SOURCE: "Vorticist Performance and Aesthetic Turbulence in Enemy of the Stars," in PMLA, Vol. 107, No. 3, May, 1992, pp. 482-96.

[In the following essay, Graver provides an analysis of Lewis's play Enemy of the Stars.]

Lewis and Ezra Pound coined the concept "vorticism" to identify the artistic trend that includes Enemy of the Stars, but the existing studies of this movement do not go very far in explaining the play's complexities. Hugh Kenner and Timothy Materer study the notion of the Vortex in detail, but neither examines closely the formal affinities between Enemy of the Stars and the avant-garde movement sweeping around it. William Wees, in contrast, claims that Lewis's play is "the pice de resistance of literary Vorticism" and notes some important affinities the play has with Lewis's paintings and theoretical writings, but Wees is reluctant to examine its intricacies in their own right … Other studies of the play make valuable observations, but none has been able to explain thoroughly the metamorphic logic and lines of force that inform the whole.

Since this play is the major literary text to appear at the founding of vorticism, it is natural to look in it for the practical application of Lewis's theoretical pronouncements. We should, however, be wary of forcing on the play a concept of vorticism developed from a backward gaze across the lifework of Lewis, Pound, and others. When Lewis wrote Enemy of the Stars his notion of vorticism was not as refined or fixed as the concept delineated by Kenner and Materer. His first vorticist proclamations were, in fact, the last pieces he wrote for the initial issue of Blast. Taken as a whole, Lewis's work in Blast does not suggest that "a Vortex is a circulation with a still center: a system of energies drawing in whatever comes near," nor does it imply "that a culture's most vital ideas would be gathered in the Vortex and brought to a still point of clarity." Lewis does say, "The Vorticist is at his maximum point of energy when stillest," but in the same manifesto he claims that "[o]ur Vortex desires the immobile rythm [sic] of its swiftness," and in another he declares:

2. We start from opposite statements of a chosen world. Set up violent structure of adolescent clearness between two extremes.…

4. We fight first on one side, then on the other, but always for the SAME cause, which is neither side or both sides and ours.

Clearly, in Blast Lewis is more interested in provocative paradoxes than in a coherent aesthetic program. The studies by Kenner and Materer make the mistake of assuming that vorticism is one coherent concept. Wees notes that Lewis and Pound interpreted vorticism differently: "For Lewis, the Vortex was a whirling, arrogant, polished monster of energy; for Pound, it was a stable, strong source of creative energy."

The notion of a central point of stability essential to Materer's and Kenner's concept of the vortex certainly finds no formal corollary in Enemy of the Stars. Lewis's play is too volatile and agitated a fluid to form one well-focused vortex. My reading shows that the still point around which the world turns is (in a phrase of the protagonist Arghol) "[a]lways a deux." The terms under which the play lives are always threatened and displaced by rival terms. Lewis pits the cool prestige of modernism against the heated rebellion of the avant-garde, the appeal of the image against the appeal of the word, allegory against realism, and narrative against drama. Nothing is left unchallenged by a nemesis, not even the autonomy of the work itself. The play's vortex spins, but it does not converge.

This paper charts the wandering course of Enemy of the Stars's eccentric vortex. The broad array of aesthetic forms and thematic focuses through which the play proceeds create a number of distinct discursive or representational realms, ranging from an avant-garde critique of the social apparatus and of the ideological assumptions of high culture through an allegorical meditation on the foundations of human consciousness and action to a wheelwright's yard on the Russian steppes, where Arghol and Hanp enact a clownish agon that anticipates both the physical humor and the metaphysical desolation of Beckett's plays.

Understanding the heady mixture of aesthetic modes turning on one another in this work fosters an appreciation of more than the play. Enemy of the Stars is a pointed example of the nonprogrammatic avant-garde of the early twentieth century. More than just innovative and inventive, it deploys forms and themes that assail conventional notions of art, but the play does not rationalize its attack by appealing to an explicit aesthetic or social program as does, say, Italian futurism or Berlin Dada. The notions of vorticism developed by Materer and Kenner apply better to later works by Lewis in which his aesthetic interests reach a discursive stability. In Enemy of the Stars he is not so much defending an aesthetic position as playing with the idea of aesthetic positioning. If, as Wees suggests, Enemy of the Stars is the piece de resistance of vorticism, the play epitomizes a performative rather than a programmatic version of the movement—a vorticism that dances and spins through a variety of aesthetic and meta-aesthetic worlds instead of attempting to make a particular aesthetic statement. In the rich concept of performance we can see some of the complexities involved in an avant-garde art that forsakes both a conventional aesthetic existence and a dissident life supported by manifestos. Enemy of the Stars shows how a predominantly literary text can manipulate its constructive principles to move into the fluid world of performance.

