and desire’ (Bradbury, 1976: 101). It is this sense of cross-cultural expatriate existence that underlies the independence of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus as well as the singularity of Pound’s ‘Serious Artist’. Critics such as Raymond Williams emphasise the ‘formal’ impact of the city on modernism, where it functions less as a location and more as an ontological condition (Williams, 1985), and for Donald Pizer ‘Paris to the expatriate writer is above all a state of mind.’ (1996: 142). But whether as site, form of consciousness or as aesthetic, the city plays a crucial role in notions and definitions of modernism. The influence of Baudelaire looms large over the 1920s Parisian avantgarde, not necessarily because of any direct lineage, but because of his textual production of a certain mode of urban being. The flâneur’s experience of the modern city, as a wandering stranger, provides the structures of desire and identification through which the celebrated modernist writers encountered the cities of the early twentieth century. Baudelaire’s ‘man of the crowd’ is a spectator; he observes, is observed, but does not interact; he can lose himself in the crowd, but is always singular and apart, his estrangement being a crucial part of his subjectivity. This urban figure emerges alongside the increased leisure time of bourgeois capital, the modern city of spectacle and multiplicity, and the dissociation and isolation of modern identity, all of which come to be articulated in Baudelaire’s particular version of the alienated artist. The midnineteenth-century flâneur wanders Paris, confirmed in his subjectivity through his endless amassing of metropolitan, cosmopolitan experiences, absorbed by the spectacle of the city, from its dejected depths to its most transcendent heights. His textual emergence in Baudelaire, as Walter Benjamin observes, coincides with the decline in his natural Parisian habitat – the arcades – making Baudelaire’s flâneur always already displaced.1 He does not immerse himself in desiring production, therefore, as his desire is articulated through this sense of displacement, a structure of loss and detachment through which he seeks to decode and control the urban milieu. Crucially, Baudelaire’s flâneur is a man, and in a further stratification of the city, the presence of women as part of the ‘non-I’ that the flâneur has an ‘insatiable appetite’ for (Baudelaire, 1964: 10) is required as a marker of absolute alterity that guarantees the subjectivity of the flâneur. So the presence of woman as non-person is reiterated and indeed celebrated in The Painter of Modern Life, not as a




becoming that signals a multiplicity beyond the self, but as an appropriated other (ibid.: 9–10). The uneasiness around la passante in Baudelaire, the passing woman who exceeds the attempt to enslave the other to a specular reflection of the subject, is the clearest indication that this gendered territorialisation of the lines and flows of urban experience can never be fixed and absolute. However, the position of women as invisible or urban non-person that is textually exemplified by Baudelaire’s urban female types – prostitutes, widows, lesbians and rag-pickers – is culturally amplified by the increasing division between the public and the private across the century. The restriction of women to the private realm meant that the only women inhabiting the nineteenth-century city streets were designated as ‘marginal or debased’ (Wolff, 1985: 42), outcasts or working women. Thus, in her influential 1985 essay ‘The Invisible Flâneuse’, Janet Wolff argues that ‘the dandy, the flâneur, the hero, the stranger – all figures invoked to epitomise the experience of modern life – are invariably male figures’, a woman could not ‘adopt the non-existent role of a flâneuse’ (ibid.: 41). By the early twentieth century social changes had altered the status of the independent or public woman enough to allow women writers of the period some access to the freedom of the urban environment. The anonymity and cosmopolitanism of the metropolitan crowds had released many women from the constraints of the domestic sphere, enabling creative experiments (in living as well as art) that would have been impossible at home. However, a gendered territorialisation of social spaces and the act of looking persisted, and consequently the female experience of the urban environment still differed from that of their male contemporaries. This territorialisation is clearly one that attempts to control the semiotic as well as libidinal and material determinations of the city, and so the metropolitan environment of modernism, as much as any pathetic fallacy of Nature, comes to be textually eroticised and identified in gendered terms. The city exists as a sexual woman; Pound’s London as a passive rape-victim, ‘oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation’; or e. e. cummings’s Paris as a tempting whore ‘the putain with the ivory throat’.2 Such gendering of the city is not an innovative personification, but it does highlight the extent to which the recognised modernist literary trope of the dislocated urban stranger intersects with Baudelaire’s masculinist formulation of modern city life. The modern(ist) flâneur in Paris, an assemblage producing and produced by so many expatriate modernist ventures, also functions in the popular (bourgeois) milieu of tourism. Adrian Rifkin notes that the




evolving deployment of the flâneur as urban type ‘could be traced almost entirely through city guides aimed at the male tourist or pleasure seeker, or those specialised sections aimed at him rather than his family’ (1993: 19, n. 15), such as John Chancellor’s How to Be Happy in Paris Without Being Ruined. Chancellor’s guide details the cabarets, cafes and restaurants of Paris (with price-lists) and describes a ‘vast cosmopolitan playground, which is rapidly becoming Americanised’ (1926: 92), but it also hints at the ‘true’ bohemia of Montparnasse (as opposed to Montmatre) where ‘strange people of all nationalities lounge at the tables’ (ibid.: 157). Andrew Roberts points out how Chancellor’s guide presents the type of (gendered) Paris experience that Mina Loy criticises in her ‘Three Moments in Paris’ poems, but the city guides have an even wider relevance. As Rifkin suggests, they reveal the commercial appeal and indeed commodification of the flâneur; he is a figure through which the experience of the modern city can be codified and consumed. The flâneur’s dependency on the capitalist society of the spectacle, as both a product and consumer, is of course something that Benjamin clearly admits.3 What the deployment of the flâneur as a figure of the ‘privileged’ male tourist reveals is that this urban type, this assemblage, also functioned with other machines of culture, machines producing economic meaning and social position. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology, the flâneur can be identified as manufacturing the ‘cultural capital’ of a specific mode of being in the city. The cultural capital of the flâneur can be accessed and assumed by the male tourist with sufficient economic capital, but in order for this to function, the practice of flâneurie must relate to the existing ‘habitus’ of the male tourist and he must benefit from his participation in it (in ways additional to the fulfilment of basic physical needs).4 So, the male tourist is encouraged to enjoy Paris as a flâneur because, by coding the activity in this way, the tourist profits from being recognised, by his social group, as a flâneur. What Bourdieu’s model for the analysis of the field of cultural production provides, then, is a way of recognising and understanding that the early twentieth-century flâneur-assemblage mobilises a system of dispositions that are gendered masculine and enable the effective deployment of (bourgeois) economic capital. This is not to propose an alternate model for understanding the flâneur: this system of dispositions or milieu (of a capitalist, masculinist society) is part of the outside that constitutes and is articulated by the flâneur-assemblage. To consider the capital of the Parisian avant-garde and its self-reflexive figurations of the artist-genius is to recognise that ‘[s]pecifically aesthetic conflicts about the legitimate vision of the world about what deserves




to be represented and the right way to represent it, are political conflicts (appearing in their most euphemised form) for the power to impose the dominant definitions of reality, and social reality in particular’ (Bourdieu, 1986: 154–5). As Elliot and Wallace highlight, this means acknowledging modernism as a discursive or cultural field, ‘the evolving product of a continuing struggle for certain kinds of symbolic power’ (1994: 2). Moreover, it means recognising that modernism is not disinterested in economic profits because symbolic power is tied to symbolic capital, which Bourdieu argues, ‘is to be understood as economic or political capital that is disavowed, misrecognised and thereby recognised, hence legitimate, a “credit” which, under certain conditions, and always in the long run, guarantees “economic’ profits” ’ (ibid.: 132). That modernism is indeed about the generation of symbolic capital that disavows the long-term profits to be earned from economically ‘disinterested’ practice is exposed by Lawrence Rainey’s study Institutions of Modernism. Rainey reveals how modernism, rather than ignoring the market, recreated literature and art as a particular kind of commodity: [I]f one could neither go back to reconstruct the aristocracy of the salon nor go forward to embrace the egalitarianism of the commodity, what solution was there? The answer, paradoxically, was to do a little of both at once: to reconstruct an aristocracy, but to do it within the world of the commodity – to accept, in other words, the status of art as a commodity, but simultaneously to transform it into a special kind of commodity, a rarity capable of sustaining investment value. (1998: 39) The defining texts of high modernism are, when viewed in terms of their ‘social actualisation’ (ibid.: 99), less aesthetic markers of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and more exemplars of the cofunctioning of modernist literary-machines and those of capitalism. Sylvia Beach’s limited edition publication of 1000 copies of Ulysses attracted ‘dealers and speculators in the rare book trade who bought the overwhelming majority of copies of the first edition’ (ibid.: 44) clearly recognising the ‘symbolic capital’ of this text which would accrue longterm economic value. Even Ezra Pound writes to his parents in mid-1921, ‘I don’t, en passant, know any sounder investment (even commercially) than the first edition of Ulysses.’5 For Rainey this comment ‘epitomises what might be called the double order of values that was at stake in the first edition’ (ibid.: 71) but these two orders of value are both implicated in the production and exchange of symbolic capital. Rainey




does not, except in passing, use Bourdieu’s framework, and so cannot follow through the connotations of his analysis of literary modernism. He is correct in pointing out that, like Ulysses, ‘the publication of The Waste Land marked the crucial moment in the transition of modernism from a minority culture to one supported by an important institutional and financial apparatus’ (ibid.: 91), but does not acknowledge the full implication of Bourdieu’s argument that: [w]hat ‘makes reputations’ is not this or that ‘influential’ person, this or that institution, review, magazine, academy, coterie, dealer or publisher it is the field of production, understood as the system of objective relations between these agents or institutions and as the site of the struggles for the monopoly of the power to consecrate, in which the value of works of art and belief in that value are continuously generated. (1986: 135) Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land are not simple commodities, just as the flâneur is not a simple tourism marketing tool – they all function in a cultural field as sources of power through which to ‘mobilize the symbolic energy produced by the functioning of the whole field’ (ibid.: 137). Although the mobilising of symbolic energy is not restricted to male modernists, and many women took part in the fashioning and marketing of modernism, the cultural capital of the expatriate genius and the tourist-flâneur are explicitly gendered. As Deborah Parsons discusses, it is Walter Benjamin who elaborates the concept of the flâneur as a masculine social figure into a metaphor for the modern artist6 and it is this dual concept that underpins the key explorations of women in the city in the work of Janet Wolff, Griselda Pollock and Elizabeth Wilson.7 Parsons rejects the gendered structure of literature that emerges from these critics’ use of Benjamin’s version of Baudelaire’s flâneur. She explores the work of a range of twentieth-century women writers, defining instead an ‘urban consciousness modelled on alternative values to those of their male counterparts’ seeking to ‘validate a place for women in the masculine defined city’ (2000: 15, 16). Focusing on ‘their relative formulations of the city’ rather than their experience in it, Parsons describes how, for Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen, and others the flâneur, as a model of the urban walkerobserver, enables their own thematic and aesthetic structuring of the cities they write and inhabit (ibid.: 7). As flâneuses or elusive ‘women of the crowd’, they find an escape from the voyeuristic, classifying




masculine gaze. The liberating exhilaration of the city, despite having isolation as its necessary condition, instigates and enables a radical remapping and reimagining of women’s experience and relationship to modernity and its urban spaces. Parsons’s makes an important contribution to debates about the potential of female flâneurie, revealing the complex possibilities of women in the city and, unlike other feminist discussions, acknowledging fully the ‘flâneur’s inherent contradictions’(2000: 5). But she still reads the flâneur as a metaphor and a concept, one that does develop over time, but one that nonetheless can provide an insight into a ‘female city consciousness’ (ibid.: 15). If the flâneur is not a concept or metaphor, with an internal functioning and consistency and a related interior ‘consciousness’, but a machinic assemblage, then female flâneurie can be read differently. The flâneur, as a productive system plugged into an outside of multiplicities, territories, becomings and effects, articulates the flows of urban energy, potentially both ceaselessly harnessing and arresting these flows in an action of territorialisation and stratification and simultaneously transmitting disruptive intensities. It does not create an interiority, a space of urban consciousness or gendered experience, but acts in and across the outside surface of the city. The flâneurassemblage can plug into other assemblages to form a co-determining intensity, one which, for example, determines the flâneur as a masculine figure of urban action and creativity, but not necessarily: the outside of the flâneur-assemblage is the delirium of the city and the haecceities of other urban becomings could also be activated by flâneurie. But with its public sculptures and architectural ornamentations abounding with female forms and iconography, it is in Paris, in distinction to the technological sublime of New York or the gothicised streets of London, in which an incontrovertible gendering of space and power seems to dominate; for Marina Warner, ‘the female figure is the dominant sign, with a multitude of significations; it is the overarching image in this capital, this city of ladies’ (1985: 36), where ‘Parisian female allegories in stone and marble achieve existence, impinge on the passer-by at the intersection where the collective becomes personal’(37). In such an environment the articulation of modernist genius with a masculine urban freedom appears difficult to circumvent.

Stunning subjects Barnes’s and Loy’s positions in the radical culture of New York had already situated them within ongoing debates about the place of




women in public culture and in the avant-garde, while Stein’s work circulated in a less public sphere: predominantly appearing as small pieces in modernist magazines and periodicals. The three women occupied different spaces within Paris of the 1920s, not that they did not pass through and often meet in particular places, but the positions they inhabited as professional women and writers were diverse. Paris was Stein’s home from 1903, and since 1910, 27 rue de Fleurus had been the location of her relatively conventional and stable ‘marriage’ with Alice B. Toklas. Visitors were initially drawn to view the Steins’s modern art and Gertrude Stein presided over a salon at her Paris home until 1913 and the new dynamics of her domestic arrangement with Alice. After this visitors were by invitation only, but many of the expatriate writers who came to Paris in the 1920s sought a visit to the rue de Fleurus as a kind of modernist pilgrimage, paying their respects to this paragon of experimental writers. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas relates how the ‘geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and their wives sat with me Madame Matisse and Marcelle Braque and Josette Gris and Eve Picasso and Pauline Hemingway and Mrs Sherwood Anderson and Mrs Bravig Imbs and Mrs Ford Maddox Ford’ (A: 95). Stein was not without her detractors both within the circles of modernism and in the wider public sphere, but she did occupy a relatively stable position both economically and culturally. Her symbolic capital as friend to Picasso and avant-garde art was extended by her growing name as an experimental writer and was fully realised in the popularity of her The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas which, after its publication in 1933, brought her work a wider audience, celebrity status in America and, perhaps most importantly, publishing opportunities for her previously arcane writing. Barnes and Loy occupied more ambivalent positions and can be seen as part of the wave of expatriate emigration to Paris, but even their experience cannot be generalised. Barnes’s move in 1921 was clearly a professional one, enabled by a loose commission by Burton Rascoe, associate editor of McCalls and then the New York Tribune. Through the 1920s Barnes’s income, though sufficient for her to purchase an apartment in the rue St-Romain and to try to support the ailing Baroness Elsa, was unpredictable, coming from journalistic commissions, royalties and advances from her publishers, and patronage from Peggy Guggenheim (and others). Barnes’s work took her back to New York but the flamboyant explorations of popular culture that characterised her New York journalism are not substantially sustained in her Paris writing. Barnes’s shorter pieces from the 1920s do continue a fascination with fashion,




celebrity and cultural trends, and they include articles, interviews, stories and pseudonymous satires and appeared in McCalls, Vanity Fair, New York Tribune, and the New Yorker among others. Her avant-garde work – the fiction and poetry selected for her 1923 volume A Book – evinced what was at times an understated, occasionally naturalistic style. Although Barnes’s novel Ryder and her Ladies Almanack do not mark an essential move away from the popular, her work of the 1920s does not necessarily address a wide audience and, in the case of Ladies Almanack, appears to function within a coterie poetic. Barnes was not offering the kind of consistent mediation of Parisian culture for an American audience that Janet Flanner’s ‘Paris Letters’ aimed for; where Flanner presents the economic context of Parisian fashion, or discusses Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Nancy Cunard’s Negro, Barnes pieces appear more flippant and satirical, and less invested in the conversion of the Parisian avant-garde into cultural capital for an American audience.8 In one piece Barnes rejects ‘a young man of the more serious type who insisted on dragging Edith Wharton and Ezra Pound into the conversation’ in favour of watching the actions of her restaurant patroness, in another she parodies the claim of the enlightened modern woman that ‘I hold advanced ideas, but not vulgarly advanced keep prettily ahead of the times where I show to best advantage.’9 From 1929 until 1931 Barnes wrote a monthly column for Theatre Guild magazine, after which her journalistic writing mostly ended. Whether or not this was a deliberate rejection of ‘popular’ writing is debatable, but Barnes spent the summers of 1932 and 1933 at Hayford Hall in Devon, the country estate that Peggy Guggenheim rented, writing and revising Nightwood, the text that was to make her name as a modernist innovator. Loy arrived in Paris in the Spring of 1923 having spent the previous two years in Florence, New York, Vienna and Berlin, much of it with her two daughters Joella and Fabienne. Her finances remained very uncertain and she turned to using her designing talents to help support herself: Loy opened a shop with Peggy Guggenheim’s support at 52 rue de Colisée in 1925 that sold her own lamp and lampshade designs. This venture proved quite successful in the winter of 1927–28 with five of Loy’s most popular designs being featured in New York in Arts and Decoration (July 1927). Loy was an erratic businesswoman, however, and her relationship with Guggenheim was never particularly satisfactory, and in March 1930 she sold the shop, bought an apartment in the same building as Barnes and began to receive a regular allowance from her art-dealer son-in-law Julien Levy, which helped with her finances. Like Barnes’s use of Wildean wit and decadent tropes in




her journalistic pieces, Loy’s market success relied on the commodification of the radical – the avant-garde of the recent past (in the case of Loy’s designs, Art Nouveau) becoming the acceptable taste of a mass-market. Although not translating, representing or satirising the Parisian cultural experience for American periodicals, much of Loy’s work of the 1920s does focus on modernist ideas of art and culture. The ‘Poems 1921–1922’ section of Loy’s Lunar Baedecker (published by Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions in 1923) considers artistic production, while attempting to explicate and define the status of the artist with reference to contemporary culture. A Baedecker for the avant-garde and the female subject, this collection, as the eponymous poem ‘Lunar Baedecker’ expresses, explores the intellectual zone of artistic endeavour. The ‘Poems 1921–1922’ section ends with the short poem ‘O Hell’, a forthright statement of modernism as the rejection of the past and as the potential for self-awareness. But the metaphorical presentation of the centrality of youth and vigour in the avant-garde is not without irony; the hyperbolic tone of the poem is explicit as Loy voices a mock-heroic apotheosis of the modernist movement, the final strophe presenting a Hellenic vision of divine youth and beauty. Loy’s Augustan pose both elevates and undermines her subject, especially as the title of the poem echoes the slang of the flapper generation in which art and avantgarde newness were less important than a celebration of youth, fun and fashion. Barnes and Loy had arrived in Paris as visible modernist women. They may have been women struggling to make a living and crossing the ‘great divide’ (to use Andreas Huyssen’s term) between avant-garde and popular culture, but they were also ‘stunning subjects’ for modernism, epitomised by an often reprinted Man Ray photograph from 1920 (Figure 5). Man Ray’s recollection that ‘[t]hey were stunning subjects – I photographed them together and the contrast made a fine picture’ (Ray, 1963: 98) can be seen to reduce them to ciphers for a certain fashionable idea of modern, liberated femininity, precursors for the stylised fashion photography of the 1930s that borrowed much from modernist photography and surrealism for its aesthetic. Both women appear in additional stylised photographs, by Man Ray and others, and memoirs of the time also seem to reinforce the visual objectification of Barnes and Loy, describing their beauty and clothing in as much detail as their writing. It might be easy, therefore, to place Barnes and Loy as part of the Paris scene that could be experienced by the discerning masculine flâneur-tourist. But as their respective negotiations and resignifications




Figure 5 Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes photographed by Man Ray c.1920, Sylvia Beach Collection, Princeton University Library. © Man Ray Trust/ ADAGP Paris and DACS London, 2006

of the ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ of women in the 1910s has demonstrated, Barnes and Loy were not transfixed and immobilised by the male gaze and their images as stunning modernist women could actually afford them a version of cultural capital that empowered their position among the geniuses and flâneurs of Paris. Through figuring as bodily and visual tropes of modernity they could carry, and indeed perform, a definition of modernism that exceeded the language of manifestos and editorial policies. They inhabit an ambiguous position: as with their work, Barnes’s and Loy’s personae position them on the side of the now – the ephemeral and popular – and also of the avant-garde – the yet to come. This double articulation clearly demonstrates how the cultural field of modernism involved many, often seemingly contradictory, forces and tendencies that were assembled or articulated at specific moments in enabling as well as restricting ways. Stein is not external to this cultural field and though she is not situated by visual representations in the same way as Barnes or Loy, she is articulated through versions of a visible persona. Most famously in Picasso’s 1906 portrait, where Stein’s face speaks of Picasso’s ‘primitive’ move into cubism, Stein too can be co-opted as a visible sign of modernity. Stein’s persona and the dress she adopted after arriving in Paris – loose




clothing, sandals, thick stockings – may have made her daily walks around Paris easier and more comfortable but they did not act as a costume, (cross-)dressing her as a male flâneur; neither, as Susan Gubar claims, did it mean that she could ‘transcend the limits of gender’ (1981: 501). Stein’s dress style was ambiguous, but not necessarily unfeminine and she was interested in clothes and fashion, wearing Pierre Balmain’s designs in her later life (when she had more money) and writing an article for Vogue about this couturier. Stein’s visual iconography is less ‘stunning subject’ and more Bhudda-like (Figure 6), not an assertion of masculinity but a playful oscillation between gender self-representation. What is produced here is an ambiguity similar to that which Carl Van Vechten saw in Duchamp’s Fountain: writing to Stein in 1917, Van Vechten described Alfred Steiglitz’s pictures of Fountain as ‘wonderful photographs’ which ‘made it look like anything from a Madonna to a Bhudda’.10 It is important to recall at this point that Duchamp’s Fountain produces a collocation of the spectacularity of the modern world of mass-production and that of the celebrity avant-garde. The visual display of object and personality was central to the world of modern consumer culture, and men as well as women were likely to become (or to actively pursue the position of being) stunning subjects. Fountain blurs the gender of the spectacular object, exposing the privacy of the male urinal, anthropomorphising the feminised receptacle, and making art an utterance only of surface display; everything is on show, but what we are actually seeing does not profess to hidden depths of meaning. This surface display is one on which gender identity is merely traced, and the uncertainty that arises is not just an effect of New York Dada but resonates across modernist culture. Thus figures such as James Joyce become implicated in the surface projection of modernist (masculine) genius. In a 1922 May Ray photograph, for example, Joyce peers uneasily, sideways on to the camera, through thick spectacle lenses, an icon of intellectual introspection. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, in contrast, projects an excessive phallic masculinity whereby the embodied Pound, who sported flamboyant clothes that may have implicated him in an economy of feminised display, is reified as an immutable Pound-as-phallus. As the situation of both Pound and Joyce demonstrate, men were also produced by the visual publicity machine of modernism and held a crucial role in the spectacular projection of the avant-garde. They were not exempt from the mechanisms through which modernist culture was articulated to and with mass-culture, just as flâneurie was a method of urban being for the bourgeois tourist and the expatriate artist alike.




Figure 6 Jo Davidson, Gertrude Stein (bronze), 1920, Whitney Museum of American Art © DACS London, 2006

Recognising the way that the men of modernism are also visually reified and projected in early twentieth-century culture demonstrates that Barnes and Loy did not occupy an opposing position to their male counterparts: they are not disadvantaged members of the Parisian expatriate avant-garde and passive objects of a masculine gaze, reduced, because of their gender, to fashionable icons and required by necessity to dilute their talent in public arenas. And Stein is not a privileged icon of experimentation withdrawn into an asexual or masculine pose and rejecting the trappings of fashion and femininity. All three writers reveal an awareness of the cultural forces of 1920s Paris and the tendencies of these forces to gender particular modes of urban practice. They map their own trajectory through these tendencies towards distinctive,





‘Pablo and Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius, Moi aussi perhaps’11 Stein’s self-professed claims to genius throughout her mature writing years align her very closely with the publicity practices that articulated her male modernist peers to their audiences and markets. The emphasis on the domestic and interior space that characterises Stein’s writing and self-imaging distances her from the flâneurie through which much of the cultural capital of modernist genius was made intelligible and marketable, but the difficulty of her texts has lead some critics to label these works and ‘Stein-as-genius’ as the ultimate modernist commodity. Susan Schultz writes that ‘the unreadable text is less a text than an icon – less an act of communication than of bravado [it] becomes a commodity through which Stein can buy the label of genius, and become famous less for what she writes than for the fact that she writes obscurely’ (1992: 86). In a similar vein, though much more sympathetic to the dynamic engagements of the texts, Bob Perelman calls ‘Stein, as genius, an ideal consumer as well as an ideal commodity, never sullied by anything resembling use value’ (1994: 167). Genius in Stein’s text, and Stein herself, is not a fixed and stable concept or construction though, this is foregrounded in the merging of self and writing and the abandonment of identity in the act of creation that characterises her difficult work. And many critics have noted how the success attendant on the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas led to a crisis and a subsequent re-evaluation of the nature of genius, money and celebrity in Stein’s public writing (her ‘autobiographies’ and lectures). Recent critical considerations have attempted to account for her strategic deployment of genius and reveal the ways in which this strategic genius developed into a more inclusive, dialogic, even democratic concept. More than this, though, if genius, like the flâneur, is comprehended as functioning as an assemblage as the term has so far been configured and applied in this study, Stein’s genius can be read even more accurately alongside the processual nature of her writing. Every repetition of genius is a repetition of difference, an event or incorporeal transformation which carries within it the possibility for new becomings. Stein’s meeting with genius emerges from her early work on ‘types’ that proved crucial for the initial writing for The Making of Americans



critical, and ultimately enabling articulations of genius, creativity and the metropolitan avant-garde.

and converges with her discovery of Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character in the winter of 1907/8. Weininger’s 1903 study (translated into English in 1906), was not unique in its misogyny, anti-Semitism and pejorative ideas about homosexuality, and was indebted to the emergent fields of both social physiology and sexology. The French school notebooks in which she worked on The Making of Americans record Stein’s response to Weininger’s book, a work which made assertions such as: ‘A female genius is a contradiction in terms, for genius is simply intensified, perfectly developed, universally conscious maleness’ (Weininger, 1911: 183). This masculinist tradition of genius reaches an almost pathological apotheosis in Pound’s assertions of a spermatic creativity at the heart of genius. His genius, as Perelman observes ‘is a mode of control over the reader, who is not only “baffled” by the writer’s insight but obliterated – to Pound’s way of thinking, invaginated, becoming the “passive vulva” to the phallic genius’ (1994: 138). Stein, ‘on the other hand allows herself to become excited and thus is not the creator of masterful language that simply acts on others, but the one in whom language is acting’ (ibid.: 138). Stein did not practice a seamless performance of masculinity through which her whole identity was articulated, so her deployment of genius cannot simply be read as an assumption of maleness. For Barbara Will, as for other critics, the ‘genius’ as type that Weininger proposes functioned as an authorising strategy for Stein enabling her, in Will’s argument, to distance herself from a racial and gender identity and a sexual norm, and reconfigure herself as masculine-lesbian genius. This argument about distancing is difficult to maintain when one recognises that Stein’s language practices have affinities with Jewishness and femininity in a number of ways, but she does persistently employ ‘genius’ and its resonances as a marker of ‘value’. At the same time her textual articulation of the everyday deliberately confuses the nature of this value: Stein is a domestic genius, the stuff of her writing is the stuff of everyday life. Even the phrase ‘rose is a rose is a rose’, a sloganistic encapsulation of Stein’s refusal of the empty noun, participates in the multiplication and subversion of ‘value’ as, through an act of multiple authorship, it becomes part of the physical fabric of Stein and Toklas’s lives. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas tells us ‘it was I who found it in one of Gertrude Stein’s manuscripts and insisted on putting it as a device on the letter paper, on the table linen and anywhere she would permit that I would put it’ (A: 151). Thus the work not only emerges from the domestic, it returns to inhabit the domestic even as it comes to carry an emblematic value.




The singularity of genius is fundamental to Stein’s figuration of herself and her writing, but this can only be conceived of as a shifting point of connections, variously ‘subject matter, goal, or authorizing source of the writing Stein’s trademark’ (Perelman, 1994: 168) and never simply a cashing in of symbolic capital. Genius features in both Stein’s Autobiographies and the persistent definition of genius that emerges from her ‘public’ writings of the 1930s is that ‘the essence of being a genius is to be able to talk and listen to listen while talking and talk while listening.’12 Crucially, the work of genius is ‘knowing that there is no identity and producing while identity is not’, which is ‘extremely difficult’.13 Will’s study of genius and Stein suggests a process of development where the early ‘authorisation’ of the genius-type becomes not an essence, but a ‘process of dialogue, of unstable and shifting language play’ (2000: 9) and in the later ‘celebrity’ writing, ‘a capacity that anyone entering into the work of art could conceivably share’ (12). Perelman emphasises the ‘pleasure’ in writing that genius was Stein’s emblem for, an emblem that signals Stein’s ‘desire for this pleasure to be socially validated’ (1994: 41). Everybody’s Autobiography is a text that plays with the singularity of genius in its very title: Stein is ‘everybody’, the celebrity she explores is both unique – the result of her writing and the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – and a process in which everybody can participate. In Everybody’s Autobiography artistic value and commercial function are confused and interchanged: advertising is poetry and poetry is advertising: I first saw the shaving advertisements that delighted me one little piece on one board and then further on two more words and then further on two more words a whole lively poem. (E: 195) Some one has just suggested that I make a lot of money writing cigarette advertisements. So naturally I begin to write them, how can I not naturally begin to write them that is what reading and writing is, naturally the ones advertising will not want them and just as naturally I will not send them and just as naturally I do write them. (E: 80) Moreover, in this text Stein also directly addresses the commercial value of genius. Thus, unlike the tactical marketing of Ulysses for example, Stein demonstrates a full consciousness of the economic worth of her symbolic capital, even while she expresses her simultaneous joy and




discomfort with the effects of becoming a part of a neon publicity machine with her ‘name in electric lights on Broadway’ (E: 94). She describes how ‘Picasso and I used to dream of the pleasure of if a burglar came to steal something he would steal his painting or my writing in place of silver and money’ and reflects that ‘after all they are right the Americans in being more interested in you than in the work you have done’ (E: 72). The contradictions and ambivalences are apparent here, but do not necessarily need to be resolved – Elliott’s and Wallace’s recognition that Stein’s later writing acknowledges ‘the degree to which “genius” exists only in public discourse’ (1994: 121) is a useful one: it is the discursive frameworks through which Stein articulated her genius that are contradictory, those very frameworks that validate the value of genius (configured as a singular, masculine attribute), while disavowing the fundamentally economic status of this value, its reliance on a shifting world of taste and fashion. Stein’s genius is not only a discursive, and indeed dialogic, construct, but an assemblage which can embrace its contradictions. The geniusassemblage has two faces, one of which faces towards the strata, towards codes and organisation (nonetheless characterised by a ceaseless mobility), and one which faces away towards asignifying intensities. Crucially, capital and capitalism function neither essentially to territorialise or deterritorialise; capital in its functioning requires and produces subjectification but also dismantles the subject, releasing disorganised drives and setting off desires. Articulations of genius can thus be seen as operations to coagulate intensities which can be appropriated into a regime of signs and exchange while simultaneously launching lines of flight out of the plane of consistency and utility. That there is no necessarily reactionary or problematic ideology of genius is clear, as genius has no essence, no inside. That it can produce some consistent sets of philosophical or cultural meaning and value whose conjoining continues to play through modernism, arises from the genius-assemblage plugging into other assemblages (aesthetic codes, gendered dialectics) to form a co-determining intensity that does not disrupt, but indeed confirms, majoritarian modes of being and the organising principles and hierarchies of the strata of signifiability and subjectification. Stein’s selfconscious deployment of genius and disorganisation of its repute functions not only to authorise her status but to disarticulate genius from a necessary ‘identity’, ‘meaning’ or ‘structure’. Genius is rearticulated in each moment of its use, just as Stein’s texts write a self that has no existence before or beyond the moment of writing but appears in and takes off from the interstice of writer/reader, speaker/listener. Stein is





always thus becoming-Stein, a process rather than an end result, which is launched repeatedly from the genius-assemblage.

