‘Melodramas of Modernity’: The Interaction of Vorticism and Futurism before the Great War

CHARLES FERRALL 'Melodramas of Modernity': The Interaction of Vorticism and Futurism before the Great War In April 1914 the magazine London Life carried the headline, 'Futurists invade Buckingham Palace.,t In· fact the Palace was one of the few bourgeois institutions to remain virtUally unscathed by the assaults of Marinetti and his followers. From their first appearance in London in April 1910 to the outbreak of war, Marinetti and other Futurists read manifestos, exhibited pictures and sculpture, gave conferences, joined suffragist demonstrations, challenged journalists to duels, performed at private functions and dinners, gave Futurist music performances, and had themselves published, talked about, written about, and caricatured to an astonishing degree. As Richard Cork points out, 'Almost overnight, anything new and shocking was saddled with the nickname of "Futurist": men's pyjamas, larnpshades, cravats, silk purses, quilts and bathing suits. The movement had become so much a part of the nation's consciousness that its n<;lme was bandied about indiscriminately to describe any new development in the arts.'2 One such development was Vorticism. Yet while the Vorticists initially welcomed the influence of Futurism upon what they perceived as the 'Victorian' culture of London, they soon became actively hostile towards the Italian movement. As if reversing this movement from acceptance to rejection, early criticism of Anglo-American modernism, presumably taking the Vorticists' denial of influence at face value, rarely discusses Futurist art and writing} while recent criticism, if anything, tends to exaggerate its influence.4 In what follows I will argue that in order to clarify our sense of the relationship between the two movements we need to address the larger question of the relationship between 'modernism' and 'avant-gardism.' Andreas Huyssen and Jochen Schulte-Sasse point out that Anglo-American criticism has always conflated these two terms.s But if we make a distinction between 'modernist' art and 'avant-garde' art - as Peter Biirger's Theory of the Avant-Garde allows us to do - then we can also understand something of the Vorticists' ambivalence towards the Futurists. The interreaction of these two movements before the war is an exemplary moment in the early twentieth-century confrontation between the defenders and assailants of autonomous art. But since the political tendencies of these two movements were towards the right, we need to question the frequent assumption that 'modernism' and 'avant-gardism' have inherent political biases. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 63, NUMBER 2, WlNTER 1993/4 348 CHARLES FERRALL When the Vorticists first introduced themselves to the public, they expressed no such ambivalence towards the Futurists. An advertisement in an April 1914 issue of the Egoist for the first number of the Vorticist magazine Blast promised a 'Discussion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art./6 This advertisement also undertook to provide reproductions of the work of the English Futurist C.R.W. Nevinson. Significantly, no mention was made of a Vorticist movement. However, when a Futurist manifesto appeared in June implying that Pound, Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, and others were followers of Marinetti, a letter soon appeared, signed by most of the soon-to-be Vorticists, disclaiming any association with the Italian movement: There are certain artists in England who do not belong to the Royal Academy nor to any of the passeist groups, and who do not on that account agree with the futurism of Sig. Marinetti. An assumption of such agreement either by Sig. Marinetti or by his followers is an impertinence/ It seems likely, therefore, that without the blunder of including the Rebel artists in the Futurist Manifesto there would have been no movement called 'Vorticism.' As Cork suggests, the term 'Vorticism' was 'the brainchild of Lewis's political ambitions, a collective term which he was able to bestow on the rebels' work after the Futurist Manifesto had offended their sense of national pride.'8 To some extent, then, Vortidsm was a manufactured movement, the product not only of Lewis's 'political ambitions' but of the need, in a culture in which 'art' is rapidly assimilated into 'fashion,' to advertise and commodify the new under the label of a suitable 'ism.' Nevertheless, there is more to the interaction of Futurism and Vorticism than simply the rivalry of two groups of art advertisers. Futurist art and performance influenced the Vorticists in more than superficial ways. For . example, Lewis's use of a discordantly heterogeneous array of typefaces in Blast clearly owes much to the precedent of the Futurists' typographical experimentation.9 Similarly, the bizarre list of 'blesses' and 'blasts' compiled by the Vorticists to describe the people, places, and institutions that they either love or hate was probably directly inspired by Apollinaire 's headings of 'Mer ... de ... aux' and 'Rose aux' in L'Antitradition Futuriste, published the previous year.IO More important, the Vorticist artists' insistence that art should reflect and celebrate the conditions of contemporary industrial society is largely inspired by Futurist idolatry of modem machinery. In the first issue of Blast, England is described as an 'industrial Island machine' and the 'permanently primitive' artist who roams about its machinery, feeding upon the 'enormous, jangling, journalistic , fairy desert of modern life' has a similar relationship with the modern city as 'more technically primitive man' with 'Nahrre.t1J Not VORTICISM AND FUTURISM 349 without reason did many contemporaries believe that Vorticism was an English variety of Futurism.12 To a large extent, the attempts by Vorticists to extract aesthetic value from machinery constituted a complete break from a tradition of Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics in which the organic work of art was opposed to the threatening vulgarity of modern industrial society. There were, however, more disquieting ways in which Vorticism resembled Futurism. The 'Initial Manifesto of Futurism,' which was reprinted for the 1912 Futurist exhibition at the Sackville Gallery in London, expressed the desire to 'glorify War, the only health giver of the world, militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that kill, the contempt for women.113 Similarly, Lewis described the artist as a 'mercenary' and argued, even after the war had begun, that 'Sport and blood .,. are the rich manure all our vitality battens on.,1 4 Like the Futurists, the Vorticists represented the art of their immediate predecessors as decadent, feminine, and pacifist. Thus the misogyny of both groups was not just a then fashionable pose adopted to 'epater Ie bourgeois' but an expression of the desire to be selforiginating and without a past. Yet despite these similarities, significant differences between the two movements soon emerged. Lewis described Futurism in 1914 as 'Automobilism ' and argued that 'The Latins are at present ... in their "discovery" of sport, their Futuristic gush over machines, aeroplanes, etc., the most romantic and sentimental Nmoderns" to be found.'15 A considerably colder attitude towards the 'Modern World' distinguishes the 'AngloSaxon genius' from the Latin sensibility. In part this is due to the fact that, as Lewis points out, ~achinery, trains, steam-ships, all that distinguishes externally our time, came far more from here than anywhere else.,16 Thus while Lewis's paintings and drawings from this period use only sharp lines and jagged edges, painters such as Severini, Nevinson, Boccioni, Carra, and Russolo tend to favour fluid, curving lines. The Futurists humanize their machines whereas the Vorticists mechanize the human form. The Futurists see an organic form beneath the appearance of the modern city; the Vorticists describe the machine beneath the skin. When Marinetti takes his 'snorting' motor car for a drive, it transforms itself into a mythical centaur upon whose back he experiences 'the very first sunrise on earth!,17 By contrast, Jacob Epstein's famous sculpture mounts a sinister mythical bird upon the body of a huge rock drill. As Epstein later pointed out, Rock Drill does not represent 'humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein we have made ourselves into.,tS The Italians love their machines; the English and Americans only admire their machines' menacing power. While the Futurists celebrate the utopian potential of modernity, the Vorticists use abstract and mechanical forms to express a violent hatred of contemporary society. 