Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

some of Tarr’s overt emotional cruelty, chalking it up to his immaturity (‘tu es
si jeune
,’ she tells him, p. 184), and one must recall throughout
Tarr
that Kreisler is in his mid-thirties, while Tarr is only in his early twenties. Hobson and Bertha, of course, are scarcely presented as authoritative witnesses within the world of the novel. But when even Anastasya hears of Tarr’s marriage, she looks blankly into his eyes and sees only a blasted landscape, in Lewis’s memorable phrase, ‘as though he contained cheerless stretches where no living thing could grow’ (p. 282).
    Tarr may be a genius, but that does not mean that he is not also something of a fool. His name tells us so. ‘Tarr’ suggests several possible origins. It may be the nickname for a British sailor who can stay masterfully afloat in the metaphorical sea of Paris (‘All the nice girls love a tar!’ Lewis later writes in another context 15 ); it may suggest the sticky tenacity, and perhaps the blackness, of his intellectualism; it may allude to a story by Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The System of Doctor Tarrand Professor Fether’, in which madmen take over an asylum. But it also suggests the German ‘
Tor
’ (‘blockhead’), a near-homophone that appears in Kreisler’s consciousness in the text (p. 99). And although ‘
Tor
’ can mean ‘fool’ in the sense of a spiritual innocent (as in the libretto for Wagner’s
Parsifal
), Tarr is no holy
naïf
, no Dostoyevskian Myshkin to counterbalance Kreisler’s Stavrogin. He is at bottom just another version of the self-important artist, one of the ‘unscrupulous heroes’ that haunt the Vitelotte Quarter, who, as Lewis warns in the novel’s first paragraph, are ‘largely ignorant of all but their restless personal lives’ (p. 7). Tarr’s Apollonian pronouncements ultimately prove no more capable of securing for him a ‘healthy’ division between sex and art than do the Dionysiac excesses of Kreisler. The novel’s final words introduce the names of Tarr’s future sexual partners, and they suggest that the supposedly superior artist will become trapped in an irresolvable vacillation between women like Bertha—who are maternal, Romantic, and intellectually unthreatening—and women like Anastasya, who are intellectual extroverts and thus dangerous to the male ego.
    In a final twist of the knife, Anastasya also falls victim to Lewis’s satire. Her conventionally feminine reaction to the news of Tarr’s marriage suggests the limitations of even her code of ‘swagger sex’; indeed, Lewis signals this somewhat earlier by noting that ‘Her romanticism, in fact, was of the same order as Bertha’s but much better class’ (p. 252). So by the novel’s end, both Tarr and Anastasya have been debunked, the biters have been bitten, and Lewis reveals the novel’s most pervasive, if subtlest, insight. No one, including the critic of inauthenticity in society and in art, can step outside the analytic gaze: the avant-gardist looks directly into the mirror when he condemns the world around him.
    ‘a sincerely ironic masterpiece’
    The interest of
Tarr
goes well beyond its formal balances and intellectual patterning of theory evaluated against practice. Its treatment of fatality, its philosophizing, and its grotesque visuality serve to underline its representation, as Lewis writes of the opening meeting between Tarr and Hobson, of a kind of ‘camouflage of intricate accommodations’ (p. 8) with received novelistic form. In itsparadoxical box-within-box admiration and satire of its represented critics and their critiques,
Tarr
looks to the reader to be many different things at the same time, for it feints and parries like a skilled fencer against the reader’s expectations. It is undeniably bleak and at times still unsettling. But if readers can bring themselves to view its world from Lewis’s detached perspective, it is also smart, provocative, and blackly entertaining. Its intertwining of