Mina Loy came to the genius-assemblage through her dealings with the Italian Futurists who shared Weininger’s belief in the maleness of genius; Loy wrote to Carl Van Vechten in 1915: ‘I think I am the only female who has reacted to it [futurism] – exactly the way I have noticed men do – Of course being the most female thing extant – I’m somewhat masculine.’14 But Loy’s poetic work rejected the gendered dualism of such theorising and she later satirised her position as ‘the “excepted” woman’ in the poem ‘Lions’ Jaws’ presenting herself as a ‘secret service buffoon to the Woman’s Cause’ (LLB: 49). Loy does not reject genius though, and when she came, in 1924, publicly to assess Stein’s writing in the Transatlantic Review it is a ‘genius’ much like the assemblage already described to which Loy turned to evaluate Stein’s achievement. In her two contributions to the Transatlantic Review, Loy chooses to identify two ‘phases’ in Stein’s work, the first of which is exemplified by ‘Galleries Lafayette’ and ‘Italians’, the second by the 1922 publication Geography and Plays, particularly ‘Sweet tail. Gypsies’. Loy’s argument highlights the influence of Bergson on Stein’s work, inducing ‘a continuity of awareness of her subject’ (GS: 305). Loy does not see Stein as describing or interpreting her subjects, instead her ‘process of reiteration’ ‘evokes’ her subjects from the ‘omniprevalent plasm of life’ (GS: 305). In the case of ‘Italians’, the process of becoming, rather than an attempt at essentialising or interiorising the ‘Italian’ subject, is what Stein offers – ‘they solidify in her words, in ones, in crowds, compact with racial impulses infinitely varied in detail’ (GS: 306) – as Loy quotes: They have something growing on them, some of them, and certainly many others would not be wanting such things to be growing out of them that is to say growing on them. (GS: 306)15 In the second, ‘impressionistic’ phase that Loy describes, Stein’s method dissolves divisions and distinctions; she ‘ignores duration and telescopes time and space and the subjective and the objective in a way that obviates interval and interposition’ (GS: 307). Loy does not deny the complexity of Stein’s work, writing that ‘it is not easy for the average reader to “get” Gertrude Stein, because for the casual audience entity



Curie of the laboratory of vocabulary

seems to be entirely eclipsed by excrescence’ (GS: 309). However, she emphasises the fact that Stein’s work ‘makes a demand for a creative audience’, that it requires a productive and affective connection from its reader and leaves ‘unlimited latitude for personal response’ (GS: 429). Crucially, the effect of ‘the friction of [Stein’s] uncompromised intellect’ is to purge ‘the meshed messes of traditional associations’ (GS: 307), a process of ‘disintegration and reintegration’ that is machinic rather than organic; an ‘intercepted cinema of suggestion’ (GS: 308). Nevertheless, Stein does not seek a transcendent or omniscient perspective, she is ‘never detached from Life, it spreads tenuous and vibrational between each of its human exteriorisations and the other’ (GS: 306). What results, a ‘simultaneity of function’ (GS: 427), confounds the hegemonic ‘logic’ of Western philosophy (GS: 429) in a ‘scholarly manipulation of the inversion of ideas’ that Loy compares to ‘Alice In The Looking Glass’ [sic] (GS: 309). Loy is not offering an act of interpretation, indeed she claims that there is ‘no particular advantage in groping for subject matter’ (GS: 427), her article is concerned with the functioning and effect of Stein’s writing, with how it produces haecceities and what effect these events or thisnesses have. ‘Modernism has democratised the subject matter and la belle matière of art’, claims Loy (GS: 430) and it is this ‘spirit of democracy’ (GS: 429) she detects as the effect of Stein’s work, an effect of the release from the ‘habits of consciousness’ (GS: 429). In her assessment Stein’s achievement is part of a whole modernist enterprise to break the restraint of tradition and locate aesthetic experience in ‘the thousand odds and ends which make up sensery [sic] every day life’ (GS: 430). Loy thus offers a particular, politicised, version of Stein-as-genius and this emerges most strikingly from the poem that stands as the epigraph to Loy’s article on Stein, and from her introductory lecture before Stein’s reading at Natalie Barney’s salon on 4 February 1927. The poem, conventionally reprinted as ‘Gertrude Stein’, has no original title: Curie of the laboratory of vocabulary she crushed the tonnage of consciousness congealed to phrases to extract a radium of the word




The poem explicitly connects Stein with Marie Curie, whose name is echoed throughout with the alliteration on ‘c’ linking her with the key terms ‘crushed’, ‘consciousness’, ‘congealed’ and ‘extract’, and the rhyming of ‘laboratory’ and ‘vocabulary’ further reinforces the Stein – Curie conjunction. By articulating Stein’s writing with the discoveries of Marie Curie, most obviously in the final line’s turn to ‘radium’, Loy draws a line of connection between the genius that is described here and the genius that is exercised by other modernists through the codes of science. Eliot’s poet as ‘catalyst’ in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ proposes an objectivity for the poet, part of the ‘escape from personality’, while Wyndham Lewis’s ‘vortex’ asserts the power and energy of the creative being. Science and the scientist have a more central place in Pound’s aesthetic pronouncements. In ‘The Serious Artist’ for example, Pound’s claim is that ‘[t]he arts, literature, poesy, are a science, just as chemistry is a science’ (1954: 42) and he goes on to emphasise the precision and objectivity of the poet-scientist-genius: The serious artist is scientific in that he presents the image of his desire, of his hate, of his indifference as precisely that, as precisely the image of his own desire, hate or indifference. (1954: 46) Curie is characterised in Loy’s poem by her activity. The indentation of the fourth and eighth lines accentuate the verbal phrases ‘she crushed’ and ‘to extract’, and the iteration throughout of the prepositions ‘of’ and ‘to’ points up a dual movement of disruption, of taking a constituent (‘of’), with the aim of creating a new object, a constructive intention (‘to’). Introducing Stein to Barney’s salon in 1927, Loy offers her as ‘the Madame Curie of language’ and again process, craftsmanship and work are central to this presentation: ‘Elle continuait à construire son œuvre’ (she continued to build her work) says Loy.16 In utilising Marie Curie, Loy connects Stein to the same scientific milieu from which Pound and his contemporaries search for a definition of artistic genius, but with fundamentally different effects. 1923 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Marie Curie’s discovery of radium, but Curie’s public reputation in France was reliant not so much upon her achievements as upon contemporary debates over sexual equality, national supremacy and political organisation. In the right-wing press Curie often served as an example of the perversions of women’s suffrage, the insidious influence of foreigners and Jews, or the breakdown of traditional French society and family life. When information about Curie’s affair with the married physicist Paul Langevin was leaked to




the press in 1911, she was subjected to virulent sexist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic slander,17 indeed, the Academy attempted to dissuade her from attending the award ceremony for her 1911 Nobel Prize because of the reverberations of this scandal. At the same time her reputation in America owed much to the editor Missy Meloney’s campaign to raise the funds for a gramme of radium for the Curie laboratory. Melony’s canvassing invoked a conservative mythologising of the scientist and her discovery for the benefit of the American public and she organised a triumphal tour of the States for Curie in 1921. Marie Curie was a celebrity, in a number of ways, as well as being the discoverer of radium: a ‘luminous detail’ of the natural world. Stein-as-Curie is thus not necessarily a type of objective, heroic scientific genius, but a hardworking, outsider celebrity-genius.18 In Loy’s terms Stein’s genius is not imagined as a gendered characteristic, though her work of genius is the work of a woman, nor is it an intangible function of aloof inspiration. The genius-assemblage of Loy’s ‘Stein-as-Curie’ draws on the functions of craftsmanship and effort, conjoined with a recognition of the performative and spectacular flows of modern culture: Elle a prodigieusement désintégré la matière brute du style, et d’une façon radicale a balayé la cirque littéraire pour faciliter de nouveaux spectacles. Ce qui a donné un courage inoui à d’innombrables jeunes.19 (She has prodigiously broken to bits the raw material of style, and in a radical manner has swept the literary circus clear for future performances. This has given unheard-of courage to innumerable young people.) This does not place an essential value on ‘performances’ in the ‘literary circus’, however; what Stein’s work effects is a depersonalisation of the subject, and of the subject of writing, and a refusal of a temporality or linearity which would pull the work back into organisation and stratification. Performance itself can just as easily be arrested into a system of absolutes wherein performance and self-presentation rather than being a recognition of the contingent articulations of modernist practices becomes solidified into an end unto itself. The disarticulation of performance from radical effects is the object of Loy’s satire in her play ‘The Pamperers’ (1920), which presents the bohemian elite as dilettante speculators intent on an endless and empty pursuit of the new. Genius is meaningful for Loy, as it is for Stein, and for both of them the ‘symbolic capital’ of genius is problematic: for Stein it can turn her into a celebrity and ‘when your public knows you and does want to pay for you.




You are not the same you’ (E: 32); for Loy it can mean that the radical energies of art are rejected in favour of a strictly marketable commodity. They do not, however, deny the force of celebrity and recognise its part in the operation of the genius-assemblage. That there existed a certain rhetoric of the avant-garde which did attempt such a denial, posing disinterested practice and denigrating, while benefiting from, the functioning of cultural capital can be seen in the co-determining effects of the flâneur and genius in high modernism. The structure and outcomes of this disavowal are something that both Loy and Barnes explore in their writing in and on Paris in the 1920s.

Portraits of the artist The aloof and deified artist-figure is at the centre of ‘Apology of Genius’, a crucial poem in the 1921–22 section of Loy’s Lunar Baedecker. Other poems from this section examine various conceptions of the artist: the Chaplinesque artist as tramp (‘Ignoramous’), or the effects of psychic and material deprivation on artistic expression (‘Der Blinde Junge’) and in both cases the workings of Baudelaire’s flâneur are taken to an extreme producing either a daydreaming wanderer or a maimed war-victim. Along with the more general exploration of artistic practice, Lunar Baedecker contains a number of poems specifically on Loy’s modernist contemporaries and predecessors (Joyce, Brancusi, Wyndham Lewis and Edgar Allan Poe). These pieces suggest an awareness on Loy’s part of the internally fabricated and self-supporting construct that passed as modernism. In a range of poems Loy challenges the assemblages of artist-genius and expatriate flâneur, offering portraits of these figures that either reveal the disruptions and discontinuities that are disavowed in their construction, or ironically undermine their rhetoric. ‘Apology of Genius’ reads less as an ‘apology’ and more as an attack on an ignorant audience: the communal voice of the poem, invoked through the use of the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’, sets ‘us’ (the Genius-artists) against ‘you’ (the unknowing Public). The division between artist and public is established through images of divinity mingled with disease, offering a double position of ostracism for the artist, beyond (that is, both above and below) the mass of humanity. The poem employs many hackneyed representations of artistic-genius: their spiritual existence sustained by ‘the wind and stars and pulverous pastures of poverty’ (LB: 77), the fire of their inspiration, the sanctity of their aloofness and the profound undertaking of their calling. But the division between the ethereal artist-genius and the material public is the same one that Loy has already played with




in her New York writing, and she suggests a highly democratic notion of genius in her writing on Stein. ‘Apology of Genius’ may not be a direct satire, especially because it reflects many real concerns about the freedom of artistic expression and is a part of Loy’s aesthetic exploration of the position of anomalousness that is the corollary of innovatory artistic vision. Nevertheless this poem, in the extremes of its assertion of the aloofness of the self-appointed artistic elite, undermines the stability of such aloofness. In the poems ‘Perlun’ and ‘Ignoramous’, Loy confronts the persona of the modernist flâneur revealing the conflicted flows that this figure attempts to harness. ‘Ignoramous’ offers a vagrant figure, ‘the Clown of Fortune’ (LB: 44), for the sardonic, displaced intellectual, a sort of ironicByronic hero manifest as a tramp. He is a mirror image of the genius of ‘Apology of Genius’, enjoying the singularity of an existence beyond the norms of society. The ‘Ignoramous’ depicted here is certainly indebted to Charlie Chaplin’s screen persona, as Roger Conover suggests, but he is not simply ‘purehearted and innocent-natured’ (LB: 186). The artificiality of this tramp’s ignorance and simplicity, the sinister implications of his relationships, and the reductive nature of his philosophy, all suggest a manipulative character. Loy’s ‘Ignoramous’ is not a wanderer out of financial necessity, but is an individual free to choose the ruse of vagrancy to justify his irresponsible, indifferent, disdainful experiencing of the modern metropolis. In Lunar Baedecker the assumed innocence of this ‘Ignoramous’ stands in stark textual juxtaposition to the preceding poem, ‘Der Blinde Junge’. The eponymous hero of this piece, the blind youth himself, is a victim of European civilisation (rather than a dilettante/wanderer). As an actual outcast, contrasted with the privileged ‘illuminati of the coloured earth’, ‘Der Blinde Junge’ depicts the youth as a ‘desecrated altar’, a true maimed innocent (LB: 83). His is no pose of artistic alienation, he is bereft even of his voice, unlike the voice of ‘Ignoramous’ which encloses that poem, and can only eruct his dispossession and alienation – ‘Der Blinde Junge’ just ‘blows out damnation and concussive dark’ (LB: 84). ‘Perlun’, a poem published in the Dial in 1921 offers another vision of the modernist flâneur: this time he is a wandering adventurer characterised through the primal beauty of boxing. Perlun is immediately associated with the sun and with a powerful, innocent charm in a union of uselessness and strength; he is ‘A vivacious knick-knack tipped with gold’, who lives beyond the restraints of etiquette and security. Perlun’s existence is an erratic series of adventures, brief encounters, and heightened experience. The mention of ‘The rituals of Dempsey




and Carpentier’ (LB: 75) associates Perlun with a brute masculinity, connecting him to the first million-dollar prize fight between Jack Dempey (USA) and Georges Carpentier (France) in July 1921 for the world heavy-weight title. Loy’s second husband, the ‘poet-pugilist’ Arthur Cravan, is certainly part of this character, one who scorns the constraints of everyday existence and social conformity and has unlimited experiences of life. Perlun is, though, the well-born son of his father, ‘Prince Fils à Papa’ (LB: 75); he has the licence to do as he pleases because he has the privilege of masculinity, indeed, it is almost a necessary part of his development as a male. Ultimately, the voice of Perlun, like that of ‘Ignoramous’, concludes his portrait: PERLUN asks ‘Do these flappers of the millionaires think I’m a doll for anyone to pat?’ (LB: 75) The exaggeration with capitals of ‘PERLUN’ mimics the assertion of identity that Perlun articulates, differentiating himself from wealthy, parasitic society, and emphasising his individuality. But he exposes, through the very terms of his identification, the underlying insecurities of his position. The performative nature of his masculine identity is indicated by the querying ‘think I’m a doll’ and the suggestion that Perlun is, indeed, a toy of the wealthy and fashionable, that his masculinity is just an amusement, is unavoidable. Thus, Loy implies, even this hyper-masculine, self-assertive adventurer is not self-made, but functions through a manipulation of the attributes of strength, beauty and carelessness, and is ultimately manufactured according to the whims of fashionable society and money. This pugilist-flâneur is an effect of, rather than a challenge to, the forces of social and sexual compliance. What is produced by such poems is a clear interrogation of the geniusflâneur-artist, an interrogation that seeks to expose and release the other energies that are disconnected in the gender-based intellectualism of creativity which mobilises many of the forces of modernist culture. However, the stereotype of the aloof and alienated genius; that is, the corollary of such modernist forces, was used to mediate between the higher reaches of the avant-garde and a wider public. Loy as much as any of her peers recognised that the cultural capital of modernist enterprises required a certain complicity in the rhetoric of individuality and genius,




a certain denial of its contingent and heterogeneous construction. It is a feature of her writing about modernism that Loy, in attempting to communicate the enabling effects of certain modes of innovative writing and art, simultaneously constructed and undermined ‘genius’ through seeking to reveal a democrative impulse that could lie behind an acknowledgement of genius as a conditional process and production. In early 1922 Loy accompanied Djuna Barnes on a visit to Joyce that would provide material for an interview in Vanity Fair. Barnes’s resulting article, entitled ‘James Joyce: A Portrait of the Man Who is, at Present, One of the More Significant Figures in Literature’, appeared in March 1922.20 It presents this difficult genius to an American public aware of the sensational obscenity prosecution of The Little Review in February 1921 for its publication of excerpts from Ulysses. Vanity Fair had already published the work of Stein, and would go on to publish ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’ in 1923. It also included writing by Tristran Tzara and Ezra Pound, Man Ray’s photographs, and was involved in a bidding war for the publication of The Waste Land.21 So Barnes’s article is not simply directed at a conservative audience resistant to or unaware of the modernist avant-garde in Paris. There are echoes of Barnes’s sensational journalism in the piece and she employs recognised, even trite, notions of the artist-genius to depict Joyce, without simply expressing a complicity with such notions. Moreover, in this and a contemporaneous article for a small periodical, Barnes hints at the connections between the ideals of the artist and the sexual politics underlying the masculinist articulation of the modernist experience of Paris. Before encountering Joyce in the article, the reader is introduced to Barnes’s personal relationship to his writing and, crucially, to his reputation: ‘I had been told that he was going blind, and we in American learned from Ezra Pound that “Joyce is the only man on the continent who continues to produce, in spite of poverty and sickness, working from eight to sixteen hours a day” ’ (I: 290). Throughout, the article repeats images of the genius-artist and his estrangement from the world, his ‘weariness of one self-subjected to the creation of an overabundance in the limited’ (I: 293). Moreover, in the details of Joyce’s ‘limp’ and ‘peculiarly pulpy hands’ (I: 292), the ‘paleness’ of his eyes (I: 293), his distinctive appearance, and his ‘eternal cigar’ (I: 294) the portrait deploys, as Elliott and Wallace argue, some of Barnes’s earlier decadent stereotypes as a ‘ready-made language for articulating alterity’ in order to sell bohemia to a bourgeois audience (1994: 137). Barnes reinforces the reputation of Joyce and highlights his obliviousness to material trivialities, referring to his dedication, enervation





Yes, then I realized Joyce must indeed have begun life as a singer, and a very tender singer, and – because no voice can hold out over the brutalities of life without breaking – he turned to quill and paper, for so could he arrange, in the necessary silence, the abundant inadequacies of life, as a laying out of jewels – jewels with a will to decay. (I: 290) There are striking similarities between Barnes’s representation of Joyce and the ideas that Loy explores in ‘Apology of Genius’ and elsewhere; Barnes’s image of Joyce producing ‘jewels with a will to decay’ is strongly echoed in the ‘imperious jewellery’ and ‘criminal mystic immortelles’ of Loy’s poem (LLB: 78). But it is not, as Carolyn Burke argues, that Barnes and Loy are expressing a common belief that ‘[a]lthough artists might be outlaws in the eyes of society, their alternative religion confers on them its own version of immortality’ (1991: 75). Even Loy’s poem expresses an uneasiness with the assumed superiority of the artistic elite, and Barnes’s article is similarly ambiguous about the pose of genius. For neither of them is decadence an easy short-hand for the complexities of the genius-assemblage. Barnes’s portrait of Joyce places much emphasis on appearance but it is not, or not simply, to mediate him to the Vanity Fair audience, which is John Russell’s take on the piece (in Richardson). Neither is this a straightforward use of decadent tropes. Joyce’s ‘orderly distemper of red and black hair’, ‘too young’ coat and ‘delightful waistcoat’ (I: 291–2) emphasise the appearance of genius because genius itself is an appearance, an externally functioning effect of the articulation of avant-garde innovation with various factors in the field of production (including the ephemera of ‘innovation’ itself) which is only visible in this effect. The contingency and constructedness of genius is as much an outcome of Joyce himself and his visible persona as it is of Pound’s pronouncements on Joyce, as Barnes’s portrait reveals and she hints at the over-studied, over-controlled nature of Joyce’s pronouncements. In addition she offers Joyce’s opinion of women: We have talked of women, about women he seems a bit disinterested. Were I vain I should say he is afraid of them, but I am certain he is only a little skeptical of their existence. (I: 294)



and aloofness, and presenting his struggle against the ‘brutalities’ of the world:

What emerges here is the suggestion of a desire for a form of artistic androcentrism in Joyce which, connected to a suppositional fear of women implies a refusal to recognise the reality, the energies, flows, and drives of female existence. In contrast to Joyce’s refusal, Barnes presents the reality of his wife Nora’s voice, her ‘brogue’ (I: 294), complete with her idiomatic grammar: Nora offers a common-sense and practical assessment of Joyce as Creative Genius; ‘for as Nora says, “It’s the great fanaticism is on him, and it is coming to no end” ’ (I: 292). Thus Nora’s specificity speaks an immanence that poses a ludic riposte to the sphere of the (male) creative genius. What her voice exposes is the reductive sexual politics that can be formed in and produced by the articulation of the genius-assemblage. Like Barnes’s portrait, Loy’s poem ‘Joyce’s Ulysses’ is a celebration of the challenge that Joyce’s work poses to the norms and commonplaces of literature and culture. She presents him, through the use of religious vocabulary, as a martyred artist and celebrates his reintegration of the body into artistic expression, representing his achievement as a usurpation of the dogma of Christianity: The word made flesh And feeding upon itself With erudite fangs The sanguine Introspection of the womb (LB: 88) The incarnation of God-as-Christ becomes the corporeality of Joyce’s literary expression, but the positive effects of this textual incarnation are arrested in the face of Joyce’s control and intellectualism: his textual body is, ultimately, parasitic and destructive. This critique of the narcissistic intellectualism of Ulysses is connected to a sexual and moral politics: the self-enclosed nature of Ulysses – ‘The sanguine/ Introspection of the womb’ – is a figurative, feminine space that Joyce attempts to dominate and manipulate textually. Joyce’s text offers a ‘gravid day’ which ‘spawns’ nothing more than an elaboration of the cultural hegemony –‘guttural gargoyles/ upon the Tower of Babel’ (LB: 90). Ulysses is not democratic, it contributes to the intellectualism of art, and in so doing Joyce participates in the mystification of the mass of humanity. Ulysses is an ‘Empyrean emporium’ (LB: 90), a market for trading the highest ideas, so this text does not escape the commercial realm, and indeed trades in the cultural capital of the erudite. In a draft fragment for





Out of the city In May 1922 Barnes offered a second version of her meeting with James Joyce in The Double Dealer, a New Orleans published little magazine. ‘Vagaries Malicieux’ is predominantly an account of an American visitor’s first stay in Paris and the voice that Barnes employs is a subtle blend of naivety and incredulity. The speaker of ‘Vagaries Malicieux’ meets a ‘Professor’ on board her ship to Europe who acts as her personal Baedeker. Her first reaction on arriving is to mark the absence of ‘soda water and chewing gum’ and profess a disbelief in the reality of Paris: I am almost ready to swear that the Bon Marché is a fraud and that the Louvre is a somewhat flawless production of something French. (1974: 10) This sense of Paris as simulacra is conjoined to a reiteration of the gendering of city – ‘it had the fame of a beautiful woman’ (ibid.: 19) – and serves to disrupt the perspective of the tourist-flâneur that Barnes plays with. The ‘sights’ of Paris that the essay enumerates fail ultimately to impress, not necessarily because they have been spoilt by tourism, but because the version of ‘Paris’ produced from such sights is abstracted from the reality of an intensive urban life. James Joyce, the famous expatriate genius, fills the role of one of the Parisian sights on the avant-garde tourist trail but Barnes, just as she subverts the myth of expatriate Paris (by hinting at its unreality and relationship to tourism), subverts the myth of Joyce. Here he is described as a ‘sad, tall Irishman’ (1974: 14) with ‘strangely spoiled and appropriate teeth’ (12). When she turns again to describe the Joyce voice, Barnes displays a cutting irony: ‘His memory is said to be perfect (I had little chance to find out) and it has some of the slow dragging quality of an inland mist.’ (14). The Joyce offered in ‘Vagaries Malicieux’ is slightly boring rather than being the epitome of avant-garde genius – ‘My mind wandered a little’, the speaker says (14). What was offered as a ‘great voice’ to the Vanity Fair readership is presented to the assumed avant-garde-literate readers of The Double Dealer as too studied and dull.



‘Joyce’s Ulysses’, the presentational commercialism of Ulysses is emphasised further where Joyce is described as ‘Omniscient Showman/ of a day/ Irish and infinite.’22 He is the creative genius as astute businessman, or ‘showman’, disavowing this aspect in a performance of high art which attempts to control meaning and deny the specificity of woman.

Indeed, Barnes’s lack of attention deteriorates until she concludes ‘here I lost all connection with this man, sad, quiet, and eternally at work’ (15). Perhaps, the essay implies, we are meeting ‘another one of the world’s misconceptions of the mystic’ that we are told Joyce discusses (14). Elliott and Wallace are right to point out how Barnes’s portrait of Joyce appears within the wider context of her ‘not-so-gentle deflation of the Paris of expatriate lore and a demonstration of the impossibility of achieving a “Paris” of full presence’ (1994: 139). Moreover, Barnes mimics the eroticisation of Paris, gendering its monuments female and leading from the end of the Joyce portrait with the remark ‘the chic of Paris, the beauty of its women, the magic of its very existence –’ (1974: 15). Within this miming of the expatriate myth of Paris as an elegant, exciting, erotic adventure, Barnes suggests a link between the genius and the flâneur through their solidification of a specifically gendered disavowal and exploitation. Through the central portrait in ‘Vageries Malicieux’, a middle-aged, bourgeois wife of an obstetrician, Barnes reveals the reality of female existence within the mythical metropolis: ‘women who have come in and out of boudoirs to no end but the grave, and have done it so bravely, with lace and scent and timely fashions of all sorts, running on satin slippers which left the heel at every step.’ (ibid.: 16–17). The interest of the speaker of ‘Vagaries Malicieux’ is in the bourgeois family, street life, dancers and women in cabarets, women restaurant owners and chambermaids. All this amounts to an ‘exposure of the other side of the Paris of the modernist imagination [which] reveals the degree to which expatriate dreams of freedom and licence were founded on the sexual and domestic labour of women’ (Elliot and Wallace, 1994: 140). And what it produces is a recognition of the functioning of flâneurie, whether as a tourist or expatriate genius, as co-extensive with this system of exploitation in which the possibilities of women’s existence are curtailed and put in the service of a machine of symbolic economy that produces bourgeois tourism and avant-garde culture alike. But the arrested flows of female urban existence remain and their very presence can exceed and disrupt the cultural construction and exploitation of femininity. Barnes’s other Paris journalism interrogates and satirises the cultural construction of femininity and the ‘geniuses’ of modernism. In ‘The Models Have Come to Town’ (published in Charm, November 1924) she undermines the supposition that women such as Kiki of Montparnasse stand as the passive, bodily instigator for artistic innovation. Instead of being fixed in a reductive passivity, the incomplete subjectification of models such as Kiki (with their ‘fancies’ for mice, monkeys, birds, snakes,




cinema) poses a threat of disorganisation to a masculinist economy of representation and meaning: the models, in Barnes’s piece, are ‘superbly irrelevant, magnificently disconnected, triumphantly trivial’ (I: 302). Barnes demonstrates a further concern with the position of women within the tourist-expatriate machines of modernist cities in her continued interest in and support of Baroness Elsa, the epitome of deterritorialising urban woman. A key issue that concerns Barnes, Loy and other women writers is the relationship between urban women and the panorama of masculine control over the eroticised female object, particularly what factors disturb the completion of this panorama. The potentially grotesque spectacle of the ageing urban woman, imagined as the ageing lush, is a concern of Loy’s late 1920s poem ‘Lady Laura in Bohemia’, in which Lady Laura, a middle-aged, British expatriate in Paris clings to shreds of symbolic capital while she drinks and flirts unsuccessfully in ‘Zelli’s’. There are articulations between the self-delusion of Lady Laura and the protagonists of Jean Rhys’s Paris expatriate novels, ‘Sasha Jensen’ in Good Morning Midnight (1930) for example, and even to Baroness Elsa dying on the verge of destitution (possibly killing herself) in Paris in December 1927. These proximities suggest a shared collapse into the desolation of marginalised femininity, but they can be read differently. ‘Lady Laura in Bohemia’ suggests a certain singularity survives Lady Laura’s defeat at the hands of the sexual economy of bohemian culture – ‘She is yet like a diamond on a heap of broken glass (LLB: 98) – forcing a recognition of other energies that the ageing female lush produces in surfeit of her place as non-person in a High Modernist Paris of flâneurie. In her grotesque excesses, through the very disgust that she evokes (for example W. C. Williams’s description of Baroness Elsa; ‘a reek stood out purple from her body’ (1951: 11)), the lush produces a ‘phenomenon of bordering’ that points towards different readings, readings which assemble and amplify the disruptive forces of carnivalesque manifestations and abject liminalities and which push the subject towards a radically different becoming. There might even be a proximity here to Stein’s writing: she negotiates a bodily field of profusion and excess through the domestic codes of texts such as Tender Buttons, while producing a genius-effect in the public arena of transnational space. To get out of the city of the modernist-flâneur and the genius artist is not to effect an escape from the forces of capitalism, publicity and fashion. Neither Barnes nor Loy postulate a surrogate space of feminine realisation free from the masculinist assemblages of culture: Nathalie Barney’s Temple à l’amitié may have idealised an alternative ‘Lesbos in




Paris’, but the dynamics of this community were just as susceptible to stratification and hierarchical coding, as Barnes goes on to explore in Ladies Almanack. The city is a striated territory and masculinity is one of the terms that organises and controls it, but the lines and flows that cross and constitute the urban space also enable the possibility of deterritorialising lines of flight. Thus, Barnes and Loy diagnose the function of specific assemblages that require and produce a masculinised modernist city while also tracing a diversion that does not transpire in opposition to this city, but from within its very terms. Stein writes from the smooth space of a domestic sphere that emerges from, and does not sit in opposition to, the striated territory of the city, while her domestic play with Alice further confuses the gendering of terms. The assemblages of masculine-genius and flâneur-artist are not fixed and closed concepts, but processes of production that are necessarily plugged into other desiring and social machines, as Stein demonstrates through her own genius-machine, a processual and contingent production of her own genius. Such assemblages are implicated in a variety of systems (including systems of consumption and codes of fashion) which can ensnare the existence of the urban woman but also launch her out of a gendered, stratified city.