350 CHARLES FERRALL Because of their differing attitudes towards machinery and the modern world, Futurists and Vorticists take antithetical positions on the relationship between 'art' and 'life.' In his essay on Vorticisffi, Pound points out that 'We are all futurists to the extent of believing with Guillaume Appollonaire [sic] that "on ne peut pas porter partout avec soi Ie cadavre de son pere." 119 Like the Futurists, the Vorticists attack academic art. However, although the Futurists desire to destroy the Academy, the Vorticists only want to replace its current membership. Marinetti, for instance , while calling for Italy's deliverance from 'its canker of professors, archaeologists, cicerones and antiquaries,' recognizes that his own art will eventually become institutionalized. So he says; 'When we are forty, let others, younger and more valiant, throw us into·the basket like useless manuscripts!,20 By contrast, Lewis, Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, and others planned to set up a ICollege of Arts' with themselves as professors! A detailed prospectus for this school, complete with an outline of the kinds of instruction to be offered and the fees to be paid, was published in the Egoist in 1914. Of course, the college never progressed beyond the stage of advertisement, yet the mere planning of such an institution indicates the degree to which Vorticism differed from Futurism, at least in 1914.21 While the Vorticists attack various schools of art, they do not, unlike the Futurists~ attempt to destroy what Burger calls 'the institution of art.' According to BUrger, it is precisely this different relationship towards the 'institution of art' which distinguishes 'avant-garde' movements such as Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism from other modernist movements. Burger argues that with the historical avant-garde movements, the social subsystem that is art enters the stage of self-criticism. Dadaism, the most radical movement within the European avant-garde, no longer criticizes schools that preceded it, but criticizes art as an institution, and the course its development took in bourgeois society.... The avant-garde turns against ... the distribution apparatus on ~hich the work of art depends, and the status of art in bourgeois society as defined by the concept of autonomy. Only after art, in nineteenth-century Aestheticism, has altogether detached itself from the praxis of life can the aesthetic develop 'purely.' But the other side of autonomy,art's lack of social impact, also becomes recognizable. The avant-gardiste protest, whose aim it is to reintegrate art into the praxis of life, reveals the nexus between autonomy and the absence of any consequences.22 We need to distinguish therefore between avant-garde art, which attempts to reintegrate art back into the praxis of life~ and ·modernist art, which leaves unchallenged the ways in which bourgeois society, from about the eighteenth century onwards, conceives of art ~as a social realm that is set apart from the means-ends rationality of daily bourgeois existence./23 If VORTICISM AND FUTURISM 351 we interpret Futurism and Vorticism as being in many ways paradigmatic respectively of the avant-garde and modernism, we can begin to understand the ways in which these two movements interacted in London before the war. Certainly, Lewis was at least partially aware of this difference. For the Futurist, he argued, 'Art Merges in Life again everywhere.'2.4 Instead of moving into 'a purer region of art,' artists such as Marinetti, according to Lewis, are in the process of becoming monuments of 'puerility, cheap reaction and sensationalism.'25 The political implications of the Futurists' embrace of modernity are obvious. Pfhe People,' Lewis points out, occupy 'the same position as the Automoble [sic]' in Futurist art. Consequently, their 'identification with the crowd' constitutes them as 'POPULAR ARTISTS.' Futurist doctrines of 'maximum fluidity and interpenetration' are therefore 'too democratic.'26 Nothing could be more anathema for a writer such as Lewis than the Futurists' description of the ways in which 'our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which 'we sit, and -the sofas penetrate our bodies.' Such 'interpenetration' of subject and object, mind and matter also involves breaking down the divisions between artist and audience. As the Futurists proclaim, 'We shall henceforward put the spectator in the centre of the picture.'27 In contrast, Lewis's 'blessing' of the 'hysterical wall built round the ego' is partly motivated by the desire to for~ify the boundaries between artist and audience, self and other, the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic.28 The attempt by Marjorie Perloff, therefore, to place Pound within a brief utopian phase of early twentieth century art, a phase prematurely ended by the destruction of the Great War, is somewhat debatable. Perloff argues that 'It is ... [the] straining of the artwork to assimilate and respond to that which is not art, that characterizes the Futurist moment. It represents the brief phase when the avant-garde defined itself by its relation to the mass audience.,29 We shall later need to qualify Perloff's politically sanguine interpretation of the Futurist assimiJation of the aesthetic into the non-aesthetic. However, for the moment it need only he pointed out that Pound can only be made a member of such a 'Futurist moment' by considerable interpretative violence. Perioff argues that Pound's use of quotation and linguistic 'objets trouves' brings the 'outside' into the text and destroys the poem as 'isolated artifact.,30 But what should also be considered is the fact that nearly all of Pound's 'objets trouves' are picked up from such 'high' literary sources as the classics or Troubadour poetry. Contemporary reviews of Pound's poetry often represented the American poet's learning as ostentatious, sometimes as superficial, but nearly always as a barrier to the common reader.31 Pound's use of pastiche may be potentially radical as a formal technique, but the content of the material which he uses, written as it usually is in a multitude of languages, is unlikely to welcome the average reader in off 352 CHARLES FERRALL the street and into his poetry. His call in 1914 for an 'aristocracy of the arts,' premised as it is upon the recovery of traditions of literature accessible to only a tiny minority of the English speaking world, can only be described as elitist.32 Thus Pound in many ways epitomizes a modernist aesthetic which, according to Huyssen, 'constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture.'33 Pound is, for example, unable to accommodate himself in any way to modem systems of mass cultural production. In a letter to John Quinn, the wealthy New York