The play begins with a conventional assertion of literary autonomy: a title page with inch-and-a-half-high letters sets it off from the preceding material in Blast and encourages the reader to expect unity and coherence in a literary representation of some sort. The second page, however, begins to trouble the reader's expectations by announcing a "synopsis in programme." As one reads further it becomes clear that Enemy of the Stars is not conceived as the text of a play that might be performed but as a performance in itself. The readers find themselves in a theater of printed words, confronted with a confusing spectacle and unfortunately lacking the "programme" that might aid in explaining the events before them.

The confusion is increased by the references to "you and me" made in the advertisement and elaborated on elsewhere:

"Yet you and me: why not from the English metropolis?"—Listen: it is our honeymoon. We go abroad for the first scene of our drama. Such a strange thing as our coming together requires a strange place for initial stages of our intimate ceremonious acquaintance.

The familiar tone here suggests that the writer is speaking directly to his readers and, hence, implies that the drama concerns the act of reading, the drawing together of author and audience. The circle of aesthetic autonomy moves beyond the play to enclose the authorial voice and the eyes that draw it from the page. With one turn of the page, however, the familiar tone is gone, and the readers and author have been replaced by "the cream of Posterity, assembled in silent banks," and by the spectacle they gaze on: "a gladiator [Arghol] who has come to fight a ghost, Humanity—the great Sport of Future Mankind." Here the circle of aesthetic autonomy expands to include the meta-aesthetic, social conditions of art, making the ideology of high culture part of the artwork itself.

After posterity "sinks into the hypnotic trance of Art" the play's autonomous field of aesthetic display and the universe inhabited by "you and me" contract to the scene occupied by Arghol and Hanp, but the representation remains unstable. Dramatic action is usually anchored to a protagonist and an antagonist with fixed forms of existence, but here the polymorphous characters erode the significance of the action with their ambiguous proliferation of meanings. Even with only Arghol and Hanp on the stage, the action vacillates between the realistic, allegorical, ritualistic, mechanical, oneiric, parodic, and hallucinatory. The aesthetic autonomy of the play remains unstable both because of its dubious beginnings and because of the ambiguous, shifting ground on which it finally appears to settle.

The shifting claims on autonomy made in the early pages are complicated by the general ambiguity in the relation between a dramatic literary text and the possibilities of its staged performance. The dramatic form itself usually implies the question, Does this text stand on its own as a literary work or is it merely the outline of a theatrical work that exists in its entirety only in performance? The extravagant stage directions and elaborate prologue material in Enemy of the Stars decide the question of the text's status: the play is a closet drama meant only to be read. Closet dramas have a long history in European literature; they have been written by authors such as Hroswitha, Goethe, and Ibsen, but Lewis's play stands out in this genre through its resistance to the possibility of a theatrical staging.

Since closet dramas usually stage themselves before the mind's eye when read, transferring their mise-en-scenes to the boards of a theater rarely presents insurmountable obstacles. Lewis's play resists such a transfer because it is not simply staged in the mind's visual field and it does not unfold solely in the act of reading. The work's shifting circle of autonomy and the visual delights that the layout and graphic art offer independent from any act of reading create a performance impossible to contain on the reader's mental stage. To perform this play in a physical theater would require suppressing the performance that is already taking place on the pages of Blast.

Despite being distant from conventional closet drama, the performance in Blast still necessarily involves the act of reading. This imperative gives the performance an intimacy and insidiousness missing from physical theater. At the theater audience and spectacle each have a significant degree of autonomy. The audience can ignore the spectacle, and the spectacle can proceed without the audience's attention. (The separation is significant enough for Artaud to wish to overcome it and for Brecht to wish to refine it.) But for the performance of Enemy of the Stars to proceed, the reader's mind must take it in. Once there, however, it asserts its performative autonomy, drawing attention to the distance between reader and text and to the ideological rituals involved in "[s]uch a strange thing as [their] coming together."

