Marxism’s Limits

 

     I place this is the Politics category of my Index since the central point concerns not so much writings by Marx, Trotsky, or Breton as the attitudes of political people who identify as socialist, both in and out of power.

     Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes, those in parentheses refer to pages in Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, University of Michigan, 1970.

 

 

     The Soviet Union stopped claiming to represent the triumph of socialism a few decades ago when the regime was reborn in a new form, the equal to any of its predecessors in tyranny and chauvinism.   While few outside Russia’s borders will today defend Stalin, many leftist intellectuals in the West cling to remnants of Soviet-style “Socialist Realism,” a theory far more innocuous when its proponents are out of power.  In the vulgarest notion of Marxist literature, the hero is working class, the villain is capitalist, and the denouement is flushed pink with hope in works that can hardly be called “realism” at all, nor are they definitively socialist.  Simple-minded and reductive, this was the formula likeliest to prove comprehensible to those with little or no cultural background.  Social factors entirely unrelated to aesthetic concerns have kept this concept alive, though it is indefensible on theoretical grounds.  It remains influential today among socialists who should know better.

     Marxist writers have often, quite without warrant, considered their theory to be universally applicable, and have wandered from their proper territory in matters of ethical philosophy, economics, and politics into the aesthetic field.  In artistic questions Marxism has very limited though admittedly useful significance in recognizing the ideological elements of art and the nature of the production of culture in specific historical conditions.  The pressure of polemics in capitalist countries and the desire to maintain control in those that have claimed to be socialist have encouraged the mistaken notion that poetry and fiction can be judged by political criteria.  Equally misguided attempts to define Marxist science must similarly fail, as the criteria and assumptions of scientific research, like those of art, have little to do with social analysis. 

     Prescriptive literary models are not, however, inevitable accompaniments to Marxist economic analysis.  Marx and Engels themselves had traditional notions about literary value.  They discounted the radical writers of their day, preferring the classics.  Marx was, after all, an intellectual who read Ancient Greek for relaxation [1] and, when asked his favorite poets named Shakespeare, Aeschylus, and Goethe [2].  Among modern novelists, Engels praised the royalist Balzac, saying that his pages managed to record more data about French society than “all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period.”  Engels flatly declares that “The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art.” [3]  To him Balzac, in spite of his conscious political allegiances, encoded in his work a “revolutionary dialectic” [4] due to his insight and art, making his fiction more valuable (even to the revolutionary cause) than the well-intentioned novels of socialist partisans.

     Lenin likewise had an education that allowed him to read Latin poets and rhetoricians, as well as German classics like Goethe’s Faust.  Having little sympathy for his day’s avant-gardes, he wrote “I am a barbarian.  I cannot extol the products of expressionism, futurism, cubism, and other ‘isms.’”  To him there is “very little sense” in modern writing, “Why worship the new just because it is new?” [5]

     When he does address the question of the construction of a revolutionary culture, he recommends that modern artists begin with imitation, coopting “the best models, traditions and results of the existing culture.”  [6]  To him the individualistic and spiritual Tolstoy in a sense “the Mirror of Russian Revolution.” [7]

     Though Lenin repeatedly calls for a “free literature,” he at the same time he refers to art as no more than “’a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism.” [8]  Lacking susceptibility to art on aesthetic grounds, Lenin laid the foundation for later repression.  His preferences for writers like Chernyshevsky and Nekrasov was based on no artistic criteria, but only their perceived sympathy for the people.  Lenin never felt moved to inquire more subtly into literature.

     During the ‘twenties, though, prior to Stalin’s taking power, a good deal of latitude was given cultural workers.  Under Lunacharsky’s tenure as Minister for Education (People's Commissariat for Education or Narkompros) the Symbolists, Suprematists, Constructivists, and Futurists who might seem petty bourgeois individualists, were tolerated, both within and without Bolshevik circles.  Even apparently reactionary formations, such as the “changing landmarks” movement, which had been associated with the Whites, and a number of religious writers wrote and published in the first years after the Revolution, though the scope allowed to them shrank consistently during the ‘twenties and Lunacharsky, who had been pursuing “god-building,” the construction of new rational surrogates for religion, was removed from office in 1929, the same year Trotsky left the country.

     Before that time, however, even the committed revolutionary writers of the Kusnitsa (or Smithy) group demanded “complete freedom” in their manifesto and Bogdanov’s Proletkult sought autonomy from the Party.  To replace such undependable cultural groups an organization for writers willing to follow the government’s line without fail, the Russian Association of Proletarians Writers, was founded in 1925.  The preference for unquestioning loyalty from writers with little regard for other standards was clear by the time of the 1932 Central Committee’s order that all arts groups must come under centralized control.  In 1934, when Gorky prescribed Socialist Realism as the sole acceptable literary method in a speech to the Soviet Writers Congress, he established the parameters that later were enforced by the Kharkov Doctrine (later identified with Zhdanov) which required absolute obedience to the state line from intelligentsia and artists. 

     The Soviet example, now continued under Putin’s kleptocracy, has perniciously influenced other countries claiming to be socialist including China, Korea, and Cuba.  In spite of outstanding and creative Communist revolutionary poets like Mayakovsky, Césaire, Quasimodo, Neruda, Alberti, Hikmet, Darwish, and countless others, it is inevitably philistine timeservers who come to administer these repressive systems. 

