ABSTRACT
Writing in 1922, T.S. Eliot identified two novels, Wyndham Lewis's Tarr and Joyce's Ulysses, as the novels of the modern period, the only novels written to date that broke effectively with what Eliot terms "the narrative method" of nineteenth-eentury realism (~'Ulysses"480). Reviewing Tarr for the Egoist in 1916, he had described it as "impressively deliberate [and] frigid" (/lTarr" 105). To a similar end but in characteristically more colorful and idiosyncratic terms, Ezra Pound described Tarr in the Little Review as lithe most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time." Lewis and Joyce are "men who are once for all through with the particular inanities of Shavian-Bennett, and with the particular oleosities of the Wellsian genre" (425). "In so far as 'styleI is generally taken to mean 'smoothness of finish', orderly arrangement of sentences, coherence to the Flaubertian method," Pound concedes that Lewis's writing is "faulty" by comparison with Joyce's in Portrait of the Artist. Nonetheless, he is quick to insist that Lewis's novel is of interest "not due to style ... but due to the fact that we have a highly-energized mind performing a huge act of scavenging; cleaning up a great lot of rubbish, cultural, Bohemian, romantico-Tennysonish, arty, societish, gutterish" (428-9). I quote at length from Pound's 1920 essay:
first novel, which was originally serialized in the Egoist between Apri11916 and November 1917 before being reprinted in book form twice in 1918 and then again in 1928 (see Morrow and Lafourcade 28-37). Most importantly, both Eliot and Pound establish a binary opposition between realism and modernism, that iSI between an aesthetic of mimetic representation ("illusionism") and an aesthetic that refuses to organize itself around what Oscar Wilde termed in 1889 "the burden of the human spirit" (192). Modernism is figured in both of these reviews as a radical departure from, an absolute break withl not only the literary conventions but also the ethics of representational art. Thus, Tarr is praised because it neither documents quotidian reality nor "satisf[ies] the mannequin demand for 'beauty'''; instead, it is "volcanic," "frigid." And because it does not observe or respect the formal and ideological conventions associated with realisID1 "we"-Eliot and Pound-like it. And IIthey"-the British reading public and conservative reviewersdon't. Modeled in these reviews are not only two different aesthetics but also two different audiences for literature and two different reading practices.
