Extract from my ‘Criticism and Culture’ MPhil Thesis written in June 2022. This section used Mina Loy’s work to newly consider the debates surrounding boundary in the the aesthetic manifestos circulating during the modernist period. This works within the thesis’ consideration of how membranes function within and as a model of literary exchange.

A large volume of the manifestos that emerged in Europe and America in the modernist period, each vying to ‘make it new’ (Ezra Pound), pushed form to the extremities of pure form or formlessness.[2] These texts repeatedly viewed the circle as an object of formal concern. They tended to be hypergeometric in content and, due to their authorship, male-coded in their ideological structures and concerns. American Henry James, for example, approaches a definition of the membrane through a mathematical lexicon in his 1907 ‘Preface’ to Roderick Hudson:

British Vorticist Wyndham Lewis takes this further, imagining an ‘uncompromising’ and ‘water-tight’, non-living art form.[4] James and Lewis call upon images of hermetic enclosure and geometric boundary to frame art in a static, final stage. This hypergeometric circular formal model is reversed in the work of the Russian avant-gardists; Wladyslaw Strzeminski would call for artists to ‘renounce line’ and Kasimir Malevich declared that he had ‘destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things’.[5] Across all these works, concerns with circumference, containment, and boundary were fundamental to imagining new art forms. Each theorized how the the perfecting or demolishing of the circle initiated new relationships with infinitude. At its most polarized, Loy’s contemporary aesthetic theorizations viewed art as an aspirational geometric containment of the infinite and a surrender to infinity that destroyed all possibility of containment.

Loy’s approach to the ‘circle’ fits neither. The widening cervix of ‘Parturition’ problematises the geometric safety of James’ ‘circle of relations’ and enclosure of Lewis’ ‘water-tight’ art form, while also insisting on a circularity Malevich claimed to have ‘escaped’ and ‘destroyed’. Mother and poem undergo intense labour to accommodate these spatial reconfigurations. Loy synthesises the hypergeometry of pure form (‘circle’), and the absence of geometry in formlessness (‘exceeding its boundaries’), by finding a cervical model that joins and separates both. In one way, this rescues the poem’s obstetric concerns from a marginalized feminist history and understands birth as a profoundly aesthetic event, where child and art become coeval. In another way, Loy asserts the uterine membranes of the maternal body as intervening in and responding to male-dominated aesthetics.[6] This simultaneously assimilation with and differentiation from male-dominated, hypergeometric, discourses, is arguably an effect of Loy’s membranal aesthetic. The membrane has a circular geometry of its own; it is an encircling form that both ‘joins and separates’ (OED) inner and outer realms, bringing them into a ‘co-presence’ (Deleuze) where differences are held and sustained.

The poem’s paradox of a centring and exceeding the circle is not only thematic and ideological but typographicand grammatical. In the same way that a membrane exchanges and filters information across a surface, the paginated text can be understood as a network where words connect and contrast. The following lines, for example, negotiate the collapse of inner/outer boundaries in both birth and aesthetic creation through typographic and antonymic structure:

Expansion – the prolonging of ‘infinitely nerve-vibrations’ – is but one spatial-temporal effect of birth. Loy offers, through her connective ‘or’, an image of ‘contraction / To the pinpoint nucleus of being’. Obstetric and psychic boundaries not only widen but contract – as does the written line which performs its denotation. Like the ‘centre / Of a circle’ evoked at the beginning of her poem, Loy’s term ‘pinpoint nucleus’ reintroduces concerns of anatomical and mathematical specificity to her extremely abstracted, microcosmic claims. 

Loy’s typography does, visually, what a membrane does, chemically. It makes polarizing claims co-present. Not only is an ‘irritation’ both ‘without’ and ‘[W]ithin’ the maternal body as a way of highlighting sensory and epidermal confusion, where the maternal body cannot accurately place its pain, but this irritation becomes typographic through Loy’s subtle switching of suffixes, changes of capitalisation, and shifting indentations of the terms. The typographic collapse and rapid switching between the antonymic suffixes of ‘without’ and ‘within’ generates a sense of birth being both and neither – a laborious exchange between the internal and external realm of the body. As Prescott tantalizingly suggests, Loy’s typography generates a two-columned text that evokes ‘an echo, a rhythmic heartbeat’.[8] Loy’s typography can therefore be read not only as a textual trace of the spatial confusion that occurs during birth but a productive polarity that evokes the heartbeat, a binary rhythm signifying life. Loy’s series of spatial contestations in both form and content, and the rhythms that these contestations bring about, is arguably what makes the poem amenable to a membranal reading. Her expansions/contractions in poetic images and in her typography enable the poem to present birth as a fluctuation of spatiality that, in turn, finds new zones of dwelling. The poem’s spatial contestations presents itself as a model for psychic and aesthetic figuration – where the confusion of mother and child begins to represent the dialectic of artist and artwork.