     The relations between artists, even those, like the Proletkult members, who are sympathetic to socialism, and bureaucratic ideologues has often been uneasy in capitalist countries as well.  In 1925 Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Péret, and Unik joined the French Communist Party though neither side knew quite what use to make of the other.  Though Surrealists officially supported (for a time) the Party, their delegates were viewed with great suspicion as bourgeois bohemians, solipsistic individualists whose writing style could never be popular among the masses.  The leftists were particularly offended by real or fancied homosexuality which to them meant degeneracy, while many Surrealists objected to the imposition of a mandated political line for the movement.  Breton was repeatedly criticized by the French party’s Central Committee for insisting on maintaining his Surrealist identity along with his Marxist one. [10] Aragon, Buñuel, and Unik abandoned Surrealism when obliged to choose between the art movement and the party.  In later years Surrealism and communism remained intertwined in Situationism and Franklin Rosemont’s Chicago Surrealist Group.

     Leon Trotsky was one figure prominent in the Bolshevik revolution who avoided the narrow-minded restrictions of Stalinist Socialist Realism, deviations which, among others, resulted in his exile and eventual assassination.  In 1938 Breton visited Trotsky in Mexico and they composed a “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art” [11].  This document opposes “those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of ends foreign to itself” and insists on utter freedom as a necessary precondition for the production of art.  “The free choice of these themes and the absence of all restrictions on the range of his exploitations –- these are possessions which the artist has a right to claim as inalienable.” 

     While conceding the role of central economic planning, Trotsky and Breton contend that direction from the top is wholly out of place in the realm of culture.  They could hardly have been more emphatic in their contention that autonomy is imperative not only for the arts, but for all intellectual work.  The reader can sense in their urgent words the distress of suffering Soviet writers and revolutionaries under Stalin. 

If, for the better development of the forces of material production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be established. No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above! Only on a base of friendly cooperation, without constraint from outside, will it be possible for scholars and artists to carry out their tasks, which will be more far-reaching than ever before in history.

     While the manifesto compares the threat fascism poses to culture to the legendary depredations of the ancient Vandals and maintains that art or science in the cause of reaction is in an “absolutely intolerable” position, the authors were careful to object in equally strong terms to government control of writers in the Soviet Union.  Breton and Trotsky express guarded sympathy with anarchists, Futurists, and Freud, implying acceptance of a popular front broader than any the Comintern would have tolerated. 

     Yet they went further, to a far more sweeping claim.  In the end they assert that, since art offers fresh perspectives “expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time,” all art is in fact at heart revolutionary.  For them “true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which bind it.” 

     In signing this statement Trotsky was perhaps seeking allies in his attacks on Stalin and his attempts to construct a Fourth International independent of Soviet rulers.  Yet when he held power years earlier he had espoused similar views in his book Literature and Revolution (1924).  In this volume he lays out the theoretical basis for his view of revolutionary art as well as discussing the current Russian literary scene in rich and lively detail, sometimes vituperative.  Few, even among specialists in the period, will recognize the names of many of the writers he discusses.  Yet Trotsky has strong opinions on them all, which he expresses in often colorful language.  His polemics do not, however, focus directly on the class origin or loyalty of the authors, or on their party fealty, but rather on their personal qualities or their allegiance to metaphysical ideas.  Thus to him Blok’s work is “romantic, symbolic, mystic, formless, and unreal,” (116) and Schkapskaya’s religious inclinations are “so organic, so biologic, so gynecologic.”  His misogyny allows him to include in his ridicule Akhmatova and other “real and near poetesses.” (41).

     Trotsky’s approach, while impressionistic, is based in theory.  Trotsky begins with the assumption that the art of every era reflects its socio-economic structure, art, in fact is “the highest test of the vitality and significance of each epoch.” (9)  Yet the evolution of such an internalized Weltanschauung, what Trotsky calls “the formation of a new culture” requires “considerable time.” (184)  Those qualified in the arts at the time of revolution are inevitably bourgeois and even those who are sympathetic to the cause of the people will be “not the artists of the proletarian Revolution, but her ‘fellow-travelers’” (57).  Proletarian literature is, he maintains, unlikely to emerge before the dictatorship of the proletariat has given way to the altogether classless society of communism in which art will have no class character.  Thus “there can be no question of the creation of a new culture.” because “there is no proletarian culture” and “there never will be” due to the brevity of the transitional period.  Furthermore, during this “brief period” (185) the regime will be unable to afford much art and will be obliged to dedicate its resources to material economic progress. (185) 

     These rosy expectations sound sometimes quite like utopianism.  Under communism according to Trotsky “the powerful force of competition” over wealth under capitalism will be alchemically transmuted to “a higher and more fertile form,” “the struggle for one’s opinion, for one’s project, for one’s taste.”  Using Freudian language, he says that what had been greed will be “sublimated,” “channelized into technique, into construction which also includes art (230).”  The book’s conclusion sounds romantic, starry-eyed. 

Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant.  Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build people’s palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree . . .Life in the future will not be monotonous. (254)

The prospect inspires Trotsky to grand and lofty rhetorical flights.