In addition to having a multivalent representational significance and manipulating the intimacy of reading, the play is disturbingly duplicitous in its representational mode, for Lewis couches the text almost entirely in narrative prose. Indeed, the only approximations of dramatic dialogue are a few episodes of extended direct-discourse quotation. This play is, hence, a drama by virtue not of its form but solely of its subject matter, its thematic focus. Lewis uses the narrative form to explore areas of dramatic representation that are usually beyond the reach of conventional dramatic mimesis. We have already noted the attention he draws to publicity, posterity, and the box office. The extravagant description of impossible scenery—for example, "ponderous arabesques of red cloud, whose lines did not stop at door's frame, but pressed on into shadows within the hut, in tyrannous continuity"—highlights the psychological, rather than physical, importance of objects and milieu. The narrative also imparts a physical presence to the characters and events that they do not usually enjoy in the dramatic text. Rather than remain the disembodied voices of dialogue, the characters are transformed into "enormous youngsters, bursting everywhere through heavy tight clothes…" This vivid physicality continues throughout the play: "Arghol lay silent, his hands a thick shell fitting back of head, his face grey vegetable cave"; Hanp "sprang from the bridge clumsily, too unhappy for instinctive science, and sank like lead, his heart a sagging weight of stagnant hatred."

The narrative in this play, besides commenting on the world of dramatic representation, becomes a creature of that world. One generally associates with narrative a marked freedom, the ability to move quickly and effortlessly from subject to subject, from one time and place to another, but in Enemy of the Stars this freedom is stripped away. While able to explore the dark, secretive recesses of dramatic representation—exemplified by the institutional apparatus surrounding the spectacle or by the interior surfaces of the characters' bodies—the narrative of this play is tied inextricably to the place and time of the representation. The words are no longer the instruments used by a narrative voice to manipulate a scene of action in which it is not immediately implicated but are transformed into elements of the scene in which the action occurs. The words take on a solidity and presentness unusual for narrative. They become part of the play's spectacle and part of the milieu in which the characters move and act. Note, for instance, the furious verbal setting created during the fight between Arghol and Hanp:

Arms of grey windmills, grinding anger on stone of the new heart.

Messages from one to another, dropped down anywhere when nobody is looking, reaching brain by telegraph: most desolating and alarming messages possible.

The attacker rushed in drunk with blows. They rolled, swift jagged rut, into one corner of shed: large insect scuttling roughly to hiding.

When Materer complains that "[t]he action of the Enemy of the Stars … is not powerful enough to shine through the thick layers of static images," he misunderstands the formal logic of the play. Action clogged with static images is the natural outcome of forcing narrative into the mimetic confines of drama. Wees has a better grasp of the aesthetic rationale of the piece and notes that while the narrative vignettes do not propel forward the overarching action, they are not in themselves unmoving: "The action and language are violent, but individual moments of action are strangely isolated and static. Events are broken down and reconstructed like the interrelated fragments of Vorticist pictures." If, as Wees suggests, a montage effect of fragmentation and reassembly is the central point of vorticism, then Enemy of the Stars, with its iconoclastic aesthetic, surpasses this movement. The collision of drama and narrative orchestrated in the play breaks up representational space as thoroughly as do the shifted and distorted surfaces in Lewis's visual art, but Enemy of the Stars lacks a unifying universe of discourse equivalent to the picture plane in which to reconstruct itself. This point becomes clearer as I continue my analysis.

The static, fragmenting weight of the words is formally emphasized and compensated for by the use of numerous episodes. The narrative concentration on the here and now in each verbal vignette would prevent the action from moving ahead without the abrupt changes of narrative scene afforded by the episodic structure. The thin theme of the central action connects the episodes but does not acquire enough prominence to push the action forward from one scene to the next. Consequently, each episode stands virtually on its own as a narrative performance. Each creates a unique representational scene. All the scenes are actually just different ways of observing the same central agon, but the differences in perspective are so extreme that the unity of the object observed is often not obvious. One episode scans the audience awaiting the show, another plunges into the dream of the sleeping Arghol, another moves through the nerve endings of the battered Hanp. Here are two examples of the bewildering shifts in perspective and in mode of observation that rise above the representational unity of the story: "Two hundred miles to north the Arctic circle swept. Sinister tramps, its winds came wandering down the high road, fatigued and chill, doors shut against them"; "A strong flood of thought passed up to his fatigued head, and at once dazed him."