lawyer and art patron, Pound argued in 1915 that if a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time and food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist: he is building art into the world; he creates.... A great age of painting, a renaissance in the arts, comes when there are a few patrons who back their own flair and who buy from unrecognized men.l4 Pound seems to have believed that modern art could be economically supported by a system of patronage not unlike the patronage systems of Renaissance Italy. For all its 'primitivism,' therefore, Vorticism was partly an attempt to preserve a tradition of autonomous 'high' art from the kinds of mass culture produced by a rapidly modernizing society. This is not to say that any defence of autonomous art will necessarily be conservative. Herbert Marcuse argued that the very detachment of art from the praxis of life allows it to protest against the processes of alienation and reification in modern society. Bourgeois culture is 'affirmative,' according to Marcuse, because its 'decisive characteristic is the assertion of a universally obligatory, eternally better and more valuable world that must be unconditionally affirmed: a world essentially different from the factual world of the daily struggle for existence, yet realizable by every individual for himself "from within/' without any transformation of the state of fact.,35 The most obviously 'affirmative' characteristic of AngloAmerican modernism before the war is the way in which writers such as Hulme and Pound oppose 'poetry/ 'metaphor,' and the 'image' to 'prose,' discursive language, and 'rhetoric.'36 Critics such as Renata Poggioli and Clement Greenberg have argued that oppositions such as these derive from a more fundamental dichotomy between experimental language and the languages of stereotype, convention, cliche, and kitsch produced by the capitalist market-place.37 For Greenberg, as the aesthetic 'avant-garde' emodernist' art according to our definition) detaches itself during the nineteenth century from bourgeois society and the markets of capitalism, it seeks to VORTIOSM AND FUTURISM 353 maintain the high level of ... art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point. 'Art for art's sake' and 'pure poetry' appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague. It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at 'abstract' or 'non objective' art - and poetry too. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape - not its picture - is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals. Content is to be dissoived so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.38 If we accept that Greenberg's 'avant-garde' should more accurately be labelled 'modernism,' then we can see how accurately his analysis describes the work of Pound, Lewis, and Hulme. Pound begins his career locked into what William M. Chace calls 'the Symbolist quarantine' of pure art;39 Lewis represents the artist as a Godlike figure whose originality is threatened by the imitations of bourgeois and bohemian 'apes,;40 and Hulme argues that abstract art is motivated by the desire to create a form which 'being durable and permanent shall be a refuge from the flux and impermanence of outside nature:'H Like Greenberg, the Vorticists consider purity to be the most essential characteristic of art. Not only do these writers think of the aesthetic sphere as relatively autonomous and pure but each of the individual arts is itself represented as autonomous. Thus Lewis attempted to expunge all 'literary' or 'narrative' qualities from his painting and Pound argued that Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the art of this form. If sound, to music; if formed words, to literature; the image, to poetry; form, to design; colour in position, to painting; form or design in three planes, to sculpture; movement to the dance or to the rhythm of music or of verse.42 The various arts retain their purity by remaining, despite their mutual influence} separate from each other. By contrast, Futurist manifestos actively attempt to combine all the arts by means of their performative aspects. Whereas the Vorticists restrict each art form to one sense, the Futurists experiment with various kinds of synaesthesia as a way of breaking down the boundaries between the arts. But for all their differences, modernism and avant-gardism were often grounded upon a similar eschatology. Biirger argues that Aestheticism is 'the logically necessary pre-condition of the historical avant-garde rnOvements .143 The avant-gardists did not desire to integrate art into the praxis 354 CHARLES FERRALL of a world dominated by means-ends rationality but into a new life praxis. Since autonomous art provides a paradigm of one kind of unalienated labour, it also allows us a glimpse of what this new life praxis could be. Thus the modernist desire to separate art from the bourgeois market-place is a necessary precondition for the eventual reintegration of art back into life. Such a separation of the aesthetic and non-aesthetic can, of course, lead to various kinds of elitism. The opposition of the 'artist' and the 'bourgeois' common to much modernist art often rests upon the assumption that only a chosen few can have access to the higher realms of art. But the modernist aesthetic, while premised upon an elitist separation of the artist and the rest of bourgeois society, can contain within itself the recognition that at some further moment in history the great divide between artist and audience will collapse. When this recognition does not occur, then the kinds of 'chronic negativity' and 'oppositionalism ' which Fredric Jameson finds characteristic of Lewis's modernism can be frozen into a kind of reactionary elitism.44 Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this modernist reactionary moment occurs when discourses concerned with the purity of art slide into discourses whose nodal points are race and class. In 'Patria Mia,' for instance, Pound habitually oscillates between discussing the ways in which the American will sell himself for a Jquotation/ cliche, or 'set of phrases' and describing how the initially 'static element of the AngloSaxon migration' has been-Jsubmerged and well nigh lost in the pool of the races which have followed them.'45 AdmittedlYJ Pound expresses extremely ambivalent (if not contradictory) attitudes about the ways in which America has been populated by a vast array of 'nomadic' and 'migratory ' ethnic groups. He argues that because America is such a 'mongrel ' nation with 'one stock neutralising the forces of the other, the climate takes up its lordship and decrees the nature of the people resulting.'46 Paradoxically, it is the very multicultural aspect of America which ensures that its people are so easily formed by the processes of nature. Nevertheless, Pound makes no distinction between the opposition -of the 'passionate desire for accuracy' of art and the 'rhetoric' of commercial writing, and a racial or ethnic dichotomy, such as that between the 'individual' and the 'mongrel' 'American type.,47 By flitting back and forth from discussions of language and literature to analyses of ethnicity, Pound establishes a connection between the 'appalling fungus' of American magazines and letters and America's cultural, ethnic, and racial heterogeneity. The inescapable implication of his argument is that the 'passionate desire .for accuracy' which produces art is also racially motivated. At some level, Pound believes that there is a connection between aesthetic purity and ethnic and racial purity. Although Pound by and large avoids making any explicit connections between aesthetics and race or ethnicity, Gaudier-Brzeska feels no such VORTICISM AND FUTURISM 355 