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher biologic type, or, if you please, a superman. (254-255)

     Of course, a hundred years later we are aware that these hopeful expectations have not been realized in history.  The whole idea of the inevitability of the coming of communism under a workers’ government as predicted in The Communist Manifesto has always sounded like a kind of messianism, though it looked more plausible a century ago.  Still, this question has no bearing on Trotsky’s skepticism about the possibility of proletarian culture or his recommendation that artists must have, in the words of the 1938 Manifesto, “free choice” and “the absence of all restrictions” as “inalienable” rights.

     Ironically, on the cultural side, Breton actively exercised his Surrealist leadership in a dictatorial manner himself, parodying the official Soviet government authoritarianism without knowing it, prescribing requirements and ousting those he saw as dissidents while maintaining a more libertarian stance in theory.  Radical artists as well as dogmatic rulers, it seems, may seek to impose their visions on others.  Under externally imposed limits, art can prove resourceful.  Roman Catholicism did not disable the brilliance of Dante and Eisenstein’s imagination glows brightly even under Stalin’s scrutiny.  Imposing non-aesthetic requirements does not preclude the creation of great literature and great paintings though the interference of reductive and overly confident systems is likely to set them askew.   

     Surely the strongest revolutionary movement must be one in which each field’s progress is guided, not by expertise dictated from outside but by practitioners and their peers.  Farmers are experts in farming; printers in printing.  The principle is no different in intellectual work than in the production of goods.  Scientists must have autonomy to do good science, and artists must have no less.  There is no “party line” in aesthetic endeavors any more than there is in particle physics or hydraulic engineering. 

     Since the Romantic Age, a good share of artists has been politically radical, for the most part more or less on the left, though with extreme rightists as well.  This critical stance is not dictated by aesthetic theory, but rather by the compassion of the creators upon witnessing the suffering of the poor and the indifference of the comfortable.  Since the whole business of art is the exchange of subjectivities, the artist is likely to be more adept than some with the practice of empathy.  In a curious ironic turn, for some the spontaneous charity of the heart entails, or at least renders attractive or acceptable, the imposition of non-aesthetic standards on their own work as well as, what is worse, seeking to extend these irrational limits to others.  Every advance toward socialism, toward the greater well-being of most people, is welcome, while at the same time each expert should be allowed sovereign freedom in every field whether it be fishing, mining, construction, chemistry, mathematics, or, yes, art. 

 

 

 

1.  This journalist’s questionnaire is reprinted in Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow, 436

2.  Letter from Marx to Engels. Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow, 261

3.  Letter to Margaret Harkness.  Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow: Progress, 93.

4.  Letter to Laura Lafargue Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, 439.

5.  See K. Dasgupta, “Lenin on Literature,” Indian Literature XIII, 3 (September). 

6.  “Rough Draft of a Resolution on Proletarian Culture” (1920).

7.  “Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution” (1908).

8.  “Party Organisation and Party Literature” (1905).

9.  Proletkult, under the leadership of Lenin’s rival Bogdanov, was absorbed into the education ministry in 1920.  The Kuznitsa writers challenged the regime from the left, denouncing, for instance, Lenin’s New Economic Policy, but they moderated their deviations carefully enough to survive until 1932

10.  See Robert S. Short, “The Politics of Surrealism, 1920-36,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 1, No. 2, Left-Wing Intellectuals between the Wars (1966). 

11.  Though signed by André Breton and Diego Rivera, the statement was written by Trotsky and Breton.  In a translation by, Dwight MacDonald it appeared The Partisan Review 1938, vol. IV #1 , Fall 1938.

12.  A high point of Trotsky’s polemic is surely his ridicule of Biely who, he says, “day in and day out caught in his immortal soul certain little insects and spread them out on his fingernail,” etc. (Literature and Revolution, 54).

Visions of Vorticism: Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound

 

Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring 1915 (1961-62) by William Roberts. Representing Cuthbert Hamilton, Ezra Pound, William Roberts, Wyndham Lewis, Frederick Etchels, and Edwatd Wadsworth.

  

     Like other self-conscious schools of twentieth century modernism, Vorticism was imprecisely defined by its inventors, inevitably then producing work of considerable variety.   Though the concept of the vortex had been first used by Ezra Pound to refer to some contemporary art and poetry, suggesting the site of the greatest concentration of energy, the idea of a Vorticist movement emerged publicly with Wyndham Lewis’s Blast in 1915 and the show at the Doré Galleries in London the same year. [1]  With an eye on being the most avant-garde of the avant-gardes, Lewis had sought to distinguish himself from recognized schools, maintaining the superiority of his own version of the geometric designs of Cubism, encouraging abstraction energized by a certain modern dynamic sometimes labeled “hard-edged,” resembling Futurism with an interest in industry and violence.   Lewis’s own art and that of others who exhibited as Vorticists – the original show included Lewis, Jessica Dismorr, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Frederick Etchells, and Edward Wadsworth [2] -- combined Cubist fragmentation of reality with imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment.  The idea of Vorticism itself adds little to understanding of the works from that show or of Pound’s poetry of the time.  Lifting the banner of a militant movement, however, l did provide an arena for avant-garde posturing by both Lewis and Pound, entertaining in itself, but shedding limited light on their art.   