Carnival Bodies, the Grotesque, and Becoming Animal

In this exploration of different articulations in and of modernism, it has become clear that a rationalised logic of a (singular) modernist enterprise, characterised by stylistic complexity and aesthetic selfsufficiency, can only be supported at the expense of an active engagement with the complex forces and flows of early twentieth-century culture. However, what has also been exposed is the erroneous assumption of an ‘other’ modernism (opposed to the hegemonic modernist narrative) that expresses and represents those experiences and voices that are repressed and denied in hegemonic (high) cultural forms. As the explorations of the First World War, New York Dada and 1920s Paris have demonstrated there are no unified discourses of modernism, only specific and localised points of intersection and negotiation. My articulations of these points of effect and investment seek inevitably to expose the real in its action in these points or moments. In other words, the effects I have identified so far do not produce a finalised map of the modernism that Barnes, Loy and Stein participate in and create, but indicate how, at specific junctures, modernist texts are manufactured out of the different flows of determination (from the material and libidinal vectors of Paris, to the semantic and somatic indices of technologised war) of which their contexts consist. It is the potential in unsublimated flows of desire, the flows that reach beyond the boundaries of the sovereign rational subject towards disturbing, transgressive and grotesque experiences and forces that this chapter is concerned with. By considering further the articulations of modernism and modern culture, in both cultural practices and the subsequent theorisation of those practices, the irrational, unaestheticised factors that propel a whole spectrum of modern texts will be examined. My intention is to bring terms such as gothic, grotesque, and carnivalesque into play in 150



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the debate as a way of illustrating the becomings that are triggered in texts which consider the popular and the body, even when these texts are seeking the repression and denial of such aspects of experience and identity. As my methodological beginnings in the Introduction called on Foucault’s genealogy, it is worth recalling his point that ‘Genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival’ (Foucault, 1977: 94).

Becoming-grotesque and grotesque modernism The gender anxiety that was produced by the First World War resulted in a re-articulation of a fear of the feminine (mass), connected to a sense of the destruction and betrayal of traditional masculinity. Despite the dominating association of a feminised mass with mass-consumption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women were not locked into a position within mass-culture or as a consumer. As the previous chapter has shown, it is possible to take off from gendered stratifications, to interrogate their terms and use them as the launching point for a line of flight, a mode of becoming. In the feminine mass there are indeed potential mutations which create a disturbance in the hierarchical and monologic ordering of culture and gender. Gothic is usually seen as a popular and mass-cultural form emerging from and appealing to the market tastes of the nineteenth century, and one made redundant by the modernist emphasis on visibility and contemporaneity. But, as the use of a popular language of degeneracy and vampirism in Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), the textual echoes of Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) in Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), or even the ghost stories that haunt some of Woolf’s fiction show, there is a gothic supplement in the texts of modernism.1 This supplement or surplus is directly related to the gothic flows of modern culture: the world made strange by technology, anthropology and archaeology; the self fragmented and haunted by an otherness within; the ghostly echoes of that which is denied in bourgeois stability; the disembodying power of consumerism and the spectacle. This modernist gothic surplus, with its articulation to a mass-market or mass-taste, poses the opportunity of a flight out of purism and original creation (fictions of individualism) towards possibilities of grotesque re-embodiment, that is to say it can pose connections between bodies, states and modes of being that were before only implicit or virtual, creating mutations out of potential relations. Gothic transmutations and distensions of somatic, psychic and historical experience reveal the fragile and contingent boundaries of cultural normativity and



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the integrity of the subject; they produce a grotesque (cultural) body that exudes and creates transgressive relations of proximity, bringing things together that should be kept apart. The gothic and the grotesque have very different critical heritages and it is not my intention here to subsume one into the other, rather I am drafting a set of articulations that draw modernism, mass-culture and the flows of non-human, dehumanised becoming in confluence with each other. The gothic transgresses, or makes clear the breaks in, the codes of normalcy, and the grotesque similarly fabricates an effect out of and across key dualisms (animal–vegetable, familiar–fantastic). These terms both function as nouns and as adjectives and this grammatical multivalence designates an uneasy linguistic being which produces a multiplicity of effect. Gothic and Grotesque are objects that are also transferable states, points of departure and nodes of becoming. The grotesque as a term and theoretical assemblage has had a long and important career in discussions of mass-culture and the challenge it might pose to majoritarian structures, crucial as the vehicle for transubstantiating the mass-produced into the ‘properly’ (and revolutionary) popular or ‘folk’ culture. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1965),2 his politicised retrieval of a carnival folk tradition has the grotesque body and grotesque realism at its core. The festivities, spectacles and rituals of carnival, in early modern Europe and in the texts of Rabelais, offer a hybridised, excessive, defiling and exuberant inversion of power structures and order. In these, with a fundamental gesture towards the corporeal, low, earthly stratum, the grotesque body provides images of procreation, excess, degradation, consumption, expulsion, death, abundance, a ‘cosmic and universal’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 318) body. Only after the Renaissance, argues Bakhtin, were the grotesque body and the principles of grotesque realism reinscribed through a monologic system. Bakhtin’s theorisation of the grotesque and carnivalesque functions, in part, as a response to an earlier characterisation in Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1963).3 Kayser emphasises the negative aspect of the grotesque since the Romantic period, its role as an expression of alienation, a representation of a modern worldbecome-strange. But Kayser’s study is useful in that he highlights the definition of the grotesque through its difference from a realm of order, closure and rationality. Thus Kayser describes how the Renaissance word grottesco designated ‘a world in which the realm of inanimate things is no longer separated from those of plants, animals, and human beings, and where laws of statics, symmetry, and proportion are no longer valid’




(1981: 21). He also points out that ‘the first instance of such usage in the German language refers to the monstrous fusion of human and nonhuman elements’ (ibid.: 24) and that the early usage in French also attests ‘the same monstrous quality, constituted by the fusion of different realms as well as by a definite lack of proportion and organization’ (24). Where Kayser and Bakhtin differ most obviously is that Kayser’s analysis relies, ultimately, on the concept of the unconscious and emphasises the grotesque as an individual experience or expression, while Bakhtin’s carnivalesque and grotesque realism represent a model of the body politic and the utopian potential of heterogeneous insurgent folk culture. Bakhtin’s idealisation of the carnivalesque is rightly identified as a problem by Stallybrass and White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. They warn against the ‘current tendency to essentialize carnival and politics’ (1986: 15) pointing out that there is ‘no a priori revolutionary vector to carnival and transgression’ (16). There are problems with the way carnival has been used, with the nostalgia and uncritical celebration of carnivalesque populism, while carnival’s actual historical status as licensed release really has to be acknowledged. But Stallybrass and White do see the carnivalesque ‘as an instance of a wider phenomenon of transgression’ (ibid.: 26). Thus the ‘underlying structural features’ of carnivalesque, particularly the ‘taboo-laden’ overlap between high and low discourse which produces the grotesque’ (26) are useful in uncovering the discourses and structures of social classification and delineating the nature and function of ‘transgression’ in bourgeois culture. For Stallybrass and White the persistence of carnival and the grotesque body in modernity are not the residual traces of a once utopian discourse, but an indication of how bourgeois identity marginalised and repressed carnival as marker of the nature (by showing its opposite) and limits of its own meaning and domain. Thus carnivalesque transgression – through an identification with an image-idea of the grotesque body for example – could just as much be ‘a powerful ritual symbolic practice whereby the dominant squanders its symbolic capital so as to get in touch with the fields of desire which it denied itself as the price paid for its political power’ (ibid.: 201) as a politically progressive cultural act. For Mary Russo, Bakhtin’s characterisation of carnival and the grotesque body ‘fails to acknowledge or incorporate the social relations of gender’ (1994: 63) and so ‘leaves a static and universalistic notion of the feminine securely in place’ (29). Russo’s The Female Grotesque confronts the reductive (and essentialising) associations of the feminine with the



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grotesque (as body, as cave, as excessive corporeality, as spectacular stunt) seeking out the female grotesque as ‘a space of risk and abjection’ (ibid.: 12) which figures ambivalently and heterogeneously in modernity and modern explorations of identity and normalcy. The disobedient, leaky, excessive and freakish textual bodies that Russo examines are abject in the sense in which they ‘disturb identity, system order’ as Kristeva defines the abject in Powers of Horror (1982: 4). This clearly demonstrates that the transgressive power of the grotesque body lies in the challenge it poses to the boundaries of ‘proper’ subjectivity. The importance of the abject in historical, and particularly contemporary, gothic horror reveals how it links the visceral transformations and mutations of the gothic with the grotesque broaching of the boundaries of the subject. For Stallybrass and White, as for Russo, carnival transgression through an identification with the grotesque body is not an automatically progressive or liberatory act. What then is its deterritorialising force, what happens in the production of grotesque transgression that effects a coming undone of the regulatory structures of subjectification? What is crucial to Bakhtin’s carnival, and at the heart of the grotesque, is the movement of becoming: ‘Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and complete’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 10); similarly grotesque realism ‘seeks to grasp in its imagery the very act of becoming and growth, the eternal incomplete unfinished nature of being’ (52). In this the carnival, grotesque body is ‘a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed’ (ibid.: 317), it is a rhizomatic and productive body of unregulated and non-interiorised desires. In contrast the classical body presents a closing off, a limiting, an individual body from which all protrusions and transgressions which launch a mutation, a new body or new set of corporeal connections are eliminated. In its realisation of only previously implicit connections between corporeal sites, the grotesque body is a plane of becoming. Such a plane of becoming can, as Bakhtin discusses and as pointed out by many other theorists, be reterritorialised – as a marker of otherness, a transgressive pleasure which confirms the power status of the subject who chooses to experience it – but the previous act of deterritorialisation, the mutation of the constants of the organism and subjectification has launched, however transiently, a line of flight out of normalcy and exposed the subject as an epiphenomenona arising from chance confluences (the arresting of the kineticism of desire and the arbitrary attributions of power and domination).




The becoming-other of the grotesque body should not be equated with an essential ‘otherness’ that the grotesque embodies. Mary Russo both warns against, but also indulges in, a reductive association of ‘women and other excluded or marginalized groups’ (1994: 56) with grotesque otherness. In her study of Irrational Modernism Amelia Jones’s consideration of the ‘irrational grotesque subjects whose expressions and desires are uncontainable not only in the logic of mainstream European cultures but also within the restrained and restraining logic of avantgardism’ (2004: 26) privileges Baroness Elsa as an example but similarly runs the risk of essentialising the irrational and grotesque subject as ‘feminine and/or queer’ (177). In contrast to this I offer a more mobile and flexible figuration of the grotesque body as becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-plant. For Deleuze and Guattari becoming designates the continual production of difference immanent to an event, with ‘event’ not limited to a physical occurrence and understood as a unique moment of desiring production within and out of the associative flow. Becoming-animal, becoming-molecular concerns the haecceity that is entered into, the absolute difference that is produced in a moving away from the limits of the molar human subject. Becoming-animal is not about imitation or formal similarity as Deleuze and Guattari point out in A Thousand Plateaus, it is a ‘zone of proximity’ (1988: 273) that both indicates and is indicated by the process of becoming. Thus a grotesque body does not become ‘like’ an animal or plant but ‘enter[s] into composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate thus composed’ will be animal ‘as a function of the relation of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity’ (ibid.: 274). That is, something that has to do with animal enters into composition with the body to result in the emission of particles that are not ‘a’ specific animal, but put the body in molecular proximity with animal. This understanding severs the possibility of a naturally feminine or other grotesque, as the grotesque comprehended as becoming-animal does not establish a corollary or resemblance between particular bodies and the realm of animals and plants. One does not become other because one is ‘like’ the other, but out of the composition of a haecceity that grows in the midst of things. But, as the feminist critique of Deleuze mentioned in Chapter 1 has highlighted, there are hierarchical dualisms which impact on the gender-neutral process of becoming as Deleuze and Guattari describe it. Their becoming-woman refers to the affective states and positions of ‘woman’ (not a feminine subject) in the same way that becominganimal refers to something to do with the animal (the forces, effects



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and speeds), but not a specific animal itself. However, the proximities are too often collapsed into an analogy in which becoming-woman and becoming-animal is articulated in a hierarchical and detrimental way to real women. The ‘laughing hags’ that Bakhtin evokes in Rabelais and his World (1984: 25) are key to Russo’s identification of an aporia around the female grotesque: they embody a grotesque that is fundamentally gendered; the association of the abject with a jettisoned mother’s body that Kristeva’s Powers of Horror explores, forges a similar analogy. Along with the ubiquitous cultural representations of female bodies and behaviours as animalistic, such articulations enforce a reductive correlation of woman–animal–grotesque. This correlation works against the deterritorialising, molecular effects of becoming to capture and fix women. Any consideration of transgressive, carnival bodies, the grotesque and the potential of becoming-animal, therefore, needs to pay attention to their potential to disorganise the hierarchical constructions of identity, from within the very terms of that identity. Grotesque bodies are a feature of a range of modernist texts, within and beyond the gothic echoes that haunt canonical modernism. The mutilated, fragmented bodies that populate writing about the Great War display the boundaries of the proper body transgressed, the excess that spills out of the body as it merges with the earth of the trenches, or the mutations (both psychic and somatic) that sprout from the wounds of war. The technological bodies of New York Dada also produce bodily transgressions in the form of the ‘ “technical” grotesque’, a ‘fusion of organic and mechanical elements’ that Kayser himself identified as important in twentieth-century art (1981: 183). Grotesque bodies emerge in a variety of ways from the work of Barnes, Loy and Stein, often accompanying an engagement with carnivalesque elements of popular or mass-culture. Thus these grotesque bodies can be articulated both to a low stratum of mass-culture and to a specific breaching of the proper boundaries of the body in a movement out towards becoming animal. Reading their work in this way, my approach is clearly invested in acknowledging the transgressive potentials produced by specific texts, but also attempting to resist the lure of a simply oppositional (feminine) modernist practice. There are grotesque possibilities in both Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land, for example: grotesque and carnivalesque bodies proliferate in the ‘Nightown’ (Circe) episode of Ulysses when the text moves into the night-world of fantasy, hallucination and ‘pornosophical philotheology’ (1992: 564), while the many sites of grotesque abjection in The Waste Land – the numerous corpses, Teiresias, the impotent Fisher King and the sweating Thames – are matched by the




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Bodies, buttons and cows: Gertrude Stein Of the three women covered by this study, Stein’s body is the one that has often been taken as excessive or mutant, oddly feminised or too large and masculine. Hemingway, at his most pleasant, marks Stein’s body as culturally low describing her as ‘very big but not tall and heavily built like a peasant woman [with] lovely thick, alive, immigrant hair’ (1964: 14). The physical rhythms of Stein’s writing do seem to produce a materiality that presupposes a bodily presence, and Carolyn Burke, among others, sees in the rhythmical writing of pieces such as ‘Ada’ a preOedipal bodily realm, an evocation of the mother’s body (Burke, 1982). However, approaches such as Burke’s (based in Object-Relations and poststructuralist feminist theory) would tie Stein’s writing too closely to a single nostalgic body, and ignore the fact that her explorations, in Tender Buttons (1914) and elsewhere, of the interrelation of the self and the world are productive invocations of the multiplicitous possibilities of bodily affects far beyond the mournful structures of psychoanalytic theory. In Stein’s texts the body and its proximities and becomings are experienced in a much more fluid and multiple way. Stein’s The Making of Americans is a text that attempts to articulate a processual acquisition of knowledge and meaning, a sense of becoming that stands in tension with a stratifying desire to know and fix, but it is also a text that invests in a specifically embodied mode of textual pleasure, one in which an ‘anal eros’ dominates the rhythms and flows. This is what Lisa Ruddick identifies in her description of The Making of Americans as a ‘spectacularly anal text’ (1990: 77) in which the ‘teller’ functions as a kind of ‘omnipotent digestive system’, the text passing through ‘something like an authorial body’ (81) in paragraphs which ‘fill with and then evacuate words as if they were faeces’ (79). This is not merely a childish ‘play’ with words, but a fundamental recasting of the hierarchies of writing and meaning in which the text is excreted from an amorphous, grotesque body. Stein writes in the later Tender Buttons, ‘real is, real is only, only excreate, only excreate a no since’ (TB: 38), thereby highlighting the punning play of excre(a)tion in the process of her writing, its presence as rhythmical amassing and discharging,



images of gothic haunting that abound in the final section ‘What The Thunder Said’. In such texts the push towards mutation and disruption on one hand, and aesthetic totality on the other sit in tension with each other, but they do not stand in complete opposition to the grotesque becomings imagined by their female peers.

and its relationship to the real and to a smooth (non-stratified) space or innocence (‘a no since’) where meaning and nonsense (‘no since’) collide in an excretory mass. The retaining and releasing pleasures of the permeable body are explored in other ways in Tender Buttons, published in America after the ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge’ had made Stein’s name in New York and beyond. This collection of poetry (as Stein designated it) is primarily concerned with a domestic space and the objects, people and forces that inhabit and traverse this space. Tender Buttons is thus consciously written out of a traditionally feminine sphere and concerns itself with the cooking, eating, talking and listening that occurs here. It offers a poetry of the permeable and unconstrained body, not a nostalgic evocation of a lost maternal body (though there is no reason why the mother’s body could not be part of the immanence produced by Tender Buttons). This text creates a celebration of the body in linguistic effects and thematic proximities that produce ‘caressed objects’ (as Stein describes them in ‘Poetry and Grammar’); a field of forces and effects that refuses the distinction of self and world, that present a permeable, grotesque bodily milieu. As Harriet Scott Chessman describes, ‘Stein’s foregrounding of nouns as caressed objects in their own right, without any necessary reference to objects, marks her effort to avoid any rigidity of distinction between the “me” and the “not me” ’ (1989: 87). The caressed objects of particular poems in the ‘Objects’ section of Tender Buttons range from a purse, a Seltzer bottle and a blue coat, to ‘A Little Bit of a Tumbler’, while the section entitled ‘Food’ contains roast beef, mutton, celery, pastry and asparagus among much else. The poems are not representational, they do not describe in an apparent way, but neither are they pure experiments in abstraction. Like the portraits Stein was also writing at this time, the poems in Tender Buttons attempt to produce, through the functioning of their language, the subject with which they are concerned, but without reproducing a syntactical logic that would chain a subject and its effects to a grammatical hierarchy. Through paratactic constructions, oblique associations, partial glimpses, word-play and metonymic contiguity Tender Buttons creates a vibrant world of interplaying energies and effects in which objects are not separate from the subjects and effects of their use. So instead of a description of a ‘carafe’, the opening poem ‘A Carafe, That Is A Blind Glass’ offers the resemblance of a carafe, its prismatic effect on sunlight, its unique ordinariness as an object, and points to the possibility of difference in itself when the homogenising power of representation (‘resembling’) is rejected:




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In other pieces, such as ‘Mildred’s Umbrella’ and ‘Colored Hats’, the individuals and objects are more than just connected items, they are expressed as inseparable forces that produce meaning as they emerge from a point of visual and temporal articulation. Tender Buttons is concerned with a differentiated but non-hierarchical space, in which activities and energies merge and emerge. The space of Tender Buttons could be read as feminine, as ‘the gendered realm of consumer culture and domestic space’ that Nicola Pitchford identifies (1999: 650). For Pitchford, Stein’s non-representational poems stand as an ‘attack on patriarchal representation’ (ibid.: 650), but I would suggest a more nuanced reading, one which acknowledges the stratifications that Tender Buttons writes against, without reifying a feminist praxis and constraining Stein’s work with it. Tender Buttons also engages with the lesbian space of Stein and Toklas’s relationship, sharing with ‘Lifting Belly’ an expression of an intention towards an other that transgresses the proper boundaries of identification and desire (both wanting to be and wanting to have). From this perspective, the ‘tender buttons’ of the title are a coded reference to the erogenous ‘buttons’ of the female body (nipples, clitoris) and many individual poems produce a scene of lovemaking. ‘This Is The Dress, Aider’, for example, contains an implicit reference to Alice by playing on the pet-name ‘Ada’/‘Aider’ (aid her, help her, implicitly to her orgasm) whilst also presenting the rising energies of sexual pleasure in its repetitions, rhythmic accumulations and explicit reference to oral sex: Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers (TB: 17) But just as in Lifting Belly, such poems are not expressing the internal and bounded dynamics of a lesbian dyad that stands in rigid opposition to a mainstream erotics and phallogocentric language. In Tender Buttons the dominant role in erotic play (usually gendered masculine) is also expressed, so ‘This Is The Dress, Aider’ also ‘makes a meadowed king’ (TB: 17), just as the ‘Caesar’ in Lifting Belly expresses the force of a female



A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color, and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading. (TB: 3)

orgasm as well as the ‘masculine’ erotic role. Stein’s poetics should certainly not be characterised as oppositional lesbian modernism, but as actions on and in the flows of the real. The desiring production of Tender Buttons operates in a traditionally feminine sphere (the domestic), but the events of this text are not gendered. The interruptions in the associative flow of forces, the linguistic slicings-through that create planes of meaning and affect around and through objects, people and emotions, are the meanings in this text, and they are not limited to a specifically gendered or queer experience of the world. The poems in Tender Buttons open out the body – its desires, movements and orifices – to the real world, a world of cooking, eating, moving, talking, listening, loving. The ‘Food’ section of Tender Buttons foregrounds the body ingesting and enjoying, a grotesque, unbounded, mutating body that moves towards and with the meat, vegetables, cakes and butter that pass through it. Tender Buttons is both a search for the thisness, the haecceity of things, and an opening out of the forces and effects of things and people within the proximities of becomings. The final section of Tender Buttons, ‘Rooms’, opens with a paragraph that highlights many of the tactics of the text as a whole: Act so that there is no use in a centre. A wide action is not a width. A preparation is given to the ones preparing. They do not eat who mention silver and sweet. There was an occupation. (TB: 43) By refusing the organisational properties of a ‘centre’ this text acts in and through a multiplicity, a ‘wide action’ which cannot be fixed as a measurement or quantity (‘not a width’). The rhyming sentence, ‘They do not eat who mention silver and sweet’, introduces, by omission, the grotesque body into the action. The eating body (consuming, taking in, merging with and re-forming the external world) is opposed to an orderly, acceptable, hierarchical world of money and calculated consumption. This disorderly body also refigures the feminine domestic space. What was once an allotted role (‘was an occupation’) in the domestic space becomes an enabling site of bodily transgressions, the past-tense framing of the noun ‘occupation’ signals a move from a fixed sense of what one is occupied with, to a more dynamic process. This is a reiteration of the third sentence in which the noun ‘preparation’ is ‘given to’ the present participle verb ‘preparing’, a shift from fixed object to active process. The final sentence also signals a shift away from taking possession (implicitly by force), describing the ‘occupation’ of




the domestic zone, a living in, controlling, holding, as a past state of being, to be replaced by bodily becomings-other. The potential for becomings-animal is present in Tender Buttons, particularly as the poems on meat, ‘Roastbeef’, ‘Mutton’, ‘Chicken’, refuse the idea of fixity and ownership in favour of the process of difference, and point at the proximate possibilities of subjects, objects, animals and environments. Thus in ‘Roastbeef’ Stein writes – ‘Claiming nothing, not claiming anything, not a claim in everything, collecting claiming, all this makes a harmony, it even makes a succession’ (TB: 23) and: It is so easy to exchange meaning, it is so easy to see the difference. The difference is that a plain resources is not entangled with thickness and it does not mean that thickness shows such cutting, it does mean that a meadow is useful and a cow absurd. It does not mean that there are tears, it does not mean that exudation is cumbersome, it means no more than a memory, a choice and a reestablishment, it means more than any escape from a surrounding extra. (TB: 21) There is no necessary reference to roast beef here, but the qualities, aspects and relations of the meat (thickness, cutting, meadow, cow) are mentioned in sentences that foreground a space of ‘difference’ in itself and ‘exchange’ between two differences. These differences cannot be fixed and controlled by a noun (‘cow absurd’) as the cow/meat is product of an environmental field of forces (‘meadow is useful’) that enters into the interaction of eater and meat and takes part in the becoming that results. In this interaction the literal slicings off (of the roast beef) are not a violence to be mourned (a tear that produces tears) but productive ‘tears’ of the flow of forces and effects; segments that enter the body and leave it transformed, as the words of the text enter the machinic body that ingests and excretes or exudes them. The consuming body, consuming and exuding the roast beef, partakes of the speeds and velocities of the masticating cow, its digestive tract, its immanent processes. The proximity of bodies (eater and meat of cow) enter into a relation that is ‘no more than’ an archaic ‘memory’ of non-differentiation from the world, a ‘choice’ to pass into a becoming beyond the rigid boundaries of subjectification, and a transformative ‘reestablishment’ of an individuation that is ‘very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 261). And all of this is infinitely more meaningful than a denial



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of the abundant grotesque excess of the immanence of becoming: ‘it means more than any escape from a surrounding extra.’ The absurdity of ‘cow’ as a significatory stratification and territorialisation of the becoming-animal is reworked in As A Wife Has A Cow: A Love Story published in Paris in 1926 (with lithographic illustrations by Juan Gris). In this text the becoming-animal is produced more readily and explicitly and the ‘cow’ functions as a recasting of a traditional animalising of unthinking, feminine immanence. This text is usually read as a coded account of lesbian sex, building in its rhythms and repetitions to a linguistic and sexual climax that is the ‘cow’ or orgasm of Stein’s ‘wife’ (Alice). As A Wife Has A Cow does ascend in its incremental syntax and grammatical variations towards a final ‘cow’, but to interpret it solely as a coded account of lesbian sex would be to limit the possibilities produced by this text. The repetitions and variations produce a movement in and out of a permeable body/experience: ‘In came in there, came in there come out of there. In came in come out of there’ (SW: 481). The experiencing body is a grotesque and unbounded one, an excessive and repetitive having of a ‘cow’ (the word is used 24 times) that marks a movement beyond ‘proper’ sensation into a present space where pleasure and sensation constantly move through the (lesbian) body: ‘Just as soon just now just now just as soon just as soon as now. Just as soon as now’ (SW: 481) As a Wife Has a Cow builds to an evocation of the continuous present of an experience that is not, or not merely, jouissance: ‘Have it as having having it as happening, happening to have it as having, having to have it as happening’ (SW: 482). It is not about the singular experience of a subject ‘having’ but a movement across the threshold of the organism into pure intensity that is becoming-animal: To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 13) ‘Cow’ is not just a code for lesbian orgasm, but is the marker of a becoming-animal that is realised in the excessive, asignifying flux of Stein’s text. This stands in contrast to a desire for proper objects,




which would fix and differentiate a meaning for ‘cow’, ‘woman’, ‘lover’, ‘beloved’. In many other of Stein’s texts the body also figures as a site of intensitive relations, as a site of consumption, as something to be consumed, as a productive (often sexual) excess and, ultimately, as a potential becoming. In ‘Susie Asado’, the first piece in Geography and Plays (1922) and the related ‘Preciosilla’ (published in Composition as Explanation in 1926),4 the subject of the portraits is a flamenco dancer. Her physical attractions are punningly described as ‘Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea’ and her bodily movements ascribed to ‘jelly’ (SW: 485). ‘Susie Asado’ also moves towards the movement of trees (‘Trees tremble’), she is becoming-other (becoming-tree/wood, becoming-animal) through her moving dress, the responses she elicits, her tapping shoes: ‘drink pups lease a sash hold’ ‘[a] nail is unison’ (ibid.: 485). She is a source of sexual excitement in ‘Preciosilla’ which emphasises ‘wet, wet naturally’ and says ‘Toasted susie is my ice-cream’ (ibid.: 486), again producing an excreting, consuming grotesque body that vibrates, as the text itself does, with the intensity of desire and becoming. What must also be reiterated, though, is that the spaces of Tender Buttons, ‘Susie Asado’ and ‘Preciosilla’ are spaces of the everyday or popular, spaces filled with mass-produced consumer objects and a domestic and folk culture that has no aspirations towards aesthetic permanence. Thus Stein’s grotesque bodies, mutated embodiments and proximities of food, sex and identity are marked by a participation in mass-cultural forms. A central paragraph in As A Wife Has A Cow is concerned with ‘what is it as they expect of it’ and ‘the fifteenth of October’ (SW: 482). This may seem an incidental speculation on external expectations (perhaps projecting a mainstream, voyeuristic interest in the intimacy of lesbian sexual relations), but the date is far from incidental. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas relates how in the Autumn of 1924, T. S. Eliot visited Stein and agreed to print something in the Criterion as long as it was ‘her very latest thing’, and so ‘she began to write a portrait of T. S. Eliot and called it the fifteenth of November, that being this day and so there could be no doubt that it was her latest thing’ (A: 217). After much wrangling and Stein telling ‘all the english people coming to the house’ about what was happening, the piece finally appeared a year later in the October issue and ‘she replied that nothing could be more suitable than the fifteenth of November on the fifteenth of October’ (A: 218).5 The ‘fifteenth of October’ thus articulates the becoming-animal of ‘my wife having a cow’ to a ludic response to the modernist expectations of Eliot as editor of the Criterion. The



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insistence on a meaningful contemporaneity (‘latest thing’) is undone through an excessive literalism that confronts the institutional consolidation of modernism that the Criterion heralded and effected.6 In addition the orgasmic, intensitive body of Stein’s text stands as a response to the proper body of the modernist Criterion in its ‘self-appointed role as a guardian of European civilisation’ (Harding, 2002: 6).

