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Novels of the First World War<br />

431<br />

O’Rourke told him about, them with the rheumatic wheels, for the day<br />

cheap.<br />

(The Sisters)<br />

The other distinctive expressive feature in Irish English writing is a<br />

constant verbal ‘play’ with the resources of the language as a whole,<br />

in which the whole fabric of idiom, allusion, derivations, etymologies,<br />

parody, pastiche and figurative expression is exploited to create a<br />

world in which there is no single vantage point. It is a linguistic<br />

artifice appropriate to Modernism which also reinforces mutiple ways<br />

of seeing, but it in part underlies the strong connection between much<br />

modern Irish writing and the formal inventiveness of modernism.<br />

Its apotheosis is Joyce’s Finnegans Wake which is simultaneously<br />

no language and every language, a heteroglot of words and structures,<br />

a kind of world English but one which Joyce himself called ‘the last<br />

word in stolen-telling’, recognising that this inventively fabricated<br />

English has its roots in the everyday English of the Ireland of his birth.<br />

Sobs they sighdid at Fillagain’s chrissormiss wake, all the hoolivans of the<br />

nation, prostrated in their consternation and their duodisimally profusive<br />

plethora of ululation. There was plumbs and grumes and cheriffs and<br />

citherers and raiders and cinemen too. And the all gianed in with the<br />

shout-most shoviality.<br />

NOVELS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR<br />

Wyndham Lewis – like Henry James, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot – was<br />

born in the United States of America. With Pound he edited Blast<br />

(1914–15), which expressed the views of the Vorticists. This was<br />

primarily an artistic movement, influenced by Futurism and Cubism,<br />

determined to replace Victorian sentimentality with abstract art and<br />

writing. Perhaps the First World War achieved the Vorticists’ aim for<br />

them: the old ways changed rapidly, and the movement petered out<br />

after 1915. But Lewis went on to write several novels and a great<br />

many critical essays, which have been neglected despite their<br />

explorations of the hollowness of modern values and beliefs. Tarr<br />

(1918) and The Apes of God (1930) are energetic depictions of artistic<br />

life in Paris and London, attacking several of the literary figures of the

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