      The investigation into the question of to what extent, if any, these artists constituted a coherent group would seem to depend primarily on their adherence to the principles of Vorticism.  As it happens, the same year of the Vorticist exhibition, Lewis published a manifesto in his journal Blast. [3]  The reader might be baffled to find virtually no reference to visual art in this document.  Its attention-getting typography reinforces the notion of volume implied by the publication’s title, but the shouting does not seem to add up to much of a program.  The emphasis is rather on playing the bohemian viva voce, satirizing the priggish and the sentimental, the conventional and the bourgeois, while claiming for England (and in that way for himself) the leadership of modern art.  Lewis here constructs a persona by taking center stage to enact the role of the modern artist.

     There are artistic references, all polemical, in the series of declarations opening the inaugural and penultimate issue of Blast titled “Long Live the Vortex!”  Bearing the banner of the avant-garde holds for Lewis a critical significance.  Due to the value he places in novelty, he declares that “education (art education and general education) tends to destroy the creative instinct,” though his own theory remains obscure, apart from a commitment “to destroy politeness, standardization, and academic, that is civilized, vision” and to express “vivid and violent ideas.”  He arbitrarily claims that “great artists in England are always revolutionary, just as in France any really fine artist have [sic] a strong traditional vein.”  Precisely what this might mean is unexpressed, except that Vorticist art must engage “the Reality of the Present,” shaped by the artist acting as an individual.

     With a self-conscious deprecation of realism, he maintains that Vorticism means to appeal to “every class and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL” in spite of the fact that he is well aware that the overwhelming majority of the populace will never hear the word.  He emphasizes this vague universality, concluding with the summary statement: “Blast presents an art of individuals,” a proposition acceptable to most Romantic and post-Romantic critics.  In an equally ill-defined clue to the identity of Vorticism, he anticipates Surrealism, saying “WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY – their stupidity, animalism, and dreams.” [4] 

     Whatever this may mean, he fears that his movement might be confused with Futurism which he repeatedly condemns as “sensational and sentimental,” no advance at all, but merely “the latest form of Impressionism.”  His own predilections for fascism made him no more sympathetic to Mussolini’s cheerleader.  He ridicules the Italian’s interest in industrial and mechanical imagery, saying “Marinetteism” [sic] amounts to nothing but “Automobilism.”  His rivals, though somewhat similar to Lewis to outsiders, are not to him even second-rate; they are contemptible

     Lewis compensates for the fact that Vorticism may seem to some a splinter of a faction by jauntily speculating on the pillars of society becoming Vorticists: Lloyd George, shortly to become prime minister, Lady Mond, Baroness Melchett, and perhaps even the king.  The effect of the suggestion, of course, is to emphasize its unlikeliness and thus to highlight Lewis’s counter-cultural credentials.

     “Long Live the Vortex!” is followed by a lengthy manifesto, or series of manifestoes.  The first eighteen pages are a compilation of blessings and curses of things English and French, an amusing and typographically spectacular definition, I suppose, of Lewis’s specific individuality.  Much of this content is satirical or otherwise humorous, though certain significant patterns emerge.  English wet weather and politeness are both rather predictably condemned, but so are England’s “socialist-playwright” and “tonks.”  Considering France he curses “gallic gush,” the Arc de Triomphe, and France’s status as a “Mecca for Americans” and for many an “amative German professor.”  The years 1837 to 1900, the period of “bourgeois Victorian vistas” are denounced as a whole, though he blesses Britain’s “seafarers” expressing particular fondness for their “restless machines.”  Having blasted “humour” in one section, he returns to bless it a few pages later.  In England the “art-pimp” is blasted though with no description by which he might be identified, while in France a similarly mysterious “bad music” is condemned.  The reader is clearly dealing with a self-identified enfant terrible, more eager to provoke than to present a new view of artistic practice.  The address of Blast is, after all, the Rebel Art Centre, implying that the most important element in Lewis’s Vorticist program is rebellion.

     A seven-part document titled “Manifesto” follows.  Part I sheds little new light on artistic practice, but rather aims to evoke and destroy dualities in the same pronouncements.  This principle is restated in several forms.  The first item says “Beyond Action and Reaction we would establish ourselves.”  Next, starting from “opposite statements of a chosen world,” the Vorticist wishes to set up a “violent structure” between the extremes.  Thus “we discharge ourselves on both sides.”  Etc.  What this might mean in terms of practice or connoisseurship remains obscure.

     Perhaps in illustration of this dialectic, Lewis proceeds, after establishing England’s reputation as “anti-artistic,” to assert that this is the very reason “why England produces such good artists.”   Hints of appropriate subject matter emerge as “the Art-instinct is permanently primitive,” finding “stimulus” in a chaos of imperfection, discord, etc.,” a “savage” wholly unlike any “Futurist individual of Mr. Marinetti’s limited imagination.”  The modern artist will derive material from “this enormous, jangling, journalistic fairy desert of modern life” as artists of the past had been inspired by nature.   In spite of the world’s being “a fairy desert,” Lewis laments the passing of fairies and offers a somewhat premature elegy for the Spanish bullfight.  Fruitful imaginative resources, “springs of creation,” remain, however, characterized by “mysticism,” “gladiatorial instincts,” and “blood and asceticism.” 