From repulsive women to becoming-animal: Djuna Barnes In an analysis of Stein’s Tender Buttons, Elizabeth Frost suggests that it stages a feminising of the fetish, resisting the masculinism of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory with a lesbian linguistic version of object-love, while Jane Marcus argues that Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) rewrites (and refuses) Freudian psychoanalysis and Freud’s narratives of female hysteria. In these readings both writers parody castration anxiety: Stein with a non-phallic eroticisation of ‘the objective world and of language’ (Frost, 2003: 27) and Barnes with ‘transvestite-shaman’ Dr Matthew Mighty O’Connor’s excessive womb envy (Marcus, 1991: 245). Such an obvious connection between the two writers seems almost irresistible, but in turning to look at the work of Barnes, here I again refuse an easy, Freudian model for interpretation. The following account chooses instead the flows of popular culture and the grotesque bodies that are produced by popular energies as a point of articulation, rather than an interiorised and universalised theory of the subject. Barnes engages with the grotesque border-spaces of American popular culture in a range of her early journalism and performs or experiences abjectification when she finds out ‘How It Feels Too Be Forcible Fed’ in 1914. This article has already been considered as a particularised embodiment of the struggle of a feminist body with specific state power and an interrogation of the cultural construction of the female body as vessel or container, but what it also does is articulate the (feminised) body to other abject bodily forms and forces: the maternal milk that is force-fed, the corpse-like position of Barnes, semi-conscious and bound and held by doctors. And in so doing the article further articulates this abjectification to a spectacularity, explicitly connecting the grotesque and abject (figured through a whole spectrum of feminine immanence from mother to corpse) to mass-entertainment. Elsewhere Barnes’s New York journalism interrogates the functions of popular cultural forms such as Coney Island freak shows, the Hippodrome, burlesque and vaudeville, film, evangelism and boxing, and evinces a particular interest in the spaces wherein these forms produce grotesque embodiments or




mutations. So, the ‘limbs’ of the Ziegfeld Follies’ girls, the discarded costumes of the Hippodrome and the ‘fixed smile’ of a female spectator at a boxing match problematise the organisation and control of the body, tending towards an unsettling fragmentation and exaggeration of body parts.7 Laura Winkiel argues, in her article on public culture in Nightwood, that Barnes is concerned with the commodification of entertainment and the transformation of a heterogeneous public culture (epitomised by the circus) into a homogenous, technologised mass-culture of spectacle (epitomised by the Hippodrome’s co-option of circus and vaudeville, and film). I would, however, allow Barnes a much more knowing understanding. Given her own ambivalent position as avant-gardist writer, spectacular subject and popular journalist, the popular public culture Barnes reports can never be ‘either wholly corrupt or wholly authentic’ (Hall, 1981: 232). The mutation of the proper body and proper boundaries of the subject into liminal spaces of freakish proximity and disordered dissilience is what emerges from Barnes’s engagement with popular, mass-culture. The political force lies in the becomings launched from such spaces, not in a nostalgia for a utopian public culture. Disagree as I might with Winkiel’s assessment that Barnes celebrates an authentic public culture as opposed to an alienated mass-form, her argument does highlight the importance of the circus and circus animals of this carnivalesque space to Barnes’s work. Central to the circus and its attractions is the grotesque body with its exuberant disregard for the norm, its excess, degradation and abundance and this is epitomised in Nightwood which presents outrageous circus performers and in which the circus attracts all the key characters; Nora Flood, Robin Vote, Dr Matthew O’Connor and Felix Volkbein. Barnes’s writing before Nightwood explores grotesque disruptions, but her earlier work is not a rehearsing of themes for this novel: in The Book of Repulsive Women, Ryder and Ladies Almanack she produces distinct, heterogeneous grotesque bodies, often ones that serve to interrogate the seemingly natural articulation of women to the low, earthly stratum. What also emerges from these texts is a mobile engagement with versions of the carnivalesque overturning of boundaries and order. The Book of Repulsive Women is, perhaps obviously, a text in which grotesque women’s bodies play a central role. These women stand in contrast to the myths of a modernist, machinic American dream, presented as perverted, deformed and abjected instances of femininity: the ‘long blank udders’ of a prostitute in ‘Twilight of the Illicit’ (B: 27), the lips of a nude woman that ‘bloom vivid and repulsive’ in ‘Seen From the



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“L”’ (B: 24), the ‘shattered’ and ‘shock-abbreviated’ female corpses in ‘Suicide’ (B: 35, 36). The illustrations and the poems combine to introduce a decadent aesthetic into the modern streets of New York, but also to exceed and overrun the proper boundaries of the subject, bringing sex, death, birth and animality into close conjunction with each other. What is particularly pressing in this text is the effect of conjoining women with the grotesque so that the articulation functions in a process of stratification in which the articulation woman-body-grotesque comes to seem ‘natural’. Using such a decadent aesthetic Barnes runs the risk of merely reinforcing a reductive representation of women. Her only defence against this naturalisation in The Book of Repulsive Women is to make her women appear as unnatural as possible, both in the poems and in the illustrations. More than this, though, as Bonnie Kime Scott points out (1995b: 84), several of the illustrations suggest mutant, grotesque forms in which the human and animal are fused or merge in stylised ways, in a nude woman with cat-like face and elongated ears, for example, or arms appearing from the side of the page that also resemble a phallus or a giraffe’s neck and head. A critique of the normalising, naturalising tendencies of American culture can also be seen in Barnes’s family chronicle Ryder which, among other things, describes the lives of the free-thinking polygamist Wendell Ryder and his family (his mother, two wives, many children and lovers). Ryder, as with Ladies Almanack and Nightwood, is often articulated, in criticism, to the literatures it echoes – Chaucer, the King James Bible, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Fielding, Sterne – and particularly Rabelais. With its ‘antique’ illustrations and chapter-length insertions, Ryder writes through the grotesque body, in its presentation of bodily processes and sexuality and in its protagonist Wendell Ryder who, as Sheryl Stevenson rightly identifies, has ‘a body image that is strongly grotesque (in Bakhtin’s terms) [and so] breaks down barriers between human and animal, celebrating the abundance and fertility of the earth itself, epitomized in his own body’ (1981: 85). Wendell, introduced as ‘Jesus Mundane’, stands as a forthright rejection of puritan America, advocating an earthly spirituality of phallic fecundity and excess: Cheryl J. Plumb describes Ryder as a ‘protest against a repressive middle-class ethic’ (1986: 86). But Wendell produces pain and suffering in the women around him, he is a sexual and domestic predator, an instrument of oppression. Thus, as Susan Edmunds argues, the ‘antinormative domestic project’ (1997: 219) of Ryder reveals that the two competing models of American reform – the middle-class, puritan mode and the radical freethinking mode – both seek to capture and control




woman (as pure ideal or as vessel for polygamous fecundity) and deny her the possibility of escape from the stratifications of gender. In both cases the ‘violation’ (real or imagined) of the ‘little girl’, Julie, marks this capture and control. Ryder is very clear that there are two sides to grotesque abundance and the low body, and the text makes the connection between sex and death apparent through the ambivalent image of the marriage bed, the site of pleasure and the pain and blood of parturition, and through the visions and stories of rape and death in child-birth. Ryder does not simply celebrate grotesque abundance and the open body, but it does produce an abundance of female parodic grotesques, from Amelia’s (Wendell’s first wife) ‘Bottoms-up’ greeting on their first meeting (R: 126), and Kate’s (his second wife) emptying of a chamber pot out of her window, pouring ‘the brimming vessel’s contents upon the periwigged pate of some good father of the law’ (R: 90) to Molly Dance’s weird Creation story and complete disregard for ‘order’, propriety or even of identifying the paternity of her children (R: 198–9). Kate’s ‘brimming’ chamber pot helps to indicate how Ryder itself brims over with instances of urination and bodily fluids, both textually and in the illustrations, presenting an open, productive, scatological femininity. These instances include Wendell’s mother Sophia’s five chamber pots, accompanied by an illustration of her using one as her husband Alex enters the room, and an illustration of Kate’s mother, ‘the buxom contralto from Cork’, busking the streets of London that she towers over, ‘singing and ∗∗∗∗∗ like a stupendous hound dog’ (R: 81). Such references to urination were the most heavily censored in the first edition of Ryder and the pissing singer picture was one of the illustrations that were removed in 1928. The relationship between text and illustration, and the impact of censorship is also pertinent to Barnes’s highly unconventional Ladies Almanack: showing their Signs and their tides; their Moons and their Changes; the Seasons as it is with them; their Eclipses and Equinoxes; as well as a full Record of diurnal and nocturnal Distempers: written & illustrated by A Lady of Fashion, privately published and circulated in Paris in 1928. This elaborately titled, satiric ‘chapbook’ ostentatiously and playfully depicts the predominantly lesbian circle around Natalie Clifford Barney. The reader is offered philosophical and social discussion, and a gay Amazonian mythology, which intersperse the narrative of Dame Evangeline Musset (representing Natalie Clifford Barney). Critics have seen Ladies Almanack as a text that either ‘reclaims the positivity of the female body and the lesbian experience’ (Lanser, 1991: 164) or offers a ‘biting satire, verging on viciousness’ and a ‘reductionist vision of lesbianism’ (Jay, 1991: 185,



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193). Though this text expresses a fundamental ambivalence about the Sapphic circle it depicts, throughout Ladies Almanack the excessive and desiring bodies of women are celebrated. Where the lesbian sex in ‘From Fifth Avenue Up’ in The Book of Repulsive Women is presented in full decadent perversion as a ‘sagging down with bulging/ Hair to sip,/ The dappled damp from some vague/ Under lip’ (B: 14), Dame Musset and her friends revel in a bawdy, Rabelaisian sexuality that makes no concessions to decadent stereotypes. Woman’s exuberant body abounds in this text – her ‘Gusset’, ‘flaps’, ‘belly’ and ‘bosom’ – and her sexual pleasure is described and illustrated. In Ladies Almanack it is only the interventions of heterosexuality and patriarchy that corrupt and exhaust the (female) body. Musset herself is ‘one Grand Red Cross for the Pursuance, the Relief and the Distraction, of such Girls in their Hinder Parts, and their Fore Parts’ (A: 6), well known for her ‘Slips of the Tongue’ (A: 9). It is her tongue that ultimately outlives her death and cremation causing a ‘great Commotion, and the sound of Skirts swirled in haste, and the Patter of much running in feet, but Senorita Fly-About came down upon that Urn first, and beatitude played and flickered upon her Face, and from under her skirts a slow Smoke issued, though no thing burned, and the Mourners barked about her covetously’ (A: 84). The barking mourners at Dame Musset’s wake recall the numerous proximities of human and animal in Ryder and it is these proximities which mark some of the most unsettling, grotesque functions of the text. Barnes herself acknowledged the influence of L’imagerie populaire, published in Paris in 1926, an anthology of fifteenth-century illustrations of human–animal hybrids where the roles of human and animal are reversed and interchanged. Bonnie Kime Scott, who discusses ‘Barnes’s Beasts Turning Human’ reads the influence of this text and Barnes’s repeated ‘blurring of the distinctions between the animal and the human’ as ‘part of her general tendency to focus on intermediate grounds that lie between accepted, overdetermined categories, and interfere with neat progressions’ (1995b: 73). The example of L’imagerie populaire for Ryder is not thus just one of an inverted, carnivalesque world, but one of a ‘blurred middle ground between the bestial and the human’ (ibid.: 73), where the possibility of escape from molar subjectivity is hinted at by becomings-animal. In Ryder therefore, the gigantic pissing singer mirrors a previous illustration of ‘Pennyfinder the Bull’ who towers over a cobbled street, farting, defecating and urinating while children bathe in his huge pool of piss (R: 63),8 Amelia dreams of a ‘great fair ox of a Black Beauty’ who ‘laid down beside her’ (R: 99), and the first man ‘Jonah’ is born from a whale’s mouth in Molly Dance’s Creation




story (R: 195). Such proximities, proximities of grotesque bodies and animals, instigate a further unsettling of the boundaries of the subject and the proper body so that the mutation into an other, a disorganised, improper life-form, is realised. Neither bestiality, or an imitation of primitivism, the becomings-animal of Ryder are a full extension of the promise of the grotesque body: not simply positive or negative, enabling or restricting, but a new way of being, a liberation of desire from the stratifications of the human subject into a realm ‘outside of the imagination and quite beside what men would call the point’ (R: 119). This is how the mate of the ‘Beast Thingumbob’ is described in Ryder. She appears in one of the primal myth stories that Wendell tells his children Julie and Timothy, has hooded feet, ten breasts, no face and has lived for over a thousand years. Doomed to die bearing Thingumbob’s ten sons, this creature stands at the boundaries of comprehensibility, a grotesque limit case in which the potential for becoming-animal is returned to a gendered system that uses and destroys it. In Ryder the creature is pictured supine under the Beast (who has wings, a ram’s head and a lion’s body) in an illustration that was also censored from the 1928 edition for its ‘unnaturalness’. At the end of Ryder even Wendell, whose animal proximities have been restricted to phallic and fecund identifications with the natural world, merges with the animal pack, a multiplicity in which the self is broken apart: And everything and its shape became clear in the dark, by tens and tens they ranged, and lifted their lids and looked at him; in the air and in the trees and on the earth and from under the earth, and regarded him long, and he forbore to hide his face. They seemed close ranged, and now they seemed far ranged, and they moved now near, now far, as a wave comes and goes, and they lifted their lids and regarded him, and spoke not in their many tongues, and they went a far way, and there was a little rest, and they came close, and there was none. Closing in about him nearer, and swinging out wide and from him far, and came in near and near, and as a wave closed over him, and he drowned, and arose while he yet might go. (R: 242) A similar movement towards animality is depicted at the end of Barnes’s Nightwood as Robin Vote, the ‘Somnambule’ lover who speaks only twice in the novel, ‘bows down’ and crawls on hands and knees with her



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Then she began to bark also, crawling after him – barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching. Crouching, the dog began to run with her, head-on with her head, as if to circumvent her; soft and slow his feet went padding. He ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees. (N: 238–9) This shocking and ambiguous scene has perplexed critics since the book’s publication and, rather than make a specific statement about the bestiality or not of Robin’s behaviour, what I intend to do here is articulate it, and other aspects of Nightwood, to the becomings-animal that emerge from Barnes’s work. These becomings-animal are not a performative atavism, but a contagion, an unnatural participation that fundamentally ruptures the central institutions of family, religion and State. In Nightwood they can be particularly collocated with the carnivalesque inversions and mutations that emerge most notably from the circus space prominent at the beginning of the novel. Here Barnes, obviously indebted to Joyce’s own Rabelaisian explorations of the grotesque, activates political effects that remain dormant or ultimately controlled by the structures of a text such as Ulysses. The grotesque characters that populate the Denckman circus, where Nora and Robin meet, are ‘gaudy, cheap cuts from the beast life, immensely capable of that great disquiet called entertainment’ (N: 25). ‘Frau Mann’, the trapeze artist with her muscular ‘unsexed’ body (N: 28) and ‘Nikka, the nigger who used to fight the bear in the Cirque de Paris tattooed from head to hell with all the ameublement of depravity’ (N: 31), notably confound and confuse the hegemonic stereotypes of racial, gender and bodily otherness and have received most critical attention. But largely prominent in analyses of Nightwood that focus on otherness in all its manifestations is the queer, transvestite would-be gynaecologist Doctor O’Connor, who makes his first appearance in Ryder and who most fully bodies forth the grotesque mutations and excesses of this novel. O’Connor indulges in masturbatory antics in a church (N: 188–9), appears in bed in ‘a woman’s flannel nightgown’, a ‘golden



ex-lover Nora’s dog. Robin circles and bangs against the side of the dog as it springs back and forth, barking and biting at her:

semi-circle of a wig with long pendent curls’ and ‘heavily rouged and his lashes painted’ (N: 117), and offers a sacrilegious mysticism of the abjected peoples of the ‘Night’ (queers, prostitutes, freaks, performers, Jews, black peoples). Nightwood, and Doctor Matthew O’Connor, merge the sacred and the profane, destroying the boundaries between the clean and polluted, the proper and the corrupted, masculine and feminine: the invert is both a sufficient and a scant figure for these disruptions. Nightwood is not, despite its sparse plot, fragmentary structure ‘partly overlapping and in a contingent order’, and a ‘rich stylisation of sentence and luxuriant proliferation of trope’ (Tyrus Miller, 1999: 149), an abstract, modernist montage of surreal verbal encounters. As many critics have noted, it is a fundamentally political text, ‘a book of communal resistances of underworld outsiders to domination’ (Marcus, 1991: 221) and a defiance of ‘rationalization and embourgeoisement’ (Chisholm, 1997: 195) in the face of the Fascist politics of the 1930s. For Tyrus Miller the very excess of narration of Nightwood signals the impossibility of ‘ “rescue” – both as an issue of plot and as a problem of interpretation’ (1999: 151), presenting existing redemptive strategies, for the modernist text and for the marginalised, as fundamentally insufficient. Barnes considered ‘Night Beast’ as a title for her novel and, as Marcus points out, Nightwood ‘has more animal characters than people, from lions to mouse-meat, cows, horses, fish, and an extraordinary number of birds’ (1991: 248). But where for her these are ‘adding to its archetypal qualities’ (ibid.: 248), I would argue for such animal abundance as a key component in the becomings this text launches. O’Connor himself, often displacing the human with the animal in his displays of verbal profligacy, offers a startling instance of a non-filiative alliance between man and beast: he relates to Nora and Felix a wartime experience in which the shock of a bomb attack, the same shock that thrust many Great War combatants beyond the limits of the subject, brings O’Connor into a proximity with a cow:

I had her head on, and the poor beast was trembling on her four legs a flash of lightning went by and I saw the cow turning her head straight back so her horns made two moons against her shoulders, the tears soused all over her great black eyes I put my hand on the poor bitch of a cow and her hide was running water under my hand, like water tumbling down from Lahore, jerking against my hand as if she wanted to go, standing still in one spot; and I thought, there are directions and speeds that no one has calculated, for believe it or



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This experience of the ‘directions and speeds’ of this cow signals the momentary emergence of an alliance wherein O’Connor, in his fear, and the cow in hers, become-other to, and with, each other, producing a singular moment at the limits of human comprehension. It is a moment of the complex emergence of a new potential: ‘Becoming is involutionary, involution is creative’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 238). O’Connor’s becoming-animal, both here and elsewhere, repeats the effect of Robin Vote, the mute centre of the novel. When she is first introduced, Robin occurs simultaneously as a fixed cinematic image, echoing images of Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus,9 and as a submerged vegetative life-form: On a bed, surrounded by a confusion of potted plants, exotic palms and cut flowers, faintly over-sung by the notes of unseen birds, which seemed to have been forgotten lay the young woman, heavy and dishevelled. Her legs, in white flannel trousers, were spread as in a dance, the thick-lacquered pumps looking too lively for the arrested step. Her hands, long and beautiful, lay on either side of her face. The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earthflesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. (N: 55–6) Both a fixed iconic image, and a metamorphic state of being that does not have any stable structure of meaning, Robin exists throughout the text in this dual aspect. One facet represents the attempt to capture, organise and subjectify, turning Robin into a being abstracted from the impenetrable otherness of her existence, and it is this that both her husband, Felix Volkbein, and her lover Nora attempt, and which instigates their loss of ‘Robin’. Felix admits his error saying ‘An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties’ (N: 160) while Nora confesses the murderous potential of her desire to ‘capture’ and ‘fix’ Robin as a ‘woman’ not as a process: ‘Once, when she was sleeping, I wanted her



not that cow had gone somewhere very fast that we didn’t know of, and yet was still standing there. (N: 40–1)

to die’ (N: 183). Robin’s proximity to plant and animal life sets her on another path, the path of ‘absolute deterritorializations’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 13), the movement of becoming-animal. Robin is indeed ‘a woman who is beast turning human’ (N: 59) who has no final resting place and who does not fit into any stable structure of description or meaning. Hers is not an imitation of an animal, instead she provokes a startling interest from the circus animals including a lioness who ‘regarded the girl, as if a river were falling behind impassable heat, her eyes flowed in tears that never reached the surface’ (N: 83). Nor is it a master and pet relationship: her husband Felix remarks that she is incapable of caring properly for her pets. The return she threatens – ‘she who is eaten death returning’ (N: 60), ‘she carried the quality of the “way back” as animals do’ (N: 64) – is the return of non-being, of undifferentiated desire, a ‘world of pure intensities’ the ‘nonsignifying sign’ of ‘an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 13).10

Urban detritus and the abject: Mina Loy Mina Loy appears in Barnes’s Ladies Almanack as Patience Scalpel, a voice of scepticism amongst the excessive lesbian voices and bodies that populate the text. In ‘October’ she cries, ‘ “God help us !” draining her Glass, “not one good hammer-throwing, discus-casting, coxy Prepuce amongst you !” ’ (LA: 67), thereby bemoaning the absence of a ‘real’ man in Dame Musset’s Sapphic lesbian community. As commentators have pointed out, Patience is the token heterosexual in the text, but the narrative voice often blends into, or echoes, her scepticism. Susan Snaider Lanser describes Patience as the ‘archheterosexual’ (1991: 160) identifying her ‘Scalpel’ as her voice and conflating Patience with surgery and rape, specifically with the surgical defloration that Dame Musset relates in the ‘March’ section (LA: 25). Lanser concludes that ‘the designation of surgeon as rapist implicates the name Patience Scalpel as well, linking her voice even more firmly to a violent heterosexuality’ (1991: 160). This is an over-reading of Patience’s role, particularly as, on hearing Dame Musset’s story, Patience expresses her regret in more sincere and profound tones than the over-emotional response of ‘Tilly Tweed-in-Blood’ (LA: 26). The textual allusion to surgery and loss of virginity can be articulated, though, to the ‘unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty’ advocated in Loy’s ‘Feminist Manifesto’ (LLB: 155), a polemical separation of women’s sexual identity



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from their value in the patriarchal economy. The scalpel here produces the cutting edge of Loy’s feminism, her denial of the biological identification of women and their subjection within their bodies, rather than a heterosexist contravention of lesbian integrity.11 The ‘Patience’ of Patience Scalpel cannot be ignored and this aspect of her characterisation also functions to blur the boundaries of public and private identities. Patience speaks the forbearance that her name suggests; ‘ “Time passes,” said Patience’ (LA: 68) and her comments offer a sceptical take on myths of romance and sexual liberation. Patience Scalpel in Ladies Almanack is much more than a foil to a celebration of lesbian sexuality; she facilitates a negotiation between public and private, verity and irony in an anomalous figure even within the elite of unorthodoxy. Crucially, she does not represent the surgical excision of the grotesque lesbian-feminine body in favour of an ideal of classical restraint, her position is, instead, merely that of scepticism about the rhetoric of (sexual) liberation and separatism. Loy-as-Patience Scalpel and Loy in her work, particularly her later poetry and art, do not stand in opposition to Barnes’s representations of the body. Throughout her work Loy explores the position of the anomalous, particularly those marginalised and abjected from society and culture, and considers how the grotesque functions as repository for the desires and fears of a bourgeois culture. In the poem ‘Crab Angel’ (1921, for example, a dwarf circus performer on horse-back is variously imagined as an ‘atomic sprite’, an ‘effigy of Christmas Eves’, a ‘sugar angel’ and ‘Hercules in a powder puff’ (LLB: 85, 86). His status as a freak, under the control of the circusmaster who pulls the wires holding him, demonstrates the function of the grotesque as an outlet for the repressed desires and denied expectations of bourgeois normalcy. In his artificial, machinic conjunction of beauty and grace, and deformity and awkwardness, the ‘minnikin of masquerade sex’ reveals the limits of dreams of transcendence, his fall to the ‘soft earth’ and his ‘bow legs’ (LLB: 85, 86) mark the inevitable immanence of the real. This poem also engages, in a wider way, with the carnivalesque disruptions of a popular culture that cannot simply be dismissed as ‘mass’ entertainment. The circus of the 1920s had come into direct competition with moving pictures during a period in which Laura Winkiel argues, there was a ‘shift from live, interactive forms of entertainment to mass culture spectacle’ (1997: 9). The Ringling Brothers had bought the Barnum and Bailey circus in 1907 and in 1919 (because of the pressures of the First World War) had combined the two circuses into the ‘Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Combined Shows: The Greatest Show on




Earth’. The three-ring circus Loy describes – ‘Ringling’s revolving/ trinity’ (LLB: 85) – thus purports to be the most spectacular entertainment available, incorporating all the spectacles of history (from the Roman amphitheatre through to the Wild West shows, travelling menageries and freak shows of the late nineteenth century). As Barnes highlights in Nightwood, the circus offers a blasphemous celebration of the unusual, the grotesque and abnormal. In the space of the circus, religion is parodied simultaneous with a disruption of the divisions of gender in an experience that confronts and undermines the expectations of its audience: the circus conjoins a variety of effects that include the specificity of its performance (audience, location) and make disinterested (alienated and removed) spectatorship impossible. It is its carnivalesque potential that Loy explores in ‘Crab Angel’. But Loy’s work does offer a sense of the limits of carnivalesque disruption and an analysis of the ways that the grotesque bodies (of racial others, women, the poor) are put in the service of the production of a consumerist norm. Thus, cinema, fashion, the geographical divisions of a city, charity and even the work of aesthetic creation function to iterate and substantiate a distinction between the acceptable norm (the bounded and beautiful body) and the grotesque deviation. This does not amount to a simple denial of grotesque embodiment, but often requires the exploitation of this grotesque in the actual manufacture of an ideal. Loy’s poem ‘Film Face’ (n.d.) offers a momentary articulation, a ‘garbage-barge’ passing below a bill-board picture of Marie Dressler (LLB: 125). Dressler, primarily a vaudeville and musical comedy performer had played alongside Charlie Chaplin in his film debut (Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914)) and had become, in the 1930s, a huge box-office draw, receiving the 1931 Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as a dock-worker’s wife in Min and Bill. A very well built woman, union activist and already 46 years old at the beginning of her film career, Dressler was a very different icon to her svelte and sexy co-star in the 1932 film adaptation of Emma, Myrna Loy. In (Mina) Loy’s poem, Dressler’s status as film star is juxtaposed to that of ‘the Gods on Olympus’, but she rests not on ‘clouds’ but on the ‘clouds/ of sanitation’s chaos’ and is yoked, in this visual and semantic articulation to the ‘ruined body of/ the poor people’ (LLB: 125). Dressler, as ‘image’ of the grotesque body substitutes for and elides the grotesque realities of life in a consumerist New York, the cinematic fetish disavowing real experience. Thus, Hollywood cinema co-opts a disruptive, carnivalesque body and organises and appropriates it as a figure that signifies.



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In a similar representation of the disavowal of the unspeakable – here racial otherness – drafts of Loy’s poem ‘Mass Production on 14th Street’ highlight the role of Jewish immigrant and African American workers in the garment industry, whose presence is abjured in the artificial gardens, the ‘conservatories of commerce’ of the department stores (LLB: 112).12 The ‘carnal caravan/ for Carnevale’ (LLB: 112), linguistically presented with an excessive alliterative force that undoes its own signifying possibility, is a consumer carnival in which bodily efforts are transformed into fashioned garments, a simulacra of the productive abundance of the garment-workers, a carnival that is delineated by the ‘static’ ‘paralysis’ of ‘mannequins’ (LLB: 112, 113). ‘On Third Avenue’, also about the disavowed reality of the New York Bowery (where Loy lived from the late 1930s to the early 1950s), reveals and explores the grotesque remnants (bums, prostitutes, drunks, the poor) of a city obsessed with the progress of its own modernity: ‘ “You should have disappeared years ago” – ’ the poem quotes at its opening (LLB: 109). The ‘shadow-bodies’, ‘down-cast’, ‘mummies half unwound’ of this urban zone are juxtaposed to two possibilities of escape, or ‘compensations of poverty’: the first is the escapism of the cinema, the second a flight uptown. In both cases, what is involved is the transformation of a shocking and repulsive field of forces and effects, a range of grotesque cultural practices, into a fetishised normality, desire coagulated into acceptable forms – the straight lines of the Hollywood narrative or uptown New York. Discussing these ideas, Susan E. Dunn points out, ‘Loy’s literary and artistic oeuvre traces a fascination with the power of the grotesque body’, in the poem ‘Chiffon Velours’, for example (1999: 7). The ageing woman in this poem is ‘sere’ (LLB: 119), both withered herself and also, in her active reforming of her ageing body, producing a profound (searing) affect on those who see her. The word also suggests ‘seer’, and in this the woman’s prophetic potential lies, not just in announcing the old age to come for us, but particularly in predicting, through her body, the potentials for disorganising the body and moving outside its supposed limits. For Dunn ‘the woman’s “web of wrinkles” suggests, a new, organic structure for her flesh’ as her ‘flesh is replaced by external props of fashion’ (1999: 7), and indeed the ageing female body of ‘Chiffon Velours’ mutates towards a hybrid, non-organic state that recalls Baroness Elsa’s New York performances. During her years living on the Bowery, Loy wrote other poems; on an ‘Idiot Child on a Fire-Escape’, a photograph of Nazi mass-murder of Jews (‘Photo After Pogrom’), and on her own ageing body (‘An Aged Woman’), as well as on the bums and alcoholics of the Bowery (‘Hot




Cross Bum’). All of these explore at an explicit level the grotesque, not as abstract category or even as an imaginative blending of human and non-human elements; the grotesque in Loy, as in Stein and Barnes, is involved in a becoming-other, a becoming-unhuman, and in a transgression of the proper limits of the body. In Loy’s work, however, what is produced is a sense of the grotesque as the necessary production of the city, the urban detritus that makes modern Manhattan possible. In her visual artwork of the early 1950s, Loy explicitly utilised urban detritus in three-dimensional constructions made from rubbish such as Communal Cot, No Parking, Bums in Paradise and Christ on a Clothesline This use of urban detritus and the abject as actual material (as well as thematic content) for her work can be articulated to Loy’s automythological long poetic sequence Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923–25) in which she correlates mass-culture, an abject aesthetic and a ‘mongrel’ identity. Such articulations pose further possibilities of connection and meaning-production, specifically to an agglomeration of racial indeterminacy and modernity which functions to interrogate systems of signification and domination. The grotesque marginalities that Barnes’s texts produce are also ones which disrupt systems of significance and subjectification, while Stein’s consuming, excreting, orgasmic bodies activate forces that are deliberately prohibited by a heterosexist norm. It is at such joints or hinges that the politics of becoming-animal meets the minoritarian: There is an entire politics of becomings-animal which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State. Instead, they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized institutions. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 247)



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Wandering and Wondering: Jewish Identity and Minority Writing

Jewishness as an area within debates about language politics and the politics of representation has come to concern recent criticism on modernism in general, and on Barnes, Loy and Stein in particular.1 The late nineteenth century saw a particular turn in definitions of, and debates about Jewishness, not just in response to the wave of Eastern European migration following the pogroms in the Tsarist Empire from 1881 onwards, but also emerging from new racialist definitions of Jewish identity (a shift from religious and cultural ideas of the ‘Hebrew’ to conceptions of a Semite race). The notion of a Jewish-Bolshevik menace (after the 1917 revolution) or an international Jewish conspiracy (with the widespread dissemination of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in the 1920s) further modulated conceptions of Jewishness and its place in (or threat to) modern society. The ‘Jewish question’, a nebulous set of anxieties and concerns about Jewish cultures in Western societies, was an important facet of the late nineteenth century. It impinges on a range of modernist practices, not in a simple philo- or anti-Semitic vein, but in articulations with and through the Semitic discourse2 that permeates early twentieth-century culture. Jewishness is connected, in a variety of ways, with debates about modernity and modernist creativity and also figures as an ambiguous heritage for a range of writers and artists (Loy and Stein among them). In this chapter the Jew will be considered as a figure produced in and for modernism, and as a personal point of articulation for Jewish writers. Central to this consideration will be the minoritarian status of Jewishness, not a ‘minor’ status defined and circumscribed by a majoritarian norm, but a potential site of articulations (in both meanings of this word) that could resist and transform an imperative linguistic 178



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system – the order-word function of language that marks stoppages, and arrests and commands bodies.

