''Tarr'' is a

modernist Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

novel by

Wyndham Lewis Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957) was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited ''BLAST,'' the literary magazine of the Vorticists. His novels include ''Tarr'' ( ...

, written in 1909–11, revised and expanded in 1914–15 and first serialized in the magazine ''

The Egoist ''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the m ...

'' from April 1916 until November 1917. The American version was published in 1918, with an English language edition published by the Egoist Press appearing shortly afterwards; Lewis later created a revised and final version published by Chatto and Windus in 1928.O'Keeffe, Paul, ed. Tarr: The 1918 Version. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1996, page 5 Set in the bohemian milieu of pre-war

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

, it presents two artists, the Englishman Tarr and the German Kreisler, and their struggles with money, women and social situations. The novel abounds in somewhat

Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his car ...

an themes. Tarr, generally thought to be modelled on Lewis himself, displays disdain for the 'bourgeois-bohemians' around him, and vows to 'throw off humour' which he regards—especially in its English form—as a 'means of evading reality' unsuited to ambition and the modern world. This self-conscious attitude and the situations that it brings about are a major source of the novel's pervasive dark humour. Lewis will later clarify that there "is laughter and laughter. That of true satire is as it were tragic laughter". Kreisler, a violent German Romantic of protean energy and a failure as an artist, is in many ways the focus of the novel. An indication of the extremity of his vivid portrait is Lewis' own wondering several years later if he had, in Kreisler, anticipated the personality of

Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...

Synopsis

Analysis

Punctuation

The American first edition used a punctuation mark (resembling an equals sign: '=') between sentences (after full stops, exclamation marks or question marks; in the earlier ''Egoist'' version it had been an m-dash). It has been claimed that these were an attempt by Lewis, an artist, to introduce 'painterly strokes' into literature. This has, however, been disputed by Dr. John Constable, who believes that they are nothing more than a German punctuation mark briefly adopted by Lewis. Lewis himself wrote to Ezra Pound about this when reconstructing missing parts of the manuscript for the U.S. edition: "Were those parallel lines = Quinn mentions kept going by the Egoist, or not? Could not they be disinterred, & used by Knopf?" (Lewis to Pound, October 1917). Evidently not all were disinterred, as large stretches of the book as published are without them.

Publication

Both the 1918 and 1928 versions of the novel have been in and out of print since its original publication. Oxford University Press has reissued the 1928 text, edited and with notes by Scott W. Klein of Wake Forest University, as part of its Oxford World Classics paperback series in 2010.

References and sources

External links

Tarr
at Google Books
Tarr
at Oxford University Press
Lise Jaillant, "Rewriting Tarr Ten Years Later: Wyndham Lewis, the Phoenix Library and the Domestication of Modernism." Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies 5 (2014): 1-30
{{Wyndham Lewis navbox 1918 British novels Novels by Wyndham Lewis Novels first published in serial form Works originally published in The Egoist (periodical)