     Shakespeare embodies a certain British “mysticism, madness, and delicacy” uniting comedy and tragedy.  Lewis indulges in his peculiar version of chauvinism by claiming that the “Modern World” as a whole is due to “Anglo-Saxon genius,” making the English the natural practitioners of the imagery of “machinery, trains, steamships” “buildings, bridges, and works.”  They are “the inventors” of modern “bareness and hardness,” and the enemies of “Romanticism,” while the similar modernism of the Futurists is to him spurious, “romantic and sentimental,” nothing but “gush.”  The tone of the journal is clear from the next feature, poetry from Ezra Pound, beginning with his “Salutation the Third” which opens, “Let us deride the smugness of ‘the Times’:/ GUFFAW!”

     Apart from his considerable brio in presenting an individualistic catalogue of preferences somewhat resembling the lists of the hip and the non-hip Norman Mailer compiled for the Village Voice and his generalized bad boy persona the reader may yet wonder just what a Vorticist work of art looks like.  The show at the Doré Gallery perforce answered that question and, in Lewis’s “Note for Catalogue” [7] of the exhibition, he let the cat peek just a bit out of the bag.  He opens with an adroit faux naïf use of passive voice, referring to “painters, to whom the name Vorticist has been given” (as though he and Pound had not concocted the movement).  He has not dropped his rivalry with Marinetti, referring to the “fuss and hysterics of the Futurists,” but he is now at pains to distinguish himself from another rival as well, Picasso in whose work he finds “passivity” (Lewis used all capitals) in contrast to Vorticist “activity.”  To him Picasso is a “dressmaker” who simply “matches little bits of stuff he finds lying about. He puts no life into the pieces of cloth or paper he sticks side by side, but rather contemplates their beauty.”

      The heart of Lewis’s remarks in this introduction to the exhibition, however, stresses abstraction rather than dynamism.

The impression received on a hot afternoon on the quays of some port, made up of the smell of tar and fish, the heat of the sun, the history of the place, cannot be conveyed by any imitation of a corner of it. The influences weld themselves into an hallucination or dream (which all the highest art has always been) with a mathematic of its own.   

He criticizes naturalistic or academic painting the goal of which is what was later called photorealism, concluding that abstraction is the only adequate method of conveying his vision.  His whimsy has not altogether departed.  He suggests that if advertisements were abstract “the effect architecturally would be much better, and the Public taste could thus be educated in a popular way to appreciate the essentials of design better than picture-galleries have ever done.”  As a final caprice, he implies that Vorticism is a contribution to the British war effort in contending against German Kultur.  In terms of actual Vorticist characteristics, gallery-goers are offered only in fact abstraction as a kind of higher symbolism and the idea of energy.

     While Blast had been primarily a counter-cultural entertainment, an irreverent eruption making considerable noise while shedding little light, the exhibit allowed Lewis to define the “movement” with bit more specificity.  Today descriptions of Vorticist art generally limit themselves to prescribing “hard-edged abstraction” allied on the one hand with Cubist forms and on the other with Futurist themes. 

     The movement’s other parent, however, was Ezra Pound whose primary concern was literary.  Pound argues in his essay “Vortex” [8] for a sort of abstraction in literature as well as visual art, quoting with approval Pater’s line that “all arts approach the conditions of music.” He elaborates.

It is no more ridiculous that a person should receive or convey an emotion by means of an arrangement of shapes, or planes, or colours, than that they should receive or convey such emotion by an arrangement of musical notes.

 For him consciousness is “the primary pigment,” and the artist is reproducing a state of mind, not an observed external scene.  Just as poetry tends toward the pleasures of music, music answers and, to him, “music, sheer melody, seems as if it were just bursting into speech.”  Everything is symbolic.  “The vorticist relies not upon similarity or analogy, not upon likeness or mimicry.”  Realism is a “secondary application”

     In Pound’s Vorticist poetry prettiness, too, is not the focus. 

Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have used images as ornaments. The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.

In accordance with Pound’s admiration for craft, the primary aim for him is formal, a value highlighted by his claim (which he immediately moderates) that “Lewis is Bach.” 

Music was vorticist in the Bach-Mozart period, before it went off into romance and sentiment and description. A new vorticist music would come from a new computation of the mathematics of harmony, not from a mimetic representation of dead cats in a fog-horn, alias noise-tuners.

     Far from dropping Imagisme for Vorticism, he built on its foundation.  Far from being left behind, the image generates the vortex.  For him “THE IMAGE IS NOT an idea,” and presumably not mere decoration either. He characterizes it using formal terms, beginning with the word vortex itself.  To Pound the vortex is “a radiant node or cluster.”  His images are meant neither to be symbols requiring decoding nor decorative elements, but rather vortices, formal patterns “from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”  Even the sort of images he admired in East Asian poetry become, through this lens, vorticist nodes of activity in spite of their apparent stillness.   Rhythms alone are, like music, capable of communicating anything.  “I believe that every emotion and every phase of emotion has some toneless phrase, some rhythm-phrase to express it.”

     Physicists in the early twentieth century found, upon close examination of material reality, that its apparent solidity conceals teeming activity and extraordinary potential energy on the subatomic level.  At the time of Vorticism scientists were beginning to dig deeper yet, uncovering first the mysteries of relativity and then those of quantum mechanics.   By analogy the Vorticist claimed to be likewise looking into the very essence of things. 