restraint. After having served with the French army for two months in the trenches, Gaudier-Brzeska writes: This war is a great remedy. In the individual it kills arrogance, self-esteem, pride. It takes away from the masses numbers of unimportant units, whose economic activities become noxious as the recent trade crises have shown us. My views on sculpture remain absolutely the same. It is the vortex of will, or decision, that begins. I shall derive my emotions solely from the arrangements of surfaces, I shall present my emotions by the arrangement of my surfaces, the planes and lines by which they are defined.fB Just as the sculptor chisels away the extraneous rock so as to arrive at some aesthetically pure arrangement of abstract forms, so the war cleans away the extraneous 'numbers' of humanity. Gaudier-Brzeska is not so much protesting the ways in which capitalist societies reduce people to economic 'units' (as they also debase language to the level of convention and stereotype) as proposing a eugenic remedy for the diseases of standardization and quantification which afflict modern societies. The main assumption behind Gaudier-Brzeska's anti-humanism is that we cannot draw a distinction between the essential humanity of people and their standardized and conventionalized identities. The initially radical opposition of the unalienated individual (as epitomized by the artist) to the quantified subject of capitalism has here degenerated into a crude eugenic anti-humanism. Art is no longer a sphere of social act_ivity to which the transformed society of the future will approximate. Instead, Gaudier-Brzeska conceives of art as locked into a permanently adversarial relationship with the rest of society. The oppositional qualities of the modernist aesthetic are frozen into an anxious and sterile elitism. We need to recognize, then, that many of the supposedly formal qualities of the modernist aesthetic are directly related to a rather crude reactionary politics. When Pound fought with Amy Lowell over control of the Imagist movement, he wrote to her: I should like the name 'Imagisme' to retain some sort of a meaning. It stands, or I should like it to stand for hard, light, clear edges. I can not trust any democratized committee to maintain that standard. Some will be splay-footed and some sentimental. I was right in refusing to join you in any scheme for turning Les Imagistes into an uncritical democracy with you as intermediary between it and the printers.49 Critics usually assume that adjectives such as 'hard,' 'light,' 'clear,' 'precise,' and 'accurate' - adjectives which occur obsessively in the criticism of Pound, Lewis, and Hulme - refer to only the formal aspects 356 CHARLES FERRALL of the work of art. For example, Donald Davie discusses at some length Pound's extensive use of sculptural metaphors without ever leaving the realm of formal aesthetics.50 Yet such descriptive terms always imply, and are often directly contrasted to, a set of opposing adjectives: the feminine, sentimental, soft, democratic, and amorphous. Although autonomous and pure art often resists the kinds of commodification, alienation, and reification characteristic of advanced capitalism, it may also oppose the forms of democratization and liberalization which, historically, have often accompanied the transition from 'traditional/ pre-modern economies to market-place, capitalist, or laissez-Jaire economies. It is important to recognize that the ambivalent relati~nship which autonomous art has with modernity is quite different for reactionary modernism than for any kind of liberal or leftist modernism. A modernist critic such as Greenberg, for instance, argues that the autonomous art work's resistance to the mass culture of capitalism does not involve any nostalgia for pre-capitalist societies. In his 1953 essay 'The Plight of Culture,' Greenberg points out that Eliot's Notes towards the Definition of Culture advocates a 'conservative solution' to the' problem of culture which consists simply in a process of 'checking' modernization. Greenberg maintains that 'The opposed solution, the socialist and Marxist one, is to intensify and extend industrialism, on the assumption that it will eventually make well-being and social dignity universal, at which time the problem of culture will solve itself of itself.,sl The assumption upon which Greenberg'S argument rests, an assumption which is common to all forms of orthodox Marxism, is that capitalism creates the conditions whiCh will bring about its own downfall. The art work's resistance to capitalism is therefore only partial or qualified: in the last analysis, capitalism represents the penultimate stage in the teleology of modernity. It is only by moving through or beyond capitalism, rather than wallowing in an Eliotic nostalgia for the pre-modern, that the social conditions can be created in which the aesthetic can be reintegrated into the praxis of life. As Huyssen points out, 'the modems tended to embrace modernity, convinced that they had to pass through it before the lost unity of life and art could be reconstructed on a higher level.'52 By contrast to such progressive modernism, reactionary modernism has a contradictory relationship with modernity. It is not just that there is a tension in the aesthetics of Lewis, Hulme, and Pound between experimentalism and innovation and the valorization of 'tradition.' More important, there is a contradiction between their representations of the aesthetic as, by and large, an experimental, iconoclastic, and anti-traditional sphere of social activity and the conservative political values which they espouse for the rest of society. For Marxist modernism, the aesthetic sphere may oppose many of the negative aspects of modernity, yet ultimately its restless quest for what is new parallels and mimes the ways in which VORTICISM AND FUTURISM 357 modernity itself breaks with traditional social values and institutions. With a reactionary such as Hulme, however, the acceptance of mechanical forms in the work of art is accompanied by an almost total rejection of the social and political conditions which allow for the kinds of technological innovation reflected by such 'mechanical' art. For Marxist modernism, the aesthetic sphere is involved in an agonistic relationship with modernity, yet both, in the final analysis, are moving towards the same end. In the writings of Hulme, Pound, and Lewis, by contrast, the society and art of the future will move in opposite directions. Reactionary modernism is a form of arrested modernism because the liberation promised by art cannot be extended to the larger society. The dissolution of the boundaries between 'art' and 'life' which occurs during the 'Futurist moment,' therefore, represents for the Vorticists the most threatening moment of modernity. Hulme argues that Futurist art is the 'exact opposite' of 'geometrical art' because it is 'the deification of the flux, the last efflorescence of impressionisrn.'53 In a similar way, Pound criticizes Futurism for its passive acceptance of all aspects of the modern world: 'futurism,' when it gets into art, is, for the most part, a descendant of impressionism. It is a sort of accelerated impreSSionism. There are two opposed ways of thinking of a man; firstly, you may think of him as that toward which perception moves, as the toy of circumstances, as the plastic substance receiving impressions; secondly, you may think of him as directing a certain fluid force against circumstances, as conceiving instead of merely reflecting and observing.... In the 'eighties there were symbolists opposed to impressionists, now you have vorticism, which is, roughly speaking, expressionism, nea-cubism, and imagism gathered together in one camp and futurism in the other. Futurism