ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide the complex intertwining of modernist aesthetics and ideologies by re-casting the relation between psychoanalysis and modernism through the work of another writer who was also uniquely poised between the two; the writer, art critic and painter, Adrian Stokes. For Stokes, limestone is the trope that both unleashes an affirmation of the primacy of the sensual and immediate and forms the basis of an entire geographical, historical and cultural aesthetic. Stokes’ fable looks like a phobic response to a perceived threat to a loved object that risk exacerbating the violence it sets out to check. Stokes made many transitions, many journeys, intellectual and geographical, in his life. In 1934 Pound reviews Stokes’ work on the ‘Quattro Cento’, The Stones of Rimini. Stokes sees art as the dramatization of both ‘positionalities’, although the moral emphasis continues to be laid on the maturity of the ‘carver’.
