The Clown and the Über-Marionette inEnemy of the Stars

Pound echoes his earlier remark about the unperformability of Exiles in an account of the experimental play Enemy of the Stars by Wyndham Lewis, first published in BLAST in 1914: ‘it could not be presented in the theatre’. Stage directions summon the mimetic body of the actor, only then to dismantle it, resisting Pound's definition of the ‘medium of drama’ as ‘not words, but persons moving about on a stage using words’. This resistance to perform-ability, the negative critique of theatricality, is a key aspect, I will argue, of the play's aesthetic of anti-mimesis and the tension it generates between the body of the actor, constantly invoked as a point of reference, and a ‘phrasal style’ which seeks to explode the performative body into linguistic components. As Martin Puchner observes, modernist drama, while often seeking to ‘interrupt and break apart any possibility for either an actual or an imaginary stage’, nevertheless ‘contains that which it resists’. By situating the play within the performance culture of its time, and by exploring the category of theatre which Enemy of the Stars violently resists, I will show how Lewis's attack on mimesis parallels a similar critique by figures at the forefront of a theatrical (rather than literary) tradition which privileges anti-naturalist, machine-like abstract gestures.