is descended from impressionism. It is, in so far as it is an art movement, a kind of accelerated impressionism. It is a spreading, or surface art, as opposed to vorticism, which is intensive,54 It is not entirely clear what Pound means by 'symbolism,' 'neD-cubism,' 'expressionism,' and 'impressionism,' since he does not elaborate on these brief distinctions. However, the contrast which he draws between an art that passively receives the sensory material of the modern world and an art which actively shapes this material into some kind of aesthetic form is reasonably straightforward. In the same article, Pound also argues that 'The logical end of impressionist art is the cinematograph.'55 Since Futurism is 'accelerated impressionism,' it is a close cousin to the cinema. What Pound in many ways appears to be attacking is realist art, or at least the kind of art which uncritically reflects the contemporary world. Elsewhere he maintains that 'Vorticisrn is the use of, or belief in the use 358 CHARLES FERRALL of, THE PRIMARY PIGMENT.' It is an art which is therefore 'interested in the creative faculty as opposed to the mimetic.'56 Since reality is ontologically prior to its representation, mimetic. art is therefore secondary. Vorticisrn, by contrast, Jis art before it has spread itself into flaccidity, into elaboration and secondary applications.' 57 Because mimetic art, including even the masculinist art of Futurism, is secondary, it is therefore either impotent, flaccid, or feminine - unable, in other words, to exert a Jfluid force against circumstance'! The assumption which underlies the Vorticist critique of Futurist mimesis is that the art work which passively re-presents or reproduces the modern world also uncritically repeats the temporality of modernity. Certainly, the dynamism of Vorticism, as Giovanni Cianci argues, owes much to the influence of Futurism.58 The image of the vortex, as that into which 'All experience rushes/ is clearly influenced by the Futurists' fetishization of speed. Yet Lewis also insists that 'The Vorticist is at his maximum point of energy when stillest.'59 The Vorticist paintings of Lewis at the same time assimilate and control Futurist dynamism by means of their cold, almost frigid qualities. A picture such as The Crowd, for example, takes the forms of the modern cityscape - the geometrical and serial forms of modern architecture around whose rigid boundaries swarm the antlike masses of anonymous pedestrians - and gathers them into a swirling vortex. However, this vortex, for all of the ways in which it 'plunges to the heart of the Present,'60 refuses to celebrate the utopian potential of such a moment. The dominant tone of this painting, which is a]so that of literary works such as The Apes of God, is of a sense of vertigo held in check by a freeZing of the emotions. Whereas the Futurists attempt to 'put the spectator in the centre of the painting,' Lewis maintains a separation between the implied viewer of the painting and the painting's subject matter. The gaze of the painter/spectator both engages with the dynamism of modernity and keeps a cold, somewhat anxious distance. After the war, notably in Time and Western Man, Lewis argued that Futurism was typical of a dominant Western 'Time-mind' which, by deifying the Bergsonian 'duree,' attempts to merge and fuse the self with a mystical and primitive other. The senses which Le\-yis connects with the 'Time-mind' are those of hearing and touch. 'The eye,' he argues, 'estranges and particularizes more than the sense of touch,' and it is therefore this sense which will, by means of its 'spatializing' capacities, save the West from the 'romance' of Communism.61 The opposition of the spatial and temporal senses does not receive any lengthy philosophical and political articulation by Lewis before the war. Nevertheless, prewar stories such as 'Bestre' are saturated with optical images; and the narrator of Tarr even goes so far as to wonder 'If killing could be embodied in the organ that sees.,62 In Blasting and Bombardiering Lewis VORl1CISM AND FUTURISM 359 remembers saying to Marinetti before the war, 'Je hals Ie mouvement qui deplace les lignes.'63 Apocryphal or not, the statement captures the sense in which the Vorticists reacted to the Futurists' cult of motion, speed, and action by attempting to fix and control the dangerous'flux through the use of spatial forms.64 Of course, the privileging of space over time was not entirely a result of the Vorticists' reaction to Futurism. In I A Lecture on Modem Poetry,' which was delivered in 1908 or 1909 (and therefore well before the arrival of the Futurists), Hulme already favoured the eye over the ear: The effect of rhythm, like that of music, is to produce a kind of hypnotic state ... This is for the art of chanting, but the procedure of the new visual art is just the contrary. It depends for its effect not on a kind of half sleep produced, but on arresting the attention, so much so that the succession of visual images should exhaust one. Thls new verse resembles sculpture rather than music; it appeals to the eye rather than to the ear. It has to mould images, a kind of spiritual clay, into definite shapes. This material ... is image not sound.65 No doubt the shift from regularly metred verse to the kinds of vers Iibre advocated by Hulme, which occurs in Englishas well as other languages around the· beginning of the century, was partially a result of the increasing dominance of print culture over traditional forms of oral culture. Verse that is made to be seen rather than heard can experiment with more irregular metrical forms, since the eye is able to see line breaks which the ear cannot. In Hulme's literary criticism, however, the preference for vers libre over 'traditional' metres is given a definite political inflection. Vers libre poetry, which relies upon the eye to arrest and fix the flux of experience, makes a complete break with the kind of poetry in which the 'sou}' soars towards a 'higher kind of reality.' The new verse, which Hulme discusses 'in a plain way as I would of pigs,' is designed to resist any form of transcendence, sentimental or otherwise.66 The anxiety associated with the fluid and amorphous, which is even more pronounced in the painting and writing of Lewis, derives from a fear that the merging of subject and object so characteristic of mystical and religious experience does not lead to a transcendence of the ego but rather to the dissolution of the boundaries which protect it from a threatening 'other.' The senses of touch and hearing, as Lewis makes clear in Time and Western Man, do not always allow for a clear separation of the subject and object. But with its division of the world into perceiver and perceived, the eye keeps the external world at a safe distance. The price which Lewis, for his entire career, paid for his exaggerated cultivation of' the eye and its spatializing functions was an acute and self-destructive 360 CHARLES FERRALL paranoia. After all, the eye only tries to murder the object because it perceives itself as threatened. Because of the importance placed upon the spatializing sense by early reactionary modernism, we need to distinguish between the respective experiments in 'simultaneity' of Pound and the Futurists. Near the beginning of The Spirit of Romance, Pound writes: It is dawn in Jerusalem while midnight hovers above the Pillars of Hercules. All ages are contemporaneous. It is B.C., let us say, in Morocco. The Middle Ages are in Russia. The future stirs already in the minds of the few. This is especially true of literature, where the real time is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grandchildren's contemporaries, while many of our contemporaries have been already gathered into Abraham's