Asking where and what is the Jew in modernity is not just about identifying anti-Semitism, it is a matter of understanding how Jews, the scapegoats of medieval Western culture, came to be rearticulated to a negative projection of fears and anxieties in the modern age. For Zygmunt Bauman the project of modernity necessarily produces anti-Semitism: the homogenising impulse of European nation-states emancipated its ‘citizens’ but negated and suppressed other (diasporic) loyalties (Bauman, 1998). David Feldman argues, though, for the contingencies of particular Jewish communities in specific nations across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pointing to the continuous redefinition of Jewish identities. For Feldman it is the anti-socialist, demagogic politics that emerge as the elite attempts to retain control after the enfranchisement of the masses that particularly ties anti-Semitism and modernity together (Feldman, 1998). It is necessary to take both these arguments into account as the relationship of Jews to the nation and the ongoing deployment of stereotypes of ‘the Jew’ in the face of perceived internal threats and in support of an anti-socialist politics are recurrent features of the early twentiethcentury cultural and political milieu. Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture as the erasure of distinctions between the ‘Hebraic’ and the ‘Hellenic’ in Culture and Anarchy (1869), influentially proclaiming the civilising assimilation of archaic and worldly Semitism into ‘culture’, characterises the liberal inclusiveness of nineteenth-century England. In Germany, the Enlightenment model of Bildung enabled Jewish participation in German civilisation through an ideal of cultural education, and the 1789 revolution in France had offered inclusion to Jewish citizens. But the defined borders of these nation-states also provoked an anxiety about the transnational position of the Jew, for though Jewishness was an archaism that could supposedly be assimilated into a universal culture, its essential cosmopolitanism exceeded national categories. Such contradictions of modern Jewishness drew on equally contradictory stereotypical precedents: Jews are represented as both the embodiment of liberal progress and as the vestiges of an outdated medievalism; as a bastion of empire and one of the main threats to empire; as prefiguring a socialist world state and as a key force preventing its development; as the ideal



The Jew in the modernist (con)text


Across the Western world the ambivalent, ambiguous ‘Jew’ marked a negative point of articulation for national and cultural identity. The ideal of an inclusive American culture that would level differences between peoples, celebrated by the Anglo-Jewish Israel Zangwill in his 1908 play The Melting-Pot, was a utopian vision that was not necessarily shared by American writers: Henry James, for example, expresses his distaste for the ‘Hebrew Conquest of New York’ in the 1907 The American Scene (1968: 132).3 The Dreyfus Affair in France, the 1905 Aliens Act in England,4 the waves of anti-Semitism in Weimar Germany, all suggested a great unease about and antipathy towards the perceived inassimilable foreignness of Jews. There are differences in the position and representation of Jews in these different national contexts, but there are also shared stereotypes and consistent fears about the Jew who was ‘simultaneously at the centre of European metropolitan society and, at the same time, banished from its privileged sphere by semitic discourse’ (Cheyette, 1994: 12). Both inassimilable otherness and dangerous hidden presence within the modern nation, anxieties about the Jew produced scientific as well as political debates. The racial sciences that proliferated at the end of the nineteenth century sought to define Jewishness as a race at a time of fears about the increasing ‘invisibility’ of acculturated Jews. The inherently Oriental Jew, a carrier of disease and pollution, a lower race closer to the Negroid than the Arian, a teeming mass that polluted the wider population through intermarriage, the Jew as unstable and degenerate; these ideas were given ‘scientific’ weight particularly as general notions of degeneration were widely articulated at the fin-de-siècle. Jewish degeneracy was associated, not only with a physical tendency to disease, deformation and (diseased) sexuality, but with a mental instability which aligned Jews with the conditions of city living and with the impulsive excesses of genius (or for Cesare Lombroso a ‘pseudo-genius’; creative genius afflicted with an inherently Jewish neurosis). Stereotypes of Jewish intellectualism and sensuality were thus brought together in an articulation of genius, degeneracy and race. The racial difference of the Jew that the anthropologists, ethnologists, and biologists of the late nineteenth century had ‘discovered’ is linguistically reinforced by the Yiddish ‘sub-tongue’ of the Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants who found their way to the cities of Europe and America.



economic man and the degenerate plutocrat par excellence; as the modern alienated artist and the incarnation of a corrupt worldliness. (Cheyette, 1994: 9)

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This was not just the hidden language of the ghetto, however: the New York of the 1910s had a thriving Yiddish literary scene with some 20 Yiddish Theatres,5 and this presence was the result of a very recent movement of Yiddish out of the domestic realm to become an acknowledged public, literary language, as in the work of Sholem Aleichem.6 And as it became a recognised international literary language, Yiddish was also co-opted as a powerful symbol of a modernist nomdaism. As Maria Damon explains ‘Yiddish also takes on the symbolic significance of an improvised language of exile characterized by the highly valorized modernist tenets of constant change and fragmentation’ (Damon, 1993: 218). The altered status of Yiddish and its persistence as a modernist and nomadic mode of discourse is pertinent to both Yiddish and nonYiddish speakers of modernism. Yiddish has no ‘unified cultural or geopolitical referent’, it is an ‘elastic language that slips through the cracks of other languages even as it bears the marks of the cultures and languages it slips through’, a ‘weird association of a homey (haimish), humorous “household” language with the high spiritual drama of Hebrew lettering’ (ibid.: 222). The ambivalence of the Jew – what Brian Cheyette describes as the ‘very slipperiness and indeterminacy of “the Jew”’ (1994: 11) – which seems to be encapsulated in the lived collagism of Yiddish – was fundamental to the way this figure was imagined and mobilised by many modernists. Yiddish suggest a disruptive and deterritorialising linguistic presence, one of pass-words or the components of passage, transformations of the compositions of order-words. In this it provides an exemplum of Jewish inbetweenness through which the tactics of modernist writers, writers who do not write in Yiddish but who seek such transformations of order-words in an otherwise dominant language, can be articulated. In their study Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari consider Kafka’s practice as a Prague Jew writing in German, for Kafka writes in German rather than Yiddish. Yiddish is important for Kafka though, ‘less [as] a sort of linguistic territoriality for the Jews than as a nomadic movement of deterritorialization that reworks German’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 25). It is a language that is popular, lacking a grammar and ‘filled with vocables that are fleeting, mobilised, emigrating, and turning into nomads’ (25). As a result Kafka ‘uses the path that Yiddish opens up to him’ (25) and effects a deterritorialisation of German, a minor utilisation of it, blurring the different functions, playing with them, being a ‘stranger within his own language’ (26). What Deleuze and Guattari locate in Kafka is an example of ‘minor literature’; not (necessarily) the literature of a minority, nor literature in a




minority language. The characteristics of ‘minor literature’ are ‘the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation’ (ibid.:180). In other words minor literature is constructed from within, and disrupts, a major language; it is never simply about an individual or Oedipal family triangle, this is always connected up to other forces, economic, bureaucratic and so on, that determine it; and it is not tied to an enunciating subject who causes it, rather it is collective and expresses the possibility of an alternative community. Kafka’s writing results from a tripartite contradiction; the ‘impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 16), and this highlights how minor literature in general emerges from an impasse in relation to the majority language it is written from within. Language imposes power relations (through its codes and structures) but also necessarily contains instability, different functions and speech acts that mean that ‘language remains a mixture’ (ibid.: 26). It is thus open to major and minor uses that either fix, control and support the dominant order, or take advantage of divergence, disorganisation and diversity: to make use of the polylingualism of one’s own language, to make a minor or intensive use of it, to oppose the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive quality, to find points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape, an animal enters into things ’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 27) Minor literature offers a resistance to an ‘authentic’ or original language (‘the most Oedipal of reterritorializations’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 24]), to an impossible and nostalgic notion of return. The concept of minor literature also enables the political struggles of minorities to be linked to literary experimentation, not as unintelligible utterance or the eruption of the (Kristevan) semiotic chora, but as an ‘intensive usage of language’, what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a ‘blur of languages, and not at all a system of languages’ (ibid.: 24). In this intensive usage minor literature creates a process, a process of becoming minor, rather than a product (a fixed and final minor literature). Throughout modernism the process of minoritarian writing can be articulated to representations of Jewishness: the effects of this articulation highlight how both majoritarian assemblages and minority becomings engage with the Jew.





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As recent studies by Brian Cheyette and others have detailed, the Jew figures in a range of modernist texts. Cheyette’s examples in Constructions of the Jew (1994) include G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, Hilaire Belloc, Joyce and Eliot, and reveal that Semitic racial representations are, in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s words, ‘not aberrations or embarrassing gaffes but central to the construction of liberalism’ (2001: 160). The realisation that the reductive representation and deployment of Jewishness is ubiquitous rather than exceptional leads some critics to conclude that anti-Semitism was ‘the price to pay for admission into the club of Modernism’ (Freedman, 2000: 16). Certainly charges of anti-Semitism have dogged the work of T. S. Eliot, despite the fact that he let his most virulently anti-Semitic statement, in After Strange Gods (1934), go out of print.7 In his 1920 poems ‘Gerontian’, ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’, ‘A Cooking Egg’ and ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’, anti-Semitic stereotypes abound: the Jew who ‘squats’ in ‘Gerontian’, the ‘protozoic slime’ of ‘Burbank/Bleistein’, the voracious prostitute ‘Rachel née Rabinovich’ in ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’, the East End ‘red-eyed scavengers’ of ‘A Cooking Egg’. DuPlessis also sees the Jew in the unregulated hordes of The Waste Land; for her the Jew ‘occurs intermittently, and is not named as such, yet the figuration is present’ (2001: 155).8 For Ezra Pound, though he does not figure directly in his Hell cantos, the Jew comes to represent all the sins of usury, and through his Fascist broadcasts for Rome Radio, Pound reproduced all the vilifying stereotypes of diseased and verminous Jews.9 Such anti-Semitism, as a critic like Maud Ellman reads it, is fundamentally part of a projection of an inner darkness onto a scapegoat. Ellman reads the Jew, in both Eliot and Pound, as a disavowed figure of self-recognition arguing that ‘for both writers, Jewishness comes to stand for the deracinating, mongrelising, disembodying effects of writing; and the imaginary Jew becomes a mirror image of the poet himself’ (1996: 89–90). For both Eliot and Pound it is the ‘indeterminacy’ the ‘slipperiness’ that Cheyette identifies (1994) that feeds into their anti-Semitic representations and that also makes the Jew dangerously close: the indeterminacy that seems a particular fact of modernity articulates the Jew to the modern, and so to the enterprise of modernism. In Joyce’s texts this is less of a problem. In Dubliners he deploys stereotypes of the Jew, notably the desirable and corrupt/corrupting Jewish feminine (in ‘A Little Cloud’ and ‘Counterparts’),10 whilst in



Jewish modernism and modernist Jews

Ulysses Joyce actively exploits the ‘instability of “the Jew” as a racial and cultural signifier to undermine any dominant discourse’ (Cheyette, 1994: 206). As Cheyette demonstrates, Joyce’s text offers an ambivalent construction of racial difference, particularly in the ‘disruptive capacity of Leopold Bloom’s unstable “greekjewish” identity’ and attempts to ‘break down the binary oppositions between ‘ “Jew and gentile” or “Hebrew and Hellene” ’ (ibid.: 267). In his consideration of the ‘Jewish question’ in Ulysses, Steven Connor focuses on discourse, seeing ‘the poetics, the erotics, and the politics of address’ in the novel as implicated with the complexities of the Jewish question and linked to the familiar Jewish themes of dispossession, dispersal and selfdivision (1995: 236, 226). He concludes that the ‘repeated insistence on the vagrant, broken nature of address’ in Ulysses (235) is rehearsed through and connected with Jewishness in the text. By articulating the Jew to a disruption of the cultural and identificatory sedimentations that are consolidated by forms of discursive address, Connor’s reading brings Ulysses close to my own reading of Stein’s Lifting Belly, and the effects that war and love produce in that text. The question is whether articulating the Jew to such discursive disruption furthers a Semitic discourse or activates a minor deterritorialisation of language Other writers deploy the disruptive, minoritarian potential of the Jew in their writing, putting it into the service of molar and majoritarian politics. In Pilgrimmage (1915–67) Dorothy Richardson presents the cosmopolitan, degenerate Jew, Mr Mendizabel and the Zionist Michael Shatov, who wants to marry her protagonist. Both are Russian Jews who facilitate, in the text, Miriam’s encounter with otherness, an encounter that enables her to see ‘England itself from the gaze of the other’ and continue with the process of her feminist emergence (Radford, 1998: 100).11 Mary Butts’s Death of Felicity Taverner (1932) deals directly in the stereotype of the Jewish Bolshevik agent in the figure of Nick Kralin, a simultaneously charming and repulsive threat to the integrity of the British countryside and heritage. Neither Richardson nor Butts was Jewish, though Richardson gives her protagonist a Jewish name (Miriam) and Butts was briefly married to a Jewish man, John Rodker. It is in the texts of Jewish individuals themselves, like Rodker and Isaac Rosenberg, who stand at the margins of the modernist canon, that the disruptive potentials of ‘the Jew’ in the text are differently mobilised. Both Rodker and Rosenberg grew up in the East End, the first generation children of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants, and friends with




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other important Jewish modernists, Joseph Leftwich, David Bomberg and Mark Gertler. Rosenberg served, and was killed, in the First World War, Rodker was imprisoned as a Conscientious Objector, but in these opposite experiences both writers encounter state power and its mechanisms for producing a proper (controlled) subject, an encounter which informs the representation of majoritarian structures in their work. In his study of Anglo-Jewish poetry, Peter Lawson identifies Rosenberg and Rodker’s work as ‘minority modernist poetry’, seeing their ‘social and literary hybridity’ (Lawson, 2006: 19) as crucial to this minority writing. In Rosenberg, in particular, this produces a ‘dynamic, AngloJewish poetry and poetics’ (ibid.: 31) while the ‘ungraspable’ and ‘indeterminate’ (as figures of Anglo-Jewishness and exilic modernism) (9) are at the heart of Rodker’s affirmations of ‘foreign-ness and revolutionary arts’ (76) Rosenberg’s poetry and poetics are characterised by an inbetweenness and a linguistic oddness, and for Lawson these are the crucial mechanisms by which he ‘deterritorialises English in order to write another, eccentrically located kind of poetry’ (2006: 4). The possibility of a language that produces a real is what Rosenberg’s poetry attempts. As Jon Silkin recognises, instead of representing ideas ‘Rosenberg’s language is them [ideas], sensuously enacts them, and experiences them’ and so approaches the potential of a linguistic manufacture of ‘ “haecceity” (or thisness)’ (Silkin, 1979: 56). For Adam Phillips, Rosenberg’s poetry is ‘suggestive of the sense in which language is understandable and ungraspable can be used but not mastered or owned’ (Phillips, 1994: 185). Close to the limits of language Rosenberg’s poetry either ‘refuse[s] the obvious connections, leave[s] out the transitions’ or is ‘promiscuous in the making of connections’ (Phillips, 1994: 186). Rosenberg’s poems multiply images of suspension, as in ‘Chagrin’ (1915–16), manifest a concern with transitions and terrifying images of assimilation or non-differentiation as in ‘Dead Man’s Dump’ (1917), and pose a refusal of normal order (at formal and linguistic as well as textual levels). All of these mechanisms could be articulated to the suspension, assimilation and complex differentiation of Anglo-Jewish identity, of which hyphenation is an undeniable mark. Rosenberg’s poetry attempts to write, in a majoritarian language, an other experience, the experience of Jewishness within it. What Edward Marsh (Rosenberg’s friend and editor of the Georgian Poetry anthologies of the 1910s) described as the ‘lawless and grotesque manner’ of Rosenberg’s poetry,12 can be articulated both to the stereotypical representations of the Jew (diseased, deformed and cosmopolitan) and to the linguistic




impropriety of his poetry. As grotesque exemplum, the improper Jew and his minority writing may be used as a figure to shore up codes of cultural normalcy, but this ‘grotesque’ may also launch a becoming, a becoming-animal that exceeds the bounds of the subjectified and regulated human organism. In his poems ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ (1916), ‘The Immortals’ (1917) and ‘Louse Hunting’ (1917), Rosenberg offers a different version of the verminous stereotypes of the Jew, endowing lice and rats with a power to defy humanity. The ‘droll rat’ of ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ has ‘cosmopolitan sympathies’ that ‘they would shoot you’ for and passes between the opposed forces at the Front. This ‘queer sardonic rat’ does not hold an omniscient, objective perspective, he ‘crosses’ at ground level, and in touching an English and a German ‘hand’, he produces a proximity between these ‘haughty athletes’ and the ‘sleeping green’ that the hands themselves cannot grasp. The possibility is that the soldiers too will become part of the ‘bowels of the earth’, merged into a state of imperceptibility and dehumanisation that is, of course, articulated to the loss of stable identity in the trenches, but also to the indeterminacy of the Jew/rat. John Rodker, a publisher of Eliot, Pound and Joyce was more accepted than Rosenberg in the high modernist circles of the 1910s and 1920s – he followed Pound as London editor of The Little Review in 1919 – but was also circumscribed by the anti-Semitism of these circles. He published Eliot’s Ara Vos Prec in 1919 which contained the poems ‘Gerontian’ and ‘Burbank/Bleistein’ with their anti-Semitic representations, and is the basis for the repulsive Russian Jew Nick Kralin in his ex-wife, Mary Butts’s Death of Felicity Taverner, and for Julius Ratner, a ‘highbrowsub-sheik of the slum’ in Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God (1984: 143). Rodker, who spent much time in post-war France, poses an acute inbetweenness in Memoirs of Other Fronts: ‘In Paris I feel English, in London a foreigner’ (1932: 16). As author, editor, publisher and translator, Rodker’s affiliation to a European avant-garde is marked by his articulation of foreignness, modernist innovation and Jewishness, an articulation that enables his own modernist practice. Thus, in his essay The Future of Futurism (1927) he identifies modernist innovation through the foreign, Jewish artists Jacob Epstein, Schoenberg and Gertrude Stein. His own presence as translator (of Lautréamont among others) and the publication of his works in French when no English publisher would take them, locate him in a liminal space, between languages and national spaces. Such a liminality underscores the question of ‘his status as a subject’ which is already posed by his Jewishness and which, as Ian




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Patterson points out, was one of the ‘enduring concerns’ of his work (2003: 91). The writing that Rodker produced is not a search for an originary or definitive space of identity and personal voice. He deterritorialises the self, ‘his writing is permeated with the affective modes of the self’ (Crozier, 1996: xvii), and he uses language in an explicitly minor mode, punctuating his work with ellipses and dashes and creating disjointed phrases and eliding transitions or conjunctions. Rodker’s minority writing is elaborated, as Lawson points out, through his depiction of ‘nomads, immigrants and Gypsies’ in his poetry and prose (2006: 87); in ‘The Fair’, ‘The Flying Banvards’ ‘The Acrobats’ and in the centrality of the fair in Adolphe 1920 (1920). But it is also produced through Rodker’s visceral engagement with the flux of modern life in many poems (for example, ‘The Theatre’, ‘To a Renault in the Country’, ‘London Night’). The self as performative marionette and intensive surface for the inscription of experience are both features of Rodker’s writing, and they do not stand distinct from each other. In ‘Wax Dummy in Shop Window’, stark and disjunctive images of ‘Rain – loud bee swarm’, ‘Burst spar-eyes’ juxtapose to a molecular ocular perception that is ‘prisms’, ‘light cones’, and which merges the viewing subject, the city crowd and the inanimate Dummy/God (Rodker, 1996: 85). Rodker’s translation of human affect into silent or mechanical action is most fully realised in his dramatic texts ‘Theatre Muet’ (1915–19) and ‘The Dutch Dolls’ (1915), but throughout his works he produces versions of machinic identity that blur the boundaries of the human, and pitches the interior or personal out into the real. This is what Andrew Crozier describes as ‘the projection of somatic field and psychic affect into the lived world’ (1996: xvii) and it is a marked feature of Rodker’s novel Adolphe 1920. Rodker also provokes animal-becomings that transgress the inner – outer, human – non-human distinction, with poems of frogs, worms, fish and rats that ‘depict a host of animals which escape such assemblages [of modern life] by slipping through the cogs of (sociocultural) machines’ (Lawson, 2006: 92).13 Like Rosenberg, Rodker takes on stereotypes of the Jew, imagining himself as a poisoned rat in ‘Hymn to Himself Atlas 20th Century’, while in Memoirs of Other Fronts and elsewhere Rodker disarticulates the stereotype of the slippery Jew to produce an enabling, desegregated minority position: as Lawson argues, he ‘deploys the traces of anti-Semitic discourse to universalise the “slimy”, and Jewish, freedom of slipping between taxonomical definitions’ (2006: 96).




Marianne Moore includes a similar slipperiness in depicting the Victorian Prime Minister, baptised Jew Disraeli as: ‘You brilliant Jew,/ You bright particular chameleon’ with ‘stripes and parti-coloured mind’ (Moore, 2002: 181). The decision not to republish the poem in which these lines appear after 1924 might show that, as both DuPlessis and Cristanne Miller suggest, Moore recognised the potentially anti-Semitic articulations that could be made with the poem.14 But Moore is not just a non-Jewish poet engaging in Semitic discourse. As Miller explores, Moore’s interest in and poetic comments on Hebrew prophetic poetry demonstrate that it was an important model for her own poetic voice. Miller argues that Moore found in Hebrew poetry ‘a model for addressing political injustice that acknowledged personal doubt or emotion as part of public, ethical statement (2005: 149), and expresses this model in poems such as ‘The Past is the Present’ (1915). Where Ezra Pound reads ‘a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas’ (1918: 57) in his designation of the poetry of Moore and Loy as logopoeia, articulating them to a masculinist tradition of irony (that includes Jules Laforgue and early Eliot), posing a Jewish minority writing as a force of their work presents a very different articulation. Considering the Jew in the modernism of Barnes and Stein, as well as Loy, makes this articulation (of Jewishness and minority writing) a productive way of reading the linguistic intensities and revolutionary force of their work.

‘The Jew’s history a commodity’: Barnes, Nightwood and the Jew In 1937, a year after Barnes’s Nightwood was first published, Dylan Thomas described it as ‘one of the three great prose books ever written by a woman’ while T. S. Eliot considered it to be concerned with ‘the human misery and bondage which is universal’,15 both assessments that universalise Barnes’s achievement with the novel. Nightwood actually opens with the story of the main Jewish character, Felix Volkbein, and a long narrative discussion of Jewishness. This aspect of the text was not much acknowledged in contemporary reviews, which tended either to laud or condemn the novel’s depiction of homosexual outcasts and the prominent character and voice of Dr O’Connor. Identifying Jewishness as a crucial component in the mechanisms of Nightwood forces a shift away from a focus on the queer aesthetic the novel might express and also counters the universalising tendencies of other praise for the novel. The indeterminate Jew of modernism, a figure of myth and historical




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and cultural reality who was produced in a range of textual assemblages, functions in Barnes’s novel to signal the potentials and limits of representation itself. Nightwood begins with an account of the birth of Felix to Hedvig Volkbein, ‘a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty’ who dies straight after naming him (N: 11) and Guido Volkbein, who died six months earlier. Guido is described as ‘a Jew of Italian descent [who] had been both a gourmet and a dandy, never appearing in public without the ribbon of some quite unknown distinction tinging his buttonhole with a faint thread (N: 12). Guido is thus marked by a blurring of distinctions (between gourmet and dandy) and a search for a ‘thread’ of distinction or identity, a history beyond that of the non-history of the ‘outcast’ (N: 14). This extends into Guido’s search for a valid history of his race, and a personal genealogy that he constructs in order to enter into the Gentile world: he fakes his Austrian nationality, his Baronetcy and even his family portraits are actually pictures ‘of two intrepid and ancient actors’ (N: 19). Guido’s racial identity16 is one he also constructs through the association of Jews with loss and subjugation to Christian structures of social and religious redemption, encapsulated in the title of the first chapter, ‘Bow Down’. The ‘sum total of what is the Jew’ for Guido (N: 13) amounts to their ‘degradation’ as scapegoats for Christian society, embodied in ‘the ordinance of 1468 demanding that, with a rope about its neck, Guido’s race should run in the Corso for the amusement of the Christian populace’ (N: 12), and in the degraded sellers of second-hand clothes whose ‘cry’ was ‘running the Piazza Montanara long ago, “Roba vecchia” ’ (N: 13). The uneasy proximity of ‘race’ and ‘running’ in these descriptions unsettles the stability of the racialised fixing of the Jew: the race is marked as a competition that is run (rather than an immutable and eternally fixed identity). The race is run, notably, in order to confirm a hierarchy of Christian over Jew, revealing that this stratification of social and racial identity rests on the denial of the specificity of the Jew. As Julie Abraham highlights, Jews exist outside the ‘history of the official record’ (Abraham, 1991: 255), but this means that they are also a necessary trace that disturbs its comprehensibility, allowed to enter it as victims and so as examples, within the terms of Christian discourse, but unrepresentable in their own singularity. This unrepresentability and externality to official history is the heritage that Felix inherits; he ‘had become the accumulated and single’ (N: 22) and ‘exact history stopped for Felix’ (N: 19). All Felix has in terms of a record of himself are ‘these facts [about his parents]




and two portraits and nothing more’ (N: 20). But it is Felix’s aunt, from a 30-year perspective, who offers him the ‘only knowledge of his past’ (N: 20) thereby displacing the veracity of just ‘these facts’ (his history) even further. Felix’s lack of a history is connected to his identity as a ‘wandering Jew’ (N: 20); ‘the Jew seems to be everywhere from nowhere’ (N: 20). This phrase both universalises (everywhere) and displaces (nowhere) the diasporic unfixity of the Jew. Nomadic unfixity lies at the heart of Nightwood’s construction of the Jew, and connects him to ‘those who are outside the circle of power that the official history bestows and legitimates: Jews, wives, daughters, homosexual men, and lesbians’ (Abraham, 1991: 255). But this does not produce a liberating flight from the majoritarian structures of subjectification for any of the ‘outcasts’ of Nightwood. Felix is attracted to a huge range of cultural artefacts and activities (folk stories, wine, architecture, museums, the circus) that reverberate with an ‘oddness’, in a search for a form that could reflect a stable and singular sense of himself back to him. But all of these, and even his attraction to the carnivalesque milieu of the circus, brings him within the remit of the ‘Christian’ (N: 26), demonstrating the impossibility of defining a self that actually lies beyond the terms and assemblages of the Christian norm. Even in his marriage to Robin and devotion to their sickly son, Felix is in search of ‘density’ (N: 170) that would establish a fixity that his Jewish heritage denies. Felix’s story ends with himself, now a heavy drinker, ‘Frau Mann’ (the trapeze artist) and his devout Catholic son forming an ‘odd trio’, a degenerate family unit, in Viennese café life. (N: 175) As Hanrahan writes, ‘the Barnesian Jew suffers from so total a lack of identity, so unredeemable a confusion that any attempt to redeem his condition only aggravates it’ (Hanrahan, 2001: 32). Thus the Jew, what he represents, what his history is, what his role in culture is, is always and only intelligible within a framework that denies the haecceity of the Jew, that takes the real and solidifies it into a sign that can be traded and spent in a system of exchange and use: ‘The Christian traffic in retribution has made the Jew’s history a commodity’ (N: 24). So Nightwood articulates the discursive construction of the indeterminate Jew and the place of the Jew in recent history (it is not accidental that Felix is born in Vienna, the home of Freud, in 1880, at the beginning of the Russian pogroms) with a further concern about the effects in the real of capturing and marking certain types of ‘outcast’ subjectivity. The Jew does not feature in Nightwood simply to enact metonymically the outcast position of other Others (transvestites, gays, lesbians, blacks among them), but points to the central concerns of the text with




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intelligibility. Thus the ‘difficulty of defining the Jew opens onto the wider epistemological impossibility of achieving any definition whatsoever’ (Hanrahan, 2001: 33), not to lock the text into an epistemological mis-en-abyme, but to show how Nightwood reveals the limits of majoritarian structures of knowing and its distorting effects on other modes of life which are processes of becoming that exceed fixed categories. But the question that is often asked of Barnes’s Nightwood is whether her representation of Jews elides their specificity as Mairéad Hanrahan argues (2001: 47), essentialises them (along with African identities) as Karen Kaivola suggests (1993: 182) or even ‘triumphs over its own antiSemitism’ (Marcus, 2006: 229). Nightwood certainly draws on Semitic discourse in its portrayal of Jews. Otto Weininger’s assertions of the effeminacy of the Jew in Sex and Character echo in the association of both Felix and his father Guido with a gender uncertainty so that they amount to what Kaivola describes as ‘parodies of masculinity’ in which the ‘male Jewish body is portrayed as the antithesis of desire’ (1993: 181, 180). At the same time homosexuality is described in terms which evoke Havelock Ellis’s sexological theories of the ‘third sex’, bringing other scientistic discourses into the novel. That much of the racial and sexual theory of Nightwood, after the opening, comes from the mouth of Dr O’Connor is not incidental. O’Connor as a medical man and the Irish-Catholic who listens, much as a priest would, to the confession of the central characters functions as the mouthpiece of medical and religious knowledge, but only in order to destabilise the certainties and boundaries of all knowledges. O’Connor is, after all, a queer transvestite, non-registered doctor who masturbates in church, and so his (often contradictory) dogmatic pronouncements issue from a site of transgressive indeterminacy. This further points to Jewishness (and other forms of ‘oddness’) as an experience that lies beyond hegemonic modes of discourse, a set of affects that this discourse territorialises and fixes (even as the epitome of unfixity) for its own meanings. The limits of discourse, which mean that the unrepresentable can only be captured and distorted in any attempt at representation, point out towards the linguistic tactics of Barnes’s writing here and elsewhere. In her response to the ‘impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing the impossibility of writing otherwise’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 16), Barnes deploys a range of devices, most obviously her use of baroque. The baroque is a ‘multiply[ing] of principles’ according to Deleuze, an excessive heterogeneity produced in the absence of a singular norm or principle. The baroque thus attempts to overcome




the want of a ‘theological ideal’ (Deleuze, 1993: 67).17 Baroque is not meaningless excess and collision, but the multiplication of meaning that occurs when a totalitarian regime of codes is dismantled: it is a multiplication that undoes the power of that regime. This points to the deterritorialising function of Barnes’s writing, its function as ‘minority writing’, not the writing about a minority, but the collective assemblage of enunciation of the minoritarian: a potential community. The communal enunciation is obvious in Ladies Almanack and in (the much more pessimistic) Nightwood, but even in Ryder and The Antiphon which seem to offer fables of filiation in juxtaposition to the two other affiliative texts, the political immediacy of the enunciation connects the family triangle of Ryder to social, juristic and cosmological forces and the Oedipal structures of The Antiphon to fascism and war, and feminist becoming. Barnes’s writing may pose a minoritarian challenge to the totalitarian regimes of meaning and classification, but her representation of Jews remains equivocal. Barnes’s comments elsewhere offer problematic accounts of Jewishness. In Ladies Almanack, whilst celebrating the forces and flows of (female) desire and desiring production, Barnes makes reductive comments about Jewishness. Further, in notes towards her memoirs, entitled ‘Vantage Ground’, Barnes describes the Steins’s cultural interest and financial position in less than flattering terms ‘A Jew is already running both before and behind you that he may “catch” everything’ (CP: 236). So it is impossible to deny Barnes’s deployment of Semitic discourse and even of stereotypes in her representation of Jewishness, nor is it sufficient to point to her friendship with Mina Loy, or the origins of her own name as a deformation of Eugène Sue’s ‘Djalma’ (from The Wandering Jew) as some kind of evidence of ‘sympathy’ with Jewishness. But, Barnes does include Jews in her attempt to write out a minoritarian politics, a politics of becoming that offers an alternative to the rigid structures and subjectifications of majoritarian culture. Jews in Nightwood are, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terms for the becominganimal, ‘elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State. Instead, they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognised institutions’ (1988: 247).

Anglo-mongrel modernism: Loy and the wondering Jew Loy comes to the Jewish question and to the representation of the Jew from a different perspective than Barnes. The daughter of a HungarianJewish immigrant father and a Protestant English mother (who is




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depicted in Loy’s autobiographical writing as anti-Semitic), and brought up in the London of the 1880s and 1890s, Loy’s writing articulates a Jewishness that is a personal (racial)18 heritage as well as an assemblage of speculations about avant-garde writing and of minority experience. As with Barnes’s writing, critical appraisals of Loy’s work have increasingly become attuned to racial resonances particularly in terms of the linguistic and aesthetic features of her writing. These are variously described as ‘mongrelised’ English (Perloff, 1998: 146), as Loy’s ‘ “mongrel” poetics’ (Frost, 1998: 149; Miller, 2005: 160) or as a ‘mongrelised asthetic’ (DuPlessis, 2001: 159), and all these critics draw on Loy’s connections to, and depiction of, Jewishness for their formulations. DuPlessis and others locate Loy’s turn towards her Jewish heritage as a poetic and aesthetic factor in the long poem Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, begun in 1922, but there is some disagreement as to where and why Jewishness became important to Loy. For DuPlessis it is a ‘response to T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitic discourses of the early 1920s’ and the ‘loose, general anti-Semitism in the British world in the 1920s and earlier’ (2001: 160) while Miller sees Loy’s ‘experiences of living among a culturally vital population of immigrant and assimilated Jews in New York and Berlin’ in 1920–22 (2005: 167) as the crucial catalyst for her interest in Judaism. As Loy was brought up in an Anglo-Jewish household in London in the late nineteenth century and repeatedly reworks the tensions of this household in her autobiographical and automythological writings, it seems apt to bring the British context under examination alongside her writing on Jewishness in the 1920s.19 Goy Israels, the title of some of the unpublished autobiographical writings held at the Beinecke Library, demonstrates Loy’s affective engagement with the construction of Jewish identity in Imperial England, and her later (unpublished) writing on the Jews in history, Jewish intellectual perseverance and anti-Semitism reveal a continued interest in racial identity. Loy’s use of the Yiddish term for a Gentile, ‘Goy’, in Goy Israels marks a concern with the linguistic tactics of Jews within majoritarian systems that suggests that, rather than mongrel poetics, her work could be described as minority writing. Commentators on Loy’s Jewishness singularly fail to acknowledge that racial identity figures as a concern in Loy’s poetry before the 1920s. In the 1915 poem ‘To You’, which may have been intended as an epigraph to the Love Songs sequence,20 Loy uses racial otherness directly to confront the ambivalence of her position as authorial voice, an intermezzo position that is also indicated by the positioning of the ‘author’ and ‘addressee’ of the poem as a relational activity within the self.




