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

violence and humour may seem quizzical, but for Lewis the two are inseparable, as are both qualities from the world itself. ‘Mine is a repulsive task,’ he later writes, ‘I discourse matter-of-factly upon the most repulsive matters. But however ugly (and I have agreed that they are that), those things are quite
real
.’ 16 This is one respect in which Lewis may be said to concur with Marinetti, who proclaimed in his 1912 ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’: ‘Let us boldly make “the ugly” in literature, and let us everywhere murder solemnity.’ 17
    That
Tarr
murders solemnity is beyond doubt. No novel before the work of Samuel Beckett so thoroughly introduces to the English tradition the idea of the Absurd (‘we represent
absolutely nothing
thank God!’, Anastasya drunkenly proclaims in the restaurant with Tarr, as though she has reached an apotheosis, p. 270). No other English novel sets its action in play with so little concern for morality: in his later
Rude Assignment
, Lewis writes that the story of Kreisler is expected ‘to awaken neither sympathy nor repulsion from the reader … His death is a tragic game.’ 18 No other novel would have the temerity to begin a scene of rape with a man telling a woman ‘Your arms are like bananas!’ (p. 166), or to introduce an entirely new character in its last two words. Yet Lewis was sensitive to English charges that
Tarr
’s satire was an affront to all that was good in the novelistic tradition. He insisted that
Tarr
was ‘not (if you cared to cross the Channel) the first book in European literature to display a certain indifference to bourgeois conventions, and an unblushing disbelief in the innate goodness of human nature.’ 19
    For
Tarr
crosses many kinds of channels—between comedy and tragedy, between philosophy and satire, and ultimately between antihumanism and humanism. Lewis was initially concerned that Harriet Shaw Weaver, the first publisher of
Tarr
, might find the tone of the book ‘too heartless, bitter and material’. But he also wrote ‘if the book has a moral, it is that it describes a man’s revolt or reaction against his reason’. 20 If we accept his description of
Tarr
as a kind of treatise on reason and detachment gone wrong, we may also understand the novel as part of a line of twentieth-century art whose themes Lewis anticipated, even if he did not directly influence them. Its haranguing philosophizing and its mordant criticism of a society that demands ferocious attack from within can be seen in such later Austrian novels as Robert Musil’s
The Man Without Qualities
(1930–42) and the works of Thomas Bernhard. Postmodern English art recapitulates many of Lewis’s central aesthetic concerns. Like
Tarr
, a film such as Peter Greenaway’s
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
(1989) blends rebarbative intellectuality with social satire, sexuality, and anti-humanism, all treated with the most formal visual and aesthetic rigour. And a work of art such as Damien Hirst’s installation
Away from the Flock
(1994), which notoriously displays a sheep in a glass box filled with formaldehyde, addresses the same concerns as Lewis’s Vorticism: how art, in framing organic form by rigorous aesthetic geometries, can make the viewer reconsider the status not only of art, but of life itself.
    And if these comparisons seem to be trying to rescue a form of humanism from Lewis’s often fiercely held anti-humanism (as Lewis himself would begin to do in such later novels as
The Revenge for Love
), it is worth remembering Horace Walpole’s claim that the world is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy for those who think. For
Tarr
, in containing opposites, can ultimately be read either as a comic endorsement of its rather heartless world, or by challenging the reader to bring to bear an understanding resistant to its satiric surfaces, as a denunciation of those who, like Tarr, would suppress the world of feeling beneath an