     Pound, then, argues for the formal values of abstraction while maintaining a practice of imagism, asserting what to him  are essentially artistic values against thematics.  He republishes his principles of Imagism which have now become principles of Vorticism as well. [9] He aspires to pass beyond the mild beauty of the picturesque, beyond the appeal of the concrete specific, to reach a glimpse of the tumultuous, sometimes awe-inspiring energy of the vortex.   He repeats at the same time Lewis’s conviction that Vorticism must be altogether au courant, in the very forefront of innovation.  “Vortex is the present, the moment of the creation of the future.”

     To visualize Vorticism as the central modern art movement he situates it among others, Marinetti, Picasso, and Kandinsky in particular.  He declares defiantly that Marinetti “did not set on the egg that hatched me,” he disparages Marinetti’s Futurism as merely “a sort of accelerated  impressionism.”  For him all non-Vorticist work, “every work that is not poised in this whirlpool” [i.e., the vortex) “is a corpse”.

     On the other hand he admires the artists most associated with abstraction and Cubism, Kandinsky and Picasso, and is willing to accept descent in their lineage.  “Picasso, Kandinski, father and mother, classicism and romanticism of the of the [Vorticist] movement.”  In associating Picasso with a sort of “classicism,” he may have been recognizing the tendency toward poised serenity in composition of many of Picasso’s Cubist work during the World War I period even before what art historians often label his ”classical” phase. 

     To Kandinsky he attributed the principle that content is quite irrelevant.  “An artist should have just as much pleasure in an arrangement of planes or in a pattern of figures, as in painting portraits of fine ladies, or in portraying the Mother of God as the symbolists bid us.”  This insistence on abstraction is shared by Lewis and Pound and is perhaps the chief discernable principle of Vorticism. 

     The documents here analyzed preserve the idea of the movement, though Lewis’s visual works might well be subsumed under other labels.  Vorticism is ever elusive since it “never presented a coherent point of view.” [11]  A critical article wonders “on what basis we can call any work of art ‘Vorticist,’” adding  “It is difficult to imagine any sentence as an example of the Vorticist style, or any visual style in painting.”  A description of Vorticist work might be equally applied to paintings by Kandinsky or Picasso or, indeed, to “most of the paintings created between 1907 and 1915 by the avant-garde.”   Vorticist poetry seems to be in an even worse case.  Even when looking at Pound’s own work, the Vorticist character “remains elusive.” [10]  another investigator says that, in general, Vorticism “failed miserably,” and “left no permanent traces on  Western styles of art.”   “If few understood it then,” the writer concludes, “it is even more obscure now.” [12]

     Vorticism, though occasioned perhaps more by Lewis’s break with Roger Fry’s Omega group and Pound’s rambunctious free-lance troublemaking than by theoretical considerations, enjoyed a brief efflorescence.  At its crest, though, the movement had little to distinguish it from the longer-lived trends of Imagism and Cubism.  Vorticism’s founders, much as they looked down upon Marinetti, shared with him a noxious politics that has discouraged discipleship.  Yet for a time Vorticism seized the spotlight of the art world, though this most often meant attracting scorn.  The Daily Mail commented that “Almost any child between the ages of eight months and three years can be a first rate Vorticist if it is given some lightly coloured paints, bottle of blacking and mama’s new white tablecloth.” [13]  Such philistinism is by no means entailed by a critique of Vorticism.  Lewis’s pictures and Pound’s poems retain a lasting value and Blast will remain a marvel, a pyrotechnic display that energizes and amuses still after more than a hundred years, a reminder of a time when the Bohemian avant-garde still possessed the power to shock and, with that sometimes, to stimulate thinking.    

 

 

1.  This was followed by a New York show at the Penguin Club the same year1915.  The group then lost coherence, though elements recoalesced as Group X (which exhibited in 1920).  Since then, major shows focusing on Vorticism as a historic phenomenon, first at the Tate in 1956, and since at the Estorick Collection in 2004, and again at the Tate in 2011. 

2.  Others of the circle included Lawrence Atkinson, Cuthbert Hamilton, and Sir Jacob Epstein.

3.  Though the manifesto bears eleven signatures, it is thought to have been written by Lewis.

4.  Capitals in the original.  Following this statement, however, Lewis’s capitalization seems impressionistic and improvisatory, guided by design more than content.  To avoid an unpleasantly busy page, I shall silently return other cited phrases to conventional capitalization. 

5.  Reprinted in Advertisements for Myself, p. 364-6 where the reader learns that “Schrodinger’s model of the atom,” “differential calculus,” and Catholic things are hip, while  “Bohr’s model of the atom,” “analytic geometry,” and what is Protestant are square. 

6.  Whether another critic might deem “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” passive may seem dubious, though many of the artists’ Cubist works are serenely composed and he was shortly to enter what art historians call his neo-classical period.

7.  Available online at https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/exhibition/724.

8.  “Vorticism,”  The Fortnightly Review, September 1914.  Available at https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/vorticism/.

9.  “A Few Don’ts by an Imagist,” Poetry Magazine,z March 1913. 

10.  William C. Lipke and Bernard W. Rozran, “Ezra Pound and Vorticism: A Polite Blast,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1966).