Additionally situated within the uncertainty of the city space, ‘To You’ (1916) identifies, and identifies with, the dispossessed inhabitants of this cosmopolitan zone; ‘a nigger/ And a deaf-mute/ Of introspection’.21 Thus the poet characterises her unsanctified interlocutory role by an affective intersection with tropes of otherness, articulating emblems of racial and cultural dispossession and denial which continue: Plopping finger In Stephen’s ink Made you hybrid-negro (1915: 28) Usurping the privilege of authorship from the male, the poet becomes a ‘hybrid’ other in which the blackness of the (unauthorised) written word (as black ink) metonymically refers to the blackness of race. Thus, she is stained by her transgression of the boundaries of (male)subject(female)object (of self and other, I and You). In ‘Stephen’ Loy articulates a range of figures of masculinist authority: her first husband, Stephen Haweis; Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s prototypical modernist artist; and the original martyr Saint Stephen. In ‘To You’, Loy draws on racial figures to manufacture her own sense of her minority writing, one that deterritorialises the major forms of author-ity that ‘Stephen’ regulates. A racialised conception of outsider status is elaborated in full in AngloMongrels and the Rose through the figure of ‘Ova’, the ‘mongrel–girl/of Noman’s land’ (AM: 150), the daughter of ‘Israel and of Albion’ (AM: 50); that is, she is the daughter of ‘Exodus’, a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant – or an ‘exile mechanism’ (AM: 17) – and ‘Ada’ or ‘English Rose’. Anglo-Mongrels was composed and published in the early 1920s when new waves of anti-Semitism were crossing the West: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, an infamous forgery about the secret world power of the Jews, was circulated by Henry Ford through his dealerships in the early 1920s, while conspiracies of Jewish manipulation of the First World War (echoing earlier claims about Jewish financiers and the Boer War) abounded. Western states (including Britain in 1905 and America in 1924) were limiting Jewish immigration, and meanwhile the stereotypes of Jewish intellectualism, sensuality, cosmopolitanism, degeneracy and (degenerate) genius persisted. While Barnes’s Nightwood explores the juncture of Jewish marginalisation from Christian society, from history and ultimately from forms of representation and intelligibility, Loy, in Anglo-Mongrels confronts the terms of Semitic discourse and attempts




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to define a racially identified source of poetry in concourse with an avant-garde aesthetic. Anglo-Mongrels opens with the adolescent Exodus’s departure from Hungary; escaping the persecution of the Jews, his business acumen and tailoring skills establish him in England where he ends up in a mutually frustrating marriage with Ada. Anglo-Mongrels emphasises Exodus’s dislocated Jewish heritage, and depicts him through Semitic discourse: he is disinherited by his grandfather but keeps ‘biblical Hebrew’ and ‘seeds of science’ (AM: 10), and a ‘racial instinct’ that acknowledges his immanence (AM: 12), and he conforms to the stereotypes of intellectualism, aesthetic appreciation, sensuality, cosmopolitanism and nervous sensitivity. His ‘alien’, ‘foreign’ and ‘outsider’ status is reiterated, alongside his particular linguistic relationship to his adopted culture; his fluent ‘business-English’ (AM: 13) and financial ‘jibbering’ (AM: 14). What this amounts to is more than the reproduction of a stereotype. The mockheroic opening of Anglo-Mongrels, with its inverted grammar and exaggerated rhyme and alliteration establishes Exodus, the itinerant Jewish pariah of Western culture, as both a heroic individual and a figure of ridicule: he is spurred to physical self-consciousness, for example, by a flea bite. Loy reproduces the assumptions of Western culture in which the Jew is the antithesis of heroism but also, through the very irony of her identification of Exodus, she undermines the representational codes of Semitic discourse and poses the specificity of the Jew. As a ‘wondering jew’ (AM: 15) Exodus’s intellectual curiosity becomes both a mythical racial instinct (allied with wandering Jewishness) and a specific disjunction from his contemporary British context. His ‘itinerant/ Judaic eyes’ (AM: 16–17) playing on the homonym I/eye poses both his perspective and his identity as cosmopolitan, mobile and incomplete. Ada, the ‘English Rose’ and the obverse of Exodus, is representative of sedimented and sentimental English culture. She figures as the instrument and symbol of her own, and her Jewish husband’s, repression as well as embodying the dual role of victim (of imposed notions of femininity and feminine achievement) and enforcer of this victimhood (especially onto her daughter, Ova). Ada is a ‘Rose of arrested impulses/ self pruned’ (AM: 41), but in her depiction Loy makes it clear that this national idea of the ‘everlasting’ rose (AM: 41) conjoins imperial domination, class repression and the suppression of women. These stratifications all use the mechanism of the ‘Rose’ to perpetuate an oppressive and hierarchical norm. Thus subjectivity is shown to be the product of subjectification; that is, the effect of the workings of imperial, national, class and family machines on the ‘The flux of Life’ (AM: 169). In this





mostly a microcosmic replica of institutions (AM: 164) In this system of the imperial, national and racialised production of identity, Ova holds an inherently hybrid status. Neither the absolute foreigner nor the ideal of Albion, Ova inherits her father’s intellect, the ‘Jewish brain’ (which her fairy godmother gives her at her birth, AM: 50), but is also firmly interpolated into a racial Christian hegemony which enforces the self-abnegating code of the ‘Gentle Jesus’ (AM: 159) and distinguishes Ova from the ‘Jews and Raggamuffins of Kilburn’ (AM: 171). Ova has inherited her father’s ‘heritage of emigration’ (AM: 188), an enabling and indeterminate itinerancy, but she is trapped between her father’s compromised (but nonetheless oppressing) patriarchal power, her mother’s frigid rejection, and the structures and institutions they body forth. Distinct from the other artistic personalities presented in the poem (Esau the ‘Infant Aesthete’ (AM: 139) and Colossus the Dadaist), Ova has no inherent aesthetic or established tradition through which to express her sense of self and world. She is connected to her father through her nomadic impulses, her Jewish genius, and through the ‘feminisation’ he experiences – his is described as an ‘occupation all too feminine’ (AM: 194) – but she can never embody the absolute alterity of the immigrant experience as he does. She is required, instead, to manufacture what she can from the sensory, experiential and racial oddments that traverse her. The inbetweenness that Loy associates with ‘mongrel’ Ova (rather than with her straightforwardly Jewish father) is comparable to the indeterminacy that John Rodker associates with the nexus of AngloJewishness and exilic modernism from which his notion of revolutionary arts emerges, an ungraspable intermezzo positioning that (for both Loy and Rodker) enables the production of a new mode of writing. That Loy hails Rodker ‘as one European to another’ in a 1921 exchange in The Little Review over Rodker’s review of the Others for 1919 anthology,22 establishes a further point of articulation between their cosmopolitan estrangement within English. And like



the family reflects ‘national construction’ (AM: 165) and the ‘contours’ of tradition (AM: 164) making ‘personality’

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Rodker’s deployment of anti-Semitic discourse to produce a desegregated minority voice and position, Loy uses stereotypical associations of Jewishness to enable a slipping between dominant definitions and modes of creation. In Anglo-Mongrels the Anglo-Israelite and her artistic and poetic awakening converge with the mass and with the (bodily) refuse of culture. Thus the mechanism of the infant Ova’s epiphany of the intensive, immanent power and simultaneity of language is the word ‘[d]Iarrhea’ (AM: 146) and like the ‘arrested artists/ of the masses’ she makes ‘moon–flowers out of muck’ (AM: 149). Ova’s transformation of ‘excrements’ (AM: 150) into art resonates with an earlier statement about Jewish financial traders transforming the ‘muck’ of the ‘Occident ox’ into gold (AM: 11) and marks this power of transmutation as irrefutably Jewish. In Anglo-Mongrels Loy attempts an auto-mythologisation of her own racial heritage in order to produce an affective account of avant-garde creativity, but her Jewish heritage was also constructed, and fixed, for her by contemporary commentators. In his 1929 survey of American poetry Our Singing Strength, Alfred Kreymborg, in celebrating her as one of the true originals and eccentrics of the era, describes Loy in distinctly racialised terms: ‘a curious woman, exotic and beautiful, came to New York from foreign shores: the English Jewess, Mina Loy [whose] clinical frankness and sardonic conclusions, wedded to a madly elliptical style scornful of the regulation grammar, syntax, and punctuation, horrified our gentry and drove our critics into furious despair’ (1929: 488–9). Kreymborg draws on stereotypes of the belle juive here, a distinctly gendered Jewish ‘type’ based in decadent typecastings of Jewish femininity, alongside his characterisation of Loy’s poetic mechanisms. Like Edward Marsh’s designation of Rosenberg’s ‘lawless and grotesque’ poetry, Kreymborg explicitly articulates Jewish otherness to shocking and lawless poetic content and form. As in the case of Rosenberg, this contiguity can be productively rearticulated so that what emerges is an explicitly minoritarian usage of language that expresses the divergence and diversity of being a stranger within English (and everything that ‘English’ as a language commands and realises). In her consideration of Anglo-Mongrels and the feminist avant-garde in American poetry, Elizabeth Frost highlights Loy’s ‘overwriting’ and ‘overdoing of poetic technique’ (2003: 32) in which the word sounds and word-play (alliteration, polysemy, neologisms, punning, bathos, rhyme) produce an excess of poetic convention. The tactic of ‘overwriting’ is central to Loy’s work, and Frost describes the effect of such overdetermination as ‘undermin[ing] the literary tradition as a whole’ (ibid.: 32). However,




this can also usefully be activated as a tactic of deterritorialisation – an excess of formal mechanisms (like Barnes’s use of baroque) and a divergence from the oppressive rules of a major language – that produces an intensive minoritarian usage of English. Most obvious in Anglo-Mongrels and its search for a new aesthetic and expression for the ‘composite Anglo-Israelite’ Ova (AM: 50), such minority writing is also a feature of all of Loy’s poetry. In her one published statement on modernist writing, ‘Modern Poetry’, published in the magazine Charm in 1925, Loy forges a specific coalescence of New York immigrant communities and new poetry. In this article, in which she comments on William Carlos Williams, Pound, e. e. cummings, H.D. and Marianne Moore, Loy claims America as the fount of the new poetry and American English as its source: ‘English enriched and variegated with the grammatical structure and voice-inflection of many races’ (LLB: 158). Using Zangwill’s image of American multiculturalism, Loy claims that the ‘tongue’ of modern literature has ‘been loosened in the melting-pot’ and this is epitomised by the voices of immigrants ‘on the baser avenues of Manhattan’, where ‘every voice swings to the triple rhythm of its race, its citizenship and its personality’ (LLB: 159). Loy makes explicit reference to the language of ‘an adolescent Slav who has speculated in a wholesale job-lot of mandarins and is trying to sell them in a retail market on First Avenue’ (LLB: 159) – certainly as DuPlessis suggests a ‘Russian Jew speaking Yiddish’ (2001: 166) – to exemplify the voice of modern poetry. Thus, just as American Jazz (which Loy also mentions) inserts a minority expression and minority experience into a majoritarian language (of music), syncopating and diversifying it, allowing it to escape from within this majority, so modern poetry, as Loy describes and as she writes it, deterritorialises the language of tradition and releases the rhythms of modernity, which are also the rhythms of the immigrant. Thus in Loy’s writing and poetry, social and racial minorities (Jews, immigrants, the masses) are articulated to a deterritorialising voice and aesthetic, one that transmutes the ‘muck’ of culture into an intensive force. This force is itself articulated to the powerful flows of modernity, but it also indicates how the individual situation is also a social and political one: Exodus’s ostracism is shown, in Anglo-Mongrels, to be an effect of imperial ideology functioning through the individual microcosm, and through ideological stratifications that touch all the classes, races and genders of the British Empire. The majoritarian structures of Empire, law, capitalism, the Oedipal family, are just that, structures and stratifications that capture the fuzzy indeterminacies of bodies and





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Yiddish, Zionism and patriarchy: Stein’s Jewishness Gertrude Stein was the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants to America. Though born in Pennsylvania, she lived in Vienna and Paris until she was five, when her family returned to settle in California. English was a second language to both her parents and in Wars I Have Seen, the last of her autobiographical writings, Stein describes how her early years were spent with the sounds of ‘Austrian German and French French, and now American English’ (1945: 1). Many critics have drawn on this early estrangement from ‘proper’ English, and the poor grammar and spelling of her early essays at Harvard, to suggest an origin for Stein’s particular stylistic practices, while Stein’s own decision to write in English in France seems to provide further evidence of the foreign status of English in Stein’s writing practice. But it is through Stein’s Jewishness, Jewishness as a linguistic practice as much as anything, that the following discussion articulates her work to a dissident position within majoritarian culture. Deliberately adopting the tactics of being a stranger within English, and drawing on the exemplum of the elasticity of Yiddish, its slippery status between geopolitical referents and modes of discourse (the haimish and the spiritual),23 Stein’s writing pursues becoming-minoritarian, perhaps to an even greater extent than the work of Barnes or Loy. By the late 1930s Stein had clearly identified herself as Jewish; Linda Wagner-Martin claims ‘she seemed intent on being Jewish claiming her Jewishness with such pride in the midst of the secrecy and persecution that shrouded most of Europe’ at the time (1995: 230). But neither Stein nor Toklas was a practising Jew, and some of Stein’s comments seem to distance her from Toklas’s more visible Semitism: she referred to her as ‘my little Hebrew’.24 In Everybody’s Autobiography Stein is forthright about the ‘name’ of a Jew: ‘I dislike it when instead of saying Jew they say Hebrew or Israelite or Semitic’, she writes, ‘I do not like it and why should a Negro want to be called coloured’ (E: 172). She goes on to point out that though ‘a noun to me is a stupid thing you have to know its name to talk about it’ and so ‘its name is Negro if it is a Negro and Jew if it is a Jew and both of them are nice strong solid names and so



becomings. The enunciative statements that ensure the capture of these indeterminacies constitute the imperative linguistic system, the axioms, statements and significations that divide and fix. By intensifying and overwriting the language of the majoritarian standard, Loy’s writing attempts to exceed, and so evade, the divisions it instantiates.

let us keep them’ (E: 172). There may be a certain naïvety to the power relationships of naming here, but Stein is also refusing the semantics of euphemistic racism and asserting the Jew’s right to what is clearly a ‘racial’ identity. Stein’s racial understanding of Jewishness is expressed early on in an essay she wrote for a Junior-year class at Radcliffe College: ‘The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation’ (1896).25 In this Stein identifies characteristics of Jewishness – intellectualism, revolutionary tendencies, financial ability, ‘clannishness’ (1896: 424) – that are a conflation of psychology and social practice, she also emphasises the importance of public assimilation and private difference and claims ‘isolation as a birthright’ of Jews (427). This claim for absolute difference, that the ‘Jewish race [is] a nation to stand apart’ (ibid.: 425) poses the Jew in an utter, and for Stein enabling, alterity to the Anglo-Saxon nations they inhabit. The Making of Americans is a text about an immigrant family and, in line with Stein’s interest in character types at the time of writing (an interest that included her reading of Weininger’s Sex and Character), the novel explores the types of distinct Anglo-Saxon and Jewish races. Stein’s racial definition of Jewishness, which connects her to both Barnes’s and Loy’s understanding, is in evidence in the earlier work QED (1903), in which the Adele character, representing Stein, affiliates herself to a middle-class moderation in line with the aspirations of her ‘tribe’ (QED: 57). Adele contrasts with, and stands apart from, Anglo-American Helen and the European affiliated Mabel.26 In The Making of Americans the Jewish type is also in evidence, but the manuscripts of this text detail a gradual de-racialisation as the Hersland family are first described as a Jewish and German Jewish family, then merely ‘german’ and finally just ‘foreign’ and ‘middle class’. The racialnational paradigm for the characters in the novel remains, though, in the form of ‘independent dependent’ (Anglo-Saxon) and ‘dependent independent’ (Jewish) natures; in this distinction the Jewish type is represented as intellectual and earthy, ‘being part of the solid dirt around them’ (M: 298). But as The Making of Americans refuses ‘completed understanding’, so the classifying, scientistic, ethnographic ambitions of the narrative are thwarted. Racial types emerge as a process of repetition, a process that involves continual alteration and modification and is never complete or fixed. At key points in The Making of Americans, Stein fabricates a set of associations that brings innovative writing together with racial and sexual ‘oddness’. In the early pages she writes that ‘Custom, passion, and a feel for mother earth are needed to breed vital singularity in any man’





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Brother Singulars, we are misplaced in a generation that knows not Joseph. We flee from all them who never any way can understand why such ways and not the others are dear to us, we fly to the kindly comfort of an older world accustomed to take all manner of strange forms to its bosom. (M: 21) In the later ‘Alfred Hersland and Julia Dehning’ chapter, producing a different kind of writing (the work of ‘Brothers’ singular) is considered. Here it is associated with liking a ‘dirty thing’, and this articulation of writing and dirt is allied to a ‘queer feeling’ and a difference from ‘every one of your class’ (M: 485). The judgement of the majority on this writing (and difference and feeling) is that ‘every one of your kind of living thinks it a very ugly or a foolish thing’ (M: 485). What emerges is a sense of the deviance (racial, sexual, moral) ascribed to the type of writing Stein is conducting, a deviation from an Anglo-Saxon, middleclass, heterosexual norm. Given Stein’s connection of racial and sexual oddness with writing, what then does Jewishness represent for Stein: is it the ‘race feeling’ of being ‘a nation to stand part’ that her college essay ‘The Modern Jew’ describes (1896: 426, 427)? Gary Levine, using Stein’s 1935 Saturday Evening Post articles on money links a racialised support of economic freedom to a fluidity of language in her work and reads ‘Stein as a (Jewish) champion of both linguistic and economic free markets’ (2003: 158). Fluidity and mobility is the key aspect of Feinstein’s reading of Stein’s Jewishness which, for her, means that Stein sees ‘writing as an asemantic medium for sketching mobile identities’, including wandering identities such as the Jewish diaspora (unpublished dissertation: 416). This corresponds to Jessica Rabin’s description of Stein’s Jewishness as part of the ‘host of marginal, liminal, and transnational figures’ she uses to depict identity as fluid (Rabin, 2004: 131). Marie Damon’s argument that ‘Stein’s Jewishness is, arguably, a language practice’ (Damon, 1996: 492) adds a further dimension to such ideas of an affinity between the indeterminate Jew and Stein’s understanding of identity as mobile and processual, avoiding a reductive association of race with a particular linguistic mode. The tactics of Stein’s Jewish language practice, or minority writing, are exemplified well by the text ‘Yet Dish’ (1913) in which, as Marie Damon highlights, Stein takes the model of Yiddish to use for her own disruptive writing.



(M: 21), custom, passion and earthiness being aspects that are stereotypically associated with Jewishness, and goes on:

‘Yet Dish’ functions on a very simple basis with no extended sentences or clauses, a limited lexicon and the most minimal of grammatical constructions. This does not mean that it simply reproduces the limited semantic possibilities of majoritarian language however, ‘Yet Dish’, through an internal estrangement that relies on extreme simplicity, makes that language vocalise minority experience. In ‘Yet Dish’ this is explicitly the experience of the haimish (the domesticity to which the ‘Dish’ of the title refers), a place of food and comfort but also of ‘coarse’ (necessary, basic, bodily) familial-racial relations – ‘Cousin coarse in’ (Y: 55). The body pervades this text: fleeting vocables, words and statements transform into their aural reflections and this modulation of language often connects abstract, intellectual concepts to physical sensations, food and drink: XXXV Witness a way go. Witness a way go. Witness a way go. Wetness. Wetness. XXXVI Lessons lettuce. Let us peer let us polite let us pour, let us polite. Let us polite (Y: 59) ‘Witness’ becomes ‘Wetness’, ‘lettuce’ ‘Let us’ and the judgements of others (peers) become the ‘polite’ actions of serving tea, to pour lightly. The text is full of verbal jokes and puns and evinces a real joy with the sounds of language: ‘Never second scent never second scent in stand.’ (Y: 60), but as in this example, what ‘Yet Dish’ does is challenge the hierarchies of language, its abstraction of meaning and place. There is ‘never second’ (or implicitly a first), there is only the multiplicity of sensual existence that ‘stands’ in the moment, the in-stance. And this sense of the ability of language to mean what it does not mean, to bring together the earthy and the intellectual is firmly anchored in the hybrid, liminal intermezzo of Yiddish, a mixture of places and tongues such as Polish, Russian and German: XLVIII Polish polish is it a hand, polish is it a hand or all, or all poles sick, or all poles sick.





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XLIX Rush in rush in slice.

(Y: 61) Yiddish as ‘Yet Dish’ is particularly about the continuance, the repetition, the additional, the simultaneous, signalled by the conjunction ‘Yet’. The word ‘extra’ appears three times and ‘extravagant’ twice in the text, marking the surplus that is fabricated from within the strictures of imperative language when it is set in motion and becomes a blur, when phonemes and syllables emigrate within the system. This nomadic ‘extra’ language marks an exit from the imperial, imperative modes of language, confusing rules and boundaries just as the Jew, in his wandering, does. In a later text, ‘The Reverie of the Zionist’ (1920),27 Stein explicitly engages with debates about the status of Jewishness and its relationship to the nation. The text reveals how the cosmopolitanism of the Jew is at odds with nationalistic fervour, with the voice of the Zionist in the text emphasising that the supposed intellectualism of the Jew can produce patriotism rather than degenerate genius: ‘We can think and we know that we love our country so.’ This links the aspirations of Zionism with the patriotic fervour of European nations immediately succeeding the Great War. The Zionist argues that the cosmopolitan Jew is not representative – ‘Let us remember that the little bird of all is not the one’ – and characterises the rejection of the cosmopolitan Jew in terms that recall the association of sexual with racial oddness, and with avant-garde writing, in The Making of Americans: ‘it sings and it sings and a great many people say it is not pleasant’. The text also functions through a sexual and gendered subtext, implicit in the cluster of nouns ‘love’, ‘dell’, ‘beards’, ‘girls’, which establishes a further articulation between the racialised Jew and the queer woman. For the Zionist, ‘Race is disgusting’ when it challenges nationalism, instead ‘Judaism should be a question of religion’, clearly distinguishing a notion of the Jew as a biblical Hebrew, destined to return to the promised land, from an embodied, racial subject. The text closes with a contradiction, ‘I don’t want to go to Zion’, says one voice, which may be the interjection of another speaker, followed by the statement, ‘This is an expression of Shem.’ If these concluding statements are connected, then the reverie



L Little gem in little gem in an. Extra.

is disrupted by the expression of the race of Semites (through Shem the most important of Noah’s sons), who reject the nationalistic and religious interpretation of Judaism. The final word ‘Shem’ also points towards a Yiddish term that would return the distinctions the Zionist attempts to maintain to their pre-existing state of radical indeterminacy, a ‘shemozzle’ (muddle). The mobility of Yiddish, its playfulness that blurs the doggerel and the biblical, speaks an inbetweenness that is mirrored in the position of the Jew in Western culture: in Stein’s writing this inbetweenness is also a valorisation of the processual, a rejection of logic, order and sequence. Her writing produces ‘no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’, just as Deleuze and Guattari describe the effect of the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 25). What Stein’s work manifests is an understanding of ‘how to move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings’ (ibid.: 25). In this way Stein’s writing draws together the rhizomatic exemplum that Deleuze and Guattari extol with their conception of minority writing. In her Stanzas in Meditation, written at the same time as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein almost completely forgoes the ordering factor of nouns (which name and place things) and relies instead on connectives; as John Ashbery pointed out in his review: ‘These austere “stanzas” are made up almost entirely of colorless connecting words such as “where”, “which”, “these”, “of”, “not”, “have”, “about”, and so on’ (1957: 250). Stanzas in Meditation is not the epitome of Steinthe-abstractionist though, the poem is resolutely ‘about’ the world: it produces it through the rhythms, flows and continual differings of life, to quote Ashbery again: ‘The poem is a hymn to possibility; a celebration of the fact that the world exists, that things can happen.’ (ibid.: 251). And as Neil Schmitz points out, the ‘fleeting pronominal verse’ of Stanzas in Meditation ‘is constantly in touch with the old noun poetry, its ruins, its remnants, using it, abusing it, caressing it’ (1988: 144–5): Stein simplifies, reduces and makes an intensive, rhizomatic use of the dominant language of poetry. The figuration of the rhizome is useful in working with Stein’s poem ‘Patriarchal Poetry’ (1927) which presents a thorough dismantling of the majoritarian language practices which articulate the assemblages that essentialise a gender, sexual and racial hierarchy and instantiate phallogocentrism. ‘Patriarchal Poetry’ is not concerned with patriarchy, as understood in an orthodox feminist grammar, but patriarchy as the arborescent, molar structural systems of territorialisation and





205

As long as it took fasten it back to a place where after all he would be carried away, he would be carried away as long as it took fasten it back to a place where he would be carried away as long as it took. (Y:106) The text presents many statements about Patriarchal Poetry, its division and designation – ‘patriarchal means and close patriarchal means and chose chose’ (Y: 110) – its concern with ‘their origin and their history’ (Y: 115), that it ‘makes no mistake’ (Y: 115), especially when it comes to ‘estimating the value’ (Y: 124), that it assembles and abstracts, ‘the result of organisation industry concentration assistance and matter of fact and by this’ (Y: 110–11). But the very language of Stein’s text, which is a prose-poetry mixture and so itself in-between, demonstrates the multiplicities of escape and flux that can be produced whilst the majoritarian assemblages are constantly reproducing themselves. The repetition of key pronominal statements fabricates the multiplicity and singularity of becoming: ‘Once. We to be we to be. Once. To be. Once. We to be. Once. To be. Once. To be we to be. Once. To be. Once. To be we to be. We to be. Once. To be. We to be. Once’ (Y: 114), or the phrase ‘Let her’ which occurs 113 times in 70 lines (Y: 120–1). Stein’s language refuses arborescent ordering principles, preferring to ‘put it’ and ‘add it’ and ‘with it’ (Y: 118), and reverse hierarchy: ‘leave it to me naturally to see the second and third first naturally’ (Y: 138). Against the interdictions and designations of Patriarchal Poetry, Stein stands the production of a haecceity: This part the part the part of it. And let to be coming to have it known. As a difference. By two by one by and by. (Y: 122) What Stein effects is a transformation of majoritarian language through an incremental process of differentiation and disintegration that puts Patriarchal Poetry ‘at peace’, ‘a piece’, ‘in peace’, ‘in pieces’, ‘as peace’ (Y: 133). And with this ‘Patriarchal Poetry in pieces’, what happens is that ‘Pieces have left it as names which have left it as names to all said



reterritorialisation through which significations make sense and subjects are sorted. Indeed the actions of territorialisation and reterritorialisation can be read through the very first paragraph of ‘Patriarchal Poetry’:

all said as delight’ (Y: 145), a delight that reduces language to the most childish, the most erotic, the most ludic intensity of the repeated ‘dinky pinky dinky pinky’ (Y: 146). ‘Patriarchal Poetry’, majoritarian language, is thus undone by the productive energies of desire, the desires of the feminine, of lesbian sex, of a becoming-woman that pushes out of the restrictions of language. But the ‘dinky pinky’ reference too to the penis returns the text, also, to the Jewish body, the freak body marked by circumcision and standing between proud phallicism and the lack of the feminine (as majoritarian structures would designate them). The Jew, in the slipperiness of his language, his character, his nationality, his body, his gender, is the figure who slips between axioms, who persists in the fuzzy gaps between majoritarian structures, and who marks, for Barnes and Loy, as well as Stein, a mode of writing from out of these minoritarian gaps. Barnes, Loy and Stein do not represent or write the Jew in the same way, even if they all participate in the fabrication of a minority writing out of the majoritarian structures of language that would fix racial (and sexual) others. Refusing the sedimented hierarchies of language and attempting deterritorialisations of this language, these writers, in their very different ways, set in flight a literature of mobile and nomadic possibilities. There is no permanent escape route, there is no fully satisfactory way out of the imperative linguistic system, one always falls back onto the need to name, designate, describe. But Barnes, Loy and Stein, amongst them, produce an enabling set of practices whereby the forces and flows of the early twentieth century are articulated to a range of intensive literary tactics that do pose the potential for new processes of meaning.




In 1884, aged 42, Judge Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would lead to him spending the majority of his remaining 27 years in asylums. In his Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkrankan (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness), first published in 1903 and written before his release from Sonnenstein public asylum in 1902, Schreber offered a detailed account of the unique revelations and experiences that constituted his madness. These experiences included being a corpse, dead and rotting, becoming a woman – that is, being ‘unmanned’ and filled with ‘feminine voluptuousness’ – being transformed into the ‘Eternal Jew’ (Schreber, 2000: 60), being subject to continual rays and ‘nerve contact’ from God and other ‘souls’ that reached his head ‘like telephone wires’ (277) and experiencing various bodily transformations and tortures, such as ‘the head-compressingmachine’ (150) inflicted by the ‘little men’ all over his body. Schreber had been a distinguished jurist and National Liberal Party candidate before his illness, and was the son of Moritz Schreber an infamous pioneer of childcare and child-training systems. Schreber’s case articulates many of the themes of this study, themes that, through textual, cultural and theoretical events, have been discovered as processes of becoming: becoming-abject or grotesque, becoming-woman, becomingJew, becoming-machine. Rather than closing down these possibilities with a universalising thesis, Schreber poses the possibility of another point of beginning. His case presents the dysfunction of majoritarian structures, his breakdown is a breakdown of his ability to identify with ‘himself’ as produced by the categories that arrange and classify ‘him’ as a white, middle-class, Protestant man. His case (and this includes not just his Memoirs but the juridical and psychoanalytic papers produced from the case, including those by Freud and Lacan) comprises a complex 207



Postscript

of territorial machines and deterritorialising vectors. Schreber is trapped by the panoptical forces of modernity, the machines of his father’s child-rearing programme, the mechanisms of subjectification that claim his identity, at the same time as he is set in flight by the becomingminoritarian, becoming-molecular of his schizo state. For Deleuze and Guattari, Schreber stands as an exemplary victim ‘posthumously oedipalized by Freud’ (1984: 64), and an exemplary schizo, a ‘faceless and transpositional subject’ he is ‘man and woman, parent and child, dead and alive: which is to say he is situated wherever there is a singularity, in all the series and in all the branches marked by a singular point’ (85). In Schreber we can read the collapse of an identity constituted on the exclusion of the minoritarian non-subjects of Jews and woman, and the production of a machinic network of molecular forces and flows into which he is inserted. This network, which deracinates Schreber and produces the magnificent multiplicities of his ‘delusions’, points towards the productive contiguities of women, animals, machines and the minoritarian that could refuse a hierarchy of connections in favour of a rhizomatic instance that vibrates with all the intensity of the modern(ist) moment. This present study has focused on particular historical junctures – the First World War, New York in the 1910s, Paris in the 1920s – to accompany the thematic interest in grotesque bodies, fashions, machinic productions, women’s writing, becomings and Jewishness. This could substitute a temporal teleology, an unfolding of a modernist aesthetic over the decades, for intensive moments and events. It seems to follow that Barnes’s, Loy’s and Stein’s development over the years leads inexorably to a ‘minor literature’, the encapsulation of all the subversive energies of their writing. But I reject such a historical, developmental line, and refuse to posit Hitler’s genocide of the Jews and other marginal groups in Europe as the seismic shift that could mark the ‘end’ of modernism. Refusing a neat or inevitable conclusion, I proffer Schreber as a different hinge point, one that poses new lines of flight instead of finales. In so doing I am remaining faithful to the methodology that drives this study, one that resists the pressure to offer a single and necessary interpretation of cultural forces. Articulation is not a fixed structure but an expressive and interventionist practice, and the process of articulation I have followed is one that has sought to locate the multiple trajectories and different vectors of determination that intersect across different textual moments, never losing sight of the real that these moments participate in, produce and are effected by. The modernist articulations I have assembled and activated in the preceding pages are not intended to be programmatic or exhaustive,




rather they aim at opening up the field of modernist studies and realising the heterogeneity and multiplicity of Barnes’s, Loy’s or Stein’s work, releasing from this work some of the potentials it produces, potential disruptions of a normative and passive mode of experiencing and interpreting culture. I have read Barnes, Loy and Stein in an unapologetically political way, but they remain distinct at the end of this study and their work remains full of possibility. Their texts continue to perform actions, do things, create connections and alignments: they have been engaged with here, not as sign systems (and as somehow signs of a system of otherness), but as intensive and affective events that carry on happening whenever they are galvanised by you, the reader.