Although the narrative scene moves in and out of the characters, it remains fundamentally dramatic in the terms it deploys. The world of this work, whether located in the characters' heads or in their pasts, is made up entirely of objects and actions. Thoughts leap and strike; a soul is an ocean town. The narrative voice manipulates and distorts the properties of this world with anarchic abandon but with no real freedom. Shifting the attributes of things about compulsively but unable to break away from the universe of discourse prescribed by drama, the writing traces a tightly closed world in which desires for freedom turn to vandalism.

Lewis's narrative delineation of drama gives his play both an immediacy and a distance unusual for the form. Narrative brings the action closer to the reader than do the dramatic conventions of the playscript—a narrative gives the scene directly to the reader while a playscript asks the reader to picture the scene on a stage. Nevertheless, while presenting the action immediately to the mind, narrative withholds it from the eye: the reader hears the narrative voice describing the events but lacks the premise that they are observable. In this play the physical impossibilities, volatile transformations, and polymorphous personifications that the scene undergoes emphasize its unobservability, while the concrete dramatic terms in which the narrative is couched invade the reader's ear with disturbingly visual imagery.

Lewis's dramatic concretion of narrative causes the representational existence of the work to vibrate giddily before the reader, while the narrative delineation of the drama sweeps the scene around and within the reader. Just as the narrative freedom within the scene violates the boundaries between objects and can turn characters inside out, the narrative presentation of the scene violates the space of readers, at times incorporating them in the scene, at others forcing them to be distant spectators.

While trapping his narrative in the cumbersome concretion of the dramatic here and now, Lewis also sinks both narrative and drama within the physical presence of the printed page, using the visual appeal of the illustrations that intrude on the text and of the layout to fuse representation with the presentation of the book. Just as the tension between narrative and drama is not resolved, the printed page does not unequivocally dominate the literary representation but sets up a competing center of activity and a competing mode of aesthetic existence within the artwork.

The bold layout of the text's first three pages, particularly of the advertisement, encourages an appreciation of the text as visual image, but the images conjured verbally in the advertisement disrupt the visual enticements of advertising by inviting the viewer to a world beyond sight ("some bleak circus… packed with posterity… silent, like the dead, and more pathetic… very well acted by you and me"). The rupture in the play's text caused by the six following pages of pictures is repeated in the way these abstract arrangements of swirling, colliding tonal planes relate to their provocatively denotative titles (Plan of War, Timon of Athens, Portrait of an Englishwoman, etc.). The pictures are incongruous both with their titles and with the play's text.

Lewis never allows the viewer or reader a comfortably secure approach to the artwork. The striking graphic design used in the advertisement encourages the artwork's recipient to view this page as much as read it, while the titling of the pictures and their intrusion on the literary text prompt an attempt to read them as much as simply view them. Thus, reading and seeing vie with each other for possession of the artwork. Breaches of the boundary between word and image are, of course, fairly common in the history of Western art, but Lewis does more than contribute another example. He so confounds the territories of word and image that a unique and inhospitable aesthetic realm arises in the disputed space. Because the play refuses to be entirely literary or entirely visual or even to demark which of its aspects are visual and which literary, it remains independent of the logic that constitutes particular art forms. Enemy of the Stars establishes itself in an aesthetic sphere of its own making that floats eerily above the usual categories of artworks.

Even the pictures resist formal, thematic, or stylistic coherence. The styles vary from the distorted, tense protodeco of Decoration for the Countess of Drogheda's House and The Enemy of the Stars through the broad, blocklike structures of Portrait of an Englishwoman and Plan of War to the tumbling fragments of Timon of Athens and Slow Attack. Some of the images suppress perspectival depth while others exploit it. The themes include a stylized but recognizably human figure, in The Enemy of the Stars; architectural abstractions, in Portrait of an Englishwoman and Timon of Athens; and forthrightly nonrepresentational studies of motion and force, in Plan of War and Slow Attack. The discursive rationale that each image claims for itself ranges from Slow Attack's avant-garde celebration of energy and movement similar to futurism to the parodic assault on the social and aesthetic conventions of portraiture in Portrait of an Englishwoman, from the reverential submission to social hierarchy and the marketplace of high culture implicit in Decoration for the Countess of Drogheda's House to the textual illustration provided by The Enemy of the Stars.