bosom, or some more fitting receptacle.67 As is well known, this famous passage of Pound's is similar to Eliot's assertion nine years later that 'the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of ... [one's] own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.'6Il For both Pound and Eliot, the spatial arrangement of literary/ aesthetic works stands above the chaos and flux of time, both redeeming and transcending history. The ways in which Eliot and Pound juxtapose literary fragments from periods of history which are temporally non-contiguous is often pointed to as evidence of the radical aspects of their modernist aesthetic. But, as Karl Mannheim points out, the progressive experiences the present as the beginning of the future, while the conservative regards it simply as the latest point reached by the past. The difference is the more fundamental and radical in that the linear concept of history - which is implied here - is for the conservative something secondary. Primarily, the conservative experiences the past as being one with the present; hence, his concept of history tends to be spatial rather than temporal; it stresses co-existence rather than succession.69 We might say that whereas Pound and the other reactionary modernists turn time and history into a spatial pattern, the Futurists gather spatially non-contiguous objects into an apocalyptic present. The Vorticists want to abolish time, the Futurists, space. In Boccioni's The Noise of the Street Penetrates the House, for instance, the woman standing on the balcony cannot be clearly distinguished from the scene which she watches in the street below. At the centre of the painting is the vague outline of the woman's head which is also formally the still point or centre of a vortex into which the whole of the external world is swirling. The distances which separate the woman from what she perceives as well as each of the VORTICISM AND FUTURISM 361 external objects from one another seem to be collapsing. The 'present' in which the woman exists is a single point towards which the spatial world centripetally draws. Of course to pair Vorticism and Futurism against, respectively, the 'spatial' and the 'temporal' is something of a simplification. If we consider Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on Leash, for example, we could say that the various positions of the woman and the dog in space are being collapsed into a single moment of time, or we could say that the figures' different positions in time are all laid down on the same spatial frame. Obviously, however, the woman and the dog are moving through both space and time. The 'simultaneity' of the Futurists is designed to break down both spatial and temporal distances.7o As Marinetti expresses it, 'Time and Space died yesterday. Already we live in the absolute, since we have already created speed, eternal and ever-present.'71 David Harvey has recently attempted to relate such aesthetic phenomena as Futurist 'simultaneity' to the kinds of 'space-time compression' which occur in capitalist economies from about the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Harvey argues that a new sense of space and time occurs after 1848 which reaches its apogee during 'the halcyon days of modernist innovation before World War One.' The 'space:-time compression ' or 'annihilation of space through time' so characteristic of modern societies can be related to the ways in which capitalism produces a 'speed-up in the pace of life' which so overcomes 'spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon US.172 Futurism, I would argue, is a movement which reacted in a fundamentally positive way to this phenomenon of 'space-time compression.' This does not mean that it simply legitimated the existing capitalist order. Rather, the Futurists attempted to harness what Harvey describes as the 'permanently revolutionary and disruptive' forces of capitalism for a utopian purpose.73 The Vorticists' reaction to Futurist simultaneity and, more generally, 'space-time compression' is fundamentally ambivalent. Many of the dynamic qualities of Lewis's paintings and Pound's post-Imagist poetry a~e due to the influence of Futurism; nevertheless, it is precisely the dynamism of Futurism to which the Vorticists object. Futurism is an 'accelerated impressionism' whose 'mouvement' displaces 'Ies [ignes' (my emphasis). The anxious attempt to control such movement by the use of spatial form reflects, I would argue, a more fundamental ambivalence towards a certain kind of temporality. Hulme believes that all 'romantic' and 'progressive' ideology is grounded upon the concept of 'progress.' He argp-es that the 'symbol of the wheel,' as a 'symbol of the futility of existence, is absolutely lost to the modern world.' According to Hulme, 'Progress' has become 'the modern substitute for religion'; it is therefore an opiate which conceals 'the tragic significance of life.,74 We could, 362 CHARLES FERRALL however, turn Hulme's critique of 'progress' upon his own nostalgia for a return to cyclical time. Mircea Eliade, for one, has shown how 'the myth of the eternal return' derives from a desire to escape from the contingency and chaos of history.7S The mythical time to which modernist writers such as Eliot Pound, Yeats, Lawrence, and Hulme desire to return which , as Joseph Frank demonstrates, is expressed by their use of 'spatial form,76 - may be not so much the disillusioned acceptance of the tragic significance of life as an attempt to escape from the unsettling and disruptive dynamism of modernity. Hulme criticizes 'progressives' for their lack of a reality principle, yet his own concept of a religious absolute is not without its comforting qualities. Similarly, we may wonder to what extent Pound's 'return' to the cyclical time of the pagans is less a recovery of what the West has lost than the construction of a refuge from the modern world. Yet at the same time as these writers resist the temporality of modernity they unconsciously reproduce it in the most obvious and striking of ways: the present to which the Vorticists belong is not only a unique moment in history but the beginning of the radical transformation of society. In a Vorticist manifesto Lewis argues that the 'new vortex' 'regards the Future as [being] as sentimental as the Past'; yet he also states that it 'plunges to the heart of the Present.,n Jt is precisely the 'present,' of course, which Futurist eschatology celebrates: if the present moment in history is unique then one is breaking with a past and (possibly) moving into a utopian future. As if recognizing that such a celebration of the 'present' implies a linear view of history which might lead to the kinds of utopianism he is rejecting, Lewis also argues that 'The Present can be intensely sentimental' with its 'numbing displays of vitality.' Similarly, while he begins his manifesto rejecting the 'Past' and the 'Future,' he later points out that we need 'the Past to mop up our melancholy, the Future to absorb our troublesome optimism.Jis The whole of the manifesto devolves into a mass of contradictions as Lewis becomes divided between his desire to advertise the radical newness of his movement and his dislike of Futurist 'optimism' and 'sentimentality.' Lewis, like Hulme and Pound, is working both within and against a utopian eschatology. The - ambivalence which the Vorticists display towards Futurism is part of their larger ambivalence towards the temporality of modernity. So far we have been considering Futurism as a movement which exemplifies a certain kind of positive or even utopian stance towards modernity. However, although the Futurists attempt to engage with a mass audience, reintegrate art into the praxis of life, and harness the promethean potential