11.  Arthur J. Sabatini, “Vorticism Revitalized,” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Summer 2015).

12.  Herbert N. Schneidau, “Vorticism and the Career of Ezra Pound.”  Modern Philology, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Feb., 1968).

13.  Quoted in  Andrew Thacker “Blasting Beyond Britain,” Fortnightly Review, August 24, 2011.

On Marinetti’s Avant-Garde Fascism

     Since the Romantic era innovative artistic programs have often been associated with the left wing of politics. From the radicalism of Shelley and Blake, Whitman and Zola, through the anarchists and communists of Dada and Surrealism up to the present day, most artists and a forteriori those who consider themselves avant-garde have challenged the status quo from a progressive perspective. [1] (Indeed, in the news this morning is the announcement that President Trump will not attend the Kennedy Center arts award ceremony due to his fear of hostility from those being honored.) Yet some artists have been equally fierce militants from the right. Going beyond the casual sexism, anti-Semitism, and class bias so common in writers of a broad range of viewpoints, Marinetti was a founder of Italian fascism, Céline a virulent Nazi sympathizer, Pound a propagandist for Mussolini, and Mishima an imperialist militarist. At the same time each of these might also be called, to one extent or another, a revolutionary in art. [2]
     It is not difficult to assume a natural link between progressive views and powerful art. Art, after all, is based on imaginatively experiencing another’s consciousness and, in a sense, “trying out” other people’s experiences and emotions. Art, like science, requires a receptive and open mind. The themes of art often encourage a broad-based sympathetic understanding that goes well beyond tolerance. Because fascist artists and artistic movements are thus anomalous, their origins seem well worth investigating, especially in the present historical moment. The most significant explicitly fascist artist of the twentieth century is perhaps Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose loyalty to Mussolini was no less steady than his influence in poetry and visual art. [3]
     Marinetti’s dedication to the Italian fascist movement has problematized readers’ consumption of his work and that of his movement. Though he was obliged to separate his political and artistic programs once the fascists were in power and decided they preferred the same sort of kitschy “wholesome” art their Nazi associates liked, the poet was in fact, a founder of Italian fascism. He, with Mussolini and the syndicalist Alceste De Ambris [4], wrote the party’s founding document, the 1919 “Manifesto dei fasci italiani di combattimento” (“Manifesto of the Italian Fasci of Combat”).
     Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” (1909) makes little direct reference to politics. Much of it is little different from the many other manifestoes of modernism. The reader finds the usual call to do away with the old and introduce the new. [5] There is, however, a curious and significantly different enthusiasm as well that one might label a fascist sensibility. When Marinetti says, “I stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier” [6] the reader is put on warning.
     At first the language is not so transgressive. Marinetti celebrates “the love of danger,” and insists “except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.” The emphasis on action is underlined by violent associations. “Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.”
     This is all very well, but the praise of death recurs in the manifesto with a persistence unparalleled in any statement of Dada or Surrealism. After an opening when the speaker and his associates, a fevered group of young intellectuals not unlike the coterie evoked by Howl, one finds that rather than “burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” Marinetti and his friends “like young lions . . . ran after Death.” Ignoring the ambiguity of whether the young lions are thought to run after their own death or that of their prey, the reader can only wonder at this extraordinary reversal of conventional values.
    The proto-fascist Futurist explicates, but his comments do not seem to help. “There was nothing to make us wish for death, unless the wish to be free at last from the weight of our courage!” He imagines a fight to the death with mysterious antagonists. “They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by a hatred the more implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. ”An explicitly erotic aura seems somehow to accumulate about mortality. [t] “Death, domesticated, met me at every turn, gracefully holding out a paw, or once in a while hunkering down, making velvety caressing eyes at me from every puddle.”
     Yet he does describe this Todestrieb in social motives terms, culminating in a shocking declaration: “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.”[7] In the end “art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.”
     Though poetry celebrating war is as old as poetry itself, this formulation is unprecedented. The aestheticization of violence is ancient, but it had in the past not been glorified to the exclusion of other elements. The nineteenth century anarchists such as Most, Bakunin, and Kropotkin cultivated a taste for the propaganda of the deed and probably the most direct influence from the social realm on Marinetti’s attitude is that of the left syndicalist Georges Sorel (who in fact admired Mussolini as well as Lenin). [8] Sorel had insisted in his 1908 “Reflections on Violence” that “proletarian violence, carried on as a pure and simple manifestation of the sentiment of class struggle, appears thus as a very fine and heroic thing.” [9]
     Apart from racism, chauvinism, censorship, and militarism, fascism is generally associated with a radically contrarian values including the celebration of violence, even of death. One thinks of the slogan of the Legión Española “¡Viva el muerte!” Its members described themselves as novios de la muerte ("bridegrooms of death"). Similarly, the SS used a skull and bones as insignia. The division that administered the death camps was in fact named the Totenkopfverbände (Death’s Head units).
     Similar imagery -- skulls as well as signs suggesting Satanism and fascism -- can be found among prison inmates, outlaw bikers, and heavy metal enthusiasts. For these subcultures it is surely the shock value, the ability of these symbols to disturb the general population, rather than any specific allegiance to Nazism or diabolism that underlies this usage. Hooligan skinheads may ape fascist gestures while hardly knowing what they mean. Examples of this posture, taken to the point of caricature, include Aleister Crowley and his epigone Anton LaVey. Parallel phenomena include the role of heroin in, first the jazz scene and later in the Beat movement and the music of the Velvet Underground, novels of Will Self, and, of all things, the “heroin chic” of nineties fashion photography. [10]
     The most significant parallel in art to this predilection for death is the tradition rising from the confluence of the Romantic love-death in Werther with such rebellious quasi-Satanic anti-heros as Byron’s Manfred, Lautréamont’s Maldoror, and Baudelaire. Why, after all, are the flowers evil?
     Perhaps someone knows what it can mean, after all, when Marinetti says that art “can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.” The first has, of course, always been a component of human psyches and human art; the second was developed by Artaud into a coherent theory; the third I can understand only as an oblique way of saying that the imagination is stimulated by suffering. But how any of these notions could support Marinetti’s other theoretical writings [11] or the actual poems and paintings of Italian Futurism is to me a mystery. It would be simple to play psychologist with Marinetti’s peculiar ideas about women, but such speculation is irrelevant to his art.
     Thus it is perhaps not merely uneasiness when confronting taboos that explains the difficulty contemporary readers have with the theory of Italian Futurism. If Marinetti’s ideas do not even fertilize the rich artistic practice associated with his movement, it may be simply because they are adventitious. Truly fascist art is recorded in Germany and in Italy and it resembles nothing so much as the productions of Stalinism and Maoism: reductive, conventional, sentimental, and shallow, with little to interest those other than true believers. [12]
     Marinetti’s manifesto is better considered as a literary rather than a philosophical document. The compelling power of the circumstances into which he places his strident claims – the automobile crash in the original manifesto and the airplane ride in the manifesto on writing – establishes a memorable and effective dramatic context. His assertions are expressive of the mood, the sensibility of his reaction to the historic moment. Rather than statements of serious aesthetic theory, he is writing poems. His “Futurist Manifesto” broke new ground, establishing in fact a new genre of literature, and set the pattern for many to follow. He is most fruitfully read not for ideas but for his boisterous rhetoric.
     His language remains not merely vigorous but suggestive and even eloquent. Toward the end of the “Futurist Manifesto,” after the speaker has overturned his car after facing the dialectical motorcyclists, he rises and cries out, “O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse… When I came up—torn, filthy, and stinking—from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!” This montage of imagery is rich in connotation, engendering widening waves of semiotic association, but the images make sense only in the most oblique, self-contradictory fashion. The reader who seeks a logical, even a persuasive program will be disappointed.