The heteroclite visual imagery introduces the deepest irregularities in the work's claim on unity, but as the play proper opens step by step through seven introductory pages, the work gradually returns to the signifying field of literature. Space does not permit a detailed examination of the subsidence of the visual and the growth of the verbal over these pages, but a few highlights will give a sense of the process.

Page 60 describes the stage arrangements, with remarks on the two scenes to come in the play and on the position of the "audience." Three fonts, underscoring, and boxing are used. Page 61 presents the opening of the play: Arghol's entrance and the audience's shift of attention to the spectacle. Three fonts and the setting of some paragraphs all in capitals make the printed text contract and expand as "THE ACTION OPENS":

Posterity slowly sinks into the hypnotic trance of Art, and the Arena is transformed into the necessary scene.

THE RED WALLS OF THE UNIVERSE NOW SHUT THEM IN, WITH THIS CONDEMNED PROTAGONIST.

THEY BREATHE THE CLOSE ATMOSPHERE OF TERROR AND NECESSITY TILL THE EXECUTION IS OVER, THE RED WALLS RECEDE, THE UNIVERSE SATISFIED.

THE BOX OFFICE RECEIPTS HAVE BEEN ENORMOUS.

Page 62, entitled "The Yard," establishes the representational scene of the action (as distinct from the stage arrangements described on page 60): "The Earth has burst, a granite flower, and disclosed the scene."

From here on the narrative is blind to the audience, the box office, and the rest of the extra-representational apparatus of drama. The typography also becomes subdued, with fewer titles and no capitalized paragraphs.

The central dramatic event of the play, the confrontation between Arghol and Hanp, begins on page 65. The visual aspect of the remainder of the text submits entirely to the conventions of narrative literature and becomes as insignificant as Blast's large, distinctive format will allow. Henceforth, major section divisions are marked simply by roman numerals at the tops of pages, and minor divisions and breaks are made with dashes between paragraphs.

In passing from the pictures, where the eye dominates, to page 65, where the reading faculty prevails, Lewis makes calculated use of page breaks, layout, and titles to impart a tactile quality as well as a specular one to the activity of his readers. Not only their eyes and reading faculty but their hands and arms are involved in constructing the scene of the drama as they turn the pages to reveal character descriptions, stage arrangements, the creation of aesthetic autonomy, the conjuring of the mimetic scene, an initiating act of violence, the universe that encloses the scene, and, finally, the beginning of the central dramatic event. These pages induce a performative vignette in their own right as the motion of the reader's arm in turning them seems to wave away the visual impact of the unruly typography while summoning up the dramatic setting.

The central agon in Enemy of the Stars comes as close as modern drama usually can to constituting a dramatic action as that concept is defined by Aristotle and Hegel. This action begins with Hanp's growing animosity toward Arghol and with Arghol's self-destructive indifference to the threats that surround him. The terms of the dramatic conflict are established in the dialogue, then theatrically manifested in a physical battle between the protagonists. At the end of the struggle Arghol has beaten Hanp unconscious and fallen asleep. Here the mechanisms of action retreat from the physical scene to the separate mental worlds to the two characters (Arghol dreams and Hanp meditates murder), but the consequences of their interior monologues carry the central action to its denouement in the communal dramatic scene: Hanp kills the sleeping Arghol and then drowns himself in the canal that flanks the field of their battle.

The dramatic action in this play does not indicate Lewis's capitulation to a conventional aesthetic of representation but rather forms another facet of an aesthetic built on conflicting conventions of representation. While subduing the conflict between reading and seeing, Lewis continues the one between narrative and drama and opens up another, between mimesis and metaphysics. He pits the clear, persuasive line of the action against a metaphysical allegory that threatens to dissolve the foundations of the drama, while the drama, in turn, attempts to sensualize the metaphysics into the inconsequential pleasures of a mental game. This confrontation leads to an entwinement of allegory and representation that makes the ontic character of the space in which the play unfolds perplexingly ambiguous.

Although Roman Ingarden speaks of the "ontic character" of "represented objects" and how it is altered by their presence in "represented space," I think it makes better philosophical sense to speak of the ontic character of the space in which objects exist. After all, does an object not take up space or at least find itself within a particular universe of discourse? From my point of view, an object is "real" if it exists in real space, "oneiric" if it exists in a dream, "ideal" if it inhabits a universe of carefully defined ideas, and so on. Focusing on the ontic character of a space as a whole is also useful for grouping objects and events—for example, real people and their real actions.

