ABSTRACT
Lewis’s closet drama Enemy of the Stars does not do away with the actor – in its clash of mimetic and diegetic elements, it stages the agony of “performing” or “becoming” humanity itself. Its main characters, Arghol and Hanp, function as embodied verbs; in their agonistic struggle, stand metonymically for the agency missing from language. The blurring of the Vorticist manifesto with drama makes the play unique in the history of closet drama; it dramatizes Lewis’s critique of the master–slave dialectic by placing the master’s masochistic relationship to language in clashing juxtaposition to the slave’s resistance to unconscious agency and freedom.
