Tarr, a Vorticist novel

When we looked at the modernist poets earlier this semester, we read a manifesto by the Vorticists, some pre-WWI British dudes who liked blasting things and big fonts (also, saying "fire" and "damn"). Last week I was in somewhat of a blasting mood so I picked up Tarr, by Wyndham Lewis. Lewis was one of the main figures in Vorticism; according to him, "Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did and said at a certain period," a statement that didn't exactly endear him to other Vorticists.

I'm about 168 pages into Tarr, in the middle of a chapter entitled "Bourgeois-Bohemians," and it seems to fit pretty well with the manifesto. Part I, "Oveture," follows this guy Tarr around Paris as he talks down to people, stresses out over having a German girlfriend, spouts some industrial-strength misogyny, and knocks a guy's hat off. The book is obsessed with questions of national character, and there are some pretty startling proto-Fascist rumblings:

"You are concentrated, systematic slop [Tarr tells Hobson].=There is nothing in the Universe to be said for you.=Any efficient State would confiscate your property, burn your wardrobe, that old hat and the rest, as 'infecte' and insanitary, and prohibit you from propagating."

There's a lot of angular language that seems deliberately ugly, and a propensity for accurate but bizarrely detached similes (e.g., "Her head was like a deep white egg in a tobacco coloured-nest.")

Some of my favorite quotes:

"'If we had numbers, for instance, instead of names, who would take the number thirteen?'
'I,' said Kreisler."

"Tarr turned to Hobson, and seized him, conversationally, by the hair."

"The leaden brilliant green of spring foliage hung above him, ticketing innumerably the trees, sultry smoke volumes from factories in Fairyland."