Postscript 209

Introduction: modernist studies and cultural studies 1. See Burke, 1984, 1987 and 1991. 2. This is by no means an exhaustive list and ignores completely, for example, work on race and modernism, both within and beyond definitions of the Harlem Renaissance 3. As an example of interdisciplinarity, consider the Italian Futurist’s sphere of activity which incorporated burlesque performance, visual art, advertising, cinema, clothing, mathematics and politics. 4. For a very useful genealogy of ‘articulation’ within cultural studies see Slack, 1996. 5. ‘[C]ontext is not something out there, within which practices occur or which influence the development of practices. Rather, identities, practices, and effects generally, constitute the very context within which they are practices, identities or effects’ (Slack, 1996: 125). 6. The potentials and limits of Deleuze and Guattari for a feminist theory and praxis are too complex to be summarised here but will be returned to in Chapter 2; for debates in this area, see Alice A. Jardine, ‘Becoming a Body Without Organs: Gilles Deleuze and His Brothers’, in Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1985). Both Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz make excellent use of Deleuze in their work, and are a profound influence on my own thinking, see also Buchanan and Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory (2000). 7. ‘The assemblage is tetravalent: (1) content and expression [a semiotic system and a pragmatic system]; (2) territoriality and deterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 505). 8. Deleuze, Nietzsche aujourd’hui, vol. 1, Intensities, Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 10:18 (1973): 87: Quoted in Daniel W. Smith, ‘Introduction: “A Life of Pure Immanence”: Deleuze’s “Critique et Clinique” Project’, in Deleuze, 1998: xvi.

1 Becoming-modernists: Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein 1. Stein’s self-professed relationship to cubism, and to wider trends in modernism, have also inflected versions of Stein that have been constructed with some critics, Marjorie Perloff most prominently, placing Stein in a lineage that leads to contemporary L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. 2. Jane Marcus’s important 1991 essay on transgression, taboo and Nightwood presents an alternative Barnes, however; one that has been recast in subsequent evaluations of Barnes’s negotiations of cultural subversion, popular culture and the carnivalesque. 210



Notes

3. As with Barnes’s Nightwood, questions of textual authority continue to surround Loy’s writing and, unlike Stein’s unpublished work which appeared in successive editions of the Yale Gertrude Stein, a substantial archive of Loy’s writing remains unpublished in the Beinecke Library holdings. 4. See Braidotti, Metamorphoses (2002: 79) for this argument. 5. Comentale’s essay, ‘The Shropshire Schizoid and the Machines of Modernism’ (2005) offers an exemplary way of understanding modernism and modernist desires through such a denaturalised and Deleuzian frame. 6. The term is Mary E. Galvin’s in Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers (1999). 7. Steve Watson’s comprehensive survey Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (1991), for example, mentions Barnes hardly at all despite quoting from her journalistic writing on Greenwich Village. 8. ‘Veterans in Harness: No. 6 – “Uncle Tom”’ Baird, Engineer; 65 Years Running Machines’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 16 November 1913, Part 2, p. 3; reprint in NY: 99. 9. ‘Veterans in Harness: No. 4 – Fireman Michael Quinn: 40 Years a Flame Fighter’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 2 November 1913, Part 4, p. 22; reprint in NY: 89. 10. See Barnes’s 1913 articles on the proposed closure of the Arbuckle ‘Floating Hotel’ for working young women, on a ‘Home Club’ for servants and on street orators. The suspicion of middle-class reformism becomes an important aspect of the later novel Ryder. 11. The photograph of Barnes being forcibly fed is reproduced in Broe, 1991, Figure 1, and in Goody, 1999. 12. These pieces have suggestive names, La machine à coudre, Le Cirque hagenback à Florence, Le Petit carnaval, and La Grotte de Cythère, but as none have been located it is impossible to assess the extent to which her visual work was moving away from the decadent influence of her earlier art towards new forces of cultural life (the machinic, the popular). 13. For example, ‘in her portraits, then, we see Gertrude Stein going through a progressive march toward greater abstractionism’ (Hoffman, 1965: 174). 14. Steiglitz, ‘Editorial’, Camera Work special issue, 2 August 1912. 15. See Walker (1984) for this argument. 16. See, for example, the Introduction to the Penguin edition of Three Lives (1990). 17. See Rudnick, 1984: 49–51.

2

The Great War, hysterical men and the modernist lyric

1. Djuna Barnes, ‘Seeing New York With the Soldiers’, New York Morning Telegraph Magazine, 7 July 1918: 8; reprinted in NY. 2. Mina Loy letter to Carl Van Vechten, postmark October 1914 in Loy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale, quoted in Burke, 1969: 181. 3. Gertrude Stein ‘Painted Lace’, reprint in Y: 191–2. 4. See, for example, Sherry (2003), Bourke (1996) and Tate (1998). 5. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 25, quoted in Winter, 1995: 172 and 225.



Notes 211

6. But America was caught up in hyperbolic war propaganda too, with recruitment posters declaring Destroy this Mad Brute above a picture of a ferocious gorilla in German military helmet and bloody hands carrying a half-naked white woman, and a full-scale replica of a warship in Union Square, New York, advertising a recruitment station; see Jones, 2004:72–9. 7. ‘When Emperors Are Out of Men!’, published in All-Story Cavalier Weekly, 31 October 1914: 153; ‘Just Lately Drummer Boy’, published in The Trend, October 1914: 32; ‘Who Shall Atone?’, published in the New York Press Sunday Magazine, 4 April 1915: 1: all reprinted in CP. 8. This mausoleum, the largest in North American, houses the bodies of Ulysses S Grant, the victorious Union commander in the Civil War and twice US President, and his wife in two, three-ton sarcophagi in a sunken crypt. 9. See, particularly, ‘Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War’, Chapter 7 of No Man’s Land, Volume 2: Sexchanges (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). 10. Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933; London: Virago, 1979), 292. 11. Beard coined the term ‘neurasthenia’ in 1881 describing it as a ‘disease of civilisation’ brought about by ‘the complex agencies of modern life’, ‘steam power, the periodic press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women’, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences, a Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881), 96. 12. Shephard gives the percentages as ‘7–10 % of all officers and 3–4 % of all ranks’ (2000: 21). 13. See Wendy Holden, Shell Shock (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 49– 52 for details. 14. War Neuroses (1918), British Pathe, A. F. Hurst. 15. Beard, 1881, op. cit. 16. Eliot in the Criterion 1934, quoted in James E. Miller Jr., ‘Four Quartets and an “Acute Personal Reminiscence” ’, in Knowles and Scott, 1990: 222. 17. Colleen Lamos discusses the connections between the ‘drive towards death’ and self-annihilation and the ‘disavowed homoeroticism’ of Eliot’s poetry in ‘The Love Song of T. S. Eliot: Elegiac homoeroticism in the early poetry’ (in Laity and Gish, 2004: 37). Her argument is that ‘Eliotic melancholia embraces the narcissistic, masochistic death of the self together with the death of the beloved’ (ibid.: 38). 18. There is ample opportunity for biographical speculation about the Love Songs and Loy and Papini which will not be indulged in here. For details of Loy’s involvement with Papini and Marinetti, see Burke, 1996: 119–94. 19. ‘Letters and parcels and wool’ was first published in As Fine As Melanctha (1914–1930): vol. 4, The Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein (1954).

3

Dada, cyborgs and the New Woman in New York

1. The article is entitled ‘Do You Strive to Capture the Symbols of Your Reactions ? ’ and is based around an interview with Mina Loy. 2. ‘The poems of Abel Sanders’ (Ezra Pound), Little Review 8:1 (Autumn 1921): 111. 3. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, ‘Preface’, in Sawelson-Gorse (ed.), 1998: x.



212 Notes

4. In using the terms ‘mass’ and ‘popular’ culture I am not asserting an absolute distinction between an inauthentic and an authentic popular culture: all popular culture of this period (1880s to 1920s) is, despite the attempts of writers at the time and subsequent theorists to valorise specific forms or manifestations, implicated in commodification and containment. As Stuart Hall points out ‘there is no whole, authentic, autonomous “popular culture” which lies outside the field of force of the relations of cultural power and domination’ (1981: 232), popular culture (and I would add mass culture) is ‘[n]either wholly corrupt [n]or wholly authentic’ (232). 5. Chicago was the first city to build a skyscraper (the nine storey steel-frame Home Insurance Building was completed in 1885), but New York soon followed with impressive steel frame buildings such as the Flatiron Building (completed 1902) and could already boast of the Brooklyn Bridge (opened 1883), the longest suspension bridge in the world, along with the first electric street car (1874), America’s first electric power station (built by Edison in 1882 to power electric lighting), and in 1913 the completion of the world’s tallest building, the Woolworth Building. 6. The Ajeeb chess-playing automaton was made by Charles Hooper, a Bristol cabinet-maker, in 1868; like Kempelen’s original which had fascinated people such as E. T. A. Hoffman and Edgar Allan Poe, Ajeeb was worked from inside by an experienced chess player. Ajeeb was exhibited in the Eden Museum NYC in 1868 before transferring to Coney Island in 1915. It was destroyed in one of the many Coney Island fires in 1929. 7. See Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-theCentury New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986) for further discussion of the different leisure cultures and styles of working-class women. 8. Bruno’s Weekly, 29 April 1916: 665-670; reprinted in NY. 9. ‘Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians; When the Dusk of a Musty Hall Has Crept through the Ever Widening Keyhole the Queen of Bohemia Has Arisen, for Her Day Has Begun; You Will Find Her in Polly’s, the Candle Stick, the Brevort, The Black Cat or Any Other Greenwich Village Place You Care to Visit’, New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine, 19 November 1916): reprinted as ‘Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians’ in NY. 10. See also the whole of the chapter ‘Village II: The Selling of Bohemia’, in Watson (1991). 11. Louis Bouché ‘Autobiography’, Louis Bouché Papers, Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC, microfilm roll no. 688, frame 700. 12. Djuna Barnes, ‘Notes from Elsa’, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Collection, Special Collections, University of Maryland at College Park Libraries, Series 1, Box 1. 13. Biers is correct to register Laura Winkiel’s argument that Barnes offers a negative presentation of modern spectacular entertainment in contrast to the transgressions of circus and vaudeville (see Winkiel, 1997; and the discussion in Chapter 5 of this volume). 14. ‘The Wild Aguglia and her Monkeys’, New York Press, 28 December 1913: Part Three, 2; ‘Flo Ziegfeld Is Tired of Buying Hosiery’, New York Press, 24 May 1914, Part Five, 1, ‘Yvette Guilbert’, New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine, 18 November 1917: 2; all in I.



Notes 213

15. For full details of Loy’s publications, see Marisa Januzzi, ‘A Bibliography of Works By and About Mina Loy’, in Shrieber and Tuma (eds), 1998: 507–39. 16. Photograph of Tice reproduced in Naumann, 1994: 117; cited in Keller, 1998: 427: see Keller’s entire piece for more details on Tice and her work 17. T.N.P., ‘The Conning Tower’, New York Tribune, 13 August 1915: 7. 18. A cartoon by J. F Griswald, in the New York Evening Sun ‘The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway)’ is indicative of the response to Duchamp’s Nude. 19. R. Mutt is usually read as a pun on both the manufacturers of the urinal, Mott Iron Works Company, and on the strip cartoon Mutt and Jeff who were the first cartoon characters to be copyrighted – for further details of the place of humour in New York Dada see Francis M. Naumann, ‘New York Dada: Style with a Smile’, in Naumann and Venn (eds), 1996: 11–26. 20. This was reported in The New York Sun as ‘Independents Get Unexpected Thrill’, 20 April 1917: 6. 21. ‘Cubist Depicts Love in Brass and Glass; “More Art in Rubbers Than in Pretty Girl” ’, The Evening World, 4 April 1916. 22. There is an element of ambiguity in Picabia’s Fille: Caroline Jones suggests that Picabia, during his neurasthenic cure, identifies with his Fille née sans mere which is an ‘hermaphroditic machine’ demonstrating the ‘absolute unfixity of the machinic phylum’ (1998: 172). She also presents the possibility of Picabia’s close identification with the fille, an identification which, as Amelia Jones elaborates, poses him, a non-combatant and neurasthenic, as un-manned (castrated) (A. Jones, 2004). 23. In contrast, see Picabia’s mecanomorphic portrait De Zayas! De Zayas! in 291 (July – August 1915) which presents an empty corset ‘apparently intended for a buxom woman’ that is ‘watched’ by viewing apparatus, and is attached by the garters and crotch to an arrangement of rods, wheels and two suction cups (Tashjian, 1965: 39). 24. See Wintle, 2001. The popular version of the New Woman in America was the Gibson Girl (the creation of the cartoonist Charles Dana Gibson) who, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s words, was ‘braver, stronger, more healthful and skilful and able and free, more human in all ways’ than the average American woman (Women and Economics, Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898, Part VIII); the Gibson Girl was often pictured with a bicycle. 25. See, for example, Conan Doyle’s story ‘A Case of Identity (1891) and Gissing’s Odd Women. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) Mina Harker is particularly endangered through her affinity with communication and recording technology and so, by association, her affinity with the Count (see Wicke, 1992). 26. Quoted in Wood, 2002: 147 (although she mistakenly dates this article 1912). 27. The term and the male tradition are both from Dickran Tashjian’s 1965 study. 28. Wood originally painted a piece of soap but followed Duchamp’s suggestion to nail a real one in its place. For details, see Franklin (1998). 29. 291, no. 2, June 1915: 2. 30. But note the reactive depictions of such woman-authored cyborg identities in the mecanomorphic association of dada women with thermometers or barometers in the work of Picabia and Man Ray, depictions that capture her again into the codes of gender heirarchy. Juliette Roche features in Picabia’s (lost) 1917 Juliette Gleizes au manomètre (Juliette Gleizes as a Manometer: Albert



214 Notes

Gleizes was her husband) and Man Ray’s Catherine Barometer, is a ‘portrait’ of Katherine Dreier. In 1920 Ray also photographed Loy in profile with a thermometer as an earring. The found object here, producing an assemblage of woman and technology, does connect with Loy’s own explorations of Dada detritus, but also fixes a particular image of the temperamental woman. 31. ‘Flagrant illogic’ and ‘freak’ are words Baroness Elsa herself used to describe virginity in her autobiography; quoted by Jones, 2004: 155; and Gammel, 2003: 148. 32. Jane Heap, ‘Dada’, The Little Review 8:2 (Spring 1922): 46. 33. For further readings of Baroness Elsa and the cyborg-feminines of New York Dada, see my ‘Cyborgs, Women and New York Dada’, The Space between: Literature and Culture, 1914–1945, 2:1 (2007).

4

Fashions for genius and the flâneur: a guide to Paris

1. See Benjamin, 1989. 2. Pound, ‘Translator’s Postscript’ to The Natural Philosophy of Love (London: Quartet, 1992 reprint), vii; e. e. cummings ‘little ladies more’, Collected Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace1966) . 3. See Parsons, 2000: 40–1 for a further elaboration of this point. 4. For Bourdieu’s theory of ‘cultural capital’, see Bourdieu, 1984; for his definition of ‘habitus’ see Bourdieu, 1990: especially 54. 5. Pound to Homer and Isabel Pound, YCAL Pound Papers, box 52, folder 1966; quoted in Rainey, 1998: 71 6. See ‘The Flâneur’ and ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in, Benjamin 1989. 7. Wolff , 1985; Pollock, 1988; Wilson, 1992. 8. Flanner appears a ‘Nip’ of the sisters ‘Nip and Tuck’ in Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1992). 9. ‘Vagaries Malicieux’, The Double Dealer 3 (May 1922), reprinted in Vagaries Malicieux (Barnes, 1974), 25, subsequent references are to this edition: [Lydia Steptoe] ‘Against Nature’, Vanity Fair 18 (August 1922): 60. 10. Van Vechten to Stein undated (c.April 1917), published in Burns, 1986: 59. 11. Gertrude Stein, notebook for The Making of Americans, YCAL. 12. Gertrude Stein, ‘What are Masterpieces and Why There Are so Few of Them’, in Writings, 1932–1940 (1998), 355. 13. Ibid. 14. Carl Van Vechten Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale. 15. Loy is quoting from Stein, ‘Italians’ (see GP: 47). 16. Loy, ‘Gertrude Stein’, introductory lecture for 4 February 1927, partial typewritten manuscript (in original French); in Mina Loy Papers, box 6, fol.156, 2, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale; quoted in full in Barney, 1992: 172. 17. Curie was Catholic not Jewish, but in a nexus of ideas (that echoes and parallels the Dreyfus affair and its divisive effect on French society) she was associated with ‘the Sorbonne with its half-breeds and Jews’ against the ‘still solid rock [of] French custom’. Maurice Pujo writing in l’Action française, December 1911; quoted in Quinn, 1996: 329.



Notes 215

18. There is a crucial difference in W. C. Williams’s later use of Marie Curie in Paterson IV, which abounds in stereotypes of femininity, while Pound’s Cantos only record the efforts of Pierre Curie (in Canto XXIII). 19. Loy ‘Gertrude Stein’ introductory lecture, op. cit. 20. Barnes ‘James Joyce; A Portrait of the man Who Is, at Present, One of the More Significant Figures in Literature’, Vanity Fair 18 (April 1922): 65, 104: reprinted in I: 21. John Russell describes Vanity Fair as a periodical that ‘aimed to combine the characteristics of both the little and the big magazine’ (in Richardson, 1982: x). 22. Handwritten draft fragment, n.d., in Mina Loy Papers, box 5, fol. 98, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale.

5

Carnival bodies, the grotesque and becoming-animal

1. See the essays on Lawrence, Woolf and Barnes in Smith and Wallace, 2001. 2. First published in Russian under the title Francois Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in 1965. 3. First published as Das Groteske: Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung in 1957. 4. Carl Van Vechten writes in his notes in The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein that ‘[t]here is reason to believe that these two poems paint a portrait and make an attempt to capture the rhythm of the same flamenco dancer’ (SW: 484). 5. ‘The Fifteenth of November’ actually appeared in the Criterion in January 1926: 71–5. 6. See Michael Levenson’s comment on the role of the Criterion (Levenson, 1984: 213) and the discussion in Harding (2002). 7. See ‘Flo Zeigfeld Is Tired of Buying Hosiery’ (24 May 1914) in I: 69–75; ‘Interviewing Arthur Voetglin Is Something Like Having A Nightmare’ (19 July 1914) in I Could Never Be Lonely Without A Husband, 1985: 77–84; ‘My Sisters and I at a New York Prize Fight’ (23 August 1914) in NY: 168–73. 8. One cannot help but think of the woman who ‘pisses cowily’ in the ‘Nightown’ section of Ulysses (Joyce, 1992: 578). 9. See Winkiel, 1997: 22 for details. 10. Bestial and animal imagery and becomings-animal return in Barnes’s subsequent work. In The Antiphon (1958), for example, animal imagery touches the language and representation of all the characters and at the end of the play, Miranda and her Mother fall in death across a settle made from a gryphon roundabout car: Creatures in an Alphabet (1982) presents a bestiary in which the poetic quatrains and accompanying drawings confound and exceed the anthropomorphic imaginings of human language (see Caselli, 2001 for a reading of Creatures in an Alphabet). 11. In her poem ‘Those Various Scalpels’ (1917), Marianne Moore also articulates Loy and the scalpel, presenting a verse portrait of Loy as a sophisticated and cynical surgeon, Barnes’s Ladies Almanack offers a much more human figure than the ‘hard majesty’ Moore constructs (Moore, 1968: 51). 12. For further details and discussion, see Susan E. Dunn’s article on Loy and Fashion (1999).



216 Notes

Notes 217

1. On ‘the Jew’ and modernity, see Cheyette, 1994; Garb and Nochlin, 1995; Cheyette and Marcus, 1998; Cheyette and Valdman, 2004; on Barnes and ‘the Jew’, see Marcus, 1991; Altman, 1992; and Hanrahan, 2001; on Loy and Jewishness, see DuPlessis 2001 and Miller 2005; on Stein and Jewishness, see Damon, 1993; and Rabin, 2004. See also Feinstein, 2001 (unpublished dissertation). 2. Following Brian Cheyette I use the term ‘Semitic discourse’ to describe the ambivalent discursive construction of ‘the Jew’, rather than segregating representations into the (judgemental) categories of anti-Semitic or philoSemitic; see Cheyette, 1994: especially 8. 3. Henry James of course encouraged his friend George Du Maurier to create the Jewish anti-hero Svengali of Trilby (1894). 4. See Estelle Pearlman for an account of how anxiety about Eastern European Jewish immigration in the late nineteenth century led to the revival of medieval stereotypes of the tribal, devious, acquisitive Jew in Edwardian England (2004). 5. See Frederick M. Binder and David M. Reimers, All the Nations Under Heaven (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 134. 6. See Cynthia Oznick, ‘A Critic at Large: Sholem Aleichem’s Revolution’, The New Yorker (28 March 1988): 99–108. 7. In After Strange Gods Eliot writes that ‘any large number of free-thinking Jews’ is ‘undesirable’ in Christian Society (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 19. 8. For more on Semitic representations in Eliot, see DuPlessis, 2001; and Ellman, 1996. For a culturalist account of Eliot’s anti-Semitism and its context, see Julius, 1995. Eliot’s anti-Semitism has been most recently debated in full in Modernism/Modernity 10:1 (January 2003) and 10:3 (September 2003). 9. On Pound’s anti-Semitism, see Casillo, 1988. 10. Marilyn Reizbaum argues that Joyce’s ‘emblematic figure of degeneration was “the Jew” ’ (2004: 143) 11. For accounts of Richardson’s use of ‘the Jew’, see Rose, 1996; Radford, 1998; and Parsons, 2000: 105–9. 12. Quoted in Lawson, 2006: 31. 13. Fish feature in the poems ‘Married’ and ‘Out of the Water’; frogs in ‘I’d have loved you as you deserved had we been frogs’ and ‘Frogs’; fish in ‘The Flying Banvards’ and ‘To a Renault in the Country’; rats in ‘Wax Dummy in Shop Window’, ‘To Any Idol’ and ‘Hymn to Himself Atlas 20th Century’. For further discussion, see Lawson, 2006: 92. 14. See Miller, 2005: 159; and DuPlessis, 2001: 158. 15. Dylan Thomas, review of Nightwood in Light and Dark, March 1937, quoted in Jane Marcus, ‘Mousemeat: Contemporary Reviews of Nightwood’, in Broe, 1991: 200; T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’ to Nightwood (N: 5). 16. Throughout Nightwood Barnes conceives of Jewishness as a racial identity, rather than a religious or cultural affiliation. As is discussed below, this means that the text both brings into play and subverts the racial sciences of the early twentieth century.



6 Wandering and wondering: Jewish identity and minority writing

17. For a detailed discussion of the baroque in Barnes, including a consideration of Deleuze’s understanding of the baroque, see Monika Kaup ‘The Neobaroque in Djuna Barnes’, Modernism/Modernity 12:1 (2005): 85–110. 18. Like Barnes, Loy’s conception of Jewishness works with racial scientific classifications of racial identity, finding both the positive forces and limits of scientistic definitions of Jewish intellectualism and degenerate avantgardism: Loy in particular is responding to Max Nordau and Richard von Krafft-Ebing. 19. See Feinstein (unpublished dissertation), Chapter 4 for a persuasive reading of Loy’s writing on Jewishness in this context. 20. In a letter to Van Vechten (n.d. c.1915) Loy asks for ‘To You’ to appear as a ‘dedication’ at the beginning of the Love Songs (letter quoted in Koudis, 1980: 64). Conover follows this letter in placing the poem with Love Songs in the Last Lunar Baedeker (1982: 89–90) but omits the poem from The Lost Lunar Baedeker explaining that ‘[Marisa] Januzzi has persuaded me that despite M[ina] L[oy]’s plea to C[arl] V[an] V[echten] [ ] I may have taken this request too literally in [The ] L[ast] L[unar] B[aedeker] I now find it difficult to read ‘To You’ as a prelude to ‘Songs to Joannes,’ either thematically or structurally’ (LLB: 191). 21. ‘To You’ was first published in Others 3:1 (July 1916): 27–8; all quotations are from this first published version. 22. Quoted from Loy’s note at the end of ‘To Mina Loy’ by John Rodker, The Little Review 7:4 (January–March 1921): 44–5. Rodker’s piece is a response to Loy’s ‘John Rodker’s Frog’, The Little Review 7:3 (September–December 1920): 56–7. 23. This is not to assert that Stein or her family were necessarily Yiddish speakers, rather, as discussed below, Yiddish provided a racialised exemplum for a minority writing practice. 24. Quoted in Damon, 1996: 499. 25. Published in PMLA 116:2 (March 2001): 416–28; edited and with an introduction by Amy Feinstein. 26. See Damon, 1993, for a full reading of Stein’s representation of Jewishness in QED. 27. First published in Painted Lace and other Pieces, 1914–1937: The Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein (1953), 94: subsequent references are to this text.



