Rude Mouths

Abstract

Part II: “Image, Gender, Apocalypse”, our corridor in which “time passes”, looks at the currency of the image in a selection of texts from the Imagist movement onwards, and opens up questions of gender, class, race and war as points of transition, opposition, and crisis, and of montage and collage of the image as the dominant avant-garde aesthetic mode. The springboard “image” is the vortex, as outlined in the springboard magazine, Blast. “Blast”, of course, is a curse condemning its targets to eternal damnation, and the arena for “Image, Gender, Apocalypse” is Hell. We are not going to linger over the pages of Blast, as we did over The Egoist, but will use Pound’s declaration on the image there, as the catapult (such is the energy of the vortex) out to the gender war located with the transsexual Tiresias, somewhere in the “house of Hades”. The gender struggle over the mythopoesis of Hell, which began to emerge in our discussions in Part I, contributes to the major transition that marks the period 1910–45: the rise of women and the working classes, the creation and establishment, along with that of the infernal military-industrial complex, of a welfare state; and broadening the public sphere, the opening up of professions to women and men previously excluded on grounds of class, race and/or gender. Both support and opposition to these transitions are conducted in the literary gender wars of the era, staged in Hell.