of technology, they also 'wish to glorify War ... militarism, patriotism ... the contempt for women.' The militant quality of their messianism is an end in itself rather than a means to some VORTICISM AND FlITURISM 363 utopian goal. This coexistence of "a utopian optimism with qualities such as misogyny and militarism points to a kind of contradictory relationship with modernity which we can also find exemplified in the Futurists' fetishization of technology. The automobile in which Marinetti rides off into the sunset is a mythical creature which appears to be in no way the product of an industrial society. Marinetti, in other words, reifies technology by separating it from the social relationships out of which it is produced. Jeffrey Herf argues that a similar contradiction characterizes those whom he calls the 'reactionary modernists' of the German Weimar Republic and Third Reich. According to him, the 'paradox' of 'reactionary Modernism' is that it rejects Enlightenment reason while at the same time it embraces technology: 'To oppose or defend the Enlightenment and industrial progress together is straightforward enough. The paradox of reactionary modernism is that it rejected reason but embraced technology, reconciled Innerlichkeit with technical modernity,,79 One of the more obvious characteristics of the kind of 'reactionary modernism' described by Herf is its aestheticization of technology. Such an ideology, I believe, can only embrace the technological products of an alienating industrial society by a process of reification which turns these products into aesthetic objects. It would follow that the aestheticization of technology, to a certain extent, reintegrates the aesthetic sphere into the praxis of life. What Burger would describe as the 'avant-gardist' attempt to break down the boundaries which separate 'art' from 'life' can therefore lead to the aestheticization of politics which Walter Benjamin found so characteristic of fascism.80 Perloff tries to defend 'avant-guerre' Futurism against charges that its reintegration of 'art' into 'life' leads inevitably to fascism by arguing that all revolutionary movements have an aesthetic goal. According to her, the distinction which Benjamin makes at the end of 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' between' "aestheticizing the political" and "politicizing the aesthetic" may turn out to be two sides of the same coin.,sl It may be true, as Perloff argues, that all revolutionary movements have an aesthetic goaL Often this is because the work of the artist is paradigmatic of the kind of unalienated labour which will characterize the utopian society of the future. Nevertheless, we need to distinguish, as Perloff does not, between the fascistic aestheticization of politics and technology and the genuinely avant-gardist desire to make the labour of the artist universal. Fascism prematurely reintegrates art into life, since its aestheticization of technology and politics does not allow for the transfonnation of the modern industrial class society.s2 Although fascist ideology, with its dreams of a return to a mythological Golden Age, rejects industrial society, its fetishization of machinery and technology also allows it to leave the industrial SOciety and class system largely intact. Fascism's accession to modernity, its political avant-gardism or utopianism, is therefore partial, ambivalent, and arrested. 364 CHARLES FERRALL Such a contradictory relationship towards the modern industrial society and the dynamics of modernity also characterizes the reactionary modernism of writers such as Hulme, Lewis, and Pound. In one of his Blast manifestos, Lewis writes that 'our industries, and the Will that determined, face to face with its needs, the direction of the modern world, has reared up steel trees where the green ones were lacking; has exploded in useful growths, and found wilder intricacies than those of Nature.'83 Lewis represents the world of machinery as a second nature with which the artist can be reunited. But this techno-pastoral is really a parody of pastoral. Lewis proposes that the artist can become reunified with the products of his labour: machinery. If the latter represents an extension of the subject into the objective world from which and by which he is alienated, then the reunification of the subject with his objectified self (machinery) is analogous to the fallen subject's return to a state of nature. It is only in a prelapsarian condition that humankind is reunited with the products of its labour. Yet Lewis represents the modern artist's identification with machinery as completely antithetical to any utopian impulse. With its 'polished sides' and 'red hot swiftness,' Lewis's vortex is designed to attack the 'dispersals' and 'reasonable chicken-men' of the bourgeoisie.54 The Vorticist artist identifies with machines so that he can more effectively attack the rest of society. But this represents a contradictory attitude because it is precisely industrial society which alienates the artist in the first place. Lewis identifies with the most visible manifestation of that which alienates him. He turns the products of industrial society against the very society which produces them. Like the Futurists, he reifies and aestheticizes technology and machinery. Whereas Marinetti identifies with his automobile so that he can 'merge' and identify with the rest of the universe, Lewis glorifies the industrial machinery of Britain so that he can assert an antagonist separation between himself and the rest of the world. Yet both men, despite the . differences between their avant-gardist and modernist aesthetics, separate their machines from the industrial society which produces them, the one to create .identity, the other difference. Despite all the differences between the (incomplete) avant-gardism of Futurism and the modernism of Vorticisffi, both m~vements, therefore, are unable to realize fully the radical aspects of their adversarial aesthetics. The war which the Futurists and the Vorticists declare on the rest of society becomes an end in itself rather than a means towards some end. If the separation of art from the rest of society invests art with liberatory potential, and if the reintegration of the two spheres is a goal that has utopian characteristics, then the emancipatory eschatology upon which both aesthetics seem to be grounded has been drained of its redemptive characteristics. The war between artist and philistine leaves the status quo intact and society untransformed. In the end, Futurism and VORTICISM AND FUTURISM 365 Vorticism do not so much oppose the capitalist societies of pre-war Europe as exemplify their most militarist, nationalist, and misogynist tendencies. NOTES 1 Quoted in William C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976), 107. 2 Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (London: Fraser 1976), 225. 3 Hugh Kenner, for example, in The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press 1971), makes no mention of Futurism and refers only once in passing to its founder, Marinetti. 4 See Giovanni Cianci, 'Pound and Futurism/ Blast 3, ed Seamus Cooney (~anta Barbara: Black Sparrow 1984) 63-7; 'Futurism and the English Avant-Garde: The Early Pound between Imagism and Vorticism,' Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 6:7 (1981), ~39; 'D.H. Lawrence and Futurism/Vorticism,' Arbeiten aus AngUstik und Amerikanistik 8:1 (1983), 41-53. Other critics who have discussed the relationship between the two movements are Timothy Materer, Vortex: Pound, Eliot,and Lewis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1979t 15-37, and Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1985), 1~85. 