218 Notes

Abraham, Julie, L. ‘ “Woman, Remember You”: Djuna Barnes and History’, in M. L. Broe (ed.), Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 252–68. Altman, Meryl. ‘A Book of Repulsive Jews?: Rereading Nightwood’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13:3 (1992): 160–71. Apollonio, Umbro, ed.. Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973). Ardis, Ann L. Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Arensberg, Walter. ‘ “Axiom” “Theorem” ’, The Blind Man, 2 (May 1917): 9. Arnold, Elizabeth. ‘Mina Loy and the Futurists’, Sagetrieb, 8:1–2 (Spring and Fall 1989): 83–117. Ashbery, John. ‘The Impossible’ [Review of Gertrude Stein Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems, Yale University Press, 1956], Poetry (July 1957): 250–4 Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World (1965), trans. Helen Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Barnes, Djuna. ‘Against Nature: In Which Everything that Is Young, Inadequate and Tiresome is Included in the Term Natural’, Vanity Fair, 18 (August 1922): 60. ——. At The Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1995). ——. The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1994). ——. Collected Poems with Notes Towards The Memoirs, ed. Phillip Herring and Osias Stutman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). ——. Collected Stories, ed. Phillip Herring (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1996), ——. I Could Never be Lonely Without A Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes, ed. Alyce Barry (London: Virago Press, 1985). ——. Ladies Almanack (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992 facsimile reprint). ——. New York, ed. Alyce Barry (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1989). ——. Nightwood (London: Faber & Faber, second edition 1950). ——. Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, ed. and intro. Cheryl J. Plumb (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995). ——. Ryder (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990 version of 1979 restored text). ——. Smoke and Other Early Stories (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1993). ——. Vagaries Malicieux: Two Stories by Djuna Barnes (New York: Frank Hallam, 1974). Barney, Natalie Clifford. Adventures of the Mind (Adventures de l’esprit), trans. John Spalding Gatton (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992). Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Baudelaire, Charles. ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 1–40. 219



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232 Bibliography

Abraham, Julie, 189, 190 Ajeeb Chess Player, 88, 213n6 Aldington, Richard, 58 Anti-Semitism, 133, 139, 179, 180, 183, 191, 193, 194, 199, 217n4 Ardis, Ann, 11 Arensberg, Louise, 97, 105, 115 Arensberg, Walter, 99, 101, 105, 115 Armory Show, 34, 35, 48, 50, 54, 99 Arnold, Elizabeth, 43 Arnold, Matthew, 179 Art Nouveau, 128 articulation, 14–16, 20, 21–5, 31, 33, 150, 208–9 Ashbery, John, 204 assemblage, 18, 21, 23, 24, 121–2, 125, 132, 135, 149, 152, 177, 182, 187, 210n7 avant-garde, 5–6, 9, 20, 25, 32–6 , 49, 50, 54, 71, 86, 92, 95, 114–17, 118, 123, 127, 128–32, 142–4, 146, 186, 195, 197 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 152–4, 156, 166 Barnes, Djuna, 1–4, 23–6, 29, 33–43, 126–9, 143–9, 164–73, 188–92, 208, 209 and avant-garde, 40, 87, 91, 92, 97 and Barney, Natalie Clifford, 167 and baroque, 191–2, 198 and becoming-animal, 170, 172 and carnivalesque, 165–6 on Coney Island, 34, 89–91, 164 and Decadence, 34, 29, 127, 147 on fathers (dead), 53, 59 and female body, 28, 37, 164, 165–6, 167 and feminism, 36–7 and First World War, 58, 61 friendship with Loy, 1, 2 and Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness Elsa von, 93, 116 on genius, 144–7

and gothic, 151 and Greenwich Village, 33, 34, 36, 91–4, 97 and grotesque, 164–5, 167–9, 175, 177 and Guggenheim, Peggy, 127 and Hanfstaengl Ernst, 34 and incest, 45 and Joyce, James, 143–7 and Jewishness, 25, 178, 188–92, 194, 200 journalism, 24, 25, 28, 34–6, 39, 88, 93,126–7, 160, 147–8 and Lemon, Courtney, 34 and mass culture, 87, 91–2, 165 poetry by, 2, 33, 34, 38, 60, 127 plays by, 2, 28, 34, 39–40 and Provincetown Players, 34 and Pynne, Mary, 34 Ray, Man photograph of, 128, 129 short stories, 28, 33, 34, 37–8, 40, 126–7 on Stein, Gertrude, 192 and suffrage movement, 37 and Van Vechten, Carl, 33 writing on Mina Loy, 95 Barnes, Djuna, works by, The Antiphon, 2, 28, 40, 192, 216n10 ‘Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians’, 91, 95 The Book of Repulsive Women, 38–9, 165–6, 168 ‘Cassation’ (‘A Little Girl Tells a Story to a Lady’), 40 ‘Creatures in an Alphabet’, 216n10 The Dove, 39–40 ‘Flo Ziegfeld Is Tired of Buying Hosiery’, 94 ‘The Grande Malade’ (‘The Little Girl Continues’), 40 ‘Greenwich Village As It Is’, 91, ‘How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed’, 37, 45, 94, 164

233



Index

Barnes, Djuna, works by – continued ‘How the Villagers Amuse Themselves’, 92, 93 ‘If Noise Were Forbidden at Coney Island a Lot of People Would Lose Their Jobs’, 89 ‘I’m Plain Mary Jones of the U.S.A.’, 37 ‘James Joyce, A Portrait of the Man Who is, at Present, One of the More Significant Figures in Literature’, 143–5 ‘Just Lately Drummer boy’, 89 Ladies Almanack, 2, 3, 165, 166, 167–8, 173, 174, 192 ‘The Last Petit Souper (Greenwich Village in the Air – Ahem!)’, 91 ‘The Models Have Come to Town’, 147 ‘My Adventures Being Rescued’, 94 ‘My Sisters and I at a New York Prizefight’, 94 Nightwood, 25, 28, 151, 164, 165, 166, 169–73, 188–92, 194 ‘Paprika Johnson’, 37–8, 43 ‘The People and the Sea’, 89 Ryder, 28, 40, 165, 166–9, 170 ‘Seeing New York With the Soldiers’, 57, 60–1 ‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl: On the Restless Surf at Coney’, 89, 90–1 Three from the Earth, 39 ‘The Tingling, Tangling Tango as ‘Tis Tripped at Coney Isle’, 89 ‘ “Twingeless Twitchell” and His Tantalizing Tweezers’, 94 ‘Vagaries Malicieux’, 146–7 ‘Veterans in Harness’, 35 ‘When Emperors Are Out of Men!’, 88 ‘Who Shall Atone?’, 89 ‘The Wild Aguglia and Her Monkeys’, 94 ‘Yvette Guilbert’, 94 Barnes, Zadel, 28, 39 Barney, Natalie Clifford, 118, 119, 137, 138, 148, 167 baroque, 191–2, 198

Baudelaire, Charles, 120–1, 124, 140 Bauman, Zygmunt, 179 Beach, Sylvia, 123 Beard, Charles, 94, 97 becomings, 17, 19–21, 24, 27, 29–30, 99, 125, 191, 206, 207 horizon of, 84 and minor language, 182 becoming-animal, 31, 40, 155–6, 161–4, 168–70, 172, 173, 177, 186, 187 becoming-grotesque, 151–7 becoming-insect, 79 becoming-machine, 98, 105 becoming-minoritarian, 199 becoming-woman, 30, 45, 47, 53, 111, 113, 155, 156, 206, 207 Benjamin, Walter, 120, 122, 124 Benstock, Shari, 6 Bergson, Henri, 31, 46, 136 Biddle, George, 93 Biers, Katherine, 93–4 biography, 1, 2, 23, 28, 55, 80, 116 Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, 13 Blind Man, The 100–2, 103, 114 Blind Man’s Ball, 154 Booth, Allyson, 59, 61 Botticelli, Sandro, 114 Bouché, Louis, 93 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 12, 24, 122–4 Bourke, Joanna, 62 Bowen, Elizabeth, 124 boxing, 141–2, 164–5 Boyle, Kay, 119 Bradbury, Malcom, 120 Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane, 5 Braidotti, Rosi, 30, 84, 87, 111, 113, 124, 132 Brancusi, Constantin, 140 Bridgman, Richard, 122 Brittain, Vera, 63 Brown, Robert Carlton, 90, 101 110 Bruno, Guido, 34, 39, 91 Bunting, Basil, 28 Bürger, Peter, 5 Burke, Carolyn, 28, 77–8, 115, 144, 157



234 Index

Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 166 Butts, Mary, 184, 186 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The, 151 caesar salad, 83 Camera Work, 25, 42, 50, 54, 95, 114 capitalism, 17, 24, 86, 103–4, 122–3, 135, 148, 198 carnivalesque, 2, 25, 148, 150, 152–3, 156, 165, 174–5, 190 Carrà, Carlo, 41, 42 Cèzanne, Paul 70, 73 Chancellor, John, How to Be Happy in Paris Without Being Ruined, 122 Chaplin, Charlie, 104, 140, 141, 175 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 64, 65 Charm, 147, 198 Chessman, Harriet Scott, 158 Cheyette, Brian, 180, 181, 183, 184 Christian Science, 41 cinema, 8, 103, 104, 137, 148, 172, 175, 176 circus, 165, 170, 190 colonial encounters, 31 Comentale Edward, 11, 211n5 Coney Island, 34, 88–90, 101, 114, 164 ‘Flip-Flap’ rollercoaster, 114–15 Connor, Steven, 184 Conover, Roger, 28, 69, 96, 102, 141 consumerism, 24, 31, 32, 66, 86, 108, 114, 118, 132, 151, 175 Cook, George Cram, 95–6 Cravan, Arthur, 77, 103, 142 Criterion, 72, 163–4 Crowninshield, Frank, 97, 98, 101 Crozier, Andrew, 187 cultural capital, 24, 122, 124, 127, 129, 132, 140, 142, 145 cultural studies, 8–13 cummings, e.e., 58, 113, 121, 198 Cunard, Nancy, 127 Curie, Marie, 138–9, 215n17 cyborg, 24, 111, 113, 115, 116 Dada Almanack, 114 Damon, Maria, 181, 201

235

Decadence, 28, 34, 39, 41, 42, 49, 73, 91, 98, 127, 143, 144, 166, 168 Deleuze, Gilles, 29, 30, 191, 192 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, 17–23, 26, 27, 30, 40, 75, 76, 82, 105, 155, 161, 162, 172, 173, 177, 181, 182, 192, 204 Anti-Oedipus, 19 A Thousand Plateaus, 19, 20, 30, 155 Demuth, Charles, 101, 102, 103, 116, desire, 18–20, 55, 71, 77, 159, 173, 176, 206 anti-oedipal desire, 40, 53 Decadent desire, 39 fields of, 153 flows of, 48, 66, 81, 150, 195 and the grotesque body, 154, 163 materiality of, 80 and subjectivity, 31, 32, 38, 169 desiring machines, 18, 149 desiring production, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 32, 47, 63, 66, 67, 75, 120, 155, 160, 192 deterritorialisation, 17, 19, 24, 29, 30, 53, 67, 75, 111, 118, 135, 148–9, 154, 162, 173, 181, 184, 185, 192, 198, 206, 208 Dietrich, Marlene, 172 Dodge, Mabel, 35, 41, 48, 50, 54, 55, 76, 95, 158 Dreier, Katherine, 113 Dreiser, Theodore, 36 Dreyfus Affair, 180 Dressler, Marie, 175 Duchamp, Marcel, 24, 48, 99–100, 101, 102, 103–4, 105, 111, 113, 115, 116, 130 as Rrose Sélavy, 104 Duchamp, Marcel, works by Bicycle Wheel, 103, 111 The Bride Stripped bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass), 104–5 Fountain, 99–100, 130 In Advance of the Broken Arm, 103 Nude Descending a Staircase, 99, 104 Traveller’s Folding Item, 111 Duncan, Isadora, 98



Index

Dunn, Susan E., 176 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 183, 193, 198 Edmunds, Susan, 166 Edison, Thomas, 111, 112 Eilshemius, Louis, 101 Eliot, T.S., 2, 3, 5, 11, 23, 25, 58, 59, 60, 67, 71, 72, 74, 84, 124, 138, 156, 163, 173, 174–5, 183, 186, 188, 193 ‘A Cooking Egg’, 183 After Strange Gods, 183 ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’, 183 ‘Gerontian’, 183 ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 71 ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’, 183 The Waste Land, 58, 72, 74, 124, 156 Elliot, Bridget and Jo-Ann Wallace, 7, 123, 135, 143, 147 Ellis, Havelock, 191 Ellman, Maud, 72, 183 family (Oedipal), 18, 19, 33, 39, 40, 43, 45, 65, 111, 170, 177, 182, 192, 198 fashion, 28, 37, 47, 92, 108, 110, 116, 119, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 135, 148, 149, 175–6 Feldman, David, 179 Felski, Rita, 9–10, 11, 86 female grotesque, 148, 153–4, 156 femininity, 38, 45, 63, 65, 86, 94, 97, 104, 110, 111–12, 113, 114, 117, 128, 131, 133, 147, 148, 165, 167, 195, 197 feminism, 2, 3, 6, 10, 11, 16, 17, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 36, 37, 43, 50, 52, 86, 155, 157, 159, 164, 174, 184, 192, 197, 204 First World War, 23, 24, 56, 57, 58–63, 65, 66, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77–8, 80, 81, 82, 84, 150, 151, 156, 171, 174, 185, 194, 203, 208 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 119 flâneur, 24, 119, 120–2, 124–5, 128–9, 130, 132, 140, 141, 142, 146, 147, 148–9

flâneuse, 121, 124 Flanner, Janet, 119, 127 Ford, Ford Maddox, 58, 126 Ford, Henry (Fordism), 32, 90, 108, 112, 194 Foucault, Michel, 12, 20, 21, 31, 151 Freedman, Jonathon, 183 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 23, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 87, 164, 190, 207, 208 Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness Elsa von, 24, 93, 94, 113, 115–17, 126, 148, 155, 176 God, 116 Limbswish, 116 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 6 Frost, Elizabeth, 164, 193, 197 Fussell, Paul, 58–60, 61, 70 Gammel, Irene, 116 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 72, Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, 130 gender studies,7, 10, genius, 24, 72, 96, 122, 124, 125, 126, 129, 130, 137, 138–41, 142, 142, 144–5, 146, 147, 148, 149, 180, 194, 196, 203 Gibson Girl, 214n24 Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, 7, 62–3 Good Housekeeping, 112 gothic, 2, 125, 150, 151–2, 154, 156, 157 Gourmont, Remy de, 74 Greenberg, Clement, 4 Greenwich Village, 33, 34, 36, 41, 49, 50 Grossberg, Lawrence, 11, 14–19, 20, 21, 22 Grosz, Elizabeth, 30, 49 grotesque, 25, 150, 152–7, 158, 160, 162–70, 174–7, 185, 186, 197, 208 grotesque body, 152–4, 155, 157, 160, 163, 165, 166, 169, 175, 176 Gubar, Susan, 130 Guggenheim, Peggy, 126, 127 haecceity, 29, 38, 125, 137, 155, 160, 161, 185, 190, 205 Hall, Radclyffe, 63, 127



236 Index

Hall, Stuart, 12–14, 16, 165 Hanrahan, Mairèad, 190, 191 Hanscombe, Gillian and Virginia L. Smyers, 6 Haraway, Donna, 111 Harlem Renaissance, 210n2 Haweis, Stephen, 41, 60, 194 H.D., 6–7, 198 Hemingway, Ernest, 119, 157 homoeroticism, 69, 70 Howe, Irving, 4, 5 Huyssen, Andreas, 5, 6, 7, 8, 86–7, 128 hysteria, 31, 64, 65–6, 70, 72, 80, 111, 164 L’imagarie populaire (1926), 168 incest, 28, 39, 40, 45, 52, 53 Independents Exhibition (1917), 85, 99–100, 101, 102, 103, 114 individuation, 29, 161 intensities, 20, 21, 22, 29, 38, 40, 46, 75, 79, 81, 84, 90, 125, 135, 162, 163, 164, 173, 188 intermezzo, 40, 196, 202, 204 Italian Futurists, 3, 21, 23, 28, 41, 42, 43, 46, 48, 68, 69, 77, 96, 136 Jacob, Mary Phelps (Caresse Crosby), 110 James, Henry, 5, 51, 180 Janet, Pierre, 64 jeune fille américaine, 105, 108 Jewishness, 25, 28, 29, 90, 133, 138, 171, 176, 178–206, 207, 208 Jones, Amelia, 60, 103, 104, 116, 155 Jones, Ernst, 65 Jones, ‘Mother’, 34, 37 jouissance, 6, 162 Joyce, James, 5, 7, 11, 36, 59, 118, 119–20, 124, 130, 140, 143–7, 156, 170, 183, 184, 186, 194 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 119 Dubliners, 183 Ulysses, 25, 124, 156, 170, 184 Kafka, Franz, 181–2 Kaivola, Karen, 191 Kant, Emmanuel, 16, 21

237

Kayser, Wolfgang, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, 152–3, 156 Kenner, Hugh, 7 Kiki of Montparnasse, 147 Kouidis, Virginia, 75 Kreymborg, Alfred, 98, 197 Kristeva, Julia, 60, 154, 156, 182 Lacan, Jacques, 18, 207 Lacerba, 41 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry, 210n1 Lawrence, D. H., 5, 22, 151 Sons and Lovers, 151 Lawson, Peter, 185, 187 lesbian erotic, 80, 81, 159, 162, 163 Levenson, Michael, 7 Levin, Harry, 4, 5, 6, Levine, Gary, 201 Lewis, Wyndham, 12, 59, 138, 140, 186 Levy, Julien, 127 literary machine, 21, 26 little girl, 40–1, 167 Little Review, The, 33, 96, 116, 143, 186, 196 Lombroso, Cesare, 180 Loy, Mina, 1–4, 41–8, 75–80, 84, 95–9, 127–9, 136–43, 173–7, 192–9, 200, 208, 209 ageing women, 148, 176, and avant-garde, 125–6, 128, 131 and Barney, Natalie Clifford, 137 on Brancusi, Constantin on boxing, 141–2 and carnivalesque, 174, 175 and Carrà, Carlo, 42 and Chaplin, Charlie, 141 and Christian Science, 41 on cinema, 175 and Cravan, Arthur, 77, 142 on Curie, Marie, 138–9 daughters of (Joella and Fabienne), 127 and Decadence, 41–2, 128 and Dodge, Mabel, 41, 95 and female body, 45–6 and First World War, 25, 57, 58, 63, 75–8, 98 on flapper generation, 128



Index

Loy, Mina – continued friendship with Barnes, Djuna, 2, 3 friendship with Stein, Gertrude, 1, 41 on genius, 24, 118, 136, 139, 140–2, 143 and grotesque, 156, 174–7 and Guggenheim, Peggy, 127 and Haweis, Stephen, 41, 194 and Independents Exihibition (1917), 114 and Italian Futurists, 3, 23, 41, 42–3, 95–6, 136 and Jewishness, 25, 178, 192–9, 200, 206 and Joyce, James, 140, 143, 145–6 lampshades, 127 on Lewis, Wyndham, 140 logopoeia, 188 and Marinetti, F. T., 42, 46, 96 as ‘Modern Woman’, 97 mongrel poetics, 193 and Moore, Marianne, 188, 198 and New York Bowery, 176 and New York Dada, 24, 87, 101–2, 103 and Papini, Giovanni, 42 as ‘Patience Scalpel’, 173–4 on Poe, Edgar Allan, 140 Ray, Man photograph by, 128, 129 and Rodker, John, 196 and Stein’s writing, 1, 41, 136–9 and Stevens, Francis, 41 and Van Vechten, Carl, 41, 95 and virginity, 43, 108–9 visual art by 41, 114, 177, 211n12 Loy, Mina, works by: ‘An Aged Woman’, 176 Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, 42, 177, 192–7, 198 ‘Aphorisms on Futurism’, 42, 95 ‘Apology of Genius’, 140–1, 144 Bums in Paradise, 177 ‘Babies in Hospital’, 77 ‘Chiffon Velours’, 176 Christ on a Clothesline, 177 Communal Cot, 177 ‘Crab Angel’, 174–5 ‘Der Blinde Junge’, 76

‘Feminist Manifesto’, 28, 30, 42, 173–4 ‘Film Face’, 175 ‘Gertrude Stein’, 137–8 ‘Giovanni Franchi’, 96, Goy Israels, 193 ‘Hot Cross Bum’, 177 ‘Human Cylinders’, 99 ‘Idiot Child on a Fire-Escape’, 176 ‘Ignoramous’, 141 ‘Italian Pictures’, 43, 47; ‘Italian Pictures’: ‘Costa Magic’, 45, 53; ‘Italian Pictures’: ‘Costa San Giorgio’, 43–5; ‘Italian Pictures’: ‘July in Vallombrosa’, 43; ‘Joyce’s Ulyssses’, 145–6 ‘Lady Laura in Bohemia’, 148 ‘Lions’ Jaws’, 145 Love Songs, 24, 63, 75, 76, 77–80, 82, 84, 98–9 ‘Lunar Baedecker’, 128 Lunar Baedecker, 128 ‘Modern Poetry’, 198 No Parking, 177 ‘O Hell’, 128 ‘O Marcel - - - otherwise I Also Have Been to Louise’s’, 101–3 ‘Mass Production on 14th Street’, 176 ‘The Pamperers’, 139 ‘Parturition’, 41, 66–9, 95 ‘Perlun’, 141–2 ‘Photo After Pogrom’, 176 ‘Sketch of a Man on a Platform’, 96 ‘Three Moments in Paris’: ‘Café du Néant’, 42, 122 ‘To You’, 193–4 ‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’, 108–9 Loy, Myrna, 175 lyric voice, 58, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 80, 84 McAlmon, Robert, 119, 128 majoritarian, 17, 22, 24, 29, 30, 32, 33, 38, 43, 47, 111, 113, 115, 135, 152 207, 182, 185, 190, 192, 193, 198, 199, 202, 204, 205, 206 see also molar



238 Index

Marcus, Jane, 164, 171, 191, 210n2 Marinetti, F. T., 23, 41, 42, 46, 48, 67, 68–70, 74, 96, 108 Marsh, Edward, 185, 197 Marxism, 11, 14, 17, 78, 103 masculinity, 23, 24, 42, 58, 60, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70–1, 74, 86, 104, 130, 133, 142, 149, 151, 191 mass culture, 5, 6, 24, 86, 87, 91, 92, 103, 108, 112, 114, 174, 213n4 materialism, 8, 17, 22, 78 Matisse, Henri 48, 51 Woman with a Hat, 48, 50 mecanomorphic portraits, 105–8 Messerli, Douglas, 35 Meyer, Agnes Ernst, 114 Miller, Cristanne, 188, 193 Miller, Tyrus, 171 minor literature, 181–2, 208 minoritarian, 17, 24, 32, 33, 37, 177, 178, 182, 184, 192, 197, 198, 199, 206 see also molecular Modernism/modernity, 8 modernist studies, 6, 8–10, 12, 13, 21, 209 molar, 17, 18, 19, 22, 30, 32, 68, 71, 75, 77, 81, 99, 111, 155, 168, 184, 204 see also majoritarian molecular, 17, 18, 22, 27, 37, 40, 49, 68, 155, 156, 187 see also minoritarian Moore, Marianne, 188, 198, 216n11 Mutt, R., 99, 101, 214n19 Muybridge, Eadweard, 104 Myers, Dr C. S., 64 Naturalism, 35 Naumann, Francis, 101, 104, 110 New England radicalism, 36 New Woman, 24, 105, 110–11, 113, 114, 117 New York Dada, 24, 85–7, 93, 99, 102, 104–8, 113, 115, 116, 118, 130, 150, 156 New York Society for the Supression of Vice, 97 Nietszche, Friedrich, 20, 31, 36

239

Nijinsky, Waslav, 98 Nobel Prize, 139 nomadism, 19, 81, 181, 187, 190, 196, 203, 206 North, Michael, 9, 11, 33 Norton, Allen, 54, 90, 95, 103 Norton, Louise, 54, 95, 101, 102 organism, 18, 63, 66, 67, 113, 154, 162, 186 orgasm, 80, 83, 159, 169, 162, 164, 177 Others, 33, 41, 95, 98, 99, 196 Owen, Wilfred, 67, 70, 74, Owens, David, 80–1, 82 Papini, Giovanni, 42, 77, 96 Paris, 125, 146–9, 186, 199 Italian Futurists in, 41, 48 guides to, 122 lesbians in, 148–9, 167 in the 1920s, 24, 55, 118, 119, 120, 126–8, 131, 150 Paris Exposition (1878), 112 Rodker, John, in, 186 Stein, Gertrude in, 23, 48, 80, 126, 129–30, 199 Parsons, Deborah, 39, 124–5 Passos, John Dos, 119 paternalistic reform, 36 Paterson Strike Pageant, 35 patriarchy, 10, 16, 17, 38, 40, 45, 159, 168, 174, 104–6 Patterson, Ian, 187 Perelman, Bob, 132, 133, 134 Perloff, Marjorie, 68, 71, 193 phallic poetics, 74, 133 phallus (great castrated soaring), 75 Phillips, Adam, 185 photography, 37, 65, 94, 98, 101, 104, 105, 128, 129, 130, 143, 176 Picabia, Francis, 24, 48, 85, 101, 105–8, 110, 113, 114, 116 De Zayas! De Zayas!, 214n23 Fille née sans mère, 105–6, 114, 214n22 Juliette Gleizes au manometer, 214n30 Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans ‘état de nudité, 106–8



Index

Picasso, Pablo, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 126, 129, 135 Pizer, Donald, 120 Plumb, Cheryl, J., 166 Poe, Edgar Allan, 140 Poggiolo, Renato, 5 pogroms, 178, 190 Pollock, Griselda, 123 popular culture, 8, 15, 49, 87, 91, 94, 98, 102, 114, 126, 128, 164, 174, 213n4 poststructuralism, 7, 8, 12, 16, 17, 157 potentia, 75 Pound, Ezra, 3, 5, 7, 11, 22, 23, 28, 59, 60, 67, 72–4, 84, 85, 119, 120, 121, 123, 127, 130, 133, 138, 143, 183, 186, 188, 198 Pound, Ezra, works by: Cantos, 108, 110, 183 Homage to Sextus Propertius, 72 ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, 73–4 ‘Translator’s Postscript to Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love’, 74 Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, 178, 194 Provincetown Players, 34, 92 psychoanalysis, 18, 19, 31, 40, 64, 65, 66–7, 74–5, 87, 111, 157, 164 Rabin, Jessica, 201 Rado, Lisa, 10 Rainey, Lawrence, 7, 119, 123 Rascoe, Burton, 126 Ray, Man, 24, 85, 104, 105, 113, 120, 128, 129, 130, 143 Homme: Femme, 105 Catherine Barometer, 214–15n30 real, the, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 32, 49, 51, 105, 150, 158, 160, 174, 185, 187, 190 Reed, John, 35, 41 Red Head Priming Plug, 107 Rhoades, Katherine Nash, 113, 114 Rhys, Jean, Good Morning Midnight, 148 Richardson, Dorothy, 124, 184 Rifkin, Adrian, 121–2 Roberts, Andrew, 122

Roché, Henri Pierre, 101 Roche, Juliette, 24, 113, 115 (see also 214n30) Rodker, John, 184–5, 186–7, 196 Rogue, 41, 54, 60, 95, 96, 97, 108, Rosenberg, Isaac, 67, 70, 184–6, 187, 197 Ruddick, Lisa, 52, 157 Russo, Mary, 153–4, 154, 155, 156 Sanger, Margaret, 43 Sassoon, Siegfried, 67, 70 Sawelson- Gorse, Naomi, 113 schizoanalysis, 19–20, 75, schizophrenia, 31, 208 Schmitz, Neil, 204 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 207–8 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 7, 166, 168 Semitic discourse, 178, 180, 184, 188, 192, 193, 194, 195, 180, 217n2 sexuality, 1, 3, 5, 8, 28, 31, 53, 65, 75, 87, 102, 104, 110, 166, 168 shell-shock, 64–6, 70 Sherry, Vincent, 59, 60, 61, 67, 73 spectacle, 9, 25, 36, 37, 89, 91, 92, 93–4, 117, 120, 122, 148, 151, 165, 174–5 Spender, Stephen, 4, 5 Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, 153, 154 Steiglitz, Alfred, 34, 35, 50, 85, 101, 113, 114, 130 Stein, Gertrude, 1–4, 5, 27–8, 48–55, 80–84, 131, 132–6, 157–64, 199–206, 208, 209 and America, 50, 53–4, 126, 199 automatic writing by, 21 Barnes, Djuna, on, 192 and becoming-animal, 161–3 continuous present, 51, 55 and Criterion, 163–4 and cubism, 49, 51 Davidson, Jo, sculpture of, 130, 131 and domestic sphere, 149, 158, 160, 202 and Duchamp, Marcel, 48 and écriture feminine, 6, 28 and fashion, 130



240 Index

and fetish, 164 and First World War, 57–8, 59, 67, 80–2, 84 friendship with Loy, 1, 41 friendship with Picasso, 48, 135 on genius, 24, 118, 126, 132–6, 139–40, 148 and grotesque body, 156, 160, 161 Hemingway, Ernest, on, 157 and incestuous father, 52–3 and Italian Futurists, 48 and James, Henry, 51 and Jewishness, 25, 28, 178, 188, 199–206 at John Hopkins School of Medicine, 49 on lesbian sex, 28, 80, 159, 162, 206 Loy, Mina, writing on, 136–9 and nouns, 158, 204 oral-anal, 25, 157–8 in Paris, 23, 48, 80, 126, 129–30, 199 and pet-names, 83, 159 and Picabia, Francis, 48 plays by, 56 portrait of, by Picasso, 48, 129 portraits (verbal) by, 50, 53–4, 56, 102 at Radcliffe, 49, 200 repetition, use of, 51–2, 53, 82, 102, 203 Rodker, John, on, 186 in Spain, 48, 80 and Toklas, Alice B. 23, 48, 49, 80, 126, 149, 159, 199 and Weininger, Otto, 133, 200 and Yiddish, 201–3, 218n23 Stein, Gertrude, works by: ‘Ada’, 53, 157 As a Wife Has a Cow, 162–4 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1, 48, 119, 126, 132, 13, 134, 163, 204 ‘Aux Galaries Lafayette’, 54 Everybody’s Autobiography, 134, 199 Geography and Plays, 50 ‘Henri Matisse’, 50, 54 ‘IIIIIIIIII’, 54 ‘Letters and Parcels and Wool’, 83–4

241

Lifting Belly, 24, 80–3, 84, 159 The Making of Americans, 1, 15, 23, 41, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 132–3, 157, 200–1, 203 ‘M. Vollard et Cèzanne’, 54 ‘The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation’, 200, 201 ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’, 143 ‘Mrs Th—–y’, 54 ‘Pablo Picasso’, 50, 54 ‘Painted Lace’, 57–8, 67 ‘Patriarchal Poetry’, 204–6 ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia’, 41, 50, 54–5, 158 ‘Preciosilla’, 163 QED, 200 ‘The Reverie of the Zionist’, 203 Stanzas in Meditation, 204 ‘Susie Asado’, 163 ‘Sweet tail. Gypsies’, 136 Tender Buttons, 23, 28, 49, 148, 157–61, 164 Three Lives, 23, 50–1 Wars I Have Seen, 199 ‘Yet Dish’, 202–3 Stein, Leo, 41, 48, 49,192 Stella, Joseph, 101, 116 Battle of Lights, Coney Island, 101 Stevens, Francis, 42, 97 Stevenson, Sheryl, 166 Stopes, Marie, 43 stratification, 18, 19, 24, 66, 74, 80, 88, 99, 102, 104, 159, 162, 166, 167, 169, 189, 195, 198 subjectification, 18, 24, 63, 66, 67, 71, 120, 125, 139, 149, 154, 161, 177, 186, 192, 195, 208 subjectivity, 5, 7, 16, 18, 19, 22, 31, 38, 39, 46, 74, 75, 80, 86, 93, 99, 113, 120, 154, 168, 190, 195 Sue, Eugène, The Wandering Jew, 192 suffragettes, 37 Sunday, Billy, 94, 102, symbolic capital, 123, 126, 134, 139, 140, 153 Symbolism, 2, 28, 34



Index

291, 35, 105, 107, 114 Tate, Trudi, 7, 61–2, 63, 66–7 Taylor, Charles (Taylorism), 32 technology, 31, 34, 42, 66, 68, 69, 87, 88, 93, 98, 101, 105, 110–13, 115, 150, 151, 156, 165 territorialisation, 18, 19, 32, 104, 121, 125, 135, 149, 162, 181, 182, 191, 204, 205 Tice, Clara, 24, 97–8, 101, 102, 108–10, 113, 114 Virgins Minus Verse, 108–10 ‘Who’s Who in Manhattan’, 97–8 Todd, Ellen Wiley, 88 Toklas, Alice B, 23, 41, 48, 49, 84, 133, 159, 199 Transatlantic Review, 50, 136 Twitchell-Wass, Jeffry, 80 typewriter, 110–11 Tzara, Tristran, 143 unconscious, the, 18, 75, 153 Van Vechten, Carl, 33, 41, 48, 76, 95, 102, 130, 136 Vanity Fair, 60, 91, 97, 98, 101, 127, 143, 144, 146 Verdenal, Jean, 72 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, The Future Eve, 111–12 virginity, 43, 79, 108–10, 116, 173 Vogue, 119, 130

Wagner-Martin, Linda, 199 Warner, Marina, 125 Watson, Steven, 139 Weininger, Otto, 133, 136, 191, 200 West, Rebecca, 65 Wharton, Edith, 127 Who’s Who in New York’s Bohemia’, 91 wild realism, 17 Wilde, Oscar, 94, 95, 127 Will, Barbara, 133, 134 Williams, Raymond, 120 Williams, William Carlos, 5, 21, 28, 113, 148, 198, 216n18 Wilson, Elizabeth, 124 Winkiel, Laura, 165, 174 Winter, Jay, 59–60, 61 Wolff, Janet, 121, 124 Wood, Beatrice, 24, 101, 111, 113, 114, Woolf, Virginia, 5, 30, 59, 60, 61, 151 Yealland, Lewis, 64 ‘Yellow journalism’, 34, 90, 93, 103 Yiddish, 180–1, 184, 193, 198, 199, 201–4 Zabel, Barbara, 104, 105 Zayas, Marius de, 114



242 Index

Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Reading of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein

Modernist Women Writers and War: Trauma and the Female Body in Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein

Testimony against Gertrude Stein

Reading Modernist Poetry

Gertrude Stein (Pamphlets on American Writers)

Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens

Gertrude Stein (Pamphlets on American Writers)

Gertrude Stein (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives)

Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens

Gertrude Stein (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives)

Gertrude

Gertrude

Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act

Mina

Mina

Gertrude Stein - Three Lives 3 The Gentle Lena

Goodbye Mina

LOY-BottleFullOfRye

Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Else Lasker-Schuler

Reading into Cultural Studies

Gertrude Stein - Three Lives 1 The Good Anna

Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: the poetics and politics of modernism

Potezna mina

La Mina

Husserl and Stein (Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change)

Hippocrates - On the Articulations

International and Cross-Cultural Management Studies: A Postcolonial Reading

Introduction to Mathematics (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Reading of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein

Modernist Women Writers and War: Trauma and the Female Body in Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein

Testimony against Gertrude Stein

Reading Modernist Poetry

Gertrude Stein (Pamphlets on American Writers)

Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens

Gertrude Stein (Pamphlets on American Writers)

Gertrude Stein (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives)

Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens

Gertrude Stein (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives)

Gertrude

Gertrude

Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act

Mina

Mina

Gertrude Stein - Three Lives 3 The Gentle Lena

Goodbye Mina

LOY-BottleFullOfRye

Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Else Lasker-Schuler

Reading into Cultural Studies

Gertrude Stein - Three Lives 1 The Good Anna

Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: the poetics and politics of modernism

Potezna mina

La Mina

Husserl and Stein (Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change)

Hippocrates - On the Articulations

International and Cross-Cultural Management Studies: A Postcolonial Reading

Introduction to Mathematics (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

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