"Appalling tabernacle of self and unbelief": Wyndham Lewis's enemy of the stars

Authors

Allan C. Pero, The University of Western OntarioFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-13-2018

Journal

Closet Drama: History, Theory, Form

First Page

83

Last Page

94

URL with Digital Object Identifier

10.4324/9781315107394

Abstract

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

Notes

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/closet-drama-catherine-burroughs/e/10.4324/9781315107394

Burroughs, C. (Ed.). (2018). Closet Drama: History, Theory, Form (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315107394

Publication Status

1