5 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1986), 162-3; and Jochen SchulteSasse , Foreword, to Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984), xiv. 6 Advertisement for the first number of Blast, Egoist (1 April 1914), 140. 7 'Futurism,' New Age (15 June 1914), 239. The signatories to this letter are Richard Aldington, David Bomberg, Frederick Etchells, Edward Wadsworth, Ezra Pound, Lawrence Atkinson, Gaudier-Brzeska, Cuthbert Hamilton, W. Roberts, and Wyndham Lewis. 8 Cork,234. 9 See Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986), 92-115. 10 Alan Windsor, 'Wyndham Lewis's "Blast and Bless,'" Wyndham Lewis: Letteratura/Pittura, ed Giovanni Cianci (Palermo: Sellerio editore 1982),92-115. 11 Lewis, 'Manifesto,' Blast No.1 (1914; Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow 1981),23, 33. 12 See Wees, 108-9. 13 Reprinted in Joshua C. Taylor, Futurism (New York: Doubleday 1961), 124. 14 Lewis, 'The God of Sport and Blood,' Blast No.2 (1915; Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow 1981), 9. Lewis, 'Manifesto/ Blast No.1, 41. Lewis, 'Manifesto,' Blast No.1, 39. 366 CHARLES FERRALL 17 F.T. Marinetti, 'The Futurist Manifesto,' repr as an appendix in James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics (New York: Harper and Row 1965), 180. 18 Jacob Epstein, Let There Be Sculpture (New York: Putnam 1941), 49. 19 Pound, 'Vorticism/ Fortnightly Review (1 Sept 1914), 461. 20 Marinetti, 'Manifesto of Futurism,' 124. 21 'Preliminary Announcement of the College of Arts,' Egoist (2 Nov 1914),413. 22 Burger, 22. 23 Burger, 10. 24 Lewis, 'Futurism, Magic and Life,' Blast No. I, 132. 25 Lewis, 'The Melodrama of Modernity,' Blast No. I, 144. 26 Lewis, 'A Review of Contemporary Art,' Blast No.1, 42. 27 'Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto,' Futurism, 126. 28 Lewis, 'Manifesto,' Blast No. I, 26. 29 Perloff, 38. 30 Perlofi, 192, 190. 31 See Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage, ed Eric Hornberger (London: Routledge 1972). . 32 Pound, 'The New Sculpture,' Egoist (16 Feb. 1914), 68. 33 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, vii. 34 Pound, letter to John Quinn, 8 March 1915, Letters of Ezra Pound, 97. For a discussion of some of these issues, see David Murray, 'Pound-signs: Money and Representation in Ezra Pound,' in Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading, ed Ian Bell (London: Vision 1982), 51. 35 Herbert Marcuse, 'On the Affirmative Character of Culture (1937),' Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans J.J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press 1968),95. For a discussion of this essay, see Schulte-Sasse and Burger, xxxv-xxxvi, 11-14, and 50. Marcuse also argues that there is an ambivalent character to autonomous art. While autonomous art criticizes negative aspects of society, it also provides a form of cerebral compensation for such a SOCiety, thereby leaving the existing order intact. 36 See T.E. Hulme, 'Bergson's Theory of Art,' Speculations, ed Herbert Read (New York: Harcourt 1924), 143-69 and Pound, 'Affirmations: Analysis of This Decade,' New Age (11 Feb 1915), 409-11. 37 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1968); Clement Greenberg, 'AvantGarde and Kitsch (1939),' in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press 1965), 3-21. 38 Greenberg, 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch,' 5-6. 39 William M. Chace, The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1973), xviii. 40 The post-war work which best epitomizes this is The Apes of God, but 'Enemy of the Stars,' which was written before the war, expresses similar attitudes. 41 See T.E. Hulme, 'Modern Art' and Its Philosophy,' Speculations, 86. 42 Pound, 'Vortex,' Blast No.1, 154. 43 Burger, 96. VORTICISM AND FlITURISM 367 44 Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press 1979), 184. 45 Pound, 'Patria Mia (IV),' New Age (26 Sept 1912),515. 46 Pound, 'Patria Mia (n),' New Age (12 Sept 1912), 466. 47 Pound, 'Patria Mia (n),' New Age (12 Sept 1912), 445. 48 Gaudier-Brzeska, 'Vortex,' Blast No.2, 33-4. 49 Pound, letters to Amy Lowell, 1 Aug 1914 and 19 Oct 1914, The Letters of Ezra Pound, ed D.D. Paige (New York: Harcourt 1950),78,84. 50 Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (New York: Oxford University Press 1964), 54-64, 127-34. 51 Greenberg, The Plight of Culture,' Art and Culture, 29. 52 Andreas Huyssen, 'The Search for Tradition: Avant-Garde and Postmodernism in the 19708/ New German Critique 22 (1981),36. 53 Hulme, 'Modern Art and ItsPhilosophy,' Speculations, 94. 54 Pound, 'Vorticism,' 461, 467-8. 55 Pound, 'Vorticism,' 467. 56 Pound, 'Affirmations (n): Vorticism,' New Age (14 Jan 1914), 277. 57 Pound, 'Vorticism,' 466. 58 Cianci, 66. 59 Lewis, 'Our Vortex,' Blast No.1, 148. 60 Lewis, 'Our Vortex,' 147. 61 Lewis, Time and Western Man (New York: Harcourt 1928), 403. 62 Lewis, 'Bestre,' in The Complete Wild Body, ed Bernard Lafourcade (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow 1982), 228-33; Tarr, ed Paul O'Keefe (1918; Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow 1990), 27163 Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937; Berkeley: University of California Press 1967), 35. 64 The term 'spatial form' was originally coined by Joseph Frank in 'Spatial Form in Modern Literature/ Sewanee Review 53 (1945), 221-40. 65 Hulme, 'A Lecture on Modern Poetry,' Further Speculations, 73, 75. 66 Hulme, 'A Lecture on Modern Poetry,' Further Speculations, 67. 67 Pound, The Spirit of Romance (1910; Norfolk, Conn: New Directions 1950), 8. 68 T.S. Eliot, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent,' in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt 1975),38. 69 Mannheim, 'Conservative Thought,' in Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology, ed Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge 1953), 111-12. 70 See John }. White, Literary Futurism: Aspects of the First Avant-Garde (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1990),364. 71 Marinetti, 'Initial Manifesto of Futurism,' 124. 72 David Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1989), 29, 240. 73 Harvey, 107. 74 Hulme, 'A Notebook by T.E.H,' New Age (23 Dec 1915), 188. Mircea Eliade, TIre Myth of the Eternal Return; or, Cosmos and History, trans Willard R. Trask (1949; Princeton: Princeton University Press 1954). 368 CHARLES FERRALL 76 Frank points out that 'The juxtaposition of disparate historical images in Joyce, Pound, and Eliot also transforms the past into the present of the indicative; and in doing so they turn history into myth (Cassirer defines the mythical imagination precisely in terms of the lack of a "dimension of depth," a lack of differentiation between foreground and background in its picture of reality): 'Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics,' Critical Inquiry 4 (1945), 237--8. 77 Lewis, 'Our Vortex,' Blast No.1, 147. 78 Lewis, 'Our Vortex,' Blast No.1, 147. 79 Geffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984), 224. 80 Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' Illuminations, ed and intra Hannah Arendt, trans Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken 1968), 217-52. 81 Perloff, 34-5. 82 Leon Trotsky made much the same criticism of Futurism when he pointed out that 'one must have a little historic vision, at least, to understand that between our present-day economic and cultural poverty and the time of the fusion of art with life, that is, between the time when life will reach such proportions that it will be entirely formed by art, more than one generation will have come and gone.' Literature and Revolution, trans Rose Strunsky (New York: International Publishers 1925), 136-7. 83 Lewis, JManifesto (IV),' Blast No. I, 36. 84 Lewis, JOur Vortex,' Blast No.1, 149. ...