Literary space presents a special problem because it can mimic the ontic character of other kinds of space. Indeed, Maurice Blanchot considers literary space the most dangerous and deceptive kind of all, always ambiguous and shifting (L 'espace). Nevertheless, I think we can generally speak of the ontic character of a given literary space (i.e., the space in which objects in a specific literary work exist) as being, or at least claiming to be, primarily either representational or allegorical. Blanchot disputes the possibility of making this distinction, but he discriminates between writing that (dishonestly or naively) tries to make it and writing that exploits the impossibility of doing so, exemplified for him by Kafka and Mallarmé, among others. Enemy of the Stars also sabotages the separation between allegory and representation to create ontological disturbances within literary space.

To understand how Lewis overlays and confounds inimical ontic characteristics, we should first examine in some detail the metaphysical allegory that he pits against mimesis. In an appendix to the second version of Enemy of the Stars Lewis states that his play "is intended to show the human mind in its traditional role of the enemy of life, as an oddity outside the machine." The mind he equates with the intellect and the principle of "not-self," which is characterized by its strict rationality and ability to understand and identify with others and the world in general. The not-self turns out to be very unhuman in its rarity. The enemy of the mind is life, the machinelike existence of the universe, which is driven by egoism. Whereas the intellect is interested in truth and is willing to sacrifice itself to it, the ego is interested only in power, in the sphere of its own influence. The egoistic self sees the passive intellectualization of the not-self as a mortal threat and attempts to crush the opponent. Enemy of the Stars charts this destruction.

In Lewis's allegory of self and not-self Arghol represents the self-effacing mind. The ego, which is in alliance with the forces of life and nature, is represented by Hanp. The powers of the self turn out to be no match for the powers of the not-self when Arghol defeats Hanp in hand-to-hand combat, but Arghol becomes vulnerable when he is overcome by his own dreams, and Hanp dispatches him. That Hanp also kills himself signifies, presumably, that life means nothing without mind, that the intellect of the not-self gives form and direction to the self.

This is the allegorical reading to which the bare outlines of the characters and action are susceptible. Actually reading the allegory in the text is complex and difficult, however. The allegory is deflected by the elaborate subjectivities of the characters, these subjectivities are overwhelmed by the imagistic undulations of the scene, and then the scene is in turn swallowed up by the machinelike logic of the allegory. At times the struggle between allegory and mimesis is made part of the central dramatic conflict. Arghol champions the rigorous intellectual logic of the allegory, and Hanp stands for the casual, vitalistic play of mimesis. As the struggle between the two develops, however, their positions are adulterated. Arghol descends to the mimetic world of combative psyches, and Hanp asserts the allegorical primacy of certain metaphysical ideas. Arghol's victory contributes to the allegorical argument for his superiority but also weakens his allegorical consistency, as Hanp bitterly notes:

Sullen indignation at Arghol ACTING, he who had not the right to act. Violence in him was indecent.…

He gave men one image with one hand, and at same time a second, its antidote with the other.

At this point both Arghol and Hanp are highly conscious of their allegorical significances, and one expects Arghol's death to proceed (in the allegorical space established) like a ritual sacrifice, but Lewis allows mimesis to wrest control of the action just when the allegory is about to bring a closure: Hanp decides to murder Arghol on a whim rather than in defense of his own allegorical position.

Tip him over into cauldron in which he persistently gazed: see what happened!

This sleepy desire leapt on to young man's mind, after a hundred other thoughts—clown in the circus, springing on horses back, when the elegant riders have hopped, with obsequious dignity down gangway.

This clownish thought trots in to disrupt the classical structure of the dramatic action as well as the allegorical consistency. Hanp's resolution to murder Arghol defies in its offhandedness the central importance Aristotle attaches to decision making in dramatic mimesis. Hanp is more a desultory clown than a dramatic agent, and in failing to live up to the demands of Aristotelian drama, he also fails to give the play a firm superstructure on which to hang its allegory. In casually tipping Arghol into the cauldron of death, he also tips the drama into the volitionless bog of naturalism, degrading the action to an event. By this point, however, the agitation produced by the interplay of allegory and mimesis prevents the play from sinking into a naturalist representation as Hanp sinks in the canal. The ending only raises the volatility of the work by adding a third factor, modern naturalist representation, to the agon already established between classical dramatic mimesis and allegorical symbolism. This struggle counterpoints the confrontation that Arghol and Hanp pursue throughout Enemy of the Stars and continues to rage even as the characters meet their ends.