1. It seems in fact scarcely debatable that the professariat as well as the intelligentsia in general, are distinctly liberal, while the uneducated, unfortunately, chose our current President Trump.

2. For fuller scholarly accounts of the relationship between fascism and the avant-garde see Mark Antliff’s Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939 and Andrew Hewitt’s Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-garde.

3. Pound had perhaps even more profound influence, but his Social Credit theories had an indirect relation to fascism in spite of his attempt to serve fascist Italy.

4. Alceste De Ambris had been a major organizer of the agrarian strike of 1908. As a “national syndicalist” he supported Italy’s entry into WWI. He soon became disillusioned with the fascists, however, eventually entering into active opposition until his citizenship was withdrawn and he was driven into exile in 1926.

5. Laurent Tailhade is reputed to have stated, after Auguste Vaillant bombed the Chamber of Deputies in 1893: "Qu'importent les victimes, si le geste est beau?" ["What do the victims matter, so long as the gesture is beautiful"]. In 1929 André Breton's "Second Manifesto" stated that "L’acte surréaliste le plus simple consiste, revolvers aux poings, à descendre dans la rue et à tirer au hasard, tant qu’on peut, dans la foule" [The simplest Surrealist act consists of running down into the street, pistols in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd]." On a similar topic see my “The Inconsequential Bayonets of Art: Militant Rhetoric and the Avant-Garde” on this site.

6. Has anyone noted the anticipation of the opening of “Prufrock” with its “patient etherized on a table”?

7. Marinetti was explicitly anti-feminist and quite consciously misogynistic.

8. See Sorel’s March 1921 conversations with Jean Variot, published in Variot’s Propos de Georges Sorel, (1935) Paris, pp. 53-57, 66-86 passim.

9. Sorel also became, after supporting Dreyfus, a virulent anti-Semite.

10. In the eighties, when grunge was big, my wife knew a young lad who liked to play music shirtless and carefully applied makeup to his chest to create the illusion of an unhealthy sunken chest. This is not far distant from the nineteenth century view of tuberculosis as beautiful. Byron said “I should like, I think, to die of consumption.” (See Katherine Byrne's Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2011.) Poe said in “Philosophy of Composition” that “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”

11. His “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” for instance, has seemingly nothing to do with death or violence or fascism. Instead, apart from calling on Futurist poets to “hate the intelligence” [emphasis in original], it consists of such curious proposals as the abolition of the adjective and adverb and all punctuation. The “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting” likewise seems unconnected to Marinetti’s politics or his obsessions.

12. In his speech for the opening of the “Degenerate Art” exhibit on July 18 1937, Hitler could sound something like an avant-gardist: “I am going to make a clean sweep of phrases in the artistic life of Germany,” but he looks only backwards, endorsing “healthy,” easily understandable art.