Loy’s exploration of polarity as the catalyst, the beginning, of art can be contextualised in ways that understand Loy as more membranal than her contemporaries. As ‘Parturition’ puts it (in an apt summary of its own processes):

Loy’s lines are reminiscent of F. T. Marrinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1909), which imagines a linguistic model that:

Anticipating a Saussurean linguistic logic, Marinetti imagines language as a system reducible to a topology of ‘concentric circles’ of sematic crossover.[11] It rejects ‘sensibility’ – a term that, in a hangover from the sentimental fiction of the Victorian era, was contaminated with references to the hysteric and the domestic (both coded as female). Loy engages with the same terminology, though to a different effect. ‘Blurring’, and ‘elusion’ indicate a lexicon of avoidance and non-specificity that enable ‘sensibility’ to be both ‘[c]onfuse[d]’ and ‘intensif[ied]’. Loy co-opts the geometric vocabulary associated with both Futurism and emerging linguistic theory – that sought to dissolve the body and its sensations to dimensional planes – to expose the insoluble nature of corporeal and affective experience. In the ‘delirium’ of birth, the body is not lost but reconfigured.

Maud Ellman, writing on specifically modernist approaches to space and geometry, offers a useful way of thinking into how this elision was managed:

Both Marinetti and Loy claim to forfeit ‘sensibility’ in their work. Marinetti adopts the former approach, where the ‘essential word’ is lost, leaving behind only its ‘concentric circles’. Loy follows the latter view, suggesting that a forfeit of sensibility both ‘[C]onfus[es]’ and ‘intensif[ies]’ it; a ‘primordial trauma’ of the body returns, even as its circumscription – its spatial description and linguistic expression – is eluded. Loy’s claims, crucially, are coded through a womb-bearing, maternal body that is sensitive to its cultural history as a reproductive body, to its ‘primordial traumas’. The poem, therefore, witnesses a sensitivity to the gendered and gynaecological conditions of childbirth – conditions that can never be fully ‘forfeited’. Loy offers a version of modernism that attests to the primordial status of maternal creativity.

[1] Mina Loy, ‘Parturition’ in Lost Lunar Baedeker, pp. 4-8 (p. 4).

[2] Ezra Pound, Make It New: Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1934).

[3] Henry James, Roderick Hudson, (London: John Lehmann, 1947), p. viii. Emphasis my own.

[4] Percy Wyndham Lewis ‘Our Vortex’, Blast, Vol. I (London, June 1914). Reprinted in Art in Theory 1900 – 1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (London; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1992) pp. 154-156 (p. 155).

[5] Wladyslaw Strzeminski, ‘Statements’, Abstraction-Création, No. 1, (1932), reprinted in Art in Theory, pp. 359-361 (p. 360); Kasimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting, (Moscow, 1916), reprinted in Art in Theory, pp. 166-176 (p. 166). Emphasis my own.

[6] Tara Prescott’s subsection on ‘Parturition’ in Poetic Salvage (pp. 35-43) chimes with this view. Prescott similarly notes Loy’s appeal to traditionally “masculine” forms of study and argues that these disciplines fail to ‘understand and encapsulate [a] woman’s experience’ (pp. 35-6). Prescott’s reading understands ‘Parturition’ as a poem of ‘self-discovery’ (p. 43), effected across different spatial realms; while I agree, and have demonstrated this in my own close reading, I push this view to consider the structures at work in the poem’s project of self-actualization.

[7] ‘Parturition’, p. 4. 

[8] Prescott, p. 37/

[9] ‘Parturition’, p. 5.

[10] Franco Marinetti. Marinetti, Flint, Coppotelli, Perloff, Flint, R. W., Coppotelli, Arthur A., and others, Let’s Murder the Moonshine : Selected Writings (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1991)

[11] Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale was published posthumously in Geneva in 1916. It proposed that language was a self-contained system of interrelated structures that could be understood apart from its social context.

[12] Maud Ellmann, The Nets of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2010) pp. 8-9.