The aspects of Enemy of the Stars we have examined thus far all emphasize conflict and disintegration. These elements decisively distance this play from the constructive principles of the organic artwork and from the discursive consistency of the programmatic avant-gardes, but Lewis checks the dissolution with three forms of cohesion: (1) a demonstration of aesthetic construction, (2) the continuity of the dramatic event, and (3) the performative display of the work as a whole.

The first two sources of cohesion do not encompass the whole play but, rather, run a relay race through it: after the dramatic situation solidifies following the chaotic interplay of word and image in the opening pages of the text, the struggle between Arghol and Hanp sustains cohesion to the end. The play as a whole coalesces only in its performative display, but this unity exists solely in the continuous discord of its elements.

By the phrase "performative display" I intend all the potential ontological ambiguities of performance and theater. An object exhibited on the stage is always at least two things, itself and what it represents. Thus, the world of the real and the world of the represented overlap during a theatrical performance. Lewis exploits this overlapping and multiplies it. In place of the theater's usual tension between presentation and representation, Lewis develops tensions between narrative and drama, word and image, allegory and mimesis, reading and the page.

In addition, because Lewis performs his version of theatrical display within a printed text rather than on the boards of a stage, the constancy of place common to most theater evaporates. Lewis's play is set simultaneously or in alternation within Blast; within the institution of art (the realm of "trance" and of box office receipts); within a narrative voice; within the act of reading; between "you" and "me," self and not-self, personality and humanity; before posterity; and in a wheelwright's yard on the Russian steppes. The constant fluctuations in the narrative focus, allegorical portent, and dominant imagery prevent the ground in the wheelwright's yard from becoming any firmer than the other more or less ontologically distinct spaces that are developed in the text. The primarily textual existence of the play also denies it the grounding of a physical presence. The page layout early in the play pleads for the primacy of physical presence, but Lewis is careful to undercut this source of stability as decisively as he does every other.

The closest physical corollary to the performative display of this text would be a multi-ring circus. The text's aesthetic performances take place in a number of distinct ontological rings. Sometimes these performances follow one another; sometimes they overlap; sometimes they proceed simultaneously. Indeed, the groundlessness of Lewis's theatrical display is achieved not by dissolving the particularities of place but by multiplying them, by setting the drama in a bewildering array of conceptually disparate milieus. Unlike the multi-ring circus, however, the particularities of place in Enemy of the Stars are extremely volatile.

Fredric Jameson identifies hypallage as the central trop of Lewis's narrative style. Jameson suggests that Lewis creates, in his novels and short stories, "a world in which the old-fashioned substances, like marbles in a box, have been rattled so furiously together that their 'properties' come loose and stick to the wrong places." In Enemy of the Stars, where the narrative voice must make its way among other modes of aesthetic construction, hypallage transcends the status of a central trope to become a metaphysical principle. The various ontological spheres of the work (reality, literary and aesthetic representation, allegory, meta-aesthetic commentary) constantly rattle against one another and exchange properties, producing hybrid spheres of existence that develop out of and dissolve into one another.

The ontological turbulence of this artwork is so great that neither montage nor collage, constructive principles often used in avant-garde art, can contain it. The work eschews montage by refusing to subordinate the heterogeneity of its constituent elements to a central purpose in the way that, say, Brecht does in his drama. Because the visual imagery, narrative voice, and allegory are allowed lives of their own, we might be tempted to liken the construction of Enemy of the Stars to that of a collage, whose heterogeneous elements disrupt its unity with persistent gestures to their independence. But if Lewis is using collage, to what is he gluing the components? Avant-garde playwrights such as Raymond Roussel and Roger Vitrac take the dramatic form as a baseboard, but Lewis attenuates and dilutes this form with other elements so thoroughly that it cannot offer any significant cohesion. Jameson's metaphor for hypallage proves apt for describing the unifying principle of Enemy of the Stars. Lewis's title and the theatrical gesture with which the play is presented on the pages of Blast serve as a kind of box within which the elements of the artwork rattle against and intermingle with one another.

Enemy of the Stars is exemplary of one extreme in the early-twentieth-century avant-garde. It borrows an iconoclastic flippancy from manifesto-inspired movements such as futurism (with which Lewis was very familiar) but then ironically manages to enhance its commitment to aesthetic anarchy by refusing to adhere to a particular antiaesthetic program. Instead of protesting against the conventional concept of art, as Peter Burger suggests the most radical avant-gardes do, Lewis creates a performance with elements of such a protest. Instead of dismissing the active-passive relation between artwork and audience, he infuses it with disturbing shifts in perspective and significance. The vortex of this avant-garde aesthetic cannot converge because each source of stability is confronted with a nemesis, each image is undercut by its antidote. An aesthetic of performance eliminates the stability of the artwork.

Given the primarily textual nature of Enemy of the Stars, what is implied in calling it a performance? Since most theories of performance focus their attention on the human performing agent and many locate the essence of performance in the felt experience of engaging in it (what Victor Turner calls "flow"), it may seem perverse to suggest that a text can perform. Nevertheless, I think the ontic character of performance, when examined closely, can tell a great deal about the ontic character of Lewis's play. A performance is not a statement, although it may contain or make a statement, nor is it simply a signal, although it may emit signals of various kinds. A performance is an action. Theories on the subject suggest that performance can take place in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from the narrowly aesthetic to the more broadly cultural, from the psychospiritual interior of the individual to the wide stage of international politics (Schechner). I would like to suggest that the following elements are required to make an action a performance in any arena: an agent engaged in an activity who is aware that it is observed by an audience (real or imagined) and who acts in a formalized setting in space and time that separates the performance from other objects and activities.

Literary texts cannot normally be considered performances for a number of reasons. First, the reader is not always constituted as an audience. The text often excludes the reader from its represented world in a way that even the most naturalistic theatrical performance does not. Even when readers are brought into the text through direct or implied address, they tend to remain individual and isolated in space and time both from the text and from one another. Thus, even if a literary text acknowledges and manipulates how it is received, the reception still lacks the collective, spatial and temporal focus of the audience-performance nexus. Reading is not constituted as a group activity and is not tied physically or conceptually to the place of the text.

The second major difference between the two forms is that texts do not generally occupy particular settings in the way performances do. The text floats free of all outside circumstances. Of course, the contexts in which a literary work is created and canonized and read certainly influence the text and its meaning, but the places and times of such contexts are matters of the text's performance in particular cultural milieus rather than evidence of the text's being a performance in itself. We should distinguish between a literary text and its involvement in specific cultural activities in the same way that we should distinguish between a performance and its involvement in the culture that surrounds it. If we grant that both text and performance can be considered, at least provisionally, in themselves, we see that they are quite different. Taken autonomously, the text is a disembodied series of gestures and movements within a particular space.

Finally, although the literary text may contain voices that in some sense perform, it does not normally constitute itself as a performing agent. The text is more analogous to the site of a performance than to the performance itself. Thus, the major difference between literature and performance is that literature creates the parameters of its aesthetic space and performance fills an aesthetic space with its activity.

I hope my reading of Enemy of the Stars demonstrates some of the ways in which the play crosses the boundaries between literature and performance. First, it turns its readers into an audience by means of the various theatrical motifs introduced at the text's entrance—the "synopsis in programme" and "[p]osterity, assembled in silent banks," for example. Publication in Blast focuses the text's place and occasion and drew initial readers together in the collectivity of the subscribers. The text receives a formalized setting within the rather spectacularly laid-out pages of the large, pink-covered periodical. As I note, the play makes much of setting and shifting other boundaries within which it performs. Finally, the text constitutes itself as a performing agent by its self-conscious display of itself on the page and before posterity and by its impressive dexterity in juggling modes of being rather than simply narrative voices. Working within multiple aesthetic frames allows the text to make itself seem an activity rather than a constituting entity. Even when it is establishing the context for the agon of Arghol and Hanp, the text's act of creation becomes a performative gesture tied to a physical here and now by the turning of the pages.

The emphasis on setting, gesture, and audience in Enemy of the Stars links the play's subversive, vertiginous qualities less to Blanchot's literary space (where the sirens call one to the absence of the imaginary) than to a performative space (filled with activity rather than absence). The literary qualities of the text infiltrate the performance, however, robbing the agent of the comfortably fixed existence of standard performers. The text overlays and shifts the ontological terms within which it performs, creating a performative space as deceptive as any literary one. Instead of converging on the still point of the performer, the aesthetic turbulence of Enemy of the Stars remains constant, fueled by the play's literary existence.